Her mother came in. She addressed Arun: “You must leave at once. You can see we’re very busy.” To Dipti she said, “The jeweler has come. I told him it’s a bad day, but now he’s here, we might as well look at what he’s brought. There’s not much time left.”
“Not much time left for what?” Arun asked Dipti, ignoring her mother.
Dipti had her back to Arun, and instead of answering him, she scooped up the food from her father’s chin back into his mouth.
Her mother told her, “Don’t forget those people are sending a car for you in the afternoon. I said, Where is the need, we have plenty of cars of our own, but they insist. They like to do everything right—naturally, they can afford it. I’ll call the jeweler in here, he can spread it out on the bed for us to see.”
“It’ll disturb Daddy.”
But her mother went to the door to call for the jeweler. Quick as a flash, Arun drew near to Dipti and bent down to breathe into her ear, “Tomorrow. Four o’clock.” She still had her back to him, and he laid one finger on the nape of her neck—it was the lightest touch, but he felt it pass through her like an electric current, charged with everything that had always been between them.
But it so happened that next day Raju stayed home. Usually he accompanied his wife when she left in the morning and then remained in the center of town for the rest of the day, calling on friends, sitting with them in their favorite coffee-houses, enjoying himself. But that day he had a cold, and as always when he was sick, he looked at Indu with piteous eyes that said “What has happened to me?” Before leaving for the office, she rubbed his chest with camphor and tied a woolen scarf around his neck. She left tea ready brewed for him on the stove, and two little pots of food she had prepared. He stayed in bed, mostly asleep; but as the day wore on, he became more cheerful, and by afternoon he had almost forgotten about his cold.
Arun arrived just before four, and as soon as he entered, he heard his father singing a lyric to himself, in that swooning way he had when deeply moved by a line of verse. “What are you doing here?” Arun said, in shock.
Raju stopped singing and pointed to the scarf Indu had tied around his neck. He coughed a little.
“Oh my God,” Arun said in such despair that Raju assured him in a weak voice, “It’s just a cold, maybe a little fever.” He felt his own forehead: “Ninety-nine. Perhaps a hundred.”
There was a soft knock on the living room door, and Arun ran to admit Dipti. “Who is it, Arun? Has someone come?” Raju called from the bedroom. Dipti’s eyes grew round in distress and with the same distress Arun said, “My father has a cold.”
Raju came shuffling out of the bedroom, and when he saw Dipti, he held his hands to cover the crumpled lungi in which he had slept all night and day. “Oh, oh!” he cried in apology. “I thought you were Indu come home early from the office. She was very anxious about me when she left.”
But he quickly recovered and began to compliment Dipti on her appearance. She was dressed in pale turquoise silk with little spangles sewn on in the shape of flowers; she also wore a pair of long gold earrings set with precious stones—“Are they rubies?” Raju admired them. “All set around a lovely pearl. They say that older women should wear pearls, here, around their throat,” he touched the woolen scarf, “but I love to see them on a young girl.”
“You could go back to bed,” Arun suggested.
“And leave you alone here with this pearl?” A flush like dawn had tinted Dipti’s face and neck. “Anyway, I feel much better. Completely cured by the sight of beauty, which is the best medicine in the world for a poor susceptible person like myself. I don’t have a heart,” he informed Dipti, “I have a frail shivering bird in here, drenched by the rains and storms of passion.”
Arun exclaimed impatiently, but when he saw Dipti, still freshly flushed, smile at Raju’s extravagance, irritation with his father turned to anger against Dipti. “You should ask her some more about those earrings,” he said. “Ask her if they’re her wedding jewelry—” Her flush now a deepest rose, Dipti’s hands flew to her ears. “What was he doing there yesterday with you and your mother,” he challenged her more harshly, “what had he come to sell?”
“Whatever they are,” Raju said, “she’s come here wearing them for you. I wish I could say it were for me, but even I’m not such a conceited optimist. But I’m really feeling much better and I think I might just lie and rest here a little bit on this couch. I won’t disturb you at all—I’ll shut my eyes and I shall probably be fast asleep in a minute. But if you’re afraid of waking me, you could go in the other room and keep very quiet in there.”
