The Romantics

Chapter 1

1

When I first came to Benares in the severe winter of 1989 I stayed in a
crumbling riverside house. It is not the kind of place you can easily find
anymore. Cut-price "Guest Houses" for Japanese tourists and German pastry
shops now line the riverfront; touts at the railway station and airport are
likely to lead you to the modern concrete-and-glass hotels in the newer
parts of the city. The new middle-class prosperity of India has at last
come to Benares. This holiest of pilgrimage sites that Hindus for millennia
have visited in order to attain liberation from the cycle of rebirths has
grown into a noisy little commercial town.

This is as it should be; one can't feel too sad about such changes.
Benares-destroyed and rebuilt so many times during centuries of Muslim and
British rule-is, the Hindus say, the abode of Shiva, the god of perpetual
creation and destruction. The world constantly renews itself, and when you
look at it that way, regret and nostalgia seem equally futile.

The past does live on, in people as well as cities. I have only to look
back on that winter in Benares to realize how hard it is to let go of it.

It was pure luck that I should ask the pujari at the riverside temple about
cheap places to rent at the very moment Panditji came in with his offering
of crushed withered marigolds. Panditji, a tiny, frail, courteous old
musician, overheard our conversation. He saw me as a fellow Brahmin who had
fallen on hard times and he offered to help. With his oversized rubber
flip-flops slapping loudly against the cobblestone paving, he led me
through narrow winding alleys, past large-eyed cows and innumerable little
shrines to Hanuman, to his house. We went up steep stairs, past two
identical enclosed courtyards on the ground and first floors, on which
opened a series of dark bare rooms, to a tiny room on the roof. Panditji,
his white wrinkled hands fumbling with the large padlock and the even
larger bolt, unlocked the door. I saw: sunlight streaming in through a
small iron-barred window that looked out onto a temple courtyard;
whitewashed walls, a cot with bare wooden boards, a writing table and
straight-backed wicker chair; fluffs of dust on the rough stone floor. The
room, Panditji said, could be mine for just Rs. 150, what he called
"Indian" rent, meals not included.

Oddly, I hardly ever spoke to Panditji again. He spent his days in a haze
of opium under a pile of coarse wool blankets. In the evenings he would
awaken sufficiently to give sitar lessons to American and European
students-all identical with their long hair, tie-dyed shirts, and stubbly,
emaciated, sunken-eyed look. I saw him occasionally, wearing a muslin dhoti
and white Gandhi cap, carrying a pail of milk back to the house from the
corner sweetshop, the skin on his exposed bony legs shriveled and slack,
his sacred thread dangling from under his woolen vest. We nodded at each
other, but never exchanged more than a word or two. All my dealings were
confined to his arthritic wife, Mrs. Pandey, who lived in one of the dark
bare rooms on the first floor with her family retainer, Shyam; she had long
cut off all contact with her husband and claimed not to have gone
downstairs for over fifteen years. The tenants lived in two small
bedsitters on the roof, and I shared the view of the river, the sandy
expanses beyond it, and the brooding city toward the north, the looming
cupolas and minarets, the decaying palaces and pillared pavilions, with
Miss West.

Miss West (as she was called by the local shopkeepers-it was weeks later
that I discovered her first name was Diana) was English, middle-aged, and,
from what I could tell, well-to-do-she presumably paid the "foreign" rent
for her room. The perception that Miss West with her clean high forehead,
hazel eyes, slender neck, and straight blond hair, now flecked with gray,
had been very beautiful at one time came to me only later, when I was more
accustomed to the physiognomies of white Europeans. Her presence in
Benares, in a tiny room on the roof, where she appeared to do nothing all
day except read and listen to Western classical music, was a mystery to me.
I thought it had to do with some great sadness in her past. It was a large
judgment to make on someone I didn't know at all. But the
impression-seemingly confirmed by the serene melancholy she gave off as she
sat on the roof, a Pashmina shawl draped around her shoulders, and gazed at
the river for long hours-this impression came out of the mood I lived with
for those first few exceptionally cold days in Benares, the thick mists
rising from the river and shrouding the city in gray, the once-hectic
bathing ghats now desolate, the sad-sweet old film songs from an unseen
transistor radio in the neighborhood reaching me weakened and diffused as I
lay huddled under multiple quilts in my chilly damp room, trying to read
The World as Will and Idea.

