My Nine Lives Read online

  At that time I lived in an old row house off First Avenue, in a railway flat I shared with two other refugee girls, Eva and Renate. We had two bedrooms and took turns sleeping on the couch in the living room, though this arrangement changed whenever one or other of us had a man friend staying the night. That morning, before leaving to work with Hoch, I had washed some stockings, and on my return I went straight into the bathroom to take them down; there was also some underwear belonging to the other girls, and none of it was quite dry yet, but I needed the rope. I pulled out the table in the living room and placed it under a hook in the ceiling; a previous tenant must have had an electric fan, which he took away with him when he left. I placed a chair on the table and climbed up on it. My principal worry was that table and chair would break under me while I was fastening the rope. All our furniture was old—some donated by friends, some found abandoned on the street.

  There was a ring at the door—the bell went through me like an electric shock. It was only then that my heart started beating fast, as though shocked into life; before that I had been calm, cool, doing everything correctly. I stood waiting, hoping the caller would leave, yet also waiting for the bell to ring again. As I counted the seconds, it rang again, and then again. I went to the door: the visitor had started calling my name, knocking on the door till I opened it to him. It was Gerd. He was holding a bunch of flowers.

  “Thank heaven,” he said. “I thought you weren’t home, and then what would I do with these?” He stretched them out toward me. They were cheap flowers, all any of us could afford at the time, bought on the street and wilting from the city dust while they waited to be sold.

  I didn’t ask him in; on the contrary, I stood blocking his way.

  “Should we put them in water?” he asked. For a few seconds more, we stood facing each other, his smile uneasy but persistent.

  To prevent him from going into the living room, I led the way down the passage to the bedroom at the other end. The door of the living room was open—did he turn his head to look in, and if so, how much did he see? He said nothing, but followed me; when we got to the bedroom, it was he who shut the door behind us. Although by nature a shy, reticent person—we had never yet slept together—he did not hesitate to take the initiative. He sat down on the bed and, making me sit close beside him, put his arm around me; for the first time in our relationship he was in charge.

  I told him I was pregnant, and by whom. Perhaps he thought that this was the only reason for what he had seen through the open door of the living room. If he had seen—we were married for over fifty years, and never once did he refer to that open door. He reacted to my news with such a rush of joy that it overflowed into me. He convinced me that it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me, and to him. And this was how it was between us from that moment on—through our wedding day, for which Hoch and Hedda sent a set of kitchen utensils, so sturdy that they are still in use—and then through all my years with him and Debbie, and with Hoch. For my life and work with Hoch continued, even our journeys together to conferences and the waiting for him in hotel rooms, although in his last years I was allowed to accompany him to the conferences, for he needed someone to help with his notes and, after his stroke, to help him physically too.

  Usually I fulfilled my function with him without demur or question; but there were times when I felt the same as on that day when Gerd came with the flowers. Although these depressions tended to occur during the summer months—about the time the Hoch family left for their vacation in the Swiss Alps—I always thought of those days as my frozen winter days. And always, like that first time, it was Gerd who melted the ice that had formed around my heart, asking me perhaps to explain some aspect of Hoch’s new ideas that I had been working on. Gerd freely admitted that he really was the donkey that Hoch took him for, and it is true I had difficulty getting some of these ideas across to him. But it was always worth it because when a glimmer of their meaning began to dawn on him, Gerd would clasp his hands and cry out, “What a man! My goodness, what a great man!” Then I realized all over again the joy and privilege of working with Hoch. And Gerd made out that he too felt privileged to be part of this situation.

  7

  Dancer With a Broken Leg

  MY FIRST husband was the most ambitious person I have ever known. This is strange, because when I was with him and we were both very young, we thought ourselves to be totally free of any desire for worldly advancement. We both admired Lalit Kumar—or L.K., as he was known to everyone—and wanted to be like him in living up to the noble ideals we held at that time.

  I had met L.K. on a bus going from Kanpur to Delhi. It was one of those inter-state buses, piled on top with baggage and bundles and maybe a crate of chickens, some of them dying on the way; and inside it was crowded with farmers, clerks, pregnant women carrying infants, and children vomiting out of the barred open windows through which dust and pollution flowed in. L.K. seemed not very different from the other passengers; he looked poor in his cotton clothes frayed from too much washing. But he was different—he addressed the people on the bus like one used to making speeches. His voice was loud and dramatic like an orator’s, and he must have made many witty and humorous remarks because people shook their heads and laughed. It was all in Hindi, but when he saw me—a pale foreign girl—he politely translated himself into English. It wasn’t the sort of English I was used to—not American English of course, nor modern English either, but a sort of florid oldfashioned prose that he must have read in books and not spoken very much.

