‘Dom Minto?’ The name stopped me in my tracks. She might as well have said ‘Hercule Poirot’ or ‘Maigret’ or ‘Sam Spade’. She might as well have said ‘Inspector Ghote’ or ‘Inspector Dhar’. Everyone knew the name, everyone had seen Minto’s Mysteries, the railway-station penny-dreadfuls chronicling the career of the great Bombay private eye. There had been a series of movies about him in the 1950s, the last one following his involvement in the celebrated murder case (for, yes, there had once been a ‘real’ Minto who had ‘really’ been a private detective) in which the Indian Navy’s high-flying hero, Commander Sabarmati, had shot his wife and her lover, killing the man and seriously wounding the lady. It was Minto who had tracked the cheating couple to their love-nest and given the irate Commander the address. Profoundly distressed by the shootings, and by the unsympathetic portrayal of him in the film based upon the case, the old man – for he had been ancient and lame even then – had retired from his profession, and the fantasists had taken over, creating the heroic super-sleuth of the cheap paperbacks and radio serials (and lately the motion picture remakes, as big-budget superstar vehicles, of the old 50s B-features), transforming him from an old has-been into a myth. What was this masala-fiction of a fellow doing in the story of my life?
‘Yes, the real guy,’ said Aurora, not unkindly. ‘Now he is eighty-plus. Kekoo found him.’ O, Kekoo. Another one of your fancy-boys. O, darling Kekoo found him, and he’s just too darling, the darling oldster, I set him straight to work.
‘He was in Canada,’ Aurora said. ‘Retired, living with grandkids, bored, making the youngsters’ life miserable as hell. Then it turns out that Commander Sabarmati has come out of jail, and patchofied things up with his wife. What do you know? Right there in Toronto they were live-o’ing happily ever after. After that, according to Kekoo, Minto felt free of his old misdeed, came back to Bombay, and in spite of advanced years went right back to work, fut-a-fut. Kekoo is a big fan; me too. Dom Minto! Back then, you know, he really was the best.’
‘Wonderful!’ I said, as sarcastically as I could. But my heart, I must confess, my penny-dreadful heart was pounding. ‘And what has this Bollywood Sherlock Holmes to tell me about the woman I love?’
‘She’s married,’ said Aurora, flatly. ‘And currently fooling around with not one, not two, but three lovers. You want photos? Your poor sister Ina’s stupid Jimmy Cash; your stupid father; and, my stupid peacock, you.’
‘Listen on, because I’ll tell you once only,’ she had said in response to my persistent inquisitiveness about her background. She came from a respectable – though not by any means wealthy – Gujarati Brahmin family, but had been orphaned young. Her mother, a depressive, had hanged herself when Uma was twelve and her schoolteacher father, driven mad by the tragedy, had set himself on fire. Uma had been rescued from penury by a kindly ‘uncle’ – actually, not an uncle, but a teaching colleague of her father’s – who paid for her education in return for sexual favours (so not ‘kindly’, either). ‘From the age of twelve,’ she said. ‘Until just now. If I followed my heart I would put a knife in his eye. Instead I have asked the god to curse him and simply turned my back. So maybe you understand why I do not choose to talk about my past. Never speak of it again.’
Dom Minto’s version, as reported by my mother, was rather different. According to him Uma was not from Gujarat but Maharashtra – the other half of the divided self of the former Bombay State – and had been raised in Poona, where her father was a high-ranking officer in the police force. At a young age she had shown prodigious artistic gifts and been encouraged by her parents, without whose support it was improbable that she would have achieved the required standard for a scholarship at the M.S. University, where she was universally praised as a young woman of exceptional promise. Soon, however, she had started giving signs of an exceptionally disordered spirit. Now that she was becoming a celebrated figure, people were reluctant or afraid to speak against her, but after patient inquiries Dom Minto had discovered that she had on three occasions agreed to take heavy medication intended to control her repeated mental aberrations, but on all three she had abandoned the treatment almost as soon as it had begun. Her ability to take on radically different personae in the company of different people – to become what she guessed a given man or woman (but usually man) would find most appealing – was exceptional; but this was a talent for acting that had been pushed to the point of insanity, and beyond. In addition she would invent long, elaborate personal histories of great vividness, and would cling to them obstinately, even when confronted with internal contradictions in her rigmaroles, or with the truth. It was possible that she no longer had a clear sense of an ‘authentic’ identity that was independent of these performances, and this existential confusion had begun to spread beyond the borden of her own self and to infect, like a disease, all those with whom she came into contact. She was known in Baroda for telling malicious and manipulative lies, for instance about certain faculty members with whom she fantasised absurdly steamy love affairs, and eventually wrote to their wives with explicit details of sexual encounters that had, in more than one case, led to separations and divorces. ‘The reason she did not let you go to her college’, my mother said, ‘is that up there everybody hateofies her guts.’
