The Death of Mr Love, page 5
‘Imagine, Bhalu, the lunatic irresponsibility of it. Someone draws a line on a map and one morning millions of people wake up to find themselves on the wrong side of a new border. Could no one have predicted that they would panic? Were they expected to abandon homes, fields, cattle, jobs, friends, children’s education? Were the British really surprised when Hindus and Muslims who’d lived side by side for years were filled with fear, or madness, and began cutting one another’s throats?
‘Across the fields of blood each side stared at the other. How had one become two? Everyone had friends on the other side. Why was it happening? Gandhi went on a fast to the death and at last the killing stopped. Would it resume? Was it enough? Then – three shots in a temple garden – and Gandhi himself was gone.
‘The miracle really is that we recovered. But what else? We were young, and ahead was nothing but the future. Our country had been torn in two, yet we’d build a great future in the half that was left to us. We must bring about a healing. During the fifties everything blossomed. We could reach people, talk to them, via the cinema. The first real proletarian art form. So exciting. Oh, in those days how I wrote, wrote, wrote. I was always tapping something on a typewriter. And you know, our work wasn’t mere entertainment. It was dedicated to those things that nowadays sound so fustian, like justice and compassion. Above all, peace.
‘We vowed that the bad times would never return, but now it is happening again in Bombay. So we failed. And who is left to speak out against it? In those days, so many people wrote on this theme. Listen to their names, even their names make a poem: Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chughtai, Mulk Raj Anand, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Krishan Chander, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Josh Malihabadi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafry, and of course, the unforgettable Manto . . . If the tears of poets could heal wounds, there would be no India and no Pakistan, we would all be living in Toba Tek Singh . . .’
Writing this, and I’ve kept it to her part of the conversation because my own was largely interjectory, I am surprised to realise how hard all this would be to explain even to my own children, neither of whom can speak a word of Hindi, and who know little enough about life in India and Pakistan, let alone a congerie of poets and writers, most of them unknown in the West, from half a century ago. I would have to explain that Toba Tek Singh was a village in an Urdu short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, his most famous story, in which the governments of the new nations of India and Pakistan decide that having exchanged refugees, they must also exchange inmates of insane asylums.
‘If we’re going to talk about Manto,’ said Maya, ‘we ought to have another rum.’
So we sat and got quietly ‘rummed-up’ together – that was the old Bombay phrase – and we raised a glass to Manto’s memory and Maya said he was the finest short story writer that ever lifted a pen. ‘Better than Maupassant, better than O. Henry.’
Manto was a genius. It is said that, in his later days he would take a tonga (horse-drawn cab) to his publisher’s office, ask for a pencil and sit there until he had written three or four stories, for which he invariably demanded to be paid on the spot. He would then take the tonga, which was waiting outside (he always hired them by the day), to the nearest liquor shop. He died aged forty-three after composing his own epitaph: ‘Here, under tons of earth lies Saadat Hasan Manto, with all the secrets of storytelling buried in his breast, and the question still unresolved as to who is the better short story writer – he or God.’
‘Hai,’ said Maya. ‘No one will ever ask that about me.’
Why then had she stopped writing? This was the big mystery of her life. She might have had success, might even have earned a place in that list of names. Whence came the bitterness that she packed so carefully along with her books and her carvings and furniture when she left India?
‘You should have stayed,’ I said. Then asked, as my sisters and I so often had before, ‘Why did you leave?’
She was silent.
‘You gave up everything, your work, your friends.’
Silence.
Why did you leave? Why didn’t you go back? How many times had we asked these questions? How many different answers? . . . I didn’t plan to stay on, it just happened. (Incredible. One does not lightly give up husband, friends and career.) After a while there was nothing to go back for. (Begging the question.) I thought I’d make a better career in England. (Nonsense, she was lost. She did a bit of journalism, and some writing on Indian cookery.) Once you married an English girl I knew our future would be here. (Why? There were lots of Englishwomen in India. Hadn’t one of her best friends been English?)
