Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

That the director’s words were intended more for Anand’s ears than Catherine’s mother’s was obvious. What wasn’t apparent to me was Anand’s motive in telling this story to me. Was he telling me this to show he was different from the ‘devious Indian men’ the director had spoken of? Was he making a political statement about the director? Or was he complaining about Catherine’s mother’s passive complicity?

Catherine appeared with the coffee, which was aromatic and French: a gift, Catherine said, from her mother. She talked about Miss West’s party, how much she had enjoyed it. But the conversation came back, in stages, to her mother. It was a topic that seemed to absorb both Catherine and Anand endlessly; its special intimacies could shut out the visitor completely.

Catherine said that Miss West (she called her Diana) had helped offset some of her mother’s shock on arriving in Benares. Miss West had even tried to reconcile her mother to Anand.

Anand said: ‘She told Miss West that she didn’t know about what you wanted to do. If you want to live in India, she could buy you a house in Benares.’

Catherine poured scorn on the idea. Anand silently watched her, his face a blank. I could not be free of the suspicion that, however briefly, he had been held by Catherine’s mother’s suggestion, if only for the wealth and privilege it suggested: that someone, or more specifically his girlfriend’s mother, could so easily talk of buying a whole house in Benares, something for which people he knew saved and scrounged all their lives.

*

I remember coming away that evening with a sense of wrongness. I couldn’t put it into words then: all I knew was that something wasn’t right. There was the incongruity of Catherine’s presence in that small house, the French coffee and Gallimard paperbacks surrounded by the teeming obtrusive life of old Benares; there was the incongruity of her relationship with Anand.

And yet I was tempted into going back to her house again and again. That first visit, as I remember it now, was to set the pattern for all other visits over the next few weeks. I remained shy and awkward before Catherine. She was the first woman I had known outside my family; the frank directness of her gaze and the assurance of her speech were new wonders for me. They inhibited me, and I felt at ease only when talking about literature; even then her obviously greater knowledge, acquired and systematized at a famous university, awed me — I, who gobbled down books without any sense of the larger civilization that lay behind them, the hectic world of big cities and writers and publishers, of urgent social concerns and existential anxieties.

The allusions she made to her life in Paris were very faint clues to that great mystery of her background I was always trying to figure out. The even greater mystery was the peculiar chemistry between her and Anand. With Anand she did most of the talking, Anand just about managing to keep up with his broken English. They frequently quarrelled or withdrew into sullen silences. These frictions embarrassed me, but they were too self-absorbed to notice. They were like people trying out their new roles, charging into, or abruptly retreating from, freshly opened areas of perception and feeling; and watching them together, the quarrels, the silences, their small gestures towards each other — she absent-mindedly caressing his hair, he interrupting his sitar practice to make her tea — I would often wonder if this was ‘love’.

WHEN I NEXT SAW CATHERINE, she was about to leave for Anand’s village in Bihar. Anand had written to his parents about Catherine; they had wanted to see her in person.

Miss West, who accompanied me to Catherine’s house that evening, told me this. She knew of Anand’s father: he was a farmer and headman of an upper-caste village, a conservative man from all accounts. But she didn’t remark on the potential awkwardness of Catherine’s visit, or on how Anand had explained Catherine to his parents. Patroness, girlfriend, fiancée: they all would have been alien and difficult concepts for them.

Miss West said, in that slightly bored, offhand voice I was beginning to recognize, ‘He’s so full of enthusiasm, that boy. Wants to win the world, and more. Makes the rest of us seem so dry and sterile.’

We were in a rickshaw, bumping along over cobblestone lanes, and Miss West’s voice came out in short hiccupy bursts. Despite the continuous jolting, she sat very erect on the narrow seat. She always travelled with the hood down, wearing her oversized straw hat. People turned to look at her; they often shot a brief, slightly mocking glance at me. Miss West didn’t seem to notice them, but I invariably grew self-conscious in her company.

Catherine was alone at home, writing official letters to the French embassy: a French tourist, she said, had been found in the city’s red-light district, unconscious, with no money or identification. ‘Probably a drug overdose. The doctors are looking into it,’ Catherine said. ‘These wretched day trippers,’ Miss West remarked as she took off her hat and shook her tousled hair, ‘why can’t they go to Costa del Sol or wherever? Why do they have to come all this way to mess themselves up?’

In her reading glasses, and with her hair tied in an Indian-style ponytail, which made her forehead look wider and cleaner, Catherine appeared slightly different from the last time I had seen her. She always dressed elegantly, wearing bright Indian colours in many different combinations. These fresh sightings of her made her strangeness, her unknown past even more intriguing, and I had to remind myself not to stare too long at her in Miss West’s presence.

Despite the complications with the unconscious tourist she was in a buoyant mood, humming to herself as she made coffee in the kitchen.

As usual, I said little to her. I asked her only if she was looking forward to her visit to Anand’s village. She replied, ‘Yes, of course. I am very excited.’ Then, turning to Miss West, she added, ‘It was really long overdue. The more time we waited, the more awkward it would become.’

It was also to Miss West that she confided her nervousness about the visit. Anand’s parents had never met, or even seen, a white person in their entire lives: it would all be a bit bewildering for them. She wasn’t expecting to be received warmly. Anand himself had warned her about that. They were likely to be wary of her and they were likely to resent her for her influence over their son.

When she came out of the kitchen, she began to speak of Anand’s difficult childhood in her soft French accent, frequently mixing up the English tenses. Miss West and I settled ourselves on her bed, leaning against the bolsters and drinking coffee. Catherine hadn’t put on the lights yet and the room was full of the smoky blue light of the evening. Street sounds drifted in through the tiny window: the squeaks of Bajaj scooter horns, the jangle of rickshaw bells. In one of the rooms in the congested house across the street a fluorescent tube kept flickering in and out of life; the pigeons, so neatly arrayed one moment on the electric wires, kept exploding into the air with a loud flapping of wings.

Anand’s parents had two daughters to marry but no money for the dowry, the current rate for which was very high within families of their caste. They had looked to Anand for help: they expected him to do well in his studies and find a salaried government job somewhere. They had actively discouraged Anand from developing his musical talent and they had almost disowned him when he dropped out of school and declared his intention of going to Benares to find a music guru. There had been vicious rows at home. Anand was often beaten up by his father.