Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

I HADN’T FORGOTTEN Miss West’s remarks about Catherine and Anand when I ran into them a few days later, walking back from the library at Benares Hindu University.

I saw Catherine first; she stood out in the crowd at Lanka Crossing in her pale yellow sari, her hair loose and luxuriant over her shoulders. Anand followed a little behind her, stylish, as he had been that evening, in a long white kurta and churidar. Together they attracted, I noticed, the lecherous malevolence of the student idlers who usually hung out at the adjacent tea shacks, gossiping about, and verbally goosing, every passing girl.

It was Catherine who saw me and waved. They walked across to my side of the road. I felt the students watching me and grew very self-conscious. I was relieved when the conversation ended quickly, before the students could get up to anything more than gesturing at us and laughing.

Catherine was now working part-time at the French Tourist Information Centre. A steady traffic of French tourists passed through Benares, and they often ended up losing their passports or becoming seriously ill or getting robbed, or worse. It was her job to help them out.

‘We get some real cases sometimes,’ Catherine said. ‘Otherwise the job is easy.’

They had recently moved into a new house not far from Assi Ghat. Catherine said I should visit them there. They had no phone, but I could simply drop in any time in the afternoon. Anand seconded her. I promised to do so, and then we parted.

A few days passed before I went one afternoon to their house. I would have gone immediately, but was held back by my very eagerness to see Catherine again: I sensed something coarse in it, and unhealthy. That scruple faded in time, but was never to disappear altogether.

The spools of memory have suddenly begun to roll faster. Jolty progress on a rickshaw through brick-paved narrow alleys splattered with lumps of fresh cow dung. Overhead, torn paper kites lie trapped in the dense tangle of electric wires, over which sit, in neat rows, grey pigeons. On both sides, claustrophobically small houses pushing against each other, jostling for space; balconies with arabesque fretwork streaming with saris hung out to dry; a tea shop with sooty interiors, the corpulent halwai ensconced before his enormous cauldron, poking with a long-handled skimmer at the lone samosa sizzling in the black oil. An ochre-robed sadhu with matted locks sits on the raised porch of a bangle shop and eats roasted chana from a paper cone. Walking up a narrow and steep staircase, the sides of which are covered with a mural depicting Ram and Sita on the throne of Ayodhya, and on to a tiny landing. A door on the left leads to two box-shaped rooms on the roof, where a sagging string cot lies in one corner.

It was Catherine who opened the door, her face breaking into a wide welcoming smile as she saw me. She was wearing a starched white kurta over blue jeans; her hair was wet and glossy from a recent washing and had created a damp patch on her back. Seeing her, I was once again aware of a peculiar inner slackening. The self I knew and displayed to other people sank into a strange torpor; something weak and pliable took its place.

Catherine showed me around the house. It wasn’t very big: two squarish rooms on the first floor, a bathroom and a kitchen, approached through a landing they shared with their landlord. The windows, overhung with pots of bougainvillea, looked out on the congested houses across the street — small dark rooms choked with furniture and bawling babies. The walls, painted a light yellow, were bare; there were mattresses and bolsters on the floor, covered with hand-printed Kalamkari sheets; two handsome gleaming sitars stood in one room, and the only item of furniture was a cane bookcase, crammed with Gallimard paperbacks.

Catherine said, ‘We decided not to have too much.’ She laughed, as if she had just remembered something, and added: ‘My friend Louise was saying the other day, it’s too bourgeois to have too many things cluttering up your house. It reminds you of Paris.’

My mind was full as always of something I had just read, and I quoted Flaubert, from some probably inaccurate translation, about how one should live like a bourgeois but think like a bohemian.

Catherine laughed — a full, throaty, generous laugh — and said, ‘That’s good. That’s very good.’

And then, suddenly growing serious, she said: ‘Really, I would like to live as simply as possible in India. We can sleep on the floor, we can do without a fridge, washing machine. .’

Anand, who was wearing a flimsy lungi and T-shirt and lying against the bolsters on the floor, peeling a banana, interrupted at this point, saying, ‘But we need an air-conditioner, no?’

Cathering sought to humour him: ‘Do you really want an air-conditioner? I can buy you one any time.’

Anand’s expression suddenly drooped; he grew very quiet. Catherine’s answer had put into unwelcome focus what I knew about from Miss West: his almost complete financial dependence upon her. It wasn’t something he could refer to without embarrassment. There were a few moments of awkwardness before Catherine turned to describing their landlord, Major Aggarwal. He had retired some time back and constantly worried about finding adequate dowry for his four young daughters. Catherine suspected him of being better off than he let on. The sources of his income were unknown, but they were various enough in the past to enable him to buy prime property all across Benares. Major Aggarwal’s wife was a mousy woman; the daughters were no less subdued. Catherine said that Major Aggarwal’s military discipline had stunted their characters.

Catherine’s mother had just gone back to France after a month’s stay in Benares. Her time in India was still a new topic between Catherine and Anand; we went back to it often during this first evening at their house.

The three of them — Anand, Catherine and her mother — had recently travelled together to Rajasthan. It hadn’t been easy for Catherine’s mother, who was used to another order of comfort altogether from the one she found in India. She had had to suffer the indignity of travelling back from Jaipur in the crowded cockpit of a truck, crushed with beedi-smoking villagers who hawked and spat out of the window every two minutes; she had not spoken to Catherine or Anand for many hours after the trip. Then she hadn’t ceased complaining about the cheap, unheated hotels Catherine had booked them into in every town.

Catherine said, ‘We would go to a restaurant for lunch and she would not stop moaning about the dirty cloth the waiter was using to wipe the plates dry.’

Anand spoke for the first time since the remark about the air-conditioner. He said, ‘She was so unhappy with the way Catherine was living in India. She said she would not come back again.’

Catherine said, ‘I told her this is the way people live in India, and you have to do the same when you are here.’

It seemed a bit excessive and unnecessary to me, imposing ‘Indian’ ways upon a first-time visitor. But I said nothing, only kept listening: nothing more was required of me. Presently, Catherine disappeared into the kitchen to make some coffee, and Anand told me more about the visit.

He had been with Catherine’s mother when Catherine was interviewed for her job at the French embassy in New Delhi. With them in the waiting room was the director of the French Information Centre, a somewhat arrogant and pompous man from Anand’s description. He was talking to Catherine’s mother in English instead of French, and if that wasn’t odd enough, he was talking — in Anand’s presence! — about the need for Catherine to steer clear of devious Indian men. The director knew of many instances where French women had fallen for them, only to find themselves used as passports to Europe; it was imperative, he said, that Catherine stay away from such sordid liaisons.