The Death of Mr Love, page 6
What a romantic she was. And what pleasure she’d had in that world of art and discourse and dandified friends, some of whom behaved as if they were living in the eighteenth century. How did this reconcile with her crusading for the poor? No contradiction. Romantics have always been drawn to revolution. It is a small step from ‘Man was born free and is everywhere in chains’ to ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.’ Maya believed in the power of art to change things.
– Mahatma Gandhi, assorted sayings. News reporter: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilisation?’ Gandhi: ‘It would be a good idea.’ Philosophy of non-violence. Not a weapon for the weak. One must be capable of violence and choose not to use it. His assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist and follower of Savarkar, in the garden of the Birla temple, Delhi, on 30 January 1948. Godse brought up as a strict Hindu (cf Srinuji), as a child forced to recite Sanskrit verses from the Rig Veda and Bhagavad Gita, proud of his Hindu upbringing but – one of those quirks impossible for a novelist to invent – was an addict of Perry Mason detective stories. He apparently spent the night before the assassination in loud enjoyment of The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse. Also in this file, Maya’s comment on the film Gandhi, ‘more swamiography’. A side-note that Jinnah had been played with great élan by an old acquaintance from Zafyque’s Theatre Troupe.
– corruption in government service (a lot of cuttings, some quite recent). A series of articles published in a Bombay paper by a journalist who had made his name writing ‘scandalographies’ of Indian movie stars.
– the Bombay riots of 1993, aftermath of the Babri Masjid business, when thirty thousand Hindu zealots, among them whole tribes of ash-smeared but otherwise naked ascetics, tore a Muslim mosque apart brick by brick because, they said, it stood on the place, the very spot where Lord Rama, incarnation of the god Vishnu, had been born. Violence then, inevitable, predictable. Riots in Bombay. In Radhabhai Chawl, a Hindu family burned to death. Hindu mobs went looking for revenge. Not just in the poor areas to which previous troubles had been confined. Went to posh localities like Malabar Hill and checked the apartment blocks for names of Muslim residents. Missing names a giveaway. In some buildings, all names were removed to protect Muslim occupants. Zafyque had come to us later that year with tales of knifings, burnings and beheadings, which horrified Maya in some intensely personal way, as if she held herself to blame.
I also found a sheaf of poems and about thirty short stories in manuscript, among them many old favourites I had known from my childhood: Silver Ganesh, Nafísa Jaan (in two versions, ‘meethi’, sweet, and ‘teekhi’, bitter), Badnaami ka dilaasa (The Solace of Infamy, several drafts, plus notes for screenplay).
Thoughts in post-rum disarray jostling and squabbling like a posse of Trafalgar Square pigeons . . .
Among the Badnaami material, sweet revival of old delight. A mass of notes, and photos of Johnny Walker, actor man, comic genius, my childhood favourite, Bombay’s raspberry at Jerry Lewis.
JW’s real name was Badruddin Jamaluddin Qazi. At the start of the fifties he’d been a conductor on a B.E.S.T (BOMBAY ELECTRIC SUPPLY TRANSPORT) bus, red with yellow lettering on the side, streaked with paan spit. Number 132. Ding-ding. Ran from R.C. Church in the naval cantonment, up past Sassoon Dock (fishwives in parrot-hued saris reeking of pomfret and Bombay Duck, the sun-dried and aptly-named sardine Bummalo bummalo) to the Regal Cinema, Churchgate, Marine Drive, Chowpatty Beach in a fug of sweat, tobacco, jasmine and cheap hair oil, people running alongside executing balletic last-minute leaps onto the platform, the conductor pulling them aboard. He liked an audience and would cheer up his customers with jokes and silly faces, comic soliloquies, songs and scraps of ribaldry. The actor Balraj Sahni saw this performance (yes, in those innocent days film stars rode on buses with their public) and got him a screen test. The rest, as they say, itihaas.
Such a long time since I’d seen a Hindi movie. To hire one meant a trek to Southall or that little shop in Drummond Street, off the Euston Road – just across from the Bengali grocer where Srinuji used to buy Alfonso mangoes in season, a presentation box for my mother, always one or two gone pulpy in the straw at the bottom, packed cheekcheekcheekcheek six thousand miles away in Crawford Market, corner of Mohammed Ali Road near Victoria Terminus (boy’s trail in Silver Ganesh), on the other bus route from Colaba, the noble 123, a two-cinema journey from R.C. Church through the bummalo stench to the Regal, Flora Fountain, Dhobhitalao (Washermen’s Tank, stop for Metro cinemagoers) and Girgaum (through which passed the horseman, drums and multitude of Savarker’s funeral procession) thence to Lamington Road, where huge hoardings, each a unique handpainted work of art, ice-cream pink heroines, villains’ green faces, announced the latest films – such a pity you couldn’t get them in Lewes, but once in a while I would see one at Maya’s. She used to watch them with gloomy pleasure. ‘The monkey business going to the dogs.’
