The maid was obviously a Gond or a Santhal from Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, or perhaps one of the aboriginal tribes in Orissa. She looked like a child of maybe fourteen or fifteen. From where I sat I could see down her kurta to where a tiny silver crucifix nestled between her tiny breasts. My father, who had a reflexive hostility towards Christian missionaries and their flock, would have called her Hallelujah. For all his sophistication he possessed more than just a streak of impropriety.
Enthroned in her giant watermelon, looking radiantly out at me from under her halo of tinted hair, Rolypoly gave me a whispered, incoherent account of what had happened upstairs. “I think so she is not a normal person,” she said, more than once. To be fair, perhaps she was coherent and I was hostile to the idea of hearing her out. She said something about a baby and the police (“I was dump-struck when police knocked on the door”) and bringing disrepute to the house and the entire neighborhood. It all sounded a bit vicious and far-fetched. I thanked her and left with the gift she pressed into my hands—a DVD of her husband’s latest documentary on the Dal Lake in Kashmir made for the Department of Tourism.
An hour or two later, here I am. I’ve had to bring in a locksmith from the market to fashion a key for me. In other words, I’ve had to break in. My second-floor tenant seems to have left. “Left,” if Rolypoly is to be believed, may be something of a euphemism. But then “tenant” is a euphemism too. No, we were not lovers. At no point did she ever offer me a hint that she might be open to a relationship of that sort. Had she, I don’t know myself well enough to say how things might have turned out. Because all my life, ever since I first met her all those years ago when we were still in college, I have constructed myself around her. Not around her perhaps, but around the memory of my love for her. She doesn’t know that. Nobody does, except perhaps Naga, Musa and me, the men who loved her.
I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings that connected the three of us to her and eventually to each other.
The first time I saw her was almost exactly thirty years ago, in 1984 (who in Delhi can forget 1984?), at the rehearsals of a college play in which I was acting, called Norman, Is That You? Sadly, after rehearsing it for two months we never performed it. A week before it was meant to open, Mrs. G—Indira Gandhi—was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
For a few days after the assassination, mobs led by her supporters and acolytes killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi. Homes, shops, taxi stands with Sikh drivers, whole localities where Sikhs lived were burned to the ground. Plumes of black smoke climbed into the sky from the fires all over the city. From my window seat in a bus on a bright, beautiful day, I saw a mob lynch an old Sikh gentleman. They pulled off his turban, tore out his beard and necklaced him South Africa–style with a burning tire while people stood around baying their encouragement. I hurried home and waited for the shock of what I had witnessed to hit me. Oddly, it never did. The only shock I felt was shock at my own equanimity. I was disgusted by the stupidity, the futility of it all, but somehow, I was not shocked. It could be that my familiarity with the gory history of the city I had grown up in had something to do with it. It was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it. Maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores—as clerks, tailors, plumbers, carpenters, shopkeepers—life went on as before. Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist—continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
We decided to postpone the opening of the play by a month in the hope that by then things would have settled down. But in early December tragedy struck again, this time even harder. The Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal sprang a deadly gas leak that killed thousands of people. The newspapers were full of accounts of people trying to flee the poisonous cloud that pursued them, their eyes and lungs on fire. There was something almost biblical about the nature and the scale of the horror. News magazines published photographs of the dead, the ill, the dying, the mangled and the permanently blinded, their sightless eyes eerily turned towards the cameras. Eventually we decided that the gods weren’t with us and that performing Norman would be inappropriate for the times, so the whole thing was shelved. If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation—maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. In the case of Norman, though, we didn’t need a final performance to change the course of our lives. The rehearsals turned out to be more than enough.
David Quartermaine, the director of the play, was a young Englishman who had moved to Delhi from Leeds. He was a lean, athletic and, if I may say so, devastatingly beautiful man. His blond hair fell to his shoulders, his eyes were an unreal, sapphire blue, like Peter O’Toole’s. He was stoned most of the time, and was candidly homosexual, although he never brought it up in conversation. A parade of dusky adolescent boys—the turnover was high—passed through his book-lined rooms in Defense Colony. They lounged on his bed or curled up on his rocking chair, flipping through magazines they obviously couldn’t read (he had a clear preference for proletarians). We had never seen anything remotely like it. The day we gathered in his two-room flat for the first play-reading, his silent, efficient maid had efficiently delivered her third child in his bathroom. We lived in awe of David Quartermaine, of his audacious sexuality, his collection of books, his moodiness, his mumbling and his sudden enigmatic silences, which we believed were the prerequisite characteristics of a true artist. Some of us tried to replicate that behavior in our free time, imagining we were preparing ourselves for a life in the theater. My classmate Naga, Nagaraj Hariharan, was cast as Norman. I was to play his lover, Garson Hobart. (In the early rehearsals we hammed it up more than just a little. I suppose in our young, stupid way we were trying to signal that we weren’t really homosexual.) We were both finishing our master’s in history at Delhi University. As a consequence of his parents and mine being friends (his father was in the Foreign Service, mine was a senior heart surgeon), Naga and I had been together through school and now university. Like most such children we were never close friends. We didn’t dislike each other, but our relationship had always been more than a little adversarial.