My Secret History (69 page)

I joined Jenny. I took her hand. She held mine a moment and then dropped it.

In the courtyard of the mosque, as the muezzin howled, a solitary muslim was bent double, worshiping Allah.

“He’s praying,” I said.

“I know that.”

“They do it five times a day.”

“I know that, too.”

We stared at the praying man.

“I just remembered something,” Jenny said. “Isn’t it awful when someone says a striking thing that you know is unfair? The way it sticks in your mind, as though it’s true?” Her eyes were
still on the muslim crouched in prayer. “I admire that man’s piety. My vulgar Uncle Monty fought in Mesopotamia. He was a war hero, so we could never contradict him. When they pray, he used to say, they look like a dog fucking a football.”

Mahadeva was watching us from his little wooden porch. We had taken a rattly train from Madras to Tambaram. Mahadeva had suggested the train when I came the day before by taxi to explain that I would be returning with my wife—and I gave emphasis to the word.

He called out and clapped his hands when we approached his house, and three of his children rushed up to us, the smallest and dirtiest plucking at Jenny’s bag.

Mrs. Mahadeva was apologetic and shouted for the older girl to take the child away.

“Please don’t worry,” Jenny said. “All children are the same. Mine used to be like that. It’s good—it means they’re not afraid of strangers.”

“You are having?” Mrs. Mahadeva said.

“Just one. A little boy,” Jenny said. “Not so little!”

Mahadeva listened to this exchange and smiled. He said, “Let us leave these ladies to entertain themselves.”

Jenny was marveling at the older daughter’s gleaming hair.

“We are applying coconut oil to it, sometimes on a daily basis.”

Mrs. Mahadeva spoke English!

When I saw Mahadeva relaxed I realized how fearful he had been when I had brought Eden here. His fear had made him seem poor and beaten. This time he was expansive. He had little experience of a single woman; but a wife and mother he understood.

As we ate—and this time we ate together, the four adults sitting around the table—the older girl served and spooned seconds onto our palm leaf plates. And she sometimes missed the leaf: she had been staring at Jenny, and she kept glancing back at her.

It was clear that she had made Jenny self-conscious, because Jenny began to speak with her. The girl was sweet and inattentive, and she went on serving in her clumsy way until her mother muttered at her.

“What is your name?” Jenny asked.

“My name is Annapurna.”

She was very thin, with bony hands and bony feet, and large sunken eyes, and she was wrapped in a faded sari. But the name was that of the mightiest mountain ridge in the world.

“This food is really delicious, Annapurna,” Jenny said, squelching the rice into a little ball and wiping it through the puddle of smashed lentils and conveying the sticky mass to her mouth.

Jenny’s dexterity with the food was remarked on by Mahadeva—and still his daughter Annapurna stared. Why did this make me so uneasy? The rest of them were talkative, complimenting Jenny on her pretty dress, her sensible hat, her sturdy shoes, her lovely hair; and they said how lucky I was to have her with me.

“I hope, before we leave Madras, that you’ll come to our hotel and join us for a meal,” Jenny said.

Mahadeva was pleased and flattered to be asked, and it was obviously a novelty for him to be negotiating this with Jenny and not me. Out of deference to Jenny he consulted his wife, and out of deference to us they discussed the matter in English.

“But there is impending arrival of Subramaniam,” Mahadeva said.

“We have ample of time before then to make preparations,” Mrs. Mahadeva said.

“I think he will be left cooling his heels,” Mahadeva replied.

This went on for a while, and at last, with profuse apologies they said they were forced to decline—and they used those words.

“What about next time?” Mrs. Mahadeva said, and she went on to say that she looked forward to seeing our son.

Still Jenny ate and still Annapurna stared.

Mahadeva said, “We will go to Mahabalipuram. We will bring a picnic hamper.”

It did not matter that this was fantasy and probably would never happen. It brought consolation to them. Or perhaps it seemed to them that I was making regular visits to Madras—I had been to their little house twice in six weeks.

Sensing Annapurna’s eyes on her, Jenny said, “My husband
hasn’t finished his rice. I hope he did better than that the last time he was here.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said slowly, folding her skinny arms together. “But the other auntie did not eat the food as you do.”

