‘You are a yogi? You have a school somewhere?’
‘Not a school. Just four young men who were studying with me in the evenings. I spend part of the year in Bombay, in a hostel. I’m a Jain. The other part is in Gujarat, where our order is based.’ He smiled. ‘How much do I owe you?’
Mohan hesitated. ‘Let it be,’ he said.
The other man began to waver even more than before. ‘Please, that’s not right. You must charge me,’ he said.
‘You’ll need to send more letters to him, in any case. Pay me next time.’
A smile broke out over the other man’s face. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and waggled his head. He was about to turn, then he enquired, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
‘Me? No, no.’
Mohan remained looking after the thin figure as it worked its way into the crowd.
After lunch the rain held off; he thought he’d take a walk. He headed through the arcades; they smelled damp and were slimy underfoot. The umbrella seller had new stock: umbrellas shaped like the faces of cartoon animals, or printed to mimic a Kanjeevaram sari. Mohan cut through Fountain and made for the university. He’d always been fascinated by the back of the severe, neo-Gothic cloisters, with their thick, unadorned walls and iron bars in the windows. As a child he’d taken them for a prison in which scholars were shut up and forced to produce works of learning. Now the rooms held nothing but steel shelves of periodicals thickly covered in dust.
The old stones were quiet here, polished by the footfalls of the years. Gandhi and Jinnah must have walked up this stretch, founding fathers of two quarrelling nations; the same basalt flagstones offered a place of rest to beggars and itinerant vendors of fresh lemonade, second-hand textbooks, and handled-looking postcards that showed ten famous views of the city. Walking here, he felt that he walked among the great and insignificant of the past; all, alike, hurried as he did, for in this city even idlers liked to look as though they had somewhere to go smartly. All the clerks and petty officers; in their stream, he imagined his father, hurrying along with a set of proofs in a large envelope; he’d been proud, at one time, to do some printing for the university. It hadn’t been a lucrative job, but had seemed to confer a diffuse glow of learning over all his work. A hundred and fifty years earlier this had been the beach, before the land reclamations; perhaps it was the murmur of the waves one heard on the busiest of days, through the endless talking of peons and clerks and bearers and passers-by, and the rumble of the red buses, the taxi horns, the metallic steps of each person hurrying through the Fort.
Something was missing. He wanted to leaf through the pages of unknown books on a stall, and hear a title call to him from the stacks. There was a new bookshop on the other side of the maidan; he found himself walking towards it. At the same moment it began to rain. The people crossing the Oval flinched, suddenly exposed to the dark and heavy sky, the wind and the rain. Mohan had forgotten to bring his umbrella with him; he smiled as though the weather had made a joke. He looked out towards Churchgate: the maidan was muddy in places; a few wanderers huddled under plastic sheeting tied to the iron railings; behind him the clock of the university library rang the hour.
The bookshop was alive with brightness. Fluorescent light reverberated from every surface, and the red livery rang out here and there. Life-size cardboard cut-outs of famous characters stood in front of stacks of books; other volumes were piled on large tables, apparently by subject. One table bore heaps of a picture book called How the Earth Works, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, Around the World in Eighty Days, the Upanishads in translation, and a volume entitled Save Yourself, Save the World. A couple of slender south Bombay girls stood turning the pages of the picture book.
He wandered, finding nothing that spoke to him; even the classics were overpriced and oddly blank. The shop was organized in jagged alleys that reached towards the nave, where a small cafe served different types of tea in strange looking cups. When he reached it he paused. A pair of college kids, like Ashish except obviously wealthier, looked up at him in surprise and giggled. Mohan dived around the partition.
