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The Red Sari: A Novel

Page 6

by Javier Moro


  But it was exhausting to live always against herself, questioning the attraction that filled her with hope and, a moment later, with doubts and fears. Tired of those ups and downs that took her from euphoria to melancholy, one day she stopped struggling and threw herself into his arms, while the music of Gerry Mulligan was still ringing in her ears from the inside of a bar on busy Sydney Street.

  5

  With Rajiv, life took on another tone, another flavour. Boating down the river behind the colleges in a punt that he piloted like a real gondolier, the views from the top of St Mary’s Church they so enjoyed, or sitting on the grass eating a sandwich, the smell of the parks after the rain … The most harmless things took on unexpected aspects. One night they went to Les Fleurs du Mal to listen to live music and dance the twist, the rhythm that was all the rage at the time and which Sonia danced very well. Suddenly Cambridge was the most romantic city in the world, and she no longer wanted to be anywhere else so she could enjoy the here and now. A present that consisted of seeing each other every day, going to each other’s house by bike, going on a picnic, making plans for the weekend… Rajiv was very fond of photography and soon he, his Minox camera and Sonia made an inseparable trio: he had found his perfect Muse and did not stop taking photos of her. Their romance reached such a level of intensity that the owner of the Varsity, Charles Antoni, said he had never seen “a couple so much in love … like out of a novel.”

  The here and now also consisted of driving in the Volkswagen Beetle that Rajiv had ended up buying from his friend for a few pounds. They drove all over the English countryside, visited London and enjoyed a freedom that at the time seemed endless. When the windscreen broke, they continued to use the car, but wrapped themselves up in blankets.

  Rajiv lived just like any other English student, working in his holidays to get some extra money. He had been an ice cream vendor, another year he had worked picking fruit, loading lorries or taking the night shift in a bakery. “Cambridge gave me a view of the world that I would never have seen if I had stayed in India,” Rajiv would recall later. In Sonia he found the perfect ally. She was against any raucousness or extravagance and only aspired to what she had already known: a quiet, balanced life with no shocks or scares. If Sonia perceived the vast difference that separated her from him, she also saw all the things they had in common. They were both shy by nature and never sought to be the centre of any kind of attention. They were not attracted by either the sweetness of success or fame, but rather the opposite, those were things that it was better to flee from. “They were not interested in the outside world or life in high society … They valued privacy above all,” Christian would say. They both had a very similar view of family life, perhaps because in their respective cultures the family is the highest value. Rajiv lacked any kind of political ambition; he liked technical things and manual activities. He confessed to Sonia that if he had made the effort to get into Trinity College, it had only been to please his grandfather, who had studied there and who had the dream that one of his grandchildren might follow in his footsteps. But now Nehru was dead, Rajiv was seriously thinking of leaving Trinity College and following his true vocation, as a pilot. He still did not know how to tell his mother.

  What he did manage to tell Indira in a letter dated March, 1965, a month and a half after they were introduced at the Varsity, is that he had met Sonia: “… You’re always asking me about the girls I meet and if there is one that attracts me specially. Well now I can tell you that I have met a very special girl. I still haven’t asked her, but she’s the girl I want to marry.” In her reply, his mother reminded him that the first girl one meets is not necessarily the most suitable one. She wanted to moderate her son’s passion. After all, he was only twenty. But in his next letter, Rajiv confessed, “I am sure I am in love with her. I know she’s the first girl I’ve been out with, but how can you know if you’re going to meet a better one?” By return post, Indira informed him that she had just accepted her first official position. She had done it a little unwillingly, but now it was done: she was Information Minister of the government of India. As such, she intended to make an official visit to London at the end of the year and she would like to take advantage of the opportunity to meet the young lady. Sonia’s stomach went into knots when she heard the news. As for telling her family, she was totally unable to get her courage together. She could not even imagine what her father’s reaction would be …

  But the news of Indira’s arrival made her forget the present for the moment. She suddenly glimpsed dark clouds on the horizon of her happiness. Her fears came back and she asked herself if there was any future for their romance. It was too good to last. She no longer doubted her own feelings, quite the opposite, she was crazy about Rajiv, she had never known ecstasy like this, but she felt that the huge difference between their origins would end up taking its toll on the relationship, and could perhaps ruin it completely. The little she knew about India she had learned from a friend who had described it as an immense, faraway country full of snake charmers and elephants, paralyzed by poverty and backwardness. A country that lacked even the most basic comforts, a country castigated by an implacable climate; a dirty country where cows wandered at will and were more respected than the members of the lower castes, definitely a difficult and exciting country … for an anthropologist or a yogi, but not for a girl who aimed to work for an international institution and wanted to have a trouble-free family life. Where did Rajiv fit into that picture? The Nehrus, that friend who was not exactly up to date had explained, were of aristocratic origin, from Kashmir. Somehow they dominated the society of their country and up to a point they had been controlling world politics… Beside them, what were the Mainos? thought Sonia. Just paesani, she told herself. What could the daughter of a small-time provincial Italian builder bring to Rajiv? She was sure that Rajiv’s mother would be asking herself the same question, and that made her feel very uneasy. Sonia was aware that their families “could not be more different”, according to her own words. Neither could she imagine herself telling her father that she had fallen in love with a dark-skinned man, who, furthermore, was Indian and on top of that professed, at least officially, the Hindu religion. No, that was a pill that good Stefano Maino was not going to swallow so easily, however much the grandfather had been a prime minister.

