The Way Things Were (52 page)

‘Have we met before?’

‘I am Pooja!’ she says. ‘Pooja Paranjpe. Don’t you remember me? I used to work at the Hospitality Desk of the Raj.’

‘Oh, Pooja, of course! Where is my mother?’

Before she can gesture to the partition, Uma’s voice rings out, ‘In here. Out in a minute. Suzie’s just finishing drying my hair.’ Then, after a long pause, she says, ‘Are you alone, darling?’

‘Yes, why?’

No reply.

‘The queen of the unsaid’, Rudrani calls her, along with ‘Her Ecstasy’, and ‘stepmother’, which drives her mad. Rudrani has never – not for a moment – romanticized their mother. Nothing about her has ever seemed tragic or pitiable. She sees her in clear and simple terms as selfish, manipulative and, most damningly, as someone whose worst moments are a form of vanity. ‘If you could know,’ she once said to Skanda, after one of Maniraja’s uglier scenes, ‘how complicit she is in her debasement, you would not feel a jot of pity for her. She loves it, don’t you see? It answers a deep need in her for opera and high drama. It was what Baba could not provide, and she never forgave him for it.’ Put in those terms, it seems true, but Skanda – and here perhaps lies his own complicity – never quite believed it, never as a conviction.

‘Did you see Mani?’

‘I did.’

‘And? How did you find him?’

‘
Healthy
, as they say here.’

‘I know! And he used to be so fit, do you remember? Men, I tell you, I don’t know what happens to them. They just go off after a while, don’t they? Anything else?’

‘Calmer.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that’ – and now the plane sinks a little under the weight of her footsteps; Suzie’s voice is heard; the partition parts and Uma appears.

The years after Gulmarg were her hardest in Delhi. The freedom she had glimpsed in the time after Toby had proved to be a dangerous thing, a shorthand for her vulnerability. And, as much as she tried, she was unable to recover the innocence of that earlier time. The city had shown her the insecurity of her position and she was like someone who, relishing the dark, is suddenly made aware of the dangers that reside within it. She was surprised to know how few defenders she had. There were many to commiserate, but none to defend as a brother, husband, or fully grown son might have.
It is in this way,
she thought,
through an experience like Gulmarg, that one is made aware of the feudal character of the place one lives in
. Beneath the token outrage expressed by friends and family, there lay – and she could see it in their eyes, placid, unshockable, desensitized – an easy acceptance of violence as the organizing principle of society. Though she was hardly conscious of it, it altered her idea of her independence, turning what had been a privilege into a lack, carving out in her a need for security that she had never thought to possess. And, though later, someone looking at her life might easily have said that that need had always been with her – that the insecurity Toby made her feel was part of her rejection of him – life, being an instinctive exercise, something through which we grope our way right to the end, the need never made itself apparent in the abstract till it was embodied in a person.

Mani, in those months after Gulmarg, was not a part of her life. Not for any lack of interest from him, but because she, acting as if out of an animal instinct, found herself incapable of responding to his advances, found herself wanting nothing more than to go to ground. So much of romantic life – and our willingness to admit it into our lives – is an extension of our self-esteem, our exuberance and energy. And, after Gulmarg, Uma’s capacity for these things was severely diminished. This was why later she never came to associate her love for Mani with need, because, so long as she had really been
in need
, she had actively kept away. It was only when she felt well and strong, and had the courage to be in the world again, that she had allowed him back into her life.

After Gulmarg she wanted justice or revenge. She wanted to see Tunnu behind bars, publicly shamed; she wanted him to lose his position at the head of his companies. For a while she considered pressing charges.
Assault and battery. Forced entry . . .
She seized on these terms with that special comfort the legally untrained derive from legal jargon. When her friends – Priti Hirachand, namely – tried to persuade her of the futility of this course of action, making the case that the same society that had not expressed sufficient outrage for what had happened would also find ways to legally protect its perpetrators, she fought with them. She fought with many people in those days after Gulmarg. She fought with Isha for not walking out of a dinner at which Kitten Singh was present. ‘Mishi . . . Uma, I mean: it was a sangeet: there were some two hundred other people there.’ ‘I don’t care,’ Uma answered her, ‘you’re my sister. You should refuse to be anywhere that will have people like that.’

