The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  *

  A few weeks passed. I kept thinking about Rajesh, and then one day wrote to Pratap to ask him his whereabouts. He replied almost immediately: a short note saying that he had just met Rajesh after many years. He had told Rajesh about his unexpected meeting with me in Dharamshala; he had also passed on my address to him and mentioned my desire to be in touch again.

  And then one day a letter came from Rajesh himself. The envelope was postmarked Mirzapur, and did not have a return address. Inside there were a few paragraphs on a piece of lined paper.

  Dear Brother,

  It is one of the great mysteries of life that I should hear of you again after so many years. Pratap told me about you, the special path you have chosen, in which you appear to be content. I knew when I first met you that you’d somehow break out of the world we knew, that you would go on to do different things. That you have done so makes me very happy.

  Pratap said you asked about my mother. I have sad news to offer. She passed away three years ago. I was with her during the last days of her life. The final rites were in Benares. She often asked me about you. She didn’t have too many visitors at her house, and whenever someone showed up she would remember for years afterwards. After her death, I moved from Benares to Mirzapur. But I am rarely there. I travel a lot and I don’t stay in any place for too long. Pratap said that you would like to meet me. This is awkward for me. Do not misunderstand me when I say that any meeting between us, even if practically possible, would put you in a very difficult position. I wish it was otherwise but the life I have chosen has shut me off from many things I valued in the past. You, who liked reading so much, would be unhappy to know that I don’t read anything apart from newspapers. I have no friends left from my time in Benares.

  The city is a foreign place for me now. But I can’t write or think too much about this. After all these years, life is no more than a habit, it is not a subject for reflection. I simply go on. I do not think much about what I do or what I have become. On certain days I remember those lines of Faiz, ‘This is not that long-looked-for break of day/Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades/set out . . .’ But how many of us can say they have reached that dawn – so, I am not alone, there are millions of us, and this is a source of consolation. I hope you’ll understand and forgive me.

  Your elder brother,

  Rajesh

  I had never seen his handwriting before. He wrote a beautiful Devanagari script, and there was an elegant formality in his prose which I thought would have come to him from the Urdu poetry he read. And that wasn’t the only unexpected thing about the letter. I had imagined him as someone cut off from his old life of ruminative reading, someone inevitably undermined by rough times, by the brutalities of his trade, and I had expected a more direct statement about the unsuitability of our meeting. Such a considered response made me wonder if I had ever really known him.

  The bigger revelation still lay in the future.

  The letter had confirmed what I already suspected: that no further contact with Rajesh was possible. And it had begun to fade from memory until a few weeks later.

  One day I was looking through old files for a missing receipt from the school when I came across the xeroxed copy of Wilson’s essay on Flaubert. I was casually flipping through the pages when I saw some passages underlined in red. I could never bring myself to mark up printed text, out of an old and automatic reverence I had for the printed word. It could only have been Rajesh.

  I read the underlined sentences:

  Frédéric is only the more refined as well as the more incompetent side of the middle-class mediocrity of which the dubious promoter represents the more flashy and active aspect. And so in the case of the other characters, the journalists and the artists, the members of the nobility, Frédéric finds the same shoddiness and lack of principle which are gradually revealed in himself . . .

  The passage went on. But I was struck more by the underlining. What had the words said to Rajesh, I wondered?

  On another page of the essay, the underlined passage read:

  Flaubert’s novel plants deep in our mind an idea which we never quite get rid of: the suspicion that our middle-class society of manufacturers, businessmen and bankers, of people who live on or deal in investments, so far from being redeemed by its culture, have ended by cheapening and invalidating all the departments of culture, political, scientific, artistic and religious, as well as corrupting and weakening the ordinary human relations: love, friendship and loyalty to cause – till the whole civilization seems to dwindle.

  Wilson’s denunciation of capitalism here had an old-fashioned Marxist ring. Nevertheless it was a good passage in that it offered a small glimpse of Wilson’s way of finding connections between life and literature. But why had Rajesh underlined it? Again, how had he interpreted it?

  I thought of the day I went to visit Rajesh’s village; I had remembered from it only the boy I saw in the mango grove, the boy who came to symbolize my aspirations for a quiet, restful life. Some other memories bubbled up now: the steam-engined train chugging away through stubbly fields, coils of smoke torpid above little huts; his mother’s tiny room, with its calendars of Shiva and Krishna; her conversation about Rajesh’s past; and Rajesh’s own words about Sentimental Education on the journey back to Benares, the coal embers darting past us in the dark, words I had dismissed as exaggeration, the hard, determined look on his face as he said, ‘It is the story of my life. I know these people well. Your hero, Edmund Wilson, he also knows them.’

  *

  What had he meant by that?

  It took some time to decipher these remarks. My mind kept probing them in idle moments, but it was only when – overcoming my fear of novels – I decided to reread Sentimental Education that I began to arrive at some kind of answer.

  I eventually saw that there had been purpose behind Rajesh’s invitation to his home, his decision to reveal so frankly his life to me. Even the remarks about Sentimental Education and Wilson on the train: he wanted me to know that not only had he read the novel, he had drawn, with Wilson’s help, his own conclusions from it.

