That evening, like almost every other evening, they had to go to a party. One part of her mind in a state of febrile blankness, the other part carefully chose a sari from the folded piles and the ones listlessly dangling in their many concentrated colours from hangers, a subdued Chanderi, of a faint glowing green that bordered on white; then, swiftly, efficiently, a drawer unlocked and opened, went through the ritual of jewellery-wearing. It was the humiliation she minded; not of herself, but of her husband; she had outgrown her parents and her brothers and her friends, but not him. In her mind, in spite of his defects, he had always been infallible; to see him deceived like anybody else was shocking. She was almost proud, though, that his most glaring shortcoming was naivety, trusting the wrong people, gauging the others by the standards of his simplicity (for that was how she saw him, as a simple man); or would he have courted Laxmi Ratan Shukla for so long, hoping this taciturn man would produce her disc? Already, she began to make small readjustments to her understanding of the husband she’d known for twenty-nine years. Really, with hindsight, she marvelled that a man as simple as he had been as successful as he was.
They were to have dinner at the Danish Consul’s house; the Danish Ambassador, whoever he was, was visiting. The card, with the black, self-conscious, italicised letters embossed on white, had arrived, and the envelope been opened, two weeks ago. Dinners at these Europeans’ residences were, at times, a little easier to bear; her hosts instinctively sensed her reserve and dignity, and were unconcerned and ignorant of her small-town background; she had nothing special to say, and they liked her for it. Tonight she had to put on a sort of show; she mustn’t think she had only another week as a Managing Director’s wife; at the same time, she must be herself. She shivered with contained anger at the thought of running into Raman and his wife; how easily, decorously, unremarkably, everything had changed between yesterday and now for both them and her. Yet nothing had changed; life was as it was.
Often, that evening, as she sat seemingly self-contained and complete with a glass of sweet sherry upon the sofa, she had to control herself. She smiled determinedly and blankly when the Ambassador’s wife described to her in fond detail, the homesickness in her voice politely, expertly, transformed into anecdote, her two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, whom she’d left behind in Copenhagen. The Consul’s flat was on the third floor of a grand, cool art deco building on an elevation in Breach Candy; the hosts had kept the windows open for the sea breeze to breathe through their transitory posting and its convivial gatherings, and often Mallika Sengupta found herself being fanned by nature, a vast, gentle solace coming out of nowhere; a large doorway opened invitingly onto the semicircular balcony, a dim promontory that jutted out into the compound’s protected darkness.
The food was a diversion; an instance, as ever, of buoyant self-absorption and fantasy in the cricket-infested nighttime of these seven conjoined islands. An invisible cook, quite likely from Kerala, had been given free rein and command. She’d, of course, had no inkling that the Danish had a cuisine; she had a vague conception that they had hams and sausages and cold cuts. But the soup, a milky broth that a bearer took around in bowls, calmed her greatly. They could have served her anything tonight, and she would have connected it with Denmark. Tears formed spontaneously in her eyes; they dried by themselves, no one around her noticing them; even she was hardly aware of them. The change in their lives was a secret, but she wouldn’t mind if it weren’t; already she’d begun to accept how things would be from tomorrow. The buffet appeared, with its daunting array of cold meat; the eager carnivores made a beeline for it, glasses balanced forgetfully in one hand. Among the long china dishes was one that held a smoky mass, which Mrs Sengupta paused at, thinking it was some sort of confection. She broke its surface stealthily with a spoon and transferred some to her plate. Eating it later, she was puzzled; it tasted very delicately of fish. It was fish mousse; in all her years, she’d eaten nothing like it.
* * *
THERE WAS no great change the following day; from afar, Nirmalya could see Jumna squatting at one end of the drawing room, cutting swathes across the floor with the grey wet rag. Nirmalya was unperturbed they’d be leaving Thacker Towers. Then, the day passed and dwindled, the hard glitter of the Arabian Sea and the curving panorama visible from the balcony becoming the inevitable scattered nighttime dazzle.
More and more, he felt philosophy was his future; that he had to have his say on various mysteries — God, Being, consciousness, the self, etcetera. He’d long finished the chapters on Croce and Santayana and Nietzsche in The Story of Philosophy; he’d responded with an innocent, assenting delight to the Santayana and the Croce, but Nietzsche and Zarathustra had maddened him with incomprehension. Only Spinoza he’d formed a special fondness for, without understanding him at all, but because it seemed that he’d proved, with a logician’s tools, that God and the universe were one thing. What a wonderful hypothesis, and how magical if it should be irrefutable! He turned to a book in his father’s study, a Grolier classic (one of a handsome bound set his father had purchased from a distant, once-youthful regard for masterpieces), to read, minutely, the steps in logic by which Spinoza had demonstrated his argument: his mind glazed over. A phrase stood out, ‘God-intoxicated’, which, a note said, had been used once of the seventeenth-century philosopher. Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.
As his parents made sketchy and unserious preparations to move to the suburbs after a year, discussing it half-jokingly amongst themselves, he thought increasingly, too, of gods and the divine nature of the universe. At thirteen, he’d dismissed God as a fiction; now, through Tulsidas and Kabir and the pseudonymous authors of the classical compositions, and their constant invocation of Krishna’s lips, his eyebrows, his antic childhood, Shiva’s tangled locks, his undecipherable moods, silences, and fantastic temper, Nirmalya was made to laugh at how profligate and real the universe of the gods actually was. Unkempt, loitering in Joy Shoes sandals, he was trying to make sense of the anarchic creation of the poets. How messy that world of eternal beings was: Shiva’s matted hair infested with the moon and the Ganges, as if they’d nested there like cheap trinkets or bats rustling inside a den or ruin; and all the buttermilk spilt in Yashodha’s kitchen as Krishna rummaged clumsily among the utensils. The songs were full of such workaday calamities and disturbances.
As he walked down the driveway and then out of the gates of Thacker Towers, he’d be observed warily by the security guard, and sometimes glanced at, with sudden recognition, by the driver of his father’s Mercedes. What was this boy in the kurta all about? Neither the driver nor the guard had quite decided. The guard knew by now that Nirmalaya wasn’t a student who’d wandered into the compound, but was the son of the man on the twentieth floor who, flickering in his suit, went to work in the white Mercedes.
Nirmalya, now that his sojourn in Thacker Towers was coming to an end, felt more than ever that his home, his calling, were elsewhere. He walked past Snowman’s Ice Cream Parlour, where boys in slim-fitting trousers and girls with horizontal bits of midriff afloat playfully above their jeans laughed loudly and devoured the fragile ice-cream cones they held in their hands. Were they laughing at him? Rows of expectant motorcycles stood crowded in the parking space in the centre of the road, booming at the touch of a boy’s hand, roaring as he turned his wrist and straddled the taut, muscular epidermis of the seat, always exploding into speed rudely. He didn’t care. He was preoccupied with existence itself, with the question almost made nonsensical by repetition, ‘Why do I exist?’