it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a chikan tablecloth, ornamented with white-on-white flowers, that my mother gave for the writer.
He was annoyed even before we sat down. My mother had asked him for eight; he had arrived with his wife and shooting stick some ten or fifteen minutes past eight. Shabby Singh, in a black and red cotton sari, her large red bindi fiery that night, her politically grey hair in a tight bun, had come by eight thirty. She brought her husband, a small Sikh gentleman in a yellow kurta. Sanyogita and I were on time as well. But Chamunda was late, very late.
At nine, the writer, unaware that Chamunda was coming, but seeming to anticipate a general tendency on the subcontinent for late, drunken dinners, said, ‘Udaya, we’ll eat soon, won’t we? We’ll eat soon.’
‘Yes, of course,’ my mother said, covering his small, firm hand with her jewelled one.
‘Good, good,’ he said.
My mother, intercepting me on the way to the bar, sent me to take her place and dashed off into another room to call Chamunda. An urgent exchange was faintly overheard. She emerged a few minutes later, with a strange, nervous smile playing on her lips. She took the writer’s wife aside, and, in Punjabi, rapidly recounted the outcome of her conversation. The writer, who had been talking to me a moment ago about the bronzes, now let the conversation between us die and turned his attention gravely to the women talking. His eyes seemed shut, and though he hardly understood the language they spoke, he drank in every word. His lower lip quivered and his expression became so dark that his wife could not continue listening to my mother. She turned to her husband with a large, prepared smile and said, ‘Darling, Udaya is just telling me that Chamunda, her school friend whom you like so much, the Chief Minister of… Where is it?’
‘Jhaatkebaal,’ my mother offered.
‘Jhaatkebaal! Is coming to dinner tonight.’
‘Oh, good,’ the writer said coldly. ‘When?’
‘Darling,’ the writer’s wife said, agitation thick in her voice, ‘she’s had some problem in her state, the discussion in the Assembly has gone on longer than she expected. Bas, she’ll be here any minute.’
‘Amrita, I’m not a child. If I get home past a certain point, if I am forced to drink too much, the following day is ruined. Ruined.’ Then turning to me, he said, so everyone could hear, ‘Amrita speaks to me as though I’m a child, as though I could be fooled into believing I haven’t been waiting one hour.’
The room fell silent. The writer’s wife was close to tears. She reached for some nuts. The writer saw this and smiled. ‘Amrita eats nuts,’ he said to me, but again for all to hear, nodding his head slightly. ‘She eats nuts; she likes to eat nuts.’ The Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta, perhaps vicariously enjoying this bit of conjugal derision, of which he himself seemed incapable, laughed uproariously.
‘Shut up, Tunnu,’ his wife barked, fixing him with a stern look.
It was nearly nine thirty when the front door swung open and a mobile phone conversation, complete with bouts of wicked laughter, was brought leisurely to an end behind the stained-glass doors that separated our tiny hall from the drawing room. For a few seconds, everyone’s eyes watched the double doors, the wicks of candles burning through their coloured panes. Then they flew open, coughing out Raunak Singh with his great moustaches, kohled eyes and gold earrings, and his boss, still, at this time of year, in chiffon. And what chiffon! The colour she wore was hardly different from her own, a chocolate brown, with tie-dyed diamonds of reddish-orange. She wore little bits of gold in and on her ears, nose and fingers, her straight black butt-length hair was open, her giant eyes wide over her face.
Chamunda, who moments ago had been late and rude, was now like a girl of sixteen, biting her lip from shyness at facing a room full of people. The writer had watched Chamunda’s entrance carefully, seeming to record every detail, and now, as she went over to shake his hand and apologize for being late, deciding in the last instant to give him a brief hug, an amazing change came over him. The old writer began to laugh. A deep, asthmatic, rolling laugh rose from his depths, and like those whistles that only dogs can hear, diffused the tension in the room. ‘Beautiful, beautiful, all beautiful,’ he muttered to himself as Chamunda, after Sanyogita and I had risen to touch her feet, took my place next to him.
