A Fine Family: A Novel (28 page)

‘Arjun!’

Arjun stopped and looked behind him. Priti was sitting in a cane sofa in the Bombay Gymkhana, her hands folded in her lap. She was facing the green playing field and the Victorian buildings on the horizon. He had passed by without noticing her.

‘I had heard you were living here,’ she said.

‘And what are
you
doing in Bombay?’ he asked.

She opened her empty hands in her lap in a futile gesture, and looked up slowly. ‘Nothing—hoping perhaps to find a job here; hoping to escape from myself.’

‘Escape? Can one ever escape?’ His lips curled into a smile, and he looked at her with a playful expression.

‘You’ve changed,’ she said.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Most people don’t,’ she said, and she tilted her head in her characteristic way. ‘They stop in their twenties and stay the same all their life.’

She was still a good looking woman, he thought.

‘Stay awhile, if you are not pressed,’ she said, looking intently at him.

He sat down beside her.

‘What will you have?’ He rang the shiny brass bell and a bearer appeared.

‘What does one have in this remnant of the British Raj?’ she asked.

‘Fresh lime soda?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Chutney sandwiches?’

‘No, I’m not hungry.’

He signed for two fresh lime sodas.

‘What are you doing at the Gym?’ he asked.

‘I am waiting for Neena. She is playing tennis. I always seem to be waiting these days.’

Priti wore a plain, handloomed cotton sari with a quiet pattern, which enhanced her profile. Her sleeveless blouse drew attention to her handsome neck and finely framed shoulders. In the late afternoon sun of Bombay, her ‘cotton look’ appeared graceful and made her stand apart from the other women in the club, who mainly wore saris of synthetic materials. Her long hair was brushed back into a bun. Her body, although still small, was now more rounded—just like her personality, which appeared to be friendlier and mellow in comparison to ten years ago. She seemed frank and almost humble in the way she spoke.

The bearer returned with two bottles of soda, a bucket of ice, a jug of sugar syrup, a container of salt, and two glasses containing fresh lime juice. Priti added sugar and salt to her drink. Arjun drank his more austerely, without ice, salt, or sugar.

As he took a sip, Arjun’s mind went racing back ten years to that evening in Simla when she had asked him to kiss her. He could not believe that this weary, serious-looking woman was the same one who had caused him such agony. The memory of her framed in the doorway of her house in Simla came back to him: he saw her in the rain in a pink raincoat and hat and black rubber boots, her face wet, waiting for him with a distant, wistful look on her face.

Now here she was ten years later, and Arjun wished that he could reciprocate her confidence and give her some token of acceptance. But he felt there was little in his flat, intensely work-filled life that was worth talking about. He spoke, instead, of Bombay, lightly and amusingly. But he was not very good at small talk, and the conversation faltered.

He pointed out in the distance the splendid Municipal Corporation, with its extravagant domes and minarets. Nearby was St. Xavier’s College. Behind it, he told her, was the J. J. School of Art, where Rudyard Kipling was born, a hundred years ago when his father ran the school. ‘Victorian Bombay at its exuberant best!’ he exclaimed. ‘And if you go back another hundred years all you had here were coconut and palm trees swaying to the breeze of the Arabian sea.’

‘So you like this city?’ she asked.

‘Yes. It’s fine place where a lot goes on, and there are chances for all. I can put up with the overcrowding and the dirt for the sake of being a part of it. I love the energy and you can almost smell the money in the bazaars.’

‘You have changed, Arjun. You are wiser in the ways of the world. Not at all the frightened boy who used to come to our house in Simla. Tougher, too.’

‘You’re gentler,’ he said.

‘And more patient,’ she added.

And sadder, he thought.

‘I don’t think I am as good as I was ten years ago,’ Arjun said.

‘Women don’t usually like men for their goodness.’

‘But once they do like one, they believe only him to be good.’

‘You are not really bad, are you?’ She looked up with a smile. Her dark eyes sparkled as they once used to. They both laughed. They talked thus lightly and easily. She must be close to thirty, he thought—the eleven months difference in their ages which seemed terribly important then, had ceased to matter. Her tilted head, which he had once thought was not quite connected to her body, seemed now very much a part of her.

In the intervening years he had heard that the Mehta fortune had collapsed because of mismanagement, and the family had become bankrupt. Their grand house in Simla had been sold. He had also learned that Priti and Karan had broken up after a few years. She spoke lightly about some of these things, but he could tell that she had suffered. Occasionally there was discouragement on her face, but it also gave it a new character which he found attractive in its way.

