A Fine Family: A Novel (37 page)

‘Of course you won’t go,’ Priti said when Arjun suggested that he wanted to accompany her to the ashram. ‘Don’t. I have to be alone.’ She spoke sharply, and her gaze followed his, as if wanting to make sure that his eyes did not escape her. She stood over him in the misty early morning light. ‘You are not to. Answer me.’ And as if to make sure, she slipped off her sari and petticoat and fell softly in bed beside him. Her warm hair and mouth and the soft movements of her nervous body folded around him like a healing balm. He surrendered himself to this therapy. He became small in her arms. Softly he touched the warm slope of her legs, caressing them, stroking them unhurriedly. His hand moved patiently past her loins, down between the round softness of her buttocks. She shivered. As she felt his desire, she let herself go to him. With silent force he now took over. She yielded, her arms open, and her body helpless and expectant.

Later, as she lay beside him, he kissed her again softly. She turned to him. He held her arm but said nothing. She crept nearer. He was utterly still. Slowly he opened his eyes and he saw a grave expression on her face. She was staring at him with her wonderfully expressive eyes. Her silence was difficult to penetrate.

‘You do love me, don’t you?’ he asked.

She kissed him softly.

‘Speak to me,’ he said.

She nodded and put her arm on his.

‘Tell me, yourself,’ he looked pleased.

‘Don’t you feel it?’ she said clinging to him.

She smiled and turned her back to him. She lay quietly on the bed, and he stared at her curved naked back, and he had no idea what she was thinking. He bent down and kissed her soft flank and rubbed his cheek against it. She stretched back and stroked his face.

‘Do you believe that this is how things were meant to be?’ he asked sadly.

‘Arjun, what do you believe in, if you don’t believe in god?’

She rose, opened the curtains wider, and began to put on her clothes. She stood there, above him, fastening the drawstring of her petticoat and looking down at him with wide eyes, her face a little flushed and her hair mussed but still beautiful in the misty morning light. It made him want to hold her, for there was a sleepy remoteness in her beauty. She kissed him between his dark eyes, and she left.

After she was gone, Arjun’s happiness slowly began to fade. She was sympathetic even warm-hearted to him, but she did not permit him to possess her. She did not depend on him. This, he realized with regret, was the hold that she had over him. As a normal, possessive man, he found the thought painful. He remembered Seva Ram once saying, ‘After the pleasure must come pain.’ The more detached she became the more he wanted to possess her.

In the evening Priti joined Arjun on the terrace. The air was still. The darkness, the silence, were broken by the uneven lapping of waves below. The sea was tame after the monsoon. The cicadas in the garden were also quiet.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

‘Of you,’ she sighed. ‘Of how I can get you to think my way. I can’t get you to love the guru. So I must appeal to your reason. Truth is so simple.’

‘Is it?’

‘Look at that pot of clay. The reality is clay, the pot is only a verbal distinction, a name. In the same way the only reality is pure consciousness, the rest are verbal distinctions.’

‘Not true, my love. Because a pot can hold water and clay alone cannot. Your guru even dismisses my joys and sorrows as verbal distinctions.’

‘What is so great about our emotions? As a child I was afraid of people; as an adolescent I was tormented by lust and men; as an adult I am afflicted by worries of my children; when I am old there will be the fear of death. What kind of life is that?’

‘What about love and beauty. I love you, Priti.’

‘Love is a transitory illusion, like life itself.’

Arjun sat silently, smelling the heavy tone of her body’s scent; soon he was lost in the memory of his most solitary moments—those of coitus with her. He could get no nearer to the truth. After a long pause he said, ‘Don’t you feel outrage, Priti, at the circumstances that crush our people?’

Priti looked up defensively; she wondered what sort of mental trap he was preparing.

‘By offering dreams of god, religions have been distracting people for a thousand years from the immediate wrong-doings, especially of the upper castes. Since god’s moral law governs the world, every injustice is explained away. They want the oppressed to change their perception because they dare not change their circumstances. In this manner every village tyrant gets his way, and the weak merely say, “It’s god’s will, Sir.”’

Priti continued to listen attentively. Arjun looked at her, but he could not make out what she was thinking. Outwardly there were no signs of any struggle. He was caught between his argument and his passionate concentration of watching his wife’s face in the dark.

‘The only thing that matters to me, Priti, is to have compassion for human suffering. God has no place in it. I feel sympathy for the vulnerable and I try to avoid causing further pain. I remind myself every day to do something, even the tiniest action will do, to improve the prospects of the worst off.’

Priti was surprised to hear Arjun speak with such conviction. Listening to him she was convinced that the months in prison had left a deep impression. She could not have imagined him talking like this earlier. After a pause she said, The Gita says the same, Arjun. Although to be one with god is our great goal, there are many paths. One such path is that of action, provided we act without thinking of the rewards of what we do. The realized soul inevitably transcends selfishness and devotes himself to the welfare of others.’

