A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West Read online

  ‘Why are you sitting on his bed? Get up.’

  ‘And when I’m a famous author all the girls will run after me, and it is for me she will say, “Daddy, why did you take me away from him?”’

  ‘Oh my friend,’ D said, ‘you’re talking such nonsense.’

  Sahib winked at his wife. ‘Did you hear that? What sort of books can a person write who thinks love and romance are nonsense?’

  D was struggling into his shirt, for he was both shy and ashamed of his undervest, which was torn. ‘Yes, put on your clothes, man,’ Sahib urged him. ‘Don’t show yourself before my wife. She imagines things.’

  ‘It’s he,’ she desperately told D. ‘He’s been imagining things – about you and her. All lies. You’re a liar – ’ she turned on Sahib – ‘and come out of his room. You shouldn’t be here with your thoughts.’

  ‘And what about your thoughts?’ Sahib said, enjoying the mischief rising in him. ‘Don’t I know you have them? Haven’t I been married to you for twenty years, lying next to you in bed while you had your thoughts? . . . Oh, not about me, what am I, a ruined wreck, but others – like your guest, your paying guest, a guest who pays you, what luck . . .’

  Was there, as described in the novel, a dust storm blowing that day? It was the season of such storms – day after day of furnace heat, and then, suddenly, wildly, winds laden with the dust of the desert whirling through the city. I seem to remember returning from my teacher’s house in such a storm, but it may have been that Dinesh’s novel suggested it to me, and he in turn may have invented it as a pathetic fallacy (for he was getting skilled at such effects). Wherever it came from, my memory of that scene in the Malhotra house is set within swirling columns of dust that lashed the tree outside, bending its sickly trunk and stripping it down to the last of its dying leaves. Dust thick in my mouth, dust stinging my eyes, I groped my way inside. The first thing I noticed was that the windows had not been shut, so that the storm whistled and shrieked around the room as freely as it did outside. It was only when I had managed to shut each window in the house that I became aware of the people in it.

  They were a group in the living room: Bibiji on the floor, on her carpet, not as she usually sat there, singing to her harmonium, but with her knees drawn up and her face hidden in her hands. Dinesh was bending over the sofa, and he turned to me and said, ‘Get a doctor.’ I heard Sahib groan, ‘Let me die,’ before I actually saw him laid out on the sofa.

  Dinesh asked Bibiji, ‘Where is there a doctor nearby?’ Sahib’s groans of pain instantly changed into a moan of panic: ‘No doctor.’

  ‘Should we let you bleed to death?’ Dinesh said. Blood was seeping through Sahib’s shirt and slowly spreading over his chest. His eyes were shut, his face had the pallor of a dead man; but he was energetic enough to insist again, ‘No doctor.’

  I went to find a sheet to tear up for a bandage. Crossing the courtyard, I saw a half-peeled potato lying there and, a little way apart, as though it had been flung there, the knife with which it had been peeled. I picked it up and found that, besides potato peel, it also had blood on it. Dinesh was calling ‘Hurry!’ so instead of a sheet, I quickly tore the top part of my sari. I helped Dinesh raise our landlord to a sitting position to bandage him. Sahib groaned and cried between us, but when we asked if we were hurting him too much, he denied it and said for the third time, ‘No doctor,’ and now Bibiji echoed him.

  Her voice roused him, he became animated: ‘She wants me to die . . . Why else did she murder me?’

  Dinesh said to me, ‘What’s that knife?’ I had completely forgotten about it. I picked it up from where I had dropped it. Sahib, now bandaged and prone on the sofa, said, ‘Get rid of the murder weapon.’

  Bibiji got up and took it from me. She regarded it front and back; she told Sahib, ‘You can say you did it yourself.’ She demonstrated, raising the knife towards her heart.

  ‘Why should I wish to kill myself and not you?’

  ‘People often kill themselves. You yourself, at that time, and if I hadn’t found it—’

  ‘I bought it for the rats!’