The position she took made her own social life difficult, for Delhi was still a small town in those days, and how many parties could one walk out of! Her voluntary withdrawal from society, her isolation, increased her feeling of injustice. She felt she was being made to suffer, while her victimizers roamed free.

She could not remember when exactly this cycle broke – how many months it took – she only knew that it corresponded exactly with the coming of foreign television to Delhi, which began slowly, with the first Gulf War, when the most fashionable place in town became a disused discotheque in the Taj Hotel called The Number One. It was here that the ladies of Delhi would come to watch CNN. They had always seemed, these ladies, so cynical and knowing, so weary of the world. But, in The Number One, watching for the first time the green carpet of Baghdad be bombed by Scud and Patriot missiles, listening to the voice of Peter Arnett, an incredible innocence came over them. Their poise fell away, their stern faces softened and all their style, one came to feel, had been nothing but the sulkiness of deprivation. By the early 1990s, they were missing dinner parties – or arriving very late, at least – because they could not tear themselves away from
The Bold and the Beautiful
and
Santa Barbara
. As Gayatri Mann, who sensed perhaps the end of her own utility in these changes, said, ‘Who would have thought that after wars and riots and emergencies, the thing to deal a deathblow to social Delhi would be American daytime television?!’

Uma went at first because it was a public place – of which, in those days, there were relatively few – and should Kitten and her husband have appeared, she could have left without a scene. A few times they did – or Kitten, at least – and a few times Uma had walked out. But, gradually, she began to notice that she made Kitten far more uncomfortable than Kitten made her, and she decided to stay and let her stew. Uma found that their old group of friends closed around her, and often her being there meant that it was Kitten who had to keep away. She began to come more often to The Number One. And it was there, one day, after many months had passed, that she saw Maniraja again.

It was dark in the old discotheque and at first she didn’t recognize him. The city was flooded with Indians who had left the Gulf during the war and they sat – Nixu Mohapatra and her – with Ruxana Idriss, a tiny Indian woman, with bright intent eyes and short hair streaked white. She had a Kuwaiti husband, and the couple, together with their three sons, dressed often in ‘Free Kuwait’ T-shirts, were waiting out the war in Delhi. They came almost every evening to The Number One, offering, in accompaniment to the news stream coming off the large screens, a private commentary of lives disrupted and escapes through the desert at night into Saudi Arabia, even as Saddam’s tanks closed in on the little oil-rich emirate.

Uma, newly returned to social life, enjoyed it all. The drama on the big screens, the news as entertainment, which seemed so unbelievable after a decade of being subjected to the tedium of the state broadcaster; the foreign ads, which put within reach a world hardly anyone was able to afford as yet, but whose very existence on those screens seemed to assure its impending arrival. It was an exciting time: a Time of Things!

Uma was talking to Ruxana’s engineer husband, Hisham, about the special features of the stealth bomber, newly introduced into the war, when Nixu squeezed her leg under the table and whispered, ‘Darling, don’t look now. But they’re here. The turds.
Les deux.
Ignore them. Please don’t let it spoil your evening.’

Uma didn’t look, but her good mood drained away. She had seen Kitten since Gulmarg, but not Tunnu, and the thought – nothing more, just the thought – of setting eyes on that little man caused the tendons in her knees to tremble and soften; her stomach churned painfully. Hisham’s words, so fascinating till a moment ago, grew suddenly remote. A rush of emotion rose in her like a fever. Her mind swarmed with things she would say or do, if she found herself face to face with her assailant. She could almost have yawned from the strain on her nerves; she feared she would lack the impetus to do anything. And aware of this incapacity – and it was just that! – she thought,
How nice it would be to have someone stand between me and the world, to have a defender; I’ve never had that!

Then she saw Maniraja.

She was still in that liminal state, still feeling the cold standing flood of a panic attack rise in her, when she heard Ruxana, in her clipped convent accent, say, ‘These businessmen-types, I tell you. We may treat them offhandishly in our houses. But, look: here, in the hotels, they are the undisputed kings.’

