The Way Things Were (51 page)

Tunnu had been trying the door, but, finding it locked, or perhaps glimpsing Skanda inside, had decided instead to rap. At first, Skanda was not sure he had heard correctly; the noise came from an anteroom beyond a thick curtain; his footsteps on the wooden boards were loud. But when he stopped walking, and the house regained its quiet, he heard it again, distinctly this time. He thought it must be his sister and grandparents.

He pushed aside the curtain and followed the rapping to the door. He was surprised to see an unfamiliar face. Still, a visitor was a visitor, and, if nothing else, it was an excuse to wake the others.

He turned the key in time with Tunnu turning the brass knob. The door opened with a shudder and the full freshness of the Gulmarg morning, of grass, dew and sunlight, poured in, overthrowing the stale air in the house. But Tunnu was not of a piece with its freshness. His face was drawn and lined, his features lost in the sagging mass of hair; and only the redness of his eyes, like two dying embers, brought anything that might be described as life to his ashen face. He was like someone fearful of the day. He entered with the haste of a man wanting to escape its light and freshness.

‘Bete,’ he said rapidly, ‘where is your mother’s room?’

‘She’s asleep,’ Skanda answered casually, adding with annoyance, ‘everyone is.’

‘I know, bete, but where is her room?’ Tunnu pressed him.

Skanda suspected nothing. He was pleased to allow into the house someone willing to wake the others.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said, turning toward the large door that led into the internal corridor. The gloom closed around them and the two figures moved soundlessly through the darkness of the corridor.

At the door of his mother’s room, the visitor said in a quiet, but friendly voice, soft and full of patience, his eyes shining, ‘Now, go outside, bete. We have some grown-up things to talk about.’

Skanda nodded, put his head through the door and said somewhat triumphantly, ‘Ma, someone’s come.’

Then he turned around and vanished down the corridor.

He had barely made it to the main room, when reaching him past the vault-like hush of the house, he heard a harsh splintering sound. An upward movement, a snap. Immediately his mind made the connection: the strip of plywood I was just playing with has been torn from its place on the headboard. But why? That short cruel sound was followed fast by a volley of muffled thuds, incoherent conversation: ‘Huh? What? Who?’ ‘
Whore. Bitch. My wife.
’

Then they came, and they sucked the possibility of action from his body. He crumpled on hearing them, buckling against a wall in the outside room to his haunches, unmoving but for the violent and involuntary trembling that gripped his body.
His mother’s screams.
It was as if he had anticipated this moment for years now; the moment of real physical threat to his mother; it was something that was built into the idea of his father’s departure, always there in the background. But now that it was real, he found himself inert. Cowardice – for that was what it felt like – rose like a cold, silent flood. It was like drowning. With every cry that came from the bedroom, he tried to listen for some hint that the fight was turning in his mother’s favour. But, though they were angry cries – and they would have been that way right to the end – they suggested no victory of any kind. The house was silent, the man emboldened and his mother’s screams were growing hoarse. Where were the others? He was useless. Fine! But – oh, God! – where were the others?

He dragged himself to his aunt’s room. It was across the corridor from his mother’s, and, though Skanda himself could not speak, he managed to throw open both doors at once. On one side, the dark silent cavity of his aunt’s room; on the other, a scene more terrifying than he could ever have imagined. A tempest of white sheets and morning light. A little man, like a spirit or djinn, his short wild shadow dancing against the wall, blue turban and hair unravelling about him, struck his mother again and again, now with the blunt end of his fist, now with the strip of plywood. Skanda saw the open gash on the headboard. And his mother, until now so strong and defiant, was a pathetic figure of rage and sobs, a battered woman. The image, as if closing a circuit in his mind, wrenched from him a shriek. For a moment there was no response. Then, as if the black cavity of his aunt’s room had been a mute intelligence of some kind, watching and listening, but not speaking, it let spring from its unresponsive darkness, the enraged and running figure of his aunt.

She tore into his mother’s room, not stopping once to take in the scene. Without a moment’s hesitation, she caught hold of the little demon’s beard and spat in his face. ‘Go beat your whore of a wife, who sleeps with all of Delhi!’ The petty demon shrank before her strength, and, even before she had taken the green plastic jug of water that lay at Uma’s bedside, emptying its entire contents in his face, he was vanquished. He had become in a few short seconds the weak-voiced figure of moments ago and, his beast having deserted him, he could only mumble through his soaked beard, ‘Teach your sister some manners next time.’

