Last Labyrinth Read online

  Aftab spoke of Lucknow, of his ancient relatives draped in fine silks, riding elephants, leading the siege to the Residency. There were women and children inside but the fire that had swept Avadh did not take note of such details — on either side.

  ‘My ancestors believed they were the true rulers of Hindustan,’ commented Aftab wryly. I wondered if he, too, thought that and at times, on hot, idle evenings, looked back with rage and nostalgia at how close victory had been. Aftab’s ancestors were fine soldiers, a match for the English who were camped across the river. But, unlike the English, they had no plans. They lived from day to day and impulse to impulse.

  ‘Just like me,’ said Aftab. Inside the city, dancing and drinking parties went on until one night news came that the English had made a bridgehead. The sowars, then, rushed out in tens and twenties and were quickly cut down. Canon balls flew through the Imambara, the palaces. Children, their backs broken by grapeshot, lay quietly down on doorsteps to die. Later, all was arson and loot. His ancestors fled — to Rohilkhand, Nepal, Benaras. Years of idleness and decadence followed. His father tried to rise from these ashes and pushed their fortunes into plastics.

  Somewhere behind him this troubled and fiery past still loomed. So did the dancing girls and the music. For all I knew, he was presented with a female slave when he was fifteen.

  When it was dark we came down. In the Blue Room, on the low divan, staring into the vacancy of the crepuscular darkness, sat Anuradha. Aftab went to her and put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  She smiled at me, a warm friendly smile, but said nothing. Aftab sat next to her. They did not talk. Their silence had that quality of satiation that is known only to the long and happily married or among very old friends. I felt envious. Geeta was all that a wife could be and yet, somehow, I had goofed it all up.

  Aftab said, ‘I think I’ll wash up. Make yourself a drink, Bhaskar.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ I told his disappearing back.

  Anuradha and I stared at each other, like old adversaries, each, presumably, familiar with the other’s tricks. Her direct intense gaze bristled with unspoken questions. I was the first to turn my eyes away.

  That gaze had been forged for carrying out transactions of the soul. Looking at you like that she seemed to put her hand on your shoulder and invite you to open your heart, promising you all the while that there was nothing that would surprise her. She was not self-conscious about her body of whose grace and sensuousness she seemed unaware. She did not fidget about or pull at her sari like most women. A lamp burned by her side lighting up parts of her face. She looked thoughtful and tired. Coming across her like that, the idea crossed my mind that, perhaps, it was to see her and not to negotiate for the shares that I had really come to Benaras, and to Aftab’s haveli.

  I felt weary, too, after all that inspection, and a little fuzzy in the head.

  ‘Do you like Benaras?’ she said.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would come.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would invite me.’

  ‘You have begun to talk like Aftab. Come and sit down.’

  She patted the place next to her where Aftab had sat a while ago. I sat down, feeling light.

  ‘Make yourself a drink if you like.’

  ‘Where is Aftab?’

  ‘He takes time getting ready for the evening.’

  ‘This is hardly evening.’

  ‘For the night, then. Anyway, would you like a drink?’

  She pointed to a long dark cabinet. I pulled at a brass knob that stuck out of it. The cabinet door came down revealing a bar of sorts. The bottles were stacked against a mirror. For a moment, I was transfixed, staring at the reflections of our faces: one ageing and tense, the other dark-eyed, sexy, a little fatigued, like the haunting images of my childhood. She smiled into the mirror. I continued to stare at her reflection unable to break off. I knew I wanted her even if, as usual, it was just for once.

  She sat up, tucked her legs under her. ‘Did you manage to talk to him about the shares?’ she said.

  I looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘Are you making fun of me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like that. Anyway, it was he who talked about them. He said he might have disposed of them had it not been for you. It was you who wanted him to succeed in industry, he said.’

  ‘What is wrong with that?’

  ‘It is what they call a misplaced enthusiasm.’

  She did not catch that.

