The Way Things Were (37 page)

‘It’s very nice,’ Skanda says, and closes the book.

‘How is your translation coming?’

‘I am into the last few cantos.’

‘Ah, and will you translate the later cantos?’ Maniraja says knowingly.

‘No,’ Skanda replies firmly, ‘only the first eight are Kalidasa’s.’

‘So,
The Birth of Kumara
, but there is no birth . . .’ Maniraja says, and chuckles.

‘Exactly. And there is something suggestive in that, something subtle.’

Maniraja’s laughter vanishes.

‘The girl tells me,’ he says – now returning barb with barb – ‘that you are yet to immerse your father’s ashes at Prayaga.’

‘I’m waiting for my sister,’ he lies.

‘Well, don’t wait too long.’

‘Why? The “girl” must have told you: ashes don’t go off.’

The conversation is over. Both men rise.

‘What brings you to Delhi, by the way?’ Skanda asks.

‘Politics, my friend, politics. Sometimes we, men of commerce, when it is asked of us, must play different roles. And this Italian bitch – this Whorebassano, you know!’ he says, relishing what seemed to Skanda like a stolen/borrowed/play on words, ‘she’s done this country a lot of harm. She must go.’

‘So . . . ?’

‘We want to put together a plan. A blueprint for a new and muscular conservatism. Something that will straighten the backbone of this country. But it is not easy. This place is so scared of winning, Skanda. It is very hard to make India believe in herself. But let’s see. If Modi comes in, there’s some hope. It won’t be any thanks to your mother’s friends, I can tell you. That chhakka Nixu Mohapatra has sworn never to join him, and that fool Chamunda thinks he’s her rival. I tell you, we’ve been unfortunate in our elites. In other countries, the elite throws up the odd star; but, in India, it’s just been downhill since Nehru. Chalo, we’ll see. I’m meeting a few people.’

Then, contemplative, he says, ‘I chose to live here, you know. I could at any moment have sold out; I could’ve bought a ten million dollar apartment in Manhattan, put my money abroad and lived comfortably. I didn’t; I dedicated myself to this country, to its future. But, Skanda – I don’t know! – this should be our moment, a moment that comes but once, and we’ve let it pass us by. People think it’s an administrative issue, a question of policy and reform, but it’s not. It is cultural; these things are inseparable from history. And there’s an effeminacy about this place that I don’t understand, an unmanliness that runs in our blood.’ Then he stops abruptly, and, pointing at a corridor that leads to the rest of the terminal and the tarmac, says, ‘But why don’t you go through? The girl’s waiting for you.’

‘Is she really not planning to disembark?’

‘No. She says she hates this city. She has her magazines, her iPad, her DVDs. And she has Suzie coming.’

‘Suzie?’

He smiles.

‘The pedicurist.’

The sun beats down on the tarmac, forcing a wobbly vapour to rise from its petrol-stained surface. In the distance, he can make out Maniraja’s jet. A glistering tube, with a discreet crimson line along its flank, and a diamond on its tail.

The separation had been like a long illness. A dull persistent ache. Uma knew – people told her – that she had to wait it out; to see it through to the end; that one day, she would wake and find herself whole again. But, so long as it was with her, the feeling of illness, it seemed there was nothing powerful enough to flush it out. Nothing that could rid her of her tiredness, which seemed to come from deep within her body, and which, like a beneficial enzyme, protected her from herself, limiting her range of intensity, disabling her capacity for strong emotion. So, no less than keeping her from the world of laughter and light and joy, it also insulated her from a sorrow too keen to bear.

A period in her life had begun that was like a second youth. She was living with her parents again; or rather, they, until Fatehkot House was rebuilt, as a block of flats this time, were living with her. Her husband was gone. Her children, more than at any other time in her life, seemed to be like someone else’s, like nephews and nieces for whom she felt a great affection, but felt no real sense of responsibility. They came to her with their stories of school; with occasional anxieties about clothes, a frock that was too tight, a sweater too itchy. But she did not dress them in the mornings; she did not oversee the making of their tiffin; she did not give permissions. In fact, where the latter was concerned, and where, in the past, she had always been so diligent – and Toby so lax – the very request for a permission, to spend the night out, to go on a school trip, produced in her so vacant and wandering an expression that the children themselves stopped asking. It seemed to frighten them, that faraway look of hers. They went straight to their grandmother, onto whom many of the more banal aspects of their upbringing had devolved.

