The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (51 page)

Winter came early in Kashmir, late in October when the valley sloshed humidity into the mountains to tumble back as cloud, gothic mist to intrigue in the avenues of Srinagar, in liaison with woodsmoke, in a pre-modern smog. Night began with the unseen dropping of the sun behind unseen peaks, at four o’clock. Balwan Singh entered a bungalow on the city outskirts, threw his coat on a peg, and approached the hunched and red-eyed members of the Marxist Students Reading Group, speaking before he reached them, before they could greet him.

“Classically,” he said, “the revolution proceeds at the most general level along dialectical lines between theory and praxis, praxis and theory. Lenin’s perception of his historicity became Lenin’s stewardship of the Bolshevik actions, which actions, their practical successes and failures, led to a refinement of his theory, specifically in the concepts of imperialism and the Communist state. As long as Lenin lived, this dialectic closely matched its counterpart, that of man as participant and man as percipient, as subject and as object. But the death of Lenin, the emerging imperfections of the early state, and above all the rise of Stalin created a crisis in the dialectic: praxis dictated that theory, in the short run, be its apologist.”

His comrades squatted on the floor, leaned against walls, chewing
paan
or smoking, like a congregation of ruminant boatmen a generation older. Most of them were sons of well-heeled Hindus, their eyes Brahmanically mournful, and they’d adhered to the Indian pattern by which youths become men early. Textbook materialism had exalted them. They filibustered in classrooms. They got themselves expelled. They laughed at jokes that were correct.

Singh, whose jokes were always correct, never laughed. He paced back and forth before them, standing at the center of an asterisk of shadows cast from his legs by the lanterns, his strut as always part professorial, part firebrand, and mainly Heinrich Heine—and he began to sense that he was not being heard. His comrades’ shoulders bucked and dipped as if they felt a draft. They
did. It was a newcomer, behind them, a girl, a very young girl with a boyish body and a boy’s short hair, sitting cross-legged in slacks on the floor near the wood stove. Singh interrupted himself to ask for her name.

“Jammu,” she said.

He welcomed her stiffly and, by example, led the group to ignore her for the duration of his lecture. When the meeting broke up she slipped out of the bungalow like a shrug embodied, like a self containable in one small word. He followed her, with a glance over his shoulder to make sure no comrades saw.

She said she came from Bombay. She said she was sixteen. She was studying in Srinagar against her will. She told Singh it wasn’t a good university. Her mother wanted her to marry a certain forty-three-year-old Kashmiri landowner because she was a bastard and the landowner had asked. She was studying electrical science. She spoke no Kashmiri. Her mother wanted to manufacture transistor radios in Ahmadabad and wanted her to run the company. She wanted to go to London or Paris and be a writer and not marry. She’d seen one of the Reading Group’s handbills. Her mother had told her her religion was neosocialism. In the cellar of their house, in Bombay, she had watched a cat in a window well push five wet babies out of its body. The cat became angry and tried to escape but was too weak to climb out of the window well. The kittens were squirming like living excrement on the dead leaves. The cat lay down again and ate the sac. She asked Singh who Trotsky was.

She would have fallen to the first man unscrupulous enough to claim her, would have become, at someone’s arbitrary urging, a fascist or an industrialist or a criminal, would have put out for the most tertiary member of the Reading Group. (And then would have included him in a biting
roman à clef
and left it unfinished in a footlocker.) She was preternaturally innocent, like the simple brain of a time bomb. She was incapable of love but acted wed, directing Singh’s life (“You can’t afford those boots”) and viewing other men with airtight indifference. She went where no women had gone, did what few girls were doing, and so it didn’t matter what she said. If you were Jammu, it didn’t matter. The Reading Group, soon recast as the Kashmiri Alternative Socialist Front and thence as the People’s Reading Group, believed her to be doctri
naire. So did Singh. He promoted her to a position of command. He forsook all others in bed. He and she dressed identically.

