The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  Yellow flames flickered and glowered through the grey haze at Manikarnika Ghat. The peal of temple bells travelled in light wispy echoes across the river. The sky above was heavy and expectant with thick dark clouds.

  It grieved me to look at the despair that had passed over Miss West’s face as she spoke, to have the sense, as I once had, of the density of memories, wounds, ambitions and regrets seething inside her.

  And I was looking away, at the looming city, when I heard her saying, her voice abruptly bright: ‘But you would remember her, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The courtesan I was talking about,’ Miss West replied. ‘The woman with the kohl-rimmed eyes. She sang that beautiful song about Krishna and Radha at that party we had when you first arrived in Benares, where Anand played the sitar and Catherine did her bit with the tanpura. You remember that, don’t you?’

  The moment was inevitable. I knew it would come from the time I ran into Mark in Dharamshala. With such dread and curiosity had I anticipated it, and now, as an old suppressed vision arose before me, I knew again the familiar horrible clamour of memories, memories of that evening on the roof, the night at Kalpi, the evening in Pondicherry and so many other days – the poisoned past that for many years never left my side, that first clung to me on those aimless travels across the country, during sleepless nights in creaking, crackling train compartments, as relentless and futile as the circling shadows around me, the past that scratched old wounds on serene mornings in high mountain valleys and among the sullen ruins of remote monasteries, the past that long after I settled in Dharamshala and began to heal, pursued me into innumerable exhausting dreams.

  Miss West was saying, ‘I suppose you haven’t heard about Catherine and Anand.’

  The boat coming in from the opposite direction moved closer. Its four or five rowers frantically pushed at the oars, sending little ripples coursing through the water; their frenzy enhanced the stillness of the women with long sari veils and men in white kurtas, one of them holding a large gleaming brass urn.

  Miss West said, ‘The whole thing collapsed not long after they got to Paris.’

  The boat appeared to be heading directly towards us, and in the end passed us barely inches away. It was at that very moment that a strong wind suddenly came over the water. The veils of the women fluttered and were immediately tugged back into position. Little clouds of dust and sand loomed up on the other, empty side of the river and rolled for a little distance before abruptly fading.

  Miss West said, ‘It collapsed once it became clear that Anand was no Ravi Shankar. I sort of knew it wouldn’t last long, but I was surprised by how quickly it folded. I remember just before she left Benares, Catherine was neurotic about him; she would go on about him to everyone she met. I thought she was totally insecure, almost pathetic in her insecurity. But she was right to be so, because when they got to Paris no one would give Anand a job, even those Indians who are in the cultural business in such places and do things for European consumption. Catherine’s parents were horrible to him, in their own subtle manner. Catherine defended him; she was good at that. She still went on about him, but in a different way.’

  We were halfway to Dashashvamedh Ghat, its throng of bathing devotees partly visible behind the plume of black diesel smoke that one of the empty anchored boats breathed into the air. The boat slid forward in smoother bursts now. A small breeze blew in from the other side, ruffling the water and making Miss West, as she spoke, draw her shawl around her even more tightly.

  She said, ‘I saw them together once in Paris. She had a little party; all her friends were there; she kept talking about Anand to her friends; he was her little trophy from India. Anand this, Anand that. Oh, look at him, isn’t he wonderful? But when I next went to Paris, he was gone. He had gone back to India. Catherine wouldn’t speak much about him; her mother, a rather tedious middle-class woman, complained to me about the water he spilled on her bathroom floor. Catherine was living with a new boyfriend, an Algerian, some sort of film-maker. I didn’t see her again.

  ‘She wrote a few times. Her boyfriends kept changing. The last time she wrote she was with some stockbroker; she said she was planning to marry him, raise a family. She felt secure with him. It was all very odd: she sounded so much like her mother; she wanted children, security, stability, all those middle-class things. All that bohemianism had gone.

  ‘I saw Anand in Delhi a couple of years ago. He plays for some radio orchestra in Delhi and lives in a dreadful slum east of the river – probably not a slum, most of Delhi, even the middle-class suburbs, looks like a slum to me. He looked completely wasted, even thinner. His sisters are still unmarried; his parents have almost disowned him. When I met him, it was four years after he came back from Paris and the poor man was still devastated, still pining for Catherine, hoping for some sort of miracle, writing long letters to her and getting shorter and shorter notes in return.

  ‘I had to be tough with him. I told him to stop thinking about her. I told him to move on, get married, work hard, lose himself in something. But I thought later that I was probably too harsh with him.

