The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  The years had somehow passed in overcoming all these different obstacles. But now she was worried. Rajesh, she feared, had reached a dead end. There were no more openings for him. All the government jobs these days were going to low-caste people, and not only did Rajesh have the wrong kind of caste, he had no connections anywhere. He also had too much self-respect to work for low-caste shopkeepers and businessmen.

  Disdain entered her voice as she said this. I had encountered it before. It came from an exalted sense of being Brahmin, of being marked and set above people from other castes, races. Rajesh himself possessed some of that feeling, which in his case was also an awareness of not having lived up to old standards. ‘I am a Brahmin,’ I had heard him say, ‘but I have done things no Brahmin would ever do.’

  But I didn’t think of this then. I was shocked by what Rajesh’s mother had told me about his life. How little of his past I had known! Of the childhood spent in maize fields and carpet factories, I had known nothing at all. I did know a bit about these factories. They had been in the papers after some human rights organizations petitioned the government to prohibit them from using child labour. There had been pictures of large-eyed, frightened-looking children in dimly lit halls, framed against their exquisite handiworks. I had read the accompanying articles and then I had forgotten about them.

  To think of Rajesh as one of those children was to shrink the usual distance I kept from these things – the cruelties of rural India, occasionally reported in the papers and then buried under reports of similar cruelties. It was to have, however briefly, a disturbing new sense of the harsh world around me.

  Rajesh himself changed in my eyes when he came back into the room. Behind his unreadable handsome face, I now saw tormenting private memories of childhood. The instability I had noticed and feared on more than one occasion appeared as a natural consequence of his past.

  But the moment soon passed. Rajesh set out small wooden seats on the ground and his mother served out hot steaming parathas with mango pickles in large brass thalis.

  She did not eat with us; it was too early for her, she said. She spread a sack on the floor, sat cross-legged on it and then watched us alertly as we ate, quick to offer us more parathas and refill our steel tumblers with water.

  She apologized all the time for the meagreness of what she was offering. Once she asked me about my plans for the future; she asked if I was preparing to take the Civil Service exam.

  She didn’t say much to Rajesh. Most of her conversation was directed at me; and when after breakfast I said I was going for a walk, it was to give them some time together.

  *

  The children, whose noises had reached me inside the small room, had quietened down a bit when I walked out into the bright day outside. They stood in a small crowd, watching for oncoming vehicles on the road. They turned and stared as I approached, but averted their eyes and turned back swiftly to the road as soon as I met their gaze.

  I walked back the way we had come and was soon past the row of box-shaped rooms. Mud huts lined the road after that, buffaloes tethered in front yards messy with hay, and women cooking midday meals on dung-cake fires, the hot foamy yellow dhal trickling down from above the quivering pans.

  The huts ended and the mango groves began. I was a few paces into the grove when the voices reached me, loud accusatory yelps rising from somewhere deep in the cluster of trees.

  I walked farther and saw, in a levelled clearing screened off from the road, five or six children playing cricket. The ball was rubber and bouncy; a rectangle cleanly carved on the bark of a tree served as wickets; and the bat was equally improvised, somewhat akin to the wooden truncheon with which washermen beat clothes on the ghats in Benares.

  The children were so absorbed in their game, they barely noticed me. Their voices receded as I penetrated farther into the grove on a narrow pebble-strewn path zigzagging between trees, and were reduced to a lone extra-loud yelp.

  Soon, the grove was all silence, and the only sound came from my shoes crunching the pebbles on the dirt path. Overhead, the trees, fruitless, with the season still months away, formed a thick awning with their abundant leaves. A few stray sunbeams filtered through them to fall in small bright patches on the ground, carpeted with dead leaves and wild grass.

  I had been walking for some time when I stopped, and then stood still for a while. My thoughts, briefly disturbed by the unexpected disclosures about Rajesh, had returned to Catherine. The possibility that I had merely been a source of comfort for Catherine during her troubles with Anand had come to me repeatedly in the previous days. I had begun to wonder if my time with her had only served as a release for her anxieties about Anand.

  And thinking about that now, facing the mute trees – old, with gnarled, coarse-fibred roots – I felt again a heavy sluggishness in my heart.

  I had been standing there for a few minutes, hearing only the slow regular rhythms of my breathing, when I heard, faint at first, but growing clearer by the second, the tinkling of bells. I recognized the sound instantly. I had heard it countless times in the alleys of Benares; it was the sound of cows going past. The large number of wandering cows in the alleys made it blend into a kind of continuous ringing; and it was, along with conch shells and temple bells, one of the sounds of the old city.

  Detached from the city, and in this mango grove, among the still trees, the bells had different associations. Coming closer all the time, they seemed deeper, melodious, almost meditative, an emanation as if from unknown ancient times.

  Presently, I saw them, the herd of cows pressing closely against each other on the narrow path, a cloud of dust billowing softly behind them. They came closer and I stood aside as they passed me.

  Sharp long horns were raised threateningly for an instant as they examined me with large limpid eyes. Then they demurely dropped their gaze to the ground and moped on.

  It was as the last of the column filed past me that I saw the boy.

