The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  *

  We turned out to be the only occupants of the bus to Kalpi, apart from a few grey sacks of mail tossed in behind the driver’s seat where leaking diesel oil had blended with dust to produce a black paste of sorts. The road began to curl up steeply minutes after we left the bus station. Soon, the snowy peaks, temporarily occluded by mist and clouds, came back into sight, grave and majestic against the deep blue sky; the frothy river we crossed on a jittery, jangling bridge turned into a winding silvery trail; the fields we had raced through knitted themselves back into elegant patchwork quilts.

  There were more flocks of yak on the winding road here, each flock carrying its own little cloud of dust as it scampered to the side of the road. Tiny monkeys with red, hirsute faces crouched and gawked at the passing traffic. The sacks of mail were heaved out and thrown on to the ground before tiny red-painted post offices. Little hamlets lined the road, houses with slate roofs and neat dung-paved courtyards with rose bushes and tulsi plants. School-age children stood at ramshackle bus shelters painted with signs for Four Square cigarettes, their white shirts and blue shorts and skirts unexpectedly formal in this setting. When they saw us, wide smiles would break out across their ruddy cheeks and they would start waving at us with hectic energy. I once turned to see Catherine waving back delightedly, her hair blown back by the wind, the tip of her nose red, her eyes streaming, a smile of pure happiness on her face.

  She saw me looking at her and shouted: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to live here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I shouted back, ‘yes.’

  The same thought had come to me; had, in fact, been with me from the time the bus left Mussoorie. It came out of the happiness I always felt among the Himalayas, a kind of private exhilaration that made the tensions of the previous days dissipate fast, made them seem part of another, not quite real or significant, life. It wasn’t just the beauty of these snow-carpeted mountains and broad green valleys and surging rivers – the beauty that could move even those with no aesthetic feeling. It was because so much of this landscape was marked for me; the peaks and valleys and rivers held so many associations. It was the first landscape I had known in my imagination, in the stories from the Mahabharata, where it was the setting for exile and renunciation. The Pandav brothers had walked on this ground, their presence commemorated by innumerable small temples across the ranges; great Hindu sages had made their home on the banks of its famous rivers. It was always oddly exalting to think that these secluded mountains and valleys were where, in unknown times, my own ancestors had wandered after long, fulfilled lives on the plains. They were linked to my vague but cherished sense of the past, my memories of Sunday mornings, rooms filled with the fragrant smoke of a sandalwood fire, my father meditating on his tiger-skin rug before a miniature temple, whose ascending spires, I knew even then, approximated the soaring peaks of the Himalayas.

  Presently, the school appeared, to which all the children had been heading. It was perched between shimmering rice fields, a single small building on a flawlessly clean lawn, with a red corrugated-iron roof on which the school’s name had been painted in wavering white letters. A deep gorge appeared on our left, the river in it seemed to sneak shyly past all obstructions. The illusion was broken when, after an hour of travelling down into the gorge, the river appeared roughly parallel to the road, and all the bus’s relentless grumbling and rasping and clanking could not muffle the thunderous boom of thick white jets of water pummelling the huge white rocks squatting in its way. Away from the angrily frothing river, the thinner, humbler streams flowed into small quivering pools on whose banks grew delicate irises.

  Slim, tall waterfalls draped the hillside in many places; old grimy snow lay in shaded gullies, from under which water leaked out in muddy trails. Overhead, the hills were all sheer rock, with young shepherds perched on the serrated slopes, sheep grazing on grassy narrow cornices. The gorge widened into a valley with dry riverbeds, smooth white boulders piled up on the side of the road. The bus rambled through forests of pine and oak, the river lost from sight, the sky reduced to a patch of blue pawed at by the tops of pine trees. More snowy peaks came into sight; the valley narrowed and the road rejoined the river and almost immediately deteriorated. Fine chalk-white dust rose into the air as the bus lurched across the rock-strewn flinty surface. Finally, at the end of the dusty track was Kalpi, a scattering of slate-roofed huts on a green meadow, deserted on this drowsy late afternoon, with long cold shadows creeping down from the snow-clad peaks towering above the raging river on both sides.

