My Nine Lives (13 page)

“No, George. It's the other way around:
Ars longa, vita brevis est.
”

“Thank you, Helen. I was made to learn Latin too, and much good it did either one of us . . . Don't you see that what she's made of herself is much greater than anything we could do? Art is imitation but she's real. The real thing. Everything she's done.”

“Everything?”

“If Father were alive today, he would be grateful for what she's doing—for Lisa, for the house, and for us.”

I said, “All right, George.” I didn't want him to say any more, and I think he was glad not to have to.

Next day he and Maggie were both on the phone a lot with Lisa, discussing the work to be done for the weekend. Some tasks were allotted to Teddy and me: George had
unlocked the silver, which hadn't been used for a long time, and Teddy took pride and pleasure in making it shine. He tried to dispel my misgivings for the coming weekend—“You'll see: it'll all work out fine. They'll come, they'll have a good time, Lisa will be happy, and then we can start in on
our
plans.” I believed him, I too wanted to work for the success of the occasion and make Lisa happy.

But the day before her arrival George came to us and told us that we were not to put ourselves out in any way. When we protested that we were ready to work as hard as everyone else, he became uncomfortable, apologetic: “Everyone knows how you detest these kind of social things; and why wouldn't you—you're artists, after all.”

“What about you, George?” I asked.

“Oh I,” he said. “I. Everyone's given up on me long ago.”

“I haven't,” I said. “Teddy and I believe in you.”

He kissed us both, thanked us. Then he added, “But you know, she's right.”

“She? You mean Maggie who's always right?”

“She wants to help me. She already has—opening my eyes to a lot of things. To myself, principally.”

Teddy and I both wanted to contradict whatever it was he had been told about himself, but he repeated, louder, “No she's right! All my life I've been self-indulgent and fooled myself. Just because I have money doesn't mean I can write or paint or whatever.” He went on quickly, “I'm talking about myself, Helen, not you. Of course you're an actress and you have to continue to work at it and not let anything take you out of your way. That's why it's better for you not to be here tomorrow; so you won't be taken out of your way.”

“Maggie says it's better?”

“And Lisa. They both believe in you, that you'll do something. They don't think I will, so they say I should stay here
and be—sort of—you know, the master of the house, if that doesn't sound too ridiculous. But they think I have something of Father, some of his personality. Maybe because I'm kind of fat,” he said humbly.

“You're not fat, George. You're big, like Father was.” “Maggie wants me to start smoking cigars. She's ordered Father's brand, Cuban or whatever. I told her I can't stand the smell let alone smoke them, but try telling Maggie anything she doesn't want to hear.” He chuckled, but then went on very seriously: “And just think—Helen! Teddy! Think how happy it would have made Father to see his house and everything in it used the way he wanted it: guests having a good time, eating and so on—that's what he bought it for; that was his dream.” George's eyes shone, so it appeared to be his dream now too.

At the edge of the property there was a little clapboard house—not much more than a hut—where the gardener used to stay when we had one. It had been empty for years and was full of spider webs, and raccoon and other droppings. Teddy tried to clean it up for the two of us to stay in that weekend; he succeeded to some extent—anyway, we had no choice, since all the rooms in the house were taken. Lisa and her party arrived early in the morning, and then throughout the day more and more cars drew up and businessmen and their wives and children came tumbling out in holiday mood. It was a glorious day, drenched in sunshine and blue sky, and a garden party had been arranged with a buffet table in a tent as yellow as the sun. Guests strolled around the lawns or sat on the white Victorian benches and were sprinkled by cool drops from the fountain. Some of the wives had brought parasols, and from a distance these looked like flowers
bobbing around. Swings and other amusements had been hired and the voices of chirping children carried all the way to the gardener's hut where we sat. We could also hear the string band that Maggie had engaged to play summer tunes.

It was too far for us to make out any faces, but Teddy had his binoculars, which I had given him on his last birthday to help him identify birds. He adjusted the view, and we focused on Lisa. She was wearing a new dress, a floral silk that Maggie had helped her choose; she looked prettier than we had ever seen her—she had had her hair done, and her skin toned, and her face glowed with inner satisfaction. When we had gazed our fill at her, we focused on Maggie, trailing over the lawn in her gown. She darted from person to person, smiling here and smiling there, with some curt commands to waiters and other hired help. She moved so swiftly that George, whose arm she was holding, had difficulty keeping up with her. He appeared as contented as Lisa, and looked very impressive in his naval blazer and panama hat. He was trying to smoke a cigar, which was making him cough.

