He wanted to talk more, and was moving towards a tea stall, when I realized that I needed to be alone. Pratap couldn’t have told me anything significantly more about Rajesh, and given his overly excitable mood, I didn’t want to encourage him further.
I said I had to attend to some urgent work at the school, and slipped away so quickly that there was no time for Pratap even to suggest, as I knew he wished to, another meeting. He did appear a bit hurt by my sudden great desire to part from him, and I thought later that perhaps I had been unfair. There was nothing premeditated about his malice towards Rajesh. He was speaking out of his own frustrations, the sense of having reached a dead end in his own life.
It also occurred to me afterwards that I should have asked him about Rajesh’s current whereabouts, and I thought at the same time of the futility of the request, had I indeed made it. That part of my life was over. I did not plan to return to Benares.
I wondered if I should write to Rajesh, but simultaneously felt the incongruity of such a correspondence. What would I say? It was hard for me to think about Rajesh in a focused way even though he had been a major presence in the other life I lived at the university. It was hard, too, to disentangle him from the mass of suppressed memories.
Instead, I kept thinking about what Pratap had told me. My mind was filled with banal images I knew well from those Benares papers: they formed the usual pattern of daylight murder in the city. I kept seeing Rajesh at that busy crossing, trapped in the dense swarm of scooters, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, cars, buses, trucks and bicycles, the four men converging upon him, producing pistols from their pockets. .
*
A few weeks passed. I kept thinking about Rajesh, and then one day wrote to Pratap to ask him his whereabouts. He replied almost immediately: a short note saying that he had just met Rajesh after many years. He had told Rajesh about his unexpected meeting with me in Dharamshala; he had also passed on my address to him and mentioned my desire to be in touch again.
And then one day a letter came from Rajesh himself. The envelope was postmarked Mirzapur, and did not have a return address. Inside there were a few paragraphs on a piece of lined paper.
Dear Brother,
It is one of the great mysteries of life that I should hear of you again after so many years. Pratap told me about you, the special path you have chosen, in which you appear to be content. I knew when I first met you that you’d somehow break out of the world we knew, that you would go on to do different things. That you have done so makes me very happy.
Pratap said you asked about my mother. I have sad news to offer. She passed away three years ago. I was with her during the last days of her life. The final rites were in Benares. She often asked me about you. She didn’t have too many visitors at her house, and whenever someone showed up she would remember for years afterwards. After her death, I moved from Benares to Mirzapur. But I am rarely there. I travel a lot and I don’t stay in any place for too long. Pratap said that you would like to meet me. This is awkward for me. Do not misunderstand me when I say that any meeting between us, even if practically possible, would put you in a very difficult position. I wish it was otherwise but the life I have chosen has shut me off from many things I valued in the past. You, who liked reading so much, would be unhappy to know that I don’t read anything apart from newspapers. I have no friends left from my time in Benares.
The city is a foreign place for me now. But I can’t write or think too much about this. After all these years, life is no more than a habit, it is not a subject for reflection. I simply go on. I do not think much about what I do or what I have become. On certain days I remember those lines of Faiz, ‘This is not that long-looked-for break of day/Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades/set out. .’ But how many of us can say they have reached that dawn — so, I am not alone, there are millions of us, and this is a source of consolation. I hope you’ll understand and forgive me.
Your elder brother,
Rajesh
I had never seen his handwriting before. He wrote a beautiful Devanagari script, and there was an elegant formality in his prose which I thought would have come to him from the Urdu poetry he read. And that wasn’t the only unexpected thing about the letter. I had imagined him as someone cut off from his old life of ruminative reading, someone inevitably undermined by rough times, by the brutalities of his trade, and I had expected a more direct statement about the unsuitability of our meeting. Such a considered response made me wonder if I had ever really known him.
The bigger revelation still lay in the future.
The letter had confirmed what I already suspected: that no further contact with Rajesh was possible. And it had begun to fade from memory until a few weeks later.
One day I was looking through old files for a missing receipt from the school when I came across the xeroxed copy of Wilson’s essay on Flaubert. I was casually flipping through the pages when I saw some passages underlined in red. I could never bring myself to mark up printed text, out of an old and automatic reverence I had for the printed word. It could only have been Rajesh.
I read the underlined sentences:
Frédéric is only the more refined as well as the more incompetent side of the middle-class mediocrity of which the dubious promoter represents the more flashy and active aspect. And so in the case of the other characters, the journalists and the artists, the members of the nobility, Frédéric finds the same shoddiness and lack of principle which are gradually revealed in himself. .
The passage went on. But I was struck more by the underlining. What had the words said to Rajesh, I wondered?
On another page of the essay, the underlined passage read:
Flaubert’s novel plants deep in our mind an idea which we never quite get rid of: the suspicion that our middle-class society of manufacturers, businessmen and bankers, of people who live on or deal in investments, so far from being redeemed by its culture, have ended by cheapening and invalidating all the departments of culture, political, scientific, artistic and religious, as well as corrupting and weakening the ordinary human relations: love, friendship and loyalty to cause — till the whole civilization seems to dwindle.
Wilson’s denunciation of capitalism here had an old-fashioned Marxist ring. Nevertheless it was a good passage in that it offered a small glimpse of Wilson’s way of finding connections between life and literature. But why had Rajesh underlined it? Again, how had he interpreted it?
I thought of the day I went to visit Rajesh’s village; I had remembered from it only the boy I saw in the mango grove, the boy who came to symbolize my aspirations for a quiet, restful life. Some other memories bubbled up now: the steam-engined train chugging away through stubbly fields, coils of smoke torpid above little huts; his mother’s tiny room, with its calendars of Shiva and Krishna; her conversation about Rajesh’s past; and Rajesh’s own words about Sentimental Education on the journey back to Benares, the coal embers darting past us in the dark, words I had dismissed as exaggeration, the hard, determined look on his face as he said, ‘It is the story of my life. I know these people well. Your hero, Edmund Wilson, he also knows them.’
*
What had he meant by that?
It took some time to decipher these remarks. My mind kept probing them in idle moments, but it was only when — overcoming my fear of novels — I decided to reread Sentimental Education that I began to arrive at some kind of answer.
I eventually saw that there had been purpose behind Rajesh’s invitation to his home, his decision to reveal so frankly his life to me. Even the remarks about Sentimental Education and Wilson on the train: he wanted me to know that not only had he read the novel, he had drawn, with Wilson’s help, his own conclusions from it.