by Peter Hayes
Apart from his obvious joy in the matter and the fact that Jai, despite an Oxford education, truly believed in the values of his culture—I found the idea of an arranged marriage trying, at best, even when augmented by modern technology, as theirs had been.
I clicked on a multimedia attachment as my study filled with a whining shenai playing some extravagant oriental melody, while the monitor flashed with stills of the wedding. Jai wore a turban, looking every inch the mahārāja. The pictures of his bride were less clear. In most, her eyes were lowered as befits a dutiful Hindu wife, while in several others she was actually walking several paces behind her new husband in the most subservient and traditional manner—one that would make a feminist scream. Only in the last, poised atop an elephant, was she gazing at the camera, and the look in her eyes was riveting, wild. A postscript added:
By the way, received the book half an hour before I left. Took it with me to Mumbai and on honeymoon. Interesting. Why not celebrate our good fortune, meet the Missus and pick it up? Usual place. July 28;
8 p.m. RSVP. Om Shāntī.
Your,
Jai
I found it maddening he didn’t say more. What, if anything, had the book revealed about my Lady? And what was so damned “interesting”? The book or honeymoon? The whole thing was infuriating. But that’s how Jai was. There was nothing for it but to go to London.
Before leaving, I met with the Royal Commission and we agreed not to speak about my Lady to the press until we had finished our preliminary study. For we all wished to avoid a repeat of the circus that often accompanies these extraordinary finds, such as the one surrounding Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old Tyrolean iceman who, upon his discovery, was identified as a shepherd boy dead from exposure in an autumn storm—only later to have his handlers concede he was a forty-five-year-old neolithic warrior who’d died in the spring from an arrow in his back, the head of which was still embedded in his shoulder! No, we agreed, such precipitous pronouncements gave forensic anthropology a bad name.
Afterward, in his office, I met with Strugnell to coordinate our efforts and access to materials while I was away. We also spent a few minutes looking at some snapshots of the treasure. Several pieces appeared unique—the most prominent being a large bracteate, or gold medallion, with a nick in its rim. Several small torcs were also visible, one made of three entwined gold strands, while the other two were likely formed of silver cylinders. Finally, though shadowed, the hilt of a sword was visible in profile, cast in the form of some fabulous, stylized beast. “Any progress with the investigation?”
But Strugnell indicated there was none. As I rose, he called me back to confide that he’d been to a hypnotist, a local woman, to relive his encounter with the drowning girl and to try to circumvent his amnesia. He asked me if I’d care to listen and before I could answer, tapped a button on his mobile phone, activating an audio file on which a woman’s soothing voice was saying: “Sit back now and close your eyes. I’m going to ask a few questions. Don’t edit. Just say the first thing that comes to mind. Ready? So, you try to save the drowning girl. She puts her arms around your neck and starts to pull you under. What happens?”
There’s a long, searching silence. Then Strugnell’s voice says, “She’s pointing at the bottom. I can . . . see a light. Way . . . far away . . . . I’m having no trouble breathing.”
“And the girl?”
“Her arm’s around me . . . . She’s . . . guiding me down.”
“Down where?”
“Well, it takes a while, doesn’t it? The water’s getting colder, darker. I turn and look back up at the surface; it’s the size of a bleedin’ . . . postage stamp! Then . . . we’re at her house. It’s charming. The light is good. She . . . offers me something . . . I think it’s wild honey.”
“You eat it?”
“Oh, no. Fairy food, innit?”
“And then . . . ?”
“She shows me her bed. She wants me to . . . lie down with her.”
“And?”
“I’m . . . afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of her . . . of who . . . and what she is.”
“And who is that?”
“Someone who . . . she knows things . . . about the crops, the beasts and stars.”
“What happens then?”
“She’s hurt and angered by my refusal. She begins to cry. Just like any woman. And then . . . she curses me!” he says, surprised.
“Curses you? How?”