He stayed listening to her for a long time. They had another round of fresh lime. In the breezy late afternoon they watched the buildings in the distance suffused with a yellow glow from the setting sun. She watched his eyes as he looked out to the green stretch before them, not consciously seeing it, absorbed in his own thoughts. Long strips of mellow light fell on the playing fields and among the rows of commuters as they crossed along the narrow track beyond the green field to catch the Western Railway line from Churchgate or the Central Railway line from Victoria Terminus. The rich, long shadows touched the great buildings in the back.

‘Will you have dinner with me?’ he asked.

‘I’ve promised to go to Neena’s house.’

‘Then what about tomorrow?’

‘Why don’t you come to Neena’s?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think she likes me,’ he said with an innocent smile.

She laughed.

‘You are amused?’

‘No, your smile.’

‘What of it?’

‘It fills your whole face, Arjun. You’ve got it from your father, haven’t you? My mother used to talk about his smile.’

Neena arrived with Rao Sahib and Arjun got up. Rao Sahib shook his hands warmly and invited them for a drink in the bar. Seeing Rao Sahib after a decade, Arjun had a strange feeling of going backwards in time. His clothes, his manners, his bearing had not changed, and Arjun could have sworn that the frayed blazer and the faded ascot were the same ones he used to wear in Simla.

‘Oh, I say! How he’s grown!’ said Rao Sahib as he sat down at the bar.

‘How have you been, sir?’ said Arjun.

‘Yes, I hear you’ve done very well. Good!’

‘Oh Neena, there you are!’ came a voice from the crowd. It was Dumpy, a young and rotund executive with a British soap company. He was distantly related to the Jaipur family, had gone to Doon School, but had got into the firm on his own merits. He came up to her. ‘Hello Dumpy,’ said Neena. ‘Meet Priti. She is staying with us. And you know Arjun.’

Dumpy nodded to Arjun, and immediately turned to Priti. ‘I say where have you been hiding all this time?’

‘Well, I’ve just arrived in Bombay.’ said Priti.

‘How is the soap business, Dumpy?’ said Rao Sahib.

‘People are still bathing,’ said Dumpy with a boisterous laugh, which had an aristocratic public school ring to it.

‘I thought with the recent price control on soaps, you chaps would be in the dumps.’

‘Yes, I know “Dumpy in the dumps”.’

‘Ho, ho, ho,’ roared Rao Sahib.

As Dumpy turned to talk to Priti, Rao Sahib said to Arjun, ‘Be a good chap, will you? Do you think you could fix up Flukey? My nephew, you see. I dare say it’s time he settled down.’

Looking at this anachronism, Arjun wondered if this was the same man who had appeared such an exalted human being ten years ago in Simla. How could he begin to explain to Rao Sahib that a whole generation of MBAs had entered industry since he had retired, and you didn’t ‘fix up’ nephews in management jobs over polite drinks at the club any more? People like Rao Sahib were the only true ‘English’ left in the world, Arjun realized. The species had vanished in England, and the only surviving specimen were to be found in the old clubs of India.

As he settled down over a second peg of Scotch whisky, Rao Sahib began to speak of his connections with Cambridge in his exaggerated upper middleclass accent. He quoted from Shakespeare and Coleridge, and he spoke wistfully of the Court Circular in
The Times
of London. He was proud that he was more familiar with the geography of London than of Bombay. But the twenty-five years since the end of the Empire had robbed him of much of his plumage and left him a somewhat ragged figure of fun. Even the once imperial Bombay Gym had changed. The Gym today was vibrant and humming with confident young Indian managers, who had been educated at the institutes of technology and management and were refreshingly free of the baggage of the old Raj. Having retired from his job in a British company, Rao Sahib was only comfortable with old school types like Dumpy, who were becoming increasingly rare. While he tenaciously clung to the attitudes of Kipling’s India, and carried on with his mock English country squire’s life, new classes and new powers were emerging daily. There were elected legislators, entrepreneurs, and farmers who had prospered with the ‘green revolution’—about all of whom he was quite oblivious.

A week later on Saturday afternoon, an artist friend took Arjun to the Jehangir Art Gallery to see an exhibition of Amrita Sher Gil, the extraordinary painter of Punjabi-Hungarian parentage. He was absorbed in a painting of three women, when his artist friend tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Come quickly before she changes her pose.’ They went past the crowd rapidly and arrived in time to see Priti leaning against a wall, looking dreamily at a painting called
Woman Resting on Charpoy.

