The Way Things Were (39 page)

‘Skanda!’

‘I remember thinking that I had never met a man like that in my house before.’

She looks long at him, then says, ‘Do you remember when it was, roughly speaking?’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I know exactly when it was. It was 1989. How could anyone forget that year.’

‘Why? What’s the big deal about 1989?’ she says, now sleepily.

‘Gauri, what are you saying? A huge year. Everywhere. The end of that Stasi night in Germany, the war in Afghanistan, the Mandal commission in India: everywhere events
whose beginnings did not know their ends
. The twentieth century was never as over in 1999 as it was in 1989.’

She is not listening. He thinks she’s asleep and, turning off the light, is about to go to sleep himself, when she says, ‘And your mother? Was she single that whole time?’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘for a long while.’

‘That must have been hard. Socially, I mean.’

‘It was,’ he says, then after a pause, adds, ‘But less hard than when she found someone again.’

‘Huh?’ Gauri says into the dark.

He laughs. ‘She used always to tell me, my mother – it was one of her great throwaway remarks – “Darling, we have just as much to fear from the people who can’t handle our success as we do from those who can’t handle our failure”.’

The women who came into Uma’s life with Toby’s departure brought friendship, support, ways of healing. But there was, she sensed it even then, something parasitical about their sudden arrival. They seemed in some ways like people who reverence the thing – make a god of it, even – that they fear most. The thing being, of course, marital collapse, the loss of the man, abandonment, the shame associated with the breaking of the conjugal bond. They came, Uma knew, to stare in fascination, as crowds in a poor country come, when a rich man, who till then they had believed to be above death, is killed in his expensive car.

Built into their wish to help was an equally powerful impulse for Uma to stay as she was, to never quite recover, to remain the totemic victim of marital failure. Uma, now frighteningly available, was someone to be watched. And these women formed a protective girdle round her, which was meant at least as much to protect the world – that little world! – from her as it was meant to protect her from the world.

Of the women who came into her life during this period, one of the few to truly wish her well was Priti Hirachand. She was a woman to whom life had given so much that it produced in her a gratitude akin to nobility. It could be said, in the thanks she felt she owed life, that she was superstitious in her obligation to be the agent of happiness and pleasure in the lives of others. That she understood these things in very limited ways – to mean little more than Cartier watches, holidays in London, toosh shawls, love affairs and parties – was not her fault. In that socialist winter, with only the faintest hint of thaw in the air, everyone’s idea of contentment, their sense of what happiness consisted of, was a superficial thing. Pretty Priti – remember! – had come of age at a time when the airlines were the only way for a girl of her class to see the world. That now, with even the slightest easing of the regime, her husband’s biscuit fortune allowed her to travel freely, to move easily between London and Delhi, to stay for months, during the summer, in a suite at the St James’s Court Hotel: well, it felt to her like life itself!

A Time of Things was at hand and, for that generation, who had never tasted real Italian food, who had never drunk anything other than French table wine, whose entire idea of the world came from a few foreign newspapers and magazines smuggled into Delhi a week late, the whisper of change in the air excited in them deep material passions. It was impossible not to want to cast off the genteel poverty of Mrs Gandhi’s era for the wonderful optimism of what seemed to lie ahead.

It was at this stage just a change in mood, in sensibility even, and, as such, it expressed itself anecdotally. Businessmen, whom nobody had even known in the old days, let alone invited into their drawing rooms, suddenly found they were welcome in Delhi. Slowly, very slowly, Money found it was welcome too. The nature of corruption began to change. Having once obstructed business, it now enabled it. One sensed from the new discourse, as with something hard and sensual in the voice of a woman considering an affair, that a country, too good too long, enshrining Gandhian austerity in a sticky web of Nehruvian red tape, was on the verge of cutting itself free. On the one hand, there was glasnost and perestroika in Moscow, speaking even then not so much of change as of moral and ideological collapse; on the other, the spirit of Nehruvian austerity was undermined at home by arms scandals and malicious gossip that the prime minister’s wife had a taste for expensive things, now sable coats and Charles Jourdan shoes, now toosh shawls and stolen antiquities.

