Indian Nocturne (3 page)

‘He’s not here,’ I said. ‘He’s not one of these.’

He pushed aside the curtain to the hall again with the same politeness as before, letting me lead the way.

‘The heat is unbearable,’ I said, ‘and the fans aren’t working. It’s incredible.’

‘The voltage is very low at night in Bombay,’ he answered.

‘And yet you have a nuclear reactor at Trobay, I saw the cooling tower from the front.’

He smiled very weakly. ‘Almost all the energy goes to the factories, then to the luxury hotels and the Marine Drive area; here we have to make do.’ He set off along the corridor
taking the opposite direction to the one we’d come from. ‘India’s like that,’ he finished.

‘Did you study here?’ I asked.

He stopped to look at me and I had the impression that a flicker of nostalgia lit his eyes. ‘I studied in London,’ he said, ‘and then I did my specialisation in
Zürich.’ He brought out his straw cigarette case and took a cigarette. ‘An absurd specialisation for India. I’m a cardiologist, but no one here has heart problems; only you
people in Europe die of heart attacks.’

‘What do people die of here?’ I asked.

‘Of everything that has nothing to do with the heart. Syphilis, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhoid, septicaemia, cholera, meningitis, pellagra, diphtheria and other things. But I enjoyed
studying the heart, I enjoyed finding out about that muscle that controls our lives, like this.’ He made a gesture, opening and closing his fist. ‘Perhaps I thought I would discover
something inside it.’

The corridor opened on to a small covered courtyard in front of a low brick building.

‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m an atheist. Being an atheist is the worst possible curse, in India.’

We crossed the courtyard and stopped in front of the other building.

‘The terminal cases are in here,’ he said, ‘there’s just a chance your friend is one of them.’

‘What are they suffering from?’ I asked.

‘Everything you can possibly imagine,’ he said, ‘but perhaps it would be better if you went now.’

‘I think so too,’ I said.

‘I’ll show you out,’ he said.

‘No, don’t bother, please, perhaps I can get out through that door in the entrance gate. I think we’re by the road here.’

‘My name’s Ganesh,’ he said, ‘after the merry God with the elephant’s face.’

I told him my name too before setting off. The gate was only a moment away beyond a hedge of jasmin. It was open. When I turned to look back at him he spoke again. ‘If I find him, should I
say something?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘don’t say anything.’

He raised his hairpiece as if it were a hat and made a slight bow. I went out into the street. It was getting light and the people on the pavements were waking up. Some were rolling up the mats
they slept on at night. The street was full of crows hopping around the cow dung. Near the steps at the entrance was a beat-up old taxi, the driver asleep with his face against the side window.

‘The Taj Mahal,’ I said, getting in.

The only inhabitants of Bombay who take no notice of the ‘right of admission’ regulations in force at the Taj Mahal are the crows. They drop slowly onto the terrace
of the Inter-Continental, laze on the Mogul windows of the older building, perch amid the branches of the mango trees in the garden, and hop on the perfect carpet of lawn that surrounds the
swimming pool. They would go and drink from the pool itself or peck at the orange peel in your martini, were it not for a very efficient servant in livery who chases them off with a cricket bat, as
though in some absurd match orchestrated by a whimsical film director. You have to be careful of the crows, they have very dirty beaks. The Bombay town council has had to arrange for the enormous
reservoirs that feed the city’s aqueduct to be covered over, because more than once the crows, who themselves arrange for the re-introduction into the ‘life cycle’ of the corpses
the Parsees lay out on the Towers of Silence (there are quite a number of towers in the Malabar Hill area), have dropped the odd mouthful into the water supply. But even with these measures the
town council certainly hasn’t resolved the hygiene problem, because then there are the problems of the rats, the insects, the seepage from the sewers. It’s as well not to drink the
water in Bombay. But you can drink it at the Taj Mahal which has its own purifiers and is proud of its water. Because the Taj is not a hotel: with its eight hundred rooms it is a city within a
city.

