by Jon Stock
“Priyanka works for Seven Days magazine,” Susie said, firmly, helpfully.
“Do you know it?” Priyanka asked.
“I’ve seen it on the shelf, at Khan Market,” I said, struggling to appear normal, my scalp suddenly glowing.
“Raj, you need a drink,” Frank said. “What can I get you? Bordix? Fresh from the Africas.”
“Maybe later. I’ll take some lime soda.”
“One nimbu pani,” he said, heading off towards the kitchen.
Frank and Susie employed a huge number of domestic staff, but they always seemed to be huddled in the corner of the main room, watching Hindi movies on a small but loud television set. I hadn’t been to an expat house where the hosts fetched their own drinks. At the High Commissioner’s official residence, generous gin and tonics were brought to you on silver East India Company platters by bearers in white starched uniforms and pugris.
I wanted to talk to Priyanka, but she had turned to Tapash. Instead I chatted with Ranjit about Britain, the only common subject that came to mind, but he wanted to know what I did at the High Commission.
“I’m a doctor,” I said, glancing across at Priyanka. “One of two. My colleague is away on a tour of Bangladesh and Pakistan.”
“Anything else?” he asked in perfect, almost over-precise English. His eyes were a little too moist, giving the impression they were permanently twinkling.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, wrong-footed.
“Do you do anything other than doctoring?” he said again, gently brushing down one side of his moustache. His eyes sparkled. I was flummoxed and he knew it. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” he said, leaning forward to touch my arm. “It’s just that in my experience nobody at an embassy ever serves only one purpose.”
“As far as I know I’m just the doctor,” I said, laughing, regaining some composure, hoping that he would change the subject. “Occasionally I have to read last rites, but not very often.”
“Don’t worry about him,” Tapash said, breaking away from Priyanka. “He thinks everybody at the British High Commission is a spy.”
“Absolute nonsense,” Ranjit said. “Although I do remember a first consul once tried to recruit me when I told him I preferred Margaret Thatcher to Mrs Gandhi.” I stood back a bit to let Tapash and Priyanka join our circle. They seemed close and I found myself wondering, briefly, if anything existed between them. Frank came over with my drink.
“What’s there to spy about anyway, these days?” Frank asked. I could smell wine on his breath.
“Trade, nuclear technology,” Tapash offered.
“But you’ve got the bomb,” Frank said, pouring himself another glass of wine. I wondered how this conversation had ever begun.
“Oh yes, we know how to blow things up,” Tapash continued, “but we can’t crack a reactor, not on our own. We’ve been trying to build an indigenous nuclear submarine for years.”
“That’s all very well,” Frank said, “but it still doesn’t explain why we would want to spy on you.”
“Frank, you’re sounding positively colonial,” Tapash interjected. “We’ve got plenty of secrets.” He paused, looking at Priyanka. “Like my mother’s recipe for papdi chaat.”
We all laughed and I took the opportunity to glance at Priyanka again. She was tall, about my height, with an upright posture that suggested poise rather than arrogance. Her black hair was rich and effervescent, tumbling down below her shoulders. By anyone’s standards she was beautiful, but it was her manner, her equanimity, that was touching something inside. It was a quiet confidence, a focused calmness, a trait that I hadn’t seen too much of in Delhi.
“Were you here or in London when we tested the bombs?” Ranjit asked, making me nervous again.
“No, I was in Edinburgh,” I replied.
“Raj has only just arrived in Delhi,” Frank added.
“And did you join in the chorus of Western disapproval?” Ranjit continued.
“It took me by surprise,” I said, beginning to suspect how much this man knew. “I think I squealed, more in shock than pain.”
“A very medical answer,” he said.
“I’m a doctor,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders. I glanced at Frank for help.
“It was an interesting time,” Frank said. I don’t know whether he was bailing me out or just getting into his stride. “The fallout did funny things to your head. All my life I’d opposed nuclear weapons but I suddenly found myself defending India’s right to test them. It was the hypocrisy that got me: it’s all right for us, the first world, to have nuclear bombs, but it’s not okay for a third-world country. They didn’t want India to join the club.”