After the twins were born, I’d suggested to Katy that we might try living in India. Maya was horrified.
‘You’re going to ask that poor girl to take her young babies to a country where if you want unwatered milk you have to keep a cow? Does she like cockroaches? Where will she ride in Bombay? Englishwomen have a rough time in India.’
‘What about your friend?’ I’d asked. ‘Your English friend?’
‘That’s how I know.’
None of these answers stacked up. Now she sat, cradling her glass, staring into the distance. What was she thinking about? Manto? Her lost career? We were both getting drunk.
I remembered a thing Srinuji had once told me. ‘Your mother has made great sacrifices.’ (Never said what these might have been.) ‘She’s had many disappointments in her life.’ (By which I assumed he meant me.) ‘Whatever I can do, in my own small way, to ease the passage,’ he had added as if he were tackling an ugly case of piles, ‘that I do and do gladly.’
I knew at least what Maya must have said about me: ‘Bhalu is a strange boy. Nearly fifty, yet I find it impossible to think of him in other terms. So awkward, so shabby, why has he buried himself in that bookshop? He could have done something useful with his life. He grew up surrounded by books and art and I thought he could have made a life for himself in that field. Even if not as a first-rate writer, as a journalist. There is such a thing as genius in bookselling; a bookshop can be like a work of art, if the bookseller chooses his books as carefully as a novelist his characters. Unfortunately Bhalu is not a genius.’
These were all things that, at different times and with varying degrees of unsubtlety, she had conveyed to me herself.
But no one could be more disappointed with my life than me. I’m not talking about bookselling, which is a noble calling – the bookshop was the first time I’d been happy in years – I mean what happened before. The lost years. My life had been filled with Maya’s stories: endless, endless stories, anecdotes, yarns, recitals, chronicles, sagas, narratives of now and then, mysteries, legends, adventures, dramas, parables, fables, tall tales, wonderful stories pulled from histories or squeezed back in again, stories, stories without end, and yet . . . as the years went by I began to feel that there was one story missing, a big story, a secret, something not being said, that had never been talked about, which nevertheless sat at the centre of our lives and had shaped them, a void bounded by other stories, a story-shaped hole into which explanations fell and vanished. This untold story corresponded in some way which I could not explain, nor begin to understand, to the hole in my own life, the gap where my destiny should have been.
For the first time, I said all this to Maya.
The room slowly filled again with silence. Even the bulbuls were quiet. They must have been asleep, little heads hidden under their wings.
At last she said, ‘Bhalu, in the bedroom. The old almirah is full of files. My work. I was going to leave it to you anyway, but I think you should take it tonight. Look through it, then we’ll talk.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Foolish!’ she said. ‘Do you suppose you’ll find an essay entitled Why I Left India by Maya Sahib?’
‘I don’t know what to suppose. This is your idea, not mine.’
‘Don’t argue, Bhalu.’
‘Are you feeling all right?’ She was seventy-six, recovering from a temperature, and we’d had how much grog?
‘It’s not a question of this bit or that bit.’
‘What then?’
‘There are things . . .’ She stopped as a new thought occurred to her. ‘In music there are two kinds of notes. Those which are played. And “unstruck notes”, the so-called “anhad naad”. The unstruck notes are not played, but they are there, we hear them. Without them music makes no sense. It’s the same with stories. You just described it. “The untold story, the story-shaped hole into which reason vanishes.” Yes, I like that. I like it very much. You should consider picking up a pen, Bhalu. It’s never too late, not even at your age.’
‘Things such as?’ I asked, trying to find patience. ‘I have read all your work.’
‘Things you know, things you don’t. Things you know without knowing you know – this rum is twisting my tongue. In a writer’s work, stories are never really separate. They reach out to one another. They touch, merge, diverge. They slide in and out of each other. There are stories hidden within stories, hidden in the work as a whole – a bit of this story, a piece of that. Suddenly parts of different stories combine to reveal a new, surprising tale. That’s the one to look for.’
