All the Lives We Never Lived Read online

  As the train blew a few impatient whistles and set off in a cloud of smoke, one of the men pressed his face against a window. His head was shaven bald and tiny insects buzzed around the many sores on his scalp. I could see a band of gray skin through his open shirt front. The man smiled straight at me. After a second’s hesitation, I started to run alongside the train and pulled out a few boiled sweets I had in my pocket. I passed them to the man through the window. Nobody stopped me, a schoolboy chasing a train. I ran alongside it until the shade of the platform’s tin roof ended, the platform turned to grassy dirt, and I was out under the impassive white-hot sky, my head reeling from the change of light, my sun-blinded eyes swimming with dots of bright color.

  What had I hoped to find at the station? I did not know then that the answers to a hundred urgent questions in my head were stored in one man lying in a heatstroke stupor in the coach fourth from the front on that train which was going further and further away from me with every exhalation of soot.

  By the time my eyes adjusted to the light, all I could see was the guard’s van in which a soldier stood facing the retreating station, green flag in one hand, jug of water in the other. He tilted his head back and poured the water all over himself, soaking his shirt and his face.

  I have long had a habit of noting down the interesting plants and trees that I spot, whether in my daily rounds of this town or when I traveled out, especially during my plant-gathering treks with two friends from my undergraduate class. I find now that my brisk scientific jottings and the drawings that accompany them can bring back particular walks in mountains and marshland, long nights in flimsy tents, the leopard we once saw perched stone-still on a tree branch, observing us with an expressionless menace that turned our bones to water, the river that almost swept me away as I bent too close to examine a weed, and the cliff on which I lost my footing trying to reach a saxifrage on a rock just out of reach. A botanical journal. A route map of my wanderings. On some days it appears as if all my time on earth has gone like a blurred, inconsequential scene rushing past a moving window, and at such times my jottings slow me down, return me to places, give those places names and meaning. A note about the differences between Datura suaveolens (angel’s trumpet, innocuous) and Datura stramonium (thorn apple, poisonous) brings back the whole scene—snatches of our argument that night about the differences between the two plants, how we cooked rice in our saucepan, then smoked and talked of things one talks of only when one is young and sitting around a fire miles away from home, sheathed in darkness, no sound but rustles in the trees, no smell but the dizzying scent of the datura and our harsh, unfiltered cigarettes. I am of a temperament that needs the written word. For anything to have meaning, it has to be set down, it must live on paper before it is fully alive in my head. It has to be a series of words in sequence in order to reveal a meaning and pattern.

  I have put aside my unmade will.

  The package is before me, still sealed, the image of a god with powers I cannot fathom. Before I make preparations for a tidy ending to my life, it appears necessary to write down whatever strikes me as significant about the beginning.

  When I began to put down the words that follow, trying to make my growing-up years coherent to myself, I found I had only a hazy notion of the time or the weather on the particular day I was writing about, or the words that were spoken, or the sequence of events. Yet many things I want to forget remain painfully vivid. Images pass through my mind like flashes of light enveloped by darkness. At first I tried to be diligent. I got in touch with my two trekking mates from college, I asked Dinu questions: Do you remember this? Don’t you remember that? His recollections so often differed from mine that our conversations ended in arguments. I returned to the places of my childhood to check—was there really a cave by the river or a Gothic mansion at the corner of Hafizabagh where my grandfather took me once? We had seen two horses grazing on the front lawns and inside the cavernous house were four-poster beds, enameled washbasins, jardinières, and a ballroom with a sprung floor where the wild-eyed Nawab of Hafizabagh had appeared in a grimy cotton vest and lungi and begged my grandfather to sell everything in the house for him because he had no money.

  At the riverbank I found a power plant, its four monstrous chimneys throwing out smoke that drained the sky of color. The mansion in Hafizabagh was still there, although half of it had become a pile of fallen masonry and what stood was blackened by time, wind, rain.