She told herself they did not think anything was wrong. Because, in some respects – and children can be shallow, in these respects – when it came to an impromptu bedtime story, or a sudden act of generosity, a Nirula’s pizza, an Atari set, a chicken and cheese grilled sandwich at the Taj, she was more willing than ever before. She was, and she was only dimly aware of it, more and more like Toby. The source of all the nice things in their lives, and no responsibility. Their father, they believed – and they were partially right – had gone to Kalasuryaketu to work on a translation.
Three Additional Sanskrit Plays.
A companion volume to his much loved
Three Sanskrit Plays
, of which the new edition had only recently arrived from England.

The third play in the planned new volume was Bhavabhuti’s
The Last Act of Rama
, which takes as its subject Rama’s return to Ayodhya and his renouncing of Sita. Their reunification after a long sorrowful separation. Viraha. Toby had told them all about it, with that special genius he had for making things which even to adults would have seemed obtuse and remote simple for children: ‘It is about two people, Ram and Sita, who love each other very much, but who, for reasons beyond themselves, are forced to separate.’ She had, naturally, seen the barb, seen the parting shot. She knew, too, how much Toby liked life to be an exercise in meta-references. Left to him, that is all their life would have been. One long elaborate exercise in self-referentiality, turning in on itself, churning its guts, gorging on its tail.

And it would have been enough for him. He had once said – and she clung to it as the intellectual basis for their separation, ‘I don’t know why people feel that if this is the only life, then it follows that one must be hedonistic, or live hard. I should think that if this is the only life, if really and truly there is this and nothing else, then one can relax, squander one’s life with impunity, spend it reading, sitting in a chair, or learning languages. Wait it out, you know. Treat it like a throwaway thing. One-use-only.’

‘Toby, that makes no sense.’

‘Do you remember when we were with the kids once, at that aquarium in Baltimore?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘And we bought Skandu that little plastic stick, which, if you cracked it, would glow in the dark . . .’

‘Yes, he loved it.’

‘He did. But do you remember what he asked us?’

‘No.’

‘He asked us how long it would glow for. Whether it would glow ad infinitum, or whether – and this was nice – it could be turned off, to glow again on another day . . .’

‘Toby, what has this to do with anything?’

‘It has everything to do with everything.
Because
– do you remember? – once we told him that that was it, that once he’d cracked the thing, it would glow till it ran out, and never glow again, he was instantly contemptuous of it. He threw it aside. We tried to explain to him that he should cherish it in the moment, enjoy the glow while it lasted, but it was no use: he was no longer interested.’

‘Toby, are you saying that that is your attitude to life?’

‘In a sense, yes,’ he said, and grinned.

A joke, but it chilled her. It was a confirmation of something she had half-suspected. And she remembered it through the separation, because in these moments, when the framework of a shared life comes apart, one’s emotions are unreliable. They are, like a swimming pool in spring, full of cold and warm currents. One has to be careful not to be taken in by occasional bursts of tenderness; not to mistake these short-lived conflagrations for real fire, for love again. In these moments, one needs, as protection, a rationale for the separation, something immune to strong emotion.

And she had hers. She missed Toby terribly; he had been witness to so much in her life; in fact, it was her missing him that was the cause of her convalescence. But never, in all this time, did a counterargument emerge with power enough to overturn her decision. She never found a reason persuasive enough to make her want to be with him again, except for those that grew out of moods and sentimentality.

One thing, however, was real: not a reason, but a fear. Her fear for her children.

She told herself that, in the long run, once the initial shock had worn off, it would be better for them too. That it was better – everyone said so! – that they see their parents apart, and happy, than together and miserable. Which is what, in those final months, they had been. Rudrani was younger and saw less, but Skanda, on virtually a daily basis, was exposed to the toxicity of the dying relationship. And he had, in one instance – she could not wish it away – been witness to an incident he would never forget. That one scar, she had given him – there was no escaping it – and she was pretty sure it was permanent. It was what had brought the curtain crashing down on those last days of anguish.

