Three Continents (40 page)

The climax of the ceremony consisted of the Rawul being weighed against a pile of books. He explained that in Dhoka it was the custom on the royal birthday to weigh the ruler against gold, which was then distributed among the poor; a beautiful custom, he said, as were so many prevalent in his country, and one he wanted to preserve and adapt to the conditions of his modern world-state. And so it was not gold that this modern ruler had himself weighed against but wisdom—the Wisdom of all ages and all cultures; the Wisdom of Mankind. The Rawul had the ability to say such things absolutely straight because he so absolutely believed in them. And to him it wasn't a bit ridiculous to have this huge pair of scales carried in by four followers and to seat himself in one of the balance pans. Stout and majestic as he was, it wasn't easy for him to get into it and there was a bit of heaving to do before he smilingly sat there, like some giant exotic produce, pomegranate or pineapple—no, not one bit ridiculous but meaningful, solemn, and satisfying. Because he believed in himself so utterly, everyone else was willing to go along with him, even the family in the front row. The girls tittered at first, but Bari Rani soon had them in line and looking as respectful as the rest of the audience.

The books were piled into the other pan: truly the Wisdom of the ages. There had been some discussion about these books, not about what they were to be—Michael settled that;
I suppose he was the only one who had actually read most of them—but about their purchase. Michael had wanted to buy whole sets of beautifully bound editions, but Crishi said we couldn't afford it and why not get them from the library; and when that was unacceptable, he had suggested paperbacks, except that these would not have weighed enough against the Rawul. In the end there was a compromise, and Michael bought whatever he could secondhand or in cheap standard editions; so that it was a somewhat tattered assortment that was piled onto the weighing pan. But only physically—in content they were top class: They included the Bible, the Koran, Plato, the Dhammapada, the Questions of King Milinda, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Tao Teh Ching, Carlos Castaneda, St. Augustine, Plotinus, Kierkegaard—it was at Kierkegaard that the Rawul started to swing up so that a few volumes had to be taken off to get him even and then put on again, with some fine adjustment to get it right. And when that happened, at that moment of perfect balance, the little band of musician followers struck up—flute,
tabla
, and guitar, and including a pianist, since there was a piano in the room left over from the stockbroker's day and bought by Babaji along with the rest of the furniture. This truly cross-cultural group of instruments played their cross-cultural synthesis of sounds: and everyone applauded as the Rawul swayed there in midair, balanced against the wisdom of past ages. Calm and self-possessed, he was equal in weight and value with the knowledge and philosophy of the whole world, and therefore its natural ruler, the ruler of the modern world. He believed it, and I don't know who else did in that room except I was sure about Michael. I stood next to him and felt him draw in his breath, holding himself totally still in total conviction. It was a sort of climax for him, this weighing of the Rawul, of everything he had thought and read and experienced up to this point. It was all summed up for him in the pile of books on the one hand, and the Rawul, smiling and spotless in white silk, on the other.

O
UR arrival in India was not what I had expected. I had thought that we would go right off to Dhoka, but we stayed on in Delhi. We took suites of rooms on one floor of a high, huge luxury hotel—it wasn't quite finished yet and maybe never would be, like some great cathedral or palace complex to which something always remains to be added over the centuries. The unfinished sections of the hotel were barricaded off, but the constant thuds of a building site penetrated to our suites through the silvered paneling on the walls. We all had suites; they varied in size from the Rawul's, which was the biggest in the hotel and was called the Shah Jehan suite, to the one where I was with Robi, and with Crishi when he wasn't somewhere else. Michael stayed with us when he was in the hotel, but that wasn't often. Robi and I were mostly alone together, during the day and the night. I can't say I was bored because I thought of it as an interim time in which we were waiting to go on to Dhoka; and though Robi sometimes got querulous with nothing to do, he had periods of furious activity going up and down in the elevator or chugging along the corridors as train or plane. We took tickets on a tourist bus and were driven to all the interesting historical places in and around Old and New Delhi. They
were
interesting, and I thought I got a lot out of that trip but it couldn't have been all that much, because, looking back on this period, what I remember principally is the hotel room with its exotic decor and the view from the picture
window when I drew back the raw-silk drapes. This view was very extensive, for we were high up in the hotel, which was so tall that it dwarfed the rest of the city. From my room, I looked over a great expanse of new neighborhoods with identical one-story cement structures and what appeared to be a bridge spanning an empty riverbed, though it may have been a bypass built across barren land. It was a very flat expanse with here and there a high-rise office building or apartment block sticking up out of it, and then some domes of a tomb or mosque, and an occasional royal or presidential palace, looking very small; the only buildings on a par with ours were other luxury hotels. Everything appeared dry, white, parched by the sun like skeletons, although it was the coldest season, with a sharp, frosty tang in the air at night. Inside the hotel the temperature was carefully controlled, creating the stifled, pampered atmosphere of a place closed off not only against heat and cold but everything else coming in from outside.

Crishi seemed to know as many or even more people here than in London, and he was out for most of the time—at least I thought he was out, but it happened more than once that I came across him inside the hotel. A lot went on in the hotel; in many ways it was a city in itself with enough to do in it to keep everyone occupied. There was the arcade with all the fancy shops, or boutiques, as they were called on account of their high prices. Once I came across Crishi in the jeweler's shop, which was as tiny as all the others and appeared even tinier because it was so crammed with both junk and treasures of jewelry and miniature paintings, scimitars, incense holders, silver idols, even a complete suit of Moghul court dress of tattered silk splayed out on the wall like the dissected corpse of a frog. There was the jeweler himself: He greatly resembled and may have been one of the men who used to bring paintings to Crishi in London, with the same oiled hair and skin and shiny rings. He wasn't pleased to see Robi and me, for he only had enough space in his shop for serious customers, which we obviously weren't.

