The Way Things Were (55 page)

Or, Mani, having read in the paper that Zubin and Gayatri were in town, might – for he seemed really to seek out these people! – ask that Uma invite them to dinner in a restaurant, the Zodiac Grill say. If, by chance, they were not free, he would rub in her face that they had snubbed her. If they were free – and dinner was arranged – he would, with all the awkwardness of having a fifth person at a dinner for four, insist that some friend or professor or relation whom he had only the other day himself described as ‘very boring’, join them. Then, in the middle of a conversation about the Clinton election, say, which Gayatri and Zubin since they now lived in New York knew something about, he would loudly, across the table, say to the fifth guest, who until then had been sitting in complete silence, ‘Thambi, tell us that poem of Thiruvalluvar.’ And Thambi would begin reciting the alliterative verse of the classical Tamil poet, in Tamil, about the first rain. Then Mani would ask him to translate, and Thambi would say, ‘“The rain drips down, drippety-drop-drop, the first rain . . .” Leave it, Mani, it is hard to convey the beauty of the verses in English.’ ‘No, no, please go on. I insist.’ Thambi would labour through with a few more lines, after which, Mani would smile, and turning to Zubin, might say, ‘So, Mr Mann, have you thought of publishing Thiruvalluvar in New York . . .?’

Whether it was eye drops or Thiruvalluvar – and later it seemed almost an admirable quality – Mani was completely unafraid of boring people. It was an aspect of his inability to listen. He was a man who treated what other people said as an interlude in which he could prepare what he would say when it was his turn to speak again. So much so that later, when he went on to meet a variety of interesting people – and he met many – Nixon, Gorbachev, in one of his first public appearances after the end of the Cold War – he could always only remember what he had said to them. Never a word of what they had said to him.

He was fascinated by little things about his person. That he had small very beautiful feet or excellent handwriting or that he liked his eggs a little burnt underneath and soft on top were subjects that he could talk about for well over half an hour. Eggs, it is worth mentioning, were an eternal source of tension in the life Uma and Mani made for themselves. Having perhaps never fried one himself – but applying what must have been some corporate desire for uniformity – he had a notion that an egg was spoilt unless its yolk fell exactly dead centre of the white. On an average morning he would send back some three plates of eggs, his temper boiling with every returned plate, until he got one – and he very rarely did, for, by now, the cook’s hands had begun to tremble – with the yolk at the centre. Uma, naturally, was to blame for the shoddy operation she ran, in which a cook couldn’t even make an egg properly. And again she put up with it, even when the people who loved her were driven away because they could not bear to witness it.

Why?
Money was one obvious explanation that many, including Rudrani, offered. And it was a real consideration. Because Maniraja, for all his other faults, was extremely generous. There were cars and holidays and first-class tickets, expensive shoes and handbags; hideous but exorbitantly priced pieces of jewellery, such as the emerald tiara he gave her, with Uma written touchingly in rubies on the front. So, money could not be discounted as a motivation for why she bore it all; it was a Time of Things after a time of deprivation, and Uma was not immune to its appeal. But it never seemed to Skanda like an adequate explanation for why she stayed; not simply because what she put up with was not worth the money; but because, in those early days, at least, before habit and security closed her escape routes, she seemed really, with energy and conviction, to be in love with Maniraja.
Or
: in love with the idea of herself in love.

She had a way, Uma, when in love, of appropriating every aspect of her lover’s world, of making its politics, its beliefs, its attitudes all her own. So, if as the wife of a Sanskritist, she was reciting
ś
lokas and making opaque references to classical India, and lamenting the loss of funding for Indic studies in the West, then, as the girlfriend of a businessman, she became a full sethani, with a mouth reddened by paan and a bunch of keys in her petticoat, and strong views about Manmohan Singh’s budget. And it was not as if the Sanskritist or the businessman asked these things of her. They asked them of her no more than a people one is travelling amongst ask that you take on the intonations of their speech and accent. But, not unlike certain travellers who do, travellers with a good ear and an active imagination, she found herself powerless to resist the allure of reinvention that love offered. It was for Uma the ultimate form of self-discovery.