Dinner – shami kebabs, baby aubergine, cumin potatoes, lentils, raita, okra and chicken curry – was served very soon after. On the way to the table, Shabby pushed her way up to Chamunda. ‘Where… where were you?’ she said, prodding her. ‘Not at a prayer service for yourself, I hope.’ At this, her whole body shook with laughter. ‘The divine Chamunda,’ she sniggered, as though wishing for the writer, still finding his place on the table, to hear.
‘Shabby, I don’t know if TVDelhi considers this news, but there have been bombs in my state -’
‘One bomb!’ Shabby interjected. ‘And that also a very small one.’
‘There has been an encounter, a man from Sectorpur was killed, there are rumours of a backlash.’
‘What about the two young boys who were killed?’ Shabby demanded. ‘What about that backlash?’
‘They were terrorists, Shabby.’
‘Terrorists, my foot. Show me the evidence. Where’s the evidence? Just two poor Muslim boys framed by your police because they’re too incompetent to catch the real guys.’
Chamunda gave my mother a look as if to say, ‘Put this woman far away from me or I can’t be held responsible for the consequences.’ And, as my mother was in the process of seating everyone, it was easy to separate them. The writer went between my mother and Chamunda; the Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta between the writer’s wife and Sanyogita. With three men and four women, it was a difficult placement, and though Chamunda and Shabby could have been put further apart, any further and they would have been face to face. And so my mother, counting on me and the curvature of the dining table to ease the tension, put them on either side of me.
Shabby, perhaps sensing why the placement had been made the way it had, let drop her conversation with Chamunda and picked it up in a different tone with the writer.
‘What do you think, Mr Vijaipal, of this dastardly situation we’re in, here, in India?’
The writer, putting away small quantities of yellow dal with a teaspoon, wiped his lips. For a few moments, his mouth seemed softly to run over the words he was about to give Shabby. Then as if finding them too complicated, he began more simply. ‘I think it’s a difficult situation, a unique situation in fact. Unique, yes, unique. I’ll tell you why. You don’t have a Muslim-majority population, like Pakistan and the Arab countries, but neither is your Muslim minority an immigrant population, like with the European countries and North America. This makes for a special tension…’ He broke off, and as if articulating this tension directly was proving too hard, came at it from another angle. ‘I was in England when they had their bombings. I felt then that the great shock was not the bombings themselves, but the headlines the following day.’ Making the shape of a lengthening rectangle with his hands to indicate a headline, he said, ‘They were all British!’ The description had its impact and the table was silent. The writer, now only warming up, said, ‘The shock of being attacked by one’s own people, you know, the shock of being attacked by one’s own. Very hard, you know, very hard.
‘The English to some extent could distance themselves, knowing that the people who attacked them, though legally British citizens, were immigrants. That made it easier to bear. They had come to Britain no more than fifty years before. To undo that history would be no great thing. But in India we’re talking about that same feeling, the feeling of being attacked by one’s own, and the tension that arises from that, except in India we’re talking about a non-immigrant population that constitutes nearly 15 per cent of the whole population. And of course a thousand years of history, bad history, most of it obscured or not dealt with.
This last remark concerning the tearing apart of the country was understood on the table in very different ways. Somewhat elated, Shabby said, ‘I know, I know. I keep telling these saffron-types that this was never a country; the British made it a country. It can never be ruled as one country. It must be ruled in small, manageable portions.’
‘You want it to be partitioned again,’ Chamunda flared, ‘why don’t you come out and say it? Do you see, Mr Vijaipal, what our so-called “intellectuals” want?’
The writer, seeming to filter many ideas at once, muttered, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Yes, yes, what?’ Shabby badgered him.
The writer answered her by ignoring her. Raising his old lion’s face up to Chamunda’s, a comic gleam entering his eyes, he said, ‘I think they would like to make India destroyable. Isn’t that right, Chamunda? That’s what they’re trying to do, yes?’
Chamunda clapped her hands like a little girl. She took the writer’s huge face in her soft brown hands, with
