The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I had occasionally run into Arjun and Sitadevi on the stairs. Sitadevi, a tall, thin woman in her mid-twenties, would raise her angular face from under her pallu to throw me a sharp searching glance, and then would wordlessly pass on, her high-heeled shoes tick-tocking against the stone floor.

  Arjun barely registered my presence. He was a short, bearded man with thinning hair and thick lips; his slow, sly manner made him seem capable of the brutality his mother feared.

  I stood with Miss West on the roof and talked for a while about Arjun and Sita. It was only when she turned to go that she said, averting her eyes from my face, ‘I’m sorry I was such a bore the other morning. I hope you won’t mind too much.’

  I had been thinking more about that time. But I was not closer to knowing what had made her so unhappy, and her quick recovery suddenly made my questions seem irrelevant.

  Before I could even think of saying something, she had proposed a boat ride in the evening. ‘I haven’t done it for ages,’ she said. ‘Will you come? You should do it at least once to get a feel of the city.’

  I said yes. I never went out on such excursions on my own; the city was still an unexplored place for me.

  Miss West had her own favourite boatman: his name was Ramchand and he came running up the steps as soon as she and I appeared on the ghats that evening.

  He was a strikingly handsome man with beautifully sculpted muscles on his lean, chocolate-brown body, most of which was bare, his only item of clothing being a dhoti, which he wore like a G-string, tightly wound round his hips and buttocks. He held his palms together before Miss West; he bowed his head; he looked eager to serve. Miss West, speaking to him in broken Hindi, inquired after his health and family; she asked about the house he was building for himself as he led us to his boat, a ramshackle affair of nailed-together planks lying still on the black, scummy water.

  She brought an un-Indian naturalness to her exchange with the boatman, and watching her, I felt a trifle awkward. Although I spoke the same language as Ramchand and lived in the same country, the scope for conversation between us was limited. Countless inhibitions of caste and class stood in our way; the only common vocabulary between us was of the service he offered.

  ‘He’s quite dishy, isn’t he?’ said Miss West as we got into the boat, and Ramchand began to disentangle the ropes that tied it to the iron picquet on the muddy bank.

  I was too embarrassed and flustered to respond; the word ‘dishy’ was new to me, but it wasn’t hard to guess at its meaning.

  ‘Back in England, he’d be a film star, or at least a model,’ Miss West said. And then after a short pause she added, ‘But you don’t go for men. I know that. I noticed you gawking at Catherine that evening. Tell me,’ she asked in that sharp demanding tone of hers, ‘do you like her?’

  This embarrassed me further. There was so much here that was weird and unfamiliar: women commenting on the physical allure of men, particularly men socially inferior to them; the notion that I could ‘like’ men in that way. What seemed worse (for it was partly true) was that I would be so taken by Catherine in that brief meeting that other people would notice the change in my demeanour.

  I mumbled something about Catherine being ‘nice’ and was relieved when Miss West didn’t ask me any more uncomfortable questions about her.

  Instead, she said, ‘Poor girl. How badly she needs to be loved. She’s obsessed with Anand. She thinks of him as the next Ravi Shankar. But I wonder how long that will last. I don’t think he can give her the stability she needs. He’s too dependent on her.’

  I thought: but hadn’t she herself said that they were very much in love? These second thoughts of Miss West’s perplexed me at first. But they also sounded truer; and I acknowledged these new facts of Catherine’s relationship with Anand with the sudden thrill that accompanies the truths that in some unconscious way matter deeply to us.

  Soon we had moved away from the ghats, Ramchand pulling at the oars in a slow graceful motion, the varied sounds of the city becoming a steady background hum to the soft plop-plop of the oars against the water.

  We passed a few fishing boats anchoring themselves for the night, their tattered sails fluttering against the soft breeze blowing in from the other bank. On Harishchandra Ghat, among piles of wooden logs and mounds of swept-up ashes, there was a lone burning pyre, and the grieving friends and relatives of the deceased stood motionless around it. At Kedar Ghat, the piercing oboe-like sounds of shehnai from a wedding procession travelled over the water in brief gusts. Up ahead in the far distance, a train rattled across the Dufferin Bridge, its windows flashing the last of the day’s sunlight.

