The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I overheard bits of the conversation between Debbie and Sarah. Debbie was saying: ‘You know, I met this really peculiar man at the Taj yesterday. Mark knows him; he’s an Indian scholar of some sort, called Prasad . . . Anyway, he started asking me all kinds of really aggressive questions about Buddhism . . . and, you know, I could tell what he was thinking inside . . . something like, “What’s wrong with this woman? Why’s she a Buddhist?” etc., etc. I didn’t like him at all. He sounded like a real jerk with his . . . sort of British public-school accent . . .’

  ‘How did he know you were interested in Buddhism?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Well, he asked me what my religion was.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Well, just that I was raised a Christian, but I’m now thinking of converting to Buddhism.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Nothing much really.’ Debbie seemed to lose interest in the topic. ‘He really ignored me altogether and started talking to Mark about how people in the West had completely misconstrued Buddhism and how . . . unequipped the Western mind is to receive a philosophy of negation and how people can only be – his phrase was – “part-time Buddhists”. I thought he was being totally ridiculous. So . . . Oh, yes! He also asked me if I had read Hermann Hesse. I said, “Who hasn’t?” And he said, “So did Siddhartha inspire you to come to India?” It was really condescending.’

  Anand was telling the tabla player about the concert he was giving in Paris next year. ‘Good money,’ he said, in Hindi. ‘When I come back I want to open up a school for sitar players, free training, free meals, everything.’

  Mark was discussing with Miss West his plans to go back to America and get ‘serious’ about Debbie. ‘I don’t want to be a rolling stone all my life,’ he said. ‘You know, one of the great things for me about coming to India has been knowing about poverty and pain and suffering, and realizing that there is a whole world outside America where people don’t even have the basic things in life. I mean, you keep seeing all those things on television, you know, those starving kids in Africa, but somehow you never get close enough to really feel it. It doesn’t register much. It’s just out there on a map and you never really care as much as you should. And then you see it face to face and, boy, it knocks you out. I feel I have been lucky in this respect both as an artist and a human being. Not many people get the chance to experience all this. Back home we are kind of trying to forget what pain and suffering are . . . keep . . . covers . . . only . . . real life . . . winners and losers . . . this . . . machismo . . . makes . . . pathetic failures. I mean spiritually, because we don’t allow ourselves to suffer, experience pain. What I want to do when I get back is find a way of sharing my experience of Benares, and find some way of integrating it into daily life.’

  Miss West, who had given the impression of listening carefully until now, suddenly jerked her head up. ‘I am frightfully sorry, but I simply must attend to the garland situation,’ she said and walked away briskly. Mark watched her go, and then shook the ice cubes in his glass before draining his drink.

  All around me, people continuously spoke, laughed, ate, drank; and watching them, I became increasingly aware of the strangeness the occasion held for me. Was this what always went on at parties, I wondered: the easy exchange of confidences, the casual display of personality, the quick amiability and seemingly inconsequential chatter about things that appeared important.

  It all seemed to be an esoteric ritual, and I took no part in the conversation. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and had no clear idea of what the right thing was. I did once ask Debbie – safely following Mark, who had asked me the same question – what she was doing in Benares. Passing through, she said, and gave her short nervous giggle, and I was so struck by her reply that I could not add anything more to my question.

  *

  At some point in the evening, a tall striking girl wearing a blue embroidered Kashmiri kaftan appeared on the roof. I knew it was Catherine. I had heard of her from Miss West, who was frank in her disclosures about people she knew in Benares, and even franker about people she considered her protégés, such as Catherine and Anand. It was hard not to be distracted by Catherine’s extraordinary beauty. Miss West had said, ‘She’s very pretty.’ I was struck then by this way of looking at women. ‘Pretty’: it wasn’t a word much used for women in the world I had known, where even the most beautiful women were kept unaware of their advantage. Women were obedient daughters, dutiful wives and devoted mothers; they weren’t ever considered outside these roles. Now I looked at Catherine in the light of Miss West’s remark, and the word ‘pretty’ came to be crystallized by the lovely vulnerability of her face, the clear olive skin, the large hazel eyes that looked out at the world with a mixture of uncertainty and sadness, the full lower lip, the dark wavy hair that formed a perfect inverted V over her forehead. After this, her soft French accent was all the more unexpected; it made her seem oddly childlike, more human, more manageable.

  Catherine’s father was a leading banker in Paris, and she had come to Benares in order to get as far away as possible from her oppressively ‘bourgeois’ parents – this deployment of a word I had previously encountered only in Marxist texts was new to me. In Benares she had fallen in love with Anand, whom she had met at one of Miss West’s musical soirées. They lived together in a nearby riverside house. At the end of the winter Catherine planned to take Anand back with her to Paris, where he would attempt to make a living out of performances and studio recordings while Catherine finished her philosophy degree.

  Miss West made the introductions. Again, I was presented as the tireless autodidact. Catherine smiled and asked me the predictable question about my current reading. I told her. ‘Turgenev? Oh, he’s wonderful,’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘All those country-house settings and passionate people. But I haven’t read that book. Will you lend it to me?’ ‘Yes,’ I found myself stammering, ‘yes.’

