Karna sloped along, Vik walked purposefully, almost clicking his heels. Karna rarely smiled. Vik laughed often. He said he had decided early in life that a sense of humour was the best way forward. A sense of humour made the world safe for business. And now, after Moksha Herbals had stormed across many mountains and seas, he always had lots of parties where everyone could enjoy each others’ company, do business and tell jokes. He said he loved luxury, good art and people. He always made sure his surroundings were the best in the world. She imagined his home, Jehangir’s palace, where he, in a silk turban, wandered under flaming chandeliers and heavy gilt curlicues laced with spider-filled cobwebs.
He wore sharply ironed shirts and bright ties. His nails were neatly filed and his shoes were well polished. His clean-shaven face looked gym-fresh. Karna’s polar opposite, she thought. They would jeer at each other.
He had a point to prove, he said. His MBA from Wharton had not only given him a good education but had also provided him a list of important phone numbers which had helped him create a product that had great appeal in the domestic film world and great international potential – both among wealthy immigrant South Asians as well as among certain kinds of buyers in Europe and the US. He wanted to prove to his international customers that they could do business with him. That they could buy his cosmetics, display them on the counters of expensive shops and be guaranteed satisfied customers.
He said, after many years of hiding behind high walls, India was rushing out towards the world. Rushing out with her ancient wares and newly acquired bodies and faces, clamouring to be heard; trying to sharpen up a slow creaky machine that was weighed under too many totems and lucky charms from the past. It was his destiny to prove that there was a new country behind the Himalayas.
A country crammed not only with lepers and snake charmers; a country in which he too strode among the crowds.
Things were changing. Fortunes were being built from mud. Hondas and Mitsubishis now negotiated dirt tracks. A young graduate might set up a computer centre in a mustard field and begin a lucrative outsourcing business to an American firm headquartered in Memphis. Today’s cooks are tomorrow’s motel owners in Dubai, and day-after’s international tycoons. Fathers may push carts of fresh fruit down the street but they’ll do their damnedest to make sure their sons become Members of Parliament. The old businesses in steel and coal were lumbering along, but there was another quicker, lighter economy offering its services to a new generation. Moksha Herbals had supply centres all over India. The freshest cream, the purest neem and young banana, the juiciest apricots and vanilla sticks were paid for and manufactured so that the sellers got the best possible price. A restless country had replaced a soporific one and he was a part of that action.
She was impressed. Clearly not all Indian businessmen were shallow smarties. As a mark of her newfound respect, she tried to make him laugh. The other morning, when she had stepped briskly off the tube in an effort to be the hotshot journalist on the move, she had landed chin first in front of Wimpy’s with her hair under somebody else’s shoe and her leg tangled in somebody else’s briefcase. The gods had obviously been irritated by her stab at dynamism and tripped her up. And didn’t he think that when Tiger gazed at Mithu, his hair positively frizzed with virile static? He laughed, throwing his head back and covering his eyes, and she was gratified.
They went to Tate Modern. She told him that Anand’s paintings had been displayed here and she showed him her father’s painting of the Kumbh Mela at home because she didn’t know how to tell him about Karna. He said it was cool. He said the Kumbh Mela needed to be marketed far better than it was. They went to Covent Garden and to the Portobello Road market, ate in Greek and Indian restaurants and went for walks on Hampstead Heath. He bought her a lithograph of New York and she gave him a wool jumper.
The city had suddenly become generous and every building welcomed them with open arms.
One evening, he crossed his arms across his lanky chest and sized her up as a hairdresser sizes up a customer. ‘Hey, you know what you look like?’ he said. ‘You look like a wild flower, a wild berry. Something growing freely in the grass. Not manicured and cut and twisted into a vase. Your eyes are not painted with my Vedic eyeliner. You’re not wearing my Karmic lip balm. You’re a hopeless consumer. My mother would call you a harum-scarum. But I think you’re a love-in-a-mist. A love-in-a-mist. You know, the flower surrounded by green threads, like a mist?’
