The Impressionist (5 page)

So as Pran reaches out a hand towards Anjali’s daughter, his world is more precarious than he thinks. Huge forces are tensed, ready to uncoil. If his fingers connect, things will move fast, but the moment has a certain frozen grace to it, a fake stillness which approaches the true stillness of synchronicity. Time out of time, mysteriously pervaded by the smell of raw onions.

By the end of the Great War, the distinguished court pleader Pandit Amar Nath Razdan has become the proud author of no less than 276 published articles, which have appeared in organs ranging from Kashmiri Youth Society pamphlets to national newspapers. His interests are wide ranging. Politically he favours a cautious nationalism, based on the maintenance of the separate identities of all communities. On matters of religion he belongs to the conservative wing of the Kashmiri Pandit community, equating social with moral status, and sternly disapproving of all relaxations of caste restriction. On the important issue of individual health he is a staunch and prolific advocate of rigorous personal hygiene, which he believes should be reinforced by local government ordinances, or perhaps even a salaried inspectorate paid for out of the coffers of the Department of Health. On etiquette he mourns the decline of the formal canons of traditional politeness. On language he is a fierce opponent of debased or impure usage, impropriety, profanity and slang. In literature he favours the Ancient writers over the Moderns. In the pictorial and plastic arts, likewise. Food, he has opined, should be prepared plainly and nutritiously, taking care to avoid faddishness, innovation or undue richness of sauce. On matters of dress, personal modesty and avoidance of overbold patterning are the watchwords, especially when considering the reckless combination of checks and stripes.

On the whole, Pandit Razdan’s opinions are received politely and attentively by those to whom he offers them. If, in court, rival pleaders and members of the audience are occasionally to be observed with heads lolling or eyes shut during one of his famously meticulous summings-up, this is usually put down to the hot weather, heaviness of diet or some otherwise unrelated cause.

The acute observer, a man perhaps who has followed Pandit Razdan’s publications over a period of years, might observe a thread of argument which runs through them all. The same thread is rather more obvious to those who wash his clothes, sweep his floors and cook his food nutritiously and without undue saucing. He is terrified of pollution. It is his main enemy, an adversary he battles daily through every aspect of his life. The maintenance of impermeable boundaries between himself and the world’s filth has gradually come to take up most of his energy, time and love.

By 1918, aged forty, Pandit Razdan’s morning routine is fixed in the pattern that it has followed for almost ten years. He awakes from his bed cautiously, having scanned the room for any new obstacles or dangers that might have manifested themselves during the night. When he is certain the coast is clear, he stands, says a short prayer and makes his way to the latrine. There he squats for a minimum of ten minutes, easing out the contents of his colon and examining the results. Assuming nothing untoward detains his attention, he can then proceed to the bathroom.

There he first makes sure the floor is free of dirt, with special reference to the drain in the far corner. He checks that no insects or small animals are lurking in or near any of the water vessels or furniture, then stands on the low wooden platform by the tub and pours seven lotas of water on his head, then a further seven over his body. Next he squats to pour a lota-full very carefully over his genitals, assisting with his fingers in areas of folding or supplementary hair. A fresh cake of soap is always placed, still in its paper wrapper, within reach of the platform. He discards the wrapper neatly to one side and soaps and sluices his body in a series of moves as precise and as solemn as the progress of a military funeral.

Shaving requires the arrival of hot water at precisely the right moment, and his servant considers this his most important duty of the day. The razor is stropped for no less than two minutes and the lather whipped for another two as the master, naked, bends and stretches his body into a series of post-bath postures which are fully described in his seminal ‘Next to Cleanliness and Godliness Third Let Us Put Correct Circulation of the Blood’.

