The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  It didn’t take me long to adjust to my new surroundings. I moved into the house and spread my few possessions around. I let the house retain its bareness, and equipped it with only the few items of furniture that were strictly necessary. I liked walking through its large empty rooms and listening to the echo of my footsteps on the wooden floor.

  After many mornings of waking up in strange rooms to homesickness and heartache, I now opened my eyes to the white light coming through the muslin curtains, behind which I knew was the dewy lawn sparkling in the morning sun.

  The days filled up once school started. My duties weren’t onerous: three classes a day, and occasionally a private session with a student. I wished for more responsibilities, but the school had its own peculiar ways of functioning.

  It had been inaugurated some years back; the marble plaque marking the event mentioned the Dalai Lama and some other local dignitaries. But lacklustre management had led to swift decay. The principal – Mrs Sharma, Deepa’s friend, a highly strung woman in her mid-thirties – was hardly ever there; the sarcastic explanation offered by other teachers was that she was away ‘junketing’ around the world at various seminars on education and refugee problems. Her younger sister, Gita, a pretty plump woman with something unstable and fragile in her personality, looked after day-to-day administration. But she wasn’t very efficient, and the results of her inefficiency were visible all across the small compound. The hall with the corrugated-iron roof, where all five standards were accommodated, was littered with metal filing cabinets and expensive-looking projectors. New-looking furniture had been ordered but still lay under plastic wraps months after arrival; sports equipment was discernible under layers of dust in another corner. The electric voltage was too low for even ordinary heaters to work, and teachers had to resort to illegal log fires when the cold became unbearable.

  I felt sympathy for Gita. She was resented by the other teachers, many of whom were much older than she was. Her own sister, on the few occasions she was present at the school, treated her with startling rudeness in public.

  But I kept my distance from her problems. I did what was required of me – reciting the English alphabet three times a day, conducting spelling tests, setting homework – and went home. I exchanged little more than small talk with the other teachers, several of whom were people like myself, academic aspirants hoping to pick up some teaching experience. They stuck close together and thought me peculiar for keeping to myself; murmurs to this effect reached me at times, and I came to sense both curiosity and mockery in the excessive cordiality they displayed towards me.

  With the children themselves, I had a working rapport. They came mostly from Tibetan homes, the first from their families to be sent to school, and they were eager and intelligent learners, particularly of my subject, English, which was their passport to the larger world. Among their parents, who ran the small businesses and shops in the town, there were many who constantly worried about the progress of their wards. They were the ones who stood outside school as I came out, tightly grasping their slightly embarrassed child by the hand, accosted me with simple, often naive, questions, and touchingly offered me special discounts at their shops.

  There was still a lot of time left over from my teaching duties, and I filled that first semester with reading and long walks in the surrounding forests. In the market, I discovered a Tibetan bookseller. New kinds of books now appeared on the living-room mantelpiece, behind the picture of the Dalai Lama, where there had mostly been Penguin and Picador paperbacks. My reading tastes changed. I lost my passion for literature, and in fact developed a kind of fear about novels and the sprawling shapeless human lives they seemed to contain. Instead, I read books on wildlife and the environment; I learned to identify all the trees and birds and flowers in the area. I followed all the latest advances in science and astronomy. I also acquired a stereo system, and from a tiny shack tucked away in the back alleys I bought tapes of music that Miss West had once introduced me to: Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Sibelius. I made other good discoveries in the town: cheap restaurants, shops that sold good bread and cheese.

  I grew to like the variety of people passing through Dharamshala, the artificial bustle they created in the town’s winding, narrow alleys. The town received a disproportionate number of visitors. Some were Indians, young affluent men in packed Marutis, the ‘yuppies’ Uma Devi disliked, and honeymooners who posed for pictures, gingerly perched on horseback, in heavy ethnic costumes and jewellery. But most of the visitors were Tibetophiles from the West. There were ageing hippies with pony-tails and beer bellies; European and American dowagers in crimson robes and necklaces with big brown beads; German tourists clutching paperback copies of Siddhartha. One dusky evening the Tibetan man at the shop from where I bought my provisions pointed out to me a famous Hollywood actor and his equally famous wife, a fashion model. In more conspicuous numbers, however, were the tourists without spiritual ambitions, the American teenagers and bronzed Israeli young men on leave from compulsory military service, who, late in the evening, crowded into dingy video shacks run by foppish Tibetan youth wearing fluorescent anoraks and earrings.

  The liveliness of the bazaar was a welcome contrast to the peace and seclusion of my house, which I appreciated afresh every time I pushed the creaky wicket gate and went in after an unusually long and exhausting day at school. The natural serenity of the surroundings – the lawn in front, the shaded paths through the forest, the oaks and pines, beyond which slumbered the Kangra valley – brought me closer to the inner composure I so keenly sought in those early days. I’d never had a place I could call my own home, and as time went on I came to feel something close to a home-maker’s possessiveness and love for this house, which had given me, I felt, a new chance.

  *

  At the end of three months, my time at the school came to an end. But I wanted to stay on, and as I expected, the school was only too happy to grant me an extension. I wrote to my father, explaining my decision. He wrote back a short note saying I could do whatever I felt comfortable with at the present moment. He encouraged me to keep the ‘bigger picture’ in sight. He once again talked of Samskara.

