I now wonder at my extreme reaction. But Mark’s insecurity and self-aggrandizement wasn’t what I, after years of my own private struggles, wanted to be involved with when my own equanimity, the balance I had arrived at in Dharamshala, was so fragile. I did not want it to be threatened — particularly by something that was an echo from my time in Benares.
3
BUT WHEN A PARCEL from Miss West came one cold autumn morning, I thought of Benares again, and the feeling came over me of having left something incomplete and unresolved.
Inside the parcel there was a brown-paper-wrapped packet that looked like a book; there was also a postcard with a picture of Benares, a badly printed generic picture of the ghats, with a few lines scrawled on the back.
It was a very brief letter. But it had something of her bantering manner, and it broke into my placid routine with unexpected power.
I read the lines over and over until they became a meaningless jingle in my head. They said,
Dear Friend,
Just found out from Mark where you have been hiding all this time. Benares isn’t the same without you. Do come for a visit sometime. I’d love to see you again and catch up with your news.
Love,
Diana
PS Lots of new CDs here!
PPS I enclose something for you that someone left here for you ages ago.
Before the postcard came, I had been thinking of what Mark had told me about Miss West. I had once envied her for her great luck, for living her life, as I saw it, in ever-new glamorous settings. But what I had seen as luck had come with its own special burden, its own store of disappointments and frustrations, and now that burden, which Miss West was to carry for the rest of her life, made the luck seem tainted.
I hadn’t realized this, and I wondered again at how much in other people’s lives I had either missed or not been equipped to see at all. While in Benares, I had remained busy with monitoring the many different registers of my own feeling and thinking self, and later, when that phase of my life ended, I became preoccupied with the next one. Other people were reduced to minor figures in this large drama of the self; they ceased to exist for themselves. My vision of them kept shrinking, and some of them, like Rajesh, for instance, had dropped altogether out of memory.
I had last seen Rajesh on the ghats on my last day, speaking to the terrified young student about the illusion and the void. I was full of other things then; I had kept my distance from him.
I now unwrapped the packet inside Miss West’s parcel to find the Penguin Classics paperback of Sentimental Education and the xerox copy of Wilson’s essay on Flaubert that I had once lent Rajesh.
That moment was the first time in years I had thought of Rajesh. I imagined he waited for me at the library, and then, after I failed to appear for several weeks, he must have gone to Panditji’s house to return the book and the essay. I wondered if he had met Miss West, and if he had, was he puzzled by her in the way I was years ago, when I saw her sitting out on the roof in the evening listening to music.
I put the book behind the framed and garlanded picture of the Dalai Lama with the row of novels that I no longer read. I almost threw away the essay after it had been lying on a side table for some time; it ended up in a file of xeroxed pages I rarely looked at.
Then one evening in the town, I went to a travel agency to arrange for a school excursion and ran into Pratap. He was one of Rajesh’s hangers-on from a nearby village, one of those students who used to sit under the giant banyan tree outside the university and gossip about prohibitive dowries and corrupt civil servants. Pratap had completed his several attempts at the Civil Service examination and was now a tour guide for Indian tourists. He travelled with them on buses across several states: a hard and poorly paid job and very remote from the dreams of power and affluence that he, along with many others, would have had in Benares.
He was wearing a floppy white cricket cap over a bright red windcheater, his imitation blue levis sat loose on his thin frame and his thick sneakers in fluorescent colours seemed too big on his feet. He was embarrassed when I recognized him, and it was out of this embarrassment that he began to speak of Rajesh. He hadn’t seen him for many months now, but he had news of him from other people. Rajesh was now more notorious than ever.
Why notorious, I wondered? I had always known about his connection to Vijay, the Allahabad student politician who had sent me to see him. I had seen the pistols in his room and wondered about his connection to the rioters and the strange people who came to visit him in the Ambassador with tinted windows. But I hadn’t thought of him as notorious.
Pratap looked at me with some puzzlement. He said he thought I knew all about Rajesh. I said I didn’t. The misunderstanding was to be soon cleared.
Pratap had seen me as an intimate friend of Rajesh’s, and now, as he spoke, he grew increasingly surprised at how little I knew of his life. He was surprised that I didn’t know while in Benares that Rajesh was a member of a criminal gang specializing in debt collection on behalf of a group of local moneylenders and businessmen.
Although I was taken aback, I realized that it did explain his long mysterious absences from Benares, the pistols in his room. I had attributed the absences to a secret mistress hidden away somewhere, but the pistols had unnerved me. I remembered, too, the sinister-looking Ambassador, and from this sudden rush of memories emerged one of Arjun, Panditji’s errant son, whom I had once seen badly injured. Rajesh had said that Arjun was trying to mortgage a house that didn’t belong to him, and he had asked me lots of questions about him. How did he know all this? Was Rajesh involved in beating Arjun?
I asked Pratap. He couldn’t remember at first, and then as his memory returned he looked amazed at my ignorance. He said that Rajesh had taken on the commission of roughing up Arjun basically to keep him from troubling me.
These commissions, Pratap went on, were a good steady business. Once confronted with the possibility of violence, people paid up very quickly, or did whatever you asked them to, without involving the police.
But then Rajesh had graduated to something riskier, and at this point, although shocked and bewildered by what I had already been told, I was not prepared for what I heard next.
Pratap saw the disbelief on my face. He seemed to be enjoying it as his voice grew more dramatic. At some stage, he said, pausing after every word, Rajesh had turned himself into a contract killer. It was an extremely well-paid profession, also a well-connected one. You worked for small-time contractors, who in turn worked for wealthy industrialists. These businessmen also did favours for local political bosses, who did not always rely on their own private armies.
Pratap went on, a strange excitement glistening on his face. You got to know everyone well after a few years in the business. But there were problems. You worked for all these important people, yet you were always on your own. The chances of survival weren’t very high. Sooner or later, the police came to hear of you. Fierce loyalties of caste and clan ensured that every murder would be avenged.
It was what would happen to Rajesh, he said. He could see now an ambush of the kind often reported in the local papers: Rajesh would be on his motorcycle when four men would surround him at a busy intersection in the old city and shoot him dead.
I was suddenly appalled by this turn in our conversation, by the prurient way in which Pratap imagined Rajesh’s fate.