Her parents had reacted to the news of her mental illness by abandoning her to her fate; not an uncommon response, as I was well aware. They had neither hanged nor immolated themselves – these violent fictions were born out of their spurned daughter’s (pretty legitimate) rage. As for the lecherous ‘uncle’: according to Aurora and Minto, Uma after her rejection by her family – not at the age of twelve, as she had said! – had quickly latched on to an old Baroda acquaintance of her father’s, an elderly, retired deputy commissioner of police by the name of Suresh Sarasvati, a melancholy old widower whom the young beauty effortlessly seduced into a quick marriage at a time when, as a disowned woman, she had a desperate need for the respectability of marital status. Soon after their marriage the old fellow had been rendered helpless by a stroke (‘And what brought that on?’ demanded Aurora. ‘Do I have to spellofy it out? Must I draw-o you a picture?’), and now lived a dreadful half-life, mute and paralysed, cared for only by a solicitous neighbour. His young wife had taken off with everything he owned and had never given him a second thought. And now, in Bombay, she had started playing the field. Her powers of attraction, and the persuasiveness of her performances, were at their peak. ‘You must break her magic spell,’ my mother said. ‘Or you are done for. She is like a rakshasa from the Ramayana, and for sure she will cookofy your poor goose.’
Minto had been thorough; Aurora showed me documentation – birth and wedding certificates, confidential medical reports acquired by the usual greasing of already-slippery palms, and so on – which left little doubt that his account was accurate in all important particulars. Still my heart refused to believe. ‘You don’t understand her,’ I protested to my mother. ‘O?, she lied about her parents. I would also lie about parents of that type. And maybe this ex-cop Sarasvati is not such an angel as you make out. But evil? Mad? A demon in human form? Mummyji, I think some personal factors have intervened.’
That night I sat alone in my room, unable to eat. It was plain that I had a choice to make. If I chose Uma, I would have to break away from my mother, probably for good. But if I accepted Aurora’s evidence – and in the privacy of my own four walls I had to concede its overwhelming force – then I was condemning myself, in all probability, to a life without a partner. How much longer did I have? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty? Could I face my strange, dark fate alone, without a lover by my side? What mattered more: love or truth?
But if Aurora and Minto were to be believed, she did not love me, was simply a great actress, a predator of the passions, a fraud. All at once I realised that many of the judgments I had recently made about my family were based on things Uma had said. I felt my head spin. The floor fell away beneath my feet. Was it true about Aurora and Kekoo, ab
out Aurora and Vasco, about Aurora and Raman Fielding? Was it true that my sisters spoke ill of me behind my back? And if not, then it must be true that Uma – O my best beloved! – had sought deliberately to damage my opinion of those to whom I was closest, so that she could insert herself between me and mine. To give up one’s own picture of the world and become wholly dependent on someone else’s – was not that as good a description as any of the process of, literally, going out of one’s mind? In which case – to use Aurora’s contrast – I was the mad one. And lovely Uma: the bad.
Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.
The next morning I sat on the terrace at Elephanta staring out at the glittering bay. Mynah came to see me. At Aurora’s request she, too, had assisted Dom Minto in his inquiries. It turned out that nobody in the Baroda branch of the UWAPRF had ever met Uma Sarasvati or knew of her involvement in any kind of activist campaigning. ‘So even her introduction was a phoney,’ she said. ‘I tell you, little bro, this time Mummyji is spot on.’
