The Death of Mr Love, page 17
‘That’s so romantic,’ said Phoebe. ‘But you always were.’
‘Hardly how I’d have described myself.’
‘Oh, making a girl cut up worms is quite romantic, in its way.’
‘When we told them we were engaged,’ I said, ‘her father I think was aghast, but did his best to hide it. He took me aside and asked me not to rush her into marriage. “She’s so young,” he kept on and on saying.’
‘So when did you disappoint him?’
‘We’ve been married just over twenty-two years. The twins had their twenty-first birthdays, just after Maya died.’
I wanted to change the subject. ‘You haven’t yet told me about Peter. How long have you been married?’
She said, ‘Oh hell, for ever.’ But her eyes were suddenly quick.
‘Phoebe, do you remember Tiger’s Leap?’
It was one of my most vivid memories of her, as a child during that last summer, when the shadows from the grown-up world had begun to fall across us. Late afternoon on one of those days when the rain stops and everything sings. She was standing at the edge of the cliff at Tiger’s Leap, gazing into a brazen haze out of which rose an odd, conical peak. We used to joke that it was like a breast with a standing-up nipple. She took off her glasses, held her face up to the sun, closed her eyes and in the oddly grown-up manner she had acquired, said, ‘I’m so happy. If anything makes me sad, I’ll remember this moment.’
In the years that followed, I learned to do this myself, store up moments of happiness and hoard them against dark times.
She frowned. ‘I remember all sorts of queer things. Some of it’s a bit hazy. But I remember everything we did together.’
‘You know, I always hoped we’d meet again.’
Dropping her voice so low that it was almost a whisper, she said. ‘You hoped? I knew! I knew you would keep your promise.’
I must have looked blank because she added, ‘You promised you would come to England and find me.’
Piglet came up and said, ‘Are you going back to Lewes, Bhalu? Cadge a lift, can I?’ He drifted away consulting his watch. Probably working out if he’d have time to see Charlotte.
‘Time I went,’ said Phoebe. ‘Dare I kiss you again?’
But this time it was just a peck on the cheek. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve found you I’m not going to let you go.’
‘Well, well,’ said Katy, watching Phoebe taking her leave of my sisters. ‘So that is the legendary Phoebe? I can see that she must have been very pretty, when she was young. You certainly made a big hit with her.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Katy, we were children.’
‘Well, you’re not a child now,’ said Katy. ‘No matter what your mother may have told you to the contrary.’
Srinuji was approaching to make his farewells. Odd, but now that I knew why he had shaved off his moustache, I felt almost fond of him.
‘Your mother and I,’ said this surprising man, drawing me aside, ‘used to enjoy playing the game of moamma. Do you know it?’ I did not.
‘Moamma means quandary, dilemma. The first player quotes a line of poetry, with one word missing. The second player is offered two words, both of which are apt. Which is the correct choice? To win, you have to know the language and the literature. This is a Lucknowi game. It was played in the time of the nawabs. Of course the courtiers used to play for thousands, but when I went home last year’ – I had forgotten he was from her home town – ‘there were five-rupee games on every street corner. One can buy the entry forms in sweet shops and bicycle shops. Forget professors of poetry, in Lucknow even rickshaw drivers want to discuss the latest moamma situation with you. I shall demonstrate with an easy example: “Na tha kuchch to blank tha, kuchch na hota to blank hota . . .” “When nothing was, there yet was blank, had nothing been blank would have been . . .” Your choice is “malik” or “khuda”.’
Both words were Muslim names for God.
‘I never thought to hear you talking of Khuda.’ I had no idea why he was telling me all this.
‘Whatever name we give to Him, the One Upstairs is the same. Would you like to play?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘I’ll give you a couplet of Kabir’s. “Piya chaahe prem ras, raakha chaahe blank, ek myaan men do khadag, dekha suna na kaan.” “You want to drink love’s potion yet keep your blank preserved, but two daggers in one scabbard, no one has yet observed”. Your dilemma is “jaan” or “maan”.’
