The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  He had been hit by a hand grenade. I had seen the kind before: filled with little rusty nails, it was small enough to be concealed inside a fist and exploded on impact.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The bystanders threw themselves to the ground – it was a reflex inspired by action films. And as we did so, there came to us the sound of a large motor vehicle. We looked up to see a large khaki-painted truck coming to a stop behind the parked jeeps. It was part of the original team of policemen, and had somehow arrived late.

  The tables turned in an instant. The newly arrived policemen jumped down from the truck and charged into the crowd to rescue their beleaguered compatriots. It was the students’ turn to panic, and most of them simply abandoned the lathis and took to their heels. In seconds, the dense crowd dissolved into so many rapidly lengthening streams, the air suddenly full of the fast patter of leather shoes hitting the asphalt road.

  I was one of the students running away fast from the museum, full of fear that my sandals would break and leave me barefoot and stranded. I ran wildly like everyone else. Not knowing where I was going, and concerned only to get as far away as I could from the museum, I ran deeper into the campus. It was after I was some distance away, the sickening sight of the wounded policeman finally out of my eyes, that I took stock of my situation. The police were certain to go after the students now. They would cordon off the area and raid every building in the vicinity of the museum, every building that seemed to harbour students. I wasn’t a student, but looked like one, and the policemen were indiscriminate in their vindictive fury.

  I looked around me. I had run a fair distance from the museum; I had crossed the large cricket and football grounds – a handful of students were crossing them now, running towards where I stood. I realized I was very close to Rajesh’s hostel. From where I was I could see the tea stall where he had taken me, and the cupolas on the roof of the hostel. Things looked quieter around here: deserted roads, deserted hostel. It seemed unlikely that the police would come so far as this. It was to Rajesh’s hostel that I went.

  He was in his room, but preparing to go out, to the Hanuman temple in the old city, he said, tightening the laces on his tennis sneakers – sneakers no longer muddy, but freshly washed and sparkling white. It was Tuesday, a day of fasting and prayers for him. I told him he couldn’t go, and when he looked at me quizzically I told him my news, panting a bit with excitement and breathlessness.

  He listened to me attentively, without a shift in his expression at all. But when I stopped and he looked away, that uncertain look came back to his eyes.

  He said nothing for a while. When he spoke it was with his face still averted. He said, ‘I had told you this would happen. Why didn’t you listen? You shouldn’t involve yourself with such people. You are a Brahmin, you are here to study, and that’s what you should do.’

  That’s what he had said to me the first time I met him. It irritated me a bit now. I hadn’t involved myself with anyone or anything. I had simply been, like many other bystanders, caught up in the events of the morning. It was true that he had warned me. But I couldn’t have known how or when exactly the students would initiate the disturbances.

  And the Brahmin bit didn’t make sense. It smacked of melodrama; it harked back to an India that had long ceased to exist, the India of classical times, where learning and the arts were the almost exclusive province of Brahmins.

  But I couldn’t say that to him. Our relationship, so new and unsettled, couldn’t have permitted such frankness. I was still made nervous by him. They weren’t there now, but I hadn’t forgotten the pistols in his room. I didn’t know him at all well, and felt that he could so easily have been the student who attacked the policeman. I wondered if the grenade that was used came from sources known to Rajesh, whose foreknowledge of the events of the morning was one sign of his proximity to the rioters.

  But instead of expressing any of these doubts and hunches, I said, ‘There were Communist students in the crowd; also, Hindu nationalists.’

  He was unexpectedly quick in his response. ‘No,’ he began, his eyes fixed on me now. ‘No, these were just students. You can’t call them Communists or Hindu nationalists or Congresswallahs.’

  He paused. ‘Never make that mistake, never.’ There was a new vehemence in his voice. ‘These were just students with nothing to do, nowhere to go, with no future, no prospects, nothing, nothing at all.’

  He went silent again and sat there, his face turned away from me, his shoelaces pulled but still untied.

  He got up and paced the room, the laces trailing on the floor. He stopped before the table and stared at the pile of books on it. His voice softened when he spoke again. ‘Have you read Iqba¯l?’ he asked.

  I said no, a bit surprised. He had previously asked me about Faiz. His interest in Iqba¯l, the poet advocate of Islamic Pakistan, was even odder.

  He extracted a slim book from the pile on the table and leafed through its Bible-paper-thin pages.

  I was exhausted from all the running, and the memory of the policeman’s awful bloody wound was still fresh; at the back of my mind was the fear that the policemen would decide to raid all the hostels in the campus. I was eager to get out of the campus as fast as I could. And so I barely listened to what Rajesh recited. But stray words from the poem stayed in my memory, along with their gloomy sentimentality, and I recently found an English translation of the poem.

  Love fled, Mind stung him like a snake; he could not

  Force it to vision’s will;

  He sought the orbits of the stars, yet could not

  Travel his own thoughts’ world;

  Entangled in the labyrinth of his learning,

  Lost count of good and ill;

  Enchained the sunbeams, yet his hand no dawn

  On life’s dark night unfurled.

