The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  Rajesh’s room was at the end of a long corridor on the first floor; the door was open when I arrived. It was close to dusk and it was dark inside, where he was lying on a cot, wearing a polo-neck jumper and cheap polyester pants of the kind sold outside the university in the rows of tiny shops. He was reading a Hindi paperback edition of poems by Faiz, the Pakistani exile, the poet of heartbreak and loss. He seemed completely absorbed.

  He peered at me from behind the book as I knocked on the door. I introduced myself; I told him that Vijay had asked me to see him.

  He seemed to know at once why I had come. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said and got up and held out his hand to me.

  He was a tall, good-looking man with a slim supple frame and a slight glint of uncertainty in his probing dark brown eyes. There was something buttoned-up, inscrutable, in his expression, in the way his thin lips clamped shut above a strong jaw. Thick black hair fell down from one side of his head; unlike most students at the university, he did not have a moustache. He had shaved badly that morning and tiny patches of stubble lay under his throat, just above where the polo-neck collar touched his skin.

  He spoke slowly, with a great deal of deliberation – his Hindi had a faint regional accent – and his normally vigilant eyes lost their intensity and seemed to turn inward when he did so.

  ‘Where are you staying in Benares?’ he asked. I told him. He paused for an instant, and said, ‘Do you know Arjun?’

  I said he was the son of my landlord. If he was surprised, he did not show it. He silently mulled over that piece of information while gazing out of the room and running his hand through his hair.

  And then, abruptly, he asked, ‘Have you read Faiz?’

  I said I had.

  He didn’t appear to have been listening. He picked up his book from where it was lying face down on the cot and recited a few lines from it in a low, sombre voice:

  Ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab-gazida sahar

  Vo intizar tha jis ka, ye vo sahar to nahin,

  Ye vo sahar to nahin jis ki arzu lekar

  Chale the yar ke mil-jaegi kahin na kahin

  Falak ke dasht men taron ki akhiri manzil

  Kahin to hoga shab-e sust mauj ka sahil

  Kahin to jake rukega safina-e-gham-e-dil.

  This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled –

  This is not that long-looked-for break of day,

  Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades

  Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void

  Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place

  Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,

  Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

  A strange disquietude came over his face as he recited. After he finished, he sat still for a moment, eyes fixed on the open book in his hand. He then abruptly got up and offered to get me some water; his eyes when they met my face were again full of uncertainty.

  The earthen pot he picked up from under his bed turned out to be empty. He said he would refill it in the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor and went out.

  The room felt less small and congested without him. Besides the strong cot there was a rough study table, a wooden chair and a jute-and-bamboo bookstand, its thin legs askew under the weight of dust-laden old books and papers. Cobwebs clung to the high ceiling and even to the broad sooty blades of the old-style fan overhead. From a solitary nail in the dark blue wall hung a pair of cheap denim jeans. Muddy tennis shoes lay on the stone floor. Under the cot sat a black metal trunk, a familiar object that almost invariably accompanied a student on his first journey to college, on his passage to responsible adulthood. It was a common sight in the hostels of Allahabad; I had one when I first came to the university. But it was oddly distracting to see it here, Rajesh’s name painted on it in stylish white Roman letters above the word ‘University’, wrongly spelled ‘Universty’.

  I noticed the bag of pistols last, probably because it belonged so naturally to the room and the hostel, was so much a part of the broken furniture and the wild grass and the betel-juice stains. A couple of pistols were bulging out of a jute shoulder bag lying on the floor next to the green plastic bucket. I had seen the type before: ugly long-barrelled metallic pieces that came out of some dingy back room in the poorer parts of the city. They looked unreliable, and were indeed known to explode sometimes at the slightest bit of pressure on the trigger.

  Vijay had told me that Rajesh was not into politics. I was less certain about what he actually did at the university. The pistols now made me wonder; they also made me nervous. I almost wished I hadn’t come.

