Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  ‘Enough,’ I said, my voice rising. ‘I’ve had it with all this hand-wringing, Tasha-di, and with all this beta, beta, beta.’ She looked like she’d been stabbed, and I rounded back to where she sat, ‘I want to know what passed between Ma and this man.’

  Evening had crept in around us, and the room was beginning to grow dark. I could have switched on a light in a second, but I didn’t want to move, and Tasha-di was finally beginning to talk. I sat by her feet as she cleared her throat. The other two were upstairs, and I worried an interruption might break Tasha-di’s flow, but she spoke in a low, still voice, ‘I didn’t really know Raja Singh. He was an acquaintance of your Ma’s from her college days. Your Ma was an impressive journalist and Raja…’ She grimaced. ‘Raja, of course, was starting to emerge as a business superstar.’ She paused. ‘He had magic in his fingers; anything he touched turned to gold.’ Mrs Bhatnagar had said the same thing, and now Tasha-di added, ‘He was fearless, that man. He saw India changing as the economy was liberalised. He sensed that consumption would rise, and the new precious commodity would be access. He poured money into India TV when only the national broadcaster existed. He put money into online magazines before the internet really took off.’ She paused. ‘He had true vision, that man. He became synonymous with the Indian growth story.’

  She was talking about Raja Singh as if he was the one who had died. ‘They say excellence breeds excellence,’ Tasha-di was saying. ‘The people he invested in rose to prominence over the next few decades, and when your Ma thought to launch The Satirist, he was the obvious person for her to approach.’

  She fell silent. Her fingers were working the fringe of her dupatta, running from one end of the cloth to the other. I worried that the edge would fray, but she seemed consumed by the task, and as the dark grew around us, I heard her above me, her hands busy with her cloth.

  I heard footsteps approach and turned to see Maya switch on the lights. ‘What are you two doing in this gloom?’ she scolded. She laughed to see us so strangely positioned, then as we both continued solemn, asked if all was well.

  ‘Siya went to see Raja Singh at his office today,’ Tasha-di said, and Maya came to sit by her side. She sat with her hands neatly arranged on her lap, her head cocked a little, just as she had as a child in readiness for a story. ‘Siya,’ continued Tasha-di, ‘asked me if it had been Raja’s letters you girls had found among your mother’s things.’

  Maya’s lips parted in anticipation.

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  Tasha-di didn’t answer me. ‘I was telling Siya,’ she said, ‘about how brilliant Raja Singh is.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Maya quietly.

  ‘I was telling her,’ Tasha-di ploughed on, ‘about how he has always been two steps ahead of the Indian consumer.’

  ‘Tasha-di…’

  She looked at me, bit her lips and nodded. ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘Ok. Those were Raja Singh’s letters you found. It was he who agreed to fund the magazine.’ She looked at the both of us again. ‘It was he who set us up, finding us our office, introducing us to suppliers and printers and sponsors. He was like a Godfather to us…’ Tasha-di trailed off, though her head continued to bob gently, like a baby in a rocker, or like one of the dancing hula toys in Maya’s car.

  ‘Tasha-di,’ I said. ‘I want to know what happened between them.’

  Maya was silent, her eyes on our aunt’s face. Her hands were still neatly placed on top of each other on her lap, her position unchanged from when she had first sat down, and it seemed to me that she hadn’t moved, hadn’t played with her hair, hadn’t scratched herself, hadn’t rearranged herself, hadn’t so much as breathed for fear of disturbing Tasha-di’s flow. She didn’t speak now, but her lips parted, and I turned to look at our aunt.

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ she said unwillingly. ‘It all looked so good at the start. Raja Singh loved the concept of The Satirist and the idea of a woman-led team. He said it was just the thing India needed.’ Once more she fell silent. There was a rustle at the door, a footstep or a shadow of one, and we all looked in its direction. I moved towards the door, but there was no further noise, and I paused for a while. Tasha-di had cleared her throat, and I was fearful of missing her testimony. There was no further noise, no door opened, and at length I returned to the armchairs and perched myself on my sister’s armrest.

