The Temple-goers (8 page)

‘The following day, as he had asked, the dead army officer’s funeral procession passed in front of the temple.’

‘Aakash, when did all of this happen?’

He looked blank, as if I had asked him a childish question. ‘Fifty to a hundred years, maybe two hundred,’ he replied, ‘maybe more.’

‘More? But he’s your great-grandfather, right? Your father’s grandfather? Were the British here?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Aakash said, ‘it was definitely the time of the British Raj. So anyway. When the procession comes by the temple, my great-grandfather appears outside, and addressing the corpse of the dead army officer, says, “Your death has disgraced your village and your community. And so I, as your priest, give you my remaining years. Rise now. I have renounced my life.” ’

The light in the flat had diminished. Aakash had smoked and drunk continuously. I stood up and turned on a few lamps. Aakash looked sombre, too moved by his own story to speak. I avoided his gaze, unsure of what to make of this afternoon visit. His conversation had included tales of forced blow jobs, social mobility and now magic. And though he himself had a hazy idea of time, his family’s history in roughly three generations mapped perfectly on to the country’s transitions: from its old religious life and priesthood, to socialism and his father’s work as an auditor, to now and Aakash.

He lay back on the sofa, still in his grey vest, his wide arms sprawling behind him.

‘Did he come back to life?’ I said in the lamp-lit softness of the room.

‘That evening!’ Aakash replied. ‘That evening he rose as if from a deep sleep, and when the people went to the temple, they found that my great-grandfather was gone.’

I wanted to ask any number of questions that would expose the story as untrue, but before I could he abruptly said, ‘You know I’m telling you all this for a reason?’

‘What reason?’

‘I want you to come somewhere with me. My family go every year to the village where all this happened. We take food and offerings. People come from all over. I want you to come with us.’

‘Why me?’ I asked.

Aakash smiled, and draining his glass, said, ‘Because I think it’ll be good for you.’

And those words felt like reason enough. Aakash had broken into my afternoon with a gesture of friendship, made possible by its spontaneity; and from its success seemed to come this second invitation, now given rather than taken. Like the first, it was an acknowledgement of the mutual appeal our lives held for each other. But because it was instinctive, and inarticulate, and because behind that appeal I sensed some vague contest for power, it had to be taken for now – like certain childhood friendships – on trust.

I accepted his invitation and he gave me a date a few weeks later on which to be ready. Then looking round for his T-shirt, he rose to leave.

He had put his arms in as far as the sleeves when he stopped. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s been so peaceful here this afternoon. I really needed it.’

When he had gone, I felt that he had come with one intention and realized another. I went home smelling of beer and cigarettes. And that night, on Sanyogita’s garden terrace, I noticed that the potted frangipani had died.

7

When I came back to Jorbagh, Sanyogita was in the drawing room. She wore her faded T-shirt and tattered tracksuit bottoms. Her legs were up on the sofa and the room was filled with pools of lamplight. They reached to the far corners of the high ceilings and emphasized the evening darkness. Sanyogita’s small, squat toes gnawed the edge of the sofa. She had her computer in her lap and was tapping away thoughtfully.

‘Baby!’ she said when I came in. She observed me carefully and seemed to sense something strange in my manner, smelt something perhaps, but said nothing directly. ‘Where have you been? I must have tried you half a dozen times.’

‘I’m sorry, I ran into my grandmother. I must have left the phone upstairs. What are you doing?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ She smiled. ‘
Vanity Fair
has an annual world bazaar issue and I know this girl who’s doing it. She wants me to handle India. I may get a byline.’

‘That’s great. Do you want to have a bath?’

‘Yes! It’s just what they need,’ she said, wiggling her toes.

‘They?’

‘Baby, them!’ She gestured to her toes; they wiggled happily.

We had an ongoing joke where we ascribed human characteristics to her toes.

‘Oh, them!’

‘Yes, they would hate to be left out!’ They fanned from side to side as if they were about to get up and follow me into the bathroom.

‘OK, but come quickly.’

‘Baby, don’t make it too hot.’

I walked towards Sanyogita’s room, past my study with its red carpet and the garden terrace with its dahlias. There was no moon and the night filled the little terrace. I was about to enter Sanyogita’s room when, from the light of a naked bulb, I made out the shape of a potted frangipani. From where I stood, its leaves seemed to droop and its trunk and branches had an unhealthy, pulpy texture. I pushed open the door to the terrace to take a better look.

Even before my eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness I could see that the tree was dead. Its trunk and branches had begun to soften and their ends were shrivelled. The large broad leaves hung on like the open eyes of a corpse. We hadn’t planted the garden ourselves; we had inherited it. And the death of the slim-limbed frangipani only weeks before it was meant to flower gave me a terrible intimation of the whole garden dying on our watch.