‘I’ll teach you some manners, you little fucking turd! Dirty coward. Beats a woman when she’s asleep. Beat your whore of a wife . . .’ his aunt yelled, and dug her hands into his shrunken body, throwing him to the floor.

Now others had appeared in the corridor – Viski, his cousins – but the object of his fear had been reduced to this tortured figure, dishevelled and deturbaned, collecting hair and cloth about him, while trying to stand up. There was little left for Viski to do. He grabbed hold of Tunnu’s elbow and pushed him out of the corridor, causing him to become entangled in the long length of his turban. It was left behind, and Fareed and Iqbal took pleasure in gathering it up crudely into a blue starchy knot, and throwing it after him.

Outside, the sun burnt away the mists that lay over the meadow, striking each drop of dew with a fatal and beguiling portion of light.

Skanda sat on the stone steps of the cottage with his cousins. They had gathered about him, in that instinctive, but inarticulate show of male affection, as presence and deed rather than word. Iqbal was saying, ‘I wish to God I’d been awake. I’d’ve taken my Swiss knife, and before he’d even put one finger on Uma Massi, I’d’ve cut his neck, like the little chickens last night. I’ll go right now and cut him up. Nobody can do that to my Massi, and get away with it.’ ‘But, Iqbal,’ Fareed said, after a moment of solemn, but awe-struck, consideration, ‘the slingshot would’ve been better. You can’t even reach his neck.’

‘On my skates I can.’

‘You’d’ve come on your skates?’

‘Of course.’

‘Over the carpet and everything?’

‘Yeah,’ Iqbal said, now doubtfully, ‘and he’s, by-the-vays, not so big, Fareed. He’s a puny kind of guy. Not like Papa. I’d’ve squashed him in my mutthi.’ Then realizing the conversation had extended well past their commiseration with Skanda, they fell silent again. Fareed asked, ‘What I don’t understand is how d’he get in, in the first place?’ Silence. Iqbal, at last, taking as neutral a tone as he possibly could, said, ‘Skanda opened the door.’ ‘Oh,’ Fareed said, and they were quiet again.

Some distance away, at the edge of the garden, a conversation, in low murmurs, with the occasional raising of a voice, a word of abuse, took place between Viski and Tunnu. It was strangely peaceable, and it was wounding to Skanda. He was not alone in this feeling. When his aunt, after tending to his mother, came out and saw the men speaking, she threw open the veranda door and yelled, ‘What is that man still doing here? What’s happened to your famous Sikh courage, Viski? You stand there talking to a man who’s just beaten up your sister-in-law?! Get him out, this minute, or I’ll come down with a hockey stick. Do you hear me, Tunnu? Go back to your wife, or is your place already taken? Swine!’

Tunnu accepted the abuse, Skanda felt, for it came from a woman who was protected. And then, a few minutes later, he saw him, a free man, set out across the valley.

He did not know when Rudrani and his grandparents had arrived. Ten or fifteen minutes later? Or two hours later? The day, save for that one moment that had defined it, acquired a fluid formless quality; the hours seemed just to roll out; the sun to shine meaninglessly. He was wandering about the side of the house – he had been asked to keep away from his mother for a little while – when his grandmother approached. Always one to put the blame for misfortune at the door of the victim, she had a strange and hunted quality. It was as if she was afraid to be asked her opinion, as if she herself was guilty of the morning’s violence. And yet she wanted to comfort Skanda. She approached him with a mug of milk and Bournvita. They did not speak directly of what had happened. ‘You’ll grow into a big, strong man,’ she said. ‘I can see it already. You’re a talker, a true batuni, you might become a lawyer, or a diplomat, you should aim for the United Nations. Then when you’re rich and strong, you can support your old, frail Nani. Yes, Skandu? Defend her from all the bad men in the world? The goondas who want to push her over and snatch her handbag, no?’

‘Yes,’ he replied weakly.

She could always get her point across.

