Last Labyrinth Read online

  I stared out of the window. It was very quiet. ‘That sounds like Babar and Humayun.’

  She said nothing. My voice had sounded much too loud to my ears and I lowered it to a whisper.

  ‘Was that his grave near the cottage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You believe this... this story?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably.’

  ‘You really do!’ I laughed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘You don’t realize that I don’t understand the way you talk. I cannot argue with you. I will never be able to argue with you. I don’t even know the words that can argue with you. But you go on and on.’

  I was surprised at her outburst. Something had upset her.

  ‘I go on and on about what?’

  ‘I don’t know about what. But let me tell you something: You are not as clever as you think. You are wrong about many things. You are wrong even about yourself. You think you know a lot, when, in fact, you don’t.’

  After a pause she said, ‘Why don’t you leave us alone?’

  ‘I am leaving tomorrow — and not coming back.’

  ‘You mean you are not interested in Aftab’s business?’ She was all attention.

  ‘Mr. Thapar can handle Aftab’s business.’

  ‘What did you come here for?’

  ‘I came because of you, I think.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to meet you again, I now realize.’

  I had no face to save now. I would be gone in another few hours and I would never see her again.

  ‘I did not know that,’ she said slowly.

  ‘You know now.’

  She stepped forward. I touched the bangles on her wrist, I counted them, one after the other, as one might count on the abacus. From her bangles I looked up into her large wondering eyes.

  ‘Stay with me,’ I said trying to keep the note of desperation out of my voice.

  ‘No. No,’ she said, her voice suddenly rude. She pushed me away, and was gone.

  7

  There are the wanters of this world and there are the givers. And, often, the wanters, I know, don’t recognize the givers, or the givers the wanters. And, most times, the wanters don’t even know that they are wanters or the givers that they are givers. And if they know, they are too shy to admit. Or, too proud. And so they wander the streets of the world, on opposite pavements, burnt in their hunger, to take or to give, and do not lift their gaze and, finally, fall in the dust of the road. So it goes.

  Frustrated, standing at the window, watching the old man in the ‘house of weddings’ I thought of Geeta. She would have enjoyed the Pir story. Of late, she had become a great enthusiast of temples, shrines, tombs of the godly. Ten years with me and she had developed her own guide-book of grief. Saints, sadhus, miracle-workers, astrologers, they drew her. Was it my rages that had driven her? My fornications? Her brother’s death? Or some urges of her own? Where she had every right to the adulteries of the body she had only taken to the cleansing of the soul.

  Geeta, of course, is a great, big giver herself. As big as they come. Between Anuradha and her it must have been love at first sight. If discontent is my trademark, trust is Geeta’s. She is an intelligent person, sophisticated, aware of the pitfalls of the world. Why then this trust in the world’s mechanisms, this faith that the engine shall not seize, or worse, explode?

  Geeta trusts like birds fly, like fish swim.

  It was this trust of hers — in me, in life — that had drawn me. Beside the swimming pool of the Cricket Club, to be precise. It enveloped her, this trust, like the amniotic fluid envelopes the embryo, protecting her slim shanks and tender white arms. It was stamped on her swimming suit, so modest amidst the grossness that lay about. It exuded from her small breasts — so different from Anuradha’s — and if she had removed her dark glasses I would have found it radiating from her two eyes, like the beams of a lighthouse.

  If trust could navigate men through the storms of the spirit, I would have weathered them all.

  But I needed the trust — who doesn’t? I needed it all the more because I did not trust myself, or my men, or my fate, or the ceaseless travel on the social wheel. Between the empty home and the cluttered offices — so many men, unknown, unknowable, each with a quiver of axes to grind — between these two poles of existence, friendless in a city that I did not love and which, for that matter, did not love me, even though it eyed my money, in this whore of a city what I needed most was to be reassured that all was well.