  In telling the story of any life, and certainly when telling our own, we cannot pretend we are narrating everything just as it happened. Our memories come to us as images, feelings, glimpses, sometimes fleshed out, sometimes in outline. Time solidifies as well as dissolves. We have no precise recollection of how long things took: a few days, weeks, a month? Chunks of time are a blank, while others grow to be momentous in retrospect. I believe this is true for most people. Over the years, when friends contradicted me over details, my uncertain hold over my memories began to make me think I would no longer recognize myself in old photographs, the person in those black-and-white images was somebody else. Think too hard and you might think yourself into lunacy.

  In one of his poems Rabindranath Tagore says:

  I cannot remember my mother

  But when in the early autumn morning

  The fragrance of the shiuli floats in the air

  The scent of the morning prayers in the

  temple comes to me as a scent of my mother.

  The poet lost his mother when he was fourteen; I was only nine the year my mother left. How can it be, then, that she is as close to me as my own reflection in the mirror? Present in every detail and yet imprisoned in a different element, unreachable. Entire conversations come back to me, incidents, arguments, the way she would line her eyes with kajal, the fresh flowers in her hair, the circle of red kumkum on her forehead which was invariably smudged by mid-afternoon. How she recited rhymes to make me memorize them, how her skin was the color of beaten gold and her eyes slanted, how those slanted eyes had an impish gleam. I am certain I truly remember these things and have not built impressions up from stories and photographs.

  Yet the older I grow, the less certain I am of certainty.

  One of my mother’s contemporaries—of whom I will have more to say later—wrote a book in which she recalled events from forty-two years before. I can make no more than a clumsy translation of how she describes the machinery of time in the working of memory.

  “As I went down the stairs my body was trembling . . .” she writes, and then interrupts herself to ask:

  Did it happen that very day? I can’t be sure. I kept no journal, I am writing neither from a diary nor from memory. I cannot tell if I am writing these events as they happened, one by one. But what appeared then as if they happened one by one—now they have neither beginning nor end. Now these days are simultaneously in my present—oh, I cannot explain. Why is it hard to explain? After all, Arjuna saw all of the universe, past and present, in Sri Krishna’s opened mouth. I too see things in that way. You have to believe me. These are not memories, these are my present. At every moment I am getting closer to the year 1930. I can feel the year 1930 on my skin.

  It is the year 1937 that I feel on my skin.

  2

  THE BIGGEST ADVENTURE in my mother’s life took place just months before she married my father, and many of their quarrels ended with my father saying, “The trouble with you, Gayatri, is that all you want to do is live off your memories. Past glory.” He stated this in the mild tone he adopted while arguing—first with her, later with me—as if he were the sole repository of sanity and reason in a set of people deranged by illogical passions. My father believed feelings had to be kept on a tight leash. Or else they were likely to run away with you. If my mother appeared annoyed, he said, “You gain nothing when you lose your temper.”

  The joyous adventure my mother fell back upon when daily life defeated her was a boat ride. The way she told it, it was 1927, she was on the brink of
turning seventeen, and she was with her father, Agni Sen, in a boat on a lake in Bali. They sailed towards a raft moored in the middle of the lake and when they came closer they could see that there was a man on the raft, lying on his back, face hidden by a flat straw hat of the kind farmers wore in that country. The man pushed away his hat and stood up when he heard the splash of their oars. Standing, he was a tall, angular figure with golden hair thrown back by the wind. He could have been the figurehead on the prow of a ship. He wore a white shirt that was open down the front and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His trousers were sand-colored. The man began to laugh when he saw them. “The whole way from India—and you know where I hide out in Bali!” He held a long, sun-browned hand out towards Gayatri and said, “Come on, come aboard now that you are here.”