  He had been totally concealed by the cows, by their high, bobbing backs, but he had been there all the time I had been watching. He probably lived in one of the mud huts of the kind I had passed a few minutes ago where midday meals were being cooked on dung-cake fires. He didn’t appear to be more than ten years old, even in his oversized shorts, which hung down well below his knees. The half-sleeved vest he wore above the shorts showed his thin, tender arms. He held a small stick in one tight fist, and there was, in his large brown eyes, below the unruly mop of hair, an expression of pure terror.

  He stared at me for one fugitive instant, then quickly jerked his head away. He walked with his stick pressed stiffly to his thigh, his head turned, like the cows’, towards the ground, and watching his retreating back, the twitching folds of his vest, which expressed fear and suspicion, watching him go, the cow bells slowly dying away in the distance, I was overcome by an inexplicable desolation.

  I stood for a few more minutes on the spot where I had stopped to let the cows past.

  It soon grew quiet again. But something didn’t seem right; the spell had been broken. And when I turned to go back, every movement of my feet filled me with weariness.

  I began to walk fast. Out on the road, I saw the herd of cows again, restored to ordinariness in plain daylight. I couldn’t see the boy, but I didn’t look long before starting back for Rajesh’s mother’s house, past the mud houses and the loitering, half-naked children, who on seeing me were stirred by curiosity yet again.

  *

  On the train back to Benares – after a bone-rattling tonga ride through empty fields – Rajesh broke his silence to say that he had read Sentimental Education, and that it was a story he knew well. ‘Yeh meri duniya ki kahani hai. Main in logon ko janta hoon,’ he said in Hindi, in a louder voice than usual to make himself heard over the racket of the train.

  ‘It is the story of my world. I know these people well.’ He gave me a hard look. ‘Your hero, Edmund Wilson,’ he added in English, ‘he also knows them.’

 
I had got used to his silence; I was thinking of other things, and I had almost forgotten that I had lent him Sentimental Education and Wilson’s essay.

  Rajesh was still looking at me. ‘Achcha? Really?’ I finally replied. I didn’t know what else to say.

  But with one part of my mind I puzzled over what Rajesh had told me. It didn’t make sense. What could Rajesh, a student in a provincial Indian university in the late 1980s, possibly have in common with Frédéric Moreau or any of the doomed members of his generation in this novel of mid-nineteenth-century Paris?

  Rajesh kept looking at me in a challenging way, as though wanting me to respond to what he had said, wanting me to ask him to explain his gnomic remark about Sentimental Education. But I didn’t say anything. I already felt awkward over the unexpected disclosures about his past. I hadn’t known how to respond to them, and the embarrassment over my lack of response obscured the admiration I might otherwise have felt for Rajesh, for his hard journey from the maize fields to the university. In any case, these thoughts about Rajesh existed in a separate and very small compartment. I didn’t see how they could be related at all to the new doubts I had developed about my relationship with Catherine, which had been preoccupying me.

  In the darkening fields there were beginning to appear little spots of yellow light. Coal embers glowing red flew past the window. Farther ahead, frequently obscured by the jet-black puffs of smoke from the engine, a golden glow on the horizon announced Benares.

  6

  THE TELEGRAM WAS WAITING for me at the house when I got back from the railway station. It read, simply: YOUR FATHER SERIOUSLY ILL. COME SOON. It had been sent two days before, and it was signed by a woman named Deepa.

  I had been looking forward to some kind of message from Catherine. We had planned to meet the next day; it was what I had been thinking about during the rickshaw ride to the house. But she hadn’t come to the house all day. Miss West told me this, her eyes as always inquisitive and searching my face for a drastic change of expression, and after this piercing disappointment my first reaction to the telegram was to keep it aside, as I had kept aside, and eventually failed to act on, the first letter informing me of my father’s illness.

  But later that night, I woke up seized with guilt and fear. Had something irrevocable happened? Were the words ‘seriously ill’ a deliberate euphemism, as they often were, on the part of a cautious sender? Was he already dead? I stayed awake for quite some time, assailed by grim possibilities, thinking of that other death, that of my mother, when I had arrived too late.

  It wasn’t an easy decision. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to stay in Pondicherry. It seemed likely that I wouldn’t be able to return to Benares, and the strangely exciting life I had found there, for a very long time.

  But in the morning, my mind was made up. I could no longer postpone leaving Benares, which, I now told myself, in any case would have lost much of its attraction for me after Catherine’s departure. It was time to go, and in my self-reproaching mood, I now told myself that it had been time to go when I received my father’s letter on the day I returned from Kalpi.

  A sympathetic Miss West arranged rail tickets for the next day through her travel agent. There were no second-class tickets available. I had to go first-class air-conditioned. I hadn’t any money for it, and I had to make an awkward request to Miss West for a loan.

  She was quick to oblige. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Send it back whenever you can.’

  There weren’t any last-minute urgencies. I took down the books from the niches, where once little clay vermilion-splattered idols of Ram and Krishna had rested, and wrapped them in newspaper and string; I brought in the clothes I had left to dry out on the roof. I swept the floor with a broom. I settled all outstanding accounts with Panditji’s wife. I packed all my possessions in two bags, and although I was ready to leave, I still had almost a whole day and night to kill.

