The Way Things Were (60 page)

At one point the two of them – in between his making foie gras omelettes, and her helping lay the table – took some time out together, in private. That was when, Skanda later learned, his father had asked his mother’s help in saving the Kidd Sanskrit Library. And though her own situation was as uncertain as ever – she thought she would leave Maniraja – she promised to help, promised never to let the project die or be ‘entombed’.

Skanda’s enduring impression of that night was not of his parents, but of his father and grandfather. Deep Fatehkotia, now too arthritic to leave the house, had not come. But the Brigadier, though he was very old himself, his eyes almost gone, his beard totally white, his mouth ever a little open, had made a special point of it. He had sensed his presence was needed. It was he, after all, who, from the depths of that bad time in 1984, had first advised Toby to leave India, and never return. And though no one had told him that Toby was leaving for good – no one knew! – he seemed to have guessed he was, and that was why his presence was required.

He spent the evening, a stiff whisky in his mottled hands, talking to Toby alone. He kept saying, ‘So pleased you’re leaving, son. You must,’ he added, certain that everyone who left India went to the same place, ‘give my salaams to I.P. He has become a policeman, you know, in Canada. Or New Zealand, is it? It is his little revenge against the world.’ Then, as if he hadn’t asked it until now, he said, ‘Tell me, Raja saab: I see your reasons for leaving, of course, but why now?’

At first Toby, who wanted to make light of his departure, bluffed. ‘Oh, I’m only going for a short holiday, sir; I’ll be back soon enough.’ But this brought an impatient and dissatisfied expression to the Brigadier’s face, and, after only a short gap, he found a way to rephrase his question. ‘Wonderful that you’re finally off, Raja saab. I always thought this was no place for a man of your quality and intellect. But why not earlier? I mean: why now?’ Again, and again, till Toby felt the truth of what he sought to conceal wrung from him.

‘See, sir,’ he said at last, almost from exasperation, ‘the thing is – the reason I’m leaving – is that I fell in love.’

The Brigadier chewed his gums, unsure perhaps if he had heard right.

‘Not with your daughter,’ Toby said quickly, ‘though I loved her too. Very much.’

‘My daughter – ’ the Brigadier interrupted, ‘I don’t know where she gets it from – has tremendous common sense. She is, I think I told you once, a great pragmatist. But you mustn’t doubt, Raja saab, that under all this good sense – and I fear it won’t bring her a day of happiness – there is a great store of romance. You mustn’t think of it as having all been a waste. I can tell you: she doesn’t. And this little bania she’s found . . .’ he began with contempt.

‘It doesn’t matter, sir,’ Toby stopped him. ‘What I was saying was that though I loved her very much, my great love was always this language, which I found as a young man. It seemed to me at the time to contain a whole universe of thought and feeling and sensibility. I believed it to be the most beautiful thing in the world . . .’

‘I see,’ he thought he heard the Brigadier say.

‘This, I believed, must be what the poets of old had meant when they spoke of language as a deathless thing and gave to its most basic unit – the syllable – the word ak
ṣ
ara: that which does not decay.’

‘Come again, son,’ the Brigadier said, with renewed interest, ‘“ak
ṣ
ara” did I hear you say? What did you say it meant?’

‘The imperishable: that which does not decay.’

The Brigadier’s eyes widened.

‘Lovely. Very lovely.’

‘Yes. And what can I say, sir? I held out some little hope for it.’

‘For what?’ the Brigadier said with confusion.

‘For the language, for the place. I suppose I felt that some particle of the spirit that had made it might fertilize a future time in this country. And that I would witness one of those moments so rare in history . . .’

At this point there was a disturbance at the centre of the room. Vandana or Dhanalakshmi – hard to know which – had, after saying, ‘Let’s see what those damn firangs are saying about us,’ turned on the television and its light and noise filled the room. The novelty of it was still very real and the others soon gathered around.

