Free The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer Page B

Kanyakumari.’
    ‘I know.’ He wants to say,
More than you could ever know
, but he stops himself. ‘What can I say? People will have the past speak in ways that have more to do with the present than the past.’
    ‘You’re smart,’ she says prissily, spoiling the intimacy that has grown between them. ‘I hope to see more of you. There are not too many people in this town who – to steal a phrase from Proust – are part of “the aristocracy of the mind”.’
    He wants to get away again, but she unexpectedly says, ‘Skanda, if you’re in Delhi for a while, I’d like you to meet my son, Kartik.’
    ‘Your son? Why?’
    ‘Oh, because,’ she says, coolly, ‘I think it will be nice for him to meet a likeable Sanskritist for once. It’ll be a change after that swine, his father.’
    ‘I knew it!’ Skanda says and begins to laugh.
    ‘Knew what?’ She says defensively.
    ‘That you had married a rotter, and that it had coloured your view of Sanskrit . . .’
    ‘My view of Sanskrit is not coloured.’
    ‘Come on!’
    She laughs now too. ‘Well, a little perhaps. Yours would be too, if you lived with an abusive little shit who thought he was Shiva, and found all the validation he needed in Sanskrit texts.’
    As they’re leaving, she says, ‘I mean it, Babhru. I really do want you to meet Kartik. I’ll call you soon.’

A fat orange sun, sulphurous as a bomb, rose over the land outside Delhi. It burnt away every trace of the night, under whose cover so much had been possible. The two people asleep in the back of the Ambassador were in that state before wakefulness, when the mind tries frantically to reconstitute the fragments of the night. Which, having known no unity save the now dispersed darkness, resist being threaded together.
    The car barrelled south; they came in and out of sleep. But, every now and then, an eye, red and sticky, glued together, would open and gaze furtively at the semiconscious form of the other. The lolling head; the drawn lines; the faces soggy with sleep and drink; the muscles around the mouth tightening and flexing – the hint of stale breath – the sudden flicking back of the head in the eternal (and futile) search for a better resting place. It was such intimate company for two strangers to find themselves in. And it was with a mixture of wonder and awkwardness, the night’s memories returning as a flood, that they became aware of their flight from the capital.
    *
    The night before, there was this exchange outside the coffee shop of the Oberoi.
    ‘In Sanskrit, Mishi . . .’ Toby said, and stopped. ‘Mishi? What kind of name is that?’
    ‘It’s short for Michelle!’
    ‘Michelle? Is that your real name?’
    ‘It’s actually Uma, but—’
    ‘Uma! You can’t have as grand a name as Uma and call yourself Mishi! No, no, no. You must go back to Uma. And, as I was saying, Uma – yes, Uma! Much better . . . So, as I was saying, in Sanskrit we have a dual number. A whole declension for things that come in twos, such as Toby and Uma . . .’
    ‘If I’m no longer Mishi, surely you can’t be Toby.’
    ‘All right then. What shall I be?’
    ‘Whatever you really are!’
    ‘But I’m really Toby.’
    ‘I mean whatever you are, if you’re not Toby, the way I’m Uma, if I’m not really Mishi.’
    ‘Oh, you mean what I really-really am!’
    ‘Yes. What you really-really are, if you’re not really Toby.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No? Why no?’
    ‘It’s too long.’
    ‘What do you mean too long?’
    ‘It won’t work. What I really-really am is too long.’
    ‘Try me.’
    ‘Ghanashyama Mayurdhvaja Pashupati Rao . . .’
    ‘OK, OK. Toby.’
    ‘But you are definitely still Uma.’
    ‘I’ve never been called Uma.’
    ‘But now you will be. And as I was saying, Uma, in Sanskrit we have a dual number, devoted solely to those things that come in twos. So, for instance, if I were to say, we go, as in we all, you, me and this rather annoying woman called Kitten Singh –