The Romantics
Page 18
*
It was close to dusk when we returned to Pondicherry. There were a few strolling families and ice-cream vendors on the promenade. At the bandstand, ageing policemen wearing French-style red helmets played ‘Halcyon Days’ to a small indifferent audience of Hindu pilgrims. Invisible behind the bright sodium lamps, the sea heaved and broke on the rocks.
At the hotel, Priya went off to buy some incense sticks from a nearby store. I went straight to my room; I no longer stopped at the reception.
Later that evening, I was in my room, packing for the next day’s journey, when Priya came in through the open door, freshly bathed and bearing a whiff of talcum powder.
I thought she had come for a walk on the promenade, and I didn’t look up from the crammed suitcase I was pressing down in an attempt to lock it.
I struggled with the suitcase for some time, half expecting her to help me. I looked up when the two ends of the lock finally met in a click. She was sitting in the only chair provided in the room, facing the sea, but with her hands over her face, her thin shoulders jerking spasmodically with ever deeper sobs.
Her sobs intensified as I walked over and squatted beside her chair. I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t reply.
I watched her helplessly waiting for her to speak. But when she did, her speech was so blurred and indistinct that I had to strain hard to hear each individual word.
‘You . . . are . . . going away, you . . . are . . . going . . . away,’ she said, ‘and I . . . and I . . .’
Before she could complete the sentence, a fresh wave of emotion convulsed her.
The piteous sight released something in me, in that heart which ached with its own secret burden. Tears sprang to my eyes, and as I was trying to control them, she removed her tiny hands from her face.
Her eyes were swollen red, her cheeks drenched. But now as she looked at me, she noticed the wetness in my own eyes which I was trying to hide, and a strangely beatific expression came over her face.
Once again my mind was somewhere else, but she was not to know this as, looking up at me, her sobs receding, she began to speak, once, twice, choking and sniffling between words, her voice pleading and anxious: ‘Will you . . . miss . . . me? . . . Will . . . you . . . miss . . .’
As if in a farce, I heard a muffled cough behind me.
It was Deepa, framed against the open door, her face dark and unreadable. She wasn’t unexpected. We were to have our last dinner together that evening. Deepa was to accompany us to the dining room.
She walked towards us. Her face appeared in the light. She looked as severe and composed as always. She asked, ‘What’s wrong? What happened to you, Priya? Why are you crying?’
Priya said nothing, and kept sniffling, her head hung low. Deepa said, ‘Please go to your room now and wash. We are going to the dining room in five minutes.’ Stern authority now resonated in her voice.
Priya got up reluctantly, knocking against the leg of the chair, her eyes downcast, with tear trails scored all over her cheeks. Slowly, with almost imperceptible movement, she shuffled out of the room, fear and shame written large in the curve of her back.
Deepa turned to me. I had been trying surreptitiously to wipe my eyes with my shirtsleeve. She said, the sternness in her voice abruptly gone, ‘I feared that this might happen. You should have been more careful. She is an impressionable girl. God knows what kind of romantic rubbish they give her to read in that awful school of hers.’
These were her only words on the subject. Priya didn’t join us for dinner. Deepa went to her room when she failed to emerge after ten minutes and came back saying, ‘She wants to rest, poor girl. I don’t blame her.’
She made no reference to Priya during the dinner. She joined my father in asking me about the travelling I proposed to do. She told me about her friends in Dharamshala.
*
These dinners in the communal dining room had always been brief; it was still early in the evening when I came back to the hotel, after tepid, somewhat formal goodbyes to my father and Deepa.
All through dinner, I had kept worrying about Priya. I had no idea what I would say to her, but I felt it imperative to go up to her room.
I was striding past the reception when I heard the stern-faced woman calling out my name.
‘There was a letter for you this afternoon,’ she said, in her clear gravelly voice. ‘The chokidar has slipped it into your room.’
‘Where . . . where?’ I stuttered, stupidly.
