The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I felt a new kind of unease: it was the beginnings of the guilt I had not known until this moment. Watching him as he lay there, appearing so vulnerable and exposed in his deep slumber, was to have a dark, heavy sense of the relationship that now bound me to him.

  Even as I stood there, the first moment of shock wearing off, I was surprised to see how adroitly Catherine handled the situation. Such great reserves of calm she drew upon as she woke Anand up and, as he opened his eyes sulkily and squinted at us, began to ask him why he was still in Benares. Had he gone to Bihar at all, or had he returned early?

  She went on with her questions. Anand, still lying on the floor, kept wearily staring out of sleep-blurred eyes at her. I began to notice that he looked distinctly unwell: his hair was rumpled, he hadn’t shaved for some time, there were dark shadows under his eyes and his mouth had a pinched look.

  Catherine finally ended the questioning, but with a request: ‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said, smiling, and then added, a contrived note of weariness in her voice, ‘but could you make us some tea now? We are both exhausted, totally, completely exhausted.’

  Anand seemed to have been waiting for that cue; he got up in an access of fresh energy, kissed Catherine on the cheek and started making tea, apologizing all the time for his inaction of previous days.

  Later, the tea made and served, he brought out photographs of Catherine’s friends from their time in Benares. Most of them were fairly innocuous: smiling faces in front of temples, ghats and restaurants. It was the photographs taken at Ramnagar, on the sandy beach across the river, that held my attention. In one of them, Anand appeared in a skimpy bathing suit, his thin hairy body exposed, splashing water over the broad sunburned back of an oblivious Jacques. He seemed so different in these pictures, so free and relaxed; Catherine and her friends seemed to have brought out in him such a childlike enthusiasm for life.

  I watched the pictures with growing discomfiture. They made me feel guiltier about Anand. I saw Catherine, her face freshly washed and glowing, exclaim and smile over the photos, and felt even worse.

  Within minutes she had slipped into her old role with Anand: here, she was strong-willed and purposeful, hard to recognize as the fragile person I had known in the last few hours.

  The small room suddenly felt oppressive. I left soon after finishing my tea. Catherine and Anand came to the top of the stairs to see me off. I had noticed Anand scrutinizing my face, frank curiosity in his eyes; he now looked especially closely at me as I said something to Catherine about meeting soon.

  Outside, boredom hung heavy over familiar alleys and shops. The day, only just begun, already seemed stale, the white light dull, the river, glimpsed sporadically from the alleys, torpid.

  The sadhu with matted hair did not look up as I passed him. Behind him, a boy attempting to ride a bicycle much bigger than he was tipped over and fell; a veiled woman watching him from the roof suddenly broke into laughter. The vegetable vendor kept on monotonously reciting the prices of tomatoes and cabbage.

  Back at the house, Mrs Pandey and Shyam looked up from platters of sliced onion, tomatoes and garlic as I came up the stairs, and then hung their heads again. A shiny new padlock glistened on the door to Miss West’s room. The open-air bathroom was without water, and there was no power in my room. Street sounds – snatches of excited talk, the jangle of rickshaw bells – rushed in through the window I opened; dust swirled in the rays of sunshine that struck the floor; dust rested in a thin film over the books on the table; a new cobweb hung from one of the ceiling beams.

  On the floor lay a letter from my father, postmarked Pondicherry; Shyam would have slipped it beneath the door. The letter had come registered. Why the importance and urgency? I wondered as I opened the envelope.

  Inside, there was a brief precise note in unfamiliar handwriting that said that my father wasn’t well, the old heart problem, and hoped I would come to Pondicherry soon to see him.

  I untied my shoes and lay on the bed and imagined my father in Pondicherry, in a whitewashed house along the coast. I thought of leaving Benares, and there came to me immediately the painful thought of being separated from Catherine.

  4

  SO BEGAN MY LAST DAYS in Benares – days of gnawing restlessness and gloom.