“France were much more consistent,” Ranjit said, turning towards me again. “They were very brave, no squeals.”
“Were you scared at the time, worried that tensions might escalate?” I asked.
“Not really,” Frank said, looking at Ranjit, who nodded assent. “I popped over to Khan Market, asked a few of the shopkeepers if they were stocking up, but they weren’t. The bazaar always knows.”
Ranjit had the unnerving habit of taking a fistful of peanuts and then offering them round. His enormous hand was now extended towards me, the nuts glistening in their own oil and some of his sweat. I was not obsessed by personal hygiene, but I spent a good deal of my day telling patients to wash their hands before eating anything. I hadn’t washed when I arrived, but it would have seemed rude if I didn’t accept Ranjit’s offer. I took the nuts and squeezed them in my hand. When no one was looking I slipped them into an urn.
I looked around at the gathering, trying to stand back. The moon was full and had appeared above the front eaves of the house. A tandoor was heating up in one corner of the courtyard, its thin, blue smoke rising into the clear sky. There was a smell of sandalwood incense, too, mixed with the sweet scent of Rath-ki-Rani, Queen of the Night.
I felt happy here, particularly when Susie rejoined the group. She was in her forties with an aristocratic air that I had mistaken for snobbishness when I first met her. Now I had her down as an eccentric. She took all six of her female staff to Lodhi Gardens every morning to practice Vipassana meditation, much to the surprise of the locals out on their morning walk, according to Tapash, who had witnessed the spectacle. To look at, she was attractive in a natural, no-make-up way, and she had made a virtue of her hair greying early. It was long and shiny and made her skin look younger. She could be motherly, too, not just to Kashmir and their daughter, Jumila. When I first arrived, she had sent her driver round with my dinner every night in a stainless steel tiffin box, chilli chicken curries with brinjal and chapatis folded like napkins.
“And how is the new cook shaping up, Raj?” she asked, sitting down next to me. “Still stealing eggs?” “I’m sorry, Susie, but you know the rules,” Tapash said, interrupting. “You’re not allowed to talk about servants.”
“‘Staff’, please,” Susie said. “You must call them staff. You don’t have to listen.”
Tapash turned to me and said, “I’m sure you’ve noticed, Raj, that when two or more expats gather in one place, all they can talk about is the lazy mali, the dangerous driver, the cheating cook and the awful ayah.”
“It’s the novelty,” I said. “We’re not used to this kind of thing in Britain.”
His eyes lingered knowingly on me before he turned away. I couldn’t be sure but it was as if, for a moment, he had forgotten that I was from Britain. I had only met Tapash once before, but he had never shown me any of the coldness that I had encountered with other Indians. Perhaps it was because he had been to Britain and considered himself cosmopolitan, able to mix easily with anyone. Or perhaps it was because he was without envy. He had been to the West, seen what he was meant to be missing and now he was back in India, contented.
“Actually,” I continued, “I’m more worried about my neighbour’s ayah. My Hindi teacher says she is too ‘frank’ with men, particularly my cook. And when I’m away she e
ven climbs trees, which apparently confirms her lack of morals.”
“Talking of ayahs,” Susie continued, smiling at Tapash, who was shaking his head in despair, “I’ve written a letter of protest to the High Commissioner’s wife complaining about them not being allowed to sit by the pool. It’s outrageous, worse than the white suburbs of Johannesburg.”
“Why do you still go there, then?” Tapash asked. “The children need somewhere to swim, and until they clean up the Jamuna it’s the only option.”
Dinner turned out to be a feast – organic chicken from a French-run farm outside Delhi and cooked by Frank in their own tandoor oven. (Their Nepali chef had asked for, and been granted, special permission to visit the picture house to see Manisha Koirala in her new movie, the third film he had seen that week.) We squeezed fresh limes on the chicken and laughed at the funny shape of Frank’s naan breads.
“They’re like maps of India,” Tapash said.
