Hodson killed Zafar’s sons, bundled doddering Zafar off to Burma, and took over the city. The Mughals died. The old and mannered ways of Delhi were trampled underfoot first by the British, then by the Socialists who replaced them after Independence – who were so fixated on Five-Year Plans for the economy that they had no time to reawaken Zafar’s courtesies and poems.
Few in this city would even recognize Zafar if he reappeared in this new city where the sun sank into putrefying ditches of purple water which supported jigsaws of mosquito eggs and mucus. A sweetly pungent smell of fart hung over the electric wires which dipped towards a neglected mosque. In the mosque, migrant construction workers cooked vegetable paste over a wood fire and cared two hoots for Zafar. The city’s wide boulevards and colonial architecture looked helplessly down on screaming new Mercedes and Volvos. Packed buses lurched across the river carrying the workforce back to their apartments. Loudspeakers sent bitter hymns across the neglected bend of river.
Zafar, the romantic, would be lost in this lawless city, a city-village contained in a single tree-lined entity. The countryside burst from skyscrapers, pushing hutments and oxen to take refuge under new flyovers. A skyscraper was reflected in a lily pond in which buffaloes floated. Small patches of mustard fields swayed next to New Instant Fax and Email Centres. A herd of cattle and a leotard-clad jogger were inhabitants of the same fountain park. Open ravines yawned next to glass-and-chrome office blocks. Gypsy women in bright skirts and veils danced past billboards announcing United Colors of Benetton. At traffic lights, illiterate village elders and bejewelled nomads from interior Rajasthan hawked Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and feather dusters, while their skinny livestock waited on road dividers. The cripple in the Stetson hat who ambled about on his arms near the Golf Course was spider-like – useless skeletal limbs supporting a huge head and cowboy hat. But in a sooty apartment block, hung with clotheslines and aerials, Mia spotted a little girl dressed as a fairy queen. Someone bent over her, fixing little white wings as she twirled in a flickering dark neon. An angel in the gloom. She blinked again and rubbed her eyes. She had slipped, as usual, into the familiar can’t-shock-me alertness of India.
Death lurked under iron and steel. Giant boulders which had been moved to make way for the new Metro sometimes rolled down and crushed a family. A rattling bus would careen into a waiting bus stop and kill the first half of the queue. Many slipped accidentally into the invisible realm that churned next to every footstep.
At a traffic junction a smiling beggar with huge eyes, closely cropped hair and a single arm offered blessings in return for money. Mia gave her some but the beggar made a face and tossed it away. Mia had mistakenly handed out a Euro.
Men came crowding at her. Men with eyes that bulged out of their heads. Men huddling at roadside tea-stalls. Men with eyes that didn’t seem to move from her body. Men strolling in couples with their little fingers linked. Skinny men running along highways with not a care in the world. Fat men standing on pavements sending spirals of snot into the air. A bare-bottomed man astride a fence shooting cylinders of turd into the hedgerows. Men with eyes that stayed fixed on her face or raced up and down her body with expressionless urgency.
There were eyes everywhere. Eyes in Mughal tombs. Eyes on the road that swept towards the colonial palaces where the government sat. Eyes in parks. Eyes behind showers of bougainvillea. Dead eyes, bright eyes, bulbous eyes, eyes that belonged to hands working furiously in loose crotches, eyes in bus windows, eyes that flew at her from from passing cars.
‘Vik,’ she asked as they craned their necks up the Qutub Minar. ‘Who are all these guys?’
‘Unemployed buggers, baby,’ he grunted, trying to position his camera. ‘Nothing to do. And why shouldn’t they look at you? You’re hot. You know, I’m glad I’m an employer,’ he continued. ‘I’m glad I’m the job-giver. I’ve seen the horror of my artisans and workers. You think these guys are ugly, right? But they’re ugly because of the horrors they’ve endured, the horrors they’re constantly aware of. The fear of tiny hands reaching for non-existent pots of rice, aching fear that can make a man of dignity turn to a bottle of arrack or journey to the city and become part of the footpath people. Selling plastic cars and glossy magazines at traffic lights, poked and shoved by the police, watching their bewildered wives open their legs to strangers. Setting out every morning with the staffs of beggars and the begging bowls of easily recognizable scum. Industry saves, it doesn’t oppress, whatever the fashionable firebrands may say. I’m glad I’m part of the rescue team.’