  Her introverted character prevented her from sharing her fears with Rajiv. She did not want to destroy their happiness, which might be as fragile as the finest crystal. With him she was sweetness full of reserve and the looks she gave him were full of questions. He was Indian, but in his gestures and way of speaking, she saw an Englishman. He was distinguished and at the same time he behaved in an amazingly simple manner. Actually, Sonia experienced a strange and definitive change that led her to total, blind acceptance of what could happen to her later in life because of Rajiv, or thanks to him. She felt that in the distant frontiers of her being, everything had been fixed by destiny beforehand, even before she was born.

  One weekend Sonia met Sanjay, Rajiv’s only brother and two years his junior. He was taking a training course at Rolls-Royce in Crewe, three hours away, and went to Cambridge from time to time to have some fun. He was very handsome, like his brother, but with a different kind of attractiveness. Sanjay had an oval face, thicker and more sensual lips and an incipient receding hairline. Just like his brother, he had impeccable manners and spoke in a soft tone of voice with a perfect British accent. Both were frugal in their habits. Sanjay did not eat much, but he talked a lot about politics and he loved parties. Rajiv did not like smoking or drinking and he was not in the least interested in politics—actually he rejected that world and preferred a quiet dinner with friends to a noisy party. Sanjay was colder than his elder brother, and did not project that feeling of quiet warmth, of a kind person who made Sonia feel so safe. And their way of looking at you was different. Rajiv did it as though he was caressing you with his almond eyes. His brother, on the other hand, had a distant, somewhat inso
lent look. You could tell he was very proud of being who he was, completely unlike his brother.

  It was a marvellous year, perhaps the happiest of their lives, if by happiness you mean the almost total absence of worries and problems. But the academic year was coming to an end, and the summer holidays were going to interrupt the Cambridge idyll.

  In July 1965, Rajiv and Sonia were apart for the first time. Sonia went back to Italy. She had arrived in England a few months earlier as a young girl, and now she was going home as a woman, with the firm idea of making her life with Rajiv. She did not know how or when, but she was determined. It was a happy farewell, but also an upsetting one at the same time because although they were convinced they would see each other again, Sonia was afraid of her parents’ reaction. The future was scattered with questions.

  It filled her with satisfaction to realize how much her English had improved when she found jobs as an interpreter in the Turin trade fairs. What a difference, what fluency … At least signor Maino had not wasted his money. That was good news for her parents. The other news, the important news, she could not find a way to put into words. However much she practiced saying it in her head, it did not come out right. “I want to tell you that I’m in love with a boy … No, not like that, that’s ridiculous!” she told herself, before trying it another way: “I have met someone very special and I want to marry him… How am I going to tell them that?” she told herself again in desperation. When the moment came to face up to it, she was petrified. “Although we were a very united family,” Sonia would write later, “they were very conventional, especially my father who was an old-fashioned patriarch. In a family like that, contact between boys and girls was strictly supervised and controlled.”

  Rajiv did not understand Sonia’s reticence when it came to talking to her parents. She tried to explain it to him: How can I suddenly tell them I have been having a passionate love affair all these months without having said a word to them? She did not know how to break the ice. “She doesn’t seem able to tell them,” Rajiv wrote to his mother. “I can’t understand it. It must be something very peculiar. She only does what her father tells her.” Of course Rajiv did not know Stefano Maino, he had never seen his reddened face or his rough highlander features and he had never heard his hoarse voice or his domineering tone when something displeased him.

  “It took me a long time to get the courage together to talk to my parents about my feelings for a boy who, for them, was not only a stranger but a foreigner as well.” The occasion arose after the wedding of Pier Luigi, the owner of the Via Frejus bar. Pier Luigi, who had watched her growing up, had wanted her to be the witness at his wedding. It was the great event that summer in the neighbourhood. A party with music, lots of drink in the bar, which was overflowing with people, as many as at the annual event that gathered all the neighbours like a ritual to watch the San Remo Festival on television.

  “I’m in love, I love him,” she told them after explaining who the boy was and how they had met.

  “How old do you say he is?”

  “Twenty …”

  “He’s too young,” said her mother.

  “And on top of that he’s from far away!” added her father.

  Just as she had imagined, they showed not the slightest enthusiasm. They reacted with total disdain, as though their daughter had been suffering from a passing attack of madness. There was nothing in that relationship to please them: the boy was barely two years older than Sonia, he was a foreigner, and he was not English or French, but from a country that only appeared in the news because of disasters; he was a terrone, as those from the north of Italy call immigrants from the south, with the added fact that he was not even Italian. And he had another important defect: he was not Catholic. In their opinion, Sonia had drowned her fears about feeling lonely in a foreign country for the first time by falling into the arms of the first comer.