He did exactly what he said—stretched himself on the couch and shut his eyes, so that they could think of him as fast asleep. But they had no time to think of anything—before they had even got into the next room, Arun was already tugging at her beautiful clothes and she was helping him. It was many weeks since they had last been together, and they were desperate. Their youth, their lust, and their love overflowed in them, so that their lovemaking was like that of young gods. It is not in the nature of young gods to curtail their activities, and they forgot about keeping quiet and not disturbing Raju.
He was disturbed, but in a way he liked tremendously. He lay on the couch, partly listening to what was going on next door but mostly preoccupied with his own thoughts. These made him happy—for the young people in the bedroom, of course, and for all young people, and these included himself. Raju was nearly forty, he did not have an easy life—he told no one about the many shifts he had to resort to in Bombay, to keep himself going in between assignments, which often fell through, or were never paid for. Nevertheless, he had not changed from the time he had been a student in Delhi and used to creep up to the roof of Indu’s parents’ house. She often had to put her hand over his mouth to keep him from waking everyone up, for in his supreme happiness he could not refrain from singing out loud—he knew all the popular hits as well as more refined Urdu lyrics, and they all exactly expressed what he felt, about her, and the stars above them, and the white moonlight and scent of jasmine drenching the air around them.
But now the sounds from the next room changed: Raju propped himself up on his elbow. “I’ll tear them off!” his son was saying. He was back on the subject of the earrings. The girl screamed—Raju sprang up, ready to intervene: he knew there was something in his son that was not in himself—a bitter anger, perhaps transmitted to him by his mother during the years she had struggled to make a living for them both. But somehow the girl pacified him, or it may have been his own feeling for her that made him hold his hand. She pleaded—“What else could I do? Arun, what could I do? With all that was happening, and Daddy’s illness.”
“You wanted it yourself. Because they’re rich. Ah, don’t touch me.”
“Yes, they’re rich. They can help Daddy.”
“Who are they anyway?”
She hesitated for a moment before replying: “They’re Daddy’s friends.” He had to insist several times for a more definite answer before she came out with the name. Then Arun said: “Great. Wonderful.” And Raju too on the other side of the wall was shocked: for the name she had mentioned was that of a tremendously wealthy family notorious for their smuggling and other underworld activities and involved in several political scandals, including that of Dipti’s father.
Dipti said with a touch of defiance: “They helped us when there was no one else.” But her voice trembled in a way that made Raju’s heart tremble too; but not Arun’s, who continued to speak harshly: “And you’re madly in love with the boy . . . Why don’t you answer!”
“I’ve met him twice. Arun, don’t! I’ll take them off. Here.” She unhooked the earrings before he could tug at them again. He flung them across the room. One of them rolled under the partitioning curtain into the next room. Raju looked at it lying there but did not pick it up.
Arun said, “It’s like selling yourself. It is selling yourself.”
Again she spoke defiantly:
“As long as it helps my parents in their trouble.”
“Yes, and what about being a college lecturer? That was just talk. All you want is to be rich and buy jewelry and eat those horrible cream cakes.”
After a while she said in a very quiet voice, “That’s not what I want.”
“Then what? Don’t try and fool me. I know you like no one else knows you. Like no one else ever will know you. You can never forget me. Never. Never.”
“No. I shall never forget you.” Then she broke out: “But what can I do, Arun! You tell me: what else can I do!”
And on the other side of the curtain, Raju’s heart was fit to burst, and it was all he could do not to cry out to Arun: “Tell her!” He was almost tempted to show him—ah, with what abandon Raju himself would have acted in his son’s place, how he would have flung himself at the girl’s feet and cried: “I’m here! Marry me! I’m yours forever!”
But Arun was saying something different: “I’ll haunt you like a ghost. You’ll keep reading about me in the newspapers because I’m going to be very famous. If necessary, I’ll go into politics to clean up our country from all these corrupt politicians and smugglers who are sucking it dry. You’ll see. You’ll see what I’ll do.”
“I have to go. Let me get dressed.”
“Not yet. Five minutes. Ten.”
