The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  As if sensing this, he once brought to the library a notebook of thin, damp, double-lined pages, with a red-lipped Murphy Radio Baby on the cover. Inside, he had copied some of Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s poems. He had studied them as part of his undergraduate course: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ was his favourite among them. But, unlike the works of Faiz and Iqbal, Romantic poetry was something he only read, never recited. He said he had trouble pronouncing certain English words – he was working on it however, he said. One couldn’t get anywhere in India without a good knowledge of the language, and the poems helped him, he said. But when I asked him what exactly it was that he liked about the poems, he wouldn’t say anything. They seemed to exist in his head alone, as a kind of private music.

  He would often join me at the fly-infested tea stall outside the library where I had lunch. Invariably, the students who hung around it at all times of the day recognized him, and within minutes a small crowd would gather around him to discuss the latest gossip, corruption and sleaze scandals: the size of a politician’s wealth, the imaginative ways in which the World Bank or some other rich development agency had been conned, the bridges that existed only on paper, the dual-carriage highways that had never been built.

  When asked to respond to something, Rajesh would retreat into one of his long monologues. Some of his themes soon became familiar to me. Gandhi, he claimed, would have set a proper course for the country had he not been murdered so soon after independence. Though a good, well-intentioned man, Nehru had little understanding of India. He believed too much in imported formulas: industrialization for an agricultural country, state secularism for a religious people.

  This was one theme. Another related to politicians and businessmen (he would refer to them as dukandaar, shopkeepers) who, together, had betrayed the country. The only hope, he would say, lay with honest civil servants.

  And so it would go on until I slipped out of his small agog audience and would make my way back to my windowside desk at the library.

  I occasionally speculated about his other friends. Who were they? What did they do? Once I saw him step out of a dark green Ambassador with tinted windows – a sure sign of dubious character. With him in the car were two paan-chewing, thickly moustachioed men dressed in the garb of local politicians: white khadi kurta and tight churidars. I wondered if he was planning to go into politics, if the students he patronized were part of a larger strategy to build up his electoral base in the university. But I couldn’t be sure of any of this – even after the riots in which I thought he had played a role. It did occur to me to ask him, but he never talked about anyone he knew at the university or outside it. I was sure that he would take the question badly, and the thought of how he might respond made me nervous.

  He did once mention Arjun, Mrs Pandey’s errant son. He already knew I lived in his mother’s house. He said, ‘That Arjun. Do you know what he tried to do?’

  Puzzled, I said, ‘No.’

  He continued, ‘He tried to mortgage the house you live in – a house which doesn’t belong to him.’

  How and where had he acquired this piece of information? I didn’t say anything then, but rather thought I should speak to Mrs Pandey, who was forthright on the subject of her son’s misdemeanours and would have liked to know about any fresh instances.

  But it slipped my mind each time I saw them. On those evenings when I did not visit Catherine’s house, I ate with Mrs Pandey and Shyam in their dark, windowless kitchen. Dinner was a quiet affair. Shyam kept dropping perfectly shaped chapatis into my brass thali, his face almost demoniacally intense in the glow from the chulha fire. Mrs Pandey watched, wordlessly, without a flicker of expression on her broad, large-featured face. Long shadows leaped over each other on the soot-encrusted walls, and bells and conch shells rang out from the adjacent temple courtyard, where a small group of devotees performed the evening aarti. From downstairs would come the faint twanging of sitars and the hollow beat of tablas – Panditji rounding up the last of his evening lessons for the American and European students, who often came up to the roof afterwards to smoke opium, much to Miss West’s annoyance. ‘Wretched addicts!’ she would exclaim. ‘I must have a word with Mrs Pandey about them.’

  In fact, she had already complained to Mrs Pandey, but since she had only an elementary grasp of Hindi, she hadn’t understood when Mrs Pandey expressed her helplessness in the matter. The students were acquaintances of her son, Arjun, and they brought in much of Panditji’s income – his occasional singing at the temple paid a pittance; they couldn’t be antagonized.

