My Nine Lives Read online

  Their last long car ride together was to Bikaner. He had to go to a meeting of his election committee in the district from which he was returned year after year. They traveled for a day and a night, across long stretches of desert. They got very thirsty and drank whatever was available—the glasses of over-sweet and milky tea that Muktesh was so fond of, or buttermilk churned out of fly-spotted curds. Once, when there was nothing else, they made do with stagnant water out of an old well. Neither of them ever had a thought for disease, she out of recklessness (the Begum called it stupidity), he out of his optimistic fatalism.

  I have only his account of that day in Bikaner, and he was busy till it was time to set off again the same night. All day he had left her in his mother’s house, with no comment other than that she should be looked after. His mother was used to his arrival with all sorts of people and had learned to ask no questions. She was an orthodox Hindu, and for all she knew he might have brought her untouchables, beef-eaters; but from him she accepted everything and everyone. By the time he had finished his meetings and returned to the house, he found his mother, and mine, sitting comfortably together on a cot in the courtyard, eating bread and pickle. The neighbors were peering in at them, and his mother seemed proud to be entertaining this exotic visitor—her fair-complexioned face uncovered and her vivacious eyes darting around the unfamiliar surroundings, taking everything in with pleasure the way she did everywhere.

  Even well into her sixties, the Begum continued to be surrounded by admirers. They came in the evenings and had their usual drinks, no longer served by Amma but by Amma’s granddaughter. Otherwise everything was unchanged—including the Begum herself who still chainsmoked. At home she was always in slacks and a silk shirt and her hair was cut short and shingled; but there was something languid and feminine about her. She relaxed in a long chair with her narrow feet up and crossed at the ankles while she joked and gossiped with friends. They had two favorite targets: the crude contemporary politicians who amassed fortunes to cover their fat wives and daughters with fat jewels, and the wooden-headed army generals one of whom had long ago had the misfortune to be her husband. “What did I know?” she still lamented. “My family said his family was okay—meaning they had as much money and land as we had—and at seventeen I liked his uniform though by eighteen I couldn’t stand the fool inside it.”

  It was only in Muktesh’s presence that she was not exactly tense—that would have been impossible for her—but less relaxed. By this time he was very important indeed and his visits involved elaborate security arrangements. He himself, in handspun dhoti and rough wool waistcoat, remained unchanged. Whenever I was there, he came as often as he could, mostly very late at night, after a cabinet meeting or a state banquet. The Begum, saying she was very tired, went to bed. I knew she didn’t sleep but kept reading for many hours, propped up by pillows, smoking and turning the pages of her books. She read only male authors and went through whole sets of them—ten volumes of Proust, all the later novels of Henry James, existentialist writers like Sartre and Camus whom everyone had been reading when she was young and traveling in Europe, usually with a lover.

  Muktesh talked to me about the reforms he was trying to push through; he spoke of dams, monetary loans, protest groups, obstructive opposition parties and rebels within his own party. He spoke to me of his concerns in the way he must have done with my mother; but his mood was different. When he was young, he said, he could afford to have theories, high principles. Now he didn’t have time for anything except politics; and he drew his hand down his face as if to wipe away his weariness. But I felt that, though his mind and days were swallowed up by business and compromise, the ideals formed in his youth were still there, the ground on which he stood. And I might as well say here that, in a country where every public figure was suspected of giving and receiving favors, his integrity was unquestioned, unspoken even. It wasn’t an attribute with him, it was an essence: his essence.

  Whenever Muktesh came on one of his official visits to London, he took off an hour or two to be with me and my father. We usually met in an Indian restaurant, a sophisticated place with potted palms and Bombay-Victorian furniture and a mixed clientele of rich Indians and British Indophils who liked their curry hot. In later years, there were always several security people seated at a discreet distance from our table. My father was the host—he insisted, and Muktesh, though always ready to pick up bills and pay for everyone, gracefully yielded. He and my father were both generous in an unobtrusive way, and it was not the only quality they shared. My father was as English as it was possible to be and Muktesh as Indian, but when I was with them, I felt each to be the counterpart of the other. Although they had many subjects of interest to them both, there were long silences while each prepared carefully to present a point to the other. They both spoke slowly—my father habitually and Muktesh because he was expressing himself in English, which he had first learned as a teenager in jail. Muktesh ate rapidly the way Indians do, neatly scooping up food with his fingers, and he was already dabbling them in a bowl with a rose-petal floating in it, while my father was still following his Gladstonian ideal of chewing each mouthful thirty-two times. Occasionally they turned to me, in affectionate courtesy, to ask my opinion—as if I had any! I wasn’t even listening to their conversation. I knew nothing of the checks and counterbalances between an elected government and a highly trained bureaucracy—one of their favorite subjects—but I loved to look from one to the other. The evening always ended early because Muktesh had to return to the embassy to prepare papers for his next day’s meetings. When we got up, so did the security personnel. Several diners recognized Muktesh and greeted him, and he joined his hands to them and addressed them by name if he remembered them, which as a good politician was surprisingly often. A splendid doorman bowed as he opened the doors to the street for him. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked Muktesh, for even in the London winter he wore the same cotton clothes as in India, with only a rough shawl thrown over him. He laughed at my question and drew me close to say goodbye. I could feel the warmth of his chest streaming through the thin shirt and his strong heart beating inside it.