When I arrived in this city I was received by a doorman dressed as an Indian prince with red sash and turban, who led me as far as the lobby, all done out in brass, where there were other
employees likewise disguised as maharajas. Probably they imagined that I too was disguised, though in reverse – that I was a tycoon dressed up as a nobody – and they busily set about
finding me a room in the noble wing of the building, the part that has the antique furniture and the view of the Gateway of India. For a moment I was tempted to tell them that I wasn’t there
for aesthetic purposes, but just to sleep in consciousless comfort, and that they could put me anywhere they liked, in a room with shamefully modern furniture, even the skyscraper of the
Inter-Continental was okay by me. But then I thought it would be cruel to disappoint them like this. The Peacock Suite, however, I refused. It was too much for one person on his own; but it
wasn’t a question of price, I explained, to maintain the kind of style I had opted for.

The room was impressive, my case had come along ahead of me by some mysterious route and stood on a wicker stool, the bath was already full of water and foam. I sank into it and then wrapped
myself in a linen towel. The windows opened onto the Arabian Sea. The sun was almost up now, and a pinkish light tinged the beach; beneath the Taj Mahal the life of India had begun to swarm once
again. The heavy curtains of green velvet ran sweetly and softly as a theatre curtain; I drew them across the scene and the room was reduced to half-light and silence. The lazy, comforting hum of
the big fan lulled me and I just managed to reflect that this too was a superfluous luxury, since the room temperature was perfect, when suddenly I found myself at an old chapel on a Mediterranean
hillside. The chapel was white and it was hot. We were hungry and Xavier, laughing, was pulling out some sandwiches and cool wine from a basket. Isabel was laughing too, while Magda stretched out
on a blanket on the grass. Far below us was the blue of the sea and a solitary donkey dawdled in the shade of the chapel. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a real memory; I was looking into the
dark of the room and seeing that distant scene which seemed like a dream because I’d slept for a long time; my watch told me it was four in the afternoon. I stayed in bed quite a while,
thinking of those times, going back over landscapes, faces, lives. I remembered the trips in the car along the pinewoods by the sea, the nicknames we gave each other, Xavier’s guitar and
Magda’s shrill voice announcing in mock-serious tones, like a fairground showman: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, we have among us The Italian Nightingale!’ And I
would play along with her and launch into old Neapolitan songs, mimicking the out-dated warbling of singers in the old days, while everybody laughed and applauded. Amongst ourselves, and I was
resigned to it, I was ‘Roux’, short for Rouxinol, Portuguese for nightingale. But the way they said it it seemed an attractive, even exotic name, so there was no reason to take offence.
And then I went back over the following summers. Magda crying – I thought, why? Was it right perhaps? And Isabel, and her illusions. And when those memories took on an unbearable clarity,
sharp as if beamed on the wall by a projector, I got up and left the room.

Six o’clock is a bit too late for lunch and a bit too early for dinner. But at the Taj Mahal, said my guidebook, thanks to its four restaurants, you can eat at any time. The Rendez-Vous
was on the top floor of the Apollo Bunder, but it was really too intimate. And too expensive. I dropped into the Apollo Bar and chose a table by the big terrace window looking out on the first
lights of the evening; the seafront was a garland. I drank two gin-and-tonics which put me in a good mood and wrote a letter to Isabel. I wrote for a long time, in a constant stream, with passion,
and told her everything. I wrote about those distant days, about my trip, and about how feelings flower again with time. I also told her things I would never have thought of telling her, and when I
re-read the letter, with the reckless amusement of someone who has drunk on an empty stomach, I realised that really that letter was for Magda, it was to her I’d written it, of course it was,
even though I’d begun, ‘Dear Isabel’; and so I screwed it up and left it in the ashtray, went down to the ground floor, into the Tanjore Restaurant and ordered a slap-up meal,
exactly as a prince dressed up as a nobody would have. And then when I’d finished eating it was night-time; the Taj was coming to life and sparkled with lights; on the lawn near the pool the
liveried servants stood ready to chase off the crows; I sat myself down on a couch in the middle of that hall, big as a football field, and set about watching luxury. I don’t know who it was
said that in the pure activity of watching there is always a little sadism. I tried to think who it was, but couldn’t, yet I felt that there was some truth in the statement: and so I watched
with greater pleasure, with the perfect sensation of being just two eyes watching while I myself was elsewhere, without knowing where. I watched the women and the jewels, the turbans, the fezes,
the veils, the trains, the evening dresses, the Moslems and the millionaire Americans, the oil magnates and the spotless, silent servants: I listened to laughter, to phrases comprehensible and
incomprehensible, whispers, rustlings. And this went on and on the entire night, till dawn almost. Then, when the voices thinned out and the lights were dimmed, I leant my head on the cushions of
the couch and fell asleep. Not for long though, because the first boat for Elephanta casts off from right in front of the Taj at seven o’clock; and along with an older Japanese couple,
cameras round their necks, I was on that boat.