This duty attended to, the razor is handed over, handle first, and shaving can commence. The operation is very delicate, and requires no small nerve on Pandit Razdan’s part. There are no circumstances in which he will trust the servant to shave him. The blade is so sharp, his ear so close, the floor always potentially treacherous despite his care to move to an area away from the tub. He feels he can barely trust himself to do the job. Sometimes he fantasizes that he has lost control of his hand, that it is swiping uncontrollably at his throat. Once the thought is broached, it takes an iron effort of will to carry on shaving.

Just before the outbreak of the war he solved the worst of this problem by growing a beard. Nevertheless, trimming is still required, and even this is fraught with danger. Each morning the difficulty of shaving nearly reduces him to tears, but each morning he accomplishes it. It is only one of a hundred such tiny battles he fights during an average day.

Dressing involves shaking shoes to dislodge scorpions and calling for fresh linen should a garment fall on the floor or get contaminated by a drop of hair oil, interspersed by attempts to control his breathing and quell his racing heart. At intervals during this routine, he may detect some trace of illness in his body, and order his servant to call a doctor. The servant will rush convincingly out of the room and spend a few minutes smoking a bidi on the steps outside. Pandit Razdan never questions the doctor’s non-appearance, and the symptoms invariably subside as soon as his attention is diverted elsewhere.

At the courts, Pandit Razdan makes sure a supply of soap, water and towels is always available. He also takes care to provide himself with a spare set of clothes. Mealtimes are conducted with immense formality, and should the pleader be unfortunate enough to find himself travelling, he makes stern inquiries about the caste status of any potential cook. ‘In this debased age,’ he writes in his well-received commentary on ‘The Perils of the Modern Kitchen’, ‘it is sadly necessary to don the hat of a policeman in ascertaining the fitness of a cook, should one wish not to jeopardize one’s spiritual welfare.’

Pandit Razdan avoids shaking hands with the English Circuit Judge, and has thus acquired a reputation as something of a radical. However, the real reason has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with his horror of touching a casteless beefeater with suspect personal habits. Once an eager young English lawyer strode forward and clasped Razdan’s hand in his, before he could do anything to prevent it. Proceedings were held up by almost three quarters of an hour while the shocked pandit, who had locked himself in the men’s cloakroom, obsessively washed his hands to get rid of the taint.

When the influenza epidemic comes, it is as if the universe has personally challenged Amar Nath Razdan to a duel. No greater terror could have been devised. The first victim he sees is a street-dweller, laid out by the side of the road, surrounded by weeping relatives. The corpse’s face is distorted, blue-black and swollen. Later, when ordinary systems of propriety have broken down, he sees a dying Englishwoman being carried out of one of the houses in the Civil Lines. Her face is the same blue-black colour, all distinction of race erased by the disease. The collapse of categories appals him almost as much as the fact of death itself.

Within a week of the first cases of ‘Spanish Flu’ being reported in the city, thousands are ill or dying. In America and Europe millions have already succumbed, and it is known that little can be done for the afflicted. It is rumoured that troopships crossing the Atlantic have been arriving half empty, their human cargo decimated by the disease. Panic sets in and the bazaars empty of people. Stories filter in from remote districts about ghost villages and bullock trains found by the roadside with all the drivers dead in their seats. When the hospitals and zenanas can no longer cope, rich families start opening their houses as temporary wards. Despite his membership of various benevolent societies, Pandit Razdan refuses to do this. He starts to pen an article provisionally entitled ‘Twenty Prophylactic Measures in the Struggle Against Airborne Maladies’ but before a first draft is complete, his confidence has evaporated. He no longer believes that ‘superhuman acts of cleanliness’, well-ventilated rooms or the wearing of a cotton face mask will be enough to protect him.

