The Way Things Were (45 page)

‘Maybe you needed to go through it,’ Maniraja said, with the miserable smile of a man losing control. ‘Taught you a lesson the Muslims would do well to learn too!’

She held his gaze a moment, as if offering him an opportunity to retract what he had just said. But finding his face closed, her eyes trailed away, as if in sadness, and suddenly she leapt to her feet and strode across the drawing room, knocking her knee against the coffee table, but hardly noticing. ‘Narindar!’ she yelled. ‘Narindar! Saab, ki gadi bulao.’

A moment later, she was at the front door, holding open its one narrow panel with her hand. The warm breath of the night blew through the flat. Uma, with her head down, arm outstretched like that of a traffic policeman, repeated again and again, as if afraid she would forget, ‘Go. Just go. No, no. Just please go . . .’

Maniraja came up to the door. He said, ‘There’s no need to call the car. I walked here. I’ll walk back.’

But at that very moment both of them found themselves standing squarely in the broad yellow beams of a car’s headlights.

‘Whose car . . . ?’ Uma began, but was interrupted by the sight – the silhouette, rather, large and billowing – of a man leading a boy in their direction.

‘Skanda? Hira? What . . . ?’ she said, as the figures appeared out of the smoke and headlights.

‘Satzriakal, bibaji,’ Isha’s driver said and handed Skanda over to Narindar.

‘Satzriakal,’ she said in confusion. ‘What happened?’

‘There’s been some trouble at the house,’ the driver said quickly, and with embarrassment. ‘Saab and memsaab have had a fight.’

Skanda, his hand in Narindar’s, looked long at the strange man standing at his front door, then he disappeared into the flat.

*

Mani walked back to the Raj, alone and wretched.
Such a bad evening
, he thought.
Bad, bad, bad
, he said, almost aloud, and put his hands in his pockets. He found he still had the grease-daubed napkin with Pooja’s extension number written on it.
What time is it?
He looked at his watch and saw that it was 12.30.
Good
, he thought, and smiled inwardly,
there is still time; nothing is irretrievable
. He took a deep breath of the warm night air and quickened his stride.

*

A few days later, Uma went to see her sister on Curzon Road. She drove through the hard dazzle of an April day. It was a season that anticipated the great heat with a parade of flowers. The silk cotton, with its fleshy coral flowers and stony branches, casting long shadows over the ground, had come and gone. And now, as the days grew whiter, and the scorching breath of gr
ī
ṣ
ma began to blow over the city, a procession of flowering trees ushered in the season of death. There was the burnt orange of the gulmohar, the phantasmagoric yellow of the laburnum and the heartbreakingly clement lilac of the jacaranda; on the city’s roundabouts, the thatched canopies of jarul were covered in bright purple blossoms. It was funereal, this solace of flowers, even as the frank gaze of the sun beat down on the land; and shadows grew short and inky, the cool of old houses bewitching and intense.

At the house on Curzon Road, the verandas shrank back into the face of the building, forming solid blocks of shade. Such heaviness, Uma thought, as she made her way through the house, its air tinged with the smell of old flesh, of widowed aunts, in white cotton and chiffon, retiring for naps; air in which there was always the faint reek of a meal having just been cleared away; air, dark and enveloping, where the hum of a refrigerator or the distant whirr of an air cooler was pierced, now and then, by the sad and aimless shriek of a koel.

She passed a garlanded photograph of Viski’s late mother, who had died some months before – old Teji Kaur, with whom the sadness of the house on Curzon Road had begun, and who, in death was more trouble than when she had been alive – and entered her sister’s part of the house. She found her sitting barefoot on the shallow steps of an internal courtyard, her hair wet. The radio – a Hitachi – played old film songs; in a narrow strip of shade, there were large ceramic vats of pickle, whose yellow and white glazing, faintly cracked, gave off a distant and impenetrable gleam.

‘Shikanjvi?’ Isha said.

‘I’d love some.’

‘Bihari,’ she yelled back into the darkened house, ‘nimbu pani laana.’

The formality over, she did not look up at her sister. She just sat there, twining her wet hair into a rope and making it drip onto the sandstone stairs. Then with a joyless laugh, she said, turning to face her sister, ‘What do you think? Shall we say conjunctivitis? Or a fall?’

It was impossible to make out anything past the sunglasses. No swelling, no colour. Uma found herself peering blankly at their large lenses, tinted a shade of brown.

