The Way Things Were (44 page)

Their conversation was stilted and laboured. Nothing came out right.

‘I’m a political Hindu,’ he said at length, looking briefly in the direction of the beef. His voice contained a hint of apology.

‘Oh! . . .’ she said and then did not know what more to say. ‘What does that mean . . . ?’

‘It means I’m not religious: in the sense, I’m an atheist . . .’

‘My husband – my ex-husband, I mean – used to say all the Eastern religions were fundamentally atheistic.’

Maniraja minded the interruption. He looked at her with the irritation of someone forced to suppress his irritation, but she could not yet read the expression.

‘I mean: I don’t follow any rituals: no practice, as such. I eat beef with relish.’

‘Oh, I wish I’d known!’

‘No, no, that’s not what I’m saying.’

‘You are, after all,’ she said this carefully, ‘the go-ghna.’

Maniraja’s face went blank. But he did not ask for an explanation. What he did not know did not interest him.

‘My son . . .’

My son! My husband! What kind of woman is this
, Maniraja thought.

‘My son is always showing it to me in the Sanskrit dictionary.’

‘Your son learns Sanskrit?’ Maniraja said, not with curiosity but with something like confusion.

‘Yes.’ And, conscious now not to say ‘my husband’ again, she said quickly, ‘But what’s interesting is that go-ghna, which should mean simply noxious to kine, is, in fact’ – and she said this with such care that it was as if, able to see her life for the first time from the outside, she was saying,
I was married to a Sanskritist once
– ‘an irregularly derived compound, you see.’

‘I’ve been working with some Sanskritists,’ Maniraja interrupted, feeling perhaps that the conversation had gone too far out of his control.

‘Yes, but wait: let me finish—’

‘Let you finish!?’ Maniraja flared up, as if she had touched a nerve, crossed some unspoken cultural boundary. ‘I was the one speaking, if you recall,’ he added, now more softly, seeming with trouble to control his temper.

Uma stared at him in surprise. At that moment – before her judgement clouded – she knew, at least, in respect to his view of women, exactly the sort of man this was.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

‘No, no. Please!
You
go on.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘I insist,’ he said, reaching over for the wine; and, passing a scrutinizing eye over the label, poured himself some.

‘I’m not sure what I was saying . . .’

‘Sanskrit,’ he pressed, and smiling, added, ‘Your husband, your son.’

He was beginning to feel in control now.

‘I don’t even know how we got onto the subject . . .’

‘I said something about my being a political Hindu, about eating beef and you said . . .’

‘Yes. Go-ghna! Which is apparently an irregular upapada tatpurusa. So instead of meaning noxious to kine, it is derived as: for whom a cow is killed.’

Maniraja winced.

‘And guess what that is? A guest! Go-ghna is a synonym for guest.
Now go tell the men in saffron that!
’

Maniraja was silent.

‘Wine?’ he said.

‘Why not! In for a penny, in for a pound.’

They both drank in silence for a while. A warm breeze began to blow; there was the scraping of dead leaves over the dry earth; the candles in the fanooses guttered.

‘Storm,’ she said, draining her glass. ‘Should we go inside?’

‘Sure,’ Maniraja said quietly, picking up the bottle of wine. Later she would know what this quiet meant, but at the time – new to him, new to the situation – she interpreted it as a version of what she was feeling. Which was desire.

Inside, among the shelves of old orange-spined paperbacks and the looming shadows of potted plants, Maniraja passed an eye, at once bored and probing, over every detail. The books. The bronzes. The stacks of old records and tapes. The entire recessed wall devoted to Sanskrit; his eye trailed the brown and gold surface of a many-volumed Mahabharata. He saw the Rushdie lying carelessly on the canvas seat. And it all, in equal measure, like the woman whose flat it was, seemed at once to repel and fascinate him. He couldn’t decide if there was really something here, or if it was not just all terrible phoniness, if these people were not just third-raters, hiding under the veneer of good English. His eye rested on the picchvai of the peacocks.

Uma, whose eyes had followed his, said, from where she stood near the tape deck, ‘Krishna with his gopis. What is it Coomaraswamy says’ – and she marvelled that she remembered – ‘that it is all an allegory. “The reflection of reality in the mirror of illusion. The reality is the inner life, in which Krishna is the Lord, the milkmaids the souls of men and Brindaban the field of consciousness.”’