  The weather, so beautifully benign, clashed with my mood. Winter was slowly receding, and though the mornings were still misty and chilly, the afternoons were one long stretch of breezeless sunshine. Scarcely a cloud lingered overhead, and the smell of roasted peanuts hung all over Assi and Lanka. The evenings steadily lengthened.

  The violence I had witnessed at the university had had ramifications. The student agitators had eventually organized themselves and declared a general strike. More violence had followed while I was away. Police excesses had become the new rallying point for the strike leaders, whose list of demands grew to include the withdrawal of all policemen from the university. A big crackdown by the authorities was now expected; the talk at chai shops was of more instability and violence, and for a few days after I returned to Benares I kept away from the university.

  I stayed in my room all day – it was too hot to sit out in the sun for long stretches – and randomly browsed through books that seemed either to match my mood or to offer a palliative to it.

  The thought of my ailing father came occasionally to me, and brought with it fresh pangs of guilt and self-reproach. I hadn’t dared read the note again. It lay next to my bed, and every time I saw it I wondered if I should go to him immediately. But the idea wasn’t allowed to linger long, and was crowded out, as it was, by thoughts of Catherine.

  I had stopped going to Catherine’s house. It was her own wish. She said she felt uncomfortable and nervous being with Anand and me under the same roof. She wished to see me separately. I didn’t complain. It was difficult for me as well to see her with Anand. I never had much to say to him and in the couple of times I met him after my return from Kalpi, that inability had turned into self-reproach. I wasn’t able to face him with an unclouded mind; guilt and unease hung over even the most commonplace of conversations between us.

  I would see Catherine in one of those modernized sweetshops-cum-cafés that were just beginning to replace the old sooty halwai stalls in Benares. It was she who suggested it. She seemed to imply that there was no question of our meeting in any place more private.

  There at the sweetshop we talked for a half-hour or less over cups of milky tea. Catherine was always full of fresh news regarding her plans for France – plans steadily progressing now. Her parents had agreed to help her find a flat; she was to leave soon, in a few weeks if Anand’s passport came through. Each one of these developments infused her with new energy; a seeming nod from her father about anything could make her day.

  She would come into the café, beads of perspiration on her forehead, an embroidered bag hanging from her shoulder, and give me a quick furtive kiss on the cheek as the owner, sitting under a profusely garlanded framed photo of his father or grandfather, absent-mindedly swatted the flies whining around the gleaming glass cases, and the underworked waiters, grime-stained hand towels draped over their shoulders, looked out blankly at the bright empty street outside.

  These meetings left me weary with unexpressed emotion. I wished nothing less while they lasted than to recapture the intimacy we had known, however briefly, in Kalpi. This desire – which arose fresh and was thwarted every time we met – was only partly physical. Its most compelling aspect was that mysterious affinity I’d known. It was something I had never known before, except as a witness, when I saw, with wonder and curiosity, Catherine and Anand together. In my memory, it had become part of the wonderful strangeness of the time – the bizarre concatenation of events and desires and emotions that, among other things, had made two full-grown adults revert to the long-forgotten language of childhood.

  A part of me also wished, in some vague yet optimistic way, to talk about the future, about where we saw ourselves in the next fe
w years. I could not bring it up myself. I feared being presumptuous, and I feared, too, the harsh truths such a line of thought might expose me to.

  Catherine made scarcely any reference to what had happened between us; the terrible thought often came to me that the time in Kalpi, unforgettable for me, had already been forgotten by her. I wondered then if for her it had become yet another of the inconsequential experiences she had disclosed to me, a minor distraction that would soon be swallowed up by other memories from her long, eventful past.

  Often, listening to her speak about Anand and her anxieties, I felt full of resentment. I felt with greater intensity what I had dimly recognized the first time I saw her with her friends: that her life previous to Benares had a greater claim on her, and the person with very ordinary concerns was more authentic and tangible than the person who had bestowed her gift of tenderness and happiness on me.

