The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  I said so, but I really didn’t expect him to read all, or even any, of the material I gave him. He hardly ready anything apart from Faiz and Iqba¯l and the Hindi newspapers scattered around the university’s tea stalls. I didn’t think Flaubert and Wilson were writers he would like or understand.

  *

  Miss West finally returned to Benares. New, unfamiliar music floated out of her room. I was particularly struck by one haunting melody she played over and over again. Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, it was one of the new CDs she had come back with, she said, and I wondered whether the CDs had been sent to her by Christopher, whose picture I now looked at more closely whenever I was in her room.

  I now saw her in the light of Catherine’s revelations. I thought I could see dissatisfactions in her bright eyes and offhand manner, neurotic irritations appearing in her brusque speech. I saw the troubled past I had suspected when I first came to Benares appear again as she would sit out on the roof late in the evening, looking over the moonlit river.

  But I no longer felt the confusion Catherine’s revelations had induced in Mussoorie, as I sat out under the luminous sky at night. It no longer struck me as strange that a life could be so exclusively dictated by a single passion. That past of Miss West I had wondered about, the past that had seemed to me like a prison, now seemed an essential part of her life, her personality, her sense of humour and malice, and even her love for music, which I now understood better, along with the music itself, when I listened to some of her favourite composers: Brahms, Schubert and Schumann.

  She told me about her new connection with Benares. She had earlier mentioned to me a great-aunt of hers who was married briefly to a captain in the British Indian army. Now she had come to know – through old letters discovered and read by a cousin in England – that this great-aunt had visited Benares in 1945 and fallen under the spell of a famous Tantra practitioner. She had stayed with this man for a few months. It was an outrageous thing for a British woman of her time to do. Her marriage to the army captain had broken up soon afterwards and she had returned to England to a series of lovers. She had finally died in Norfolk, alone, a few weeks ago.

  ‘What a story!’ Miss West said. ‘It’s like Passage to India and Jewel in the Crown all jumbled up together. The letters are to her younger sister and they don’t mention it, but I am quite sure she had an affair with the Tantric. Those Tantrics are great experts on sex, aren’t they? I am sure the men she slept with in England felt themselves blessed.’

  A few months ago, I would have been embarrassed to hear her say this. I only smiled this time.

  I wondered if she was monitoring changes in my manner. I often made up an excuse when she offered to take me along on her social rounds through the city. I agreed to go with her to a party at Sarah’s house, but then had to feign illness hastily after I came to know that a concert by Anand was scheduled later that evening.

  ‘You look out of sorts. What’s wrong?’ she often asked as I went up to my room after a long, gloomy evening at the ghats. She was curious about my time in Mussoorie with Catherine: the maharaja, she said, hadn’t mentioned me in his account of our lunch at his hotel. She was especially curious to know about the unscheduled day and night in Kalpi. Was there a hotel there? What kind of room was it? Single or double?

  She had, I knew, put somewhat less probing questions to Catherine. Did she suspect something? I couldn’t tell.

  But there shortly came Shivratri, when I almost gave myself away.

  *

  In Benares’s calendar, teeming with festivals, Shivratri occupies a special place. Millions of pilgrims visit the city that day to bathe in the river; and it was to witness their slow exuberant late-afternoon progress through the streets and alleys of the old city that I arranged to meet up with Catherine and Miss West on Dashashvmedh Ghat.

  I reached the top of the broad flight of steps a bit before the appointed time. It was, I remember, a day of streaming refulgence, one of those perfect days of March, whose tingly mornings, tenderly azure skies, soft, sun-caressed afternoons and long indigo twilights are the last parting gifts from the gods of spring before they are abruptly deposed in April by the malevolent spirits of the Indian summer. All around me, and in the far distance, swarmed a crowd of pilgrims, with not a patch of uncovered ground to be seen anywhere, pilgrims surging into the main road from all directions, through narrow lanes and maze-like alleys, from between houses leaning into each other; pilgrims holding marigolds and red hibiscuses, brass and steel platters filled with lit diyas and sweets and vermilion powder, pilgrims wearing pink and purple saris, crimson and white turbans, glossy silk and threadbare cotton, pilgrims ochre-robed and naked – ash-smeared, matted-haired Naga sadhus with gleaming tridents, their long penises slackly swinging as they walked towards the ghat – pilgrims everywhere, chanting slogans in praise of Shiva as they went down the steps, past the coconut and flower sellers, the anxious-eyed cows and the fat priests under their tattered straw umbrellas, to the river, throwing rose petals over their heads, up towards where the monkeys balanced on electric poles, quiet and watchful.