  “She’ll soon get over it …”

  But she did not get over it. Even the postman joked with the family because now he was bringing three letters a day, all with the stamp from England, and all for Sonia. The “little girl” spent many long hours in her room, replying to the voluminous correspondence, or anxiously waiting for a long-distance phone call. Then there were her sisters, who understood that Sonia was really in love. The “it’ll soon pass” of their parents gave way to the “what if it’s really serious?” of Anushka and Nadia. The only thing that softened the mother’s position was that the boy was “from a good family”. At least it had done some good to send her to the most expensive school in Cambridge! That he was Nehru’s grandson, that his mother Indira was in the government, left Stefano cold. But her sisters already saw themselves parading on the back of an elephant in the gardens of some Indian palace. For them, the story had something of a fairy tale about it: a prince of the East had fallen in love with their sister… It was exciting.

  The big argument was over her return to Cambridge. Her father did not want her to go back. According to him she already knew enough English. What he really wanted was to nip his daughter’s romance in the bud. But Sonia was determined to take the exam, the Proficiency in English, and for that she needed another year. As usual, Paola’s influence was decisive. She and her husband knew perfectly well that their daughter wanted to go back because she was in love, but Paola insisted on the importance of her obtaining a qualification. Sonia held firm. She told them that if they would not help her, she was prepared to do what many girls who were there studying English did: she would look for a job and would become independent. Nobody likes standing up to their parents, and Sonia less than most, because it did not go with her docile character. But love was stronger.

  Her parents finally gave way, thinking that opposing their daughter’s romance would only make things worse. Better for her to go back to England, they thought. At least she would come home with a qualification. They were sure that the affair, which they saw as an eccentricity, would not survive the passing of time… The only thing they could do was to advise her: be careful what you’re getting into, don’t rush into things.

  Sonia was so respectful of family tradition, and so disliked confrontation, that she promised to keep them informed of everything. So, once back in Cambridge, and in view of the imminent arrival of Indira, who had shown a desire to meet her, she thought it best for her parents to know. Rajiv, who had been wanting to get in touch with the Mainos, took advantage of the occasion to send them a letter asking permission for the meeting between their daughter and Indira Gandhi to take place. An extremely formal and very respectful letter which left the Mainos puzzled, but what could they do? Refuse? Stefano would not have hesitated for a second, but his wife convinced him to give his permission.

  6

  It was winter and the road gleamed from the rain. They were arriving in the City in Rajiv’s battered old Volkswagen when Sonia had a panic attack. Suddenly the prospect of attending a reception at the Indian Embassy and meeting her boyfriend’s mother in surroundings she did not know terrified her and made her freeze. “What am I going to do there?” she suddenly asked herself. A flood of questions, some serious, others trivial, swirled inside her head. “How should I address her? Will I be suitably dressed? What must I say to her? What if she looks down on me? What if she’s aggressive towards me?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” Rajiv kept telling her.

  Suddenly, Sonia’s world seemed to be coming down about her ears. It seemed to her that the months spent in Rajiv’s company had all been a dream that was about to fall apart. She thought she was not ready to meet his mother. Furthermore, that meeting meant becoming even more involved, and how could she do that if her own parents had been so negative about her romance?

  “But they are aware of it, your father has given permission … Are you pulling out now?”

  Rajiv did not understand at all. Sonia was frightened. She thought perhaps her father was right and the moment had come to put the brakes on, to cool things and take a step back �
��

  “Sonia, we’ve arranged this, they’re expecting us …”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not going. I can’t.”

  Sonia was flustered and unable to keep control of the situation. Rajiv’s efforts to calm her down did not work, so he had to call his mother and invent an excuse to cancel the meeting.

  They put it off for a few days later, when Sonia had calmed down. This time she promised herself she would behave properly, but it was still a difficult thing to do. Her legs shook when she went up the steps of the Indian Ambassador’s residence where Indira and her best friend Pupul Jayakar, who had helped her organize the tribute to Nehru, were staying. The two of them were still worked up because the day before, after a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and that of other beat generation poets, they had ended up at one in the morning in a Spanish restaurant eating tapas and watching the flamenco dancing. On their return, they had found the Ambassador extremely worried; he was about to call the police because he thought something had happened to them.

  Indira received them in her room, smelling slightly of incense. Sonia found herself facing a fragile-looking woman dressed in an elegant silk sari. In those dark, almond-shaped eyes she saw Rajiv’s. Her hair, pulled back in a bun, left a thick lock of white hair visible over her forehead, in spite of her being only 48 years old. That lock of hair, which would become a sign of her identity, conferred some considerable distinction on her. She had a charming smile, delicate manners and a prominent nose that she tried to hide with makeup under her eyes to lessen the shadows. Actually, according to what she had confessed to her friend Pupul, what she would really have liked to do was to have an operation on that nose.

 

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