MY FIRST husband was the most ambitious person I have ever known. This is strange, because when I was with him and we were both very young, we thought ourselves to be totally free of any desire for worldly advancement. We both admired Lalit Kumar—or L.K., as he was known to everyone—and wanted to be like him in living up to the noble ideals we held at that time.
I had met L.K. on a bus going from Kanpur to Delhi. It was one of those inter-state buses, piled on top with baggage and bundles and maybe a crate of chickens, some of them dying on the way; and inside it was crowded with farmers, clerks, pregnant women carrying infants, and children vomiting out of the barred open windows through which dust and pollution flowed in. L.K. seemed not very different from the other passengers; he looked poor in his cotton clothes frayed from too much washing. But he was different—he addressed the people on the bus like one used to making speeches. His voice was loud and dramatic like an orator’s, and he must have made many witty and humorous remarks because people shook their heads and laughed. It was all in Hindi, but when he saw me—a pale foreign girl—he politely translated himself into English. It wasn’t the sort of English I was used to—not American English of course, nor modern English either, but a sort of florid oldfashioned prose that he must have read in books and not spoken very much.
When we reached Delhi, L.K. took me to the flat where he was staying. I was used to going with people I happened to meet on my way. It was how I lived in India at that time, wanting to be far away from home and other people’s expectations of me, far away from my parents’ quarrels and divorce proceedings. So for me India was this place to be free and to travel in. I really had no understanding of anything and didn’t realize that the household to which L.K. took me was very unusual. It consisted only of a mother, Dharma, and her son, Vidia; later I learned that the father hadn’t lived with them since Vidia was six months old. L.K. had more or less taken his place, at least for part of the time, whenever he was in Delhi.
Dharma was, or had been, a dancer: not of the hereditary caste that dancers at that time mostly came from—that is, one classed with semi-prostitutes—but from a prominent South Indian family. Like other young girls, she had learned dance as a social accomplishment but had continued for the love of it, for her talent, and inspired by a famous teacher under whom she studied. Her unconventional enthusiasm didn’t stand in the way of a conventional marriage arranged for her with another prominent South Indian family. I had no idea what a revolutionary step it had been for Dharma to leave her husband and join a troupe of dancers. She was with them for several years, traveling around India and abroad, keeping Vidia always with her, so that he grew up in a makeshift, bohemian atmosphere. Later, during an engagement in Paris, she broke a leg, and after that could never dance again. Her family paid her a stipend to stay away from the South, and her husband, who had married again and had another family, contributed something toward Vidia’s education. When L.K. took me there, they had already been for some years in Delhi, often shifting house but always staying together in a tight bond with each other.
I had grown up listening to my parents’ quarrels, before, during, and after their divorce; but whereas they hated each other, Vidia and his mother quarreled in a different way. They were both intensely passionate—at least she was, and at that time I thought Vidia was too. I fell in love with him at once: he was so handsome, slender, his limbs delicate yet supple and strong, dark Indian eyes that smoldered, and sometimes blazed. We shared the same ideals; we both hated sham, pretension, money, the power and greed of materialism. I rejected this hateful world by traveling around with no responsibilities; he wanted to change it by taking on responsibilities, even if necessary entering politics to fight corruption from within.
L.K. had spent his life in politics. He had been a trade union organizer and also a freedom fighter, who had been jailed many times by the British. He was again in jail when Independence was won, and by the time his release papers came through, a new government had been formed and its prime posts filled by those lucky enough not to be in jail. He detested the members of this present regime, who were very different types from himself. He was a peasant, self-taught, while they were widely traveled aristocrats with hereditary lands and perfect English accents. He didn’t express his dislike the way Vidia and I would have done. Reading some item in an English newspaper, he looked sly and ran his tongue over his lips. “Ah, here’s Madam with a new hairstyle signing away another chunk of Mother India to her favorite international imperialists,” he would say, about India’s lady ambassador to the United Nations. “Very generous, very nice.” Vidia would snatch the paper away from him, read the caption under the photograph, and then tear out the page and crush it in his fist. L.K. laughed and pinched his cheek. For L.K., Vidia had remained the little boy he had met with his mother out for a stroll at India Gate; he had given him some of the candy that he always carried in his pocket for children encountered on the way.
L.K. and Dharma were an unlikely pair—he an impoverished labor leader from a North Indian provincial town, she a South Indian dancer, or artiste as she called herself. Although he shared her bedroom, this may have been because it was the only one; Vidia slept in the living room on a string cot. I didn’t have a sense of any physical relationship between L.K. and Dharma; he was twenty years older and maybe more of a father figure to her. He certainly had a calming influence on her, which she needed—she was very explosive, especially in her quarrels with Vidia. If L.K. was there and felt they had gone too far, he intervened; at that time, when I first met them, he had great authority with them both.
