A Fine Family: A Novel (36 page)

The evening chanting of the
sandhya
was over. For a quarter-of-an-hour Arjun had watched from his flat the magnificent pink light turn into dusk over the sea; for a quarter-of-an-hour voices of Seva Ram, Tara, Priti and his two daughters and their girl friends had interwoven a rhythmic chant in Sanskrit. During the melodic strain the whole atmosphere in the white stucco drawing room seemed to change. Even Rajah, their princely Indian hound, given to the girls by their grandmother, looked penitent and abashed.

Now, as the voices fell silent and the lights were switched on in the apartment, everything dropped back into its usual disorder. Golden-haired Rajah jumped up and ran about barking. The women rose quickly to their feet, their silk saris rustling as they left the room. The girls fussed with their dresses and their hair, exchanged quick glances and snatches of boarding school slang. For over three weeks his daughters had been home from their school in the Himalayas. It was their summer break, and they were happy to be back with the family. The grandparents were also visiting Bombay, glad to escape the northern heat. Restlessly, Priti glanced around at her noisy children and her quiet husband, and walked out towards the kitchen to oversee the dinner arrangements. A large number of people would be dining with them tonight. Apart from the family, numerous friends were expected (including friends of friends of the girls) to celebrate Arjun’s fortieth birthday.

Meanwhile, Arjun too rose to his feet. He had filled out and looked prosperous and substantial, a man ready to enter middle age. With a quick eye and a glint of pride, he took in his family assembled around him. But the lofty feeling was tinged with sadness. For despite his worldly success, all was not well in his world. He has been out of Gaya Central Jail for six years now, but its memory continued to impinge on his present life. Priti had been initiated by the guru for the same amount of time and she had changed even more.

Arjun’s release had come with as little warning as his arrest. After fifteen months in prison he was suddenly discharged on a sunny morning in January. As he was going through the formalities of departure at the jail office he happened to glance at a newspaper on the clerk’s desk. The headline announced that Mrs Gandhi had called an election. She had relaxed the Emergency and political opponents were being released so that they could contest the elections. ‘In a democratic system the government must face the people periodically and reaffirm the power of the people,’ the paper quoted Mrs Gandhi. Even a tyrant, Arjun had thought with amusement, needs the people’s consent.

After an emotional meeting with Priti, the baby, and his parents at the ashram, Arjun went to Bombay where he was accorded a hero’s welcome at his office. He learned that his strategy on the margins issue had been vindicated and the trade boycott had rapidly fizzled out. Not having succeeded in raising quick money, Guha had lost interest and moved on to more lucrative ventures. With the Emergency over, Arjun’s company now retained a high-powered criminal lawyer to press charges against Guha, the Calcutta police officer who had signed his FIR and the deputy commissioner of Calcutta, under whose signature the MISA warrant for his arrest had been effected.

Arjun was not bitter about his fifteen months in jail largely because of his positive outlook on life. Much like Bauji after the partition, he had pulled himself together and gone back to doing what he did best. He felt it could have happened to anyone. But he was no longer innocent of suffering and cruelty; he had certainly become acutely sensitive to the value of liberty. He did not gloat over Mrs Gandhi’s defeat at the polls; nor did he believe that the Emergency was more than a temporary insanity.

‘I sometimes wonder,’ Tara told Arjun, ‘if our democracy isn’t just a matter of the blind leading the blind.’

‘The taste of democracy becomes bitter, mother, when the fullness of democracy is denied; when the weak do not have the same opportunity as the strong.’

Although Arjun had now reached the dangerous age, he had not grown fat; he looked strong and significant, as successful men have a way of appearing. He had never been big; in fact he was shorter than most men, but his broad shoulders made him seem large. He had also been elevated to the board of his company, which continued to be a blue chip on the Bombay Stock Exchange. He was one of the youngest in the corporate world to have won that privilege, and he continued to successfully steer the company to growth and profitability through difficult times. Everyone expected him one day to become chairman of the company. Outside, he was admired for excelling at his work and his views were solicited by both industry and government. Thus Arjun had more than fulfilled Bauji’s prophecy.

Scattered around him were the material symbols of his worldly achievement: rich Persian rugs and carved chests from Chor Bazaar with gilt ornamentation, hooked clasps, and inlaid polished brass; his spacious penthouse flat was furnished with controlled simplicity, which is the best sort of elegance; on the white stucco walls several old-fashioned windows offered awesome views of the sea.