Monkeys, orange-eyed. After her Srinuji confession, impossible to take this supposed illness seriously. Punching holes in the skull. Yes, I knew how that felt.
O my head.
Six large ones, it must have been. Maybe seven. Sisters livid. Naturally, blamed me. Bhalu up to his old tricks. Maya greeting them gaily.
‘Isn’t this a treat?’ she cried. ‘I haven’t had you all together for ages. You see? I really don’t mind being ill. It’ll be such fun. In bed with my favourite authors. Munching chocolates. Fresh flowers every day.’ Not long before her genius for infuriating her family worked its customary effect.
A man come back home from a meeting,
Catch he wife with a next man cheating . . .
Rummed-up last night in the back of the minicab, Maya’s boxes rattling beside me. The driver was a chatty Trinidadian. He drove the first mile elbow on seat-back, half-turned to talk.
‘I take your mother round a lot of times. She’s a nice lady.’
‘Where does she like to go?’
‘Two three places. St John’s Wood.’ (Panaghiotis.) ‘Harrow.’ (Srinuji.) ‘Couple weeks ago I take her to Peckham.’ (??)
But he did not know.
Somethin on yuh mind Ah want to know
Darling why you behaving so . . .
‘You like calypso music?’
‘I like reggae.’
Bob Marley. ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Those were the days. Before the bad times. When the twins came along, we named them Isobel and Imogen, so they became I & I. Inseparable ‘I’s. Twins, a theme in my life.
‘Welcome to the Mighty Sparrow,’ the driver was saying. ‘Litta bitta sunshine from home. One of these days I’ll go back, get myself a house on the beach. Not Trinidad. Tobago. People work in Trinidad, retire in Tobago . . . So, what do you do?’
‘I’m a bookseller.’
‘Your mother tells me she writes stories. You must be selling plenty of your mother’s stories.’
Most of these exchanges took place within a few miles of her flat. He told me that he was homesick, was hoping to get back for the next North Trinidad v South Trinidad cricket match, didn’t see enough – ‘Lara, there’s a graceful bat’ – and the date of birth of his dog (Alvin, labrador, 31/3/94).
Pomploomically speaking you’re a pussyistic man
Most elaquitably full of shitification . . .
Acute discomfort. Not just the motion, trees reeling past. The sour rum aftertaste brought back bad memories. Years ago. Fifteen at least. Pre-bookshop. That life long gone, but the shame survives. Home too often from London by the company’s taxi service, too curdled to walk straight. Late-night taxis like this one weaving through nauseous country roads. Hither, yon, thither, on. Bidding the driver stop at roadside inns or (if passing through a town) at one of those Bangladeshi restaurants that masquerade as Indian, ordering with a lordly air. ‘And one for my chauffeur.’
Yes, shame. Guilt. Fear, too. Katy’s anger. ‘Won’t be a bloody doormat. I’ll make my own life.’ Did as well. Why be surprised?
Your splendiferous views are too catsarstical
Too cuntimoratic and too bitchilistical . . .
Somewhere after Gatwick, we left the motorway at the wrong exit and got lost on little back roads. Well after midnight. Open heath heaving to horizon. Oak woods in last summer leaf. Cypress besoms trying to sweep the sky of stars. Headlights picking out a sign that read ‘Pennybridge Lane’.
‘Boss, we are miles out of our way.’
But I didn’t know either. What strange trigonometry of fate had triangulated his Calypsonian and my Indian sorrows on this night to this lane in this most English of landscapes?
ELEVEN O’CLOCK PIGLET
The clock on the church opposite began to strike the hour. From my window I could see a cascade of roofs descending Castle Hill, bent roofs, crooked roofs, tiles of various colours. The early sun was gone. From a few chimneys smoke was trying to push upward, beaten down by a thin rain. Eleven. Maya’s papers were spread out across my desk. I pushed them aside. Time to revive the kettle. Any moment now the doorbell would go and Piglet would stoop through the undersized doorway, turn, flap his umbrella in the street, snap it shut, execute a semi-military about-face and zigzag between the bookcases to my inner sanctum where, with rain dripping from a nose reddened and shined by whisky, he would ask the question he came in to ask on most mornings at this hour.
