The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  She said, ‘You are welcome to hang out here if you want.’

  Inside, there was the same assortment of ethnic knick-knacks I had once seen in Mark’s house by the river in Benares: Azamgarh dhurries, Himachali wall hangings, Gujarati lampshades, Tibetan tankas and various kinds of pots and pans.

  The woman extended a small warm hand, introduced herself, and then sat down before me on the dhurrie. Her name was Rekha and she was in her final undergraduate year at Berkeley, California. That made her someone in her late teens. But she looked older; her glasses gave her a severe, studious look, and she spoke fast, with a kind of flatly emphatic tone and accent that sat oddly with her Indian face.

  She said she was working as an intern for the rights of single-mother minority women in San Francisco. After graduation, she planned to get into law school and work permanently as a lawyer for the rights of single-mother minority women.

  The conversation floundered on my side. She asked me no questions, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to her disclosures, which she seemed to make with complete sincerity and frankness; and when she got up to make some tea, I half wondered if I ought to offer to help her.

  It was as she pottered about the kitchen, blindly reaching out for shelved jars and cups, that I remembered Debbie. Where was she now? I wondered, and sitting in the narrow, dimly lit room, surrounded by the clutter of Mark’s days in Benares, I had a sudden melancholy awareness of the large store of unrecalled and unreflected-on memories I carried within myself.

  Mark came in soon after we finished our tea. He looked delighted to see me, and his news came out in a rush.

  He said he had recently reached a momentous decision in his life; it was something he had agonized over for years now. He was going back to America. He was going back next year, and planned to settle down with Rekha in California. Yes, the time had come. He loved India deeply, particularly Benares, and it hurt simply to think about leaving it. But it had to be done. It was a now-or-never thing.

  I kept waiting for him to move on to Miss West. I didn’t dare ask about her myself, for fear of being confronted with unsettling subjects. It was why I hadn’t had any news of Miss West for a long time. I had written to her from Pondicherry; she had replied with a postcard, one of whose innocuous sentences had leaped out and startled me: it said she was going to Paris for the summer to see some friends, including our mutual ones. I had received the postcard soon after I arrived in Dharamshala, and a sudden attack of dread had made me tear it up. I hadn’t written to her again.

  Now, according to Mark, she too had made a ‘momentous’ decision in her life. She was still in Benares, but was planning to leave soon.

  Mark said, ‘She has broken off her long-standing relationship with the guy in England. It wasn’t going to work out. It took her twenty-seven years to realize that, and I think she’s pretty devastated by it all, but she’s so English, she wouldn’t let on anything to anyone. All I know is that she has bought a house in East Anglia, somewhere in the country, and plans to live in it for the rest of her life. I’ve been there once; it’s very flat and damp. I can’t imagine why she wants to go there – I mean, she could move to California, or some place less depressing – but I think she has basically given up on the idea of waiting for this guy. She has to go somewhere, and I think she’s leaving Benares and India because it wasn’t going to work out for her. Too many memories, I guess. I guess she wants to be in some place she can call home.’

  And now Mark went on to make a long speech. He said, ‘I don’t know if she’ll be happy again. I was talking to my Hindi teacher the other day and he was giving me his usual line about how everyone in the West thinks about nothing except pleasure and happiness. I was trying to make him realize that there is a different kind of pain attached to this kind of life. It comes with adulthood, like hair on your chest, a pain in the gut like the one your father probably had and it’ll stay with you the rest of your life. Maybe drugs and alcohol and art would relieve it for a little while but it always returns. You could win the academic lottery, get tenure or whatever, but even that won’t knock that pain out. And what I was trying to tell him was just this: that it’s a different kind of pain no more and no less than what you see here. People are people all over the world, in America or anywhere else, and they really all want one thing and little else: love, which is really lacking in life as we live it today.’

  This monologue – halfway through which I remembered that I had heard similar things from him, turned out to be the prologue to the plans Mark now disclosed to me, plans for, as he put it, ‘feeling and conveying love’, ‘expressing our common humanity’. He had already given up his research on Ayurvedic medicine; he was now also going to give up his interest in Indian classical music. He was going back to work for a rehabilitation centre for AIDS victims in Berkeley. In the time left over from this demanding work, he would serve as a volunteer for an environmental organization.

  All this had been arranged by Rekha, he said, turning back to where she was sitting. But, unnoticed by him, she had quietly left the room some time ago. As he turned back towards me, he mumbled something about getting married to her later in the year.

  He continued, ‘I find it hard to believe that I was once a fanatical scholar who cared for nothing apart from his work. But Rekha really has given me the courage to face up to my real self and cut through the bullshit. And made me see what I really want. It was so simple. Like everyone else, I also want to love and be loved. Just that.’

  And then, looking up at me with clear confident eyes, he grew unexpectedly wild. ‘There is another thing I realize. It’s that we are made of flesh and bone and this flesh is the most important thing we have. You know, you realize after some time what a load of bullshit’ – he raised his arm and pointed towards the jute bookstand, which I had examined when Rekha was in the kitchen: it was full of books published by presses called Shambhala and Tricycle and Wisdom – ‘all these great religions and philosophies are, this thing about solitude and loneliness being good for your spiritual and artistic growth. So you end up starving yourself in every way, waiting and hoping for this truly awesome spiritual jackpot that never comes, and then one day you are down there all alone on Manikarnika Ghat turning to ashes with not a single soul on the fucking planet who feels sorry for you . . .’