‘Why do I always get the feeling that you’re laughing at me?’
‘Bhalu,’ she said reproachfully, ‘I am your mother.’
‘As my mother, you were always quick to point out what a dull swamp my life had become. Why won’t you talk about this?’
‘You don’t understand. It’s not that I won’t talk about it. I can’t talk about it. I promised I wouldn’t.’
‘Who did you promise?’
She said sadly, ‘There was no choice, Bhalu. We agreed. It was necessary.’
‘Who agreed?’ She was as maddening drunk as sober.
‘Bhalu, I am so sorry . . . Over all the years, all your ups and downs, and the drinking,’ she said, oblivious to the groggy irony of our situation, ‘I prayed you were happy. No, of course I don’t pray, not exactly, but I hoped . . . You had Katy, the twins.’
‘What was necessary?’
‘I promised your father I would not tell you, but the fact is that we agreed, your father and I – and it was the only thing we had agreed upon for years –’
‘Maya!’
‘– that it was necessary that you leave. The girls and I simply followed. So really, the answer to your question is that I did it for your sake.’
‘My sake?’ I was amazed. ‘You left India for my sake? Why?’ This was her revelation and it made no sense at all.
Inside the wardrobe – only Maya still called it an almirah – were nearly two-dozen box-files. Willing though I was to humour her, I would never be able to carry them on the train. I said I would ask Katy to drive me up at the weekend.
‘No, no. There’s no time. I have an account with a minicab firm. Phone them now. Take everything to Sussex tonight.’
Then she said, ‘Bhalu, don’t waste your life.’
Whether she meant this as a moral to be drawn from her own life, or as a comment on mine, I never found out, because at that moment the doorbell rang.
POMPLOOMICALLY SPEAKING
Sun throbbing into the bookshop’s tiny kitchen. Operated kettle, found coffee, dark-clotted spoon stuck upright in the jar. Milk off. Yesterday’s. Everything here just as I had left it the day before, as if the world had not changed. Mother’s dying swan routine. What did she mean, she had done it for me? Sugar on the draining board, ants at it already. Stirred in three, took the mug into the bindings room, as we called it, really my lair, where Maya’s files were stacked in an untidy ziggurat.
Quarter to nine. Sun leaping too sprightly off the gold-blocked lettering on Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (Cass & Co, 1967, 4 vols, reprint of the enlarged 1861–2, v.g.c). Strange that such a subject should be given so lavish a binding. I shouldn’t drink. It plays havoc, and I’d promised Katy.
Last night, well after one by the time I got home to the cottage, walls washed white by the moon, no lights on. Note from Katy in the kitchen (nearly said oven), If hungry, Shepherd’s Pie in oven (not very nice I’m afraid). By the kettle she had left a waiting mug in which was a teabag, half-buried under a small heap of sugar and ginger-dust. My habitual bedtime guzzle. Thoughtful of her. Tiptoed into our bedroom to find, as so many times before, a lozenge of moonlight spread across the floor, Katy’s head on the pillow, gentle purr of her breath (Rolls-Royce of snores). ‘Why do I feel so guilty?’ Lay awake with my mind racing. Garbled dreams involving exotic birds, large claw-waving crabs, my mother and a man, a pussyistic man, from whom, pomploomically speaking, I must run away and hide. I rose, still groggy, stood under the shower for twenty minutes and came downstairs to find Katy staring at the huge pile of boxes that contained Maya’s work – she could never say ‘my work’ without that inflection, a self-conscious lilt followed by a minute pause, – work –. As Katy, in a crackling, bubbling, hissing, sputtering cacophony, prepared breakfast, I told her the whole, weird tale.
‘She isn’t dying,’ I said, ‘she’s up to something.’
‘What will you do with these?’ Katy asked, indicating the box-files.
