The Way Things Were (54 page)

More often than not she got their mother on the phone, and they would see Uma, standing by the telephone table in silence, as the woman spoke, interrupting only to say quietly, ‘Please stop this! If you have a problem with your husband, you must speak to him. You can’t call here.’ They had sensed naturally that something was the matter, but they had not been able to tell what exactly, until – once or twice, when Uma was out – they had answered the phone themselves. At first, when the woman heard it was them, she just breathed noisily down the phone and hung up. But gradually she became emboldened and, on one occasion, while speaking to Rudrani, who was endlessly amused by her calling, she said, ‘Tell that randi, your mother, that she will never have him. You hear? Rolexes, she wants? Well, Rolexes maybe she’ll have, but never him. Go, go and tell her!’

But they didn’t mention a word to Uma, though they did see she had a new watch.

It was a strange time; it was as if their mother was taking a kind of revenge against their family, almost as if she was punishing Toby by exposing his children to Maniraja. She also ended up doing Maniraja a great disservice, for, in not explaining his presence in their lives, she never made her children take him seriously. One felt almost as if she had abdicated her role in their family and meant now for everyone to be left to their own devices.

Skanda had, for a long time, been unnerved by Maniraja, especially during those dinners when he attacked Muslims. There was something disturbing about his tone and, though Skanda could not prove it, he suspected he was ignorant of the things he spoke so excitedly about. He never forgot his elation when he discovered for the first time that what Maniraja was saying was not just ugly, but wrong. Plain wrong.

He was almost sixteen at the time; his aunt Isha was present too at dinner. And this – the presence of others, especially those from Uma’s old world – always brought out the worst in Maniraja, for as Rudrani liked to point out to her brother, ‘Dada, you know what kind of man he is?’

‘What kind?’

‘The kind who thinks it’s cool to make his girlfriend look bad in front of his friends?’

‘Oh, and you’ve known many men like this?’

‘No, dada. But I know one when I see one.’

Maniraja was speaking over everyone to Choate in a loud and boastful way about model villages they were setting up in the hills of U.P., where people would be taught – or
retaught
, as Maniraja said – to speak Sanskrit.

Skanda, in part because his aunt was present, and in part because of the recent telephone calls, was in a combative mood. And though Maniraja, especially in those days, spoke in a way that was impossible to interrupt, Skanda saw his opportunity and said, ‘But, Uncle Mani, why are you setting up these villages?’

‘Why?’ Mani asked. ‘Why are we setting them up?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Because, son,’ Maniraja said, ‘language is a great source of confidence for people. Rob them of their language, and you break their spirit. So what we’re trying to do in these model villages is to give people back the language of their ancestors.’

Skanda looked long at Maniraja, then he said softly, ‘But it was never the language of their ancestors.’

Maniraja looked confused.

‘Forefathers, son. The generations before them, before the coming of the invader, you know.’

‘I know what
ancestors
means, Uncle Mani: what I’m saying is that their ancestors would never have spoken Sanskrit.’

And now Maniraja began to get his drift.

‘Means?’ he said cautiously, and laughed. ‘What did they speak then? Swahili?’

Skanda could feel his aunt’s and his mother’s eyes on him. And channelling the ghost of his father, he said, using an old form of entrapment, ‘Who, by your own estimation, do you suppose spoke Sanskrit?’

‘In the past or now?’

‘At any time in the history of the language.’

‘It was the language of India. Everybody spoke it!’

Skanda held his gaze a moment longer, then began to laugh. He looked at his mother, and she, after a moment’s hesitation, began to laugh too. Then Rudrani, and then Isha – though she was not sure why – also began to laugh.

Skanda, as if the fight was not worth the fighting, said nothing more. But his mother, enjoying herself, and amplifying something Toby had once told her, said, ‘No, no, no, Mani. You’re out of your depth, my darling; you’ve obviously never so much as opened a Sanskrit play. Or you would know, and anyone will tell you – Sheldon Pollock, for one – that,
it was never the language of the nursery, the bedroom, the field
. . . Its relationship to the local languages operating below it was always and only – even more so than English today’ – and how she relished the use of this difficult word – ‘one of “hyperglossia”. Not simply a high language, my darling, but an über, über language: a language of the super elite, as there has never been anything the likes of since. And the peasants of Uttar Pradesh, Mani dear, did not speak Sanskrit – not now, not ever. They spoke no more Sanskrit than you do . . .’