  Miss West said, in that unnaturally loud and tense voice I had heard for the first time that evening, ‘Shall we have some music now?’ She looked around, anxiously. ‘Shall we? Shall we?’ she repeated. People interrupted conversations to nod weakly at her, and began reluctantly to move towards settling themselves on the two large bolster-strewn mattresses that had been placed directly opposite the musicians. The sitar and the tablas were unpacked and tuned. As everyone applauded, Miss West garlanded the musicians, put vermilion dots on their foreheads and placed several incense sticks and diyas before them.

  First, one of the performers who had come with Anand – an old courtesan who had quietly spent most of the evening in one corner of the roof – sang a Thumri. It was about Radha’s love for Krishna, the longing that remains for ever unfulfilled, and shades into a bitter-sweet acceptance of life and its limits; and it was sung well, with a depth of feeling that would have been impossible to predict from the appearance of the singer, who was about seventy years old, with eyes kohl-rimmed a forbidding black. Mark, who sat in front of me, obscuring my view of Sarah, kept shaking his head and throwing up his hands in the appreciative manner he seemed to have picked up from Indian audiences. Debbie sat cross-legged and stiff in a meditative posture, her eyes closed. Miss West, her face visible to me in profile, wore that melancholy expression she often had when she sat on the roof looking out over the river.

  Then it was Anand’s turn, and he played Raga Malkuns, one of the gravest of Indian ragas, a look of tense concentration on his face, fingers sliding up and down the strings with a vehemence that was in sharp contrast to the sombre stately notes produced by his instrument. Catherine accompanied him on the tanpura. ‘They are very much in love,’ Miss West had said, and I played with the words in my head, trying to fit them to what I saw before me. But Catherine and Anand barely glanced at each other; it wasn’t easy to imagine between them the continuous exchange of tenderness and passion that the words ‘very much in love’ suggested. So dissimilar they appeared: Anand, fidgety and intense, who, with hi
s thin face and tormented looks, would always be associated with the warren of dark slumbering alleys around us; and Catherine, looking in her calm self-possession, as she would always do, from another world, richer and more fulfilled than the one she lived in now.

  In the months that followed this evening, I was to see her in every mood and posture, in every kind of dress and at different times of the day; such rapt gazing as mine would leave a wealth of memorable images in my mind. But it is the picture of her sitting up very straight on the jute mat, abstractedly plucking at the tanpura’s strings, the light from the short flickering flame of the diyas bathing her clear unblemished face in a golden glow, that has stayed most vividly with me, and is the central force that illuminates the rest of the evening in my memory.

  2

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for my days in Benares to fall into the kind of self-imposed routine I had known during my undergraduate years in Allahabad. I got up early, awakened, more often than not, by the sounds from nearby houses: radios blaring devotional music, crying babies, wet laundry being slapped against the bathroom floor, the voices of people queuing up before the municipal tap in the alley below, water cannonading into plastic buckets.

  Within an hour I was ready to leave. The door to Miss West’s room was still closed when I went down the stairs to have breakfast with Mrs Pandey and Shyam. I sat on a low wooden stool in their lightless kitchen and ate warm parathas off a brass plate and drank ginger-flavoured tea from a scalding-hot steel glass. Shyam squatted before the chulha fire, fanning the flames with a sooty jute fan. Mrs Pandey sat before me, slowly slicing vegetables in a large brass plate, her broad face expressionless as always.

  I walked the three miles to the library – my meagre budget couldn’t accommodate rickshaw rides to and from the university every day.

  A thin crimson-edged mist hung over the river when I walked out of the house. The alleys leading to the main road would be empty, the houses sunk in a blue haze, still untouched by the sun, which had already begun tentatively to probe the façades of the houses lining the river. Rubbish lay in uneven mounds, or was strewn across the cobblestone floor, firmly sticking to the place where it had been deposited by an overflowing open drain. After every twenty metres or so, a fresh stench hung in the air.

  The road was full of potholes, which, when filled by unseasonal downpours, reflected the tops of the overlooking houses and a slice of the sky in their dirty grey stillness. There was little traffic, except for a few newspaper boys on cycles, who would jauntily pedal past the slow-moving rickshaws bulging with noisy schoolchildren, satchels and plastic water bottles; swift sprightly figures, in contrast to the rickshaw drivers, silently toiling with their heavy loads, bare feet and legs thrusting at the obdurate pedal, their shoulders pushed back and arms stretched taut over the handles.

  After the constriction of Lanka – box-shaped brick houses, shuttered shops, exposed drains, pavement vegetable vendors and tea shops spilling out over the road – there would be the ever-renewed surprise of the university’s green open spaces; the broad tree-lined avenues stretching from one end of the campus to the other; the sprawling cricket and hockey grounds; the quiet cool groves of bamboo, banyan and mango trees.

