Vijay, as was her way, made friends with everyone, teachers and students, but her favorite was Ram, one of the dance teachers. He came from Jaipur and was the nephew of a famous exponent of the Kathak form of dance. His mother tongue was some strange Rajasthani dialect and the Hindi in which he had to communicate in Delhi was atrocious and made everyone laugh. Vijay also laughed and she tried to make him speak more correctly, but he couldn’t learn, or wouldn’t. He said he would like to learn English, which she spoke well and he not at all. He admired her for her higher education, and for being rich. She invited him to the house, even sometimes to eat with her; it was good to have someone share the big meals the cook prepared every day for her alone. At first Ram was shy because he didn’t know how to eat rice at a table with a spoon and fork. She taught him, and there he was quick to learn and eager, for it was his ambition to be sent abroad and perform for foreign audiences in their big halls.
Sometimes the old man came down and joined them. The first time Ram was astonished to see such a shabby person in this grand house and even more astonished to learn that he was Vijay’s husband. But when she enlightened him who this husband was, or had been, Ram’s attitude changed completely. The next time he saw the old man he stooped to touch his feet in the traditional mark of respect—or at least he tried to, but the old man prevented him by jumping backward and flapping his hands at him, as though shooing away some noisome insect about to sting him. Vijay covered her mouth to stifle her laughter; she had always been amused by the way the old man had dealt with people who tried to pay him respect. When he was a cabinet minister, she had seen him literally turn and flee before a group of citizens advancing toward him with garlands to hang in honor around his neck.
The old man accepted Ram’s frequent visits without comment. Perhaps he did not always notice him—sometimes it seemed to Vijay he did not even see or notice her, he appeared so lost in his thoughts or in his reading. He carried his strange books around with him—old books, falling to pieces, out of which he would occasionally read a passage aloud to them. Ram listened with the utmost respect, with reverence, swaying his head in appreciation of what he heard, though Vijay knew he understood even less of it than she did. In the old days, when they were first married, the old man—Prakash—had read to her out of the books he had brought from his studies in England: Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx—she hadn’t always understood them entirely but had grasped the gist of their ideas. Now what he read was way beyond her. But so was the old man himself—she understood him less and less but accepted him wholly in all his eccentricity; and so did Ram, honoring him as supremely noble, a sage who had given up the world. The three of them had begun to form a family group, Vijay and Ram at the dining table enjoying one of the cook’s sumptuous meals while the old man read aloud out of his tattered book, about the soul and the Absolute and their identity-in-difference.
These pleasant hours had to cease when their son Anand arrived from Bengal to confer with his superiors at the Ministry of Home Affairs. His official visits occurred two or three times a year and gave him a chance to check up on his parents. He had taken charge of their finances some years ago. This had become necessary when the old man was on the point of giving everything away, including their house to be converted into a beggars’ home. Now Anand had settled the house and all monies on his mother, under his personal supervision, relieving his father of the millstone of earthly possessions. When Anand was there, his parents were on their best behavior. The old man remained quietly in his room on the roof; Vijay did not visit the dance school or anywhere else in the neighborhood but stayed at home, supervising the servants. On the first day of Anand’s arrival, Ram had come as usual, but after that he stayed away. He knew Anand’s type well, for civil servants exactly like him arrived for an inspection every time the grant to the school came up for renewal. Then students and teachers were meek as mice, their lessons went like clockwork, and it was not until the inspection was over that everything reverted to normal. Similarly, it was not until Anand had left (fortunately he was too busy to stay long) that Ram came back to eat his meals, the old man descended from the roof, and the three of them resumed what had become their regular routine.
Vijay had always been proud of her son, who had been a brilliant student and had stood first in the administrative service exam. She boasted that, of course, with such a father, nothing less could be expected of him; but really Anand did not take after his father at all, his brilliance was of quite a different order. The old man had questioned all authority, whereas Anand did everything he was told from above with no questions at all. He blamed his father for retreating into his own eccentricity instead of serving his country. Vijay tried but found it hard to defend the father against the son, for she had never really understood why the old man had had to give up everything—except, as she told Anand, that he had been unhappy with the way power was being misused by those who had seized it. Anand waved this away: personal feelings were of no account at a time when the country needed to be guided by men of talent and integrity. When he said this, his spectacles gleamed the way the old man’s used to when he spoke of his ideals; but, strangely, the glass of Anand’s lenses gleamed in quite a different way from his father’s. Maybe because with the old man you never could be sure whether he was laughing or not, whereas with Anand you could be sure that he was not.
