The Way Things Were (32 page)

*

Toby had seen the taxis too. It was his birthday that day – 1 November. A beautiful clear morning. The U-shaped street that ran around the public garden, connecting his block of flats to the Raj to C-Block on the other side, was freshly washed and the tarmac shone in the sunshine. He sat outside, reading the paper. He had just been with I.P.

His arrival at the flat the day before had created certain difficulties. The children, who had been told he was away on a trip, were eager to see him. Toby felt it was fine; that it would clear the air; but Uma felt it was too soon, that it would be frightening for them. And perhaps, she added, I.P. was not ready either. He had been put in Toby’s study, a quiet windowless room, and had not stepped out once since his arrival.

When Toby, after knocking lightly, entered the darkened room, he found I.P. in a canvas chair under a pool of light. There was a tape playing softly. Nayyara Noor singing Faiz. Narindar had, unbeknownst to them, brought him some tea, which I.P. had partially drunk from a straw. And next to the brown ceramic mug, like an almost magical reminder of continuity, was
Midnight’s Children
. Toby felt some shock at seeing it, casting its short bridge over what felt like an unbridgeable expanse of time.

Finding the book an easier point of entry into conversation than the usual small talk, Toby, gesturing to it at I.P.’s feet, said, ‘Are you done with it? With the Rushdie?’

A smile appeared in I.P.’s eyes. Hunting about for his pad and pen, he scribbled, ‘I’ve abandoned it.’

‘Why?’ Toby said, feigning amazement.

‘Too long,’ I.P. wrote quickly, and seemed to shake a little with laughter. Then Toby saw a slimmer book in his hands, which he recognized immediately.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that! Well that won’t take you long.’

I.P., marking his page with his finger, opened the book. He was at the end of the third canto.
The Death of Love
. Toby saw, from the faint markings on the page, that he had been trying to decipher the Sanskrit.

‘Can you make any sense of it?’ Toby asked, feeling a sudden optimism about I.P. ‘Of the original, I mean?’

I.P. thought hard about the question, then wrote, ‘The vocabulary, yes. But not how it all hangs together.’

‘Yes,’ Toby said, almost with a note of apology in his voice, ‘you’ll need to know something about the cases for that. There’s no word order, you see. It has a very loose syntax. It was the one thing Panini didn’t set down. “He goes to the fields. Fields to he goes. Goes he the fields to.” All possible and impossible to crack without a knowledge of the cases. But I see you’ve underlined . . .’

I.P., who had been listening intently, put the nib of his pen to one of the circled words.

‘Ambu | r
ā
ś
i
ḥ
,’ Toby said, carefully voicing the aspirated ending, ‘it means, quite literally, a heap of waters. The ocean, you see. Which in this case – for Kalidasa is the master of the simile, the upama – is being compared to Shiva’s internal state.’

‘Which is?’ I.P., open-palmed, seemed to ask.

‘Faint uneasiness?’ Toby replied. ‘Disturbance? He is unsettled like the ocean – ambu | r
ā
ś
i
ḥ
– at the rise of the moon . . .’

I.P., absorbing the comparison, wrote: ‘Why?’

‘Why?!’ Toby exclaimed with a little rhetorical flourish.

‘Why is he disturbed?’ I.P. wrote quickly.

‘Good question: why? Well, because his eyes have just rested on Uma’s face, and he has felt the first stirrings of desire. But he shouldn’t be feeling any desire, you see. For he is jitêndriya: one who has conquered the senses. And so, in the sudden stab of desire that comes unexpectedly over him, he infers Love’s mischief. That is why he is uneasy. And, presently, when he sends his gaze out in all directions, he sees Love standing there, poised to strike, the arrow called Fascination fastened to his bow. Love, on Indra’s command, is ready to flame amazement. And for this, for the violation of Shiva’s austerities, he will die. Shiva is moments away from reducing him to ash. Later we learn that Love does not, in fact, die; he is only rendered bodiless. But I like to think – though there is nothing to support it in the text – that Shiva is, in some small way, also mourning the death of Love, that part of his uneasiness comes from his pain at what he is about to do.’

Scolded so often by Uma for these tangents, Toby suddenly stopped himself. ‘
But read on
. It’s a very exciting moment.’ Then remembering what he had come in for, he added, ‘What’s your plan? Do you want to stay in here a while? Or shall I put a chair for you outside? It’s a beautiful morning.’

