The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘I don’t think anyone knows. I think the thing just appeared like Venus rolling in from the sea in Cyprus in rock form. It was created wholly by the imagination of men.’

  The Natraj had been turned into a national icon in India, appearing in airports and on HB pencils; the writer knew this.

  ‘The image,’ he said, ‘is much debased. It’s used everywhere, like some of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings.’ Then looking at the little man, gasping for his life, on whom the dancing Shiva stood, the writer said, ‘I will interpret it in my own way. He is standing on the monster of ignorance.’ That monster the writer saw as representing ‘the snare of life’. He didn’t mean appetite, but irrationality, darkness and cruelty especially; the possibility men always have of being less than men.

  Standing before this most Indian of Indian images, the writer could not have been oblivious to its context. He was a man who always knew where he was. He seemed to stand there considering the dark history that had landed the bronze image before him in a glass case, unseen, unthought of, in the country from where it came. He began to draw a historical thread. But even before he began, I had been thinking of Aakash. I don’t know why; perhaps only because of his feeling for the gods, and my removal. The writer spoke directly to my thoughts.

  ‘Many people don’t know,’ he said, ‘that in the nineteenth century there was an anti-Brahmin movement and that the Brahmins were driven out of town. That was when there was a looting of their works of art and devotion. The people who were doing the looting didn’t think what they would replace these images with. It was then that they began to appear in the salerooms of Europe and America.’

  A nineteenth-century anti-Brahmin movement! Had that been the history behind the magical story of Aakash’s ancestor? Had his run-in with the village, and his subsequent disappearance, ‘the driving out of town’, been part of a larger story, part of an anti-Brahmin movement that the writer, living thousands of miles away, could have read about? Was the statue I had seen of Aakash’s ancestor, with his saffron robes and three streaks of turmeric across the forehead, a gesture of historical remembrance? It was amazing to consider.

  The Natraj had been rubbed to shine in some places. The writer liked that. ‘It’s to me a nice idea, rubbing the parts they thought beautiful. No polish…’ he began.

  ‘Is as good as the human hand,’ his wife finished for him.

  We moved on from the Natraj and the writer’s mood lightened. His earlier solemnity lifted, he spoke more generally about the figures. ‘Someone asked me,’ he said, ‘why the figure had four hands. “It’s not a human figure,” I told him. “It’s a human figure representing something. The arms are there to represent what is being honoured.” ’ But when we came to a Shiva in a relaxed human posture with Parvati by his side, the writer chuckled. ‘Here, when the figure has a consort and comes down from its pedestal, things become a little more complicated.’

  In another glass case, there were Vijaynagar bronzes. The figures were squatter, thicker of limb. ‘We were talking of security earlier,’ the writer began, and speaking of the Muslim invaders and Vijaynagar respectively, said, ‘They destroyed it and destroyed it completely. This destruction is made beautiful by the Left. You know, by the drawing-room intellectuals, the ladies with their fashionable grey hair and ethnic saris, ambassadors of the Caliph to the Republic of Letters. They say that it was destroyed by the Indians themselves. They are so completely degraded, they can’t deal with their own defeat, but we mustn’t let that spoil the beauty of what we’re seeing.’

  The writer began to get tired. We sat down, his wife and I on a bench, him on his shooting stick, with its Air India tag still hanging from it. He began advising me on books I might read about the bronzes. They were all by German and British writers. ‘It’s cause for shame,’ he said, ‘that Indians don’t write these books themselves.

  ‘You see, the English-speaking people of India don’t come here. They think this is local stuff. They want to go to America and have their self-portrait painted and buy nudes, like the Maharaja of Patiala. And then they complain that the British looted them. These were in the viceroy’s house. It was Nehru’s idea to bring them here; it was a good idea, but no one wants to come.’ He raised his hands, open-palmed, in despair.

