The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I suddenly wished she was with me, and overcoming the pathos of my own vulnerability, I went and stood next to her.

  She turned away from the tourists to look at me and smiled – a brief quizzical smile – and then turned back to them again.

  My uneasiness deepened as we went in for lunch. The soft-hued interiors, the quiet conversations and subdued laughter at surrounding tables, the clink and clatter of spoons and forks, all intimidated me into a restive silence, and once again I sought strength from Catherine’s unfazed demeanour.

  Among the strange faces at our table was that of one of the newly arrived Americans, a tall balding middle-aged man, a visiting scholar of Indian history. His wife was a stout and somewhat fidgety woman who kept going off in the midst of lunch to apply fresh coats of powder and lipstick, and came back each time seized by a fresh anxiety.

  ‘Andrew, Andrew,’ she would start, ‘I just wanted to say that the bathroom hasn’t been sterilized this morning.’ Or it would be: ‘Andrew, Andrew, I just wanted to say that Prakash hasn’t returned from the bazaar yet.’ Interrupted in the midst of a long story he had been telling the French tourists with great detail all through lunch – about the Maharaja of Jodhpur, whom he referred to as His Majesty – her husband would grunt and then ignore her altogether.

  At one point, he turned to Catherine and asked her what she was doing in India and how much longer she planned to stay. Catherine told him. She also told him about Anand, describing him as ‘my Indian boyfriend’. He asked her more questions, and Catherine now went into a long litany of her anxieties regarding her return to France.

  There were no good jobs to be had for people like her, who had waited too long after finishing their first university degrees. The universities were reducing their staff. There was little scope in publishing firms. It was why a lot of young people were going off to London or America to look for work. She blamed Mitterrand; she blamed socialism for the failing economy.

  As she went on, sounding, I felt, quite overwrought, the French tourists kept shaking their heads in agreement. Once or twice, Catherine’s eyes met mine – the profound worry in them was unmistakable. The tourists said a few words in confirmation. Once, Andrew’s wife came down from her room to suggest a person in Paris who might help Catherine find a job. The conversation moved to Gorbachev and perestroika. The French tourists turned out to have strong views on this subject: they argued furiously with Andrew when he said that Yeltsin was the only hope for the Soviet Union.

  *

  Catherine said when we reached the house that she was tired and wanted a nap. She threw herself on the living-room sofa, and lay there all afternoon, curled up sullenly on her side, on the chocolate-brown silk cover, her hair falling in a thick mass almost to the carpet, exposing the delicate down on the nape of her neck.

  I sat out on the sunny lawn. The deep midday stillness was disturbed only by strangled shouts from a basketball court and echoes of a recorded muezzin on a loudspeaker in the town below. I read The Leopard, and ambled through Sicilian landscapes in melancholy reverie.

  Catherine emerged from her sleep several hours later to propose a walk. Bleary-eyed, she stood at the door to the living room, smoothing her hair and saying, ‘We have to go out anyway. We must call Miss West in Delhi and find out her plans.’

  We did so. Miss West sounded cheerfully resigned on the phone, and inquired about her friend the maharaja, but also told us that she had been detained for a few more days and would not be able to reach Mussoorie until after we were gone.

  Later, after the phone call to Delhi, we sat in a glass-roofed restaurant full of Punjabi vacationers from Delhi – the men in three-piece navy-blue suits, the women in glossy salwar-kameezes, the squabbling children in fluorescent Disney colours – and wondered how best to spend our time in Mussoorie. I was keen to go somewhere else and get away from the over-appointed house and the hotel, the maharaja and the American visitors, and so when Catherine suggested making an excursion to Kalpi, a riverside village she had heard of from one of her friends, I immediately agreed. We made inquiries at the local tourist information centre and were told there was a bus for Kalpi early next morning. We decided to take it.

  Walking back from the mall, past the busy restaurants and the electronic beeps and peeps of video-game parlours to the forested hill, Catherine abruptly began to speak of Anand.

