The Way Things Were (21 page)

When he no longer could be asked when he was leaving, when he appeared every other day at their parties alongside a woman they thought no better than themselves – and some thought considerably worse – when his children went to the same schools their children went to, smashed open the same piñatas, took the same riding lessons at the President’s Estate Polo Club, he became, for every notch they had placed him above themselves, twice diminished. They sneered at his learning, they rolled their eyes at his mention of classical India; they told him they loathed the sound of Sanskrit.

‘But for the Indian woman,’ Naipaul writes, ‘a foreign marriage is seldom a positive act; it is, more usually, an act of despair or confusion. It leads to castelessness, the loss of community, the loss of a place in the world; and few Indians are equipped to cope with that.’

Did Uma feel this loss? She did. Gradually, the phone rang less and less; people were out of town a lot; and, though it seemed they saw each other as much as ever before – and Delhi people will always let you know this – they saw Toby and Uma less and less. They became an unfashionable couple; they vanished from the premier drawing rooms of the city; they came to be seen as déclassé. And, unthinkable as it might have seemed in 1975, they became more and more dependent on Uma’s family, I.P., Viski and Isha – who had invited them to dinner that night – for support and company. Did it affect them? Not easy to say. What cannot be denied is that the change in their status did away with what in 1975 had been taken for granted: that it was Toby who would bring the world to Uma.

‘And him?’ Gauri asks. ‘Your father? Why does he seem so weak?’

Skanda does not reply.

In the musty darkness of the abandoned drawing room, shot through with the light-infused fog, billowy and tumbling in, as if coming off the slide of the transom overhead, they sit on the opium bed, smoking and staring blankly out at the large empty room.

‘Tell, no?’ Gauri presses him.

‘Tell, what?’

She comes behind him; he feels her breasts on his back; she slips her feet inside his legs, so that his balls rest on the hard skin of her heels.

‘Why was he so – I don’t know – dead, yaar!’

Then, placing the burning cylinder of the cigarette on the edge of the opium bed, she reaches with both hands for his penis; and, with the ease of someone removing something distasteful from her own body, squeezes out a last bead of semen from the fast-shrivelling folds of his foreskin. She holds it up before him, with a child’s mixture of revulsion and delight, as if it were an insect or a blackhead, then slides it deep into the wet tube of her mouth, seeming to say,
I, for one, am not afraid of life.

If it is her intention to intimidate, she does. A little. If to arouse, that too: nothing sexier than a girl not squeamish about these things. But, if she means to make some larger philosophical point about passion and daring, about putting one’s hand in the fire, well then she must be replied to. Because it is not enough to say the other side is simply afraid of life, too weak-stomached for its big impulses, too – what are you if you’re not red-blooded . . . ?

‘No, Gauri. It’s not just people who are
dead
who don’t want scenes and dramas, who want to avoid saying what they don’t mean; who – yes! – want in some ways to be unassailable; whose definition of love is not a cycle of big fights and big make-ups; who don’t want to get themselves dirty in the shit pool of uncontrolled emotions—’

‘I lost you: too many negatives. Are you saying people should be like this or should not be like this?’

‘I’m saying that this is not the only definition of being alive. There is such a thing as an internal life, a life of contemplation, a life of peace on the surface, and a long labour below; it need not be written off as “dead”. Or, un-Indian . . .’

‘Un-Indian?’ she says with genuine surprise.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean: land of spices, hot weather, melodrama, Bollywood . . . Anyone who wishes to be a little more low-key, written off as a wuss, a foreigner, someone who doesn’t have what it takes . . .’

‘What are you getting so worked up for?’

‘I’m not getting worked up. And, if you want me to get worked up, all you have to say is, “What are you getting so worked up for?”’

Silence.

One cigarette is extinguished, another continues to burn, though its cycles are shorter and fiercer.

‘Sorry.’

‘I don’t know what got you started.’

Gauri lights up again.

‘Tell me what happened to your uncle, I.P.?’

After a prolonged silence, he says, ‘We must go and find this party.’

‘Skanda . . .’