  There wasn’t a single person in sight. With stiff legs and humming head, I followed Catherine over a rope bridge across the river and up to the only solid-seeming building in the vicinity. It was a forest bungalow, with wooden lattices in the veranda and a small patch of lawn, now covered with snow. The chokidar was asleep in one of the outbuildings, in a squalor of firewood logs, old smelly clothes and charcoal braziers. His eyes were red, his speech was blurred and he smelled of cheap rum. He said we were the first visitors of the year, and the bungalow wasn’t ready to be lived in yet, except for one room. The room that he unlocked for us contained the sullen chilly dampness of many airless months. The damp seemed to come off the walls and penetrate the several layers of woollen clothes we wore. There was no power. The mattress on the sole bed was bare; the coir rug on the floor gave off a sour smell of old dust. Stiff, tiny morsels of rice from the last dinner lay on the oilcloth top of the dining table. In the bathroom, with a skylight that framed the white peaks, the taps rattled and shook at first and then, after some noisy expostulations, settled down to produce a steady stream of muddy, hand-numbingly cold water.

  Gradually, with many incomprehensible mutterings, the chokidar brought in candles and logs of firewood, fresh sheets and quilts smelling of mothballs. Catherine knelt before the stone fireplace for a long time, striking matches one after another, before giving up. The wood was too damp. ‘We’ll have to do without the fire,’ she said, smiling, and gave a mock shiver.

  The long drive had filled her with high spirits; she was amused by the chokidar – his slow mincing gait, his slurred speech – and attempted to mimic him when he was out of sight.

  I was tired, and when Catherine went to the bathroom for a bucket-bath I lay down on the narrow double bed and soon dozed off.

  I woke up to find the room in pitch-darkness – Catherine had blown out the candle – and Catherine next to me, her face buried deep into the pillow, the back of her neck with its delicate down gently rising and falling.

  I lay there stiffly for a while, not daring to shift position lest I wake her up. The exhilaration of the ride hadn’t done away with the peculiar tension I had known in Mussoorie the day before, and I now felt even more keenly, lying next to Catherine, the somewhat comic strangeness of my situation: a Brahmin student from Allahabad all alone with a French woman in a room at the edge of the world.

  This wasn’t how I had imagined ourselves when we first set out from Benares. In days past, when such vague and exuberant hopes accompanied me repeatedly to Catherine’s house, I hadn’t gone on to visualize such perfect proximity to her. Something had held me back: a puritanical fear, perhaps.

  But it was a situation that seemed to have its own odd logic and momentum. I felt I had already surrendered to it, was no longer in control. My nervousness had been replaced by a quiet excitement.

  *

  I must have drifted back to sleep at some point. I opened my eyes to find Catherine moving around the room, searching for something, her shadow dark and looming in the light from the candle.

  ‘Would you like to go out?’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful outside.’

  It was wonderful outside, the day dying in a sea of indigo ink; the snowy summits in front wreathed in cotton-wool clouds that caught the last light of the day and held a pinkish tinge; the tall hills behind us silently silhouetted against the darkening sky, where a star or two had begun to glimmer.

  We walked up to the temple we had s
een on the way up to the rest house. It was very small, shaded by an old oak tree, with elaborate and elegant wood carvings on the eaves. There was no one around, but the gate to the sanctum was open and the sequinned idol inside was of Krishna, purplish instead of the normal dark blue. A smell of freshly burned incense hung in the thin air. Moths whirled around the lantern that stood on the brick-paved porch. On the left of the temple was a storeroom of sorts, on stilts; behind it was a wooden lion’s-head gargoyle from which water, fed by a stream, gurgled out into a narrow drain.

  Someone finally emerged out of the darkness. It was the priest; a young sadhu, an unexpectedly handsome man. His well-muscled torso was uncovered – astonishingly so, for the cold was intense. He wore a white dhoti over bare feet. There were marks of sandalwood paste on his broad forehead. His long black hair hung down over his shoulders. He saw us; his eyes lingered slightly longer on Catherine, but not a flicker of surprise crossed his fine sharp-featured face. We had come late for the evening puja, he said; it had just finished.