  He was impractical, she said, and had no idea of what was in store for him in Paris. He thought it would be very easy to perform, to make albums, to be recognized, not realizing that people in Europe hang around on the fringes of the music world for years before they are noticed.

  And so she went on in her soft strained voice until she suddenly stopped and said, ‘What do you think you would have done in my situation?’

  It was the very first time she had asked me such a direct question, and it put me in a quandary. Until now, I had been merely a listener. Like Miss West, I had been a witness to her dissatisfactions; I had never actually wondered what I would do in her situation, simply because I couldn’t imagine it ever developing in my own life. Then, it wasn’t my place to offer advice. I didn’t know Anand well, and of Catherine I had only a broad fuzzy image in my mind. With her knowledge of literature, her instinct for style and elegance, she was the cultured European woman who for some half-understood reasons had chosen to live in Benares, and had, for even less well-understood reasons, fallen in love with an Indian man from a very different background and outlook.

  Yet I felt I was called upon to say something, and I felt that this time, unlike on other such occasions in the past, I couldn’t get away so easily. I thought hard of something appropriate, Catherine quietly expectant beside me. But I could only remember my father’s homilies about the importance of detachment, homilies drawn from classical Hindu scriptures, and they were what I was just beginning to repeat before her, a little embarrassedly, when she impatiently interrupted me.

  ‘Are you saying I should be more detached from Anand?’ she asked.

  She didn’t wait for my reluctant nod. ‘Yes,’ she said, with a new tone of zestful certainty in her voice. ‘That’s exactly what I have been thinking about recently. I have invested too much in Anand and I need more detachment. Yes, detachment is right, absolutely right.’

  She fell silent as we trudged back to Landour on the leaf-strewn and flinty paths through the forest, our backs turned to the glorious chaos of colours on the western horizon, where the sun was slowly disappearing behind starkly outlined hills.

  The light had turned an aquamarine blue when we reached the top of the Landour hill and strolled through the language school, where a couple of American students stood shining a torch over a spectacularly abscessed dog, on the way that went past the disused British cemetery. Snow lay thick on the paths in this densely forested part of the hill, where tall pines and oaks brood over the sad human waste of empire, the graves of very young women and children. Behind the trees glimmered the villages of the valley behind Mussoorie, the low, tin-roofed, wanly lit huts, which on moonless nights were like sallow gems scattered all across the dark folds of the hills. A sombre silence hung in the air, the silence of ageing trees and the dead, and the snow in the dark seemed to glow with a soft inner light.

  Catherine was silent all the way back to the house. Her earlier voluble mood had gone. Shrouded in a thick white blanket, the chokidar was waiting for us outside the living-room door. He had seen us at the hotel in the afternoon; now that he knew that we were guests of both Miss West and the maharaja, he was eager to please. He addressed Catherine as Memsahib, his teeth, when he smiled, gleaming in the darkness. He brought out chairs for us to sit on and then paced the lawn behind us in short assertive steps, sporadically slamming his lathi into the ground in the over-assertive manner of chokidars.

  Down in the valley, the scattered points of light seemed to mingle with the stars in the vast arching sky overhead. A lone owl somewhere on the trees around the house hooted repeatedly at short int
ervals. The undergrowth was full of brief rustling anxious noises. A childhood memory stirred within me, of sleeping in the open on clear spring nights, curled up on cold velvety sheets under the mysteriously luminous sky.

  Catherine said she was sad Miss West wasn’t with us to enjoy the view. It was the first time she had spoken since the cemetery; I was getting used to her long silences. ‘Poor woman,’ she said, ‘there are so many troubles she has to deal with.’

  I wondered about this. Which troubles? But I did not get a chance to ask as Catherine quickly spoke again to ask me about the university. Did I enjoy my time there? I told her about the riot I had witnessed, the agitated students, the badly wounded policeman. She seemed shocked: it was far beyond anything she ever suspected on her trips there, she said. She asked me about the kind of life students at the university led. She had asked me that question before in Benares. I remembered because I had had problems with it. The life of the students at the university was the only one I knew, and I would have had to know other kinds of student lives to be able to define our lives properly.

