No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself . . . as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set . . . and with the house the town . . . the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets . . .
All this from a cup of tea!
After reading Proust’s great novel, I had a great desire to visit Illiers-Combray, the small turn-of-the century town, not far from Paris, which Proust transformed lovingly into the Combray of his imagination. I had imagined going there by train one day from Paris, but in the end I never got there, not even by car. Proust, however, has stayed with me, teaching me to be conscious of the sights, smells and sounds that set off memories. He was the first person to coin the term ‘involuntary memory’ which he felt contained the ‘essence of the past’.
Thousands of years before Proust, Valmiki knew that it is not only the mind but the body also has memories, especially those of physical love. In Valmiki’s Ramayana, Rama returns after killing the golden deer with a sense of ominous premonition. Sita, his wife, is missing. He searches for her like a madman. He sees her in the trees, in the animals and in the shrubs of the forest. In tears, he asks the kadamba tree, ‘Have you seen my beloved who loved your fruit so?’ To a tiny deer, he insists, ‘You must know where the doe-eyed Sita is!’ To an elephant, he inquires, ‘Is she with you in the forest?’ ‘O Sita, my dearest, where have you gone!’ he cries, evoking the different parts of her body—her eyes, her skin, the shape of her breasts and thighs. Since he knows intuitively that their separation will be long and troubled, he pours out his love in a flood.
Valmiki realized that memory is an essential part of love, and it sustains and nurtures it. Sita, in despair, a prisoner of Ravana in Lanka, sends Rama a message through Hanuman, recalling how one day, when her body was still wet from a bath, Rama had fallen asleep with his head in her lap. A crow carrying a piece of meat in its beak attacked her. She tried to fight back and in the process her clothes came off, and at that moment, Rama awoke. Seeing her naked, he laughed; she was embarrassed and hid in his arms.
At the very end of the Ramayana, when Sita has disappeared into the earth forever, Rama makes a statue of her in gold, and places it beside him, a reminder of the body he can no longer touch, and the voice he can no longer hear. It becomes the symbol of Rama’s memories of his wife; for his brother a memory of her anklets since he never dared to raise his eyes to look at her; and for the subjects a memory of their queen.
After Isha’s death, only memories exist: the taste of hot cocoa after a bicycle ride in the cold, blustery rain; the glimpse of her at the gate waiting for me in the pink raincoat; and the musty smell of her rain gear, along with the cap and boots—all these persist, more fragile but more faithful and enduring. Even though Isha is gone forever, I am able to recapture my yearnings, self-doubts, recurrent jealousies and the betrayals. And the reality behind them is kama. Although Isha was cremated rather than buried, Baudelaire expresses my sentiments in his last quatrain of ‘Une Charogne’:
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!
~
The maid’s words were just the stimulus I needed to shake off my self-indulgent, nostalgic reverie which had paralysed me so far. In a determined manner, I marched off with a quick, firm step to Isha’s mother’s study. As executor of Isha’s will, it was my duty to go through her papers and those of her mother’s to make some sort of sense of the state of the family’s finances and businesses. On arriving in the study, I looked around at the elegantly proportioned room with the exquisite rosewood desk which I had admired the previous day. I asked the maid to get Munshi-ji on the phone. When he came on the line, I requested him to come in the afternoon with detailed accounts of the various businesses.
He said he would bring the consolidated balance sheet and profit-and-loss account for the previous year, but insisted that I needed to speak to the heads of the subsidiary companies to understand their accounts. I agreed. He said that he would summon the business heads of the subsidiary companies individually the following week, along with their accountants. I requested him to alert them to begin preparing a presentation of their businesses. We agreed to begin with the Delhi-based companies, move on to the Calcutta business, and review the smaller, upcountry businesses the week after.
‘Good! I shall expect you then at 2 p.m. today,’ I said.
‘But you won’t understand the accounts, sir,’ he cautioned me. They were written in the Landa mercantile script of the ancient Mahajani accounting language.
‘Then please bring someone who can translate them into modern accounting language?’
‘I don’t have a translator, sir.’
‘Ah!’
After hanging up, I phoned a Marwari friend in Bombay, who fortunately had just the right person, familiar with both the western and Mahajani accounting languages. He routinely translated the old bania books into modern accounts for the tax department. Since their tax returns for the year had been filed, my friend’s load had diminished and he offered to loan the ‘translator’ to me.
‘Can you spare him for a couple of weeks?’
‘He’s a valuable man . . . he’s a damn good accountant too.’
‘That’s why I need him,’ I appealed, explaining that the financial affairs of the Malik family were in a mess and I needed all the help I could get. I would compensate him generously—we would also send him on a weekend holiday with his wife to the Taj Mahal in Agra. He agreed reluctantly.