“I . . . don’t know. She’s . . . angry! Supernaturally angry!”
A full fifteen-second silence follows, at the end of which he sighs and says, “Returning now. Breaking the surface. Ah, but the air is sweet! Blinking. Sun’s in me eyes.” He taps the phone, as the audio stops.
“And who was this creature?” I ask him now.
“You know who. Your Lady Albemarle.”
“And why did you see her? Was it by chance?”
“Oh, no. She called me. The way she’s calling you.”
“Me? I see. And why is that? Why us, I mean?”
“Don’t be an idiot! You know damn well!” He looks at once furious and frightened. “We gave her her freedom. When we removed the bloody stakes!”
Part II
JAI
In traditional Hindu medicine
a fairy tale giving form to his particular problem
was offered to a psychically disoriented person,
for his meditation. It was expected that
through contemplating the story
the disturbed person would be led to realizing
both the nature of the impasse
and the possibility of resolution.
—Bruno Bettelheim
The Uses of Enchantment
Chapter 10
Jai Prasad was one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indic life and culture. His early work had transformed the course of Vedic scholarship, even if his rivals could credibly claim that Jai’s success was due more to his predecessor’s incompetence than to his own native wit. For all Jai had done was to translate the ancient verses correctly, pointing out along the way, in wry asides disguised as footnotes, the numerous errors made by the eminent Wilbur Liebecker, Stanhope Professor of Dead Languages at Ball State, in his translations of the admittedly difficult texts. Liebecker’s sin, Prasad had shown, was that he had no understanding of the spiritual system from which the verses sprung—without which his exceedingly literal translations were as cryptic, naïve, ungrammatical and bizarre as those instructions in English accompanying Chinese radios.
Strive, break, O spotted, Tvāsthar!
As to me, Bull, with the Moon
He pours upon the six conjoined,
Him increasing in his home,
Brilliant like the sun,
Serpents entwined in everlasting!
Identifying this translation from the Rig Veda as typical of much of Liebecker’s work, Jai had pronounced it (and the many more like it) unintelligible, as anyone could plainly read (but no one had had the nerve to say before), claiming, further, that only an unconscious contempt for the ancient peoples of the East would make one think their greatest bards and mystic seers had written such appalling barf, memorized it, and taught it to succeeding generations for the next three thousand years. “Him increasing in his home,” indeed!
Then Jai had posed a provocative question: Would such a translation of Western religious literature be seriously offered? It was, he asserted, tantamount to translating the opening lines of the Bible’s Gospel of John as:
Word was at start, Deity is,
Was Word, and with Word Deity was
Not cognizant of
Envelope of darkness,
Which was eating, not knowing . . .
and then remarking, drily, upon the primitive obscurity of early Christianity.
Of course, if Jai was controversial, this was only to be expected in one whose career was a lifelong effort to pry prehistory fr
om the Western-centric grip of American and European scholars—the nearsighted vision that relegates anywhere south of Crete and east of Baghdad as the rim of the universe, and credits the East (and the Chinese, at that) with a mere two of the planet’s billion inventions: gunpowder. And noodles!
London was . . . well, Loondun, full of, among other things, many beautiful and stylish women. Just as all Gaul, according to Caesar, is divided into three parts, so womankind, to my way of thinking, is divided into two: those you would go to bed with and those you would not. I have always prided myself on the extreme restraint that allows the vast majority of human females to pass into the latter column. Though as I’ve grown older, I’ve watched my sense of discernment erode—either that or the girls are getting better looking—for the number in the first category increases yearly.
In fact, if viewed with a certain eye and distance, London is a continuous feast. There are so many delicious foods to taste, splendid and handsome clothes to buy, books for sale, people to meet, historic and elegant places to see, and comely women to make love to. Why then couldn’t I walk through its streets continually tasting the best of everything, continually filling my senses with bliss?
I don’t know—but I couldn’t.
