The Way Things Were (36 page)

The memory is clear in Skanda’s mind too. They are standing outside CM1; the adults are inside the cottage with his mother; Iqbal takes out the blade of his Swiss knife and offers to kill the man who has just attacked his mother. ‘I’ll go right now and cut him up. Nobody can do that to my massi, and get away with it.’

Skanda is about to say something further to Iqbal, when Viski returns. ‘Look, look at this.’ He holds in his hands an old Penguin edition of his father’s most famous book,
Three Sanskrit Plays.
The pages are yellow, the cover soft and black, with a russet image of an apsara on the front.

‘This is out of print now,’ Skanda says, for want of anything else to say. He has only one copy himself, which he had bought once at a second-hand bookshop in Holborn.

‘Read the inscription, read the inscription,’ Viski urges.

Skanda opens it. It reads, in his father’s small fine hand, the black ink now brown:

‘I remember him giving it to me,’ Viski says. ‘We were sitting in the coffee shop of the Raj. It was the day we heard of the Bhopal gas tragedy. Awful bloody end to an awful year. A year of blood and gas.’

‘1984?’ Isha says, as if she hadn’t heard.

‘1984? Of course 1984. Annus Horribilis. We sat in that coffee shop, drinking bloody cold coffee with ice cream. And your father was saying that he was going to Kalasuryaketu for a while; that things were bad between your mother and him, but that they would come right; I’ll never forget that phrase: “they’ll come right”. They never did, of course. Who knows why? She was a strange woman, your mother . . .’

‘Eh, eh, eh. Watch yourself,’ Isha says.

Viski bites his tongue comically and winks at Gauri. Then, serious again, he says, addressing her now, ‘She blamed him terribly – I don’t know for what? – for I.P. leaving. No one else did. Even old Deep Fatehkotia, God rest her soul, who blamed everyone for everything, never blamed your father for I.P. “He’s in a much better place,” she would always say, as if he was bloody dead. And, in a sense, to her he was.’

‘What a time that was, I tell you,’ Isha says, her legs up on the table, her hand resting flatly on the crown of her bald head. ‘So hard to know what to do with it. Just feels like dead time, you know. Not lost, but dead.’

‘Hey, serdy,’ Dadu says to Iqbal. ‘Spliff’s smoking, brother.’

Round about now there is the first real brightening of the day. The sun, at last, rends a coin-sized hole through the fog. This new assault, of direct yellow rays, casts the terrace scene of drinkers and smokers freshly into damnation. Skanda looks imploringly at Gauri. They make to leave and this time nobody stops them, in their hasty exit from that divided house on Curzon Road.

It is one of those mornings when redemption, if there is to be any, lies in the continuation of morning rather than in sleep. There is an air of late-morning sunlight, of coffee, of dust dancing in a beam. They come in and seem to go their own ways. Skanda, long addicted to the comfort of radio, searches for his iPad. For the NPR app that, disembodied and distant, has been so consoling to him over the past six months. Soon it is playing.

Gauri, who has been lying on the sofa, her exposed belly burnished in the sun, rises and wanders up to the sideboard. She trails her fingers along the pot-bellied urn, with its ruff of blue polythene.

‘Baby,’ she says, and he likes that she says
we
, ‘we must do this soon.’

‘No hurry,’ he says. ‘My mother tells me they don’t go off.’

She smiles, then comes back to the sofa and lies down. ‘I’m going to have a little sleep right here.’

‘All right,’ he says, ‘I’ll join you in a second. I want to check email.’

His father’s study. As ever, in deep shade. There is an email from Theo Mackinson. Skanda, having decided to take time off from university to devote himself exclusively to his translation, now occasionally photographs difficult sections of The Birth, and sends them as an attachment to Mackinson, who, though on holiday, always replies promptly. The verse in question is the moment when Rati – Love’s wife – on seeing him incinerated, swoons and faints. And now rising, she says, ‘Ayi, lord of my life, do you live still?’ For she sees on the ground before her – and here Skanda had had trouble: puru
ṣ
’ | ak
ṛ
ti.

Mackinson has glossed it in his email as ‘the outline of a man’. ‘But what?’ he asks, pleonastically. ‘What, Skanda Mahodaya, is there’ – and he can virtually see him grinning as he asks the question – ‘in the outline of a man? What does Rati see?’

Bhasman
, Skanda thinks, and observes the case agreement. ‘Ashes! She sees ashes in the outline of a man. Ashes of the fire of Shiva’s wrath.’

Mallinatha – the great Mallinatha! – glosses, ‘The sense is: that there is no man.’

For Love, it is implicit, had ceased to exist.

The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The blaze is back. It is a year since his arrival in Delhi, a year to the day since his father died.

There is some commotion at the back. A plump man, dark and moustached, who must think he is waiting for Maniraja, rushes up.

‘One minute, one minute,’ he pleads, as if asking permission to pee. ‘Chief is coming just now.’

Skanda does not expect this. He knew Maniraja and his mother were flying in together, but he does not expect to run into him. He is unprepared; a childhood dread comes up in him, an emotion that must have some deeper cause, but feels always like the dread of stilted conversation. Of never having anything to say. Too late to slip out to the bathroom now. The commotion is too near; and somewhere, in that eddying crowd of people, in that parade of briefcases and Louis Vuitton shoulder bags – the retinue of drivers, fixers, secretaries – a set of eyes has surely already seen him. Then the crowd parts, and he appears, with his slow gliding step, his silvery hair, his air of distraction, which, even as a child, had seemed to Skanda like the caricature of a businessman’s busyness.