Maniraja did not say a word. But, in the whiteness of those eyes and in those chapped slightly parted lips, through which a crooked row of tobacco-stained teeth was visible, it was possible to see the rage of a man whose past was lost to him, and who, out of that anger, would see destroyed not one or two or three mosques, but a thousand, before he found his way back to that elusive confidence he spoke so much about.

Looking out of the window at the low line of trees, standing at the base of an immense white sky, Uma says, ‘This is the heat of my childhood. You lot are lucky. You’ve never had to experience it. In those days, we had air conditioning in only one room of the house, if at all, and power cuts all the time, and those slow dead hours. What a time!’

Suzie kneels at her feet, listening intently. Removing one of them from a red tub of warm soapy water and wrapping it in a towel, she says, ‘I remember. It like that when I come here.’

Uma looks at her in puzzlement, as she removes her other foot from a red-soled Louboutin and places it flat in the warm water.

Then looking at Skanda, she says, ‘Bombay is not like that. Save for the monsoon, the weather has no gravitas. There is always a breeze, always the breath of the sea; the nights are moist and smelly. There’s something clammy,’ she says with distaste, ‘about the climate in Bombay.’

He can see what she is doing. When she does not like what has been said – and she did not like their earlier conversation about Maniraja – she changes the subject to something seemingly irrelevant, like the weather, but gives it the mood of what she is feeling, and then, when the time is right, she will return to the original subject obliquely. By saying, for instance, ‘Charm. I suppose that matters a lot, doesn’t it?’

Skanda waits for her to say more, but she just smiles at him, and lets her gaze rest on Suzie’s scalp, on the neat parting lying like a caterpillar over the head of shiny straight hair.

‘Huh? What do you mean?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’ve just come to feel over the years that it matters a great deal, it’s perhaps all that matters. People will always forgive someone with charm. Rajiv Gandhi had charm, and look: they forgave him everything. Rudrani has charm, too, when she wants to.’

‘So do you, Ma. Great charm.’

‘Thank you, darling. Your father had it too, of course, in bucketloads, which you have inherited. Toby was one of those people who made you smile the moment he walked through the door. Everyone was willing to do everything for him. It was a gift, really. It made people happy to make him happy. Not everyone has that,’ she says pointedly.

And now he begins to see where she’s headed.

‘You mean Mani?’

‘Mani has no charm. Poor man! Not one teeny weeny little ounce. And he suffers for it. He has no friends. I’m his only friend. He’s forever telling me after meeting some old bore or the other, “I think he likes me.” And I think: how pathetic! Who gives a fuck if he likes you? Do you like him?! But people who have no charm have to think of these things.’

‘Ma!’

‘What?’

‘Let’s please not make it seem as if all Mani’s trouble boils down to his not having charm. He was also capable of some pretty ugly behaviour.’

‘Never directed at you!’

He laughs. ‘So?’

‘So?
So
what people do in the context of love –
out
of and
because
of love – cannot be used as a just assessment of who they are.’

‘No?’

‘No! A big emphatic no. You can’t run your emotional life following fixed rules, never giving second chances; the ones who do either end up alone or with someone many times their inferior, with a—’ She stops herself.

‘With a . . . ?’ he says, unable to tell yet if this is a veiled attack on him or his father.

‘With a Sylvia,’ she says easily, and adds, ‘The big relationships are like the big novels, messy, chaotic, imperfect. They operate by an emotional logic. You can’t lay down guidelines for good behaviour, and expel anyone who doesn’t follow them.’

‘But when do you draw the line? When is enough?’

‘When there’s no feeling anymore, obviously. When love is gone,’ she says, and peers vacantly into the eddying islands of soap.

Skanda is silent.

‘Suzie?’ she says, a moment later.

‘Ma’am?’

‘May I take a cigarette break?’

‘You’re smoking?’ Skanda says.

‘Only menthols.’

‘Really? But you haven’t smoked in years.’

‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ she says and smiles.

