The Way Things Were (31 page)

Skanda and Gauri laugh nervously. And this eggs her on; she seems pleased to please them, and is suddenly contemptuous of her daughter-in-law.

‘Do you want to hear a joke?’

‘Sure,’ they say with some relief at the sudden levity.

‘Confucius say,’ Isha begins, in an appalling Asian accent, ‘man who go sideways through door is going to Bang-cock.’

Skanda and Gauri – it must have been their nerves – find themselves laughing uncontrollably. Isha, delighted at the joke’s success, seems suddenly at her ease with Skanda. ‘My nephew,’ she says proudly, clamping his face hard between her fingers, and kissing his cheek. Then, glimpsing Alaya, still standing there with an empty glass, she barks, ‘Go on, ascender. Ascend the stairs and get your mother-in-law a bloody drink.’

‘Mama, should you . . . with your . . .’ she says.

‘With my what? My cancer?’ She turns to Skanda and Gauri, and says, with exaggerated courtesy, as if excusing herself for having a bad throat, ‘I’m dying, you see.’

‘Mama, you’re not dying!’

‘Maybe I’m not. But I feel like I bloody am. A mutilated thing with a chopped off breast. I’m as good as dead. But none of that tonight. My nephew is here and I’m going to drink my bloody liver out. Alaya! Pffff! Your father,’ she says, as if one thought excites the other, ‘always knew what everything meant.’

‘Oh, Isha Massi . . . may I call you that?’ Gauri bursts in.

‘Did you hear that . . . she called me Massi! Your girlfriend? Very pretty. But thin, so thin. Darling, you’re not eating enough . . . Of course, call me Massi. I am your Massi.’

‘I was just going to say: he’s exactly the same, he knows the meaning of everything too. He won’t shut up.’

Isha claps her hands with childish excitement.

‘Really? You know Sanskrit too?’

‘Not as well as Baba . . .’

‘Don’t be modest, baby. You know quite a bit.’

Isha clutches his hand. She can hardly listen through her emotion.

‘Come upstairs,’ she says at last, ‘I want to show you a picture of them from the old days, a picture I took.
From the old days
. I used to be a very good photographer, you know.’

Halfway up the stairs, which she negotiates with difficulty, she swings around and says, with that irrepressible candour of hers, ‘What happened with I.P., you know, it destroyed your parents’ marriage. It all began with I.P., the rot. Do you like the new house, by the way?’

Before he can answer, she says, ‘The gloom is gone!’

A very different kind of party is in progress upstairs. Younger, loucher, but more adult somehow. In a line of long thin-paned windows, clusters of dark mango leaves are visible, their veins gilded with streetlight. Pinkish halogen lights burn behind a bar of glass shelves; their shadowy reflection blazes dimly in the brass studs lining the green leather arms of a sofa. From the pool table at the centre of the room the low murmur of voices spills over like mist off a stage. The room is a holding pen for other rooms, for terraces and balconies, for bathrooms. And it is here, in this place so thickly absorbed in the present, that Isha, a half-crazed Katerina Ivanovna, comes hunting about for the past.

Her arrival causes some little stir. It feels as if friends and wives have been quick to spread the word to the brothers hosting the party, Iqbal and Fareed, that their mother has broken bounds.

One senses she has done this before, chosen a night like tonight, when hope is high and the memory of bad times more distant than ever, to resurrect the deadest of dead pasts. She comes, with Skanda and Gauri following, somewhat brazenly into the room and makes straight for a table near the sofa. After groping about in the darkness for a moment, she turns on a switch and a bright pool of light falls over a table with many framed photographs. The light coming on like that, in the dark room, gives people a shock, and they recoil, as if only now certain of a rumour that has been doing the rounds in the darkness. A few prettily made-up girls sitting on the sofa smile nervously.

Isha, oblivious to the reaction in the room, runs her finger over one picture with a silver frame. Skanda and Gauri, believing perhaps that it is the picture she has brought them up to show them, draw nearer. But they soon see that it is someone else. A black and white picture of a very beautiful woman with a boy. She has a heart-shaped face, a deep widow’s peak, and dark lips and eyes full of laughter. She is dressed in what looks like a maroon or red salwar kameez, cut squarely at the neck, a chiffon dupatta hangs lightly off the springy mass of her hair. She stands behind a sofa, leaning over the boy, who is in school uniform, with his long hair in plaits and white ribbons. He holds a school book in his hands, but looks adoringly up at his mother. Gazing at the picture, half-tenderly, it seems, Isha murmurs, ‘Bitch!’

Then she turns to the sofa where the girls sit. Her eye, trailing its length, rests on the girls whose faces are buoyant with collagen; their lips glossy; their cleavages deep and draped in chiffon. Her gaze sharpens, seems even to burn slightly; she considers them as if they are a stain on the leather; then finally, when they do not get the message, and smile nervously back up at her ever more lethal eyes, she says, ‘Get up! Let an old woman rest her bones.’

The girls’ gelatin lips part in white-toothed smiles of apology. They slide down the sofa, forcing one of their flock to rise. She stands by the arm, uneasily surveying the scene in the room. Soon the one nearest to her rises too, sending a seesaw of nerves sliding down upon the one who remains sitting. The two who are standing conveniently see someone they know by the bar and take flight. This is too much for the one who remains. She gives Isha who has just sat down heavily next to her a frightened look, a plea for understanding, and flees herself, leaving the sofa empty.

‘Ha!’ Isha says. ‘We soon saw them off, the little sluts. Come sit down. And let me tell you. Where was I?’

Before they can answer, she turns her eyes, with their blank and loveless gaze, to the picture, which is in her lap now.