Vijay loved her son dearly, but it had always been difficult for her to express her feelings for him. From childhood on, he hated to be kissed and fondled, hated to have his hair combed by her as she longed to do. Ram was the opposite. His own mother was far away, so were his many sisters, and he missed their endearments. On hot summer afternoons he and Vijay kept each other company, sitting on the marble floor of her drawing room directly under the ceiling fan, which brushed them with a cool breeze like a delicious shiver. He leaned against her knees while she combed his hair, playing with and exclaiming over it. Anand’s hair had always been straight and thin (it had begun to fall out when he was still in his twenties), but Ram’s clustered over his head in bunches of pitch-black curls that she could wind and rewind over her fingers. Each curl was plump like Ram himself and, also like himself, shiny with scented oil. Inhaling its fragrance, she could not resist kissing first his hair and then his cheek, which was rounded like a peach and rarely needed shaving. He smiled and looked up into her eyes and fondly murmured “Ma.” From the beginning, he had called her mother, but it was only lately that she had begun to call him not son but “My sweet son.” Because that was what he was to her, in a way that no one had ever been. When she was tired, he massaged her feet as he used to do to his mother, cracking the toes. The only other person who had done this to her was the old man, when they were both young and forever making love.
Once the old man came in unexpectedly while Ram was doing this to her feet. Usually in the afternoon he stayed on the roof—she never knew how he could stand the heat up there under the tin roof of the little room that he had taken for his own though it was only meant for storage. He refused to have a fan—do horses have fans?—and anyway there was no electrical outlet. Now he had come to read a passage from his book to them, and he did read it; it was about the knowledge that is real and the knowledge that is illusory. She sat up—she had been reclining on a mat spread on the floor—and Ram stopped massaging her feet, while they both listened respectfully. When he had finished reading, the old man shuffled out again, without saying anything more. Ram wanted to continue his massage, but her mood was spoiled, almost as if they had been doing something wrong though she knew they had not.
Later that day she went up to see the old man—she did this at least twice daily to check up on him, once to bring his food and make sure he ate it. But that day she lingered longer than usual, chatting away to him but with pauses to give him the opportunity to say something if he wished to. When he didn’t, she herself started on another topic, and finally she talked to him about Ram. She said Ram was the wrong name for him, it wa
s impossible to connect him with that intractable warrior god whose wife had to be so far above suspicion that he banished her, though she was pure and innocent. It was Krishna whom her Ram resembled—“our Ram,” she said, glaring at the old man when he did not respond: Krishna with his flute and all his milkmaids who loved him though he teased them mercilessly, mischievous boy that he was. Not that Ram, “our Ram,” was in the least mischievous: on the contrary, never had she known a boy to show so much respect and devotion to his elders. “You never ask if my legs are hurting,” she accused the old man. “Dr. Sehgal says it’s the beginning of arthritis, but what do you care? I could be lame and blind and you wouldn’t even notice, you or your son.” The old man still had said nothing, but he looked up at her and when she looked back at him, she saw that one lens of his spectacles was cracked right across. Exclaiming impatiently, she snatched them off his nose and had them fixed by the optician that same day.
Her friendship with Ram continued to grow. Only it wasn’t friendship, it was something else, some other relationship that they often speculated about, deciding that it had been carried over not only from one previous life but several of them. They might have been mother and son in one incarnation, husband and wife in another, brother and sister, even lovers, they teased each other, like Leila and Majnu, or Romeo and Juliet. The emotions of all these relationships had been infused into their veins in this birth, so that they could not help being what they were with each other. In the cool of the evening they walked by the river, his hand in hers like a child’s, or their intertwined hands swinging between them like those of friends. The hymn-singers around the holy man made room for them to join their circle, so did the groups of gossiping housewives; everyone smiled on them, on the old woman and the youth, and the way they cared for each other.
The biggest treat for both of them was to go shopping together. She hired a carriage, the prettiest she could find, the driver with a clean shirt and the horse with a little bunch of flowers nodding behind each ear. They drove into the big bazaar opposite the Red Fort, into the cloth-market and the lane where gold-embroidered slippers were sold. The owners sent for iced sherbet, while Vijay and Ram pointed up to the shelves to have more and more bolts of cloth brought down till there was a glittering sea of silks and muslins spread around them. Ram had a fine appreciation of quality—of course he was a dancer, an artiste with a highly developed sense of beauty. She loved to watch him examining the embroidery on a tunic or rubbing a delicate silk between his fingers. What he liked best always turned out to be the most expensive item in the shop, and he would modestly lay it aside: “No no, it’s too much.” She drew it forward again and insisted till he gave way; and then she was doubly rewarded—by his joy in the new acquisition and by the tender gratitude he expressed toward her, the donor.
When, on his next visit, Anand made his usual scrutiny of her accounts, he was surprised by the increase in her expenditure. She easily explained it: there had been visits to the dentist, a loan to the cook who was arranging his daughter’s marriage, and then she had ordered clothes to be stitched for the old man—and did Anand have any idea what a chore it was to make him wear them? Anand nodded, he remembered many altercations between his parents, whenever his mother had tried to replace some coat or shirt falling to pieces. For years now she had wanted to throw out the tattered blanket that was his only covering in the winter—she had even tried to steal it, but the old man had made such a fuss that she had had to give it back. Anand was aware of the situation and deplored it, along with all his father’s eccentricities. It seemed to him that the old man was getting worse, but what could he, what could anyone do about it? Usually he just shook his head and shrugged; but on this last visit, he detected something in his father that made him ask his mother: “Is he all right?”