‘In your room,’ she repeated, a slight edge of irritation in her voice.
Suppressing the impulse to run, I briskly strode across the dimly lit forecourt with its throng of gleaming bicycles and scooters; then, once out of sight of the reception, I bounded up the steps two at a time, startling an old German with thick white hair coming down with bundles of laundry.
With a pounding heart I reached my room, fumblingly took out the key from my pocket, rammed it into the lock, turned and entered – as always, the curtain on the far, sea-facing window of the room billowed towards me and then, as I shut the door and killed the breeze, was sucked back, outlining the iron bars of the window.
The light switch was a few metres away from the door, but I didn’t bother with it. I looked down; the letter would be on the floor if it had been slipped underneath the door.
I saw, as my eyes adjusted themselves to the dark, a faint glow on the floor and I realized I was standing on part of it.
I picked it up. It was a white envelope, imprinted now with dust from the sole of my shoe, and – a mild twinge of disappointment there – oddly lightweight.
Still standing in the dark, I tore it open with trembling hands and then realized that, while doing so, I might have rendered illegible the return address on the back of the envelope.
I finally reached out and pressed the light switch. But I forgot to switch on the ceiling fan, and it was many hours later in that humid airless room that I discovered that my throat was dry and my body drenched from head to foot in sweat.
Catherine’s spidery handwriting covered the entire length of the one small page of thin airmail paper. Samar, it read:
Two weeks ago, Anand found a letter I was writing to you and everything between us came very suddenly and painfully to the surface. We still haven’t recovered, maybe we will never recover, and this might give you an idea of the violence I did to Anand by having an affair with you. The question before me is: why did I do it? And why did you do it? What was the meaning of this affair in the total economy of our lives, apart from giving me a sense of mischievous adventure and providing instant gratification to both of us? It was a perversion of human emotions, of our humanity. I now see that perversion within myself and feel ashamed. I feel ashamed of your role also. You only encouraged the development of harmful ideas and notions inside me. You told me to detach myself from Anand. What were you aiming for? In all this process, I have destroyed the trust Anand had in me – the trust of the person I love most in my life. I don’t know what you can do to save the situation. Perhaps, nothing. Please don’t write or try to get in touch in any other manner. Please accept this break with dignity and grace if it is possible for you.
Catherine
THREE
1
THE WORLD IS MAYA, illusion: it was one of the very first things my father told me. But it is a meaningless idea to a child, and the peculiar ordeals of adulthood take you even further away from true comprehension. New deprivations and desires continually open up within you, you keep learning new ways of experiencing pain and happiness, and the idea of illusion, never quite grasped, fades.
The world you find yourself in then becomes the supreme reality: the world you have to go on living in, with or without your private griefs.
I left Pondicherry the next day and travelled around the country for several weeks. I had little money and I travelled cheaply, mostly by bus and train. The plan and itinerary I was hoping to draw up, and had postponed formulating while in P
ondicherry, hoping to do it in a calmer state of mind, never came into being. My travels came to be ruled by whim and chance; the map traced by them, if I were to draw it today, would resemble the aimless drifting of one of those sadhus you still find travelling in second-class train compartments, people with gaunt blank faces and depthless eyes fixed on the passing scenery.
In some sense, I travelled everywhere and nowhere. The miles clocked up, and there came a point when I could no longer distinguish between the settlements clattering randomly past my jaded eyes – the overpopulated slums with their tottering houses, fetid alleys and exposed gutters, their cooped-up frustrations and festering violence, their hardened ugliness. The small and big towns where I often spent a sleepless night in a tiny bare hotel room all began to merge together. I would often be kept awake by the varied cacophony emanating from the other rooms, where young men of distinctly criminal appearance drank rum and watched jaunty Hindi musicals.
