The Way Things Were (53 page)

Mani looked long at them, then beckoned to his friend, the manager, and after a whispered exchange, the two men walked over. What played out had, in Uma’s mind, the mute and comic aspect of an early Hollywood double act. The two men approached the table. Kitten rose and greeted Maniraja in her usual effusive way, when meeting rich men other than her husband. Mani seemed to accept the greeting; but, in the short exchange that occurred between them, Kitten’s face lost all colour and her expression sagged. Then the three of them – Kitten, Mani and the manager – turned to look at Tunnu, who looked back at them with the innocent surprise of a small child unused to being picked for the team, finding himself picked first. He walked over with something like curiosity. The manager moved forward – some quick words passed between them – and slid his fingers behind the lapels of Tunnu’s grey coat. But Mani, like a gangster showing mercy, stopped him. Some more words were exchanged; the alarm in Tunnu’s face, as with the moody lighting of the discotheque, alternating between blues and pinks and yellows, changed to resignation, then to what almost seemed like gratitude. And now the manager slipped his arm into Tunnu’s and led him out of The Number One. He looked tragically back at Kitten, who returned his expression with impatience before swinging back around to rejoin her table.

The scene was a perfect cliché. Mani’s actions were often drawn from cliché. He was neither subtle nor unknowable, and, although he would never be able to surprise Uma – which, later, drove him to seek out women less mondaine – his predictability was a great comfort to her. She felt she could always see the shape of his thought and, where she lost out in excitement, she gained immeasurably in dependability. His betrayals were never of the serious kind. Uma knew that for all his moods and tantrums he was a man she could entrust her life to.

That night, as a feeling of jubilation overtook them, there were other clichés: more champagne; caviar and blinis; there was the bathtub of a penthouse suite . . . In the bright lights of the bathroom, she made a careful inspection of Maniraja’s body. It was as if she wanted to understand what part of his physicality had so deep a hold on her.
His fucking cheapness
, she said almost aloud in her drunkenness, as her eyes followed the thin line of greying hair into the sallow chasm of his chest. They paused at the gold chains; she noticed the small bones and the surprising musculature around the stomach, which, in another time, she knew would have had the soft dimpled fatness of generations of vegetarianism; she held his erect penis in her hands. Long, thin, uncircumcised. The folds of foreskin glistening with precum. She observed the hair grow thin over the slim sinews of his thighs, the tiny calves, the small beautiful feet. She pressed her face against the bullet-black nipples and smelt his armpits. Their smell, even after a bath, was still there. His expression was hungry and open-lipped, as if he meant to inhale her. If she could only focus her mind, she felt she would be able to identify what it was about his physicality that held such power for her. But her intellect stalled at the attempt to express in words what must forever remain slightly mysterious. They fucked deep into the night.

In the morning, there was a last and memorable cliché. Her eyes opened to the rattle of a trolley, fat wheels over a carpeted floor; there was somewhere the sight of pale morning light coming in past gauzy white curtains, there was silver and orange juice and the smell of coffee; and Uma exulted in what must be one of the great underrated pleasures of our time: the pleasure of waking up in a hotel room in one’s own hometown.

Uma is dressed in an aquamarine sari (Mani has forbidden her salwar kameez, which he finds unflattering); she has a towel about her neck and shoulders; her hair, which has been straightened, is light and freshly dried.

‘We had a little scene just before landing,’ she says, ‘didn’t we, Pooja?’

Pooja smiles shamefacedly. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘The champagne apparently wasn’t right. Can you imagine? And this from a man who had never drunk champagne till he met me? Hello, darling,’ she says, and clutches his hand. ‘You look well.’ Then looking closer, she adds, ‘But thin! I wish I could be a little thinner too. I’ve just come back from Buchinger – boot camp, I tell you! – and I don’t think I’ve lost an ounce. Can you tell the difference?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen you in a while, Ma.’

‘I know, darling. But, you know – I didn’t want to say it earlier; you seemed so content here – but this town, you know how I loathe it. My worst memories . . .’