  ‘You wrote a note.’ She whispered, ‘A suicide note. The police took it. It is in their hands.’

  He too was whispering now – out of weakness and pain, but also that was the way they spoke to each other when they had bad things to say. ‘I wanted to die. This is the second time you’ve killed me.’ To Dinesh and me he said, ‘Yes, call the doctor. Let him get the police. Let them take her away this time.’

  ‘So, all right – I’ll go,’ she said indifferently.

  ‘You! As if you could stand it there . . . Wipe the handle.’ She did so on a cushion but not thoroughly, so that he said, ‘More, more . . . Now give it to me – don’t touch it! What a fool. Hold it with your sari.’

  That was the way she handed it to him. He pressed his fingers around it but was too weak to hold on, and it fell to the floor. We all looked at it; the blade still had potato peel and blood on it. No one wanted to pick it up.

  At last Dinesh said, ‘Suicide is also considered a criminal offence.’

  Bibiji cried, ‘He didn’t do anything!’

  He opened his eyes; he murmured, ‘I tried to kill myself. I stabbed myself with a knife.’

  ‘It was I!’ She turned to Dinesh. ‘You saw me. And you heard what he said. The lies he told about you. That’s why I did it. I couldn’t stand his lies.’ She sank to the floor. Her shoulders shook with sobs – completely silent ones, but they were more than her husband could bear.

  He told her, ‘It was a joke. You know how I love to make jokes.’ To Dinesh he said, ‘Tell her the girl was nothing to you. Tell her.’

  Dinesh had lowered his eyes. When he spoke, he did so in the strangled voice of a very truthful person making up a lie. But Sahib appeared satisfied. He said, ‘My poor wife. She doesn’t understand that when there is a girl, it’s human nature to make jokes. Everyone does it. But really there’s only one person, and when she sings and plays her harmonium – oh! oh!’

  ‘I think he’s fainted,’ I said, for his face was drained and he had shut his eyes again.

  ‘No.’ With an effort he motioned for Dinesh to come closer. ‘Tell her it’s true about her singing: how you love it – because it is very good and because it is she who sings.’ When Dinesh confirmed this in the same strangled voice as before, the husband appeared satisfied and said nothing more.

  In the novel, the husband dies in the night and the wife goes mad with grief and remorse. But Sahib didn’t die and Bibiji didn’t go mad. Instead she showed herself very practical, and it was she who nursed him and dressed his wound every day. I tore up the rest of my saris and Dinesh and I rolled them into bandages. We never needed to call a doctor. The only person to help us was Gochi, the old sweeper, who brought a herbal ointment that helped to heal the wound. She asked no questions at all; she was probably familiar with difficult, even violent family situations and was more knowing than the rest of us.

  But we too had learned to be less innocent. Since it was necessary to find a new tenant for Kay’s room, we took care that it should be not a young but a middle-aged lady who moved in with us. Shortly afterwards, Dinesh asked for a transfer to his home town (he said his family needed him); and to replace him, I found another, and even older lady, whom I had met in my teacher’s house. Bibiji began to cook for her paying guests, which increased her income; now Gochi could be employed on a daily basis. The Malhotras no longer ate alone behind the closed door but sat together with their boarders on the living-room carpet to eat in the traditional way with their fingers from little bowls. Sometimes Bibiji took out her harmonium, though more rarely now, and her songs were no longer ambiguous but definitely spiritual.

  The visits to my teacher’s house became less satisfying to me. Also, I missed Dinesh – anyway, soon after he left for Kanpur, I too decided to go home. Here is my farewell letter to him, describing the new set-up in our household:

