The Death of Mr Love, page 38
Then it occurred to me that blackmail is a crime of the head, not of the heart. The box under Ahuja’s bed had contained letters from six women. Wouldn’t the blackmailer have put the squeeze on all of them? Why pick on Sybil and ignore the rest? But who were the other women? Who might know?
‘Bhalu! You?’
What astonishment and delight the voice at the other end of the phone poured into those two words.
‘Here in Bombay? Arré! When did you come?’
Zafyque, Maya’s old friend. He had known Sybil. La Cantatrice Chauve in ‘faute de mieux’ French.
‘You’re staying where? What made you choose that place? It has a reputation for being rather . . . how shall I put it . . . shady.’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you come over for dinner? We’re not far.’
‘Okay, when shall I come?’
‘Come now. Shahnaaz is away. I am alone. I’d enjoy company.’
‘Now? But it’s almost ten.’
‘So? Who in Bombay eats before ten?’
I walked through a quarter of tiny shops, some of them housed in corrugated boxes scarcely bigger than phone booths. One cupboard-like establishment had nothing but a bunch of green coconuts hanging on its bright blue walls. Another, the MAHARASHTRA PLUMBING COMPANY, displayed bits of piping arrayed according to gauge. A bare room of surpassing filthiness described itself as RESTAURANT PARADISO. A man in a singlet squatted inside, cooking on a small kerosene stove. His customers ate at tables in the street, ignoring the dogs that picked through garbage at their feet.
A few twists and turns, following the directions he had given, brought me to a high wall studded with broken glass, above which rose the scarred façade of an old mansion. A chowkidar dozing by the door (huge and studded with ironwork), confirmed that Zafyque sahib did indeed live here. He let me in. I mounted a wide stair to the fourth floor and was shown by a servant into a hall stacked high with books, and papers dun with age, most of them untouched for years, judging by their veil of dust.
‘Bhalu, welcome home, my boy!’ bawled the rich, thespian voice. ‘Through here!’ I found him sprawled in a cane armchair sipping a drink, on a terrace where flimsy curtains were being lifted like dancers’ skirts by a sea breeze. Zafyque must have been as old as either Maya or Sybil, but his hair was black and his beard still possessed a vigorous Shakespearean jut. He rose to greet me, and we embraced.
‘Come, sit,’ he said. ‘Scotch.’ Statement, not question. ‘I am so sorry about your mother. She was a wonderful woman. She had something . . .’ He did not seem very certain what it was. ‘She wrote to me about a play. What was it called? To do with Jerusalem?’
‘Via Dolorosa.’
‘That’s right. Did you ever see it?’
Of course I had not. A nurse with painted toenails had opened Maya’s door and the tickets had remained, unused and forgotten, in my pocket. Katy later found them and propped them on the mantelpiece in our bedroom where they probably still were.
Zafyque told me he was engrossed in a new production and began outlining the difficulties he was having with his leading lady. I listened, noticing how the lights of the bazaar spread to a dark, hard line that marked the edge of the sea.
‘So anyway, what brings you to Bombay, after so many years?’
I said, ‘You remember an Englishwoman called Sybil Killigrew? She did La Cantatrice Chauve with you.’
‘Ah! Bazaar! Balzac! Bazooka!’ His hands flew up into the air and he declaimed:
‘Une pierre prit feu
Le château prit feu
La fôret prit feu
Les hommes prirent feu
Les femmes prirent feu . . .’
I was reminded of his performance in the bistro in Battersea, chatting up the waitress in his best buongiorno accent.
‘Forty years I’ve remembered those lines!’ he said proudly. Then, as the significance of this struck him, ‘But how can this be connected to your visit?’
So I told him.
A servant laid the dinner out on a table between us, naming each dish as he set it down. There must have been a dozen dishes, for the two of us.
‘My dear young man,’ said Zafyque when we had eaten, ‘this is a preposterous tale.’
‘But a true one.’
