The Way Things Were (58 page)

‘Don’t get excited, Mani,’ she said, knowing full well that it would only excite him further.

Pompy intervened, ‘You see, his model, in the end – Vijaipal’s – is that of the European Renaissance. And so, in a sense you’re right: a certain kind of violence, especially religious violence, he would recognize as resembling that of Shakespeare’s time, say. But what he would be looking for – and, here, I’m afraid the men in saffron fall woefully short, Mani – is an intellectual element.’

‘Exactly!’ Uma said. ‘Listen to him, Mani. Don’t always be so blinded by prejudice. There’s more to civilization than killing Muslims and demolishing mosques . . .’

Mani looked at her straight in the eye, his chapped lips quivering with anger.

At that moment, or one long moment later, the bearer opened the door to say dinner was served. And it was this man who received the full brunt of what Uma had excited. Mani, whose behaviour with servants was habitually vile, spoke to him in a manner that did more to diminish himself in the eyes of a man like Pompy than anything else. ‘Eh, bastard, bhenchodh, interrupt when you want to, huh? Can’t you see we’re talking . . . ? Do you want me to rip your asshole out and garland you with it; you want me to do that?’

The man stood stock still in the doorway, shrinking from the abuse.

‘We were not talking, Mani.’

‘You . . . you just . . . keep quiet.’

Then he turned back and continued insulting the poor man.

On the way to the table, in the corridor, Pompy could not restrain himself. He kept saying, under his breath, but loud enough for Skanda to hear, ‘Not done; just not done . . .’

The stage had been set for a fight. But, like those storms where rain is slow on the heels of thunder, it broke only after dinner, when everyone, especially Maniraja, was much drunker. The provocations of the evening seemed mutely to have returned to him over dinner, and become amplified under the influence of alcohol. He had tried brokenly to participate in the conversation, which was all Ayodhya; but, seeing Uma, irreverent and taunting, and making an exhibition of the fun she was having in Pompy’s company, he had retreated into a long hostile silence. In these moments, it seemed to Skanda almost as if his mother by some strange inverted logic was punishing Maniraja for something . . . For what? His charmlessness? For the boredom of the life she led with him? Its security, its compromises? Punishing him, perhaps, for not being the big love of her life. And what made it all very sad was that as much as Maniraja could be controlling, and his behaviour crude and violent, of one thing there was no doubt: Uma was the big love of his life.

When they came out into the drawing room, Uma went straight for Vijaipal’s book and, pulling her feet up under her, she sat down on the sofa as if meaning to read the whole thing right there and then. Mani tried to tell her to put it down and come and join them, but she ignored him. ‘I want to show you something,’ she murmured.

The men had just about managed to resume some kind of conversation, something about the advantages of American universities – of which Mani was a great advocate – over the English, when Uma, having found what she was looking for, interrupted them with, ‘Ah, listen to this: “Over the course of a journey like this – eight months of travel across India – more people help than can possibly be remembered here. Still, the generosity of a few stands out . . . Padgaonkar . . . Ajay Sharma . . . philana dhimkana” – Ah, here it is – “. . . and my old friend, HH The Raja of Kalasuryaketu . . . over two decades of friendship, we have disagreed over many important issues concerning India and her past, and many disagreements still stand, but it is him whom I must thank for first helping me to recognize the futility in a political idea of revenge . . . and in the end, I suppose” – listen to this, Pompy, this is for you – “there are only two kinds of people: those who are of the intellect and those who are not . . .”’

With this she slapped the book shut with a pleasing sound, and, looking Mani in the eye, said, ‘There you have it, my darling. Don’t go about co-opting good writers for your shameful cause. Vijaipal does not support a political idea of revenge, in other words, he does not support demolishing the Mosque in Ayodhya.’ Then, for good measure, as this was very much her style, she added, ‘Got it, dumbo?’

But Mani had got it long ago, and now pronouncing the words carefully, for they did not come naturally to him, he said, ‘Fuck you.’

Then he walked over to her and, snatching the book from her hands, sent it windmilling across the room. It fell face forward on the sofa, its flaps stretched uncomfortably back, its spine bulging.

India: Decay and Renewal.

Uma stared at him in cold silence, then at the others and said, ‘In a country where Saraswati is a goddess, where there is nothing more sacred than the written word, you throw a book? Shame on you!’

‘What do you know about this country? You know nothing about this country!’