The party went on for a long time, till the shadows lengthened and the sunlight dimmed. The voices of the children became plaintive, and while the band went on playing, their tunes were slower now and somewhat melancholy. Teddy and I continued to sit on the wooden bench outside our hut. Some melancholy had crept into our mood as well—at least into mine, and Teddy set out to dispel it. He had plans for us, which would take us away from the house to wander he wasn't quite sure where and to do he wasn't quite sure what; but it would all be new, a fresh start for the two of us. Teddy was even thinner now than when I had first seen him chopping wood, and his face was very pale and lined. I was glad to think that he would never have to shift and starve again. There would be my money now for
us both, including my share of the lease of Springlake (which George would scrupulously pay). I don't know if this occurred to Teddy—no, I'm sure it did not. He was only thinking of everything we were going to do, he and I, and he talked as he used to, breathless with enthusiasm; and at that moment I loved him as I used to, and when I kissed him, I found his lips as fresh and sweet as I remembered them.

5

A Choice of Heritage

D
URING THE
latter half of the last century—maybe since the end of the 1939 war—nothing became more common than what are called mixed marriages. I suppose they are caused by everyone moving more freely around the world, as refugees or emigrants or just out of restless curiosity. Anyway, the result has been at least two generations of people in whom several kinds of heritage are combined: prompting the questions “Who am I? Where do I belong?” that have been the basis of so much self-analysis, almost self-laceration. But I must admit that, although my ancestry is not only mixed but also uncertain, I have never been troubled by such doubts. Many members of my father's totally English family have served in what used to be called the colonies—Africa or India—where they had to be very careful to keep within their national and racial boundaries. This was not the case with my father: at the time of his marriage, he had been neither to India nor to Africa. He met my mother in England, where she was a student at the London School of Economics and he was at the beginning of his career in the civil service. She was an Indian Muslim, lively, eager, intelligent and very attractive. She died when I was two, so what I know of her was largely through what my aunts, my father's sisters, told me. My father rarely spoke of her.

It is through my Indian grandmother, with whom I spent my school holidays, that I have the most vivid impression of my mother. This may be because my grandmother still lived
in the house where my mother had grown up so that I'm familiar with the ambience of her early years. It was situated in the Civil Lines of Old Delhi, where in pre-Independence days British bureaucrats and rich Hindu and Muslim families had built their large villas set in large gardens. This house—with its Persian carpets spread on marble floors, pierced screens, scrolled Victorian sofas alternating with comfortable modern divans upholstered in raw silk—seemed to me a more suitable background to my mother's personality, or what I knew of it, than the comfortable middle-class English household where I lived with my father.

My grandmother, no doubt because of her royal style, was known to everyone as the Begum. Every evening she held court in her drawing room, surrounded by male admirers who competed with one another to amuse her and light the cigarettes she endlessly smoked. Her friends had all been at Oxford or Cambridge and spoke English more fluently than their own language. Some of them had wives whom they kept mostly at home; one or two had remained bachelors—for her sake, it was rumored. She was long divorced and lived alone except for her many servants, who were crammed with their families into a row of quarters at the rear of the property. They too vied with each other to be the closest and most important to her, but none of them ever captured this position from her old nurse, known as Amma. It was Amma who had learned to mix the Begum's vodka and tonic and to serve their favorite drinks to the visitors. During the hot summer months the household moved up into the mountains where there was a similar large sprawling villa and another set of admirers—though they may have been the same ones, except that here they wore flannel trousers and handknitted cardigans and came whistling down the mountainside carrying walking sticks over their shoulders like rifles.

There was one visitor who was different from the rest. His name was Muktesh, and when he was expected, she always gave notice to the others to stay away. He had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, and though his English was fluent, it sounded as if he had read rather than heard it. But his Hindi was colloquial, racy, like a language used for one's most intimate concerns. He was known to be a first-class orator and addressed mammoth rallies all over the country. He was already an important politician when I was a child, and he could never visit the Begum without a guard or two in attendance (later there was a whole posse of them). He was considerate of his escort, and Amma had to serve them tea, which was a nuisance for her. Tea was all he himself ever drank, pouring it in the saucer to cool it. He had simple habits and was also dressed simply in a cotton dhoti that showed his stout calves. His features were broad and articulated like those of a Hindu sculpture; his lips were full, sensual, and his complexion was considerably darker than my grandmother's or any of her visitors'.

