‘Are we stealing your dad’s scooter?’ I whispered as I pushed the vehicle along.
‘What does it look like to you?’ he retorted. ‘But don’t worry, I’ve done it before, and as long as we return it in one piece, we’ll be fine.’
Once we were on the slope leading away from the church, we hopped on, Noah produced a spare key, turned on the ignition, put the scooter in gear and we were off. I had never ridden pillion on a two-wheeler before, and I was acutely conscious of how close to disaster I was perched. Noah drove very fast and the ancient vehicle protested at every bump in the road, but the fact that he was stoned out of his mind terrified me even more. I tried shouting to him to slow down but my injunctions were torn to shreds by the speed at which we were travelling. I wished I’d told the butler back at Cypress Manor not to cancel the taxi he had ordered.
As we left the church behind and took the narrow twisting road to town, the mist rolled in and visibility came down to a few feet. To add to my discomfort, the horn wasn’t working well, and its weak chirp could barely be heard above the noise of our passage. Noah didn’t slow down but resorted to shouting at the top of his voice in Tamil to say that we were coming and that approaching vehicles should give way. After about ten minutes of this, I could bear it no longer. I leaned forward and shouted into his ear to stop as I was feeling sick. In response, Noah braked abruptly and I was almost thrown off. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked innocently, as he pulled the scooter to the side of the road.
‘If we drive like this, we’ll die,’ I said shakily.
‘This is the only way I drive, and I’m still alive,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Do you want to take over?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know how to drive a scooter,’ I confessed, adding, ‘but if we can’t go any slower, I’m sorry, I’d much rather walk.’
He looked at me and smiled, still high, and I thought he might decide to go on without me, but then he said, ‘OK, da, have it your way, but I tell you, you’re going to miss the adrenalin rush of shooting through the mist like a meteor.’
We set off again, at a pace that was much more moderate although it was still too fast in my opinion. I shut my eyes and prayed that we wouldn’t meet another vehicle every time we took a corner, but I wasn’t as paralyzed with terror as I had been before. To our great good fortune there was no traffic until we were on the outskirts of town, where Noah had no option but to slow down because the road had been churned up into a quagmire which every passing car and lorry only made worse.
Up close, Meham was a squalid town, in total contrast to the beauty of the landscape surrounding it. The decline in the fortunes of the tea industry, which had been its mainstay for almost a century, was evident everywhere. Its single main street was rutted and muddy. Above it, dingy computer training institutes, minute department stores, shops, bakeries, two inhospitable-looking lodges, the local branch of a national bank, small one-room restaurants, a travel agency, three tea showrooms and a liquor shop clustered together, all looking as if they had been assembled from whatever materials the builders could find close at hand. Rows of small, badly constructed, weather-beaten houses ascended the slope from the shops. On a hill facing the town proper, there were three temples, a mosque and a church—there was obviously no dearth of piety around here. What worried me were the knots of young men I could see standing around aimlessly everywhere I looked. If their frustration and anger were to be exploited by the fundamentalists, then this town could become like all the others that Mr Sorabjee’s old Gods had taken over.
Noah wanted to buy some bones for Godless, so we parked the scooter by the side of the road and went into the bazaar that descended from the main street to a dirty river that carried away the town’s waste. We made slow progress through a warren of tiny lanes, on either side of which were stalls that displayed all manner of goods; everyone seemed to know Noah, and we were obliged to stop every few minutes to chat to the shopkeepers. Eventually, we arrived at a vegetable market, redolent with the smell of curry leaves, where Noah spent a long time flirting with the fat proprietress of a stall on which mounds of aubergines, bitter gourd, tomatoes and carrots were heaped. From here it was a short walk to the butcher’s shop, a low-roofed shack that stood a little apart from the rest of the stalls. Outside, wire cages bulged with quails and chickens, all of them strangely quiet. A mangy black dog slunk out of the doorway as we entered. I was leading but I had barely taken a few steps into the shop when I noticed that Noah was no longer with me. On the far side of the establishment the butcher was chopping up a slab of mutton with a small axe for the only other customer in the place, a well-dressed, pompous-looking man with a high-domed forehead from which a great wave of white hair swept back. The butcher looked up briefly, and then went back to his work, while the customer ignored me. I hastily retraced my steps and found Noah behind the cages of poultry, smoking a cigarette.
‘How come you disappeared?’ I asked in some bemusement.
‘Oh nothing, just didn’t want that pompous arsehole in the shop to see me. Great friend of the Brigadier’s, would string me up if he caught sight of me,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Fortunately people like him normally have their noses hoisted so high in the air, they wouldn’t notice you unless you bit them on the face.’
‘What did you do to make them dislike you so much?’
‘Nothing, da. You’ll hear about a hundred different versions of what a bastard I am if you stay here long enough, just don’t believe any of them.’
He said nothing more. A few minutes later the man he had been trying to avoid walked out of the shop and, looking impassively ahead, disappeared into the vegetable market. As soon as he had gone, we went into the shop. The butcher greeted Noah affectionately: ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, has that mongrel of yours died?’