  Rajesh came back with the water and then proposed that we go out for tea. ‘There is no light,’ he said, gesturing to the naked lightbulb hanging at the end of a long electric cord tied to the ceiling. ‘No light all day today.’

  It came to me that he wanted to get away from the room for another reason. Had this something to do with the pistols? But he had made no attempt to conceal them from me.

  We walked through the deserted corridors to the rusty iron-barred gate, which had come loose from its hinges and furrowed the earth whenever it was moved. I asked Rajesh about the locked rooms. He said that most of the students had gone home after their ‘Mains’ – the main examination for the Civil Service.

  He was silent for a while after this. But as we went through the gate and joined the tree-lined road leading to the tea stall, he asked me, ‘Are you planning to take the exam?’

  I said I was, but I wasn’t twenty-one yet.

  I needn’t have told Rajesh this, but the exam had been weighing on my mind for some time. It was partly why I had been sent to Allahabad University. It was why most people – at least in North India – went to university. In the past, the Civil Service – originally set up by the British – recruited large numbers of students from the universities of Allahabad and Benares. The number had diminished steeply in the last decade. But the old reputation had endured; these universities were still seen as portals to the Civil Service. Almost every student took the year-long three-tier exams at some stage; it was the thing to do whether or not anything in your academic record justified your ambitions. Though very exacting, they still offered the quickest route to affluence and power in North India. More important, they offered a way out of the hopelessness and desperation many of the students from nearby villages and towns knew awaited them at home. These students spent the best part of their twenties in their badly lit rooms, grappling with various exam ‘guides,’ memorizing whole essays on Gandhi and Nehru, cramming their heads with arcane statistics about the Indian economy. But only a handful of them ever qualified. To the rest, the results came every year as a fresh blow. They were the ones you saw age fast, with grey hair, crow’s feet and faltering eyesight; and every year there were at least four or five suicides.

  *

  At the tea stall – known to me from previous visits – the pot-bellied owner stopped pumping his kerosene stove as soon as he saw Rajesh and left his position behind the stall to come scurrying forward to greet him.

  Rajesh seemed to take these attentions coolly, but I was struck by the man’s obsequiousness. Only a few days ago, I had seen him take a student by the scruff of his neck, after an argument that suddenly grew abusive, and send him tumbling out into the road to crash headlong into a terrified cyclist. Violence against students could invite immediate retaliation, but the actions of the stall owner suggested that he was indifferent to that possibility, that he was on good terms with the more aggressive elements within the student community.

  With a wet rag he wiped a narrow wooden bench, placed it close to the stall crammed with kettles and glasses and motioned to us to sit on it. It was almost night now; the birds chattered loudly in the massive mango tree above us; mosquitoes danced around the petromax lamp on the stall.

  Swathed in thick shawls and blankets, a few students appeared out of the dark. They saw Rajesh and came over to wher
e we sat waiting for the tea to arrive. There was reverence in their attitude towards him; a couple of them even made as if to touch his feet but then flicked their hands across his knees instead.

  Rajesh made no attempt to introduce them, but they all shook my hand and told me their names. From their accents and names, they appeared to be Brahmins from the rural districts near Benares, and were no different from the students that hung around Vijay in Allahabad, ‘studious’ boys from impoverished families, freshly arrived and vulnerable at the university and in urgent need of ‘backers’.

  They began talking among themselves about an incident near the women’s hostel where an outsider had been caught molesting a woman student and was badly beaten up. I was sitting there listening when Rajesh turned to me and said, ‘You are here to study, is that right?’

  I didn’t know what to say and gave a brief nod.

  ‘Then that is what you must do,’ he continued. ‘If anyone bothers you, let me know and I’ll fix the bastard.’

