The Way Things Were (6 page)

‘Haan, tell me, what were you saying?’

‘I was saying: you and Mama seem to be getting along.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Just a ceasefire.’

‘And are you pleased you came today?’

‘I couldn’t be happier, Ish. It was wonderful.
He
was wonderful.’

Isha gave a little laugh; the car trundled through the empty streets; shafts of yellow light waved them along on their way.

‘Well, have a little scene, if you like. But don’t get too serious.’

‘Why?’ she asked, though she had a good sense of what her sister might say.

‘It never works, you know. Even though he’s probably more knowledgeable about India than we are.’

‘Not probably; definitely.’

‘Definitely. But still: the mentality is very different. You’ll forever be looking over your shoulder to see if he’s OK. And you don’t want that: you want the man to lead.’

‘I don’t know, Ish . . . Maybe I don’t want to live here at all. Maybe I want to get out for good.’

‘You think that now. But trust me: our kind of person can’t manage abroad. Doing everything for yourself. The poky little flats. All those khit-pitty Angrezes, with their precious little manners: it’s death. You’ll go mad.’

‘I don’t know . . . I really felt something today.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a sign.’

‘What kind of sign?’

‘Well, do you remember the episode I had on the plane with that rude man?’

‘The humpy story?’

‘Exactly.’

At that moment, just as they were crossing the intersection, an expression of amazement came into Isha’s face.

‘Mishi, wait, one minute, look at that. Hira, araam naal.’

The car slowed, and down the long deserted street, lining it on both sides, the women saw armed men in the shadows of trees.

‘My God!’

‘It’s all real. We’re in for it, Mishi. Till this moment . . .’

‘Me bhi soch reya si . . .’

‘Chup kar, Hira! Jaldi agge chal.’

The car sped on.

‘A police state!’

‘I know. Just like that. One day to the next.’

The sisters, in the hope of recovering their composure before the party, tried to pick up the thread of their earlier conversation. But the car had already entered Sundar Nagar and they drove along a street that had houses on one side, and a high stone wall with iron spikes – the wall of the Delhi zoo – on the other.

‘You were saying, a sign . . .’

‘He didn’t even know I was listening. But I heard him mention it . . . Hampi this . . . Vijayanagara that . . . and I thought it was so strange because it was the only other time in my life—’

‘We’re here. Tell me inside.’

Soon the two women were crossing the small front garden of Bapa’s house, where, past open doors and muslin curtains catching in the hot wind, there was the comforting sight of a lamp-lit drawing room, from which they could already hear voices and laughter.

‘Systole and diastole . . .’ Theo Mackinson says, slipping past the camera. ‘Skanda Mahodaya, wait: I see that you have a coffee. Let me get one too.’

He is dressed in olive-green khakis and a red-checked shirt. Past the polished surface of his desk, once the camera’s eye has adjusted to the change in light, Skanda sees, in the long rectangular window, a glimpse of the city he has left behind. A newly green branch, tense and sprung, sways lightly in the breeze. Beyond, a facade of blackish-brown-yellow brick. The faint screech of a siren carries up from the street. Seen from the thick night of a Delhi summer, it seems so mild and clement an impression of spring. Spring! Which, at this very moment in his translation of the Birth has, in league with Love, stolen unseasonably into the ascetic’s grove, where Shiva is performing his austerities.

‘Skanda Mahodaya? You there?’

He swipes the pad; the screen brightens.

‘Much better.’ Noticing his reddish eyes, Theo says, ‘How late is it for you there?’

He searches the screen.

‘About 1.30.’

‘That late! You should have told me. We could have found another time.’

‘It’s fine. I prefer working at night these days.’

‘The heat?’

‘Yes. And the glare.’

‘I remember. I once spent a whole summer like that in Varanasi. Speaking of which, have you been down that way yet?’

‘To Varanasi? No. Why?’

‘To Prayaga. I thought you might have—’

The Confluence, the ashes. He has not thought about them in days.

‘No. Not yet.’

