My Nine Lives (28 page)

There is something wholesome about the climate in these foothills—the sharp mountain breezes with their hint of snow, the deodar trees rising so tall into the sparkling sky that they seem to be drawing a constant supply of fresh sap from it. Shivaji put us on a diet of vegetables grown on our land and cooked in a simple and delicious way he devised himself. A small colony of houses grew up around us, built by the people who had followed Shivaji to be close to him. He established a crafts center as part of our community and persuaded the
lepers who used to beg on the bridge to learn to spin and weave the rugs that were then sold for good prices. It became a thriving business and Shivaji retained something of the brisk commercial air I have mentioned. Studying accounts through his rimless spectacles, he was quick and shrewd, and when buyers came from abroad, he would make us take out and press one of his linen suits. But mostly he remained the Shivaji I first knew, shimmering in white muslin as though filled with light from within. While the colony proliferated with more and more houses, he remained the center around which everything revolved. Just as we had done in Delhi, in the evenings we gathered in the central room of his house while he talked to us and sang, encouraging us to join in. The lepers from the workshop were also part of our community, and although during the day there were a lot of disputes among them, in Shivaji's room these were mostly forgotten. This hour we spent with him had the same effect on us as did their ritual bath for the pilgrims washing away their impurities in the holy river below.

Unlike C. and Priya and their movement, we never became very famous. Even so, some magazine articles were written about our work and a documentary film was made for German TV, and these brought inquiries from people wanting to help. Shivaji dictated answers to all these letters, and he was very specific about what was required: some were asked to send money, others to come to the crafts center and help with the work there. The TV crew had given him a VCR, and he often asked for tapes to be sent to him. He was particularly fond of American films—especially Westerns, and comedies of the 1930s and '40s which always made him laugh. He had me wheel in Renuka to watch these films with him, and she also laughed when he did. Although no longer walking or talking, she seemed calm and happy. We lived
there for many, many years, and she must have reached the age of ninety or more. The climate had a preserving quality, assisted in her case no doubt by the constant presence of Shivaji from whom she appeared to draw light and air, like the tall trees from the sky.

One year Priya came to visit us. She had read some article about us and was curious to see what we were up to. Renuka did not recognize her; for the last many years she had assumed that I was her daughter, and she knew that she had never had more than one. Priya had retained some features of the young Priya we had known: her elegance—she was still in the finest silk saris—her intelligence, her educated accent; she was skinny now rather than slender, and wore large black-framed spectacles that took up most of her face. She summed up our activities with one glance and made her opinion of them clear. And she was right; in comparison with her worldwide operation, we were negligible. Priya had always emanated a sort of contemptuous pride—as was perhaps her right, since she was so much more clever and efficient than most other people. But now, mixed with that, there was some other expression. It was almost as if her pride and contempt had turned inward, as if she herself, her own life hadn't come up to her expectations. And this was strange, since she had been so spectacularly successful in what she had undertaken.

She had not revised her opinion of Shivaji. She was still certain that she could see through him, though I'm not sure what it was that she saw: she could hardly accuse him now of misappropriating her mother's wealth when she herself had stripped her of it. Once she said, “What's worse than being a fraud?” and laughed, with a hard bitter sound that she had when she laughed at all, which wasn't often. “To be an unsuccessful fraud,” she answered herself, and then went on, “At least that one's successful . . .” She meant C., and it was
the first time she had mentioned him. Now that she had started, she couldn't stop and it came out in a rush, all the bitterness I had felt in her, not only against herself but against C. too and what he had become, and what she had helped him to become.

“You wouldn't even recognize him if you saw him,” she told me. This was one night when she and I were alone outside one of the houses perched on the slope of the mountain. Shivaji and Renuka were inside the main house, watching an American Western—the sound of it came drifting out, a strange contrast to the silver silence of the stars overhead and of the river below. But Priya's thoughts were as violent as the galloping horses and the double-barreled guns of the Western. They were all about C.—how his voracious bulk had to be continually stoked with food and vulgar luxuries, and how an endless supply of money was needed to satisfy his coarse cravings. He had a fleet of twenty-seven Rolls-Royces, though he was too fat to move, so that everything had to be brought to him: including of course an endless supply of women, who became younger and younger, more and more stupid—as stupid as animals, Priya said, to please his animal appetites.

After that, what we heard later came as no surprise. Priya broke away from the movement—broke it from within by joining his enemies and providing them with crucial evidence for the many cases brought against him. At first it seemed that he was to be extradited to Holland, but in the meantime a court in Texas built up a sufficient case (something to do with a fraudulent conversion of title deeds) to bring him to trial there. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment. So it was in Texas I imagined him—a place I only knew from Shivaji's VCR tapes. How to fit C. into that landscape, among those big men in big hats? Of course he himself had always been big; but his bulk was charged with
brain, alive with thought that had soared right up to the dome of the British Museum Reading Room. How could so much thinking, such high ideas become gross the way Priya had described? It was impossible—just as it was impossible to think of this large and happy person as a convict in a cell.

