To take their minds off Karan, they went outdoors. Priti wanted to ride a Victoria, and Arjun hailed one on Cuffe Parade. As soon as they got in, Priti’s face flushed with excitement. She felt gay and exultant.
‘Let me drive, Arjun. I want to go sit up with the driver.’
‘Please, Priti.’
‘Whoa driver!’ she shouted. ‘Wait. I’m coming up beside you.’
Arjun held her by the arm to stop her from falling. The carriage sped onward. Her forehead wrinkled slightly as she tried to see better ahead of her.
‘Ah,’ she said as she sat back and relaxed on his arm. Her head came close to his, and he recalled for an instant the warmth of her body under her sari. The city looked entrancing in the monsoon twilight. A gentle wind from the sea grazed their cheeks. They heard the wail of a siren as they went past Sassoon Dock. From the Gateway the sea looked unusually blue, unlike the grey that they had got used to.
They drove past Walkeshwar and up Malabar Hill to Hanging Gardens, where they got off to walk. After some time, they sat down on a bench. A traffic policeman in familiar blue and yellow walked passed wearily on his way home. Other passing faces had a shiny, blurry quality, as they hurried by.
‘Arjun, tell me about your father?’ said Priti.
‘What?’
‘I mean what is he like?’
‘What does one say about a father?’
‘I remember him vaguely from Simla. He is a good man, isn’t he?’
Arjun nodded.
‘Very quiet?’
Arjun nodded.
‘Tell me about his religion. It is true that the guru gave you your name?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that you were the guru’s cow in an earlier birth?’
‘If you want to believe that sort of thing.’
‘I do. I really do. And I want to meet your father and his guru.’
On an impulse they decided to go out of Bombay. They both felt that they needed a change, and they agreed to visit Karla caves in the Western ghats. They met at Victoria Terminus early the next morning. She wore a cotton sari. In spite of her plain clothes, he thought that she stood out in the crowded station. She looked younger and happier, like a schoolgirl. In a plastic bag she carried their picnic lunch.
The Poona train was not crowded. They were in a carefree mood, eager to be satisfied by the smallest pleasures. The very names of the suburban train stops echoed the poetry of their journey: Byculla, Dadar, Sion, Kurla, Ghatkopar, Thana, Kalyan. Soon they were out of the city and the countryside was like a carpet of green. It drizzled lightly and Arjun stuck his face out to feel the rain falling on it. They alighted at Khandala and took a tonga. Arjun felt moved as they walked up the hill to the two-thousand-year-old caves. He read to her from a guide book about how Buddhist monks used to live in these rock-cut monasteries. Priti was not much interested in history, but she seemed delighted by the outing. Arjun continued to read aloud about the master rock-cutters who had made the caves in the first century BC.
As they entered the caves, they suddenly became quiet. They stood gazing reverently at the great stupa in the large vaulted prayer hall. They walked around the stupa several times, but they found themselves slowly pulled towards the colossal free-standing pillars surmounted by lion insignia. Each pillar was fifty feet high and stood on a wide cylinder of rock with a group of stone lions supporting a large wheel. Behind the lion columns was a vestibule separated by a rock-cut screen. They passed through a horseshoe-shaped archway and approached the tiers of carvings in rock. Below the railings were panels filled with figures in relief, and, alongside, a series of life-sized elephants, each carved in relief. They walked out of the central hall through doorways, into square cells, which were used as apartments by the monks. There were numerous cells and the cliff side was honey-combed with them, like the nesting burrows of birds.
They sat quietly in one of the cells, overlooking the plain, and Arjun’s mind was filled with the beauty of the colonnade, the lion insignia, and the wonderful carvings. He thought about the rustle of monks’ feet in procession, thousands of years ago, echoing through the colonnade of the prayer-hall. And he was filled with admiration for these men who, urged by their devotion to the Great Buddha, conjured such a majestic place of worship out of the bare hillside.
Arjun looked at Priti and wondered at her lack of enthusiasm. She seemed to be lost in her own world. She did not look bored, merely detached. Arjun felt excluded and hurt. They had their picnic quietly on the hillside. Down below, on the other side of the hill, they spotted a lake.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ he said.
‘If you wish,’ she replied.
Her indifferent tone suggested to Arjun that she had lost interest in everything. What had happened, he wondered. Was she looking for something else? He had noticed this before, several weeks ago, and it made him uneasy. Perhaps, he thought, that she had experienced everything at too early an age. What was she really after, he asked himself.
At the landing on the lake, Arjun negotiated with a fisherman. He unfastened the rope and they got into the smelly, dilapidated fishing boat. He pushed an oar against the stone landing and the boat gently glided off. The calm surface of the water reflected the green hills. As the ripples rose through the brilliant surface, Pri-ti’s mood visibly changed. She said that she felt liberated by the thought that this day, this moment would never return and that something was slipping away irrevocably.
‘Shall we go to the other end?’ he asked.
‘What’s at the other end?’ she said.
‘Come on, let’s go look,’ he said and he rowed with vigour.