There was no room for them in our tiny cottage. She drove me to the bookshop and we carried them, six at a time, through the shop to the bindings room. I sat and ignored them while I opened the morning post. Bill. Bill. Junk mail selling health insurance. Bill. Letter from someone asking could I supply a set of Household Words. ‘Editor, Charles Dickens,’ the sender had written, as if I wouldn’t know. Had, as it happened, volumes I, II, III, IV, V, IX and X in the original green cloth, vols XIII and XVI in half-calf. So, neither a complete nor a matching set. Still, a start. But I couldn’t reach them because Maya’s temple was in the way, a black pyramid at whose heart was a story-shaped chamber. Somewhere in there were the pieces I must assemble. Hot coffee abs. no effect on headthrobbing. I opened the first box.
The work comprised:
Several drafts, in English, of an unfinished novel, The Cowdung Factory, about a village whose harmony is shattered when one family acquires an apparatus for turning cowdung into gas. Maya liked to grow her tales, like pearls, round bits of grit from the real world and The Cowdung Factory was based on feuding families in my father’s home town, Kumharawa.
Five screenplays in Hindi, of which two, Doraaha (Two Ways) and Badnaami ka dilaasa (The Solace of Infamy), had been produced.
A chaos of handwritten notes, magazine cuttings and smudgy photocopies (made by flattening book so its spine bends back on itself like a circus acrobat, and type arches up and out of a dark central gutter – ruinous to bindings, bookseller speaking here) collected in different boxes according to subject.
Themes which interested her (there were dozens, I am being selective, choosing those with a bearing on this story) included:
– the 1857 Mutiny (First War of Independence). Accounts of battles, particularly Jaura Alipur, 1858. My father’s recollection of accompanying his grandfather on hunting trips in Nepal, c1926, with muzzle-loading muskets of the Brown Bess type as used by the rebels of seventy years earlier. A peevish note complaining that the conflict had never been properly documented by the Indian side. Even Savarkar, the Hindu revolutionary, had to rely on British sources in his account. In another file I found a news-cutting describing Savarkar’s funeral procession (Bombay, 1966), led by a saffron-capped horseman, the body carried on a truck, flower-heaped, in slow procession from Dadar to Chandanwadi followed by a huge crowd, a hundred thousand people at least, including, Maya had pencilled, the film producer V. Shantaram and his ‘keep’, a girl called Sandhya, ‘a better dancer than she was an actress’.
– the Mahratta leader Shivaji, 1627–80, whose file, a manila folder marked M.E.S. STORES, AMBONA, contained an account of the giant ghorpats, monitor lizards, of the Deccan plateau.
– sayings and lore collected from villagers, some of which I remembered, for example the verse people chanted as they carried statues of elephant-headed Ganesh (these were gaudily-painted clay idols, often very large) to the lake at Ambona, wading until they were in over their heads, only the statues riding the waves
Ganpati bappa morya
purjya varsha laukarya
Ganpati geley gavala
chaiin pade re amhala
until the statues would tilt, dip, and the lake softly ungarland them, widening rings of marigolds and roses on the water.
– research on the opium trade as conducted by the East India Company. An account of going with my father and ‘that mad afimchi’ Zaz Qaradaghi to an open-air concert in Poona to hear maestro Bhimsen Joshi. ‘Joshi-ji was at his best, only a little the worse for wear. He sang his favourite raga, Miya ki Malhar – the critics used to say he was too fond of it.’ Zaz (real name Zahir, a regular at her Ambona soirées) was the only opium addict she knew. When Zaz listened to music, he would lodge a small, gummy ball of the bitter stuff behind his front upper teeth, and swore he could see the sound. Maya gave a page to his description of the patterns and colours of the raga: ‘I lost sense of time and place and grew aware of graceful designs that swam before my eyes, the music carving shapes, inscribing bright arabesques in the dark air before me. I remember a slash of gold, a blue blob, scarlet dots and a yellow object shaped somewhat like a frog: my mind despairs of communicating these visions.’