‘Life or honour?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Which is it?’
‘That is for you to decide.’
I told him I would think about it, but inside me rose that silent, violent joy.
501 BAR SOAP
How did a cowherding caterpillar, Jula, become the pupa from which emerged Mitra the printer?
Having time on my hands, I decided I would put Jula’s story on paper for Phoebe. It began, of course, in Ambona, but years later, I had got to know him again under different circumstances in Bombay. If Ambona was the determining influence of my childhood, our times in the Dongri bazaar were the most exciting part of my early adulthood. Ambona and Dongri, these were the two most powerful places in my life and Jula, aka Mitra, had been there with me in both. I had never told these stories before, much less written them down. My account started as a letter, but after several days of scribbling and rubbing-out, I realised that I was really writing for myself.
After we left Ambona it was nearly six years before I saw Jula again. January 1966. I was sixteen and had just finished at my school in the north, where I was sent after you left for England. In India in those days one left school after doing more or less the equivalent of the old British O-level. At an absurdly young age, we went on to university. I was going to Saint Stephen’s in Delhi, with a lot of my friends, but the next few months were my own. Maya and my father were back in Bombay, strangely enough, in the same flat we lived in before Ambona. Captain Sahib’s dreams of a rose garden – remember how he loved his roses, his long lectures about hybrid tea roses called things like Doctor K. Biswas and Deenabandhu Reverend Andrews? – had long since been reduced to a few mildewed plants that struggled to breathe in the Bombay fug. I was in the city for a few weeks, and decided to take the train up to Ambona. It would be the first time I had been back.
Indian railway stations all smell alike, of coal dust, engine grease and disinfectant, with hints of jasmine and beedi-smoke.
VT, Victoria Terminus, was thronged with villagers. Baskets of produce, eggs, aubergines, spinach, poultry wheezing in wicker cages, went bobbing by on the heads of red-shirted porters with brass licence plates bound to their right arms. I drank a tea – Indian Railways brew, thick and sweet with a hint of cardamom, and felt ridiculously happy. Even the letters AMBONA on my smudgily printed pasteboard ticket were jigging up and down, as though they were as elated as me. I was travelling third class. I used to enjoy the crowded compartments and bizarre combinations of people brought together by chance.
Bombay is like a finger pointing south into the Arabian Sea. Ambona is to the south-east but to get there, whether by rail or road, one has to go thirty miles north, before turning for the hills.
Phoebe, remember what makes that journey unforgettable? The train howls and plunges into a tunnel – darkness, muffled wheelbeats, red lamps swinging past like infernal milestones, a long, long wait before touches of light on rough rock walls signal the tunnel’s end approaching fast – a glimpse of day, impressions of tawny slopes climbing away steeply and you’re into the next – a roaring black mouth opens and swallows you; people’s voices buzz strangely; there’s barely enough light to see one’s neighbours and the tunnel goes on and on until lamps flashing by almost create an illusion of floating backwards, until light again starts to sculpt the walls, then – daylight, the train swaying in sudden quiet, and in a clear breath a valley falls sheer to the right, fields dotted with hayricks a thousand feet below, the landscape stretching away to haze in the direction of the sea; half a mile ahead, the locomotive whistles, and for a moment you see it, a chuffing toy on the curve of a miniature track. Twenty-six tunnels that loop the train up and through the hills, emerging in the surreal scenery of Reversing Point, where a viaduct carries the railway across a gulf right under the outlandish shape of Duke’s Nose. Not five minutes later, we are pulling into a yellow station past a sign which says, in big Marathi letters, , AMBONA.
I found an auto-rickshaw at the station and told the driver to take me to Karvanda village. A long trip, but I wanted to go straight to see Jula. Nothing had changed. The town square was still there, with its statue of George V, and roofs growing grass between their tiles, same blue mountain sky. It even smelt the same.