‘Look . . .’ she begins. ‘Come sit down next to me. Why are you two standing?’ Once they have sat down, she takes their hands in each of hers. ‘Look. Even then you can see it: the poor git obsessed with her.’

Thinking, for some reason, of the photographer, Skanda says, a little distractedly, ‘Which one?’

This makes her laugh. ‘Exactly! Both, of course. She could do it to any man.’ At this, Isha snips her fingers clumsily in the air. Then, seeing some confusion in Skanda’s eyes, she says abruptly, ‘You do know who this is, don’t you?’

‘No,’ he answers.

She is incredulous. ‘This – the little boy – is your uncle Viski. And this, this . . . woman is his mother.’

‘She is beautiful,’ Gauri says cautiously.

Believing perhaps that Gauri has offered this as an explanation for her power over men, Isha says, ‘Yes, but that is not why. Many women are beautiful. I, myself, was not bad.’

‘You’re still beautiful . . .’ Gauri starts.

She pats the air into silence. ‘I know what I am. But
she
, she had something else. She had that strange ability only very few women have to inspire love in men and then systematically deny it to them.
Your mother
, Skanda—’ she begins, then thinking better of it, says, pointing again at the boy in the picture, ‘This poor sod, for instance, he wasted his whole life trying to earn her love. Sacrificed all the love around him, that of his children, that of his wife, for one little ounce from her. And, even that, she gave only to take away. It’s one thing,’ Isha continues, ‘not to be a good mother to your children. God knows, I, myself—’

‘Oh, come on!’ Skanda says, hoping to stem the tide of remorse.

‘No, no, I know. I can see these things very clearly now. And I have my regrets. But I never played with my children . . .’ Sensing how strange this sounds, she rephrases, ‘I never manipulated them, I mean. This one! They were like little chess pieces to her. Tick, tick, tick. Tick!’ she says, moving a knight on an imaginary board.

‘But why?’

‘Because she could. Because she was supremely selfish. Because they – or Viski, at least – wanted her love, and she his money!’

‘Isha Massi!’

‘It’s true, Skandu. Ever since she was thrown out of Curzon Road . . .’

‘Out of this house?’ Gauri asks, though she has been told.

‘Yes! Well, the one next door.’

‘We were just there, you know.’

She stares at them both in amazement.

‘We’ve been lost for a while,’ Skanda says sheepishly.

‘But it makes perfect sense, baba. Don’t you see? That’s the only house you’ve ever known. Of course you went there. You virtually grew up there, after all. You must have gone automatically.’

‘Were we there in 1984?’ Skanda asks, thinking of Gauri’s question earlier that night.

‘During the riots?’ Isha says with alarm.

‘Yes.’

‘No. No one was there. I mean people were there, but not us. It had become a fortress. No, you weren’t there, not in ’84. Why did you ask that? You were there a lot, though, for endless Holis and Diwalis. There, when your Viski Masardji and me had one of our big violent fights.
Swine
,’ she says, with casual rancour, as if returned to the emotion of that night, ‘he broke my nose. Do you remember that? I came running into yours and Fareed’s room bleeding. And Viski, he was ready to beat me some more. And for what? Because I called his mother a whore. So? She was a whore.’ She laughs out loud. A terrible laugh.

‘I met your mother soon after it happened. She came to see me. It was just before we all went to Gulmarg for the summer. And she said – Viski must have gone whining to her – “Ish, did you call his mother (his late mother: she’d just died!) a whore?” I said, “I did. So? He called our mother a whore too.” And your mother – she used to be so funny, Skandu: instead, of showing concern for her poor sister, still licking her wounds – she said, “Ish! What does it matter if he called Mama a whore? Mama, who’s lived such a dreary life, she would probably be delighted if she knew someone had called her a whore.
His
mother, on the other hand – God rest her soul! – slept with half the Punjab. You can’t go about – with her ashes hardly cold – calling her a whore . . .”’

Isha laughs uproariously and lights a cigarette; then, catching the bearer’s eye behind the bar, she tinkles the ice in her glass, and mouths, ‘Drink lao, fatso.’

Her mind, though in some ways puddled with alcohol, is, in other ways, flexible and capacious, able to keep many windows open at once, able to form surprising connections. She now says, ‘But your mother, Skandu, was not like Viski’s mother, who, though brave and beautiful and glamorous, was, at the end of the day, a fool. Her motivations were the motivations of a fool: lust, money, power. Your mother, though at times she chased these things too, chased them for different reasons. She had such a romance in her mind, about her life. She had such – I read this phrase once in a novel . . . must have been Dickens or Thackeray, James perhaps –
a talent for life
. Is it James,
Wings of the Dove
?’

He doesn’t know, but he is deeply impressed. This generation, he thinks, this last little trace of colonial education in India, they are not so bad after all. They’re on their way out now, and, when they’re gone, no one will remember, in the world opening up, of collagen lips and blue glass malls, that there were once these people. These women, who, drunk and angry and bitter about life, could nonetheless, from the depths of some quieter India, where afternoons were longer, and reading deeper, throw a little Henry James your way on a cold December night, as easily as someone passing over a bowl of peanuts.

‘But I was saying . . .’

‘Her talent for life.’

‘That’s it. It was this she felt she could not betray. It was like a vocation to her; it was the only thing to which she remained true. She could endure any amount of hardship so long as she believed in the story she told herself about where her life was headed. And, with your father, it was this that began to meander. She was one of those women who need to be near things, you know, who need, in some way, for the times to be reflected in their lives.’

She says this and sits bolt upright. ‘But, you silly fools, I haven’t shown you the picture I brought you here to show you.’

Gauri smiles.

‘No, no, no. I must show it to you. It was taken on the night of the 1st. I remember, I.P. had just come back. And the next day he left, left for good. Because, by then, the killings had begun.’