Against the terminal wall of the shop, there was the spirituality section; an illustrated Dhammapada, a pocket Bhagvad Gita, Tales from the Bible, four different editions of The Prophet. Crab-like, the letter writer kept to the edge of the room and followed the wall till he reached the entrance again. There he recoiled, for he saw now that one of the cut-outs, fatter, smugger than ever in laminated board, was his old classmate Yezdi Sodawaterbottlewala. The cardboard Yezdi was beaming, gaptoothed, and holding a book entitled Easy Dishes for Busy Days. His belly burgeoned over his trousers. Mohan walked around the back of the cut-out to make sure it was two-dimensional. What was the fellow doing here? Wasn’t it enough that his mugshot appeared weekly at the head of that ridiculous column, or that Lakshmi had once acquired a copy of one of his books (which Mohan had tried to lose in the bookshelf)? Yezdi even had a television show, though not on a particularly popular channel; in it, he smilingly took viewers on a tour of the best places in the city to eat particular dishes, a subject on which he was, unsurprisingly, well informed.
The back of the cut-out was white card, with a stand at the bottom. Mohan had a fleeting urge to kick it away. Instead, he hurried towards the door. The rain was falling more steadily than when he’d come in, and the air outside was clammy and smelled of leaves and mud. He plunged into it at once.
That Saturday, the visit to Vivek couldn’t be put off. Mohan left work early and took a train to Andheri. When he arrived, in a light drizzle that was almost a mist, his sister-in-law greeted him warmly. Her face wore the usual slightly anxious expression; it made her look vulnerable and belied the fact that she was a bit of a shrew. ‘He’s in the balcony,’ she said, and cried in the direction of the balcony, ‘Mohan’s here!’ There was no discernible response. ‘What’ll you have?’ she went on. ‘Tea? Something else? Juice?’
‘Tea,’ he said.
He went through the living room into the long, narrow balcony. His brother was wedged there, in one of the ridiculous plantation chairs from the old house. It always disturbed Mohan to see the furniture from that house here, which was illogical, since some of it was in Saraswati Park, where it didn’t disconcert him at all. Vivek had a few news magazines next to him, and a right-wing newspaper. He wore reading glasses, attached to a cord around his neck.
‘Ah, Mohan,’ he said, as though his brother had merely been in the next room for a few hours.
Mohan grinned a bit and sat down in the less comfortable chair next to Vivek, who continued a conversation that, probably, he had been having with himself. ‘It’s too bad about these Biharis, Bangladeshis, UPites, Mohan,’ he said, staring at his brother accusingly over the top of his reading glasses. ‘They’re everywhere, building slums, contaminating the water supply, making the city dirty.’ He waved an arm towards the balcony railing, through which Mohan could see a segment of the backs of other apartment blocks, a small, scrappy park, and part of a road.
‘Hm,’ Mohan agreed. He preferred to be thought a dreamy idiot than to engage in one of these conversations, which he couldn’t bear. How had his brother, who had grown up in the same house as him, turned into this kind of idiot, he wondered sometimes. It wasn’t just his political opinions, about which he tried to involve everyone that he met in conversations that, for his side at least, faithfully followed what he read in the newspaper: Vivek complained about everything; he only seemed to be interested in the rising price of grocery items, or how much better the old days had been. He doesn’t even read, Mohan thought, except for thrillers, the ones with titles in shiny, embossed lettering, in which authoritative, excessively masculine men throw women around and beat up villains.
‘How are the children?’ he enquired.
‘Very well,’ said Vivek without interest. One of his sons, like Mohan’s younger daughter, worked for an American company. He had subscribed to Time for Vivek. ‘Very good magazine. But a
lot of the things they write about India are wrong,’ he observed, pushing up his spectacles again, and flicking possessively through his stack of India Today, Outlook, and Span. ‘When are you going to retire, Mohan?’
‘I’m only fifty-eight,’ his brother murmured.
‘Still, you should think about it. Acquire some interests, other than sitting at home. Join an association.’ Vivek was a member of two, and had fallen out with the committee of one because he was too pushy. ‘The Lions Club, except that they’re idiots, or the Rotarians. I could have a word with someone I know, see if I can get you in.’ Now that he had a good manager for the printing business he rarely dropped in there, perhaps two or three times a week.
‘Hm,’ Mohan smiled. His sister-in-law brought tea, and some boxes of fried snacks: chaklis and sev.