  In what was to be the last year of his life, he wanted to take me to meet his mother. But when I told the Begum of this plan, she shouted “No!” in a way I had never heard her shout before. She lit a new cigarette and I saw that her hands were shaking. She always hated to show emotion—it was what made her appear so proud and contemptuous; and it was also one of the reasons, a physical as well as emotional distancing, that she didn’t like to be touched. I knew that her present emotion, the mixture of anger and fear, was a revival of the past, when my mother had returned from her visit to Bikaner—travel-stained, exhausted, and with the beginning of the sickness that would flare up on her journey back to England. I tried to reassure the Begum: “You know Muktesh doesn’t travel that way any more—” for nowadays there was always a special plane and a retinue of attendants.

  But it wasn’t only fear of the journey that upset the Begum: “God only knows where and how she lives.”

  “Who lives?”

  “And she must be ninety years old now, probably can’t see or hear and won’t care a damn who you are or why he brought you.” Although this was her first reference to the possible alternative of my begetting, she cut it short, dismissed it immediately—“Well go then, if that’s what he wants—but if you dare to eat or drink a thing in that place, I’ll kill you.” She had a way of gnashing her teeth, not with anger but with a pain that was as alive now as it had been these last twenty years. Or if there was anger, it was at herself for not being able to hide it, or at me for witnessing even the smallest crack in her stoical surface. “All right,” I said, “I promise,” and I kissed her face quickly before she had time to turn it away.

  But my other grandmother—if that was what she was—liked to touch and to be touched. She sat very close to me and kept running her fingers over my hair, my hands, my face. Muktesh had gone off to his meeting
s and left me with her the way he had left my mother, without explanation. Or had he told her something about me—and if so, what had she understood that made her so happy in my presence? We were in the same house and courtyard that my mother had visited, maybe even sitting on the same string cot, now several decades older and more tattered. Many years ago, to save his mother from the usual lot of a Hindu widow, Muktesh had taken a loan to buy this little house for her. The town had grown around it, new and much taller buildings pressing in on it so that it seemed to have sunk into the ground the way she herself had done. As the Begum had guessed, she was almost blind. The iris of one eye had completely disappeared and with the other she kept peering into my face while running her fingers over it. At the same time she tried to explain something to me in her Rajasthani dialect that I couldn’t understand. When at last Muktesh reappeared, with all his convoy of police and jeeps, she chattered to him in great excitement. Muktesh agreed with what she said, maybe to humor her, or maybe because it really was true. When I asked him to interpret, he hesitated but then said—“She’s comparing you with all her female relatives—your nose, your chin—and your hands—” she had taken one of them into her own bird claw and was turning it over and over—“your hands,” Muktesh said, “are mine.” “Bless you, son, bless you, my son!” she shouted. He bent down to touch her feet, and the people watching us—neighbors had crowded every window and some were up on the walls—all let out a gasp of approval to see this son of their soil, this great national leader, bow down to his ancient mother in the traditional gesture of respect.

  A university press had commissioned me to bring out a volume of modern Hindi poetry. When I asked Muktesh if he had any poems for me to translate, he smiled and shook his head: what time did he have for poetry? Yes, sometimes on his way to a rally, he might compose a little couplet to liven up a speech. That wasn’t poetry, he said, it was propaganda, not worth remembering. And there was nothing else, nothing of his own? He shrugged, he smiled—perhaps he might at some time, in the heat of the moment, have scribbled something of that kind, maybe in a letter long since destroyed.

  I knew that the Begum had some of his poems addressed to my mother. On my return from Bikaner, when it was time for me to return to my teaching job in London, I asked her to let me take those poems with me. At first she hesitated—I knew that it wasn’t because she was reluctant to part with them, but that she didn’t want me to take them away to England, where they did not belong. I had heard some of what he called his “propaganda” verses—I had seen him write them, in a car while being driven from one election meeting to another. They were all poems with a social theme, humorous, sarcastic, homely, with a sudden twist at the end that drew amused appreciation from his audience. His poems to my mother were completely different, yet if you knew him—really knew him—it was recognizably he who breathed in them. And not only he but poets dead a thousand years, for he belonged to their tradition of Sanskrit love poetry steeped in sensuality. As they did, he loved women—or rather, a woman: my mother, and with her the whole of life as he knew it, the whole of nature as he knew it, with its sights and smells of fruits and flowers. He wrote of the rumpled bedsheets from which she rose as the Sanskrit poet did of the bed of straw on which his mistress had made love; of the scent of her hair, the mango shape of her breasts. He longed to bed and to be embedded in her. His love was completely physical—to such an extent that it included the metaphysical without ever mentioning it, the way the sky is known to be above the earth even if you don’t look up at it.

