by Anuradha Roy
My father gripped my hand firmly as he spoke, I had the sense he was warning me to keep my mouth shut. Usually he wore slippers, but that day, despite the heat, he had new black leather shoes on. They seemed oddly large on his feet and his pajama legs flapped a few inches above them, his skinny, white-socked ankles a stick-bridge between the two. As if that were not strange enough, he had put on one of those cloth caps that looked like an upturned boat. I tried to tug my hand out of his. He did not let go.
Dinu’s father stroked his car some more, changed the subject. “It’s a new model. Dodge. One of these days I’ll take you for a ride, drop you off at your college before I go to court. You won’t believe how smooth it is, like being on a barge.”
“I’m a walking man, you know that. If we were meant to move faster our stomachs would have had petrol tanks.”
Dinu’s father shook his head in exasperation, puffing his cheeks and letting out a breath with a fooof. “You know, Nek, we have been friends since we were boys and still I don’t understand you. You have to give up your airy-fairy philosophies someday. Time you discovered the pleasures of life.”
Arjun Chacha had a round paunch, plump cheeks, and flared nostrils below which his mustache bristled black and lush. His eyes were tiny and ever alert. A barber came to his house every morning to shine and comb his hair, shave him, trim his mustache and the hair in his nostrils. He sprinkled himself with Old Spice before he went to the courts and you could always tell when he had walked past because of the fragrant cloud in his wake. Nobody could accuse him of not enjoying money, Arjun Chacha said with a smile, one needed to know how to make money, and also how to spend it.
“Every night I stand at my open window before I sleep and I gaze out into the dark—the summer wind is blowing, the trees are dusty and half-dead, but I know at dawn the plants will be watered, the driver will wash the car, the cows will be milked, the mangoes are ripening, I have five cases sub judice, ten clients to see, advocates to interview, solicitors to hire, the cloth mill in Kanpur to manage, and fields of wheat and sugarcane. All this goes through my head and I marvel—this is my kingdom, this springs from me and rests on me.”
“How true, how true,” my father mumbled, trying to get away. He was supposed to take me for an eye checkup. I was happy to be delayed. Eye tests were worse than school examinations. At school I had a slim chance of passing. At the eye test, never.
Dinu’s father, however, had not quite finished. He was in full flow now, the advocate whose eloquence and anglicized accent were legendary as far away as the Allahabad High Court.
“It’s not mere improvements to a house, Nek. I think of the thirty-five people in my charge and my chest bursts with pride.” He thumped his large torso. “A lazy rake of an alcoholic brother who has a love affair going in every alleyway. A writer! A household name! But do you think he earns a single paisa he doesn’t drink away? Then there is my aged mother, my aunts, staff. The lot. I think of the cooks, the maids, the driver—I can hear a hum of peace, like the engine of a good car, from the back quarters. Would anyone else take responsibility for a senile old watchman as I do? Would anyone else have provided for Munshiji? That imbecilic clerk’s a remnant from my father’s days! Once they are under my care, they know I won’t let them down. But they have rules. Every dog, cat, cow, every human, needs clear-cut rules.”
He made a meaty fist of his hand and held it out. “The iron is there, Nek, under the silk and velvet. What families need—what this country needs—is a benign dictatorship. That’s all there is to it. People say, throw out the British, they are tyrants. I say, keep them. There’ll be anarchy without them. Once I give an order, it is written in stone, my friend, carved in granite. Gayatri’s a lively girl. But the company she keeps! When will you take charge of your own ship?”
I sensed my father bristling now, about to say something scathing, but he was forestalled by the crash of shattering glass. The sound came from inside the house and what followed was silence for a few seconds and then a rising crescendo of women’s voices. We could hear Dinu howling, “It just happened! It was an accident!” Arjun Chacha jerked his head towards his house. “That idiot with his cricket ball . . . Dinu, Dinu! If he doesn’t get a caning today . . .”
Arjun Chacha considered himself generous, wise, and above all just. His three sons had the best cricket bats, bicycles, the latest air guns, and the most money to spend, but Dinu lived in mortal fear of him and every now and then, especially if he was caught breaking a rule, he was summoned for an audience with his father.
He would trudge up to the office room to be interrogated: “So, young man, which class are you in now? Are you the head boy? Why not? Tell me, what is the capital of China? Who is the prime minister of Britain? Straighten up, boy, square chin, square chin.” The questions came as a rapid-fire bark, with barely enough time for Dinu to mumble answers, and all along his father would do something else as well, such as write notes in the margin of a document or ask his clerk if the next day’s work had been typed up.
Dinu was older than me, at school he was my protector. When the boys in senior school got after me, he took them on, punching, kicking, and if the bullies were taller, he charged them in the belly with lowered head, uncaring of the consequences. But at home he was as watchful as a hunted animal. I think he knew even then that he would never measure up. He would always be too gangly, too clumsy, too awkward, and neither his chin nor his cover drive would ever be square enough.
My father was not like Dinu’s, he never summoned me or interrogated me. Even so, I was wary of him. My mother knew this and if I was being difficult, all she had to say was “Wait till your father comes home, wait till he hears what you’ve been up to.” My father’s personality was forbidding and the things that occupied the rest of us were too frivolous for him.