‘But I love her,’ I said helplessly. ‘I can’t stop. I just can’t.’
Mynah sat beside me and took my left hand. She spoke in a voice so gentle, so un-Mynah-like, that it caught my attention. ‘I also liked her too much,’ she said. ‘But then it went wrong. I didn’t want to tell you. Not my place. Anyhow, you wouldn’t have listened.’
‘Listened to what?’
‘One time she came to me after being with you,’ Mynah said, squinting into the distance. ‘She told me some things about how it was. About what you. Anyway. Doesn’t matter. She said she didn’t like it. She said more but to hell. It doesn’t matter now. Then she said something to me about me. That is to say: wanting. I sent her packing. Since then we don’t speak.’
‘She said it was you,’ I told her dully. ‘I mean. Who was after her.’
‘And you believed her,’ Mynah snapped, then swiftly kissed my forehead. ‘Of course you believed her. What do you know about me? Who I like, what I need? And you were crazy for love. Poor sap. Now, but, you better wise up quick.’
‘I should dump her? Just like that?’
Mynah stood up, lit a cigarette, coughed: a deep, unhealthy, choking sound. Her hard, front-line voice was back, her anti-civic-corruption lawyer’s cross-examination voice, her fighting-against-murder-of-girl-babies, no-more-sati no-more-rapes loud-hailer instrument. She was right. I knew nothing about what it might be like to be her, about the choices she had had to make, about whose arms she might turn to for comfort, or why men’s arms might be places not of pleasure but of fear. She might be my sister, but so what? I didn’t even call her by her proper name. ‘What’s the big prob?’ she shrugged, waving an ashy cigarette as she left. ‘Giving up this stuff is harder. Trust me on this. Just cold-turkey the bitch and be thankful you don’t also smoke.’
‘I knew they would try and break us up. From the beginning I knew.’
Uma had moved into an eighteenth-floor apartment with sea view on Cuffe Parade, in a high-rise next door to the President Hotel and not far from the Mody Gallery. She was standing, theatrically ravaged by grief, on a little balcony against a suitably operatic backdrop of wind-agitated coco-palms and sudden, voluminous rain; and now, sure enough, here came the quiver of the sensuously full lower lip, here came her very own waterworks. ‘For your own mother to tell you – that with your father! – well, excuse me but I am disgusted. Chhi! And Jimmy Cashondeliveri! That dumbo guitar-wallah with a missing string! You know perfectly well that from the first day at the racecourse he thought I was some avatar of your sister. Since then he follows me like a dog with his tongue hanging. And I’m supposed to be sleeping with him? God, who else? V. Miranda, maybe? The one-legged chowkidar? Have I no bloody shame?’
‘But what you said about your family. And the “uncle”.’
‘What gives you the right to know everything about me? You were pushy and I didn’t want to tell you. Bas. That’s all.’
‘But it wasn’t true, Uma. Your parents are alive and the uncle is a husband.’
‘It was a metaphor. Yes! A metaphor of how wretched my life was, of my pain. If you loved me you would understand that. If you loved me you would not give me the third degree. If you loved me you would stop shaking your poor fist, and put it here, and you would shut your sweet face, and bring it here, and you would do what lovers do.’
‘It wasn’t a metaphor, Uma,’ I said, backing away. ‘It was a lie. What’s scary is, you don’t know the difference.’ I stepped backwards through her front door, and closed it, feeling as if I’d just leapt from her balcony towards the wild palms. That was how it felt: like a falling. Like a suicide. Like a death.
But that was an illusion, too. The real thing was still two years away.