  ‘His love for Catherine, his time in Paris: this was the greatest thing that could ever happen to him. He had only this past and he was trapped by it. Catherine could move on, but he was stuck. She is drifting, too, poor girl, but she is supported by her father’s money, her culture, her background; they give her at least an idea of what she owes to herself.

  ‘Anand, people like him, they can’t afford such ideas; they don’t know who they are; they don’t know what they want; they are just trying hard not to sink into the misery and wretchedness they are born into. That’s what he is doing now.

  ‘But he was young when he first met Catherine. And when you are young you have these desires like everyone else; you’re greedy for love, you feel then that the world owes you your happiness; you feel you are entitled to it simply by being alive . . .’

  She stopped suddenly. We were about to reach Dashashvamedh Ghat. It was dark over the river now; a tangle of sounds from the city reached us. Broken reflections of the sodium lights on the ghat glimmered and trembled in the black water.

  I couldn’t see Miss West’s face, and when she spoke again her voice seemed to come from the same faraway world she had been talking of. She said:

  ‘I have been going on for far too long. Now tell me about your own life. It’s been such a long time since you were here.’

  Until now, as she was speaking, I had felt an old bitterness and anguish surge up within me. I had suddenly felt myself full of things to say. I had longed to speak, somehow or other to express the great turmoil in my heart.

  But now the moment was dead, and Miss West’s question left me feeling drained. What could I have told her about my life? There were the broad details, and I tried to list them: the school, the job, the travels in the Himalayas. But the things that really mattered in it were all so private; they were like the events in Miss West’s own life. Where would I have started? How could I have confessed to her the circumstances that had driven me to a life so different from any I could have expected to lead when I first knew her in Benares? How could I have confessed that the larger world that I had once longed to enter had become a fearful place?

  *

  A thin drizzle had started by the time we got out of the boat. A stronger wind now blew in from the other shore; the anchored boats rocked and thudded into each other.

  The glare of the sodium lamps outlined the thin slanting threads of rain as we went up the long wide steps to the top of the ghat. The concourse ahead was a sea of agitated black umbrellas and glistening plastic sheets, people everywhere running for cover, past the bright blurred gleams of the brassware and gift shops.

  ‘What a dreadful time to rain,’ Miss West said. ‘We’ll all get pneumonia.’

  She added, ‘But look! There’s a rickshaw.’

  She skipped and flounced towards it, the hand she had raised to poi
nt at the rickshaw still held up, and then she jumped in.

  I followed her to the rickshaw and stood before it.

  Miss West wiped the rickshaw seat with her handkerchief, and then in one swift movement pulled the tarpaulin hood over her head. There was a moment of uncertainty before she realized that I was not going to join her.

  She extended a hand; it was cold and clammy to the touch.

  She said, ‘I am going away in a couple of weeks. Back to England.’

  I nodded, and she said nothing more. She hadn’t talked about leaving Benares to me. But she knew that I knew.

  She kept her hand in mine for a few more wordless moments.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said at last.

  And then added, ‘Come and visit me in England. We shall . . .’

  She appeared to pause in mid sentence, but then said nothing more.

  The rickshaw driver mounted his seat. I felt Miss West withdraw her hand. The roving headlight of a scooter illuminated her pale serene face for a brief instant, and then darkness moved in.

  The rickshaw moved off with a brief jerk. I felt something well up inside me.

  As I watched, the rickshaw lurched away and soon melted into the tumultuous traffic ahead. I was turning to go when I suddenly remembered that this was where I had once stood with Miss West in the middle of a festive afternoon, waiting anxiously for Catherine. I remembered how flustered I had been when Catherine finally appeared, how the freshness and grace of her face always came to me as a little shock each time. I turned back and there, between two white temples, was the entrance to the lane with the matt-haired sadhu and the house with the Ram-Sita mural, and I remembered how I would walk through the bustling ghats and alleys to Catherine’s home, with that anticipatory thrill in my heart, and it all came back to me in a rush: the empty days, the long smoky-blue twilights, the flickering fluorescent light and the pigeons in their neat rows, the voices from the alley floating up to the small room with the gleaming sitar in one corner, all that slow leisurely life of old Benares, and the furtive tender growth inside me; and I felt sad, and full of mourning for the past, for that pure time of desires and dreams I knew when I first came to Benares and lived in a crumbling old house by the river.

  The rain suddenly grew intense. Heavy hard drops fell on the back of my neck. I turned around to look for another rickshaw; there was none in sight.

