The Death of Mr Love, page 15
To the next life you go, your minds bearing traces of things you did in this, and to reap the harvest of those deeds, to this world you return.
This of course was exactly what she did not believe. For her the idea of future lives was a political tool, a conspiracy encouraged by princes and politicians to prevent the masses from rising up in anger. ‘Landlord Dusht Singh, who is an evil man, lives without a care in the world, whereas we . . . Never mind. He’ll be reborn as a cockroach, and what a good laugh we’ll have.’
She used to say that when Karl Marx made his remark about religion being the opium of the people, he was attacking neither religion nor opium. He was saying that people denied justice and forced to lead desperate lives had, up to that point in history, no other consolation, relief or pleasure besides religion and oblivion. There is a Hindu equivalent, which Mitra (who had been Jula) sang one night in the Bombay bazaar when we were drinking bhang (milk into which a paste of cannabis leaves, almonds and sugar has been stirred):
Ganga, bhang do bahin hain,
sadaa rahat Siva sang
bhava taran ko gang hai,
jag taran ko bhang
Ganga and bhang are two sisters,
who live forever with Siva,
On Ganga we float to the world beyond,
but bhang is this world’s river.
I sat in my back room, watching mist drift across the Downs, softly erasing thorn bushes one by one. My pencil hovered over a few more passages, but I found it hard to concentrate. The wisdom of ages seemed curiously unsatisfying.
You may do all manner of good on earth, but actions alone will not earn you the long rest you seek, for their effects are quickly exhausted.
Maya would say that doing ‘all manner of good’ is all that can be asked of a human being. The rest is nonsense: our actions have endless consequences for good and ill. She might concede (I kept forgetting she was dead) that good effects fade more quickly – how long did Mahatma Gandhi’s example sustain Indian politics? – whereas evil generates its own squalid kind of immortality.
Maya sneered at the orthodox view of karma, but her own view also guaranteed survival after death, if only by default, through the continuing effects of what she had stirred up during her life. This was something which obviously troubled her. Since her death I had hardly thought of Retribution. The questions it posed no longer seemed very important, which was just as well, since there was no longer any way of answering them. Really, what is the point of leaving a gnomic legacy when your entire life has been devoted to telling people that they must take note of the past? But irritation was pointless. The dead are dead. Perform the rites. Let them go.
That narrow ancient path which stretches far away, I have found it at last.
My mother would have liked a pyre of sandalwood sprinkled with clarified butter and strewn with eleven kinds of jasmine, but they don’t run to that sort of thing at the West London Crematorium. She should have been borne to the fire by shaven-skull brahmins chanting mantras and sutras. Instead, on the morning of her funeral the family, minus the twins, whom the Embassy in Greece had been unable to find in time, assembled outside her flat to be greeted by an undertaker with an unsuccessfully scrubbed egg-stain on his lapel, who asked, ‘So it’s just the one limb, then?’
‘God, no, the whole body,’ replied my sister, Suki, horrified, until she realised that he meant a limo.
His comment must have brought to her mind the same image as to mine, a childhood memory of a Hindu funeral by a river, pale flames stalking on a pile of logs, out of which stuck the legs of the corpse, stiff, dusted with ashes.
You go to the fire, your body its fuel, your breath turns to smoke, your desires become coals, your life becomes the sparks of that flame in which the gods offer a human being, from which arises the being of light.
From the limousine, moving slowly through the streets of London on that damp and grey Saturday morning, we could see the hearse with the coffin loaded with flowers turning ahead of us, into the Fulham Road, then into the cemetery gates. As we drove past acres of tombstones, sorrowing cherubs, angels with outstretched wings, India seemed far away and long ago, a string of bright visions teeming with people, very clear but tiny, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It came to me very strongly that this was not the right place to say goodbye to her. She might not have believed, but she’d still have liked a proper Hindu funeral. Maybe she should have gone home to Kumharawa, where they’d have known not only her name, but those of her grandparents. Hundreds of people would have come to pay their last respects. She’d have had her good send-off. The old women would have made a fuss. There would have been to-do with pastes of sandalwood and saffron, gold dust and armfuls of flowers. Between death and funeral she would never have been alone. People would have kept vigil with her, saying prayers, chatting to one another, including her in their conversations. The brahmin – it was really our duty, but I couldn’t picture any of us doing it – would have muttered in her ears things she would need to know about the sights she would encounter, the words she would need to gain safe passage.