  He spoke Hindi with a strong Sanskritic emphasis. There was grave courtesy in his manner. He invited us to sit on the porch and share his evening meal. Catherine hesitated, but he assured us there was enough food for all. In a few brisk precise movements, he brought out brass thalis from the storeroom and ladled out dhal and rice from large steel containers and filled chipped enamel cups with water from the gargoyle. We ate with our fingers. He apologized for not being able to offer us spoons or forks; he said the water came from a nearby spring and was safe to drink. He said little more of his own accord; he asked us no questions – no questions about where we came from, and what we were doing in Kalpi.

  I asked him how long he had been at the temple.

  ‘For five years,’ he said, his head bowed over the thali, fingers nimbly mixing dhal with rice.

  And where had he grown up?

  ‘Lucknow,’ he said, his mouth full. He then paused in his chewing and looked up at me with his clear confident eyes and added: ‘But that was another life, less meaningful, less substantial.’

  He bowed his head; he went on eating. So beautifully he spoke, with such resonant Sanskrit phrases: they weren’t something he could have picked up in Lucknow; they spoke of a different kind of training. Intrigued, I asked him more questions. Slowly, the details came out, sketchy but significant; and it was with some difficulty that I translated them into English for Catherine’s sake.

  He came from a middle-class shopkeeping family and had been conventionally educated at a local school and university. His parents had arranged a marriage for him when he reached twenty-one. He hadn’t wanted to get married, but his parents had been attracted by the large dowry that came with the bride. His wife died soon after marriage – he barely knew her, but it was a devastating event for him; it set him thinking about his life and made him question everything he had held to be true. With that growing estrangement from the world he had grown up in, he had begun frequenting temples and ashrams; he had started to read religious texts. Then one day he had left home and travelled with some sadhus to Gangotri, the source of the Ganges. He had wandered around for some months, staying at various ashrams, and then had come to Kalpi. Here, he had lived with the man who was previously the priest at the temple. The man was old and ailing. He had looked after him, and when he died, he had decided to stay on in the village.

  Catherine, who hadn’t spoken at all until now, and had been struggling to eat with her fingers, asked me to translate a question for her. She asked: ‘Do you keep in touch with your parents and brothers?’

  ‘No,’ he said, his handsome face impassive in the light from the lantern. ‘When I left, I left those relationships behind me. I didn’t bring them here. They belong to the past.’

  *

  It was dark when we returned from the temple, moving slowly, with the aid of Catherine’s torch, down the steep, muddy slope, past sweet whiffs of Rajnigandha. The sky overhead was luminous with stars; the black hillsides, their outlines blended with the sky, were punctuated by the tiny, wan lights of kerosene lanterns; a dog somewhere nearby kept barking; the rope bridge was dark and still against the white glowing water.

  Catherine said she wanted to sit by the river for a while. We took the narrow dirt path that led to the water, past scattered boulders and twists of pony excrement, and found a suitable place on one of the huge rocks just above the water. The river was calmer here. I sat next to Catherine, legs dangling over the rock, feeling a fine cold spray on my face.

  We sat there for a while, without exchanging a word. I thought of what the sadhu had said about his rejection of the past. It had briefly reawakened a feeling that had come to me earlier in the day, the old, almost religious sense of the Himalayas as a refuge from the futility of life elsewhere. I thought of his earlier life, his grief on his young wife’s death, his wanderings in the mountains.

  I could sense Catherine’s thoughts weren’t far away from the sadhu. After sitting silently for some time, I asked her, ‘What did you make of him?’

  It seemed as if she had been thinking of him; she instantly replied, without turning her face, ‘He is a weird man.’

  ‘Why weird?’

  She thought for a while and then said, ‘Well, maybe “weird” is not the right word. I don’t know. Not normal, perhaps . . .’

  She stopped. A few moments later she said, ‘But I liked the serious way you spoke to him and took an interest in his life.’