For example, one evening my grandfather, mother, and I were sitting together and talking of nothing in particular, when my father arrived and announced in grave tones that the police had raided the college that day. “Three students in the lockup. Third-degree questioning, no doubt. They’ve done nothing seditious.” He slumped with his head in his hands as though he were Atlas and the weight of the world had doubled. “All this anxiety and anger—is this what student life should be about? It should be about learning, discoveries. You aren’t bothered now, but in a few years, Myshkin will be one of them.”
He sighed. “We are fugitives in our own land.”
All conversation had to come to a halt, nobody could escape the feeling of guilt with which my father could swamp a room. It was bad form to discuss anything but politics when our countrymen and -women were going to jail for us. I did not understand it except for the part where revolutionaries threw bombs and started armies to fight the British. This I wanted to do as well, but my father was of the view that the nonviolent methods of Gandhi were both more moral and more effective. That is what Mukti Devi argued as well, and he was utterly persuaded. “You must come and listen to her,” he urged us. “The air around her is charged with the spirit of sacrifice and service. You sit in her presence for a couple of hours and come away feeling cleansed.”
Mukti Devi was the head of Muntazir Seva Ghar, which was also called the Society for Indian Patriots. She had been born with a different name but had changed it to Mukti, which meant freedom. By this time, she had already done two jail terms and lost her hearing in one ear after a blow from a police baton, because of which she had a way of tilting her head to one side when spoken to. Before I met her, I thought of her as a comic figure, forever chanting and spinning cotton. Then one day my father insisted I come to a meeting. Despite my protests, he made me wear a white, handspun kurta, and when I reached the meeting, I saw why: everyone wore white there. The courtyard at the Society was a restless sea of white as people sat, rose, changed places. Mukti Devi had not yet arrived, and while people waited for her, they drank tea, cracked open peanuts, and gossiped in loud voices. She entered through a side door and a hush of ex
pectancy fell over the crowd. I saw she had a wide, open smile much like Mahatma Gandhi’s. As she walked towards the front, she kept up a constant stream of questions to people she recognized there. “So, Mushtaq, I see your wife is feeding you well. Sunita, is it possible you are still so beautiful? Ramu, there you are, the secret police himself! Tell the Inspector I’m missing his hotel!” She shook with laughter and the plainclothes policeman hung his head.
Mukti Devi’s skin was the color of boiled potato, with green veins threading her arms. Constant fasting had made her so thin that her shoulders were hunched and her clavicles were like rods you could have hung hooks from, yet she did not appear to be suffering. If anything, she seemed to find the world vastly entertaining, and sat cross-legged on her cotton mattress regarding her audience like a tiny, amused deity. She spotted me squashed between two or three bulky men in the second row and called me and made me sit beside her, saying, “Isn’t that much better? Always a good thing to face people than have them behind you.” As the speeches by visiting speakers went on and on and I began dozing off, she bent towards me and whispered, “Do you know what I think of British rule? I think the best thing about Lord Clive is that he’s no longer alive. There’s a good deal to be said for being dead.” And then, without a second’s pause, she interrupted a ponderous man’s views on the provincial elections with a sharp comment that made everyone clap. When she started her speech and I saw how the people in the hall listened to her with the kind of stillness that came from suspending everything, even breath, I understood in some obscure, childish fashion how extraordinary was her charisma.
My mother and grandfather never went to listen to her, nor could my father persuade them to adopt her austerities. A mocking smile curled around Dada’s lips whenever my father talked of the benefits of asceticism and spartan diets or the need for wealthy Indians to go and live in a slum for a week. My father did few of these things, nor had he ever been arrested. He complained about the difficulties of fighting for freedom while working for the very government he wanted to overthrow. But how else was he to earn a living and support his family? If only he were single! He would have lived on nothing and devoted himself to the cause.
Dada never commented on the ironies of my father’s way of fighting for freedom, but once, only once, he referred to my father as a dabbler. Not knowing better, I asked my father what it meant.
“A dabbler?” my father said. “Your grandfather said I am a dabbler? Is that so?”
Dada hemmed and hawed. “Myshkin overhears things he doesn’t understand and then says things he does not know the meaning of. I called him a babbler, he misheard me.”
My father went on with his dabbling. He woke before sunrise and went for a walk to the river along with other members of the Society. Mukti Devi would set off with a few followers from her own neighborhood, some distance away. They held little brass cymbals which they knocked softly one against the other as they passed, singing hymns and patriotic songs. From lane to lane they went in the dark heat before the birds had woken. A quiet stream of people would trickle out from doorways along the route, until it became a little procession led by Mukti Devi. The chimes grew louder and lingered by our gate as they waited for my father to join them. After that they went down past Dinu’s towards the river, and the sounds of bells and songs softened by degrees until they were gone. They walked along the riverbank until they came out at Hafizabagh at the other end and there they sat for an hour in the grounds of the Nawab’s mansion, his two horses cropping the grass nearby. They sang hymns and listened to Mukti Devi’s discourses. Afterwards, my father came back and drank a glass of lukewarm lemon water sweetened with honey while I got ready for school.