A silence swelled in the room and solidified like lead, and stifled every noise. And then the Mahadevas, husband and wife, spoke at once.

“Annapurna, hurry and get the container of pickle!”

“Our children will play together in the sea,” Mahadeva said. “In Mahabalipuram.”

Jenny had only momentarily lost her smile.

“I look forward to that,” Jenny said. “To coming back and seeing you.”

“And I hope you will bring your hubby,” Mrs. Mahadeva said.

Jenny was rising from the table. She gathered her palm leaf and mine, and some of the tin bowls and cups and she made for the kitchen.

“That’s up to him,” she said, just as she disappeared behind the door.

I rose to follow her, but Mahadeva waved me back.

“Never mind. We will talk.”

But all we did was sit, and I tried to hear the whispers from the kitchen. Jenny stayed there a long time with Mrs. Mahadeva and Annapurna. Nothing said was audible, though once I heard Jenny laugh—and the others did the same in a nervous respectful way.

“You see? It is all right,” Mahadeva said.

When they emerged, Mrs. Mahadeva said, “Your lady wife was adamant about helping me.”

When it was time for us to go, I was moved by the tenderness of Mrs. Mahadeva’s farewell to Jenny. She seemed genuinely sorry to see Jenny leave, and I wondered perhaps whether they shared a secret. Again, we were made to promise to return soon.

“Both of you together,” Mrs. Mahadeva said, stepping in front of Annapurna. And she repeated it, “Both of you together!”

“What was that all about?” I said.

We were walking back to the main road through the deadening heat and noise of the Tambaram bazaar.

Jenny said, “Don’t mock her. I liked that woman.”

“You’ll never guess how old she and her husband are.”

“Let me try,” Jenny said, and guessed at their ages and got them both.

“She must have told you,” I said. “When you were talking all that time in the kitchen.”

“No. We were talking about something else.”

Jenny faced me to see my reaction to this, and encouraged by it—I could not hide my curiosity, I could not mask my mounting sense of dread—she said, “I was seriously wondering whether the world is just illusion. Does the secret lie in letting go of things?”

In that moment I thought again of Eden.
The other auntie
.

Jenny simply stared at me, and when I said, “Is that all?” she laughed and took my hand.

“That is everything,” she said quietly.

We found a taxi at Tambaram Station that would take us to the temples at Mahabalipuram. I showed Jenny the temple that stood amid the crashing waves. Jenny was just behind me. I turned towards her. Was that grim expression on her face an effect of the strong wind, or was she thinking about us—our marriage? I didn’t know how to ask. The surf broke and pushed its suds up the shore. Fishermen wearing wet pajamas knelt in clumsy black catamarans and cast their nets downwind.

Jenny put her arm around my shoulder, the way she often did with jack. But there was almost no weight to her arm, no pressure to her hand, and she did not lean on me. Yet I was weakened by the gesture.

The monotonous surf kept collapsing on the shore near the temple.

“Or letting go of people,” she said, in a different voice, as though finishing a thought.

She spoke to the crashing waves.

For a moment I had not the slightest idea what she was talking about in this broken-off sentence. And before I could say anything she let go of me and left me. When I looked around she was gone—lost in the crowd of Indians on the beach.

I stood awhile and thought of Eden, of a particular moment—naked, wearing the skull necklace and standing over me, looking like Kali, looming above me with her legs apart. The memory rattled me. Feeling guilty I went in search of Jenny. I found her
up the hillside standing near the grand bas-relief that was dense with the carvings of elephants and dwarfs and monkeys and birds.

A barefoot Indian in a pin-striped jacket and wraparound
lungi
was saying, “—depicting all the gods and humans and animals observing Lord Shiva who allowing River Ganga to flow through his tangled hair, so that it spills gently—”

Seeing me, Jenny said, “I reckon that’s why my husband didn’t tip his raft over.”

“Is this gentleman your husband, madam?”

“What’s left of him,” Jenny said, and then turned back to the gray stone cliff-face and its carvings. “That’s a beautiful story,” she said, as though the thought had just struck her.

