The Way Things Were (30 page)

But, as with all creative enterprises, the riot depends also on what is left unsaid. It is not – and can never be – an out-and-out conflagration. Never a war of all against all. A riot is suggestive. The silent street at the end of which waits a mob. The quiet afternoon, an afternoon like any other, on whose fringes the fires burn. The sleepy town, of bureaucrats, boulevards and bores, which on that day alone is animated by a darkling energy. The sudden bursts of violence. Intelligent violence, unpredictable, predatory, which, armed with voting lists, knows the addresses of its victims. The possibility of violence is all. And, sometimes, more traumatic than the actual violence of a riot is its power of suggestion.

Later, much later, Toby, in his more thoughtful moments, would wonder if they had done too much to shield I.P. from what happened over those few days in 1984. A futile regret, for given what I.P. had just been through, no one would have done otherwise. Yet Toby could not help but feel that too much had occurred off-stage, too much had been left to the imagination. I.P. saw nothing of 1984. Even the children saw more.

For no sooner had the crowd fallen upon its first victim – more a symbol than a victim, a human spark – than Toby swung I.P.’s wheelchair around. He would have caught nothing more than the sight of an old man with a white beard and white kurta sailing blithely into that angry crowd. He was pulled off his bicycle and beaten up, his mauve turban torn from his head and stamped on, his bicycle smashed up. But I.P., though there was no way to stop his ears, saw nothing.

When Uma was finally able to bring the Fiat around, she watched an old man pick up the wreckage of an Atlas bicycle and walk quietly away, his turban looped in his arm like a mangled wheel; there was the mob with its first taste of blood, newly aware of how hungry it still was; and, strangest of all, past the wrought iron bars of the medical institute, there was her husband with his back to the crowd, casting a shadow over the cemented earth. His hands rested lightly on the handles of a wheelchair, in whose brown leather seat a cowering man, with a beard and sunglasses, stared blankly up at the vast and unspeaking edifice of the medical institute.

It was a clear beautiful day of pale gold sunshine. In the distance, the occasional bang of a cracker could still be heard – from a Diwali a week old to the day.

They have found the party. It is just past the doorway in the wall, through which the pale smoky breath of the night comes in, uniting old with new, past with present.

Beyond are deep courtyards open to the night sky; there are pastels and tiles, and wrought iron balconies, and fairy lights in the trees. A
ś
oka trees – a |
ś
oka, like the emperor for whom they’re named: he because of whom there is no
ś
oka, no sorrow; the same
ś
oka, whose access had produced
ś
loka all those years ago – rise high into the darkness. Laughter and chatter and cheer filters down into the well of the courtyard, amidst the sharp clicks and muffled thuds of pool balls above. Waiters in white, the blue crest of the Raj embroidered onto their jacket pockets, bring around heavy inches of Scotch on silver trays. Clear beakers of soda, soft kebabs and the faintly charred loins of lamb. There is, though this is yet only a guess, cocaine in the bathrooms and Manali Cream on the terraces. There are blue mosaic fountains which actually play and slim Latinate terraces from which pretty pregnant girls look down, sipping pale glasses of white wine, while their husbands marvel at the turn to which life has brought them. ‘Serdy, never thought you’d get married, yaar; let alone be a dad!’ Such airiness, enough to air out the gloom of that old bad time, leaving them not just without a past, but hardly in need of one. It is airiness in which one man with brilliantined hair might say to another, ‘Don’t feel like I’m in Delhi at all, m’fucker! Feels like goddamn Mexico!’ Airiness and lightness and security and,
mashallah
, wealth – and security about one’s wealth.

Delhi feels tonight like a place where there is now and nothing else. So intense is this feeling of now-ness, so aggressive almost, that it creates at that party on Curzon Road an air of embarrassment among the older generation. Viski and Isha’s friends.

Skanda watches as the older men, in baggy starched shirts and stiff jeans, buckled too high, wander through the party of young people, putting in a leg where possible. They are a generation that has grown old just as change has made the world new. It must impart onto their old age, he thinks, a magical quality, elongating their lives and distorting their sense of time. They must feel their youth is even further behind them than it in fact is. And, given that for many the bad time in the country coincided with a bad time in their careers and marriages, this feeling that things are better and brighter just as they are older must sharpen in them that eternal sense of youth misspent. How guilty they seem, Skanda thinks, of their knowledge of the past. None among them would dare say to any of us who are younger, ‘You, who are here tonight, you don’t know what it was like, you don’t know what Delhi was like.’

