The Way Things Were (4 page)

Mishi had not meant to laugh, but her mother’s hysteria always produced in her a nervy feeling of lightness and hilarity. She gave a clear crisp little laugh, which seemed to come from a place of total contempt for her mother and her values. But, though she seemed uncaring on the surface, inside she was wretched. She was desperate to get out and to be, in some way, her own woman. As long as she remained under her mother’s roof, she felt her life was shaped by her displeasure. She felt it become nothing more than an act of rebellion.

She flew for three years, and, though it gradually lost its charm, she clung to it, as her only escape from the oppressiveness of life in Fatehkot House. Then, one day, on the flight back to Delhi from London, an incident occurred that in a roundabout way brought her time in the air to an end.

It was that hour after dinner when the cabin acquires the air of a late-night bar. Dinner had been served; the lights were dim; some passengers were drinking brandies and coffee. The smokers congregated at the back of the cabin. One man, particularly, had made several trips there. He wore jeans, a blazer, soft red leather shoes with tassels. He was balding, attractive; there was an air of good living and reading about him. Mishi, on her barrelling journeys up and down the aisle, had on more than one occasion caught his eye. Peering up at her over his glasses, a book, a cigarette, a glass of red wine, all hanging off his hands with a kind of studied ease. This was a man, she felt instinctively, who could make love to her as easily as he could solve the crossword puzzle.

Mishi, at twenty-five, was sexually inexperienced. Not out of prudery, but because the few men she had been with had seemed to her more fumbling and inexperienced than she was herself, and, finding herself in unsafe hands, she had decided to hold out for better things. She was at that age when the mind is ready, but the body, untested, craves a guiding hand.

Glances turned to smiles; there was the odd banal exchange: ‘How tiring it must be to serve dinner to a plane-load of people’; there was a furtive and generous refilling of his glass. Then the darkness deepened and Mishi, casting her eye up and down the aisle, saw nothing but a dim expanse of sleeping bodies, and the man she had admired still drinking and reading in the light from a single spot overhead. He seemed to be waiting for her.

She was right. He was self-assured; he spoke and moved fast; within minutes of her approaching, she felt his fingertips graze and trail the woollen expanse of her skirt, pinch the flesh at her waist. But, though deft, he was not gentle; there was, in fact, something brutal, something urgent and hurried about him. And quickly she saw that his main interest lay in seducing an air hostess – a local one at that – and, while still in the air, fucking her on the aircraft.

‘It will be something new,’ he said in an accent that as far as she was concerned could have been French or Spanish or Italian.

New?
she thought.
For who?
It was all new for her.

‘I go,’ he said, jumping his eyebrows in the direction of the toilet, ‘and you come.’

‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘I will lose my job.’

He became impatient, and the hand that had been trailing the inside of her stocking, made a sudden leap up her skirt, and a thumb, poised and prodding, forcefully massaged her clitoris, as though seeking to flip a switch that would change her mind.

‘No!’ she said, and pushed him away. Then, straightening her skirt and blouse, she added – such was her uncertainty! – ‘We can have coffee in Delhi, if you like. But, for now, let’s just talk. Tell me: what are you reading?’

His plans spoiled, he smiled at her, and now frank and naked in his face, she saw his contempt for her.

‘We talk?’ he said. ‘What we talk of?’

‘What are you reading?’ she repeated.

‘What’m I reading? I’m reading a history of Vijayanagara. You know Vijayanagara?’

She didn’t.

‘Hampi? You never heard of Hampi?’

She shook her head.

‘You see, you rich Indian girls! All the same. What is there to talk to you about? No history, no culture. Just good for one kind of humpy,’ he said, and laughed, taking a foreigner’s pleasure in the pun, ‘then marriage, children and game over. If it was not for us, you people, you wouldn’t know nothing.’

Mishi reddened. She would have liked to slap him or spit in his face. But she felt ashamed by what he said, and did not want to react in a way that would seem too scripted. That would have drawn a smile from him, as if this, too, like her ignorance, he had anticipated. ‘Swine,’ was all she managed, hissing it under her breath. And, walking away, she heard the sound of his laughter behind her.