They sat looking out at the rain. Mohan slid a sidelong glance at his brother. Vivek’s face had chosen an unexpected moment to solidify into age. The lines that ran between his nose and mouth, the set of his features, spoke of decisiveness, a person rarely at a loss for a judgement. His eyes had tiny patches in the sclerotic; the whites had begun to be less white, in the way that pages of old books in Bombay yellow at the edge, because of the humidity: the books look as though they have escaped a terrible fire. Is this what happens? Mohan wondered. A young man’s face can change at any moment, move into a different expression, but by our age it’s different. He thought of the elder brother he’d idolized as a child. He’d loved, for example, in the afternoons when he was supposed to be napping, to root among Vivek’s things, touch his pens and books, use his comb or try on his clothes, all activities that enraged Vivek, who would come home from school, discover the unwanted rummaging, and hold the young Mohan upside down by one leg. He’d thwack the seat of Mohan’s pants, muttering through clenched teeth, ‘How often – smack – have I told you – smack – not – smack – to touch my – smack, smack – things?’
Mohan had then secretly vowed, tearily, to hit Vivek back harder when he was older. Somehow, this hadn’t happened; instead, their fights had melted into a different relationship, one in which the elder brother liberally dispensed unsolicited advice, and the younger, wary, listened and said nothing.
Perhaps that was only fair; after all, Vivek, the elder, had had to manage things when their father died. He’d been the one who decided it was pointless, given the state of their finances, for Mohan to go to college. ‘I got a degree and I have no use for it, better if he learns the trade straight away.’ With their father’s death a new era had begun: one of practicalities, and stubborn truths like those in the newspaper editorials Vivek admired.
The air was damp and chill; the rain continued to fall. The side window of the balcony, closed so that a rack of clothes could dry, had misted over. Mohan took off his spectacles and wiped the lenses with his handkerchief.
‘King’s Circle will flood,’ Vivek said.
‘Hm.’
‘Will you have trouble getting back?’
‘No no,’ Mohan said. ‘I’ll leave soon. The train will be fine, I checked high tide, it isn’t till later.’
Vivek’s stomach, which wasn’t enormous but was rounded, seemed to have made a semi-permanent crease in his shirt. His feet, unselfconsciously hairy and the heels a little rough, were propped on the long arms of the plantation chair. And I, what do I seem like to him, Mohan wondered. He imagined Vivek telling his wife later, ‘Mohan’s still the same, completely unrealistic. I made some suggestions to him, but he didn’t listen…’
Near the door, as ever, his brother became more human. ‘So, how’s Ashish?’ he asked.
‘He’s fine, he’s doing well.’
His sister-in-law came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. ‘Stay for lunch and then go,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly ready.’
He smiled. ‘No, I said I’d be home.’
‘How’s Lakshmi? And Ashish? Tell him to come and see us some time.’
He nodded. ‘He’s busy studying, but I’ll tell him.’
‘About time he studied,’ Vivek observed.
‘Well, I think the rain’s less now. I’ll go,’ Mohan said. He took his umbrella from his brother and went out; Vivek stood, the door ajar, watching him. When Mohan reached the street he felt gleeful, as though it would have been fun, suddenly, to kick through a puddle and splash someone. Birds were singing raucously; the rain had stopped. He hummed to himself as he walked up the muddy lane towards the main road and the station.
The house was empty when he arrived. He put away his umbrella, washed his hands and feet, then sat in the chair, surprised at the silence. The smell of damp had crept inside, and hung in the corners. He got up and found the volume whose pages he had for a while had his eye on. It was a facsimile edition of a book by Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story and Other Essays. The title had first interested him, and then, when he’d opened the book at the stall, he’d been struck by its generous expanse of margin, nearly two inches. He took out two new pencils, sharpened them, then set them on the table next to the book. He flicked through its pages, and sat there for some minutes, silent. Finally, just as he heard the putter of a rickshaw in the lane – it drew up to the gate – he wrote a sentence in the margin: ‘Outside the house at Dadar were old, tall trees where, at sunset, parrots came to roost.’