The family was at the dinner table. I.P. had been gone a few weeks. Toby, turning to the Brigadier, said, ‘Sir, you won’t believe who came to see me today.’

The Brigadier, compressing his bearded lips, wet with droplets of whisky, looked over at his son-in-law. The light from a wicker shade fell in a bright pool over the red and white chequered oilcloth of the dining table.

‘A fellow called Choate.’

The Brigadier laughed. Then, with some delay, Skanda laughed. Rudrani had not understood, and feeling left out, looked to her mother, who mutely wagged a disapproving finger at her. Deep was in the kitchen.

‘What did he want, this Choate? Does he have a first name?’

‘Ben.’

The Brigadier roared with laughter.

Skanda, complicit in the joke, and scornful of his sister’s inability to grasp it, laughed too.

‘He wanted,’ Toby continued, ‘my patronage, if you please . . . Some businessmen in Bombay, a fellow I used to know, put him up to it . . .
For
– it beggars belief! – a
holocaust
museum.’

‘Dada,’ Rudrani said, ‘what is hollow-kos?’

Skanda didn’t reply.

The Brigadier said, ‘A Holocaust museum? In India? Bit strange, no? What next? A Civil War Memorial? A mausoleum to those who fell at Sebastopol? A parade marking the end of the Franco-Prussian War?’

‘No, no, no sir,’ Toby said, laughing. ‘Not that Holocaust. Holocaust with a small “h”.’

‘Baba,’ Rudrani said pointedly, ‘Skanda doesn’t seem to know – but what is a hollow-kos?’

‘My darling, it was the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Millions died. But the reason Nana and I are laughing is that the man who came to see me today wants to open a holocaust museum documenting the killing of Hindus by Muslims.’

‘Go on!’ the Brigadier said. ‘Is that right? But the man must be a damned fool. A real Ben Choate. There are no numbers, no evidence; it would have happened –
if
it happened – over hundreds of years. What would you exhibit in such a museum? It can’t be compared . . .’

‘I know. I was appalled. I tried to tell him what insanity it was.’

‘Dangerous insanity.’

‘I even asked to meet his backers. Because, you know what this sort of man is about, sir? Cynical. Full of a foreigner’s disregard. He comes into a place he knows nothing about; finds some banias, with a bee in their bonnet about Islam, and, suddenly he’s convinced them to put up the money for a holocaust museum, and to make him the director, no doubt.’

Uma, silent throughout, now said, ‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with it.’

Toby looked at her across the pool of light on the table and, sensing her aggression, did not respond.

It was her father who said, ‘It’s madness, Mishi . . .’

‘Mishi?’

‘Uma.’

‘Mishi! Mishi! Mishy-mashy!’ Rudrani shouted, finding it endlessly amusing that it had once been her mother’s pet name.

‘It’ll criminalize the Muslims of this country. It’ll leave the blame at their door, for a killing in which they had no part. A killing, which I might add, is undocumented. You can no more have a museum like that than you can have . . . I don’t know . . . ?’

‘One in the Levant documenting the people killed in the Crusades?’ Toby ventured. ‘I know. I tried to tell him: the Holocaust, both in its execution, and the ideas behind it, was a modern thing. And the Germans kept scrupulous records.’

Uma fell silent.

The kitchen door swung open, and Narindar, followed by Deep Fatehkotia, emerged with dinner. Cutlets, chips, peas.

‘Well!’ the Brigadier said, and drained his drink. An air of normalcy returned to the table.

Toby, though addressing himself to the Brigadier, tried secretly to placate Uma. ‘But, sir, I fully support the desire to want to face the past. No matter how distant it is. After all, it is only as near or far as it feels. Look at Iran; Karbala might have happened just the other day. And that was 1,500 years ago. But you can’t graft the modern past, with all its needs and anxieties, onto the distant past. It will only leave you more confused. And angry. Historical understanding – I think it is one of the South African writers who says this . . .’

Suddenly there was a loud crack, and ‘Fuck!’

Uma, for some time now, had been playing with a loose strip of Formica on the edge of the dining table. It was noisy and Toby had looked over at her a couple of times, but had not said anything. She had now broken it and a tiny fragment of wood, he could see, was lodged painfully under her nail.