We decided to postpone the opening of the play by a month in the hope that by then things would have settled down. But in early December tragedy struck again, this time even harder. The Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal sprang a deadly gas leak that killed thousands of people. The newspapers were full of accounts of people trying to flee the poisonous cloud that pursued them, their eyes and lungs on fire. There was something almost biblical about the nature and the scale of the horror. News magazines published photographs of the dead, the ill, the dying, the mangled and the permanently blinded, their sightless eyes eerily turned towards the cameras. Eventually we decided that the gods weren’t with us and that performing Norman would be inappropriate for the times, so the whole thing was shelved. If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation—maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. In the case of Norman, though, we didn’t need a final performance to change the course of our lives. The rehearsals turned out to be more than enough.
David Quartermaine, the director of the play, was a young Englishman who had moved to Delhi from Leeds. He was a lean, athletic and, if I may say so, devastatingly beautiful man. His blond hair fell to his shoulders, his eyes were an unreal, sapphire blue, like Peter O’Toole’s. He was stoned most of the time, and was candidly homosexual, although he never brought it up in conversation. A parade of dusky adolescent boys—the turnover was high—passed through his book-lined rooms in Defense Colony. They lounged on his bed or curled up on his rocking chair, flipping through magazines they obviously couldn’t read (he had a clear preference for proletarians). We had never seen anything remotely like it. The day we gathered in his two-room flat for the first play-reading, his silent, efficient maid had efficiently delivered her third child in his bathroom. We lived in awe of David Quartermaine, of his audacious sexuality, his collection of books, his moodiness, his mumbling and his sudden enigmatic silences, which we believed were the prerequisite characteristics of a true artist. Some of us tried to replicate that behavior in our free time, imagining we were preparing ourselves for a life in the theater. My classmate Naga, Nagaraj Hariharan, was cast as Norman. I was to play his lover, Garson Hobart. (In the early rehearsals we hammed it up more than just a little. I suppose in our young, stupid way we were trying to signal that we weren’t really homosexual.) We were both finishing our master’s in history at Delhi University. As a consequence of his parents and mine being friends (his father was in the Foreign Service, mine was a senior heart surgeon), Naga and I had been together through school and now university. Like most such children we were never close friends. We didn’t dislike each other, but our relationship had always been more than a little adversarial.
Tilo was a third-year student at the Architecture School and was working on the sets and lighting design. She introduced herself to us as Tilottama. The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
I wish I knew what it was about her that disarmed me so completely and made me behave like someone I am not—solicitous, a little overeager. She didn’t look like any of the pale, well-groomed girls I knew at college. Her complexion was what the French might call café au lait (with very little lait), which, as far as most Indians were concerned, disqualified her straightaway from being considered good-looking. It’s hard for me to describe someone who has been imprinted on me, on my soul, like a stamp or a seal of some sort for so many years. I see her as I see a limb of mine—a hand, or a foot. But let me try, if only in the broadest brushstrokes. She had a small, fine-boned face and a straight nose, with pert, flared nostrils. Her long, thick hair was neither straight nor curly, but tangled and uncared for. I could imagine small birds nesting in it. It would have easily made the Before part of a Before-and-After shampoo commercial. She wore it down her back in a plait and sometimes twisted into an untidy knot at the nape of her long neck with a yellow pencil stuck through it. She wore no make-up and did nothing—none of those delightful things girls do, with their hair, or their eyes, or their mouths—to augment her looks. She wasn’t tall, but she was rangy, and she had a way of standing, with her weight on the balls of her feet, her shoulders squared, that was almost masculine, and yet wasn’t. The day I first met her she was wearing white cotton pajamas and a hideous—the hideousness somehow deliberate—printed, oversized man’s shirt that didn’t seem to belong to her. (I was wrong about that: weeks later, when we got to know each other better, she told us that it was indeed hers. That she had bought it at the second-hand clothes market outside Jama Masjid for one rupee. Naga—typically—told her that he knew from reliable sources that the clothes sold there were taken off the bodies of people who died in train accidents. She said she didn’t mind as long as there were no bloodstains.) The only jewelry she wore was a broad silver ring on a long, ink-stained middle finger and a silver toe-ring. She smoked Ganesh beedis that she kept in a scarlet Dunhill cigarette packet. She would look right through the disappointment on the faces of those who had tried to scam what they thought was an imported filter cigarette off her and ended up instead with a beedi that they were too embarrassed not to smoke, especially when she was offering to light it for them. I saw this happen a number of times, but her expression always remained impassive—there was never a smile or the exchange of an amused glance with a friend, so I never could tell whether she was playing a practical joke or whether this was just the way she did things. The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness. Behind her plain, unfashionable spectacles, her slightly slanting cat-eyes had the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac. She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked—like pets. As though she was watching considerately, somewhat absent-mindedly, from a distance, while we minced along, grateful to our owners, happy to perpetuate our bondage.
