The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I remember one dappled afternoon – the last of its kind before summer – when I was sitting out on the courtyard of the ashram my father and I were staying at in Benares. I was trying to read when I looked up to see my father walking towards me. How infirm he looks, I suddenly thought with a twinge of pity, how old he was, half leaning on his stick, his hair and moustache a uniform grey, the sun highlighting his deeply lined face.

  I stood up as he approached. He came closer, and then stopped and tilted his head sideways to peer at my book. I immediately held it out to him, but he waved it away and, looking me straight in the eye, asked me if I would go with him on a walk through the ghats.

  There, amid the crowd of late-evening bathers, my father explained to me his plans for the future. He had decided to wind down his present life. He wanted to retire and move to the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry. It was where he had long wanted to go; if he didn’t go now, he would never be able to leave. As for me, he would make all possible arrangements. He had built no house to pass on to me, and there wasn’t much money. But he could set aside a small allowance that would see me through college. After that, it was up to me to make what I could of my life.

  He then concluded these abrupt announcements with an even more uncharacteristic personal philosophical statement. He said he had never wanted to get married; his marriage was a mistake from the very beginning, and both he and my mother had suffered for it. Another mistake lay in joining the PWD. But there was no choice for him. It wasn’t anything he ever wanted to do, and he had ended up spending the best years of his life in joyless drudgery. But then, he didn’t have too many regrets about all that any more. Experience had taught him that of such mistakes were most lives compounded.

  What he had always desired was freedom: freedom from all bonds that tie one down to the vanities of the world, freedom from all duties and responsibilities to other people. It had come to him at last in old age, with the death of his wife, when he could not take full advantage of it. He was going to make the most of it in the time left to him.

  It took him a few more months to wind up his affairs. I was still in Allahabad, and didn’t see him leave for Pondicherry. He wouldn’t have liked that anyway; the sentimentality of goodbyes. He did ask me to visit him during my holidays. But I never went. I sensed the awkwardness of such a visit for both of us. I went instead to Kerala, Kashmir, Darjeeling and Shimla; I stayed in cheap hotels and travelled on buses. I wrote to him about my journeys. He seemed to approve of them in his replies. I wrote to him from Allahabad; my letters grew more brisk and confident.

  It was in Allahabad that, amid all the disorder of the university, I was able to carve out my own life. It was a life I wished to continue in Benares when my three years in Allahabad came to an end. Benares was a choice by default. In Allahabad, I had developed no clear idea of what to do or where to go next. I rarely attended classes, and spent the long empty days in the cool arbours of Azad Park, where I would read and read for hours. Away from the chaos of the university there existed a different city of broad sleepy avenues and old colonial mansions peacefully crumbling behind overgrown hedges, and it was there I sought those peculiar delights of the solitary and the eccentric, and even managed to know happiness of a sort.

  In my mind’s eye, I see Allahabad now as I often saw it from the top balcony of a high tower in the middle of the university campus, the crinkled green silk of its many trees held down here and there by domes and spires. The epicentre in this toytown of the imagination is the ramrod-straight street down Civil Lines, on which were located, in close proximity, Wheeler’s bookstore and the Palace Cinema. Wheeler’s, as it was called, was bigger and better stocked than the bookstores you would find in a small town. The books were well organized and arranged on long, dusty shelves, and the store was – unheard-of luxury! – air-conditioned. The Palace Cinema offered another, more readily accessible kind of haven for the imagination. It was there that I once watched James Bond cheerfully outwit a global cast of villains in Cuba, Berlin and Rajasthan. From this dizzying world tour I remember emerging through dark staircases not into drab reality, but into an enchanting night, transformed by an inaudible shower into a soft-focus, blurry glimmer, bright lights trembling behind the thin mist rising from puddle-smeared pavements, a lone bicycle rider imprinting a trail of tread marks on the gleaming wet road.