She looked over and, in the green light of Baghdad seen through night-vision lenses, there he was. He sat at a round table with a few men who looked like they worked with him; there were a couple of bottles of Black Label on the table, and vodka, it seemed, in a large ice bucket; the manager of The Number One was tending to the table personally. Maniraja didn’t seem to know anyone else there, but it didn’t bother him. He seemed, she recalled thinking, perfectly alone and perfectly secure. It was an image that remained with Uma; and later, if she forgave him some of his worst behaviour, it was because she could see only too clearly that it came from insecurity, and rather than condemn him for it, she felt responsible. She felt that it was she who, by bringing him into contact with a world for which she felt nothing but loathing, had, in some ways, robbed him of his natural security.

None of this was in view that night; that night, as Ruxana pointed out – and as, to some extent, would always be true of those places where money and respect were closely linked – Maniraja was king. Nothing, save the entry of a movie star or a politician, could have drawn the manager of The Number One away from his table.

To Uma, the sight of Mani, sitting alone with his business associates, an island of unfamiliarity in a stagnant sea of the known and familiar, was like a lifeline. A way out of some unique and interminable hell of singledom, late motherhood and a forties and fifties that had all the potential to be at once more active and full of promise than they had been for her parents’ generation – Deep was an old woman at fifty! – while possessing, in equal measure, the danger of being bleaker and more directionless.

‘Isn’t he the same man, darling?’ Nixu’s voice came in. ‘He’s looking straight at you. And such DGs, all goggly-eyed. What did you do? Break his heart? What a pool of piranhas this Number One is; the turds on one side, and now this serial killer of an ex-lover on the other? Uma? Say something!’

She ignored him. She knew perfectly well what was at the bottom of the long cold stare, a little surprised, a little frightened, that Maniraja gave her, once they made eye contact. This was one set of hurt feelings she knew exactly how to deal with. And, excusing herself, she got up a moment later and walked over to his table. Maniraja looked away when he saw her coming, but she carried on, threading her way between the round tables, through this strange scene – never to be witnessed again in the city – of fashionable people congregating at an old discotheque to watch 24-hour news television.

He didn’t greet her, but she pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. The manager automatically asked her what she would like to drink. And now Mani, unable to deny this courtesy even to his worst enemy, for he was pathologically generous, could not help but turn to her.

‘Kya peeyogee?’ he said, half-sneeringly.

‘Main toh champagne peeyoongee,’ she replied coyly.

He handed her the menu, and frosty again, said, ‘You’ll have to choose yourself. I don’t know anything about champagne.’

‘I’ll have a glass of Dom Perignon,’ she said.

A quick look passed between the manager and Mani, and he went off with a nod. Soon, a bottle of champagne was added to the ice bucket with the vodka. Uma drank the first glass almost in silence; then she asked for a second; and Mani, after studying the dark green label, carefully poured her one.

‘Is it any good?’

‘Very good. Have some.’

‘I don’t drink champagne.’

‘Drink some tonight.’

He beckoned to a waiter to bring him a champagne glass. The man came back a moment later with a champagne saucer. Mani stared at it in wonder before pouring himself a glass. Uma was onto her third. And it was only then – quite drunk, and relishing the pleasure of making confidences to an old lover – that she told him the story of Gulmarg, told him why, in short, she had shut him out of her life. Mani was expressionless. He listened, as if he was listening to someone making a business proposal to him. But, from time to time, when she would look up, Uma saw, really for the first time, the outrage she had looked for and not found among her own people in Delhi; she saw something cold and threatening and unreadable in his eyes.

When the story was over, he said nothing more about it, but asked, ‘And he’s here, tonight, this man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Point him out.’

‘Don’t say anything . . .’

‘Point him out.’

‘Mani . . .’

‘Point him out.’

Under the pressure of his words, she scanned the crowd. Tunnu, with his turban, was easy to find. He stood at some distance from a table where Kitten Singh, lips thin and painted, a large fake hibiscus in her hair, was entertaining a table of Delhi businessmen.