‘Um, I’m not sure.’
‘So when can I take your interview? And I’ll need to bring a photographer.’
‘Well, just cross the road any time, and find me near the kabutar khana.’
‘Can I come after lunch?’
‘Certainly.’
The excited person turned out to be a young girl, slightly older than Ashish, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looks like a child, Mohan thought, and was flummoxed remembering that, when they married, Lakshmi had been younger than this.
The girl said she was a trainee with the newspaper. She asked Mohan a volley of questions, and stared down at her pad, scribbling and tucking away a long strand of hair that had escaped from her pony tail.
‘And how old are you?’ she enquired.
Mohan was amused to find himself reluctant to answer. ‘Fifty-nine,’ he said, after a small pause.
The photographer, a middle-aged Marathi man with a hero moustache, took several pictures (he called them ‘shots’) of Mohan: under the banyan tree, next to the plaque that identified the red and yellow drinking fountain behind the letter writers as a gift from Ma Devidas Purbhodas Tiwari in memory of his late daughter Mrs Lilawati Tribhovandas (on 24 May 1923), and finally – here Mohan looked a little bashful – one next to the gate of the GPO. ‘Hey, what about us?’ Khan called after the photographer and reporter when they left. ‘Don’t you want to take our picture?’
The story appeared on Sunday. It was four paragraphs long, misspelled Mohan’s name (Kharekar) and said that he was part of a dying breed of letter writers in the city, whose trade had been killed by mobile phones and cheap trunk calls. Still, several people he knew called up to congratulate him, including Yezdi, who said that there had been a couple of calls at the office asking for Mohan’s contact details. ‘This chap I know from a publishing house wants to meet you for a series of new Bombay writing.’ He read out the name, Dharmendra Kapoor, and dictated the telephone number. After Mohan had hung up he looked at the piece of paper for some time. Finally he reached for the receiver again.
‘Full.’
The lift man, shrunken in his white clothes, looked older than Independence; he pulled shut the concertina door of the lift and it departed without Mohan, who shrugged and began to climb the stairs. These old buildings in Fort had a specific smell that both turned his stomach and made him feel at home: wood shavings, furniture polish, a vestige of incense and betel nut, and of course dust. Spittle stains festooned the walls of the stairwell; the stairs were crumbling at the edges and must have been this way for years. Even inside it was warm: about three o’clock in the afternoon.
At the fourth floor he found the door labelled Modern Republican (Marxist) Alliance; this had been crossed out, and a piece of paper with New Vista Publishers written on it pasted above the wooden sign. The name of the now-defunct political party was like a very old piece of gossip: it caused a slight current of air to flutter after it, in baffled reminiscence.
‘My uncle is the last member of the MR(M)A. This used to be our family business office,’ explained the young man who appeared in the shabby reception area. ‘I’m Dharmendra Kapoor. Thanks for coming.’
He looked short for a Punjabi, Mohan thought, but he was really more of a Bombayite: he was smiling and fair, with rosy cheeks and conciliating manners. He pointed out the water cooler, turned on the fan, and took the typescript from Mohan. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said pleasantly, smiled, and shook Mohan’s hand. Then he nodded and went into a smaller office partitioned off from the main room in dark panelling, and where a yellowing sign marked MR(M)A, Secretary General had been scored through by two pencil lines. A piece of paper taped below said Editorial Director.
Mohan, slightly unsure of what to do, sat on the bench in the outer room. He looked up at the dusty framed pictures. One showed Gandhi and his secretary walking in Bihar; another was a drawing of a spinning wheel. There was an old clock barometer on the reception desk, a thing he hadn’t seen for years. A single window, about four by two and a half feet, framed a section of sky and two branches of a budding bhaya tree, a laburnum. When the bench became too noticeably solid, Mohan shifted his weight, and concentrated on the door, which was surely about to open. But it remained shut, while the light at the window changed. The backdrop of the laburnum branches went from white-yellow to deep blue. From the other side of the door he heard a few phone conversations, laughter, and then again silence.
At six o’clock Kapoor came out, humming to himself. Mohan jumped up.
