The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  Miss West said, ‘I am so sorry to hear this, I really am. It shouldn’t happen this way. But this is not an ideal situation. These things are inevitable given the disparities, I mean the differences in terms of money and background, things like that. But I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. I am sure it’ll work out in the end, one way or another.’

  I listened, feeling embarrassed by Catherine’s disclosures, and said nothing.

  I was walking home alone – Miss West having gone off to Godhulia on her own for some shopping – when it occurred to me that in some unconscious way Catherine may have been speaking for my benefit. It was a flattering supposition, and I almost dismissed it at first for that reason. But it seemed more plausible when I thought of my last visit to Catherine’s house. After all, Miss West already knew of the events of Anand’s past that Catherine spoke of so passionately; they were what she had had in common with Catherine since the time she had introduced her to Anand at one of her musical soirées. Catherine’s words were perhaps meant for me more than either of us realized, and I now felt I should have said something to her – even if it was little more than the slightly banal generalities Miss West uttered on such occasions.

  I couldn’t see it then, but for Miss West, Anand’s welfare was a small private concern, which coexisted with the doubts about his artistic potential she had recently admitted to me. For Catherine, lonely and insecure in Benares, it was nothing less than a cause, and she seemed to want it to be shared, or at least known, by more people.

  It was clear to me even on that evening in her house – listening to her quietly emotional voice in that darkening room, the fluorescent tube outside flickering away – that the stories about Anand’s childhood had affected her deeply. What wasn’t apparent to me then was that in telling them, she wanted to have their injustice acknowledged by others. She also wanted to protect Anand and keep him from further hurt.

  This was her primary motivation, and now after the new complications created by her own and Anand’s parents, with these growing troubles, she needed to have it attested by others; she needed to know if she was doing the right thing.

  *

  Anand, when I next met him, was already looking forward to going to Paris; he spoke of this with the curious serenity that I had seen come over him, the serenity that came from his belief that with Catherine by his side, things could not but turn out well for him. Paris had become for him a locus of several desires. He spoke solemnly about the visit as expanding the narrow vision he had inherited from his rustic background; he spoke with childlike enthusiasm about the sold-out concerts he would give, the best-selling recordings he would make. I had already heard him speak at Miss West’s party of the school he wished to set up for talented and needy sitar players; he expanded on the subject now, speaking as though the school were already a reality.

  It was peculiarly disquieting to hear all this. I had no awareness of how the music industry worked, but felt that the success Anand projected in his immediate future couldn’t be so easily achieved. I thought he had very little sense of the world he was about to enter, and, watching the hopeful unclouded expression in his eyes, I couldn’t help feeling – as on that first visit to Catherine’s house – a sense of wrongness and incongruity.

  But it was too late to withdraw. Without quite realizing it, I had become addicted to their company; it was the regular fix I needed in addition to my daily visits to the library. I went often to Catherine’s house, and stayed for long periods. The sadhu with matted hair in the alley outside her house and the halwai with the enormous paunch in his sooty sweetshop became familiar, reassuring figures. But these visits weren’t without their secret torments: I saw in Anand’s serenity the serenity of a sexually satisfied man, and I was often pursued, after leaving their house, by dark imaginings of that unknown part of his relationship with Catherine, its physical side. These imaginings were limited and made yet more intense by my own lack of experience. But they gave an edge to my impressions of Catherine, to her soft voice and to her face that seemed to change its appearance every time I saw her; and another layer of awkwardness was created between us.

  In any case, I didn’t speak much. I would tell Catherine about my recent discoveries at the library – and that was all I had to offer by way of conversation. I mostly listened to their plans and anxieties about the present and the future, their disagreements, their playful bantering.

  I can see now that for Catherine and Anand I had my role cut out. They were so self-contained and content when in each other’s company, but like all couples, they needed witnesses from the external world, and in this most tradition-minded of Indian cities, the presence of people like Miss West and myself was to them an important fact; it was a positive endorsement of their new fragile status as an unmarried couple. Catherine barely knew anyone in Benares apart from Miss West, Mark and a few French semipermanent residents I would see occasionally, middle-aged harassed-looking men wearing pony-tails and earrings. Anand, too, had few friends in Benares: timid, depressed-looking sitar or tabla players who would sometimes be at Catherine’s house, hunched over in one corner, not saying much, unsure of what to make of Catherine or, indeed, Anand. I now see how his relationship with Catherine, a rich European woman, must have put a strain on these older relationships in Benares; it would have set him apart from the people he knew among the musical fraternity, most of whom lived improvised lives in the poorer quarters of the city.

  But there were my own needs. I had no friends: growing up alone, I had developed no skills for intimacy, or even ordinary camaraderie; friendships seemed to require from me a degree of self-abnegation I could not achieve. However, a large part of the loneliness I had increasingly come to feel had been offset by my obsessive reading, the regard I had for the life of the mind. With each book, I entered into what I felt to be an exalted bond with its writer, to whom I gave all the care and attentiveness I could not bring to human relationships.