We had the upstairs flat in a two-storey house—I say “we” because it didn’t take long for me to become part of the family. Although fairly new, the house looked old—cracks in the cement and dark patches left by the monsoon rains. The other houses looked the same, and there was a lot of illegal construction and makeshift shops or stalls at street level. Although built as a middle-class residential colony, it had become not unlike an old city bazaar; this was altogether convenient, for we could always run down and buy snacks freshly made on the sidewalk. Also, it was easy to get transport, for cycle rickshaws and horsedrawn carriages plied up and down, along with barrows selling peanuts and slices of coconut. With all this traffic and the cries of passing hawkers, it was very noisy during the day. It was never really quiet at night either, for even when everyone was asleep, the air was always full of sounds: dogs barking, sometimes a shriek of jackals, or the fragrant sound of a prayer meeting with its hymns floating to us from far away. Some of the smells were also fragrant, as of jasmine and Queen of the Night, intoxicating but only partly drowning out the daytime smells of petrol fumes, rotting vegetables, urine.
I became familiar with these summer nights, for when it was very hot, Vidia and I moved our cot on to the balcony overlooking the street. This balcony was just outside Dharma’s bedroom, so that whatever we were doing must have been clearly audible to her. It might be thought that she would be jealous of my relationship with her son, but not at all: she was delighted. Sometimes she even called out to us: “What’s going on there? Are you making me a grandmother? I’m too young!” And she laughed, though Vidia got angry and called back to her to shut up and mind her own business. Then she replied that she had no business, that she was young but not that young; and she laughed again.
Dharma was my friend—she really was, as though we were the same age. The local housewives had their own little clubs and assemblies to which Dharma, with her strange background, was not invited. But she was used to having girl friends to share secrets and snacks, the way she had done with the young dancers in her troupe. Now I was her girl friend—her “sakhi” she said, explaining to me the role the sakhi played in Indian legend and dance: the messenger, the consoler, the go-between of Lover and Beloved. There were many other aspects of the dance she explained to me: the meaning of each tiny gesture of finger and eyebrow, one saying “Come here,” another “Where are you?” and then, “I miss you, I cannot bear this absence O lotus-eyed One and who made those scratches on your neck?” She had some records of a woman singer with a raucous voice, and while she listened, it was clear that the love and longing that came crackling out of the old turntable were also in Dharma’s own heart.
She spoke to me about other things too, like clothes and cosmetics of which she was very fond. Her broken leg had left her with a limp, but this was skillfully hidden by her dress and the way she carried herself. She moved in a cloud of gauze veils and loose garments, glittering with sequins and jingling with rows of ornaments. She wore a lot of make-up, day and night—I never saw her without a layer of powder, circles of rouge on her cheeks, her eyes, extended with kohl, huge and alive under arched eyebrows: a dancer made up for her performance. When he was angry or impatient with her, which was often, Vidia would accuse her of making herself look like a lady from the G.B. Road (the red light district of Delhi). At first she would laugh but the next moment she was terribly angry and would shout how she was an artiste and that he had no respect for her art, or any art or anything beautiful.
When he and his friends got together, they talked about politics. At first he wanted me with him all the time, so he took me along to the coffee-house where they all met. They spoke in a mixture of English and Hindi, discussing both student and national politics; I didn’t listen much, I was just glad to be sitting there with him. I must add here that he never, either before his friends or before his mother and L.K., made any kind of tender gesture toward me, or touched me, though I was longing to touch him. His friends were shy with me—shy and very polite—they were not used to having a girl with them, let alone a foreign one. But when they got deeper into their argument, they forgot about me—as did Vidia too. They always met in the same coffee-house, a dark place with torn plastic seats and a waiter with only one eye and a grimy uniform. And they always placed the same order, cold coffee and potato chips with tomato ketchup, the latter congealed in its bottle so that it had to be shaken and got splashed over the tablecloth. If anyone ordered anything more, they had difficulty paying for it, and I picked up the check, for I always had plenty of money.
It astonished Vidia, the way I always had money. Sometimes he came with me to the American Express office, where other young travelers stood around, waiting for their allowance from home. There were also some who did not have parents to keep them supplied; there was one rather wasted French girl, for instance, who was always asking for money—to buy air mail stamps, she said. I only had to cable my father and he would immediately respond. “Is he very rich?” Vidia asked me, and I had to admit that he was. I didn’t say that my father thought it was his fault I had dropped out of college and was traveling around in this way in a far-off place, that he felt guilty for breaking up my home and so on—it was a story I had no interest in telling. After collecting my money, I often gave most of it to Vidia; he was standing for election to some student committee and needed funds to print posters and treat supporters with snacks in the college canteen.
All this was about the time of his final exams, which he was determined to pass in the first division. He studied far into the night, and in the early hours of the morning he joined me in our bed out on the balcony. Even on moonless nights, I could make out his features by the yellowish light of a street-lamp near our house. I saw his eyes and his teeth gleaming while he made love to me. When he turned around and went to sleep, I pressed myself against him, against his back. I felt such pride in him, in his beautiful body, his wonderful mind; I lay awake, drenched in my own happiness, and in his and my perspiration from the heat of a Delhi summer night.