  In the hard and mean world he had lived in, first as a child labourer and then as a hired criminal for politicians and businessmen, Rajesh would have come to know well the grimy underside of middle-class society. What became clearer to me now was how quick he had been to recognize that the society Flaubert and Wilson wrote about wasn’t very different from the one he inhabited in Benares.

  ‘It’s the story of my life,’ he had said. I couldn’t see it then, but in Benares I had been among people who, like Frédéric and his friends, had either disowned or, in many cases, moved away from their provincial origins in order to realize their dreams of success in the bourgeois world. Rajesh was one of them. So was Pratap, and so, in a different way, was I, with all the confused longings I had for a true awakening to the world, for everything I felt lay out of my reach.

  But only a handful of these students were able to get anywhere near realizing their dreams of joining the Civil Service. Most of them saw their ambitions dwindle away over the years in successive disappointments, and they knew not only failure but also the degradation of living in a world where self-deception, falsehood, sycophancy and bribery were the rule.

  The small, unnoticed tragedies of thwarted hopes and ideals Flaubert wrote about in Sentimental Education were all around us. And this awareness – which, given the meagreness of my means and prospects, was also mine but which I tried to evade all through my time in Benares – this awareness had been Rajesh’s private key to the book. Reading it during the tormented days that followed my return from Kalpi, I had seen only the reflection of a personal neurosis in it; the character of Frédéric seemed to embody perfectly my sense of inadequacy, my severe self-image.

  Reading the same book but bringing another kind of experience to it, Rajesh had discovered something else; he had discovered a social and psychological environment similar to the one he lived in.
He shared with Flaubert and Wilson – so far away from us in every way – a true, if bitter awareness of its peculiar human ordeals and futility.

  ‘To fully appreciate the book,’ Wilson had written of Sentimental Education, ‘one must have had time to see something of life.’ Rajesh had exemplified this truth even as he moved into a world where he couldn’t be followed.

  *

  It had taken me much time to realize the simple fact that Rajesh had been struggling to make sense of his life, to connect the disparate elements that existed in it: his self-consciousness about his Brahmin identity, the pistols in his room, the talk of illusion and the void.

  And now, whenever I recalled my time in Benares, I felt that it was a task I had shirked, that I had understood very little and misunderstood much during those months there. I was haunted by the sense of having left something incomplete, and with it came a quiet yearning to go back, to gaze with a fresher eye at things grown so dim in memory.

  I struggled for some time with this growing desire. Then one evening I came home, my mind miraculously made up, and without even pausing to switch on the geyser in the bathroom, I sat down at the unused dining table and wrote to Miss West.

  Miss West took her time in replying, and when she did, made no mention of her own plans.

  Her letter came as school was about to close for winter. Dark clouds every day threatened snow and sleet. Dull grey light came out each morning from under the curtain in my bedroom; the day appeared stale even before it had begun. The town wore a deserted look after the tourist invasions of autumn; the day died early in colourless sunsets.

  But I couldn’t leave straight away. Events at the school kept me busy. We received a high-level visit from the state education minister. His approval was necessary in acquiring official recognition from the government, and Mrs Sharma, the principal, came back from another long foreign sojourn to take personal charge of the visit. Her sister, Gita, came up from Delhi, bejewelled and plumper than before; she came ostensibly to help but created more problems by quarrelling constantly with her sister.

  The winter holidays had leaked away, and the school was scheduled to reopen after just a few days, when I finally left for Benares.

  4

  TAXI TO PATHANKOT, the rail head of the British Raj, and from there the old train that once took vacationers back to Calcutta from the Kashmir valley. The taxi was a luxury, and it was with the same light-headed extravagance that I cancelled my earlier reservations and upgraded my ticket to second-class air-conditioned.

  We left in the evening, and for a very long time I was unable to sleep. Shadowy figures moved silently outside on the poorly lit platforms; a luggage cart would trundle past with a muffled drone; and in the silence that descended upon the compartment after it had gone, the soft rhythmic snoring of the overweight man on the berth next to mine would become audible.

  A strange agitation in the mind, a kind of noise created by random thoughts and memories, kept me awake. At one point, I gave up all attempts to sleep and instead lay still on my berth, listening to the rattle and roll of the wheels, and waited for the morning which seemed to hold something of great significance.

  It was in that position that I drifted back to sleep.

  I woke up early. The flimsy curtains on the window promised light, but when I parted them, the world outside, seen through the murky windows of my compartment, the world I had feared and was seeing for the first time in seven years – flat fields, ramshackle sheds at level crossings, battered trucks with bundles of hay, bullock carts inching forward on rutted dirt tracks, buffaloes splattered with mud, children playing outside low huts – the world with big skies and wide flat horizons that held millions of competing lives, that world appeared empty and lacklustre.

  The train swayed and clattered ahead through tangles of gleaming tracks. Benares appeared at last after a series of small deserted stations, and the view contracted: it was now naked brick houses, and messy electric wires and algae-covered ponds, around which sat early-morning defecators, gazing up meekly at the passing train.