  The monsoons turned into autumn. More visitors from the plains arrived. Dead leaves carpeted the path to my house. Then one night, fresh snow fell on the Dhauladhar ranges; the wind turned chilly; charcoal braziers and men with fur caps appeared in the alleys and the number of visitors abruptly thinned.

  Winter came, and one night, as I slept, it snowed in Dharamshala. The light through the curtains when I woke up the next morning was dazzling; I parted them to find the world startlingly white. Icy breezes blew across the lawn, and on the veranda, under the dripping corrugated-iron roof, a stray cat lay curled up on my cane rocking chair.

  The school closed for two months, but I stayed in Dharamshala and walked every morning through alleys slushy with melting snow to give special tuition to a Tibetan child. In the evening, the yearning melodies of Sibelius’s symphonies flowed through the bare rooms while clean rectangles of pale yellow light from the windows stretched across the snow-carpeted lawn outside.

  Spring came, the school reopened and I fell back into the old routine.

  When school closed again for the summer, I locked up the house and took a bus to the Lahaul valley, where I spent the next two months, trekking through vast landscapes of bleached snow-splattered rock, milky blue lakes and clear shallow streams.

  The sun was hot, with scarcely a cloud in the sky. My skin quickly turned very dark; my lips were chapped; tiny spots danced before my unshaded eyes and I had to refresh myself after every hour from the cool streams where trout flicked over smooth pebbles. At the end of each day of walking, I would make for the nearest village, visible by the coils of smoke loitering above it, and find food and shelter for the night at the house of a potato farmer.

  In the morning I would start again, with no trace of exhaustion at all. I felt renewed, and reaching a small summit after a day
of clambering up steep rocky slopes, I would be suffused by a sense of well-being I had never known before. This was to me the new and exhilarating discovery of that time, during those long walks through the endless valley: the discovery that health lay not only with the whole mind, but with the robust body.

  When school started again that monsoon, I put in an application for a long-term extension. I wrote to my father, saying that I wished to continue indefinitely at the school. There was no reply from him for some weeks, and then when the letter came, it was full of reproaches. He said that being a teacher in a primary school in a small town was justified only if you saw it as a step towards something much bigger. He said he had wanted to see me in a more prestigious academic position. He once again spoke of a sense of obligation to ancestors; he spoke of Samskara. His exasperation came through clearly in his concluding remarks: ‘It is your life,’ he said, ‘and you know best.’

  I didn’t reply immediately, and when I did, I talked of other things. I wrote about the mythological significance of a nearby temple. I spoke insincerely about my wish to visit Pondicherry at the earliest.

  In the meantime, my application was accepted by Mrs Sharma, back from one of her foreign tours. She also gave me an unexpected bonus. She had arranged Gita’s marriage to a Delhi-based businessman, and she now, in her brisk fidgety manner, promoted me to deputy principal. I was to remain a teacher but to have additional administrative duties.

  The result was that my days at the school lengthened. The number of Tibetan parents waiting outside the school gate increased. I was greeted in the town’s alleys with new respect, and gifts of sweetboxes in shiny yellow cellophane wrappings appeared outside my door on Diwali morning.

  That summer I went to the Spiti valley. I walked through flat grey plains of snow and rock, and into verdant valleys. I stayed in an ochre-coloured monastery to which a shopkeeper in the bazaar had recommended me. It was perched high on a treeless hill, and from my bare room I watched silver-grey twilights in the snow-muffled valley, oaks with scrawny limbs silhouetted silently against the white ground, the first lights cautiously appearing in the distant haze, the still air quivering with the sound of tinkling bells.

  The following summer I travelled to Kinnaur, and every summer for the next seven years I went walking in some part or other of the Himalayas.

  I made no other travels. The thought of the big world beyond the mountains filled me with apprehension. My father often wrote to renew his invitation to Pondicherry, and I had to find a fresh excuse each time.

  2

  WHEN YOU ARE in your twenties, seven years can seem like a long time – especially if you live a secluded life, if you know neither ambition nor love nor any of the other preoccupations of that age.

  However, my time in Dharamshala passed swiftly, divided between unchanging routine and solitude; there were hardly any periods of restlessness or torpor. I did my work – reciting the alphabet and maintaining petty cash accounts – without feeling greatly committed to the school or the children. I read many books out of an old reflex. I listened to music for long hours. I went for walks. The years passed.

  When, in later years, I watched the people in the bazaar – the honeymooning couples, the high-spirited young people, the sober spiritually minded Europeans – I watched them with a sense of strangeness and dread. The gratifications and torments of their personal lives, their desires, fears and insecurities, their interconnected roles in the large world they came from – I didn’t wish to know more about them than what I saw.

  I still sensed something raw and incoherent within my own personality, and I remained vulnerable to those large vague longings, the urge to throw oneself into a grand and noble venture, into whatever could give coherence and shape to my own life. But these moments went by quickly, much to my relief. I did not resist the self-pity that inevitably followed them. I was more conscious than ever of how absurdly romantic and incongruous these longings were for me.