  Why hadn’t I talked to him about the shares which was what I had come to do? And I was to leave for Bombay the next morning. The issue had been there, alive all the time, at the back of my mind. But it had been swamped, drowned out: by Lal Haveli, its sounds and colours, the maze of its layout and the maze of the city as I had seen it from the terrace, by the unexpected stirring in me of some long dormant essence of a different kind.

  ‘When I was in Bombay last month I ran into Geeta,’ she said.

  ‘You did!’

  ‘At K’s clinic. She said you were standing for the presidentship of the Association.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘How should I know?’ she laughed.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ I said. ‘I really want to know.’

  ‘You should. You are made for such things. Maybe, that is all that you want.’

  She leaned sideways reaching for a box. It was made of silver and looked like a paandan. She opened it and took out a cigarette. As I bent forward to light it for her I noticed how well her choli fitted her. A very fine gold chain glowed around her throat and on her chest and disappeared between the full breasts. If she was aware of my gaze she took no notice of it.

  ‘That is a curious looking box,’ I said.

  She handed it to me. ‘Aftab’s father gave it to us. It is a hundred years old.’

  ‘It certainly looks it.’

  It was heavy, mysterious, made of solid silver. It shone with a dull glow. Its lid was brazed with round silver coins, the kind I had seen in the museums of the Nizam. There were things written in Persian on the coins and on the sides of the box. I resisted the temptation of asking her what it was that was written on the box. I opened the lid.

  ‘And these are curious looking cigarettes.’

  Anuradha smiled, and, to my surprise, blushed.

  ‘They look delicious,’ I said.

  She nodded slowly, letting out smoke.

  ‘I just visited the spot where you cried the day you were married,’ I said.

  ‘Married?’ she laughed. ‘I have never been married.’

  For a moment I was too confused to speak.

  ‘Aren’t you and Aftab married?’

  ‘Of course not. I just live with him.’

  ‘I see.’

  She was a nice attractive person and there was a vitality in her that had drawn me so. It seemed a pity that she should be nobody’s wife.

  ‘It is better not to be anybody’s wife,’ she said as if reading my thoughts. She had a way, I discovered later, of commenting on things that you had yet to put into words. ‘You can’t marry everyone you love. So, why marry anyone at all?’

  That sounded like Leela Sabnis.

  ‘But if you have never been married why should Aftab mention it?’

  ‘One of Aftab’s little make-beliefs. That’s all. You have your own.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Make-beliefs.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I rose to make another drink.

  There was the sound of a harmonium somewhere in the haveli. A woman’s voice rose and fell. I stood against the little bar and again looked at Anuradha. The muted light of the lamp fell across her, throwing her shadow on the velvet cushions and on the wall. With her old jewellery and antique clothes she looked like a ghost from long ago. She was smoking, thinking. The light in the room had not changed. The shadows clung to their appointed places. So did the fu
rniture. Anuradha looked up, ‘You are watching me again.’

  ‘Yes. You are very good looking.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Tell me something. Why is this house made like this?’

  ‘Made like what?’

  ‘In this hotch-potch way.’

  She was puzzled.

  ‘I don’t understand. I have not noticed anything unusual. It is an old haveli.’

  ‘It is made like a labyrinth, Aftab says.’

  ‘That is another of his make-beliefs. He likes the idea of a bhul-bhulaiyan. Once we visited the Bhul-bhulaiyan of Lucknow. We wandered a long time through it, over and over, one whole afternoon. It was evening when we came out. Aftab was exhausted but he was excited as he never gets excited. When we came back, he said, “Isn’t this built like a bhul-bhulaiyan, too?” Now he shows people round this haveli as though it were a labyrinth.’

  ‘The strange thing is, it seemed like a labyrinth to me, too.’

  ‘Maybe, the two of you have something in common,’ she smiled, playing with the chain around her neck.

  ‘Aftab even has a view on what is in the last labyrinth.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Death, he says.’

  ‘Oh! The two of you really have something in common.’

  Aftab entered through an unlit entrance. He greeted me, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘We have met before, you know,’ I said, taking his hand in mine.