She was surprised at his unexpected passion. Vik’s hidden depths were well hidden, indeed. Karna had judged him too easily.
It’s easy, Anand had told Mia, to be deceived by India. To not see that meagre yet intelligent poetry is being murmured in slum colonies. That among migrant gangs of brickworkers there sits a grandmaster of a dying tradition of martial arts. That in the crowd of vendors walks a mathematician. On a footpath, even a beggar carefully peeling a rotten apple as the traffic roars by him, has created an island of a remembered civilization, because the human has tunnelled deep into India’s earth. Most westerners have been blinded by India’s sun. Only few were different. There was Alexander Cunningham, for example, father of Indian archaeology, who toiled alone in the fields of north India unearthing stupas and attracting the anger of the colonial government because he knew the official records were only partial truths.
He obviously took great care of his home. Victoria Villa looked freshly painted, white on the outside, cream walls inside. The living room was furnished in leather and hung with a central chandelier. There were freshly cut flowers in the vases. In the garden were the two trees as he had described. She remembered their names. A silk cotton, the semal and a java plum, the jamun. And they too seemed to have dressed themselves up for her. Sunlight shone through their branches in filigree patterns. Under each tree was a flowerbed ringed with a triangular brick edging.
Yet Victoria Villa was no beautiful Jehangir’s palace. It was as emptily immaculate as a company guesthouse. It smelt of lost pride and a nagging grievance that everyone – starting with the British sahibs who’d built it – had deserted it. Inside the house, there was a waiting in the air: something had been brewing here for decades and was about to rise up and crush the house under its weight. The staff – a flashily-dressed male cook with blowdried hair and his wife with plucked eyebrows – Mr and Mrs Krishnaswamy, looked sullen, as if waiting to start an insurgency.
The branches of the semal were like skinny outstretched arms. The bark near its base was pock-marked with hollows. The tree was in bloom. Blossoms the colour of dark blood grew in clusters. She thought she heard a cry from its upper branches, a cry that was frantic and shrill. A sinister tree, branches darting this way and that like rude statements. She turned towards the jamun which seemed far friendlier, its leaves hanging shyly to the ground.
She felt disoriented. Remnants of jet-lag ached like a dormant boil and her skin smelt of Duty Free. She wandered down the front veranda, deciding finally to put up Anand’s painting opposite the four-poster bed in the massive master bedroom where she and Vik would sleep off their daily doses of beer and whisky. In a drawer of the dressing table, she placed The Drama of Depression.
She met his friends. There was a skinny runner-up in a Miss Universe pageant with skin lifted from ear to ear, like tarpaulin stretched across crumbling rocks; a gun-trader equipped with a wordless yet stunning wife; a smart politician who carried two mobile phones at the same time and had a face that drooped as liquidly as Salvador Dali’s melting clock. There was a construction magnate with a bouncy ponytail who told Mia that it was a relief that Indians no longer felt ashamed of being naked and horny and a massive newspaper baron whose weight was all alcohol induced and who lived in a Moorish-style villa normally seen in the suburbs of Morocco.
Vik’s evenings centred around 5-star hotel nightclubs which shone as brightly as his credit cards. At night, he would take
her, with his friends, to atmospheric lounges fashioned like caves or tents where security guards kept out those not rich enough to be sexy.
Landlords from the hinterland, newly rich and stuffed into sequinned couture sometimes became filthy drunk here and bludgeoned their chauffeurs to death, though subsequently the cases were fixed, the judges were bought off and everything was forgotten in a couple of days. Despondent beauties climbed to the roof, crawling along the airconditioning ducts clutching bottles of whisky. Then they plunged head-first down sixteen floors, leaving suicide notes on their mobile phones, while only a few miles away in the depths of the countryside, neighbours hacked each other to death because there was a drought and no water to drink, let alone whisky.