But his impression of Maniraja is not to be trusted. He can still see, too clearly, the man who first entered their lives. The man of astrological rings, albeit very expensive ones, of gold chains buried in a thick bed of greying chest hair; the man who made ‘awry’ rhyme with ‘lorry’, and broke the silence of the ‘c’ in ‘scintillating’. The man who never dropped the ‘so’ in I don’t think so, even when it was followed by a clause: ‘I don’t think so we can make it to Delhi today.’ And though fragments of that man remain in the statesmanlike figure now approaching him, it is the transformation that is staggering. Skanda has never known a man to grow more between the ages of forty and sixty – an age when men notoriously stagnate – than Maniraja. Not just in superficial ways; in profound ways, Maniraja seems to have absorbed the idea of self-improvement. Had he been a different man, Skanda would have admired him deeply. In fact, one of the reasons he resents Maniraja so much is that he makes him aware of things in himself that he despises in others. He makes Skanda feel like a petty snob: a man who, far more than the object of his derision, is himself diminished by his attitude. And, whenever he sees reflected in the admiring faces of others the man Maniraja has become, Skanda is reminded of his own defective vision, of how little he can see him as others see him.

‘Hello, my friend,’ Maniraja says, seeming, in the weary solemnity of his tone, to be consciously making time for Skanda while letting him know he knows it is their first meeting since Toby’s death. He is dressed in dark jeans and a youthful shirt whose hem hangs short over a new paunchiness; he has his devices in his hand. The weight surprises Skanda, for Maniraja had always paid assiduous care to fitness; he had discovered it well before anyone knew the concept in India; and had, in those days, when people cared only how food tasted, paid visits to doctors in places like Austin, Texas, to meet with the father of aerobics and learn more about the workings of such things as the glycaemic index. So, the sudden fat, all unhappily concentrated, in the Indian way, around the belly of this small-framed man, seems to mean something, seems to speak of a greater change in attitude. But Skanda cannot say what; and, quickly, the thought is subsumed by another, no less surprising: his awareness of how long he has known Maniraja. Twenty years, almost. He is amazed that their relationship, even after all this time, is still so dependent on Uma for the most basic flow of conversation. There is still the crushing awkwardness of even two minutes together.

‘Hi, Mani. Glad to catch you.’

‘Yes, yes, my friend. I was just telling the girl that we must now, in a very clear and systematic fashion, set aside time for each other. Otherwise, schedules being what they are, too much time flows under the bridge. And one has reached that age, you know,’ – here, he lets out a wet burst of raucous laughter – ‘when time is finally a scarcer commodity than money.’

Skanda feels a familiar deadness come over him. As an adolescent he had mistaken Mani’s way of talking for pedantry – and it had always shut down his mind. He sees now that Mani is struggling, in this rigid and unfeeling tongue, to condole with him.

‘I was telling the girl the other day . . .’

Girl?!
Had he missed it the first time?

‘Which girl?’

Mani laughs. But it is not a joke. Which girl?

‘The one on the plane,’ he says, gesturing towards the tarmac.

‘The air hostess?’

A look of dismay appears on Maniraja’s face.

‘Your mother!’

‘My mother? A girl?’

‘Why, what’s wrong with that? I think she’s still a girl.’

‘If you say so,’ he says, feeling teenage embarrassment engulf him.

Ever one to take things literally, Maniraja says, ‘
I say so
. I was telling her that this experience of death must be gone through. It is a new experience for you and her. I had it very early, you see: I lost my father, when I was still a young man. Death is part of life.’

‘I know,’ he says, trying to hasten through this ordeal. ‘I lost my grandparents.’

‘Yes, but that is something different. A parent is different. Even the girl – you wouldn’t know it – she feels it too . . .’

‘Yes, truly, Mani, you wouldn’t.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’ Then, looking long at Skanda, he says, ‘I want to show you something, my friend. Tell me what you think.’

Maniraja now indicates that they should sit. His retinue, forming a line and watching from a distance, falls back.

‘H2 ka briefcase dena, Major saab.’

Major saab, a short stout man, with a handlebar moustache, sifts through Maniraja’s half a dozen briefcases with ease. Each has been labelled: LV1, 2 and 3; H1, 2 . . . He hands Maniraja a soft bottle-green Hermes bag from which Maniraja removes two or three beautifully published books, in pale shades of orange, yellow and brown.

‘In India,’ he says, ‘we have many words for this colour. For this yellowish-tawny-brown . . .’

‘I know,’ Skanda says, regretting the sharpness of his tone. ‘It was my father who taught my mother that.’

Maniraja does not react. He does not have to; his name is on the insignia of the books; it is his library now. MCL. The Maniraja Classical Library. Skanda, of course, knows the books. But Maniraja is at pains to point out the black margin that has appeared on their cover.

‘All the books this year, in honour of the passing of the founder of the library,’ he says, careful not to mention Toby by name, ‘including your translation, will be published in this fashion. Open it, open it. Look.’

He takes the book from Skanda and flips to the dedication page.

It reads, ‘To the memory of H.H. G.M.P.R of Kalasuryaketu, Founder, 1940–2013.’

Skanda knows no cause for the terrible pity he feels. No cause, save the morbid feeling of embarrassment he has for his father. How he would have hated to be remembered in this way! A leaf out of Maniraja’s book, a frontispiece to the project that he had envisaged . . . And yet Skanda finds himself powerless to protest. His mother and this Claudius, they have a way of recasting the world that is watertight; there is no room to slip in an objection.