A Fine Family: A Novel (38 page)

Priti had been gone almost nine months. Although Arjun continued to miss her, he was now more and more absorbed by his job. Without her to distract him he realized what pleasure he could get from his work. Billimoria was getting old and he had delegated most of the operations to him. Arjun had begun to model the company’s future according to his own ideas and he derived great delight in developing the organization, especially the careers of young and bright managers.

Gradually, some of his earlier feelings of discontent began to diminish. The turning point came with the success of a new project involving medicinal herbs, which were hand-picked by thousands of tribal women in the forest. The naturally growing herbs went into a new remedy for asthma which his company had developed. At Arjun’s urging the company set up hundreds of collection centres in central India, where the tribals sold the herbs at a pre-established price. As the product gained market share, the demand for the herbs grew, and more and more tribal women got employment. Arjun estimated that at certain times of the year as many as twenty thousand women were collecting the herbs on behalf of the company.

Arjun was so gratified with this project that he was already planning two others on similar lines. For the first time, he began to derive great emotional satisfaction from his job, and became convinced that business in fact could provide scope for positive and socially useful activity. The gap between aspiration and reality had begun to narrow. He concluded that providing work, for example through picking and selling of herbs, was a far better form of social service than giving charity to the poor. Earning one’s living, he thought, led to self-esteem and confidence, which in turn resulted in self-reliance. Arjun felt so enthusiastic with his discovery about the social benefits of the market economy that he no longer felt the need to be defensive about business.

Priti returned to Bombay on a fine, ringing morning with low mists hanging over the outlines of the great sea. Arjun waited on the platform while his chauffeur and car stood outside under the palm trees at Bombay Central station. Priti took one wild look around her, as she stepped onto the platform in the same chiffon sari that she had left in almost a year earlier. Arjun walked across the grey width of platform number two, and swung her into his arms. They embraced as the untroubled, incurious city looked on. She had come after a year, even though she had decided to go for two weeks.

As they rounded Babulnath and turned on to Chowpatty, Arjun sank back in the spacious, airconditioned car with a sense of sureness, almost of beatitude. With his dark-browed, queenly companion at his side, he felt his relations with the world enhanced and calmed. He could feel her appraising eyes upon him, lighted with compassionate curiosity mixed with admiration. Priti looked out at the water, smiling and eager as if she were on a holiday. She giggled at the dancing and winking waves, as they swept along Marine Drive. Then she turned away to watch children’s kites glisten against the morning light above Hindu Gymkhana. At Cuffe Parade she excitedly pointed to the coloured sails of fishing boats in the back bay amidst the white waves.

He looked at her closely as she got out of the car. She had put on a little weight on her face. Her hips and her features seemed to have broadened. But her glistening eyes and her quick, incisive way of breathing were still there; so was the characteristic tilt of her head. She had written to him regularly from the ashram, but her letters had merely described the eventless, mundane toil of the place. He looked at her again and equal he noted that she had changed. For one thing, her self-destructive, feverish look was gone; so was the insolent, unbalanced air.

Inside the house, they were shy with each other. Priti claimed to be happy and spoke with uncharacteristic humility. She described the austere life of the ashram simply and unimaginatively. Arjun noticed that her once finely-tended hands were calloused and rough. The physical labour at the ashram must be tough, he thought. He felt ashamed because he himself was immaculately clean, reflecting good city food and leisurely baths. Watching her now and remembering the touching and tormented person of a year ago, he found it hard to comprehend her transformation into this rounded, peasant-like person with coarse hands.

Priti showered, then came out in the living room and sat demurely beside him. She covered her head with the end of her sari as women did at the ashram. When it slipped she put it back hastily. Although meant to be a sign of modesty, this repeated gesture had the opposite effect of emphasizing her femininity.

‘What?’, said Arjun.

‘What did you say?’ she said.

‘I said “what”?’

‘So?’

‘So what.’

They burst out laughing and they embraced.

‘The girls will be down next week,’ he said.

‘Yes, they wrote to me from school.’

‘Their winter break is always the nicest.’

Later that night a whim seized him to drive her to Hanging Gardens in the late moonlight. They sat in the car for a long time in silence, gazing out at the moonlit city, the winding curve of the Queen’s Necklace gleaming below them against the gentle waves of the bay. It was during this silence that he perceived the truth about her. She had not really changed inside. She had merely adopted a new mask. A saint and a sinner’s mask, he realized could be interchanged. Priti had been seeking temptation, and saintliness was also a temptation. She had always been passionate, and of course it was easier to make a mystic out of a passionate person than out of a prig.

