The Way Things Were (46 page)

‘What kind of things?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Shirishas. Shinshapas. Dhavas. Shalmalis. Kinshukas . . .’

‘Never heard of them!’

‘Me neither. Kinshuka, I know, is
Butea frondosa
. Flame of the forest. It comes up a lot in literature. But the rest, well, you know, I never paid attention to a damn thing he said . . .’

‘But still. You must have picked up a lot just by being around him.’

‘Not really. And what there is will go fast. Skanda is the one who will retain it. I see the signs already.’

‘Of what?’

‘Well, of someone compensating for his father’s absence with the things he taught him, with Sanskrit. He never took it so seriously when Toby was around. But, now, it’s as if he’s using the language as a proxy, to fill a hole, you know.’

‘You’ll bring them to Gulmarg, of course?’

‘Yes. Rudrani, I might send up with the parents beforehand. Skanda, I’ll bring myself.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he has to go to England first.’

‘Uma. Don’t tell me. You’re not sending him all the way for that silly birthday party. You’ll spoil the market. What’ll I tell my kids . . . ?’

‘No.’

‘Then what? Why does he
have
to go to England.’

‘To attend a wedding.’

‘A wedding? Whose?’

‘His father’s,’ she said, and with a smile that seemed to heap scorn on the world, a smile the Fatehkotia sisters had between themselves perfected, added, ‘Toby is remarrying.’

‘That was our last summer in Kashmir,’ Skanda says, looking out of the window onto the cemented surfaces of Legend, one of the many developments to emerge on this southern extremity of Gurgaon. The land around is full of what the Indian Society of Weed Science describes as ‘aggressive colonizers’. And some of that aggression must have rubbed off on the people too, for Legend was built in alarming haste, even before there was a proper road. It is here, among these beige towers, with their traffic-island greenery and Tetris sky, that Gauri lives with Kartik.

Skanda, as if perturbed by something he sees outside, says, with sudden agitation, ‘It’s so hard to connect one time with another, this world with that world. The scale feels all wrong. The shape of things . . . What was the little phrase you read me the other day, Gauri?’ he says, gesturing to the book on the coffee table,
The Masque of Africa
.

Gauri has marked out the pages she likes in the back. She picks it up and reads: ‘And then I thought that his life had been too varied, full of unconnected or disparate parts, and he hadn’t worked out a way to present himself. I suppose that meant he hadn’t been able to make a whole of his experience.’

‘That’s it! You see, in life, a man we hardly know can break into a woman’s bedroom in the morning, beat her up in front of her son and leave. Life owes us no explanation. If it sits badly with us, it’s our problem. But if – decades later – we recall the event, as part of
our trying to make a whole of our experience
, it is not enough just to say it happened; not enough to say it was terrible; or that it left a scar on the woman and her son: not enough to say that, for her, it was a final confirmation of her vulnerability in a world she had sought always to escape . . . Or that, for the son, on the verge of becoming a man, it dealt a blow to his masculinity from which it would never really recover. A masculinity that, I should say, the sins of the father had already put in jeopardy. Not enough to say that, is it . . . ?’

‘Not enough? Why?’

‘Because I feel it doesn’t work; it doesn’t add up.’

‘But doesn’t it work, really?’ she says, answering him with an impatience of her own. ‘We know Kitty; we’ve met Tunnu. We know her trouble with the Fatehkotia sisters. Your mother made off with a man she was interested in, not once, but twice. Your aunt stole her house. And we can sense Uma’s restlessness. What is so hard to understand?’

‘The pettiness of it all. The meanness of the motivations. The more one seeks to explain it, the more it feels like a lost cause. And yet . . .’

‘And yet?’

‘It mattered so much, Gauri. It was a final expression
of the way things were
. It came out of nowhere. And that is the point: it was a world where ugly motiveless things could come out of nowhere, and be forgotten. A world where a man could beat a waiter to death for being rude to him and get away with it. A world whose behaviour was unregulated by the public sphere: an inward-looking and Hobbesian world. And it was always what she had sought to escape. On the night of her birthday party, her angst against all those women was nothing but a wish to escape them all. To get out, once and for all. It was all she had ever wanted. But my father was a false escape, a cul de sac: for he could live in the world and be apart from it. He had the life of the mind, you see. That was not what she wanted: she wanted the world, the real world.’