The driver was a teenager, my own age. He drove too fast and kept glancing at me in his mirror. ‘Sir, you look familiar.’
‘I used to live here.’
‘What’s your name?’
So I told him. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said, swivelling and sending the rickshaw round a corner on two wheels. ‘Don’t you recognise me? I was at school with you.’
His name was Razak. I remembered him now. His father used to drive a truck at the naval base. We’d been friends, until I was plucked out and sent to my posh boarding school.
‘Ben went to join the Navy,’ he told me. ‘He’s a cadet now, in Khadakvasla.’This was the military academy near Poona.
‘I’m going to see Jula,’ I said, after we’d exchanged news. ‘Do you know him? He must have joined a couple of years after I left. About our age, but a couple of classes lower down.’
‘Bit of a dunce?’
‘Actually the reverse. A clever guy. He just started late.’
‘I don’t know any Jula,’ scattering chickens.
‘From Karvanda village. His surname is Kashele.’
‘Oh, you mean Mitra.’
The rickshaw put-putted across the long dam of the monsoon lake. Bicchauda rose ahead. I could smell its mineral breath. Five years, what would have changed? But nothing had changed. It was all just as I remembered. The lake at winter level, horses and sheep grazing its margins on meadows that would go twenty feet under when the rains came. Among the herds and flocks moved tiny herdsmen, their turbans little bright blobs. It was all still there. You fear that you turn round and the world will vanish, but it was as if the hills had been waiting for me to return. Look, they were saying, we have kept everything in good order. Our trees are here, the animals are here, every one of them inventoried. Everything is just as you left it, awaiting your return.
Bicchauda’s forest was dry and winter-dusty, but already some trees were putting out new leaves, yellow, pale lime. Here and there were crimson bursts of palasa, the flame of the forest. Round the lake we toiled. Up there, above, was the steep rock-face where Rosie had fallen. One dark blot on memory, the one thing about Ambona I would have liked to forget. The rickshaw shuddered on, over the pass, up and around the hill, and there was the track that led to our house and the village. Still there.
Our house did not appear to have changed. It was shut up. The gates were fastened by a rusted chain. There were weeds growing through them. They had obviously not been opened for months because it was monsoon growth, long since dead and yellowed. Strange to say, I passed it without regret. I was glad not to find someone else living there.
The track grew too poor for the rickshaw. I paid it off and watched it bounce down towards the lake in a cloud of red dust, then I turned my face to the village. Up and around the spur of Bicchauda, the track twisting down through the valley and then the gentle climb up the lower slopes of the next hill, Dagala. I found myself searching the hillside, where cows and buffalos were dotted about, for a small figure in ragged shorts. From the jungle-crowned top of Dagala, a cliff fell almost sheer into forest. This was where we had climbed to look for the Kathodi. It looked impossible. How had we got up it so easily?
At last, the familiar approach. Karvanda had not changed. The houses, with their roofs of thatch and grassy tile, looked as if they had grown out of the earth, been there for ever.
News of my approach must have already reached the village, because I was escorted the last hundred yards by a crowd of tiny children. I came to Jula’s house and there was his mother, coughing, wiping her eyes, bangles jingling. She had aged, was stooping like an old woman, although she must have been younger than Maya.
She came and bent to touch my feet. I stopped her.
‘No, Ma, it’s only me.’
So I hugged her. She put her hand on my head, closed her eyes and murmured some mantra, gave me a blessing. She said to one of the boys hanging in the doorway, ‘What are you staring at? Go find Mitra, tell him Bhalu has come . . . He helps the younger children with their schoolwork,’ she explained to me. ‘It’s the school your mother started.’
Then she asked about my mother and said she was a saint and how everyone remembered those days and wished she’d come back.
‘Jula!’
I hardly recognised him. My little ragamuffin friend had grown long and thin. He wore glasses, small round-framed specs that gave him a studious air. His face broke into a huge smile and he stuck out a hand, something he wouldn’t have known to do in the old days.