Never had the city looked so entrancing as it did that night in the soft sea air. He felt the light breeze from the water on his cheek. She put her hand on his, and spoke softly of older days. He did not take in all that she said, so glad was he to have her back, and so drunk on the beauty of the city which was now a part of him.

Bombay gave dignity to people, he thought. Even though it might mean living in a crowded shanty or on the pavement, this city gave a job and an escape from the tyranny and the debasement of a rigid caste system in the village. It represented liberty to hundreds of immigrants who came daily from the villages of India. This was a great deal and this was the city’s real beauty. He had once asked the low caste woman, who cleaned the floors at his office, ‘Why did you leave your home and family and come so far away from your village in Bihar?’ She had replied, ‘Arjun Sahib, ever since puberty I had been free game for the upper caste landlords of my village; I used to be scared and I had learned to walk with my head lowered and my arms over my breasts. Here, in Bombay, I feel free again. I don’t depend on anyone and I walk with my head high up.’

Arjun did not speak of the ashram, except to ask guarded questions about Tara and Seva Ram. Priti, too, stayed clear of the subject which was on both their minds. The two of them had certainly had enough time to think about it. He, for his part, had pondered it for months, and having thought through the matter, he was now more than ever convinced that spirituality, no matter how attractive, was an evasion of moral commitment to the here and now. It was an escape from having to face the misery of the deprived and the vulnerable. To ameliorate the tragic conditions in which most Indians were condemned to live was what really mattered. As always, Gandhi had said it best, ‘If god were to appear in India he would have to take the form of a loaf of bread.’ Service to man was more important than devotion to god! The two were not necessarily incompatible, but even Mother Teresa had made her choice, as had Gandhi. God in each case was reduced to a facade. It couldn’t be helped because both man and god required a single-minded commitment to the virtual exclusion of the other. The most satisfying attitude, Arjun had come to believe, was one of self-giving compassion, flowing freely towards all men. Indeed this was also the way to personal happiness. Unhappiness, he believed, was caused by a selfish preoccupation with oneself. By subduing one’s ego and identifying with others, especially with their sorrow, led to enduring peace and joy. There did not appear to be any room for god or immortality in his earthly way of thinking.

Where did one go from here, he wondered? There was little hope from the rulers who were in power. So one had to rely on oneself. It required courage to reach out to the poor and the defenceless. But that was where hope lay. Hope lay in the private individual, who was liberal and educated, reaching out to the silent and the suffering, and showing through his example how the liberal institutions could work. ‘Each one, teach one,’ Mahatma Gandhi had said and he had reached out and identified with the weak with all his being—wearing their clothes, eating their food, living their life. We can’t all be like the Mahatma, thought Arjun. But each of us in his small world could reach out and help just a little bit to root the institutions in the people, so that they were just a little bit less like dream castles built out of middle class aspirations. Arjun had no use for the spiritual till human dignity was established through an unsentimental concern for others.

Arjun had vowed never to question Priti’s beliefs, nor to resent Seva Ram’s choice in favour of the other world. As for himself, he would be content to give of himself when Priti needed him and sympathize with her joys and sorrows. He was no longer tormented by his own lack of action in the social area. The herbal project had shown the way as far as he was concerned. And he no longer felt the need to pursue a lofty goal beyond his everyday life in the company and his family.

The best that could be said about the bigger picture was that democracy in some form had taken root on the Indian soil. Up until this point in his life the Indian voter had twice peacefully driven the ruling party out of power. Mrs Gandhi had lost the election because of the sins of her Emergency, but she had returned laughing a few years later when the same people got sick and disgusted with her quarrelling successors. As for the Emergency, Arjun believed that it had been an aberration, but the ease with which liberty was snuffed out on 26 June 1975 occasionally sent a shiver down his spine, and made him appreciate the delicate jewel that democracy was.

A week later the girls came down from boarding school for the winter break. They came by train, accompanied by their grandparents, who too thought it was time for a holiday. Arjun entered the drawing room when everyone was on a second cup of tea. Seva Ram was reading the newspaper. Priti was stitching a fall on her sari. A considerably mellowed Rajah sat beside her, watching her with polite interest. Tara was teaching embroidery to the older girl. The younger girl, whose cheeks glowed red from the fresh Himalayan air, was absorbed in trying on bangles on the divan. As soon as she saw Arjun, she ran up to embrace him. She held up her wrists. ‘Do you think I am wearing too many bangles?’ she asked.

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘You must put on more.’ She giggled and ran back to the divan.

A fine family, thought Arjun.

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First published by Penguin Books India 1990

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Copyright © Gurcharan Das 1990

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ISBN: 978-0-140-12258-9

This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18427-0

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