The Way Things Were (34 page)

As with many men, especially those raised in colonial countries, where the language of emotion and instinct – Hindi or Punjabi, say – is denied a certain class, and has been replaced with the formality of English, I.P. tried to understand what he felt, which was a thing with emotional charge, in purely intellectual terms. He seemed to want to crack it open like a puzzle.

The game had begun, when I.P., sitting opposite Toby, leaned in to show him something on his pad. Toby looked and saw it contained the record of the morning’s conversation, ‘I’ve abandoned it/ Too long/ The vocabulary, yes. But not how it all hangs together/ Why?/ Why is he disturbed?/ In here, for now/ Forgive me. Not yet/ Happy birthday . . .’

Waiting for his reaction, then seeing his puzzlement, I.P. glanced at the pad and snatched it back hurriedly. He turned the page and showed it again to Toby.

It read, ‘K
ā
la. Time. The Great Healer? SKT: K
ā
la. 1) Time, in general. 2) Time, as destroyer of all things: Death.’

‘Yes!’ Toby said, with exaggerated interest – he, of course, knew K
ā
la meant both Time and Death.

‘Oh I know who this one’s for,’ Uma’s voice cut in, and reading the card in her palm with care, she said, ‘Whose first screen words were “Gif me a viskey ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy baby”?’

Toby tried to deflect his embarrassment – Uma had taught him not always to seem so knowing – by drawing attention to the question. But I.P. was insistent and was urging him – over cries of ‘Greta Garbo’ and ‘Viski, you ought really to have known that’ – to turn the page. He did and it read, ‘Sanskrit:
kal
, to calculate or enumerate. Latin
calen-doe
; Hibernian
ceal
, death and everything terrible. c.f. Latin
kalendarium
, account book.’

And then a question from I.P., ‘Related?’

‘Yes, very much so!’ Toby said. ‘You’ve made what I call an etymological poem, in which one creatively supplies what etymology only hints at. Yes, they are absolutely related. For at the end of all our calculations comes Death. And, in that sense, the word K
ā
la contains in it not just the notion of Time, but also that of its passage, the count of days, as it were, at the end of which Death waits. The ideas collapse into each other, you see . . .’

‘Oh, here’s one for I.P., I think: “What fruit was embroidered on the handkerchief that led to Desdemona’s death?”’

I.P.’s eyes glittered feverishly. He scribbled – ‘strawberry’ – on the pad and showed it to Toby, who answered on his behalf. Cries of ‘Pie!’ rose from the people playing, but I.P. was not interested. He turned the page and now tapped Toby’s elbow. ‘And Kal
ā
? Art. But which can also mean a division of Time. Is it related too?’

Toby laughed. ‘To Death, and to Time, and to Calculation. No, no. That would be asking too much. That all those things should share a thread with Art! In any case, kal
ā
means Crafts rather than Art in a unified sense. But, yes, were it true, it would give a whole new meaning to the consolations of Art . . .’

Toby could not gauge what comfort – or conclusion – I.P. was drawing from all this. It seemed as if some emotional need was finding the wrong outlet. At the same time he did not want to discourage him. Seeing his disappointment, Toby said, ‘You know, some things, I.P., must just be allowed to run their course. They belong to the realm of feeling. They can’t be solved like an equation. They
need
Time—’ Toby stopped mid-sentence. I.P. looked crestfallen. ‘What are you searching for?’ he said.

I.P. thought about this and wrote at length, ‘I don’t know. A way for things to add up? For meaning, in the literal sense, to impart meaning in the abstract.’

‘But that’s a wonderful thing to say,’ Toby said, looking at I.P. in amazement. ‘That’s almost all that needs to be said.’

But I.P. was not satisfied.

Iqbal, ‘Would a pig have been able to swim if it had fallen off the Ark?’

‘We’re out, I’m afraid. We’re just going to chat for a bit.’

There were groans of irritation from the adults lost among the excitement of the children having, at last, found a question they could hope to answer.

I.P., in the meantime, had written simply, ‘What is the word for history?’

‘In Sanskrit?’

I.P. nodded.

‘Itih
ā
sa, of course. And it’s a compound: iti-ha-
ā
sa: The Way indeed that Things Were.’

I.P. seemed, in his eyes, at least, to smile.

Then he wrote, ‘How did you manage to stay above it all?’