I tried to find out more about her, but she gave very little away. When I asked her what her surname was, she said her name was S. Tilottama. When I asked what S stood for she said, “S stands for S.” She evaded my indirect questions about where home was, what her father did. She didn’t speak much Hindi at the time. So I guessed South India. Her English was curiously unaccented, except that Z sometimes softened into S, so, for example, she would say “Sip” for “Zip.” I guessed Kerala.
It turned out that I was right about that. About the rest—I learned that she wasn’t being evasive; she genuinely did not have answers to those ordinary college-kid questions: Where are you from? What does your father do? Et cetera and so on. From stray wisps of conversation I gathered that her mother was a single woman whose husband had left her, or she had left him, or he was dead—it was all a bit of a mystery. Nobody seemed to be able to place her. There were rumors that she was an adopted child. And rumors that she was not. Later I learned—from a college junior, a fellow called Mammen P. Mammen, a gossipmonger from Tilo’s home town—that both rumors were true. Her mother was indeed her real mother, but had first abandoned her and then adopted her. There had been a scandal, a love affair in a small town. The man, who belonged to an “Untouchable” caste (a “Paraya,” Mammen P. Mammen whispered, as though even to say it aloud would contaminate him), had been dispensed with in the ways high-caste families in India—in this case Syrian Christians from Kerala—traditionally dispense with inconveniences such as these. Tilo’s mother was sent away until the baby was born and placed in a Christian orphanage. In a few months she returned to the orphanage and adopted her own child. Her family disowned her. She remained unmarried. To support herself she started a small kindergarten school which, over the years, had grown into a successful high school. She never publicly admitted—understandably—that she was the real mother. That was about as much as I knew.
>
Tilottama never went home for her holidays. She never said why. Nobody came looking for her. She paid her fees by working in architects’ offices as a draftsman after college hours and on weekends and holidays. She didn’t live in the hostel—she said she couldn’t afford it. Instead she lived in a shack in a nearby slum that was strung along the outer walls of an old ruin. None of us was invited to visit her.
During the rehearsals of Norman, she called Naga Naga, but me, for some reason, she only ever addressed as Garson Hobart. So there we were, Naga and I, students of history, wooing a girl who didn’t seem to have a past, a family, a community, a people, or even a home. Actually Naga wasn’t really wooing her. In those days he was mesmerized more by himself than anybody else. He noticed Tilo and switched on his (considerable) charm, like you might switch on the headlights of a car, only because she didn’t pay attention to him. He wasn’t used to that.
I was never entirely sure what the relationship between Musa—Musa Yeswi—and Tilo really was. They were quiet with each other in company, never demonstrative. Sometimes they seemed more like siblings than lovers. They were classmates in Architecture School. Both exceptionally gifted artists. I had seen some of their work, Tilo’s charcoal and crayon portraits, Musa’s watercolors of the ruins of the older cities of Delhi, Tughlakabad, Feroz Shah Kotla and Purana Qila, and his pencil drawings of horses—sometimes just parts of horses—a head, an eye, a wild mane, galloping hooves. I once asked him about those, whether he drew them from photographs or copied them from illustrations in books, or whether he had horses at home in Kashmir. He said he dreamed about them. I found that disquieting. I don’t pretend to know much about art, but to my layman’s eye, those drawings, both his and Tilo’s, looked distinctive and dazzling. I remember they both had similar handwriting—that casual, angular calligraphy that used to be taught in architecture schools before everything came to be computerized.
I can’t say that I knew Musa well. He was a quiet, conservatively dressed boy, compactly built and only about as tall as Tilo was. His reticence may have had something to do with the fact that his English wasn’t fluent and he spoke it with a distinctly Kashmiri accent. He had a way of being in company without drawing any attention to himself, which was something of a skill, because he was striking-looking, in the way many young Kashmiri men can be. Though he wasn’t tall, he was broad-shouldered, and there was a concealed sinewiness to his compactness. He had jet-black hair, which he wore cropped very short. His eyes were a dark browngreen. He was clean-shaven, his smooth, pale skin a sharp contrast to Tilo’s complexion. I remember two things about him clearly: a chipped front tooth (which made him look ridiculously young when he smiled, which he seldom did) and his surprising hands—they were not the hands of an artist at all—they were a peasant’s hands, big and strong, with stocky fingers.
There was a gentleness to Musa, a serenity, which I liked, although it was probably those very qualities that coalesced into something dreadful later on. I’m certain he was aware of what I felt about Tilo, yet he showed no signs of feeling either threatened or triumphant. That, in my eyes, gave him tremendous dignity. In his relationship with Naga I think there was less equanimity, which in all probability had more to do with Naga than with Musa. Naga showed a peculiar insecurity and lack of grace when he was around Musa.
The contrast between the two of them was remarkable. If Musa was (or at least gave the impression of being) solid, dependable, a rock—Naga was breezy and mercurial. It was impossible to relax around him. He couldn’t be in a room without directing all the attention towards himself. He was a great showman; boisterous, witty, a bit of a bully, and utterly, hilariously merciless with the people he chose to publicly pick on. He was nice-looking, slim, boyish, a good cricketer (off-spinner), with floppy hair and glasses—very much the cool, intellectual sportsman. But more than his looks, it was his roguish appeal that girls seemed to love. They flocked around him giddily, hanging on to his every word, giggling at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. It was hard to keep track of his string of girlfriends. He had that chameleon-like quality that good actors have—the ability to alter his physical appearance, not superficially, but radically, depending on who he had decided to be at that particular moment in his life. When we were young, it was all very entertaining and exhilarating. Everybody looked forward to what Naga’s newest avatar was going to be. But as we grew older it became a little hollow and tiresome.
