The Way Things Were (12 page)

Skanda is in front of his laptop, waiting for his sister to stop being Mrs Glowitz. But he can see she’s revelling in it, making a show of her busyness. She has appeared twice before the camera to say she’ll just be back. Once with his nephew, on his way to school. ‘Say goodbye to Skandu Mamu . . . in India! . . . Because, darling, when it’s morning here, in Connecticut, it’s night in India. And your Skandu Mamu is an owl who sleeps in the day and wakes at night.’

While he waits for Rudrani to return, his fingers, guided as if by a cognition of their own, explore his stepfather’s company’s website, which is designed in the shape of a 3D diamond. At its core are images of coal manufacture, of heavy machinery, of furnaces. The group’s mission statement reads:

On the clickable facets of the diamond-shaped site are: fields of tulips; Maniraja, himself, in gardening gloves, sipping red wine (they’ve even managed a mist!) in front of a trellis of grapes. One rhomboid facet shows customers in a high-ceilinged bookshop with wood panelling and a single malt corner; and, in gold leaf along the cornice of the shop, Skanda can make out his own contribution. Valmiki’s ‘Creation of Poetry’ verse.

Rudrani returns; Skanda can see immediately that she is in one of her taunting moods.

‘You should go,’ she says, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s good for you to face these things, your demons. Did you say that he had his secretary invite you? I love it. When it comes to newer and more innovative ways of being a pure dick, Maniraja really raises the bar. What is it? Some new foray into the arts, no doubt? A chair in some college? A library? A seminar on the ancient art of oenology in India?’

‘An event for the MCL,’ he says, glancing at the web page open before him.

‘Ah, your employers!’

‘Not my employers,’ he says, closing the page. ‘They commissioned a translation, that’s all.’

‘That man, I tell you! He’ll do anything to retain his control over us. Probably it was our dear mother who suggested it:
Why not give Skanda a translation to do? That way we can keep his scrotal sack
in our fist a little longer.
And Maniraja must have jumped at the idea. Baba’s death, I suppose, has done nothing to pacify him. He still doesn’t feel he can sit back and relax. Who knows? He might return from the grave and steal our mother away. Is she going to be in attendance, by the way, Her Ecstasy, The Ballbreaker of Kalasuryaketu?’

‘No. She’s travelling.’

‘She still hasn’t been down to see you, has she? How long have you been there? Six weeks?’

‘About that long.’

‘Incredible. You can’t make them up, this lot. If they were parents in a novel, no one would believe it. I’m afraid, brother dearest, on this front, we’ve been dealt a pretty shabby hand. All the more reason to ditch the fuckers and get on with our own lives, no? Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to ask you: why aren’t you back yet?’

‘No reason, really,’ he says, after a pause. ‘It’s just nice to be here after so long.’

‘Nice to be there? Skanda, it’s 120 in the shade. Nobody thinks it’s nice to be there. I hope you’re not crawling into one of your dead moods: “Let me just find a little cave somewhere, where I can do Sanskrit for the rest of my life. And hopefully, when I next look up, my life will be over. Yay!”’

‘The rains should be here soon.’

‘So? Then it’ll be humid, and there’ll be mosquitoes and Dengue. Hell! What are you talking about? And Sanskrit? Columbia? What about all that?’

‘It’s the summer, Rudrani.’

‘Still! You have a life here. Friends, family, me! I don’t like the idea of your staying on there indefinitely one bit.
Unless
. . .’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless you’ve met someone.’

‘No, but—’

‘No but what?’

‘But something.’

‘You know you’ve got to stop living in this way.’

‘Which way?’

‘Of refusing to try anything for fear that it might not be perfect. There’s more to life than being unassailable, Skanda. “No but” what? What were you going to say?’

‘That I did meet someone I quite liked the other day . . . and she’s meant to be coming over in a day or two.’

‘Who? Where?’

‘She’s called Gauri. I met her at the house of this woman called Kitten Singh . . .’

‘This woman called Kitten Singh? Skanda, are you out of your mind? You know perfectly well who Kitten Singh is. You remember what she did that summer in Gulmarg?’

‘I do.’

‘I do? But you went to her house anyway. Skanda, you frighten me. Does Ma know you went to Kitten Singh’s house? I mean, I’m no fan of mommy dearest, but even
I
wouldn’t go to Kitten Singh’s house . . .’