  I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but he spoke in his normal voice, without emphasis. The moment quickly passed as someone turned to Rajesh to ask him his opinion of Rajiv Gandhi – the Bofors scandal had just hit the headlines then and made Gandhi, so far known as Mr Clean, suddenly seem corrupt and devious.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and when he spoke, he went on for a long time. He spoke not only of Rajiv Gandhi, who he thought was out of touch with Indian realities, but also of his mother, Indira, and then of Pandit Nehru. He was certain that the Nehru-Gandhi family had caused great damage to India. He said that Nehru wasn’t tough enough on corruption. A few sentences later, he said that circumstances had forced Nehru into being excessively accommodating. The speech was full of contradictions of that sort; he didn’t seem to have thought through many of his ideas. But the students listened attentively and he spoke slowly, drawing out his words with great deliberateness, eyes skimming over the faces around him. At times, he would open his palm to emphasize a point and would bring it down with a soft slap! on his thigh.

  He stopped only when the tea came, in tiny tumblers, cardamom-scented, sweet, served by a small boy wearing an oversized threadbare jacket over a grimy vest. We drank in small sips, greedily inhaling the warm, scented fumes first.

  The conversation turned to a student who, after just two years in the Civil Service, had accumulated millions of rupees in illegal commissions. Someone added, in a tone of amused awe, that he had also fetched a dowry of twelve million rupees.

  Other such civil servants and large sums were mentioned; the students grew increasingly excited discussing them. The small boy in the threadbare jacket began to spray the scraggly ground with water from a leaking plastic mug. From the big transistor radio, encased in battered leather and hung from a nail in the trunk of the mango tree, came the baritone voice of the seven o’clock Hindi sports newsreader.

  A few students passing by the tea stall noticed Rajesh and instinctively bowed their heads in greeting. Rajesh responded with a faint nod. I noticed all this and became even less sure of what to make of him. The admiration for Faiz, the pistols, the Godfather-like status, the monologue denouncing the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty – he had left a mixed impression on me. But it was hard to deny the sense of security his presence gave, and I felt I could disregard the rest. Sitting next to him that evening, among the only people I knew so far on the campus, I had felt myself safe for the first time in many days. The confusing bits about Rajesh, the parts that didn’t add up, didn’t seem to matter much at that point.

  3

  I CAME TO KNOW RAJESH slightly better over the weeks that followed. But I felt easier in Miss West’s company; the world she represented held me more than the university, whose recurring tensions I found too familiar.

  There had been an awkward moment with her after the party. I had been the earliest to leave and go to bed that evening. I was always in bed by ten, although this was one of my rules I was soon to break. The party had continued – I had gone to sleep with the soothing notes of Anand’s sitar in my ear.

  Early next morning I was awakened by the now familiar sounds of someone using the roofless toilet at the top of the stairs. There was no flush system in the toilet; we had to splash water from a large rusty Nestlé powdered-milk tin after filling it up from a tap that seldom worked. I heard the creak of the tin door, the hollow gurgle of water rolling down into the hole in the ground, and then the futile repeated tweakings of the dry tap.

  And then I heard something else: sniffling sounds, as though produced by suppressed sobs. They went on for a while. I lay there in the half-dark, listening, and then got up to investigate.

  It was chilly out on the roof, where smoke from Shyam’s cooking fire below was already rising through the bluish air. Miss West was still in her soft brown party dress, sitting slumped against the low parapet amid last night’s mess of overturned earthen cups, mattresses, rumpled sheets and marigold petals.

  She looked completely drained of the nervous vitality of the previous evening, dishevelled and strange: in her sleep her vermilion dot had spread all across her high clean forehead. She glanced at me with tear-smudged eyes as I came out of my room; her voice still seemed under the influence of last night’s bhang as she said, ‘Oh, hello there. Did I wake you up with my blubbering?’

  I said she hadn’t.

  But she wasn’t listening to me. With her face turned away from me, she said, ‘It’s all a waste, isn’t it? Such a fucking waste.’