‘Oh!’
‘I – ah –’
‘As a matter of fact I haven’t yet had time to read your work. I didn’t realize you were still here – that is – if you give me some time,’ the young man said, a little reprovingly, ‘I could read it and let you know. Leave it with me for a few days – a couple of weeks.’ He waited for Mohan to go out of the main door so that he could lock it. ‘Not more than a month, hm?’ he said when he had done so. ‘I’ll be in touch. Goodbye!’ He ran down the stairs.
When he was home, Mohan wandered near the chair in front of the television, which still had a folded shawl draped neatly over its back. He thought about calling his wife. She knew about the will, but not about the competition; she hadn’t reacted much to the news about the will, either. He would call, he decided, when he heard from the publisher. He couldn’t rid himself of the thought that it was too late, and she simply wanted him to leave her alone. In the chair near the window he opened the Mark Twain; he began by looking at his notes, but moved onto the essay in defence of Harriet Shelley which he’d started to read weeks earlier.
The printed words reproduced the monotype of the first edition. How beautiful the face was, with its small, human imperfections. Harriet was Shelley’s first wife; they had married when they were very young, he was nineteen and she was sixteen; Mohan nodded to himself. Twain was reviewing a biography of Shelley in which the writer put the blame for Shelley’s desertion of Harriet onto Harriet herself, a literary sleight of hand that Twain kept pointing out. Shelley had had to grow up early: ‘He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill.’ The young couple had been happy at first, though they had little money. ‘Harriet sang evenings, or read aloud.’ Mohan felt an almost physical pain in the chest, remembering a few early times when Lakshmi had sung, laughing, a song or two for him – nothing complicated, she had no training, but her voice was sweet though not strong. Eventually, after they had been married a year, Shelley became involved with another woman. Twain complained that Harriet’s part of the story was never told: ‘The young wife is always silent – we are never allowed to hear from her’, he wrote. A little later – Mohan was nodding vehemently now – ‘surely she would speak if she were allowed’. His eyes skated on, but they had filled and he saw indistinctly. ‘We get only the other side, they keep her silent always.’ Next to this he saw the start of his notes for the first and second stories. For the first time, it struck him: these stories distilled from the years, where in them was the person who had been there with him? He repeated to himself, ‘they keep her silent always’.
It was late; Ashish was still out. Mohan turned out the bright naked bulb and paused in the dark room, his finger marking his place in the book. He saw something white move opposite. Was it one of the owls Ashish had been talking about? But he didn’t see it clearly. He went to bed, and the house seemed to bear witness against him: the fridge murmured reproof, the fan turned like an unceasing background accusation. He lay on his side of the enormous bed, which had been made for his parents. Vivek hadn’t wanted it when they had taken the furniture from the old house, and Vimla hadn’t had room. It was the size of two single beds, joined, a fact he had always liked; as a child he remembered how, with the mosquito net rising above it like a shamiana, it had been a whole world that he could crawl into and pretend he was in a ship or a caravanserai.
There was no rest tonight. Shadows s
lid across the room now and again, when movement outside blocked the glow of the street lamp. But the very stillness of the house was a reproach. ‘They keep her silent,’ he thought, and tears came to his eyes, though the pictures in his mind were confused. He remembered times of humiliation and sadness as a young child, and then how his wife had looked when they were first married. There were things that had been difficult for her, and which he hadn’t really noticed, like living with her mother- and sisters-in-law for the first few months, or dealing with a young man who knew nothing about women and yet had firm ideas – he had been an idiot, or worse – about how his wife should behave, what she ought to wear and where she should or should not go alone. Yet he had been so different with his daughters.
He imagined writing her a letter, which was ridiculous. He, who’d turned others’ feelings and concerns into more shapely phrases for years, couldn’t envisage words fixing anything here. By the time dawn came, his exhaustion was complete; the phrase still repeated in his mind, and his wife was frustratingly just out of reach. A decision came, quite simply. He would be his own messenger; a letter or phone call wouldn’t do. Why hadn’t he acted earlier? He would go and speak to her, try to persuade her to come home. It was time to make a trip to Nagpur, as soon as Ashish’s exams were over.