  The mood excited a story of Coomaraswamy, the Sri Lankan art critic. ‘His dates are 1877–1947. He was half Sinhalese and rich,’ the writer said. ‘It was open to him to start up life as a Mayfair gentleman or in the country, but he decided to devote himself to Indian art. In 1917, when Coomaraswamy was forty,’ the writer added, calculating fast, ‘he heard that the Hindu University was being built in Benares. He offered them his, by then, vast collection of Indian art, which he was ready to give them free on the condition they started a chair of Indian art and made him the professor.’ The writer paused.

  ‘What did they say?’ I asked.

  ‘They told him to go away. They told him to go away. They told him to take his art collection and go away,’ the writer said, laughing, his eyes widening. His repetition made simple and ordinary something shocking, in turn deepening its effect. His laughter rang out as if no calamity was great enough to smother its rumble.

  ‘Where is it now?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s in Boston.’ He chortled. ‘It’s in Boston.’

  A few Indians, middle-class-seeming people with cameras, sauntered in. The writer’s wife took this as an opportunity to challenge her husband’s earlier claim that English-speaking Indians were not interested in India’s antiquities. ‘Look, they’ve come,’ she said.

  ‘They’ve come for the jewels. Yes, yes, they’ve come for the Nizam’s jewels. Their grandparents were taxed to death for the Nizam to have those jewels. And he didn’t do a thing; he just handled his jewels. The Left adores the Nizam.’

  Then suddenly, our visit seeming to wind down, the writer became urgent. ‘You’ll come back,’ he said, ‘and you’ll look at these things. You’ll look at what we’ve seen and then move on.’

  Walking out, we passed a map of the places from where the antiquities had come. It annoyed the writer; it seemed to show nothing but the actual digs, with no historical or geographical points of reference. He saw one place somewhere near Calcutta; ‘the Calcutta Museum,’ he said, ‘had a good collection, but kept badly. I think they would like to destroy them,’ he added, ‘but they can’t. So they do the next best thing: they let the workers watch them. Yes, they let the workers watch them.’

  Another group of Indians, in bold colours, were coming in just as we were leaving. They seemed from the south, with teekas on their foreheads and flowers in their hair. They were laughing and visibly excited by what they saw.

  ‘You see my point,’ the writer said. ‘The people who come are the temple-goers and the ones who stay away are…’

  ‘The anglicized…’ his wife started.

  ‘The green-card folk,’ the writer offered, and laughed deeply.

  15

  Sanyogita didn’t like the writer. She felt he wasn’t kind; that was her word. She had begun many books of his. I think she read them for my sake rather than out of any real interest; and later I felt she left them unfinished for the same reason. One lay by her bedside now.

  ‘I can’t!’ she said, standing in front of a dressing-table mirror, her head cocked to one side as she put in an earring, ‘I just can’t. I’ve tried, but they’re so dry. And he’s not kind to his subjects.’

  ‘What do you mean “not kind”? What’s kind got to do with it?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think he shows any compassion to the people he writes about.’

  ‘Isn’t just being plain honest a kind of compassion? Doesn’t it give back to people a kind of dignity, just to judge them by your own good standards and not as people who’ve been colonized, defeated, oppressed or enslaved?’

  She didn’t answer; she was having trouble finding the hol
e. The earring slipped and clattered across the floor. Sanyogita, already in her heels, squatted down in one movement. But when she found it, it was broken. It was one of Ra’s earrings, the one with the moonstone and the ruby. The moonstone was missing. It left a visible vacancy.

  ‘Baby!’ Sanyogita cried, and squatted down again, feeling around the floor for the stone. We found it under her dressing table, covered in wisps of dirt and dust. She handled the little paisley-shaped stone as though it were a chick that had fallen from its nest. She found these small, inauspicious tragedies very moving; they could almost reduce her to tears. Then she saw that I was squatting down next to her and she smiled. She reached a long arm up to my ear, rubbed its rim between her fingers and rose in one movement.

  ‘No big deal, right? I’ll get Ra to fix it. When are we meeting your mother?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘OK, I’ll hurry.’