Two o’clock came and went and Munshi-ji did not show up. I called his office after half an hour and was told that he had suddenly become sick and gone home. I asked for his home number and address. The voice at the other end was reluctant but I was insistent. I phoned Munshi-ji at home, where I was told by his daughter-in-law that he could not come on the line. I expressed concern for his health and asked about the nature of the sickness. Since I didn’t get a satisfactory reply, I informed her that I would be sending a doctor shortly. The maid connected me to the family doctor, who visited him and phoned back in an hour saying that there was nothing wrong with the man. He was just nervous and feigning illness. I called Munshi-ji again and informed his daughter-in-law that I expected her father-in-law to be present at the house at ten o’clock the next morning.
Munshi-ji came the next day and complained bitterly that he had felt insulted. He had never had to show the accounts to anyone since Isha’s father died. Both Isha and her mother had trusted him, a trust built over generations, and he felt humiliated to be treated in this way. I explained patiently that it was not a lack of trust, but owners and shareholders had to know how their businesses were faring. I reminded him that faking sickness was not a good way to build trust—his actions of the previous day suggested that he might have something to hide.
Munshi-ji opened his ancient briefcase and took out the consolidated balance sheet and the profit-and-loss accounts for the previous year, and handed them to me. I was shocked to find that the Malik family was practically bankrupt. I asked to see the full accounts and he grudgingly sent for them. By noon, the young Marwari accountant also arrived from Bombay. We pored over the accounts all afternoon. Munshi-ji was not very helpful but he could no longer avoid scrutiny. During the following two weeks, I worked hard to uncover the finances of the Malik family businesses. As expected, Munshi-ji kept on stonewalling, but with the help of the family solicitors, I was able to engage a battery of young accountants on a temporary basis from a firm of chartered accountants, who were familiar with the books as they had once audited the family accounts.
~
I recalled Isha’s words: ‘It takes time to love these works but now I adore them—they are my family.’ I too felt the same way now.
Towards the end of the week I came upon a scrap of paper in Isha’s sloppy handwriting. It was in the tiny, messy room that she had occupied before her death. I had kept postponing a visit to this room but eventually I needed some papers related to one of the family’s properties which were lying there, according to the maid. Beneath a jumble of clothes was an exquisitely carved Burma teak cupboard with a dozen drawers. I opened one and found a hundred letters from friends going back to her childhood. Among them I stumbled on a torn blue-lined sheet on which Isha had hurriedly scribbled some personal thoughts. The scribbles turned out to be a cry. Isha wailed at having deluded herself, thinking that she was driven by love. Instead, she had discovered that there was only isolation at the end. Life had been a gamble and she had lost. What was left in the end was fear, the dread of being alone. I tried to imagine Isha with her wide, troubled eyes, penning these words, her face incandescent in abstract earnestness, wrapping up her life with the words, ‘and then there is no love’.
I have concluded that there is something primal about human loneliness. Animals, they say, do not fear isolation. They fear predators but the dread of separateness is peculiarly human. Adam felt lonely in Milton’s Paradise Lost and asked God for a companion, someone he could talk to. God obliged but that led to other problems—Adam went on to suffer from the ‘mess of love’, as D.H. Lawrence would have it. Plato too noted ‘absence’ to be the human condition and believed that love helped to surmount this primal isolation. The practical dharma texts prescribed marriage as the answer to conquer loneliness. In the Gitagovinda, Radha’s loneliness stems from separation from Krishna and she overcomes it by merging with the deity.
Kama originates in the lonely human condition, and men and women have discovered love to be the best way to overcome this isolation. The need to love and be loved lies deep in human nature. Some of the difficulty springs from our inherited evolutionary past but it has got exaggerated in modern times. We long to be recognized, to be near another person, to be appreciated. These concerns may have played an elementary role in the lives of our primitive ancestors but they have grown exponentially after the enticing hold of romantic love. Even though romantic love is an integral part of the contemporary global culture, there are variations from society to society—for example, there is a difference between the cultures of arranged versus love marriage. Both marital arrangements create their own problems as couples long to be understood, but it is awkward to want to make public too much of one’s inner troubles; and this is one of the riddles of kama.
This is why I am sceptical about the American view of marriage, which demands almost a maniacal need to express absolutely everything. Even marriage needs a degree of privacy. If you express too easily what should be unexpressed, you risk becoming false. It is just as important what lovers do not say to one another. This is not hypocrisy: it is common sense and good manners. Married couples and best friends should conceal parts of themselves to preserve some mystery. Total frankness is not only impossible but also undesirable. The American obsession with transparency is the cause of too many unnecessary divorces. In the same way, Americans have drained the word ‘love’ of significance by misuse and overuse: they ‘love’ hot chocolate, a new dress and a birthday party. In a genuine relationship, ‘love’ should be used sparingly; we should earn the right to say, ‘I love you.’ When uttered with sincerity, it carries with it a sacred spirit.