When you depart this world, you go up into the air, which opens like the hole in a chariot wheel. Through this you ascend, you rise towards the sun, which opens like the eye of a drum. Through this you ascend, you rise towards the moon, which opens like the bowl of a drum. Through this you ascend, you rise towards a world free of sorrow.
I could imagine my dead mother’s mirth at all this mumbo-jumbo, picture myself addressing her smirking corpse: ‘Look, if you find this so silly we’ll just stop, shall we?’ and her replying, perhaps by means of some casual poltergeist activity, ‘No way, José, I want the works.’ So thrice around the pyre we would have carried her, me and the incantating brahmins, before laying her on it, and I would have placed grains of rice in her mouth, to sustain her soul on its journey.
You pass forth into this space, from space into air, from air into rain, from rain into the earth where you become food. This food becomes the spark of man which kindles woman’s fire, and in that fire you are born again and come again into the world. Thus do you rotate between the worlds.
Yes, had we been in India, my head would have been shaved, leaving only a tassel of hair hanging down the back of the skull – the choti, as worn by Hindu boys – Grandfather used to tie my father’s choti to a hook in the ceiling to stop him nodding off over his textbooks. I would have circled the pyre five times, widdershins, before setting it alight. Then I would have had to wait, enduring all the barbecue smells and sounds, until the flames had exposed my mother’s skull bone and baked it brittle, after which, taking a heavy staff, I would break her head like a coconut. This duty of the eldest son – my father had fulfilled it for my grandfather, my grandfather for my great-grandfather, Great- for Twice-Great and Twice-Great for Thrice-Great, the rebel, who survived the carnage of the late 1850s to live to a ripe and cantankerous old age – is done to free the soul to begin its journey, as it says in the Brhandaranyaka Upanisad, along that narrow ancient path which leads to the other world. Luckily the by-laws of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the rules of the General Cemetery Company make this sort of thing impossible, but to maintain the spirit of the rite, I had brought along the book, from which I planned to quote bits which I thought would have either appalled, or appealed to, my mother.
When you know the Self, good or evil no longer touch you. You do not think ‘I have done a bad thing,’ nor ‘I have done a good thing.’
The chapel was full. My sisters and I had not expected the announcement in The Times to draw so many mourners. Most of them were recent friends, people with whom she played bridge and went to parties. There were a few ex-expatriates from the Bombay Society. Some of them we knew, but hadn’t seen for years. On the way to the lectern to give my short address about my mother’s life, I saw several people I recognised. Even after four decades there was no mistaking the turbanned profile of Joan Barboushjian – ‘Pope Joan’ as she had been dubbed in the fifties by the city’s literati.
You have passed beyond good and evil and are therefore troubled no more by what you may or may not have done.
‘My mother Maya,’ I told the audience, ‘called herself a Hindu, but for her, Hinduism was a way of life, rather than a religion. She did not believe in rebirth, reincarnation, but . . .’
I spoke of my mother’s socialism, her respect for Gandhi and her disappointment at the tawdry communal politics of today’s India. During all of this, I noticed a pair of knees in the front row. Attractive knees, well shaped, beneath the hem of a smart skirt. Held close together but allowed to lean gracefully a little to one side. Their owner was staring at me, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Someone of Maya’s, or perhaps a friend of Nina’s. She smiled when she caught me looking and I dropped my eyes to my notes.
