The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  He had changed considerably in the last year. I hadn’t forgotten what he told me soon after my mother died, one evening on the ghats in Benares. Freedom from all bonds was what he had desired: this harsh ascetic resolve had brought him to Pondicherry. The intimacy with Deepa now made me wonder about the life he had shared with my mother, the deprivations he had come to know in it, the special needs which Deepa appeared to fulfil.

  Deepa herself was aware of this. She often dropped hints about her dissatisfaction with the way my father had led his life so far. These remarks, and the proprietory claim they appeared to make on my father, made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to respond. Hopeful thoughts of Catherine would usually banish the anxieties I felt about my father.

  *

  The days drifted past, and I began to feel a bit bored and restless. The hotel didn’t cost much and food in Pondicherry was cheap. But there was little reason to stay on. The heat, for one, was an extremely discouraging factor. All that had once struck me as somewhat interesting for its newness – the dazzling sea, the blinding white light, the geometrically straight boulevards stretching emptily into a trembling haze, the high grey walls of secluded houses and their knife-edged shadows – all that now seemed stale, and as I awakened every morning to the curtains fading slowly in the harsh light from the sea, I told myself: let Catherine’s letter arrive today, and I’ll pack my bags and leave tomorrow.

  It was not possible to think beyond tomorrow. The future seemed such a large blank, and it seemed even larger when my father, in his new solicitous mood, wanted to know about my plans for the year ahead.

  His health had improved hugely. He had resumed his normal routine. He no longer appeared on Deepa’s arm when he went into the dining room, and he often lectured me in the way he had in the past. He spoke of the need for a design in one’s life; he spoke of ancestral obligations; he spoke of samskara. ‘We all have something in us of our forebears; we must act true to their legacy.’ It was something I, as a child, had often heard him say, and it didn’t make any clearer sense to me now.

  But I did feel myself on the spot when he asked specific questions. Among other things, he wanted to know if I had been preparing for the Civil Service exam during my time in Benares.

  These probings of my father always jolted me out of my distraction. I couldn’t think of much to say and I gave vague replies to him. But once I was frank and focused enough to say that I was more interested in an academic career than in the Civil Service. I said I wanted to study at a university in Delhi for a Ph.D. degree. It surprised me to see how receptive he was to the idea.

  He added that it would be a good idea for me to get some teaching experience in the months that remained before I could apply for admission to a university. He suggested I talk to Deepa; she knew friends in Dharamshala who ran a primary school for Tibetan children.

  Deepa was in fact present on the occasion we had this discussion. She was wearing her usual uniform of white cotton sari, and walking alongside my father in her slow graceful manner. We had gone for a stroll along the promenade. It had just stopped drizzling and the sea looked lazily replete. The strong salty breeze made the white shirt of the ice-cream vendor in the deserted distance billow and flutter; gusts of steam rose from the drying asphalt and immediately vanished.

  Deepa said, in her slightly high-pitched anxious voice, ‘If you want I’ll call my friends and ask them if they have a vacancy. They are always looking for new people. The salary isn’t much, but you’ll like Dharamshala.’

  The idea attracted me, not for the reason my father had mentioned but for the proximity to the Himalayas it offered. Even as Deepa spoke, I felt a great longing to be back in the mountains, to know again some of the drama that, after Kalpi, had come to be attached to them in my imagination.

  Images from my previous travels there occurred often in my daydreams. I remembered in particular my time in Darjeeling, the rain steadily drumming on the corrugated-iron roof while I sat myself before a vivacious log fire, and watched through large French windows the steam-engined toy train scuttling out of a thick wall of fog, triumphantly hooting, its greasy elbows frantically working. I remembered, too, the clear days, when I could see far in the distance where low arching clouds formed elegant awnings over the rumpled green silk of tea estates. There were many other mental pictures, and their suggestions of travel and new sights came as a release from the anxiety and restlessness I had come to feel in Pondicherry.

  *

  Deepa called her friends. As it happened, they did need an English teacher for the school semester beginning in three months’ time, and they were happy to accept me; they weren’t discouraged by my lack of formal qualifications. Working with remarkable speed, Deepa arranged my job in just two more phone calls.

  I was asked to reach Dharamshala two weeks before school started in mid-July. In the meantime, there still remained many more weeks to kill. On the idle afternoons I spent in my darkened room, I daydreamed of travelling around India, as I had done the previous summer. Walking past the Alliance Française, I toyed with the idea of learning French: I imagined Catherine’s delighted response to my secret proficiency in the language. The day came to be broken up into these separate daydreams and reveries. I didn’t read much. I found my attention quickly drifting from even the newspapers and magazines I picked up at the reception. The bag full of books I had brought from Benares remained unopened in one corner of my room.

  I lay in my bed for most of the morning, eyes never averted for too long from the wall clock under the portraits of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Punctually, at three o’clock every afternoon, I went down to the reception, where the stern-faced woman no longer said anything but simply shook her head on meeting my nervous gaze, and I would trudge back to my room, through the forecourt and up the stairs, in an agony of dejection, which would slowly subside through the rest of the day and night, only to turn into fresh expectancy the next morning.