  It was from this crowd that Miss West suddenly emerged, in sunglasses and straw hat, wearing a pale yellow kurta over blue jeans, her face flushed with excitement.

  It wasn’t just the excitement of the surroundings; she had experienced that too many times. She had more stories of Catherine’s friends. Catherine was too protective of her friends to disclose to me anything more than what was strictly mentionable about their misadventures in India. She did confide them in Miss West, however, who thought them both deliciously funny and sad, and wasn’t slow in relating them to me in full detail.

  This was the gossipy side of her. A strange fascination shone from her eyes as she quickly ran through a few of the stories, the crowd flowing past noisily all the time.

  Claire, the woman with whom I had the argument about Evelyn Waugh, had returned from Orissa full of bitter complaints about young hooligans who accosted her at every street corner with obscene requests. She also had her camera and Swiss Army knife stolen by her honest-seeming host in Ahmedabad. Pierre – Miss West called him, ‘a troubled young seeker’ – found himself awakened in the middle of the night by his French-speaking Tamil host in Pondicherry, and offered his nubile daughter’s virginity as premarital dowry. Deirdre, an unhappily overweight woman Catherine knew through another friend, had unexpectedly got married to a young importer-exporter in Rajasthan; he could not pronounce her name and so called her Didi. And Danielle, an avowed Thervada Buddhist, had got involved with a Tibetan boy while on a ‘meditation retreat’ at Bodh Gaya, but then fled the scene in some panic when the boy began to speak about the wonderful life they would lead together in France.

  From where I was, I could see quite far into the distance. Catherine would, I knew, stand out even in the massive crowd, but there was no sign of her anywhere. As Miss West spoke on, I began mechanically noting things: the hastily erected telephone booth, freshly painted, but without its constitutive instrument; the misspellings and malapropisms on the bright little posters for Keo Karpin hair oil on lamp-posts and the vaguely fluttering banners between them; the paunchy constables lathi-cutting a narrow swathe through the crowds for a VVIP visitor.

  More minutes ticked past, and I began to grow slightly impatient. The appointed time came and went. Four, four-ten, four-twenty, half past four. The second hand moved with agonizing sluggishness.

  I interrupted Miss West to ask her if she knew why Catherine was late. But she didn’t, and she didn’t seem very concerned as she carried on with her stories.

  I began to speculate about what had happened to her. Grotesque visions danced before my eyes: a rickshaw accident, mangled metal and rubber, the indifferent bystanders. All the repetitive horrors and trite headlines of the local papers sprang to mind: broad-daylight kidnapping, rape, murder, absconding criminals. Where was she?

  At five the crowds were still coming in, and it was with a kind of choking d
espair that I watched every fresh wave of cheerful unfamiliar faces roll past.

  Miss West still hadn’t finished with Danielle’s story. Her abandoned Tibetan lover had followed her to Kathmandu, along with a crudely carved wooden-handled knife, which he pressed against her neck one morning in her hotel room, demanding suitable recompense for the humiliation and ridicule he had suffered in the eyes of his Tibetan compatriots, to whom he had already promised to send Disney T-shirts and levis from Paris. She had to shell out a lot of money before the knife was removed.

  Miss West said, ‘Catherine said there is still a scar on the poor girl’s neck. She must be having a hard time explaining it to people in Paris.’

  And then in the same breath she said, ‘Look! There she is! There’s our Catherine.’

  She was pointing towards the river. Catherine had come by boat, not on foot as originally planned.