  Of Arjun I saw little. But I remember one incident well. One evening as I came up the stairs, I saw someone slumped on a string cot just outside the kitchen threshold where Mrs Pandey and Shyam were sitting. The figure stirred slightly and then raised himself up on his elbow, the cot creaking, and looked at me out of a black-eyed, swollen face. It was Arjun, almost unrecognizable at first, his thick lips chapped and bruised, his beard and balding head covered with bandages and bits of sticking plaster.

  He squinted at me, figured out who I was, and then slowly sank back on to the cot.

  I walked up the stairs. Later that evening, sitting before Mrs Pandey in the kitchem Arjun still slumped on the string cot outside, I asked her, ‘What happened to Arjun?’

  ‘Someone hit him,’ she said. Her tone was neutral. She might have been speaking of someone else’s son.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  She nodded her head as if to say she didn’t know. Then, after a pause, she added, ‘It’s his own fault. He gets involved with unsavoury people; he gambles; he takes loans he can’t pay back . . .’

  She went on to enumerate more faults. Shyam kept nodding and saying, ‘Greed is the biggest evil. It eats away man, destroys families, sunders son from parents, husband from wife . . .’

  As he mumbled on, Rajesh’s words abruptly came back to me: he was trying to mortgage a house that didn’t belong to him.

  I thought I should tell Mrs Pandey. There might have been a connection between what Rajesh had told me and Arjun’s present state. But the moment – Mrs Pandey denouncing her son as he lay outside groaning softly with pain – didn’t seem right then.

  And when the moment passed it never came back. The story sunk into memory, where it remained until many years later.

  TWO

  1

  FEBRUARY HAD JUST TURNED INTO MARCH, the afternoons steadily growing warmer, when abruptly one day Miss West announced her decision to go to Mussoorie for a few days (‘to the hills’, she said, in her old-fashioned way).

  She told me that she had already discussed her plans with Catherine, who was to go with her.

  ‘Her interesting friends have gone travelling in different parts of the country,’ she said. ‘The poor girl wants to get out of Benares and do some travelling herself before she goes back to Paris.’

  Miss West knew friends in Delhi – actually a former maharaja – who owned a house in a less crowded and touristy part of Mussoorie. She asked me if I wanted to come along. ‘There’ll still be snow on the ground,’ she said, her face shining with childlike excitement. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you? And the views of the Doon valley from the house are absolutely gorgeous.’

  My first thought was: can I afford it? I had to count the money I kept in an imitation-leather pouch in my room before I could say yes.

  It was impressive, after that, to watch the speed with which a journey could be arranged, tickets bought, clothes packed: my parents used to plan for months before stepping out of the house for a short train journey.

  But when we were almost ready to go, Miss West’s plan developed complications, and, as it turned out, was never to recover from them. She had to stop over in Delhi to complete certain very important formalities at the Foreigners’ Registration Bureau. She gave me all the details of the Mussoorie house and then left for Delhi by an earlier train, promising to join us in Mussoorie after a day’s delay.

  So it was that Cat
herine and I came to travel together to Mussoorie.

  Throughout the days leading up to our departure, I felt an odd growing excitement: it was the first time I would be travelling alone with a woman, and then there was the always redeemable promise of the Himalayas. Anand, on the other hand, looked morose, even depressed. I knew from Miss West that Catherine had asked her not to invite him to Mussoorie. Catherine had wanted to do this trip without him; it was meant to be a change from her usual life in Benares, a life recently grown more tense with the growing anxieties about her and Anand’s future in Paris.

  Anand was parting from her for the first time since he came to know her. With me he had always been polite. In the past, he hadn’t seemed to mind being left out of the few conversations about books I had with Catherine. Practising his sitar in the next room while I talked to Catherine, he had appeared confident of his own special claim on her time and attention. But he didn’t like being excluded from the trip to Mussoorie, and there was now a new, appraising wariness and even a touch of antagonism in his attitude towards me.

