Three Continents (47 page)

To keep the events of that night straight, I had better record them one by one. The center of activity was inside the tent, where the Rawul was receiving his guests. He stood resplendently by the entrance, and as each VIP came in, he greeted him with that formal, stylized courtesy he had worked up to such perfection—one world power meeting another, making an event that went far beyond the personal to where the fate of nations hung in balance. How often I had seen and admired the Rawul in this role—with Grandfather, with Babaji, even with Tom: but never had the scene been as impressive as it was now. This may have been due to the guests, who, for one thing, were
physically
as weighty as the Rawul. They wore various forms of national dress—pajamas,
kurtas, lungis, dhotis;
the thin muslin cloth, starched to perfection by Indian washermen who had done nothing else for generations, showed off the full weight and volume of each chief minister. And besides the physical weight, there was also the moral one—I mean, they were very important, each in his state literally ruling over millions; they had in reality what the Rawul so far had only in his thoughts and dreams.

The tent was filled to capacity, for besides the chief ministers with their retinue, there were other dignitaries with theirs, and local politicians, and whoever else Bari Rani considered useful to her cause. The serving staff circulated with trays of fruit juice and hors d'oeuvres and carried in the dishes to be placed on the long buffet tables, behind which
more attendants stood ready to serve. The tent had begun to heat up, and the electric fans, hanging down among the lights, had been set in motion; along with the air, they circulated the smell of spicy foods and hot breads and pickles, and of heavy bodies lubricated in perfumed oils. The wives sat to one side, and it was the task of Bari Rani and the girls to make what conversation they could with them. I could see them working hard at it—even the girls, who had had to be primed for several days before, were rallying nobly to their parents' cause. It couldn't have been easy for them, not even for Bari Rani, for their guests were mostly peasant women with plain manners and plain speech, some of it in a dialect no one could understand. Since there was such a crowd, Bari Rani had given orders that those of us who had no duties inside the tent should stay in attendance outside; I took this to apply to myself, as did Michael. The Bhais squatted at the back of the tent, where they had got up a game of throwing dice among themselves.

I enjoyed lingering outside and watching the goings-on inside the tent. I ought to say that the weather had changed since our arrival—the crisp North Indian winter had gone, and the air, no longer tangy with the breath of Himalayan snow, was soft and warm and shot through with desert dust, also with waves of some exotic perfume. “What is it?” I had asked Crishi, and he had said “Oh some Oriental creeper the hotel people have planted.” “What's it called?” “How should I know?” (How indeed? Nothing was further from Crishi's interests than any kind of flowering natural thing.) The sky shone with more constellations than I had ever seen. It lit up the lawn where the tent was, eclipsing the rows of lights and paper lanterns strung from skinny, newly planted saplings. Beyond the lawn loomed the hulk of the main building, and here the sky was itself eclipsed: for inside all sorts of parties and receptions were going on, and the hotel was afloat like an ocean liner with lights and music streaming from it. Although I was watching the proceedings in the tent, some of my thoughts lay in the direction of the hotel, for Renée was in there, as was Sonya, and maybe Crishi too: For some reason he hadn't come down for the Rawul's party.

I made the mistake of asking Michael why Crishi wasn't
there. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it, for as always nowadays with Crishi, even at the mention of his name, Michael shrugged and turned away his face; and next moment he burst out, “Never mind why he's not here. Why am I? Or you?”

A new phalanx of heaped and steaming dishes was carried past us by uniformed hotel bearers, and the Bari Rani appeared at the door of the tent to hurry them up. Before she could go back inside, Michael blocked her way: “What's the program? What's going to happen next?” She stared at him blankly, too preoccupied as hostess to quite connect with him. “When's he going to speak?” Michael went on; and when she still said nothing but tried to push past him to get back to her guests: “Don't say he's not going to speak—that this is all—that it's just an eating and drinking party?”

