The Death of Mr Love, page 4
Certainly he was, and became more so. He grew the moustache and straggly beard of a tortoise patriarch, abandoned his cheap jacket and shabby overcoat (which used to make him look like one of those old Asian men you see sitting on benches in Southall, lost in baffled contemplation of their cold, grey lives), threw a shawl round his shoulders like a Himalayan baba and began wearing a necklace of rudhraksh beads wrinkled as scrotums.
Over the last few years Srinuji had come to see himself as the spiritual godfather of our family. We would receive cards at Holi, Diwali and New Year, always signed ‘Srijunis’. My sisters and I learned to feel dismay whenever his name was mentioned, yet my mother had a great deal of time for him and introduced him to Panaghiotis, who also seemed to find much in him to respect.
‘Pan says Srinuji is a gymnosophist,’ Maya told us.
‘What does he mean by that?’
‘I have no idea at all,’ she replied, smiling.
Never underestimate the resources of a bookseller. A quick forage through my shelves produced a tatty volume of the OED. (The compact edition, micrographically reproduced four-pages-to-a-page, cocked spine, bumped corners, sadly minus magnifying glass – lor, the work involved in cataloguing my so-called best stock.) The magnifying glass being lost, I deciphered the tiny text with the help of a milk bottle, found in the kitchen at the back of the shop, which had first to be rinsed and then held, half-full of water, at a tilt above the page. Of course it dripped, thereby further diminishing the book’s value, but revealed that the gymnosophists were ‘a sect of ancient Hindu philosophers of ascetic habits (known to the Greeks from the reports of the companions of Alexander) who wore little or no clothing, denied themselves meat and gave themselves up to mystical contemplation’; none of which shed any light on the enigma of Srinuji (who I could not imagine naked or performing yoga), nor explained his hold over my mother. Then one day the mystery was solved. I let myself in to Maya’s flat and discovered them sitting on the sofa side by side. They leapt apart and I thought, Oh, surely not! Not Srinuji! But Maya explained in a rather embarrassed voice that he had asked to hear some of her poems.
‘I had no idea you were interested in poetry,’ I said. I had always imagined Srinuji’s reading stopped at shastras and tantras and magazines like The Urinologist.
‘Your mother is a great woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘It is a privilege to sit at the feet of someone who has achieved so much. Who has known the great ones of our culture.’
So that was it. A writer who had abruptly stopped work at the very edge of success and produced nothing new for twenty years had at last found an audience in this solitary fan.
‘I’m afraid I have been boring Mr Srinuji with my stories of long ago,’ said Maya.
He laid his hand on hers. ‘Maya-ji, you are incapable of being boring.’
But there was something else, unsaid, between them . . .
Recently, he had made the baffling decision to shave off his moustache. The combination of naked upper lip and beard, a style favoured by Muslims, all but unknown among Hindus, made him more peculiar than ever.
‘I won’t allow you to laugh at Srinuji,’ my mother had once said. Now she was sitting up in bed, laughing at me.
‘You are an appalling woman.’
This seemed to strike her as even funnier. She laughed until she was sobbing, heehawing for breath, and the gasps caught in her throat and turned into a fit of coughing. ‘Oh, oh, oh . . . Bhalu, you are a great fool. Just like your father – that’s what he used to say.’
‘All this tamaasha turns out to be only Srinuji!’
This set her off again. Eventually she found a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘Poor Srinuji. Of course! It’s his fault that I am ill. He must be more careful in future. If Katy falls off her horse tomorrow, or if you catch cold, he’ll be to blame.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mother. It’s Srinuji who has made you believe, if you really do, that you are . . . that you’re . . .’
‘Bhalu, if you dislike tamaasha, don’t create one.’ (Tamaasha, used in Hindi/Urdu to signify ado-about-nothing, a stagy uproar.)
‘Well, I’m not the one who’s behaving irrationally.’
‘I didn’t want a fuss. I detest hysterics,’ she said, picking up a hand-mirror and peering at it to check whether the kohl had run from her eyes. ‘What possible good can it do, all that rushing around, hair-tearing and hullabaloo? It robs one of dignity and makes a difficult thing harder to bear.’ She folded her hanky, drew one corner into a peak, licked it, and applied it to a smudge.