  ‘It all,’ Tasha-di was saying, ‘looked absolutely perfect. We had funding from Raja Singh, we had our team of journalists, and we had our cover. Our layout—,’ she pointed up, and to Maya’s room where Ma’s layouts rested—‘was finalised, and it seemed our dreams were finally coming true. A few days before the launch…’ Here again Tasha-di paused, wrestling with her memory. Maya didn’t speak, and as I leant forward in my impatience, I noticed my mouth was parted. ‘About a week before our launch,’ Tasha-di continued, ‘Raja called your mother into his office for a meeting.’

  Another pause, another refusal to look up or around. ‘She was gone a couple of hours. Yes,’ she said, ‘a couple of hours at the most.’ I expected her to furnish details of what had transpired at the meeting, but she began to speak about the time Ma had been away. ‘I’d initially thought she would call me once she was back, but I was so excited about the launch that I returned here in the evening. Your Ma had been gone an hour by this point, and I expected her back at any moment. Your father was away on business, and you girls…’ Tasha-di smiled. ‘Do you remember that time, girls? I’d come in, and it was just the three of us until you had to go off to bed?’

  Maya shook her head noncommittally. It was such a regular occurrence, Tasha-di’s presence in our home that it would have been hard for us to pinpoint any one occasion. She was as constant as daybreak, and to our ungrateful memories, as unremarkable.

  ‘Well,’ Tasha-di said, ‘Anyway. After you girls were taken away, I sat here.’ She pointed to the seat Maya and I occupied, ‘And I waited.’

  There was a knock on the door and Shanti popped her head around the door. ‘I wanted to see if you wanted anything.’

  We shook our heads, and Tasha-di burst out laughing at Shanti’s retreat. ‘It was just like this on that evening too. Shanti checking up on me every so often, and your mother…’ Here she smiled at me, and I rose. Tasha-di’s recounting had been unbearable. Her digressions had been endless, but worse still were the details she was now beginning to provide. The thought of Ma, of my mother alone with Raja Singh in his office was revolting. I had been there, right next to his whisky smelling breath a few hours ago, and the thought that my defeated, inward looking mother had suffered a similar fate was unthinkable.

  Maya spoke now. ‘What happened, Tasha-di?’

  The older woman nodded. ‘She returned after a couple of hours. She was surprised, I think, to find me here, as she initially sat in the hallway on one of your leather armchairs and only came in here to turn out the lights.’ She nodded, as if buying time, as if weighing her words, as if she knew her account would change the way we viewed our mother forever. There was another long pause as Tasha-di consulted her memory. ‘I forget too, but there was no hiding her distress. Her hair was dishevelled, her breathing ragged, and all I could get out of her for the longest time was that Raja had made a move on her.’

  This was all alien to me. The idea of Ma in disarray, the vocabulary Tasha-di was using; this was all from a set, from the imagination, and not from any life Ma or her dearest friend could ever have known. And yet, there Raja Singh had been earlier in the day, reminiscing about Ma and about their relationship, shuffling closer to me until I had nowhere to move. Ma, so protected, so cherished, would never have been able to deal with an onslaught like that. ‘He,’ I asked, ‘tried it on with her?’

  Tasha-di swallowed. ‘I don’t know the details. But he didn’t behave properly with her.’

  This could have been a lunge or an attempted kiss or an arm around Ma. This could have been anything or nothing, but Maya was up, pacing the floor, her hands cupping her face. �
�I never knew,’ she said, ‘I never knew.’

  Tasha-di was nodding. ‘She always tried to protect you girls,’ and all at once the pieces fell into place. Ma’s aversion to boyfriends, her resistance to our travelling outside India for our studies. Her furies, her irrationality, her eventual shrivelling into herself.

  ‘I never knew,’ Maya was saying, and I could see it playing out in her mind. Maya, who had never taken a risk, who had given up a boyfriend to avoid offending her mother, who had never stepped out of line, now thought of her mother alone in a predator’s office. ‘But,’ she said as a new thought struck her, ‘Raja Singh is such an icon.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Tasha-di, ‘he’s such an icon.’

  Maya came to sit on the armchair, but continued to cup her face. She didn’t speak, nor did I, but Tasha-di seemed to have unlocked some great reservoir that she had held within her for years. ‘That was the problem, if I think about it. He was such an icon, and he had to remain an icon. The incident would have blown over if your mother had let it…’

  Maya gasped. ‘She should have let him…’

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Tasha-di. ‘Not that. Never that. But he was her funder, he was her mentor, and her reaction—to threaten exposure…’ She stopped talking, and for the first time that evening I sensed her agitation. Her words played through my mind—her mentor, her funder—and I thought of the Raja Singh I had encountered earlier in the day, so suave, so warm, so generous, and so, so close.