  I saw her paying the boatman. There was the usual brief argument and then the boatman turned away, satisfied. Catherine now started in our direction.

  Disappearing for a while behind the straw umbrellas, the billowing saris, she reappeared in the middle distance, tall, dark, distinctive, springily striding ahead of the returning throng of bathers, who had wet clothes wrapped around their shoulders and forearms, her white sleeveless kurta all shimmering folds and dimples.

  She saw us and waved. Closer, closer, across and up the slushy flower-strewn steps, past the dazzle of the brassware stall, and I saw the pale skin aglow on her bare arms, her curly mop of hair gently bouncing behind her head, her mouth half open, as if in expectation of the apologies and explanations that would soon pour out. She came up the stairs in one last energetic spurt and now finally stood before me, panting and excitedly stuttering and gesticulating, and although I tried to listen, I couldn’t, and only kept nodding weakly in response to her flow of words. It seemed as if somebody had switched off the sound, and the whole of the teeming ghat had dissolved in a watery blur.

  As I stood there somewhat helplessly I suddenly noticed Miss West.

  She was staring at me and had, in fact, been doing so for some time, her expression alternating between frank curiosity and puzzlement.

  She turned away now as our glances met, and it was in profile that I saw the small lopsided smile on her lips: the then unreadable smile that, in retrospect, appears as much bitter as benevolent.

  5

  RAJESH REAPPEARED at the library one afternoon after an absence of ten days.

  These recurring periods of absence from the university struck me as odd, but he never disclosed where he had gone. He had been away, he would say, on urgent work.

  What kind of work, I wondered, but the question always stayed with me.

  This afternoon, Rajesh said that he was on his way to visit his mother, who lived in a village forty miles west of Benares. He added that I could come with him if I wished to.

  It wasn’t like him to make such invitations; and he extended it to me with some shyness. His eyes were turned away as he spoke, and he looked as if he would be relieved if I said no as quickly as possible.

  I almost did. I knew little of Rajesh’s background, and in the past many weeks, I had been intermittently curious about it. But my interest in him, as in a lot of other things, had dwindled since I came back from Kalpi. I was preoccupied with different matters altogether, and my first reaction was to decline his invitation.

  It was when I was ready to present him with an excuse that the depressing thought came to me of another empty evening on the ghats.

  We left one morning from Benares railway station, on the steam-engined and usually empty shuttle that in those days used to run on the narrow-gauge line between Benares and Allahabad. It was unusually cold and foggy for March. The newspaper I bought at the railway station spoke of fresh and unexpected snowfall in the Himalayas, and I thought immediately of Kalpi, imagining it snowbound, the chokidar drinking himself into a stupor in his outbuilding, the sadhu at the temple serenely going on with his small, restricted life.

  A chilly wind, gritty with coal dust, blew in through the iron-barred windows as the train puffed and wheezed through an endless flat plain. The loud rattle of wheels made it impossible to talk for more than a few minutes, and we stretched ourselves on hard wooden bunks, wrapped from head to toe in coarse military blankets that Rajesh had brought with him, and gazed out of the window, where stubbly fields stretched to tree-blurred horizons and coils of smoke stood torpid above ragged settlements of mud huts and half-built brick houses.

  A tea vendor, wearing a monkey cap with flaps that covered his ears, kept walking up and down the corridors. He looked inquiringly at us every time he passed. Rajesh finally summoned him, speaking in a local dialect I had never before heard from him, but the cardamom-scented tea seemed to turn cold the moment he lifted the kettle off his tiny coal stove and poured it into glass tumblers.

  Rajesh sat up and hurriedly put on his tennis sneakers as the train clanked and rattled to a stop at a station that resembled one of the many small stops we had passed. The platform was deserted; the station building had a red-tiled roof and, unexpectedly, bougainvillea curling out of hanging wood baskets. Outside, on a concourse littered with horse dung, three tongas stood waiting, a couple of emaciated, mangy dogs staggering around the still horses.

  Rajesh said that it was another half-hour tonga ride from there.

