The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  As I watched, a rickshaw suddenly swerved in from around the corner and thudded and jolted across a small pothole. The driver rang his jingling bells as if to protest against the shock, and the sound unfastened an old memory in the mind: the cold foggy mornings I woke up to during my first days in Benares, which I spent in bed, huddled under the Panditji’s thin quilts, trying to read The World as Will and Idea as rickshaws overloaded with children lurched down the potholed alleys and old Hindi melodies wafted out of unseen radios and jets of water from municipal taps cannonaded into plastic buckets, and a woman whom I could never see towel-dried her hair with that peculiar sneezing sound.

  *

  I showered, put on fresh clothes and went down to the empty restaurant in the lobby for a late and heavy lunch of parathas and pickle. Miss West wasn’t expecting me until later in the afternoon; there was nothing to do until then, and after lunch I went back to my room and played with the television set, switching channels randomly, moving swiftly from MTV to Santa Barbara to CNN and back.

  It was the first time in seven years that I had sat before a television screen, and to confront the unfamiliar faces and speech – the anorexic MTV VJs with their bare midriffs and eyebrow rings and rapid-fire banter – was to feel as if I had arrived in an alien city.

  I switched off the TV; I went and stood at the window and watched the street. I switched on the TV again, and immediately turned it off as a long wailing sound filled the room. I lay on the bed for a while. I felt a gentle restlessness. I wished to go out; I wished to be away from the hotel.

  When I eventually went out into the mellow winter sunshine, things appeared to happen in an effortless daze.

  I did not have to think before telling the rickshaw driver the name of the area where Panditji’s house stood; the words slipped out of my mouth as instinctively as they once had. Sitting on the rickshaw, feeling a cool breeze upon my face, passing through streets and alleys so familiar – the tattered kites trapped between power cables, the house with the tiny door that opened towards a large sunny loggia-like space where on crisp winter afternoons women sat on charpoys and oiled their thick black tresses, the men staring out vacantly from dark chai shops – I had the sensation of re-entering a dream.

  *

  It was damp as always in the alleys leading to Panditji’s house. But a small surprise awaited me at the house itself.

  In my memory the main door leading in from the alley had always been open, revealing a small dark courtyard surrounded by the room where Panditji lay under layers of blankets and a bathroom with scars of green slime on the lower end of the walls. The door was now locked from the inside.

  I knocked; I heard people talking: a man’s voice and then a woman’s.

  Waiting for the door to be opened, I looked up at a strip of blue sky and noticed a woman staring down at me from the roof terrace of the adjoining house. Her face beneath her sari veil was fleshy and expressionless, and I wondered, with a pang of disappointment, if she was the one I had heard drying her hair.

  The voices inside grew louder and stranger and then the door was yanked open.

  A tall and skinny white man in a lungi and khaki waistcoat stood before me, his head and shoulders hunched under the short door frame. His hair was long and stringy; the skin on his long face was stretched tight over his cheekbones; on his bare pale forearms there were identical tattoos of the goddess Kali, her bright crimson tongue a dab of startling colour in the surrounding blackness.

  His body filled the entire frame of the door, and he seemed to be concealing someone behind him. He stared at me with his mouth slightly open, and then said, ‘What do you want?’ His voice was gruff, and the accent was Israeli; I had come across it many times before in the alleys and shops of Dharamshala.

  His manner softened when I mentioned Miss West.

  ‘Oh, I see. You want to talk to the English lady?’

  I nodded.

  ‘She’s upstairs, on the roof,’ he said, and stepped away from the door.

  I went in. I heard a shuffle of slippered feet, and the door to Panditji’s room banged shut immediately. I caught a flash of bare brown legs – a woman’s legs – and coils of cigarette smoke inside.

  The Israeli man looked at me and smiled – a sheepish smile.

  I trudged up the steep stairs, remembering how I used the brief exacting climb to prepare myself for the blank gazes of Mrs Pandey and Shyam sitting outside the kitchen.