  But then she would, in the midst of speaking of other matters, offer one of her endearments – French, but rendered quaint in English – her eyes suddenly full of concern for me and our ‘beautiful friendship’, as she called it, and my discontent would subside for some time.

  But not for long. I imagined her going back to her house, through the crowded alleys, past the sadhu and the halwai, up the stairs with the mural, to the room where Anand lay half-propped on bolsters, and the thought of this other life of hers, with its greater, more significant intimacies, would once again plunge me into gloom.

  I would make my own way back to Assi. I went through the ghats; I avoided the alleys, whose bright liveliness in the evening – the men playing cards or chess, the groups of loudly bantering men at tea shops, the snatches of sitar or sarod music floating out of open windows – depressed me. In my mind, I would keep thinking of things Catherine had said to me, turning them over, searching for signs of affection, and feeling more disappointed and saddened than before.

  The hole in my stomach growing large, I loitered on the ghats until it was dark, among a mixed company of touts and drug pushers; washermen gathering clothes that had rested on the stone steps all afternoon, white and sparkling in the sun; groups of children playing hopscotch on the chalk-marked stone floor; a few late bathers, dressing and undressing under tattered beach umbrellas; and the groups of old men, silently gazing at the darkening river.

  As I came back to the house, walking down the dark alley that led to it, I would be suffused by a strange sense of anticipation; the sense that there might be something, someone – a letter, a person, a telegram – waiting inside, who or which at one stroke would change my life for ever and, leaping across all the intermediate steps, transport me instantly into a world cleansed free of such exacting cares and anxieties.

  Each time I would meet with a keener sense of disappointment as, after washing my hands downstairs in a tiny dark washroom, where the floor was slippery with slime and often caused Panditji’s students to fall, I would go up to the second floor, where Mrs Pandey and Shyam sat waiting, and settle down on the floor to eat the unvarying meal of dhal, chapati and sabzi.

  Wearily each evening I watched Shyam garnish the dhal in his slow methodical way. He warmed the ghee in a small steel bowl, added some sliced onion and garlic and cumin and coriander seeds; he tilted back a bit, his eyes half-shut, his lips curled, as sparks of ghee and blackened cumin seeds flew out of the bowl with a loud fizz and crackle; then, after the fumes from the bowl began to grow steadily thicker and rise – filling the room with an aroma that was to be for ever associated in my mind with the restlessness of those days – after the onion and garlic turned a deep golden-brown, he would tremulously lift the bowl with a steel pincer and gently pour it into the brass tureen, where, after a brief noisy protest, the ghee would tamely spread across the watery surfaces of the dhal.

  *

  I now heard a special reproach in Shyam’s voice when he said, ‘Greed is the biggest evil, it destroys families, sunders son from parents, husband from wife . . .’

  Something of a cautionary message also came to me from a book I was reading at the time. There are certain books we read which, no matter how celebrated or acclaimed, make little or no impression on us. It is because, intellectually and emotionally, we aren’t ready for them; our experience and understanding of ourselves and the world isn’t rich and deep enough to match that of the writer.

  I had first read Sentimental Education, a novel by Gustave Flaubert, a couple of years earlier. I had bought a secondhand 1950s edition of it for twenty rupees from a pavement seller in Allahabad. The name of the first owner and the red rubber stamp of the bookseller, Wheeler’s, were still legible on the flyleaf, and from the pages, when I opened them, fluttered out pressed rose petals. I had been attracted by the prestige of the writer’s name and that of the publishing imprint, Penguin Classics. But the novel had passed me by, like many other books at the time: it had struck me as flat and overly long. I did persevere to the very end, but it was with the bloody-mindedness with which a man might finish a marathon long after he has run out of energy. After that the book had mouldered on my shelf with some other conscientiously read but unabsorbed books.