In the time between leaving the terrace and opening the bath taps, I came to blame Sanyogita for the tree’s death. It was not because she was in charge of the garden – I was – but because I had noticed and I knew she never would have. I worked myself into thinking that her not noticing was an aspect of a deeper complacency: how almost two years after finishing college she had no more idea of what she wanted to do than when she graduated; how she preferred cities like London and New York, with their cinemas, restaurants and Sunday papers, to all that India had to offer; how she was always late for everything; and how she now sat in her drawing room, wasting her time doing someone else’s work.

I got into the bath, full of irrational rage. I knew that Sanyogita, in her mulish way, would carry on doing her work till the bath went cold. But I didn’t want to call her because I enjoyed letting my anger grow. The water was hot and burned my skin. I sat there until it became tepid and seemed to cling to me. I felt a sick excitement when Sanyogita came in at last. I said nothing about the bath’s temperature. I just lay there looking up at the saucer-shaped ceiling light.

When Sanyogita took off her clothes, I watched her. I saw her pale skin, her big bones, the caterpillar scar that ran across her hip from the skiing accident and her low-slung breasts. She saw me looking at them and became shy about the way her nipples had expanded. She dipped her hand into the bath so that she could harden them. It was then that her frank smile turned to confusion. Why was I lying in a bath that had gone cold? She could see that all wasn’t well with me, but she was happy to get in the bath anyway, happy just to add some hot water and bear it for my sake, happy just to be in the bath with me. But as soon as she put one foot in and then the other, letting her large, smooth body sink into the few feet of soapy water, I got out of the bath and left the room without a word.

I saw her face as I left the bathroom, the smile, the confusion and at last the hurt.

When Sanyogita came out of the bathroom a few moments later, she was crying. She always cried silently, but her face was wet with tears, a different wetness from the glisten of her body. She lay down on the bed, just as she was, and wept.

I lay down next to her, noticing the things I found beautiful about her: the straight, strong bones of her shoulders and the paleness of the skin that collected over them now that her arms were raised; her smooth shiny black hair that dropped in steps down her back; the single skin-covered mole on her back which, if I ever touched, she asked me to be kind to as it was the only one.

Sanyogita, as if acknowledging the seriousness of the fight, didn’t push me away when I lay down next to her. She seemed to be considering what the real problem might be. With the side of her face pressed against the bed, she said, ‘Baby, is it necessary that you revise your novel here?’

‘In Delhi or India?’ I asked.

‘Both,’ she said, the conversation calming her down.

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Because I’d like to go away for a while. And I want you to come with me.’

She seemed at once to warn me and to bring me in. The fact that she had already read into the deeper vibrations of our fight, and felt no need to state them but had moved on to a solution, gave her an authority over me.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘The summer.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Europe, America, anywhere. This place gets to me after a while, that’s all. I need to be reminded that there’s another world out there, a world where I feel better about myself.’

I didn’t want to, but I gave in. I felt paralysed by the onset of the heat. I wanted to drink lime waters all summer, wear white salwar kameez and finish my revisions in my new study. My life in Delhi had acquired a serenity beyond all my expectations. The revised version of the novel was seeming much better to me. I wrote early in the mornings. Vatsala had learned to make coffee in the Italian percolator. It spat out a thick dark liquid. She mixed it with hot milk and brought me two mugs a morning. The effect of the coffee and the quiet work made me restless for Junglee. I’d spend an hour there and come back to a light vegetarian lunch with Sanyogita. Zafar came every afternoon. After he was gone, I’d walk three rounds of Lodhi Gardens. The park at that hour was filled with overweight women in salwar kameez and sneakers, slim-bodied young men hanging on each other, couples canoodling and old men in white shorts. There were also faces from the area: the Sikh gentleman who owned a bookshop called The Bookshop; the feuding brothers who owned The Music Shop in Khan Market; and an Australian woman who wore pink turbans and flowery dresses and bred beagles. After the walk, I’d read over my writing, drink a glass of wine and resist efforts to make me go out. I didn’t want the slog of life in the West; I didn’t want cosmopolitan life. I was tired of subtitled movies and Sunday supplements.

But almost as soon as I agreed to the time abroad, our relationship revived. The days that had seemed to run into each other now led up to a final date of departure. The heat that had seemed like a preparation for June’s deathly white skies was now only enervating, somebody else’s problem: Zafar’s, who struggled under it every day, his elegant white umbrella providing hardly any protection from its exquisite blaze. It had made his dark red sores bloom and brighten so that he seemed to sweat blood. The heat was Aakash’s problem, who left home even earlier now to avoid the worst of it. And though he was too vain to ever smell bad, his clothes now emitted the odour of cotton fibres baking in the sun.

Zafar took the news of my departure with gloomy resignation. He would feel the hole my five thousand rupees would leave in his monthly income. He feared that without practice, the Urdu I had learned would slip away from me. Aakash didn’t even entertain the idea that I might be able to stay in shape without him. ‘We’ll have to start again,’ he said, ‘from scratch.’ He was at first curious about my going off to the West and he liked telling the other trainers, but soon his supreme belief that anywhere he wasn’t was of no interest took over. A look of pity entered his eyes every time the subject was brought up. He now spoke of our trip to his village, which was only days away, as if it were a send-off, a final celebration before my months of obscurity began.