When she went to Chicago (under a false impression of that city’s political climate; it was 1968 and she thought it was a hotbed; hers was, Singh came to see, a peculiarly Indian blunder) he departed for Moscow to study mechanical engineering. He had a room in the largest freestanding structure in all of Eurasia, the MGU on the Lenin Hills, a monument to Stalin’s conviction that More Is More. One day he went to the thirty-fifth floor and found a neglected rock collection and a door to a tiny elevator, an elevator with space for only two people squeezed tightly together, so that when he’d ridden it up as far as it went and the door had opened, his face was a matter of inches from a steel fence and a sign which commanded in Russian
DO NOT TOUCH
and which was marked with a skull and crossbones and a bolt of lightning piercing the skull’s eyesockets. He took the elevator back down to the rock collection. He had a fling with a young engineering student named Grigor who worked part-time in the Soviet patent office and who claimed, when drunk on vodka, to have the task of copying patents from Western nations into Russian and dating them to appear to have been issued in Moscow several years before the originals. Then he would weep and claim he was lying. From Chicago Jammu sent Singh a postcard that read in its entirety, “Miss you.” Back in Bombay he found that, out of his sight, she had entered the Indian Police Service. He didn’t mind. She was still his favorite, his first and only woman to date, and in reminding him that he could go both ways she made him feel universal and powerful. He performed his historical function religiously—if religion implies the submission of the autonomous mind to ritual. As the most erudite Catholic theologians take communion and are confessed, in Bombay Singh never stopped recruiting, inciting, discussing. For several years he lived in Mahul, in the shadow of the Burmah Shell refinery. Every morning he would leave his rooms to ply the streets or wait tables at the Lady Naik Hotel or burn time in a tea room with his leftist pals, and on the steps of his building he would stop in front of a deformed little cigarette seller and drop coins on his outspread scarf and take a package of genuine Pall Malls. For arms the man had two ebony hemispheres protruding from his shoulders, arrested in
utero thirty years earlier, shining in the red morning light as though varnished. The deformity wanted to shame the concept of arms, or perhaps reproduced in Singh the man’s longing to have them. The man was an avatar of Jammu.

Frequently in those early years Singh visited her mother’s house on Mount Pleasant Road. Shanti Jammu hosted nightly showings of the creations of her Pathan chef and of her own conversational effulgence. Shanti fancied herself a marxist of the gradualist school. “Ours is a country of caste divisions, Balwan,” she would twinkle, as if this were news to him. “Not class divisions. The Petits against the Patels. The tinkers and the tailors. Sikhs and Hindus, and vice versa of course. How can this be changed? Who’s to break the traditions? Who’s to build the slums and run them on the Western model? A very wise man I once knew spoke of dehumanizing this generation in order to humanize the next one. So I’m a capitalist roader. A ruling-class dog. Just fulfilling…my historical telos!”

“Your dharma.”

“Come, come, let’s be modern.”

“That’s my point. You aren’t transcending the superstructure. You’re still a Brahman squeezing Harijans in the name of wisdom and racial privilege.”

“And you’re still a superior Sikh. That’s
my
point. You and your Russians! They were nothing but Frenchmen in sable. Germans with samovars. We’re still Indians. We won’t shed our Oriental souls overnight. If we look west, it’s to England. Dignified, class-conscious sentimental old England.”

“Home of Marx and still the only Labour government in postwar Western Europe.”

“Do have some beef, Essie. You too, Balwan. You’re looking peaked. Where is the working class in ‘socialist’ India? Where is the Industrial Revolution? It’s a generation down the line.”

“Not in Bombay, Poona, Delhi, Bhopal. And it’s the urban centers that matter, because that’s where the organs of repression are concentrated. Russia itself was a feudalistic agrarian state in 1917.”

“Well goodness gracious, then be my guest. Foment! Ignite the slums! Only drop me a line on the eve of your revolution.” She
touched his arm, and winked at her daughter. “I’ll want to pack. I’m sure the canaille won’t grasp that I’ve been working in their best interest. Will they?”

“Does a chicken have lips?”

“But it will all be in the family. Essie keeps you out of jail. You’ll keep us off the guillotine.”

Jammu kept him civil. She said she shared his contempt for her mother, saw the egregiousness, knew all about it, so why bring it up? She had no other family in the world. So Singh held off, and by and by Shanti banned him from the house. Both he and she made believe, for Essie’s sake, that their enmity was rooted in politics. It wouldn’t have done to let Jammu know that there was simply bad blood between her only two loved ones, that their antipathy could not be rationalized. It was a measure of her dictatorial potential that people close to her felt compelled to shield her from unpleasant facts.

