CALCUTTA, 1930. A sixteen-year-old Bengali girl of unusual intelligence and literary gifts meets a Romanian student named Mircea Eliade. Decades later the girl, Maitreyi, writes a novel about a young Romanian scholar who came to live in her house as her father’s protégé. She calls the scholar Mircea Euclid and the teenaged girl Amrita.
In the novel, it is Amrita’s father who brings Mircea to their house one day and announces that his student will live with them. He orders his daughter to ready a room for the visitor, to make it comfortable and pretty. Such devotion to a student was not unusual in her father, Amrita says, nor was the generosity straightforward:
My father’s students were ready to sacrifice a great deal for him, he too loved them, but it was not the love of uncomplicated people like us for one another. His kind of love has no sympathy for others. His love is for himself. For example, he loves me, he loves me a great deal—not so much for my sake as for his own. Look, my daughter is such a peerless jewel, how beautiful she is, what wonderful poetry she writes, how fluent is her English—this is my daughter. Look, look, everyone!
I am the apple of my father’s eye. But I know that if I do a single thing against his wishes he will crush me. To him, what will make me happy is utterly irrelevant.
This is my own clumsy translation, the work of a horticulturist from a small north Indian town. Maitreyi Devi might have forgiven my ineptitude: those who have lived with a great absence, as she did, recognize this compulsion to claw at the faintest of similarities: the angle of a chin, the curve of a forehead, the flash of anger, a particular way with words, the friendship with a stranger. My mother had torn herself up and scattered her shreds in the breeze when I was nine. Ever since, I have scoured everything I read, see, hear, for traces of her.
In Maitreyi Devi’s novel, Mircea is about twenty, has dark hair and high cheekbones. At first Amrita does not notice anything special about him, but as the weeks go by she finds she is lingering at the breakfast table with him long after everyone else has left; another hour slips by at the door to her father’s library. Her father passes them on his way to and from his library but says nothing; nobody stops them idling together. Amrita begins to notice things about Mircea: how his kurta is open at the neck, the triangle of pale skin revealed by his undone buttons. That his eyes seem different when he takes off his glasses.
One day, her father tells her he will teach the two of them Kalidas’s classical Sanskrit poem, Shakuntala.
From the next day we began studying together. Who knows what people of those times thought when they saw me sitting on a mat on the floor with a foreigner, learning Sanskrit. I saw jealous astonishment in the eyes of my father’s Bengali students. Older women of my mother’s generation were suspicious and disapproving; those my own age regarded us with avid curiosity. My father paid no attention to any of it. The foreigner was gradually becoming a part of our family.
When I read those lines, my thoughts went back to the time Walter Spies began coming to our house. The disapproval and envy and curiosity had been identical, and evenly distributed between our neighbors and my father. My father’s disapproval intensified to a kind of jealous rage as my mother grew closer to Mr. Spies. Maybe he could see that he had never, despite his lectures on patriotism and his reading lists, succeeded in animating her with the kind of passion Mr. Spies did by merely doodling an eagle or sketching a face. Did he sense the danger of a bond that shut him out? His response was to order her not to go out with the visitors and to discourage them from coming home. But forcing my mother into acceptable conduct was never going to work; he should have known that in her personal list of the seven deadly sins, obedience sat somewhere at the top and propriety followed close behind.
In Maitreyi Devi’s book, the bars of the cage around Amrita are familiar. She can do nothing without her father’s permission, and his tyranny, disguised as concern for her welfare, is absolute. She yearns to plunge into the river of life that she can see is flowing outside her home, but is forbidden. Once, when she ignores his strictures and joins a funeral march for a nationalist, her livid father roars at her, raging on and on until she is worn down.
Maitreyi Devi and my mother were almost contemporaries and my mother may even have met her when she went in 1926 to Santiniketan with her father to visit Rabindranath’s school. They had stopped in Calcutta on the way. Agni Sen, a scholar himself, would have had reason to visit Maitreyi Devi’s father, a philosopher and teacher who knew Rabindranath well. Whether she and my mother met, what they talked about, if they talked at all—I do not know. But as I read the Bengali novel, I thought that when my mother left our house with Beryl and Walter, she forced open a door that had been barred for Maitreyi Devi.
As an old man trying to understand my past, I am making myself read of others like her, I am trying to view my mother somewhat impersonally, as a rebel who might be admired by some, an artist with a vocation so intense she chose it over family and home.
As a child abandoned without explanation, I had felt nothing but rage, misery, confusion.