  But there was no one in the courtyard, which had been extensively renovated. The walls had been painted a bright yellow; the door leading to Mrs Pandey’s bedroom had new Diwali floral decorations on it; the place close to the kitchen door where she and Shyam once sat was now occupied by a sparkling white washbasin with a welter of exposed red rubber pipes underneath it.

  But the room with the iron-barred door beside the kitchen still brimmed with darkness, and here, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I thought I saw someone stir inside.

  I went closer. It was a man. He was sitting on the floor, his legs drawn up against his torso. He was leaning against the wall facing the stairway; he would have seen me come up.

  At first, I saw only his eyes, then the rest of his swarthy, stubbly face, and then the grimy khaki shorts from which his dark hairy legs stuck out; I realized that it was Shyam.

  I was too shocked and unsettled to speak. I stared at him for a moment, and when I eventually managed to get the words out, I said my name. I asked him if he recognized me. I tried to speak in the local Hindi dialect I used with him and Mrs Pandey.

  I could see his eyes clearly now; I felt something flicker in them. But no words came out.

  I came closer and now held the smooth iron bars with my hands. A faint smell of urine met my nostrils.

  I said my name again, a little louder this time. I told him that I had once lived in the room on the roof.

  ‘He doesn’t hear anything,’ a voice said behind me.

  I turned back to see a tall woman in a sari; she had silently appeared out of Mrs Pandey’s room.

  It was Sita, Arjun’s wife. She nodded and said Namaste, inaudibly moving her lips. My presence didn’t seem to surprise her a bit. I would have recognized her immediately if she had been wearing the sari over her head in the way she used to when I passed her on the stairs.

  She hadn’t changed much: she was as thin as I remembered her; her upper teeth slightly jutted out; frank curiosity lay in her round dark eyes and there was a soft solicitude in her voice.

  ‘He doesn’t hear anything,’ she repeated.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We had to take him to a mental asylum after Mataji died,’ she said, in Hindi, using the word Pagalkhana. ‘He got into a fight there; someone hit him on the ear with a hammer.’

  I looked back at Shyam. He hadn’t moved; and now his eyes met mine: something dead now lay in them.

  ‘Will you have some tea?’ Sita was asking, half gesturing, as I turned to look at her, towards the kitchen.

  I was beginning to decline politely when I heard a sound behind me. It was a low mumble. But a few words came through somewhat clearly; I didn’t have to listen to all of them to know what he was saying.

  ‘Greed,’ he was saying, ‘greed is the biggest evil. It divides families, sunders husband from wife, son from parents . . .’

  I saw Sita throw a quick impatient glance at Shyam before saying, ‘Have some tea. It’ll only take two minutes to make. We have a gas stove now.’

  As she spoke, the door opened behind her, and Arjun came out, thick-lipped, with thinning hair, but startlingly clean shaven. He scowled at me for an instant and then his face broke into a smile.

  ‘Hello, boss,’ he said. ‘How are you? Come to see Miss West?’

  It was the bantering manner of college-educated youth. ‘Yes, yes,’ I stammered, suddenly remembering what Pratap had told me, and still held by his face, the lips that appeared thicker without the beard.

  ‘Have some tea,’ Arjun said. �
�You must be tired. You have come a long way.’

  I heard Shyam’s monotonous drone behind me. ‘. . . Divides families, sunders husband from wife, son from parents . . .’

  ‘See the kitchen at least,’ Sita was saying. ‘You will not recognize it. It’s all modern now.’

  ‘It’ll take two minutes only,’ Arjun said, in English. He added, a smile on his face, ‘Miss West is not going to run away in that time.’

  Inside the kitchen, Sita flicked on the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The sooty black walls and the cow-dung-paved hearth were gone. White tiles gleamed on the walls, and on a raised cement platform squatted a gas stove, its metal frame painted a garish green. In one corner was a small fridge, with a large Dennis the Menace sticker on the door.