Was that a hint of tears? She could be such an actress. After her peculiar phone call I’d rung Katy and told her what had happened, that I was catching the next train to London and would probably stay the night with one of my sisters. ‘Do you think she’s really ill?’ asked Katy, with the scepticism of one who had been Maya’s daughter-in-law for twenty-two years.
So I looked at my mother, who had composed herself on her pillows like a small, outraged but defiant, owl.
‘Sorry, Ma, no sympathy. See a proper doctor, or don’t expect me to believe you’re . . .’
‘I’m what? What upsets you more? That word you can’t utter? Or that I made the vulgar error of telling you?’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I thought you’d want to come and see me. So sorry to waste your time. Mr Very Important Bookseller.’
‘Oh please!’ I said. Let her not start about bookselling. ‘I came running, didn’t I, when I got your call? But you must see, this stuff of Srinuji’s, karma, palm-readings . . .’
‘One day, Bhalu, you’ll realise what a friend Srinuji has been to this family.’
‘Ah yes, the family witchdoctor.’
‘As for karma, you of all people should know what I mean.’
‘I’ve never understood.’
‘Poor boy, my karma is this room and everything in it. Which includes you . . . And now, as my eldest son, it’s your duty to make sure my wishes are honoured. It’s not much to ask. I’m doing you a favour by dying in England. You realise that if we were still in India you’d have to crack my skull.’
‘You are incorrigible.’
‘You think I’m joking? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Grandfather’s funeral.’
‘As you please,’ I said stiffly.
After this we sat in a silence broken only by intermittent and dispirited whistling from the bulbuls in their cage. Outside, it had grown dark. I went and stood at the window. From its bay I could see the lights of the theatre, the crowd on the pavement outside. A taxi with a yellow cyclops-eye turned into the square followed by another, its eye put out, which pulled up below. I wondered if it would disgorge my sisters. If they came soon I could still get a train back to Sussex. But a young couple got out.
A curious keening made me turn. Maya was humming.
‘Bhalu, can you guess what’s been running through my head all day?’
‘No.’
‘You really can’t guess? Shall I tell you?’
I was expecting a line from Ghalib, or perhaps something from Tolstoy, or the Upanishads. Instead she sang: ‘O doctor I’m in trouble! Well, goodness gracious me!’
Placing one finger on the point of her chin, she cocked her head, simpered, and gave an astonishing display of eye-rolling.
‘My heart goes boompity boomputty boompity boomputty boompity boomputty boomboomboom . . .’
‘You are a complete disgrace.’
‘O from Delhi to Darjeeling I have done my share of healing
And I never once was beaten or flumm-o-o-o-o-oxed . . .’
She would sing this song to us when we were small, and had fevers, or toothache, or when we fell over and hurt ourselves.
‘I remember how with wunjab of my needle in the Punjab
I cleared up beri-beri and the dreaded dysentery,
But your complaint has got me truly foxed!’
In spite of everything, my feelings rose up and overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help it, I never could be cross with her for long. I put my arms round her, hugged her. She looked pleased. I said, ‘Now, Mother, no more silliness. Let’s talk about getting you better.’
She drew my head to her shoulder and stroked my hair as if I were a child. ‘So, so serious, Bhalu,’ she said. ‘So stiff, so solemn. You always were, even as a little boy.’
What was I to do with her?
My mother had a Hindu mind, her world organised with that genius for taxonomy which has minutely subcategorised everything from music to lovemaking – she told me once that she imagined the hordes of Hindu deities arrayed in rows, each god and goddess in its own little jar, like a spice, with its own special virtue, Laxmi for money, Ganesh for luck, Saraswati for skill with the pen – but she was unorthodox to the extreme and loved to present herself as an enigma. For example, she claimed to be an atheist, but put in daily requests to Ganesh, denying that this amounted to prayer. ‘It’s not that I believe in him, it’s just that my wishes always seem to be granted.’
Maya did not see such statements as contradictions, which, in any case, she regarded as trifling obstacles to understanding. We would often hear raised voices from the room she used as an office, and it would be Maya arguing both sides of the case with equal vehemence. If the imagined adversary was a man, she would even put on a gruff voice to make his points. When we teased her about talking to herself, she claimed that the creatures of a writer’s imagination could not be counted as self, and besides, she was the only person she knew capable of giving her an intelligent debate.