  8

  IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that Catherine’s friends from France began to appear at her house. They would come in groups of two and three, leave after a few days and then come back again after a week or so. The chaste spaces of Catherine’s rooms, still without furniture, came to be littered with grubby backpacks, empty Perrier bottles, bundles of laundry, old copies of Le Figaro and L’Express and Newsweek in Air France folders.

  She had known these friends as fellow students during her undergraduate years at the Sorbonne. Nearly all of them had been active in left-wing student movements, with a special interest in Third World causes. It was Catherine who told me this. I think she was eager to establish the credentials of her friends. So that when I saw them first, they were inseparable in my eyes from those massive French demonstrations led by Danielle Mitterrand that made it occasionally to the front pages of Indian newspapers.

  After just a few years out of college, they had taken good jobs in various fields. When Catherine said this to me soon after the first of them arrived at her house, I had to ask her what she meant, and I noticed a tinge of envy in her voice and manner as she listed their flourishing careers in advertising, journalism, design and so forth. I now see that she must have felt left behind in Benares; that meeting old friends with new and varied accomplishments in their recent past would have aroused an old student competitiveness within her.

  In their company, Catherine became a vivacious yet somewhat remote person. She and her friends spoke among themselves in English, out of consideration for Anand and me. But she would frequently lapse into rapid-fire French in the middle of a conversation. The effect was disconcerting, and not the least because I already felt disconnected from the conversation, from the names of unseen cities and cafés and films tripping off their tongues.

  Faced with such mature experience of the world, such casual yet intimate knowingness, I felt the fragility of my own personality, my lack of opinions and taste.

  Catherine did make several attempts to bring me closer to her friends. With Anand, her friends’ attitude could only be that of an interested and kindly patron. He had nothing to say to them. They were bored
by Indian classical music and sat through the couple of private performances Catherine persuaded Anand to give only because it would have been rude to leave. She felt that I was the Indian friend she had in Benares with whom they could profitably converse. She enthusiastically introduced them to me, describing me as an ‘intellectual’ – a word so quintessentially of Paris that it embarrassed me. But in using it, Catherine was probably hoping only to set off some sort of frank exchange.

  However, things didn’t turn out that way. I knew so little about her friends, and I had no means of finding out more. Catherine had made me think of them as people concerned about the Third World. The simpler truth was that they had moved on from their student days to professional careers; their visits to India, on Catherine’s repeated invitation, were in the nature of safe adventures, forays from secure positions into the unknown world for which they had once possessed an abstract political passion.

  But I didn’t know this then. Whatever else I knew of their social and intellectual background came to me from books, from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century utopian philosophers I had been directed to by Edmund Wilson, the American critic, whose books I was then reading at the library. The dated and mostly irrelevant knowledge I possessed only confused me further; it made me look for meaning and nuance where none existed.

  Almost the same kind of book-created confusion existed on their side. I recall one episode with particular clarity. Seconds after we were introduced, one of Catherine’s friends – Jacques, a tall shambling man with a permanently aggrieved expression on his face – had set about interrogating me about Gandhi. It took me some time to figure out what he meant by his questions, and by then it was too late to go back to basic history.

  In the vision that had come to him from books and films, every Indian was axiomatically a Gandhian, and the country on the whole an Edenic setting of self-sufficient villages and their cotton-spinning non-violent inhabitants. His great desire was to explore the ‘real’ India – the Gandhian India, as opposed to the ‘fake’ India he said lazy tourists saw.

  I had lived in India all my life, but I couldn’t divide it up between the tourists and the Gandhians. Jacques’s way of looking at India intrigued me. I felt, as I often did with Catherine, that he was bringing a larger vision to something that had grown overfamiliar. I wished to enter that vision, to see things the way he would see them, and I felt oddly protective about him when I heard – from Anand – that he had had a hard time on his travels. He had left Benares with the intention of finding this Gandhian India, and was ready to sacrifice all comfort and luxury to this end. He had returned a fortnight later, sick and feeble with food poisoning and dysentery. The horrors of semi-urban and urban India, Anand said, had repelled him so profoundly, that within the very first week he had shed his ascetic resolve and sought refuge in those very same sanctuaries of five-star hotels he had earlier derided.

  My encounters with Catherine’s other friends were equally unsuccessful. Once past the barrier of language (they spoke English with considerable difficulty and with a heavy, almost incomprehensible accent), our conversations floundered in prejudice and artifice. Most of them couldn’t think of India as anything other than an exotic hotbed of illiteracy, poverty and religion: they would come back from their travels around Benares, speaking excitedly of sadhus who had been standing on one leg for ten years, of beggar children without limbs and of the huge rats scurrying about in the alleys.

  In trying to correct their notions of India, I became false to myself and others. I turned into a performer, one eye and ear always open for Catherine. I became eager to flaunt my book-learning, and I dropped names right and left: Nietzsche, Mann, Proust, James, Kierkegaard, Pascal. I was keen to demonstrate that I had read them all and, what’s more, remembered everything I had read.