  He came to the railway station to see us off, looking slightly haggard with his unshaven face and crumpled kurta. He helped us store our bags on the overhead bunk, and then we all stood outside the coach. Around us seethed the usual mass of people and things: toy stalls blared Hindi film music; the waterless urinals gave off a strong stench of ammonia; pornographic magazines covered with crinkled yellow plastic lay in a prominent heap on the magazine stall; half-naked child beggars with stringy rust-brown hair tugged at people’s clothes and there were several men who kept running from one end of the platform to another for no apparent reason, their faces distorted with acute anxiety and weariness.

  With a palpable air of disinterest, Anand went over his plans for the coming week with Catherine. He was to visit his parents in Bihar – they needed him for a family wedding. But before he left, he was to try again to arrange a studio recording with All India Radio, research cheap air tickets to France, chase up his passport application. He impatiently nodded when Catherine, who was in a contrastingly cheerful mood, reminded him of some further tasks he hadn’t mentioned.

  The train stayed on beyond its scheduled time for departure, well after the goodbyes had been said, and in the strange limbo that developed, communication first dwindled and then ceased altogether.

  Anand looked increasingly glum, and when the train finally jerked into movement and began to slide down the platform, it was with a great effort that he held up his hand, as if drawing on his last reserves of energy, but did not wave.

  The train picked up speed; dust blew in through the windows. Benares – this part of it newly developed and ugly – soon petered out in ponds of stagnant water and rows of corrugated-iron sheds and yards filled with rusty junked cars and trucks. The five burka-draped women with us in the compartment began to whisper among themselves. I heard the word ‘angrez’ – the all-inclusive term for foreigners. They were speculating about Catherine, who was sitting by the iron-barred window, gazing out at the darkening flat fields and ditches.

  Night swiftly descended. A weak yellow light came on in the compartment. We clattered past a series of dark, deserted stations. Little points of light punctuated the blackness outside. Catherine didn’t shift from her position by the window. The Muslim women played cards, pale white arms and long, pink-painted fingernails darting in and out of their burkas.

  It was still dark when we reached Dehradun and transferred to the small crowded bus that was to take us to Mussoorie. I sat next to a bleary-eyed Catherine, our bodies separated by a couple of inches, and touching when the bus driver took a sharp turn on the deserted sodium-lamp-lit road. A new, awkward intimacy ensued, reinforced by the curious backward glances of the army cadets in the row in front of us.

  I must have dozed off soon afterwards, for when I woke up the bus was speeding along a brightly lit stretch of roadside petrol pumps and Catherine was asleep on my shoulder, the garish lights outside flickering across her face, her reposeful eyes and slightly open mouth. Careful not to disrupt her sleep, I sat stiffly on my seat, flinching each time the tyres hit a pothole, and watched the orange glow of dawn fringe the towering snow-capped green hills of Mussoorie. Most of Doon valley still lay under deep-blue shadows. But on Rajpur Road, the dew-drenched lawns of retired civil servants and army generals were beginning to glitter, and rolled-up newspapers on wide gravelled driveways patiently awaited their first readers.

  Catherine blinked into wakefulness just as the bus began its groaning spiralling ascent to Mussoorie. We hadn’t spoken at all on the train. In any case, the loud clatter of the train’s wheels would have made it difficult to talk. We had retired to our bunks early. She now apologized for having gone to sleep on my shoulder. ‘I hope I didn’t stop you from sleeping,’ she said. I said she hadn’t. She smiled, and then in a sudden access of energy began gently to massage my slightly numb upper left arm. ‘Did you sleep well then?’ she pressed and asked. I lied again.

  *

  The air in Mussoorie, when we left the diesel-smelling warmth of the bus, felt chilly. Snow lay in grimy mounds on the side of the road. Coolies from Kashmir squatted around little charcoal braziers; thin columns of smoke rose into the crisp air from the tin-and-timber shacks huddled down in the valley. Outside shuttered shops stood men wearing thick mufflers and pyjamas, and brushing their teeth at municipal taps.