I checked into a boutique hotel in Chiswick. It wasn’t a place one stayed for long on a research fellow’s earnings, but then again, I didn’t intend on remaining there, or a research fellow, long. I showered, changed into a summer tuxedo, the nicest suit of clothes I owned, and walked through the old-rose-gold and platinum twilight to Jai’s flat. Once, I thought I was being followed, but chalked it up to a gibbous moon playing peek-a-boo between the buildings, rather like a pink balloon being drawn on a long, invisible string.
Jai’s bride greeted me at the door. “It’s Xan, isn’t it? My husband asked that I fetch you the instant you arrived.” She paused, then added with a shy, disarming smile, “I’m Vidya,” and offered me a golden hand at the end of an arm as thin, bare and graceful as a tendril. She had bangles on her wrists, rings on her toes, and hands and feet inscribed with elaborate temporary henna tattoos, traditional for a Hindu bride: fronds, fruits and burgeoning leaves—symbols of fertility.
All in all, she was unbelievably lovely: sinuously sexy yet obviously refined. Her black hair, a dozen strands of it oddly braided with twisted strips of colored twine, swarmed around her brown shoulders like bees, and her eyes were the color blue that certain works ascribe to paradise. A yellowish diamond, small, but flawless, studded her nostril, while a thumbnail-sized emerald, green as Eire, sparked at her throat. It was a formal dinner and the new Mrs. Prasad was dressed for the occasion in a magnificent gold-embroidered Kanjeevaram sari worn in the most daring high fashion without the underlying choli, the fitted brassiere. The sari hid the front of her breasts, to be sure, but left bare their sides, exposing one almond shoulder and the delicate fluting of her ribs—so that while the other young beauties were equally uncovered, flaunting low-cut gowns with deep cleavages, it was Vidya’s tan and tender sides that drew the men’s stares and the women’s daggers.
“What a bizarre fashion,” a dowager whispered as Vidya and I passed by.
The new bride, who might easily have ignored the dig, flashed at the woman a smile of such wattage that the old lady froze like a deer in the headlights. “Oh, not at all,” Vidya laughed, “it’s traditional, really. It was the missionaries who made us wear cholis, so as not offend their Victorian tastes. Before that we were quite content with jewels (jew-ells) in a few strategic places.”
Having defended both her dress and her countrywomen with an argument of such boldness and impeccable political correctness it could not be touched, she bowed graciously, threw me a grin, and, confident I was right behind her, headed off toward the den where Jai was holding court.
A vigorous, handsome, white-toothed man of extraordinary personal charm and charisma, Jai Prasad stood out in the world of academia like a movie star. At the conferences we attended several times a year, his entrance made the coeds’ pulses quicken and sent shivers of excitement running through the hall. His lectures were always SRO—for if, as a scholar, he was controversial, as a teacher he was mesmerizing. Later, you would ask yourself what the hell it mattered if you now knew that hag had meant originally holy (as in hagiography, the life of a saint) and was applied to a woman at menopause when her “wise blood” was no longer lost, and that it was only much later—with the church’s efforts to break the power of these “witches”—that it took on its current derogatory spin. Still, listening to Jai, it seemed to matter vitally, as if you were on the cusp of uncovering some secret set of correspondences that would connect all the dots and explain everything. Later, in the rheumy blue eyes of the crone who sold the evening paper, you saw someone staring back at you you’d never seen before.
The dean of students was speaking with Jai as Vidya smoothly inserted me into the conversation, saying, “Xander, I hear, is Jai’s star pupil.”
“He’s more than that,” Jai corrected her evenly. He gave me a warm and affectionate hug. “I’m grooming him to be my spiritual heir, and yet . . .”
“And yet?” the dean queried.
“Obviously, we’re still in process. The training for that is still going on.”
I was surprised by Jai’s answer. Something was up, though now was not the time to pursue it.
Sensing the awkwardness, Vidya slipped her arm through mine, declaring there were a dozen guests to whom she had to introduce me, and whisked me off, employing for her purpose that excessively cheery neo-British manner we Americans so deplore.