Safe in the knowledge that she would never see that man again, Mishi was able to consider what had occurred with an open mind. And what stood out for her was not what he had done, but rather her own meekness. The way she had fallen in line. His easy power over her. He had spoken, she knew, with his own ends in mind, but what he had said was true. How effortlessly he had been able to take her measure, to know the kind of girl she was, whereas she had nothing comparable to say about him. She had no world view in which she could locate him as he had located her. And there was something else: when he was at his most insulting, when his face was a sneering mask of contempt, she had found him sickeningly attractive.

Skanda is invited to a party. The price one pays for venturing out in a city such as this!

The morning begins in frustration. He is working on a compound at his father’s old desk. A special kind of compound called a bahuvr
ī
hi, which is exocentric, referring to something outside itself. So, what might mean strong horse would – if a bahuvr
ī
hi – mean he whose horse or horses are strong. The compound is:

Literally: tilaka | sandalwoodpaste | grey | lock (as in hair).

The difficulty lies in identifying – from left to right – the relationship between each two elements. So, lal
ā
ṭ
ik
ā
| candana. A genitive relationship, it would seem, as the sandalwood (paste)
belongs
to the tilaka on her forehead. The next step is to figure out what relationship this fragment of meaning – the sandalwood-paste-of-the-tilaka – bears to the colour grey. Dh
ū
sara. Is it
because of
or
by way of
the sandalwood (paste) that the lock of hair is grey. Which would suggest an instrumental relationship.
Or
. . . and here Skanda feels himself making mistakes.

His eyes begin to wander. To the cracked and almost petrified surface of the old desk. An inkwell, its thick glass chipped in places. A wrought iron paperweight of George V. A cream-coloured wall from which the paint cracks and peels. One kind of frustration excites another, and soon he is watching a video he has been following for days:
Dora Venter Dog World
.

Dora in an arid plain. She stumbles along, her flesh-coloured dress torn, her slender and small-breasted body visible. Her blue eyes are blackened with kohl, her fair hair wind blown:
a wild angel has appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error.
She has a clear bottle of amber-coloured spirit in her hand. She spills it on herself and on her shaved pussy. Men in boots and fatigues, wife-beaters – four, in a menacing circle – assemble, their uncut cocks in their fists. And soon little Dora is on her knees, then in their hands, her little aureate body arced and passed about. DP’d, TP’d almost, and Dora laughing through it all. She is trying to make it all seem as if it were part of the plan. Her plan. She is fighting to suppress the pools of kindness and innocence that rise to her eyes and spoil it all. Dora laughs it all away. There are drums in the background. And Navajo flags. Dora is showered in semen in the sunlight on the dry earth, the shadows of denuded branches long across her back. Dora is asleep, alone – poor Dora! – with nothing but Enya for comfort.

He squeezes out a last drop, puts the tissues in the ashtray and heads out.

Khan Market. On the surface it is exactly as Skanda remembers it, but the shell of the old market is full of new shops and cafes; there are patisseries selling ten-dollar éclairs; and even the back streets teem. All along an arterial section, darkened flights of stairs lead up to air-conditioned restaurants. Gunmen sit outside on wooden stools, and at their feet, nourished by a drain, are sprigs of fresh peepal.

He is stepping out of a bookshop when, from a crowd of people picking their way over the uneven flagstones, a graceful and raspish voice says, ‘Skanda?’

He looks up and sees . . . he is not sure! But he knows this face. A youthful face, with long greying hair. The eyes bright and warm and dancing. Who is this woman? So familiar and yet . . . he can no longer conceal the questions in his face, and she says, a little accusingly, ‘Kitten Singh!’

Kitten Singh! He now knows exactly who she is. A strong aversion for her rises up in him like an instinct. He finds himself staring emptily at her face. She’s had a lot of work done and it has left the texture of her face uneven: in places, lined and expressive, in others, taut and immobile. It gives her facial gestures an unpredictable quality; there is almost a kind of delay, as with an actor whose lips are out of synch with his song.

‘Please accept my condolences. I used to know Toby very well in the old days. Both of them.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, though he is never sure if that is what one says.