‘Nothing happened, Gauri. He was picked up the night before Diwali by the cops. He vanished into Tughlak Road Police Station. That’s all. You know Tughlak Road Police Station? Where there is now a metro stop and a newly whitewashed police building, and where the cops – such is their new sensitivity! – have preserved an arch from the British days. That is where I.P. spent some of his last nights in India. And were it not for our servant Narindar, ending up there himself for some rowdy behaviour on Diwali night, we might never even have found him. It was what my grandmother, poor woman, could never get over. They kept looking for him all over the city – pulling every damn string in the business – and, all the time, he was just down the road, shouting distance, almost . . .’

‘And what? This was Diwali time?’

‘The night before the am
ā
vasy
ā
. Which does not, by the way, mean moonless; it means a dwelling together – am
ā
, together; vas, to dwell. The night the sun and moon dwell together and, so, moonless because—’

‘I get it, Skanda, I’m not an idiot: the moon, busy
dwelling
with the sun, fails to makes its appointment in the sky. The dwelling together, I get it. It’s lovely.’

That night Toby, Uma and I.P. remained together a long time. Frosted light fell from the keystone of the sunken arch outside their flat, and made loom the shadows of creepers. The air was cold and dense and particled from watchmen’s fires and crackers. There was a feeling of warmth from within the house, of children asleep or nearly asleep; their young uncle, in blue jeans and a white shirt, a Scotch in his hand, had come out to say goodbye to the departing adults. Uma, in a black and gold sari, leaned against their blue Willy’s jeep, in which a single orange light burned, and Toby’s fingers rested against the perforated face of an engine heater.

The familiarity of the scene concealed her unhappiness that night. Her dissatisfactions remained; they were, in fact, built into the shape of her life, but, seen from another angle, they seemed, as with a flight of Penrose stairs, to vanish, seemed almost to be a trick of the eye.

The familiarity that was secretly galling to Uma – that same force of habit – was reassuring to Toby. He felt none of her ambiguity. He had around him all that he wanted from life. He was not blind to his wife’s restlessness – he had noticed the rolling eyes, noticed her impatience with him – but he could not imagine the world otherwise. Nor was he wrong to trust in this blind way to habit, for it is so often what keeps people together, just as a cataclysm, an event in the world beyond, can make real the possibility of a life apart.

An event such as this – the kind that shows us the cracks within – entered Toby and Uma’s life one Wednesday and was gone the next. Wednesday – the 24th – was the am
ā
vasy
ā
, Diwali. On the 31st – a week later – Mrs Gandhi was killed.
All the interim is like phantasma.
It made the Tuesday – the night of the dinner at Curzon Road – stand out in both their minds. If for nothing else than the pretty banalities of that night. I.P. leaned against the arch, sipping his whisky, while Uma was brushing off the powdery whitewash from his jeans. The lights in the flat within. The odour of mothballs and old perfume in Uma’s shawl, newly removed from steel trunks for the winter. The diesel-smell in the Willy’s; the cold Rexene seats . . . later, they came all to feel, these banal details, like an achievement. They were proof, even when the world that made them possible crumbled, of their nine years together.

The sight of Uma freshly bathed and dressed and ready for the evening, especially if she was wearing a sari, the tips of her hair wet, her skin, soft and scrubbed, held great power for Toby. It was like a ritual re-enactment of their earliest attraction for one another. And, every time she came out like this, perfumed, her hair brushed, ready to go out, he assumed the grateful expression of a man who had been granted a fresh start. He liked nothing more, in these first moments, than to follow her with his eyes, even as she wore an air of distraction about her which seemed to conceal the coyest and most touching concern – the kind that never leaves a woman, no matter how much age or weight or illness ravage her beauty – for how she was looking. In the past, he might have done something, even while they were still in the flat, and she was pacing about in search of things to put in her evening bag, to break through the protective layer of her abstractedness and feast on the shyness he knew to lie beneath. But now, after children, that rite, for it invariably involved an intimacy, was confined to the moments before he turned the key in the jeep’s ignition.

It might be a long meaning look; a hand on hers; the fixing of an earring that sat badly on her earlobe. A tiny tenderness. Nothing, really. Nothing, and, yet, all. And not so nothing that he did not now sense her impatience with it. The gesture rebuffed, the hand removed. She was like a woman afraid of betraying her own grievance, afraid to let habit encircle her again. But, because it was nothing she was brushing off, she could also say, when asked what the matter was, if everything was all right, that it was ‘Nothing’. Then, masking her earlier irritation with a smile, she might add, ‘It’s just that we’ll be late; that’s all.’
Late? Late by five minutes for a dinner at her sister’s?!
An inward thought, for, if he put it into words, he could be sure he would be accused of making something out of nothing.

