The Way Things Were (33 page)

Which, in turn, was returned by a growling wave of ‘
Satzriakal
.’

*

*

Later, when some had died, and others moved away, there were very few people willing to remember the 1st, as it had actually happened. An interim of some twelve hours, which though rounded off by despair on both sides, was for those hours a period of unashamed happiness. A small and irrational shoal of time, in which everyone present knew for those few moments a great feeling of joy and human warmth. So anomalous a memory was this, gnawed away at by tragedy on both sides, that in the minds of many it did not survive. It became a casualty of narrative. And those in whom the memory did not survive, those who would come to be persuaded it was chimera, later thought nothing of telling those in whom the memory remained that, ‘No, you are sadly mistaken: charming as this notion is, of a night of respite from the awfulness of that time, it is a child’s fantasy: 1984 was unremittingly awful.’

The mood that day began to change as soon as Toby arrived back at the flat, with his in-laws in tow. And it suddenly dawned on everyone that they were safe, all safe. Then came the first joke, once everyone was indoors and the doors were locked. Not so much a joke as an observation, but it made everyone laugh nonetheless. It was Isha who said, ‘But, Papa, you look so elegant!’

Everyone looked, and everyone saw it was true! The Brigadier was in a double-breasted blazer, with brass regimental buttons, beige trousers and, rising proudly out of a spotless white shirt, an emerald green scarf.

‘I say, sir!’ Viski exclaimed. ‘Well done!’

‘Thank you,’ the Brigadier said, with some embarrassment, and looking slyly at his wife, who was in her usual salwar kurta and sneakers, muttered, ‘Didn’t want to die looking like a rag, you know.’

Then, amid the laughter, Toby appeared out of nowhere – the pantry, it seemed – and said, ‘What will you have to drink, sir?’

The Brigadier looked at his watch and something occurred to him.

‘Isn’t it your birthday today, Raja saab?’

‘It is,’ Toby said.

A murmur of ‘Oh, Happy Birthday, Toby!’ went through the room. The children, frantic with excitement and finding themselves all together in the consoling presence of their grandparents, began to sing. And if, at first, an effort was made to stop them, it was quickly overruled. The Brigadier added to the mood by saying, ‘Well, in that case, I’ll have vodka. Lord knows, I deserve one.’

And soon there was vodka, then talk of a cake. Deep Fatehkotia – whose chocolate biscuit cakes were legendary – began asking her daughter if she had any Marie biscuits. Games of some kind had begun, unruly and rowdy ones, issuing from imaginations newly inspired by the morning’s events. There was something that involved hooping a hula-hoop around a victim. Which Rudrani, being the only girl, found she was made too often. A manic and ranging energy spread through the flat, making the time go by more quickly. The mood of the adults and children seemed to merge. Their whispered conversations shed their air of confidentiality. Soon Deep Fatehkotia was reading
The Swiss Family Robinson
to the children . . . And the Brigadier, sipping vodka from a dainty glass while glancing at the newspaper, found he needed more light.

Darkness fell.

The lamps came on. The bar was laid. There was talk of dinner; and Isha, now making herself a drink, asked Toby if he had a backgammon set . . . Or a game? Trivial Pursuit, say.

‘In my study.’

He said this and now a hush came over the room. For, of course, though no one was saying it, there was something not quite right about this scene. Something off, something heavy and lingering.

I.P. had not set foot out of his room all day and no one – save Toby – had been allowed in to see him. He must have known that the whole family was together in the flat. But no one – not even Toby – felt they could tell him why. Not after what had happened.

‘What if you were to say,’ Isha whispered, ‘that it was your birthday and you were having some people over?’

‘It would embarrass him,’ Toby said.

‘Tell him the goddamn truth . . .’

‘Viski . . . !’

‘I mean what is this pussyfooting around one’s own brother? He’s a Sikh. A Jat. He can handle the truth; he would prefer it to all this . . .
Excuse me, please
. . .
I hope you don’t mind
. . . All this walking about eggshells, minding our Ps and Qs. Let him know that what happened to him is bloody nearly about to happen to the rest of us . . . Speaking of which, I’m going to go and check on our barricade. I say, tell him the truth.’

The Brigadier seemed to read his paper more intently; the women traded uncertain glances; only Deep Fatehkotia, with something sad and hopeful in her face, held Toby’s gaze. The children, in turn, fastened their gaze on her, waiting for their story to resume.

Before the tension could break, the door of the study opened. And I.P., a shawl draped over his shoulders, came out to join them, holding in his hands a battered blue box.
Trivial Pursuit!

‘So it was OK, then? All OK, in the end? A happy time.’

Isha, with the picture of Toby and Uma in her hands, glances bitterly at Gauri; there is something sneering in her eyes. Then she drinks her drink, and looks long at Skanda, as if to say,
you tell her
. It is late, 4.30 a.m. The central room, with the pool table, is mainly empty. But outside, on the terraces and balconies, there is still the murmur of late-night voices.

‘What a great picture,’ Gauri says, taking it in her hands.

‘I took it,’ Isha said slurringly. ‘I could have been a good photographer, you know. But nobody became anything back then.’

‘Look. There’s even the picchvai of the white peacocks, with Krishna as the single blue peacock.’

‘Where is that picchvai?! So beautiful, among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.’

‘Still in their flat. In exactly the same place. In fact, seeing this picture, it’s as if nothing has changed in that flat in twenty—’

‘Thirty.’

‘Thirty! Thirty years. It’s a great picture, Skandu,’ she says again, ‘so much of that time. And they make such a handsome couple.’