Silence. Give Mackinson a difficult compound and he’ll flush out the derivatives and internal bahuvr
ī
his, but people, emotions . . . Well, it is one of the reasons why one becomes a Sanskritist.

‘All well, though?’

‘Yes, yes. All fine.’

‘And do you have friends and family in Delhi?’

‘Some. Cousins and things. Grandparents I was very close to. Maternal. But both dead now. Not too many friends. But I’m going to a party in a few days,’ he says, with uncertainty. ‘So I might make some.’

Theo laughs. ‘Where were we?’

‘Systole and diastole.’

‘Ah, the two narratives, and the relationship between the two. So, yes: I like to think of it in terms of the basic motion of the heart. Of course there is a relationship. A vital relationship. But the two actions, like the two narratives, are also discrete. Every now and then we will be slipped a little clue – such as when Kama is in conference with the gods – that one is aware of the other. It is an intelligent breathing relationship, a porous relationship, but also subliminal. The larger machinery for the most part remains concealed. Which I think is nice. But, you, Skanda Mahodaya, should not, beyond a point, concern yourself with these things. They are too
meta
for your purposes. They are there for your interest and amusement. But your main focus must remain the text. And try to read from within the tradition. Let the commentators guide you. Let the great Mallinatha guide you; you couldn’t hope for a better teacher than him. My job is just to hand you over to him.’

Skanda loves the commentators. They answer in him a deep need for teachers. And, even more than the main text of the poem, it is that paragraph of gloss, which unpacks the verse and seems to contain the ghost of the tutorial, that really excites him. His father used to say that that was the true link to the past: that was where you could actually hear a voice from ancient India.

‘Out of interest,’ Mackinson says, ‘where have you got to?’

‘The third sarga.’ Glancing at the open book – M.R. Kale – next to the computer, he reads:

‘Oh! A wonderful moment, Skanda Mahodaya. Love and Spring, in league with each other, have entered the forest, forcing the hot-rayed sun north. There is now suddenly a fragrant breeze in the woodlands. In which, the red palasha flowers, curved and crescent, appear like nail scratches. The female elephants – always a sign in Sanskrit poetics of rut in the air – are offering trunkfuls of water, scented with the pollen of lotuses, to their mates. Shiva is deep in meditation. And look at the descriptions of him here. Do you have the David Smith with you?’

‘No.’

Mackinson hurriedly searches a shelf of turquoise-coloured volumes. He finds the one he wants and flips fast through its rustling pages.

‘“The fierce pupils motionless,”’ he reads, and looks up with a smile. ‘Then, look at this, the classic description of meditation: “By restraint of his internal currents he was like a cloud without the vehemence of rain, like an expanse of water without a ripple, like a lamp in a windless place absolutely still!” One trembles at the thought that this is the man Kama is to disturb. Kama who comes into the forest, “avoiding the lamp of his eyes”. And now at the verse you are at we find him poised. “K
ā
mas tu b
ā
ṇ
’ | âvasara | prat
ī
k
ṣ
a
ḥ
. . .” What do you have for that, Skanda Mahodaya?’

A little embarrassed now of his own translation, he says, ‘It’s still very rough, Theo.’

‘Never mind.’

He reads, ‘“Having espied the opportunity for his arrow, Kama . . .”’

‘Fine. And for “Hara | baddha | lak
ṣ
ya
ḥ
”?’

‘“His gaze fastened on Shiva.”’

‘Yes! Then?’

‘“With Uma near . . . in proximity”.’

‘Lovely: “vivik
ṣ
u
ḥ
”? Do you see the desiderative here, reduplicating the verbal stem
vi
ś
? Which related to the Latin v
ī
cus gives us such words as vicinal and vicinity, and means here: to enter, enter in, go into. In the desiderative, it is the wish to enter.’

‘Yes. Kama is described as a moth wishing to enter the mouth of the flame.’

‘Very nice. Fine. And, at last, coming at the end, the actual predication.’

‘I had trouble here.’