  It was September. Sultry and warm. I went to a fair; no, a fete, a fete for the dead of a war, laid out in a lawn full of stones and yellow grass. There were stalls, the kind that clutter the fetes for the dead. Handicrafts. Brasswork. Children’s clothes. Chaat. Hand-printed saris. A stall for contests whose rules no one understood and hence whose prizes nobody won. Through the stalls, threading each with the next, rushed old Parsi ladies. There were young girls, too, bright young things. I wandered about, losing patience by the minute, looking for one Mrs. Bedi, for whom I had brought a cheque. Why couldn’t they make her stand in the front? Twenty five thousand rupees was no chicken-feed. I gave her two minutes to show up. Two minutes or I would go. I had better things to do.

  There was a stall of silent, vacant-eyed dolls. Beyond it lay an enclosure, bounded on three sides with red shamianas. There, in neat rows, in a vacancy that seemed an extension of the vacancy of the doll’s shop, sat a hundred women, shrouded in white, and in a silence that rang louder than the tumult around.

  Astonished, I stared at the women and they at me. Then one came forward.

  I said I was looking for Mrs. Bedi.

  ‘I am Mrs. Bedi,’ she said.

  She was plump, grey-haired, rosy-cheeked, a bit like Gargi. I fumbled in my pockets forgetting which contained the cheque.

  ‘This is our contribution,’ I said, shaken by those terrible rows of muslin. Mrs. Bedi did not look at the cheque but folded her hands.

  ‘Thank you. It will be of great help to all of us.’

  I turned to go, then turned back, confused and upset. ‘Listen,’ I said, trying not to show my nerves. ‘This isn’t much. We shall do more. Raise more money, I mean. Soon. Tell me where I can get in touch with you.’

  ‘It is kind of you,’ Mrs. Bedi said. She gave me the address.

  Stepping out of the enclosure, hurrying, aware at my back of the gaze of the hundred whom death had undone, I began to dump my armour, the shields and the swords, the coats of mail. By the time I passed the stall of the dolls again, I was stripped naked. In the stall, trembling, I came upon Geeta, holding a brown teddy bear, a badge on her shoulder, alive and smiling, surrounded by a multitude of glass eyes. We looked at each other. Around us the fete swirled, mounting every few minutes a notch or two, towards some final climax when, through the rangoli-strewn gates, a Minister would come and, ensconced between chiffoned women, would address the widows’ silence.

  ‘Come, let us go,’ I said.

  ‘Go where?’ Geeta said, taken aback.

  ‘Anywhere. To your house. To the movies. Anywhere.’

  We went to her house and had dinner with her parents. Her father made small talk. Her mother was shy but alert. She tried more than her husband, to make me feel at home. Their son, she said, was at the front.

  After dinner I took Geeta out. I did not know where I was taking her. It was not very late. The city was still awake, not that it ever slept, tying up the day’s transactions, unlocking the coffers of the night, putting out such charms as it possessed, stirring its octopus arms, in pursuit of little pleasures or little vendettas, or even that aimless wandering that filled the hearts of its youth — the clerks, the shop girls, the unemployed. They milled about the shop fronts and board-walks, eager for life. Through all this we cruised, Geeta and I, in the Mercedez that had been my father’s, Geeta sitting as far away from me as the seat would allow. I avoided the horn: that was the least that I could do for them, the wandere
rs. And at one point I said to Geeta: ‘How do you think it feels to be young and spend the finest evenings of one’s life beating the pavements, hungering and empty-handed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  No, Geeta is no waffler. Not by a long shot. No bogus shaman to the sorrows of men, no candidate for the thrones of judgement that I have been only too eager to jump into.

  We didn’t say much as we drove. Geeta did not know where we were going. Nor, for that matter, did I. Through the neon-lit streets, narrow and wide, I coursed, drifting north. Near Mahim, while I waited before a traffic light, the sweet stench of the slaughter houses wafting through the car, I thought of the Maya.

  It had been bought for the peace and the quiet of my mother. It was here that she spent her last days. Here, one afternoon, when she was young and not ill, she came out from the bath in a robe and sat before the mirror while I brushed her hair. She kissed me on the ear and called me a beautiful boy. When she died my father put a telescope on the roof and, to kill his insomnia, started to track the stars.