‘It’s correct that Sybil had an affair with Ahuja. We all knew that. But the rest? This allegation of blackmail?’
‘. . . is also true.’
‘So you believe, and I’m sure you’re sincere. All right, let it be true. How will you prove it?’
‘We can’t, without the notebook – the one that names him, that Maya and Sybil hid. But we can confront the man.’
‘Leaving aside the difficulty – actually I’d say impossibility – of finding him, okay, suppose you succeed. What will you do?’
The question Katy had asked.
‘Phoebe’s idea is that we should document the whole thing and make it public.’
‘Isn’t this rather near the knuckle?’
‘Why?’
‘Her own mother – the scandal. Would the family want it dug up again? What good can it do, after all these years?’
‘It can bring my friend peace of mind.’
‘This friend, Phoebe. You speak as if she’s very close to you. Are you . . . excuse my asking?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just friends.’
‘Bhalu, you’re asking me to remember things that happened half a lifetime ago. Many of those people are dead.’
‘If you can remember lines from that era, why not people?’
‘I never knew Ahuja well. Only by reputation. I remember Sybil getting mixed up with him, but I don’t know who the other women were . . . There is another thing,’ he said. ‘Your mother had a bee in her bonnet about a theme of this sort. A famous murder, police corruption. She was trying to get a movie made. She wrote script after script. But she got nowhere. Nobody would touch it.’
‘It was called Gunah-i-ishq. Was her script no good?’
‘It was a story nobody wanted to hear . . . I don’t think anything has changed. I seriously advise you to drop it.’
Later, he said to me, ‘Do you know what the real significance of the Nanavati case was? Nothing to do with the Blitz tale of romance and murder. The passion! Adultery! Jealousy! What a play it would make! Now if only Nanavati had shot his wife first and then himself, we’d have had our own Indian Othello!’
I wondered if he remembered that other reversal, Othello in lacy undies, strangling the hulking muscular Desdemona.
‘In fact,’ Zafyque said, ‘there was a movie made of the story. I have it on video – I will lend it to you. But as I was saying, the real impact of the case was different. First, the behaviour of the jury made the politicos realise that juries were dangerous, they could not be controlled. So they abolished the jury system in India.’
‘With no jury, there’s just the judge to manage?’
‘We have many good judges. Thank God this country is not completely rotten. There are even rumours of one or two sincere politicians. But bribery is a subtle thing. One hears stories about judges. Before a case opens, His Honour receives two brown envelopes. One is from the plaintiff, the other from the defendant. He hears the case, gives a fair judgement. The loser’s envelope is returned, unopened. The question is, can that be called a bribe?’
The servant came in and silently began clearing up the meal.
‘. . . The second thing was this. Nanavati was found guilty of murder by three separate courts, up to and including the Supreme Court. Yet he was pardoned and set free. This called into question other life sentences. There was a guy called Gopal Godse, who had been in prison since the death of Mahatma Gandhi. Gopal was the younger brother of Nathuram, who did the actual shooting . . .’
The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse. Nathuram Godse, the Perry Mason fan who had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.
‘It’s fifty years since Gandhi’s death, but the hatred that killed him is still at work in the world. The controversy is not over. How do I know all this? Because last year there was a play written about Nathuram. A Marathi play. It caused a huge tamaasha because it gave his, the assassin’s point of view. It was banned. Many people, me included, think that was wrong. Works of art should not be banned. What made the play dangerous, was that it articulated a different version of history. One that does not fit with what we were taught at school, or what was preached by our politicians after Independence. But it’s that view of history that is coming to be accepted now . . . Once Gandhi was a hero. Now, you might find it difficult, at least in this town, to find two people who have a good word to say about him. The thing is, people forget. Gandhi was anti-bigotry, anti-communalism, he stood for Hindus and Muslims, both. People in those days saw that for themselves. They had his moral example in front of them. They heard him speak. What’s left now? Garlanded portraits in public buildings? Lip service by generations of tainted, self-seeking politicians who betrayed everything he stood for. Nowadays his even-handedness is interpreted as anti-Hindu. Of course, we have our history books, but there is such a thing as rewriting history.’