  This time I told her about Rajesh, without naming him. I described his room at the hostel; I mentioned the friends he hung out with. I told her about the Civil Service exam, and felt at that moment at least – sitting out under the night sky in the hills, so far away from Allahabad and Benares – immune to all the anxieties so normally associated with it.

  *

  It was later – after some talk of the day ahead, the chokidar now silently sitting behind us, the blackness and stillness of the night present almost like a solid substance around us – that she came back to Miss West. She said she had been reading a book about women who love too much. She said it reminded her of Miss West.

  She said, ‘Diana has been involved with this man for a long time, almost twenty years: a married man, a man with school-age children. The man’s wife knows about the affair, but not his children. She pretends it doesn’t exist. It’s hardest for Diana, because she wanted to marry this man, have children and settle down. But he won’t leave his wife, and Diana can’t bring herself to leave him. It’s a hopeless situation for her. Of course, when she was young and beautiful she had many admirers; even now it wouldn’t be hard for her to find a good man to marry. But she won’t do it; she is completely in love with Christopher. They never see each other in England; they meet in Europe or India, spend a few days together. Christopher’s father was in the Indian Civil Service and stayed on for a while after independence; he’s been to India so many times, and it seemed natural for them to meet here. He doesn’t even come to Benares; he wants to keep it entirely secret. Diana goes along with him on this. It’s for his sake – he’s a senior corporate executive and may go into politics; he’s a public figure, and I think wants to avoid a scandal – so it’s really for his sake that she lives in India for most of the year, and she lives from meeting to meeting . . .’

  Christopher: the name struck a note in my memory, and even as I sat there absorbing Catherine’s words I remembered the captions to the photographs in Miss West’s room. He was the smiling man who featured in so many of the pictures.

  Catherine went on and I sat there listening with a growing sense of unreality. So hard it was to connect her words to the person I had spoken to just this morning, to connect the image Catherine’s description gave me, the image of a life and personality so compromised by passion, to the confident, humorous voice on the phone: the voice that had always struck me as that of someone who knew what she wanted from life and the world and was capable of getting it. So enviable had Miss West been to me, her background, the seemingly untroubled self-knowledge, her quick ironical assessments of people and situations, which put her on equal terms with the maharajas of the world.

  I had admired and envied these gifts – the gifts that I thought were of an easeful life, a life made comfortable by money and travel, the many-dimensional life I had glimpsed in the photographs on the wall of her room. The discovery that complete fulfilment still lay far beyond Miss West’s grasp confused the image I had had of her. I was troubled, because Miss West’s disappointments seemed to point at an even harsher fact: the cruel-seeming asymmetry between desire and satisfaction that could exist in the most privileged of lives.

  Catherine had been speaking in a low soft voice so as not to let the chokidar hear anything. But it wasn’t hard to discern the restless mood she was in. The private disturbance that had earlier made her speak so obsessively of Anand had now made her disclose confidences Miss West had probably entrusted to her at an equally unguarded moment.

  The mood explained the impulsive gesture that left me flustered as we went indoors, to the quiet, warmly humming house. Just as we were going to our separate bedrooms, Catherine paused in mid-step. I reflexively stopped too. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Thank you for all your help,’ she added, and gave a tiny wave, and then suddenly reached forward and gave me a quick, light embrace. A rustling of clothes, the pressure of her arms and shoulders, a whiff of shampooed hair, and then she had withdrawn, and with a brief backward smile slipped away into her bedroom.

  I slept badly that night. I missed the certainties of my life in Benares, the measured day, the focused mind. The long journey from Benares, the strangeness of my new surroundings, the hotel, the house, the maharaja, the manager, the Americans, the French tourists, the new complicated knowledge about Miss West’s past, Catherine’s unsettled and unsettling presence, her many alien, inscrutable emotions and preoccupations – I felt them beginning to work on me. Thoughts combined, interlocked, ramified. I felt tense, oddly exposed.