The fast fading rays of the setting sun over the Arabian Sea lit up Arjun’s honey-coloured skin; they emphasized his northern profile and Punjab lineage, the influence of Tara’s side being stronger than Seva Ram’s. His hands, like Bauji’s, were broad and strong, unlike his father’s delicate, long ones. There was more than a hint of passion on his face unlike Seva Ram’s cool and distant look. His face also suggested perseverance, which according to his colleagues, was the quality that best explained his success. However, he had inherited his father’s naive smile. Its casual simplicity suggested that despite his success, Arjun had neither become self-contented, nor cynical; on the contrary, he appeared to still want to fulfil some lofty goal over and above his everyday life. What exactly this goal was he was not quite sure. And because he could not seem to do anything about it, he felt a hopeless gap between aspiration and reality. It was this gap which partially accounted for his perpetual regret, and prevented him from becoming capricious and arrogant, like many senior Indian managers and officials.

Filled with humiliation at his own inability to act, Arjun would sometimes blame his father. He was resentful with Seva Ram at having ill-prepared him for a life of public affairs. He felt that Seva Ram had been too preoccupied with his own spiritual quest to have bothered with his son. The only goal that he had offered his son was the unpalatable one of worldly withdrawal.

Seeing the frown on his face one day, Tara took him by the arm, ‘Son, what is it? Why are you unhappy? You have everything a man could ask for: health, happy children, you’re a success in your job, a wife who respects you, parents who dote on you, and this magnificent flat. What more do you want?’

Arjun sighed, ‘You won’t understand, mother.’

Between the pride and the drive of his mother and the detachment and spirituality of his father, Arjun thus lived in a state of discontent. He watched Priti become steadily more distant from him as her involvement with religion deepened. He felt frustrated at not being able to do anything to save the situation. During his days in prison, he had become convinced that an excess of religion was partly to blame for the country’s problems: it supported an unjust social structure; it made people obscurantist and fanatical; it allowed them to accept injustices; it turned their minds to their personal salvation and the other world, and prevented them from acting to improve this world. It would never have entered his head to dispute Seva Ram’s religious convictions, but to watch Priti change before his very eyes was depressing.

The hour between the
sandhya
and dinner was a good time to escape and savour the evening alone. When he mentioned to Priti that he was taking the dog downstairs, she frowned and reminded him to return soon as he had to shower and dress; people would be coming early. With a wildly excited Rajah bounding ahead of him, shaking his thick tail, Arjun went down the lift into the garden of their apartment building. Enclosed between three walls and the sea its seclusion gave the garden an unreal air. Palms, laburnum, and casuarina trees filled the reddish earth. On each side rested faded green wrought iron benches surrounded by bushes of musanda and wisteria. Tropical greens—crotons, monstera and rubber plants—grew in thick but orderly fashion; the hibiscus hedge seemed to prevent movement rather than guide it. The gardener had made a heroic but unsuccessful effort to grow cannas, asters, zinnias and other plants. The gleaming purple bougainvillaea bush in the western corner provided the only real note of colour and gaiety.

Arjun would have preferred a less orderly garden, something that looked more like a tropical jungle. He had suggested it to the gardener but he had been vetoed by the formidable Sindhi lady on the third floor, who was secretary of the flat owners’ society. His preference for disorderly vegetation was in contrast to his structured business life, but in keeping with his present emotional state. He sat on the bench, watching with embarassment as Rajah leaped about among the plants, and he debated the merits of the third floor lady getting cleanly run over by a BEST double-decker bus. Having put her to rest, he looked on without guilt at the devastation wrought by the irrepressible Rajah, who returned periodically to his master with large innocent eyes seeking praise for a job well done. The garden might still turn into a jungle.

Three weeks later the summer dissolved in the monsoon. The pavements of Bombay were continuously wet from the rain. The city’s air was heavy with moisture, and it reflected the mood of the tired inhabitants. Walking slowly past the Parsi statue on Veer Nariman Road, Priti brushed against Arjun’s arm. He turned around and she looked into his eyes with a sad expression.

‘I’m thinking of going away to the ashram,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Something is happening to me.’ Suddenly tears came into her eyes and she added. ‘I am afraid for the first time, but I don’t know why.’

This year’s monsoon was worse than Arjun had ever known it before. Before dawn the skies would turn dark grey and then slowly darken further, and the clouds would swell before exploding over the commuters who gushed out in a black tunnel of umbrellas from VT and Churchgate. The city had, as always, shuttered itself tightly against the gales from the southwest. But this year it wasn’t enough. The dark and bitter rain weakened the light of the sky for weeks together. In the darkness of the shuttered, ill-lit offices, water invaded everything, appearing magically among files, books, paper clips, and pictures, even inside the locks of doors and under fingernails. The air caused people to cough and sneeze, while the sea swelled and churned in anger. The wet wind let up from time to time, giving the trees, the buildings, the monuments and the people some respite, but then the rain took over, so that one had the illusion of being permanently trapped in a whirlpool. As a result, the usually energetic people of Bombay were seized by a listlessness of spirit which made them impatient and reckless.