Sensing how this must sound, she stops herself and says, ‘Not with all of you, of course. But later. I don’t know; I’m not saying it right. It’s not even as if it brings back bad memories. Just feels like lost time, you know. Almost as if I never lived here.’

‘You don’t remember it?’

‘Hardly. That’s the strange part. I know I lived here; there’s proof enough; but I don’t
feel
that I did, not in my bones, you know. It was easier to come to see you when you were in New York. That, at least, was something new.’

The brassiness in her voice momentarily falls away, and she becomes as he remembers her.

‘I loved your introduction to the Birth, by the way,’ she says. ‘Thank you for sending it to me. I read it on the flight over here. I want Mani to read it. Do you mind if I pass it on to him? It’ll do him good.’

‘Sure, Ma. But, you know . . .’

‘What?!’ she says, falsity returning to her voice. She knows exactly what, but she wants to hear it from him.

‘There’s no point. He’s not much of a reader, and, besides, it’s as Rudrani says,’ he begins, regretting his tone, regretting the power of family to draw us into old patterns. ‘Mani already knows all that he wants to know.’

‘
Firstly
,’ she says with irritation, ‘that was your father’s phrase; she’s stolen it from him. And, secondly, it’s just not true anymore. He’s changed. We all have, but him much more than others. He’s not the man he was when you first met him. He’s improved; I’ve improved him. The prejudices are almost all gone. And he has other qualities, you know. A very caring side.’

‘Financially, you mean . . . ?’ Skanda says, and stops himself, but it is too late.

‘No, not just that. It’s not right of you to say that, but now that you have: let me tell you, that matters too. Your father left us flat. Not just me; all of us. Mani would never do that. But no: it’s not just about money. Very wrong of you to say that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She looks out of the window, her expression blank and searching. Some men in blue jumpsuits pull away a red trolley whose tyres leave fat black marks on the tarmac. ‘He’s the only man,’ she says at length, ‘to have really made me feel he cared about me.’

And then, as if annoyed by something she sees outside, she adds with impatience, ‘I only wish I had better handled his entry into our lives.’

And she was right. His entry into their lives might have been better handled. The year was 1992. It was the year the Ayodhya issue divided Delhi like a Dreyfusian knife, and their family unit entered its last cycle before disintegrating completely. It was a year of change. And Maniraja, with his suits, his foreign car, his way of always laying the removable face of his car stereo down on the coffee table next to his gold-rimmed spectacles, was so much of a piece with the change.

It was not simply that for the first time since 1980 there was no member of the Gandhi family in power. There were other things too, more tangible than politics, such as potato crisps and Lehar Pepsi, new cars in the streets: Maruti 1000s in the streets! This simple sedan did more to put an end to those socialist years in India than any announcement from Moscow, Berlin or Racecourse Road. At a time of migration to the city the Maruti 1000 put money and status firmly at the centre of the new mandala. The appearance of this car, with its stoutly beyond-reach price tag of some 3.8 lakhs, was like a reason to keep going. It was an ideal that, for once, people could actually see and touch, and show their friends, a hard concrete symbol of who and what they were, just as they were more unsure of it than ever.

That Time of Things made simple people of everyone, and Maniraja embodied its simplicities. He was the kind of man who always meant everything he said. A true literalist, there was never a gap in his speech between word and meaning. He spoke a language that was lacking in those shades of meaning that come usually to be part of its music. If listening to him speak, one found one had to concentrate hard, it was because the words were just words; they were not spoken with any feeling for sound or emphasis; and one could be replaced with another. His language, as with certain borrowed forms of art, was stripped of all possibility of liveliness and invention, of subtlety and humour.

This was especially true when he spoke ill of Muslims. And it was deeply shocking for Skanda and Rudrani to hear him speak in this way. They had been raised on the pieties of the Nehruvian state, of which, in that pre-Babri Masjid era, none was more sacred than secularism. In the world they grew up in, secularism meant much more than just a separation of church and state; it was a modern articulation of what many believed to be an ancient and emic idea of religious tolerance in India. An expression of the Indian ethos, even: of those great moments in her history when, faced with the choice between purity and synthesis, she had gone the way of synthesis every time.

