The Way Things Were (5 page)

She was nineteen; in the bloom of her youth, she had believed; and now, in one stroke, her father had snuffed the bloom out, robbing her of illusions.

Another kind of person, more daring, more of a risk-taker, might have sought a different revenge on the world. She might have run away; had an affair and eloped; slit her wrists, who can say? But Deep, influenced perhaps by the spirit of passive resistance, so prevalent at that time, chose for herself a unique form of revenge. She decided to make her life a monument to the early injustice she had experienced and to forgo all the things that made life worth living.

Her father, trying to make up to her for what she had lost in marriage, gave her a lavish trousseau of suitcases full of Wedgwood, Mappin and Webb silver, fine crockery, enough for two dozen people to eat off, beautiful Banarasi saris, boxes upon boxes of jewellery, Toosh shawls in every colour and stripe. But she refused to have them unpacked, let alone used. She had a car and driver at her disposal, which she kept idle, choosing instead to send out for a rickshaw every time she wanted to go out. Her father had given her two sprawling bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi with lawns on all sides. But nothing that could be described as cheer was ever allowed to enter them. They remained in a permanent state of semi-darkness. The carpets, the heavy furniture, the objets, all were of a piece: each achieving the amazing distinction of appearing both ancient and valueless. The tablecloths were frayed and stained; the napkins never of a set; meals were a disorderly affair; and the kitchen was so dirty that the smells would carry into – and fill – the house every time its white swing door, finger-marked and begrimed, swung open. Nothing life had denied Deep could compare with what she was willing to deny life. And it was a very studied kind of gloom, indeed, that pervaded Fatehkot House.

If Deep lived with hope at all, it was that one of her daughters, either Isha or Mishi, would, through marriage, restore to her the glory that she had never believed truly to be gone, but merely occulted, like the Mahdi. In her two girls, she had, with the precision of the creator herself, planted two perfectly symmetrical complexes: in the older, Mishi, she had instilled the belief that she was intelligent, but ugly, talkative and unmarriagebly dark. Meanwhile, she had convinced the younger, Isha, that for all her classical Punjabi beauty, she was an abject fool. Till marriage appeared on the horizon, the girls had been roughly equal in the affections of their mother, with the balance, in fact – for Deep fancied herself as a bit of an intellectual – tilting in Mishi’s favour. But when, at the age of twenty-one, with her older sister still unmarried, Isha became engaged to Viski Singh Aujla, the heir to an immense Delhi fortune, the advantage, with the sudden frostiness of the sun gone behind a cloud, shifted away from Mishi.

In fairness to Deep, something must be said about the Aujla fortune, for it was, and still is, legendary in Delhi. And any mother, especially one nursing an ancient grievance, might be forgiven for discovering a special store of affection for a child who had allied herself with it.

There was the Raj, of course, that art deco marvel in the heart of Delhi, the brightest jewel in the crown of the Aujla fortune, which, though less grand than it is today, was nonetheless one of the city’s great hotels; there were whole quadrants of Connaught Place that belonged to them; there were several properties in Lutyens’ Delhi, so many that it was only on roundabouts, with the radial spokes of the city’s streets coming at them, that they could even remember the ones on which they owned houses; there was sugar and jute in the east; and, in the west, in Punjab, there was rice and wheat, carefully apportioned into land-ceiling-proof parcels. There were old-fashioned houses in the hills with wooden floors and carved eaves and falling-to-pieces bungalows in various small towns across U.P. and Punjab. There were peripheral plots of land, each several acres large, on what was quickly ceasing to be the periphery of Delhi, and a farm the size of an Argentinian ranch on the border of Pakistan . . . Or had that been acquired by the government? A lot had been acquired. In fact, such was the extent of the Aujla wealth that, if just what had been acquired by the government was given to a single individual, he would, on the crumbs that had fallen from the Aujla table alone, have been one of the richest men in the city. Such – mashallah! – was their wealth. And once Isha put herself in proximity to it – at the very same time that her sister decided to become an air hostess – the game, as far as maternal love went, was up.

Transfigured by this new reality, Mishi’s life, in the eyes of both her mother and herself, came to seem like one long act of defiance. A series of unconnected incidents – her referring, as a little girl, on her father’s prompting, to her mother as ‘the contractor’s daughter’; her cutting her hair in open disobedience of the Sikh injunction not to do so; her smoking as a teenager; a disastrous episode involving a driving lesson in an army town that had ended in recrimination, and a girl with a broken arm – all came to seem like example after bitter example of Mishi’s defiance of her mother.