  Then one day Deepa said, ‘You must meet my niece, Priya. She is staying at your hotel and is also bored with Pondicherry. Maybe you two could spend some time together.’

  I at once knew who she meant. I had seen her almost every evening as I came out of my room and stood on the balcony. She sat facing the sea, with her back to the exercising Germans, on the edge of a wooden bench, her hands in her lap. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, touchingly thin and flat-chested in her ill-fitting kurta, her coarse frizzy hair massed over her narrow shoulders. I often saw her at the hotel laundry, and seen from close up her elongated face was pretty, with small delicate features and large black melancholy eyes.

  Deepa said, ‘She has just finished school. She went to an exclusive Christian boarding school and came out completely westernized. Her parents are very devoted to the ashram and feel alienated from her. They sent her here to get some Indian culture. But I can’t do much with her. I hardly have any time.’

  Time wasn’t so much a problem as the appropriateness of being with a girl who was only three years younger than me. But when I looked at my father, whom I expected be alert to this aspect, he was nodding his head in agreement. Deepa herself seemed quite keen, and arranged a meeting the very next day.

  I had no experience of girls like Priya, and I was apprehensive at first. There was something confusing about such simplicity as she seemed to possess. I responded with caution to her eager and open ways. It took me time to realize that she was what she appeared to be, and as the days passed, I came to be grateful for her company.

  The childlike enthusiasm with which she talked about her school, the nuns and friends she idolized, the books she read, all this was so remote from my own preoccupations that I could not but welcome the different associations and thoughts they created in my mind.

  We went for walks on the promenade and often ran into my father and Deepa on their evening stroll. These encounters had a subduing effect on Priya. She had little to say to my father, who in turn had never been easy in the company of
younger people. She held Deepa in great awe, and was tongue-tied before her: the reason lay in the family story she had heard from childhood, the story she once repeated to me, of how Deepa, as the sole owner of a vast business, had renounced everything in order to be at the ashram and work as a minor administrator.

  Things improved when Deepa lent me a ramshackle but still operative moped, and Pondicherry and its environs opened up for me as places that could be explored and even enjoyed. Every day now, I went on the moped to Auroville, the international village a few miles outside Pondicherry. Most of the sprawling area was forested, with clusters of elegant buildings in small clearings. Its residents were mostly middle-aged or elderly Europeans and Indians who had been living there for a decade or more; something calm and contented lay behind their reserved demeanour and unhurried gait. They were part of the soothing bucolic nature of the place: the bullock carts trundling down long, somnolent roads, their passengers, colourfully dressed peasant women, solemnly staring as you attempted to pass them; the dirt paths meandering through dense woods of banyan trees; the crickets crepitating through long smoky twilights.

  Priya often came with me to Auroville, riding pillion on the moped, her hair frequently flying into my face as she turned her head, one arm draped around my abdomen. There, in a café set in a shaded clearing between thick bamboo groves, we lingered for hours, drinking tea or nibbling at the walnut cake the place specialized in. I listened to Priya as she recounted the plot of The Scapegoat and Rebecca – she was devoted to Daphne du Maurier – in her vivacious sing-song voice, her head childishly drooping leftward, large eyes flickering to take in the fresh arrivals at the café, one hand habitually smoothing her unruly hair.

  She often brought her notebook and wrote little haiku poems in it, wetting the tip of the pencil as she ruminated over a word. She never showed the poems to me.

  ‘You would laugh. Grown-ups are so cruel,’ she said.

  I idly wondered about her life on the occasions she spoke about it. The schoolgirlish intimacies with other students, the crushes on male teachers and pop stars, the starry-eyed anticipation of the future – all of this seemed so remote from my own life and so embalmed in innocence.

  It rained a lot in Auroville, especially in the afternoons; these monsoon showers, so heavy and furious, were consoling to me as we sat in the café, dry and safe. A light breeze carrying a fresh aroma of moist earth would be the first sign of approaching rain. Then the scattered black clouds would steadily blend into a vast, smooth canopy. A few outsized drops fell randomly at first and were immediately soaked up by the parched red earth. After a few minutes began a firm, regular pattering on the tarpaulin roof of the café’s veranda; the ground in front softened and then in a few seconds was scored with criss-crossing channels of water. Outlined against the dark foliage of mango trees and the brown corrugated-iron roof of the lavatory, the rain was all thick ropes at first and then, as it thinned, delicately fibrous.

  Long after the rain stopped there would remain the flushing sounds of overflowing drains, the burble of tiny rivulets busily furrowing the pliant earth and, finally, the steady plop-plop of water sloping down the tarpaulin roof into a rusty Ovaltine tin.

  The sun was quick to reappear and soon dried everything. Red dust swirled through the bars of sun below giant ancient banyan trees, and naked bronze-bodied children frolicked noisily in shaded ponds as we returned each sunset to Pondicherry.

  As we neared the city, the traffic growing thicker all the time, the clouds on the horizon gloriously crimson and pink, a familiar disquiet would gnaw at me.