  From her, the invective was unexpected and unsettling, and I was standing there wondering what to do when she said, ‘Listen, will you be a dear and help me to my room?’ I took her proffered hand and helped her to her feet. She put her arm around my shoulders as we walked towards her room. ‘You are such a dear, such a dear,’ she muttered. I felt her weight on my shoulders and smelled the rose water Anand had brought with him and sprayed on everyone, and I had a sudden oppressive sense of the density of memories, wounds, ambitions, regrets, seething inside the body leaning against mine.

  Once in her room – which I was seeing for the first time – her manner abruptly changed. When I began smoothing the sheets on her bed, she said in a snappish voice, ‘Leave them there. I can deal with it.’ As I prepared to go she said, ‘Wait, let me get into bed first,’ and then half stumbled, half walked from one corner of the room to another, searching for what turned out to be her sleeping pills.

  I stood awkwardly, gazing at the collage of photographs Miss West had stuck on one damp-scarred wall of her room. The pictures must have been of her friends and relatives; they had been taken at different times but shared remarkable similarities: there were, everywhere, the same wide, bright laughing and smiling faces, glittering with good health and high spirits. Only the settings differed: a Sunday picnic, open hampers, paper cups, champagne bottles; a beach party; a crowded dance floor, bare shoulders and black bow ties; a Christmas dinner, animated faces around a table crammed with open tureens, plates and wineglasses. I noticed the tiny captions beneath some pictures as Miss West, now having found her pills, poured water from her earthen pot into a glass. Here was Fiona, running away – panting, crouching, laughing – from an approaching wave; there was Juliette with her suntanned shoulders and tuxedoed companion. I lingered, in particular, on pictures of Miss West, all younger versions of herself. In one she sat in what looked like a veranda on a cliffside house, wearing sunglasses and a straw hat, the deep azure of the sea behind her. In another photograph, she had her arm around the waist of a tall man by the name of Christopher. His height, and the riding breeches he wore, at first conveyed an arrogance that was negated by the shy smile on his pleasant face. He was in several other pictures as well. I wondered about Miss West’s connection with him. Was he her husband? If so, why was she called Miss West?

  I left Miss West on her bed, a small, quiet bundle under the quilts, and paced the roof for a while. On a river sparkling with early-morning silvery wrinkles, the first boatloads
of tourists were beginning to appear. A familiar sneezing sound was coming out of the open window in the adjacent house: it was the woman whose face I could never see, towelling her hair. Somewhere on the congested ghats to the north, a loudspeaker belched and burped into life and began to leak whiffs of an old Hindi melody into the still air.

  I felt a little out of sorts. I had witnessed yet another side of Miss West, and I was as unsure as always what to make of it, or how to figure out the sources of her distress. I kept coming back to the pictures. I couldn’t help being struck by the unique suggestions they carried. Such a full and varied life they spoke of, such pleasures of untroubled prosperity! It occurred to me that much care and energy had gone into assembling and mounting these pictures, and my view of Miss West shifted yet again. I now began to see how closely she was still connected to her past, and this awareness suddenly made me melancholy.

  It was an odd moment; but when years later I returned to it in memory, I was to discover in it the necessary prelude to my time in Benares, to the many tumultuous events of that winter.

  *

  Miss West knocked on my door a day after the morning I had seen her crying on the roof. I was getting ready to go to the library; it was where I had taken to spending my days.

  ‘Just checking to see whether you are dead or alive,’ she said as I opened the door. She looked jaunty in her oversized straw hat and pleated khakis, and she was full of news. She was going out to the market, and she had overheard the newest row between Mrs Pandey and her errant tabla-playing son, Arjun.

  One of Mrs Pandey’s obsessive topics concerned Arjun, who, she said, was plotting to throw her out and take over her house. She claimed he was encouraged in these nefarious plans by his wife, Sitadevi, who she thought was the most corrupting influence over her son’s mind and soul. ‘She says she comes from a Brahmin family, the witch,’ Mrs Pandey would say, ‘but she’s really the lowest-born among the low’; and Shyam, who never said anything else, would intone: ‘Greed is the biggest evil. It eats away man, destroys families, sunders husband from wife, son from parents . . .’