‘More than you, clearly,’ she said, and smiled.

‘Fuck you,’ he said again, as if he had got hold of a mantra.

Silence.

Uma said, ‘Well, all right boys. That’s my cue. I’m off to bed. Pompy, it was lovely to see you. You remind me of my brother and of many wonderful things besides. Good night!’

With this she sailed out of the room to which she had brought such turmoil. Pompy stayed a few minutes longer, just so as not to seem as if he was leaving in a huff too, then he excused himself and slipped away, leaving Maniraja to a long session of remorse and confessions and drinking. He had switched to Black Label – his pre-Uma drink – and he kept Skanda up late into the night, wanting to impress upon him that he had not meant to offend his guest – ‘I was honoured to have him here’ – but that it was his mother, Uma, who was determined to create a scene. ‘I don’t know why . . . we were having such a nice evening . . .’ he said again and again, borrowing a phrase that Skanda recognized as his mother’s.

Skanda, enraged at the spectacle Pompy Vohra had been forced to witness, wanted to leave for Delhi that very night. He stayed out of concern for his mother, though, as it turned out, that was not necessary.

He had been asleep for barely a few minutes when he heard more shouting, the slamming of more doors. Their fight had resumed. Then, moments later, there was the fast patter of feet in the corridor, and Uma was saying, again and again, ‘It’s too awful, it’s just too awful.’ Silence followed; some moments of indecision perhaps; then there was a knock on Skanda’s door. He opened it and saw it was his mother, her face still half made-up. ‘I hate to do this to you, darling,’ she said, ‘but pack a small bag. We have to leave.’

That was how they found themselves at the Shivaji Sheraton, where – on CNN – they saw that the Mosque had been demolished.

It is dark and he is alone. The plane’s engines whirr with new urgency. On the flight map, the golden wheel spins faster, and a broad lime-green arrow now leapfrogs between Delhi and Bombay. Outside, the heat of the night is still palpable: now in the bothered shiny faces of the men who come and go from the plane, now in the strangled quality of the amber lights, which seem barely able to pierce the density of the night.

Uma returns, freshly made-up. An actress in the bright cabin lights. The slackening of skin around her mouth and neck, where two parallel rills are digging in, the dark pouchiness of her cheeks, gives her newly painted lips a sternness that was not there before. Her hair is brushed, and her face, a throwback to the flying days, has a closed quality.
Change is real
, he thinks;
we must not expect people to speak as people they have ceased to be.

‘I saw Isha Massi,’ he says, ‘and Viski.’

‘How nice for you,’ she replies. ‘You must see her. She’s your aunt. See her all you want.’

He smiles. But she does not return his smile.

‘She’s also your sister and she seemed very sad that you don’t speak to each other anymore.’

‘Who? Her and me?’ she says, buying time.

He nods.

‘Ah, yes. Well . . .’

Silence.

‘That’s it?’

Irritation, as if he has just spoiled her make-up, appears on her face.

‘I’m too old, Skanda, to be told what to do,’ she says. ‘I won’t live with anyone’s disapproval.’ Then, as if what she has just said has accidentally become imbued with deeper meaning, she adds, ‘I’m sixty-three. Sixty-four, this year. I’m not answerable to anybody. I’ve done the best I can. But now everyone must also do what they want.’

Her eyes, from under which she has recently had the bags removed, are hard and intelligent; they hold him just as long as is needed for him to know that what she has said must be applied widely. Then they are veiled again, and she says, ‘Well, I’d better be off.’

Which really means that he, Skanda, had better be off.

Pooja, as if magically, appears behind her to say Mani is on the tarmac.

‘Ah, good. Tell the car to wait, so that it can take my son back.’

He stands; she lets him come in for a parting hug; then, clutching his hand, she says, ‘You must deal with Toby’s ashes; it’ll be good for you, too. He loved this country more than anyone I know, your father. His problem was . . .’ She glances at the tarmac, where Maniraja has arrived in a convoy of white sedans. Then, looking searchingly at her son – there is a glimmer of something frantic in her eyes – she says, ‘His problem was that he could see what no one else could see, but he also failed to see what everyone else could: what was plain to see. And then – what can I say? – one day he did.’

•

The night is heavy and sweltering. They pass each other at the foot of the stairs, Mani and Skanda, strangers as ever, exchanging a brief word of farewell.