And yet I found myself enchanted by her, and more than willing to stay by her side. She spoke a lovely, lilting colonial English, with a cadence less clipped and musically richer than London speech. Nor was she strictly Indian. Her family, I learned, were ex-patriots in Kenya, a part of the Asian community there. They were, I gathered, part of one of those clans who appear on the surface more British than the raj itself—with splendid, impeccable nineteenth-century manners and a father who is managing director of a firm that manufactures motor cars; and whose home in Mombasa is tastefully done in rattan and vrai bamboo with zebra throws and wildebeest heads, and pictures of an adorable, adolescent Vidya and the twin boys standing on a reviewing stand beside Lady Mountbatten in the African sun. Yet, if one ventured deeper into the house, one came across a grand amma sitting on the floor, chanting in Hindi before a pūja displaying the family deity, Kali, who brandished a sword while dancing on the body of her dead husband, Shiva, amid a welter of kumkum, smashed coconuts, burning camphor and sacred leaves.
At one point I followed Vidya out onto the balcony. The sunset over the River Thames, the soaring steeple of Christ Church and the unexpected lowness of the railing—or maybe it was the odor of Vidya’s perfume, my manic mood or the three big whiskeys I’d just gulped down—made me nearly pitch into the street before steadying myself and ducking inside.
“Arranged marriages,” someone clucked over dinner. (It was the crone who’d disparaged Vidya’s outfit.) “I didn’t know such things were permitted nowadays.”
Vidya stiffened, as if a rod were lengthening in her spine. “Actually, it’s quite civilized. Much more civilized than basing it solely on passion, don’t you think? Look what happens. The passion fades, the marriage founders. And then it’s the children who suffer.”
Everyone nodded over their mulligatawny. For how could one not, without seeming to favor the suffering of children? Jai, who had spent a lifetime defending his culture, nodded proudly.
Mrs. Vidya Prasad, I remember thinking, was going to make one hell of a faculty wife.
Most of the Indians I had known before Jai were physicians, newsstand owners, or computer engineers who had turned their backs on “superstition.” What was different about Jai is that while he was a thoroughly modern fellow who dressed like a preppie in Gap work shirts, chinos, and kelties by Cole Haan—or, this evening, in a white silk Bijan tux that had cost
somebody three or four grand—he truly believed in the wisdom of the culture that had raised him.
Which was why he’d submitted to the apparent lunacy of an arranged marriage, I suppose; though I was beginning to think, gazing at Vidya, that his submission had the lunacy of genius.
Several times over dinner, I tried to get him to talk about the book. He wouldn’t. In this way he was your typical Eastern trader. You couldn’t just pay him and walk off with the goods; that would have been too simple and insulting. Instead, you had to sip endless cups of steaming chai, chatting about everything under the sun but the one thing you were interested in before you could begin to get down to business.
When I pressed him on it, Jai demurred. “You don’t really want to talk shop tonight, do you, Xan?”
“Shop? We’re speaking about what could be one of the more significant archeological discoveries to come out of England in years.”
“Oh, it’s that, all right!”
I looked at him, at once heartened and maddened. “Can’t you at least give me a hint?”
But Jai was as indifferent to my desire as the Lord Buddha was to his own. He only smiled graciously and shook his head.
“When?”
“Later. Now I have guests.” And he returned to his soup and Beaujolais.
With the appearance of the duckling, brilliantly spiced with ginger and soy, the discussion moved to other ancient traditions such as the svayamvara, in which suitors vie for the princess bride’s hand. Everyone agreed it was “gender-empowering.”
“And then there’s human sacrifice,” I said, unable to resist lobbing a verbal grenade.
“Well,” Vidya said, “and what’s wrong with that?”
There was a dumbfounded silence, in the midst of which I raised my eyes. “You can’t be serious, Miss Vidya,” I said.