‘I feel so old,’ Gauri says, taking Skanda’s hand.

‘You? You feel old. Why?’

‘Skanda, I’m the only woman here under fifty dressed in a sari.’

He looks, and sees she’s right. The young girls are in black dresses, in leopard print, in ill-fitting trousers, expensive designer dresses in bold colours. A busy world of stripes and straps and buckles.

‘It’s interesting, no?’ she says, clutching her evening bag nearer to her, and lighting a cigarette.

‘What?’

‘That in a place so familiar with the use of colour . . . we should get it so wrong when it comes to Western clothes!’

‘Who are you looking at?’

‘Everyone. That one,’ she says, her dark skin radiant in the light of the match. ‘Look. The one in the pink and pistachio dress. A horror! And what she must have paid for it! I can only imagine. Tch, tch, Skanda. And just the other day, in Gurgaon, I saw a woman and – my God, baby! – you should have seen her style!’

‘How was she dressed?’ he says abstractedly.

‘Effortlessly! A mud-coloured ghagra; an off-white blouse, full sleeved; and from her head to her waist, edged with a rough border of silver thread, a sky-blue dupatta. A peasant, Skanda, with a coarse and lined face. And not young, mind you; she must have been pushing fifty. But so glamorous, so effortlessly glamorous . . .’

She suddenly stops herself and says, ‘Who are we looking for? I mean are we going to say hello to anyone? Or are we just going to stand here, on the edge of the party, bitching out everybody that goes by?’

He laughs.

‘I don’t know. I don’t recognize anybody.’

‘What? You can’t be serious. No one? Not a soul? Not your aunt, your uncle, your cousins?’

‘It’s been so long, Gauri. And we made a clean break, you know.’

‘And they? Won’t
they
be able to recognize you?’

‘I’m not sure, no one’s seen me since—’

‘What about that one? She’s been staring at you since we walked in. Look. Next to the one we were just talking about. There, she’s looking at you again.’

‘Who?’

She now points to a woman with a scarf round her head and a baseball cap.

‘Chemo, I think, Skanda.’

He looks over and sees the woman Gauri has been pointing to. She is dressed in jeans, keds and a red brocade kurta. Her face is bloated; there are lines of bitterness about the mouth, and emotion in the eyes. He looks, and looks again, but there is no immediate recognition. Then an odd thing happens. In watching her recognize him – watching the eyes send their frantic message to the mind asking it to merge a face from memory, a boy’s face, with the grown man standing before her – he recognizes her. It is his mother’s sister. Isha.

She stands there stock still. A smile on her lips, her eyes glistening, as if, in that moment, she can see the arc of events spread out before her, like a child who, staring out of the window of an airplane, has a rare view of the curvature of the Earth.

She just stands there, in one spot, swaying slightly, her body rigid with a joy that is like grief. Then mutely, she flaps her hand in their direction, gesturing to them to come over. No sooner does Skanda take a step forward, shattering the reverie perhaps, making it all too real, than she is struck by the force of her emotion. She clutches the hand of the tall beautiful woman she stands next to, and, swinging round, collapses onto a flight of stairs next to her. There, with her palms resting on the edge of the polished wooden stairs, she lets her head hang down, so that all that is visible are her tense shoulders, the nape of her neck, the knot of her scarf and the creeping margin of chemo baldness. And she sobs so hard her whole body shakes and shudders. The veins in her neck swell, her seated heart knocks hard against its cage.

‘My God! Mama,’ the girl in the dress says, with airy agitation, gesturing at Skanda and Gauri to go away. ‘What on earth has brought this on?’

She makes no reply. She just lets her neck sink deeper into the trough she has fashioned for it with her shoulders, and weeps with enviable abandon. She seems hardly to notice that they are there at all. It is only when Skanda and Gauri, yielding at last to the girl’s entreaties for them to withdraw, take a step back, that they see how acutely aware she has been of their presence. Skanda barely moves when a hand shoots out from that weeping mass and grabs his wrist.

‘My nephew,’ she says through her tears, looking up at everyone except Skanda. ‘My nephew. I’m so glad you’ve come. My nephew.’ And she squeezes his hand.