She was silent as we visited the other
raths
and pillared caves and did not speak again until we were in the taxi back to Madras. She said, “But India is full of beautiful stories, isn’t it? That’s probably why it’s such a desperate shambles.”

The taxi was traveling down a narrow road of soft and broken tar, past parched fields.

“Letting go of me?” I asked.

At first she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, “Would that worry you?”

She smiled pityingly at me in my discomfort.

“What did that woman tell you?” I asked.

At first she shrugged, and then she had an answer.

“What I’ve known for ages,” she said.

I had not expected this at all. I did not know what to say. And it angered me that I did not know whether she was teasing me. And which was worse, the teasing or the truth?

At the hotel, Jenny said, “I hated that story the Indian told me about the Ganges. I kept thinking about that dead body you told me about—the one you buried.”

We were walking through the cool lobby.

“Whenever you see something dreadful here someone has a beautiful story to explain it,” Jenny said.

Another couple was waiting to take the elevator. The man was one of those bearded individuals whose hairy face is like a hedge—he peered at us silently across this barrier. The woman was small and blonde and wore a brick-red dress.

Seeing us they took a step nearer each other and held hands.

“Isn’t this weather something?” I said, to be friendly.

“It’s a lot hotter than this where we’re going,” the man said, and it seemed like a boast. “Thanjavur,” he said, unnecessarily giving the place its ancient name and then he explained, “Tan-jore.”

“Where the bull is.”

“The Nandi, yes,” he said, and the woman looked anxiously at him, averting her eyes from me. The man was still talking solemnly through his beard. “In the Pagoda of Brihadi-Swara. They anoint it every day with oil—the whole thing.”

“What a splendid idea,” Jenny said without raising her voice.

The man went silent, perhaps wondering whether he was being mocked. And when the elevator came we got in and ascended in silence.

“Another beautiful story,” Jenny said in the room. Then she smiled. “What a funny couple. I’ll bet you anything they’re not married. Americans can be so pedantic.”

“Why don’t you think they’re married?”

Jenny shrugged. “Something in the air. There was an atmosphere around them. They were edgy and bored and formal and a little too polite.”

“And holding hands?”

“That too. Another auntie.”

I hated the word—it was worse than
wife
. We had taken the word away with us from Mahadeva’s, and since then it had developed into a presence—not a person, but a specter. There were three of us now.

That night over dinner Jenny was raising some food to her mouth when she stopped her fork in the air and said, “I suddenly want to be out of here. I want to be home, in a mess I understand.”

We stayed two nights in Delhi in order to rest for the long flight back to London. Jenny said she wanted to see the place where Gandhi had been cremated, and so we went to Rajghat on the Jumna and mingled with the pilgrims. Her voice came out of that mob.

“What bothers me most is that I’ve been involved in some drama without knowing it. That I’m a character in a plot. That I’m a fool.”

She walked on, buying some flowers and strewing them over the Mahatma’s funeral ghat.

“You’re being very enigmatic,” I said.

“It’s my way of being honest,” she said. “Only writers believe that life has a plot, that stories have an end.” She was still tossing marigolds onto the dusty ground. “Don’t think I’m not glad we came here. It’s just that if I stayed longer I think I’d turn into Forster’s Mrs. Moore and start talking obscurely about the riddle of the universe and the irony of death—that silence is truth.”

She was still walking slowly and then she let go of the last of her flowers.

“Well, silence
is
truth, isn’t it?” she said, and walked on without waiting for my reply. “And I’m not a fool.”

I began to understand why Jenny doubted beautiful stories. There had to be a ragged element in the best of them, because certainty was nearly always false—it was self-deception. In this mood I could easily work around to the view that silence was truth and the whole world was
maya
, all illusion. But the mood was broken by the memory of Jenny saying to Indoo, “Then what’s that in your hand?”

All this time I felt that Eden was listening to us, and it made me feel guilty, because Eden believed in beautiful stories. She believed in me, she depended on me, she was waiting.

We had wandered to the river to find some shade under the trees.

I said, “If silence is truth, then what’s writing?”

“I don’t know. Are you going to tell me your theory of art?”