Zafyque looked grim. I remembered that during the communal riots in Bombay in 1993, he had kept an iron bar inside the door of this flat.
‘Our modern politicians are a very sorry breed, Bhalu. Most of them see public office as a means to line their pockets. They will do anything for power. In Britain, Enoch Powell got drummed out of the Tory Party for his remarks on race. Here, every thug who can raise a communal rabble is able to stand for office . . . See, the thing is, Gandhi was wrong. Not in what he said and practised – that was noble. His mistake was believing that other people would have the guts and the strength to follow him. Also, he was naive about certain things. In 1930, when Gandhi’s followers went on the salt march, they walked unarmed, bare-headed, straight into the lines of police with their lathis . . . They were hammered down. Gandhi said that we should not blame the police who did the beatings, who were Indians. They had been led astray by their British masters. Once we got our independence, he said, there would be no further need for police. They would melt back into the people. There would be a loving relationship between police and people. That is a sick joke. I belong to a human rights organisation. A few years ago, a report written by Amnesty International on India came into our hands. It contained nothing we did not already know. Suspects in police stations being beaten, tortured, sometimes even killed. Women raped. When I read this report just one thought was thudding in my mind: Gandhi, thank God you never lived to hear these stories.’
It was one o’clock in the morning. Past time to go. Zafyque saw me to the door. He said, ‘Sorry I am not able to help you . . .’ He held on to my hand for a few moments longer. ‘Bhalu, if you are determined to go round asking questions, especially about the police, please be careful.’
The tumbledown quarter through which I had come earlier was bunkered down for the night. Despite the fact that it was the rainy season, some people were sleeping, wrapped in sheets, on the steps of shops. On charpays under inadequate roofs. My home town was a vast slum, where the rich hid in palatial boltholes, with the poor camped at their gates.
Near the hotel a drunken man stumbled out of a doorway and accosted me. ‘Hey, sir! Sir! Want a girl? Anglo-Indian? Virgin!’
Above his grinning head, a sign over an antique shop caught my eye. LIVE IN ORIENTAL GLORY OF GRANDEUR.
I had a video player delivered to my room and played Zafyque’s tape. The film was Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke (Such Are the Ways of Love). The video player, like everything else about the Rudolf Hotel, was comically wretched – what had Zafyque meant by ‘shady’? The image was poor, bands of noise zigzagged across the screen, the vertical hold was precarious, every so often losing its grip and flipping the picture rapidly upwards, but under the opening song, I could make out a woman in a white sari, lying at the foot of a shrine. This surely was the hero’s penitent wife, S, transformed by the magic of the camera and the rewriting of history to a noble, if flawed, Hindu woman. White for mourning, for regret, for grief. Yet what grief, what regret had the real S felt, who could calmly deliver testimony that the Sessions judge had rejected as false, in the presence of her erstwhile lover’s bullet-holed head? How had she changed so suddenly and completely, from a woman who could hardly bear the sight of her husband, to the repentant, loyal wife? How could she bear to see Ahuja’s skull grinning at her perjuries?
One thing truly puzzled me. Why had she decided to drag Sybil into it? To save the husband she had been desperate to abandon? Sybil’s letters could never have saved him. Or did the memory of those letters still rankle, those literate, infuriatingly funny letters that Mister Love had so cruelly read to her? Was it simply a final act of spite? She had successfully got rid of Sybil from Mister Love’s life. For a year she had him to herself. Still, he did not seem to want her. Did she blame Sybil? Why should you get off scot-free when I am suffering? Is this what she had thought? Facing disgrace and disaster herself, had she decided to take Sybil down with her? Whatever passed through S’s mind, whatever her motive, what she did was hideously cruel. Sybil had suffered enough at her hands. There was never any need for a second family to be dragged into the maelstrom and destroyed.