He took her to the offices of Moksha Herbals. The New Delhi store, after the one in Mumbai, was the biggest in the chain. Two floors of cosmetics, bath oils, perfumes, dyes arranged in glass shelves, their colours enhanced by overhead lights and wooden floors. There were bottles, vials, syringes, gelatinous globs of flesh-like material, lipsticks, even wigs and face masks. There were huge slabs of natural soap, jars of shower-gel made from jasmine and neem, perfumes made from mint and frangipani, moisturizers made from sandalwood and rose. The names of the cosmetics were from Hindu scriptures: Vedic eyeliner, Nirvana face masks, Ganesha balms and Karma shower-gel. Behind every counter stood white-coated make-up artists and shop assistants who smiled and bent in namaste towards her.
‘Wow, Vik, this is huge.’
‘This is only the retail. Wait until you see the film unit in Mumbai. The office and administration are upstairs, including a salon. But retail is not half as profitable as film. Production houses are bulk consumers and many are ready to try Moksha because it’s cheaper than the bigger brands. We do a great deal of film and stage make-up. We have false skin of every colour and texture. Contact lenses, dentures, prosthetic noses, limbs, all made from indigenous herbal products…’
‘False skin?’ Mia asked.
‘Sure,’ he laughed. ‘False skin. Would give a person a completely different face shape; make a clear complexion look mottled and blotchy. Remember Douglas Fairbanks dyed black in Thief of Baghdad? That was Max Factor. Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie? Even Kamalhaasan in Chachi 420.’
She looked around. The walls of Moksha Herbals were startling. They were covered in murals. On one wall, on a mist-wreathed mountain, Shiva sat meditating. On the opposite, a goddess on a flying tiger with demons at her heels
‘Aren’t they great?’ Vik waved at the gods. ‘Murals. My idea. Moksha Herbals in a mythological setting.’
‘Fantastic…’ she whispered, staring around.
‘I like the stories,’ he shrugged. ‘Good over Evil. Gods killing demons. Easy stuff. Stuff I can understand.’
‘The philosophy’s quite cool too.’
‘Oh,’ he waved his hand. ‘I don’t know about all that. I like the straight stories about the good guys cutting off the heads of the bad guys,’ he laughed. ‘And some of the gory stuff. Like slicing somebody’s head off with a disc. There was this beast called Narasimha, half-man, half lion, who ripped a king’s chest open and ate up his heart. Neat, huh? Wouldn’t you like to do that to your boss?’
He looked smart. His nails were filed and his shoes were polished. His socks matched his shirt and he smelt recognizably of Azarro. His skin was unusually pale. His cheeks and chin were tinged pink. His hair, brown in the dark, became light-coloured in the sun. He seemed to have grown taller. In London, he had seemed diminished by the traffic, but here his cellphone dangled perpetually from his ear like a lopsided silver earring, making him look callously overdressed in the shabbiness of Delhi.
‘It’s great,’ she said brightly. ‘What a great store.’
‘Come on.’ She felt his hand on her back. ‘The staff is waiting to welcome you. Tea for everybody upstairs.’
The semal seemed to scream particularly loudly in the evenings. A tree full of tears, Mia thought, evening tears which only the moon had seen. The tree was watching her. There were shadows it wanted to tell her about. As if some curious fate awaited her that she would never believe if she knew. The waiting that sat in the air of Victoria Villa was drawing her inexorably towards it. Anand had sent her here. What if Anand’s spirit had turned against her for some reason and brought her towards some sort of disaster? The murals on the walls at Moksha Herbals were frightening; made her feel like a little English-educated girl who had rushed in where she should have never ventured. Reality and dreams had merged. Had she willed herself into an insane, unreal area of murals and screaming trees because of some whacko attempt at retracing the footsteps of her dead father?
She had a vivid dream that night. A man in faded clothes, working tirelessly among children, cleaning their soiled beds, placing cold compresses on their heads. There had been an outbreak of something…cerebral malaria, perhaps…even though the government claimed it had been eradicated. Local party functionaries arrive, hoping to persuade the man to stand for election…Such a respected social worker, a source of inspiration to so many, a true leader…The children look at him with their dying eyes…She is one of them. He flits in the edge of her vision as he crouches by her bed, feeding her. Then she sees him. A bearded man with round spectacles wearing jeans and carrying a mobile…
She awoke with a start. Karna. Karna who made Vik seem pathetically slight and frivolous.