Before they got to the door he had put away the book and was sitting in the cane chair. He smiled when they came in, with all the bustle and importance and joy of people who have been out in the rain and are home again.
‘Ouf!’ said his wife. She looked much younger, like a child who has been outside, doing unsanctioned things: eating street food, playing in the mud, or splashing strangers. Strands of her hair, wet, clung to her forehead; her salwar kameez under the raincoat had become limp.
‘I’ll make tea,’ Mohan said. He took the umbrella from her.
‘Go, wash your feet and come,’ she told Ashish. He looked from one to the other of their faces and smiled; he went inside. Wet footprints followed him, shining in the dim light that faded into the passage.
‘The market was really dirty,’ Lakshmi said with enjoyment. ‘We bought kanda bhajia. To have with tea.’ She had taken off her wet dupatta and he took it from her hand.
Chapter Seven
He’d been here too many times, but still Ashish felt a surge of proprietorial affection as he pushed through the gate of the college and into the elegant stone courtyard. The first day of lectures, and he could easily categorize the people he saw: first-years in scared huddles, dressed in their best clothes and murmuring in Marathi while they eyed the older students and waited to be tormented; a couple of dazed looking north-eastern boys; and the more confident second- and third-years, who greeted each other in loud voices.
He looked around for but didn’t see Mayank. They’d been at school together, though the other boy was a year younger; now they’d be in the same class. The bell was about to go – he hurried down the colonnade towards the stairs. No point waiting for Sunder who, if he arrived at all, would be late.
He slipped into the lecture room just as Mrs Sahasrabuddhe was beginning. She wore her spectacles and read from a typescript in a flat, precise voice: ‘We will be dealing with the Modernists in literature, as this is the English syllabus, but this lecture will give you an introduction to the Modernist movement overall.’ She seemed to notice the small scuffle as Ashish slid into a middle row and she looked up, apparently burning his image onto her retina. ‘I request you all to be on time for the lecture so that the class is not disrupted,’ she said. ‘You are?’
‘Ashish Datye, ma’am.’ She made a mark in the register and gave him a cold look. Hastily, he got out his pad and began to take notes: Modernist movement…
‘Modernism is about discarding everything that stops progress, about doing away with old ideas about art…’
It was amazing how long forty-five minutes could last…already, after five, he felt weary, and the euphoria about his new start wa
s fading fast. Four more classes before the day ended. No wonder he and Sunder had found it so easy to bunk last year, though Sunder had little incentive to bother; he would in any case take up a job in the family hosiery manufacturing company and work there for a few years before taking over from his father.
‘In the nineteenth century we had the positivists who believed that art represents objective reality. Modernism is different: it says that life is chaotic and fragmented…’
For Ashish, who had no such prospects, it had felt daring, also a little insane, to be skipping classes. Education was a luxury for him, or should have been.
‘The first world war, when millions of young men lost their lives and the world experienced killing on a scale that had never before existed, changed people’s expectations of art also.’
He’d been sure, or nearly, that he’d fall on the right side of the not-very-stringent sixty per cent attendance rule. Who could have foreseen they’d change it to sixty-five per cent?
‘Modernism became the new orthodoxy and was widely adopted where earlier it had been rejected.’
‘I’m a victim of injustice,’ he told Mayank, when his parents had found out; they’d been appalled that he’d have to repeat the year.
The class went on and on, Sahasrabuddhe droning about the modernists as if they’d been a cricket team; the lecture made it sound as though someone had decided on trends in intellectual history then picked sides, a moment in school that Ashish had hated. He was always chosen second-last, just before the stupidest or most unfit boy; he could run fast enough but lacked any will to win. Now he distracted himself, imagining a team huddle of the Modernists. Spectacled, nearly blind Joyce was the captain: he hissed, ‘No linear plotlines! Reflect the confusion of post-war life!’ and wily looking Eliot, his cheek-bones gleaming, took the ball and went for his run-up, polishing it against his flannels.
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