When the exam results were posted up in the University, Vidia scorned to join the crowd of students jostling to read them. L.K. went instead, and when he came back, he stood in the doorway, with his arms raised, one of them holding his stick: “Triumph!” he announced. “Triumph and blessings have been showered on this home!” Vidia had passed in the first division and was second in the whole University. “Second,” Vidia sneered at himself, but it was his way of hiding how pleased he was. Dharma of course hid nothing—she danced around the room on her lame leg and clicked her fingers to make a noise like castanets. L.K. quoted one of the nineteenth-century English poets he was so fond of—“‘Victory rattles her drum!’” and went on: “Now we shall see something—now we shall see how Youth will conquer feeble Age!” By feeble Age he meant all the old men, and a few old women, who were running the government. He had very definite plans for Vidia.
L.K.’s union supported a small opposition party who were searching for a suitable candidate to field in the next general election. L.K. was eager to introduce Vidia to them—a student leader, with a brilliant degree reflecting his brilliant mind. I glanced at Vidia when this suggestion was made, and I saw his face radiant with a totally new expression. But I had hoped that, once his exams were over, he would have a lot more time for me—we had spoken about how we would go traveling together the way I had done on my own, around India and perhaps also to other places: Tibet, Thailand, China, the world was open to us and so was my father’s bank account. When I reminded Vidia of these plans of ours, he said L.K. was giving him a wonderful opportunity to work for the ideals he and I cherished—freedom, justice—right from within enemy territory. He was known as one of the best debaters in the inter-University team, and it was not difficult for him to persuade me, especially when he pressed his lips against mine and I could feel his persuasive tongue moving inside my mouth.
Dharma too was not happy with L.K.’s plan for her son. “Leave him alone,” she said to L.K. “He’ll do something great, don’t worry, everyone says.”
“Who says?”
“Everyone!”
L.K. was patient the way he always was with her, explaining about the election and what a good chance they had of winning it. At first Dharma said she didn’t understand anything about it, and then she said yes yes, she understood—but what could she be expected to know, a dancer, an artiste? She lived in a different world.
She didn’t dare provoke Vidia himself on this subject, but she talked to me about it. She sat in her bedroom before the little low table on which a mirror was fixed. She applied stuff on herself from all the little pots standing there—kohl, rouge, henna—trying out colors till she arrived at one that she liked. While she was doing this—“I hate politics,” she said. “I’ve seen what it has done to L.K.” She tried out some cosmetics on me too but had to admit they didn’t suit me.
“A very simple man,” she said about L.K. “Simple and poor.” He was born in a village, the son of peasant farmers, and at the age of fifteen he had gone to a nearby town to earn money to send home. He had found a job in a shoe factory but was dismissed for his involvement in union politics. She thought that his first regular meals had been in jail—where he also got an education from the other political prisoners and was introduced to the English classics he loved so much. But what good did any of it do him? In the end, she said, it was others who gobbled up the government with all its plums and perks.
L.K. continued his cynical comments about the ruling elite. He read the newspaper reports of the seminars they arranged in New Delhi, in the brand-new banquet hall of a brand-new luxury hotel. He read of the appointments handed out to ministers and ambassadors—“Of course,” he commented about the newly chosen ambassador to France, a relative of the Prime Minister’s, “he has to have his cousin in Paris, to send his shirts there for laundering. Our poor Indian washermen, what do they know about such fine shirts?”
“Yes and look at the rag on your back—do you think that’s what I want for my son?”
Dharma’s own plans for Vidia changed from day to day. Sometimes she wanted him to be a bureaucrat like her father; on other days she thought he ought to devote himself to literature and perhaps become a poet. “Don’t you think he looks like a poet?” she asked me. I agreed—his deep eyes, his fine brow with a lock of hair always falling across it.
L.K. pointed out: “He never writes poetry. He doesn’t even read it.” But then he went on to say that it was not poets of the word who were needed today but poets of the sword—to cleave the Gordian knot of contemporary politics and of caste-ridden elections. He shook his fist in the air so that his sleeve fell back and exposed his feeble arm. “Be careful,” Dharma laughed. “A sword is heavy to lift!”
In spite of his vague rhetoric, L.K. was really very practical. He and Vidia often sat huddled on the balcony discussing what steps to take to secure Vidia’s adoption as a candidate, while I waited for them to finish so that I could lie down with Vidia on our bed. But even after L.K. had gone, I found Vidia still sunk in thoughts of their discussion. He lay on his back with his arms folded under his head and looked up at the stars. When at last he turned to me, I thought it was the light of those stars I saw reflected in his eyes, and of his love for me. But now I think it was the prospect of the promises L.K. had made him.