‘I am in a mist most of the time,’ she confessed. ‘But Vedic eyeliner sounds great. I must remember to buy it.’
‘No, don’t!’ he laughed. ‘You don’t have to. You’re different. Most of the women I meet are just looking to hook any guy with lots of dough in any currency. But you don’t give much of a damn, right? You’re not fussed about money or how you look. You cry when you see a stranger. You cry about your father’s painting. You want to get married so your mother can be free to marry her fiancé. Isn’t that right? You’re happy to throw your life away with a greaseball like me.’
‘Hey!’ she protested. ‘Don’t make me sound hopeless and when did I say I want to spend my life with you? And are you confessing you’re a greaseball?’
‘You’re a tragic clown,’ he smiled at her. ‘Quirky, clever, aware of so many interpersonal dynamics. Let’s do it, love-in-a-mist.’
‘Do what?’
‘Marriage, shmarriage, the whole fucking thing. Let’s get the thing off the ground. Would you like to?’
Vik’s face was long and regular. All over the world he would satisfy the definition, ‘normal’ and ‘regular’. He was an advertisment for a universal corporate gene. He was the textbook definition of the word ‘eligible’. Karna would look lost in an airport. They would look at him askance in a hotel lobby. He would be turned away from clubs. Tourists would take pictures of him.
‘Yeah, I think so.’
She told Vik about her university boyfriend. She had clung to Sudden for three years and had tried different techniques to make him adore her. When she grew her hair, he had said she looked like a Greek prophetess and had taken her to meet his parents. But when she had pierced her eyebrow and entered the transparent dress phase, Sudden had suddenly left her. His devotion to her was dependent on the look of the day.
Vik laughed again. She confessed that she loved his laughter more than any other gift.
‘You’ll love my mother, love-in-a-mist. She’s a great lady. She lives in a place called Alqueria. In Goa. She runs a motel there. She’ll love you.’
She smiled at him in gratitude. He had known of Mithu and Tiger’s plans. He knew that he had been set up to fall in love with her and marry her. Yet he hadn’t run away from the trap. He hadn’t wondered if she was seeing someone else. He had given her and her situation a chance and been generous enough to like her, in spite of her scheming mother and her planet-obsessed fiancé. He hadn’t despised her, instead he had acted as if they had met by chance and had fallen in love by destiny. It was an act but it was an act of kindness.
She felt blessed.
They went to a SkyVision party. Steamers and balloons came flying through the air and bottles of wine popped in corners.
I’m swept off my feet by you, Mia. Do you have any feelings for me?
‘Come on,’ someone shouted. ‘Let’s dance!’
I think you’re great.
‘What’s up? Is this your new boyfriend?’
Well, that’s a start.
‘God the music’s awful. Let’s have something else!’
It’s the best start.
‘Shit! Somebody spilled the juice!’
You won’t regret it.
‘Fuck, what’s he done to his hair?’
I know I won’t. Something about this feels right. There is a reason why this is right. You see, I met someone. An old friend of my father’s. I met him recently. And somehow meeting you feels like a good sign. Although, I’m not superstitious.
You won’t regret coming to my hom
e.
‘Karmakarmakarmachameleon you come and go you come and go…’
No, no. Definitely not. My father would have been delighted.
‘A little bit of Monica in the sun, a little bit of Jessica all night long…’
I travel a great deal, London, Germany. They can’t get enough of my stuff. But I’m not an old fashioned, traditional-husband type.
I’m not an old fashioned, traditional-wife type.
She wondered if this would be a good time to tell him about Karna. To give some hint of her fantasies about the sadhu who had been reincarnated out of her father’s painting. To admit that she had recognized him after seeing him all her life and now dreamt more often of him than of Vik. That, somehow, it was precisely the appearance of Karna that had made her so happily accepting of Vik. It was Karna who made her want to jump off the deep end into the unknown, buoyed by an inexplicable optimism.
Reflected love. Attraction to one, so that in an ordinary reflex action, there is the readiness to meet and fall in love with another. So seduced by one that you become disposed to falling in love with many others almost immediately.