  I ran towards an autorickshaw I saw standing in one corner, and then sat back, panting slightly as the driver plunged, weaving and pirouetting, into the swarming chaos of running pedestrians, rickshaws, cycles and scooters.

  The rain flowed down the windscreen, which the driver kept wiping with a rag that lay on the dashboard. Gleamingly vivid for one moment, the streets dissolved into smudgy fluorescent colours the next. Passing scooters and autorickshaws kept spraying thick jets of muddy water from the waterlogged road into the back seat.

  We finally arrived at the hotel, after lurching and splashing through an unknown maze of potholed dark back alleys. There was no power in the area, and the big white concrete block of the hotel stood brooding dumbly over its waterlogged forecourt. Inside, all was chaos: the weak light from petromax lanterns fell on rolled-up carpets and hectic men with pails and mops. The receptionist said that I would have to wait in the lobby: the roof had leaked and some of the rooms had been flooded. He went on to describe the rest of the evening’s disasters. I only half listened. Water ran down my back; my socks were wet; my feet cold. But I was feeling quite calm.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My foremost debt is to Barbara Epstein. It would be hard to imagine this book without her support. Jason Epstein’s early confidence in The Romantics was as crucial as his later suggestions. Mary Mount at Picador was a brilliant, ever-helpful editor and I was fortunate in having such a conscientious publisher in Peter Straus. Sanjeev Saith at IndiaInk offered a very sensitive reading of the book. Hilton Als, John H. Bowles, Ulf Buchholz, Robyn Davidson, Helen Epstein, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vandana Mehrotra, Judith Miller, Nicholas Pearson and Tarun Tejpal offered valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Gillon Aitken for his encouragement through all the past few years. It has been a pleasure to work with Emma Parry and Sally Riley. I am also indebted to people who encouraged and assisted me in different ways: Robyn, Julie, William and Olivia, Norma, John, Patrick, Stuart, Chris and Sarah, Christina, the Sharmas at Mashobra, Paul, Pradip, Arundhati, Alok, Lucy, and my parents and sisters.

  THE ROMANTICS

  ‘The atmosphere of The Romantics, from the opening page, is extraordinarily seductive . . . a fine and impressive first novel’

  Jason Cowley, Literary Review

  ‘Mishra’s writing has a lovely potency . . . subtly layered and compelling first novel’

  Shirley Chew, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘An intriguing combination of casual grace and emotional intensity, peppered with discreet social comment on caste, class, sectarian strife, the state of the nation . . . this is a charming debut’

  Aamer Hussein, Independent

  ‘A truly ambitious attempt to compare the way people in the East and the West dream – and the way they put their dreams behind them when the dreams come crashing down to earth . . . Delicate and subtly tantalising in the way only a book can really be’

  Vogue

  ‘Mishra offers a surprisingly assured, provocatively balanced meditation on the familiar culture clash, focusing on a generation of Indian youth bewildered about the value of an ancient heritage others find indispensable’

  Boston Globe

  ‘Contemporary India is brought to vigorous, thrumming life in the pages of The Romantics’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Mishra’s eye is sharp, his prose flawless’

  Time

  ‘A first novel whose achievement is something that most writers could be proud of at any stage in their careers’

  Vancouver Sun

  ‘Mishra’s lyrical descriptions of the Himalayas, Pondicherry, Allahabad and Dharamshala, and the depth of culture the region offers, is a haunting reminder of India’s power to bewitch’

  Time Out

  ‘An extraordinary debut novel, The Romantics is a supernova in the wan firmament of recent fiction’

  Washington Post

  ‘It is almost as if when everyone is flashing De Beers diamonds, Mishra traps the quiet luminescence of the moonstone in his theme and style’

  The Hindu

  ‘A beautiful and moving book. Mishra deals quietly with big themes – love, loss, grief, the meeting of East and West, caste, the changes in modern India – with a delicacy and subtlety that would be impressive in an established writer’

  New Straits Times (Malaysia)

  ‘Impressive . . . The Romantics turns its back on the exotic richness and the “teeming” panoramic quality which we readily assume to be expressive of Indianness itself ’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Mishra has managed to write a novel that showcases his own distinctive voice, a voice that fuses the lapidary precision of Flaubert with the meditative lyricism of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited . . . a resonant and highly subtle novel’

  Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  PANKAJ MISHRA was born in 1969. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and Outlook magazine. He divides his time between New Delhi and Shimla. The Romantics is his first novel.

  First published 1999 by Picador

  This edition published 2001 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2011 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-447-21018-4 EPUB

  Copyright © Pankaj Mishra 1999

  The right of Pankaj Mishra
to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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