  The man was a German artist and musician called Walter Spies and over the next few weeks, he took Gayatri, her father, and their friends to dance performances, to concerts, to beaches, to painting schools. She sat beside him, every nerve alight with excitement, as he narrated to her the stories behind the dances they were watching. Rama and Sita. Hanuman and Ravana—mythological figures she knew from home. Different here, yet familiar. How strange that most of the people around her thought the whole of the Ramayana had taken place in Java and had no connection with India at all! Gayatri was wonderstruck that the myths and legends she had grown up with should exist in this altered form so far away. It was precisely this that her father wanted to show her when he took her traveling around the East Indies.

  In the early part of the twentieth century, this was not the usual thing—today it can scarcely be comprehended how unusual. It was not as if Indians never traveled abroad, but it was almost unknown for a father, however wealthy, to spend his money on nurturing his daughter’s gifts. Daughters were meant to have talents: those that would work as bait to catch a husband. But Agni Sen stood at an odd angle to things around him, he could tell the difference between talents and gifts, and he had seen a spark inside his daughter that could light up whole cities if tended. He got tutors for Gayatri to learn languages and painting, as well as dance and classical music, all this in an age when women sang and danced to entertain rich men and were derided for it. He took her to musical salons and to see artists at work. To historical monuments in Delhi, then further away.

  At one of these, when Gayatri was sitting on a boulder, sketching a dome and doorway, a flight of gray pigeons erupted from a window, the only things living in that ruined palace from the eleventh century. It prompted in her father the usual thoughts about evanescence, decay, the rise and fall of empires, but he also told Gayatri that if she stretched her mind back to the terra-cotta figurines found in the Indus Valley, to murals glowing jewel-like in rock caves, stupas buried under earth and stone temples under water, then forward to these tombs and palaces that were now ruins where banyan sprouted in the cracks, she would see that the power and tyranny and cruelties of those civilizations did not survive, the rulers fell and their courtiers lay in parallel lines of narrow marble caskets next to their king, their cats and wives too, but the beauty that had been created remained. The filigree in the windows, the calligraphy on stone, the perfection of the dome she was struggling to draw. The creators of those things, the masons, sculptors, painters, who had no role to play in the great games of power, whose minds were thought inferior, whose opinions were of no consequence, whose wealth counted for nothing: their work remained after all else had vanished. When the world was in turmoil and devastation appeared inevitable, art was not an indulgence but a refuge, its fragments remained after a cycle had run its course from creation through to destruction and begun again. Power crumbles, people die, but beauty defeats time, he declared in the way middle-aged men have of imparting wisdom to the young.

  Gayatri listened, and all along her pencil traveled in rapid lines over her open sketchbook. The dome began to take shape, then the arch below it. A pigeon took flight in three quick strokes. They went on from Agra to the necropolis of Fatehpur Sikri, then to Jaipur. She rode an elephant, clung to a camel’s undulating back as it walked, gagged at its smell. She drew the camel.

  When she was older Agni Sen took Gayatri further, to Santiniketan, to breathe the air Rabindranath Tagore and his students breathed. On that trip, a friend who knew the poet well told him Rabindranath was planning a journey to Java the next year. The knowledge settled in Agni Sen’s mind, germinated, and he became consumed by an idea that would not let go: why not travel there with Gayatri, and on the same ship as the poet? What better chance would she have to meet Rabindranath, to speak to him and learn from him, than by their confinement on a ship? Who knew to what it might lead for Gayatri? The poet was to travel with a group of friends, including Dhiren, who had mentioned the plan to Agni Sen. Letters flew back and forth, tickets on trains and berths on ships and steamers were booked, passports were requisitioned, and at the end of much complicated planning, Gayatri’s father, emptied and triumphant, announced the trip to his daughter and to his family. He would take Gayatri to the Borobudur, to Angkor Wat, to the temples of Bali. He would show her there was a shared cultural universe in Asia which had not been swallowed up by colonization.