The late afternoon sun shone through the clouds. It was a peaceful, uneventful time of the day. There was only one other boat on the pond. They reached the other side and climbed up to a grassy clearing. They lay back on the grass to stare at the monsoon sky. The rough grass pricked their backs, making Priti feel uncomfortable. It gave Arjun, however, a pleasant sensation of a prickly pain that spread out in a fragmented way throughout his back. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw a heron sitting on the back of a buffalo at a distance. The bird’s supple, curved beak was silhouetted, stretched against the sky.
‘After the lion columns and the great stupa, the boat ride, and you here, it’s almost perfect. In all my life, I haven’t had many such days,’ said Arjun.
‘Are you speaking about happiness?’
‘I didn’t say anything about happiness.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. I’d be much too scared to talk as you do. I don’t have your courage.’
‘Look, Priti, what more do you want than a day like this? What are you after?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered wearily. With that, she gently rolled over on the grass. Lying on her stomach, she lifted her head and stared across the water.
‘Arjun,’ she whispered mournfully after a while, ‘last night I dreamt that I was dead. I lay still in the middle of an empty room with large windows. It was just before dawn, and outside the light was deep blue. A young man clung to my bed; his long, black hair fell on his shoulders, and his head drooped. I wanted to see his face, but I could only make out his graceful forehead. Instead of the smell of incense and sandalwood, the scent of ripened mangoes filled the room.’
There was a long silence. Arjun watched her intently. Her cotton sari inadequately disguised the roundness of her hips, which were surprisingly large for her slim figure. All at once he felt unsettled, his mind like the lake of clear water was suddenly clouded by a disturbance below the surface.
Soon they had to return because it began to drizzle. On the way back to the station it rained hard and the tonga got stuck in the mud, but they were well in time for the last train to Bombay. Priti took out a handkerchief and dried Arjun’s forehead and hair. A feeling of happiness coursed through him. It was as if the rain had washed away the tension between them.
As they dried themselves in the tiny waiting room a
t Khandala station, Arjun remembered their first encounter in Bombay at the Gymkhana. Despite knowing her intimately for many months, he was still shy, and looked away as she dried herself with a towel. She, however, felt at ease with him. The air inside got thicker and hotter, and Arjun opened a window. On the roof they could hear the rain beating down. The waiting room had a strangely uncozy atmosphere, but they were determined to make the best of it. Ar—jun ordered a pot of tea and some biscuits. From an overflowing gutter the water poured down in a steady stream onto the platform. It sounded like a waterfall in some faraway Himalayan village.
‘I suppose the people in the station think we’re married,’ said Arjun.
She laughed and he was happy to see her smiling face. On the roof the rain was still pattering down, but the force of the storm was over; only a trickle now issued from the gutter. Arjun sighed softly.
‘Look, Priti,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’ve never asked this before, but do you still love Karan?’
‘No, not anymore.’
6
Bauji felt that his time was coming. He had been sick in bed the whole week. It was an indefinable malady, its only symptom being a mild intestinal flu, which the doctors did not think serious. He could not eat. He quickly became weak and his interest in life waned. He began to feel that his cramped bedroom was suffocating; his suffering was aggravated by the humidity and the mustiness of the ill-dusted furniture as well as the medicinal odours emanating from the large number of bottles on the night table.
When Arjun arrived Bhabo was in tears. She complained that Bauji would not allow the windows to be opened, the room to be dusted, and he was in a terrible mood. As Arjun opened the shutters, a blinding light entered, reflected from the metallic sea. With the help of the servant Arjun moved a divan out to the shady veranda. Leaning on Arjun’s arm, Bauji dragged himself out and lay down on the divan. He put his head against the bolster so that he could look at the coconut and casurina trees. Gradually he felt better; it was the kind of feeling he had had when he sat in the Company Bagh after a particularly difficult day at the courts in Lyallpur. Bauji smiled at Arjun and took hold of his hand.
Arjun kept holding his hand and talked to him. He spoke easily and enthusiastically about his work; he explained the projects he was involved in. He commented on political developments; he told Bauji about a particularly savoury scandal that had just broken out in the state government. Bauji was grateful. But after a time, he ceased to listen. His mind drifted into the past and he began to make a general balance sheet of his life. To a man of the world, familiar with business and commerce, to think in terms of credits and debits came easily. He was naturally drawn to the credit side. There were some happy moments, such as the birth of his eldest son. That Big Uncle did not accomplish much did not matter, the original moment of triumph was real. He remembered a saying: he who conquers a country doesn’t get the same pleasure as a common man who sits in the sunshine watching his first-born suck his toe. Then there was the first awareness of success in the British-ruled establishment of Lyallpur in the early ‘20s. He had enjoyed the power and the prestige which had accompanied his early professional achievements. There were voluptuous moments just before Tara’s marriage, when Anees briefly entered his life; till today her memory, caught in the heavy scent of jasmine flower, could still make his thoughts wander along a decidedly erotic path—that this could happen when he was seventy-five and dying made him alternately blush and smile.
Ruminations on the balance sheet were temporarily suspended because a snake charmer had stopped beside the house, mistakenly thinking there were foreigners about, and had started playing his pipe. Arjun hastily went up to the gate and threw him some coins and waved him on in the more profitable direction of the five star hotels on the beach.