‘Bloody racket!’ the Brigadier began and, inadvertently quoting Nehru, said, ‘What were you saying? “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history?”’

But Toby could not continue. He was too far from the television to hear, but he could see replayed the images he had seen that afternoon.

The Brigadier was urging him to go on, to finish what he had been saying.

‘I thought I would witness,’ he said at last, speaking as if out of a dream, ‘one of those moments when genius returns to a place from which all memory of it had departed. But I was wrong, sir,’ he said, his concentration returning, ‘I see now that I was terribly wrong.’

The Brigadier’s eyes shone. His mouth remained partially open. He gave Toby no indication that he had heard what he said. But neither did he ask his question again. His face came to rest.

This was the impression that Skanda, sitting at some distance from the two men, retained, of their faces flooded with the light from the television: the face of the older man, either from peace or indifference, was quiet and closed, the eyes marbled with cataract; the younger man’s face was searching and quizzical, as if able only now to see to the heart of a truth whose simplicity – had it not caused him such grief – would have made him laugh out loud.

It is late when Skanda returns to the flat from the airport. This is the hour when he has used it most. It is at this hour that the sediment of years is heaviest – and here is a nice long thread: s
ī
dati, in Sanskrit; Latin
sedere
; Lithuanian
sedeti
; Gothic
sitan
; German
sitzen
; Anglo-Saxon
sittan
; in English
sit
– the soft preservative darkness, keeping what has come, but willing to admit no more. And, even after a year of living in the flat, there is very little of him to be found in it. Whatever trace there is can be easily removed. He could pack his bags and, in less than an hour, the place would return to itself, with a sigh of relief no doubt, like an old person kept too long at lunch.

Its decay, acting as a preservative, has kept everything. The picchvai with the peacocks which seems tonight to glow with an interior light, a real
schöne
. The heavy carved sideboards. The balding discoloured carpets. The cream paint, once such an innovation, now brittle and cracking. The low-voltage lights, which seem always to know their place, and never to shine too brightly. His father’s desk in whose deep grooves a thick gunk has formed, which he – while translating his poem – likes to drive a paper knife through. The thin sheets and rasais, which more than anything – for thread has ever been associated with narrative, and so with Time – seem in the loosening of their warp and weft to contain the underlay of past lives lived in the flat.

He wants to be near it all tonight, to have it close around him; to breathe it in, the air of the vacancy, to have it wash over him, and, for him to live sensually, one last time perhaps. What he does not want are summations, no tying of knots, no ceremony of farewells.
Let be.
Nor tonight does he want to think of what the vacancy at the heart of his life has meant. The passivity that made every effort of his a half effort; the feeling of dislocation that always overpowered him; the absurdity that broke the back of the relationships he entered; the feeling of drift that made only those situations he drifted into feel real. He has no answer for why he allowed his life to become an extension of his father’s grief. Nor does he know how the tragedy of the language came to be mixed up, in his mind, with that of his father, or why his immersion into it had been a way of coping.

He had made the language the substratum of his life, a great chthonic city of ruined streets and public buildings, through which he could wander at will with the comfort of knowing that to this place, at least, no further calamity could come. Here, all that was to happen had happened. Ground zero. And, this was another nice thread:
khth
ō
n
, like the Sanskrit
k
ṣ
am
: earth or ground, cognate with the Latin,
hom
ō
: man.

He moves easily through the darker reaches of the flat, far from the round open face of the anglepoise lamp. The very darkness feels dated, feels like it has the texture of another time. All is familiar, all is known – a place without threat – and soon he is at his father’s desk, before the cool astral glow of his computer. There is an email from Theo Mackinson.

Subject: Balliol this fall

Balliol! The name returns him to Indic Mondays at the high table among numismatologists and walrus-faced Vedic experts. There are Apabhra
ṁ
ś
ists and TamBrams, in whom an overlay of English manners disguises the secretly vocational nature of their interest; and then there are fair-haired Alexes and Juliens, who, with Greek, Latin, Hittite and Avestan already under their belt, go after Sanskrit with the addict’s need for novelty.