‘No, he almost took a chunk of meat from my calf yesterday, so I thought I’d get him some scraps. Ismail, this is my friend Vijay from Bombay.’
The butcher smiled and nodded. As Noah and he got chatting I looked around. A whole goat hung from a hook on the roof, and on the long wooden counter, scarred and criss-crossed by cuts from the butcher’s knives, there were piles of bones, liver and meat. From time to time, the butcher would flick scraps of fat, white and stretched like parchment, on to the floor, and the eyes of four black cats which occupied various vantage points in the shop would flicker imperceptibly. They were well trained and wouldn’t move a muscle until the butcher indicated that they could begin, whereupon one of them would descend noiselessly in a cloud of black fur, scoop up the tit-bit and return to its perch. The cats seemed to have worked out a system for never once did any of them get in each other’s way.
Once Godless’s bones were packed and stowed away, we were finally able to make our way to the Tower of God. When we got there, to my disappointment we could see nothing as the valley was filled almost to the brim with cloud and mist. Noah told me not to worry as it never stayed that way for too long; we would make another attempt to get to it the next day. We sat for a while on the parapet looking down into the whiteness beneath our feet and I commented that it looked solid enough to walk on. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone mad enough to try that,’ Noah said with a laugh, ‘It’s over 6,000 feet straight down.’
A taxi drove up, and four people got out, by the look of them tourists from the plains. The man waddled ahead of his family, his little pot belly pushing out the front of his garish, obviously new sweater, inappropriate leather shoes squeaking as he walked. He was followed by his rotund wife, sari- and sweater-clad, with a little girl of about nine clinging on to her hand. A boy who looked slightly older than his sister brought up the rear. The man walked up to the parapet, looked out at the invisible Tower of God and said rather rudely in our general direction, ‘When will it become visible?’ When neither of us replied, he turned and surveyed us, his small eyes cold above the pencil-line moustache on his upper lip.
‘That is the Tower of God, no?’ he said, his voice a little mo
re conciliatory, although his air of importance hadn’t left him. Surprisingly Noah answered him kindly, even though the man had addressed the question to me. He explained that the Tower of God wasn’t going to show itself that day, and that he should return tomorrow when the weather was expected to clear up. Ignoring him, the man strutted back to the waiting taxi, his family following meekly behind. When the taxi had gone, I said to Noah, ‘That was good of you.’
‘Um, yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was thinking, there but for the grace of God go I, fucking pompous arsehole, apple of his mother’s eye no doubt, less than average intelligence but a great mug-pot so stands first in class in his mofussil school and college, gets a job as a management trainee or something, demands a big dowry, marries a virgin, produces two kids within the first two years of marriage, will work for the same company all his life, is sycophantic to his superiors and obnoxious towards everyone he considers beneath him, bangs his wife three times a year, once on his birthday, once on hers and once on the biggest festival day of the religion he belongs to, Christmas or Deepavali or Id. Then if she’s lucky, she gets a bonus fuck once a year—how many does that make it? OK, four. The rest of the time she looks after the kids and her lord and master. I guess that’s why I was kind to him, little does he know how truly pathetic he is, although he probably thinks the sun rises from his backside. But I could have been him, you know, da, and I… I just couldn’t help myself…’
He paused for a while, and then said, ‘You settled?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Your mother not bugging you to get married, shoving eligible Tam-Brahm virgins at you?’
‘Well, she has brought it up on a couple of occasions, but…’
‘Resist, my friend, resist with all your might. That way lies mediocrity, a life more harrowing than death.’
~
That day I was given my first proper glimpse into Noah’s life, although it took all my skills as an interviewer to wrest it from him. As the day wore on, the story emerged in stops and starts.
He was the priest’s son, he said, and as I had suspected he and his father had fallen out quite early on because Noah had never had much time for religion. ‘The quickest way for you to be turned off religion is to have it served to you morning, noon and night,’ he said wryly over the best mutton biryani I have ever eaten, hot and perfectly spiced, which we bought from a hawker’s cart outside Mitchell Park. He and his father had grown further apart when his mother died. That year Noah had turned ten, and it was then he had finally lost his religion. About two years before her death, his mother had joined a fundamentalist Christian sect, as a result of which she had refused to see doctors or take any form of medical treatment when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, choosing to rely instead on the prayers of her congregation and her Saviour to heal her. His father had failed in all his attempts to make her see reason, and when she had died an agonizing death, Noah had blamed him.
The relationship with his father had continued to deteriorate until eventually the priest had sent him away to boarding school on a scholarship reserved for children of the clergy. ‘The school, St Jerome’s, is quite close to here, they don’t usually allow local boys to be boarders, but my father pulled some strings. He realized that it would be best for both of us, especially with Mum not around to keep the peace.’ Things had gone quite well until his senior year, when he had fallen for the most sought-after girl in the neighbouring girls’ school, St Catherine’s. ‘Maya was an almost perfect Punjaban—tall, fair, not the pallor of Europeans but that perfect complexion, you know what I mean, generous-breasted even though she was only sixteen, long legs—she was a queen, da, and I fell hard. It was the worst thing I could have done, but I’d do it again and again had I a chance to relive my life, because you have to fall in love, perfectly, at least once.’