‘The verb is
ā
-m
ṛ
ś
. To touch, to stroke, to handle, to finger. Here it is reduplicated, and in the perfect. So: “He, Kama, fingered . . .”’

‘“His bowstring”!’

‘Exactly. Again and again, Kama fingers the bowstring of his bow made of flowers, ready to shoot the arrow that is Fascination. The arrow that kills if it strikes, and kills if it doesn’t.’ Mackinson pauses and says with a smile of pure and childish excitement: ‘Skanda Mahodaya . . .’

‘Yes, Theo?’

‘Love is poised to strike!’

Toby looked a foreigner in India. It was not just the light eyes, nor the fair skin and floppy blondish-brown hair; it was that, above and beyond these things, there was an innocence, a naivety in his face that gave him away as someone who could not have grown up in India. Not, at least, in north India, where even the stray dogs had a knowing and watchful look. It was strange: there was never a man who knew more about India and, yet, knew India less, than Toby. He was like one of those men who fall in love with the idea of a woman, while all the time insulating themselves from her reality. At Oxford, a student of his, a girl from Bengal, had said, ‘Professor Ketu, it’s as if you rather wish modern India didn’t exist.’

And, laughing, he had replied, ‘Don’t we all?!’

Toby’s deep knowledge of classical India made the real India remote, made it more concept than reality. For there are few places where the past continues as seamlessly into the present as India and, yet, where the people are so unaware of it. All around him Toby saw the remnants of the Sanskritic past: there in the names that were compounds, the analysis of which he would do silently in his head; there, in the low-lying colonies that had dressed themselves up in grand names from the Epics, to which his mind could not help but go; there in the nursery down the road that had named itself after Indra’s capital; or in the chemists that had taken for themselves the names of the twins who were physicians to the gods; and there in the people’s language, which even in English adopted words like ‘only’ and ‘just’ to compensate for lost particles of stress and emphasis – words such as ‘hi’ and ‘eva’ and ‘khalu’ – that had come down to them from Sanskrit.

Everywhere he looked, Toby could see, under layer upon haphazard layer of borrowed and vernacular language, the glorious and systematic bedrock of Sanskrit. It held for him all the frustration and excitement of seeing beneath a thick encroachment of slum and shanty the preserved remains of a far grander city, of gridded streets, sophisticated sewage systems, of magnificent civic architecture. But, thrilling as it was – to find extant around him the language he had dedicated his life to – it was a private thrill. For as much as the language limped on, as much as it was still visible under the vulgate, all awareness of it had gone. It was not apparent to those living among it; it was there in the form of ruins, and nothing more. The people, moreover, had no means to assess its beauty and this could produce either embarrassment or false pride.

The knowledge of decay made Toby seem passive when it came to India. The country already, to so large an extent, existed for him privately, in his mind and imagination, that he let all of it become illusory, all shadows on the wall of a cave, all a pale emanation of some far grander and irrecoverable reality. He was like a man who, having known the forum in the days of Trajan, returns to see it as spolia on people’s houses.

That attitude – his aloofness – made him for all the wrong reasons attractive to people of a certain class in India. They confused his distance, which came from an uncompromising love for what had been lost, with their own deracination. For them, he seemed to answer a need: to both be in India and to stand at a distance from it. The members of this class, who were already set apart from the rest of the country by the loss of language, by privilege, of course, and by what had come to seem almost like racial differences, had no desire to shed their distinctiveness. They clung to it, in fact, wanting nothing so much as to remain inviolable and distinct: foreigners in their own country.

And yet – strange as it must seem – they had a corresponding desire to make a great show of their Indianness, to talk of classical dance recitals, of concerts, of textiles, and spirituality. To throw in the odd precious word or phrase of Hindustani, to upstage their social rivals with a little bit of exotica so obscure that no one could be expected to know it. India was their supreme affectation! They wore it to dinner, as it were; and, of course, the ways in which they were truly Indian – their blindness to dirt and poverty, their easy acceptance of cruelty – they concealed very well.