‘It was never open to me to get sucked in, I.P.,’ Toby began. ‘My father, you know, was older. Much older. I hardly knew him. He died when I was eighteen. And he was very disillusioned at the end. He didn’t really know what to do with himself after Independence. My mother was a nurse. I was raised in boarding schools and colleges abroad. I was part of a grand family and all that, with a great legacy and tradition, but I was also, in an important sense, not part of it. Not part of its attitudes, at least. It was never open to me to adopt the politics of any particular group. I was an outsider, I.P., with a longing for India. With a need for it almost as intense as the need for self-realization. And Sanskrit – both as a language and as a little bit of old India preserved in amber – answered that need. It gave me a way in.’

‘But what has it really given you?’ I.P. wrote with fresh urgency.

‘It hasn’t
really
given me anything,’ Toby said. ‘It’s like what Wilde says about Christ, comparing him to a work of art: “He does not really teach one anything: but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.”’

‘But what if it’s all futile?’ I.P. wrote.

‘What?’

‘What if this place is never able to appreciate what you become?’

‘All acts of Love are like that, I.P. It is the risk we take. But, regardless of outcome, there is a record. And, I assure you, what we do out of Love in our life gets notched up in that column of the good things we’ve done. It’s why I sometimes feel that Kama, the god of Love, is known also as Smara, which, like the Latin
memor
, means “memory” or “remembrance”. Now try beating that as a good example of meaning in the literal sense hinting at meaning in the abstract.’

Their conversation – its urgency – had distanced the others in the room. The game of Trivial Pursuit had run out of steam. The children were falling asleep on the mattresses laid out for them; Rudrani had already been asleep for hours. The Brigadier and his wife had gone into Toby and Uma’s room, which had been given to them. The Fatehkotia sisters were in the kitchen with a bottle of whisky. And Viski? Outside, smoking a cigarette.

I.P. was calmer and there seemed something resolute about him now. He looked long at Toby, then, seeming to weigh his options, he wrote, ‘If I decided I wanted to leave. As soon as tonight, even. Would you help me?’

‘Where will you go?’ Toby said, in a voice that was something between a laugh of incredulity and a gasp.

‘Anywhere,’ he wrote. ‘Nepal. Sri Lanka, at first. Just to wait it out. And then somewhere else.’ He was about to hand Toby the pad when he took it back hurriedly, adding, ‘Somewhere without itih
ā
sa.’

‘America?’ Toby said, his voice still ringing with incredulity. ‘Australia?’

‘Even less,’ I.P. wrote, and underlined, ‘New Zealand. Canada.’

And then he looked at Toby with an expression – with that same boundless sadness – that said he had never been more serious about anything in his life. It was an expression at once imploring and desperate, seeming really to be asking Toby for help, in a way only Toby was in a position to understand. And, on receiving some unspoken word of acquiescence, he wrote quickly, ‘I don’t want anyone to know. Not even Uma.’

Toby, in what was like a sigh of grief, said, ‘How will you manage, I.P.? You’re in bad shape.’

‘I’ll manage fine.’

‘Do you want me to come with you? I can.’

‘No. I need to be alone. I need solitude.’

‘And what? You want to leave now? Tonight?’ Toby said, exasperated at how fast the conversation had come to this.

‘In the morning, maybe. I think it would be best.’

‘It’s still so unsafe, though.’

‘It won’t be. Trust me,’ I.P. wrote, and seemed to give Toby some hint as to his plans.

‘You have your passport and things?’ Toby asked, hardly able to believe what he was saying.

I.P. nodded.

‘And what about tickets? Foreign currency?’ Toby said, with increasing desperation.

I.P. gestured to Viski, coming in through the front door after his cigarette.

‘I say, fellows! Should we have another one? I don’t think our lot are going to get any sleep tonight.’

I.P., fastening his gaze more tightly on his brother-in-law, wrote, ‘He can help. He owns a hotel.’

The bathroom door in the flat was open. A needle of light broke in over the floor strewn with triangular chips of white stone. Somewhere it illuminated the squalor that, as with railway stations in certain cities, gathers in that passage between the bathroom and the kitchen. A stained bucket, a broom, a rag, a wooden crate of Campa-Cola. Skanda, desperate for a pee, stumbled sleepily in the direction of the open door. The room was filled with sleeping bodies he had to pick his way past. He was especially afraid of his aunt, Isha, who slept lightly. He managed this feat, and had come past the minefield of bodies into the passage where the light from the bathroom door came in, when he froze.