  *

  In the first few years in Dharamshala, I was still vulnerable to many memories from my time in Benares and Pondicherry – I had to train myself to see that past as dead. It became important, as a kind of mental discipline, not to think about it, or attempt to ferret out any meaning from it. It had taken much time and willpower before that past could settle in my mind as a time of confusion and loss, to which I no longer needed to return.

  But then all of a sudden, and in quick succession, people from that very past appeared in Dharamshala, and I was forced to think about it again.

  *

  The first visitor was Priya, who showed up at my school at the end of a taxing day. The peon told me that a girl from Chandigarh had come to see me. I went out into the dusk and saw a diminutive figure standing under the crescent-shaped rusty signboard that had the school’s name painted on it.

  She was as thin as I remembered her, with shorter hair and eyebrows whose earlier thickness had been stylishly plucked. She wasn’t alone; there was a tall young man with her, with smooth-shaven cheeks, blackheads around his sharp-edged nose and straight long hair that he kept wiping across his forehead in short nervous gestures.

  I had been in touch with her after leaving Pondicherry. I had written her a brief note apologizing for the misunderstanding I had caused. She had written back a surprisingly mature letter, in whose tone and vocabulary I saw the hand of an older person, probably Deepa. She berated herself for her ‘childish impetuosity’ and proffered her own apologies.

  From another, later postcard I had learned that she was living in nearby Chandigarh, attending the local university. And now she was here in Dharamshala, on an excursion to a hill station with, I soon recognized, her first ‘boyfriend’.

  It was a big adventure for her, and she was awkward before me. I took her and her boyfriend to Harry’s Restaurant, where we had an uncomfortable tea, none of us saying much. The vulnerability she revealed in Pondicherry was even more pronounced now; so were the contradictory ambitions. She now told me that she wanted to be a social worker, but wanted to do an MBA first, in the United States. Then, changing her mind, she said she wanted to write poetry and be a writer.

  An inquisitive Uma Devi sat behind the counter and gazed at us, trying to figure out my connection to the young couple.

  Later, walking through the market, I spotted them at the video shack, laughing and joking with the Tibetan youth who ran it. They looked relaxed, restored to their natural everyday selves.

  *

  And then, one day in August, the school semester yet to begin, I was browsing through a shelf of expensive new arrivals at the bookshop and chatting about the pound– rupee exchange rate with the owner, a kindly old bespectacled Tibetan called Tenzing with a big black bump on his forehead, when I heard someone behind me say, ‘Guess what! A voice from the past!’

  I turned back to see Mark, looming over me, grinning, his abundant hair falling over his ears. He had seen me come in just as he was about to go out; he said he had hung around and eavesdropped on my conversation with the bookseller in order to make sure that he wasn’t mistaken.

  A slight paunch bulged out above the broad scuffed belt of his khakis, but he hadn’t lost his handyman’s tough good looks and friendly manner. He held in his hand a new book on Ayurveda medicine. But it turned out that he had given up his research. He had a new grant from some foundation but had turned it down. He had gone back to America for a few months in the summer and then had come straight up to Dharamshala, where he planned to spend a few weeks before returning to Benares. He said he had been coming to Dharamshala for the summer and monsoon months almost every year. He couldn’t stay away from India; it had become a routine that he couldn’t do without.

  When I told him that I had been in Dharamshala for seven years, he gave a small whistle of disbelief. ‘It’s weird, you know,’ he said, ‘we should have bumped into each other by now.’

  He was in a hurry, he said, but lingered on, talking about the Kangra valley, where he had just d
one a long trek.

  And then he added, apropos of nothing, ‘Have you heard about Panditji? He and his wife died suddenly, within days of each other. People said there was something fishy about it; apparently they weren’t on great terms with their son, Arjun . . .’

  He was still speaking as he moved towards the door. ‘I’ve got to tell you about Miss West,’ he said, pushing out the door, ‘but it’ll have to wait until next time. Anyway, now that we are connected, let’s keep in touch. Drop in some time. I’ll tell you where you my house is. You go two blocks to the left . . .’

  A few days later, I found myself walking down the quiet cobblestone alley Mark had described. Hanging baskets of bougainvillea framed the front doors of the small houses and white prayer flags fluttered from the clothes lines stretched between roofs.

  It had taken me some time to decide whether I should visit Mark, and I still wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. I had been surprised at first by the coldness with which I heard about the death of Panditji and his wife: the event seemed so distant, with so little relation to anything in my present life; it was like the events in the newspapers I occasionally picked up at the bookshop. But then, later, the news had worked on me in my solitude, had loosened another kind of memory of Benares: the memory of the serene days I had spent there, the afternoons at the library, the evenings at the ghats, the smoky blue twilights, all the eventless days with their restful vacancies. Something within me kept going back to it, wanted to stay with the pictures in my mind; it was what took me to Mark’s house that afternoon.

  *

  A bespectacled Indian girl wearing a chikan kurta opened the door, and for one moment I thought I had come to the wrong house. But then she said something, with an unmistakably American accent, the sun sparkling on her glasses, about Mark having gone out to the bazaar, and I knew I hadn’t.