It is generally held that the influenza is a ground-dwelling organism, so for a while the pandit takes to conducting all his business on horseback. He has his borrowed mare saddled in the front courtyard of the house, so that when he goes out on to the street he is already out of harm’s way. Unable actually to ride into the law courts, he writes down his pleas and sends them in by hand, his servant running up and down the steps while he sits in splendour outside, watched by children and an unamused British police sergeant. Forced by a fire to visit tenants in a slum quarter of the city, Pandit Razdan refuses to enter their low-roofed houses, and conducts meetings from his saddle, a handkerchief pressed to his face. This lasts a week, until an urchin hits the horse with a stone, and it bucks its rider into a muddy puddle, a body of water almost certainly teeming with disease of every kind. After marathon washing, Pandit Razdan decides to rely on other measures, like taking regular mustard foot baths and gargling with a variety of foul-smelling tonics based, for the most part, on chlorinated soda water, bhang and boric acid. He determines that his house should be fumigated, and instructs the servants to sprinkle sulphur and molasses on hot coals, which creates a thick blue-green smoke that makes everyone choke and leaves a disgusting smell in the rooms.

At night he dreams about the contagion. Bloated faces and the sound of coughing follow him through streets where the very houses and shops seem to melt into one another, losing their integrity, invaded by their own unstoppable architectural diseases. The dream people are horrific and indistinct. At a look or a touch they blur into one another – woman into man, black into white, low into high. It seems the epidemic will obliterate all conceivable distinctions, hybridizing his whole world into one awful undifferentiated mass.

From his locked bedroom, Pandit Razdan calls for the doctor, and keeps calling until one is brought. The man wears a face mask and will come no further than the threshold. He sells the pandit some expensive medicine, and advises him to stay clear of foul air and crowded spaces. The warning is unnecessary. Most public meetings and processions have been banned. The work of the law courts is suspended by general order of the District Health Officer. A junior clerk is dispatched to inform the pandit, but Razdan refuses to admit him into the house.

One morning, during the hour-long extended bath routine he has adopted to combat the crisis, Pandit Razdan feels light-headed. He tries to fight the tide of panic which grips his chest, but the more he fights the worse it gets. Eventually he is obliged to return to bed and wait for the feeling to subside. It worsens. After an hour he has a headache, painful and unmistakable, a throbbing between his eyes which seems to rap out news of his imminent death in a skeletal tattoo. After two hours, despite drinking several glasses of water, he feels hot and feverish. When he draws a finger across his top lip, it comes away wet.

His terror deepens as the morning wears on. The ache in his head spreads out to envelop his arms and legs, and he feels the beginnings of a new drum-throb of pain at the base of his spine. The whitewashed walls and open shutters of his bedroom seem to reflect the crisis, shifting tauntingly at the threshold of his perception as if they too are animated by the fever. Around midday he begins to scream for his servants.

Pandit Razdan has one final anti-flu remedy, a measure he has been saving in case things came to this sort of head. An hour or so later he admits a line of people with baskets of onions and an enamelled tin bath. Heedless of modesty, the master strips off and jumps in. One of the younger girls runs outside and has to be coaxed back in to do her work. The onions are chopped and poured into the bathtub. Every onion available in the sabzi mandi is here, and nearly the whole household is employed in dicing them. Gradually Pandit Razdan’s thin limbs are covered over, until only his head and the tops of his knees remain exposed. The onions are packed down firmly, so that his entire body is slathered in flesh and juice. Finally white cloths are wrapped tightly around the bath and folded under his head, making him into a kind of onion-mummy, swaddled tight and sweating. Eyes streaming, the servants file out and shut the door, leaving the cure to work its magic.

The theoretical basis of the onion cure is straightforward. Onions are a notoriously hot and fiery vegetable, which induce the body to cry and sweat to counteract their influence. The power of a single raw onion is enough to repel unwanted interlocutors and clean the eater’s insides of all manner of damp or bilious humours. Spanish flu is one of the dampest diseases ever known, which makes the onion a potent weapon. Pandit Razdan hopes to draw the illness out of his body, immolating the parasite in the vegetable’s cleansing fire. For good measure, he munches handfuls of his remedy as he lies, desperately fighting the panic building up inside his shivery frame.