‘. . . Our ghosts may grow feebler. They may fade, but they never entirely vanish. We live on, in and through each other . . .’
Opening the book at the page where I had inserted a marker, I found to my surprise that instead of two thousand-year-old Sanskrit verses, I was staring at a page of ovolos, astragals and reverse-ogees. I had mistakenly brought British Planemakers from 1700.
The final contretemps. The curtains at the back of the room swung open and the coffin began to move, then stopped with a judder. Pope Joan rose from her seat, stepped arthritically forward and laid a single red rose upon its lid. As the coffin resumed its journey, my sisters came up to read poems they had chosen from Maya’s work. Nina had barely begun when a strange discordant music began to be heard. The CD, which the crematorium had asked us to supply, and which I believed to be Bhimsen Joshi singing Miyan ki Malhar, turned out in fact to be Sebastian Prior’s Cello Concerto, a modern work which sounds like a chorus of Tibetan singing bowls interspersed with pneumatic drills and the distant cries of crows being plucked. I consoled myself with the thought that Maya, who throughout her life had demonstrated a carefully cultivated taste for the theatrical, would have been delighted by the effect it was having on her audience. Nina, meanwhile, struggled on with a rhyme which Maya had made up.
Do pigeons brood on pigeon pie,
Or pigs on bacon
As men brood on death, and immortality.
The owner of the knees was still smiling at me. She was, at a guess, in her late thirties, blonde, and alluring in the way women are when they stop being merely pretty. Beauty lies deeper, it belongs to the soul. It may not show until a person’s character is fully formed, then it shines out of them. This is why young women, however attractive they may be, are very rarely beautiful. Beauty begins at forty, I used to tell Katy, whenever I caught her examining her face too closely in the mirror. After I returned to my seat I glanced over to find the blonde woman still looking at me. Who she was, I honestly could not imagine.
After the service, we waited outside to thank the departing mourners. The moustacheless Srinuji, clad incongruously for him in a suit, came up to offer his condolences.
‘You knew she was ill. How?’ I asked.
‘She had known for some time,’ he said. ‘Did she not tell you about her tests at the hospital?’
‘What tests?’ This revelation, following my mismanagement of the funeral, cast me into deeper gloom.
‘She had been feeling ill for months,’ he said, frowning at me as if I had been personally responsible for my mother’s illness. ‘I don’t understand how you could not know about it.’
‘Neither do I. But she never told us.’
‘Then it was her way of coping,’ said Srinuji. ‘Your mother was a selfless woman. She wanted to spare you worry.’
‘Tell me, why have you shaved off your moustache?’
He gave me a strangely imploring look, and plucked my sleeve. ‘Bhalu-ji—’
‘It makes you look like a mullah.’
‘Would you kindly step this way with me? Let us go and admire the flowers.’
So we strolled among the wreaths and cellophane-wrapped bouquets. He said, ‘Each of us has something to hide.’
What secret could possibly involve a moustache?
‘I used to be very fond of eating paan.’
True enough. Paan it was (a confection of nuts and pastes and spices wrapped in betel leaves) that had bloodied his mouth and stained his teeth. ‘I had to stop, because it would spoil the beard.’ He cast an apprehensive glance in the direction of his wife, who was standing talking to Katy and my sisters. ‘Those paans used to contain some tobacco. You must be familiar with them.’
‘I haven’t tasted paan for years.’ During my days at the dope den, my friend Dost used to talk about the various ‘masalas’ that could be used to ginger up a paan. There was, for example, the famous ‘palang-tod’, or ‘bed-breaker’ variety, that was supposed to contain a pinch of cocaine.
‘I am ashamed to say that I began smoking cigarettes. Just a few. Maybe five a day. But after some time I saw that the moustache was getting stained, a little brownish below the nostril.’
So he had given up his moustache. Human after all.
Katy said to me, ‘Who is that woman? She keeps staring at you.’
The blonde stranger was walking back and forth pretending to admire the floral tributes.