L.K. did a lot of traveling in connection with his work. Now he began to take Vidia with him to the various districts he visited, to introduce him to local committees and local bosses who had control of a lot of votes. While they were away, Dharma’s mood was grim; and when they returned, it was worse. L.K. tried to soothe her, sitting beside her and making tender noises as to a child or a pet. She pushed him away: “Pooh, you stink! Go and bathe before you come near me!” He had just come off an inter-state bus and was soaked in its grime and smells and sweat. “And that one!” she cried, pointing at Vidia who had just come off the same bus. “You’re making him the same as yourself, pulling him down to your own low level!” L.K. slunk off obediently to the little hole of a bathroom where a bucket of water had always to be kept filled because of the irregular water supply. But Vidia pulled off his filthy shirt and flung it at her feet: “Go and wash it then!” He stood with his eyes blazing and his chest bare like a warrior’s. “Look at him,” she said, her voice suddenly soft. She tried to touch him, his smooth satin skin, and when he pushed her hand away and turned from her, muttering “Madwoman,” she looked after him with tender eyes and nudged me to do the same.
Whenever they needed money for their expeditions, she gave them all she could out of her small monthly stipend. I didn’t have much sense of money, and never realized how she deprived herself. One day, when the milkman came to the door with his cans, she asked me to tell him that no milk would be required today. When he began shouting, she came flying out and shouted back at him. This was all in Hindi, and she explained to me in English, “I’m telling him he’ll be paid, just wait, my goodness, why can’t he wait!” The milkman appealed to me—he held up several fingers which I assumed to be the sum due to him. I had money right there in my pocket, and I took it out and gave it to him though she tried to stop me. He offered to give us milk, but she banged the door shut in his face and then burst into tears.
I felt sad that she hadn’t confided in me, and when I asked her always to let me help her, she cried more and said, “Am I a beggar?” I assured her that money was no problem to me at all because of my father. She wiped away her tears and the black kohl they had smeared over her face. She praised my father, what a good man he was and kind. Her own father too had been very good and kind, she said; what a mistake she had made in taking the path she had chosen! But there had been no choice, she added at once. If she had stayed one day longer with Vidia’s father, she would have either died of boredom or run off with a lover. Not that there hadn’t been lovers—later, on tour, other dancers in the troupe, admirers in Paris and London—oh she was not always, she smiled, this wreck with a lame leg and no one but a broken-down old man like L.K. to be at her beck and call.
When they returned from their tour, L.K. stood in the doorway, his arms raised as at Vidia’s exam results, and announcing “Victory!” Vidia had been adopted as the official candidate of L.K.’s splinter party. For that evening at least, Dharma shared in their triumph. Whispering to me for some cash which she would repay the day her stipend arrived—she had kept a very middle-class attitude to money—she sent out for biryani and mutton curry, which we ate Indian style with our fingers. I never learned to do this properly, but I loved watching Vidia, the skillful way he used only the tips of his fingers and brought them to his mouth without spilling a grain of rice or a drop of curry. It was part of his refinement, his fastidiousness: every action was neat and precise—as when he washed his hands or drank from a glass without ever putting it to his lips. Dharma explained, “He’s a brahmin”—she spoke proudly, for though she had long since left all considerations of caste and religion behind, she still had a pride in her origins and the refinements she had passed on to her son.
He was also meticulous about his appearance. As a student, he had worn Western-style trousers and shirt, but now, as a political candidate, he had to appear in Indian dress. He saw himself in a wardrobe as refined as that of the Prime Minister, who had started a fashion in high-collared jackets and always wore a fresh rose in his buttonhole. Dharma and I too were thrilled to think of Vidia in Indian clothes, and we went with him on a shopping trip to the cloth bazaar. The merchant, his stomach flowing over his thighs, sat crosslegged on a platform, directing two assistants who clambered to the top of the high shelves to bring down finer and finer bolts of cloth for inspection. Both Vidia and Dharma were very particular, and it all took a long time. Then we were directed to an adjoining shop where a tailor sat with his sewing machine. The day before, Dharma had been to the pawnbroker with some gold bangles—this was a familiar routine for her—so she had a bundle of money tucked away in her large handbag. I told her to get back her bangles because I had just received a money draft. She objected, and we had a whispered conversation about it, while Vidia was sternly supervising the tailor crouched at his feet to measure him. Finally she gave way, but instead of redeeming her bangles, we went the same afternoon to the jewelers’ market to buy a set of ruby studs for Vidia’s new Indian coat. These too were carefully chosen by Vidia and Dharma, their heads close together over the jewels spread on an embroidered cloth in another shop, this one sweet-smelling with incense burning before the gilded picture of a saint.
When the clothes were ready, Vidia brought them home and modeled them for us. Dharma burst into tears of joy, and I too was moved by his beauty. But L.K. was angry; it was the first time I had seen him openly express anger instead of disguising it in sarcasm. Did Vidia not have any idea what sort of people he was representing, he said—those who did not have enough to put into their mouths, or into their children’s mouths or to bring medicine for those same children when they lay shivering with fevers, or for their wives to prevent them from dying in childbirth? And while he spoke he trembled and wiped sweat from his forehead and eyes. I felt bad about his outburst, but Vidia didn’t seem affected at all. He said L.K. was old now and could not be blamed for having outmoded ideas and seeing the world through Marxist eyes—black and white, bourgeois and proletariat. Then he forgot about L.K. and concentrated on me; he said that we should get married.