Mia was more imaginative than she was moral. She would much rather preserve a secret world than ruin the romance by being pedestrian and straightforward. Karna was a renunciant, part of the ascetic tradition of the Dasanami Nagas. Vik was a rational choice, a dazzling emperor of the world of commerce that Karna so despised. Karna was her lucky charm, a miraculous coincidence, he had made Vik’s appearance possible. She would go with Vik to India, where she would go to his ashram and meet Karna again. Life had taken a positive turn and she would ride the crest of the wave.
Superstitions, signs and ephemeral connections had conspired to signal a new chapter of experience, a change of gear. The Drama of Depression would diagnose that she was overdoing the similarity between Karna and the painting. But his appearance here, now, added up to a phase of action in which to act positively was the signal her father was sending her. Vik had called her love-in-a-mist and asked her to marry him. Mithu’s desperation would be unbearable if Mia refused, on the grounds of the missing ingredient known as love. Mithu came from a long tradition of arranged marriages which had proved far more durable and companionable than the bewildered silences and near-total collapse of understanding that had marked her own romance with Anand. Mithu would find all talk of love outrageous. And in the crowded context in which Vik had appeared in her life, love, or the lack of it, was of negligible importance when compared to the transcendent rightness of the moment.
Her return to India, the rediscovery of her parents’ birthplace, this was the natural progression she must make, now that Anand had quit the world and was asking her to take up the baton and run the race that he had abandoned. She could never find solace in London; in London, she would be trapped by the prescriptions of Rosenthal and Silver.
She’d have to seek solace in India, in the now lost footprints of her ancestors. Yes, the road ahead was clear.
‘Congratulations and jubilations,’ Mithu sang. ‘Having a home. Having a family. These are the things, Goldie. These are the things. Can’t just keep running to some office and keep doing computer.’
‘Doing computer’ was Mithu’s term for all professionals, evocative as it was of intercourse with a hard disk.
Vik said he had to go away for a few days. Moksha Herbals was getting ready for a contract with a German chain. He had a couple of business meetings in Berlin. In the meantime, she must start shopping.
Before he left she offered him her grief –
‘My father died quite suddenly. They said it was suicide. But he didn’t tell me anything or give me any warning even though he knew he was everything to me and I was everything to him. We had this thing going. He thought I was too cynical, I thought he was often just being silly. He said it was important to be silly. That he’d made a mistake by educating me so much. Now I can’t let him die away. I’ve got to preserve his silly world. His way of seeing things is very precious to me, even though I always argued against it.’
Street lamps shone in Vik’s eyes when he pulled her towards him. ‘My father’s dead too, baby,’ his voice was soft, like someone speaking through an injured lip. ‘He was a soldier. He died before I was born. We have dead fathers in common. We’ll be fine together, love-in-a-mist. Just dandy.’
‘Shall we,’ she said after a pause, ‘call and speak to your mother?’
‘She doesn’t have a phone where she is.’ His voice was energetic again. ‘We’ll go and visit her as soon as we can.’
‘But don’t you want to call her?’
‘I’d love to, baby. Just that she doesn’t have a phone where she is.’
She didn’t understand the silence that followed. It was a silence that poured out suddenly, as if she had accidentally pushed open the lid of a manhole and the underground had opened beneath her feet and sent up a fountain of silence. She shrugged it off.
‘I’m getting married,’ she informed Karna the next afternoon.
‘Married?’ he exclaimed incredulously. ‘My god, that was quick. When did this happen? Why are you getting married? It is a big mistake! That giant wheel which sits in the middle of the world’s oceans, spinning helpless boys and girls around in different combinations. That’s the wheel of death. Why are you dying?’
‘But I thought you would approve,’ she cried. ‘Isn’t marriage Pure Love?’
‘Human emotions shouldn’t be tied to the waistband where they can get dirty, Maya. They should soar with the clouds. Why should one human being expose his dirt to another? Don’t you ever feel how meaningless marriage is? Scientists say that billions of years ago life existed on the volcanoes of Venus. Billions of years later someone will visit earth and find a wasteland. Even though lots of people in this wasteland got married, thinking they would be eternally happy if they did. The way to Pure Love is not by getting married.’