  Then, just before leaving for Mussoorie, I had come across an essay by Edmund Wilson on Flaubert’s politics. It talked about Sentimental Education in so lively a fashion as to make me think I had missed almost everything that was of value in the novel. I picked it up again. Unlike other books, which at this time I started and almost immediately dropped, I didn’t browse through it. I read it straight through, in a few sittings. And, amazingly, I now found this account of an ambitious provincial’s tryst with metropolitan glamour and disillusion full of subtle satisfactions. There were things in it I was particularly receptive to at this time. The protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, seemed to mirror my own self-image with his large, passionate, but imprecise longings, his indecisiveness, his aimlessness, his self-contempt. Also, the book – through its long, detailed descriptions, spread over many years, of love affairs that go nowhere, of artistic and literary ambitions that dwindle and then fade altogether, of lives that have to reconcile themselves to a slow, steady shrinking of horizons – held out a philosophical vision I couldn’t fail to recognize. Something of Hindu fatalism seemed to come off its pages, a sense of life as drift and futility and illusion, and to see it dramatized so compellingly through a wide range of human experience was to have, even at twenty, with so little experience of anything, a chilling intimation of the life ahead.

  *

  But the moment passed, as all such moments inevitably do; and my thoughts kept coming back, through familiar routes, to Catherine.

  The situation at the university improved; the student leaders were arrested; the strike fizzled out. I started going to the library again, and tried hard to rediscover all my old satisfactions of habit, the kind of undistracted, single-minded pursuit of knowledge in which I had spent so many hours.

  There were moments of panic now when I felt that my life had changed in some irrevocable manner, and that its old certainties had disappeared, with no purpose to replace them.

  At other times, these uneasy reflections would be replaced by memories of Kalpi, from which I could still derive a heartening sense of well-being.

  These inner dramas dissolved my concentration, and the time when I could sit for long, still afternoons on a straight-backed wooden chair, the lawn outside my window slowly passing into shadow, when an extra minute spent outside with Rajesh and his friends would lead to pangs of guilt, that time became frustratingly hard to retrieve.

  Rajesh often showed up at the library, and once when I saw him, he asked me about the trip to Mussoorie. I told him whatever I could. He listened intently. He asked me more questions about the Himalayas, for which he seemed to have a feeling not unlike mine, although, like everything else, he did not express it very clearly. I also told him about Miss West and Catherine, and he was an even more attentive listener. From that point on, he often asked me about them. I felt that he had always been curious ab
out my life outside the university, and the nature of my connection to Miss West and Catherine genuinely intrigued him for being so far from his own experience – the experience of someone who had never met a white person, had never travelled outside the region.

  Beyond the library gates where I would have lunch, there were his usual hangers-on, with their talk of politics and large bribes and dowries. Rajesh hadn’t been at the university for the past many days, and didn’t know much about the latest spell of student unrest. But the other students had all the details. It was now known that the student who threw the hand grenade at the policeman had been tortured by the same policeman in custody some time back. The attack had been a planned act of revenge.

  I still wondered if Rajesh had had something to do with all that. But the students said nothing that could have hinted at his involvement. He himself gave little cause for suspicion. The next time I visited his room – it was to pick up a xeroxed article I had lost and one of his hanger-ons had found at the library – the bag with the pistols was gone. I suspected he had hidden it somewhere, and looked in his almirah when he was briefly out of the room, but there were only some clothes, a jar of coconut hair oil and a framed and garlanded picture of Hanuman on the bare shelves.

  He was more relaxed with me, often asking me about Arjun. His disconcerting habit of creeping up behind me as I sat and read was intact. After surprising me, he would peer at my book, and once again he would say, ‘Edmund Wilson! Why are you reading the same man all the time?’

  Slightly fed up with this line, I one day showed him Wilson’s essay on Flaubert’s politics. I said he should read it to find out why I read Wilson. I asked him to get the essay xeroxed at the library photocopying room, and he in turn asked one of his hangers-on to do so. As an afterthought, after covering the frail paperback with brown paper, I gave him Sentimental Education to read. I told him he’d have a better sense of the essay after reading the novel.