The girl had reciprocated his passion, he said quite unself-consciously, because he had been one of the edgiest boys in school, a high hurdler and the student who was always on the verge of being thrown out for some act of insubordination or the other. Noah and Maya were soon inseparable. Until her father found out. He sent her to live with her grandparents in Delhi and almost succeeded in getting Noah thrown out of his school. His father had managed to enlist the support of the bishop and the expulsion was stayed but the damage was done. Noah began drinking, doing drugs, missing classes repeatedly and, I suspect, having brushes with the law, although he didn’t say so explicitly. At this point his father intervened again and gave him an ultimatum—if he didn’t pull himself together, it would be too late; he had no more favours to call in, he was just an ordinary pastor. Noah would have to go straight or fend for himself. When I asked him why his father had continued to look out for him, Noah said simply, ‘Because he was a good man. We didn’t get on, but that didn’t mean he was going to abandon me, he was my father after all, and a priest to boot. He didn’t really have an option now, did he?’
Noah behaved himself for a while, passed his school-leaving exam, even secured admission to a college in Coimbatore, but it hadn’t lasted. Maya’s grip on him did not slacken, although he hadn’t seen or heard from her in a year, and he began to drink and do drugs again. He was expelled from college and his long-suffering father, his earlier ultimatum notwithstanding, stepped in one last time. ‘He explained to me that he couldn’t do this anymore, although he was a man of God he couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive endlessly. I suppose I’d given him a really hard time, but was I in any way remorseful, grateful for everything he’d done…’ Noah shook his head and said, ‘Not on your life, da. I was an A-grade arsehole, but I wasn’t myself, I was just too intoxicated by Maya, the idea of Maya more like…’
‘Was she worth it?’ I asked. In my head danced an image of Meher as I had seen her in the Bombay restaurant, and I thought about what my life would have been like if she had shown even the slightest interest in me.
Noah was saying, ‘You don’t measure passion and romance with a calculator, da. Was she worth it? you ask. Of course not, but at the same time of course she was. You don’t get that sort of pulse-pounding passion too often in life, so you grab it when you find it… and do you know why? Because even though it may be fleeting, it’s the only thing that burns an indelible image on your soul, the only thing you will remember when you’re old and spent.’
This time his father tried to solve the problem of Maya by the rather simple expedient of sending his son to study in America. He wangled a scholarship sponsored by the Church on condition that Noah first obtain a degree in India. For eighteen months Noah steadied himself, went to evening classes, studied without a break, passed his examinations and finally boarded a plane to a small liberal arts college on the East Coast.
He loved America, its directness, its essential simplicity and lack of clutter. He read its poets, listened to its music, got caught up in the swirling energy of the country and gradually all the things that hemmed him in, most of all his obsession with Maya, began to fall away. But the freedom he was experiencing was illusory for addiction is progressive, and soon enough his obsession with the woman who had been taken from him returned.
He turned to the girls of America to help him fight off his despair. ‘American women were what I needed at that point in my life, da. They are direct, uncomplicated. They want everything clearly laid out for them: they like to discuss their feelings and every aspect of their relationships obsessively. It takes all the mystery away, but it was exactly what I was looking for. If they liked you and you liked them that was enough. No complicated bullshit, none of the baggage our women carry, you know, all the hang-ups, conditioning and shit that has been bred into them for centuries. It wasn’t love I was after, you understand, it was a sort of oblivion, and I got that in full measure. I screwed my brains out. I was from the land of the Kama Sutra after all, and if I didn’t know all the sixty-four positions in the manual, I made them up, and the women certainly seemed satisfied with what I had to offer. And I had a secret
weapon that every woman I fancied seemed to find irresistible… Do you know what an acrostic poem is?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind, give me a woman’s name, any woman’s name.’
‘Meher,’ I said.
‘Someone you fancy?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Uh, no…’ I stammered in confusion.
‘Hey, take it easy, da, didn’t mean to pry, OK…’ He cast around for a twig and scratched something out on the dirt of the path:
Mellifluous tone spells my dooM
Eyes of flame in a flawless facE
Her beauty is bracing and fresH
Enchanted I slide into her gazE
Realize I can’t ever escape heR
The whole poem took him less than five minutes to write, with all the elisions and substitutions he had to make to get the letters to line up exactly. When he had finished, he said, ‘That’s probably the worst poem I’ve ever written and I’ve written some pretty awful ones, I can tell you. But if you give it to Meher, whoever she is, it doesn’t matter if she’s never read a book in her life, let alone poetry, it’ll win her over. It didn’t fail me once when it came to ensnaring women, and I ranged far and wide. You see how the letters of her name align on both sides of the poem, well even the most stand-offish beauty is guaranteed to melt in seconds when she thinks that she has not only driven you to verse but to a poem that you’ve created especially for her, no abstract one-size-fits-all rubbish. Believe me, it worked better than presents or flowers or chocolate, which was just as well because I didn’t have any money.’
The Solitude of Emperors Page 12