A slow violent anger kindled inside me. That image of Sybil’s deathbed. Phoebe kneeling beside it. Phoebe’s despair. I thought, I feel nothing but disgust for the Nanavatis and their sordid débâcle. Disgust also for Prem Ahuja. I don’t want them in my life any more. They can fuck off out of it. What do I care about a jealous man with a gun and a temper he couldn’t control, or for a playboy with a roving eye, or an empty-headed bitch who fucked up so many people’s lives? ‘Thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you?’ S had said.
‘Your husband got away with it,’ I shouted at the white figure on the screen. ‘But you made bloody sure that Sybil didn’t.’
At about 2 a.m. the heavens opened and sent down a heavy shower across the harbour. The Arabs on the sea wall outside the hotel began their cavorting and yelling. I picked up Sybil’s Last Journal, written here, in this hotel, perhaps in this very room. Sybil had struggled against the impossibility of language to convey the terror of the sounds that assaulted her, out of the hubbub of the street – soft calls, muffled voices – she often heard her own name called: ‘Ey Sybil mem.’ ‘Oh, Sybil mem.’ ‘Oh, Killymem.’ Except that it could not be, because nobody knew she was there. Echoes of what? Terrified, Sybil crouched in her hotel room and covered her ears. Unable to move. Unable to leave. There was a scratching at her door, as if an animal were raking it with claws. Then a soft, urgent tapping. Shankar, the housekeeping boy was standing outside.
‘What do you want?’
‘You called me, madam?’
‘No.’
After a few minutes it started again, scritch-scratch, tap tap, tap tap tap. She put a pillow over her head and tried to sleep.
I woke, still angry. My morning paper contained a rich nugget of irony-ore.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY.
LONDON 1899: Crime of Passion. A terrible tragedy is reported from Bandora, near Bombay. Captain Iremonger, late of the Durham Light Infantry, was shot by an engineer named Gregory, on the staff of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. Mr Gregory afterwards shot his wife dead and blew out his own brains. Captain Iremonger lies in a precarious condition. Jealousy, says the Central News, is alleged to have been the motive of the crime, Mrs Gregory having been constantly in the company of the captain.
When Shankar came to take my breakfast tray I asked him if he remembered Sybil staying at the hotel.
‘An elderly English lady. On her own. It would have been about six years ago.’
He did remember, because she was such an unusual guest. Rarely did English people come here to this hotel, and never one so old. She stayed in her room, he told me. Hardly went out. People would ring and leave messages for her. He brought her those messages. He did not forget her, because one evening, at her request, he had brought her a bottle of whisky. She got very drunk and was shouting in the middle of the night. Some of the Arab guests complained.
‘Sahib, one thing I remember. After she came back from her trip, the police turned up here. They talked to her. That was just before she left – when she went back to England.’
‘Her trip? What trip? Where did she go?’
‘I can tell you that too,’ he said. ‘I went to buy the ticket. First class on the Deccan Queen, VT Ambona return.’
I questioned Shankar about the policemen. Who were they? From which police station? Had they given a name? I did not for a moment believe that they had come about the whisky bottle.
But Shankar did not know, did not know, did not know.
‘The English memsahib, which room did she have?’
‘Why, this one! This room we keep for non-Arab guests.’
Ah, so that was why the ceiling was cracked, the carpet reeked, and when you turned on the air-conditioner, it gave off a smell like a dead animal. Later, I telephoned Phoebe to give her the news. Apart from the discovery that Sybil had gone to Ambona, I had drawn a complete blank.
Tap tap tap. Two nights later, very, very late. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. It was happening to me. These sounds that had scared Sybil. There was definitely a soft tapping at my door.
‘Bhalu? Are you awake?’
She crept in and without a word, removed her shoes and climbed into my bed.
‘You’re not cross with me for coming?’
I shook my head. We lay together a long time, close. She must have been able to tell what my feelings were, they were shamefully apparent. Then she undressed, her long body naked in the light coming in from the street, and slipped, not into my bed, but into the twin bed next to mine.