  5

  AS I CAME UP TO the roof from the constricted courtyard, the sky suddenly lay open once again, but darkening now, the sun muffled behind a thick bank of dark clouds on the western side, the river grey and placid, a few black boats scattered around the deserted ghat.

  The riverfront was unchanged, but the view on the other side of the house had altered. A new shed of corrugated iron stood in the temple courtyard. The roof of the facing house had higher balustrades, stubs of iron girders sticking out of the uncemented brick wall. An unfamiliar lock with a round combination dial hung on the door to my room. Two tie-and-dye lungis with batik patterns hung down from the clothes line. I had to push them out of my way in order to reach Miss West’s room.

  The door was open. She was standing over the table with the piled-up CDs, in the way I had often seen her, her gaze downcast, surveying the discs, her hair falling in a thick blonde veil around her face, and for one disorientating instant I almost expected her to say, ‘So what shall we listen to next?’

  She turned and in another familiar gesture shook back her head a bit and nimbly tucked stray locks of hair behind her ears. ‘Oh, hello there,’ she said, smiling. ‘Come on in. I was sort of expecting you early. You have come too late for tea, I am afraid.’

  There was affection in her smile, but her alert eyes looked at me intently.

  She said, ‘You have changed, you know. You look taller and broader – or is it just my eyes?’

  She had changed, too. It was dark inside the room and the light through the door contrasted with the black polo-neck jumper she wore, highlighted the wrinkles on her face and the loose skin on her neck; her eyes, though still vigilant, had lost their old lustre; they looked tired when not focused on something. She would have been past fifty now, and her face, its fine balanced features, held a kind of resignation, which enhanced its natural serenity – the serenity that had struck me in the days I used to see her sit out on the roof, watching the river.

  I was full of what I had seen downstairs. Shyam in a cage of sorts; Arjun and Sita, their voices so calm, their manner so full of solicitude.

  After what I had heard, I was expecting them to be strained and nervous with me, with someone who had lived in the house when Panditji and his wife were still alive, and who had heard about the quarrels and the conspiracies Mrs Pandey suspected her son of hatching against her. But with almost effortless ease, they had assumed the role of the house’s owners, with the casual confidence that went with it – a confidence unfazed by the presence of Shyam, another witness from the past.

  I mentioned some of this to Miss West.

  ‘People talk,’ she said, ‘but there is no evidence. Nothing that points to their involvement. Of course there were no post-mortems – the funerals were held very quickly. People got suspicious about that. I wasn’t here, you know. But we all know what happens during the summer rush at the funeral ghats. All those poor villagers dying like flies in the heat. You either bribe your way through or wait your turn behind a thousand corpses rotting away by the riverside. So they had to do it quickly. Anyway, they have been good to me. I was worrying that they might ask me to leave, or ask for some ridiculous rent after Panditji and Mrs Pandey died. But they didn’t. I only wish they hadn’t let the downstairs room to those wretched sex-maniac Israelis. Did you see them on the way up? They never leave the house; they go at it like little rabbits.’

  It was the voice and manner I remembered, unambiguous, matter-of-fact, and with a sharp edge; and I had now a somewhat absurd retrospective sense of having missed them all these years.

  ‘Did you get the packet I sent you?’ she said, abruptly changing the subject. ‘Someone left it outside your door just after you left. I didn’t see who it was. No one saw him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of Rajesh walking up the stairs to my room. Had he met Arjun then?

  ‘Who was it? Who?’ Miss West was saying.

  ‘It was someone I knew at the university,’ I said, and then found myself adding, ‘I recently found out that he was a criminal.’

  ‘Was he? How interesting,’ she said. ‘But the university is full of them!’

  I wished suddenly to change the subject.

  I told her about the prostitutes at my hotel; I told her about my all-pink room, how the receptionist had called it the ‘honeymoon suite’.

  ‘I am not surprised,’ she said. She paused and suddenly shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘It’s the new mafia people talk about. They are going to transform the city. You see that happening already. Those ghastly fast-food places and beauty parlours and so-called Italian restaurants and the hotels with discotheques – the money for all this comes from the mafia.’