He was definitely not the Begum's type yet she appeared to need him. She was very much alone and had been so for years. At the time of Partition she was the only one of her family to stay behind in India while the rest of them migrated to Pakistan; including her husband, who became an important army general there and also the butt of many of the jokes she shared with her friends. They had been separated since the birth of my mother, one year after their marriage. He took another wife in Pakistan, but the Begum never remarried. She preferred the company of her servants and friends to that of a husband.

And Muktesh continued to visit her. He made no attempt to be entertaining but just sat sucking up his tea out of the saucer; solid, stolid, with his thighs apart inside the folds of
his dhoti. There were times when he warned her to make arrangements to go to London; and shortly after she left, it usually happened that some situation arose that would have been uncomfortable for her. It is said that Hindu-Muslim riots arise spontaneously, due to some spark that no one can foresee; but Muktesh always appeared to have foreseen it—I don't know whether this was because he was so highly placed, or that he was exceptionally percipient.

I always enjoyed my grandmother's visits to London. She stayed at the Ritz and I had tea with her there after school. Sometimes she had tickets for a theatre matinee, but she was usually bored by the interval and we left. Amma accompanied her on her London visits and splashed around in the rain in rubber sandals, the end of her sari trailing in puddles. She grumbled all the time so that the Begum became irritated with her. But actually she herself tired of London very quickly, though she had many admirers here too, including most of the Indian embassy staff. After a time she refused to leave Delhi, in spite of Muktesh's warnings. “Let them come and cut my throat, if that's what they want,” she told him with her characteristic laugh, raucous from her constant smoking. And instead of coming to London, she insisted on having me sent to her in India for the whole of my school holidays.

If it had not been that I missed my father so much, I would have been happy to stay in India for ever. I felt it to be a tremendous privilege to be so close to my grandmother, especially as I knew that, except for me, she really didn't like children. I learned to light her cigarettes and to spray eau-de-toilette behind her ears. In the evenings when the friends came I helped Amma serve their drinks, and then I would sit with them, on the floor at the Begum's feet, and listen to the conversation. When she thought something unfit
for me to hear, she would cover my ears with her long hands full of rings.

I felt totally at home in Delhi. I had learned to speak the Begum's refined Urdu as well as the mixture of Hindustani and Punjabi that most people use. All this came in very useful in my later career as a student and translator of Indian literature. I ought to explain that my appearance is entirely Indian, with no trace of my English connections at all. None of them ever commented on this but accepted it completely—accepted
me
completely, just as I was. And so did the Begum, though I bore no resemblance to her either, or to anyone in her family of Muslim aristocrats. Both she and my mother were slender, with narrow fine limbs, whereas I have a rather chunky build and broad hands and feet. My features are Hindu rather than Muslim—I have the same broad nose and full lips as Muktesh. My complexion too is as dark as his.

I always took it for granted that it was me whom Muktesh came to visit. It was to me that he mostly spoke, not to the Begum. When I was small, he always brought me some toy he had picked up from a street vendor, or made the figure of a man with a turban out of a handkerchief wound around his thumb to waggle at me. At least once during my stay, he would ask for me to be brought to him, and the Begum sent me accompanied by Amma, who became very haughty as if she were slumming. At that time Muktesh had the downstairs part of a two-storey whitewashed structure with bars on the windows. He had three rooms, two of them turned into offices where his personal assistant and a clerk sat with cabinets full of files and a large, very noisy typewriter. The remaining room, where he ate and slept, had the same kind of government-issue furniture standing around on the bare cement floor. The walls were whitewashed, and only the office had some pictures of gods hung up and garlanded by the
personal assistant. Muktesh himself didn't believe in anything like that.

However, he did have a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi in his own room, as well as that of another Indian leader—I believe it was an early Communist who looked rather like Karl Marx. Muktesh explained to me that, though he had never met them, these two had been his political inspiration. At the age of sixteen he had joined the Quit India movement and had gone to jail. That was how he had missed out on his higher education and had had to catch up by himself; first in jail, where other political prisoners had guided him, and afterward by himself with all these books—these books, he said, indicating them crammed on the shelves and spilling over on to the floor from his table and his narrow cot: tomes of history, economics, and political science.