  But as I grew older the substitution of books for friendship had seemed to work less and less. In truth, I had been lonely for a very long time. In Benares, the unexpected company first of Miss West and then of Catherine had only made the fact more apparent to me – a fact that never struck me with greater poignancy than when I knocked on Catherine’s door, and the sound of the heavy iron bolt struck against the old bleached wood travelling up the empty stairs seemed to carry some of my loneliness. It explained the speed with which I grew to cherish the long evenings in Catherine’s house, in the room filled with smoky blue light, the fluorescent tube outside flickering away as usual, and the pigeons periodically responding to unseen provocations by exploding into the dusk.

  So it was that I began to dislike leaving her house late in the evening and walking up three flights of stairs to find my tiny room in darkness and, when I switched on the weak bulb, all my things in it exactly as I had left them: the books slumped on the table with the markers jutting out, and crammed into the octagonal niches; the pyjamas spread-eagled on the bed where I had thrown them; the Hawaiian slippers flung beneath the chair where I had changed into shoes; the postcard picture of Proust on the window sill where I had put it up several weeks ago. It was as though I had expected them to have changed position during my absence; that they hadn’t was proof of the loneliness and boredom I increasingly felt when in that room.

  6

  IN THE YEARS SINCE THEN, I have often thought about the evening of Miss West’s party. I have wondered about the strange emotion I felt the morning after, standing alone on the roof, Miss West having drugged herself into sleep after an anguished night. It has taken me time to see that the loneliness I was to know later, when I returned to my room from Catherine’s house, was only another aspect of that earlier emotion.

  So little did I know any of the people present at the party that in the brief time I had seen them they became even more mysterious to me. I was tormented by my ignorance. I wanted to know more; I wanted to know everything about them. The knowledge was
one way of dealing with the troubled, if undefined, sense I had after the party, a sense of the largeness and diversity of the world, and a simultaneous awareness of how little of it was accessible to me, how someone like me – someone with no money or clear prospects – was placed at its remotest fringes.

  The reality of my position was made more apparent by Debbie’s reply when I asked her what she was doing in Benares. ‘Passing through,’ she had said, and the words had stayed with me. They had suggested a kind of perpetual journeying through the world, a savouring of life in a way I had no means of knowing, the life itself seeming – as it did in the pictures in Miss West’s room – unimaginably adventurous.

  And the more I knew of it, the more inadequate I felt. I knew nothing of Miss West, but had presumed to see sadness and disappointment in her past: this was the romantic idea that had been spawned by the idle solitude of those fog-bound first days in Benares. That morning after the party, gazing at the pictures in Miss West’s room – the pictures that spoke to me of the pleasures of untroubled prosperity – I was given a truer idea of Miss West, and it had brought with it only more pangs of loneliness and self-pity.

  *

  So many tangled roots our personalities have: the social and emotional circumstances of our early years, of our parents’ lives, and, if you go back even further, of our ancestors’. In some sense, the emotion I felt that morning after Miss West’s party, although never fully defined, had always been with me. It had cast its shadow upon my childhood, and it came to me then as a fear of being abandoned and unprotected. In later life, the fear lost its rawness; it became part of the larger preoccupations of a solitary adolescence. I had never analysed this fear; there had been no occasion to do so. It is only now as I write, and attempt to link disparate events and emotions, that I see the larger context to which it belongs, the long way it goes back, to a past that has grown dim in all except its broadest details.

  My ancestors were Brahmins, originally from Kanauj, the capital of the great seventh-century Indian empire founded by Harshavardhan. There were no dates for their exodus from Kanauj. We vaguely knew, by way of family lore, that the sixteenth-century Mogul emperor Akbar had created a native aristocracy by awarding large grants of land to the Brahmins of the region, and that our own ancestors had been among those so favoured. No one, however, had any details. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone cared to document, or even remember; the past was too much a part of the present to be categorized in a strict historical sense.

  For centuries after Akbar, my ancestors had remained wealthy landowners in the flat lands enclosed by the foothills of the western Himalayas. During all that time, the turbulent history of medieval India touched them little. My own knowledge of that past went only as far back as my great-great-grandfather, in the last century, but I can’t imagine his own ancestors deviated much from the well-worn Hindu grooves in which he and his son and grandson spent their own lives: studentship in Benares, adulthood and marriage, late-middle-age detachment and then the final renunciation followed by a retreat to the Himalayas.

  With India’s independence in 1947, this regulated life was unravelled with bewildering speed. My grandfather and his sons found themselves thrown into the new ruthless go-getting world of independent India with none of their old certainties intact. Successive land reform legislation undermined the family’s assets to the point where ancestral jewellery had to be pawned off to pay for the education of my father and his brothers. There was a time when neither studentship nor marriage seemed a possibility.

  My father grew up knowing both a kind of feudal grandeur and shameful penury. From a life of secluded leisure, he was catapulted into the ranks of desperate millions seeking jobs under the new regime. I did not know until after my mother’s death how deeply marked he was by that period of difficult transition.