‘Bhalu bhai!’
‘What’s all this Mitra business?’
‘Shambhumitra. My real name. Jula’s just a nickname. You know that. It means twin. When I was born I had a twin sister, but she died. My mother called me Jula to remember my sister, that she had been there too.’
But this was something I had not known.
‘You must see the school. Come, come.’ And he took me by the arm and led me. The schoolhouse had been completely rebuilt in brick; it had two classrooms. Jula, no, Mitra, called out and a thin young man emerged. ‘This is Rameshbhai, the teacher. He has been here two years. After our first teacher left – you remember Hari Prasad?’ I did not remember Hari Prasad.
‘Your mother still sends the money to pay his salary. Every month.’
They wanted to show me everything. The school books, reading primers in Marathi and English, the blackboard with sums and names of plants chalked on it.
‘Bhalu, it’s a fine school. Twenty children now learning to read and write, and all thanks to your mother.’
But later he said to me, ‘What I don’t understand is why she sent you off to that fancy place.’
I did not know why either, and I dared not tell him about my school in Rajasthan, with its marble tower and carved-sandstone cricket pavilion on the steps of which, at annual prize-givings, the boys sat in their formal achkans and Rajput turbans, like rows of expensive tulips. At Jula’s school the boys wore cheap blue shorts and white shirts. Somehow their mothers kept the clothes spotless, washing them with 501 Bar Soap, scrubbing them on stones to get them clean.
Jula was seventeen, but still at KayGee Vee, a year away from his matric exam. His father Dhondu was ill. He could no longer work regularly, so Jula had taken an evening job in Ambona, at a tea shop.
‘The traffic is growing between Mumbai and Pune,’ he said, using the Marathi names for the two places. ‘We’re very busy. I can make a few rupees, it all helps.’
Jula – I could not get used to thinking of him as Mitra – told me that he wanted to learn printing, so he could make schoolbooks. ‘We have to help the simple people. Your mother helped us. Now we have to help ourselves. We have to tell our real story as we know it.
‘Look, I have written this.’ He showed me an exercise book in which was written, in Hindi, the story of Shivaji, the Mahratta chieftain who had ruled these hills four hundred years earlier.
I recognised the story my mother had told. The ghorpats, giant monitor lizards . . . but there was about Mitra’s artless re-telling a freshness, a robust relish; it was like his father’s seedlings, firmly rooted in this good soil.
‘Do you still go into the forest?’
He laughed, put his arm round my shoulders. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and herd some cows.’
NASHA
A half-decade passed. It was 1971 and I was twenty-one. I finished college in Delhi and came to Bombay to get a job in the monkey business. Both my sisters had grown up and were at college. Maya and Captain Sahib were still in the flat in Cuffe Parade, but already there were signs that they were nearing some sort of crisis. Maya was working on a big new project, a film script, but not having a great deal of luck with it. It had been rejected by a number of directors. My father had bought some land in Lucknow and talked of building a house. He was dreaming of his gul-e-stan, and once again his talk was all roses, though by now the names were different: Patiala Durbar, Yamini Krishnamurthi, White Nun, Muzibar – strange how I remember them in their peer groups, the roses of different periods, like pop stars, or films.
One day there was a call for me. Mitra. He told me he was in Bombay, apprenticed to a printer. He’d been there just over a year.
‘I can now read English not only forwards, but backwards!’
He said he had learned how to set type, reading letters back-to-front, ranging them in trays separated by little lead slugs of just the right size. Not easy, but he was mastering it.
We met at Churchgate station and took a stroll along Marine Drive to eye up the girls. Mitra had grown taller, but was still very thin. His trousers fell in a straight line from the back of his waist to his ankles. His thighs were pencils and his shirt ballooned above a waist a girl might have envied.
Later we took a bus to his printing works. A grimy back-street building in Dongri, the heart of the Muslim bazaar area. He had two more years, he said, to finish his apprenticeship. He was full of plans.