Then there was no more talking and almost complete silence in the bedroom, so that when Indu came home, she didn’t know anyone was in there and said to Raju, “Why aren’t you in bed?”
He laid a finger on his lips and glanced toward the other room. She followed his eyes and gasped when she saw the earring that had rolled from under the curtain. “Sh—sh—sh,” said Raju.
“He’s got that girl in there,” Indu whispered fiercely.
“You needn’t worry.”
“What do you mean not worry? His finals are next week.”
“Oh, he’ll do very well. He’s your son; and your father’s grandson.”
And for the hundredth time in their life she said, “Thank God anyway that he hasn’t taken after you. Let go of me. Let go.” For he had seized her in his arms and pressed his lips against hers—she thought at first it was to silence her but relaxed as his kiss became more pressing and more passionate: as if he wanted to make it up to her for his shortcomings, and then, giving himself over completely, to make it up to all women for the shortcomings of all men.
HUSBAND AND SON
In his latter days—and even that is now over thirty years ago—her husband was always referred to as “the old man.” Or “the old man up there,” for he was by that time living almost entirely on the roof of the family house. The only sound that came from him was the Vedic hymns he sang at dawn; his voice, though cracked, sounded very sweet. Vijay was left to rattle around by herself in their large mansion, with nothing to do except bully the servants. It was her boast that any member of the household could walk in any time—rising from the dead, that is—and find the place just as they had known it At the beginning of every summer she had the carpets rolled up and stowed away, as though her father-in-law and his guests were still there to be kept cool amid marble floors sprinkled with rose water; and every winter the quilts were stuffed with new cotton, though there was no one now to sleep under them except herself. The old man on the roof just covered himself with a blanket, as threadbare with age as he was.
She spent many hours sitting on her verandah, looking out over the river Jumna. During the monsoon, it regularly flooded, and one year they had had to go up and down the streets in boats. This was before the Ring Road and the fortifying walls and the overpass were built: now you would no longer be able to see the river from their house—but anyway, once Vijay herself had died, less than a year after the old man, the house was torn down and rows of municipal offices built in its stead. Even in her day, changes were taking place. For instance, the mansion at their rear, which had belonged to a prosperous Muslim family, had been divided up among refugees from Pakistan; straw-roofed huts, selling betel and other necessities, had been built into the niches of its compound wall. And the house next door, where a famous eye-surgeon and his family had lived on a lavish scale, had been taken over by a school of Indian dance, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture.
Vijay welcomed these new activities around her. Despite her age, she was still full of energy and had nowhere to expend it. Her parents-in-law and their entire generation of widowed aunts were dead. Her son Anand—in his thirties now but too busy to get married—was posted in Bengal where he was an important government officer. And the old man was becoming more and more eccentric. He had cut down his meals to one a day, consisting of a few chapattis and a vegetable or a lentil dish, never both, for he wanted to eat no more than the poor could afford. Vijay’s appetite had remained healthy and she still needed her regular meals, with meat or fish. The old man did not grudge her this rich food and often came to keep her company while she ate. He read to her from those strange books he had or expounded his even stranger ideas. She didn’t understand or even listen much, but it gave her the opportunity to keep a sharp watch on him. Why was he holding his jaw like that? Next day she hauled him off to the dentist, overriding his protests: did horses go to the dentist? he asked. Or when it turned out he had a hernia and a truss was prescribed—did horses wear trusses?
He had always been careless of his health; careless of himself. In the past, when they were both young, it was because he had been so busy, immersed in public affairs. Although he came from a pro-British family—his father had been a High Court judge—he himself had been deeply involved in the Indian independence movement and had spent several years in jail. Later, after Independence, he had been elected to parliament and had been given a cabinet post. Those had been wonderful years for Vijay. They had moved out of the family house on the Jumna to one of the former British residences requisitioned by the new government of India. An armed sentry stood at their gate, supplemented by a whole posse of policemen when the Prime Minister or other members of the cabinet came to the house. Important decisions on national and international policy had been taken in this house. Foreign dignitaries had been entertained there, or they themselves had been driven in their official limousine to the President’s palace to attend banquets in honor of visiting prime ministers, or royal guests from the neighboring kingdoms.