‘What are we doing inside these bodies,’ said the man who was preparing to stretch out in the bed next to mine.

His voice didn’t have an interrogative tone, perhaps it was not a question, just a statement, made in his way; in any case it would have been a question I couldn’t have answered. The
light that came from the station platforms was yellow and traced its thin shadow on the peeling walls, moving lightly across the room, prudently and discreetly I thought, the same way the Indians
themselves move. From far away came a slow monotonous voice, a prayer perhaps, or a solitary, hopeless lament, the kind of cry that expresses nothing but itself, asks nothing of anyone. I found it
impossible to make out any words. India was this too: a universe of flat sounds, undifferentiated, indistinguishable.

‘Perhaps we’re travelling in them,’ I said.

Some time must have passed since his first comment, I had lost myself in distant thoughts: a few minutes’ sleep maybe. I was very tired.

He said: ‘What did you say?’

‘I was referring to our bodies,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they’re like suitcases; we carry ourselves around.’

Above the door was a blue nightlight, like the ones they have in night trains. Blending with the yellow light that came from the window it gave a pale-green, aquarium-like glow. I looked at him
and in the greenish, almost funereal light, I saw the profile of a sharp face with a slightly aquiline nose. He had his hands on his chest.

‘Do you know Mantegna?’ I asked. My question was absurd too, but certainly no less so than his.

‘No,’ he said, ‘is he Indian?’

‘Italian,’ I said.

‘I only know the English,’ he said, ‘the only Europeans I know are English.’

The distant cry picked up again and with greater intensity; it was really shrill now. For a moment I thought it might be a jackal.

‘An animal?’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I thought he might be a friend of yours,’ he replied softly.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I meant the voice coming from outside – Mantegna is a painter, but I never knew him, he’s been dead a few hundred years.’

The man breathed deeply. He was dressed in white, but he wasn’t a Moslem, that much I had understood. ‘I’ve been to England,’ he said, ‘but I used to speak French
too, if you prefer we can speak French.’ His voice was completely neutral, as if he were making a statement across the counter in a government office; and this, I don’t know why,
disturbed me. ‘It’s a Jain,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘he’s lamenting the evil of the world.’

I said: ‘Oh, right,’ because now I’d realised he was talking about the wailing in the distance.

‘There aren’t many Jains in Bombay,’ he said then, with the tone of someone explaining something to a tourist. ‘In the south, yes, there are still a lot. As a religion
it’s very beautiful and very stupid.’ He said this without any sign of contempt, still speaking in the neutral tone of someone giving evidence.

‘What are you?’ I asked. ‘If you’ll forgive my indiscretion.’

‘I’m a Jain,’ he said.

The station clock struck midnight. The distant wail suddenly stopped, as if the wailer had been waiting for the hour to strike. ‘Another day has begun,’ said the man, ‘from
this moment it’s another day.’

I said nothing, his assertions didn’t exactly encourage conversation. A few minutes went by; I had the impression that the platform lights had grown dimmer. My companion’s breathing
had slowed, with pauses between each breath, as if he were sleeping. When he spoke again I started. ‘I’m going to Varanasi,’ he said, ‘what about yourself?’

‘To Madras,’ I said.

‘Madras,’ he repeated, ‘oh yes.’

‘I want to see the place where it’s said the Apostle Thomas was martyred; the Portuguese built a church there in the sixteenth century, I don’t know what’s left of it.
And then I have to go to Goa, I’m going to do some work in an old library – that’s why I came to India.’