I was not yet eighteen at the time, but Vidia said no one would bother about my age. The magistrate was an acquaintance of L.K.’s, and as a favor he came to the flat with his clerk, who filled up the form for us to sign. They didn’t seem particular about what they put down, and the only question the magistrate asked was about me—was I a boy or a girl? He was puzzled because, on account of the heat, I had cut my hair very short. I had also bought two identical white muslin kurta-pajama sets for Vidia and me; and since we both had the same kind of build, I suppose we could have been taken for twins, except that he was dark and I wasn’t. There was not much ceremony to the proceedings, and that suited everyone for we were all agnostics. Dharma was the most insistent in her non-belief—maybe because she had had the most to overcome in getting there. Anyway, she had left it all behind long before she had even met L.K. with his cynical references to a God who had no idea what was going on in a world He claimed to have created but simply left to its own rotten devices.
The magistrate didn’t give us any kind of speech but only read out the printed matter on the form, which said that our declaration was true, though if it wasn’t, we understood that we were liable to a fine or a term of imprisonment or both. When we had signed, the clerk gathered up the form and put it in his gunny-bag, and the two of them went away without accepting the sherbet and pink sweets that Dharma offered. She was disappointed and had some hard things to say about the magistrate to whom marriage was just a fee of fifty rupees to be collected. It had been asked for in advance, and since I was the only one with ready cash, I had paid it.
L.K. was not at all put out by the lack of ceremony. He was deeply moved, and when he embraced us, there were tears in his eyes—those dry old eyes that I thought could only melt at the suffering of the poor. He made up for the magistrate by showering his own blessings on us—some in quotations from Shakespeare, but also in ideas of his own about marriage and its commitments. We were surprised by the many thoughts he had on the subject. In a society where everybody was married off at the first opportunity, he had remained single and alone, dedicated to his cause. Now it turned out that he was full of feelings both romantic and also very pure, maybe because they had not been tested by personal experience.
I was never careful about keeping count of my periods, and it was a while before I realized that I hadn’t had one for some time. When I told Vidia, he understood immediately, having grown up close to his mother and a whole troupe of young women dancers. “Now we’ll have to tell him,” he said, for we had been debating whether or not to tell my father about our marriage. I said, “Daddy would love to be a grandfather,” which was true, he was always talking about grandchildren in a longing way. “So we should make him happy,” Vidia said, indifferently. But next moment he added, “Really? Really, you think he’d be pleased with us?” He himself didn’t seem to have strong feelings either way.
Neither did I at first, but then my morning sickness started, and I felt miserable all day. Dharma soon made out what the matter was, and she was very angry with Vidia. “She’s only a child,’’ she said, and to prove it, she spanned her hands around my waist and they still went all the way around.
But L.K. was as deeply touched and delighted as he had been by our marriage. This pleased me at first, but then I found that it worked against me. L.K. and Vidia were about to start on an extended election tour, and I had been planning to go too. Now L.K. wouldn’t hear of it. He said that in my condition it was impossible to travel the way they would have to—not only in the crowded buses and third-class trains I was used to, but by bullock cart and sometimes on camel back, sleeping on the floor of village huts, eating and drinking whatever was available, and always surrounded by crowds and hecklers and police with bamboo sticks. It all sounded fine to me, and anyway I couldn’t bear to be separated from Vidia; but L.K. said, “No no no,” and he stroked my hair, saying I was their tender flower they had to shield and protect. So they left without me.
I became more sick and miserable, and Dharma took me to a lady doctor who told me that I was farther along than I had suspected. On the way home, Dharma said, “You’ll have to decide.” I had decided, and Dharma didn’t try to dissuade me. But she said, “For God’s sake, don’t tell L.K. He’s such a sentimental old fool.” She showed me how to do things like jumping down the stairs and riding on motor rickshaws that shook violently. Nothing worked, and Dharma said we would have to make arrangements. She confessed that she had several times been in the same situation, on tour abroad as well as in India, so it was nothing new to her.
She found a doctor—this one was not a lady doctor but an unshaven little man in a tenement within a city alley. The stone stairs up to his flat were littered and betel-stained, but they opened on to a wide verandah overlooking the city. There was no doctor’s name on a board but a nursery class was being conducted on the verandah by a thin and harassed-looking woman. She took no notice of us other than waving us inside, as she carried on with her lesson. Dharma whispered to me that she was the doctor’s wife who had started the school to keep them going after he lost his licence to practice.
We entered a small unfurnished room, and then the doctor appeared and took us into another small room; this one had a bed covered by a greyish sheet with faint bloodstains on it, and also some kidney bowls and other semi-clinical objects. The doctor spoke to me about America which he had visited thirty years ago, I don’t remember whether as a student or a tourist, anyway he had met some famous doctors there and also gazed on wonders like the Niagara Falls. He didn’t have an assistant but operated by himself, without anesthetic and with an instrument I didn’t wish to look at. Well, I was young and Dharma believed in positive thinking. Afterward, in view of my invalid state, she took me home in a taxi, which was expensive but rattled just as much as the rickshaws we usually rode in.