I try and imagine Isha’s life after she left Bombay and I am left with the inescapable conclusion that it was not a happy one. The heart-rending words ‘and then there is no love’ convey not only Isha’s dilemma but the self-destructive desire for a love relationship in many women. It is so obsessional that it ensures the woman’s failure both in love and at work. Of course, Isha didn’t work; nor had she developed other serious interests. Her whole life revolved around sexual love, as it does in the case of many women. A love relationship is obviously very important, perhaps the most important source of satisfaction, but it is not the most trustworthy.
‘I must have a man’ is the obsession of lots of women. In India, it is translated into ‘I must have a husband.’ Girls grow up with this single thought, and they are obsessed with this idea so that all the rest of life seems stale, flat and unprofitable. Avanti was an exception in this respect; she fought the pressure from her parents right through her youth. For most girls, however, this emotional pressure brings a feeling of intense rivalry for the attentions of a man, and often results in defeat. In the case of the girl child, the defeat is in relation to the father. But in adult life, it often ends in a feeling of being downtrodden, low feminine self-esteem and constant insecurity.
~
The affairs of the individual companies were in far worse shape than I had imagined. The managers of each company made presentations over the following weeks, and to my horror, I uncovered a number of frauds. The employees of the subsidiaries were just as uncooperative as Munshi-ji, and in desperation, I went over to the solicitors’ office to seek their help. They suggested prosecution but also warned me that the legal process would be slow, protracted and painful. It could easily take five years. I went back to my parents’ home feeling deeply discouraged.
As chance would have it, Anand phoned in the evening to say that he was visiting Delhi the following day on company business. I invited him to dinner and I told him everything, filling him with the details of the rot I had so far uncovered in Isha’s family’s business affairs. He rose immediately and made a phone call. Although he was no longer in the government, he still knew people with the influence. The call produced quick results. The following day the station house officer (SHO) from the local police station came to visit me at 23 Prithviraj Road. The sight of police officers evoked fear in the hearts of the company managers. I calmly explained to the managers that the police were here to record the FIRs of the fraud that I had uncovered. The SHO added helpfully that if they came out with the truth at this stage, the law would be lenient. Otherwise, they would be looking at seven to ten years in jail.
Anand’s strategy worked. The mere presence of authority brought a dramatic change in the behaviour of most of the company officials. One by one, the senior managers came forward and confessed. My suspicions turned out to be correct. For decades, the managers, the middle officials and even clerks had conspired to siphon money out of the Malik companies after the death of the father. It took a full month to get to the bottom of the rot. Finally, with the help of the solicitors, I filed FIRs with the Delhi Police and launched prosecutions against Munshi-ji and two dozen employees. It entailed the wholesale sacking of more than a hundred individuals as well. The solicitors informed me that at least half a dozen would go to jail. The chartered accountants institute was also informed about the connivance of the accountants in the acts of corruption; this would ensure they would never be allowed to practise again.
I had now spent three months to bring order to the businesses which I had inherited. I had completely restructured the companies, hire
d new managers and created a modern, accountable organization. About half the businesses would have to close down, but a few that remained would not only prosper but had the potential to generate vast surpluses in the future. If I managed these companies reasonably well, the income from them would easily pay off all the family debts and back taxes within three years. And there would be no need to sell any of the family’s iconic properties. Isha’s husband had been right in his assessment that the Malik family was asset rich and income poor. If only Isha had known this and had sought his help, she would not have died in relative poverty.
The projections made by the new set of accountants revealed that I would soon become a very wealthy man. On a conservative basis, they estimated positive cash flows within twelve months; in three to five years, they forecast earnings beyond anything I had imagined. All this without taking into account the value of the fixed assets, especially the grand houses, which were worth millions. When I became convinced that there was no mistake in their forecast, I resolved to take two longer-term actions. I hired a firm of architects to restore the various houses to their original state, as they had existed in the 1920s and 1930s, including the cleaning of the old paintings and insuring them; my second act was to engage a firm of consultants to set up a philanthropic foundation and chalk out a plan for giving away most of the money in my lifetime for primary education.
~
Towards the end of my stay in Delhi, as I was leaving 23 Prithviraj Road one evening, I looked out at the vast park surrounding the house and I imagined Isha’s brilliant eyes laughing at me. I was not thinking of my relationship with Isha but of its extreme consequences. This is what makes her story different from the others, wherein love is a positive good. If you have it, you’re happy and if you don’t, you’re not. Didn’t we learn this from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice?
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