Something in me longed intensely for unfamiliar sights. But unfamiliarity couldn’t have, and didn’t, last long on the peculiar trails I took. In the weeks that followed my departure from Pondicherry, I came to know all too well the plangent cry of the speeding train in the night; the whine of the overused pneumatic door to an overcrowded waiting room where sleeping bodies lay swaddled in white sheets on the floor. It all came to be very predictable after so many journeys – the heat, the dust, the noise, the anxiety, the fatigue and the cold bucket-bath in a dismal flophouse at the end. Thrown into the chaos of a railway platform I could already anticipate the eerie silence that would descend after the train had gone. A sense of futility hovered above the long hours spent waiting at desolate mice-infested bus stops in the middle of nowhere, over the greasy late suppers among the coloured neon lights and throbbing speakers of all-night dhabas.
And as it turned out, the unfamiliar world I longed for proved to be disturbing in an unsuspected way. It was nowhere more so than in the towns I passed through, that had experienced Hindu–Muslim rioting over the then still standing Babri Masjid. In these places, I couldn’t walk a few yards away from my refuge for the night without encountering some conspicuous trace of recent violence: burned or scorched buildings, charred cars, buses and scooters, upturned carts with missing rubber tyres that, I would read in the papers, had been used as ‘flaming garlands’, looted shops showing the wretched brick behind the now destroyed panelling, shards of broken windows on empty roads and, here and there on the ground, faint grey stains of unwashed blood.
I saw all this – the clumsy brutality, the rage, the dereliction, the damage I had so far read about in the papers – and the great grief I felt was reduced gradually to wordless fear. I kept telling myself as consolation: this isn’t my world, I’ll soon be out of it.
Yet it was hard to deny that something in it matched my own state of mind. I knew I couldn’t get away from it by simply taking the next train out.
*
At this time of pain, and in the numb years that followed, there would often come to me the memory of the boy I had seen near Rajesh’s mother’s house: the boy with the cows whose sad melodious jingling I had heard that vacant afternoon in the mango grove, among the mute trees, the golden dust, the gnarled, humped roots.
The image came to me as if from a recurring dream, and it was always as unexpected during these travels, and had the same effect, as that sudden rent in the wall of rock streaking past train windows which reveals, for one brief second, sheep grazing quietly on a grassy meadow, around a pond whose still surface mirrors the clean blue sky.
The image with its perfect configuration of solitude, contentment and beauty was a kind of balm in those days of exhausting travel; it revived me by throwing me into daydreams of a simplified life and world – the kind of world where children herded cows all morning and returned home late in the afternoon to meals cooked on dung-cake fires.
It was pure fantasy, and I now recognize it as such. But we live by fantasies, and this one did then what, in retrospect, was a necessary thing: it created new hopes in order to offset the destruction of old ones. It diminished, however briefly, the feeling I had known after Pondicherry that I had been contaminated in some profound way. It made bearable my random travels, and made it possible for me to think that I had another chance.
And when that chance came – by luck much sooner than I could have expected – the fantasy not only survived but filled what appeared to me as the large and ominous void of the future.
In Dharamshala, where I arrived at the end of my travels to take up the job Deepa had arranged for me, I found new ways of being that weren’t far from my daydreams of that simple life.
*
Dharamshala was then, and has remained to a great extent, an unambitious little town. Its small population consisted mainly of Tibetans who had arrived in the 1960s as refugees from their homeland, and something of the private and incommunicable melancholy of permanent exile hung over its huddled houses and pinched streets. This effect was deepened when I arrived early one monsoon evening.
Stocky monks with tonsured heads, swirling robes and oddly garish socks scurried in and out of the fog swaddling the mountaintop town in grey vapour. Hollow television voices and pressure-cooker hisses escaped through curtained doors of tiny houses leaning into each other. Open iron-barred windows revealed cramped fluorescent-lit rooms where Tibetan women sat sewing, and in dimly lit shops, ageing men with broad, lined faces sat still and pensive behind jars of sticky sweets. They looked remote and abstracted even while talking to you, and you wondered what memories of lost homelands were decaying behind the piercing sadness of their stoic faces.
