The Way Things Were (59 page)

‘Look, K
ā
la | s
ū
rya,’ Skanda said, pointing at the setting sun.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said, thinking of the little town set somewhere on the expanse of their journey north. ‘What is it, again? I once used to know. The final sunset?’

‘The sun of Time,’ he said, ‘the sun at the end of the world.’

‘How stylish! What a grand coat of arms to have!’

Then, looking out at the land, parcelled out in brown, and turning faintly violet, she said, ‘I wonder where he is? Our Raja of Kalasuryaketu.’

At sunset Toby was on the outskirts of Delhi, in a wasteland of weeds and poisoned water bodies. He had been driving all day, running, he felt, from the bad news that followed him. He had been in Ayodhya till that morning, working alongside political action groups and NGOs. His friends, Vandana and Dhanalakshmi, who were part of one such group, had recruited him to help prevent the demolition of the Mosque. For among that sea of people determined to destroy the Mosque, there were many whom Toby knew personally. Babaji, of course. But others too. Teachers, religious and secular; local politicians, bureaucrats and collectors. This was Toby’s world. The India from where the madness had come was not only familiar; it was the India Toby had banked on. It was the country he had believed, when empowered, would supplant a worthless and effeminized elite. It made what was happening much harder to bear. And it was not so much blood or riots that he feared; he had seen all that before; it was the corruption of his dream: the dream of renaissance turned to nightmare.

He had done what he could in Ayodhya the day before, but it had come to nothing. He had left the town at dawn the next day, sending Vandana and Dhanalakshmi ahead in a separate car. It was at a hotel on the outskirts of Delhi that he first saw on television what he had seen in reality. His old friend Vijaipal was being interviewed. He was saying, ‘. . . a dwarf nation . . . that is what comes of countries who sanctify history they don’t understand, who invent enemies out of their own self-loathing . . .’

Then the television flashed to images of young men on whose mute lips he could read the cries of ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ They had saffron strips of cloth tied around their foreheads and their eyes were white with exhilaration. He saw them advance upon the Mosque and swarm its base. He saw them crawl, with whatever little instrument they could find, to the petalled summit of its dome.

His memory filled in the rest: he saw the white dust of the dome’s demise rise from it like a sigh of resignation. He saw the rank red brick of its interior, akin to inflamed muscle, as it was cut open. He saw the faces of the men on its summit, smiling and happy, deeply content, coated in a clownish layer of fine white dust.

The day before he had called his travel agent, Kharabanda, to book some air tickets. He now called Kharabanda back and told him to issue them. He wanted to escape what he had just seen on the television, but it followed him. Everywhere he had stopped on the way, the news grew richer in detail. And the feeling of consensus it created, the consensus that had been a comfort to Uma, was oppressive to Toby. A triumph, not of will, but of some base and encircling energy that had singled him out for extinction. The voice of the collective! It had spoken at last, and there was media now to reverberate its echo. The soul of the country was articulate; it was a moment Toby, more than anyone, had waited for; but now that the voice had sounded, Toby found he did not recognize its timbre. It gave utterance to a rough and rapacious spirit, it contained a note of barbarism – it was not the voice of a country he recognized.

That night – 7 December 1992 – they all unknowingly converged on the flat in Delhi. The flat, which had become a void at the centre of their lives, and in which, already, the air had grown stiller, the switches faintly yellow, the electronics outdated.

It was Sylvia who arrived first. Toby had sent her down in advance with Vandana and Dhanalakshmi, the frontline in ‘Civil Society Against Fascism’. The two women had thoroughly enjoyed their activism in U.P., and, after a few mournful moments in the car in the morning, they had returned to their usual chattiness and good humour. They sat fatly outside the flat, on the red sandstone stairs, their crumpled cotton saris pulled up, smoking cigarettes. When it began to grow dark, Dhanalakshmi turned over Vandana’s plump wrist to see the time, and yelled into the house, ‘Sylvia, darling, the morale is low, the troops are tired. What about a little drinky-poo?’

Sylvia, who was waiting for the arrival of a travel agent, said, ‘I’m not sure what there is.’

‘Take a look, darling,’ Dhanalakshmi said bossily. ‘Toby and Uma’s house. There’s bound to be some booze lying around.’

Vandana, a bully herself, said, ‘Yes, go on, Sylvia, dear. I’ll drink carbolic acid, if I have to.’