  I couldn’t tell how far I succeeded in impressing them. Perhaps very little. For their attitude remained one of gentle condescension, some of which I sensed, and thus became even more aggressively knowledgeable about everything. I remember, in this regard, a brief argument with one of Catherine’s closest friends, Claire, a thin, bony woman with close-cropped hair. She claimed to be in love with England and Englishness; and she had found them best represented, she told me, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I had read the novel, and found only the first part somewhat accessible. The later descent into Catholic theology had left me perplexed; people and motivations had grown suddenly obscure, even preposterous. Then, recently browsing through the dusty stacks at the BHU library, I had come across Edmund Wilson’s famous attack on the novel, and much of it had struck me as true and just. I repeated before Claire some of Wilson’s arguments, only to elicit from her this retort: ‘Who is Edmund Wilson?’ I said he was an American critic, to which she said, ‘You know, you must never trust an American on these matters. What do they know about European literature? Nothing. Why are you Indians reading these Americans?’

  *

  It was unsettling to see Catherine so quickly assume her place in this private circle of friends from her past – people whom I, despite her best attempts, couldn’t get to like. I was struck most by the casual intimacy with which she and her friends spoke of their own and other friends’ private affairs. I had never known anything like this kind of intimacy, which, I now recognize, must have developed during their university days, during night-long coffee-and-cigarette-aided confabulations in student digs. It explains the ease with which they disclosed their anxieties about their post-university future, the joviality and light melancholy with which they discussed their current and past romantic relationships.

  With these friends around, I felt Catherine recede, grow less familiar. The house itself seemed to change, it created within me a different, more melancholy mood, with the intimations it now held of a richer, fuller life elsewhere – the glossy French magazines with their home-making advertisements and holiday offers, the wine bottles from the Dordogne, the catalogues of new exhibitions at the Louvre – the world she had known all her life, and to which, after this brief interlude in Benares, she would soon return.

  The thought, every time it occurred, came to me with new force, and it brought with it little twinges of anguish. On evenings when I came back from Catherine’s house, my dishevelled room seemed a meaner and shabbier place in the low-voltage light from the exposed lightbulb.

  Outwardly, nothing changed. My life remained fixed in routine. The day at the library passed off calmly, and anxiety and restlessness built up only towards the end of the day, when routine faltered.

  I went to the library every day and stayed there until it closed at six. I often saw Rajesh there. I hadn’t thought of him as a frequenter of libraries. But he came quite regularly, apparently with no specific purpose in mind, and every time he came he would seek me out. He behaved with less formality towards me; the stiffness and awkwardness of our earlier meetings were gone. He would still look away in the middle of a conversation, his eyes suddenly clouded with uncertainty, his face unreadable, and I would wonder again about the other life he led, the life in which I suspected he was in league with the student rioters.

  But he was now less difficult to be with. He knew where I sat, and would come and stand behind me, peering over my shoulder at my book.

  ‘Edmund Wilson!’ he would begin, always reminding me when he did so of Catherine’s friend Claire. ‘Why are you always reading the same man? What’s so special about him?’

  I felt I couldn’t explain to him the circumstances in which Wilson had become an attractive and important figure for me: my semi-colonial education, which had led me to spend more time than was necessary on minor Victorian and Edwardian writers; my own confused self-education, which had seen me randomly read books without grasping the concrete social and historical backgrounds they had emerged from.

  It was in my usual random manner that I had once chanced upon Wilson. I had read his book on the American Depression. In Benares, I found that the library had other books of h
is. I read them as well. They directed me to other books, and sent me back to those I had already read. That winter, Wilson became an indispensable literary and intellectual guide. He seemed sensitive to the artistry of great books. He could also place them in history and link them up with larger movements of men and ideas.

  There was also the image of Wilson suggested by his various diverse endeavours: it was the image of a man wholly dedicated to the life of the mind, immersed in intellectual pursuits of the noblest kind; a man with a clear vision of the world, which new discoveries continually expanded – in short, the man I secretly longed to be.

  I wasn’t completely unaware of the disparity between this ambition and the circumstances of my life. My anxieties about the future, kept at bay until I reached the eligible age for the Civil Service exam, were of a different order altogether. The future itself seemed so circumscribed – as much for me as for countless others at the university – no matter what we strove for in the present. A part of me knew I was aiming too high with the ambition to emulate Wilson. I was never far away from feeling absurd and embarrassed – which is what made me feel more abashed before Catherine’s friends.

  But none of this, I felt, would make any sense to Rajesh. So, in response to his inquisitiveness, I would make a few general statements about the importance of Wilson. He wasn’t satisfied, however. Once he saw me reading To the Finland Station – Wilson’s book on the pre-Marxist and post-Marxist tradition of historical analysis – and demanded a summary of Trotsky’s ideas.

  These demands could exhaust me and I would wonder, in a fit of irritation, why Rajesh, who seemed to read nothing apart from the local Hindi paper and Faiz and Iqbal, should be so interested in Trotsky or Wilson, people so far away from us, from Benares.