  ‘. . . Sometime
s the three ladies are all sad together, so I guess they are telling one another their troubles. Gochi squats nearby, drinking tea and contributing her own comments on life’s vicissitudes. I can’t always understand what they are saying, and I’m beginning to think you’re right and that instead of struggling with the Upanishads etc, I’d have done better to learn more Hindi. I can just see your face, you’re thinking, ah-ha, she’s had enough at last of our ancient wisdom. But it’s only that it’s difficult for me to think of everything in the world, including ourselves, as nothing but illusion. I don’t think human misery is an illusion, and rather than go into total denial about it, I’d like to learn of some ways to overcome it. I’d planned to go to Thailand for a while, but now I’ve found out that there’s a Buddhist teaching centre in Connecticut, not far from my parents’ house. So now, if you like, you can think of me with my head shaved and wearing a Buddhist robe instead of my saris. Anyway, as you know, I don’t have any left, they’ve all been rolled into bandages. But I’m definitely going to learn Hindi, so that I can translate your novel. As Kay would say, “Am I in it?” And the Malhotras? And Kay herself, so fatefully combing her hair?’

  A Lovesong for India

  Although his family had been Westernised for two generations, Trilok Chand – always known as TC – was the first to bring home an English wife. She had been his fellow student at Oxford, the university both his father and hers had attended before them. Altogether there were similarities in their background. Like so many British families in the years before Independence, hers had served in India as judges, district commissioners, medical officers; and as soon as these posts were opened to Indians, members of TC’s family, including his father, had been appointed to fill them. Shortly after his marriage, TC himself had joined the civil service and had begun the ascent from rank to rank that their fathers had taken before him.

  In his first years, he was posted in the districts, far from New Delhi and from what he considered civilisation. At this time his wife – her name was Diana – was especially dear to him. She was as mild and pastel as the English landscape he had learned to love. She was also fair-minded in the English way, careful to make no judgements and entertain no prejudices. When he returned home to her, often angry and defeated from his day’s work, she tried to speak up for the corrupt police chief or the moneylender who so disgusted him. She told him he was applying foreign values to a society that had worked out its own arrangements, with which no one had the right to interfere. When he answered that it was his job to interfere, she had her arguments ready – after all, she had from her schooldays been taught to evaluate and debate all sides of a question. He didn’t want to debate anything; he only wanted to be with her and kiss her rosy lips and run his fingers through her silky light brown hair.

  The advantage of being posted to an outlying district was the allotment of spacious living quarters. Their house dated from the 1920s, when it had been occupied by the British holder of TC’s present position. Although it was called a bungalow, it was very large with many rooms, each with a bathroom that had its own back door for the use of the sweeper. The kitchen was at a distance from the main house but that didn’t matter since Diana rarely had to enter it. The cook came to her sitting room for orders; and the bearer who served their meals knew how to keep the dishes hot while transporting them across the passage to the dining room. In winter they had a fire lit by which they sat with their books – he read mostly history, she poetry and novels; in the hot weather they enjoyed evenings on the verandah, though when storms blew in from the desert, they retreated inside with all the doors and windows shut against the dust. This nevertheless entered through every crevice and seeped deep into their books and their carpets and their curtains, insinuating itself forever into the texture of their lives.

  For the rest of her days, Diana yearned for the districts of their early years. To her, it had been a recognisable India. The English bungalow was like those her ancestors had occupied as members of the Indian civil service; it was they who had planted the grounds with seeds brought from Kent and Surrey, and they who lay in the neglected cemeteries of the small Christian churches surviving among temples, mosques and brand-new shrines. Diana never felt foreign here: although she lived in the bungalow with the English garden as in an oasis, the surrounding fields of sugar cane or yellow mustard were known and familiar to her, as were the women with loads on their heads and silver jewellery round their ankles, the wells and the bullocks circling them, and the holy man under a tree with offerings of sweets and marigolds at his feet.

  TC had joined the service a few years after Independence, when all the higher ranks had been vacated by the British. Consequently, he and his colleagues were promoted much faster than earlier or later generations, and it was not too many years before he reached the higher ranks of the bureaucracy. TC was by no means a typical bureaucrat. He was ready to bend rules when necessary; he was also decisive and quick to act in accordance with his own independent thinking. There was nothing ponderous about him – even physically he remained flexible, supple, and always looked younger than his age. This was in part due to his heritage: before serving the British, his ancestors had served the Moghul court. There may have been some admixture of blood for they mostly had the fine limbs and features of Muslim aristocrats instead of the heavy build of their own Hindu caste. He and Diana made a not dissimilar impression, both of them slender and fair, she like an Anglo-Saxon and he with what was known as the wheat complexion of an upper-class North Indian.