‘I don’t know why I went, Rudrani. I realized too late . . . And, what can I say? I was curious, I suppose.’

‘Curious? About what?’

‘About seeing who’d be there from the old days.’

‘That’s a very odd thing to do, Skanda. You have a very strange relationship with that time, you know.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, on the one hand, you’re so aloof from it – hardly even aware of it – but, on the other – in that passive way of yours – you seem to want to slide back into it.’

‘I was hoping Isha Massi would be there. That’s all!’

‘Another of our mother’s favourite people! What is this? Some kind of revenge?’

‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘So unpleasant.’

The meanness drains from her face.

‘Because I love you, and miss you, and I see what you’re doing.’

‘What am I doing?’

‘Not living in the now, raking up what’s dead and gone.’

‘I am living in the “now”, Rudrani. I even have a date in a few days.’

He doesn’t tell her more about Gauri, though. He doesn’t tell her she was once married to a Sanskritist, or that she has a young son . . . She is bound to read into it.

‘When did this happen?’ Rudrani says abruptly.

‘When did what happen?’

‘When did I end up your older sister?’

‘You’re not my older sister. You just saw less than I did.’

‘Saw less of what?’

‘The rot. Now listen, tell me: I was trying to remember the other day. The picchvai with the white peacocks . . .’

‘The one they bought in the south? On honeymoon, or whatever they were on.’

‘Yes. What is the story about it?’

‘You’re really the master, Skandu. A master in the arts of evasion and passivity. When did you first start to believe that if you didn’t see something, it wasn’t there?’

‘In Gulmarg. Now fuck off. No more lectures.’

‘You know something, Skandu?’

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t all bad. I remember.’

‘I know. I do too.’

*

That night, a dream. Not recurrent now for years. A dinner party. Everyone from the old days is there. Chamunda. Isha Massi and Viski. The abusive Ismail. Nikhil, and the black-gummed Gayatri Mann, with her evil mole. His whole childhood world. Everyone, including his mother, but, notably, not his father. He comes in, in his night suit to say goodnight. Everyone is drinking and smoking and laughing. And just as he approaches his mother someone from behind yells – ‘Ohhoho, Yuvraj saab, the little prince of Kalasuryaketu.’ The next minute someone has pulled down his pajama. ‘Look, look, the crown jewels.’

And everyone’s laughing, and he’s looking at his mother, his cheeks scorched with shame. And she? . . . Is she laughing too?

Once Vijaipal left them – and he left the day after the episode at the monuments – they gradually made their way back north. The rains encircled them en route and made driving hard. But Toby seemed not to mind. He told Uma how old and romantic an Indian impediment this was. To be delayed by the monsoon. The time when kings have ceased their campaigns, and their armies retreat. When roads and hostilities, by equal measure, are blocked with water. When clouds as big as mountains cover the sky. The sky – ‘nabhas, Uma’ –
seems to have wounds bound up with the dressing of soft clouds, red with the colour of sunset but very pale at the edges.
At night . . .
lashed by lightning as if by golden whips
, the sky – ‘ambara, Uma’ –
makes thundering sounds within, as if in pain.
And the sky – ‘kha, Uma, cognate with the Latin
halo
’ –
is darkened in all directions, favouring lovers.

‘All the time, Valmiki compares the seasons to the abducted Sita. The flashing of dark clouds to the anguished Vaidehi twisting in the arms of Ravana. I’m not boring you, I hope?’ Toby would suddenly say on those rain-drenched afternoons, when, in the front room of some rest house or Dak bungalow, they would watch, through grilled windows, the water stream onto the veranda.

‘No. I love it.’

‘All right. But stop me if I’m getting carried away. I have that tendency. I will say though, Uma, that if there is anyone to whom this season truly belongs, it is the peacocks.’

‘Of course it does, Toby. Everyone knows that.’

‘But not just because they’re happy when it rains –
anyone
, as Bob Dylan will tell you,
can be happy!
– but because of how sad they are when it stops raining.’

Uma did not forget his words, and, a few days later, at an antiques shop in the south, belonging to a woman called Dhanalakshmi, the peacocks returned.