  The crossing to Java and Bali began on July 12, 1927, on a ship from Madras which would sail to Singapore. Gayatri and her father were to travel on the same ship as the poet and his friends, and then after the days together on the ship and a week in Singapore, they would go on to Malaya and Cambodia on their own, coming to Bali in time to meet Tagore’s party after their travels elsewhere. Was it not too ambitious, given Agni Sen’s age and his heart condition? Gayatri’s mother had fretted. What a dangerous, fanciful, expensive plan! She was brushed aside.

  They stood at the rail as Rabindranath came on board, exhausted by his three-day train journey from Calcutta to Madras. He came with friends, learned and eminent men who formed a protective ring to save him from the harassment of adulation. Agni Sen had to content himself with the briefest of introductions, while Gayatri saw him only from a distance—nobody was allowed to come close. This was not what Agni Sen had expected. He was hurt by Dhiren’s possessive zeal, and retreated behind a book.

  They found out later that the poet, who had expected three days of contemplative solitude gazing at the landscape of India as it passed before his train window, had managed nothing of the sort. At Kharagpur, the first stop after Calcutta, a group of schoolboys clambered into his compartment and thrust a motley collection of notebooks at him: school exercise books, sheaves of paper stitched together at home. They wanted autographs, and one of them begged Rabindranath to dash off a new poem before the train started moving again. As they went southward, they stopped every hour or so and at each station the platforms were crammed with people who had heard he was on the train. At one of these, an old man climbed on, joined his hands in a namaste, began what sounded like a speech in Telugu, finished it, bowed deeply, and left. At another a man came out of the crowds to the poet’s window, bearing a brass tray with a lemon, incense, flowers. He lit the incense and trailed the smoke over Rabindranath, then without a word melted back into the crowds. One supplicant begged, pleaded, then harangued Rabindranath to stop overnight for a dip in the Godavari river, which he insisted was holier than the Ganga. At Kakinada, a professor of English who had lived for a time in Calcutta came in to speak to the poet in halting Bengali, gave up because he had forgotten the lines he had rehearsed, but—desperate to wish the great man an appropriately literary Godspeed—began thundering “Half a league, half a league onward!” At Rajahmundry, two hundred students came to tell him they had got the date wrong and had been waiting at the station since the day before. The poet sat on his berth, tired and gray, pushed against the window, hidden by a mass of heaving bodies shouting “Rabindranath ki Jai!” and “Vande Mataram!” People came in during nighttime halts to shine lanterns in his sleeping face.

  If he had thought he would find peace on a ship in the middle of the sea, Rabindranath wa
s mistaken. An American padre and his wife kept edging towards him if he so much as approached the deck, even as he turned away each time, casting pleading glances for rescue in the direction of his friends. At last, with no way out, he allowed them time. Once seated, they tried to prove to him that Christianity had much in common with Hinduism.

  “I have grave doubts about that,” Rabindranath said.

  “Why, we too have God the Father!” they said.

  “But you see, we also have God the Mother, God the Son, God the Friend, God the Lover. We even have God the Sweetheart,” said Suniti Chatterji, one of the poet’s companions, with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. The padre, realizing the improbability of an illustrious conversion, left the old man alone after that and he sat in his deck chair listening to the sea, reading, and sometimes lying back with his eyes closed, as if infinitely tired.

  Gayatri edged towards him, retreated. She wanted to ask him if she could go to Santiniketan to learn painting from Nandalal Bose. Santiniketan was all she had dreamed of since her visit, what she craved was to be under its open sky in the company of other students, with pots of paint and bundles of brushes, grinding her own pigments as she had heard they did there. She had discovered that one of the friends with Rabindranath was the vice principal of Santiniketan’s art school. It was as if all had been divinely ordained: she would tell the poet about her visit, how she had longed to join the school then and not been able to. He would tell the vice principal to admit her to the school instantly.

  Dreaming in this way as she leaned over the deck’s railings, no land in sight, only blue water, the conviction glowed within her like a secret flame: this voyage would lead her to her future. To her only possible life.