  *

  I left Mark’s house feeling a bit disorientated. It was dark outside; I had forgotten to bring my flashlight, and after stumbling once or twice on the cobblestone path, I began to walk very slowly.

  Mark’s words were still ringing in my head, and I couldn’t but feel their alienness. I hadn’t heard anyone speak like that for years now; the vocabulary, the concerns, the themes and the passion all came from another world.

  As he spoke, I had begun to recall something Miss West had told me: he wants to get home . . . insecure . . . As he went on, more memories came to me, including one of the conversation I had overheard the evening of Miss West’s party; and I felt that Mark’s words were meant as much for himself as for me. He needed to convince himself through other people’s approbation; he needed to measure himself in other people’s eyes.

  It was how I sought to place Mark. But his words, particularly the second part of his monologue, kept coming back to me, and I couldn’t but be aware of the odd resonance they had. There was also something vaguely threatening about them, about the way in which they forced me to reassess my own life.

  For years now, I had lived neutrally, on the surface. I had learned to live without the feeling I’d had for all of my childhood and early adulthood, the quiet certainty that had existed over and above the fear and pain of those years, that something good and precious was growing within me. I no longer felt that way, and now that that sense of inner growth had faded, I didn’t have the same self-doubts. I didn’t miss the old intensity of contradictory hopes and fears, the hopeful blind striving I knew in the days I came to live in Benares, which I often felt was leading me nowhere. Instead, I saw it
s fading away as a good thing. I thought it meant that I had reached the end of a time of bewilderment.

  This placid life I had in Dharamshala was severely judged by many people: my father, my colleagues at the school, whose slightly malicious gossip often reached my ears. But it was all I had. I had tried hard to build it up, using all the means at my disposal, and on more optimistic days I could even think that this detached, eventless life wasn’t very far from matching the old Brahmin idea of retreat, from fulfilling those ancestral obligations my father still wrote to me about.

  Mark had asked me to visit them again, but I stayed away. I had gone the first time out of curiosity, but now I was fearful – so much so that once, seeing him hunched over a shelf at the bookshop, I turned and quickly ran down the steps, much to the puzzlement of the boy at the counter.

  I now wonder at my extreme reaction. But Mark’s insecurity and self-aggrandizement wasn’t what I, after years of my own private struggles, wanted to be involved with when my own equanimity, the balance I had arrived at in Dharamshala, was so fragile. I did not want it to be threatened – particularly by something that was an echo from my time in Benares.

  3

  BUT WHEN A PARCEL from Miss West came one cold autumn morning, I thought of Benares again, and the feeling came over me of having left something incomplete and unresolved.

  Inside the parcel there was a brown-paper-wrapped packet that looked like a book; there was also a postcard with a picture of Benares, a badly printed generic picture of the ghats, with a few lines scrawled on the back.

  It was a very brief letter. But it had something of her bantering manner, and it broke into my placid routine with unexpected power.

  I read the lines over and over until they became a meaningless jingle in my head. They said,

  Dear Friend,

  Just found out from Mark where you have been hiding all this time. Benares isn’t the same without you. Do come for a visit sometime. I’d love to see you again and catch up with your news.

  Love,

  Diana

  PS Lots of new CDs here!

  PPS I enclose something for you that someone left here for you ages ago.

  Before the postcard came, I had been thinking of what Mark had told me about Miss West. I had once envied her for her great luck, for living her life, as I saw it, in ever-new glamorous settings. But what I had seen as luck had come with its own special burden, its own store of disappointments and frustrations, and now that burden, which Miss West was to carry for the rest of her life, made the luck seem tainted.

  I hadn’t realized this, and I wondered again at how much in other people’s lives I had either missed or not been equipped to see at all. While in Benares, I had remained busy with monitoring the many different registers of my own feeling and thinking self, and later, when that phase of my life ended, I became preoccupied with the next one. Other people were reduced to minor figures in this large drama of the self; they ceased to exist for themselves. My vision of them kept shrinking, and some of them, like Rajesh, for instance, had dropped altogether out of memory.

  I had last seen Rajesh on the ghats on my last day, speaking to the terrified young student about the illusion and the void. I was full of other things then; I had kept my distance from him.

  I now unwrapped the packet inside Miss West’s parcel to find the Penguin Classics paperback of Sentimental Education and the xerox copy of Wilson’s essay on Flaubert that I had once lent Rajesh.

  That moment was the first time in years I had thought of Rajesh. I imagined he waited for me at the library, and then, after I failed to appear for several weeks, he must have gone to Panditji’s house to return the book and the essay. I wondered if he had met Miss West, and if he had, was he puzzled by her in the way I was years ago, when I saw her sitting out on the roof in the evening listening to music.