I.P., as if guilty before Toby, for neither being able to appreciate what he had just said nor the beauty of the morning, wrote simply on his pad, ‘In here, for now.’

When Toby asked I.P. about whether Skanda and Rudrani should be kept out of his room, he seemed visibly pained by the question. His lips tightened over the metal in his gums, causing him to wince. Then something boundlessly sad – and final, somehow – appeared in his eyes, and he scribbled, ‘Forgive me. Not yet.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Toby said, ‘Nothing to forgive. The little monsters . . . they can see you when you’re better.’

At the mention of this word – ‘better’ – both men felt a peculiar discomfort, as if something had been said that neither of them quite knew the meaning of. It made Toby feel an impatience that was not unlike what he felt when, while teaching Skanda, something particularly intractable came up – a rare aorist, an irregular form, an untranslatable enclitic particle – whose surmounting would depend only on time and practice. Leaving the room, Toby realized his impatience was nothing but the desire to make I.P., as if by an act of will or force, whole again.

As he was slipping back out into the flat, I.P. shuffled his feet and held up his pad. Toby craned his neck to see. ‘Happy Birthday, Raja saab!’

‘Birthday-shirthday. Thank you for remembering, brother-in-law.’

By the time he came out of his room the first of the calls had begun to come through. Rumours of violence in the city. The first to call was Chamunda. ‘Well done, you guys,’ she squealed, down the phone to Uma. ‘Well done! But now please be careful. Ismail says there’s going to be a backlash.’ Then Nixu Mohapatra to say his sister, Gayatri, was unexpectedly back in town and he was having a dinner for her. ‘But Nixu,’ Toby said, ‘Mrs G was shot dead yesterday.’ ‘So?’ Nixu returned, ‘Are we in deepest mourning?’ Then, gradually, the calls became more serious. Mahijit Marukshetra called to say that there had been violence in Marukshetra. Toby’s sister, Usha Raje, whom no one ever heard from anymore, called twice from Los Angeles. Once the day before to confirm – before the state broadcaster was willing to – that Mrs G was, in fact, dead. And now again to say that the American news was reporting riots in Delhi, and showing images of Connaught Place in flames.

‘What worries me,’ Uma said, letting herself fall into a chair next to the telephone table, ‘is that I can’t get through to Fatehkot House.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It just keeps ringing and ringing, Toby.’

‘Should I go over to the hotel? Viski might be there by now. Or they might have some news, at least.’

‘Please do that.’

She rose; lit a cigarette; she was dressed in an old kimono he had once bought her. And, looking at her, he felt a pang of guilt, and knew why: he was enjoying the crisis, for the closeness it created between them. It was so long since she had confided in him, or needed him for anything.

At the hotel he found he had narrowly missed Viski. The general manager – a south Indian – told him about the policeman, about Viski leaving in a hurry. He said he would return soon. But the details worried Toby, and walking back to his flat, his mind retrieved the little snatch of poetry from earlier that morning: ‘a calm, faintly disturbed, like the ocean at the rise of the moon’. The image, though a nocturnal one, fitted the present. It seemed to capture the unease of that radiant morning touched by some darker element, as with those days when the sun and moon appear together in the sky. Or when there is, like a catch at the heart, a sudden dip in the sunshine.

He had just come back to the flat; Uma was in the bathroom. He sat down to wait for her to come out and found himself trying, under changed circumstances, to resume the routine of the morning. He had just picked up
The Hindustan Times
– the headline read, ‘Indira Gandhi Shot Dead’ – when the taxis began to arrive.

They had the air of able-bodied men coming to sign up for a war effort, or donate blood, or desert the army of a leader who had turned tyrannical. There was that same solemnity of purpose; that same quiet resolve; that same hint of fear, masked – or banished – by the sanctity of a higher cause, to which, in some private moment of reckoning, they had committed themselves completely. Stern Jat Sikh faces, bearded and lined, the eyes vast and liquid, faces that even in good times had a kind of latent thunder about them, but which now seemed battle-ready, seemed to exude a terrible strength.