  My mind was still a mess of confused thoughts about Catherine and Anand when Miss West said, ‘There, that’s Mark’s house, just above the Shiva’ – she pronounced it Sh-ee-va – ‘temple, with the iron-barred windows. Do you see it?’

  I looked in the direction she had pointed at, but it was too dark to distinguish the house from the mass of grey masonry in which it was embedded.

  Miss West said, ‘Such a nice chap, but so American. So over-sincere about everything he does. He’s taken up with that perfectly ordinary girl, Debbie, and thinks the world of her.

  ‘What he wants to do is get home,’ Miss West went on. The light was almost gone and I couldn’t see her face. But the voice still travelled through the darkness in sharp, clear bursts. ‘He’s sick of gadding about the world. And so he’s gone and fallen for the commonest American he could find here. A perfect example of poshlust – do you know the word? It’s Russian, absolutely brilliant, it stands for commonness, banality, smugness, all together. She gets her parents to send her videos of David Letterman, she misses her dog, all she wants to do in Benares is sunbathe and get a great tan, and then she says she wants to convert to Buddhism. It doesn’t make sense.’

  She was silent for a while and I tried to guess who or what David Letterman was. Miss West turned to talk to Ramchand; she asked him to take us to Narad Ghat. The evening sounds of the city – conch shells, temple bells – began to reach us as we rowed towards the bank. The water shimmered with the broken reflection of the huge sodium lamps looming out from behind the ramparts.

  Miss West tipped Ramchand generously. He bowed his head low in appreciation; that eager expression came back to his face. As he walked away from us, through a row of flower and coconut sellers, he fell in with a friend he had greeted while coming up the steps from the river with us. His manner changed immediately. His shoulders lost their supplicant’s stoop. I saw him point his thumb in our direction and laugh, his teeth white against the dark brown skin of his face.

  Later, walking through the dark alleys, a party of jovial pilgrims from Tamil Nadu ahead of us, I asked, ‘Where’s Debbie from?’ It was the question I was accustomed to ask people in India. The answers usually helped put their backgrounds in sharper focus.

  ‘Debbie?’ Miss West echoed. ‘She’s from Providence, Rhode Island. A perfectly vile place.’

  I tried to find Rhode Island on a mental map of America. I had heard about the provinciality and backwardness of Oklahoma and South Carolina. But Rhode Island? The name brought up no associations in my mind. I tried to visualize Providence to myself, and speculated about the reasons for it being so, in Miss West’s word, vile.

  Miss West couldn’t have guessed at the degree of uncertainty her remarks induced in me. They made me overturn all the notions I had formed so far. ‘He’s so American. So over-sincere,’ she had said. Were Americans over-sincere as a rule? Such generalizations lay beyond my limited knowledge of the world; they made me feel ignorant. And they made Miss West herself seem a repository of bits and pieces of odd wisdom.

  I had no means of assessing on my own the character and background of people I had met at Miss West’s party. Mark had appeared solid to me; the eventfulness of his life, the various careers – it all suggested a substantial endeavour. Miss West’s remarks made him seem different, someone much less certain of himself, and
drifting from place to place, from one second-hand idea to another. It was the same with Debbie. The bits of dialogue with Sarah I had overheard at the party, her interest in converting to Buddhism, had intrigued me. The idea of conversion lay so far from anything in my experience; such an effort of the will and intelligence it seemed to imply, such a depth of dissatisfaction with the conventions of one’s society. But when I now thought of Debbie, I remembered best her quick nervous giggle and ill-fitting sari, and I tried to see in them signs of the commonness Miss West had spoken of.

  4

  I HADN’T FORGOTTEN Miss West’s remarks about Catherine and Anand when I ran into them a few days later, walking back from the library at Benares Hindu University.