  It occurred to me that she didn’t know the details of what had taken place. She had never stepped inside his office, had possibly never even interacted with him for any real length of time. She was not to know the power of the man, or the constant oppressive nearness of him. Perhaps she thought it was merely an ill-conceived compliment, a presumption of interest, a misunderstanding that Ma had overreacted to. She had lost out too as Ma’s dreams ebbed away.

  ‘I’m not explaining myself very well,’ she resumed cautiously. ‘Of course what happened that night was abhorrent.’ She winced, and I sensed her next words, ‘But still.’

  I got up and looked at Maya. She was still up, still pacing the floor, and now she paused at Tasha-di’s words. ‘But still?’

  ‘The man made a mistake. He apologised for it.’ I watched as Maya stared at Tasha-di. Tasha-di blinked. ‘He wrote to apologise for it, Maya.’ Maya guffawed, and Tasha-di shook her head sadly. ‘It was a bad, bad business, but what did your Ma get out of her heroics?’

  ‘Ma’s heroics?’ Maya spluttered. She opened her mouth to speak further, then clamped it firmly shut, and turning on her heels, hurried from the room.

  ‘She’s just like her mother,’ said Tasha-di sadly. ‘So emotional, so ready with the grand gestures, but really, where does it leave them?’

  I thought of Ma and Maya and the regime of silence they had instituted. We hadn’t spoken for years, and I had been left in no doubt that my departure had disappointed them. But what had it gotten them, that decade or more of glorious isolation? That puritanical rigidity of thought. They remained ideologically pure, sure, but alone too, cocooning themselves in their crumbling house.

  ‘She never paused to consider,’ Tasha-di was carrying on, ‘what all was at stake. She never bothered to think that there was another way. That she could refuse Raja’s advances without rupturing ties, that she could launch the magazine, and then, when she was established, when she was a credible force, then she could effect change. No, no, she didn’t bother to think before she acted, she had to have her one principled stand, and so, in the end, she simply faded into the furnishings.’

  My head hurt. All the events of the day were still fresh; Raja Singh’s oily presence, Ajay’s kindness, Tasha-di’s revelation, and I wasn’t nearly ready to begin to make sense of them. And then to hear Tasha-di speak as she just had, so critically of poor Ma’s actions hit me with all the force of a body blow. What else was Ma to have done? I still wasn’t sure what exactly had taken place that evening between her and Raja Singh, but I had no doubt about Raja Singh having been capable of aggression, and yes, as I paused to think of it, of more. He would have tried seduction, that and coercion, he would have stooped to blackmail: all of these were within the realms of possibility. All of these things could have happened to my mother, but for Tasha-di to turn a stony face to her best and truest friend seemed inconceivable. And yet, there she sat, her fingers firm on the fringes of her dupatta, neither looking at me nor looking to soften her stance.

  ‘Siya…’

  The door opened, and I turned gratefully in its direction. It was Ajay, who was leaving. ‘I just wanted to check,’ he began, and noting Tasha-di’s eyes on him, he said, ‘if you needed anything.’

  I rose and walked to him. ‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘but I’ll walk you out.’

  XXVI

  Conversation was stilted. We all ate in our rooms that evening, and if Shanti had overheard our conversation, she didn’t mention it. The next morning, Maya rose and went for her walk without checking in on me. I didn’t remain in the upstairs lounge, but went straight down to the office, where I found a contrite looking Tasha-di who rose upon my approach. I saw she was slower in her movements. Her arthritic knee was giving her trouble with the change in the weather, and she appeared to have slept badly. Her face was pouchy, her hair uncombed, and still I turned away as I saw her.

  ‘Please,’ she said plaintively. ‘Please, Siya, I expressed myself badly.’

  Maya had returned from her walk, and perhaps wishing to be alone, had come into the office. She saw Tasha-di and me together, and turned to leave. ‘Please,’ Tasha-di repeated, ‘it breaks my heart that I hurt the two of you last evening. I who should have been there for you. I who lived through everything, and who held your mother’s hand through all her pain.’

  Maya let out a peal at this.