  Once when the reception woman bluntly shook her head, Priya, who was standing next to me, said, ‘Why does that woman always shake her head when she sees you, and why do you suddenly turn so grim and silent?’

  She was alert to my moods now; she had started questioning me about my own life. Her questions were bold and intrusive; they could exasperate me, but I could also sense, and was moved by, the simple curiosity that I thought lay behind them.

  I told her nothing on that occasion. I said I hadn’t ever noticed the woman shaking her head at me; I denied being ‘grim and silent’.

  I lay awake until late that night, suddenly full of self-recrimination and trying to work up a new resolve.

  8

  PRIYA WAS SITTING BEHIND ME on the moped, on our way to Mahabalipuram – the last of our excursions together – when I said that I was leaving the next day. I told her I was planning to travel around the country for a few weeks before heading off to Dharamshala to take up my job there.

  She didn’t say anything, but I felt her arm wrapped around my abdomen suddenly slacken. She was sullen and withdrawn and dishevelled, her hair tousled after the long windy ride, as I parked the moped and walked down the sandy paths with her to the shore temples.

  All through the morning I had known a familiar heaviness of heart: the special feeling before departure, which in this case was mixed up with the ever-present anxiety of not having heard from Catherine, and a sense of the unresolved things I would be travelling with.

  I was expecting a day of small quiet distractions at the shore temples. But it was not to be: loudspeakers blaring Tamil film music followed us from temple to temple. Guides holding plastic-sheathed certificates and speaking pidgin Hindi lurked behind every sculpted column. Noisy school tour groups thronged the forecourts, and tourist coaches disgorged squinting Europeans in straw hats who were immediately set upon by a small army of half-naked beggars lying in wait outside temple gates.

  After an hour of this, Priya said she was bored. She asked me if she could go for a swim, and when I agreed, the undercurrent of delight that always lay in her voice seemed to return. As we trudged through wildernesses of thick burning sand, she pointed and laughed at the corpulent Russian tourists slumped beneath faded beach umbrellas, the fleshy folds around their torsos glossy with suntan oil; she bantered with the ragged coconut vendors and drug pushers and masseurs that pursued us for a while before giving up.

  She finally found a secluded place in a clump of coconut trees, and reappeared in a white swimsuit that set off the swarthy complexion of her thin arms and legs. She dropped her kurta and jeans by my side and then, in a sudden burst of energy, sprinted away, a tangle of brown limbs. She waded and splashed through a timid wavelet and then, with a squeal of girlish delight, dived headlong into a nascent breaker, only to emerge a few seconds later, shaking her head from side to side, wiping away wet sticky hair from her face.

  She swam farther out than my half-shut eyes could see in the silver-blue blinding glare. A couple of coconut vendors came over, lingered a few feet away and shot hopeful glances at me. After them there came a long procession of young boys in dhotis, with caste marks on their foreheads, supervised by a short, stocky man in a silk lungi, their cautious steps leaving a trail of footprints on the wet sand. I had seen them filing out of their bus at the temples; they looked incongruous here.

  After the boys went back, the beach remained empty. I occasionally saw Priya’s bobbing head in the far distance. From time to time a small breeze blew in from the sea, and when it did, the serrated shadow of a coconut leaf swayed over the unread open page of the book I held in my hand. The sun climbed higher in the hot white sky.

  At some point I noticed Priya coming back. She was dripping with water; grains of sand stuck to the soles of her feet. There was a wan shy smile on her face as she collapsed on her stomach beside me.

  We lay there silently for some time, the trees behind us swaying and crackling in the breeze, the surf hissing up the gentle slope to the beach and abruptly shimmying back, unveiling a glittering mirror of watery sand.

  I had become so used to the silence that it startled me to hear Priya speak.

  ‘What were you thinking about?’ she said.

  I turned to look at her face freckled with tiny drops of water, and she repeated her question, abruptly flicking back curly strips of wet hair from her face. ‘What were you thinking ab
out when I was swimming?’

  I quickly lied. ‘Nothing, nothing important,’ I said.

  What were you thinking about? From Priya, it was now a recurring question, and it irritated me with the offhand way it unravelled the complicated web of thoughts within my mind.

  I could tell her nothing: it would have shocked her to glimpse even a hint of the thoughts and memories set so far away from this flat bright seascape: the white glowing peaks straining defiantly against a star-spangled sky and the damp chill of the room in the rest house at Kalpi, the swaying shadows, the sound of falling water outside, the desultory intimate talk, the long melancholy silences during which I had suddenly realized that Catherine was watching me, an expression of tender expectancy playing around her soft moody eyes and enigmatically smiling mouth.

  I had been thinking about all that again, and in a much more complicated way. I was hoping, as I always did, to coax out more meaning from remembered moods and gestures. At the same time, I could not avoid a creeping sense of exhaustion. In recent days, these forced memories had come to have some of the monotony and boredom of a too frequently observed routine, and I was often surprised, while in the midst of them, by a great urge to break away, to read, to travel, to engross myself in the great world, in an endeavour so exalted and consuming that I would forget about everything else, most of all my own welfare and happiness.

  I would have found it impossible to explain any of this to Priya; and, as always, I told her nothing.