  *

  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw more of her room, which looked much the same as before. An earthen pot damp with water sat beneath her bed; behind the flimsy curtain of the wardrobe lay the stacks of clothes; a row of paperbacks leaned on the window sill; the clunky music system still perched on the narrow wooden shelf nailed to the wall; her straw hat clung to the wall, hanging from an invisible nail.

  The only new item appeared to be a glossy poster advertising performances of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House. The year on it was 1995 – which meant that she had been to England recently.

  But the pictures on the wall were gone – the photographs from Miss West’s past, among others, of Christopher, the pictures that had once given me such a wounding sense of faraway unattainable worlds, that had stirred so many inadequacies and yearnings in me.

  Miss West said, ‘I can’t give you tea, I’m afraid. But let’s go out. Let’s go for a boat ride. Let’s do the touristy thing. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes.’

  She snatched her straw hat from the wall; and then placed it back on the nail, which had suddenly looked exposed and vulnerable. ‘The weather looks dodgy out there, doesn’t it?’ she said, squinting into the grey day outside. ‘It might rain.’

  We went out, down the stairs, through the gloomy shadowless alleys, past the little shrine to Hanuman, to the ghats. The grey placid river was pierced here and there by scimitar-like flashes of light. The birds on the ancient banyan tree chattered loudly. The sun still shone on the massive stone ramparts of Ramnagar Palace, but the city to the north cowered under an enormous pile of woolly dark clouds.

  The stone steps on the ghat were slippery with wet mud. As we went down to the river Miss West once swayed a bit and seemed about to fall before recovering quickly. There were a few boatmen closer to the river, squatting on the ground in a circle, quietly smoking beedis and talking. They saw us, and one of them immediately detached himself from the group and began to walk towards where we were.

  The man came closer; his hair was as white as snow above his dark-complexioned face.

  ‘Is that Ramchand?’ I asked, suddenly remembering the exceptionally handsome boatman who had come up to us the first time I went with Miss West on a boat ride.

  ‘No,’ Miss West said, her voice neutral, ‘Ramchand is back in his village; he has tuberculosis. This is his father.’

  It was in the same indifferent tone – the boat freed from
the bank, the ropes tossed off and the old boatman straining at the oars with small grimaces upon his bony face – that she began speaking of events and personalities from the past.

  She spoke of the break-up between Mark and Debbie, who was now a graduate student at Indiana University. She also spoke of people I hadn’t known but she assumed I did. None of this was unfamiliar to me; it matched my memory of her. So much of her time in that room on the roof used to go into these extensive analyses of people she knew.

  She barely noticed the city sliding past us, the ghats with their isolated groups of people and solitaries, the tattered beach umbrellas, the melancholy widows in white saris, the stray coils of smoke from funeral pyres at Harishchandra Ghat.

  She spoke of a courtesan she had known for a long time.

  ‘In her time, when she was beautiful and attractive and all that, this woman had known practically every rich person in town. That’s what makes it so shocking and depressing. I heard this just today: she died recently in great poverty, and her neighbour had to go around to collect money to buy wood for her funeral pyre.’

  A long-seeming boat appeared in the middle distance; it seemed to be approaching fast in our direction.

  Miss West had appeared to stop but now she added, with a vehemence that made her voice sound cracked with emotion: ‘It’s all such a waste. Such a bloody waste.’

  She was silent for a while, and in the silence I thought of the morning I had awakened to find her sitting on the roof and crying over something I couldn’t then understand. ‘Such a waste, such a bloody waste’: that’s what she had said then – the exact words – and she had bemused me by sounding so different, her tone so far from the assured intimacy and confidence that had made such an impression on me.

  I used to think then that her solitude committed her to puzzling out the characters and lives of people she knew. It came to me now that her curiosity was dictated all along by her own complicated life, by the setbacks and disappointments she suffered in it.