As if to match the city’s mood, the relationship between Arjun and Priti was equally weighed down. Indeed, even the act of making love had become exhausting and perverse and not life-giving as it had once been.

Looking at the bathroom mirror, Arjun reminded himself that he had turned forty and already there was a white hair or two at his temples. He thought about his daughters. Although he had a hard time imagining himself a ‘family man’, he was desperately fond of the girls. They lit up the grey monsoon days. They adored him, and they were proud of him. He thought of Priti, and he frowned. When he had returned from prison five years ago, she had told him everything that had happened to her at the ashram. But she had spoken in such an ordinary, nonchalant way that he had not taken her seriously. Besides, so occupied had he been with himself and the changes that jail life had brought upon him that her life seemed insignificant in comparison. Moreover, the enduring after-effects of their emotional reunion after he came home from prison had helped to disguise the truth of their gradual alienation from each other. Fortunately her strong sexual nature was not affected by her growing spiritual preoccupations. (The guru had impressed upon her that she must live like a complete woman in marriage even as she pursued the life of the spirit. ) But in recent months, her ‘secret side’ had begun to disquiet him.

Priti had begun to spend more and more time by herself. Even in the gloomy monsoon evenings, she would go out alone and look at the angry waves climb the sea wall at Nariman Point. She would watch the spray glowing in the fluorescence of the streetlamps, and the water invading the broad walk along Marine Drive, wildly lashing at the cars returning home to the suburbs. She would walk alone, her dark face full of troubled reserve. Arjun found this wounding. He could not fathom what she was looking for. He began to have doubts about himself, and wondered for the first time whether he had ever really had her confidence. The thought that she might be unfaithful to him occurred to him more than once, and each time it left him feeling sick. The silence of his huge flat became unbearable. But in his clearer moments, gathering his whole mind around the fact that there was no proof of her unfaithfulness, he was convinced that it was only an attempt on her part to free herself and make her own life. His heart seemed to be satisfied with this explanation, and he maintained a tactful silence.

Her behaviour, too, was inconsistent, for suddenly she would respond to him with a new warmth, ardour, and gratitude. Early that morning he had woken up to find her sleeping in his arms, her hair blown by the monsoon wind across her smiling mouth. Soon he could taste the bright pleasure, the warm sensual pressure of her tongue upon his, her hand touching his body. He was overwhelmed by the vastness of his happiness.

‘No, no, no,’ she said in a whisper, but drawing herself closer, she pressed her body still further to him. The smell of her mouth brought back long-sought-after memories of years ago.

Later, as she sat before the mirror naked, combing her hair, Arjun asked, ‘Priti, what is happening? Why are you so far away?’ She tilted her beautiful head and shrugged her shoulders. He kept looking at her smooth brown skin and wondered where her true self lay. In the mirror her dark eyes shone as the comb travelled through her fine, black hair. Suddenly, fugitive memories of Simla returned to Arjun, and he grew sad. Slowly, he began to recognize that she too was wounded.

‘Arjun, I can’t bear to be away from him,’ said Priti.

‘From whom?’ he asked.

‘From the guru. I think of him constantly. I feel like a disturbed, lovesick girl in those silly romantic stories who can’t bear to be parted from her lover.’

‘What about me?’ he said.

Arjun felt ashamed of his growing resentment. His shame was of those who love but are not equally loved in return. He was sobered by the thought that her quest was bigger than himself, bigger than his world. But he was also troubled, because he himself did not believe in anything beyond the here and now. She was heading towards a dangerous precipice, he thought, and he felt powerless to save her. He started to alternate between bursts of self-confidence and depression, and could not understand nor analyze these new feelings within himself. The high periods were followed by low ones in which the agony of his exclusion from Priti’s world became unbearable. He thought more and more often of his childhood, of those sunny days in Pine Villa, when he used to catch butterflies in Tara’s garden, of rhododendrons and English flowers, of flying a kite on the grassy slopes of Chota Simla; and how Tara took him to buy a sweater from the Mall, and how they encountered a smiling Seva Ram waiting for them. He thought of the comforting shade of his father and mother in those days before Priti entered his life.

One evening during an unexpected lull in the monsoon, Arjun and Priti sat on the terrace of their flat looking at the grey sea. Tara and Seva Ram had long since returned to the ashram; the girls were away visiting friends. Behind them lay the city, which maintained its tenuous grasp on their affections through deep and rich memories of their life there together, of their children, of incidents long past. Soon the evening turned into night. They sat in silence looking out at the water, neither wanting to coerce the other, nor wishing to think of life in terms of resolutions and promises.

