The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  And yet I was tempted into going back to her house again and again. That first visit, as I remember it now, was to set the pattern for all other visits over the next few weeks. I remained shy and awkward before Catherine. She was the first woman I had known outside my family; the frank directness of her gaze and the assurance of her speech were new wonders for me. They inhibited me, and I felt at ease only when talking about literature; even then her obviously greater knowledge, acquired and systematized at a famous university, awed me – I, who gobbled down books without any sense of the larger civilization that lay behind them, the hectic world of big cities and writers and publishers, of urgent social concerns and existential anxieties.

  The allusions she made to her life in Paris were very faint clues to that great mystery of her background I was always trying to figure out. The even greater mystery was the peculiar chemistry between her and Anand. With Anand she did most of the talking, Anand just about managing to keep up with his broken English. They frequently quarrelled or withdrew into sullen silences. These frictions embarrassed me, but they were too self-absorbed to notice. They were like people trying out their new roles, charging into, or abruptly retreating from, freshly opened areas of perception and feeling; and watching them together, the quarrels, the silences, their small gestures towards each other – she absent-mindedly caressing his hair, he interrupting his sitar practice to make her tea – I would often wonder if this was ‘love’.

  5

  WHEN I NEXT SAW CATHERINE, she was about to leave for Anand’s village in Bihar. Anand had written to his parents about Catherine; they had wanted to see her in person.

  Miss West, who accompanied me to Catherine’s house that evening, told me this. She knew of Anand’s father: he was a farmer and headman of an upper-caste village, a conservative man from all accounts. But she didn’t remark on the potential awkwardness of Catherine’s visit, or on how Anand had explained Catherine to his parents. Patroness, girlfriend, fiancée: they all would have been alien and difficult concepts for them.

  Miss West said, in that slightly bored, offhand voice I was beginning to recognize, ‘He’s so full of enthusiasm, that boy. Wants to win the world, and more. Makes the rest of us seem so dry and sterile.’

  We were in a rickshaw, bumping along over cobblestone lanes, and Miss West’s voice came out in short hiccupy bursts. Despite the continuous jolting, she sat very erect on the narrow seat. She always travelled with the hood down, wearing her oversized straw hat. People turned to look at her; they often shot a brief, slightly mocking glance at me. Miss West didn’t seem to notice them, but I invariably grew self-conscious in her company.

  Catherine was alone at home, writing official letters to the French embassy: a French tourist, she said, had been found in the city’s red-light district, unconscious, with no money or identification. ‘Probably a drug overdose. The doctors are looking into it,’ Catherine said. ‘These wretched day trippers,’ Miss West remarked as she took off her hat and shook her tousled hair, ‘why can’t they go to Costa del Sol or wherever? Why do they have to come all this way to mess themselves up?’

  In her reading glasses, and with her hair tied in an Indian-style ponytail, which made her forehead look wider and cleaner, Catherine appeared slightly different from the last time I had seen her. She always dressed elegantly, wearing bright Indian colours in many different combinations. These fresh sightings of her made her strangeness, her unknown past even more intriguing, and I had to remind myself not to stare too long at her in Miss West’s presence.

  Despite the complications with the unconscious tourist she was in a buoyant mood, humming to herself as she made coffee in the kitchen.

  As usual, I said little to her. I asked her only if she was looking forward to her visit to Anand’s village. She replied, ‘Yes, of course. I am very excited.’ Then, turning to Miss West, she added, ‘It was really long overdue. The more time we waited, the more awkward it would become.’

  It was also to Miss West that she confided her nervousness about the visit. Anand’s parents had never met, or even seen, a white person in their entire lives: it would all be a bit bewildering for them. She wasn’t expecting to be received warmly. Anand himself had warned her about that. They were likely to be wary of her and they were likely to resent her for her influence over their son.

  When she came out of the kitchen, she began to speak of Anand’s difficult childhood in her soft French accent, frequently mixing up the English tenses. Miss West and I settled ourselves on her bed, leaning against the bolsters and drinking coffee. Catherine hadn’t put on the lights yet and the room was full of the smoky blue light of the evening. Street sounds drifted in through the tiny window: the squeaks of Bajaj scooter horns, the jangle of rickshaw bells. In one of the rooms in the congested house across the street a fluorescent tube kept flickering in and out of life; the pigeons, so neatly arrayed one moment on the electric wires, kept exploding into the air with a loud flapping of wings.

  Anand’s parents had two daughters to marry but no money for the dowry, the current rate for which was very high within families of their caste. They had looked to Anand for help: they expected him to do well in his studies and find a salaried government job somewhere. They had actively discouraged Anand from developing his musical talent and they had almost disowned him when he dropped out of school and declared his intention of going to Benares to find a music guru. There had been vicious rows at home. Anand was often beaten up by his father.

  ‘Now,’ Miss West interrupted, ‘I didn’t know that. How absolutely awful.’

  Catherine said that it had indeed happened – not once or twice but several times. ‘And,’ she added, with a sudden sharp edge of passion in her voice, ‘this was when he was already eighteen years old.’