Chapter Eighteen
Ashish woke – it had been that intense, dreamful sleep of the evening. The lamp was on near the bed. Narayan sat in the armchair, observing him; his face was half in shadow, his expression hungry, yet analytical. ‘Watching me sleep,’ Ashish told himself warmly, fuzzily. ‘He loves me.’
Narayan’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re awake? It’s probably time for you to go,’ he said quietly.
‘Should I call my uncle and tell him I’m staying at Mayank’s?’
‘No, don’t do that, he might worry.’ But Narayan came to put his arms around the boy for a moment; his skin was warm and dry against Ashish’s back. ‘Here.’ He handed Ashish his clothes.
Ashish got up reluctantly, put on his shirt and then his trousers, wobbling as he stood first on one leg then the other. He stared at a stain on the cream wall, which was in his line of sight from the bed. The stain must have been caused by damp; there was a crack in the plaster and next to it, a baggy patch of dark grey, the colour of a pi-dog that has become wet and miserable in a storm. Then there was a chip in a cement tile near the front left leg of the desk, and the paint on the bookcase was peeling away; it was a simple thing, probably plywood, Narayan might have bought it as a student. And Ashish’s mind went down these familiar, not altogether forbidden aisles, but they were places where he wasn’t invited. The conversations he and the professor had were brisk in the way they treated the older man’s feelings and memories. He would ask Ashish a burst of direct questions that it was hard to imagine not answering, partly because each so quickly succeeded the next; but if Ashish asked a question in return, Narayan just smiled, or answered so lightly that the matter seemed to have been put aside.
In the evening, like today, when it was nearly time to go, Ashish would remain in the bed, wrap himself up to his chin in the sheet, and stare mutinously at the stain on the wall, dim in the half-light. He suspected Narayan was happy enough for him to leave, and the situation was so neatly arranged that he didn’t even have to ask Ashish to go, because he had to, in any case: he was expected at home.
This evening Narayan walked Ashish to the door and opened it with one hand. With the other he rubbed Ashish’s back between the shoulder blades. ‘See you the day after tomorrow,’ he said gently.
As Ashish’s foot hit the first of the stairs he heard the door click behind him.
In the train on the way home to Saraswati Park, he glanced around the brightly lit, near empty compartment at the dissolute, late-evening faces of the other commuters, middle-aged men, and he felt cheated, as though he had been given nearly the thing he needed to feel complete; but not quite. If he had been able to stay half an hour longer – or if he were able to choose his own moment to exit the cocoon of the cotton sheet in that bed and that oddly depressing room – maybe then it would be different? The afternoons with Sunder seemed like another life, long ago, a period of innocence.
But the next time he arrived at Narayan’s, the teacher opened the door with a charming smile and even as he was closing it, folded an arm around Ashish and kissed him. ‘I was just making some good south Indian coffee,’ he said. They took the coffee to bed. Half an hour later, when it was cold, Ashish sat up sipping his cup. Narayan lit a cigarette. ‘Does this bother you?’ he asked rhetorically. Ashish said no, though he was beginning to hate it. His father had been a smoker for many years, and he knew the matinal coughing fits and yellowed fingertips.
Narayan exhaled. ‘So tell me something,’ he said lazily, putting one arm behind his head to cradle it.
‘Something?’
‘A story, about your past.’
‘I can’t think of anything. Like what, do you mean?’
Narayan turned his head to look at Ashish. ‘I don’t know,’ he said calmly, a little bored. ‘About your first relationship, or the first person you ever liked. Or about your parents, your aunt and uncle. Anything.’ He propped his head on his elbow, and waited to be entertained.
Ashish was silent for a while. He tried to think of an amusing story. Suddenly he remembered, and it was odd how the years had buried this moment, the early crush he’d had on his cousin Gautam, who was ten years older than him. He’d often shared a bed, of course, with either or both of his male cousins; Ashok, who was much more like Ashish, had never held any attraction for him, not in that way. But Ashish had slightly hero-worshipped Gautam, who was tall, handsome and sporty, devoid of much sense of humour except the gentle and conventional, and yet was always kind to Ashish, the youngest cousin. Gautam would take him along on errands, feed him sweets, and clout Jayant, Vivek mama’s son, when he tried to bully Ashish.