  Their son Romesh was born in 1959, ten years into their marriage. He was completely different from either of them. Much darker and heavier than his father, he appeared to be a throwback to the original strains of Hindu ancestry. He was their only child, but he grew away from them very quickly. He was uncontrollable as a schoolboy, and for a while showed some criminal tendencies – he stole cars and freely took money from his mother’s purse when he needed it. But this turned out to be only an assertion of his independence, which later showed itself in other ways. He refused to go to England to study but enrolled in business school in the US. He stayed abroad for several years, and when he returned, he had already established himself as a businessman operating on an international scale, travelling widely in the Middle East as well as in Thailand and Singapore. When he was at home in New Delhi, he fitted in completely, an integral member of young society, enjoying the clubs, the parties and the girls.

  At the peak of his career, TC became the Principal Secretary of his ministry and was transferred to the central government in New Delhi. Diana never felt comfortable in New Delhi. They had been allotted a large official Lutyens residence from the 1930s, but they didn’t do much entertaining in it. There was something puritanical in Diana, which made her uncomfortable at the lavish dinner parties given with such relish by the other wives of their circle. All of these were Indian and had kept their looks, and from beautiful girls had flourished into magnificent women. Their skin glowed, their eyes shone, their hair had become an even deeper black than in their youth. They loved shawls and jewellery and complimented one another on each new acquisition. But when they said something nice about whatever Diana was wearing, it was in the sweet voice in which people tell polite lies. Diana never wore saris, she didn’t have the hips or bosom to carry them. Her frocks were very simple, sewn by a tailor in the bazaar; she avoided bright colours, knowing they didn’t suit her complexion, which by now had the sallow tint of someone who for many years had had to shield herself from the Indian sun.

  She also felt uncomfortable with her New Delhi servants. These were very different from the cooks and bearers and ayahs with whom she had had such friendly relations in the districts. Her new staff were far more sophisticated and she was rather afraid of them. Although they called her Memsahib, she felt that they didn’t regard her as a real memsahib, not like the other wives who knew how to give orders with authority. Reluctant to give any trouble, Diana sometimes surreptitiously dusted a sideboard or polis
hed a piece of silver herself. If they caught her at it, her servants would take it away from her – ‘No, Memsahib, this is our work.’ She suspected that they commiserated with one another for being employed by such an inadequate person.

  For TC, New Delhi came up entirely to his expectations. He loved being near the seat of power, to influence and even to formulate the decisions of his Minister. In the course of his tenure, the government changed several times, and while the Minister lost his position, TC kept his and was able to put his experience at the disposal of his new chief. Of course there were difficulties – the intrigues and manoeuvres he had already encountered in the districts, now on a magnified scale – but these were compensated for by the satisfaction he derived from his New Delhi social life. He had known many of his colleagues from their earliest days in the service, and now at the height of their careers, they had remained in a bond of friendship which included their wives and families.

  One of the most energetic hostesses in their set was Pushpa, whom TC had known from their college days. He had even dated her for a while, and it amused her to refer to that early aborted romance. By now she was married to Bobby, who was TC’s colleague and the Principal Secretary in another ministry; husband and wife were both fat and jolly and could always be relied on to give what they called a rousing good party. Pushpa’s buffet table was loaded with succulent dishes, which were mostly too spicy for Diana. Pushpa scolded her for being so thin – Diana was almost gaunt now – and Pushpa accused TC, ‘You’re starving the poor girl.’ Then she added, ‘I know what it is – you don’t want her to become fat like me.’ She loved to call herself the girl he dumped: ‘You think I’m only good enough for someone like Bobby who is as fat and ugly as I am!’ Everyone, including Bobby, laughed heartily.