  Catherine mentioned similar cruelties, the passion in her voice unmistakable now. It was odd to hear her talk about Anand in his absence: he suddenly appeared a man of deeper personality and experience than his own quiet, slightly bland presence made him out to be.

  Presently, Catherine got up to turn on the lights and came back with a few photos of Anand’s village. Shoddy printing and tiny white disfiguring spots made it impossible to isolate any detail on them. But the overall picture they added up to was clear: the jumble of low mud huts and naked brick houses with cowsheds in the front yard on narrow lanes rutted by bullock-cart wheels, beyond which lay the whitewashed shrines, the buffaloes floating on algae-covered ponds, the sea of yellow mustard fields and the emptiness of dusty country roads.

  How hard it was to imagine Catherine in this setting! Or to visualize the journey to the village, to see Catherine among the overflowing crowds on Bihar trains, packed tight together on hard wooden bunks and the floor and spilling out on the roof; to see her with the even more ragged passengers on the ramshackle country bus of dented abraded steel, its tyres worn smooth by the broken roads, the windshield cracked and grimy. Such aggressive curiosity she would arouse! How exposed she would be to the blank insistent stares, the intrusive questions in pidgin English, the lewd speculation about her connection with Anand.

  *

  As it turned out, I didn’t see her for many days after she returned. The first time I asked Miss West about the visit, her sole remark was: ‘It didn’t work out.’ Judging by her tone, she didn’t want to invite more questions on this matter, but later, in an absent-minded moment as we stood on the roof one evening, she came back to it without any prompting from me.

  ‘Did I tell you about Catherine’s visit to Bihar?’ she said. ‘They were hard on her, scowling and suspicious: they didn’t say anything to her – they hardly speak a word of English – Anand got all the flak. Poor girl, she was in tears. But that’s something she’ll have to live with. You can’t expect people like Anand’s parents to change: they’ll always disapprove of her, and in some sense that disapproval is important to them. It’s part of their identity; they can’t let go of it.’

  Catherine herself had moved on t
o other preoccupations when I next saw her. The biggest source of anxiety now was her own parents. She had discussed with them the possibility of arranging some concerts in Paris so that Anand could pay, with the advance money, for his air ticket to France. They had replied that he ought to earn the necessary amount in India before he even started for France.

  This greatly exasperated Catherine. How on earth was he going to do that? she exclaimed. Didn’t they know the difference in scale between the two economies? That kind of money doesn’t come easily in India. Her mother had been here after all; she must have taken with her at least some idea of Indian conditions; she was expected to be more understanding than her husband.

  We were at Mark’s house. Miss West had taken me there, on one of her rounds of late-afternoon visits after the mornings spent reading and listening to music, and we had found Catherine, along with Sarah, the German Buddhist. Miss West often asked me if I wanted to accompany her on her trips. The visit to Mark’s house, as with the previous visit to Catherine’s, was her attempt to create a social life for me. Lately, she had also undertaken to introduce me to Western classical music; she played me CDs of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Minor and the String Sextet No. 2 by Brahms, and directed my attention to specific bits. I didn’t always like the music or understand what she said, but I was glamoured by this contact with names that I had encountered only in print.

  I had seen Mark’s house several times from the river ever since Miss West pointed it out to me. This was the first time I had been inside it. It had three rooms huddled around a courtyard that offered a wide, unrestricted view of the river. The rooms were filled with a medley of selfconsciously ethnic knick-knacks – Azamgarh dhurries, Himachali wall hangings, Gujarati lampshades, Tibetan tangkas and various kinds of pots and pans.

  As we walked into the half-enclosed courtyard where they all sat, catching the last bit of warmth before the sun disappeared behind the houses to the west, Mark was reclining regally on a jute mat, facing the glinting river. Sarah and Catherine were leaning against the wall a few inches away, but it was Debbie who caught my eye. She was lying on a saggy string cot, stripped down to her bra and panties, her skin already a leathery brown, her legs drawn up and parted in a rather graceless manner.

  Miss West had told me that a widow from Bengal lived in one of the rooms in Mark’s house; she had long stopped paying the rent, but the landlord had been unable to evict her. It was her white saris that hung on a clothes line in the courtyard. Mark, Miss West said, got along well with her.

  But what about Debbie? I wanted to ask Miss West, who had remarked once before on her sunbathing: one of the signs, I remembered, of her ‘commonness’. No one seemed to see anything amiss in her present appearance; Debbie herself seemed profoundly unconcerned about it. But it was shocking to me, and I knew it was very far from anything a widow from Bengal, living out her last years in prayer and near-destitution, could have countenanced. All through the visit I kept worrying about the possibility of her making an unexpected appearance upon the scene.

  We had arrived in the middle of several bustling conversations. Mark smiled at us and gestured towards the vacant space in front of him. Sarah paused for the briefest while in her conversation with Debbie, acknowledging our presence with a smile that momentarily animated all the wrinkles on her face. Debbie abruptly sat up, revealing the freckled tops of her breasts, and waved.