  When we reached Delhi, L.K. took me to the flat where he was staying. I was used to going with people I happened to meet on my way. It was how I lived in India at that time, wanting to be far away from home and other people’s expectations of me, far away from my parents’ quarrels and divorce proceedings. So for me India was this place to be free and to travel in. I really had no understanding of anything and didn’t realize that the household to which L.K. took me was very unusual. It consisted only of a mother, Dharma, and her son, Vidia; later I learned that the father hadn’t lived with them since Vidia was six months old. L.K. had more or less taken his place, at least for part of the time, whenever he was in Delhi.

  Dharma was, or had been, a dancer: not of the hereditary caste that dancers at that time mostly came from—that is, one classed with semi-prostitutes—but from a prominent South Indian family. Like other young girls, she had learned dance as a social accomplishment but had continued for the love of it, for her talent, and inspired by a famous teacher under whom she studied. Her unconventional enthusiasm didn’t stand in the way of a conventional marriage arranged for her with another prominent South Indian family. I had no idea what a revolutionary step it had been for Dharma to leave her husband and join a troupe of dancers. She was with them for several years, traveling around India and abroad, keeping Vidia always with her, so that he grew up in a makeshift, bohemian atmosphere. Later, during an engagement in Paris, she broke a leg, and after that could never dance again. Her family paid her a stipend to stay away from the South, and her husband, who had married again and had another family, contributed something toward Vidia’s education. When L.K. took me there, they had already been for some years in Delhi, often shifting house but always staying together in a tight bond with each other.

  I had grown up listening to my parents’ quarrels, before, during, and after their divorce; but whereas they hated each other, Vidia and his mother quarreled in a different way. They were both intensely passionate—at least she was, and at that time I thought Vidia was too. I fell in love with him at once: he was so handsome, slender, his limbs delicate yet supple and strong, dark Indian eyes that smoldered, and sometimes blazed. We shared the same ideals; we both hated sham, pretension, money, the power and greed of materialism. I rejected this hateful world by traveling around with no responsibilities; he wanted to change it by taking on responsibilities, even if necessary entering politics to fight corruption from within.

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nbsp; L.K. had spent his life in politics. He had been a trade union organizer and also a freedom fighter, who had been jailed many times by the British. He was again in jail when Independence was won, and by the time his release papers came through, a new government had been formed and its prime posts filled by those lucky enough not to be in jail. He detested the members of this present regime, who were very different types from himself. He was a peasant, self-taught, while they were widely traveled aristocrats with hereditary lands and perfect English accents. He didn’t express his dislike the way Vidia and I would have done. Reading some item in an English newspaper, he looked sly and ran his tongue over his lips. “Ah, here’s Madam with a new hairstyle signing away another chunk of Mother India to her favorite international imperialists,” he would say, about India’s lady ambassador to the United Nations. “Very generous, very nice.” Vidia would snatch the paper away from him, read the caption under the photograph, and then tear out the page and crush it in his fist. L.K. laughed and pinched his cheek. For L.K., Vidia had remained the little boy he had met with his mother out for a stroll at India Gate; he had given him some of the candy that he always carried in his pocket for children encountered on the way.

  L.K. and Dharma were an unlikely pair—he an impoverished labor leader from a North Indian provincial town, she a South Indian dancer, or artiste as she called herself. Although he shared her bedroom, this may have been because it was the only one; Vidia slept in the living room on a string cot. I didn’t have a sense of any physical relationship between L.K. and Dharma; he was twenty years older and maybe more of a father figure to her. He certainly had a calming influence on her, which she needed—she was very explosive, especially in her quarrels with Vidia. If L.K. was there and felt they had gone too far, he intervened; at that time, when I first met them, he had great authority with them both.

  We had the upstairs flat in a two-storey house—I say “we” because it didn’t take long for me to become part of the family. Although fairly new, the house looked old—cracks in the cement and dark patches left by the monsoon rains. The other houses looked the same, and there was a lot of illegal construction and makeshift shops or stalls at street level. Although built as a middle-class residential colony, it had become not unlike an old city bazaar; this was altogether convenient, for we could always run down and buy snacks freshly made on the sidewalk. Also, it was easy to get transport, for cycle rickshaws and horsedrawn carriages plied up and down, along with barrows selling peanuts and slices of coconut. With all this traffic and the cries of passing hawkers, it was very noisy during the day. It was never really quiet at night either, for even when everyone was asleep, the air was always full of sounds: dogs barking, sometimes a shriek of jackals, or the fragrant sound of a prayer meeting with its hymns floating to us from far away. Some of the smells were also fragrant, as of jasmine and Queen of the Night, intoxicating but only partly drowning out the daytime smells of petrol fumes, rotting vegetables, urine.