My mother did not join him on these walks. She lay in her cot on the terrace, sheets rumpled, sari bunched up at her knees by her tousled, heat-oppressed sleep under the open sky now alive with birdcalls and Brijen Chacha’s dawntime singing. She woke once he had finished his morning ragas and I had rung my bicycle bell before leaving for school. She clung to every last shred of sleep until the shrill jangling of my bell could no longer be ignored.
5
BERYL DE ZOETE and Walter Spies had taken several weeks to reach Muntazir from Bali, and although they had planned to stay for a fortnight, then move on to other parts of the country, Beryl said she did not feel as if they had even begun to do all the things they wanted to do. This was how it had been all the way, she said, this was why it had taken them so long to come. They had thought they would not pause in Java, but it was enchanting and in Batavia they were dizzy with studying beautiful sculpture, buying things, seeing friends from the time Walter had lived there as head of the Sultan’s western orchestra. On the ship to Singapore they made friends who insisted they stay for a few days before going on to Madras. The process was repeated in places big and small throughout the journey. “Why not pause for an eternity where there is reason to pause? Why stay an extra minute when there is reason to leave?” she said, and I know my mother listened to her carefully because I found the words written down within quotation marks in her notebook.
Walter Spies was restless to leave the town and find natural landscapes and rural people. He felt at odds in cities, he said, they made him yearn for wilderness and simpler ways of living. Soon enough, he found a village nearby where he retreated to paint and ended up staying three nights in a mud hut with farmers. How he managed to communicate with them nobody knew, but he came back green-eyed from the grass of the fields, one canvas half-finished, ready to go back the very next week.
There was something about the two men he met in the village, he said, that appealed to his deepest sympathies. They were sitting outside their hut on a rope cot and were about to start eating but when they saw him, lost and tired, they invited him to perch on their cot as well and pushed towards him a plate with a hot, thick roti on which a fat blob of white butter was in the process of melting. He was hungry after his long walk and he ate all of it without a thought. He realized later, when he understood how poor the family was, that someone in the house—probably a woman—had gone without food that afternoon on his account. They said nothing, they offered him two more rotis and pickle and raw onions that night, as well as space to sleep in their courtyard. He was overwhelmed by their kindness. He left them all the money he had in his pocket, but money was not the reason they had done it, he was certain. They reminded him of the villagers in Bali, he said, understated and soft-spoken to such a degree that outsiders mistook their modesty for ignorance and thought of them as incoherent peasants. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were cultivated, civilized, gentle people. Their sense of art and music was supreme.
“I have never heard their music,” Dada said.
Walter Spies jumped up from his seat and ran an excited hand through his hair. He waved his pipe about. “It is sublime! I heard the royal gamelan at Yogyakarta when I first went to Java—it played softly at first, in drops, and then came the deep convulsive strokes of the gong, so deep they almost make you anxious. And the agitated drumming in between. Sometimes all the music simply dissipated and then it came back—drop for drop—from somewhere. It made me passionate with joy! I wanted to do nothing else but listen to that music, learn everything about it.”
“And did you?” Dada said.
“I had to earn money. I had no job then, I had just landed off a cargo ship. You can imagine how I felt after that, bashing out the fox-trot on the piano for mounds of Dutch flesh to heave to. That is what I was doing then, to earn a living.”
“Well, I have nothing against the fox-trot,” Dada said. “I have foxtrotted and even waltzed in my day. Lisa McNally will confirm that.”
“Ah come, Dr. Rozario.” Walter Spies laughed. “Is that the best you can do? I am searching for Indian music. Find it for me.”
Ultimately, Walter Spies’s first experience of Indian music happened quite by chance. One night Dada and he and I—I don’t recall anyone else with us—went out to a small darg
ah on a hilltop just outside Muntazir, with a view of the city. We took food with us, a hurricane lantern, and a couple of rugs, planning to spend the night in the open. The sky was clear but for one spreading cloud which hid the moon. The edges of the black cloud glowed silver and bright rays cut the black sky into pale strips. As the moon swam westward, one edge appeared for an instant, then sank behind the cloud again. And then we spotted movement far below. We could not tell what it was.
Time passed, the movement ceased, hidden from view until it revealed itself again: a wavering line of fireflies. It came closer, and we saw it was a stream of women and girls, holding candles that lit up their faces. The girl at the head of the procession might have been one of those angels from my mother’s art books, ethereal, calm, remote, and exquisite. They were singing a slow, melancholic tune in soft voices joined together. The chorus rose and fell, rose again. When it died away altogether, the girl at the head of the procession lifted her head and sang alone in a pure, high voice that seemed to reach the cloud and the moon hidden behind it. It was more melodious chant than song. A marsiya, Dada whispered, a Muslim mourning chant, a dirge-like song usually sung at Muharram. What were they mourning? I did not know, but I had never heard anything like it before. Neither had Mr. Spies.
They passed without seeing us, and went towards the dargah. For a while we could hear them still, but more muted, and then the voices faded, the candles grew fainter. As if a spell had been broken, the huge full moon slid out from behind the cloud. It was so close you could see the speckles in it.