  I said, ‘But it’s an interesting life.’

  She immediately spoke up: ‘Not for me, not for me. I find it empty, hollow. There is no love in it. It’s a life without love. What’s interesting about it? Nothing.’

  The sudden passion in her voice startled me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing her blue beret, which accentuated the paleness of the skin on her face and sharpened her profile against the night sky as she looked out over the river. Out of nowhere, as though from a forgotten life and world, and so foreign in this setting, the words of Miss West came back to me – how badly she wants to be loved – and I felt a strange sad feeling come over me.

  I wasn’t prepared when she abruptly asked me, giving a bizarre turn to the conversation, ‘But have you been in love? Do you know what I mean?’

  The question held an implicit challenge. It flustered and abashed me. What could I tell her? I had no ready-made answers; the truth was too complicated and I was shy about revealing it to anyone. I had lived so far away from human contact of the sort Catherine implied. I hadn’t known any women apart from those in my family. Of love and romance, the less regulated but natural order of things, I knew only from books, and I followed other people of my background in suspecting it of being not natural. In the world I had known, romantic love was looked down upon as a kind of sensual derangement that briefly affected insufficiently acculturated or Brahmanized youth, and then left them broken and disillusioned soon afterwards. In this world, men and women were ushered into marriage after their elders had matched horoscopes and convinced each other about their respective social and financial status. Love was supposed to follow marriage, not the other way round; and it mattered little if it didn’t.

  Catherine said, ‘You are not saying anything, which means you haven’t.’ She suddenly laughed; it was her full-throated generous laugh. ‘Maybe you want to be like that sadhu back there, no? Is that your real ambition? To be a lifelong celibate? Admit it, come on, come on,’ she said, gently pummelling my back with tiny fists, her beaming face turned towards me.

  Her new bantering manner defused the tense awkwardness I was beginning to feel. She mentioned one of her friends, a gay man, who had turned into a monk and then fallen in love with a fellow monk. She told more stories of his later defrocking; she became more and more voluble.

  Later, once back in the room – she said she was too cold and wanted to be under a quilt – we lay propped on pillows, unopened books on our chests, looking up at the wooden beams on the ceiling, and desultorily talked l
ate into the night.

  It was she who did most of the talking. I listened and occasionally asked questions. She spoke of her life at the university; she spoke of her school friends; she spoke of a great attachment she had formed as an adolescent to a middle-aged man who never became aware of her feelings towards him; she spoke of other unfulfilled loves.

  She recalled these with unsettling frankness – unsettling, because I hadn’t ever heard anyone speak of their past in so direct a manner. She spoke of these relationships as something in which she had invested much of herself. In them had existed all the possibilities she thought had been denied by an indifferent, over-intellectualized atmosphere at home. Different men at different times had seemed to offer an escape from the emotional sterility she thought she had grown up with, and time and again she had succumbed, only to find that she had made a mistake. She spoke of men courting her for her beauty alone; she spoke of being constantly misunderstood.

  I listened, suddenly entranced, but also sad. I had known next to nothing about Catherine’s past. The officious father, the disapproving mother, that was all I knew. These stories now began to fill in her background, but I wasn’t so held by the plain knowledge they offered about it. The fascination lay elsewhere: it lay in the enormous longing for love Catherine seemed to have, the promise of a lasting fulfilment that shaped her life. That the longing seemed to cause a kind of perpetual discontent only added to its appeal. It made for empathy; it made me see how much Catherine’s struggles resembled my own.

  Most of Catherine’s stories, even the happier ones about her university days, looked back to wasted endeavours, to a time irretrievably lost and rendered futile by later events. They suggested a larger continuing failure and drift. But it was something I knew, to a lesser extent, in my own life, existing as I did so very far from the richness of the world as I imagined it, with no means of getting closer. The sense of a life somehow not working out, a life whose true flowering had yet to come, was familiar to me, and it was by this feeling, suddenly renewed, that I felt myself deeply moved – as I had earlier in the evening beside the river, remembering Miss West’s words.