A smile appeared on Maniraja’s lips. It seemed to be directed not so much at what she said, but at her tone, her way of speaking. It all seemed so fake to him. Her security, her comfort, her ease with English, like a kind of play-acting. And now this little remark about Krishna, as if these were things that could be discussed in this off-hand way!

Uma felt the force of his discomfort. It was why she had put on the music, in part to dispel the awkwardness that had been with them throughout. And now, looking at Maniraja taking in the room, she realized how closed he seemed to her.
I can’t see the child in him
, she said to herself. Then the music intruded on her thoughts.

‘He reminds me so much of the Sixties,’ she said, ‘Leonard Cohen. Of joints, and of sitting alone in one’s room, listening to music, of finding hidden meanings in the words. This line about not being lovers like that, and besides it still being all right: it captures the mood of that time so much, doesn’t it?’

‘I wasn’t listening to this kind of music in the Sixties.’

‘What were you listening to?’

‘To Bhimsen Joshi.’

‘How sad for you!’ she said and laughed. ‘Did you miss the Sixties, then?’

‘What do you mean “miss” them? I was in my teens when they began, so no: obviously I didn’t miss them.’

She smiled and let the conversation drop. Grating as their misunderstandings were, there was something she liked about them. They made her, in some strange way, trust him. They answered a need in her for her country, which, when she met someone like Maniraja, she realized was as exotic to her as a foreign country. She had once been fascinated by Toby’s foreignness, but now, this other foreignness, this local foreignness, held an even greater power for her. His authenticity, it was so real.

He rose and walked around the room; she followed him at a distance; he stopped at a picture of I.P.

‘My brother,’ she said, in reply to the question in his face, and added, ‘He doesn’t live here anymore. He left after 1984.’

He lowered his eyes in respect; and in that gesture, in that lowering of the eyes, in the sudden gravity, she realized that one of the things she liked about him was his seriousness. It was like an emanation of other things: of hope, of patriotism, of guilelessness. It put her at ease.

But the easier she became around Maniraja the more it seemed to distance him. He did not like her, peacocking about the room in a kaftan, a glass of wine in her hand, talking about art and music; it killed the woman in her, she seemed so poised and artificial.

He was a man with little patience for beauty. His own culture, intellectually speaking, was closed to him, his feeling for its objects of beauty inseparable from the vestiges of religious feeling. He might stand before a tenth-century Nataraja and be moved to tears but he would never have been able to distinguish the emotion the object engendered in him from his reverence for Shiva.

And, besides, it was not as if the aesthetic spirit that had made the Shiva had made the world Maniraja lived and worked in, the world he saw around him every day. His everyday world was, as such, the same as Uma’s, an overlay of foreign things, and the spirit that had the potential to move him was confined to museums and archaeological sites. The loss of an idea of beauty – instinctive or cultivated – left him with a void, which unkowingly he filled with an excitable and prejudiced politics that felt almost like revenge.

He saw the world only through the lens of his politics. It reduced the complex world into a simple binary, in which people were either this way or that. Maniraja’s only task was to establish where they stood on the things that counted, which was why conversation for him was either a heated argument or something dull and utilitarian. Uma’s joke earlier about the men in saffron had set off certain alarm bells; the fact that she was reading Rushdie now set off others.

‘So what year were you born in?’ she asked, thinking back to their conversation about the Sixties.

‘1947,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘another midnight’s child,’ and gestured to the proof of the new book.

‘I don’t read novels,’ he muttered, and moved away.

Maniraja felt the conversation slip away from him again; he felt almost as if she were laughing at him. He wanted in some way to pierce the crust of her manners.

He was not a subtle man, but he had a gift for coming at things in an oblique and roundabout way. He was the master of the non sequitur; and presently, sitting down in the canvas chair where she had been reading, and placing the Rushdie in his lap, he simply said, ‘Bulgaria,’ and fell into silence.

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just sat there basking in the narcissism of a private consideration.

‘Bulgaria?’ she said, at length.

