The Way Things Were (61 page)

Summer is the season he arrived in, returning his father to the country he had left forever; and it is the season, after a year of paralysis, of coming to terms with death, as it were, that he departs in. It is the kind of symmetry that might hint at futility, but it does not feel that way. The city contained the sleeping configurations of the past – his past – which, as long as his father was alive had not, for some reason, needed to be faced. But Toby’s death had left Skanda suddenly exposed, as if the way was now clear for his own end. And what had been enough before came to feel like too little. The life that had been hardly more than an extension of his father’s grief came to feel like too little. His father, when he was alive, had, no matter how nominally, embodied the past. But, with that body gone, it was as if he, Skanda, needed the child to come up in him from the depths of a buried past to merge with the adult, like a reflection rising to meet its object. It did not have to happen in any forced or deliberate way – it did not have to be a hard and tangible thing – but he had needed the past in some way to wash over him. He had needed it to be near, as much as he had once needed to escape it. ‘Men need history,’ Naipaul tells us, ‘it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.’

They pass Khan Market, the closed shutters of BahriSons. Everywhere, all around him, from Fatehkot Apartments to his flat to the house on Curzon Road to the houses of his parents’ friends, he sees coiled about him the Snake of Residue –
ś
e
ṣ
a n
ā
ga or An-anta, the infinite.

They speed along the empty streets on their way to the new road. Kartik, in orange matching shorts and T-shirt, sleeps between them. Now not the defender of his house, now no longer sick with worry at having to keep his mother safe from intruders, he is calm, almost without anxiety. It will not be easy to know him, let alone to be part of his life – but Skanda feels, for some reason, that he, even more than Gauri, has been sent him: that he is part of his recovery. He is part of those little ways in which life allows us to set right what was wrong in our own life, to make whole what was incomplete. And when, that afternoon, a few weeks before, Skanda had glimpsed his rage and his terror, he had felt himself face to face with something so deeply comprehensible to him that he had hardly needed to put it into words. It had reminded him of the things that still lay buried in him beneath the thick overlay of his protections.

It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.

But it was hard to keep life vital, hard not to let a system of life, a formula, a key, stand between one and one’s life. He had done that, he knew, and, strangely – or, not so strangely – it was death that taught him to live again.

The new road lies like a fenced-up slab over the land, halving the distance to Agra. Even by Indian standards, it is full of dissonance and absurdity. An empty expressway, with grey and orange patrol jeeps racing up and down it, helplines, signs that say, ‘Over-speeding will invite persecution [sic]’. The Indian scene is pushed back beyond the lines of barbed wire, and the figure of a lone farmer in white against the fields, or a small pink temple with its red flag fluttering in the hot breeze, come almost to seem like the scenery that scrolls behind a stationary vehicle on a film set. Its distortions of time and space, the homogenizing power of the frame, are incredible; they seem to remake the landscape, and, under pressure from this reworking, the U.P. of his childhood comes to seem inert, a landscape robbed of its power to stir memory. Will it go all the way to Kalasuryaketu one day? What will that mean for him? What will it do – this levelling and uncaring gaze – to the landscape of his childhood? To the ravined and eggshell hills that anticipate the Tamas
ā
?

For now it goes no further than Agra. And Gauri laughs out loud when, after the exit, India returns with double force.

‘They may as well write, “Exit: India!”’

She is dressed in a white salwar kurta with a red tinselled dupatta. And she has the urn in her hands. She took it from him within minutes of their setting out. It is what he likes most about her: her quiet understanding of things, her easy solemnity. She is also a practitioner of the unsaid. He has given her so little this year; and she, like someone terrified of expectation, has asked even less of him.

‘How much time has this road saved us?’ he asks Narindar, even as the car is engulfed in traffic, in chortling engines, in bicycle bells, in clouds of brown smoke.

‘About two hours,’ Narindar says. ‘We should be there by 4 p.m.’

Lunch in Gwalior. Kartik asleep after a hunger-induced tantrum. The irresistible
Tempest
-like lull of afternoon, the whirr of the engine, the cool of the air-conditioner:
svap
in Sanskrit is to sleep, to dream, like the Anglo-Saxon
swefan
, the Latin
sopor
, soporific . . . When they wake, the sun is high and they are winding their way through that country of withered hills, their furrows deep as shadows, that enclose the Tamas
ā
.