She had re-collected herself and tried to soothe him—“Michael dear, not now—this is not the time—”

“Not the time for him to speak?” Michael took her up. Soft and insinuating, she was stroking his chest; it must have felt like a rock under her hands. “He's got to speak,” Michael said. “They're all here, they have to listen to him. He's been silent too long; bowing and smiling too long.”

Looking into the tent, I saw that was exactly what the Rawul was doing. He was standing among a group of the chiefest of all the chief ministers. Anyway, they were the most massive—vast men in thin drapery shoveling food into their mouths. Whenever a bearer passed with a dish, the Rawul stopped him and insisted on serving the guests himself, ladling food onto their already overflowing plates, bowing low over them as he did so, coaxing and smiling and putting everyone in a good mood so that bursts of fat laughter rose from that group.

“See that?” Michael turned to me; and then he said “It's disgusting,” bringing out the word like a lump from his chest.

Bari Rani also turned to me—she looked worried, as if she thought he was sick in his mind. Well he wasn't—I knew that—but he was suffering in both his body and his mind, the way he did when something deeply, deeply affected him. He breathed heavily, the disgust he spoke of suffocating him; his face was contorted with it. It may have been a trivial cause
to set him off that way—just a bunch of fat men eating—but I could see how for him it was the culmination of his disappointment.

“Listen,” he told Bari Rani. He was still barring her way. “If he won't do it—if he's not going to speak to them about our movement—and why we're here—why we're
here
!” he repeated, choking on his fury—“if he won't, I'm going in there and I'll break it up. I will,” he said. “Don't think for a moment I wouldn't.”

Again she put both her hands on his chest, and now
she
was barring
his
way: for he did seem ready to rush in there, maybe to make a speech, or in his fury to brandish his Swiss army knife, snatch dishes and plates, scourge away the guests—Christ among the money changers—both Bari Rani and I knew he might do that; to me he looked stern and ascetic, to her I guess mad.

At that moment two of the Bhais who had been gambling at the back of the tent came around to ask Michael when their meal was going to be sent to them; and so that no mistake could be made as to their meaning, they made eating motions by stretching their mouths wide open and pointing inside them. Michael's fury turned on them—in any case, he hated them, ever since he'd come. It may have been these feelings, festering inside him, which were responsible for his sick look and the sore on his mouth that didn't heal. That was how it was with Michael—he turned everything inward on himself; but it had never harmed him before, perhaps because up till now all his deeper feelings had been good and noble.

Bari Rani spoke across him to the Bhais in the language he and I didn't understand. Whatever it was she said, it made them draw closer together as if they were getting ready for attack or defense. Advancing toward Michael, they stood and looked at him. “Michael dear,” said Bari Rani in a sweet, subtle, insinuating tone, “you're not very well, why don't you go and rest. Don't you think he ought to?” she said to me, but I wasn't about to be drawn to her side against Michael.

“That's all anyone can ever think of,” said Michael. “When someone's serious, they're sick. . . . Yes I know,” he said when she was about to speak again, “it's the climate. But there's
nothing wrong with the climate, it's everything else. Every rotten thing else,” he said, and in a way that made her turn again to me and, getting no response, to the Bhais, who stood there in readiness.

But Michael laughed: “You can call them off. I'm not crazy”; and to them he said “Don't panic, you'll get your food.” They waited for Bari Rani's command, and when she hesitated, Michael laughed again. “It's all right, I'm telling you—I'm not dangerous.”

She didn't seem at all sure of that, and to see her dubious about him got me mad. I told her, “Get your watchdogs away from us.” She communicated with them again. Though I couldn't understand the words, I sensed some other secret exchange hidden inside them. The Bhais withdrew, leaving Bari Rani facing the two of us. She was in a dilemma, I could see. She wanted to get back in the tent to the hostess duties she performed so well; but she didn't want to leave us on a note of hostility. It was not so much that she was afraid Michael would rush in there but that she might lose us—that is, our allegiance, or rather, our money. What power this money gave us—without it, what were we but a couple of American kids who were getting in her way and whom it was just the easiest thing in the world to have thrown out. But there we stood, and had to be cajoled.