Theirs was not the only house in which the week of Diwali that year – 1984 – came to feel like a ceasefire in a larger conflict, a spontaneous laying down of arms – ‘Stille Nacht’ carrying up into the night air of a field in Flanders.

In the house on Curzon Road, Viski had been raging for months. He had thundered abuse against the Brahmin’s daughter on Safdarjung Road; he had, eyes bloodshot, beard hoary and fierce, slammed down closed fists on dinner tables; he had, in a state of anger verging on tears, been led away on more than one occasion by Isha. The features of that solemn Jat face, which, even when at rest, had something martial and bellicose in them, and in which there was in equal measure the potential for joviality and thunder, had since the trouble in Punjab darkened permanently. The drawing room set felt that he took it all too seriously. But they did not know what it was like for a proud and – it must be said – warlike people to suddenly, and with Dreyfusian insidiousness, find they had, in a city they thought they knew, in a city some felt they had built, become overnight the object of suspicion. And for the Sikhs, whose entire sense of self dwelt in notions of honour, of iron-spined courage, of holding one’s head high, to have a distrustful and sceptical eye – and a Hindu one at that! – look askance at them . . . Oh, it was galling.

In his more drunken moments – it was true – Viski’s anger at what he saw happening around him turned fast into chauvinistic rage. ‘The little fuckers,’ he would begin, when he was sure there was not a Hindu in sight, ‘time and again, they’ve come running to us, with their balls in their mouth, black faces terrified, quaking in their bloody chappals. “Save us, Save us! Sword-arm of Hinduism. Our women are being raped, our children massacred.” And time and again, we have risen to fight the invader, whether he be Muslim, British or Chinese. Time and again Sikh regiments have stood like a bloody wall behind the Hindu. In all the wars, it was us – us in 1947 against Pakistan, us in 1962 against China, us, again, in 1965 against Pakistan and
us
in 19 bloody 71 – who were out there fighting. Sikhs! General Shabeg, a bloody war hero. Why did he turn on the state? Why was he in there fighting alongside Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple? I’ll tell you why, I’ll tell you – I’m not afraid to say it – the treachery of the Hindu! As much as there is courage and honour in our blood, there is treachery and cowardice in his. Smiling badh-badh-ding-ding treachery. Under all that head-shaking – “yes sir, no sir, two bags full, sir” – treachery. Shabeg Singh, a bloody war hero, and you sack him in disgrace, two months before he is due to retire? Why? Because he uses a couple of army trucks to transport cement to a retirement home he’s building?! Are those grounds on which to dismiss the hero of Bangladesh? The man without whom there would have been no Mukti Bahini?! I ask you!’

Viski’s forefathers had been liberators of the Golden Temple. When Massa Rangarh turned the shrine into a den of vice, a place of louche parties and dancing girls, it was his mother’s ancestor who had gone in there and separated Massa’s head from his body. Both Viski’s grandfathers had been in Punjab politics. His mother, after she was thrown out from the house on Curzon Road, had defeated her father-in-law, Viski’s grandfather, in a famous election. And only the other day – before the siege – she had arrived in her Mercedes at the Golden Temple, when it was infested with militants, and made a speech warning those who dared to hang their undies in the house of the guru, that they would meet a sticky end. All around her there had been the crackle of AK-47s being fired into the air. But old Teji Kaur was unperturbed. After delivering this brave speech, she completed her circumambulation of the shrine and sailed away in her magenta Mercedes.

But Mrs Gandhi’s siege of the temple had stopped her mouth, as it had Viski’s. It had left them all part of a great collective silence. A silence that had prevailed since June that year. The strangest thing. It was as if an entire community, on seeing the spectacle of the Akal Takht, charred and ruined, had held their breath together. Not in a threatening or ominous way – though that was the effect – but almost in a half-curious way, for as Viski would later say, ‘You see, we all knew, every Sikh worth his salt knew, that for what she had done the witch would die . . . it was just a question of how.’