  I saw Catherine first; she stood out in the crowd at Lanka Crossing in her pale yellow sari, her hair loose and luxuriant over her shoulders. Anand followed a little behind her, stylish, as he had been that evening, in a long white kurta and churidar. Together they attracted, I noticed, the lecherous malevolence of the student idlers who usually hung out at the adjacent tea shacks, gossiping about, and verbally goosing, every passing girl.

  It was Catherine who saw me and waved. They walked across to my side of the road. I felt the students watching me and grew very self-conscious. I was relieved when the conversation ended quickly, before the students could get up to anything more than gesturing at us and laughing.

  Catherine was now working part-time at the French Tourist Information Centre. A steady traffic of French tourists passed through Benares, and they often ended up losing their passports or becoming seriously ill or getting robbed, or worse. It was her job to help them out.

  ‘We get some real cases sometimes,’ Catherine said. ‘Otherwise the job is easy.’

  They had recently moved into a new house not far from Assi Ghat. Catherine said I should visit them there. They had no phone, but I could simply drop in any time in the afternoon. Anand seconded her. I promised to do so, and then we parted.

  A few days passed before I went one afternoon to their house. I would have gone immediately, but was held back by my very eagerness to see Catherine again: I sensed something coarse in it, and unhealthy. That scruple faded in time, but was never to disappear altogether.

  The spools of memory have suddenly begun to roll faster. Jolty progress on a rickshaw through brick-paved narrow alleys splattered with lumps of fresh cow dung. Overhead, torn paper kites lie trapped in the dense tangle of electric wires, over which sit, in neat rows, grey pigeons. On both sides, claustrophobically small houses pushing against each other, jostling for space; balconies with arabesque fretwork streaming with saris hung out to dry; a tea shop with sooty interiors, the corpulent halwai ensconced before his enormous cauldron, poking with a long-handled skimmer at the lone samosa sizzling in the black oil. An ochre-robed sadhu with matted locks sits on the raised porch of a bangle shop and eats roasted chana from a paper cone. Walking up a narrow and steep staircase, the sides of which are covered with a mural depicting Ram and Sita on the throne of Ayodhya, and on to a tiny landing. A door on the left leads to two box-shaped rooms on the roof, where a sagging string cot lies in one corner.

  It was Catherine who opened the door, her face breaking into a wide welcoming smile as she saw me. She was wearing a starched white kurta over blue jeans; her hair was wet and glossy from a recent washing and had created a damp patch on her back. Seeing her, I was once again aware of a peculiar inner slackening. The self I knew and displayed to other people sank into a strange torpor; something weak and pliable took its place.

  Catherine showed me around the house. It wasn’t very big: two squarish rooms on the first floor, a bathroom and a kitchen, approached through a landing they shared with their landlord. The windows, overhung with pots of bougainvillea, looked out on the congested houses across the street – small dark rooms choked with furniture and bawling babies. The walls, painted a light yellow, were bare; there were mattresses and bolsters on the floor, covered with hand-printed Kalamkari sheets; two handsome gleaming sitars stood in one room, and the only item of furniture was a cane bookcase, crammed with Gallimard paperbacks.

  Catherine said, ‘We decided not to have too much.’ She laughed, as if she had just remembered something, and added: ‘My friend Louise was saying the other day, it’s too bourgeois to have too many things cluttering up your house. It reminds you of Paris.’

  My mind was full as always of something I had just read, and I quoted Flaubert, from some probably inaccurate translation, about how one should live like a bourgeois but think like a bohemian.

  Catherine laughed – a full, throaty, generous laugh – and said, ‘That’s good. That’s very good.’

  And then, suddenly growing serious, she said: ‘Really, I would like to live as simply as possible in India. We can sleep on the floor, we can do without a fridge, washing machine . . .’

  Anand, who was wearing a flimsy lungi and T-shirt and lying against the bolsters on the floor, peeling a banana, interrupted at this point, saying, ‘But we need an air-conditioner, no?’

  Cathering sought to humour him: ‘Do you really want an air-conditioner? I can buy you one any time.’

