The Temple-Goers

I was sending a text message, asking Aakash what the matter was, when my mother suddenly said, ‘Baba, have you called Zafar to see if he’s OK?’

The question put my back up. Both because I hadn’t spoken to Zafar since I arrived and because Sanyogita, having seen me check my phone for the third time, and guessing who it was, compressed her lips. My mother, an observer of these currents, badgered me for many minutes about how wrong it was. ‘Your poor old teacher,’ she said, ‘alone in the walled city at a time like this. How uncaring can you be, Aatish! And to a man who has given you so much, really.’

‘Ma, he’s not alone! He has a family. I’ll call him.’

‘It’s the bad Pakistani blood,’ my mother said, shaking her head, and withholding a smile, turned to Sanyogita. ‘It’s from the father. I’ve done what I can to improve it, but still it remains.’

A man in a dark jacket appeared to take our order. I ordered lamb, my mother a starter as a main course, and Sanyogita sea bass.

My mother, finding me more sensitive than she had expected, brought up the writer’s treatment of his wife, taking pleasure perhaps, after not seeing me for so long, in winding me up.

‘It can’t be easy for her,’ she said, ‘married to a man like him. He’s very demanding. It’s a twenty-four-hour job. She can’t go anywhere, you know? She’s his wife of course, but that’s it. And he can be savage to her. I’ve seen it. Stingy beyond words. She lives as he does, which is well, but I don’t think she has five rupees of her own.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but she is a writer’s wife. The man has his vocation. That’s the most important thing in his life; everything else is secondary. She married him knowing that.’

‘She’s given him her everything, given him her life,’ my mother replied, no longer playful. ‘He’s the famous writer, but what does she get out of it?’

‘To be his wife. Some men need that and some women are made to give that.’

No sooner had I made the remark than it seemed to crumble and change like one of those unstable compounds, returning to their baser elements with the slightest exposure. Defending something stupid can make the world feel beyond grasp. And that night, before my mother, the woman who’d raised me, and my girlfriend of many months, who might have considered spending the remainder of her life with me, I took a shred of a thought, this little idea that the life of vocation required the sacrifice of anyone who came within its circle, and ran with it. I poured my energy into qualifications and amendments, trying to pull out of a rhetorical train crash. My mother became grave. Sanyogita’s face shrank, till it was like a pinpoint of pain and hurt. But she didn’t say a word.

I said that certain people were touched with energies and talents that weren’t theirs, and in acting on them, they weren’t expected to meet normal standards of decency and good behaviour.

‘What about love?’ my mother said.

‘What about it?’

‘What about your responsibility to the people you love and who love you?’

Our food arrived. Sanyogita pushed behind her ear a lock of hair that had fallen forward and began quietly to pick at her fish. I thought I saw her eyes glisten. I took refuge in my lamb.

‘The person who embarks on this kind of life,’ I said at last, ‘can’t think of those things. He has to think of his vocation, whether it makes him happy or not, or those around him.’

‘That’s nonsense, Aatish. You really talk nonsense. What is life if not in the end to have been a good friend, a good wife or lover, or mother, to have a house by the sea that you love, and five beagles running about the place?’

‘Not everyone has a house by the sea and five beagles.’

‘Don’t be cussed, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean to have lived a full, balanced life, to be surrounded in the end by the things you love.’

‘It’s funny you mention that, the being surrounded in the end by things you love. Almost exactly the same conversation came up at the end of the museum visit the other day. And the writer said he wanted to die, like Van Gogh, “with hatred for no one and love for his art”. Perhaps that’s the difference, wanting in the end to be surrounded by art you love and which you have spent a lifetime creating, rather than by things you love.’

Sanyogita, who hadn’t said a word so far, who had driven me to the depths of despair with her silence, said at last, ‘What about the people who give their lives supporting you?’

I was about to speak when she anticipated me and stopped me.

‘Who do it not from any sense of vocation, but out of love. Only out of love.’

At that moment, my phone vibrated for the tenth time.

I said, ‘I don’t know, baby. This is not personal or about me. Listen, I’m going to take this call because there seems to be some kind of serious problem. It’s been ringing all evening. Will you excuse me for a second?’

And so, in this way I tried to put a rushed, modern ending to a conversation which, when I later tried to downplay to my mother, describing it as a slip of the tongue, she further described as, ‘Yes, but a very revealing one.’

In the lobby outside, Aakash, using a Hinglish classic, said, ‘Aatish, man, I’m taking a lot of tension.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked, beginning now to think of my own problems.

‘Megha just called me. Her brother knows for sure.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He just confronted Megha.’

‘Saying what?’

‘ “We sent you there,” ’ Aakash began, employing his distinctive ability to take on other personas, ‘ “to get into shape so that you could make a good match, not so that you could run off with the gym trainer. Who is he? He is nothing. He doesn’t know his station. If I wanted I could call Deepak…” ’

‘Who’s Deepak, Aakash?’

‘The owner, man. The fucker with the ponytail. “I could call Deepak,” Aakash said, stepping back into character, ‘ “and have him thrown into the street, his legs broken. The only reason I’m not doing it is because I don’t want a public embarrassment. But end this relationship this minute, I warn you. Mummy has high blood pressure. If she gets to know her daughter has run off with such a low-grade person, it would kill her. You have one younger sister. Think of her. Do you realize you’re compromising her marriage prospects as well?” ’

‘He said all this?’

‘Yes, man! I think they’re going to disappear her if we don’t do something.’

‘Maybe you should back off?’

‘Whaddyou saying, man? We have once to live, once to die. We’ll love once too.’

‘Aakash, stop giving me these bullshit filmy lines.’

‘They’re not filmy. There’s another reason; I’ll explain later. What should I do, man? If her brother tells Junglee, I’m gone. Taking too much tension.’

‘What kind of man is her brother? Big, small? Could he have you killed, your legs broken?’

‘That homo, no chance! Aatish, man, he’s a gay. And I have my people too, in Sectorpur. You’ve seen the guy. What can he do to me?’

‘I’ve seen the guy? Where?’

‘In Junglee only. A friend of Sparky Punj’s? He even came that time to Sanyogita’s house. Remember, when -’

‘Who?’

‘Lul! The guy we call Lul. Kris, Krishna. He is Megha’s brother.’

‘What? Lul is Megha’s brother? Aakash, how could you not have told me?’

‘I didn’t tell you? I must have!’

It was a suppression of truth greater than a lie. It didn’t just alter one reality but several that had come before. And it was the multiple deceptions contained in this one deception that gave it its particular sting, the sting of making me feel like a fool. It was also the reason it had been kept from me. It made Aakash seem like a man with secrets, a man playing for higher stakes, someone who didn’t need to make confidences to friends. I wanted very much in that instant to turn away from him for good. How easy it would have been in this slippery-floored lobby, into which he’d never come, with my mother and girlfriend in the other room, to get a new trainer and never think again of Aakash. I could turn away and he would vanish.

There was also, beyond questions of truth and lies, my genuine amazement that Megha and the creative writer