  *

  The person I knew best in this other life I came to lead on the university campus – separate from the life I led in Panditji’s house, with Miss West as neighbour – was Rajesh. His name was given to me by someone I knew in Allahabad, a man called Vijay. Vijay, once a secretary of the student union, had left Allahabad University almost middle-aged, after accumulating, in the manner of student politicians, six degrees in literature, commerce, journalism and law. He was now a ‘contractor’ – the much-used multipurpose word that could denote anything from a supplier of building materials to an organizer of arson and even murder. Almost all of the student politicians and troublemakers called themselves ‘contractors’; the word was considered more weighty than ‘businessman’.

  But Vijay was a Brahmin, and he felt he must affect a certain aloofness from the common run of ‘contractors’. He had made his name after organizing a large demonstration against the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, when she visited the university a few years before she was assassinated. The demonstration turned violent when the police attempted to break it up, and the police were especially brutal with Vijay. In hospital with fractured arms and legs and multiple stitches on his skull, Vijay received visits from national-level politicians from parties opposed to Indira Gandhi, and briefly became famous.

  Too old now to play an active part in student politics, he nevertheless displayed an elder-brotherly solicitude towards the Brahmin students at the university. He lobbied hard with the administration on their behalf to postpone exams, or to reinstate an expelled student; he worked overtime on the labyrinthine university bureaucracy to get more Brahmin students admitted into university hostels. He asked for nothing in return from those he favoured other than their votes for Brahmin candidates in elections to the student union. That was how he came to know me: he volunteered to help me gain a health certificate from the university infirmary, and I turned into one of the young Brahmin students under his protective umbrella. ‘Studious’ Brahmins like myself, he would say, pronouncing the English words with relish, needed ‘backers’ if they were to go on studying without fear of disturbance from low-caste ‘lumpens’ and ‘antisocial elements’.

  He had probably seen himself extending his patronage to Benares when he gave me Rajesh’s name, and asked me to look him up at the Hindu University.

  I said I would, but I had little intention of doing so. In truth, I was made uncomfortable by Vijay. I had no sympathy for sectarian, caste- or religion-based politics; I wanted to keep as far away as possible from the constant skulduggery and intrigue that went on among different political factions, and that frequently resulted in violence.

  But then one evening, not long after I arrived in Benares, as I was coming out of the library, I saw a boy among a group of students whip out a crude pistol from under his long, grimy kurta and fire it into the air. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, and he was indulging only in a bit of macho posturing. The boys accompanying him slapped him on the back and burst into laughter. But he made the rest of us jump out of our skins: the birds on the massive banyan trees outside took off with a loud flapping of wings; a rickshaw coming into the library compound braked abruptly and swerved into a hedge.

  The boys had laughed afterwards. But for that one brief moment, I had known real fear, and now the campus had different associations for me. As I returned home at dusk it appeared an ominous place; the possibility of violence seemed to lurk amid every group of students I encountered. I didn’t know anyone at the university and was conscious more than ever of my vulnerability.

  The university’s recent troubled past only further increased my fear. For some months, the campus had been the setting for pitched battles between the police and students. Things were quieter now. But the peace was temporary; it could be broken by one carefully lobbed stone. A few hundred metres from the main gates to the campus was the office of the vice-chancellor, a much-hated figure among the students for his iron-handed methods, which were a frequent pretext for violent agitation. Here, the droves of policemen, nervous khaki-clad rookies, lay in wait. Sunk one moment on string cots before tents of grey weather-beaten tarpaulin, playing cards, their lathis and rifles and riot shields resting on the ground, at the first sign of trouble – that carefully pitched stone, the sound of shattering glass, the explosion of a crude hand grenade – they could turn into a rampaging horde within seconds.

  Not far away on the same road lived their antagonists, the students, in a row of hostels, built in the Indo-Saracenic style. The rage that had undermined the university had found its easiest victim here; after years of arson and vandalism these hostels wore a look of extreme decrepitude. The aggressive graffiti in black on the walls were a premonition of the damaged furniture and shattered window pa
nes and broken balustrades inside; the lines of white underclothing hung out to dry in the arcaded two-storey blocks made the hostels resemble the old havelis outside Benares that had been overrun by squatters.

  But the hostels were inhabited not only by students. They were actually sought after by outsiders. To young men from the region around Benares, they represented an important stage in their attempt to lift themselves out of conditions of extreme poverty. Rents were very low and sometimes didn’t have to be paid at all. You could live in these hostels for many years while waiting for that miracle, a government job, and not spend more than a few hundred rupees.

  *

  Rajesh lived in one of the more run-down hostels. Wild grass grew in the quad and ran right up to the two long wings of the hostel. Soggy cigarette packs lay over a film of scum in the open stagnant drain that ran parallel to the wings. There were large light green scars on the walls where rain and damp had seeped through; the plaster had peeled off in many places, leaving the brickwork exposed underneath. The lower half of the pillars had on them block-red batik-like patterns made by students spitting betel juice. Piles of legless tables and chairs lay under the dark staircase, which smelled faintly of urine. Scraps of yellowing newspaper were scattered on the steps.

  Most of the rooms were closed, heavy padlocks hanging on the doors. There was hardly anyone around: along the large quad from where Rajesh’s room was, a bare-torsoed man once emerged from his room to drape a wet towel around the balustrade and then went straight back in.