Arjun, yes, he was certainly on the credit side of the ledger. First it had been Karan; but not only had Karan not lived up to his potential, he had revealed a dark and alien nature, which Bauji had found abhorrent. Arjun, on the other hand, brought sunshine to his last days; it was a pleasure to watch him manoeuvre through life; the affection and sincerity of his character were heart-warming.
There were other credits too: to have seen his country win freedom from foreign rule during his lifetime; to have watched Nehru place the country on the right path of democracy, secularism and social justice. There were smaller and more intimate moments: the smell of the fragrance of the wet earth mingled with jasmine in the courtyard of the Lyallpur house after the Mashkiya had watered it; being shaved and massaged by the family barber while playing bridge with his friends in the men’s courtyard; glimpsing the first wondrous vision of the snow-tipped crests of the Himalayas on the rail car to Simla.
There were other little satisfactions which mattered only to him: the delight in wearing a new silk coat; the smell of a new leather chair; the desirous smile on a beautiful woman’s face; and the first realization that she found him attractive; a few moments of frenzied passion before the marvellous yet also ridiculous act of sex was over.
Slowly his brow clouded over as his conscience reminded him to look towards the other side of the ledger. For every credit there seemed to be a half-a-dozen liabilities. He was almost afraid to start enumerating the debits because he might lose control, plunging into depths from which it would take days to surface. Just as he was about to begin to bravely count the debits and embarrassments, Bhabo rescued him. She called out to say that lunch was ready. His train of thought was broken, and he amused himself with the thought that it was just as well to let the positive side of one’s life ‘hang out’.
He had felt this way for a fortnight or so, ever since he had become aware of a sensation akin to a pair of shears approaching the vital chord of his existence from afar, ready to snip it off at the end. This sensation was not linked to any physical discomfort. Nor was he afraid; it was merely disagreeable to a man used to celebrating life. Still, with his strong pride, he did not let this sensation diminish him. On the contrary he felt a secret recompense in being privy to a secret while everyone else around him was absorbed in his petty daily routine. He felt a sense of participating in high universal drama in which the truths of life and death were unfolding.
He was accustomed to consoling friends and relatives when they suffered the loss of someone close. He had become adept at repeating at countless mourning ceremonies, ‘Now, now my dear, we must remember that we all have to die some day.’ Today he suddenly felt the irony of that mundane statement. For it was now transformed to ‘I am dying’. The obvious had become real. As a sensitive man he felt the irony acutely, because observing the death of others had not prepared him in any way for his own. Each person has to face his own death alone, he realized. He wondered if this knowledge of his dying could have any meaning or significance. Could he, for example, live his life any differently, knowing that he did not have long to live? Could this anticipation of his own death make his last moments more real, more honest, and more free?
He had his whole family around him now, but no one seemed to sense this grand drama and mystery. Certainly not his own children. Not even Bhabo. They seemed trapped in the everyday world of small talk and mindless preoccupations. He tried not to feel sorry for them.
Sitting in the divan, Bauji looked out at the Arabian sea. The sea breeze blew familiarly through the casuarina and coconut trees. His legs were wrapped in a blanket. He could see several shapes sitting on the beach. The rounded waves came rolling towards him, and broke into rich white foam before they could reach him. He picked up some sand in his hand and let it sift through his closed fingers. It sent a sensuous quiver through his body. Again he felt the shears approaching.
In the corner of the beach house was a ragged looking banyan tree, which had never quite had a chance. Beside it was a stone lamp that Bhabo was now lighting. The oil wick burned feebly as she performed the sandhya, and the evening slowly welcomed the night. The evening star was low against the horizon, and Bauji felt he could almost
reach up and touch it.
On a clear evening after the monsoons an attractive, middle aged lady confidently stepped out of a cab. The sky in the west was filled with brilliant shades of violet and crimson. She lightly crossed the empty street. Before her were a dozen identical low-built Mangalore-tiled houses and she became confused. On the corner she saw a noisy group of young men and women. They looked like students. One of the girls burst out laughing. Anees asked them for directions. There was a free-spiritedness about them, which was in sharp contrast to young people in her own country. A girl in a bright Rajasthani sari knew the house. She looked the ‘arty’ type from the way she had slung a cotton bag across her shoulder. She guided Anees to the gate.
The house was surrounded by trees and a lawn of crab grass. The side facing the street was covered with an awning of dried coconut leaves. Anees walked right in, directly to Bauji, who was sitting among the trees facing the sea.
‘No, it cannot be! It cannot be you!’ exclaimed Bauji. His eyes were filled with tears.
‘What a beautiful evening!’ said Anees, sitting beside him.
Bauji looked at her smooth, delicate skin, almost untouched by age, and he was filled with sentimental longing. A quarter-of-a century later she was still beautiful, he thought. Her pale white face was older, but her nose and cheekbones were chiseled on her square face. Her hair was still dark. The texture of the exotic light hanging over the distant shadowed sea changed from moment to moment on her face. Presently the shadows began to deepen and the evening was bathed in a wan light. The casuarinas stood out darkly against the sky.
A Fine Family: A Novel Page 32