‘They were, they were!’ Isha says.

The picture produces a kind of wonder in Skanda. Which comes solely from the fact that he has not seen his parents occupy the same physical space in almost two decades, not since the night the Mosque came down in 1992.

As the memory of them together faded, Skanda and his sister had always said that nothing would be more miraculous than to see their parents together in the same room, breathing the same air. That would never be possible now, Skanda thinks. In fact, gazing still at the picture, he marvels at how their ever having been together had come to seem fantastical, like the merging of two famous but discrete stories into one.

And what does it show, the picture? It shows a man of European appearance sitting on a faded sofa with one leg thrown over the other. He wears black shoes with thin soles that are exposed and badly scuffed. He has Indian features with Western colouring. He wears jeans and a thick woollen Nehru-collared waistcoat over his shirt. There is something quiet and contented about him; he seems in a state of relaxation or calm – hard to say which – that is indistinguishable from fatigue. Next to him is a woman of darkish skin, her hair short and shiny. She wears a pale coloured sari, lilac or mauve maybe; even green perhaps. Her bones are fine and prominent, especially her collar bone, which seems to sprawl like a large necklace; her expression, open mouthed and staring directly at the camera, is unreadable.

Skanda tries to identify what it is that makes the picture a picture of its time. The lack of clutter perhaps. The feeling of a world pared down. The switchboards; the plastic ice bucket; a single bottle of White Horse whisky on a round wooden table; an aluminium tin, containing Deep Fatehkotia’s chocolate biscuit cake, all speak of a vanished simplicity, of a time when, it seemed, there were just many more empty spaces than there are now. Spaces to read in, to have long conversations in, to have dinners that went on without care for the hour; but spaces also in which a riot or an industrial disaster could occur and the noise and commotion of the present were not there to sound an alarm. A time when bad things occurred and silence, distance and empty spaces fell like a muffler over them. A time of culpable boredom.

No, Gauri. Not all OK. Not a happy time.

It was of Time – of K
ā
la – that I.P. had been thinking while he was away from the others. His mind came to it in a roundabout way.

Except for Viski who had returned from the barricade with news that all was well, that the ‘troops’ were drinking whisky, and eating chicken curry, and playing cards, and that there had been not so much as a stir on the front line all day, the others in the room, with the exception of Toby, of course, were almost frightened of I.P. He had the air that night of the solitary – an air, in some ways, fierce and intimidating, of a man who has seen too much. Something dark and glittering in the eyes, something weary in the gait. And then that awful silence, which even upon fools can impart gravitas: but which, with I.P., because it was involuntary, and enforced by steel, gave him something of the dread aspect of those people who commit acts of violence against themselves. The trepanators, the body piercers, the heavily tattooed, the sadhus who run tridents through their faces, and tie bricks to their penises.

He met everyone – touched his parents’ feet, ran a hand over the head of the children – but he did not really meet their eyes. And it was this, his shame, that later, when they were drinking whisky together in the kitchen, caused so much pain to his sisters.

‘What does he have to be ashamed of?’ Uma said, working herself up.

Isha shook her head and said, ‘This is it. This is what happens in these places.’

‘What places? Why do you keep saying that?’

‘I don’t know! These places where the state is so violent, so unthinkingly cruel. And the society – us, Uma! – we have no response. We are just left shamed before it. It is not violence we understand.’

‘Is there any violence one understands? Do you understand what’s going on outside?’

‘Oh, 100 per cent, Uma. That violence is naked in its motivations. I understand it completely. And, awful as it is, it does not produce shame. Anger, hatred, the desire for revenge, yes. But not shame. It is this violence that comes through the filter of the state that is demeaning, that produces shame and helplessness.’

‘You know, Ish – everyone’s always told you, you were stupid, just as they told me I was ugly – but that is the best thing you’ve ever said. And if we’re not too hung-over tomorrow, try and remember it. Write it down. Tell it to I.P. It will help him.’

But there would be no tomorrow, not in the sense that she meant it. For I.P., as Deep would later say, was already gone. ‘I could see it there and then. He was there, with us, in the flesh. But in spirit, he was already gone.’

Once he had greeted everyone he came and sat next to Toby. The family had tried to fill the awkwardness of his arrival with redoubled cheer and festivity. The children – though they loathed the game – had fallen upon Trivial Pursuit, for the sole delight of opening up the quadrants of its delicate board, for the fun of the different coloured pieces and the little corresponding pies, which only fitted in a particular way. Teams were being made; there was a full dinner being cooked in the kitchen; Narindar, with his special feeling of kinship for I.P., after laying out mattresses for the children in the drawing room, brought him a ready-made drink, with a little straw on a tray. Which made everyone laugh – the sight of I.P. accepting the drink and taking the first sips. He laughed too; and, for a moment, it seemed that what had happened to him was being assimilated, that the family, each in their own way, was confronting it and moving past it. But the laughter, as soon as it was gone, produced in him a corresponding sadness. And pain: as if equal to his physical injuries, there were psychological ones, that could no more bear laughter than his real injuries could bear exertion.

It didn’t help that there was so much comfort that night, such intimacy, such a rare and exquisite feeling of human resilience, of the riot pushed back to the far reaches of everyone’s mind, the way an unexpected downpour can push back the noise of a city. For it was nothing I.P. could feel part of. It made him feel his outsiderness more acutely; it made him feel he would never be whole again; and that rather than be reminded of his exclusion, in the company of people who wished to include him, he would go somewhere where no one would ask that of him, where, among strangers, his estrangement would go unnoticed.