We both wanted to save her the trouble; and anyway what could she say to allay his doubts, when these were only too visibly confirmed by the goings-on inside the tent. We both told her not to worry but to go and help the Rawul entertain his guests. She said she wasn't worried about anything except Michael's health; that she felt he had been working too hard, had had to bear too many responsibilities by himself—“Where's Crishi?” she interrupted herself at this point, and she couldn't have said anything that so diverted our attention from the party inside.

Michael said “Don't ask about him—he has a lot of things of his own to do, a lot of other interests.”

Bari Rani said to me, “Is he in the hotel? Why don't you go and find him? He ought to be helping Michael and all of us down here.”

When I promised her I would, she was partly satisfied to
leave us, though not without first trying to make me understand that Michael needed watching. “He's been working so hard,” she said, once more passing her hands over his chest so that he stiffened against her. With a last half-warning, half-pleading look at me, she went inside. I was glad to be alone with Michael. And he with me—he must have been waiting for this moment and said at once: “Sonya's right. Tom's right. We should go.”

My heart leaped up in shock; at the same time my mind began to work furiously, getting together reasons to refute him. As though he knew them already, he said “Sometimes you just have to admit you've made a mistake.”

He was still standing at the open door of the tent and could look inside at the feasting. I felt it to be important to turn him away from that sight, for anything I said would be at once contradicted by it. I took his arm and pulled him into the semidarkness of this newly planted garden, between the tent and the looming ship of the hotel. “The Rawul told you,” I said urgently. “How we have to be practical and do things we don't care for if we want to get even halfway to our ideals. He's
told
you. Do you think he likes all this any better than you do? No he doesn't!” I at once answered myself, not giving Michael a chance to say yes.

“It's not only that,” he said, gritting his teeth. “It's not only negative that I don't want any of this. I'm positive too—absolutely positive what I do want: Sonya and I've been talking. Don't think she's tried to change me or anything. But I've changed myself, by myself. It's like you think and think and think—about what you want and don't want; about what you're going to do and not going to do: and all the time something quite different is preparing inside you, so suddenly you
know:
not what you want to do but what you have to.”

I said “You mean go back to Propinquity; take back the house on the Island; you mean go on fighting with Mother and despising Manton and everything else you've always run away from. All that damn neti.” I looked at him sideways: In half-darkness, his pale face illumined only by the glow of the lanterns strung up around us, he appeared most beautiful to me. By which I mean he was like the old Michael before we came here. No, from long before that—what seemed long,
long before that—I guess I mean before he ever met Crishi and the Rawul and Renée. But you can't go back like that in time even if you want to. I felt I had to think fast, talk fast, hold on to him, get him on my side; I said, in a half-complaining voice: “And whatever you did, I followed you. Whatever it was; wherever you went; you never had to ask me or explain anything. I was right behind you.” Thinking or maybe only hoping that I saw a shadow of doubt pass over his face, I went on more directly: “It was you who met Crishi first; and liked him—very very much. You liked him very much. It was your fault,” I said like an accusation.

But he wouldn't take that; he said dryly, “I never asked you to follow me there. I've liked other people before—in that way—but I didn't ask
you
to fall for them.”

“Is that all it was then? Just falling for him—and when it's over, it's over? Is that all it was?”

I was really shaken, and he was too and said “No. That's not all.” But I knew he meant the Rawul and the movement—everything that was at this very moment being dissipated for him in a vulgar feast. If he had said, about the Rawul and his movement, “It's all a fraud. Let's go home,” I wouldn't have made a fuss; I would have followed him as usual. But he was saying it about my marriage—about me and Crishi—and there I couldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't ever agree with him.