  The lawns of the Maya were unkempt. I did not have my father’s interest in lawns. Geeta stumbled on a sun-dial, another of his toys. We stepped on to the verandah and sat down. The chowkidar stared at Geeta, appraising her. Geeta ran no danger. The old man recognized her, knew her class. Doors were unlatched, windows flung open, all lights switched until the cottage glowed like a liner at anchor. We sat in the verandah.

  ‘He looked suspicious,’ Geeta said indicating the chowkidar.

  ‘I had brought a woman here once,’ I explained. ‘A woman off the streets.’

  We stared at each other. I realized that I was waiting. I was waiting for the reaction. And in that instant it burst upon me that she meant more to me than I had imagined. I was not one to care for people’s reactions unless they meant something to me.

  In her lap, Geeta shifted her hands. I continued to wait. But that was all. No reproach or alarm or blase nonchalance. Only a shift of the hands and that enduring trust, sending out its unfailing lasers.

  Is there a theory of mate-selection — not the Freudian stuff that old Leela was so keen on — something simpler, nearer to the plays of fate? Why does one man look into a girl’s eyes, another at her horoscope, a third at her father? For me that shift in the clasp of the hands was enough. If not enough, a long way to enough. Here was no ordinary girl. I thought I needed to explain. ‘It was a mistake,’ I said, ‘I was drunk and unhappy.’

  She said nothing.

  A little later we went into the cottage.

  Sofas, chairs, tables, lamps, paintings, books, curtains fl uttering in the breeze, my mother’s sarod, photographs, magazines, cupboards whose contents I had yet to examine, mirrors, radios, carpets, ash trays, (one of them filled with stubs), a rose-wood cabinet that, I knew, contained an astronomer’s camera, a collection of the world’s coins, sculpture, a bit of antique jewellery, the kind that Anuradha wore, my grandfather’s gun.

  You walk into your parent’s house after they are dead and the house starts talking. As we passed, visitors to this carnival of fossils, this other fete for the dead, I felt my senses sharpening. There was a steel cupboard that I had come rummaging one gloomy evening, looking for the deed of K’s trust. It lay on the middle shelf on top of the leather-bound minute-book that I am now writing in. Maybe it is not a minute-book but a diary. Why should my father keep a totally blank minute-book in that cupboard of maximum security. ‘K suggests I should keep a daily diary,’ he told me once. ‘Whatever for?’ I had said. Maybe he wanted to record his experiment about the First Cause. In any case, it is a fine piece of stationery, as good as they come.

  At the end of a corridor, on a pedestal in a corner, stood Krishna, carved in wood, ankles crossed, playing an imaginary flute.

  All my life I have heard voices. I don’t mean I am loony. I hear them just like everyone else except that, maybe, I hear them a little too often and a little too loud. Voices, mostly of the dead. That is another thing I don’t like about them but in this sort of business you can’t pick and choose. So I hear the voices of dead people: relatives, authors, scoundrels, saints, of people who had never existed — characters out of novels, gods, demons. I let them chatter, carry on their brain-washing. But at times they get under my skin. I put up a resistance then. Shut up, I tell them. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. If they don’t, I try and muzzle them or jam them like countries jam each other’s broadcasts: or I get drunk and get away from them. And there, in that narrow room, in the crepuscular darkness, beyond the sculpture of Krishna, were whispers, such a thick barrage, that I was suddenly fighting back with all my strength.

  That was where my mother had lived for six months, refusing to go to a hospital. She communed with astrologers while the cancer ate away her lungs. There was quacks, too, homoeopaths and physicians who said they were the descendents of the Greeks. They lied to her, the whole rotten bunch, and swindled her out of thousands. It was on their strength that she refused to believe it was cancer. I sat by side of that bed one winter evening and painted her nails for her, her wasted fingers, hard as pencils in my hand. I could feel through the skin the shape of the bones like the bones of the skeleton that stood in the physiology lab at school. I had started out of a whim and out of love but I was glad when the manicuring was over.