Ashish had at the age of eight or nine (he was then a slightly tubby, overserious child) decided that he and Gautam would one day realize they were meant for each other and live together in a state of quasi-erotic, quasi-romantic happiness. He had been so certain this would happen that he had never agonized over it. Gautam had married, years later, in an arranged match that seemed to make him very happy – he was one of those fortunate people whose desires conform almost exactly to those expected by the society they live in. By then, Ashish’s childhood crush had long dwindled; he’d almost forgotten it. Now, it was strange to think of Gautam, married for four years, plump and domesticated, sincere about his job in a telecom company in Bangalore, as the object of his cousin’s pre-teen romantic flame.
‘I used to have a kind of crush on one of my cousins…’
Narayan nodded, and allowed half an inch of ash to drop from the end of his cigarette into the ashtray beside him. ‘Very normal.’
Ashish laughed, half awkwardly. He felt his efforts to capture the other man’s attention fail. ‘What about you…Who was the first person…?’
‘I don’t even remember, Ashish. There was a friend of mine whom I felt very strongly about, a childhood friend, in Mangalore. And then as I grew older I just knew – that I wasn’t really interested in women. Of course in a way I was far more genuinely interested in them than the other boys around me were.’ He laughed.
‘And before this –’ Ashish waved vaguely at the rumpled bed, meaning ‘before me’, ‘– was there someone?’
Narayan looked thoughtful. He examined the end of the cigarette, began to bring it to his mouth, and then extinguished it instead. He picked up the packet and flipped it open, as though to inspect those that remained. ‘There was,’ he said quietly.
‘So what happened?’
Narayan smiled. ‘I don’t really want to go into it. But he’s not around any more, here I mean.’
‘Was he a student? When you were teaching at the university?’ Ashish felt emboldened; these were things he’d wondered about for a long time.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means –’ Narayan laughed. ‘Well, it means you’re very young. What’s the time?’ For the light coming under the curtains had dimmed, then become blue; now there was the first, orange glow of a street lamp. A train horn sounded.
‘About seven o’clock.’ Ashish got up resignedly and began to dress. He looked back at Narayan. ‘So you never wanted to live with one person, to settle down?’ he asked. He tried to imagine being like Narayan, at Narayan’s age.
‘No. I’d seen my parents’ marriage.’ The teacher got up and began to make the bed; he shook the sheet out with a sharp flap.
‘But every marriage doesn’t have to be like that, every relationship.’
‘There are darknesses in every marriage, Ashish, or every relationship that goes on for years.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ashish argued. ‘My aunt and uncle, they’re happy.’
‘Yes?’ Narayan’s eyes were sharp. ‘You think they still sleep together? That they don’t wonder, or your uncle doesn’t wonder, what it’d be like to sleep with someone else, if they’re not doing so already? That they don’t have frustrations and hatred that’ve built up through the years?’
Ashish stood still; he’d been doing up his belt. ‘No, no,’ he said vehemently. ‘They’re happy.’
‘Good for them. And for you, if it makes you happy to believe that.’
Ashish opened the front door for himself this time; he didn’t look back when it closed.
At home, he eyed his uncle sidelong, waiting for a bad mood to start. Strangely, it didn’t. There was a new, absorbed quality about Mohan. He was actually paying attention most of the time, and he performed many of the household tasks: he checked that the Gogates’ maid, Nirmala bai, was doing the household work, he bought vegetables, he kept track of whether the rice or gram flour or ghee was running out. And so things appeared to be fairly normal, and Ashish had a horror of knowing more than he had to about the situation. Privately, he speculated; he even imagined shouting at his uncle, ‘You see? How could you let her go? Do something! Take a train and fetch her back!’ And he thought of Narayan’s remarks, his casual assumption that the family life Ashish had taken for granted was just a sham. He looked at his uncle mistrustfully.
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