All this was still going on in New Delhi, on an ever larger and more sumptuous scale, but she and the old man were no longer part of it. He had resigned his offices and all his honors after only a few years of holding them, and they had moved out of the official residence back to the family house on the Jumna. She had protested—what was the use of all their sacrifices and his years in jail if they were not now to reap the benefits along with everyone else? But she had acquiesced, because she realized how unhappy he was, disgusted with the politics of power. And she could not bear to see him unhappy: it was his cheerfulness that had from the first drawn her to him, the sprightly way he moved around, humming a tune to himself (Urdu love lyrics it had been then, or Hindi patriotic songs, also the Marseillaise and the Internationale). Even on their wedding day, when they had sat together before the sacred fire and the rest of the family had been full of the usual marriage fuss and fury, he had muttered irreverent jokes from behind the strings of flowers that hid his face from her as hers was hidden from him; so that, instead of weeping the way brides are supposed to, she had had trouble stifling her giggles. Their marriage had been arranged while he was still abroad, taking his degree in Cambridge (England). The year was 1923. When he returned, the old man—only he was called Prakash then—was twenty-five years old, full of high spirits and high ideas. She liked him immediately. He wasn’t handsome but he had a very nice face, with spectacles and a mouth that was always twitching with suppressed laughter. He rarely laughed out loud, as she did all the time. Even during sex—and they had had a lot of it, oh my God what a lot of sex—he had to put his hand over her mouth so that the rest of the family wouldn’t hear
the racket she made. They had been given a bedroom of their own, but all around them were the rooms of other members of his large family. With the door shut, they felt quite private, and besides making love, they also talked a lot and he told her his ideas, which she adopted as her own. Her eyes blazed when he spoke of the necessity of throwing out the English; and during the years he was in jail, she quarreled with his family and with her own, all of whom, far from throwing out the English, only wanted to be like them and to be allowed to join their clubs. He never argued with his family but only made jokes: for instance, about his mother and aunts—poor things, he said, every day oppressed by three terrible problems: What to wear? Where to go? What to do?
Nowadays, sitting on her verandah and the old man up there on the roof, Vijay found herself beset with the same problems, or at least two of them. What to wear she had settled long ago. For a time, under his influence, she had sacrificed her fine saris for the patriotic homespun cottons he wore; but they felt scratchy and coarse, and she soon went back to her imported silks with embroidered borders. To her regret, he never again wore the suits he had brought from England, but she kept them hanging in her wardrobe—they were still hanging there, and she touched them sometimes, stroking the sleeves of tweed and wool and sniffing at them for the last aroma of the English cigarettes he had chain-smoked.
Every evening she walked by the river and sometimes joined the groups of hymn-singers clustered around a priest or holy person; she was not religious but sang as lustily as all the others. She also sat cross-legged in a circle of friendship with simple housewives whom she advised on birth control and other topics they were eager to learn about from a superior person like herself. Everyone knew and liked her; when she bought from the shops in the compound wall, they told her the correct price, as though she were not rich but one of them. As soon as the dance school moved into the eye-surgeon’s house, she couldn’t wait to pay them a visit and be shown around and watch the pupils at their practice and lessons. After that, she went every day, she liked it so much. The students were all young girls—not at all the sort you would expect to be students of Indian dance (that is, the illegitimate daughters of temple dancers) but from good families for whom the Indian classical arts had replaced the piano as part of a girl’s accomplishments. But the teachers were still of the traditional class, hereditary musicians and dancers transmitting their art from father to son. They were delighted with this new source of income, especially the old men who had spent their lives turning over the sparse coins that came their way from weddings and festivals. Now they were civil servants under the Ministry of Culture, with regular salaries and pensions and provident fund. Those who were too old for the job had sent their sons or nephews, so that there were a few young teachers too, with whom the girls fell in love. All day the house was filled with the sound of ankle-bells and drumbeats, of notes plucked from many lyres and the laughter of light-minded girls; sticks of incense, rose and jasmine, burned in honor of the patron goddess of dance and music.
East Into Upper East Page 14