“Fresh cowpats, that’s the secret,” Frank replied. “I lined the tandoor myself.”
I was thwarted by Ranjit in my attempt to sit next to Priyanka. He persisted in his questions about the High Commission, which led me to conclude that either he understood very little or he knew everything. I wanted to talk to Frank about it but I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Susie glanced at me occasionally, nodding in Priyanka’s direction when she was not looking. She could be indiscreet but at least her encouragement suggested that Priyanka and Tapash were not an item. Later she beckoned me to come into the kitchen, waving her hands about with all the subtlety of a traffic policeman.
“How’s it going?” she said, dipping her finger in a bowl of curd.
“How’s what going?” I asked, knowing full well what she meant.
“You know, Priyanka. Beautiful girl, isn’t she? Frank thinks she’s a knockout.”
“Is this a set-up or something?”
“Of course it’s not. I just thought you might hit it off, that’s all.”
“It’s a set-up. She’s not with Tapash, then.”
“Tapash!” she laughed, and then covered her mouth, looking at the door as he went past.
Outside in the courtyard I helped to hand round pieces of papaya and mango, ensuring this time that I was next to Priyanka when the music stopped. We talked quietly in a corner, unnoticed by the others, who were now slipping inside for coffee, no doubt at Susie’s behest. Priyanka’s eyes reflected the warm lights inside. It turned out she was from Kerala, which in a funny way didn’t surprise me at all. I told her my family was from Kerala, too, which surprised her more. There was something so familiar about her that it scared me because I couldn’t adequately explain what it was. Our conversation paused naturally, a moment free of all awkwardness, full of certainties, and then a crowd of people spilled back out into the night air and I was suddenly up and chatting with Frank, stealing glances across to our corner whenever I could.
Priyanka had stood up too and was now talking with Susie, calmly. She seemed so unhurried. We exchanged numbers before we left, but our parting was diminished by a change in her mood. It was like watching someone remembering a piece of bad news. The brightness vanished from her eyes as we talked, her words, so vibrant earlier, tailing off in mid-sentence. For a moment I mistook her manner for indifference.
*
I felt lonely that night as Ravi took me home, than I had done for years. Loneliness was a much more potent emotion in India. If you couldn’t find company in a country of one billion people, it was a sure sign that something was amiss. Whenever I dispatched Ravi on a task, he took a friend with him in the car, not wanting to spend time on his own. An advert for one of India s most popular vehicles, the Maruti, said, “You’ll never drive alone.” Every emotion was magnified here and loneliness, left to itself, could be more devastating than most. My feelings for Priyanka had also been magnified. They were quite irrational, way out of proportion to our brief encounter. In Britain I had taken time, too long perhaps, to decide if I liked someone.
Ravi was a man of little English, but he looked in the mirror as I stared out of the window.
“Problem, sir?” he asked.
“Koi baat nay,” I replied, stretching what little Hindi I had learnt. As we approached the turning for Sainik Farms, we passed a line of cycle rickshaws packed in the middle of the road. Their drivers were asleep in the flatbed boxes behind the saddle, oblivious of the traffic passing inches either side of them. One man, legs tight to his chest, had his head twisted awkwardly against the box’s wooden side as he slept. He had no fan, no mosquito net, not even a roof over his head. Just a wooden box, and he couldn’t even fit into that.
4
It had been a bad night in the republic. The neighbours across the road had decided to throw a party for two thousand close friends, most of whom finished dancing to Daler Mehndi at five thirty in the morning. Tukatukatuk. I was going off him. The mains electricity had failed earlier in the night. It was an illegal connection, like forty per cent of Delhi’s power and all of Sainik Farms’, so I couldn’t ring anyone to complain. Jagu, the malt, had cranked up one of two generators in the storeroom, but a water pipe was broken and it soon overheated. The back-up was in bits on the floor. Sadly, the neighbour’s party was being powered by a vast mobile generator outside our gate. Jagu had considered taking a feed from it but I told him not to bother. The republic might be a lawless place but residents stole from the state not from one another. So there I had lain, for most of the night, fair game for the mosquitos in the din and the heat.