The next morning her face stared back from the mirror. A normal ordinary face, confident about the reasonableness of the day ahead.
‘Here’s another one of my favourites coming up,’ sang the DJ. ‘Today is Cheerful Day!’ Her face, still the same, was a spur for normalcy.
That evening, while Vik dressed for another visit to a nightclub, she found herself standing on the lawn and staring at the semal again. She stood under its branches straining to hear its cry. But instead of the voice of the tree, she heard Vik’s, calling out from the veranda.
‘Hey, love-in-a-mist,’ he shouted, half talking on his phone, ‘I have to talk to you about something.’
‘Yes?’ she turned towards him.
‘Come here.’ Leading off from the front veranda was the semi-circular study with window seats all along the curve. The jamun leant in at the windows, swaying against the glass.
Vik sat down behind the wooden table and waved her to the chair facing his. ‘This is where my grandfather used to spend all his time,’ he smiled.
‘It’s a nice room,’ Mia acknowledged. ‘I love the circle of windows.’
‘Mia,’ Vik’s voice was grave. ‘I have to go away for a bit –’
‘Go away?’
‘– and have a fight with someone.’
‘What? Fight with someone?’
‘Scary, eh? Look,’ he bent under the table. ‘Look at these. Then I’ll tell you everything. Look. I have paintings too, just like you.’
In the drawers of the antique study table were a dozen canvases. They were oil-paintings of different sizes, unframed and smudged with dust, but clearly new.
‘A bit dusty,’ he said, drawing out the canvases carefully and wiping them gently with his palms. He drew out the paintings one by one. ‘I had them done from family photos when the house was being painted,’ he said. ‘Here,’ he pushed them across the table towards Mia. ‘My grandfather’ – he pointed to a man in a three-piece suit – ‘Ashish Kumar’. A woman in a sari standing on the deck of a ship: ‘My grandmother, Shiela Devi. Towards the end of her life she bathed in the Ganga so often that her clothes were always damp and she died of pneumonia.’ A couple, with their two children by their side, a vase of rich roses in the corner. The older child, with an arresting face and astonishing eyes, was dressed in shorts and shirt.
‘I didn’t know you had an uncle,’ she said, listening to her voice reach up towards the high ceiling.
‘Not uncle, silly!’ he laughed. ‘That’s my mother. They used to dress her as a boy when she was a child because they were so disappointed that she
was a girl. Yes, that’s my mother, Indira.’
No wonder the air in Victoria Villa was so bereft. Why Vik’s brown eyes flickered away when she tried to hold his gaze for too long. Why the garden was sunk in weary anticipation, sunlit but sepulchral. The sounds of the streets were remote and far away. The voices on the streets sounded distant. Where was his family? Where was Indira? He talked about his mother so vaguely. She ran a hotel, was too ill to travel to England, but they would visit her soon. Now that they were here, where was she?
‘Aren’t we going to meet your mother, Vik? Shouldn’t I speak to her at least?’
‘Of course, baby,’ his voice was cheerful. ‘Of course.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I told you. She’s busy running Sharkey’s Hotel in Goa. She’s having some trouble there. That is, in fact, what I wanted to tell you about. That’s the fight I have to have.’
‘You have to have a fight? With whom?’
‘Some ruffian’s been harassing her. A hooligan of some kind. A terrorist.’
‘A terrorist?’ she gasped.
‘Relax,’ he laughed. ‘Some local ass-hole. Probably wants to drive them off the land.’
‘Them?’
‘My mother and her staff. She telephoned. She’s scared. This man who’s stalking her, or hiding, or following her around, apparently he showed up recently. I’ll have to go and help her deal with this creep, whoever he is. Here’ – he dusted off another painting – ‘This is my mother.’
An oil of Indi.
My god, thought Mia, she’s a cracker. Tall like Vik. Dressed in a white, high-necked blouse with her hair scraped tightly back in a plait. Mother and son standing back to back. As if in a duel.
‘She studied much harder than me, but I got better grades,’ Vik tapped his temple. He picked up another painting. Indi wearing thick glasses lying on the lawn under the semal tree with a chubby boy smiling above her.
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