“How do you mean?” She was on her guard immediately; the old man was her responsibility, no one else’s.
“He’s not sick or anything?”
“Yes, of course he’s sick, there are probably a thousand things wrong with him but you try and get him to see a doctor, if you can. All I ever hear is about that horse.”
Anand too had heard often enough about the horse, so he knew it was useless to say anything more, and next day he went back to his district in Bengal where many duties awaited him.
Vijay had not needed her son to point out that there was a change in the old man: didn’t she know him better than anyone, every bit of him? All those years ago, when he had become disillusioned with his government post, she had sensed his distress though for two years he had said nothing about it. And now too she detected a sadness in him that expressed itself only in his silence. She listened for this silence—for instance, early in the morning when he had been in the habit of singing hymns to the rising sun. Now the sun rose and he was silent and she fretted. Was he really ill? His cheeks had been hollow for many years now, usually with grey stubble in them; she had recently had the last of his teeth extracted and his mouth had sunk in, which may have accounted for his grieved expression. His spectacles had lost their gleam—probably they were dirty, but when she cleaned them for him, they still looked dull: dull and sad.
When the old man no longer came down to read to them, Ram asked after him, he missed him. Vijay explained that he had these periods of withdrawal when he was very busy with his thoughts, one had to expect it in a philosophical person. Ram looked awed for a moment; then he and Vijay resumed their playful mood, enjoying each other’s company in the usual way. In the mornings she often strolled over to the dance school to watch him give his lesson. He had a class of nine girls, all eager to learn his Kathak style of dance. They were not talented and he became very impatient with them, which made them giggle in a mixture of fright and delight. They were all in love with him. Sometimes, exasperated by their ineptitude, he showed them how the steps should be done. They held their breath to watch him—the strength of his stamping feet, the imperious ring of his ankle-bells, the muscles of his round young arms rippling in the godlike movements of his dance. He was always exquisitely dressed now in the Lucknow tunics Vijay bought him; they had also begun to patronize the jewelers’ lane in the bazaar, to buy little diamond studs to fasten these tunics. Neither of them could resist the ruby ring he now wore on his middle finger, or the one in his ear, or the gold chain that encircled his neck, smooth as a girl’s but sturdy. When he danced, a skinny young musician accompanied him on the drum, beating out the rhythm with frenetic fingers, flinging himself about, long hair flying; no one had a glance to spare for him, all eyes were on Ram dancing and all of them shining, Vijay’s along with the girls’.
Alone at night, she imagined what the girls must be feeling, in love with Ram. She recalled the sensations of her own youth, what it had been like to be in love. With her, it had always and only been the old man. She had been very proud to be married—of course, it was every girl’s dream, to be a wife with a husband of her own and a bunch of household keys at her waist. She had been especially fortunate. Her father-in-law was rich, the family was tolerant and moderately modern, the house was run on a lavish scale with nothing wanting for comfort or even luxury: it was an atmosphere in which a young wife could bloom and flourish. Best of all was the old man—Prakash—himself. He was terribly in love with her. She was beautiful in those days, with wide hips springing from a small waist, and she had walked around the house lightly on bare feet, her gold jewelry jingling as if in celebration of her loveliness. Before others, he retained his cool manner, his own brand of cynical humor, but when they were alone together—the moment they locked their bedroom door behind them—he became ardent, adoring. He even fell at her feet, though she tried to prevent him, and when she couldn’t, she got down on the floor with him and they clung together and rolled around, laughing and kissing. One year, during an epidemic, she had typhoid fever and he would not leave her bedside, changing cold compresses on her head; when she woke at night, tossing and burning, she heard him murmur as if in prayer—but that mu
st have been an illusion caused by her delirium: as a young man he never prayed, it would have been against his principles.
In those years she had slept so soundly—had sunk so effortlessly into deep dreamless sleep—that it was a joke in the family how she could never be made to get up. Prakash woke early and tiptoed around and gave strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed. But nowadays, and especially during the time of her growing friendship with Ram, she spent many hours of the night awake, helpless under the press of her thoughts and memories. She was still in the bedroom she had once shared with her husband; when she felt very lonely, she went up to the roof to see him. He slept on a servant’s string cot, which on hot nights he dragged from under the tin roof on to the open terrace; he did not need a mosquito net, probably his blood was too thin for mosquitoes to bother with him. He sat up the moment he saw her, as if he hadn’t been sleeping but had been waiting for her. He smiled at her—his toothless smile that was so painful to her that she turned her eyes away. It was not only that it was a very old man’s smile but that it held something apologetic in it: yes, as if he were apologizing to her—for what? For being old, for being the way he was now, for everything he had given up and had made her give up? When he had first begun to live as an ascetic, he had also given up sex between them, though they both still desired it. It had been several years before her menopause, and those had been difficult years for her.
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