I had risen at six, unable to bear any more, and was now standing on the balcony watching the sun rise, its nascent rays reflecting off the shards of glass that lined the top of a brick wall belonging to my immediate neighbours, the Bakshis, with whom I shared a driveway. The wall must have been over twelve feet high but Mrs Bakshi had explained to me when I first arrived that it could easily be breached by determined goondas from Haryana. “But it’s like a fortress,” I had told her. She had shaken her head and said that we must not take any risks. “We are very lonely out here.” She rang the guardhouse throughout the night, she said, just to make sure that the chowkidar was not sleeping. Then she had added a strange word of warning: “There are insects and whatnots in the bushes at night.”
Below me I could hear Chandar, my Nepali cook, grinding cardamom and cloves with a metal pestle and mortar in preparation for my morning pot of massala chai. The night guard, unaware that he was being watched, was holding a fragment of mirror close to his face, trimming his nasal hair with scissors as he listened to All India Radio on a crackling transistor. Life was stirring on the surrounding rooftops, accompanied by a muezzin from a mosque towards Qutab Minar. The call to prayer was quiet and insistent, barely amplified, a welcome change from earlier. Across the road, behind the top of a grand faux-Palladian façade, I glimpsed a body moving. It was a member of staff washing, naked, except for a thin brown cloth around his waist. He was busy scrubbing himself all over, occasionally dipping a jug into one of the house’s large black-barrelled water tanks. Other similar scenes were unfolding on adjacent rooftops. I could see still forms sleeping, covered from head to foot by thin blankets, lying between vast, transparent satellite dishes. To the left, home of the sinister Dr Gupta, a more disturbing daily pageant was being played out.
The doctor’s staff were feeding six large Great Danes that guarded the premises. But it wasn’t the dogs that frightened me, it was the ghostly staff, two women in saris and a man, who walked slowly across the lawn, filling water bowls and emptying out plastic bags of bones on the lawn. The staff were albino white, their skin bleached by one of Dr Gupta’s “fairing creams” which, so the republic rumour machine had it, he had tested on them before reducing the dose and going into commercial production. I was dreading the call to dinner.
At least the guard didn’t salute me this time as the front gates stuttered open. Ravi drove me through Sainik Farms, past a young Nepali in uniform taking his em
ployer’s sweating St Bernard for a morning walk. The walls either side of the road were mostly topped with spiralling barbed wire, the exhaust pipes of diesel generators sticking out through holes in the brickwork like rusting trench guns. At the busy junction outside Sainik Farms, a woman was hanging out her husband’s shirts to dry on the central reservation barrier. A barber hung up his mirror on a wall and dusted down a wooden chair, inches away from the smoking traffic. As we passed, his first customer of the day climbed into the chair. The barber rubbed his dirty hair, starting up a conversation as they both looked into the mirror. Ravi said he only charged fifteen rupees a cut. Two men, struggling to make ends meet, each trying to cling on to some self-respect.
The medical centre had its own entrance on the compound, complete with Gurkha guards and a large dented barrier, weighed down at one end with a basket full of rocks. As we waited while a guard checked underneath the car with a long-handled mirror, my eye was caught by a young man standing in the shadow of a laburnum tree, to the right of the entrance. He seemed nervous, looking around, making sure that the guards hadn’t seen him. This part of Delhi, known as Chana-kyapuri, was packed with embassies and patrolled by armed police who moved everybody on. He was holding a piece of card in his hand. Just as I looked away, the man lifted it up. The word “doctor” had been written in large black letters. I tapped Ravi on the shoulder, opened my door and told him to drive in.
“I’ll be one minute,” I said, smiling at the guard who had now spotted the man. “It’s okay,” I said. “He’s come to see me.” The guard, who was gesturing to the man to move and shouting, “Challo, challo,” looked confused and went back to his post on the gate.
I didn’t know why I had got out of the car. A reflex action, a sense of duty, like standing up when somebody asked if there was a doctor in the house. I was also curious.
