We that are young

by Preti Taneja

  She reaches out and places her hand on the woman’s shoulder. The cheap print fabric is rough against her palm, the bones sharp beneath. She wants to kiss the wavering line parting this woman’s hair. She stares down at her own hand: her dated, round cut, diamond engagement ring winks back at her. Nanu would never touch a servant’s wife. And neither would Bapuji, Ranjit Uncle, Kritik Sahib, Jeet, Surendra, Bubu, Radha, Jivan – only Sita would do this. What will become of her now?

  The woman tenses but does not turn. The song stops.

  The man on the bed sighs.

  Gargi becomes aware again of the smells of blood on her kurta, the weight of herself. Sweat drying. She turns away from the bed and walks from the room, into the evening light. The children have abandoned their game and vanished. She crosses the pine grove and the road. She begins the long trek back. The Farm is waiting: her place.

  Keep walking, Gargi, just keep walking.

  No more waiting for Sita. No more running after Daddy. No time to monitor Nanu, or cry for dead peacocks. Kings and courtiers once ate them stuffed with rice or baked in pies. If that is what her father wants, that is what he should get. What would happen if she took the bad-luck feathers into the kitchens, and served Peacock Pie for his dinner?

  She reaches a circle imprinted on the grass. A bare, bald patch where Sita’s engagement canopy has been taken down, every marigold and ribbon removed. She steps into it. One day songs will be written about what Sita sacrificed, from the raw concrete to the built hotels, yes, but also every tiny stitched diamond within a diamond, each chashm-e-Bulbul, every precious strand of toosh. The shawls business that was their mother’s own offering when she married Bapuji, and which Bapuji wanted to give to Sita, in her own right, her own name.

  Now, from this scarred place she will announce that this land and all the land beyond it – all the people who work on it, everyone who is invested in it – everything belongs to Gargi and Radha. They will not sign Bapuji’s plan to divide. They will work together to make the Company sing. They will found a trust. Perhaps build a small town, its programmes to educate girl children will birth poets, scholars, journalists better than Nina, editors, future songmakers, and translators of stories, in every language there is. She will offer her classes in Malayalam and Kannada, Gujurati and Punjabi – and back again, and back again and again – so that every woman can talk to the other without division of borders or minds. Tamil to Telugu, no one will be silenced.

  Thank you, thank you, she thinks, and feels she is a girl again, six-years-old. Dressed in her precious hand loomed Kashmiri salwar kameez, brought back from Srinagar by her Mama. How she had loved those loose pyjama, that peasant-girl kurta. It was black velvet, with gold work on the bib. It had a yellow dupatta to tie around her head, fringed like the fortune-tellers in the lobbies of the Company hotels. The kurta was cut on the bias, it swung around her body when she wore it, and she had danced the Rouf dance dressed in that, the steps learned from her very first Lottie, a woman she remembers for her agility and aged skin, wrinkled, beautiful like an elephant’s around the eye. She came with Gargi’s mother from Srinagar when she was a bride. She died when Gargi was six.

  Standing in the circle, Gargi crosses her arms over her body, hands held out either side, imagining Radha’s hands taking hers, then another Gargi, another Radha, a Sita, a Nina, and the wife of the G.3.5. They step forward and back, a chain of paper dolls, welcoming the seasons as they come. Gargi steps the dance until she is out of breath, her hair in tangles, dirt encrusted on her skin. Then she bows, and carries on marching, marching, marching, unseeing of the garden wale and pool boys, their sideways glancing eyes.

  She cannot go straight into the house. Instead, she stops in the spa behind the pool and orders a jug of nimboo pani, squeezed from Farm lemons. Glass after glass, she drinks the bittersweet juice until she has finished it. Then orders another jug, this time with vodka, made strong. She sheds her ruined clothes, wraps herself in a robe. Drinking time in the steam room, where every part of her body can now weep in peace.

  Lying on the massage table she sees herself reflected in the mirrored ceiling – her body like a mud flat – riddled with pale dried rivulets of stretch marks; the earth photographed from the air. The massage woman enters. She holds a towel and looks away as Gargi turns onto her back. Her hands begin to press and loose knots like nails in her spine. When the masseuse asks her to turns over again, a sound between a moan and sigh comes from Gargi’s lips.