‘Bete, this must be a difficult time,’ she says hurriedly, ‘but, if you’d like . . .
if
– no pressure at all – if you’d like to get out and see some people, I’m having a Sunday lunch; there’ll be many people from the old days there, and many young people too; I’d love for you to come.’

‘Thank you for asking, but—’

‘Leave it open. Think about it. Maybe in a few days you’ll want to.’

‘OK.’

‘Chalo, I’m off. Please give my best to Mishi, sorry, Uma.’ Then she pauses and says, half in earnest, half, it seems, out of malice, ‘Does she still go by Uma? Or is it Mrs Maniraja . . . ?’

‘Still Uma.’

She gives a frosty smile and pats his cheek. ‘Such a handsome boy! Just like your father.’

The approach to the flat is through a great whitewashed arch, as cool and dark as the entrance to a mosque; the arch, in turn, is framed by a red brick doorway and festooned with creepers whose leaves have withered in the heat. Beyond is a garden, a bald patch of pale earth. And, though nothing else seems to move through the day, and even the shadows can barely bring themselves to inch forward, there is a continuous circulation of cars around the little square garden, for on its one flank stands the Raj Hotel, whose doorman, red-turbaned and dressed all in white, a Sikh, as doormen so often are, casts a solemn unweary eye over the slow progress of the afternoon.

Inside, Narindar, an old and seasoned practitioner of daytime darkness, schooled in the rituals of a north Indian afternoon, does not allow the day to enter. The flat is a place of old rasais, of reddish-brown rugs, of orange-spined paperbacks, termite-eaten with yellowing pages, of low dusty lamplight, and the occasional looming shadow of a Kurkihar bronze.

He turns his attention back to the compound from the canto entitled ‘The Goddess Reborn’ and cracks it immediately:

Lal
ā
ṭ
ik
ā
y
ā
ḥ
candanam tena dh
ū
sar
ā
ḥ
alak
ā
ḥ
yasy
ā
ḥ
s
ā
.

It was the instrumental after all: she whose locks were grey because of/by way of the sandalwood (paste) of her tilaka.

Uma, from then on, passionately in love, found no respite in her father’s house, even on thick slabs of ice, Uma whose locks were grey from the sandalwood (paste) of/from her tilaka
.

There was nothing accidental about the gloom of Fatehkot House. It had its origin in the story of Deep Fatehkotia, who, at an age when she was too young to see in her own experience the experience of others, returned home one humid afternoon in September 1947 from a picnic at the Qutab to discover that the young soldier she was engaged to marry in December that year had been bankrupted by the Partition of India. Beggared down to those little things that hurt most: the only existing photographs of his late father; the Purdey shotguns; a Samurai sword, with a red lacquer sheath, that he had taken off the body of a slain Japanese soldier in Burma, some years before.

Deep had assumed her father, Rai Bahadur B– Singh, a peasant contractor from Punjab who had amassed a vast fortune from work given him during the building of British Delhi, a man whose name was etched in stone on one of the Secretariats, would call off the marriage. Which until that moment had tilted in Deep’s favour: for while she was but the daughter of a contractor, albeit a rich one, from a lowly Jat clan, the man she was marrying was the sardar of a grand Sikh family; a missal family; a man whose ancestors had been among the handful of chieftains who had propped up the throne of Ranjit Singh, when his kingdom had stretched from Kabul to Delhi. Her fiancé’s wealth before the Partition included a dozen or so villages with tenants; a well-sized fort; houses in the hills and some 6,000 acres in the gold heart of Punjab.

But, though all this was now lost, Deep’s father refused to call it off. He had, in fact, made it his business to lend support, moral and material, to his Sikh co-religionists, so many of whom the Partition had displaced overnight. Had Deep been older, she might have seen the nobility of her father’s actions. She might have seen that she was but a small casualty in a great human disaster, touching the lives of millions around her, and that her father was one of its heroes. A Schindler to those Sikhs who had lost their homes and properties, and who the upheaval had impoverished overnight. But Deep’s world view, either as a consequence of her youth or temperament, was not generous enough to take in the larger implications of the tragedy, in which her own misfortune played so small a part. In her mind, the great event of the Partition was reduced to the manageable proportions of her own private loss.