  My mother had flown in from Bombay for two nights. She was having dinner with Sanyogita and me tonight; the following night, she was having her dinner for the writer. We were meeting her at the new Italian restaurant in the Oberoi.

  Outside on the garden terrace, the frangipani, its branches now completely bare, had shrivelled in its pot. But my premonition had been wrong. It was not the first casualty of a larger pestilence; the other plants were flourishing. From the shaft of light falling on the corridor, I could see the door to my study. Its brass Godrej lock hung heavily from the bolt; it hadn’t been opened since my return.

  Sanyogita herself had only come back the night before. She appeared in the corridor a few seconds later.

  The Oberoi Hotel attracted a variety of people. Politicians in white waited for white cars with red lights. Young men in maroon shirts with black trousers and brushed-steel belt buckles wandered in. A woman in a pink salwar kameez stepped out of a blue Mercedes. The hotel’s lobby was of black granite and heavily air-conditioned. There was a white marble fountain in the middle, with red rose petals circling on its glassy surface. On the way to the restaurant, we saw the hotel swimming pool through glass panels many metres below, brightly lit and blue in the darkness.

  The restaurant had tall grey leather chairs. The tables were made of a faux-rustic stone and were very far apart. My mother, bejewelled and in a black and gold silk sari, tapped out a text message in front of a wavy, illuminated panel of frosted glass.

  Because my mother had brought me up alone and our closeness was almost embarrassing since I was now technically a man, we played at being offhand with each other. And so even after not seeing me for months, she gave me a brief hug, said I was looking skinny and fell into Sanyogita’s arms. While they spoke about jet lag and the summer, a young man in white brought a bottle of Himalaya water to the table, then bowed in a deep namaste and went away.

  ‘That’s new!’ I said to my mother as we sat down.

  ‘I know! Isn’t it amazing? Biki has them all doing it.’

  Biki was Biki Oberoi, the owner of the hotel.

  ‘He must have picked it up in the East,’ I said, remembering the time when you couldn’t even come into the hotel’s restaurants in Indian clothes.

  ‘Isn’t that strange,’ my mother said, ‘that it should have gone from here to there as a greeting, hundreds of years ago, and has now returned via Biki Oberoi?’

  We had barely sat down when I felt my phone vibrate for the third time since we had arrived. I didn’t answer it, but was curious as to who it was: Aakash, all three times. My mother and Sanyogita were talking about Chamunda, about the dinner the next day, about the blasts and demonstrations in the old city as a result of a police encounter. I was sending a text message, asking Aakash what the matter was, when my mother suddenly said, ‘Baba, have you called Zafar to see if he’s OK?’

  The question put my back up. Both because I hadn’t spoken to Zafar since I arrived and because Sanyogita, having seen me check my phone for the third time, and guessing who it was, compressed her lips. My mother, an observer of these currents, badgered me for many minutes about how wrong it was. ‘Your poor old teacher,’ she said, ‘alone in the walled city at a time like this. How uncaring can you be, Aatish! And to a man who has given you so much, really.’

  ‘Ma, he’s not alone! He has a family. I’ll call him.’

  ‘It’s the bad Pakistani blood,’ my mother said, shaking her head, and withholding a smile, turned to Sanyogita. ‘It’s from the father. I’ve done what I can to improve it, but still it remains.’

  A man in a dark jacket appeared to take our order. I ordered lamb, my mother a starter as a main course, and Sanyogita sea bass.

  My mother, finding me more sensitive than she had expected, brought up the writer’s treatment of his wife, taking pleasure perhaps, after not seeing me for so long, in winding me up.

  ‘It can’t be easy for her,’ she said, ‘married to a man like him. He’s very demanding. It’s a twenty-four-hour job. She can’t go anywhere, you know? She’s his wife of course, but that’s it. And he can be savage to her. I’ve seen it. Stingy beyond words. She lives as he does, which is well, but I don’t think she has five rupees of her own.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but she is a writer’s wife. The man has his vocation. That’s the most important thing in his life; everything else is secondary. She married him knowing that.’