  Anand’s expression suddenly drooped; he grew very quiet. Catherine’s answer had put into unwelcome focus what I knew about from Miss West: his almost complete financial dependence upon her. It wasn’t something he could refer to without embarrassment. There were a few moments of awkwardness before Catherine turned to describing their landlord, Major Aggarwal. He had retired some time back and constantly worried about finding adequate dowry for his four young daughters. Catherine suspected him of being better off than he let on. The sources of his income were unknown, but they were various enough in the past to enable him to buy prime property all across Benares. Major Aggarwal’s wife was a mousy woman; the daughters were no less subdued. Catherine said that Major Aggarwal’s military discipline had stunted their characters.

  Catherine’s mother had just gone back to France after a month’s stay in Benares. Her time in India was still a new topic between Catherine and Anand; we went back to it often during this first evening at their house.

  The three of them – Anand, Catherine and her mother – had recently travelled together to Rajasthan. It hadn’t been easy for Catherine’s mother, who was used to another order of comfort altogether from the one she found in India. She had had to suffer the indignity of travelling back from Jaipur in the crowded cockpit of a truck, crushed with beedi-smoking villagers who hawked and spat out of the window every two minutes; she had not spoken to Catherine or Anand for many hours after the trip. Then she hadn’t ceased complaining about the cheap, unheated hotels Catherine had booked them into in every town.

  Catherine said, ‘We would go to a restaurant for lunch and she would not stop moaning about the dirty cloth the waiter was using to wipe the plates dry.’

  Anand spoke for the first time since the remark about the air-conditioner. He said, ‘She was so unhappy with the way Catherine was living in India. She said she would not come back again.’

  Catherine said, ‘I told her this is the way people live in India, and you have to do the same when you are here.’

  It seemed a bit excessive and unnecessary to me, imposing ‘Indian’ ways upon a first-time visitor. But I said nothing, only kept listening: nothing more was required of me. Presently, Catherine disappeared into the kitchen to make some coffee, and Anand told me more about the visit.

  He had been with Catherine’s mother when Catherine was interviewed for her job at the French embassy in New Delhi. With them in the waiting room was the director of the French Information Centre, a somewhat arrogant and pompous man from Anand’s description. He was talking to Catherine’s mother in English instead of French, and if that wasn’t odd enough, he was talking – in Anand’s presence! – about the need for Catherine to steer clear of devious Indian men. The director knew of many instances where French women had fallen for them, only to find themselves used as passpor
ts to Europe; it was imperative, he said, that Catherine stay away from such sordid liaisons.

  That the director’s words were intended more for Anand’s ears than Catherine’s mother’s was obvious. What wasn’t apparent to me was Anand’s motive in telling this story to me. Was he telling me this to show he was different from the ‘devious Indian men’ the director had spoken of? Was he making a political statement about the director? Or was he complaining about Catherine’s mother’s passive complicity?

  Catherine appeared with the coffee, which was aromatic and French: a gift, Catherine said, from her mother. She talked about Miss West’s party, how much she had enjoyed it. But the conversation came back, in stages, to her mother. It was a topic that seemed to absorb both Catherine and Anand endlessly; its special intimacies could shut out the visitor completely.

  Catherine said that Miss West (she called her Diana) had helped offset some of her mother’s shock on arriving in Benares. Miss West had even tried to reconcile her mother to Anand.

  Anand said: ‘She told Miss West that she didn’t know about what you wanted to do. If you want to live in India, she could buy you a house in Benares.’

  Catherine poured scorn on the idea. Anand silently watched her, his face a blank. I could not be free of the suspicion that, however briefly, he had been held by Catherine’s mother’s suggestion, if only for the wealth and privilege it suggested: that someone, or more specifically his girlfriend’s mother, could so easily talk of buying a whole house in Benares, something for which people he knew saved and scrounged all their lives.

  *

  I remember coming away that evening with a sense of wrongness. I couldn’t put it into words then: all I knew was that something wasn’t right. There was the incongruity of Catherine’s presence in that small house, the French coffee and Gallimard paperbacks surrounded by the teeming obtrusive life of old Benares; there was the incongruity of her relationship with Anand.