By the time L.K. and Vidia came back, I had fully recovered. They were both elated by the success of their tour. L.K., quoting verses about battle and victory, shook his stick in the air and cackled in his old-man way, which was at the same time youthful, childlike almost. Vidia was silent, a half-smile on his lips and his eyes shining as though he were in love—with his future, with himself, and (I thought) with me. Now, years later, this is one way I remember him.
That night, when we were in bed together on the balcony, he didn’t tell me much about their tour but what had to be done next for his campaign. One of his student friends had gone into advertising, and he had designed some very effective posters and other printed material to be distributed to voters. They had calculated the cost and it was high, higher than the funds at the disposal of Vidia’s campaign.
“Have you told him yet?”
“Told who what?”
“Your father, who else.”
Then I had to inform him that there was no more baby to tell my father about. At that he rolled away from me. He lay on his back; he looked at the stars; he was silent. I sat up and peered into his face, lit up by the yellowish street lamp. Gone was his half-smile; instead his lips were drawn into a thin, thin line. And that is the other way I remember him.
He said nothing more to me but next morning confronted Dharma, and they had one of their violent quarrels. L.K. sat in the middle of it all, dipping rusks into his glass of tea while reading the paper. But finally he threw it aside and said he could not stay in a place where one was not even allowed to read the newspaper in peace, though it was all nonsense and lies that were printed there. Vidia pointed at his mother and said, “Do you know what she’s done?” Dharma cried “No!” and she ran into the bedroom in fright. And then, when Vidia told him about the abortion, I too became frightened of L.K. and the way he suddenly changed. His grey hair seemed to stand on end as he snatched up his stick and pursued her into the bedroom. “Murderess!” he cried—and when I followed, I saw that he had caught hold of her hair and was beating her around the shoulders with his stick. I shouted above their shouts that it was my fault, that I had asked to have it done—but as I tried to get between them, Vidia came and dragged me into the other room. He wrapped his arms around me—not in a tender way but to restrain me, and he did not let go till the shouts from the bedroom had subsided. When I went in, I saw Dharma huddled on the bed, with her hair wild and loose, and her bruised face swollen with tears. L.K. stood in front of her, drained of anger now, his head lowered in contrition. When he tried to touch her, she shook him off fiercely. After a while he went into the bathroom and returned with a wet cloth to wipe her face. She pushed his hand away several times but at last allowed him to sit beside her and wipe away her tears. Both were silent.
The cost of the posters designed by Vidia’s friend turned out to be too high; and anyway, L.K. said they were suitable for an urban electorate but not for the villagers and landless laborers that their party represented. So when Vidia lost the election, no one blamed it on the lack of those election posters. L.K., who had been through many defeats of various kinds, took this one lightly and at once began to plan for the next campaign, in five years’ time. “Five years!” Vidia said with a dry laugh. But he too was not at all cast down by his failure. Unlike L.K., he didn’t speak of the future but seemed silently to be turning over plans in his mind. This gave him a closed, more determined look, as if a veil of sweetness had been torn away and another person revealed underneath. I loved him not less in this new character but differently; and it seemed almost right that he too should be different toward me.
I was often alone at night now, while he was away somewhere, not returning till I was already asleep. During the day he no longer wanted me with him as before. When I asked him to take me, he said it would not be appropriate. I understood that it wasn’t his former coffee-house friends he met now, and when I asked about them, he waved them away as though they were child’s play he had outgrown. It seemed he was meeting other sorts of people now—“serious people,” he said. I was hurt; weren’t our ideas serious too, I asked, and everything we had talked about and thought we were living for? In reply, he made the same sort of dismissive gesture as he had done when speaking of his student friends. But then he kissed me and I felt all right, especially as he began to take more interest in my appearance. He said I should no longer wear my hair cut so short, or the kurta-pajama outfit I liked but a sari or salwar. I was glad to oblige him, but even so he never took me along to these new places nor to meet the new people he was seeing.
When I met him again recently in New York, he failed to recognize me. How could he, why should he? We hadn’t seen one another for thirty years. But I think I would have recognized him, even if I hadn’t known that the reception at the consulate was in his honor. He probably hadn’t thought about me much in the intervening years, and I didn’t think that much about him either. But I was always interested to hear about him and had many opportunities to do so. Although I had never returned to India, I had kept in touch with Indian organizations like the Indo-American Friendship and the Asia Societies, and after my father died and left me most of his estate, I made donations to these and other organizations and was invited to sit on some committees and to be a patron at their fund-raisers. So I often heard about Vidia, who had become an important public figure in India. He was a leader of his party, which had remained in power for several years. He had held some important portfolios and might have become the Prime Minister, if it hadn’t been for the scandal in his private life. Soon after my departure, he had married the daughter of a rich industrialist and they had several children. But he had left his family to live with a woman who was herself involved in politics—she held some important post, which he had maneuvered for her. They were said to be very useful to each other.