  I became familiar with these summer nights, for when it was very hot, Vidia and I moved our cot on to the balcony overlooking the street. This balcony was just outside Dharma’s bedroom, so that whatever we were doing must have been clearly audible to her. It might be thought that she would be jealous of my relationship with her son, but not at all: she was delighted. Sometimes she even called out to us: “What’s going on there? Are you making me a grandmother? I’m too young!” And she laughed, though Vidia got angry and called back to her to shut up and mind her own business. Then she replied that she had no business, that she was young but not that young; and she laughed again.

  Dharma was my friend—she really was, as though we were the same age. The local housewives had their own little clubs and assemblies to which Dharma, with her strange background, was not invited. But she was used to having girl friends to share secrets and snacks, the way she had done with the young dancers in her troupe. Now I was her girl friend—her “sakhi” she said, explaining to me the role the sakhi played in Indian legend and dance: the messenger, the consoler, the go-between of Lover and Beloved. There were many other aspects of the dance she explained to me: the meaning of each tiny gesture of finger and eyebrow, one saying “Come here,” another “Where are you?” and then, “I miss you, I cannot bear this absence O lotus-eyed One and who made those scratches on your neck?” She had some records of a woman singer with a raucous voice, and while she listened, it was clear that the love and longing that came crackling out of the old turntable were also in Dharma’s own heart.

  She spoke to me about other things too, like clothes and cosmetics of which she was very fond. Her broken leg had left her with a limp, but this was skillfully hidden by her dress and the way she carried herself. She moved in a cloud of gauze veils and loose garments, glittering with sequins and jingling with rows of ornaments. She wore a lot of make-up, day and night—I never saw her without a layer of powder, circles of rouge on her cheeks, her eyes, extended with kohl, huge and alive under arched eyebrows: a dancer made up for her performance. When he was angry or impatient with her, which was often, Vidia would accuse her of making herself look like a lady from the G.B. Road (the red light district of Delhi). At first she would laugh but the next moment she was terribly angry and would shout how she was an artiste and that he had no respect for her art, or any art or anything beautiful.

  When he and his friends got together, they talked about politics. At first he wanted me with him all the time, so he took me along to the coffee-house where they all met. They spoke in a mixture of English and Hindi, discussing both student and national politics; I didn’t listen much, I was just glad to be sitting there with him. I must add here that he never, either before his friends or before his mother and L.K., made any kind of tender gesture toward me, or touched me, though I was longing to touch him. His friends were shy with me—shy and very polite—they were not used to having a girl with them, let alone a foreign one. But when they got deeper into their argument, they forgot about me—as did Vidia too. They always met in the same coffee-house, a dark place with torn plastic seats and a waiter with only one eye and a grimy uniform. And they always placed the same order, cold coffee and potato chips with tomato ketchup, the latter congealed in its bottle so that it had to be shaken and got splashed over the tablecloth. If anyone ordered anything more, they had difficulty paying for it, and I picked up the check, for I always had plenty of money.

  It astonished Vidia, the way I always had money. Sometimes he came with me to the American Express office, where other young travelers stood around, waiting for their allowance from home. There were also some who did not have parents to keep them supplied; there was one rather wasted French girl, for instance, who was always asking for money—to buy air mail stamps, she said. I only had to cable my father and he would immediately respond. “Is he very rich?” Vidia asked me, and I had to admit that he was. I didn’t say that my father thought it was his fault I had dropped out of college and was traveling around in this way in a far-off place, that he felt guilty for breaking up my home and so on—it was a story I had no interest in telling. After collecting my money, I often gave most of it to Vidia; he was standing for election to some student committee and needed funds to print posters and treat supporters with snacks in the college canteen.

  All this was about the time of his final exams, which he was determined to pass in the first division. He studied far into the night, and in the early hours of the morning he joined me in our bed out on the balcony. Even on moonless nights, I could make out his features by the yellowish light of a street-lamp near our house. I saw his eyes and his teeth gleaming while he made love to me. When he turned around and went to sleep, I pressed myself against him, against his back. I felt such pride in him, in his beautiful body, his wonderful mind; I lay awake, drenched in my own happiness, and in his and my perspiration from the heat of a Delhi summer night.

  When the exam results were posted up in the University, Vidia scorned to join the crowd of students jostling
to read them. L.K. went instead, and when he came back, he stood in the doorway, with his arms raised, one of them holding his stick: “Triumph!” he announced. “Triumph and blessings have been showered on this home!” Vidia had passed in the first division and was second in the whole University. “Second,” Vidia sneered at himself, but it was his way of hiding how pleased he was. Dharma of course hid nothing—she danced around the room on her lame leg and clicked her fingers to make a noise like castanets. L.K. quoted one of the nineteenth-century English poets he was so fond of—“‘Victory rattles her drum!’” and went on: “Now we shall see something—now we shall see how Youth will conquer feeble Age!” By feeble Age he meant all the old men, and a few old women, who were running the government. He had very definite plans for Vidia.