‘And Mani gave it to her?’

‘He did. But, at a price.’

‘Of course.’

‘But after Gulmarg she was willing to pay any price. It was so humiliating, so unprovoked, compared with what happened . . .’

‘What was the provocation?’

‘Something ridiculous. An argument or some such, a fight with Chamunda, perhaps – about how Ismail was treating her son . . .’

‘You?’

‘No, no. Chamunda’s son. Bhaiya. And Kitty kept interrupting, till I think my mother told her to fuck off. And, so, she left in a huff, and sent Tunnu back the next day. How long is it before Kartik gets home?’

‘Half an hour or so,’ she says, looking at her watch. ‘And your parents?’

‘Not till after lunch. I just had word from Maniraja’s office.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

She returns with a Stella. He takes a deep sip and looks out again, as if in disbelief, at the scorching expanse of Legend. It returns him to his earlier train of thought. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that was our last summer in Kashmir. Everyone’s last summer.’

They went up in convoy. The cars wound their way through pine forests in which there were still melting moraines of snow. The forest, full of shadows, with its soaked pine floor, its mezzanine of fern, and its sudden swinging vistas of the flat valley below, left a cool and magical impression. The occasional view of the plains gave the passengers of the climbing cars the elation of having escaped a misfortune. It made Delhi feel like a place which a coup or a pandemic had made unsafe, and which had to be fled under the cover of night.

The green-roofed houses ranged around the meadow filled fast with the families of these refugees. They found each other again with the excitement of familiars in an unfamiliar place. There were cards, lunches, golf, tattu rides for children and fire-lit dinner parties, with whisky and kebabs and Trivial Pursuit for the adults, many of whom felt the thrill of certain émigré communities who – for the service it does their social lives – seem almost grateful to the calamity that has forced them from their homes. All that was commonplace in Delhi, the running of their houses, the entertainments of their children, the glimpsing of a familiar face at lunch, acquired a special novelty in Gulmarg.

But as much as the seclusion of the hill station, the privilege it implied, heightened their joys and pleasures, it also rattled their nerves. They were like people suddenly without an accepted idea of their worth in society, forced to make themselves over in a new place. Cars, cottages, clothes, even the tattu a child got: these things became a source of hysteria among them. They were oversensitive and excitable. The slightest put-down or barb that, at home, might easily have been brushed off came in that closed and crowded circle to acquire a sharper and deadlier sting. The air in Gulmarg, as is so often the case in those places where the rich gather, was chilled, fragrant and faintly poisoned.

On the day of her birthday party, Uma watched the rain through the thin-paned windows of CM1’s enclosed veranda. A gallery of sorts, overlooking the meadow, bounded in by a slack loop of road. Golfers, walkers, bearded men with russet skin running alongside ponies ridden by children. She had a cup of tea, a rasai and a book,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
. That was how she had spent most of the six weeks they had been up in Gulmarg: quiet, reading, withdrawn. She was almost thirty-nine – at the end of one life, half considering the beginning of another – and she felt the need to stand back for a bit. She felt the need to observe her own life and to let Gulmarg, like a framing device, serve as a vantage point.

It was especially nice to see Skanda and Rudrani from a distance, to watch them as if they were somebody else’s children. Ha! At times, it felt as if it was all she had ever done: watch them from a distance. Rudrani, especially, was virtually her parents’ child now. There was something robust and untroubled about her, something whole. On the night of the birthday party, she had elected to go with her grandparents to Pahalgam.

‘Don’t you want to be here for the party?’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow. That’s when it counts, that’s the real birthday.’

That self-possession, a kind of
emotional precision
almost: that was how Uma knew Rudrani was fine.

It was no less apparent than the instability she observed in Skanda. As a child, when he had been more at ease with himself, unafraid of his sensitivity and aloofness, he had, in some strange way, seemed more protected. But now, as he grew older, she often saw a kind of terror in his eyes. He was almost afraid of his emotions and impressions, unable to trust his view of the world. Manhood, the culture of being a man, fell like an ill-fitting shroud over him, seeming to muffle him.