  2

  WE WOKE UP LATE the next morning and had to sprint down the hillside to the bus station. But the bus to Kalpi was already packed full by the time we reached it, with not an inch of sitting or standing space anywhere. The only vacancies were on top, and as other passengers – mostly peasants with sackloads of vegetables – gawked, Catherine and I clambered up to the tin-plated roof with our bags.

  The bus started late and when it did I immediately felt the cold; the dry and bracing wind cut right through to the skin. I gradually took out all the woollen clothes I had brought with me. But I still shivered every time a fresh gust of wind blew across the roof.

  As the bus groaned out of the ungainly clutter of downtown Mussoorie, wide unobstructed vistas opened up all around us: lushly forested foothills wreathed in early-morning blue mists; sharp-edged stripes of sunlight angled against the soft mulchy ground of pine groves; thin columns of smoke rising from the tiny houses with thatch or tin roofs scattered all across the hillsides and deep in the valley – the sallow gems of the previous night, now dwarfed by the huge immensities of space daylight had revealed; the vast landscape over which the snow-covered mountains to the north, resting on plinths of deep blue air, serenely presided, giant white mountains that often appeared in altered perspective and sometimes were obscured as the bus twisted and turned in tortuous loops, but which were always solidly, immutably present.

  All morning, we circled down into a flat-bottomed valley, into the gigantic needlework of rice fields, where tiny bent human figures appeared as minute coloured stitches; then, as we descended farther, the bright red kerchiefs of the women and the water-soaked fields with their jagged reflections of the sky grew clearer. Another season, another kind of climate existed here; the air became less chilly. The bus stopped to let passengers off at little thatch-roofed tea shacks, where a smell of cooking oil and tobacco hung in the crisp air and ancient grey-bearded men in thick woollen vests sat coughing over hookahs, a pine-cone fire crackling away on the ground. Coming around a bend the bus would occasionally startle a party of hook-nosed Gujjars on their way to the high passes after the winter down in the foothills; with flailing arms and a stick they would herd their flocks, all curved horns and glittering eyes, to the side of the road and then, with wary red eyes, watch the bus sidle past.

  At a raffish highway town, where we stopped to switch buses, Catheri
ne was accosted by a young entrepreneur from Delhi. Thick-lipped, leonine-browed, with the beginnings of a paunch visible even under his bulbous warm jacket, he wore cowboy boots and levis and was standing at the paan shop combing his hair with rapid stylish flourishes. Hands dug deep in his jacket pockets, he sauntered over to where we stood waiting for the bus. He ignored me altogether as he spoke to Catherine. ‘You must be going to Kalpi,’ he said, ‘but it’s very inconvenient by bus. You can come in my car. It’s very comfortable, air-conditioned and all that.’ He gestured to the steel-grey Maruti parked before a paan shop.

  Slightly taken aback, Catherine turned to me and rolled her eyes comically. She asked him, ‘Are you going to Kalpi, then?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am going back to Mussoorie. You see, I have big business there, hotel-restaurant, whatnot. I have many big businesses in this area,’ he added, taking one hand out of the jacket pocket and waving it around. ‘But I can drop you at Kalpi. No problem. Honestly, no problem.’

  Catherine said, ‘Thank you, but I’d prefer to go by bus.’

  He looked crushed. He stared wordlessly at her for an instant, his face drained of all its assurance.

  Then, as he turned to go back to his car, he asked, ‘Which country are you from?’

  Catherine, toying with him now, replied, ‘India.’

  ‘India?’ Suspicion darkened his countenance; his thick brows twitched. ‘Which state?’ he asked.

  ‘Rajasthan,’ Catherine replied, still straight-faced, and then added, ‘District Ajmer, have you been there?’

  His confusion was complete. ‘No,’ he weakly replied. There was a brief moment before the truth of his situation dawned on him, when he stared uncertainly at Catherine. Then, face reddening fast, he turned and lumbered back to his car.