The Way Things Were (42 page)

‘I’ll just be back,’ Toby said, putting down his book and drink.

‘Sure,’ she replied, and did not look up from her work.

The telephone in Kalasuryaketu was in the manager’s room. A small musty cupboard of a place, with an unsteady plywood desk and a green metal Godrej cupboard. The door of the little bulb-lit room was open and Sylvia, even with the deep breath of the river, and the orchestral cry of insects, could hear snatches of their conversation.
Sentence-sounds
, Frost called them, believing that the music of human speech had semantic force. And here the music was jolting, abrupt, cold and sarcastic. He came back a few minutes later, Toby, visibly withdrawn and irritated.

She was too polite to ask if everything was all right. She saw him return to his reading – Proust, of all people! – but he was too distracted to continue. He put the book page-down on the flagstones and hunted around for something on the floor. Cigarettes. She passed them over without a word. In that act of attentiveness to him, it was as if she had asked him a question. And he was relieved to have been asked it. Almost throwing up his hands while at the same time lighting his cigarette, he said, ‘That was my wife. Calling to see if I wanted to pay for my son to go halfway across the world for a birthday party.’

‘How old is your son?’ Sylvia asked.

‘Twelve!’

Sylvia smiled.

‘And when I said no,
obviously, no!
, she had the nerve to accuse me of punishing the family, because our relationship – hers and mine, that is – was on the rocks.’

Sylvia wanted to react, but felt that strong and feminine pressure, deeply tactical, not to say the slightest bad word against Uma.

‘Children,’ she said cautiously, ‘can sometimes be very persuasive. And they don’t always understand distances.’

‘Rubbish. It’s not him who wants to go. He loathes the little snot whose birthday it is. I had her put him on. Oh, no! It’s my wife – consorting now with the yuppy crowd – who’s put him up to it, who feels there’s nothing a twelve-year-old needs more than to go to Ninja Turtle parties in Europe. Ninja Turtles! What kind of people are these? I ask you. Renting out Claridges for a children’s birthday party. Offering to fly people over . . .’

‘How did you leave it?’

‘I put my foot down. That’s how I left it.’

Even as Toby said the words he felt some uncertainty at the pleasure his indignation gave him. Of course he thought Skanda had no business being sent to London for a birthday party, but he knew, too, that he was enjoying his outrage. His hurt feelings, which had created a more or less permanent ache in him over the past few years, were replaced by something exultant and self-righteous. How good it felt to say
no
to Uma. But no sooner had the thought entered his mind than he was struck by a feeling of pity at the slow death in him of the person who loved Uma, a version of himself that he was extremely fond of. For as much as men like Jones and Coulson, the Sanskritists, had been living models of his ideal of love, there was one man, who though not real, had exerted an almost equal degree of influence. Swann. Charles Swann.

Toby had first read Proust in his twenties. And then – save for Marcel’s obsessional love of Albertine, which never seemed believable to him – he had loved it all: the nobility of Saint Loup; the haughtiness of Charlus; the social decline of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Balbec, Combray, Paris in the war years. The extraordinary description of Madame Cottard fighting sleep at a party at the Verdurins. He had loved the music of the language. The tendrils of prose, opening out slowly, like clouds of colour in clear liquid, into long relative clauses: the predications buried deep within the sentences, so that the reader felt almost, from the effort of keeping everything in mind, that the truth of what was said was being drawn from him, the reader, rather than revealed to him by the writer. It had been one of the most profound reading experiences of Toby’s youth. He had returned to Proust many times in his life, but never so much with the urgency that he returned to it now, never so much for Swann, in general, and for his capacity for love – infinite and self-wounding – in particular. The blindness of that love was as soothing to Toby as the drive up to the Kumbh through the landscape of his childhood. It seemed in some deep and meditative way to work him through every motion of his own suffering for Uma, while at the same time, working it out of him. So that he felt at once both immersed in his pain; able, indeed, by giving it an intellectual dimension, to augment his agony; and yet, more able to bear it than before.