The Fatehkotia sisters did not allow their mother to affect their relationship. They remained close, full of love and friendship for each other. And, when Mishi returned to Delhi, after the incident on the flight with the European, Isha was the first person she told. She did not mention the inexplicable attraction she had felt for the man who insulted her and Isha could not understand why it bothered her so much.

‘What does it matter, Mishi? Hampi? Some old ruin in Karnataka. Means nothing to nobody. Why should you care? The man was obviously a low-grade cheapo, trying to take advantage of you. Brush it aside. Come instead this afternoon to meet a guest of Viski’s. He’s giving a talk today at the IIC called “The Creation of Poetry”; then you’ll see the other side of Europe. The good side. Cheapos exist everywhere.’

‘OK, Ish, but listen: I have to get waxed first. I have a forest on my arms,’ she said, running her hand over her bare arms, and causing the little bristly hairs to stand on end.

Isha laughed and mashed out her cigarette in a bronze ashtray. They sat in the smoky cool of the one air-conditioned room in Fatehkot House. A fierce June blaze pressed against the curtained window.

Later that morning Mishi heard in detail about the Emergency from Kuku-Waxing.

Kuku, who went about her tasks, heating wax in a stainless steel katori and preparing the long strips of cloth, while, at the same time, watering a money plant by the window and wiping away sweat from her brow, said, ‘She’s done a very good thing, Mishi. You don’t know, dear, you’ve been gone a lot, it was terrible. Protests, rallies, court judgements: they tied her hands. How patiently she bore it all. But after a while, you know, everyone has a breaking point. Arms and legs?’

‘Arms, legs, back and anything else you can find, Kuku.’

Kuku, a fat woman, with an awful leech-like mole on her cheek, from which some truly evil hairs sprouted, gave a loud bronchitic laugh. She moved swiftly around her cramped parlour, and soon Mishi felt the first strips come long and hot upon her legs. Except in the more delicate areas, where the skin was not firm, she enjoyed the pain. Enjoyed breathing into it, and thinking of its smooth and satisfying result.

‘Tell me, Kuku, this Emergency, will it mean everything will be closed?’

‘Like what?’ Kuku said abstractedly, as she fastened her fingers around the first little strip and tore it from Mishi’s body.

‘Shops, museums, businesses?’ she said, thinking of the lecture later that day as a way to take her mind off the pain.

‘Oh no, everything will work better than ever before. I’m sure of it. Rani saab Chamunda was in here earlier. They’re trying to arrest her mother. Naturally! Jan Sangh types. There were a lot of arrests last night apparently.’

‘Really? They’re trying to arrest her mother, and she came to be waxed?’

Kuku laughed. ‘We all have our priorities.’

‘Who else?’

‘This morning? Just you and her.’

‘No, no, Kuku! Who else have they arrested?’

‘Oh, opposition leaders, journalists, trouble makers, you know.’

Kuku moved fast, applying and tearing away the strips. Mishi’s body felt scorched and raw; her head seemed in the darkness to swoon a little; a cooler whirred, projecting a pale choppy light over the room.

‘Ms Isha, you know . . .’ Kuku said.

‘Yes, my sister, Kuku,’ Mishi answered, trying to ward off an indiscretion.

‘She came in some days ago.’

‘And?’

‘Well, she wanted, apart from the usual – pits, arms, legs, back – some waxing in her down-there parts,’ Kuku said proudly. ‘You want heart, ma’am?’

‘Maybe, Kuku,’ Mishi said tentatively, ‘let me think about it.’

The Emergency. Chamunda. The dreary south Delhi afternoon, the little parlour in the over-furnished flat. All of it conspired to remind her of the stifling smallness of this world. Was it normal to feel such urges, for flight, for escape, for a world elsewhere? Did the others feel them too? Did they also have a hard hungry knot lodged in their stomach that craved experience? The flying had got some of it out, but it had, in exciting her imagination, and putting her half within reach of a different kind of life, also made things worse, made her more aware of how much she wanted something to happen to her.

‘Kuku?’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘Heart hi de do.’

