My Nine Lives (14 page)

His time in Delhi was largely spent playing cards with the Begum or doing crosswords with her, finishing them even more quickly than she did. Unfortunately it was the middle of the hot season and, perspiring heavily, he suffered horribly from prickly heat. Like myself in later years, my mother loved the Delhi heat—the mangoes, the scent of fresh jasmine wound around one's hair and wrists, and sleeping on string cots up on the Begum's terrace under a velvet sky of blazing stars. My father was very interested in early Hindu architecture, like the amphitheater at Suraj Khund, but on this visit it was much too hot for him to go out there. Since this was a private visit, he did not think it proper to call on any of the senior government officials—his opposite numbers here, whom he knew quite well from their visits to London. I think he himself was relieved when the two weeks were up and he could return
home. The Begum said she certainly was; as for my mother and Muktesh, they never told anyone anything, but no doubt they were glad to have these last few weeks of her stay to themselves. She and I followed my father to England in September, after the monsoon, but we were back again the following January. She could never stay away for long.

During the months in between her visits to India, my mother led a very conventional life at home. I have this information from my father's two sisters (“your boring aunts,” the Begum called them). My mother seemed to have charmed them, and they gave the impression that she too had been charmed—by England, by their way of life: the family Christmases, fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, the village pageant of medieval English history. In her country garden she gathered plums and apples from her trees and bottled jams and chutneys; although in India she had, like her mother, hardly been inside a kitchen, she learned to roast, to baste, to bake, with a rattle of the gold bangles that she never took off. Both my aunts had very happy marriages and took their devotion to their husbands too much for granted to feel the need to demonstrate it. But my mother couldn't do enough to show her love for my father. When he came home from his long day at Whitehall, she would make him sit by the fire, she would light his pipe, and bring his slippers and whatever else she had heard or read that English wives did for their husbands. “No, let me,” she would say, “let me,” when he protested, embarrassed at having such a fuss made over him.

Yet her visits to India became more frequent, and longer. He made no objection, perfectly understood that she wanted to see her mother, was homesick for India. How could she not be? And he was grateful that, while she was with him in England, she gave no indication of her longing for that other,
different place. During her absence, he wrote her long letters—which she did not open. The Begum kept them, also without opening them, so I have been the first person ever to read them.

And having read them, I can understand my mother's reluctance to do so. They express him completely, his personality shining through the small neat civil service script and his longing for her through his deadpan account of domestic trifles: how Mrs. Parrot the housekeeper and the milkman had got into a fight over some cream that had prematurely gone off; how he had tried to have a quiet dinner at his club but had been caught by a very tiresome chap who knew all about India; how he had rescued a sparrow from the jaws of next door's cat and had given it water and a worm till it was calm enough to fly away . . . Each letter said not once but several times that everything was fine, he was muddling through, and yes of course not to think of coming home till the Begum had perfectly recovered from her bout of flu.

My mother died of cholera—not in India but in England, where this disease had been wiped out so long ago that English doctors failed to identify it in time. One of my aunts took me away to her house and kept me for several months until my father was able to have me back. Although my aunts loved to talk about my father's happy marriage to my mother, they never spoke of her death and how it affected him. It was as if they didn't want to remember their brother—so calm, so anchored—as he was during that year. They were reluctant to return me to him but he insisted. He never remarried. My mother's portrait, painted by an Indian woman artist, hung in our living room in the country, an enlarged photograph in the flat in town. In the former she is pensive,
with sad eyes, in the latter she is smiling. Perhaps the painter wasn't very good but, to me, the portrait conveys less of her than does the photograph. Or it may be that to smile—to be lively and alive—was more characteristic of her, of the way that people told me that she was.

Muktesh never married, which is very unusual for an Indian. He spent his days and nights—he rarely slept more than a few hours—in the service of his party, of parliament, of politics. When he said he had no time to get married, it was true. He rarely managed to get to see his old mother in Bikaner. He used to tell me how she despaired at his lack of a wife: “And when you're sick, who will look after you?” He would smile and point upward in a direction he didn't believe in but she did. He didn't get sick but he didn't get married either. Year after year, more and more desperately, she found brides for him—girls of their own caste, modest, domesticated. But he was used to my mother who argued with him about subjects of vital concern to them both. When they took long car rides together, he whiled away the time composing poetry; she worked on her PhD thesis that she didn't live to present.