‘I can’t tell.’

Isha removed the glasses and gave a languid tilt of her head. For a moment, before the reality of it all sank in, Uma found herself staring blankly at the bruises on her sister’s face. A graded range of red and blue and purple around the eyes. The colours, glazed with lotion, merged easily into one another. On the bridge of the nose, there was a round hard ball striped with a short rude gash. Then, it all coalesced, and Uma recoiled before the image of the hard blunt edge of a hand striking her sister’s face, little flesh, much bone. She made a sucking sound and said, ‘Tsssss! Put them back on, Ish.’

Isha did with a wry smile and, with something martyred in her voice, asked how Skanda was.

‘Oh, fine.’

‘Not too traumatized, I hope, at seeing his aunt beaten up.’

‘No,’ she lied, ‘he’ll be fine.’

‘I kept saying, “Not in front of the children, Viski.” But he wouldn’t hear a word. He chased me into their room: “Whore this, whore that. Your mother’s a whore, you’re a whore, your sister’s a whore.” Animal!’

A moment of awkwardness passed between them and Isha came quickly to its source.

‘I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re thinking, bad old Isha, she must have said something to provoke him . . .’

‘No. Not at all. Are you joking?’

‘I already had Mama here: “Isha, you mustn’t rub salt in his wounds.” Rub salt in his wounds! I’m the one with the bloody wounds. I’m the one who was ready to put an end to it all . . .’

‘Isha, you can’t talk like that. It was terrible what you did. You have your children to think about. How many did you take?’

‘Fifteen, twenty. Ask Mama; she counted them the next day.’

‘And?’ Uma said, unable to conceal her curiosity.

‘And nothing! I slept like a log and woke up famished. I had a trout for lunch at the Golf Club.’

‘Isha!’ Uma said, and began to laugh. ‘What can I say? Mashallah, you’ve always had such a good constitution. Only you could have a suicide attempt that ends in a good sleep and a large lunch.’

Isha chuckled.

‘What did you tell Skanda?’

‘Nothing. That grown-ups fight, and sometimes like children.’

‘Did he seem OK?’

‘It’s hard to tell with him these days. He’s so quiet.’

Nimbu panis arrived in two dented tumblers of solid silver, oxidizing blackly, the ice melting on the surface.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to leave. The boys are both at school; I want to get the hell out of here. I thought things would be better once that witch was dead. But they are, if anything, worse. At least when she was alive we could discuss the meddling of a real person, a thing of flesh and blood. Now we can’t say a word about Santa Teji, our Lady of the . . . I don’t know! . . . whores?’ she said and laughed raucously, then winced.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Ribs. They hurt when I laugh.’

‘Isha, my darling . . .’ She seemed to be about to express sympathy, then, as if wishing instead to give her sister some hard practical advice – for violence of this kind was not uncommon – she said, ‘Did you call his mother a whore?’

‘Yes.’

‘To his face? When he was drunk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isha! You can’t tell a man who’s just lost his mother, a man who’s drunk at that and who, for all her sins, worshipped his mother, that she was a whore . . .’

‘He called Mama a whore!’

‘Mama, Isha? Mama! Mama has lived so dreary a life that she would probably be delighted if she heard someone had called her a whore.’

Isha smiled.

‘
His
mother, on the other hand,’ Uma began – Isha was laughing now – ‘as we well know, slept with half the Punjab. Calling her a whore, when she’s not been dead three months, is quite another thing from calling Mama a whore.’

‘She was a terribly destructive influence in our lives, you know that. She filled him with guilt for being the only one of his children old Papaji didn’t disinherit . . . .’

‘That maybe. But he loved her. And she had her moments. She was a tiger in ’84.’

Isha lit a cigarette.

‘So what? Are you telling me to hang in there?’

‘No,’ she said, thinking of how ill-equipped her sister would be to manage life alone, ‘but I’m telling you to think carefully about it. It’s not all that much fun, the single life. Toby . . .’

‘Toby never laid a finger on you.’

‘I know.’

‘But you left him?’

‘I don’t know who left who . . .’ She gave a sigh of irritation. ‘Should we go inside? It’s very hot here.’

‘Wait.’ She squeezed out a few more drops from her hair. They splashed on the red stone of the stairs, turning it a rich rust colour that, edged with escaping granules of dust, gave a tantalizing impression of cool and moisture.