‘Good choice, ma’am. It’s the fashion now.’

When it was over, she picked her clothes off a chair in the dark. They slipped and slithered against the soapy smoothness of her skin, and she could not help but reach to touch, with her unpainted fingertips, the newly depilated skin around her vagina. It felt as arousing and new and unfamiliar, as if it were somebody else’s, the dark folds tense and prominent.
Oh God – Fucking Delhi – I’m so horny!
She felt around for her sunglasses; Kuku saw and flipped the switch, and, with the light, they came suddenly into her hands. She drove their ends into her thick hair and stood for a moment in her heels, purple tinted lenses on her head, an expression of puzzlement on her face, as if trying to remember something. Kuku still charged around the room in her grubby white frock, tidying up.

‘Kuku?’

‘Yes, ma’am?’ she said, stopping to look up.

‘Do you know what . . .
where
, I mean, Hampi is?’

‘No, ma’am. Restaurant?’

‘No, no. Nothing.’

Mishi returned to Fatehkot House to find her mother morose. The Brigadier’s wife adored Nehru; she had, in solidarity with his freedom movement, and despite the disapproval of her father, worn khadi blouses under her silk saris; she had, in support of that movement, given her own pocket money to the future prime minister for his autograph. That the daughter of that beautiful man, who to her mind represented all that was good and hopeful in her youth, should now suspend the freedoms he had fought so hard for was as disillusioning a thing as she had ever known. She was, for once, speechless. She sat with her elbows on the dining table, in the late-morning gloom of Fatehkot House.

Mishi, sailing in for lunch, before heading out for the IIC with Isha, could not help but taunt her. ‘So, Mama! Have you heard the news? Oh Boy! Heard what the great paean of democracy has been up to? Dear Pundit ji’s daughter! Looking forward, Mama, to a patch of benign despotism?’

The old woman did not reply; she was too close to tears.

*

Ordinarily, Deep would have prepared something for her daughter’s return from the IIC. Something snide and biting about her life and prospects, something slow-acting, that a few hours later would return to nag Mishi, and would – though she would tell herself it did not matter – spoil her evening. Yes: ordinarily the Brigadier’s wife would have struck back. But she did not have the chance.

The reason was that, as evening fell, and the girls returned from the lecture, they were in a wonderful mood. They filled the house with their talk and laughter. And they did not exclude their mother, but tried to bring her in. They told her all kinds of fascinating things about what the lecturer had said about Sanskrit and the Ramayana and the Birth of Poetry: of how
ś
loka, poetry, was connected etymologically to
ś
oka, grief. In all this, the Brigadier’s wife forgot her own grief about the Emergency. The girls said how they would be meeting the professor who gave the lecture later that evening at their friend Bapa’s house, and how he was a prince, but not a prince; Indian, but, at the same time, a bit of a foreigner. And it was not just Isha who was in this light and happy mood, but Mishi too. Mishi especially. She seemed to exude something so positive and benevolent. Mother and daughter exchanged a look which, though edged with suspicion, was tender. Something cautiously affectionate passed between them, something that seemed to be part of a spirit of new beginnings. A mother’s heart being what it is, the ill feeling Deep had nurtured from the morning evaporated in contact with this new warmth.

The lights came on in Fatehkot House, though dimly; the Brigadier had his first whisky; upstairs there was the happy commotion of women dressing for dinner. And just a little while later, on the back of a furious clatter of heels, the permanent gloom of Deep’s house was momentarily interrupted by the Fatehkotia sisters sweeping out into the night, leaving in their wake a trail of perfume.

*

‘Down or up?’ Isha said, turning the car window’s handle.

‘Down, Ishi. Please. In any case, we’re going to arrive with big dark patches . . .’ She raised her arms.

Isha, trying to make out her sister in the cavernous interior of the car, said, ‘No, no, you’re fine,’ and touched her kurta at the armpits, just to be sure. Then, in the yellow light that entered from outside, she thought she saw something else.

‘Eeeeeks! What is it? A creepy crawly?’

‘No, no, calm down . . . Ek minute, Hira, ek minute. Sundar Nagar. Bapa saab ke kar.’

The car, its air petrol infused, began to move. Isha handed her sister on her fingertip the burnt red petal – gulmohar – that she had removed from her hair. Mishi took it and tossed her hair back in relief.