  I put the book behind the framed and garlanded picture of the Dalai Lama with the row of novels that I no longer read. I almost threw away the essay after it had been lying on a side table for some time; it ended up in a file of xeroxed pages I rarely looked at.

  Then one evening in the town, I went to a travel agency to arrange for a school excursion and ran into Pratap. He was one of Rajesh’s hangers-on from a nearby village, one of those students who used to sit under the giant banyan tree outside the university and gossip about prohibitive dowries and corrupt civil servants. Pratap had completed his several attempts at the Civil Service examination and was now a tour guide for Indian tourists. He travelled with them on buses across several states: a hard and poorly paid job and very remote from the dreams of power and affluence that he, along with many others, would have had in Benares.

  He was wearing a floppy white cricket cap over a bright red windcheater, his imitation blue levis sat loose on his thin frame and his thick sneakers in fluorescent colours seemed too big on his feet. He was embarrassed when I recognized him, and it was out of this embarrassment that he began to speak of Rajesh. He hadn’t seen him for many months now, but he had news of him from other people. Rajesh was now more notorious than ever.

  Why notorious, I wondered? I had always known about his connection to Vijay, the Allahabad student politician who had sent me to see him. I had seen the pistols in his room and wondered about his connection to the rioters and the strange people who came to visit him in the Ambassador with tinted windows. But I hadn’t thought of him as notorious.

  Pratap looked at me with some puzzlement. He said he thought I knew all about Rajesh. I said I didn’t. The misunderstanding was to be soon cleared.

  Pratap had seen me as an intimate friend of Rajesh’s, and now, as he spoke, he grew increasingly surprised at how little I knew of his life. He was surprised that I didn’t know while in Benares that Rajesh was a member of a criminal gang specializing in debt collection on behalf of a group of local moneylenders and businessmen.

  Although I was taken aback, I realized that it did explain his long mysterious absences from Benares, the pistols in his room. I had attributed the absences to a secret mistress hidden away somewhere, but the pistols had unnerved me. I remembered, too, the sinister-looking Ambassador, and from this sudden rush of memories emerged one of Arjun, Panditji’s errant son, whom I had once seen badly injured. Rajesh had said that Arjun was trying to mortgage a house that didn’t belong to him, and he had asked me lots of questions about him. How did he know all this? Was Rajesh involved in beating Arjun?

  I asked Pratap. He couldn’t remember at first, and then as his memory returned he looked amazed at my ignorance. He said that Rajesh had taken on the commission of roughing up Arjun basically to keep him from troubling me.

  These commissions, Pratap went on, were a good steady business. Once confronted with the possibility of violence, people paid up very quickly, or did whatever you asked them to, without involving the police.

  But then Rajesh had graduated to something riskier, and at this point, although shocked and bewildered by what I had already been told, I was not prepared for what I heard next.

  Pratap saw the disbelief on my face. He seemed to be enjoying it as his voice grew more dramatic. At some stage, he said, pausing after every word, Rajesh had turned himself into a contract killer. It was an extremely well-paid profession, also a well-connected one. You worked for small-time contractors, who in turn worked for wealthy industrialists. These businessmen also did favours for local political bosses, who did not always rely on their own private armies.

  Pratap went on, a strange excitement glistening on his face. You got to know everyone well after a few years in the business. But there were problems. You worked for all these important people, yet you were always on your own. The chances of survival weren’t very high. Sooner or later, the police came to hear of you. Fierce loyalties of caste and clan ensured that every murder would be avenged.

  It was what would happen to Rajesh, he said. He could see now an ambush of the kind often reported in the local papers: Rajesh would be on his motorcycle wh
en four men would surround him at a busy intersection in the old city and shoot him dead.

  I was suddenly appalled by this turn in our conversation, by the prurient way in which Pratap imagined Rajesh’s fate.

  He wanted to talk more, and was moving towards a tea stall, when I realized that I needed to be alone. Pratap couldn’t have told me anything significantly more about Rajesh, and given his overly excitable mood, I didn’t want to encourage him further.

  I said I had to attend to some urgent work at the school, and slipped away so quickly that there was no time for Pratap even to suggest, as I knew he wished to, another meeting. He did appear a bit hurt by my sudden great desire to part from him, and I thought later that perhaps I had been unfair. There was nothing premeditated about his malice towards Rajesh. He was speaking out of his own frustrations, the sense of having reached a dead end in his own life.

  It also occurred to me afterwards that I should have asked him about Rajesh’s current whereabouts, and I thought at the same time of the futility of the request, had I indeed made it. That part of my life was over. I did not plan to return to Benares.

  I wondered if I should write to Rajesh, but simultaneously felt the incongruity of such a correspondence. What would I say? It was hard for me to think about Rajesh in a focused way even though he had been a major presence in the other life I lived at the university. It was hard, too, to disentangle him from the mass of suppressed memories.

  Instead, I kept thinking about what Pratap had told me. My mind was filled with banal images I knew well from those Benares papers: they formed the usual pattern of daylight murder in the city. I kept seeing Rajesh at that busy crossing, trapped in the dense swarm of scooters, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, cars, buses, trucks and bicycles, the four men converging upon him, producing pistols from their pockets . . .