I had told Sanyogita about the trip and feared she might react badly. But in her excitement about the summer away, she took it well and in fact became curious herself to meet Aakash again. He in turn said that I wasn’t his client any more, I was his friend, and that it was wrong for me to keep him away from his bhabi. They both seemed in their own ways to be digging at an unspoken desire in me for them not to know each other.

Then, one morning in May, the day before I was to go with Aakash to Haryana, Sanyogita rang while I was in Junglee. Aakash, who always held on to my phone while I worked out, answered it: ‘Hello, bhabi. This is Aakash, sir’s personal trainer…’

This was all I heard. I was unable to move and could only see Aakash drift off to the far end of the room. He stood under the dark plywood cornices, red light falling on him, chatting away happily. When he returned, he said, ‘Plan is set. We’re all going, you, me and bhabi, to Hookah. Man, you’ll love this place. It’s my favourite restaurant. It’s just like in Ali Baba’s time, with tents and platters and apple-flavoured tobacco.’

‘But aren’t we going to the village tomorrow?’

‘Yes, so? We’ll take bhabi’s blessings before going, no?’

I knew the plaza where the restaurant was; I had come to the cinema there many times as a teenager. Fifteen years later, change had not so much come to the plaza as grown over it. It still had its same two- and three-storey pale yellow buildings, with their exposed drainpipes and black water tanks. There was still the cinema’s original structure, low and wide. The plaza was still surfaced with uneven squares of red sandstone. At the centre was a large banyan with a circular cemented base; in the tree’s shade, there were still food sellers, amidst mountains of leaf plates and sprinklings of flies; just near it, a ‘Keep Delhi Green’ dustbin still stained red with pan spittle. And still present among the groups of young men, apparently pulling off a miracle of inconspicuity, were a family of cows. But over this scene, over a portion of the pale yellow buildings, had grown the silver and red façade of a Puma shop with large glass windows. A new company, with gold-lettered branding and multiplexes all over the city, had taken over the old cinema. Its baggy shell had been carved up into smaller, more compact cinemas. The attendants all wore purple and gold uniforms. And where there were slim-limbed, moustached men in dull-coloured polyester trousers, eating from the leaf plates, there were now also groups of young boys, with headphones, gelled hair, black T-shirts and low jeans. It was this group, overweight and dull-eyed, that slipped into the apple-scented shade of Hookah.

The restaurant was arranged on two floors. The street level was virtually empty and the bright afternoon light disturbed its dim ambience. In the windowless basement, lit by spotlight, tents had been set up in alcoves by draping red satiny material over four-legged metal frames whose joints still showed their welding. The floors were of linoleum, the walls brushed gold, and in each alcove there was a gem-encrusted mirror. Boys sprawled on red and gold satin mattresses and bolsters, smoking water pipes and welcoming large brass platters of Middle Eastern food. The girls, their hair blow-dried and their faces made-up, sat primly on chairs. Some sipped bright-coloured drinks, others smoked joylessly. Only their handbags vibrating against their legs quickened their movements, causing them to reach hurriedly for their phones and make fresh plans.

Aakash sat alone at a table. His colour, his physique, his carefully picked clothes, his decorum, made him seem of a race apart from the people around him. And yet he was nothing like the moustached men under the banyan outside. Seeing him in this new environment, selected by him, I had a sense of how much more marginal he was than I had first realized. He had said the restaurant was his favourite, but I had a feeling he hadn’t been there more than a few times.

His eyes brightened when he saw me, then became quiet and respectful at seeing Sanyogita. He seemed nervous, as if welcoming us to his own house. He asked if we’d like to sit in an alcove and yelled ‘excuse me’ in a loud voice; Sanyogita thought it would be better to stay at the table.

‘I thinking the same thing,’ he said in English.

I was worried our conversation would continue in English, but Sanyogita switched to her precise genteel Hindi and Aakash responded with characteristic fluency.

‘Who wants to sit with that tribe of assholes anyway, right?’

Sanyogita laughed with surprise at the use of the word in the context and I sensed her relax. Aakash, as if the formality of the foreign word freed him from all other constraints, yelled for the waiter with another loud ‘excuse me’. The man came over and Aakash ordered beers, hummus, salad, kibbeh. He treated the man with a rudeness that felt experimental, on its way to becoming habitual. The waiter was impervious; when he brought us only two glasses, Aakash said, ‘And my bhabi here? Has she come all the way to look at your face?’

Sanyogita didn’t like this, but tolerated it, as she did the restaurant, perhaps unsure of who should be the true beneficiary of her noblesse oblige.

As is so often the case when two people meet through a third, they inaugurate their new acquaintance by making light fun of the person who brought them together. It was in this vein that Aakash began to mock my gym clothes.

‘Bhabi, I tell him to change those long-sleeved baggy shirts, you know those blue Lacoste or God knows which company’s, but he says he can’t because bhabi likes them.’