When the door has closed again and the cool of the plane returns, Uma asks, ‘It’s strange that I’m here today of all days. A year to the day since Toby died, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘And? How do you feel?’

‘I’m fine, Ma.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear it,’ she says, with the casualness we adopt when we want to conceal our need to talk about things. ‘He was very strange, in the end, your father; I didn’t like his aloofness where the two of you were concerned; but that is not how I want to remember him.’

‘How do you want to remember him?’

‘Well,’ she says – making it clear what she really has in mind – ‘I’ll tell you how I
don’t
want to remember him. The way he was just before he left India in ’92. So lost and off track, part of that ridiculous NGO crowd – Vandana and Dhanalakshmi: people who, by the way, he, more than anyone, used to laugh at in the old days. Racing off to Ayodhya like Rambo to singlehandedly stop the demolition of the Mosque. That huge fuss he later made with me over the Sanskrit Library. And it was him, you know, who asked me to step in when that fellow – what’s his name . . . the American millionaire?’

‘Kidd.’

‘Right. When Kidd went into a coma, and his wife – God knows, I don’t blame her! – put a stop to that project, wanted, as Toby used theatrically to say, “entomb it”. Well, it was Toby who came to me, asking if Mani would support it. And when I arranged for that – and Mani was happy to do it, believe me: it was . . . it
is
a truly grand project . . . But what a fuss he later made!’

‘Well, Ma, in fairness to him, he didn’t know that the same money that funded the library would also fund the demolition of the Mosque.’

‘It did not
fund
the demolition of the Mosque. It was paying for karseva . . .’

‘Ma, that’s ridiculous. The karsevaks demolished the mosque. Those men in the pictures, clambering on top of the dome of the mosque, with saffron flags in their hand,
those
are karsevaks.’

‘But Mani didn’t know that. When you’re rich, you give to charities. You don’t track every penny. I tell my Muslim friends this all the time . . .’

‘You have Muslim friends?’

‘Very funny. Many, in fact. And I tell them all the time when they go on about the Saudis funding the jihad: I tell them they’re not funding the jihad; not, at least, knowingly. They’re giving to Muslim charities; now if that money, after several degrees of separation, ends up buying a jihadi in Waziristan an apple, an AK-47 and a suicide belt, it’s hardly their fault.’

Skanda laughs, and his mother, after peering into his face to be sure that the laughter is real, not rhetorical, laughs too. It is her great quality: she may strip the people who come into her sphere of their charm and humour – including Rudrani, who is ice cold with her – but she never lets go of these things herself. She is one of the very few people he can think of with whom it is possible to spend a day like this: on a stationary plane, with nothing but conversation to pass the time.

And, as much as life for her is blindingly real, she is never deaf to its laughter, big laughter, that makes life, if not less real, then certainly more expendable, a thing to be burnt rather than saved. Her approach to life is like the gambler’s approach to money: he cannot do without it but neither does he hoard it. And it is an aspect of how close life still feels to her that death is unfathomable. She has, for instance – with regard to Toby – made none of the little adjustments we make for the dead; she has not unclenched her fist, as it were; she simply speaks of him (and perhaps always will) as if he is still alive.

‘And he was wrong, let me tell you,’ she says, the laughter in her voice suddenly falling off, ‘your father. All that talk of fascism and the coming of tyranny: it was all rubbish. Vijaipal, when he came on TV the day after the Mosque was demolished, was right. “These are foreign words, fascist and the such,” he said, I remember so well, “they have a specific historical context, related to the history of Europe. They should not be applied easily in India.” And – what? – twenty or so years later – it’s pretty clear that what happened in Ayodhya might have been a bad thing, but it was not the Beer Hall Putsch.’

‘What are you getting at, Ma? What’s bothering you? Why all this, now?’

‘It’s not bothering me. I just don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘Why he had to take everything so much to heart, your father? Why did he have to leave India the way he did, never to return? Why did he give up on life? He became so aloof, even from you and Rudrani. Never helped with anything. Don’t forget – much as you might resent him – it was Mani who put you through college; he was happy to do it, of course; but let’s not forget who
funded
that, your little escape into classical India . . . Not daddy dearest, no. Mani! And, believe me, there’s a much clearer money trail to that than there is to the demolition of the Babri Masjid . . .’

