My Nine Lives (27 page)

Renuka became very worried about not having enough money for Shivaji. It was the one thing she had to offer him, and without it she felt unworthy. There was a humility in her
of which Priya had no trace. Priya felt that her contribution to C. was not money but understanding, intelligence, strength of mind, resolution, ability. She was no one's handmaiden but a muse, a partner, a spouse. That was why it was so easy for her, I think, to disregard and displace me: because she knew I couldn't be any of those things to him. I didn't even have money to sponsor him. She quite liked me—indeed, I became her principal confidante: she told me how they were going to go to America and set up there and start their work. There may even have been some suggestion that I might go with them, she didn't say in what capacity, nor did she promise anything.

It was her mother who questioned me as to what I saw as my role in their future plans. What could I tell her, since I knew nothing myself? All I had ever wanted was to be with him, but I had realized from the beginning—when my mother Edith too had questioned me about what I saw as my future with C.—that he could not be confined to only one person. He belonged to the world in all its manifestations, including all its physical pleasures that he relished so much—eating, and having sex with women he liked. It may sound strange that he enjoyed it equally with Priya and myself, and even more strange that this was acceptable to both of us. For her, it was anyway secondary and, I believe, always remained so. She stayed with him for many years in America and was largely responsible for building up the practical side of his movement. There were always many women around him, and I have heard that Priya encouraged their physical involvement with him as part of their treatment.

As for me in those early years, I began to learn to do without him. It was not that I felt differently about him—not at all, any more than he did about me. It didn't seem to make that much difference to either of us that he now spent
more time with Priya than with me. We both recognized that a new phase had started for him, one from which he could no more draw back than I could or would hold him back. “What belonged to us was that earlier time in London, our times under the tree. That was sealed, sealed off in all its sweetness, for the rest of
my
life anyway. Later I heard and read about him in newspapers and magazines, and saw photographs of him. He grew immensely fat, mountainous. I studied the pictures closely, trying to make out the features that I had known so well. Probably it was my imagination but I liked to think that I could find the original C. in that mass of flesh and fame: that what he had given me—all that youth and love—was still there within him and that the memory of our tree remained inviolate in him, as it did in me.

But now came the years of change, or change-over; for the more time Priya spent with him, the more time I spent in the house with her mother. Renuka wanted me there, since I was the only person she could talk to, and question about C., and about Priya, and their project together. Driven by Priya's energy and her organizing ability, both stupendous, this was now really taking shape. Whenever she showed up at the house, she was like a whirlwind, making her arrangements over the long-distance telephone and assigning tasks and commissions to her mother's staff. She was impatient and high-handed—doubtless like Renuka when she had first begun to organize Shivaji's movement. But now Renuka had to stand by and watch her daughter setting up her rival organization. She also had to watch her bank account being drained of its usual allowance, for Priya had instructed her father's employees to divert these sums to the account she had set up for her and C.'s needs. When Renuka tried to dispute or even
discuss this new arrangement, Priya would brush past her without a word, her arms full of important files.

Renuka was desperate. She needed money for the house she had bought for Shivaji and its large staff, for entertaining the crowds of visitors who came to see him; at the same time there were halls to be hired for his public appearances, and the brochures and pamphlets to be printed. All this she confided to me—whom else could she talk to? Priya wouldn't listen, and as for Shivaji himself, she would not have dared to bring these matters to his attention. Not that he wouldn't have listened, and probably very carefully, but this was her domain, the work he had assigned to her. There was nothing else he would accept from her. And here she extended her confidence to me and spoke of that other matter she could tell no one else: her relation to Shivaji, her need for him, his coldness to her that prevented her ever showing her feelings for him, not even her reverence, for when she tried to touch his feet, the way a disciple does to a master, he drew them back and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

She chose me for her confidante, I think, because of the way I tried to listen to her: with all my attention, all my understanding. These were qualities I had not shown my mother when she needed them. At that time I was too immersed in my own happiness to pay any attention to her. And if I had listened, all I would have heard were complaints—mostly about me, how I was too young, and about C., and how no one knew where he came from. Even when she spoke more generally, as she liked to do, about the experience of love and loving, I wasn't prepared to listen because I was in the middle of living that very experience and had no need of her theories about it.

As for C., he was himself young in those London years and concerned more with formulating his ideas than with
their practical application. Later I believe he did help people in trouble with their psychological problems, although even then, in America, he got into difficulties when some of his patients did not react well to his methods. Or to him—for those who came to him for guidance (or whatever) had first to deal with him, with that personality of his which played such an enormous part in his work. For some, he must have been too strong, but he was probably unaware of that, the way the waves of the ocean are not conscious of sweeping you away.

The night that Edith killed herself she had come bursting into the attic where I was sleeping with C. Perhaps she just couldn't stand it any more, creeping around on the stairs and maybe listening at the door. This time she pounded on it and then pushed it open. And she saw us in the light of a streetlamp outside—both of us naked and asleep in one another's arms. It was only when she began to tug at me that we started up out of our deep sleep. “Give me back my daughter!” she shouted. C. leaped out of bed, and as he stood stark naked before her, she began to drum her fists on his chest as she had done on the door. But he was more solid than any door, and besides he had this blond fur of hair softening her blows. “Who is he anyway?” she was shouting at me. “Where does he come from? What's he doing in our house?” C. laughed in that easy hearty way he always had, and said, “But I'm your lodger.” She began to plead with me: “Let him go, darling, everything will be as it was when he's gone. He's just a coarse, common person!” That made him laugh again, so that she tried to hit him again. This time he stepped aside—more to save her than himself, I think—and she caught hold of me. She held me so tightly that, when I remember that night, I can still feel myself pressed against her heart and hear its beat. But then I was concerned only
with getting free, shaking her off, and when I couldn't, I cried out against her, “Leave me alone!” Instead she held me closer, and I cried, “Go away and leave us alone! Go,” I cried, “go!” and with each word I struggled more fiercely to release her arms from my neck. And when I succeeded, it was I—I, not C.—who pushed her out of the door and shut that door behind her, so that I could lie down and go to sleep again with C.