  ‘I know. It is such a pleasure meeting you. Every time it seems like the first time. Would you like to go to the ghats now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was late but Aftab was a creature of the night.

  At twenty two I had patronized my father. Ten years later, at the hour nearing midnight, the sight of all those funeral pyres on the Manikarnika Ghat, the smell of burning flesh and bursting of bones, gave me one big shaking down before I got hold of myself. The flames, lighting this, hiding that, throwing crazy shadows all over, made matters worse. And in that shaking down, I sort of went stiff and, going down a step, keeled a little, knocking my arm against Anuradha’s bangles. For a passing second, I thought she curled her fingers around my wrist, as though steadying me. I turned but she was looking straight ahead where Aftab threaded down the steep steps, leading the way. Anuradha was relaxed, lost in heaven knew what happy thoughts. What filled me was the dread, cold sweat and a familiar turbulence.

  I had my reasons for the cold sweat as well as the turbulence. Some months earlier, as the doctors put it, I had had my ‘little incident.’

  I had woken up one night choking, scared to death. When I climbed steps I had pain in the chest. Finally, K took cardiograms. They were all right to start off. Then they started to go haywire. Within the hour I was in the hospital, plugged with a dozen shots. Geeta was there, distraught, holding back the tears, probably praying. Here goes another, she must have thought. Some years earlier her brother had been killed. I had never loved her more.

  I was a month in the nursing home and it was a nasty month, the worst yet. The drugs got me; there was no end to them. The first thing in the morning was a shot. The last thing at night was a shot. They depressed the hell out of me, those drugs. I felt weepy all the time. When the drugs eased the staff took over. The nurses were a rum lot, one stiffer-arsed than the next. Yet, you couldn’t do without them. All you wanted to do was to get away. And, that was precisely what you could not do. So, you kept wondering about what was happening to you. For instance, why this little ‘incident’? True, my father had a bad heart but why had I been touched so early? By what right? What was now to happen to my pursuit of fame? Had I been once and for all shoved off the stage, away from the footlights, packed off to some dark dusty corner in the wings; or some dingy green room where I was to put on a new make up, several cuts below that of a prince that I had set out to be. At the same time, though, I felt a new loathing for the squalid world that carried on beneath my hospital window. All those buses and cars and taxis and men scurrying back and forth like cockroaches. For what? But if it was loathing, then why that longing to get right back among the vermin as soon as possible? More than anyone else, it was K and Geeta who pulled me through. At the end of it all, I had begun to wonder if I at all deserved such a fine woman.

  The voids during that illness had never loomed larger. Not just without. Also within.

  It is the voids of the world, more than its objects, that bother me. The voids and the empty spaces, within and without. First, it was only the voids without: empty mountain sides, stretches of oceans, beaches, unsown fields, alleys after dark, corridors of hospitals, the hum against the ear of a conch, caves. That was how it had probably started — with the caves. I was home that summer. I was eighteen. I was alone in a cave at Ajanta. It wasn’t one of the showpieces. I must have gone in for a break from the sun. It was cool inside and dark. Then the walls started to float in, trembling, shimmering, daubed here and there with colour. The colours were faint, as they are in dreams. I had stood there trying to make sense out of them. And then, as gradually as they had materialized, the walls dissolved into the darkness. I continued to stand there until I was cooler. The walls came and went in dizzy waves, the daubs of colour dancing before my eyes. The spasms of darkness grew steadily longer. Or, so it had seemed. Finally, I could not stand it any longer. When the wall disappeared once again I dashed out.

  Voids of caves and voids of the sky; the terrible vacancies of lokalok. That same summer, on my way back to America I flew from Tokyo to Honolulu. It had been nine p.m. in Tokyo. Three hours later, over the quiet waters of the Pacific, a dawn met us. It was an ordinary dawn, gentle, even picturesque, but something in its coming, so totally without notice, disturbed me. It lit up the empty spaces of the sky like a candle does the dome of a tomb. It lit up those empty spaces so I have never forgotten them.