  —Hurting you Madam? says the masseuse.

  The woman is large, she leans over, her belly rests on Gargi’s. There is no sound in the room except grunting effort. Hands press the day through Gargi’s muscles, they rub the feeling of dead birds, the beaten man from her skin. Gargi hears the servant woman’s lullaby, she thinks about her own marriage. The tender knot of what it means to be a wife. She lies on the massage table, understanding she was bartered before she could value herself. Yet Surendra has never been bad to her or raised his voice; he rarely shows any interest at all. She has never told him what she wants or does not want. She wants the whole world, except one thing. One, natural thing.

  This is Gargi’s secret, released from her body by Sita’s absence, by the cradling of a dead bird in her arms. By a beaten man, lulled to sleep in his wife’s song.

  Gargi Devraj Grover does not want to bear children. She will not. She realised this promise after her wedding night. Has shared it only with Radha, who once, before she herself got married, begged to know what a blowjob was (Gargi couldn’t say), what squirting was (Gargi couldn’t say), why Bapuji’s friends gesticulated around her, brushing her here, or there (because men’s arms are so much longer than women’s they have to, an answer that Radha had laughed at until she cried, cried – and then said, no, it’s because they can). Finally, she wanted to know why Nanu kept saying that sex was a duty of women after marriage, when Radha wanted it to be fun.

  —Sex is for making babies. Gargi had said. You have it, and them. They can inherit this earth. I don’t want a single one.

  In the quiet room, the masseuses’ hands press down on Gargi, as if to test her womb for truth.

  She goes quietly back to the house. The pool lights are off, no music comes from the house or grounds. The night is warm; its deep gloom casts her into relief – a walking white towel robe and slippers – she cannot see her own skin. She goes to her study, she spends some time. Working on the Srinagar staffing plans. She texts Jivan a hello-what’s-up (no reply). She calls Radha and talks only about the hotel opening, not about peacocks, or Sita’s scrawled protest, or any of it. Then she orders one last person to come to her.

  Hair unbound, she sits facing herself in the mirror. The hairdresser stands behind her. He has tiny silver scissors in his ear lobes, a bandana round his head; he stands with the rope weight of her plait in his hand as if he is about to jump ship and use it as his swing.

  —Cut it, she says. Short all over my head.

  —No, Gargi Madam, he says. It will not look nice. I will do a Rachel. Just below your shoulders, with bangs. Very flirty-pretty-modern. Yes, I’ll do that.

  He begins by unwinding the plait, washing the hair. Then cutting one handful. She tells him,

  —Shorter. Shorter.

  He does it in lines. Cutting, cutting, then snipping, then shaving her neck. The snarls of hair turn the floor around them into a sea of black.

  When he is gone, she unties her robe and stretches in front of her mirrors. Five of her gaze back. She raises her arms. Her breasts are heavy. Her nipples seem bigger, more pointed and full, trying to peek upwards at her hair. She feels so light: if she lept into the air, it would hold her, suspended before she came down. All creatures rush to their destruction, like snowflakes on the breeze. She bends her elbows behind her head. There is a soft part on her neck that she has never felt before.

  For the first time in her life, she goes naked to bed. Surendra never comes to her. So, in the night, if her hands reach up to stroke
her hair, to cup her full breast and pinch at her nipples; or travel downwards below her belly to press a finger between her lips, there is no one to see, no one to know, or tell. She herself might not be aware, if, in the hot night, she spreads across the bed on her back, arms and legs wide open. Arching up: one of her hands spans the flesh below her navel, the other underneath her back, tracing down and down, meeting the fingers of her other hand inside the delicate parts of herself. No word in her language. For delicate bone. For sliding, for wetness, front and back she caresses, her fingers patter on her insides —Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, she whispers, for the first time summoning a flood.

  She bears down. Into her own hands, then up, her cheeks an offering to the air, mouth gasping, sucking on the night. She sees herself, as if from the vantage point of the camera that scans her dressing room, crawling there on all fours, mounting the chaise longue, knees splayed, fingers inside, eyes, closed, head back, ass to the camera, fingers inside, from both sides, spread open, she does it on the bed, kneels, nipples, belly, hanging down, head full of mirrors, the eye of the camera, the wire to the screens; Jivan’s face, watching, Jivan, no one else, ever, watching until he must come. Heat rises, her own voice fills her, repeating his name, only hearing herself, and there is the core of the heat, there, through the folds and layers; pure, she hears her own voice whisper,

  —Gargi, Gargi, Gargi—

  She obeys. She is the only one there to hear her wish, or grant that it come true.