Priti Hirachand, though she would later be a casualty of that time, was also the first creature thrown up by its effervescence. An early Aphrodite. Long before Kitten Singh was installed in a flat on Eaton Square, long before the new London was to come into being, of
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, of restaurants and rich Russians, of an easy prosperity and a deserted Belgravia, London, the city-state, long before all this, it was in Priti Hirachand’s voice that it was first possible to hear the brassy chime of moneyed Indians abroad. There was something bountiful and generous about her, effusive to the point of being unnerving. It was, for instance, not uncommon – if she liked you – for you to receive the next day, as a token of her enthusiasm, a little piece of jewellery in a felt bag with a golden H on it. A ring of dull beaten gold links; a serpentine bracelet with rubies for eyes; a pair of cuff links with an H of dusted emeralds. To speak of vulgarity when it came to her was to expose yourself to stating the obvious, so much so that you would only come off a little duller for it, and she much brighter.

She called one morning in March giddy with excitement. She was having a birthday party for her son, Krish.

Krish was an overweight boy with deep dimples, whom Priti dressed in tweeds and referred to quite seriously as ‘The Biscuit Prince’. The Biscuit Prince was Skanda’s age and on his way to boarding school in England. Priti was throwing him a Ninja Turtles party in London and wanted Skanda to be there. She was calling from the Hirachands’ permanent suite at the Taj. Her voice was full of careless luxury; a mixture of languor and pride; for, as much as Indians enjoy the riches and comforts of the West, there is no one they wish to impress more than the people they have left behind. It is the one loyalty that never deserts them. And Uma could sense – in the way Priti spoke – the deep satisfaction she must have been feeling at returning, full of tales of other places, to the city of her childhood, and drawing open the gauze curtains of her suite onto a skyline that must have gone through her like a breath of familiarity, the skyline of tombs and trees.

‘What do you mean “spoil him”, Uma?’ she said. ‘You think I spoil my Krishy? Not at all. He’s being packed off to boarding school, and he’s barely twelve. Just like we all were. Didn’t do us a jot of harm, did it? But I want to give him a little something before he goes off, you know, a birthday
slash
going away bash. We’ve turned a section of Claridges into a warren of tunnels and sewers and whatnot. You should have seen their faces when we first arrived. “Ninja Turtles, madam?” they said in those stuffy voices of theirs. And I said, “Yes, you better believe it: you’re working for us now, buster.” Colonial-shalonial; look who’s giving you a run for your money; Empire strikes back and all that. I mean, darling, between us and the Arabs we practically own Mayfair. I haven’t seen a white man there who isn’t a chauffeur for years!’

A clear peal of laughter came down the phone and Uma could not help but smile. She had this way, Priti, of always making the excesses of her life seem like part of some elaborate scheme for historical justice, as if she was rich not so much for her own reasons, but so that she could redeem her country’s reputation for abysmal poverty.

‘And don’t worry about costumes,’ she said, with sudden seriousness, as if only now seeing Uma’s reasons for not wanting to send Skanda halfway across the world for a birthday party.

‘We have the lot. Donatello. Michelangelo. Raphael. Leonardo.’

‘Oh, they’re named after Renaissance artists, these turtles of yours? How nice!’

‘What, darling?’ Priti said distractedly. ‘It’ll be good for him, Skanda, he’s been through a lot lately. And, you know, they adore each other, Skanda and Krish.’

This was an embarrassing lie; on the one occasion they had met, they had loathed each other on sight. And when Skanda had taken to calling Krish ‘Krish-mish cake’, Toby had had to be sent in to retrieve the situation.

‘No, Preets, I don’t think I can. He has school. And, besides, I’m a little strapped for cash. Toby’s been behaving very strangely on the money front.’

‘Really? I would never have thought . . .’

‘I mean he does the bare minimum. School fees, etc. . . . But nothing else. He’s closed our joint account. He doesn’t reply to any requests of mine for money. I’ve been living off my mother and Isha, actually.’

‘That’s so strange. He was always so generous, Toby.’

‘I don’t know. I think he thought the separation would be temporary. And when it turned out to be more permanent, he just went off. It’s not that I care about myself so much, but it’s wrong to punish the kids.’

‘How terrible! It’s always the ones who claim to be, you know,
raffiné et cultivé
, who turn out to be such rotters. And the ones we were taught to think would have bad values, hearts of solid gold!’

‘I don’t know,’ Uma said. ‘People in pain can behave in strange ways.’