  7

  IN ALLAHABAD I had been on my own. I found my own byways and cloisters in the city. But in Benares, to which I came seeking little more than an extension of the idle, bookish life I had in Allahabad, I had found myself in a different world. I knew more people, and their presence in my life filled me with new emotions and alerted me to old inadequacies.

  Restless and lonely in my room, I began to spend more and more time outside it. I spent the longest time at the university library. Many memories of my days inside its dark, cavernous echoing rooms have survived. The random browsing through the long row of shelves in the badly lit stacks, where students smoked foul-smelling beedis; the fly-infested rough wooden tea stall just outside the main gate, where I would eat, standing up, a hasty lunch of omelette and sticky-sweet tea; the view from my windowside desk of the patch of sunlight carpeting a lawn, the dewy grass ablaze but the neem trees bordering it luxuriantly dark and still; the images speak of a time of serenity and quiet fulfilment, and in so far as they do so, they are not false.

  But they edit out a small but significant part of my experience. They do not quite convey the fact that this serenity was precarious, always under threat from the chaos that was the rule in the university in those days, the chaos that I frequently witnessed from close quarters but took for granted.

  The university campus had been patterned on some design of the cosmos found in the Vedas; its sylvan seclusion owed much to the Hindu equation between students and hermits. The various departments lay on the diameter of the semicircular plan; behind them were the hostels and playgrounds.

  Set in the middle of large lawns and gardens, the buildings looked like products of an extravagant imagination, the predominant style being Indo-Saracenic, a mishmash of neo-Victorian and Hindu-Islamic styles: cupolas, arcades, colonnaded balconies, castellated towers, classical porticoes, domes, minarets, all jumbled up together in stone.

  Indo-Saracenic: I knew the name but I didn’t then have much of an idea about architecture. In Allahabad, I had lived among the very first buildings of the Indo-Saracenic style, but the fact had escaped me altogether. The buildings were much like the crumbling colonial mansions elsewhere in the city, sites of decay and ruin. India was full of such buildings. I saw them everywhere; they were too familiar; I asked no questions about them.

  This wasn’t complacency, or lack of curiosity. I saw what I saw, but there was nothing to compare it with. Decay and ruin were so much a part of one’s environment that one took no notice of them. It was the visitor, the traveller from other lands, looking to figure out a new place and its people, who brought an inquisitive and trained eye to things one took for granted – as did Catherine, who once asked me about the Hindu University.

  She often spoke of her tramps through Benares in a way that attached significance to the smallest things. Coming into the house from somewhere, she would remark on the quality of the light over the river; she would speak of the dappled effect of the water on the rooms of the riverside houses, or mention the fretwork on a particular balcony of a house on Narad Ghat. I was always struck by her great alertness to the world around her, which made her discover style and beauty in the most unexpected places. It made me want to see the city through her eyes, and always pretending to more knowledge than I possessed, I often adopted her opinions about something I knew nothing of.

  She had been to the university museum a few times, and had wandered about the campus: it was, she said, unlike anything she had seen in India or elsewhere.

  I promptly read up on the university’s history the next time I was at the library. The university, built in the early years of t
he twentieth century, was the work of the pre-Gandhi generation of Indian nationalists, such leading figures as Madan Mohan Malaviya. You could see the statues erected to commemorate them at important traffic intersections in Benares – statues that were now forlorn, neglected, discoloured.

  The larger aim these nationalists had, apart from independence, was the regeneration of India through direct and vigorous contact with the best of what was being thought and said in the Western world. The aspiration was shared not only among Indian nationalists, but many British men and women subscribed to it too. Among the inspirational figures behind the Benares Hindu University was Annie Besant, the English theosophist and Fabian socialist and friend of George Bernard Shaw. I remember reading this one afternoon in the library, sitting among the criminalish young men playing cards, the bored young women with long, painted fingernails, tracing their initials into the wooden desktop, and for a moment the internationally famous names seemed to make the university appear a more important place: a place designed for a noble cause, to which great men and women had devoted their time and energy.