  §

  I WANT, I WANT, I want to go hunting. Legs astride a horse, we shall ride. A shooting party. Shh, don’t tell I said that. Sita wouldn’t like it, I know. She has got to learn though, that guns protect. Straddling time, I have seen this thing.

  Sita was always the quiet one, so good at listening. But when we got to this house, she began talking, talking, talking and I, her father, could not make her stop. She was full of sentiments that I cannot abide. Desire, charity, her sisters. Instead of focusing on her country, she wants to think about herself in the world. She accused me of pollution. Me! She said that for every centimetre the sea levels rise by, one million species of plant are lost. So Gargi and I have a plan.

  —Really, I said, do tell.

  Sita smiled as she does when she wants to say something she thinks that I must hear. Her eyes, green and blue and ringed with a smudged brown line, were wild and wide.

  —Sita, I said, my hands on her pretty little face. Have you ever lied to me?

  She did not lower her eyes or hang her head. Straight to my eyes, I think she said,

  —Gargi and I went together to the Valley of Flowers. Bhyundar, high in the Western Himalayas, where Lord Hanuman found the herbs that brought Lakshman back from the edge of death. Gargi and I sat in the back of the landrover and ate kathi rolls. We drank tea from a flask. Gargi always thinks of everything, she even brought brownies she baked herself. She knows I love to taste. Eating her food is like being warmed by the new summer sun.

  —Why are you telling me this, Sita? I said. Don’t say your sister’s name.

  And her reply was cryptic I remember, perhaps she said,

  —But Papa, I want to start an institute to study this warming effect and save our precious species from destruction. I could live there in the Valley, while it gets established. Gargi said she would support it, if you would.

  Over by the door, the young manservant cleared his throat. I looked at him and together we shared our sense of wonder at the female imagination. Gargi and Sita wanted my money and my blessings so Sita could live in the middle of nowhere and tend plants!

  This was Gargi’s way of stealing her from my sight. Of preventing Sita from managing my line and my legacy, of fulfilling her function, her destiny as it has always been written. I will not allow Gargi to win.

  Then I asked, as gently as I could,

  —Sita, in all of this time, where have you been?

  Smiling as if tasting some memory of love, she confessed that she went to Sri Lanka, alone. Without me, or anyone she knew, she went about with monkeys and insects, the only girl of the group. I heard the manservant suck in his breath, and both of us waited for her answer. I can tell you it, since she is not here.

  —Father (I think she said, or maybe she said Pa), in Sri Lanka, the forests chatter with monkeys, and strange flora and fauna bloom. Spiders make webs that span the gap between trees. I stepped from the loving circle of my family to learn how to save creatures and their world from human destruction. To me this seemed the highest calling. Can you understand that? All we can breathe is air.

  —I know why you really went: to follow that boy who enslaved you.

  —No (I think she said, lying again). Not at all. It was my desire to go there alone, to recapture that love for the forest that he forced me to abdicate. I wandered, seeking rare plants. I wore my vest and shorts, and went sandy-footed on the beach. My body lithe and gold, my hair wild, I swam in the warm waters of the deep blue ocean, wearing a two-piece tied with no more than string. Barely covering my breasts and cunt, I was able to live as I please. But, though it was paradise, I missed you too much. After a while, all I wanted was to come home.

  As she spoke I writhed in her lap, waiting for her to notice how her words disgusted me. I asked her with my eyes to stop talking, to allow me the purity of silence. She would not listen. She never listened. But she is not the only storyteller here. I taught her everything she knows, after all, didn’t I pay for her to be educated? Thus I am the source. Of her. Knowledge. Am I not? I got up, and stood behind her in this dusty room and I put my hands lovingly about her neck. The manservant started from his post by the door, but did not intervene.