It was the kind of big book that idleness made attractive. So many long
hours of wisdom and knowledge it promised! It was why I had come to Benares
after three years in the nearby provincial town of Allahabad, where I had
been an undergraduate student at a decaying old university. In Benares, I
wanted to read, and do as little as possible besides that. The city, its
antiquity, its special pleasures, held little attraction for me.

But the weather made for a special kind of gloom. It brought back memories
of an earlier visit to Benares. I was seventeen years old then. Hastily
summoned from Allahabad, I had come with my father to perform the last
rites for my mother. It was then I'd had, tinged with my confused grief and
sense of loss, my first impression of the city. The thick river mists
through which we rowed one cold early morning to scatter my mother's ashes;
the priest with the tonsured head reciting Sanskrit mantras in a booming
voice and waving incense sticks over the rose petals bobbing on the
ash-smeared water; the temple bells and conches ringing out in unison from
the great mass of the city-these were the memories, almost phantasmagoric,
I had of that visit, and they kept coming back to me in those first few
days in Benares.

I read slowly but understood little of The World as Will and Idea.
Nevertheless, I soldiered on. Other big books awaited their turn in the
small octagonal niches in the whitewashed walls of my room where, when I
first arrived, vermilion-spattered clay idols of Krishna and Vishnu had
stood; and frequently, in the middle of reading, I would look up and let my
eyes wander over the thick multicolored spines and grow impatient at the
slow progress I was making, at the long interval that separated me from
those other books.

/ / /

Then the mists lifted and a succession of cloudless days followed. The
river gleamed and glinted in the midafternoon sun. Bright red and yellow
kites hung high in the clean blue sky. Children appeared on the bathing
ghats; the uneven cobblestone steps came to be chalk-marked with hopscotch
rectangles; scrawny drug pushers lurked on temple porches where chess
players sat hunched over tattered cardboards; pilgrims dressed and
undressed all day long in a slowly turning kaleidoscope of Indian colors:
the South Indians in their purple Kanjeevaram silk saris, the visitors from
Rajasthan unwinding the spools of yellow and crimson turbans, the widows
from Bengal in their austere white cotton. In the evenings, the funeral
pyres in the distant north of the city were like glowworms in the gathering
dusk.

I abandoned Schopenhauer and started on Turgenev's Torrents of Spring. Miss
West, who put on the first of the flowery summer dresses I was to see her
in, said, "What wonderful weather! We must celebrate, we must have a
party." This sudden familiarity puzzled me. Did the "we" include me? I had
exchanged only a few words with her. One of the very first things she said
to me was: "Where did you learn to speak such charming English?" I hadn't
known what to make of this remark. Was she being complimentary or
condescending? One sunny morning on the roof, as she lay in her sagging
charpoy, her legs partially exposed in a way I thought immodest, her oval
sunglass frames accentuating the whiteness of her skin, a mysterious
haunting melody floating out of her room-Beethoven's Archduke Trio, I later
came to know-one morning, she had asked me about my undergraduate years in
Allahabad. "You see, Rudyard Kipling wrote for a newspaper published from
Allahabad-how do you pronounce it?" she said. "But tell me: did you enjoy
yourself there? And why did you choose Allahabad of all places?" She spoke
with a sharp emphasis, in short rapid sentences, her voice demanding a
similarly precise and brief response.

There wasn't much I could tell her. These things couldn't be explained.
Just as my father, when he announced to me his decision to move to an
ashram in Pondicherry after my mother's death, hadn't needed to explain
anything. His decision was in accordance with an old rite of passage: the
withdrawal from the active world in late middle age, the retreat into the
self. We instinctively understood these ancestral obligations; we rarely
ever questioned them and never asked for explanations. It had been so when,
after an indifferent education in a number of nondescript small-town
schools across India, the time came for me to go to university. Three
generations of my mother's family had gone to the university in Allahabad,
a sister city of Benares, and it was to Allahabad that I had gone.