And then it is all coming fast at him. The town of memory, recently revisited, so now neither old nor new, standing at an odd angle to the past and present. Narindar’s home town; and he drives through it with that aggression with which we want to remind the people we have left behind that we are both theirs and no longer theirs.

‘Shiv Niwas?’ he says, as the crossroads approach. ‘Or Tripathi’s?’

‘Drop me off at Tripathi’s.’

Gauri looks questioningly at Skanda, then understands. And, quietly, after a few minutes, she puts the ashes on the seat between them.

The car stops at the crossroads. Past the frilled arch of a large whitewashed gate, the road curls up to Shiv Niwas. Tripathi’s house is to the right, at the base of the hill. At the centre of the crossroads, on the balding crest of a tiled roundabout, is the statue of a warrior queen, painted copper. Her shadow falls short over the little clearing in the town, on the periphery of which is the usual assemblage of chemists and auto-mechanics – the fossilized tread of a tractor’s tyre in the dried mud – a few stray dogs sharing what little shade there is.

‘I thought it might be raining,’ Gauri says with sudden dismay, looking about at the dusty almost shadeless town on the banks of this sluggish – and yet unseen – river. Kartik, waking up slowly, twists in her arms. He wants to know who the statue is of. ‘Ketubai,’ Narindar tells him with reverence, and glancing into the rear-view mirror, adds, ‘their ancestor.’

‘You won’t come up for a bit?’ Gauri says, with something like desperation in her voice.

‘No. Let me go and see Tripathi first.’

He doesn’t know why it must be done this way, except that it was the way it had played out in his mind. And somehow the order seems important.

‘Narindar will settle you in upstairs. And I’ll be there shortly, in time for drinks on the terrace. It’s been a long time since there were drinks on the terrace of Shiv Niwas.’

She smiles – and grave again – hands him the urn.

‘OK. See you in a bit.’

He waits till the car sets off up the hill – imagines their first view of the river – then, the urn in his hands, he walks in the direction of Tripathi’s house.

A beige and red curtain hangs like a nightgown from a springy wire in the doorway. The room, at once shaded and ablaze with tube light, is full of books in tall plywood cabinets with oblong glass windows. Mahesh, Tripathi’s grandson, a slim restless young man in dark jeans and a football jersey, plays on his phone, its eerie green light reflected in his face. Tripathi, past the curtain, in the further room, is still asleep.

He would like to be woken up, Skanda knows, but Mahesh has presented it to him as a fait accompli – ‘My grandfather still sleeping’ – and Skanda does not force the matter. He can sense his restlessness. He watches him, sullen and silent, slumped in a red plastic chair, in this room, with its cemented floor and the treasures of his grandfather’s erudition. Nothing of anything, it seems will remain in Mahesh. He is scoured clean of the past. And, predictably, almost on cue, when after some stalled attempts at conversation, he sees Skanda studying his grandfather’s books, he says, ‘Sanskrit, very old language. Mother of all languages.’

Skanda has his back to him when he hears the words and he is powerless to resist the dismay they produce in him. He has always known, implicitly, at least – he has seen it in Maniraja – that when culture dies, its slogans grow louder, its clichés become like articles of faith. But Mahesh . . . Tripathi’s grandson! Who would have thought it? Something about his restlessness, when seen next to the drying up of the cultural stream, a process repeating throughout the country, gives him a sense of foreboding: of decay without end.

‘Your grandfather hasn’t taught you any Sanskrit?’ Skanda says, still with his back to him.

‘Why?’ he says defensively. ‘He teach me. I know Sanskrit.’

He is lying. When Skanda turns around to meet his gaze, he sees his face hot with shame. He may be restless, but he is not yet a liar. And the lie told, with his grandfather practically in earshot, embarrasses him. Not just the lie, but perhaps the cause of it, too. There is such a temptation – when faced with loss of this kind – to fall into lies. To let boastfulness and false pride fill the vacancy left in you. Left, by a process beyond your control, a process that is general and historical, but which, nonetheless, makes you feel responsible for your loss, makes you feel as if you – for your laxity and disregard – have been robbed of your cultural artefacts, singled out for extinction.

Their brief exchange wakes Tripathi, and when he discovers, while emerging from sleep, that Skanda has been kept waiting, he appears in a rage in the doorway, tearing away the sagging curtain.