  The monotonous silence of the compartment that I had got so used to was finally shattered at the railway station. Chaos erupted as the train slid to a stop along the congested platform: emaciated coolies in threadbare woollen jumpers muscled into compartments; hysterical parents shouted at their children as they unloaded their luggage; ragged little boys shrilly hawked chai, and loudspeakers high above on the roof of the platform kept indifferently booming out the bad news of long delays and cancellations.

  Outside, giant hoardings of new Bombay films loomed over the concourse, the pictures of soft-cheeked men gnashing and grinding their teeth and pointing outsized guns at each other; the dhaba shacks blared loud devotional music; the big coloured trucks revved out dense clouds of diesel smoke; urchins leaning out from tempos thumped the battered sides in a bid to attract arriving passengers; and rickshaw drivers with thin, unshaven, hostile faces seethed in small mobs everywhere.

  *

  I surrendered my bag to the first rickshaw driver who approached me: a small, dark young man with a thick curled moustache.

  I had no place to stay; I was hoping to find an inexpensive hotel somewhere along the ghats. But when the rickshaw driver suggested, the veins in his swarthy legs puffing out as he pushed at the pedals, a new ‘ultra-modern hotel’ near the station, I let him take me there.

  It was a white building, strikingly clean behind brick walls garish with film posters. The bright deserted lobby smelled of floor wax; the sofas were upholstered with shiny brown leather; and the place appeared empty, the keyboard at the reception full. The receptionist, a gawky young man with glasses, kept fumbling with the registration ledger, scribbling and then striking out an erroneous entry. Behind him, in a glass cubicle adorned with a Mickey Mouse clock and calendar-art framed pictures of Shiva, sat the owner of the hotel, a thickset man in a grey safari suit, carefully counting a wad of hundred-rupee notes.

  I filled in the sheaf of duplicate forms brought by the receptionst, who kept calling me sir with exaggerated courtesy. I then waited as he examined them.

  Suddenly, at the far end of the lobby, the elevator doors slid open to reveal two young paunchy khadi-clad men – minor politicians, I immediately thought. Their steps echoing across the lobby, they strode with brisk assurance to a white Ambassador, waiting with open doors under the portico. They got into the car but the doors with the tinted windows remained open; they appeared to be expecting someone else. The man in the driver’s seat kept looking straight ahead.

  Soon I heard the elevator doors open again. They now revealed two slim, swarthy young women, wearing almost identical salwar-kurtas of some shiny synthetic material, with sequinned chunnis draped around thick gold necklaces. Crimson lipstick almost blotted out their small mouths; gold bangles flashed on their wrists; silver anklets jingled softly as they strutted past me on very high pencil-thin heels.

  They joined the politicians in the car; the doors slammed shut in the void of the forecourt; the car slunk off.

  As I turned away, I saw the receptionist looking at me with concern.

  He attempted to smile. He said, in English, ‘Special guests, sir.’

  But it wasn’t what he wished to say; his weak English had let him down, and he knew that almost instantly.

  He turned his head to glance at the man in the cubicle, who was still counting the notes, and when he looked back at me his face showed fear.

  *

  It was an odd return to Benares; it wasn’t what I had been expecting. I had imagined the moment of arrival to be calm. I had imagined it to be infused with gentle memories. But the spell had been broken at the railway station itself, facing the truculent coolies and the rickshaw drivers.

  Nothing in that scene was unfamiliar to me, but during the tranquil years in Dharamshala I had lost the old instinctive ways of dealing with it. I could no longer summon the casual self-possession required to bargain out a correct rate with the
aggressive rickshaw driver. I lacked the indifference, the unseeing blank gaze of the hardened traveller.

  Then the hotel, revealed in the first few minutes as an assignation spot for local politicians, and the nervous receptionist, the man in the cubicle counting the rupee notes – that wasn’t anything I had expected.

  I was alert, almost preternaturally so. I felt my senses on edge, but they had registered only strangeness as the rickshaw strained past the ‘fast-food’ parlours with dark glass windows, the white-painted hotels with multicoloured flags listless on their roofs, the banners advertising computer courses swaying across the roads, and now this hotel room, described by the receptionist as a ‘honeymoon suite,’ all done in pink, the walls cluttered with framed posters of tender-faced white children and garish Swiss landscapes with Christian homilies.

  This wasn’t the city I knew; what I knew and remembered lay farther down the road, closer to the river and the ghats, the decaying palaces, the half-submerged temples. I began to feel I had made a mistake in allowing the rickshaw driver to take me to this hotel.

  The moment of calm came later, when I woke up after a short nap. Light flooded the small room and created a radiant glow against the pink walls and upholstery and bedcovers; snatches of music and talk came in through the open windows.

  The morning and anxiety of my arrival seemed far away as I stood at the window that opened out onto the forecourt. The street appeared different from this elevation. Brightly painted rickshaws stood in a queue before the hotel’s gates; a little boy pushed a vegetable stall on the empty road, hawking his wares in a surprisingly deep voice; a man in white flapping pyjamas hurled up the shutters of one of the grocery stores, and the Coca-Cola logo vanished with a brief rattle.