‘Nephew?’ the girl, who, it soon emerges, is her daughter-in-law, asks.

‘My sister’s son!’ she scolds, as if scolding herself for something. ‘Mishi, Uma. Mrs Maniraja,’ she adds with a sneer. ‘Don’t you know? Silly girl! My sister!’

The girl, taken aback by this assault, smiles weakly in their direction. While Isha, still holding on to Skanda, but refusing to meet his gaze, drains her drink and shakes the empty glass impatiently at her daughter-in-law. She takes it hurriedly and withdraws. ‘Son’s married a damn bimbo,’ she slurs – she seems very drunk – and using her nephew to get up, but no more than snatching a glance at him, as if afraid she will use him up if she looks too long, she murmurs to Gauri, ‘He is his father reborn.’

The thought gives her a fresh burst of emotion – in fact, from the moment she sees Skanda she is like a woman caught mid-sentence, a woman anxious to get something off her chest, but unable to find a way to begin. It is as if she wants to do away with the intervening time and go straight to the heart of some other more urgent time. Then, in a phrase she chances upon, she finds an opening. ‘Such a victim,’ she says. ‘Your father, you know, Skanda. He was such a victim.’

Skanda looks questioningly at her – at this abrupt beginning to their conversation – but Isha does not notice.

The phrase delights her; it gives her confidence, if only glancingly, to meet her nephew’s eyes. And, as if only now able to see the full implication of her words, she says carefully, adding to what she said before, ‘He was such a victim of that time. We all, to some extent, were. But him more than most.’

She pauses. A thought has come to her on the back of that other one.

‘But not your mother,’ she says, with all the force of revelation, shaking her head violently. ‘
Not
her. She got away. And she never forgave us for knowing her in the bad years.’

At this point her daughter-in-law – Iqbal’s wife presumably – returns. The fresh drink, the arrival of another person takes some of the edge off this one-sided and jolting exchange. Isha sinks her lips into her drink, and says with sudden formality, ‘How is she, your mother? Did you tell her you were coming here tonight?’

‘No,’ he says, meeting her gaze frankly.

She grimaces, and turning to Gauri, says, her lips frozen in their bitter stance, ‘You see, my darling, we are not forgiven. Still unforgiven. And for what? For having seen, for having known.’

Tears stream down her cheeks.

‘Isha Massi,’ Skanda begins.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m spoiling it all, aren’t I? You’re coming here for the first time – what?! – in twenty-some years. And I’m spoiling it. I’m so sorry. You haven’t even met Iqbal and Fareed yet. And your Viski Masardji. And I’m spoiling it. Forgive me. It’s just I . . . I love your mother, you know. I love her. And Rudrani,’ she chokes. ‘Rudrani. How is she?’

‘Very well, Massi.’

‘In America?’

‘In America.’

‘Doesn’t want to come back?’

He shakes his head.

‘Won’t put foot here, no? Like your father. Won’t even come for weddings and funerals. There’s something sick, I tell you,’ she says to Gauri, as if addressing a foreigner, ‘about this country. It kills the ones with the fine natures and leaves only the scum. They survive. The Manirajas of the world. They prosper, they thrive! The good ones either leave or die.’ She says this and glowers at Skanda, whose face is passive, as if to say,
Don’t you dare stop me tonight: I speak from the heart
. ‘They flourish, the scum! And anyone with just a little bit of sensitivity, anyone who’s got an iota of fine feeling,’ she says, for Gauri’s benefit, ‘his father, my brother, I.P. – they flee or die.’

She closes her eyes and drinks her drink. Again she shakes the empty glass at her daughter-in-law, who takes it but does not move. ‘My daughter-in-law,’ she says, and grins inexplicably. ‘Her name is Alaya. Haven’t a bloody clue what it means. But that’s India these days: pretty things that don’t mean nothing.’

‘It means ascender,’ the girl says sternly. ‘It’s Hebrew.’

‘Hebrew-shebrew. Do me a favour, darling. Ascend the stairs and get me another whisky. And I don’t mean Viski. Don’t like my husbando,’ she says, wagging an unsteady finger in Skanda and Gauri’s direction. ‘Dirty little git. Slithering about with the chinky women in Bangkok.’

Alaya pales before this revelation, and Isha, seeming to enjoy the shock she causes, continues in this vein. ‘Yes, darling. That is what he goes for. Welcome to the family.’