  —Of course you cannot stay alone in Uttarakhand, or go gallivanting in Sri Lanka, I said. Your roots are here. For why else are we building a new hotel? Only in such a way can we balance the books. You were born in 1989, on the cusp of civil war. A year later your mother was dead, pulled from this house into the street. Who knows what she did next? Spread and begged. Reports vary. Some said she promised her body in exchange for her life. Some said she offered money and the house. Some said they took what they wanted from her and left her to die. I heard they threw the bodies of her people and all those who died into the Jhelum. I heard that some got eaten. Even the elite of this town, the ruling class! That such a boundary could be breached is inconceivable to me. Now their houses are broken, their stories are tindersticks, rubbing against each other. That is the way of this world. So it keeps turning. The lesson is: keep your wives, your daughters close. Make return with interest.

  And Sita said, I recall, as if talking to the birds,

  —Must generation after generation be punished for history’s crimes? This earth does not belong to us.

  She moved away from me, her body so lithe, she could have been an actress in another life.

  And, O how wrong she is. It is this territory, here, which should matter most to anyone of our blood. This is not about the women. In times of war, land endures and lays claim to us. It is our duty to obey.

  The manservant was watching her from the door: I signalled to him to come over.

  —Come here, I said. Come help me with this daughter, so I can make you both understand. I gripped Sita’s arm, and held her.

  —Papa, she said, and this rings clear in my mind. I want to get out of this house, this state. Let me go.

  ii

  The only thing Gargi keeps is the Mughal desk. The whisky bar is dismantled, the armchair exiled, the antique guns discharged and the hunting heads sent to storage on the Farm. The photographs of Bapuji at all ages, which line the wall behind the desk – a ten-year-old boy in knee length shorts and a shirt standing with Pandit Nehru on the steps of the Napurthala Palace, Nanu in the background in Jackie-O dark glasses and a heavy bordered sari; as a young man shaking hands with Mrs Thatcher; then Indira Gandhi at Rashtrapati Bhavan, smiling with one of the Georges Bush; and most recently, in a fine silk kurta with Sita on his arm, at the Durbar Restaura
nt in the Company Delhi hotel for the state visit of the Chinese Prime Minister. Gargi banishes all of them. Has them remounted and rehung in a discreet area of the lobby marked with a short red carpet and a velvet rope, just to the left of the revolving doors. Everyone has told her it looks totally awesome, too good, just beautiful, guarded by a selection she has made herself, of winter-flowering cacti.

  She replaces Bapuji’s photographs with an Indian city on fire. A print taken from above, a nightscape of deep blues and blacks. Three fingers of flame captured racing through urban streets – up, up, into the sky. Yes, Gargi has acquired her first Dayanita Singh, an artist whose work in light she has followed for years, and whose other photographs are of an old hijra called Mona, reclining on a day bed, eyes burdened with the blessing of seeing both sides. She could fall into this image of the city. It would be like becoming. Where fear and pain are exhilarating, and sorrows dissolve in flight. The streets endlessly renew.

  She has invested in art, on Uppal’s advising (this on trend, this show in London, all the arty-parties love this one’s work these days). Never has she bought for herself, until now. She thinks that the image is of Mumbai. She can almost make out the Company hotel in the far, far away. My hotel, she tells herself. My Company. Me.

  She allows herself to swivel in her chair. Faces the inside wall of the office, made completely of glass – an atrium which, when she was first married and new to this building, she filled with trees and flowers from all of the gardens of India and Arabia. The species number over three hundred, she had learned them all for college admittance tests: she got into St Stephens, though she was married before she could attend. A syzigium cumini presses its canopy close to her window – she knows it from her Trees of Delhi – ‘a beautiful, large jamun tree, more or less evergreen. Bark is a pale brown, flaky and rough, especially on the lower trunk. Leaves with numerous secondary veins, running parallel and united with a marginal vein. Flowers in dense clusters… white to creamish. Fruit is a round or oblong berry, deep purple. Sweet or tart to the tongue. It is used in folk medicines for diabetes, dysentery and diseases of spleen.’ Spleen, a word she associates with laughter and bursting. This goes together so naturally with the Latin name for the tree, it pleases her. The top of the atrium is open to the sky – and bright green parrots swoosh in, swoosh out. Sometimes a stray pigeon comes and sits on a branch, head cocked towards the glass with a beady eye. She runs her hand up and through her short hair. After ten days, the softness of her neck still surprises her.