  But the moment didn’t last long, as the more I read, the more I felt that I was reading about another university in another world.

  In this, the university resembled the one in Allahabad I had gone to for my undergraduate degree. The break with the past, whenever it had occurred, had been clean; the early years of idealism belonged to an unremembered time. You could get the details in books. As for the present, you had to figure it out for yourself. You had to know where you stood, and you had to be careful.

  *

  One morning, shortly after meeting Rajesh, I was walking to the library when my attention was diverted to a large and noisy crowd assembled outside the university museum. It was a building in the same Indo-Saracenic style, secluded from the road by a tall hedge and trees. Inside it, as a reminder of the university’s better days, were miniature paintings and sculpture of much distinction.

  The crowd was growing every moment, students on foot and on bicycles, and even a couple of motorcycle riders, joining it from all directions. It had spilled out on to the road by the time I reached it. I heard the slogans as I came closer: VICE-CHANCELLOR HAI HAI!! VICE-CHANCELLOR MURDABAD!! DOWN WITH THE VICE-CHANCELLOR!!

  I knew about the students’ hostility towards the vice-chancellor. I remembered, too, Rajesh’s recent warning about the possibility of student violence. I now wondered what fresh provocation had caused the large frenzied gathering.

  When I asked a bystander standing alongside me, he barely looked at me as he replied, ‘The vice-chancellor is inside the museum.’

  It seemed odd: what was the vice-chancellor doing inside the museum? And why were the students here?

  I stood there for a while, wondering if I should move on, when in a sea of unfamiliar faces shining with excitement I suddenly spotted someone I knew.

  It was Pratap, one of the young students I had met with Rajesh at the tea stall.

  He, I remembered, had been particularly excited during the talk about the civil servant and his millions, such talk among poor students being part of a consoling fantasy about the future. His hair was cropped close to his skull – it was the kind of haircut many students had, from the roadside barber outside the campus gates, the bearded hunchbacked Muslim with the rusty hand mirror and rickety wooden chair. Pratap’s shoulders lay bunched under the thin shawl draped around them; his trousers, tied at the ankles, were of a shiny synthetic material.

  He saw me looking at him and his large impassive face broke into a smile. He pushed his way through the crowd, provoking mild protests; then he was standing next to me and shaking my hand with great vigour – a gesture of friendliness that I felt owed much to my connection with Rajesh.

  He explained that the vice-chancellor had come to garland a statue inside the museum, and some students had got wind of his presence there. They had surrounded the museum, refusing to let him leave until he revoked expulsion orders he had issued for three students. He had been trapped there now for almost an hour. In the meantime, the students had locked up his personal staff in the adjacent canteen and damaged his official car. Pratap pointed to the white Ambassador car that stood marooned among swirling groups of students. The front windscreen had been knocked out, giving it the appearance of an eyeless skull; the headlights had been smashed, the shattered glass on the ground glinting like tiny diamonds; wires stuck out forlornly from the hole on the roof where there had been a revolving blue light.

  Pratap said, ‘Look over there: it’s Mohan!’

  I looked and saw a student in a white khadi kurta and vest, his thick-rimmed glasses jutting out from his face. He was being held aloft by outstretched arms and then placed on someone’s shoulders. I didn’t know who he was, and when I asked Pratap, he was surprised that I didn’t know. Mohan was an old student, a member of the Communist student wing, and famous across the campus for his revolutionary poetry.

  A loud voice appealed for quiet, and when the students had quietened down a bit, someone else announced in a dramatic tone that Mohan was to recite his poems.

  All eyes were now on the poet, who started fumbling through the sheets of paper in his hand; someone guffawed, and a few protesting voices immediately rose up. A relative quiet briefly ensued as Mohan kept searching. He finally found the page he wanted and began.

  The poem, recited in grave, admonitory tones, was about the need for a new freedom struggle and independence for India; the freedom that came in 1947 had turned out to be a fraud; it had merely replaced foreign oppressors with home-grown ones.