‘I think I’m doing the right thing. I have a good feeling.’
‘Love does not come with things like marriage.’
‘I think Vik and I will be fine. This is a good time in my life. I just have a good feeling.’
‘Vik?’
‘Yah, that’s his name.’
‘Ah,’ smiled Karna. ‘Mia and Vik. A nice couple with two short nice names. Transit lounge names that even the airport immigration officer can pronounce, no? Easy names for a globalized world. Except your name is not Mia. Your name is Maya. No, Maya,’ he peered at her through his glasses, ‘you don’t look happy to me. You look like a zombie. A mongoloid idiot.’
‘Thanks,’ she grinned back, feeling thoroughly appreciated. ‘Me with my transit lounge name. How come you’re so perfect?’
‘I’m sure I am at least better than this Vik. What does he do?’
‘He owns a cosmetic company, Moksha Herbals. They supply organic make-up to film studios as well as to cosmetic retailers.’
‘Oh no!’ Karna hit his forehead with his fist. ‘A frivolous tycoon! One who uses philosophy for his commercial needs. Moksha Herbals! How dare he make fun of an eternal principle. Perhaps he paints his face every morning with all his make-up. Perhaps he drinks orange juice every morning and worries about the acidity in his stomach and kisses you with his mouth closed.’
‘Hey,’ Mia protested. ‘Give it a break, okay? He’s a great guy. Really great.’
‘It’s your choice,’ he shrugged. ‘Your choice of an inferior life. There’s no happiness after things like marriage.’
‘Then where is there happiness?’
‘There is only happiness,’ he smiled, ‘at the Kumbh Mela.’
He said it before she could. He said it although she had planned to say it. She had known from the moment that she had seen Karna. She had known that the heart-thudding familiarity between them was not simply her imagination playing tricks. That something existed between them which had always existed and would throb to life even if they had been animals incapable of thought. He would
never let her get close, this spiritual healer who was himself in need of being healed, he would sit far away from her, keep her at arm’s length but he wouldn’t be able to deny, however hard he tried, the spark of an ancient recognition. The coincidence was stretching her imagination to breaking point; she wanted to burst into a babble of explanations that perhaps Anand had just seen a picture in a magazine of Karna at the Kumbh Mela or that his was just a typical sadhu face, but at the same time she wanted to stay quiet and let the silence take over. In the stone age, before the coming of human language, memories must have expressed themselves in mental pictures, there was perhaps no felt need for a rational sequence of events.
‘Yes,’ she said after a pause. ‘I know it.’
‘You should go,’ he said pulling at his shirt. ‘You should go there and see.’
‘See what?’
‘See the sun rise over the Ganga. See how people surrender to the river. How people surrender to life. See how people learn to love each other. You should go there. See the naked sadhu.’
‘Yes, my father told me.’
‘Those,’ his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, ‘who have nothing to lose, don’t mind shedding their clothes.’
The Grand Pitcher Festival, the Mahakumbh would begin early next year, he said. The largest spiritual fair in the world. Sages, holy men and women, firewalkers, mystics, mediums, ghost-trackers and soothsayers would come. Pilgrims would pray and chant. Naked mystics would show off massive erections. The penis, deadened to all desire, would become an object of pornographic caricature for television cameras, but for those present it would be a kind of liberation. Even Coca Cola and Pepsi salesmen would strip and run naked into the water, hoping for the accidental chance of revelation.
Would Vik ever think of going to the Kumbh Mela? No, he wouldn’t. She couldn’t imagine it. Vik was a busy executive, he kept the world sane with his normal laughter, dashing from city to city with faxes, emails and mobile phones as the ever-changing unchangeables. Karna was laughable, a freak who had once painted himself blue, stuck a feather in his hair and called himself Krishna. The army of normals versus the army of freaks, the real versus the unreal, the sane versus the insane. She knew where she stood but it was time to peek across enemy lines.
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