‘Damn fool. Good-for-nothing. Bloody goonda. You sit here, playing on your phone,
while
. . . Do you know who this is?! No tea? Not a glass of water? Oh, God. What am I to do with this boy? Damn fool. Idiot! Just get out! Get out!’

Mahesh shrinks from the abuse, but, almost immediately, like a man actively in search of injustice, something defiant enters his eyes.

Tripathi sees it and his anger grows. ‘Get out, I say,’ he yells hatefully. He looks like he’s on the verge of hitting him.

‘Tripathi saab, please, leave it . . .’ Skanda inserts.

‘No, Raja saab,’ he says – he is the first to address him this way – ‘he hates me, this boy, you don’t know. He does everything in his power to humiliate me. He wants to heap scorn on all that is sacred in my life.’

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ Mahesh says, ‘you don’t have to tell me twice.’

And the roughness with which he says this next to Tripathi’s antiquated, almost Victorian English, is so jarring that it draws out some women into the courtyard. A mother, a sister. This is obviously a familiar scene and they collect around Mahesh, shielding him from his grandfather’s temper.

Tripathi sees them and says, ‘Get this layabout away from me. And, for God’s sake, offer Raja saab some tea, some water, something to eat. He’s just driven down from Delhi.’

The women cover their heads and, at the sight of the gesture, Tripathi’s temper cools. He strokes his bald head. His long dark face brightens a little.

‘Come inside,’ he says, cleaning his bifocals with the end of his kurta. His eyes, without the spectacles, are milky, and crescent measures of luminosity and sadness are visible on the edge of the deadening discs of cataract.

Inside, over tea and biscuits, in the room bathed in fluorescent light, Skanda says cautiously, ‘How come you never taught him, Tripathi . . . ?’

‘Where would I teach him, Raja saab? I haven’t even been able to teach him manners let alone Sanskrit.’

He sits back on his narrow bed and pulls up his cracked feet.

‘But, you know, the one is not separate from the other. In fact, the one would have made the other possible—’

Tripathi cuts him short.

‘What can I say? They would come back after school with their little satchels laden with books and homework. I didn’t have the heart to press one more thing on them. And a thing that seemed so irrelevant to their lives. I wanted them to be free of that responsibility, as I had never been. Free of the obligation to our past, Raja saab. It was all over.’

He speaks out of the mood Mahesh has aroused in him. But now, as if aware of Skanda, as if aware of what he has come to do, he checks himself. And almost afraid to cause offence says softly, ‘It is much better it all go. I mean:
go completely
. Then there is some small chance that they will feel its loss. And when they’re ready – when they want their culture back – it’ll be there, waiting for them in the West, like so much else. And they will come to it with fresh eyes, as your revered father once did, come to it with the pain of their loss, and it will mean something then, as it never meant anything before. But now, in this present environment, other things being equal,’ he says, and chuckles, ‘it is much better it go.’

‘Pralaya?’

‘Total pralaya,’ he laughs. ‘Total dissolution. Look,’ he says, turning to face the wall he sits against, ‘of all the images I keep from our culture, this is the one I cherish most.’

Skanda has not noticed it. It is garish and ugly, a busy hodgepodge of green and orange. But he sees now that it is of Vishnu. Vishnu after Dissolution, reposing on the Snake of Residue, which itself floats on the primal waters; and, from Vishnu’s belly, has come the lotus calyx that contains Brahma.

‘In my view,’ Tripathi says, ‘it is our incomparable contribution to the world of images. A perfect crystallization of our thought, of our ease with the cycle of creation and decay. The world is destroyed. Nothing remains but Shesha Naga – the snake of the world’s residue! – floating on the waters, Vishnu reposing above. Time passes – aeons, maybe; the waters heat; and, from Vishnu’s belly, comes the lotus, with its promise of regeneration. Its petals open to reveal Brahma and the world is reborn. No anxiety, no excitement. Neither for the end nor the beginning. Just peace and inevitability. The peace of the abyss, Raja saab: neutral, amoral, neither with negative nor positive charge. That is why it passeth all understanding. The other religions, they speak to us of Heaven and Hell, and we just smile. We think – Ha! – if only anyone cared so much as to bother sending you to Heaven or Hell!’ He laughs, then sober again, he says, ‘But that is the great mood of our culture, Raja saab, the
inimitable
mood, if I may say so. The mood of an indifferent and uncaring peace.’