She too was there at the reception—not as his companion of course (India wasn’t that advanced yet) but in her own right as the Commissioner for Women or whatever it was she represented. I looked at her with interest, which was easy since she took no notice of me: I was just another guest at the reception in Vidia’s honor. She wore a badly draped sari that kept falling down, revealing an expanse of naked fat flesh swelling out from under her blouse. But she moved her big bulk with the easy self-confidence of a successful person and was very responsive to those important enough to talk to her, often laughing out loud with two perfect rows of healthy teeth.
It took me some time to get near Vidia, who was surrounded by Indian and American officials, several Indian businessmen settled in New York, and maybe some secret service personnel. I was shy and nervous of approaching him—and when at last I did, what I had feared happened. He stared at me with the fixed smile and the questioning regard with which important people shield themselves. I had to tell him who I was. For a moment the smile left him, but was almost at once replaced by a very cordial one—the sort extended to a former acquaintance whom one has not seen for a long time and is not anxious to see again. All around us there were others eager to talk to him and more coming up, and I had to give way. I’m not sure that I was not pushed aside by one of the secret service men in big shoes.
*
It was not long after Vidia lost his first election that his new contacts arranged a kind of semi-official job for him. I was never sure what this was, but it brought him into the orbit of some powerful politicians. He began to attend official functions, and sometimes an official car and chauffeur were sent for him and were admired by the children in our alley. The chauffeur was too grand to get out to open the door, so Vidia had to clamber in by himself. All the same, as he sat in the back of the car and was driven away to a destination unknown to us, he was already beginning to look like someone from a world superior to the inhabitants of our neighborhood, including ourselves.
L.K. was mostly away at this time, and in his case too among people and places far removed from us. Weeks passed and we heard nothing from him and Dharma grumbled, “Not even a postcard to ask if we’re alive or what.” She was not at all her usual self during his absence—she didn’t even paint herself much but sat in an old cotton sari with her feet drawn up on the chair and her elbows propped on her knees. “Anyone can send a postcard—but no, it’s too much trouble for him. And next time he comes I’ll tell him ‘Get out—get out of my home!’ I’ve told that many times to grander men than he: get out! And they’ve cried and wept, yes right here at my feet,” and she pointed at them propped up on the chair, broad brown dancer’s feet, one of them adorned with a toe-ring.
But sometimes she spoke admiringly of his work as a union organizer and how he went to remote places where no one had ever heard of labor laws. He sat under a tree and waited, and slowly people began to come to him and he told them how to work together against being exploited. “What does he eat when he’s out there for weeks and months on end, where does he sleep? No one knows. And for what?” she always ended up. “For nothing. No one pays him one single pai for his work, it’s all for others. For him—starvation and jail. Do you think that’s what I want for my son? Never. First carry away my corpse and burn it.”
Though Vidia’s work often kept him away till late at night, when he finally came home he was as fresh as he had been when he left in the morning. He only pretended to be tired when he said, “Meetings meetings meetings.” He never explained to me what these meetings had been or where or with whom. But I realized that whatever it was that was happening, it was something wonderfully hopeful for him. More than ever I loved to look at him and see his wide open, wide awake eyes sparkle in the light of the streetlamp. Sometimes he turned to me and held me hard against himself, and then I had no thought that his happiness came from anything other than myself.
He never quarreled with me the way he did with his mother. I suppose he couldn’t because I didn’t know enough Hindi and that was always the language in which they fought. They used what sounded like some very violent invective, and it often ended with things being thrown and broken, usually by her but sometimes by him. Once he swept all the pots of paint off her dressing table. She was so furious that she threatened to jump out the window and already had one leg over the sill when he pulled her back. We were only on the second floor, he pointed out, and all she would do was break her other leg and limp even more. As he said it, he laughed, and then she laughed too, and whatever unforgivable thing had happened between them was completely forgotten.
Although he was never really angry with me, he began to be irritated—by small things I had done or omitted to do, and he remembered them for the rest of the day, and the following day too. He often accused me of not looking after his clothes properly, for he was even more particular about his appearance than before: naturally, since he had to be seen by many important people in important places. If the washerman hadn’t starched his shirts well enough, it was my fault, and I often found it easier to have new ones made. I went back to the textile merchant and to the tailor where they kept Vidia’s measurements; and with the jewelers’ market so conveniently close by, I also bought new little jeweled studs to fasten the new shirts with, because I knew how much he appreciated them and was always grateful.
I still hadn’t told my father about our marriage, and whenever I asked Vidia if it wasn’t time we did, he always said to wait. In the end I never did tell my father—in fact, he never knew that I had been through a marriage ceremony in India, and he always thought that my second marriage (of which he, rightly, disapproved) was my first. What happened to that piece of paper that Vidia and I signed under penalty of a fine or jail sentence or both? Vidia told me not to bother about it—to forget it, he said—so I don’t know what strings were pulled to make it disappear. It never surfaced before or during any of my subsequent marriages. Vidia too seemed not to have been troubled by it.