I became restless. My thoughts took me far from this peaceful place sealed off in its capsule of pure air. Too disturbed now to join the evening sessions of song and prayer, I remained outside under the tent of mountain stars without looking up at them, waiting for the joyful sounds to finish. It was only when Shivaji put on one of his Westerns that I joined him and Renuka inside. I wanted to see all I could of that far-off place, which I assumed to be Texas. Apart from taking in the scenery, I paid no attention to what was happening on the screen; and it was only when loud gun shots woke up Renuka and made her cry out in shock that I noticed all the fighting and screaming going on. None of it disturbed me—until the day that I saw the hero taken off to jail by an evil sheriff. I sat up and watched this same hero as part of a chain gang breaking rocks under the eyes of a foul-mouthed guard armed with guns and a whip. Then I cried out louder than Renuka had done.

Shivaji turned off the tape in surprise. He asked me to wheel out Renuka and put her to bed. As she did every night, she embraced me like a child, with her arms around my neck. I waited for her to fall asleep, and then I returned to Shivaji. I asked him to give me the plane fare to America; he said he would think about it. By next day he had made his calculations: he said he could afford a ticket to New York and from New York to Texas. He had also worked out what I would need to reach my destination and to keep me there for a month. After that, he said regretfully, I would be on my own; but that if I wanted to return, he would somehow manage
to send me the fare. I agreed and thanked him. Neither of us mentioned my imminent departure to Renuka—anyway, she might not have understood. I could hardly wait to leave, and on my last night when I put her to bed, I was so impatient that I didn't wait for her to fall asleep but loosened her arms from my neck, the way I had released myself from my mother on her last night.

After some misadventures—I was no longer used to traveling, and America was a new continent to me—I reached the prison in Texas. It was like entering a fortress; it
was
a fortress with armed guards at each corner watching from high towers. A succession of metal gates slid mechanically behind me, and at each gate there were more guards telephoning up to the towers before I was allowed to pass on to the next one. The passages were lit by a light so blinding and unnatural that it was a kind of darkness. But I thought only of the person I was walking toward and went cheerfully through steel and stone.

At last I was face to face with him. True, it was through a glass partition, he on one side of it and I on the other, communicating with each other by telephone; but I could see at once that he had not changed. He wore a kind of overall in a bright orange color that suited him. There was nothing at all of the person Priya had described, the mass of flesh insatiable for luxuries and young women. He was muscular and fit, like someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. I asked him about the chain gangs—it was almost my first question, and my voice must have trembled over the telephone so that he quickly assured me that these had been discontinued. Having been sentenced to hard labor, he did do a lot of road work, breaking rocks and so on, which he said gave him a healthy appetite. His cheeks were pink; for many years, he said, he had had a beard, and when this was shaved off
by the prison barber, the skin underneath turned out to be soft and smooth. His hair too had been cut, but the stubble left was a grey as light as the original blond flame I remembered. Yes, many years, a lifetime, had passed, but really he was the same. His voice too was the same, and the fact that it came transmitted through a receiver made it seem as if he were whispering right into my ear, the way he used to. And he was smiling at me through the glass while the voice in my ear told me that I too had not changed. I smiled back at him, aware as I did so that I was showing the gaps left by my missing teeth; but that didn't matter to either of us, any more than that the person he was seeing through the glass had become a scrawny old woman.

However, it did matter when I tried to get a job. I had been used to doing domestic work in Shivaji's commune, serving visitors and looking after Renuka, so I thought it would be easy to find work. Wherever I saw a notice for waitresses wanted, I went in to apply but everyone laughed at me. I realized that the waitresses there were all young and pert and wore pink skirts that reached only to the tops of their thighs. But I needed to earn money very badly, having come to the end of the month Shivaji had provided for. C. was allowed visitors every fortnight, so it was necessary for me to stay in the neighborhood. I had come to an arrangement with another woman visiting her husband in prison; he was serving a life sentence, so she let me sleep in his half of their king-size bed in return for babysitting her children while she was at work. But this did not cover the rest of my expenses, and I persevered in my search for a job until at last a short-order cook hired me to clean up after him, sweeping the peelings and scrubbing the pots, that sort of work, all very easy.

With my first earnings, I bought a new frock in which to
visit C. It was quite ordinary—it had been hanging on a rack with dozens exactly like it, all marked down—but he complimented me on it, not only once but each time I went to visit him. Although we were never alone, since on his side of the glass partition was a row of prisoners communicating with visitors on my side, we felt perfectly private, our voices trickling intimately into each other's ears. He told me about his busy schedule: this included, besides his outdoor work, teaching other prisoners chess and holding seminars for them on different subjects. I would be surprised at their wide range of interests, he said. He had also learned to play basketball, and in spite of his age, was good at it, probably because of his height. So his days were full and so were mine, with my long hours of kitchen work and looking forward all day and night to these visits. But we often spoke of an even happier future and what we would do, where we would go, when his time was up. The whole world was open to us, and we considered every possibility. At the end of his sentence, even with time off for good behavior, he would be in his eighties and I in my seventies; but neither of us ever felt that our future had shrunk from the time when we had made love under our tree, or in my mother's attic room for which he was always behind with the rent.