  As Mohan went on, the crowd’s attention began to wander. He started on another poem. It was a poem about the Nazi siege of Leningrad. The crowd remained as distracted as before. Someone broke into a fit of giggles; a few other people followed.

  The student who had giggled first now screamed: DOWN WITH LENINGRAD!! A ripple of frank laughter ran across the large crowd. Pratap whispered to me: ‘These are mostly men from the Hindu Pride party. They don’t like this Russia-China, Chou-Mao stuff.’

  Mohan seemed totally unperturbed as he began his next poem. This was a Hindi translation of Pablo Neruda’s poem on the fall of Allende in Chile.

  It went on for some time: the tenacious poet, a derisive audience. I was about to leave when a tremor of apprehension originating from the western end of the crowd reached me. An instant later, I heard the familiar siren; the students became very quiet and tense. A few of them even started to extricate themselves from the crowd. Mohan stopped midway through his poem; then, as if recalling his courage, began to recite again, his voice very clear in the sudden hushed silence.

  Presently, a white Ambassador with a blue siren light came into view. It was followed by two jeeps, both crammed full of policemen with lathis and wire-mesh shields.

  Heads turned towards the gate, where the car and jeeps stopped. Someone now took Mohan’s place and began in a loud voice to beseech the students not to leave the area. ‘It is our rightful struggle,’ he said, in broken English, even as the crowd parted to make way for the policemen striding towards the museum where the vice-chancellor was held captive.

  I knew the car with the blue siren belonged to the local superintendent of police. I even knew his name – I had seen it mentioned once or twice in the local newspapers. He was known as a dedicated campaigner against local mafias. I craned my neck to get a better glimpse of him as he passed us, surrounded by a posse of constables. He was a short, corpulent man, and the expression on his face was nervous and fidgety. His cap sat askew on his head, and he walked with the gait of a man with some muscular trouble in the groin.

  The man who had replaced Mohan was still haranguing the students to stand firm and refuse to bow to police pressure.

  Later everyone, even the local papers, would offer different versions. No one apparently was close enough to see what actually happened. Too many people pressed on to the SP and his men making their way through the crowd. But people did reca
ll seeing the SP’s head suddenly capless; they would remember seeing him turn around angrily and slap the boy hard standing nearest to him; they would remember the boy throwing himself upon the SP with a mighty roar; they would remember the wrestling bodies sprawling into the crowd, which quickly receded and let them fall to the ground.

  After that there was chaos.

  The policemen left standing beside the jeeps and the white Ambassador panicked, and in their hurry to get to the commotion invisibly developing inside the crowd, they frantically swung their lathis to clear the congestion. In the restricted space allowed them, they couldn’t swing these weapons much. One student got hold of the other end of one of the lathis and snatched it away from the terrified policeman.

  This encouraged the students. Angry voices rose in unison. The policemen were easily outnumbered. A few more lathis were snatched away, and even used, and the air was filled with the sickening thwack of wood crashing down on human bones, yelps of pain rising from the crowd.

  And then I heard a big boom: it was the kind of noise a big Diwali firecracker makes, except that the sound came through slightly muffled. I turned towards the direction the noise had come from and saw a policeman – not more than twenty; tall and lean, with the beginnings of a faint moustache around his lips – totter forward, his face distorted with agony. He had been hit by something from the back, and as the crowd instinctively cleared behind him, I saw his attacker. It was a young student; his big-collared white shirt stuck to his emaciated torso like a second skin. I noticed his polyester bell-bottoms – seventies-style clothes passed down to him from someone much older in the family. His long, thin arms hanging at his sides, his feet well apart, he watched the policeman fall to the ground with a mixture of fascination and horror on his face.

  As the policeman staggered and fell, almost as though in slow motion, watched by colleagues momentarily stunned into stillness, his back came into view; a mess of furrowed skin and blood. His khaki shirt had been torn to shreds, which stuck to red raw chunks of flesh that had been loosened from beneath the skin.