Their last long car ride together was to Bikaner. He had to go to a meeting of his election committee in the district from which he was returned year after year. They traveled for a day and a night, across long stretches of desert. They got very thirsty and drank whatever was available—the glasses of over-sweet and milky tea that Muktesh was so fond of, or buttermilk churned out of fly-spotted curds. Once, when there was nothing else, they made do with stagnant water out of an old well. Neither of them ever had a thought for disease, she out of recklessness (the Begum called it stupidity), he out of his optimistic fatalism.

I have only his account of that day in Bikaner, and he was
busy till it was time to set off again the same night. All day he had left her in his mother's house, with no comment other than that she should be looked after. His mother was used to his arrival with all sorts of people and had learned to ask no questions. She was an orthodox Hindu, and for all she knew he might have brought her untouchables, beef-eaters; but from him she accepted everything and everyone. By the time he had finished his meetings and returned to the house, he found his mother, and mine, sitting comfortably together on a cot in the courtyard, eating bread and pickle. The neighbors were peering in at them, and his mother seemed proud to be entertaining this exotic visitor—her fair-complexioned face uncovered and her vivacious eyes darting around the unfamiliar surroundings, taking everything in with pleasure the way she did everywhere.

Even well into her sixties, the Begum continued to be surrounded by admirers. They came in the evenings and had their usual drinks, no longer served by Amma but by Amma's granddaughter. Otherwise everything was unchanged—including the Begum herself who still chainsmoked. At home she was always in slacks and a silk shirt and her hair was cut short and shingled; but there was something languid and feminine about her. She relaxed in a long chair with her narrow feet up and crossed at the ankles while she joked and gossiped with friends. They had two favorite targets: the crude contemporary politicians who amassed fortunes to cover their fat wives and daughters with fat jewels, and the wooden-headed army generals one of whom had long ago had the misfortune to be her husband. “What did I know?” she still lamented. “My family said his family was okay—meaning they had as much money and land as we had—and at
seventeen I liked his uniform though by eighteen I couldn't stand the fool inside it.”

It was only in Muktesh's presence that she was not exactly tense—that would have been impossible for her—but less relaxed. By this time he was very important indeed and his visits involved elaborate security arrangements. He himself, in handspun dhoti and rough wool waistcoat, remained unchanged. Whenever I was there, he came as often as he could, mostly very late at night, after a cabinet meeting or a state banquet. The Begum, saying she was very tired, went to bed. I knew she didn't sleep but kept reading for many hours, propped up by pillows, smoking and turning the pages of her books. She read only male authors and went through whole sets of them—ten volumes of Proust, all the later novels of Henry James, existentialist writers like Sartre and Camus whom everyone had been reading when she was young and traveling in Europe, usually with a lover.

Muktesh talked to me about the reforms he was trying to push through; he spoke of dams, monetary loans, protest groups, obstructive opposition parties and rebels within his own party. He spoke to me of his concerns in the way he must have done with my mother; but his mood was different. When he was young, he said, he could afford to have theories, high principles. Now he didn't have time for anything except politics; and he drew his hand down his face as if to wipe away his weariness. But I felt that, though his mind and days were swallowed up by business and compromise, the ideals formed in his youth were still there, the ground on which he stood. And I might as well say here that, in a country where every public figure was suspected of giving and receiving favors, his integrity was unquestioned, unspoken even. It wasn't an attribute with him, it was an essence:
his
essence.