Toby had for many years been a serious collector of Indian art. He had bronzes, Kurkihar and Chola, a seated Paravati and the Saint Mannikkavachaka; a Ganesh from Vijayanagara; stone heads from Gandhara and miniatures from various schools. But, of all these things, the collection that was the oldest – he had bought his first when he was still at university – and today the largest, was his collection of picchvais. These depictions of Krishna, almost always with his gopis, almost always during the rains, almost always playful, held a special appeal for him related to those forms – like the Annunciation, say – in which the fame of the scene places certain restrictions on the artist, but can, by virtue of those very constraints, draw out the best in the best artists.

‘Like the sonnet of painting,’ he told Dhanalakshmi, ‘in nine out of ten poets it brings out what has already been done. But in that one poet it will reveal an imagination that leaves the form forever changed.’

Dhanalakshmi was a large dark woman, with a handsome, cratered face, horsy teeth and short white hair. Toby knew many dealers around the country – fay Parsi gentlemen in Bombay; stylish operators like Reggie Kumar in Delhi, with his velvet suits and ivory cane; greasy smugglers like Popli, the cut-serd of The Singing Bell – but none with the drama and easy erudition of Dhanalakshmi. She was of a grand Sri Lankan family – her father had been Governor General. But she had run away from them as a young girl to marry a toothpick of an Australian jockey whom she kept in great style. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day; drank large whiskies neat; and there was not a person alive who knew more about artistic traditions, south of the Narmada, than Dhanalakshmi.

It was from her that Toby first heard the princes were being raided. ‘Every last broken-down royal, Tobs, from Bapa to Marukshetra to the Kusumapurs, of course. Gun salute or not, they’re all bloody having their trousers pulled down and their willies inspected. It’s terrible. She’s always hated them, the dragon on Safdarjung road, and now she’s having her revenge on the lot of them. And, naturally, if you raid princes, you’re going to find something or the other. Not always buried gold, like they found in Kusumapur—’

‘They found gold in Kusumapur?’

‘Kilos of it. Some bloody little government inspector tripped on a tile – and voilà! – there were stairs leading down to an underground chamber full of gold. Probably there from Mughal times. Now, Tobs, think about it, you think anyone who knew would have left it there?’

‘Probably RM Kusumapur herself didn’t know.’

‘Of course not. Old HH whatshisname died in a polo accident. He might have known. But he didn’t have time to tell anyone, did he? So now everyone’s in for it. And naturally it’s very popular. Raid the rich bastards who’ve oppressed you all these years. Obviously they’re finding things – nothing special, mind you – but a Lalique dining table here, a few silver chairs there. You better watch out. The little firang Raja of Kalasuryaketu. They might even connect you to the “foreign hand”. And then I heard about your little antics at the Oberoi on the night after the Emergency was declared. Damn fool thing to do, if you ask me.’

‘You heard about that? From who?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual Delhi gossips.’

She flared her eyes and gave a loud snorting laugh.

‘You don’t think it’ll get back . . . ?’

‘Of course it will. They probably already know. Nothing will happen though. They’ve got bigger fish to fry. But you’ll be raided, for sure . . . Are you joking? You have only so much as to own a bloody air conditioner these days to be raided. The only reason I’ve been spared . . .’

And now she paused and glanced at Uma, who, while they were speaking, had been walking about the room looking at its many treasures. In part she was doing this because of the beauty of what the room contained, but also because, from the moment they had entered, she had felt a distinct frostiness from Dhanalakshmi.

It was not obvious. Dhanalakshmi had greeted her perfectly cordially; she had shown interest in her impressions of the trip; she had displayed a curiosity, which was really malicious amusement, on discovering that she was an air hostess. But, once they had sat down and the formalities were over, she addressed not a single word to Uma. More than that, she had steered the conversation away from anything Uma might be able to participate in, either with an involved discussion over the workings of some gallery or museum, an auction of bronzes in London, or else intimate conversations about friends she and Toby had in common. Uma tried to join in, asking how Dhanalakshmi had begun as a dealer, but Dhanalakshmi fell silent, and smiled knowingly at Toby, as if to say, ‘You tell her.’ When Uma rose to look at the art in the room, Dhanalakshmi ignored her, and redoubled her effort to keep Toby engaged in conversation.