In Bombay Singh gained a reputation for irresponsibility because he was forever dropping out of sight, abandoning his cohorts. In thirteen years they never even trusted him enough to make him a section leader. The truth was that he was responsible to Jammu, the rising star of the Bombay police. He made sure he stayed available in case she needed a job done. He made sure she believed the nights they spent alone together meant a great deal to him. Perhaps they did. And perhaps her career would mean more to the future of India than any amount of marxist agitation. It was this possibility that kept him in her service. The margin of hope in Bombay ran very thin. Jammu was an anomaly, foreign to the culture, and Singh knew that change had always been forced on India from outside, by the Aryans, the Moguls, the British. Even Gandhi had come from across the ocean. If you were Indian and socially responsible, it was your obligation to leave India, literally, intellectually, or both.

When the call came, he was ready to leave. The destination—St. Louis, Missouri—hardly seemed to meet the requirements of an Archimedean fulcrum. But Jammu said the specifics shouldn’t make any difference. (Especially when it was clear that no matter what she did, stay or leave, the Bombay police would be rioting by mid-autumn.) She said that in every social entity, even a quiet
mid-American city, there were inequalities that could be parlayed into subversion. (Subversion! Constantly, in her innocence, she took corruption for subversion.) She said she was impatient with India. She wanted to leave her mark on a place, on a culture, and she knew it wouldn’t be Bombay. It had taken her nearly fifteen years with the Bombay police to reach this conclusion, which Shanti had been drawing for her all along. Of course she maintained she’d planned from the beginning to use her police work merely to launch her to America. That was a lie. She said she was bored and restless. This, Singh believed. He followed her. He was interested in attacking the United States.

But the operation had turned out to be a repeat of her performance in Bombay, where, as a member of the People’s Reading Group, she’d infiltrated the Indian Police Service and penetrated to the depths of its bureaucracy, becoming the police commissioner in India’s largest city and receiving along the way the active financial support of Indira and her party, and then turned her back on the entire country. She’d sold her work, all her chances, for a job in St. Louis. And here again she’d ridden history at a velocity that seemed miraculous to the unthinking. And here again velocity undid her. She loved it for its own sake, obsessively, with a modern desperation that tied her progress to the ghetto, which was also modern and obsessed with speed. The sudden trends, the sudden deaths. And where she’d had perhaps the only opportunity ever to arise in latter-day St. Louis to bring a small revolution to its black residents, she’d subverted subversion instead. She was on the wrong side of the law. Poverty, poor education, discrimination and institutionalized criminality were not modern. They were Indian problems, sustaining an ideology of separateness, of meaningful suffering, of despairing pride. In the ghetto, just as in the Indian ghettos of caste, consciousness would come slowly and painfully. Jammu had no patience. She’d hauled the big industrial guns into the inner city and called it a solution, because ultimately it was far easier to change the thinking of a rich white fifty-year-old or to deflect the course of his eighteen-year-old daughter than it was to give a black child fifteen years of decent education. Jammu had lied to the blacks, swindled them out of their homes, bribed and cajoled their own advocates into betraying them, and all in the name of
speed. Of appearing to solve the problem quickly. Of seizing power while it could still be seized.

Still, Singh had no ready-made category for her. She was too self-conscious, too protean, too amateur and peculiar for him to dismiss her. But at least he could see now that she and her methods weren’t what he’d hoped, her methods not the fuse of any revolution anywhere, and she not the entclechy he’d imagined he’d beheld when she was sixteen and wanted to have intercourse on gravel and in boats and to make people obey her laws. He could see now. America was the seat of her atavism. She was just like her mother. All the subtle countertrends that had nagged him from the first days in Srinagar—her lack of direction, her indifference to suffering, the patness of her utterances—had culminated in St. Louis. Senseless St. Louis. She would stick here, permanently associated, her methods sound enough to vanquish the locals but too fancy to take her further. She’d use Probst because she thought she cared for him and then discard him soon enough, for behaving like a human being. Singh was glad to have seen the changes she’d wrought, the spectacle of speed, and to have achieved momentary fulfillment in his handling of the living Probsts. He’d enjoyed the ride, and he’d be glad in a month when he was gone.