The small shop had an even smaller back room, and it was from out of there I heard Crishi's voice. Before the jeweler could stop me, I dodged behind his counter to look into that back room. The moment I appeared in the doorway, the
three men in there, one of whom was Crishi, looked up at me with startled expressions. They were sitting on the floor on mattresses with white bolsters behind them, and they had been looking at a picture, which one of them quickly concealed under his hand. And the way they looked up at me was like a flash photo of three guilty men caught in some illicit act—and caught not for the first time, so that they lived in dread of it. Yes, Crishi too: For once I saw fear in his face. But only for a moment, and then he laughed and said “It's Harriet.” They relaxed instantly, and the jeweler said from behind me, “Who is she?” I expected Crishi to say “My wife,” but I don't think he did—he spoke in Hindi to them, and whatever he said made them laugh and look at me in a certain manner that was very different from the way they had looked when I first came in. They kept on laughing, maybe partly in relief.

I left them and went upstairs to my room, waiting for Crishi to join me there and say something about what had been going on. When several hours went by and he had not come, I went down again and back to the jeweler's shop. The jeweler was standing outside, looking up and down the arcade, perhaps for customers, or only to watch what was going on and pass the time; anyway, it was an idle moment and he began to talk to me. He said that he had known Crishi a very, very long time. He suggested he knew him very well, and then he smiled as one who knew more than he was going to say. But because there was nothing else to do at the moment, and no one else to talk to except me standing there, he did go on talking about Crishi, smiling more and more: “He likes girls,” he said and looked me up and down as one of them. “Many girls. Many many many girls. English girls.” He wasn't telling me anything new; still, I went on standing there—it was irresistible to me to hear about Crishi, anything about him at all. “His wife was English. Two little children—” He showed how little, and that moved him to pity; he clicked his tongue, shook his head—“He was running here and there, having good time, and the wife and children left alone with no food in the house. What could she do? It was all in the newspapers, everyone knows the story, you know the story.” He looked at me and I said yes, I did.

It was Renée I asked about it, and she was willing to talk. There was a change in Renée nowadays—the way to describe it is that she seemed more vulnerable. I guess the process had been going on for some time—I only had to think of the last days in England—but by the time we got to this hotel in India she was like a different person. She was startled at first when I asked her about Crishi's wife, but it didn't take her long to come out with the full story; she was glad to let me know all she could, which was by no means everything. There were areas of Crishi's life that were as unknown to her as they were to me, and his first marriage was one of them. It had happened long before he met Renée, when he was young and poor. Presumably the girl was the same; she had been traveling around on the usual penniless Kathmandu and Goa trail. A nice young middle-class English girl in revolt against her parents—temporary revolt it should have been, adolescent restlessness, only her marriage with Crishi took her much farther. Renée didn't meet her till later when she was worn out by misery and poverty. Renée sighed and said she had done what she could for her. She had even sent money as soon as she learned of her existence and that of her and Crishi's children—-and this was by no means as soon as she met Crishi himself; he kept quiet about his family for a long time. He had left them behind in Delhi, in a little room on the roof of a house belonging to a municipal building inspector who lived in the downstairs part with his family. They were kind people, Renée said, didn't press the girl too much for rent and sent up little sweet dishes for her and the children on festive days. It was they who had found her on one such festive day, and it had all been very embarrassing and awful and totally unnecessary, Renée said. “But she was a depressive,” Renée explained, “and there is nothing you can do for such people.”

I was listening in silence and made no comment, but she went on as though I had: “What do you expect of him,” she defended Crishi with energy, “what could he do? The only thing you could blame him for was that he got tied up with her in the first place, and even that—he was so young, what did he know, he hadn't found himself yet; he hadn't found me.” She smiled for a moment, thinking of that time when
he found her or she him. “You can have no idea, Harriet,” she went on, “what he was like then. Young! Young! And hungry like a young wolf—for everything he could get. I really had to teach him to be a little more discriminate; and I must say this for him—he learned fast.” She gave another smile before growing serious again: “That's the trouble with him—he learns so fast—gobbles everything up so fast—and then gets tired of it and starts looking around for something new. Don't you feel that about him?” she asked, looking at me keenly as if she thought I might know something she didn't. I shook my head, remained deadpan; I had got in the habit with her of not showing what I thought or felt. She frowned, dissatisfied with me. “He's restless, don't you think?” she tried to draw me out; “like he's getting tired of something.” “Tired? But we've only just come.” “Not of the place but of—” “People?” “Maybe,” she said. We looked at, into each other: testing each other out—did she mean herself or me, which one of us was he getting tired of? She looked away first, probably not wanting me to read what was in her eyes.

In contrast to Renée, Bari Rani appeared not weakened but strengthened by our move to India. She belonged to the place, I could see, and was quite at home in this palace hotel where the staff was more deferential to her than to anyone else—certainly much more than to Renée, who was treated with the scant courtesy of an ordinary hotel guest. Here Bari Rani was the true queen; and here also it was she who was the Rawul's official consort. She lived in a suite adjoining his with a connecting door through which he kept coming in to try out his speeches on her; they were in high Hindi, so she was the only one who could understand them. She accompanied the Rawul everywhere—it was he and she who were invited to dine at a presidential banquet, not he and Renée, and he and she who sat in specially reserved seats at the Republic Day Parade. The girls attended some of these functions—not without protest, for they preferred to be with their own friends in the latest hot spot or driving out for moonlight picnics. It was considered a duty for them to be seen on occasion with their parents, for here they were not just girls but princesses, descendants of a royal figure.