Soon he is on his way back to the flat, driving through the velvety darkness, channelled along a network of elevated roads, whose amber tendrils peel fast off their central stem.

The television hung from the foam ceiling of the terminal in Bombay. Skanda and Uma, their boarding passes to Delhi in their hands, were among a group of passengers whose eyes were trained on the screen split in two: in one half was the Mosque in Ayodhya, prior to its demolition. Three domes, blackened and scarred, set against the pale blue of the December sky. It stood there, like a rock impeding the course of the river of young men bent upon its destruction. In the other, Uma stared with wonder at the changes in Vijaipal’s person. He was in India promoting his new book and the interviewer was using it as an opportunity to ask him about what had happened in Ayodhya the day before. It was hard to know how much he knew. When the British-born interviewer asked him about fascism, he said, seeming almost to glance at the images of the besieged mosque, ‘These are foreign words, Mr Datta. They have a specific context, related to the history of Europe. They cannot be used to explain what is happening in India today.’

Uma remembered him as a lean dark man, quite ugly. There was now something leonine and graceful about him. He was fatter; his eyes lidded; he had grown a beard, in which there were streaks of white. He had made something of a grey eminence of himself. What had not changed was his irritability. And when the interviewer, a youngish man in a blue polo neck, said, ‘When you say we should go back to the past . . .’ Vijaipal snapped at him, ‘That is not what I was saying. That is not at all what I was saying. You haven’t understood a word. I’m talking about a historical sense. Which, in fact, can only come about when you accept the past as dead. The last thing India needs is to
go back
to her past. Nor should she try to repeat it; that will only make things worse . . .’

Then he directed the interviewer’s attention to a book he was holding in his small dark hands. A slim tamarind-coloured volume.

‘The Kidd Sanskrit Library,’ he said, ‘a very grand publishing project – akin to the Loeb books – put together by my old friend the Raja of Kalasuryaketu . . .’

‘Baba!’ Skanda said.

‘I told you, didn’t I? He was a friend of Baba’s. Now, shush: either listen or go and find out when this flight is leaving . . .’

Vijaipal continued, ‘Paid for by an American, of course; Indians have no regard for these things. But what I was saying, Mr Datta, was that my friend Toby Kalasuryaketu, the founder of this library, is the man responsible for first helping me to see the futility in a politics of revenge. It was also, incidentally, the old Raja who introduced me to that beautiful opening canto of the Ramayana. The one, you know, where the poet from an access of grief,
ś
oka – I believe the word is – derives the
ś
loka, poetry, placing the idea of compassion squarely at the heart of Indian poetics. How strange then that, in the name of the hero of that same epic, the crowds gathered yesterday in Ayodhya to tear down that little Mosque! No, no: I’m afraid I cannot endorse it, Mr Datta. India must take as its maxim what old Raja saab had once told me it was his life’s ambition to be: “A Hindu, without vengeance, and without apology.”’

When Skanda returned from checking on the flight, he found Uma standing with her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and intense. She stood among what was now a small crowd of people. The suspended screen floated above them, bathing their faces in its bright and garish light. It was the country’s first televised trauma. And it showed them their place as they had never seen it before; it showed them faces they had never seen before. Shiny faces full of laughter and joy, in which the excitement of being on television, it seemed, far surpassed that of the great event they had inadvertently become part of. And they stared back, the faces, through this strange two-way mirror at the unknown millions who watched them.

‘A dwarf nation . . .’ Vijaipal was beginning to say, as the crowd advanced upon the mosque.

But she was not able to catch anymore, for Skanda had returned to tell her – and she heard it announced now over the commotion spreading fast through the terminal – that their flight to Delhi was boarding.

It was late afternoon and the light fell long over the land. Uma thought of the images she had just seen ricocheting – as they could only do now – among people, spreading alarm. And yet, though trouble was on the way again, for the first time on this scale since 1984, it was less scary somehow. It was as if a certain kind of negative space, a pact of silence, had been abolished. The realm of the unsaid had shrunk. It was from this sphere of unspoken things, where rumour was news, that, in the past, the greatest part of their fear had come. She realized she had no television memory of 1984; nothing except Mrs Gandhi’s funeral. But she would never forget what she had just seen; and though it made what occurred in Ayodhya real in ways that nothing had ever been real before, it also made it less frightening. There was a safety of noise and numbers in this new and easily forming consensus.