Some of it could be put down to the awkwardness of the age he was at: the burst of height that gave his movements a broken and uncoordinated quality, like a horse who’s lost his gait; the deepening voice that now had a grating and robotic quality to it; the pheromonal stench of pre-adolescence . . . These things, she was told – by Viski and others – were expected. But they did not affect Iqbal and Fareed in the same way; these changes were something apart in her son. They gave him an opaque and inscrutable quality; they made him unreadable. It was why the terror, when it appeared in his eyes, had such power for her. It was the last natural reaction left in Skanda, that look of naked instinctive fear that seemed to make his pupils fly back into the green of his eyes, like stones vanishing into the depths, meteors hurtling away into the safety of deep space.

There was something evaluating in his gaze. His eyes were full of memory. Too simplistic to say that, at times, he felt like a stand-in for Toby. And, besides, it was not just Toby she saw in those eyes; it was herself too. She saw something of Toby and their shared past. The scrutiny of his eyes, with their speckles lodged deep in their green liquid, like sand kicked up at the bottom of a pond, was like the scrutiny of the past on the present. She felt answerable to the arithmetic in them and though they seemed able to see her ever more clearly, she was less and less able to see past the one-way mirror of their gaze. There was an element in their relationship now – some dialectic of guilt and shame, of blame and responsibility – that she had not been able to name. It was new, and had only surfaced in the post-Toby years.

Skanda had come back from London full of an adult language, which, she guessed, was Toby’s, but which he had nonetheless made his own. When she asked him about his father’s second marriage, he had said, ‘I think that it’ll be a feeding relationship for Baba.’ ‘A feeding relationship?’ she said, with the alarm we feel when the poise of someone we love sets us at a distance from them. ‘In the sense,’ he said, cool and analytical in the face of her hot distrust, ‘I think Sylvia will play quite a nurturing role in his life.’ ‘And what? I didn’t . . .’ she shot back, falling straight into the trap. ‘No, no,’ he said, sensing for the first time an advantage over his mother. ‘I just meant that she is of the same temperament as him; she shares the same cast of mind.’

The conversation died there, but she had felt its bite. And she had, with great prescience, seen in it the birth of an emotional mechanism inimical to their relationship: the more Toby disappointed Skanda – the more aloof and distant and self-involved he became – the more he came to seem like a hero to him. An unassailable ideal, the embodiment of vocation, something totemic and sacrosanct. Whereas she, the more she was present and real and engaged in his life – human, in a word – the more she appeared flawed and earthly: the cause of Toby’s withdrawal from the world. Skanda, she felt, had already appropriated something of Toby’s desire to be unassailable, to always be, as if out of a Sanskritic horror of contamination, above it all.

It was after London that she began to notice a growing rigidity in her son, a studied cool. She read its vibrations correctly: she saw that it was his way, in the absence of his father, of safeguarding himself, his way of becoming a man before his time. It was another reason she was happy to have brought him to Gulmarg. In the company of his older cousins – running about being stung by bicchu buti, hurling missiles at birds with the slingshots they had all been bought on the way up to Gulmarg – his reserve, which seemed so laboured, given his age, relaxed a little. He became less buttoned-up, more spontaneous; his language changed, the new diction fell away. He seemed for a while, at least, to become a boy again.

The rain, blurring the line between morning and afternoon, made her misjudge the time. She saw now that it was nearly 12.30. She went into the dark interior of the house, the floorboards sinking under her feet, and dressed for lunch in the pale light which came in through a gap in the heavily curtained window. Isha, the only other person in the house, entered as she was getting dressed.

‘You’re wearing a sari?’ she said, opening the curtains to reveal a high escarpment, almost a wall, covered in shrubs.

‘Well, I’m having lunch with Gayatri, who always does, you know, so I thought I might as well too.’

‘Gayatri is a professional Indian, Uma. She wears saris on Park Avenue. You mustn’t compete with her. It’s going to be hell getting down there in a sari and heels.’