‘But still! Why don’t you let me give him the ticket? I’m practically his godmother; I’m allowed.’

‘No, no. They’ve travelled a lot, these kids. There’s no harm in them roughing it a little now. And, as you know, we never went anywhere till we were well into our twenties and working for the airlines.’

‘That was then. Now is different.’

‘Still. Besides the summer . . . When did you say it was?’

‘15 June.’

‘The summers are always tricky. Between Toby wanting them in Kalasuryaketu . . . plus I’ve just accepted Isha’s invitation for us all to go to Gulmarg . . .’

‘Gulmarg?’

‘Yes. You know, they have that friend, Tariq Mattoo . . . They’ve managed to get his wonderful cottage, CM1. I haven’t been in years and . . .’

‘I thought you said Skanda had school.’

‘By June, school’s out.’

‘Then, darling, send him to London. Because we might be coming to Gulmarg too, right after that. I’ll bring him along.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Kitty Singh’s been on my case. She wants me to come and stay with her. She also thinks she has CM1, by the way . . . I tell you, you Delhi ladies, you’re always in each other’s hair. And, you know, how much harder she has worked to get that cottage than Isha. She has, you know, rather a more intimate connection to Tariq Mattoo.’

‘I do know. Nixu calls her . . .’

‘They’re coming too, I hear. Nixu and Gayatri.’

‘Yes. It should be lots of fun.’

‘What does he call her, Nixu?’

‘Helen of FICCI.’

Priti gave a shriek of laughter. ‘Federation of Indian Chambers of . . . ?’

‘Commerce and Industry.’

‘Oh, darling, it’s too good. But this is why she’s been on my case, don’t you see?’

‘She wants you to help her be unfaithful to that poor husband of hers yet again?’

‘Poor Tunnu, the turd. But who can blame her? That little garden gnome of a man. And she has many flaws, old Kitty-Kat, but she’s not an unattractive woman!’

‘Not at all. But then why marry him?’

‘Moolah, of course. But tell me about yourself. What are you going to do?’

‘About Toby?’

‘Yes, about Toby! And money, and security. We’re too old to be out on our butts again, you know, Uma. Worst comes to worse: you divorce him and get a part of what he owns. Understand? Aren’t there flats on Cheyne Row and palaces on the banks of temple towns?’

‘They’re all in trusts and off-shore companies, and things like that. Trusts controlled, in part, by Usha Raje. His declared income is near to nothing. And besides, you know how long these things can take in India.’

‘Uma, be careful,’ Priti said, with sudden gravity. ‘There are only two kinds of women at our age: those who have prepared for the second part of their lives, and those who haven’t. And, with every year, the gap between them gets wider, harder to bridge. There was that mid-to-late-twenties moment – remember! – that we all went through, and there’s the now-moment. You don’t want to end up flat and alone, believe me. If you lived in Bombay, I’d say it was still OK. But Delhi, it’s still semi-feudal, still an overgrown village. It will make you feel your vulnerability. These bitches – the Kitty Singhs of the world – they will make you feel it.’

‘What would you have me do?’ Uma said, laughing off the alarm in Priti’s voice.

‘Find someone. It’s been – what? – four or five years. It’s high time.’

‘Maybe Priti, but these things don’t happen by magic.’

‘They happen if you’re open to having them happen. If we had youth and beauty on our side when we were young, we have availability now.’

‘Priti!’

‘I mean it.’

‘Well, I’m available. What do you want me to do?’

‘To meet a friend of mine who’s coming to Delhi and staying next door to you at the Raj. I want you to have him over for dinner or something. Kitty’s been plaguing my life – she wants me to introduce him to her; everyone does; he’s hot shit these days – but I’d much prefer he meet you.’

‘Why do you think he wants to meet me?’

‘Let’s just say, I know. He met you once before. Years ago.’

‘Does he have a name, this friend of yours?’

‘Mani, Mahesh Maniraja,’ she added, with a question in her voice.

The name meant nothing to Uma. It entered her mind practically free of association, an outline, for her to fill in as she would. She had hardly any memory of the man she had met at the height of the Emergency, when she was passionately in love with Toby. And she had only the vaguest impression of that bungalow in fog with its high walls and gate of dark wood and brushed steel. A frosted glass plaque, lit brightly from behind, and the fat black letters that read, Maniraja, B-17 Sarvaujas Enclave.