Part of my luck lay in finding the right house, and it began the very first night, when I saw a handwritten notice behind the receptionist’s desk at the hotel I was staying in. ‘Vacant,’ it said, ‘a two-bedroom house. Long-term tenants welcome. Contact Uma Devi at Harry’s Restaurant.’
I remember well going next morning to Harry’s Restaurant, and my first glimpse of the house I was to live in. I felt relatively calm that day; it was part of the minor satisfaction of travelling as I did, cheaply and randomly. To arrive at an unknown town after a long, exhausting bus ride; to squat under a vigorously flowing tap; to change into a freshly laundered shirt and pair of trousers and then step out, renewed, into the garish bustle of a bazaar – every one of these minor acts contained a brief but precious moment of well-being.
An aroma of ground coffee, and earnest, cigarette-punctuated conversations, hung in the small room that served as Harry’s Restaurant. In one corner, an auburn-robed young Tibetan monk kept erupting into head-turning shrieks of delight in response to whatever his companions, a middle-aged American couple, told him.
I asked for Uma Devi. I was expecting a local shopkeeping woman drowsing below framed pictures of the Dalai Lama. But Uma Devi turned out to be a slightly talkative, tonsured woman in her late thirties, from Bavaria, Germany; she had adopted the name after converting to Buddhism.
‘That was ten years ago,’ she said. ‘Now I feel like I was born with this name . . . It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she asked, suddenly turning a liquid gaze upon me. ‘Anyway, did you say you wanted to see the house?’
Agilely she led me through first a litter of back alleys, where ruddy-cheeked Tibetan children in those days played hopscotch, their exuberant cries borne aloft by the moist air and left to linger above the town, and then up a steep rock-strewn trail into a dense cluster of pine trees. She complained all the time of pot-smoking tenants who had recently destroyed the peace of her house. I listened only fitfully, panting to keep up with her unrelenting pace.
We passed the debris of a large picnic on a sunny glade – green plastic bags, pickle-stained paper plates, bits of eggshell, apple peels, crushed and crumpled packets of Uncle Chipps and Frooti – to which Uma gestured and said: ‘These yuppies from Chandigarh. They think they own the fucking universe and can do whatever they feel like doing. By the way, what do you do?’
We kept walking up the steep slope. Patches of sunlight trembled on the mossy ground littered with pine needles. A low lichened stone wall joined us on the left, petered out and then recovered. The trail looked as if it would level out soon, but didn’t. We kept going until Uma turned and pushed a wicket gate in the stone wall; she entered and then paused to wait for me, arresting the gate in mid-arc.
Quite out of breath by now, I clambered up the last of the rocky steps, went past the gate and looked up and had, at the very moment the gate creakingly swung back on its rusty hinges, the first of many invigorating sights of what was to be my home for the next seven years.
It stood in the middle of a grassy clearing on which the surrounding pine trees spread slender interlaced shadows, a single-storeyed red-roofed cottage, shyly hiding itself behind baskets streaming with bougainvillea. Inside, there were two large parquet-floored rooms whose clean-cut teak furniture gleamed in the austere white light filtered through muslin-curtained windows. There was a living room with a disused fireplace, a large-sized picture of the Dalai Lama on the mantelpiece and a faded flower-patterned carpet between wicker armchairs. A fly whined somewhere in the dank depths of the bathroom. The narrow kitchenette had a foggy window that looked out onto a tiny backyard, where one exotically coloured bird pecked at the muddy puddle left behind by the previous night’s rains.
*
It took little time to settle things with Uma Devi. She arranged for a maidservant to clean the house every week; she arranged for a boy to deliver dinner from her restaurant; she also helped in many other aspects of housekeeping. The only favour she wanted in return was for me not to take down the framed and garlanded picture of the Dalai Lama on the living-room mantelpiece.