He felt the passages about Swann’s suffering had been written with him in mind, decades before his birth. He went over them again and again. It is we, he thought, who make what we make of the people we love.
What is aught but as ’tis valued?
It is an act of the imagination, Love: mano | ratha: like a chariot of the mind or heart. But this time round I must make someone worthy, someone deserving, the object of that love. I must not make another mistake.

‘Vartir_api,’ she said, underlining the fine print of the commentary with her red pen.

He came to sit next to her. He could feel the nearness of her limbs through the muslin she wore. In his mind – for he wanted so much to love her – they were already making love. He could smell her on his lips; and his penis, cutting through the sharp reeds around the vagina, had already entered her. The deed was done. The habit of the sexual act, its repetitiveness, like a drill, would give him what he did not feel in the area of love. Soon, by the mere act of sex, he would be able to forget that their relationship would never be a passionate one, that he would never (not, at least, in the breathless way in which he had once thought of it) love Sylvia. And would it matter, really? Didn’t all love end up in the same place anyway, in that sphere of domesticity and habit? Would anyone even be able to tell the difference?

‘The locative absolute,’ he replied, ‘when the lamp has gone out: d
ī
pe na
ṣ
ṭ
e –
put out the light, and then put out the light
– the wick is smoke-blackened: dh
ū
mit
ā
bhavati. It’s one of my favourite features of grammar, the locative absolute. With a simple change of case, word endings are freed of their normal function of connecting one word to another. Instead it becomes possible for an entire predication to be connected to another: to serve, in fact – as if cast into shadow by the locative – as the context for what follows. Here – because the past participle has this perfective aspect – it is past and present that are connected; one, coming like a train through a tunnel, to meet the other.’

‘Like the past continuous?’

‘Sort of,’ he said, and felt disappointment. He could not help but think,
If I loved her, even her banalities would be beautiful.

That night, with her asleep next to him for the first time, the name came to him. The Kidd Sanskrit Library. KSL. No sooner was it in mind than he knew what the books would be. He was able to imagine them down to the last detail. His legacy. He could see their tamarind tawny-brown covers, the Ki
ḍ
written on the back in Devanagari. He could almost touch their cigarette-paper pages with the transliterated Sanskrit on one side and fresh English translations on the other.

All the great works of Sanskrit literature,
he thought,
translated by the best scholars of our time.
He imagined all the people he knew, the Priti Hirachands and Kitten Singhs of the world, the Gayatris and the Chamundas.
They might not read it for fifty years,
he thought,
but they will buy it, for their children if nothing else, the way they buy them the
Encyclopædia Britannica
and the
World Book
today
. He would make it fashionable: it was all he could hope to do: to install it, like a Japanese washing machine, this moribund body of literature, in people’s houses.
And perhaps one day,
he almost said aloud, smiling to himself,
one of these little Ninja Turtles will grow up and consider reading it. It won’t be a renaissance, but it will be something.

He put the light on; it fell aslant over Sylvia’s bare back, where his eye fixed on a mole partially enveloped in skin. Again disappointment returned, deep and unreachable. He decided to finish the chapter he was reading. She stirred a little. He watched her with some mixture of curiosity and dismay. He was at the end of
Swann in Love
: ‘And with the old, intermittent caddishness which reappeared in him when he was no longer unhappy and his moral standards dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”’

It was in late April that Kitten Singh discovered CM1 was no longer hers. She was at the Steakhouse – of all places! – buying freezer-loads of supplies for Gulmarg when she heard. It was Mrs Arjun Singh who, inadvertently, told her. This revelation, detrimental to her hopes for the summer, came to her from a lofty mass of flowered grey chiffon, French perfume and sunglasses; and Kitten Singh was made to feel that this bit of news, shattering to her in every respect, was of no more importance to Mrs Arjun Singh than if a sweating block of Emmental, which she scrutinized with diamantine eyes, was, in fact, fresh or not.