  After his retirement, my father lived mostly in the country, and I joined him whenever I was free from my teaching assignments. It was there that I did most of my translations, and I was working on one of Muktesh’s poems when the news of his assassination reached us. My father heard it on the little radio he kept in the kitchen. He came upstairs to my bedroom, which was also my study. He sat on my bed, holding his pipe though he had knocked out the ashes before coming upstairs. I turned around to look at him. At last he said, “Muktesh.” He was not looking back at me but out of my bedroom window. My father’s eyes were of a very light blue that seemed to reflect the mild and pleasant place where he lived. Instinctively, I put my hand on Muktesh’s poem. It was too alive and present with a passion I wanted to hide from my father, who had all my life hidden his knowledge of it from me.

  My next visit to India coincided with the beginning of the trial of Muktesh’s assassins, and every day the newspapers carried front-page stories of it, together with their photographs. Muktesh had been shot at the moment of leaving a function to commemorate the birth date of Mahatma Gandhi. Although one man had carried out the murder, it had been planned by a group of conspirators, including two accomplices ready to do the deed if the first one failed. They were all very young men—the youngest seventeen, the eldest twenty-four—all of them religious fanatics with tousled pitch-black hair and staring pitch-black eyes. If they had been older, their views might have been less intransigent, might even have approached Muktesh’s tolerance (for which they had killed him). And as I read about their lives—their impoverished youth, their impassioned studies, their wild ideas—I felt I could have been reading about the young Muktesh himself. And when I went to court to look at his assassins on trial for their lives, it could have been the young Muktesh standing there—as defiant as they, fierce and fervent in dedication to a cause.

  But I knew there were other sides to him. I knew it from translating his poems, and also from his manner with me. He was as reticent about my singular appearance as the rest of my family. Yet sometimes he gazed into my face the same way my father did—I knew what for: for some trace, some echo of something lost and precious. He never found it, any more than did my father, but like him Muktesh showed no disappointment. Instead he smiled at me to show his pleasure in me, his approval, his acceptance, and his love, which was as deep in his way as my father’s was in his, and the Begum’s in hers.

  She of course had her own manner of showing it. Ever since I was small, she insisted on going through my hair with a louse-comb. “Your mother used to come home every day from school with something,” she told me to explain this practice, which she extended right into my adult years. I think she just liked to do it, it made up for the other intimate gestures that she so disdained. My hair is coarse and deeply black, quite different from my mother’s, so she said, which had been silky like the Begum’s own and with auburn lights in it (by this time the Begum’s had turned almost red with constant dyeing). Sometimes, while wielding her louse-comb, she commented, “Who knows where you got this hair—it’s certainly not ours.” After a while she said, “But who knows where anything comes from and who the hell cares.” Tossing the comb to Amma’s granddaughter with instructions to wash it in disinfectant, she began on a story about her ex-husband’s family. His mother, my great-grandmother, had for thirty years had a wonderful cook:

  “A very lusty fellow from Bihar who made the most delicate rotis I’ve ever eaten. Which may have been the reason why my mother-in-law couldn’t bear to be parted from him for a day. May have been—and anyway, who knows what goes on in those long hot afternoons when everyone is fast asleep.”

  “Did this cook have hair like mine?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she said, “he always wore a cap.” She made a face and then she said, “Ridiculous,” dismissing the whole subject as unworthy of further discussion.

  6

  My Family

  MY DAUGHTER Debbie is a very boastful mother. She is proud of both her children and finds it difficult to accept that one should be doing better than the other. She thinks, or pretends to think, that it is Andrew’s fault he is not as successful as his sister, and that if only he tried harder, he would catch up with her. Debbie sees it as her duty to make him try harder, just as she did when he was at school. Andrew never did well at school—to others Debbie asserted it was because he was too brilliant, but at home she gave him no peace. From early morning, even before sh
e had had her coffee and when she is never at her best, she nagged him about his poor performance. This had the effect of making him stop going to school altogether, and for a period, when he was about fifteen or sixteen, no one knew where Andrew was, or with whom. It was also the period during which his tastes were formed, among the group of older men who took him along to their studios and favorite downtown bars and uptown gallery openings. In this milieu Andrew grew up quickly—fortunately with a basis of seriousness that made him recognize his need for education.

  At around twenty he entered architecture school but soon turned to other arts, several of them. He wrote the libretto for an opera and also, during a time when his best friend was a dancer, he designed and painted the scenery for a ballet. His next best friend was a young Indian film-maker who introduced him to Indian music, and together they made a documentary about a famous shehnai player. Debbie became very proud of him and her attitude to him changed completely. Now she would never appear before him in the morning the way she used to, shrew-like in curlers, but always careful to be her best, in appearance and manner. She even, when she remembered, developed a special way of speaking to him, more thoughtful and refined, with her lips slightly pursed. She soon reconciled herself to his homosexuality, confiding to her friends that it was inevitable among those of an artistic temperament. She also claimed that the frequency and strength of Andrew’s passions came from her, and although I never contradicted her, I knew it was not so. In her relationships, Debbie has always managed to remain in control, of herself and of circumstances, indignation overcoming pain, and marital settlements compensating for unsatisfactory husbands. But nothing could compensate Andrew for what he suffered; and Debbie herself marveled at the all-consuming extent of his passionate relationships which obliterated everything else in his life, including whatever work he was engaged on.