She slips her feet into a pair of Balinese slippers and they walk to the door of the plane, which Pooja opens, unfolding the rubber steps and letting in a great stultifying blast of heat.

‘Ah,’ she says, breathing it in, looking out in dismay at the day while lighting a brown cigarette. Her face, as the peace of the cigarette works its way through her, acquires a cool surveying quality.

Skanda, thinking still of what she said earlier, says, ‘No, Ma. It is not just a question of charm. He was awful and you know that . . .’

She does not resist his words. Soothed by the cigarette, and enjoying the sudden focus on her life, she says, ‘The trouble with Mani, the power he had over me – was that he was always willing to go to a place too ugly for me to follow him into. Those scenes! They defeated me; I could never compete with them.’

Watching her smoking at his feet, looking philosophically out at the sweltering tarmac, he says, ‘How many do you smoke?’

‘I don’t know, darling,’ she replies, half in irritation. ‘I smoke them one at a time.’

1992. The year Uma moved in with Maniraja. The year Skanda went to school. The year Rudrani went to live at the newly built Fatehkot Apartments. And the year their flat became vacant, a memorial of sorts. No one had planned for it to be that way; it just happened. But, once it had, it was impossible to escape its significance. It just sat there squarely at the centre of their lives, a great breathing vacancy, empty and preserved, a physical expression of the hollowing out of the family unit.

Skanda, when he was home from school, would have liked to live there. But Mani, as an indication of his growing power over their lives – and in a gesture that Skanda always interpreted as malicious – asked that he not be allowed to. The reason ostensibly was that Skanda, in his holidays, at least, should be given a chance to get used to his mother’s new life. But, strangely, perhaps because they knew what the answer would have been, nothing of the kind was ever asked of Rudrani. It was his mother who made the request, ‘Please, darling. You’ll be doing me a huge favour.’ When he said, in return, ‘Why not Rudrani?’ she replied evasively, ‘She’s a girl; it matters less.’

But what exactly it was that
mattered
seemed to matter much more to Mani than to his mother. It was a mysterious request because already, in that first summer before school, it was clear from the way Mani behaved around Skanda that his presence made him uncomfortable. And yet he seemed to need him there, almost as if his dominion over Uma would be incomplete without Skanda.

Maniraja’s treatment of Uma required witnesses. Again and again, he would request the presence of someone from the ‘old days’ – Chamunda or Gayatri, or Isha – for dinner at their seafront flat in Bombay, only to run Uma down before this person. Her past life – it was clear – made him insecure, and his method of conquering that insecurity was to debase Uma in front of people from her past. It was his way of possessing her.

The debasement took a particular form. And it was not always easy to know if it was something instinctive or carefully worked out. It could be described as a tyranny of his world over hers, but what it really meant was the privileging of all that was small and dull and banal over anything that had the potential to be interesting or amusing or subtle; and, as an extension, threatening. So, for instance, on hearing Viski and Isha were in town, Mani would insist they be called to dinner at once. They would arrive; there would be drinks; soon the easy flow of laughter and conversation would begin, a story, perhaps, told by Viski about his witnessing the assassination of a Punjabi politician in his adolescence . . . And, suddenly, seeing Uma begin to enjoy herself, to get a second drink perhaps, Maniraja would interrupt the conversation, and ask that she go to their bedroom to fetch him his eye drops.

Now? This minute?
‘Please, darling,’ he would say in a babyish voice, ‘Mani needs his eye drops.’ And she would go. In her absence, the broken threads of a conversation would try to reconstitute themselves. She would return with the eye drops and hand them to him. ‘Darling,’ he would say, his face souring grotesquely, ‘not these; my Japanese eye drops.’ Now there would be real awkwardness. And either to dispel it – or, as Rudrani would say, to make an exhibition of it – she would go again, with perhaps just a rolling of the eyes. Again conversation would resume brokenly; not a story, of course; but something small and polite. She would return with the Japanese eye drops. And Mani – for no tyranny is complete without repetition ad absurdum – would ask that she go back yet again, for the 13 per cent, and not the 15 per cent that she had brought. Now, at this point, if she was to say – and there were many to witness this – ‘Fuck off and get them yourself’ – there would be an ugly scene.