‘Ma!’

‘What?’ she says irritably.

‘I don’t know why he took everything so much to heart. Nobody does.’

‘Well, then don’t make it seem as if it was all in some way my fault . . .’

‘Do you feel,’ he says, asking a question that years of therapy has made possible, ‘that I do that? That I make you feel you were responsible for Baba leaving India, for his disillusionment at the end of his life?’

‘No. Not you, anymore. But your sister.’

And then, as if anticipating his answer, she adds, with her special taste for conflict. ‘You too, in your way. Because you’re full of sympathy for him, and none for me.’

The return of love made Uma unrecognizable to her children. But she seemed to them, in many ways, better off than their father. In her eyes, though dimmed, there was still the light of familiarity, there was still recognition; in Toby, it had gone out completely. When Skanda met him that autumn in Delhi, during his mid-term break from school, he was alarmed at how changed he was. Perhaps because they met at the President’s Estate Polo Club, which itself was soon to close, or perhaps because they met alone, it left him with one of his strongest impressions of his father. And it was of a man in whom something essential had gone quiet.

It was September. The rains were gone, the sky was free of clouds. The sunshine dazzled, but there was still something moist and congested in the air. They sat out in rattan chairs in front of the old red club house with its sloping roof of corrugated iron. The rides were over and the two Sikh brothers, large Jat men, with whitening beards coiled neatly into knots at their chin, were calling in the horses. A single rider stick-and-balled on the great field under a pale sky.

They had just come back from a ride on the Ridge, and there was the sweet tired dirtiness of that post-riding hour still in them, the smell of sweat and leather on their red and faintly calloused fingers. The quiet of the forest left them with some residual closeness. But, now out of those wooded trails, and in the big world again, Skanda was surprised to see how quickly it faded, how aloof his father, in actual fact, had become. Skanda had just returned from two months away at a new school, in a new place, halfway across the country, but Toby, until prompted, asked him nothing about it.

In the past, Toby’s faraway quality had been compensated for by an amazing human sensitivity, an attentiveness and concern for the interior life of the people he loved, an ability to make you feel that his distance was but a stepping-back only so that he could see you more clearly. Nothing was out of his range, nothing too low, nothing too high; it was one of the most wonderful things about him, his talent for elevating what was low and ordinary, and simplifying what was difficult and out of reach. But now, that other component, that ability to join the human with the cerebral, was gone. And it gave to his high-mindedness a frazzled and wayward quality; his speech seemed to lack volume, seemed almost to have the empty urgency of static.

He had been speaking for many moments about the only two subjects that still interested him, the Kidd Sanskrit Library and Ayodhya.

‘Mites, Skandu. Red mites. Gopas. Indragopas. Or, if you will,
ś
akragopas. Monier-Williams incorrectly translates them as fireflies. Leuchtkäfer. But Onians is right, I think, in saying they are mites. Red mites. A hallmark of monsoon poetry, because, you see . . .’

‘Who’s Onians?’ Skanda said, peering into his tea.

‘Onians? Oh, a wonderful scholar at Chicago. One of the translators for KSL. She’s done extraordinary work on certain stereotyped elements of monsoon poetry. Because, you see, in old India, the inventiveness of the poet was confined to what he did with certain fixed elements of poetry. He was not expected to invent new elements. He was expected to play with what he had. So, just as the Western poet of a certain age had to show his inventiveness within the confines of metre, the Indian poet was limited not just by metre, but by theme and metaphor too . . .’

‘Is it going well, your library?’

‘On the scholarship and translation side of things, splendidly. Couldn’t be better. But we’re having trouble with our investors. My old friend Kidd is sick, and his wife – forgive me, son – is a bitch. Hates India, hates Sanskrit. Given half a chance, she would entomb . . .’

‘Baba?’

‘Skandu?’

‘I have a girlfriend.’