They came through the iron gates in ones and twos, then in a steady stream of threes and fours. They gave a little nod of satzriakal to their red-turbaned tribesmen and coreligionists who manned the door of the hotel; then, stepping out of their taxis, and following the example of the oldest among them, they removed their turbans and placed them in a row on the marble staircase of the hotel. And, without a word to each other, they stood in silence, seeming to await orders. Their faces were expressionless, but for what Toby thought – watching this spectacle – was the faintest trace of racial pride. A quiet acknowledgement that if they were to lose this fight, it would only be because they were grossly outnumbered. And yet, as many of them would later say, this was how it had always been with the Sikhs.

By the time Isha’s car came through the iron gates, the black and yellow taxis had formed a barricade of sorts, looping two or three times around the hotel. And then all of what had been tentative and provisional coalesced.

Isha’s car drove in just as Uma came out of the house, freshly bathed.

‘Oh thank God,’ Uma said, as she saw the car door open, adding quickly, ‘. . . Toby you’ll have to go and check up on the parents . . .’ And then, as if she had used up all her pragmatism, she collapsed into her sister’s arms. Isha’s two boys – dressed as girls – crawled out of the car with embarrassment. The driver hurried around to the back to open the trunk to reveal Viski. Who, from the shame and discomfort of the journey, or from perhaps having had some time alone, or from the experience of having people witness him get out of the dickie of his own car like a fugitive, had worked himself into a rage.

‘Get in the house,’ he yelled at his wife and children. Isha, now responding to her sister, was in tears too, and was saying, ‘You should have seen them! Choodas, thooh, Uma! Scum of the earth. Coming with their kerosene rags up to the car. “Where are the Sikhs?” Thin, reedy little bastards who, under ordinary circumstances, would not dare meet the eyes of a Sikh let alone raise a hand . . . saying, “Sikh kahan hai. Sikhon nu mar dalenge.”’

‘Get in the house!’ Viski yelled again.

The two women gave him a stricken look, though the boys, now having recovered a little from their embarrassment, seemed intrigued by the scene, even a little amused by the outpouring of emotion, by their father’s escape in the trunk of the car, by the men, with their turbans in their hands, now approaching from the porch of the hotel . . . And there were as many conversations as there were things happening.

‘Narindar, Skanda aur Rudrani kahan hain . . .’ Uma began, and switching to English, said, ‘Toby, you have to go to Fatehkot House . . .’

One of the taxi drivers approached. ‘Satzriakal, sardar saab . . .’

‘Satzriakal,’ Viski said.

‘I’ll go right now.’

‘No one should leave . . .’

‘It’s fine, Viski,’ Uma said. ‘He looks like a foreigner. No one will touch him . . .’

‘What did they say?’

‘Asi tayyar’an, sab de sab . . .’ the taxi driver said.

‘Viski, what do they want?’

‘Wait a minute! For God’s sake, Isha. Let me hear what they’re saying . . .’

Then, after a moment’s pause, ‘They want us to shelter them, here, in the hotel. They’re ready to give their lives . . .’

‘Are you mad, Viski? What can . . .’ she struggled to find a number, ‘fifty . . . a hundred . . .’

‘I think it might be close to two hundred.’

‘Still! Against a whole city . . .’

‘I’m just—’

‘Do shut up, Toby. She’s right. It’s insanity. The moment they discover—’

‘They’re going to come here, anyway. It’s the most well-known Sikh property in the city. They’ve already burnt what we own in C.P.; they’ll come here next. Our choice is either to be prepared for them, or to sit cowering in your flat, and hope for the best. This way there’s a chance . . .’

‘What? That they’ll get scared and go away?’

‘Bhenchodh! I know what this kind of mob is made of. If one of these men –
one
, I say! – appeared among them with a weapon, they would melt away. The only reason . . . Don’t give me that bloody look, you know perfectly well I’m right – and I’ll scream it from the bloody roof of this hotel – the only reason they’ve dared to be so bold is because they know they have the blessings of the government . . .!’

In the time this conversation was happening, Toby had brought the jeep around.

‘Take the Fiat surely!’

Ignoring her, he said to Viski, ‘Arm them. Let them defend the hotel. Nothing will happen.’

‘Toby!’

‘Have you spoken to the parents?’ Isha interrupted her.

‘No, nobody’s picking up the phone . . .’

‘I’m going to Fatehkot House now,’ Toby said and drove away.

The news must have been communicated to the taxi drivers, for even before he reached the exit gate on the other side of the U-shaped lawn, he heard cheering and clapping. Then – low and threatening like a first roll of thunder – he heard a lone voice cry, ‘
Bole so nihaal!
’