‘There, isn’t she a sight!’ said his friend. ‘Look at the way the melancholy head reclines on the shoulder. And the flame red sari against the white wall! I’d like to paint her just as she is. And those dark eyes!’

‘For God’s sake, I know her. Don’t stare like that, she will see us.’ said Arjun.

She did see them. But instead of being angry, Priti gave Arjun a smile which was full of innocent goodwill, unmixed with vanity. Seeing him seemed to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent. Her face looked more open and youthful than before.

Arjun flushed and shyly introduced his artist friend. She smiled at the artist and naively asked both of them to explain the painting to her.

‘I am ignorant about painting. I feel stupid when everyone is admiring something, and I don’t know why.’

To the artist this was a perfect opening and he launched on a rapid exposition on colours, forms, moods, as they walked from picture to picture. Arjun and Priti listened quietly. The artist was extremely articulate and well-informed and Arjun felt a shade jealous.

‘She was one of our first painters, who responded directly and non-intellectually to visual impressions around her,’ he said. ‘Don’t take “intellectual response” as a term of blame or approval. It’s just a habit of the mind; some people have it more than others, and good or bad use can be made of it. Anyway, that is why you see groups of women sitting and talking, hill people standing. As a sophisticated city person, she could use the material of folk art without making it cheap or diluting its power, and also say things about the present moment.’

‘What about your own work?’ Priti asked.

‘Me? Whose opinion do you want? Let’s see, the papers and the professors call me Western, rootless, alienated, confused, imitative and sterile. I am told to choose between Eastern and Western art. They deny my right to be modern, because they think that to be Indian is to be traditional or folkloric. They question my right to paint, to comment on the present. And they hit below the belt saying “When people are starving, what are you doing with a brush?”’ The artist was not finished; in fact he was just warming up to his favourite subject when he was suddenly called away by one of his admirers and Arjun was relieved to be left alone with Priti.

‘He explains things wonderfully, but I wish I could feel the beauty of the pictures directly,’ said Priti.

They decided to have tea at the Samovar, a smart bohemian cafe in the garden behind the art gallery. There wasn’t any awkward shyness between them and they both felt that the meeting was natural.

‘There is such a lot of talk about art,’ she began. ‘I don’t think it matters all that much, really, does it? Isn’t it more important to live? I should like my life to be a work of art.’

Arjun looked at her questioningly.

‘I mean I should like to make my life beautiful. Art seems to lie outside of life. I know that I am inside life, or life is inside me. And I should like to make what is alive beautiful.’

‘And how would you do that?’

‘I shall tell you some day,’ she said with a smile.

They started to talk about the people they had known. He discovered that she was not interested in people in the way most people were—about what they were doing or where they were living or the gossip about their lives. She was seeking to find some kind of truth about them. She was searching in each life for some general principle which she could apply to her own life. She spoke rapidly, almost feverishly, as though she had been starved for someone to talk to. As she talked, Arjun got the feeling that she knew all there was to know about men. After she had finished speaking, she shook her head slightly and a faint blush spread over her face.

Priti told him about many people, but she did not speak of Karan. Neither did Arjun press her. She spoke fondly of Simla and her childhood as though she were turning the pages of a nursery book. They spoke of Amrita, of Rao Sahib and her friends at the ADC, and they recalled sunny picnics amidst the rhododendrons. There was a haunting unhappiness about her which spoke straight to his heart.

Before long it became dark outside, and the waiters were relieved when they got up to leave. Arjun suggested a walk along Marine Drive. They took a cab to Churchgate. Through the glass doors of the Ambassador Hotel they could see Arabs lounging in the lobby, looking fat and bored. At the hotel entrance the handsome Sikh doorman in livery had the air of a ceremonial guard. He looked straight ahead without moving his eyes, contemptuously ignoring passing pedestrians, his attention single-mindedly focused on the black limousines which pulled up one after another at the door. From Kamling, the Chinese restaurant next door, they heard loud laughter. A bright streetlamp shone through the trees in front. A red double-decker bus stopped momentarily to let off a passenger. More laughter was heard from the open windows of Kamling. In a dead-end lane between Kamling and the Ambassador, Chinese cooks in short pants were sitting on stools, cutting vegetables in the open air. A paanwala under the peepal tree smiled at them, his red betel-stained teeth glistening in the night.