Among the many odd things she wished me to inherit, besides bulbuls and the case of fading butterflies that had once belonged to my great-grandfather, the Kotwal, was her view of history as a cascade of consequences. She did not believe in past lives or in the conventional Hindu notion of paying in the next life for the sins of this one. For her, karma was experienced every second, here and now, because our lives are the continuously unfolding effect of all the caroming actions ever performed by ourselves and our forbears. ‘We are born with free will, but are forced to expend it trying to un-live the lives of our predecessors.’
Maya worried about our family legends as if they still haunted us, in which case we had much to fear. To her, the stories of our selfless servant Lajju, and of Nafísa Jaan, who was killed for being too lovely to let go (the Kotwal Sahib’s butterfly collection having been started for much the same reason) were not just tales of long ago but dark eddies in the blood.
‘If Lajju had not picked you up and carried you despite the bullet in him, if Nafísa hadn’t fallen in love, a luxury a woman in her profession could hardly afford . . .’ She rarely noticed that she said ‘picked you up’, whereas the ten-year-old boy Lajju was said to have rescued from the British on a battlefield in 1858 had actually been my great-great-grandfather . . .
‘If Grandfather’s first wife hadn’t come from a house full of smoke that ruined her lungs, she wouldn’t have died young, he wouldn’t have married again, and your father wouldn’t have been born. If a scorpion hadn’t fallen onto your father’s stomach as he slept in the courtyard – the night sky in Kumharawa is really quite luminous – and stung him fourteen times because he foolishly rolled on it – but of course he was in agony, a line of punctures, like pits of fire – he would not have been rushed to Lucknow to Doctor Sahib, and wouldn’t have met me. So you see, Bhalu, you owe your life to smoke and a scorpion.’
She might as well have added, since many years would intervene between that meeting and their marriage, that had the gunners on the Scharnhorst been more accurate, had they used their radar instead of aiming at British gun-flashes in the nacht and nebel of the North Cape, they might have sunk my father’s cruiser during the war (Boxing Day 1943) and with it his as yet unimagined and unconceived heir.
She had always been a law unto herself. When it suited her she could be thoroughly old-fashioned (deciding that her will should be executed while she was still alive) but was modern enough to have abandoned my father at a time when divorce was all but unthinkable for Indian women. She had been as daring, thirty years earlier, in making a love marriage. She met my father at the house of his uncle the Lucknow doctor, and straight away set her cap at him, a most unladylike thing to do, but as she told it, she was due to start at Isabella Thoburn College, reckoned herself the equal of any man and, besides, had chosen well, for Captain Sahib had the right caste and family background with prospects that any in-laws could wish. He was about to join the Royal Indian Navy, one of the first Indians to be selected as an officer and be sent for training in England. This was 1938, and it had taken eighty years and five generations for our family to go from being rebels to loyal servants of the Crown. Maya taught me the dates of my ancestors like a history teacher rehearsing parades of kings and viceroys. I still have a school ‘copy’ in which she had listed, for some reason reversing conventional order:
Bhalu the Great
– 1950–?
You
Captain Sahib
– 1918–?
Father
Bahadur Sahib
– 1890–?
Grandfather
Kotwal Sahib
– 1865–1940
Great-grandfather
Bhalu the First
– 1847–1915
Great-great-grandfather
Panchhazari Sahib
– 1823–1888
Great-great-great-grandfather
Maya knew all their stories. I remember thinking how strange and sad it was that the familiar bugle call that floated out over the Bombay docks at sunset (this was before we moved to Ambona), and which signalled bedtime and stories to me, was the identical sound the shivering child of a century earlier must have heard rising from the enemy lines on the eve of the battle that would alter all our destinies. Was it also his bedtime? With what stories did Lajju stop his ears? Did the boy pray for his father and Lajju not to be killed next morning? With clenched fists and tightly shut eyes, already knowing how the story ended, I used to wish backwards through time for his prayers to be answered because Maya had taught me that time is an illusion and since history, or karma, as she thought of it, exists only in what currently manifests, it can be undone.
‘There is no past,’ she said, ‘because all its effects are with us now. Only appearance changes, underlying reality does not.’
