Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

*

It had taken me much time to realize the simple fact that Rajesh had been struggling to make sense of his life, to connect the disparate elements that existed in it: his self-consciousness about his Brahmin identity, the pistols in his room, the talk of illusion and the void.

And now, whenever I recalled my time in Benares, I felt that it was a task I had shirked, that I had understood very little and misunderstood much during those months there. I was haunted by the sense of having left something incomplete, and with it came a quiet yearning to go back, to gaze with a fresher eye at things grown so dim in memory.

I struggled for some time with this growing desire. Then one evening I came home, my mind miraculously made up, and without even pausing to switch on the geyser in the bathroom, I sat down at the unused dining table and wrote to Miss West.

Miss West took her time in replying, and when she did, made no mention of her own plans.

Her letter came as school was about to close for winter. Dark clouds every day threatened snow and sleet. Dull grey light came out each morning from under the curtain in my bedroom; the day appeared stale even before it had begun. The town wore a deserted look after the tourist invasions of autumn; the day died early in colourless sunsets.

But I couldn’t leave straight away. Events at the school kept me busy. We received a high-level visit from the state education minister. His approval was necessary in acquiring official recognition from the government, and Mrs Sharma, the principal, came back from another long foreign sojourn to take personal charge of the visit. Her sister, Gita, came up from Delhi, bejewelled and plumper than before; she came ostensibly to help but created more problems by quarrelling constantly with her sister.

The winter holidays had leaked away, and the school was scheduled to reopen after just a few days, when I finally left for Benares.

TAXI TO PATHANKOT, the rail head of the British Raj, and from there the old train that once took vacationers back to Calcutta from the Kashmir valley. The taxi was a luxury, and it was with the same light-headed extravagance that I cancelled my earlier reservations and upgraded my ticket to second-class air-conditioned.

We left in the evening, and for a very long time I was unable to sleep. Shadowy figures moved silently outside on the poorly lit platforms; a luggage cart would trundle past with a muffled drone; and in the silence that descended upon the compartment after it had gone, the soft rhythmic snoring of the overweight man on the berth next to mine would become audible.

A strange agitation in the mind, a kind of noise created by random thoughts and memories, kept me awake. At one point, I gave up all attempts to sleep and instead lay still on my berth, listening to the rattle and roll of the wheels, and waited for the morning which seemed to hold something of great significance.

It was in that position that I drifted back to sleep.

I woke up early. The flimsy curtains on the window promised light, but when I parted them, the world outside, seen through the murky windows of my compartment, the world I had feared and was seeing for the first time in seven years — flat fields, ramshackle sheds at level crossings, battered trucks with bundles of hay, bullock carts inching forward on rutted dirt tracks, buffaloes splattered with mud, children playing outside low huts — the world with big skies and wide flat horizons that held millions of competing lives, that world appeared empty and lacklustre.

The train swayed and clattered ahead through tangles of gleaming tracks. Benares appeared at last after a series of small deserted stations, and the view contracted: it was now naked brick houses, and messy electric wires and algae-covered ponds, around which sat early-morning defecators, gazing up meekly at the passing train.

The monotonous silence of the compartment that I had got so used to was finally shattered at the railway station. Chaos erupted as the train slid to a stop along the congested platform: emaciated coolies in threadbare woollen jumpers muscled into compartments; hysterical parents shouted at their children as they unloaded their luggage; ragged little boys shrilly hawked chai, and loudspeakers high above on the roof of the platform kept indifferently booming out the bad news of long delays and cancellations.

Outside, giant hoardings of new Bombay films loomed over the concourse, the pictures of soft-cheeked men gnashing and grinding their teeth and pointing outsized guns at each other; the dhaba shacks blared loud devotional music; the big coloured trucks revved out dense clouds of diesel smoke; urchins leaning out from tempos thumped the battered sides in a bid to attract arriving passengers; and rickshaw drivers with thin, unshaven, hostile faces seethed in small mobs everywhere.

*

I surrendered my bag to the first rickshaw driver who approached me: a small, dark young man with a thick curled moustache.

I had no place to stay; I was hoping to find an inexpensive hotel somewhere along the ghats. But when the rickshaw driver suggested, the veins in his swarthy legs puffing out as he pushed at the pedals, a new ‘ultra-modern hotel’ near the station, I let him take me there.

It was a white building, strikingly clean behind brick walls garish with film posters. The bright deserted lobby smelled of floor wax; the sofas were upholstered with shiny brown leather; and the place appeared empty, the keyboard at the reception full. The receptionist, a gawky young man with glasses, kept fumbling with the registration ledger, scribbling and then striking out an erroneous entry. Behind him, in a glass cubicle adorned with a Mickey Mouse clock and calendar-art framed pictures of Shiva, sat the owner of the hotel, a thickset man in a grey safari suit, carefully counting a wad of hundred-rupee notes.

I filled in the sheaf of duplicate forms brought by the receptionst, who kept calling me sir with exaggerated courtesy. I then waited as he examined them.

Suddenly, at the far end of the lobby, the elevator doors slid open to reveal two young paunchy khadi-clad men — minor politicians, I immediately thought. Their steps echoing across the lobby, they strode with brisk assurance to a white Ambassador, waiting with open doors under the portico. They got into the car but the doors with the tinted windows remained open; they appeared to be expecting someone else. The man in the driver’s seat kept looking straight ahead.

Soon I heard the elevator doors open again. They now revealed two slim, swarthy young women, wearing almost identical salwar-kurtas of some shiny synthetic material, with sequinned chunnis draped around thick gold necklaces. Crimson lipstick almost blotted out their small mouths; gold bangles flashed on their wrists; silver anklets jingled softly as they strutted past me on very high pencil-thin heels.

They joined the politicians in the car; the doors slammed shut in the void of the forecourt; the car slunk off.

As I turned away, I saw the receptionist looking at me with concern.

He attempted to smile. He said, in English, ‘Special guests, sir.’

But it wasn’t what he wished to say; his weak English had let him down, and he knew that almost instantly.

He turned his head to glance at the man in the cubicle, who was still counting the notes, and when he looked back at me his face showed fear.

*

It was an odd return to Benares; it wasn’t what I had been expecting. I had imagined the moment of arrival to be calm. I had imagined it to be infused with gentle memories. But the spell had been broken at the railway station itself, facing the truculent coolies and the rickshaw drivers.

Nothing in that scene was unfamiliar to me, but during the tranquil years in Dharamshala I had lost the old instinctive ways of dealing with it. I could no longer summon the casual self-possession required to bargain out a correct rate with the aggressive rickshaw driver. I lacked the indifference, the unseeing blank gaze of the hardened traveller.