It was through his interest in these subjects that he first developed a friendship with my mother. Since I only knew her through the memories of other people, it has been difficult for me to grasp the dichotomy between my mother's appearance—her prettiness, her love of dress and good taste in it—and the fact that she was a serious student of economics and political science. Even after her marriage to an Englishman, the development and progress of India remained her most passionate concern. Outwardly, she became
more
Indian while living in England; she wore only saris or salwarkameez and her Indian jewelry. She often attended functions at the Indian embassy in London, and it was there that she first met Muktesh. He was a member of a parliamentary delegation—I don't know the exact purpose of their mission, something to do with tariffs and economic reform, anyway it was a subject on which she had many ideas. Perhaps her ideas interested him, perhaps she did, and he invited her to discuss them with him when she next came to Delhi. Since
she was there at least once and usually several times a year to be with the Begum, she was soon able to take him up on his invitation.

They must have had long, intense discussions—about public versus private ownership, economic reform and the expansion of social opportunities. From what I have heard of her, I imagine her doing most of the talking, eager to impart all her theories. She walks up and down with her gold bangles jingling. Getting excited, she strikes her fist into her palm, then laughs and turns around and accuses him of laughing at her. And perhaps Muktesh really does smile—his rare, sweet smile with slightly protruding teeth—but mostly he remains massively still, like a stone sculpture, and only his eyes move under his bushy brows to watch her. This is the way I imagine them together.

I must have been seventeen or eighteen when the Begum first spoke to me about my mother and Muktesh. She came out with it suddenly, one day when he had just left us—as usual with all his security personnel and the convoy of jeeps that accompanied him everywhere (there had been too many assassinations). “In those days,” the Begum said, “he didn't need to have all those idiots hanging around drinking tea at our expense. He and she could just meet somewhere—in the Lodhi tombs, by the fort in Tughlakabad: God only knows where it was they went to be together.” This was my first intimation of the affair—I had had no suspicion of it, but now the Begum spoke as if I had known or should have known all along:

“One day I cornered him—after all he's a sensible person, not like your poor mother . . . I told him, ‘You know how we live here: how everywhere there are a thousand eyes to
see, especially when it's someone like you . . .' He waved his hand the way he does when he doesn't want to hear something, like you're a fly he's waving away . . . ‘Yes,' I said, ‘it's fine for you, but what about her? And her husband, the poor chump? And this one—' meaning you, for you had been born by that time (a very ugly baby, by the way) . . .”

After this warning, Muktesh seemed to have made some attempt to stay away from my mother. It was hopeless, for when he didn't show up on the morning of our arrival from England, she commandeered the Begum's car and drove to his flat and made a scene there in front of his staff. So even if he had been serious about ending the relationship, he never had a chance, and they went on even more recklessly. When he gave a speech in Parliament, she was up in the public gallery, leaning forward to listen to him. She gatecrashed several important diplomatic parties, and if she had difficulty getting in somewhere, she had herself taken there by the Begum, for whom all doors always opened. Consequently, the Begum told me with amusement, a new set of rumors began to float around that it was she, the Begum, who was having an affair with Muktesh. There were all sorts of allegations, which were taken up and embellished by the gossip magazines; and not only those published in Delhi but also in Bombay and Calcutta, for he had already begun to be a national figure. His appearance in these pages was an anomaly—especially in the role of lover, at least to anyone who didn't know him.

One year, when my mother had come to India with me, my father took leave for a week or two to join us. He gave no notice of his impending arrival beyond a sudden cable announcing it. My mother took it straightaway to her mother: “Do you think he's heard something?” The Begum shrugged: “How could he not? The way you've been carrying on.”

But if he had, it seemed he gave no sign of it. I have tried to give an impression of Muktesh, and now I must try to do the same for my father. If you think of the traditional Englishman—not of this but of a previous era—then you would have some idea of my father. He was tall, upright, and athletic (he had been a rowing blue), with an impassive expression but an alert and piercing look in his light blue eyes. During weekdays in London he wore a dark suit and his old school tie and always carried a rolled umbrella against the weather; in the country, where we spent most weekends, he had a baggy old tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He smoked a pipe, which he did not take out of his mouth when he cracked one of his puns or jokes, at which he never smiled. He wanted people to think he had no sense of humor. Otherwise he did not care what anyone thought of him. He cared for his duty, for his work, for his country—for these he had, as did Muktesh, a silent deep-seated passion; as he had, of course, again like Muktesh, for my mother.