  I walked to the library and sat for a while at my desk, looking out over the patch of lawn and the dark luxuriant trees beyond it. Voices echoed loudly in the cavernous halls, which were full of men in stained blue overalls painting the walls. The students in the reading room quietly played gin rummy, elbows planted on the table, eyes fixed unwaveringly on the cards. The women were still leaning their cheeks on open palms and tracing their initials with long, painted fingernails on the wooden desktop.

  I went walking on the ghats. I was in a strange mood. The thought – and it recurred very frequently now – of parting from Catherine caused a fresh wound each time, but a part of me also felt relieved to be going away, to be putting an end to a time of futility and unhappiness. I told myself that something new would now have to begin, and these mixed emotions of sadness and a somewhat forced optimism now obscured everything I saw around myself. The gossiping boatmen, the children playing hopscotch, the chess players, the old men gazing at the sparkling river and Benares looming in the misty distance with its palaces, temples and funeral pyres – I was already remote from them.

  Later in the afternoon, I went back to the house. ‘No,’ Miss West said, as soon as she saw me, ‘Catherine hasn’t been here.’

  Emptiness building up again, I took a rickshaw to Catherine’s house. On the way, I imagined running into Anand and worried about what I’d say to him. I wondered if I could ask Catherine in his presence for some time in private before I left.

  But there was no one at the house. A rusty iron padlock hung over the door to the staircase. The sadhu with the matted locks gazed indifferently at me as I scribbled a message about my impending departure.

  I walked back home through the ghats and unexpectedly saw Rajesh. I had seen him only the day before, but the visit to his house, and the peculiar memories from that day, already seemed to belong to a very old past. I hadn’t thought about him even once after reading the telegram from Pondicherry.

  I saw him from the top of the stone steps leading to the river. He was wearing white kurta pyjamas; there was a vermilion tika on his forehead. I was wondering what he was doing there when I suddenly remembered that it was Tuesday, the day on which he fasted and offered prayers at a nearby Hanuman temple. He was with a young student, who looked familiar. He may have been one of the many who hung around him constantly.

  I could overhear him from where I stood: it was one of the odd pedagogic monologues he offered to these students. I saw him pointing to the empty expanses of sand and scrubland across the river. ‘That,’ he was saying, bringing out each Sanskrit and Hindi syllable precisely, ‘is sunyata, the void. And this’ – he pointed at the teeming conglomeration of temples and houses towards the north of the city – ‘is maya, illusion. Do you know what our task is?’ The student shook his head. Rajesh continued, ‘Our task is to live somewhere in between.’

  The student looked alternately bewildered and terrified. I thought of going up to them and then decided against it. Rajesh had always been an exacting companion, and I was in a state of mind where every encounter becomes a tremendous strain.

  Back home, Panditji had just finished his evening lessons. After the room emptied, and the European and American students made their way to the roof to smoke opium, I told him that I was leaving. He was surprised and overwhelmed when I bent down to touch his feet. He blessed me by placing his hand over my head and reciting a Sanskrit hymn, and then I went upstairs to eat with Mrs Pandey and Shyam for the last time.

  That evening they watched my face with unusual alertness, searching for signs of worry or grief. They lived without words, and felt only the most basic emotions; the watchfulness was their attempt at sympathy. As I realized that, I grew more self-consciously grave.

  Catherine arrived as I went up to my room. She had just got my message, she said, and had come straight from her house to see me. Her face was flushed red from running up the stairs; she said she had been running around the cantonment with Anand all day, arranging for air tickets. They were to leave in a week’s time: another hasty departure.

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bsp; She didn’t offer any excuses for not having arranged a meeting earlier in the day as promised. She said she was very sorry to hear about my father. Her eyes and manner indicated that she wanted to say more, but we were with Miss West, who had come over from her room to say hello to her. Catherine didn’t stay long; she said she had to rush back to meet the travel agent at her home. She said she would come to the station to see me off.

  I spent another sleepless night with the same thoughts and feelings I had known since the arrival of the telegram from Pondicherry – thoughts and feelings that formed no pattern, led to no resolutions and simply seethed within me.

  In the morning I said goodbye to Miss West. It was too early for her but she had insisted on seeing me off. She was still in her nightclothes, her hair tousled, and she didn’t come down to the rickshaw where my two bags had been placed by Shyam. ‘We’ll miss you,’ she said, hugging me, and I felt close to tears.

  She slipped a present into my hand as I came down the stairs: it was a gift-wrapped CD, useless for me as I didn’t own a CD player.

  Mrs Pandey and Shyam looked up and nodded as I passed them. Panditji was lying on his bed, eyes closed, an expression of pure serenity on his face, when I went into his room. I left without waking him.

  And then only one more goodbye remained to be said.

  *

  At the railway station, the train was late and all was disorder as usual: piles of lumpy luggage scattered the dusty floor of the platform, incomprehensible echoing announcements from the loudspeaker, food stalls with their stacks of oily bread pakoras and swarms of flies, a stench of drying excrement from the exposed tracks, perspiring harried faces everywhere, below frenziedly spinning fans.