  ‘No, no, I mean it,’ insisted Tasha-di. ‘We went along with all your Ma wanted. We shut the magazine down, we cut off all links with Raja Singh.’

  ‘Ma never worked again,’ Maya returned.

  ‘No,’ agreed Tasha-di. ‘No she didn’t. But it’s not all black and…’ She saw the hostility on my sister’s face and stopped. She returned to her seat and arranged her clothes, carefully smoothing her tunic over her lap. ‘Your mother never worked again,’ she said in a soft, composed voice, ‘but the rest of our team lost their dream too. I lost out too.’

  Maya was on the point of walking out. She turned to stalk out of the door, returned with an unarticulated barb then turned to leave again, before she finally came back in and shut the door behind her. She walked to Tasha-di, who was watching her with a curious passiveness, without judgement and without expectation. Maya hugged her, bending awkwardly over the older woman. ‘Sit,’ Tasha-di said thickly. ‘That silly man has upended everything once again.’

  Maya sat, not next to Tasha-di, but on an armchair facing her. I remained where I was standing, uncertain how long our thaw was going to last when my sister began to speak. ‘I’m not a heroic woman,’ she said in a limpid voice. There was a denial on my lips, but she held her hand up, and I sat down next to Tasha-di. ‘No, really,’ she was repeating, to give herself courage as much as to underscore her point, ‘I don’t have my mother’s drive or her imagination. I don’t have my sister’s courage,’ and here she looked at me with a gaze that was half affection and half exasperation, ‘or her sheer bloody-mindedness. No,’ she said, smiling to herself, nodding a little, ‘I’ve always occupied a smaller space. I was the quiet child, in awe of the brilliant people around me,’ and I was ready with a dozen rebuttals, examples of when I had looked up to my older sister, but she was shaking her head. Anything I said now, any tenderness I offered would be no more than the kindness offered to a child who had lost a favourite toy.

  ‘Always in awe,’ she was saying, ‘but happy with my own more compact footprint.’

  ‘No…’

  She smiled, and her voice rang out over ours. ‘And that’s the key. I was
content to be unexceptional. I wanted to be able to study, and then to work to the best of my abilities. But when it came to my studies, my brilliant, battle-scarred mother held me back and I didn’t fight back. Somewhere in me, I remembered a vigorous Ma, and I was so protective of the shell she had become that I didn’t dare oppose any stupid, paranoid thing she said.’

  Tasha-di nodded sadly at this. ‘It broke my heart…’

  Maya was speaking over her. There was a briskness to her, an impatience, as if she had to finish her monologue and interruptions were not to be tolerated. ‘Her fears became mine, and slowly, I turned inwards as she had done.’ She looked at me, and the smile returned, at once loving and frustrated. ‘Siya wasn’t the same, though. She refused to accept the boundaries Ma tried to bind us by. She was rude and unpleasant and stubborn and impossible, which Ma wouldn’t tolerate, but my little sister charted her own path. We are told so often to stay within our bounds, to not question authority, to follow tradition, to not disobey our elders…’

  Maya paused, and I held my breath. This was the first hint I had heard of Maya’s dissatisfaction with Ma. Tasha-di was up on her feet, but my sister shrugged.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, smiling her small, sad smile. ‘It really is,’ and then, after a look around the room, she shook her head. The revelations of the previous evening were fresh in her head, I could tell. She felt guilt too, for the anger she had felt at Ma’s authoritarianism, the mutinies she’d contemplated, the teenage tantrums she had thrown. I saw her smile splinter, wavering and faltering before us, and I was by her side, hugging her, trying hard to make my quiet, unobtrusive big sister forget her hurt.

  She was shaking now, shuddering against me, pushing me away. ‘I’ve always,’ she was saying, ‘tried to do the right thing. I stayed at home, I took care of Ma as she aged.’

  Maya was nodding. ‘I’m fine now,’ she said to me in her quiet voice, and I returned to my seat. ‘I am fine. I have remained safe. I haven’t been assaulted. I haven’t been raped. I haven’t been discriminated against.’ Tasha-di was shaking her head sadly, and Maya laughed a joyless laugh. ‘But I find I’ve had to pay the price for all of Ma’s disappointments. I’m sorry Tasha-di that your business didn’t work out.’ Tasha-di was shaking her head, shrinking back into her seat, and Maya said, ‘No, I really am. Who would understand a loss imposed by Ma if not me?’