Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

But in the darkness, from the roof, she saw a glow. There were fires in the fields. She saw campfires in the fields, and figures dancing about them. She watched them, for a long time, and she could hear singing. She could hear music. Finally her husband called out to her from the courtyard below, and she went down the stairs. She was happy, she laughed and played with her children, yet later she slipped out of the house, by the small door inset into the spiked gate at the back of the house, and she went into the fields. Janamohini walked for a long time, guided by the glow shining off the sky, and finally she found her campfires. There was indeed music, and singing. There were people dancing near the fires. Janamohini saw they were of despised caste, that they were celebrating a wedding, that they were drinking liquor and eating meat, and the music was happy and they welcomed her, and so she danced with them. She drank their liquor and ate their meat. And she whirled around the campfires.

But then her husband and his brothers, who had found the open door, came and took her back to Dhiresa’s mansion. Janamohini screamed and fought, but the husband said there had been no campfires, no dancers, no liquor, no meat. He said there had been nothing at all. Now Janamohini shrieked, my feet, my feet, look. She said her feet were pointing the wrong way. Upside down they are, she said. Look. And she began to walk backwards. They tried to stop her, but she walked backwards, faster and faster. She began to run backwards. Her husband wept, and she said, can’t you see? If I go fast enough, back and back, I will leap into tomorrow. And her husband wept.

They tried many exorcists then, many a priest, two Tantrics, and a doctor from the town. But Janamohini always walked backwards after that, looking for tomorrow.

But that’s not the end of it. Because on that night, no, the next morning, when the people in Dhiresa’s mansion woke up, the aunts and uncles and cousins, they saw that Janamohini’s hair was white. During that night, and that night only, all of her glorious hair, all of it long and luxurious and oiled and to her knees, all of it, turned white. From the scented clinging black of love it went to the white of madness. All in one night. All this happened in one night.

“And,” Shiv said, “she, Mrs. Chauhan, that is, she said she asked the woman who told her this, is this true?”

“Yes,” Frankie said. “And the woman said?”

“The woman said — yes, it’s true, I tell you it’s true, because Janamohini was my mother. I saw her hair turn white, she said, I saw it white in the first light of the morning. All of it white. And I am twenty-two and my hair is white. And perhaps my daughter’s hair, if I have a daughter, will be white also.”

“And it was white, her hair? The woman who told Mrs. Chauhan this?”

“White, yes. She was young but her hair was white as salt on a beach, as metal in the moonlight, as the sun on a flag.”

“That’s white,” Frankie said. “Poor Zingu.”

“Poor Zingu.”

They walked back towards the long length of the station, with the huge mottled sky above, and the wind pulled at their shoulders.

“What about her, Shiv?” Frankie said. “Did you find out anything about her? The husband?”

Shiv thought, his head tilted back to the grey glory of the clouds. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“You didn’t ask?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to know, Shiv?”

Shiv shrugged. He knew he was smiling awkwardly. “I know it’s strange,” he said. “And I suppose I do want to know. And I suppose I’ll find out. But right now, today, I just like her name.”

“Shanti?”

“Yes.”

Frankie put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and laughed. “Some people fall in love with dark eyes. Others with pale hands glimpsed beside the Shalimar. Why not a name then?”

“It’s a good name.”

“I know,” Frankie said, and put an arm around Shiv’s shoulder. “But, brother, a fact now and then is a good thing.”

“You’re talking about facts, Frankie the lover?”

“Lovers are practical, my young friend.”

“Really? That’s interesting. It means, I think, that I’m not a lover.”

Frankie nodded gravely. But as he looked away Shiv saw that he was smiling. The grass made a sighing sound as they walked.

Now Shanti — and this was how Shiv thought of her — came to Leharia often. As the trial of Dhillon and Sahgal and Shah Nawaz was argued in Delhi, and lawyers and advocates and judges jousted with each other to establish once and for all who was traitor, who was hero, she followed anecdotes and hints and the visions of delirious men up and down the country. Now she pursued the merest whisper, a shadow seen on a jungled hillside years before, a fevered groan floating across fetid bunks laden with dying men. But each time she came she told Shiv of something that she had heard on the way, the things that came to her on all the ways that she went, some incident, some episode, told to her by an old man, a young bride, a favourite son, an angry daughter-in-law, a mother, an orphan, and all of it true, true, and true. She told him about The Ten Year Old Boy Who Joined the Theatre Company of Death, The Woman Who Traded in Oil and Bought a Flying Racehorse, The Farmer Who Went to America and Fell Through a Hole to the Other Side of the World, The Moneylender Who Saw the True Face of the Creator, Ghurabat and Her Lover the Assassin Who Wept, The Birth of the Holiest Nun in the World and The Downfall of the Mughal Empire. And each time Shiv said, it’s true. Of course it’s true.

But one day in January she had nothing to tell. Or perhaps she hadn’t the strength to speak. She sat in her usual chair, an empty teacup in her lap, and her eyes fluttered shut as Shiv watched. He saw the way her mouth trembled and the slump of her shoulders from the taut line he had come to know. He took the cup from her and put it on the table, and with the tiny rattle she opened her eyes.

“They let them go,” she said. “They went home.”

“Who?”

“Dhillon, Shah Nawaz, and Sahgal.”

The papers had exulted in huge black letters: “GUILTY, BUT FREE!” They had gone home, the three, heroes or traitors, finished with it one way or the other. They had been convicted, cashiered, but finally they were told, you’re free, you can go. They would go home, and even if nothing was finished, not ever, they would batten away the memories and find new beginnings. All of them were going, going home. Shiv thought of them, the thousands and thousands of them, jostling and jolting across the country in trains, in busses and bullock carts. He pulled a chair toward Shanti, set it squarely in front of her. He sat down in front of her, his hands in his lap. At the back of his neck there was a trembling, as the words pulsed in his chest, exerting a steady pressure against his heart: you’re free, you can go.

“I heard something,” Shiv said.

“What?”

He cleared his throat, and for a moment he felt fear, blank and overpowering, and he was afraid of speaking, he felt profusion pressing up against the clean prison he had built for himself, but then he looked into Shanti’s eyes and he spoke. He told her what he had heard. Afterwards they sat in silence, and Shiv was grateful, because his shoulders ached and he was very tired.

When she was in her compartment, settled in the window, Frankie came strolling down the platform to announce that the train was delayed for twelve minutes. Shanti nodded, but Shiv was too lost in a sudden panic of emotion to say anything. He felt terror and joy mixing in his stomach, and a slow creep of pleasure at the sunlight across his shoulders, and grief. Frankie looked at him, and then took him by the arm and led him away.