‘Hello Bhalu, anything new?’ This, although a question, was not the question.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
Eleven O’Clock Piglet, ally, confrère, semblable, my closest and probably only friend – real name Pigott – was something-or-other in the White Boar Brigade, or, as he liked to put it, ‘the provisional wing of the Richard III Society’, which holds that Richard is not the murderous villain everyone believes him to be. It thinks Shakespeare was trying to curry favour with Elizabeth I, whose grandpapa had defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth. Piglet and his friends went further and claimed Henry Tudor, not Richard, had murdered the little princes in the Tower. ‘Dicky 3 didn’t have a hump either,’ he was always telling me. ‘Shakespeare made that up too. Good drama, rotten lie.’
Piglet came in every morning to pretend he was looking for books about Richard III. Each morning feigned disappointment.
‘Damn! Well, never mind . . . Charlotte?’ (This was the question.)
‘Can’t,’ I usually told him. ‘No one to mind the shop.’
‘So what? You never have any customers.’
He was right there. The bookshop was not a thriving business. It barely covered its costs, so there was nothing left to take as a salary. I was sustained by Katy, who had her own small income and ran an interior design consultancy. Thank God that even in these straitened times there were still plenty of people who could afford to pay her to scour the souks of Brighton for the ships-in-bottles, wooden ploughshares from Turkey and other bric-à-brac with which she titillated their imaginations.Thanks to Katy, my life was comfortably, reliably, humdrum: I sat, day after day, in my back room, warmed by a small log fire popping in the grate. A risk, because books lined every wall. I kept in here the more valuable volumes: bindings, worthwhile first editions. A twenty-six volume set of the Strand Magazine occupied a shelf above my head, good reading on quiet afternoons. Here also I kept sets of Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, Walter Scott, whose value would be destroyed if a volume were pinched. A couple of years earlier there had been a spate of thefts. I lost a Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and a pricy Kama Sutra illustrated with salacious Indian miniatures. Since then there had been a mirror near the door of the back room, giving me a fish-eye view of the front shop which is where I kept modern novels and subjects that sold well – antiques, being so near Brighton – art, china, dogs and cats, horses, local history and, things being what they are, sex. People browsing there could not be seen from the road and didn’t know I could see them. They often behaved oddly when they thought they couldn’t be observed. One day I was amazed to see a couple – the man had his protesting girlfriend backed up against the European History, with her skirt up around her waist and I am convinced was doing, or about to do, the dirty deed when the doorbell went and she thrust him furiously away. What should one do on occasions like this? Maintain a discreet silence and enjoy? Only once since the mirror was installed did I actually see a shoplifter and then did nothing about it because, embarrassingly, it was someone I knew.
Dong dang DING dung. All over the town, clocks exchanging hourly reassurances. Somewhere, Piglet walking in a cloud of bells.
Charlotte was the barmaid at the White Hart. It was Piglet’s custom, after he had looked in on me, to continue along the High Street to the Hart and stay there until well into the afternoon. He would drink alone if need be but preferred company. Occasionally, I was persuaded to join him, but drinking with Piglet was a bad idea. We’d invariably end up in his workshop until late, and Katy was not pleased when I came home reeking of furniture polish. Furniture polish? Yes, for Piglet, when he was not rewriting history or togging up for one of the White Boars’ frequent revisionist re-enactments – the Battle of Bosworth Field as it should have been been fought, with a triumphant Richard bestriding the body of Henry Tudor – earned his living restoring furniture. He was a craftsman, his work was exquisite, he paid the utmost attention to period detail. Under my desk was a large cardboard box full of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wooden planes. Piglet had bought them at an auction in Brighton so he could make his own astragals, ovolos and ogees, which, he explained, were types of moulding. The box had been there since the last time I accepted one of his invitations to Charlotte’s and the bookshop stayed closed for the rest of the day.
Katy used to ask if I never got sick of sitting in an empty shop. She said we were getting old without having had any fun. After the twins went off to their university she suggested we should sell up and think about doing something exciting like living in France and keeping horses (her major interest), but I realised a long time ago that what I wanted most from life was to be left alone by it. No doubt that’s why I hid myself away in a bookshop. My bookshop – well, any bookshop, but especially mine – was a complete cosmos, its books emerald tablets that mediated between the uncertain realities of the world outside and the teeming oysterbeds of the mind. It was a place to escape the real world, and in a town like Lewes, with its castle and cobbled streets, where daily life is resolutely quaint, it offered a triple escape, stories on shelves in the story of a shop in the story of a town.
It was midday before Piglet arrived to give a disappointingly perfunctory performance of his umbrella and Dicky 3 rituals.