  ‘She’s given him her everything, given him her life,’ my mother replied, no longer playful. ‘He’s the famous writer, but what does she get out of it?’

  ‘To be his wife. Some men need that and some women are made to give that.’

  No sooner had I made the remark than it seemed to crumble and change like one of those unstable compounds, returning to their baser elements with the slightest exposure. Defending something stupid can make the world feel beyond grasp. And that night, before my mother, the woman who’d raised me, and my girlfriend of many months, who might have considered spending the remainder of her life with me, I took a shred of a thought, this little idea that the life of vocation required the sacrifice of anyone who came within its circle, and ran with it. I poured my energy into qualifications and amendments, trying to pull out of a rhetorical train crash. My mother became grave. Sanyogita’s face shrank, till it was like a pinpoint of pain and hurt. But she didn’t say a word.

  I said that certain people were touched with energies and talents that weren’t theirs, and in acting on them, they weren’t expected to meet normal standards of decency and good behaviour.

  ‘What about love?’ my mother said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What about your responsibility to the people you love and who love you?’

  Our food arrived. Sanyogita pushed behind her ear a lock of hair that had fallen forward and began quietly to pick at her fish. I thought I saw her eyes glisten. I took refuge in my lamb.

  ‘The person who embarks on this kind of life,’ I said at last, ‘can’t think of those things. He has to think of his vocation, whether it makes him happy or not, or those around him.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Aatish. You really talk nonsense. What is life if not in the end to have been a good friend, a good wife or lover, or mother, to have a house by the sea that you love, and five beagles running about the place?’

  ‘Not everyone has a house by the sea and five beagles.’

  ‘Don’t be cussed, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean to have lived a full, balanced life, to be surrounded in the end by the things you love.’

  ‘It’s funny you mention that, the being surrounded in the end by things you love. Almost exactly the same conversation came up at the end of the museum visit the other day. And the writer said he wanted to die, like Van Gogh, “with hatred for no one and love for his art”. Perhaps that’s the difference, wanting in the end to be surrounded by art you love and which you have spent a lifetime creating, rather than by things you love.’

  Sanyogita, who hadn’t said a word so far, who had driven me to the depths of despair with her silence, said
at last, ‘What about the people who give their lives supporting you?’

  I was about to speak when she anticipated me and stopped me.

  ‘Who do it not from any sense of vocation, but out of love. Only out of love.’

  At that moment, my phone vibrated for the tenth time.

  I said, ‘I don’t know, baby. This is not personal or about me. Listen, I’m going to take this call because there seems to be some kind of serious problem. It’s been ringing all evening. Will you excuse me for a second?’

  And so, in this way I tried to put a rushed, modern ending to a conversation which, when I later tried to downplay to my mother, describing it as a slip of the tongue, she further described as, ‘Yes, but a very revealing one.’

  In the lobby outside, Aakash, using a Hinglish classic, said, ‘Aatish, man, I’m taking a lot of tension.’

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked, beginning now to think of my own problems.

  ‘Megha just called me. Her brother knows for sure.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He just confronted Megha.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘ “We sent you there,” ’ Aakash began, employing his distinctive ability to take on other personas, ‘ “to get into shape so that you could make a good match, not so that you could run off with the gym trainer. Who is he? He is nothing. He doesn’t know his station. If I wanted I could call Deepak…” ’

  ‘Who’s Deepak, Aakash?’

  ‘The owner, man. The fucker with the ponytail. “I could call Deepak,” Aakash said, stepping back into character, ‘ “and have him thrown into the street, his legs broken. The only reason I’m not doing it is because I don’t want a public embarrassment. But end this relationship this minute, I warn you. Mummy has high blood pressure. If she gets to know her daughter has run off with such a low-grade person, it would kill her. You have one younger sister. Think of her. Do you realize you’re compromising her marriage prospects as well?” ’