  ‘You have to move to a hospital,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You won’t get well here.’

  ‘I will. Just wait and see.’

  ‘You can’t be cured here.’ I did not have the courage to let her know that I, too, believed it was cancer.

  ‘He will cure me.’

  ‘Who?’

  She had nodded towards the same wooden Krishna. In a sudden, boiling rage I had swept the gods and the goddesses off the table along with the bottles of nail polish. The acetone had spilled over the green carpet.

  My mother had been horrified.

  I switched on the light now. There was the large circular stain where the acetone had eaten away the green. I showed it to Geeta.

  ‘It is the doing of this wooden creature,’ I said pointing out the God where He played his imaginary flute.

  She was bewildered by it all. I rushed her out into another room and then on to the stairs.

  I stopped, breathless and flushed, at the landing, waiting for the buzzing in my head to die. She stood adjusting her sari, child of another world, traversing, like a plane at a higher altitude, a corridor separate from the dark vestibule that I had just crossed.

  Watching her I was moved and I took her in my arms. Just like that. Without notice. I had done that to other women, taken them by surprise, not the surprise of a Casanova because, as one of them had explained it for me, something about the deployment and pressures of my limbs communicated that it was not that, but the pleasant, asexual surprise hug of a fellow survivor after a crash-landing. There had been many on whom I had bestowed this hug of a survivor, without another thought except the pleasure of being alive and in possession of their company: classmates, relatives, strangers — I had nearly hugged Mrs. Bedi — ayahs, librarians, nurses, aunts, friends’ wives. What happened next, after the first surprise, varies. Mostly a burst of gurgling laughter, a little additional warmth to cross the Tundras of the earth, a peck on the cheek at times, and finally a pleasant disengagement. But at times there had been fiercer entanglements and this was one such because after the first gasp of surprise, Geeta clung to me. Or, maybe, it was I who did not let her go — what chance did she have against my clasp and height? But her lips were warm when I kissed her. And she let me lead her, my arm around her waist, her flanks slim and warm against mine. Thus we went up, the future Mr. and Mrs. Bhaskar, to the roof-top, where the telescope stood.

  We stood in the shadow of the pill-box that housed the telescope. I asked her if she would like to see it. ‘All right,’ she said but I knew she wasn’t interested. ‘I would rather be with you,’ Geeta said in a sudden burst of opening up. I
had kissed her again and, trembling, hands on my shoulders, she had kissed me back. We had returned, then, into the narrow room through which I had hurried her, doubletime, past the fluteless Krishna to the upholstered safety of the Mercedez. Ten years later Geeta was the same loving, marvellous, gentle person that she had been that night. She hadn’t changed except for the sudden enthusiasm for sadhus and astrologers and such like.

  I was totally fagged out, standing at that window, looking at the bleak garden, but I hadn’t the will to move. What had Geeta and Anuradha discussed at K’s clinic? What would Geeta say about my efforts to get her friend into bed? I pushed the thought away; it was too complicated. Where was Anuradha’s room in that mysterious haveli? Or, had she gone back to Aftab who, of course, already had that child-dancer, Azizun’s niece, and, probably, Azizun herself. Quite a menage Aftab had arranged for himself.

  The old man had once again appeared on the verandah of the ‘house of weddings’. He was doing the last of the clearing up. He had stacked up the furniture neatly except for a high-backed chair on which he now sat. He gesticulated, occasionally, as if he talked to himself. He got up and walked slowly to the edge of the verandah where he stood still, head bowed, hands by his side. He looked as though he was reciting something. Now he lifted his arms and went through the mime of garlanding someone. I realized with amazement that it was a jaimal ceremony that he was going through. Fantastic, I thought. The whole city was full of nuts and not just Lal Haveli. The exchange of jaimals over, the old man walked briskly up to the last remaining gas light, took it down, and disappeared into the house.

  The deal with Geeta was, more or less, closed that evening at the Maya. If I had doubts, they were not about Geeta; they concerned the deal itself, its necessity, its durability, its very idea.