‘I’ve been interviewing.’ He had decided, he told me, to take on an assistant, ‘a young person keen to learn’. The employment people had sent him a girl with a stud in her tongue.
‘She’s not a bad sort. Just alarming when she laughs . . . I wondered if you’d like to share her.’
‘Share her?’
‘Yes. I only want her for a couple of days a week. She needs something else for the other days. I immediately thought of you.’
‘That was kind!’ I was hardly in a position to employ hands.
‘I’m writing something,’ he said grandly.
‘Let me guess. It wouldn’t be about a certain person, born in York in the fifteenth century, maligned and mistakenly portrayed as having a hump?’
‘You know, Bhalu, people are wrong about you. You have a bright and razor-like intelligence.’
Having found for Piglet virtually everything ever written on the subject of Richard of Gloucester, it amazed me that he thought there could be anything new to say.
‘Oh, it’s not scholarship,’ he said. ‘Bugger all that. I’m going to the heart of the problem, like they taught us in the Army. As I see it, all the scholarship in the world won’t do a blind bit of good while that play goes on being performed year after year.’
‘Well, what can you do about that?’
‘Shakespeare’s Richard isn’t credible. A hook-nosed hunchback casting a dirty great shadow, so that “dogs bark at me as I pass”? Where else have you seen that? It’s Mr Punch! And no!’ he said, lifting a silencing hand. ‘Don’t tell me that Shakespeare had never seen Punch and Judy. I know all about the commedia dell’arte supposedly not coming to England until 1660, but all I can say is, that’s a load of bloody nonsense. Just look at Richard III. “I am determined to prove a villain,” he’s made to say and that’s all he is. No glim of good. Alas, poor Dicky, “that slander is found a truth now, for it grows again, fresher than e’er it was”.’
I had heard many of his outbursts, but never one quite so jam-packed with fragments of bard. Piglet refused to be drawn on his project.
‘Poor boy,’ he told me, ‘you’ll be amazed! “More amazed than had you seen the vaulty top of heaven figured o’er with burning meteors” . . . Charlotte?’
Later that afternoon I found among my mother’s papers a large envelope which contained a story I had never seen before, called Retribution. It was typed on the machine she used in the late fifties and early sixties, the one with the ball of its r worn away to nearly nothing. Retribution outlined a situation, a love triangle, in which a man of overweening self-regard manipulated two women, who were so alike as to be almost twins, and got his just deserts.
The story perplexed me. Most of Maya’s tales were grown round real events, often based (Nafísa Jaan) on episodes from our own family history, or (Badnaami ka dilaasa and Silver Ganesh) things that had happened to people she knew, but Retribution, narrated by a ghost, was obviously fiction. Probably it was the preliminary sketch for a screenplay: a tragic tale of adultery and murder – in those days adultery almost always carried a death sentence, at least on celluloid – with comic interludes and a fine supernatural twist. That made sense. That sounded like cinema. She had followed the same pattern with Badnaami ka dilaasa (The Solace of Infamy), which was taken up by the director Haresh Saigal, who filmed it complete with songs, dances-round-trees and all the rest of the rigmarole, riot and chilli-spice necessary to a Bombay-made ‘starrer’. Badnaami told the story of a struggling screenwriter, played by Dilip Kumar, who falls in love with a prostitute. His friends are scandalised, but he claims to find in her a purity that others miss. He is determined to create the role that will express this. In the ensuing scandal he loses everything, wife, family, home, job, but the resulting script is his life’s finest work. The day it is completed, his wife, backed by her angry brothers, throws him out. She says he must never come near her or his children again. He runs to the girl, but she informs him cruelly that she has found someone else. In this crisis, having lost nearly everything he holds dear, he abandons what is left. He gives away his remaining possessions and takes to the road as a mendicant, begging his food. His path leads him through villages and jungles, and the land opens before him in its beauty and its pain. He sees an India he has never known before. Meanwhile (of course) his wife relents and begins searching for him. One day he enters a town and sees posters advertising the latest smash hit. It’s his movie. He sneaks inside without paying and catches the first few minutes, the scene where the girl delivers the film’s opening theme, ‘Death deceives with a blow . . .’ Her face glows on the screen. His words in her mouth have the grace of poetry. He watches and listens, entranced. The titles meanwhile are rolling. As his name appears on the screen, he is thrown out of the cinema and staggers into the street, with bell-ringing cyclists swerving to avoid him. He is knocked down by a truck (the obligatory death sentence). The people who gather round are amazed to see that he is smiling. ‘I knew!’ he tells them. ‘I knew she could do it!’