‘The Gita is certainly a big step ahead,’ said Arjun. ‘But it’s an exception. Usually, I am urged to withdraw. I am not expected to be concerned with right and wrong behaviour, but with my own spirit, which is not affected by worldly pain and suffering. Then, where is the spur to action, to alleviate suffering? And since god is the source of what exists in the world, why should I, a humble nonentity, tamper with His design? If anyone is in pain or if he is hungry and poor, he deserves to be, for it is His justice.’

‘Arjun, you are wrong. You forget that each soul is equal to another and all of us are reflections of god. As we are all one, we must treat each other alike.’

‘There you go again, equating abstractions and deriving how people should behave from it. I am expected to suppress my pain and make it an intellectual thing. Look at our thousands of holy men! Their search for god usually ends in self-attachment and callousness.’

‘At least our holy men are tolerant of others. The holy men of other religions convert at the point of a sword.’

‘Tolerance is not always a virtue, Priti. To tolerate an unjust social structure such as ours is to condemn millions to misery.’

‘All holy men are not the same, Arjun. What about Gandhi?’

‘Gandhi was not a holy man. He used religion as a spur to action. You know, Priti, I used to have a wrong impression of Gandhi. Like Bauji and others I didn’t like his fads and his religious fancies. I never saw what a revolutionary he actually was. Nor did I realize how much he was detested by the orthodox Hindus. His attitude to holy men and scriptures was that of an explorer after truth. And he regarded the Hindu texts as guides left behind by earlier explorers, not to be held in superstitious reverence, but to be subjected to the test of his own conscience and experience. He refused to believe that man’s spiritual quest could coexist with his living in degrading circumstances like untouchability and privation. So he fought British imperialism, battles for the poor and the casteless.’

There was a long pause. Having said what he had to, Arjun began to experience a sense of relief as if he had shaken off an old illness. He was filled with self-confidence. Looking at her, he knew that he had not converted her to his views. But he had dissented, which would have been difficult earlier. The experience of Gaya Central Jail had toughened him.

‘You are unhappy because you have too many preconceived ideas of what you want in return for marriage. Look at that child!’ Priti pointed to an urchin as they rode to Bombay Central. ‘He lives in a totally spontaneous way.’ They reached the station and were swallowed up by the noise of crowds, and the clanking wheels of luggage carts. They passed pavements covered with slime, and yellow pools of sodium light. As the wheels of the train began to move, he hugged her to himself. She said she was going away for two weeks to the ashram, but in a panic he feared that she might never come back. She touched his face gently, and tilting her head she looked at him with bright eyes. He was filled with unease. They looked at each other. ‘Priti,’ he called out to her but the cacophony of Gujarati farewells blotted out his words. Suddenly the dark platform was empty. Beside him a tall, shadowy Sikh trudged back from the station platform.

Driving slowly home through the dark bazaars of Lamington Road, he smelled the brackish aroma of the alleys. Arjun remembered Priti saying harshly as she lay in bed, ‘We hurt those whom we love the most.’ He looked up into the dimly-lit rooms in buildings he passed. Their uncurtained windows revealed the peeling walls on which were hung rows of calendars depicting colourful gods and film stars. Between the walls strings were drawn, on which clothes were hung, in the absence of closets. Occasionally a petty businessman carrying a black moulded briefcase would come down a dingy stairwell from his ramshackle office in an upper storey, where fleas jumped out of the rotten woodwork of old fashioned desks. ‘Bombay!’ he muttered. Here was a city dedicated to making money. You could almost smell it in the bazaars. Soon he was before a row of garishly lit cinema hoardings which provided a ghastly splendour to the otherwise drab Opera House crossing.

He wondered where Priti’s obsession had actually originated. After all they had been through similar schools, and if anything, she had been the more sceptical. He had never argued with his father, but he had always felt that mysticism appealed to the weaker side of man: to his feelings of incompleteness, to his fear of the unknown. Since the guru’s was an abstract god, here was a challenge, which evidently appealed to her. How is one to judge others, he thought. At what point do questions of personal happiness intrude into the judgement? He recalled her unexpectedly boyish laughter.

He turned into Marine Drive. With her gone Bombay seemed to take on an unexpected strangeness. The same streets, the same crossings had a bland quality. Whenever he passed a familiar landmark she was there quickly, brightly, her head tilted familiarly. Old memories and conversations returned, things she had said in Juhu, Khandala. Near the Princess Street flyover he remembered how she had stopped one evening to adjust the strap of her sandal; she had looked so desirable in a white cotton sari.

