My Nine Lives (19 page)

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.