  The view cleared as soon as the tonga left the concourse, the horse’s hooves clattering loudly against the cement surface, his long brushy tail swaying and flicking against his hind legs. On both sides sprawled mustard fields, divided into compact squares by muddy ledges on which peasants, diminished against the surrounding vast flatness, walked in orderly rows. Water gushed out in thick jets from tubewells, and raced and gurgled through narrow drains to the fields. The narrow tarmac road was corroded at the edges, as if infested by termites, and the tonga lurched ominously each time a bigger, faster vehicle – usually a snot-nosed tempo – forced it into the dusty rutted roadside. From under the hooded roof at the back, we watched as the tempo receded whimperingly down the tree-lined road and dust swirled up slowly from the ground, to be caught and illuminated in hundreds of criss-crossing sunbeams.

  *

  Mango groves appeared on both sides, the dust thick on the leaves of the trees closer to the road; then, in small clearings, a few buildings: box-shaped houses of naked brick and mud huts with large courtyards where men slumbered on string cots; cold-storage warehouses; tiny shuttered shops. Swarthy blouseless women squatted on the ground before thatched huts, slapping together cakes of cow dung, little igloos of which lined the road. A few half-naked children with distended bellies ran around screaming at the tops of their voices.

  Finally, at the end of a row of identical buildings, there was Rajesh’s mother’s house, one room, the walls undistempered, with the brick showing through. The children went very quiet as the tonga slowed to a stop, and then as we got down, they crowded around us in a little mob, their mouths open and eyes wide with frank curiosity.

  Their hair had turned rust-blond from malnutrition. The mucus from their running noses was white against the dark skin. I looked at Rajesh for a reaction of some sort, but his face was expressionless as we walked up to the house. The children followed us. One of them reached out a hand and caressed my khadi kurta. I looked down to see curiosity and fear alternating wildly in his eyes.

  The door, its wooden frame warped and chipped, was opened by Rajesh’s mother, a tiny, shrunken, fair-skinned woman in a widow’s white sari, one end of which she wore over her head as a kind of veil. There was a restless quality about her wizened face, which spoke of continuing struggles. In this first moment of meeting her, I didn’t notice much resemblance between mother and son; it was a little while later that I saw that Rajesh had inherited her eyes, so full of uncertainty and now, on seeing me and the children behind us, puzzlement.

  But when Rajesh introduced me as a friend from the university she suddenly g
rew very welcoming, and invited me into the room with an old-fashioned gracious gesture of her hands.

  After the early-morning light, it was dark and damp inside the high-ceilinged room. There was a solitary window, but it was closed. In one corner, partitioned off by a flimsy hand-loomed sari, was the kitchen. The wall there was a sooty black, and on the wet floor a few brass utensils gave off a dull gleam. In another corner lay a string cot, under which was a tin trunk, leprous with rust. On the walls were garishly coloured religious calendars: a benign Shiva, Ram with lips painted bright red and at his feet Hanuman, hands clasped and head bowed in his usual pose of devotion.

  It was unsettling: the half-naked screaming children outside and the bareness of the room. I hadn’t been prepared for this; the poverty these surroundings spoke of wasn’t immediately apparent in Rajesh’s life in Benares. I could have guessed previously that he wasn’t well off, but one could have said the same of almost all students at the university.

  Rajesh, who since the morning had become increasingly silent, left the room as his mother busied herself with breakfast. I sat stiffly in a straight-backed wicker chair and tried to make some conversation. Both of us had to speak very loudly to make ourselves heard above the fierce hiss of the kerosene stove.

  It wasn’t easy to express sympathy in that high-pitched voice, and sympathy was what was required of me as she began to tell me stories from her past.

  She had been widowed fifteen years ago when Rajesh was still a child, and soon afterwards her wealthy feudal in-laws had started to harass her. The house in which she had lived with her husband was taken away from her, and her in-laws also refused to return the little dowry she had brought with her. Her parents were dead; her brothers too poor to support her. There was only Rajesh, who’d had his own struggles: he had worked since he was thirteen, first in the maize fields, and then at a carpet factory in Benares, where he had gone to evening school and done well enough to enter the university.