He sits back and lights a cigarette, his father’s chair sticky against his skin. So here it is, at last: a reason – and one only ever needs something like this – to break the cycle he’s fallen into. He steps outside and is about to go back into the drawing room when he notices a slanted line of light from his bedroom, falling diagonally across the terrazzo floor. He pushes open the door and sees Gauri, asleep on his bed. A scrawny child-like figure in a faded T-shirt and pyjamas dotted with little yellow and pink flowers. She came! A feeling of great tenderness and pity rises in him. Not just for the gesture of solidarity, made so quietly on this hot night, but also for the lowness of expectation that they have maintained all year. The hope of romantic love, dead or asleep in their breast, like a faculty they no longer possess, a demand they no longer dare to make of life.

He is about to step back out, when he sees something on the bedside table, flapping away in the blast from the air conditioner. An A4 paper folded in half. A child’s drawing in wild reds and yellows of an armed figure on the front. Some mixture of Rambo and a jihadi. Inside: ‘Dear
Mr
Uncle Skanda, Please sori for my bad’ – and, here, the mother’s guiding hand clearly visible – ‘behaviour today.
Love,
From, Kartik.’

He smiles, thinking of the resistance the author put up right to the end, at the card that was both an apology and a redoubled threat. But, when he thinks of the mother’s labour in extracting this apology, of the anxiety that lies behind it, he has to steer his mind quickly away, for fear that it will flood his eyes.

Outside. He lies down on the large sofa whose peach flowers, like a memory of gaiety, have hardened with time, and are coarse against his back. The smoke, in its upward ascent into the high vaultages of the room, where a mute storm plays over a tableau of white peacocks, wanders carelessly over the margin of lamplight, so that its coils and tendrils are cropped and exposed.
I’ll go,
he thinks,
why the hell not. I’ll definitely go. And I’ll take Gauri and the little terrorist, too. We’ll drive up from London and stop at pubs on the way. Maybe we’ll ask I.P. to join us. Maybe we’ll shake this malaise once and for all . . .

His eye, passing through the screen of smoke and light, stops at the urn on the sideboard, with its collar of blue polythene. And the moment he sees it he knows what he must do: knows perhaps also why he has waited so long.

cf. Goth. {andeis}; Germ. {Ende}; Eng. {end}

They – Skanda, Gauri and Kartik, Narindar at the wheel – leave Delhi by a new road, heading south in the direction of the rains.

The city is dry and exposed. Its streets, with their fine margins of dust, stare blank and open-faced up at the sky, as if seeking the answer to a question. And the sky, a sooty blue at that dawn hour, stares back, with no answer to give. It seems worn out by the futility of its own cycles, by the empty brightening and darkening of its dome. The tyranny of gr
ī
ṣ
ma is never worse than when it is at its most vulnerable. In the last week of its reign over the city, it has released the full force of its desiccating winds, its asphyxiating stillness, its blanching heat. But, as with those regimes whose catalogue of cruelties in the final days speak loudest of their impending collapse, it is at an end. The news of it has spread through the natural world, which prepares the conditions for its demise.

There is something of the death rattle in the dry wind that goes through the peepal, causing its leaves to clatter, leaves on whose dirt-encrusted surface one can already imagine the first splash of warm rain that will muffle their noise and restore to them their colour. Or the runnels that line the streets, down whose uneven surface one can almost already see the first creeping streams of water. Or, most of all, the sky, which seems, from the sheer futility of its contractions, from the experience of so many stillbirths, now to literally be birthing the new season; the sky, which any day will darken with finality, and not brighten again till it has restored the world to moisture and to pigment and to textured light. So it is that this season of rain – which, for being the agent of renewal and fertility, is bound etymologically to the Sanskrit word for a male bull – is never so remote as when it is nearest at hand.