  In time, the years of struggle were left behind. He joined the Public Works Department (PWD); he worked his way to a kind of middle-class security and equilibrium. But he never spoke about his early years. Once, in an uncharacteristic burst of nostalgia, he mentioned the caparisoned elephants he rode to his grandmother’s village. On another occasion, he spoke of the time Pandit Nehru had come to the family house to borrow a horse from the stables. These memories alone came to represent for me the life he had known as a child.

  For me, born in 1969 and growing up with cricket, the books of Enid Blyton and Tintin comics, there could be no such memories. That past of my father – and also my mother, whose family had suffered a similar upheaval – was very far away from the series of PWD bungalows and mediocre Christian-run schools in which I had spent my childhood. The serenity of the old Brahmin world in which his family had lived for centuries was even more remote from me. I had an intimation of it on Sunday mornings, when my father, freshly bathed and bare-torsoed, would sit on a tiger skin rug before a fragrant fire of sandalwood and recite Vedic hymns in an approximation of a much grander ritual his ancestors had performed for millennia. I felt great reverence and awe for these ancient practices. But at the same time I could feel my own life had drifted apart from them; it had attached itself to another constellation of desires and reverences.

  I had the sharpest sense of this at the time of my mother’s death. My mother had chosen to live in an ashram in Benares when she knew that she didn’t have much longer to live. Her decision was in line with an immemorial Hindu belief that to die in Benares was to be released from the cycle of rebirths; it couldn’t be argued with.

  Before I could arrive in Benares, she died and had to be cremated quickly. I was secretly relieved to be spared of my duties in this regard. I couldn’t have coped with the physical facts of a Hindu cremation – the cold flesh, the open-mouthed grimace, the bridal gaudiness inflicted on the helpless female corpse, the breaking of the skull with a bamboo pole. It would have intruded too much into the memories I had of my mother, this neglected figure of my childhood, her happy flushed face and eager embrace as I arrived home for the school holidays, the sad fragrance and reticulated feel of her forehead as I kissed her goodbye a few weeks later, both of us restraining our tears under the disapproving gaze of my father.

  I was alone in my grief now; whatever emotion my father felt, he was unlikely to share it with me. I went by myself to the room in the ashram where my mother had spent her last years, slowly subsiding into a mist of religious piety and illness. It was where I had once seen her tiny figure huddled on the bed, quietly crying to herself. That was also the time when she first told me – out of what depths of desolation, I now wonder – that she did not wish to live any longer; and I, though taken aback, had taken after her husband, who thought her incapable of independent thought, had not really believed she knew what she was saying. In that room, devoid of furniture and resonantly silent, there was now an altar of sorts. Bouquets of fresh flowers and incense sticks – a special tribute to my mother from the ashram’s inmates – stood on a table before a newly framed picture of her. For as long as I could remember, she had refused to have her picture taken; my father had chosen for this commemorative moment a very old photograph of hers, one that I had never seen. It showed her in her graduation robes and cap, cradling her rolled-up degree, her face – as was the preferred pose in the 1950s – in half-profile, with the beginnings of an uncertain smile, the smile of the marriageable girl student who has already had an intimation of the savourless life in store for her.

  Standing in that room, I thought of my mother’s various kindnesses to me, the jars of home-made snacks and sweets she would bring to my school, the rupee notes she would push into my pocket when my father wasn’t looking. I remembered the letters she would write in her large-eyed script, overflowing with maternal anxiety. It was only after these memories exhausted themselves that my attention turned to other things, and I began to notice her various personal effects that had been transferred to this room, everyday items that death had raised to the status of memorabilia: the cloth-bound volumes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata
and the collected works of Saratchandra and Tagore, her diary with its accounts and laundry lists, old issues of the religious magazine Kalyan, rosary beads in a frayed velvet pouch, small idols of Krishna and Rama.

  These things had accompanied her all her life; they had made up her world; but it was not until I came across the heavily annotated Hindu calendar she kept hung in her room all her life that I realized how inviolably whole that world had been to her. It had been a realm of existence over and above her sorrows and disappointments on the material plane, a world with its own rhythms and seasons, virtues and habits. Magh, Aasharh, Phagun, Sankrant, Amavasya, Nau Ratri: the sonorous poetry of these Sanskrit names, the musical chiming of these months, festivals and fasting days – they had brought a subliminal order to her time on earth; they had measured out, and made bearable, her life.

  But how alien those names sounded to me! How hard it was in that room, facing that calendar, my mother’s possessions all around me, the soft chanting of the ashram’s inmates wafting in through the open windows, to deny the knowledge that the past that had given shape and coherence to my parents’ lives was no longer available to me.

  I was very much on my own: this was what my father sought to convey to me in the days that followed my mother’s death. Until then, I had never exchanged more than a few words at a time with my father. He had been the same with my mother. Practical matters were briefly discussed before both withdrew into their respective private worlds. He had been a less distant figure when I was still a child; I remember him reading me stories from the Mahabharata, and explaining to my young, uncomprehending mind the complex dialogue between the sage, Yajnavalkya, and his wife, Maitreyi, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad about the illusoriness of love and attachment. But he was by nature a reticent man, and his reticence grew with time.