Mrs Arjun Singh was not alone; the Mexican ambassador’s wife, a large lady with reddish hair and moles, was with her.

‘Christina, you tell me: does it look all right to you?’

‘Rita, I’m no great expert. But’ – she loved this little phrase! – ‘I am not too keen on Emmental.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Arjun Singh said, with some mixture of dejection and curiosity, as though about to hear something damning about someone who till then she had believed to be socially important.

‘I prefer pecorino.’

Mrs Arjun Singh digested this information with hostility, then reminded herself that Christina was European – or kind of European – and that her knowing about these things was no more surprising than Mrs Arjun Singh knowing what quantity of dal was needed for the consistency of a shammi kebab to be right.

At this point Mrs Arjun Singh said, ‘That Tariq Mattoo, I tell you, for a Kashmiri, he has such a quality of friendship! Can you imagine giving up your own house in Gulmarg in the summer, so that your old school friend can make amends with his wife.’

Here, Kitten tried to interrupt. But Mrs Arjun Singh did not let her.

‘And my God,’ she continued, fully enjoying the pleasure of the blow she was delivering, which had all the more force for seeming to come as if indirectly. ‘You should have seen her. Poor Isha Singh Aujla! “I fell,” she said simperingly. Fell?! With those bruises! Give me another one, darling! I wasn’t born yesterday. We didn’t know which way to turn. Don’t you agree, Christina?’

‘His cottage? CM1?’ Kitten Singh finally inserted, trying in this tirade to snatch at relevant information. ‘But he promised it to Tunnu and me months ago.’

‘Check again, dear,’ Mrs Arjun Singh said quickly, as if this was an incidental detail in a more important story. ‘That poor woman, she wore it like a badge of honour. Gayatri Mann was there too. And she said, “Don’t you love it, Rita ji? Only in Delhi would a woman, who’s just been beaten up by her husband, feel sufficiently compensated – enough to tell people about it! – by a house in the hills!” I laughed and laughed! What was the phrase she used, Christina?’

The Mexican ambassador’s wife, who was asking if the pork was safe, said carelessly, ‘It’s all so deliciously shallow.’ The women exchanged smiles. Christina began, ‘But tell me – I’m not too keen on it myself – you feel safe, Rita, giving your children pork in India?’

‘Bacon, yes. But not ham, Christina, nothing uncooked . . .’

Kitten Singh, from the deep shade of that Jor Bagh shop, suffered the special ignominy of someone whose disappointment was too small to consider. She gazed vacantly out at the day. The scorching wind-swept day, in whose thermal flurries little pirouettes of dust and dried leaves leapt up and died, as if to the tune of a hidden music. They made her longing for Gulmarg more acute, and her disappointment at being so newly unaccommodated keener. There was no point in fighting it. She knew it was all true. She had in the annual rush for cottages suffered a crushing and unexpected defeat.

That swine, Tariq Mattoo, had given her house away.

When she got home she sent immediately for Parmeshwari, the masseuse. A fat black woman from the south with the arms of a wrestler and a plait of wiry hair as thick as a tug-of-war rope. She went everywhere, Parmeshwari, she knew everyone, and she was – the Delhi ladies all knew it – a poisonous gossip. After each of her indiscretions, communicated to them invariably by a rival, they made resolutions never to have her again. But they were powerless to resist her. For she was the very soul of the city embodied. And there were few things in the world more relaxing than Parmeshwari’s strong coarse hands ironing out the knots in your body, round hard nodes of stress and idleness, even as she delivered in a voice, cynical and bored, and calibrated to her oily progress over your body, the talk of the town.

The price of gossip was gossip – and where Parmeshwari gave she also took – but there was, they told themselves, something neutral and even-handed about her. She was – and this was so rare in a political city – nothing if not non-partisan.

That day however, with the evil talent of an astrologer, she made Kitten Singh feel, and she always harmonized physical pain with bad news, both vulnerable and dependent.