  The house arranged by Miss West was on the large hill in Landour Cantonment. It was a substantial cottage with a white roof and green trim around the door and windows: in its size, scale and setting, it wasn’t like anything I could have imagined. Set in a large clearing of level, grassy lawn, and secluded by a thick screen of oak and pine trees, the cottage was the biggest on the hillside. From within, the large glass wall of the living room provided a panoramic view of Dehradun quietly smouldering in the wide and deep Shivalik valley. The valley itself was brilliantly visible, with enough dry riverbeds and green clumps of forests and hollow depressions to resemble a gigantic topographical map. Closer, down the hill, irregularly patched with snow, lay the doll’s-house-shaped Wynberg Allen School, and even lower, the cluttered slopes of downtown Mussoorie, the jumble of new hotels and restaurants. On the far left of the valley I could see the Ganges, hurtling past Hardwar on its furious descent from the Himalayas, but reduced, from such a distance, to a curled silver ribbon on a map.

  And after all this, there was the house itself, the maharaja’s possession, with its rich oak panelling and gleaming kitchen and springy sofas and soft carpets and expensive stereo systems and televisions and large porcelain bathtubs.

  Catherine seemed delighted by the house and the surroundings. ‘Miss West has some rich friends,’ she said as she dragged an armchair out to the lawn and settled herself in it.

  I said nothing, but I felt vaguely oppressed by the opulence of the house and was unable to put any words to what I felt. Odd, meaningless thoughts floated in my mind as we sat there in perfect seclusion and quiet for some time. Dry leaves softly rustled as someone came down the path that ran behind the house. Once or twice, the sound of a bus or truck horn came piercing through the clean air. Overhead, in the blue, birdless sky, the white clouds were like wisps of shaving foam.

  The sense of oppression grew when we went for lunch. Before that, the caretaker of the house had come round while Catherine was taking a shower. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see a short old man in faded khaki shirt and pants limping across the lawn. I stiffened in my chair, suddenly vulnerable, suddenly feeling myself more and more of a usurper in this setting. The man frowned at me as he came nearer; his small scaly face held a question mark. When I told him that we were guests of Miss West, he smiled; a wide, obsequious smile that added more folds to his reptilian face.

  We were to eat at a nearby hotel. Miss West hadn’t wanted to bother with cooking during her time in Mussoorie. The hotel was owned by the same maharaja who owned the house we were in. It was his own mansion – bui
lt in Swiss chalet style, with gables and fretwork – that he had converted into a hotel after the government of India stopped paying privy purses to the former maharajas. That’s what Miss West had told me, the maharaja and the mansion seeming very much a part of the glamour of India for her.

  I expected her to have informed the maharaja of our arrival. But he knew only of Catherine – he bowed and flashed a wide smile at her and asked her if everything was all right at the house. His response to my presence took me completely by surprise.

  ‘So you are a tour guide with Miss Catherine? From Delhi?’ he asked, in gruff Hindi, of the kind I later heard him use with the menial staff. His eyes were large below bushy eyebrows. His thick moustache was unwaxed and drooping and flecked with grey.

  Tour guide? I recovered to say, ‘No, why do you think that?’

  But he only nodded; he wasn’t listening, and his staff took their cue from him. The manager, a tall, ramrod-stiff military type, insisted that I put down my name in capital letters in the hotel register. ‘What is this handwriting, please? I am not being able to read anything. Please write clearly. We need the name for police record.’

  Turbaned bellboys wore smiles of mockery as I complied. They were still smiling when a cavalcade of dusty Dodge Caravans and Land Rovers with blue diplomatic licence plates came crunching up the gravel driveway. They shuddered over the cattle grid and then slid to a halt under the gabled portico. Children in rumpled clothes poured out, followed by weary-looking adults. Twangy American accents filled the small forecourt. The maharaja, pouting over the newspaper, snapped to attention; so did his staff. The manager abandoned his peremptory military manner behind the desk. He roared at the bellboys, and rushed to the cars to supervise the unloading of the luggage.

  In the midst of this, Catherine was busy chatting with a couple of French tourists she had spotted in the lobby, backpackers wearing identical crimson anoraks. She seemed so distant and unfamiliar in her black overcoat and a stylish blue beret I had not seen her in previously.