Sylvia emerged out of the house a few minutes later with whisky sodas for the activists, who, before taking their drinks, each removed their large red bindis, and laughing raucously, put them on the step next to them, like a piece of chewing gum they hoped later to return to.

Uma saw them as she drove in.

‘Good God,’ she said to Skanda, as the car stopped outside the arched doorway, ‘what are those two fat cows doing here?’

The women, their saris hitched up to their fleshy knees, had ordered fresh drinks; they sat on the step, greedily eating nuts from a dainty silver bowl between them.

‘Uma! My darling!’ Dhanalakshmi yelled on seeing the car. ‘What are you doing here? What a beautiful surprise! We weren’t expecting you.’

‘I wasn’t expecting you either, Dhanalakshmi,’ Uma said frostily.

‘Darling, we’re just back from Ayodhya! It’s too awful, too awful for words. Those revolting little people crawling over that beautiful old mosque.’

‘Le deluge, my dear Uma,’ Vandana chimed in, ‘le deluge.’ Then she put her two fingers to her upper lip, in imitation of a toothbrush moustache, and said, ‘Heil!’

At which point the two women fell over themselves laughing.

Uma was still under the arch of the doorway – Narindar was bringing in the luggage – when Kharabanda, a stout man with a foghorn of a voice and a cream-coloured Vespa, pulled up. Seeing Uma and Skanda, he let out a cry of joy and bounded up past the women.

‘But Rani saab,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here? I thought you were in Bombay. I have no tickets for you. Only for Raja saab and a lady . . .’

Then, opening the flap of one of the two Air France tickets he held in his hand, he said carefully, ‘Ms Sylvia.’

Sylvia, who, on hearing the commotion, had come outside.

‘Sylvia!’ Uma cried. ‘Thank heavens! What on earth is going on?’

The two women had met only once before, and Uma still had in her manner traces of that exaggerated warmth we show our successors in love when we want to reassure them that we are no threat to them.

‘Oh, Uma?’ she said, somewhat overwhelmed by the scene. ‘And Skanda! But Toby never said a word . . . ?’

‘He didn’t know. We’re here somewhat unexpectedly. But how nice that we’re all together! What’s this about tickets?’

‘We’re leaving for Paris tonight.’

‘Paris? Why?’

Sylvia was about to reply, then seeing Skanda, she said, ‘Maybe, it’s better Toby tell you himself. He should be here soon.’

Uma drew a breath, as if trying, in the growing darkness, to absorb all the activity around her. The women on the step; the travel agent with the two Air France tickets; Sylvia; and then, of course, ever present in the background, the memory of her ugly fight with Maniraja – her thoughts of leaving him – all of which had given her her own reasons for being in Delhi.

‘Well, come inside then, you lot,’ she said brusquely, casting a quick eye over the onset of the December evening. ‘No point everyone sitting outside. We had better make a little party of it, no?’

It was dark on the Mathura Road. Not the darkness of night but that of a brown haze. A smog that swallowed the headlights of cars, and muffled the thunder of trucks. The yellow beams of the car smoked before them. Toby was surprised to see how ugly it all was. The flat land, the pools of poisoned water fringed with grass, the black earth, the outlines of factories and granaries, the narrow shabby houses with their unplastered flanks, the unevenly metalled roads, the paint refusing to adhere to its lines, the filthy air:
Why have I never noticed any of this before?
he said almost aloud.
Why does it seem so new, this ugliness?
And just then he was aware of something else too: the voice in his head, it was silent. It was for once not playing its little games. Not once in that long car journey across U.P. had it seized on, say, ‘rudra’ painted on the back of a truck and thought, from
rud
, to roar and weep, related to the Anglo-Saxon
reotan
, the Latin
rudere
. Not once had he in a small town – Kannauj, say – seen Lipika Salon, and thought lipika? Scribe or clerk, from
lip
, which means to smear or anoint, related to the Latin
lippus
, but more importantly, to the Anglo-Saxon
libban
, the English live and life.

It was as if a faculty of his mind had been disabled and a whole world of meaning had gone quiet. There was nothing now holding his India together. Squalor was just squalor, dirt just dirt, people just people . . . And India, for the first time, seemed to him devoid of an animating idea; it was just a place where a lot of people lived.