  Catherine was in the midst of a serious-seeming conversation with Mark. On the last occasion we were together at her house, I had heard her say to Miss West, ‘I don’t like Americans very much, but Mark is different. He is deep, deep.’ I couldn’t see Miss West’s face; she had her own opinions of Mark, opinions she had expressed to me. But she said nothing to Catherine, and it pleased me to think that there were things she would confide only in me.

  Catherine had gone on to describe a conversation with Mark. He had told her about his life, his various careers, how they brought him little satisfaction in the end. Catherine said, ‘He has suffered a lot of pain.’ It was Benares, she said, that had healed him.

  Later, while Miss West chatted with Mark and Sarah, I listened to Catherine talk to Debbie, who was saying, ‘No, I didn’t want to come to India as much as I wanted to go to Latin America.’

  ‘Why Latin America?’ Catherine wanted to know.

  Debbie screwed up her face and adjusted the bra straps aslant on her shoulders – the skin of her shaved armpit, when she lifted her arms, was rutted and bristly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I had this really deep urge to go there after reading Márquez. You know, Love in the Time of Cholera. It’s my all-time favourite novel . . . It’s just so romantic . . . I just love the way he writes. I mean, the people in his books, they are so emotional, so free with their feelings, their bodies, everything. I don’t know, I’m not much of a literary critic, but I can’t think of a writer who can hold a candle to Márquez when it comes to . . . when it comes to . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t think it is a good idea to rank writers like that,’ Catherine said, a slight touch of reproof in her voice. ‘There are so many we don’t get to read.’ She paused and then added: ‘Personally, I like Kundera. He says serious things about contemporary life.’

  I could also hear Miss West talking to Sarah and Mark about a new guru who had appeared in Lucknow and acquired a large following among European and American tourists – ‘seekers’, as Miss West usually called them, with a derisiveness she was now underplaying in deference, I surmised, to Sarah, who was a ‘seeker’ in her own way.

  With these conversations humming in the background, my mind wandered to Rajesh, whom I had seen at the library earlier in the day. Surrounded by his hangers-on, he had talked about the possibility of student violence in the coming days. He had got the students worried; they had started to talk among themselves of leaving the university before they were caught up in the police crackdown that followed such student-inspired disturbances. I remembered briefly what they had said, and as I did so I remarked to myself at the same time about the great chasm between where I was – sitting here in Mark’s house, an expatriate corner of Benares, among foreigners who fascinated me endlessly – and the life I led at the university, whose problems from this remote distance appeared uninteresting and petty.

  Catherine and Debbie were still talking about Kundera. Debbie was saying, with a combative tone in her voice, ‘The great thing about these European novels and films is that they have no inhibitions about sex and nudity . . . It’s all presented so naturally, not like America, where you have these disgusting middle-class moralists like Jesse Helms . . . and you end up distorting everything.’

  ‘But that’s not Kundera’s point,’ Catherine protested. She was suddenly aware that I was listening, and flashed a brief smile at me. ‘In fact, nudity for Kundera is partly this state of unbearable lightness. And actually the movie has been made by an American. It’s not a European film.’

  ‘I am not saying that that was the film’s point,’ Debbie retorted. ‘I mean it in the way the characters behave towards each other, towards their own bodies, being so unashamed about their desires . . . I don’t know . . .’

  The conversation went on for some time, until Debbie said, ‘Oh, God, it’s getting cold,’ and went, much to my relief, to change into warmer clothes. Catherine glanced at me once or twice while talking, as if inviting me to say something. But I kept quiet. I hadn’t read the books or seen the films that were mentioned, and even if I had, the terms in which they were discussed were so unfamiliar to me that I wouldn’t have been able to say much with any degree of confidence.

  *

  Catherine seemed restless and troubled when I saw her together with Miss West towards the end of the visit. In that mood she was unexpectedly frank. Talking about the trouble with her parents, she digressed into a description of their marriage, which, from her account, wasn’t a particularly happy one. Catherine blamed her father for this. He was, she said, vain, arrogant, shor
t-tempered. She herself had never got on well with him. She had rebelled early, and from that point she never sought his permission for anything. When she was sixteen, she one day declared her intention of going off to Germany for a few weeks. He said no. She ignored him altogether. He raged for days after she left. The same had happened when she came to India. He had now given up trying to control her life.

  But she feared his reaction to Anand. Her mother, with whom she got on better, had barely accepted him; her father’s rejection was almost certain. He was a conservative man, a Catholic; he could still disapprove, in this day and age, of premarital sex. He could never approve of her relationship with a poor Indian.

  And his approval was important. In a few weeks they were to go to live in France, where her life would have to be partly subsidized by him until Anand’s situation changed. And that’s why it was important that the concerts be arranged, that Anand have some kind of performance record and income.

  But Anand, she said, had created more problems. He had lied to his parents about the sources of his livelihood in Benares. He had unwisely invented a fabulously well-paid sitar-playing career for himself. His parents had naturally demanded to know why hadn’t he, if he was so flush with money, sent some their way; why hadn’t he wanted to improve his sisters’ chances of early marriage? So now, in order to maintain this deception, Catherine had to send part of her own salary to Anand’s parents. She didn’t mind the money bit at all, she said with a dismissive shrug; it wasn’t much anyway. It was the lies she couldn’t deal with.