  And here, on Manikarnika, were voids with a bang. Both within and without. That was probably how it had always been except that I had been too cocky to notice. You have to have a little ‘incident’ or get a telephone at midnight about so and so popping off or catch your wife with another man or be told you have cancer to see the voids within. It was the voids and not the guava groves that I had walked through that morning my mother died; and voids too in her room in Bombay; and voids each time an affair ended; and the morning my daughter was born, and on and on. Voids all.

  We had gradually been moving up the steps, away from the burning corpses. The ghats were not deserted as I had imagined. There were men about. And animals. Even an occasional woman, wrapped from head to foot in the shroud of her sari. The men, in counterpoint, wore little. Oblivious of their surroundings, lost in the oddest of activities, they would have been taken for the inmates of a nut-house in any other country. Across the steps, in a staggered row, half a dozen men, their marvellous oiled bodies faintly gleaming, barrelled through a marathon of calisthenics. A young Sanskrit scholar recited hymns at the top of his voice. I thought of my father and his little book of the Upanishads. Another boy, equally young, corrected him. Did Panini ever live in Benaras? Behind the scholars, two young men, drowned in bhang, did a fancy jig. Boatmen, jugglers, vagrants, monkey men, idlers, beggars, flutists, bathers, the watchers of funeral pyres, junkies, medicine men, vendors, each sat in his appointed place, as if on a stage, performing parts that they had performed over the millennia. What chance did I have here of making Aftab change his mind about the shares?

  We had been going up and down the steps without my being able to grasp Aftab’s purpose. Very likely, he had done, just as he had done during that visit to the dargah. There was a temple where aarati was being performed. Outside, on the granite threshold, looking like a mauve ghost, a woman wailed and beat her shaved head against the wall. As we passed I thought she was going to touch me.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried in annoyance.

  ‘Ah, Bhaskar,’ said Aftab in mild rebuke. ‘What do you know of sorrow?’


  ‘What does this have to do with sorrow?’ I snapped.

  He kept quiet.

  Beyond the temple, we again went down a series of granite steps at the bottom of which I suddenly found myself in the hollow of a boat. Aftab and Anuradha sat on the middle plank. I sat facing them. Without a word the mallah, a shadowy naked figure with oars in the far corner, pulled out. Anuradha, head covered, sat perfectly still. She hadn’t said a word since we came to the ghats.

  A little distance away from the bank, and it was all very quiet. It was as though we had passed through an acoustical screen. The reflections of the ghat lights were also left behind. I could not see the boatman’s face but I could see the movement of his powerful arms. The boat left no wake behind. The eerie chhup chhup of the oars was the only sound. I felt as though I had moved not two hundred yards, but two hundred miles from the town of Benaras, from all towns, from the planet itself. I felt as though this was not Ganga but some unknown stream, in some unknown segment of the universe, leading to a reality that I had not yet known.

  At midstream the mallah paused. He probably needed rest. I wondered which way we were heading: downstream or across the river. When we started again I knew we were going across. A light had appeared on the other bank. It grew bigger as we approached. It was for this light, I realized, and not to rest, that the mallah had paused.

  The boat slid gently into the reeds of a backwater. A young girl stood on the shore waving a lantern. The mallah, a dark powerful man, jumped ashore, tied the boat to a stake. One after the other, he helped us get off. The girl greeted us. She wore a sari although she seemed too young for it.

  ‘Why aren’t there ghats on this bank of the river?’ I asked as we followed the girl.

  ‘This bank isn’t sacred,’ Aftab replied briefly.

  I had the impression no one wanted to talk. A hundred yards inland, we came upon an enclosure with a wooden gate. It looked like an orchard of sorts. There was an old peepul tree, like the one in Aftab’s back garden. In the shadow of the peepul stood a simple white-washed grave. The moonlight fell directly on it. I had already seen too many dead bodies to be shocked. A cottage had been built beyond the peepul. Into this, led by the young girl, we now went.