I held out for months. I lived at home, went to work, became skilled in the art of marketing and promoting Baby Softo Talcum Powder and was even appointed marketing manager by a proud father. I got through the hollow calendar of days. There were changes at Elephanta. In the aftermath of the débâcle of the retrospective, Aurora had finally got round to throwing Vasco out. It was icily done. Aurora mentioned her increased need for solitude, and Vasco with a cold bow agreed to clear out his studio. If this was the end of an affair, I thought, then it was creditably dignified and discreet: though the Arctic coldness of it made me shiver, I confess. Vasco came to say goodbye to me, and we went together to the cartoon-nursery, long unoccupied, where everything had begun. ‘That’s all, folks,’ he said. ‘Time for V. Miranda to go West. Got a castle to build in the air.’ He was lost in the flood of his own flesh, he looked like a toady, fairground-mirror reflection of Raman Fielding, and his mouth was twisted in pain. His voice was controlled, but I did not miss the blaze of feeling in his eye.
‘She was my obsession, you must have guessed that,’ he said, caressing the exclamatory walls (Pow! Zap! Splat!). ‘As she was and is and will be yours. Maybe one day you’ll feel like facing up to that. Then come to me. Come before that needle hits my heart.’ I had not thought for years about Vasco’s lost point, his Snow Queen’s splinter of ice; and reflected, now, that the heart of this altered, swollen Vasco had more conventional attacks to worry about than needles. He left India for Spain soon afterwards, never to return.
Aurora also fired her dealer. She informed Kekoo that she held him personally responsible for the ‘public relations fiasco’ of her show. Kekoo went noisily, arriving at the gates each day for a month to entreat Lambajan for admission (which was refused), sending flowers and gifts (which were returned), writing endless letters (which were thrown away unread). Aurora had told him that as she no longer intended to exhibit any work, her need for a gallery no longer existed. But Kekoo, pathetically, was sure she was deserting him for his great rivals at the Chemould. He begged and pleaded with her by telephone (to which Aurora would not come when he called), in telegrams (which she would contemptuously set on fire), even via Dom Minto (who turned out to be a purblind, blue-spectacled old gent with the huge horse-teeth of the French comedian Fernandel, and whom Aurora instructed to stop carrying his messages). I could not help but wonder about Uma’s accusations. If these two alleged lovers had been disposed of, then what of Mainduck? Had Fielding, too, been dumped, or was he now the sole tenant of her heart?
Uma, Uma. I missed her so. There were withdrawal symptoms: at night I felt her phantom-body move under my broken hand. As I was falling asleep (my misery did not prevent me from sleeping soundly!) I saw before my mind’s eye the scene in an old Fernandel movie in which, not knowing the English word for ‘woman’, he uses his hands to trace the outline of a curvaceous female form.
I was the other man in the dream. ‘Ah,’ I nodded. ‘A bottle of Coke?’
Uma walked past us, swinging her hips. Fernandel leered and jabbed a thumb in the direction of her departing posterior.
‘My bottle of Coke,’ he said, with understandable pride.
Ordinary life. Aurora painted every day, but I no longer had access to her studio. Abraham worked long hours, and when I asked him why I was being permitted to languish in the world of baby’s behinds – I, with my time shortage! – he answered, ‘Too much in your life has gone too fast. Do you good to slow down for some period.’ In an act of silent solidarity, he had stopped golfing with Uma Sarasvati. Perhaps he, too, was missing her versatile charms.
Silence in Paradise: silence, and an ache. Mrs Gandhi returned to power, with Sanjay at her right hand, so it turned out that there was no final morality in affairs of state, only Relativity. I remembered Vasco Miranda’s ‘Indian variation’ upon the theme of Einstein’s General Theory: Everything is for relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. D equals mc squared, where D is for Dynasty, m is for mass of relatives, and c of course is for corruption, which is the only constant in the universe – because in India even speed of light is dependent on load shedding and vagaries of power supply. Vasco’s departure, too, made home a quieter place. The rambling old mansion was like a denuded stage across which, like rustling phantoms, wandered a depleted cast of actors who had run out of lines. Or perhaps they were acting on other stages now, and only this house was dark.
It did not fail to occur to me – indeed, for a time it occupied most of my waking thoughts – that what had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on which we had all been raised. For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora had fried her – Aurora, that lifelong advocate of the many against the one, had with Minto’s help discovered some fundamental verities, and had therefore been in the right. The story of my love-life thus became a bitter parable, one whose ironies Raman Fielding would have relished, for in it the polarity between good and evil was reversed.
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