Priti was the first to speak. ‘The difference between the wise and us is that we flit around the world, absorbed by all the silly, distracting happenings around us. While the wise turn inwards; we turn outwards.’

‘What do you mean “inwards”?’ Arjun asked.

‘Reality is inside us,’ she said.

‘What is reality?’

‘The Absolute. God,’ she said baldly.

‘What is god?’ he asked with sincerity in his voice.

‘Pure consciousness,’ she said. ‘It is so pure that its knowledge of itself cannot be conscious knowledge—for that would imply two things, the knower and the known: the one which is aware and that which it is aware of.’ There was an uncomfortable pause. ‘This unity must be internalized,’ she continued. ‘I must know it not merely as an intellectual proposition, but I must meditate upon it till it fills my being. I must dissolve my soul into it. Then I shall realize god.’

‘But what is god?’ he persisted.

‘It isn’t this and it isn’t that. It is what is left over after all the things which exist have been denied, and after all thought has been denied.’

‘It’s too abstract for me, Priti,’ he said with frustration. He thought to himself that she had been properly brainwashed by the guru.

‘Don’t dismiss it like that, Arjun. I can tell from your look you’re not even making an effort to understand.’

‘I don’t understand, that’s all,’ he said, getting impatient.

‘Because you have a closed mind.’

‘No. You are asking me to have faith in something I can’t feel or touch. I’m only certain about my ordinary world of stones and trees. And even of that I’m sometimes not so sure.’

‘Precisely, because it is not real. The only reality is God, and to merge ourselves with it is the only legitimate aim in life. To do so, you must turn away from your world of stones and trees. And to do that you have to subdue your ego and your mind. The mind is the real villain, because it constantly brings us back into the world. You have to control it. The guru says that the mind is an “unruly monkey prancing among branches of a tree”.’

‘How can you talk like that Priti? The mind is capable of beautiful ideas, and extraordinary imaginings. Come on, you’ve read poetry. And look at what science has achieved! It is all due to our minds. Our minds can be so creative.’

‘Only God is creative.’

‘Your way of thinking dwarfs me, Priti. It makes me puny and powerless.’

‘No, it exalts you, Arjun. Because in you lies the Absolute. It raises you to the level of the Absolute itself.’

‘Priti, what you are exalting is an abstraction, which you call my ‘soul’ and you equate it to another abstraction, which you call ‘god’. Both of these I have no way of knowing.’

‘Yes, you do have a way of knowing it through meditation. Have faith and meditate and you
will
know it.’

‘By hypnotizing myself.’

‘That’s not fair. How can you say that before you have even tried?’

‘And meanwhile, I must give up my joyful world of trees and birds and flowers and children as a delusion of the mind. I love this world.’

‘Your world is ultimately sorrow, Arjun, not joy.’

‘Look at you. You have a beautiful body, Priti. You ask me to deny that as an illusion.’

‘Desire is so short-lived, Arjun.’

‘Life is short-lived.’

‘Precisely. What is the point of attaching yourself to something so transitory? When you can attach yourself to the eternal—eternally beautiful, true, and loving.’ There was a pause. ‘Arjun, you and I are not what we appear to be in the everyday world. We are not our bodies, not our senses, nor even our minds. Only our soul is real. And our soul is a bit of the Absolute.’

Arjun fell silent, and Priti felt embarrassed. Both were uneasy in the huge silence. They were thinking about different things. She wondered why he had become so stubborn. Was it the experience of prison that had so completely closed his mind to religion? Before the Emergency she remembered him as an open-minded person, who did not have strong convictions. He found it unspeakably strange to sit beside this woman who had been transformed beyond recognition. He studied her keenly but she avoided his eye and now confined her conversation to laboured commonplaces. The only reprieve, he felt, was that every now and again, behind her new identity stirred a hint of her old sensual self. He consoled himself with the thought that women of her age often turned to gurus and religion in India.

To divert his mind from these thoughts Arjun turned to look at the ocean. The sea looked tranquil. Somewhere out there, beyond the silver horizon, lay Arabia. He conjured up a rag-bag of romantic images: of Shehrazad in a veil and purple silk pants, bedouins on camels watching from sandy dunes, and oil-rich sheikhs, shaking the banks of New York with petrodollars. As it became dark, the evening sky was filled with summer stars. The lights of the ships awaiting berths at the dock dotted the horizon. To the right was the deep silhouette of Malabar Hill, crowned by apartment towers that rose out of the silence of the Parsi burial. Still further to the right was the city resting from the day’s baking under the hot sun, the tired inhabitants of Bombay clutching at the Arabian breeze. As Arjun’s eyes went east to west the landscape tones changed from silvery grey of the sea-horizon to the dark metallic rust of the bruised city.