His first impression was of a blazing white sink full of hair. Of long wet ribbons of black hair falling lightly into a gleaming ceramic bowl. And later, even when everything else had faded, this would be his one enduring memory of 1984: a bathroom sink full of hair.

His hands, which still hurt from his burns, groped back into the darkness behind him and closed gently over the cold iron handle of a gas cylinder. A perch of sorts now given him, he sat back and watched the scene before him. The barefoot man, in a thin white pajama, standing with his head over the sink, knotting his fingers around the wet strands of hair, drawing out gleaming ribbons, and cutting. Snip, snip, the tapeworm hair broke free, and fell backwards into the sink. It seemed, at first, alive, rigid and tense. Then, like a wilting flower, its crescent body suddenly drooped. Skanda watched with complete absorption.

There was an expression of elation on his uncle’s face. The half-crazed look of a man cutting himself free. He cut at the strands of thick black hair, as if they were bonds that had manacled him. And it was amazing, the joy – when he knew it was short enough – with which he combed his fingers through his hair, looking, as if for the first time, upon his face. In the mirror, a trace of vanity flickered in his eyes, for now that the hair was gone, he saw the face of a handsome man. He flicked his wrist, getting rid of what little strands still clung to his hand, and held his wired jaw clamped between his fingers, almost as if it were someone else’s.

He had just begun to clip away at his beard, when Skanda, trying to make himself comfortable, pushed back up on the cylinder. It made a terrible grinding sound, iron against stone. I.P. froze, then was at the door in a flash, a finger pressed to his lips. Skanda would have screamed had I.P. not quickly slipped his hand behind his neck, and, without a word, ushered him into the bathroom whose door he pressed shut with the help of a red bucket. Once inside, he took him by the shoulders, lowered the toilet seat and sat him down. Then he put his finger to his lips again. And smiled.

Skanda nodded, and made a little hand gesture of his own. A thumb pressed against the inside of his little finger. I.P. threw his head back and laughed mutely; his eyes danced. He raised the lid of the toilet, as if to say,
go ahead
. Skanda peed like a girl, silently against the bowl, as his uncle shaved for the first time in his life. He watched the face appear from out of the hair: the fine bones of chin and cheek, the prominence of the lips, the eyes set free of their clownish mask. Never had a man looked so emancipated;
and
, at the same time, in some essential way, emasculated. A man reborn, with all the inevitability of death that needs must always accompany such a rebirth.

The pre-dawn quiet of the flat fitted the mood of conspiracy that had grown among the men. The black Fiat, with I.P.’s luggage already in it, waited outside, the engine on. I.P., his hand resting lightly on Skanda’s shoulder, moved like a ghost out of the flat, leaving behind him the sleeping bodies, as someone might leave, with a mixture of sorrow and determination, their dead at a scene of devastation. They met Toby and Viski just past the front door, in an anteroom of sorts. And there, for a minute, the two men who had not yet seen I.P. looked for the first time, in the half-light, on his metamorphosis. Their faces, discernible even in that silvery gloom, were like mirrors to I.P.’s own internal state. There was joy in them, something of the fast-footed spirit of renewal, airy and resurgent, rising up out of the charred and still smouldering remains of a former life. But, naturally, there was sadness too. The conflicting emotions made the two adults’ eyes glitter in the coffined darkness of that tiny room where the men stood. Three men and a boy.

Toby glanced at I.P., then questioningly at the room behind. The room where the family slept, and from which I.P., had, only a moment before, made a thievish departure. I.P. resisted Toby’s suggestion – and Toby would not have pressed the matter – but then suddenly he yielded. And, more stealthily than he had left the room, he stole back into it. Like a man returning to a burning house, not from some lofty sense of duty – not, for instance, to rescue a child – but for sentimental reasons, to save an heirloom or a relic, say. Down the long axis of the flat, past the sleeping bodies, and through a door into Toby and Uma’s room, the waiting men watched I.P., in a gesture at once breezy and full of reverence, make as if to touch the Brigadier’s feet. Then his shadowy form seemed almost to recoil and he repeated the gesture at the beige and socked feet of Deep Fatehkotia. Did they stir? Maybe. Viski swore later that he saw the Brigadier – from whom his own wife had inherited her light sleeping – open his eyes, smile and before I.P. could see him, pretend to sleep.