Whenever Muktesh came on one of his official visits to
London, he took off an hour or two to be with me and my father. We usually met in an Indian restaurant, a sophisticated place with potted palms and Bombay-Victorian furniture and a mixed clientele of rich Indians and British Indophils who liked their curry hot. In later years, there were always several security people seated at a discreet distance from our table. My father was the host—he insisted, and Muktesh, though always ready to pick up bills and pay for everyone, gracefully yielded. He and my father were both generous in an unobtrusive way, and it was not the only quality they shared. My father was as English as it was possible to be and Muktesh as Indian, but when I was with them, I felt each to be the counterpart of the other. Although they had many subjects of interest to them both, there were long silences while each prepared carefully to present a point to the other. They both spoke slowly—my father habitually and Muktesh because he was expressing himself in English, which he had first learned as a teenager in jail. Muktesh ate rapidly the way Indians do, neatly scooping up food with his fingers, and he was already dabbling them in a bowl with a rose-petal floating in it, while my father was still following his Gladstonian ideal of chewing each mouthful thirty-two times. Occasionally they turned to me, in affectionate courtesy, to ask my opinion—as if I had any! I wasn't even listening to their conversation. I knew nothing of the checks and counterbalances between an elected government and a highly trained bureaucracy—one of their favorite subjects—but I loved to look from one to the other. The evening always ended early because Muktesh had to return to the embassy to prepare papers for his next day's meetings. When we got up, so did the security personnel. Several diners recognized Muktesh and greeted him, and he joined his hands to them and addressed them by name if he remembered them,
which as a good politician was surprisingly often. A splendid doorman bowed as he opened the doors to the street for him. “Aren't you cold?” I asked Muktesh, for even in the London winter he wore the same cotton clothes as in India, with only a rough shawl thrown over him. He laughed at my question and drew me close to say goodbye. I could feel the warmth of his chest streaming through the thin shirt and his strong heart beating inside it.

In what was to be the last year of his life, he wanted to take me to meet his mother. But when I told the Begum of this plan, she shouted “No!” in a way I had never heard her shout before. She lit a new cigarette and I saw that her hands were shaking. She always hated to show emotion—it was what made her appear so proud and contemptuous; and it was also one of the reasons, a physical as well as emotional distancing, that she didn't like to be touched. I knew that her present emotion, the mixture of anger and fear, was a revival of the past, when my mother had returned from her visit to Bikaner—travel-stained, exhausted, and with the beginning of the sickness that would flare up on her journey back to England. I tried to reassure the Begum: “You know Muktesh doesn't travel that way any more—” for nowadays there was always a special plane and a retinue of attendants.

But it wasn't only fear of the journey that upset the Begum: “God only knows where and how she lives.”

“Who lives?”

“And she must be ninety years old now, probably can't see or hear and won't care a damn who you are or why he brought you.” Although this was her first reference to the possible alternative of my begetting, she cut it short, dismissed it immediately—“Well go then, if that's what he wants—but if you dare to eat or drink a thing in that place, I'll kill you.” She had a way of gnashing her teeth, not with anger but with
a pain that was as alive now as it had been these last twenty years. Or if there was anger, it was at herself for not being able to hide it, or at me for witnessing even the smallest crack in her stoical surface. “All right,” I said, “I promise,” and I kissed her face quickly before she had time to turn it away.

But my other grandmother—if that was what she was—liked to touch and to be touched. She sat very close to me and kept running her fingers over my hair, my hands, my face. Muktesh had gone off to his meetings and left me with her the way he had left my mother, without explanation. Or had he told her something about me—and if so, what had she understood that made her so happy in my presence? We were in the same house and courtyard that my mother had visited, maybe even sitting on the same string cot, now several decades older and more tattered. Many years ago, to save his mother from the usual lot of a Hindu widow, Muktesh had taken a loan to buy this little house for her. The town had grown around it, new and much taller buildings pressing in on it so that it seemed to have sunk into the ground the way she herself had done. As the Begum had guessed, she was almost blind. The iris of one eye had completely disappeared and with the other she kept peering into my face while running her fingers over it. At the same time she tried to explain something to me in her Rajasthani dialect that I couldn't understand. When at last Muktesh reappeared, with all his convoy of police and jeeps, she chattered to him in great excitement. Muktesh agreed with what she said, maybe to humor her, or maybe because it really was true. When I asked him to interpret, he hesitated but then said—“She's comparing you with all her female relatives—your nose, your chin—and your hands—” she had taken one of them into her own bird claw and was turning it over and over—“your hands,” Muktesh said, “are mine.” “Bless you, son, bless you, my son!” she
shouted. He bent down to touch her feet, and the people watching us—neighbors had crowded every window and some were up on the walls—all let out a gasp of approval to see this son of their soil, this great national leader, bow down to his ancient mother in the traditional gesture of respect.