He thought of Uma saying to him, in another life, ‘Someone says H.P. to me and I think: Oh, good old Himachal Pradesh. Mountains, hill stations, busloads of tourists. But you, Toby, you’re thinking, hima: snow, cold, frost: must be related to
hiems
and
hiver
and hibernate: and a | cala, that’s a non-goer, like na | ga, means mountain. Snow mountain. How pretty!’

But was that really the reason? Was the language all that had held the world together? Had that alone been the source of meaning? Certainly it was true that, in the past, he had not been able to share the pessimism with which Indians viewed their own things. Mrinala, to a society lady in Delhi, might have seemed a common name, an ayah’s name, even; she might perhaps have preferred Zhyra or Kaireen or Alaaya; but he could not have thought of it that way. Not when he knew that it meant lotus-root, and that it was derived as that which is m
ṛ
ṇ
yate, crushed, for the sake of eating; and, immediately, from the name alone, one had a sense of its fragility. Or, take
ś
ar
ī
ra: which might to some have been an ordinary word for the body, but Toby could never have seen it as anything but a reflection of the Indic world – its deepest values – for he knew that it was traditionally derived from
ś
ṝ
, which means to break or destroy, and
ś
ar
ī
ra was nothing but that, ‘which wastes away at every moment’.

So, it was true – he could not deny it – that his feeling for the language had now, for as long as he could remember, been part of his way of seeing, part of the way he configured the world. But had it blinded him to the reality of the place? Had it spoken of an interconnectedness so deep and attractive that it had negated the India that everyone else saw? Had it contained a hope of regeneration so compelling that he had been prepared to wait forever? And now that that hope had been extinguished, killed at the germ, had it made his world unbearable? Not because it was ugly or squalid, but because it was devoid of meaning? A grand and beautiful scheme, springing from the very essence of language, had fallen through. Or worse: it had been poisoned at the source and it made Toby doubt the things he once loved.
Decay is never benign
, he thought,
I have allowed myself to be duped by that greatest of great Indian lies: the lie of eternal India.

Rudrani had been in touch through the day. He wanted to see her, and his ex-father-in-law, now very old and deaf, before he left. For a long time he had not been sure he would leave. But, when he saw the images of the Mosque under attack, he called the travel agent. Then he called Rudrani back to say he was leaving the country; not for good, he couldn’t say that; but for a short holiday, and that he wanted to see her before he left. The last time they had spoken she had told him, ‘The strangest thing, Baba: Ma and Dada are here, too, at the flat.’ The Brigadier and she were on their way there now. He should come too. They would meet him there. Good, he thought, looking out from a PCO booth on the Mathura Road, shrouded in its thin mantle of brown smoke, it’s right that we should all be together on a night like this. And, for a moment, speaking mechanically, he said, with the voice and sensibility of a man from another time, ‘Darling, is there any champagne?’

‘Of course not, Baba!’ she laughed.

‘Order some, please. Ask your mother to call Pappu, the bootlegger, and order some. And food?’

‘I think Ma’s organizing it.’

‘Tell her to make sure there are some eggs in the house; I’ll pick up some foie gras on the way.’

Champagne, foie gras: it was the last time these things would be rare or sought-after in India. Toby spoke already in a voice from the past. For a moment – for an evening, really – he was a version of the man he had been in the seventies, the man of linen suits and foreign exchange, who travelled with a large blue British passport in his pocket, and a bottle of whisky in his luggage. The man who felt it was better, if truly he was leaving India for good, to go first class to Paris, and decide the rest later.

That evening, the flat was alive again. Windows were opened, heaters were brought out, there were flowers in the vases and Narindar – on Uma’s insistence – wore his uniform. Skanda came later to distrust his memory of that night, for though he did not know it then, it was the last time he would see his parents together.

There was a great quality of friendship between Toby and Uma that night, as if they both quietly acknowledged how long an association it had been. Uma, in the presence of Sylvia, seemed tickled at playing the role of the ex-wife. It must have appealed to her sense of the absurd. And it did not take her long to see the absurdity of their present situation, nor that part of it that was deeply moving to her: which was the shared despair, the loss of illusions public and private, that had brought her together, for the last time, with a man, who, more than any other, had been the witness to her life. A man, who, once the obligation to love him had been lifted, she felt boundless amounts of affection for. And concern! Especially when intuitively, she sensed his tragedy better than anybody else. In the past, she had thought Toby’s view of India hopelessly romantic, but that night it was for India that she felt a chill, for any place willing to break the heart of a dreamer as ardent as Toby.