Tilo was a third-year student at the Architecture School and was working on the sets and lighting design. She introduced herself to us as Tilottama. The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
I wish I knew what it was about her that disarmed me so completely and made me behave like someone I am not—solicitous, a little overeager. She didn’t look like any of the pale, well-groomed girls I knew at college. Her complexion was what the French might call café au lait (with very little lait), which, as far as most Indians were concerned, disqualified her straightaway from being considered good-looking. It’s hard for me to describe someone who has been imprinted on me, on my soul, like a stamp or a seal of some sort for so many years. I see her as I see a limb of mine—a hand, or a foot. But let me try, if only in the broadest brushstrokes. She had a small, fine-boned face and a straight nose, with pert, flared nostrils. Her long, thick hair was neither straight nor curly, but tangled and uncared for. I could imagine small birds nesting in it. It would have easily made the Before part of a Before-and-After shampoo commercial. She wore it down her back in a plait and sometimes twisted into an untidy knot at the nape of her long neck with a yellow pencil stuck through it. She wore no make-up and did nothing—none of those delightful things girls do, with their hair, or their eyes, or their mouths—to augment her looks. She wasn’t tall, but she was rangy, and she had a way of standing, with her weight on the balls of her feet, her shoulders squared, that was almost masculine, and yet wasn’t. The day I first met her she was wearing white cotton pajamas and a hideous—the hideousness somehow deliberate—printed, oversized man’s shirt that didn’t seem to belong to her. (I was wrong about that: weeks later, when we got to know each other better, she told us that it was indeed hers. That she had bought it at the second-hand clothes market outside Jama Masjid for one rupee. Naga—typically—told her that he knew from reliable sources that the clothes sold there were taken off the bodies of people who died in train accidents. She said she didn’t mind as long as there were no bloodstains.) The only jewelry she wore was a broad silver ring on a long, ink-stained middle finger and a silver toe-ring. She smoked Ganesh beedis that she kept in a scarlet Dunhill cigarette packet. She would look right through the disappointment on the faces of those who had tried to scam what they thought was an imported filter cigarette off her and ended up instead with a beedi that they were too embarrassed not to smoke, especially when she was offering to light it for them. I saw this happen a number of times, but her expression always remained impassive—there was never a smile or the exchange of an amused glance with a friend, so I never could tell whether she was playing a practical joke or whether this was just the way she did things. The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness. Behind her plain, unfashionable spectacles, her slightly slanting cat-eyes had the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac. She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked—like pets. As though she was watching considerately, somewhat absent-mindedly, from a distance, while we minced along, grateful to our owners, happy to perpetuate our bondage.
I tried to find out more about her, but she gave very little away. When I asked her what her surname was, she said her name was S. Tilottama. When I asked what S stood for she said, “S stands for S.” She evaded my indirect questions about where home was, what her father did. She didn’t speak much Hindi at the time. So I guessed South India. Her English was curiously unaccented, except that Z sometimes softened into S, so, for example, she would say “Sip” for “Zip.” I guessed Kerala.
It turned out that I was right about that. About the rest—I learned that she wasn’t being evasive; she genuinely did not have answers to those ordinary college-kid questions: Where are you from? What does your father do? Et cetera and so on. From stray wisps of conversation I gathered that her mother was a single woman whose husband had left her, or she had left him, or he was dead—it was all a bit of a mystery. Nobody seemed to be able to place her. There were rumors that she was an adopted child. And rumors that she was not. Later I learned—from a college junior, a fellow called Mammen P. Mammen, a gossipmonger from Tilo’s home town—that both rumors were true. Her mother was indeed her real mother, but had first abandoned her and then adopted her. There had been a scandal, a love affair in a small town. The man, who belonged to an “Untouchable” caste (a “Paraya,” Mammen P. Mammen whispered, as though even to say it aloud would contaminate him), had been dispensed with in the ways high-caste families in India—in this case Syrian Christians from Kerala—traditionally dispense with inconveniences such as these. Tilo’s mother was sent away until the baby was born and placed in a Christian orphanage. In a few months she returned to the orphanage and adopted her own child. Her family disowned her. She remained unmarried. To support herself she started a small kindergarten school which, over the years, had grown into a successful high school. She never publicly admitted—understandably—that she was the real mother. That was about as much as I knew.
Tilottama never went home for her holidays. She never said why. Nobody came looking for her. She paid her fees by working in architects’ offices as a draftsman after college hours and on weekends and holidays. She didn’t live in the hostel—she said she couldn’t afford it. Instead she lived in a shack in a nearby slum that was strung along the outer walls of an old ruin. None of us was invited to visit her.
During the rehearsals of Norman, she called Naga Naga, but me, for some reason, she only ever addressed as Garson Hobart. So there we were, Naga and I, students of history, wooing a girl who didn’t seem to have a past, a family, a community, a people, or even a home. Actually Naga wasn’t really wooing her. In those days he was mesmerized more by himself than anybody else. He noticed Tilo and switched on his (considerable) charm, like you might switch on the headlights of a car, only because she didn’t pay attention to him. He wasn’t used to that.