On the face of it, it wasn't a bad choice. Set up in 1887, the university
was once known as the Oxford of the East. To seekers of jobs and careers in
the colonial dispensation it offered an attractive pedigree. But
unbeknownst to those of us who still set store by its old reputation, the
university had suffered a steep decline in the years since independence.
Anarchy reigned behind the still-impressive façade of its domes and towers.
Academic sessions were in total disarray: examinations due in April were
more likely to be held in December, if at all. Everyone was locked in
conflict: students against students, teachers against teachers, teachers
against students, students against the management, teachers against the
management, students against the police. Often these conflicts turned
violent. Students shot at each other on the streets with country-made
revolvers. Late at night, you were hurled out of your sleep by the sound of
a crude bomb going off somewhere in the vicinity. In the morning, you read
the details in the crime pages of the local Hindi papers: political
rivalry, ambush, instant death, investigation ordered, no arrests so far.

Miss West appeared shocked by the few things I told her. "How
extraordinary!" she exclaimed. "How absolutely awful! You must have been
very brave to have survived all that." Then, in a calmer tone, she added,
"You know I never went to university. My father belonged to a generation
where people didn't bother with educating their daughters."

I thought this odd. Prejudices against female education were a feature of
poor societies; I didn't associate them with England. Could it be that her
father couldn't afford to send her to university? I wasn't sure, and didn't
think it was the sort of question I could ask. Then she mentioned the party
and confused me further.

I was nineteen years old but hadn't ever been to a "party." The word itself
brought to mind noisy, half-naked revelers; it suggested the kind of empty
frivolity and moral laxity I had been brought up to disapprove. My view of
Miss West altered; I now saw her as an organizer of parties.

At the same time I felt myself corralled into her preparations. I bought
the welcoming garlands for the musicians who Miss West said would perform
after dinner; I went out to the bazaar and looked at the various kinds of
Bengali sweets available; and, overcoming an innate aversion to intoxicants
and stimulants, I even arranged for the bhang-flavored thandai that I'd
heard was the staple item at such occasions in Benares.

Miss West fretted over her guest list. After five years in the city, she
knew a great many people. In the end, she invited only a handful of them.
"Can't possibly have them all over. It's frightfully small, this place,"
she said, her pencil stabbing at the list of scribbled names. "Mrs. Pandey
might object to that many people trooping in and out of her house."

Mrs. Pandey and Shyam, her retainer, did look askance at our preparations.
Sitting close together on low wooden stools, they would look up from a
brass plate of finely chopped tomatoes, ginger, and garlic to exchange
muttered remarks as people came up and down the stairs carrying logs of
rolled-up dhurries and bolsters. The general drift of these remarks-some of
which I overheard-was that Miss West's party was a poor approximation of
similar events in their own past. One evening before the party when I had
gone to eat with them-as I did each alternate day, sitting cross-legged on
the floor in their dark, sooty windowless kitchen, awkwardly inhaling smoke
from the chulha fire over which Shyam rotated slowly inflating chapatis
with a pair of rusty iron tongs-Mrs. Pandey spoke pointedly of the splendor
of the musical soirees the Maharajah of Benares used to hold at one time.
Her own father, a famous sitar player, she said, was an exalted guest at
such gatherings. What about Panditji? I asked, referring to her husband
downstairs. She looked scornfully at me. What about him? she seemed to say.
I was soon to know that this was an obsessive theme with her: how the
grandeur of her family connections had been fatally undermined by her
marriage to Panditji, a penniless musician who, when he first arrived at
her father's mansion as a student, Mrs. Pandey would claim, owned nothing
other than the clothes he had on his undernourished body.

/ / /

On the evening of the party, Mrs. Pandey ate early and then disappeared
into her room. Panditji was as usual oblivious to the goings-on in his
house. Only Shyam showed some interest. He lived the neutered life of a
feudal retainer, aware of nothing except his mistress's wishes, and he
rarely spoke a word apart from a clichéd proverb in Hindi he would repeat,
without regard to context, as he fanned the chulha fire: "Greed," he would
mumble, "is the biggest evil. It eats away man, destroys families, sunders
son from parents, husband from wife . . ." This evening, he squatted on the
floor, scrubbing brass dishes with coal ash and water, his jaw jutting out
as he slowly chewed on his tobacco, and stared disconcertingly at the
guests as they walked up to the roof.