He smiled, and ran his fine fingers over the smooth blue surface of the proof in his lap. For a moment it looked like he would say nothing more. Then, just as the theatricality of his pause had grown comical, he said, ‘Yes. The Balkans. The Battle of Blackbird’s Field.’

‘The Balkans? The Battle of Blackbird’s Field? Bulgaria?’ She asked in complete bewilderment.

Maniraja looked wearily at her, readjusting the sapphire on his fingers. She was surprised at his vanity, his self-regard; she saw in it something of the ugliness of the Indian male, a creature stunted by the premature and too-emphatic applause of the women around him.

‘Go on, Mani,’ she said, with irritation. ‘Bulgaria. Battles of Blackbird’s Field. What does it all mean?’

Annoyance appeared in his face. He was like an actor who had been rushed along, his routine spoilt.

‘Bulgaria,’ he said, ‘it may interest you to know, perhaps the liberal-shits did not tell you, has some very compelling similarities with India.’

‘Oh?’ she said, now genuinely mystified. ‘Really? Like what?’

Her amusement irritated him further.

‘Yes, really. For instance, they, too, had a Muslim occupation, you know. Several centuries long, like ours. Their culture was also the victim of Islamic aggression. They have also had to address the problem of a 10–15 per cent Muslim population, which, by the way, has declined steadily since the years of ottoman rule . . .’

‘
Address
the problem of a Muslim population? Where is all this going, Mani? How did we get here? Apropos of what?’

‘You know how many mosques there were in Sofia in the nineteenth century?’

‘No, but why don’t you tell me?’

‘Sixty-nine. Sixty-nine! And you know how many there are today?’

‘No. But I’m sure you’re going to . . . Mani, where are you picking up this stuff?’

‘One! One bloody mosque. The Banya Bashi – built, naturally, on the bones of a church. But while we let all the mosques that have been built on the bones of our temples stand, the Bulgarians did not. In their national museum, the entire five hundred years of Islamic history is dealt with in one case: one glass case, containing a sword, a prayer book and a little bowl. That’s it. It was as if the ottomans were never there. Islam tried to stamp out their culture too, but it recovered. And there’s the difference.’

‘Mani, you sound crazed . . . I don’t know what you’ve been reading . . .’

He misunderstood her.

‘I’m crazy?’ he thundered. He had a childish way of always returning unchanged something thrown at him. ‘You’re crazy!’

She didn’t react. The situation forced her out of herself. In her mind it was almost tomorrow, and she was telling a girlfriend – Gayatri Mann or Priti Hirachand, say – about the calamity her date with Maniraja had been.

Her silence temporarily calmed him down. Now, he was rifling through his tan leather briefcase. He handed Uma a pamphlet which he’d retrieved from one of its interior pockets. It had a picture of a mosque with blood dripping from the dome, set against a twilit sky streaked orange and purple. Fat bold letters repeating the colours of the cover, and bordered black, read, ‘
The Indian Holocaust
, Ben Choate. The India Memory Foundation.’

‘Mani,’ she said, now almost from concern for him, and in a voice in which she detected traces of Toby’s, ‘this is a pamphlet.’

He seemed not to catch the pejorative colour of that word. For he said simply, ‘There will be books soon, and movies. We’re thinking of setting up a museum. The Indian Holocaust Museum in Somnath.’

‘
You
are the people behind that museum?’ she said in disbelief, remembering that bad night from so many years ago. ‘But it’s a joke, that museum, this foundation. This is not serious scholarship. No serious writer . . .’

‘I can say you’re a joke. Your husband’s a joke. And when he was in trouble, who did he come to? Have your forgotten the Emergency? He came to me. Your whole class of liberal-shits, Congress cronies, all jokes.’

‘Congress cronies, Mani?’ she said, ignoring the remark about Toby. ‘
We
, and Congress cronies?’

‘Perhaps you have not read Vijaipal. Perhaps he is a joke too?’

‘Don’t talk to me about Vijaipal. I know Vijaipal better than you. He is a friend of my husband’s. And he may have some controversial views, but he does not endorse this rubbish. Vijaipal is a man of intellect,’ she said, and threw the little pamphlet to the floor. ‘Congress cronies?! Us? That is rich. Us, who went through 1984! Congress cronies! That’s a good one . . .’