—
After they graduated from Architecture School, Musa and Tilo seemed to have drifted apart. He returned to Kashmir. She got a job as a junior architect in an architectural firm. Her main responsibility at work, she told me, was to take the blame for other people’s mistakes. With her meager salary (she was paid by the hour) she upgraded herself from the slum and rented a ramshackle room near the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. I visited her there a few times.
On the last of those visits we sat by Mirza Ghalib’s grave, in a pool of beedi and cigarette stubs, surrounded by the spectacular cripples, lepers, vagrants and freaks who always accumulate around holy places in India, and drank some thick, terrible tea.
“This is how we treat the memory of our greatest poet,” I remember saying, somewhat pretentiously—at the time I knew nothing of Ghalib’s poetry. (I do now. I have to. For professional reasons. Because nothing warms the subcontinental Muslim’s heart more than a few well-chosen lines of Urdu verse.)
“Maybe he’s happier this way,” she said.
Later we walked through the beggar-lined lanes to the dargah for the Thursday-night qawwali. It wasn’t the best qawwali I had ever heard, but the foreign tourists closed their eyes and swayed in ecstasy.
After the last song was sung, and the musicians packed away their battered instruments, we walked down the dark road that ran behind the colony, along the banks of a storm-water drain that smelled like a sewer, and climbed the steep, narrow stairs to her room. Her dusty terrace was stacked with someone’s—probably her landlord’s—discarded furniture, the wood bleached white by the sun. A ginger tomcat yowled in sexual desperation for the female who had barricaded herself inside a nest of loose wicker that had come undone from the seat of a broken chair. I probably remember him so clearly because he reminded me of myself.
The room was tiny, more like a storeroom than a room. It was bare except for a string cot, a terracotta matka for water and a cardboard carton with clothes and some books. An electric ring on an old jeep windscreen propped up on bricks functioned as the kitchen. A skillful, larger-than-life crayon drawing of an iridescent, purple-blue rooster took up one whole wall and regarded us with a stern yellow eye. It was as though, to make up for the lack of real ones, Tilo had conjured up a graffiti parent to keep an eye on her.
I was relieved to escape the rooster’s irascible gaze when we went out on to the terrace. We smoked some hashish, got bitten by mosquitoes and laughed a lot at absolutely nothing. Tilo sat cross-legged, perched on top of the parapet wall, looking out at the darkness. A mottled moon rose, its other-worldly beauty at odds with the sharp, very worldly fumes from the open drain across the road. Suddenly a stone spun up at us from the street below, missing Tilo by a whisker. She jumped off the wall, but did not seem unduly perturbed.
“It’s the crowd from the cinema hall. The last show must be over.”
I looked down. I could hear sniggering, but couldn’t see anybody in the shadows. I have to admit that I was a little unnerved. I asked her—it was a stupid question—what precautions she took to make sure she stayed safe. She said she didn’t dispute the rumor in the neighborhood that she worked for a well-known drug dealer. That way, she said, people assumed she had protection.
I decided to brazen it out and ask about Musa, where he was, whether they were still together, whether they planned to get married. She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
—
/>
At home that night I fell asleep thinking of the chasm that separated my life from hers. I still lived in the house I was born in. My parents were asleep in the next room. I could hear the familiar hum of our noisy refrigerator. All the objects—the carpets, the cupboards, the armchairs in the drawing room, the Jamini Roy paintings, the first editions of Tagore’s books in Bengali as well as English, my father’s collection of mountaineering books (it was a hobby, he wasn’t a climber), the family photo albums, the trunks in which our winter clothes were kept, the bed I had slept in since I was a boy—were like sentinels that had watched over me for so many years. True, my adult life lay ahead, but the foundations on which that life would be built seemed so immutable, so unassailable. Tilo, on the other hand, was like a paper boat on a boisterous sea. She was absolutely alone. Even the poor in our country, brutalized as they were, had families. How would she survive? How long would it be before her boat went down?
After I joined the Bureau and left for my training, I lost touch with her.
The next time I saw her was at her wedding.
—
I don’t know what brought her and Musa together again all those years later, or how she came to be on that houseboat with him in Srinagar.
Given what I knew of him, I have never understood how that storm of dull, misguided vanity—the absurd notion that Kashmir could have “freedom”—swept him up as it did a whole generation of young Kashmiri men. It’s true that he suffered the kind of tragedy that nobody ever should—but Kashmir was a war zone then. I can put my hand on my heart and swear that, whatever the provocation, I would never contemplate doing what he did.
But then he wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him. He did what he did. And he paid the price for it. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Within weeks of Musa’s death, Tilo married Naga.