L.K. reappeared on a day when I had bought a new set of clothes for Vidia. Vidia was trying them on before the little mirror attached to Dharma’s dressing table; this was at floor level so that he could see only his legs and feet and was complaining at there not being a decent mirror in the house. L.K., who had entered in his usual way with his stick held aloft as though announcing some victory, burst out laughing: “You won’t have need of many mirrors where you’re going,” and then, waving his stick at the new outfit: “Or of fine clothes.” He sucked in his cheeks to keep himself from saying anything more, like someone relishing a secret.
“What, no tea?” he asked Dharma, who at once began to grumble how was she to know he was going to walk in the door after not even a postcard—but at the same time she was whispering to me to go down for the milk rusks that he liked. And it was only when he was dipping these rusks into his tea that he came out with his secret. Vidia would not have to wait five years before contesting the next election. A seat had fallen vacant due to a death or resignation or expulsion, and L.K. had persuaded his party to let Vidia stand for it.
“Now we’ll show them,” L.K. said. “Now they’ll see something new.” He extended his hand to pinch Vidia’s cheek in his usual way, but Vidia moved out of reach. L.K.’s enthusiasm was not dampened. “Tell your mother how you’ll drive them out from all the seats and portfolios they’re keeping warm for themselves,” he went on. “No more shirts washed in Paris! No more rose in the buttonhole!” He laughed out loud, but Vidia only responded with a faint smile.
L.K. wanted them to leave on a new election tour at once, but Vidia said this would not be possible as he had some affairs to attend to in Delhi. And next morning he had no time at all to discuss anything because the official car came for him again and was waiting outside. I stood on the balcony to watch him leave; as usual, he never glanced back but looked straight ahead with his thoughts already fixed on the places and people he was being driven to. So he was unaware that L.K. stood on the balcony with me and that he too was looking down at the car. Although he made no comment, there was a peculiar expression on L.K.’s face, and it was then I noticed for the first time that the car driving Vidia away carried the flag and the number plate of the ruling party.
Later that day I saw Vidia and his new girl friend (subsequently his wife). I was standing outside the American Express office together with some of the others who had also come to collect their money. The office was next to an opulent restaurant that none of us cared to patronize; we had not come to India for luxury and display. But the place was popular with a modern type of Indian businessman and their elegant girl friends. We watched with disdain as their chauffeured cars drove up and the tall doorman in splendid tunic and turban opened the brass-studded doors for them.
One sleek sky-blue limousine delivered Vidia and his girl friend. I watched them get out and walk toward the restaurant. Even if he had not been with her, I would have noticed her, she was so beautiful, spilling over with jewelry, with happiness, and with laughter at what she was telling him. He was leaning toward her, listening to her with the half-smile I knew well, indicating his acceptance of his good luck. It was the way he received things I was able to buy for him—in fact, he was wearing the same new outfit he had tried on the day before while grumbling that the mirror wasn’t big enough.
I thought Vidia hadn’t seen me, but he had. When he came home that evening, he at once began to reproach me for standing around on the street like a common person with hippies and bums. “What about you?” I said. “I saw you were not with a common person.” He didn’t blink an eyelid, but went on, “You don’t understand anything.”
And the next day I heard Dharma say the same words to L.K. She was sobbing as he collected the few clothes he kept in the flat. “You don’t understand anything,” she said. “He’s my son. My son.” L.K. didn’t respond but bundled up his things. He was ready to go, while she went on pleading: “Is there a mother on earth who wouldn’t want everything for her son?” He proceeded toward the door with his bundle and his stick. He stopped for a moment in front of me—perhaps he wanted to say something but didn’t. He looked deeply grieved, his face pulled down in the lines of sad old age. Calmer now, Dharma was wiping her eyes. She asked him at least to take some food for his journey, but L.K. said he wouldn’t need anything, he was taking a train and there would be food and tea sold at every station platform on the way. When she asked him if he had money, he waved her away majestically. Then he was gone, we heard his stick thumping down the stairs.
Now, whenever I think of him, it is not the way I saw him that last time but as I imagined him on the train that took him away from us. There he is not at all the L.K. I had first seen on the bus giving speeches to his fellow passengers. Instead, he has become like other gaunt old men I had met in third-class carriages—sitting upright, staring straight ahead with eyes that don’t want to see anything more. When others, unpacking their bundles, offer him bread and pickle, he holds up his hand in refusal. At station platforms he doesn’t buy anything for himself but only some candy for the children in his carriage, wailing from heat and weariness.
And the way I remember Dharma is as she was after L.K. left: sitting on the floor by her little dressing table, she talks to me about love and longing; about meeting and parting; about sacrifice, and the passing of all things good and bad. But Life goes on, she says, and we with it. She is resigned, both for herself and me. She explains that often the people who mean most to us have to be left behind because they cannot follow us along our destined path. We may be born into a high-caste Indian family or as a foreign girl, a free spirit, dedicated to travel, but for each of us Life has many stages.
She turned out to be right; I did pass through many stages. When I look back at the time with her and Vidia and L.K., it seems separate from the rest—of a different quality like a dream, or one of those dances she showed me, made up of graceful gestures executed in the air to the accompaniment of ankle bells, drum, and some sort of lute.