‘I’ve no idea. I assumed she was a friend of Nina’s.’
‘No one knows who she is.’
‘Whoever she is, she is rather gorgeous.’
‘Yes, I saw you ogling her earlier.’
‘I don’t ogle. I’m too old.’
‘Liar.’
Feeling our eyes on her, the woman turned and smiled. She was tall, taller than Katy, with fair hair curving neatly to her nape. A dark suit showed off her figure as she made her way towards us. Close to, one could see that she was not as young as she had first appeared. Careful make-up smoothed her skin and all but erased the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, which were rimmed to make them larger and shadowed to accentuate their unusual grey-green, a colour that for some reason always made me think of rain. I was aware of a subtle lemony perfume, spiked, but not spoiled, by a note of tobacco.
The stranger took a deep breath and said, ‘This is so strange, I really don’t know where to begin. I am sorry about your mother. She and my mother were friends. Mine died five years ago, and left some things for yours. Unfortunately they’d lost touch and I had no idea where to start looking. I had given up, then I saw the notice in the Telegraph. So I came, and I don’t know if this fulfils my mother’s request, but I think perhaps I should give the things to you, because I was never meant to keep them and they may mean more to you . . .’
She stopped, tilted her head to one side, and said, ‘Bhalu, you have absolutely no idea who I am, have you?’
MOAMMA
The stranger stood smiling, waiting for a reply. As my puzzlement grew, her smile got broader. She began to affect playful impatience. She flicked her eyes up to an interesting corner of sky, pursed her lips.
‘No,’ I said at last, bemused. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Clue,’ said the stranger. ‘When we first met, you weren’t very nice to me. In fact you were downright nasty. You called me names. Does that ring any bells?’
I said, ‘I’m sure you’re mistaken. If I had met you before I would definitely remember.’
‘You made me cut up worms.’
There is a story of Nabokov’s in which a man is lifted into euphoria by the glimpse of a woman he once loved but has not seen for many years. He rushes into the Berlin night where a neon sign glows in the darkness. CAN . . . IT . . . BE . . . POSSIBLE?
‘Oh Bhalu,’ said the stranger. ‘I wish I had a feather. I could lay you out cold . . .’
I could not speak. Never mind speak, I couldn’t think. Never mind think, thought requires words. What I felt was wordless but clear, like a breath of sweet air, herbs on dry hillsides, a happiness that came bubbling up by itself from some deep untroubled source.
We stood looking at one another, mouths opening and closing like the small Bicchauda fish of years ago, imprisoned in glass jars side by side, mouthing mute questions.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It can’t be you.’
‘I feel just the same, if it’s any consolation,’ said the woman.
Then she did something which convinced me. She took my face between her hands and pressed a kiss to my lips.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ said a voice at my elbow. I had completely forgotten that Katy was standing beside me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the stranger, extending a hand. ‘What must you think of me? I’m Phoebe Killigrew. Your husband and I are old friends.’
‘So I see,’ said Katy, looking from one to the other of us. ‘Well, you must come back and have drinks.’
Could it be? This elegant creature who looked as if she had stepped straight out of a Bond Street couturier? Was this the little tomboy of childhood, she of the tuggable hay-coloured plaits?
Now that I looked again, she had a pointy chin. How had I not recognised those startling eyes? Where had the glasses gone?
‘I don’t believe it!’ I said. The severalth time.
I had often wondered what it would be like to meet her again. I had imagined throwing our arms around one another, hugging each other, as we had done when we were children. But all I could do was mumble like a fool, over and over again, ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.’ And all she said was, ‘I know, I know, I know.’
Then, bizarrely, as if there were not decades of questions to be asked and answered, the three of us found ourselves talking about where she had left her car, where near Sloane Square was the best place to park, how to find Maya’s flat, where Suki, in accordance with our darling mother’s dying wish – ‘mourning is for fools, give me a party’ – had organised a kind of wake.