When at last Skanda saw his mother, it was with everyone else. She appeared on the veranda, in jeans, a sweater and large, purple-tinted sunglasses. The ridge of her lip had flowered into a ripe swelling, giving her smile the benign and comic aspect of the mentally ill.

She came and sat next to him and Rudrani. But of what had happened, she said only (and he knew for his benefit), ‘What a shame your Mama’s such a deep sleeper, baba. That little runt of a man. Why, if I’d been awake, I’d have thrashed him myself.’ Rudrani looked impressed, but Skanda did not believe a word she said. He wished his mother happy birthday and withdrew. No one could know the extent to which he now grasped her insecurity, she, who was manless and alone in the world. She whose husband had left her open to this kind of attack, and whose son was too much of a coward to protect her. Skanda later observed – on account of his shame, no doubt – that he was written out of the adult retelling of the story, which became one of envy and revenge, something that might have happened to anyone. The shame of it, which was the shame of vulnerability – the fact that it could have happened only to his mother, and no one else – was edged out. Friends, friends solemn and whispering, streamed in. Chamunda, Nixu and Gayatri, Tariq Mattoo. The story was repeated, clothed in detail, emotions relived, and the terror Skanda had known that morning became like the accidental by-product of some larger story. His emasculation was edged out; and he, on the verge of becoming a man –
vir
in Latin, v
ī
ra in Sanskrit – was left to deal privately with the meaning of that word.

That was their last summer in Kashmir.

They drove down to Srinagar a few days later by an alternate route. The trouble had already begun. There was talk of rioting and stone throwing on the old road. That summer, unbeknownst to them, hundreds of Kashmiri boys had crossed the border into Pakistan to receive military training. Tariq Mattoo’s government would only barely see the opening of the new decade. But that was more than could be said for Rajiv Gandhi’s; or, for that matter, the Berlin Wall.

It was 1989.

The screen at the far end of the plane shows a flight map. A great golden disc, hollow at the centre, spins slowly over an astral view of India. The country of red earth and dark patches of greenery, India veined with rivers, and wreathed with mountains. The India of the opening of the Birth: ‘There is in the north, the king of mountains, divine by nature, Himalaya by name, the abode of snow. Having entered both the eastern and western oceans, he stands like a rod to measure the earth.’ A night sky over this peninsular view of India plunging into the ocean shows the curvature of the earth and
a whole silent heaven full of stars
. The graphics people at Maniraja’s office have recreated classical India on the map. They have used all the old Hindu names for the country’s rivers, cities, mountains and forests. Kannauj is Kanyakubja again – the hunchbacked girl; Delhi Indraprastha. Nothing remains of British or Muslim India. No Allahabad, no Bombay. The world – or a corner of it, at least – has been remade.

Skanda, gazing at the map, feels it contains something of the mood of the Messenger Poems, in which a lonely yaksha might charge a cloud, say, to take a message to his beloved halfway across the country; and the cloud, in doing so, will make a survey of the land. An assimilative mood, a wish to knit together and make whole what in reality is fragmented and beyond grasp. And this map would have made classical India real for Maniraja – as Sanskrit had for Skanda and his father – in ways that it had never been before. It must have given back, albeit thinly and nominally, what history had taken away.

Skanda is surprised at how much meaning it has for him, this ancient map, how many red dots on it have been part of the shape of his life. There is Kalasuryaketu, a tiny red dot on the blue vein of the Tamas
ā
, where his father, before he turned his back on his country, had retreated with Sylvia. That was the real death: the death that won him a place in the poet’s hell, reserved for those who ‘died as men before their bodies died’. There is Ayodhya, of course, the cause of his father’s leaving India, a fat red dot on the Sarayu. There are the southern hills, where he, Skanda, went to school, to escape his mother’s new life with Maniraja. And finally – if we take some liberties – there is Indraprastha, abode of his memories. Which in the early 1990s, as with Paris before Haussmann, was still unstitched, still without arteries, still a place of colony markets, still a town so boring that there was nothing more exciting than to drive with your best friend to the crest of Raisina Hill, put your car in neutral and, with Lutyens’ palace framed in your rear-view mirror, let it roll forward.

He sinks into one of the smooth seats of coffee-coloured leather, and looks out at the dead heat on the tarmac. The hostess hands him a glass of champagne. She looks familiar.