‘Summer,’ Isha said bitterly, and rose to go in.

They sat in her dressing room. The day, beaten back behind double doors, made a squalid mosaic of the tiny squares in the mesh that the years had left unclogged. A fly progressed haltingly round the sweetened rim of the silver tumbler.

Uma shooed it off, and began, ‘It’s not comparable, Ish. Your situation and mine. You and Viski, violent as it was, had a fight. Toby and I, in the end, did not fight. There was not enough fight to fight, not enough passion. We just ran out. We were nothing in the end.’

She could have sworn she made the remark without a thought for Maniraja. But, after a moment’s silence, Isha said, ‘And that businessman? How did you leave things with him?’

She stared at her sister in disbelief. Their thoughts must have become entangled in each other’s. She had told Isha about the argument, but not about the rapprochement the next day. Nor about the flowers; nor the note; nor the meeting in his hotel room that Sunday morning, before he went back to Bombay. She had not told her, because what had happened was too strange: she had no way to explain it, especially in the context of what had occurred the night before.

‘We left things amicably,’ she heard herself saying without mental effort. ‘But – I don’t know – let’s see. These are not people I really understand.’

‘We never knew anyone like that in the old days, did we? And, all that cant we hear about India being secular down to her villages. My foot! Give people half a chance to improve their lot, and the hatred and chauvinism comes free with the new refrigerator.’

Uma laughed. And then, as later she often would, she defended Maniraja. ‘I don’t know if it’s hatred and chauvinism as much as it’s . . .’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know – Toby used to be quite sympathetic with it – he thought of it as the striking of a new equilibrium. He felt us lot—’

‘
Us lot
? Excuse me?’

‘The deracinated Indians . . . we use words like secularism to make people feel small about their culture . . . He thought it was snobbery by another name.’

‘Toby was very naive about these things, Uma. Prejudice is prejudice, I say. But tell me: are we all still on for Gulmarg? I hope so. Viski – guilty as hell, no doubt,’ she said, and removed her sunglasses theatrically, ‘has gone and spoken to Tariq Mattoo and he’s managed to get us CM1. Kitten Singh is furious, of course. Because it was meant to be hers. And she, as we well know, worked much harder for it. She was to have your friend, Priti Hirachand, coming to stay. She wanted to play the big hostess. Queen of Gulmarg. But these damn Fatehkotia sisters have come in her way. She’s been bitching us out all over town. One’s gone and stolen her house, the other . . .’

‘Her man?’

‘Exactly!’

‘How does she know?’

‘They’re snakes, these women, Uma. This is all they do. Play one off against the other. Even Priti, you think she set up this meeting with this Hindutva-fellow from the goodness of her heart? Not a chance! They get married, these ladies, and then they become like madams to the rich businessmen. It’s their cachet. If they can’t sleep with so-and-so hot new tycoon in town themselves – or if he’s done with them and wants to move on – then they position themselves as his agent to the next thing that catches his interest. Don’t you see? It’s a form of currency for them.’

‘Isha!’

‘I’m just saying: be careful.’

‘Of what?’

Isha hesitated, then said, with a frankness that would one day be the end of their relationship, ‘Of being passed around.’

‘I’m not listening to this,’ she said and made to leave. Isha caught hold of her hand, and looking in the direction of the gauze door, said, as if in apology, ‘I can’t wait to get out of this place, to leave this heat.’

Uma sat back down.

‘Me too,’ she said softly.

‘And these months building up to it, they give one such a feeling of dread.’

‘Toby used to say . . .’

‘Toby, Toby, Toby . . . What’s the matter with you today?’

‘He’s been on my mind lately.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you in a minute, but let me first tell you what he used to say: he used to say that “us lot”, we no longer have a feeling for the seasons in India.’

‘Does that make them hotter?’

‘Apparently so. He used to say that if you end up estranged from the natural world in your country then it comes to feel like a foreign country, its seasons alien, its extremities harder to bear.’

‘Probably right, no?’

‘I think so. He loved the change of seasons. He would always show Skandu and Rudrani those sections in the epics where the natural world and seasons were referred to. The epics, he said, were packed full – even at the cost of narrative – of the names of trees and flowers. And that just the fact that most Indians today don’t even know the names of the trees or flowers is an indication of how much has been lost.’