No doubt this is why she called me Balachandra, and gave me the same nickname that long-ago Lajju affectionately bestowed on that other small boy, who had begged to accompany his father to war.
Bhalu, known to his playmates from an early age as Bhola Bhalu. Bhalu the Innocent. Bhalu the Fool.
A STORY-SHAPED HOLE
‘The money is equally divided,’ said Maya. ‘There isn’t much left, but the flat will be worth a bit. My gold jewellery will go to the girls, I don’t expect Katy would like it. She gets my good Kashmiri shawl. I’ve left the painting of the old nawab to Suki, because she loved it as a child. The clock with the silver pomegranates I thought Ninu would like. I’m leaving you my books. Try not to sell them all at once.’
‘Of course not.’
‘You promise?’
‘If you insist.’
‘My books are old friends. Many of them were written by old friends. Bhalu! Next door in the bookcase is Mulk’s Untouchable. Would you mind . . . ? And while you’re there,’ she called after me, ‘get me a rum! . . . Oh, don’t be so stuffy, Bhalu. There are limes in the kitchen. Make us both one.’
So I brought her rum the way she liked it, the old Navy way, with sugar, lime-juice and hot water in a jug, and she sent me back to her bookshelves for Gorky and Ismat Chughtai, Tolstoy, Manto and Lawrence, Faulkner and Qurratulain Hyder. The piles of books mounted. She laid them out on the bed, ran her fingers with fondness over them (most, noted the bookseller’s covetous eye, in their original paper jackets).
Soon she was transported back to that world she had loved and left behind. Picking up a book with a bright flourish of Urdu on the cover, she cried, ‘Look at this! Majrooh’s Ghazals! I knew him when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a lyricist in the movies. One used to meet everyone at parties. There were endless parties in those days. My God, how people drank. Everyone had told Majrooh that a poet couldn’t make a living in Bombay. He was successful, but would still get depressed. People would protest, “But Majrooh sahib, you are doing so well.” He would always quote a line of Kabir’s: “I am selling mirrors in the city of the blind”. They sing his songs still, but nobody remembers his books.’
As well as the film crowd (Charles Subramanium, who staged a bizarre public celebration of his wife’s infidelities, Shankar Rao, who threw a jug of orange squash over the Education Minister for saying that Meena was a worse actress than Nargis), she had known many writers of the time.
‘Hai, Qurru! We were together at Isabella Thoburn College. So young when she made a name for herself. And a woman! And look, here’s Ismat, who wrote Lihaaf and was prosecuted by the British for obscenity. What a victory that was – delicious to think that we had stepped into the modern age while our rulers were still in the Victorian era. It took the British sixteen more years to decide that their wives and servants could be permitted to read Lady Chatterley . . .’
She talked and talked, about India, incidents and anecdotes, people she’d known, always about the past, the life that had ended in 1973, the year she left. Most of it I had heard before. Lately, like many old people, she had developed the habit of repeating herself, but listening to her, as she caressed her books and told their stories, I was struck by how passionately she had lived.
‘Sometimes I think it would have been better if the British had never left. While they remained, they united us against them. We had purpose, a sense of destiny. So exhilarating. Inqilaab (revolution) was in the air, victory round the corner . . . then along came Independence and ruined everything. Partition was the Crown’s final act of revenge for 1857. Bhalu, did you ever read Jyoti Bhatt’s story, Vengeance? No? During the riots of 1947 a very, very ancient man remembers his grandfather, who’d fought in the Mutiny, describing how Hindus and Muslims stood side by side in 1857, and how the British took revenge for Kanpur, or Cawnpore as they called it, by blowing people from the mouths of cannons, forcing them to lick blood from the road – why do you think Thrice-Great had to hide in the jungle? – the old man’s grandfather said that after 1857 the British worked to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, and that their cruellest revenge was to pass an Act in 1903 partitioning the Hindustani language, which was a richly polyglot tongue, into Urdu and Hindi. Urdu for Muslims, Hindi for Hindus. All traces of Persian and Arabic were to be eradicated from Hindi, and of Sanskrit from Urdu. Thus the common language, which had evolved to unite us, became a tool of division. But peering out of his window at the flames and mobs of 1947, the old man concludes that his grandfather was wrong, because the last revenge of the British Sarkar was the horrifying things happening in the lane outside his door.
