She extended a hand; it was cold and clammy to the touch.
She said, ‘I am going away in a couple of weeks. Back to England.’
I nodded, and she said nothing more. She hadn’t talked about leaving Benares to me. But she knew that I knew.
She kept her hand in mine for a few more wordless moments.
‘Goodbye,’ she said at last.
And then added, ‘Come and visit me in England. We shall. .’
She appeared to pause in mid sentence, but then said nothing more.
The rickshaw driver mounted his seat. I felt Miss West withdraw her hand. The roving headlight of a scooter illuminated her pale serene face for a brief instant, and then darkness moved in.
The rickshaw moved off with a brief jerk. I felt something well up inside me.
As I watched, the rickshaw lurched away and soon melted into the tumultuous traffic ahead. I was turning to go when I suddenly remembered that this was where I had once stood with Miss West in the middle of a festive afternoon, waiting anxiously for Catherine. I remembered how flustered I had been when Catherine finally appeared, how the freshness and grace of her face always came to me as a little shock each time. I turned back and there, between two white temples, was the entrance to the lane with the matt-haired sadhu and the house with the Ram-Sita mural, and I remembered how I would walk through the bustling ghats and alleys to Catherine’s home, with that anticipatory thrill in my heart, and it all came back to me in a rush: the empty days, the long smoky-blue twilights, the flickering fluorescent light and the pigeons in their neat rows, the voices from the alley floating up to the small room with the gleaming sitar in one corner, all that slow leisurely life of old Benares, and the furtive tender growth inside me; and I felt sad, and full of mourning for the past, for that pure time of desires and dreams I knew when I first came to Benares and lived in a crumbling old house by the river.
The rain suddenly grew intense. Heavy hard drops fell on the back of my neck. I turned around to look for another rickshaw; there was none in sight.
I ran towards an autorickshaw I saw standing in one corner, and then sat back, panting slightly as the driver plunged, weaving and pirouetting, into the swarming chaos of running pedestrians, rickshaws, cycles and scooters.
The rain flowed down the windscreen, which the driver kept wiping with a rag that lay on the dashboard. Gleamingly vivid for one moment, the streets dissolved into smudgy fluorescent colours the next. Passing scooters and autorickshaws kept spraying thick jets of muddy water from the waterlogged road into the back seat.
We finally arrived at the hotel, after lurching and splashing through an unknown maze of potholed dark back alleys. There was no power in the area, and the big white concrete block of the hotel stood brooding dumbly over its waterlogged forecourt. Inside, all was chaos: the weak light from petromax lanterns fell on rolled-up carpets and hectic men with pails and mops. The receptionist said that I would have to wait in the lobby: the roof had leaked and some of the rooms had been flooded. He went on to describe the rest of the evening’s disasters. I only half listened. Water ran down my back; my socks were wet; my feet cold. But I was feeling quite calm.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My foremost debt is to Barbara Epstein. It would be hard to imagine this book without her support. Jason Epstein’s early confidence in The Romantics was as crucial as his later suggestions. Mary Mount at Picador was a brilliant, ever-helpful editor and I was fortunate in having such a conscientious publisher in Peter Straus. Sanjeev Saith at IndiaInk offered a very sensitive reading of the book. Hilton Als, John H. Bowles, Ulf Buchholz, Robyn Davidson, Helen Epstein, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vandana Mehrotra, Judith Miller, Nicholas Pearson and Tarun Tejpal offered valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Gillon Aitken for his encouragement through all the past few years. It has been a pleasure to work with Emma Parry and Sally Riley. I am also indebted to people who encouraged and assisted me in different ways: Robyn, Julie, William and Olivia, Norma, John, Patrick, Stuart, Chris and Sarah, Christina, the Sharmas at Mashobra, Paul, Pradip, Arundhati, Alok, Lucy, and my parents and sisters.
THE ROMANTICS
‘The atmosphere of The Romantics, from the opening page, is extraordinarily seductive. . a fine and impressive first novel’
Jason Cowley, Literary Review
‘Mishra’s writing has a lovely potency. . subtly layered and compelling first novel’
Shirley Chew, Times Literary Supplement
‘An intriguing combination of casual grace and emotional intensity, peppered with discreet social comment on caste, class, sectarian strife, the state of the nation. . this is a charming debut’
Aamer Hussein, Independent
‘A truly ambitious attempt to compare the way people in the East and the West dream — and the way they put their dreams behind them when the dreams come crashing down to earth. . Delicate and subtly tantalising in the way only a book can really be’
Vogue
‘Mishra offers a surprisingly assured, provocatively balanced meditation on the familiar culture clash, focusing on a generation of Indian youth bewildered about the value of an ancient heritage others find indispensable’
Boston Globe
‘Contemporary India is brought to vigorous, thrumming life in the pages of The Romantics’
Sunday Times
‘Mishra’s eye is sharp, his prose flawless’
Time
‘A first novel whose achievement is something that most writers could be proud of at any stage in their careers’
Vancouver Sun
‘Mishra’s lyrical descriptions of the Himalayas, Pondicherry, Allahabad and Dharamshala, and the depth of culture the region offers, is a haunting reminder of India’s power to bewitch’
Time Out
‘An extraordinary debut novel, The Romantics is a supernova in the wan firmament of recent fiction’
Washington Post
‘It is almost as if when everyone is flashing De Beers diamonds, Mishra traps the quiet luminescence of the moonstone in his theme and style’
The Hindu
‘A beautiful and moving book. Mishra deals quietly with big themes — love, loss, grief, the meeting of East and West, caste, the changes in modern India — with a delicacy and subtlety that would be impressive in an established writer’
New Straits Times (Malaysia)
‘Impressive. . The Romantics turns its back on the exotic richness and the “teeming” panoramic quality which we readily assume to be expressive of Indianness itself ’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Mishra has managed to write a novel that showcases his own distinctive voice, a voice that fuses the lapidary precision of Flaubert with the meditative lyricism of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. . a resonant and highly subtle novel’
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PANKAJ MISHRA was born in 1969. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books