I stayed in my room all day — it was too hot to sit out in the sun for long stretches — and randomly browsed through books that seemed either to match my mood or to offer a palliative to it.
The thought of my ailing father came occasionally to me, and brought with it fresh pangs of guilt and self-reproach. I hadn’t dared read the note again. It lay next to my bed, and every time I saw it I wondered if I should go to him immediately. But the idea wasn’t allowed to linger long, and was crowded out, as it was, by thoughts of Catherine.
I had stopped going to Catherine’s house. It was her own wish. She said she felt uncomfortable and nervous being with Anand and me under the same roof. She wished to see me separately. I didn’t complain. It was difficult for me as well to see her with Anand. I never had much to say to him and in the couple of times I met him after my return from Kalpi, that inability had turned into self-reproach. I wasn’t able to face him with an unclouded mind; guilt and unease hung over even the most commonplace of conversations between us.
I would see Catherine in one of those modernized sweetshops-cum-cafés that were just beginning to replace the old sooty halwai stalls in Benares. It was she who suggested it. She seemed to imply that there was no question of our meeting in any place more private.
There at the sweetshop we talked for a half-hour or less over cups of milky tea. Catherine was always full of fresh news regarding her plans for France — plans steadily progressing now. Her parents had agreed to help her find a flat; she was to leave soon, in a few weeks if Anand’s passport came through. Each one of these developments infused her with new energy; a seeming nod from her father about anything could make her day.
She would come into the café, beads of perspiration on her forehead, an embroidered bag hanging from her shoulder, and give me a quick furtive kiss on the cheek as the owner, sitting under a profusely garlanded framed photo of his father or grandfather, absent-mindedly swatted the flies whining around the gleaming glass cases, and the underworked waiters, grime-stained hand towels draped over their shoulders, looked out blankly at the bright empty street outside.
These meetings left me weary with unexpressed emotion. I wished nothing less while they lasted than to recapture the intimacy we had known, however briefly, in Kalpi. This desire — which arose fresh and was thwarted every time we met — was only partly physical. Its most compelling aspect was that mysterious affinity I’d known. It was something I had never known before, except as a witness, when I saw, with wonder and curiosity, Catherine and Anand together. In my memory, it had become part of the wonderful strangeness of the time — the bizarre concatenation of events and desires and emotions that, among other things, had made two full-grown adults revert to the long-forgotten language of childhood.
A part of me also wished, in some vague yet optimistic way, to talk about the future, about where we saw ourselves in the next few years. I could not bring it up myself. I feared being presumptuous, and I feared, too, the harsh truths such a line of thought might expose me to.
Catherine made scarcely any reference to what had happened between us; the terrible thought often came to me that the time in Kalpi, unforgettable for me, had already been forgotten by her. I wondered then if for her it had become yet another of the inconsequential experiences she had disclosed to me, a minor distraction that would soon be swallowed up by other memories from her long, eventful past.
Often, listening to her speak about Anand and her anxieties, I felt full of resentment. I felt with greater intensity what I had dimly recognized the first time I saw her with her friends: that her life previous to Benares had a greater claim on her, and the person with very ordinary concerns was more authentic and tangible than the person who had bestowed her gift of tenderness and happiness on me.
But then she would, in the midst of speaking of other matters, offer one of her endearments — French, but rendered quaint in English — her eyes suddenly full of concern for me and our ‘beautiful friendship’, as she called it, and my discontent would subside for some time.
But not for long. I imagined her going back to her house, through the crowded alleys, past the sadhu and the halwai, up the stairs with the mural, to the room where Anand lay half-propped on bolsters, and the thought of this other life of hers, with its greater, more significant intimacies, would once again plunge me into gloom.
I would make my own way back to Assi. I went through the ghats; I avoided the alleys, whose bright liveliness in the evening — the men playing cards or chess, the groups of loudly bantering men at tea shops, the snatches of sitar or sarod music floating out of open windows — depressed me. In my mind, I would keep thinking of things Catherine had said to me, turning them over, searching for signs of affection, and feeling more disappointed and saddened than before.
The hole in my stomach growing large, I loitered on the ghats until it was dark, among a mixed company of touts and drug pushers; washermen gathering clothes that had rested on the stone steps all afternoon, white and sparkling in the sun; groups of children playing hopscotch on the chalk-marked stone floor; a few late bathers, dressing and undressing under tattered beach umbrellas; and the groups of old men, silently gazing at the darkening river.
As I came back to the house, walking down the dark alley that led to it, I would be suffused by a strange sense of anticipation; the sense that there might be something, someone — a letter, a person, a telegram — waiting inside, who or which at one stroke would change my life for ever and, leaping across all the intermediate steps, transport me instantly into a world cleansed free of such exacting cares and anxieties.
Each time I would meet with a keener sense of disappointment as, after washing my hands downstairs in a tiny dark washroom, where the floor was slippery with slime and often caused Panditji’s students to fall, I would go up to the second floor, where Mrs Pandey and Shyam sat waiting, and settle down on the floor to eat the unvarying meal of dhal, chapati and sabzi.
Wearily each evening I watched Shyam garnish the dhal in his slow methodical way. He warmed the ghee in a small steel bowl, added some sliced onion and garlic and cumin and coriander seeds; he tilted back a bit, his eyes half-shut, his lips curled, as sparks of ghee and blackened cumin seeds flew out of the bowl with a loud fizz and crackle; then, after the fumes from the bowl began to grow steadily thicker and rise — filling the room with an aroma that was to be for ever associated in my mind with the restlessness of those days — after the onion and garlic turned a deep golden-brown, he would tremulously lift the bowl with a steel pincer and gently pour it into the brass tureen, where, after a brief noisy protest, the ghee would tamely spread across the watery surfaces of the dhal.
*
I now heard a special reproach in Shyam’s voice when he said, ‘Greed is the biggest evil, it destroys families, sunders son from parents, husband from wife. .’
Something of a cautionary message also came to me from a book I was reading at the time. There are certain books we read which, no matter how celebrated or acclaimed, make little or no impression on us. It is because, intellectually and emotionally, we aren’t ready for them; our experience and understanding of ourselves and the world isn’t rich and deep enough to match that of the writer.
I had first read Sentimental Education, a novel by Gustave Flaubert, a couple of years earlier. I had bought a secondhand 1950s edition of it for twenty rupees from a pavement seller in Allahabad. The name of the first owner and the red rubber stamp of the bookseller, Wheeler’s, were still legible on the flyleaf, and from the pages, when I opened them, fluttered out pressed rose petals. I had been attracted by the prestige of the writer’s name and that of the publishing imprint, Penguin Classics. But the novel had passed me by, like many other books at the time: it had struck me as flat and overly long. I did persevere to the very end, but it was with the bloody-mindedness with which a man might finish a marathon long after he has run out of energy. After that the book had mouldered on my shelf with some other conscientiously read but unabsorbed books.