Books have been written about the number of suicides that have occurred from around the beginning of the twentieth century among middle-class Jewish women. One theory has it that the cause may have been a sense—a fore-sense—of the fate in store for them in the following years. But another reason may also have been their own psyche and the tremendous importance they had learned to attach to it. The constant analysis of their own feelings and their attempt, on the one hand, to control themselves and, on the other, not to suppress but fully to release their impulses—all this involved them in a maze of conflict from which they couldn't find an exit. And when something bad happened to them, such as a failed exam or an unhappy love affair, then the only exit was suicide and that was the route often taken. Some of them even kept the means for it close by—Edith, ever since she was a young woman in Vienna in the 1920s, had carried a phial of cyanide in her handbag.

So now it was Priya's mother I listened to with the attention I had not shown my own mother. Priya only came to the house to quarrel with her mother. Besides money, she now also demanded her share of the family jewelry. This was to have come to her only on her wedding day, but she wanted it at once to take with her to America. Renuka tried to resist, but each time she was left wounded and panting with all her pulses beating (I believe she was at that time in her menopause
years) and in a despair that frightened me, remembering as I did my mother's own state and the way she had ended it.

C. no longer came to the house. Perhaps it was a sort of tact that kept him away, not wanting to interfere in a quarrel of which he was the cause. Shivaji also held aloof from it—perhaps this is how men of destiny reach their goal, by letting others manage matters for them. C. now spent his time in the hotel room, reading and writing. His Afghan friends had departed—some back to Afghanistan, others to buy arms in other countries, while some were in jail for pimping or drug-dealing. C. too seemed ready to move on, and I heard him ask Priya several times how much longer she was taking with her preparations. There was a hint of impatience in his tone, though normally he was so goodnatured and relaxed. Even now, he wasn't exactly tense but more like an athlete straining toward the next race.

Then one day Priya said, “I'll settle it right now, once and for all.” Looking grim, she left us to fight it out with her mother. The moment she had gone, we sank almost in relief on to the bed together. We kissed the way we used to under our tree. He was as he had always been with me, and that is the way I shall always remember him, though the later image I have of him is of a very different person. It was said that, in the process of establishing his work, he became dictatorial, even cruel toward opponents, especially toward former followers who dared to leave him. Many lawsuits were filed against him—by the relatives of young people he was said to have seduced away, or of those who had made over their properties and monies to him. He also had to fight an extradition order from Holland, where he was accused of forging a will in his own favor. But all this was in a future that I did not share with him.

Priya returned in triumph, bringing a casket that held not
only her own wedding jewelry but some of her mother's too. She spilled it on to our crumpled, sagging bed—a shimmering cornucopia of gold and precious stones that made me hold my breath at so much beauty. But for Priya there was only the satisfaction of her victory, while C.'s appreciation was almost ironic—such private wealth did not impress but amuse him, and he had no interest in its value except as a contribution to his work. That very afternoon Priya bought three tickets to New York; one-way, since there was no thought of return. For the two of them their future lay elsewhere. It was only I who felt regret: as if, unlike them, I had not yet quite finished here.

When I went to say goodbye in the other house, I found a terrible commotion. Servants and visitors ran around, some sobbing, some silent in disbelief. All the doors were wide open, right into Shivaji's sanctuary. It was empty—and for a moment this was what astonished me most, his absence, and the way it reduced the room to a dark shaft, a vacuum at the heart of the house. I was told that Shivaji was with Renuka in the hospital. She was in intensive care, having suffered a stroke after her last fight with Priya. When I arrived at the hospital, I found her with tubes and other machinery attached to her in an attempt to pump her back to life. She was unrecognizable; there was no Renuka at all, just this immobile mound. Probably that was what made Priya, after her visit, decide there was nothing she could do, so she and C. might as well depart, as planned. Since I decided to stay, she sold my ticket at the airport to a stand-by passenger.

After several weeks, Renuka recovered, at least partially, and it was a pleasure to help her slowly regain some of her faculties. She learned to move and talk again—never perfectly, her walk remained halting, her speech slurred. It was hard work but we persevered and made progress. This took all
our effort so that neither of us had any thought to spare for what might be happening outside the hospital and its therapy center.

But there was no need of us—from the moment of Renuka's stroke, Shivaji had taken complete charge. He dealt with everything himself: the bank, the accountants, with the staff, most of whom had to be let go. At least once a day he came bustling into the hospital, full of good cheer and with the air of an easy-mannered, smiling, forceful little businessman. He wore rimless spectacles and a linen suit—one of those made for him abroad that, with his handmade shoes, had so upset Priya. In this outfit he was rattled from side to side in the motorcycle rickshaw he hired, having had to sell all the cars; it didn't seem to make any difference to him, he sat there with unruffled dignity. When Renuka regained the use of one hand, he made her sign a power of attorney to him; and with this he managed her affairs, so that by the time she emerged from therapy, he had settled everything. We never even had to go back to the house, which he had meanwhile sold with all its furniture and fittings. He used the proceeds to buy land and a house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and he brought us straight there from the hospital on an overnight train.