On a sudden whim he decided to turn back and visit the Nawab. On Altamount Road he noticed that the Nawab’s study window was open. He rung the bell. The door opened and Arjun stepped into the silence of the palatial apartment. It had a strange feeling during the evening; Arjun had known it only late at night when the house was always filled with guests and gaiety. Feeling intimidated, he wondered if he had made a mistake. He was about to turn around and leave when the Nawab walked in. He greeted Arjun warmly and putting his arm around his guest, led him to the study. He was wearing a Chinese silk dressing gown above his pajamas, although it was late evening. A copy of Proust’s
Recherche
lay face down on the table beside a gold cigarette lighter and an ash tray. Arjun was grateful for the calm. They had coffee on a hundred-year-old silver service and Arjun spoke nostalgically of his love. The Nawab knew that she had left today, as he seemed to know everything else that happened in the city. With his eyes closed he listened for a long time. It seemed to cost him a great effort, and at one point a tear fell on his cheek.

‘I loved her very much, Arjun, but she preferred you. But I never ceased to care. I cared for both of you.’

Together they sat thus, talking of Priti, while the evening shadows lengthened. Arjun was calm now with a moving resignation that was eloquent. He was grateful to the Nawab, for his sympathy was both dignified and genuine.

A week later there was a freak storm in the city. Alone in his apartment Arjun savoured the strong breeze from the sea. He pictured Priti wrapped in a light cotton sheet, asleep on his bed. Then he thought of the different places in the apartment where they had made love. The sad thing about love, he said to himself, is that one of the two must always love more.

Suddenly he thought of his father. The fact was that it was Seva Ram who had invited her to the ashram; it was he who had introduced her to the guru. True, it was she who had responded to the old holy man; but he had encouraged her to get initiated. The evidence was clear that his own father was behind his wife’s alienation from him. ‘I feel close to your father,’ she had once admitted to him, as she had breezed out of the house in a smart white chiffon sari.

One day Arjun sat up panting slightly in bed. He felt the sweat begin to start down his forehead. He looked into the mirror and felt relieved that nothing of his inner struggle was visible on his face. He stayed thus for a long time, emotionally spellbound with no further thoughts shaping themselves in his mind. He was on the point of feeling sorry for himself, when he jumped out of bed. He dressed quickly and stepped out into the night air of Cuffe Parade. He was sufficiently alarmed to seek the healing contact with other human beings. What terrified him was the unfamiliar sensation of utter loneliness. Later, out in the open where he found himself beginning to think clearly again, he felt it strange that Priti could feel close to Seva Ram when he himself had never been able to feel that way.

Arjun walked rapidly among the human shadows. The damp street exhaled the smells of the Koli fishermen, their stale quarter forgotten by the fevered city. He walked briskly into the narrow alley, soft now from the rain. He noticed a dimly lit tea stall in the distance. The garishly painted booth advertised an orange drink. At its urine-smelling door sat a dark child, her hands gathered in her lap. The child shivered as the wind from the sea blew past. Arjun turned towards Colaba bazaar. The child continued to sit raptly like a yogi.

In the bazaar Arjun went and sat down in an empty Irani cafe and ordered tea from the sleepy waiter. While he sipped the heavily sweetened tea, he thought of his life in Bombay, starting from the day he arrived in the water-soaked city. ‘Don’t spit,’ said a sign on the wall. His soul he felt had become absorbed by the city and he could not conceive of himself without it. The idea lifted his spirits momentarily as he recrossed the bazaars towards his lonely flat. He walked past flesh and excrement, through a maze of narrow intersecting alleys. He met a tattered little one-man circus, a teen-aged boy carrying a monkey on his shoulder; he was a familiar sight and Arjun tossed a coin at him.

He walked past the sweetmaker, who adulterated milk and short-weighted the halwah. Arjun watched his fleshy face concentrating in the harsh multi-coloured lights. The wall behind him was covered in slogans from the last election of the Congress candidate. The election slogans had been overwritten with obscene abuses. He passed a flower girl selling strings of marigold to propitiate Krishna. An old money-lender-cum-jeweller lay sprawled on dirty cushions, half asleep, while rats whisked in the gutter in front of his shop. Ever so often the jeweller would flinch and raise his head, as he did now, at the screeching song of a leper couple. Arjun tossed another coin to the beggars, a shiny rupee, which the woman caught in the folds of her dung-coloured sari. She recognized Arjun and prostrated herself at his feet, while her husband seated in a wooden cart, folded his hands in gratitude. Arjun escaped from their deafening screams and the soiled smells of the open gutters choked with piss and excrement. He moved rapidly through crooked lanes, filled with bare feet, droppings and the many languages of India and had soon left the bazaar behind.

Arjun was glad to have slipped out of the suffocating bazaar to the wide, ordered streets of the British-built cantonment at the southern tip of the island. He took a deep breath of fresh air in a tree-lined avenue, and went towards Afghan Church, which was dedicated to British soldiers killed in the Afghan campaigns of 1832–42. He was attracted to the colonial style houses, which were now occupied by high Indian naval and army officers. It amused him that the lives of the new occupants were a faded copy of their English predecessors, as they sat sipping whisky on their spacious lawns in the company of their brown memsahibs.