So, when Maniraja, accompanied often by a Goebbels-like figure called Choate, whom he was paying to write pamphlets, and set up holocaust museums, first began to arrive at their house for dinner, and would say things like ‘those Islamic shits’ and ‘Bhenchodh Mohammadans’, Rudrani and Skanda felt they were confronting a man who their entire upbringing had been an inoculation against. They had no context for Maniraja, no idea of the extent to which he was a man of his times. They knew little about the movement for the temple in Ayodhya. Even if they had, they would certainly never have met anyone who supported the demolition of the Mosque. Maniraja, just as he was their introduction to certain new technologies, was also the first man they met to hold such attitudes as these. And nothing could have made them feel the desecration of their father’s home more acutely than witnessing his easy bigotry at their dining table.

These scenes occurred on a number of occasions and their mother played a very strange part in them. She seemed almost to be mocking Maniraja herself, especially when he spoke out of prejudice. In fact, if there was one thing for which the blame could be put squarely at Uma’s door, it was that she discredited Maniraja, long before she let it be known that he was her boyfriend and she would be moving to Bombay to live with him. In the moments when Mani’s presence was a cause of shame to her, either in the form of her own abasement or in the form of his poisonous prejudices, she seemed herself to be laughing hardest at him. And it was only later when Skanda was old enough to see how jokes can sometimes hide hysteria that he recognized his mother’s laughter for what it had been: a form of self-defence. An encoded message that Skanda interpreted as,
Ma, for reasons of her own, must be with this man; and he’s not all bad, but you mustn’t take what he says too seriously
.

A typical dinner would go like this: they’d be sitting at table, and Choate would say, ‘You know what’s interesting: Oxford was founded – the university, I mean – the very year after
they
’ – and everyone knew who
they
was – ‘destroyed Nalanda.’

Choate had a heavily lined face with greasy blondish hair and hard blue eyes. He was the author of such books as
Awake, India!
and, of course,
The Indian Holocaust
. He spoke in roundabout ways, but he knew exactly how to work Maniraja, to rouse him on a level that seemed mysterious to an outsider. So, for instance, in response to this observation about the universities, he drew from Maniraja a painful shaking of his head, and the word ‘See!’ muttered under his breath like an invective.

‘See, what?’ Uma said languidly.

Maniraja flared his eyes, then saw she was being playful, and smiled contemptuously.

‘Well, if your liberal shits don’t want to see what is plain for everybody to see, I can’t help them.’

Silence.

‘It might have been a great university today,’ Maniraja began again, and with feeling . . . ‘with an unbroken tradition of – what? – how many centuries, Choate? When was Nalanda founded?’

‘In the fifth century,’ Choate said.

‘There you are: a centre of learning fifteen centuries old. Think of the confidence it would have given our people. The feeling of continuity. But they went about it single-mindedly, destroying whatever they thought our people cherished, and giving us nothing back in return. Nothing!’

‘The Taj Mahal’s not bad,’ Uma said and smiled, making the children giggle.

‘Mosques and tombs! Nothing but bloody mosques and tombs. And none of it Islamic, by the way, all stolen from other places. You think the Taj Mahal is Islamic?’

‘Is it Christian, Mani? Hindu? Jain perhaps?’

‘Not bloody Islamic. Persian! Iranian! You think there was anything in bloody Arabia, you think those damn baddus, with nothing but sand and oil, could have built a Taj Mahal?’

‘Mani, if what you’re saying is that Islamic culture is a composite . . .’

‘There’s no such thing as Islamic culture!’ he roared.

‘If you’re going to shout . . .’

‘I’m shouting? You are shouting!’

This is how it would go. In the beginning, she was pluckier. She would fight back. But, later, as the scenes became more violent, she would just smile and look away. She would tell herself that it was a form of resistance, but, to those who loved her, it never felt that way.

The three of them – Skanda, Uma and Rudrani – did not discuss Mani’s presence in their lives. Uma never described him as anything more than a friend; and the children, for fear perhaps of hearing the truth, did not probe further. It was only when a woman began calling their house at strange hours, soon after Mani had become a fixture in their lives, that this period of wilful ignorance came to an end.