Elephants with Headlights Read online

  ‘You been well?’ Mohan asked. ‘Still teaching, yah?’

  ‘Yes. And what are you going to do with your life, Mohan?’

  ‘I’m going to take a look at your car,’ he answered, striding past her.

  Savitri was taken off guard. She watched him as he took a look underneath, back down, tummy and chest up, nothing but boots and skinny legs emerging elegantly from under the dark metal. She said nothing, but watched as he stooped over the open bonnet, pulling at meaningless, mindless cords as if he knew what he was doing. Was he the only Indian male in her circle who knew more about mechanics than banking?

  ‘Where’d you learn about cars?’ she asked.

  ‘In the US. We took road trips all over. I taught myself.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You know there’s nothing wrong with your car,’ he said after a while. ‘It works just fine. Maybe it was just an excuse for you to come and visit me?’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘Come on, yah – we should go for a drink together some time.’

  ‘You know I don’t drink …’ She realised the irony, given the whisky he’d plied her with last time.

  Mohan seemed apologetic. Respectful, even. Different from before. But Savitri got back into her car and instructed the driver to continue on to the dance class.

  ‘Come back any time,’ Mohan called after her.

  When they arrived back at the MG Road they were held up by a major collision ahead. People lay bleeding by the side of the road, and crowds were using any tools they had to prise open cars. Their driver jumped out to inspect the action. Savitri stayed in the car and tried to look away as she saw a vision of a soul trying to escape its body, possibly a male body, but too covered with blood for her to be sure.

  There were enough people around that person. Nothing she could do.

  ‘Take me home,’ Savitri instructed when the driver returned to the car, calmly, even though every cell of her body was shocked at the happenstance. She felt her entire body steeped in awakened gratitude: even for Mohan, for her grandmother, the driver. She knew nothing. There was so much to learn. Hamlet came to her mind: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  Siddharth was just about ready to go for his monthly facial and manicure when his driver announced that his wife, Tota, had just rung and he had to go for lessons with the dance master instead. He looked at the perfect face of his Patek Philippe watch – something he usually did with pleasure, because it was the one piece of jewellery that a man could wear. Yet even the miraculous Patek couldn’t squeeze the hours up close enough to fit in his trip to Venus Beauty Parlour (the men’s floor, of course) as well as a dance class with the choreographer hired for his son’s wedding. Where was he going to find the time to make an appearance at the office to make sure the good-for-nothings were working?

  Even though Siddharth’s wife had her own driver, Tota commanded Siddharth’s driver as if she owned the world – which of course she did. ‘Memsahib told me to take you straight to dance class,’ he announced, and in their familiar silent submission to all things female, driver and master made their way towards a room at the Taj Hotel, where a dozen or more family members were set to rehearse a dance routine that in Siddharth’s mind was promising to turn the wedding into a circus.

  ‘What a tamasha there would have been if my father were forced to dance for our wedding,’ Siddharth announced crossly as he reached for a copy of the Hindustan Times and went straight to the ‘Delhi Times’ section to see if he knew anyone on page three. If the future had to belong to his son’s generation, they’d be better off preparing with their brains, not their bhangra.

  ‘Yes, sahib, what a tamasha there would have been if they’d forced your father to dance at your wedding,’ the driver lamented, repeating, as always, exactly what his master said with a ‘sir’ for emphasis and implicit agreement. Siddharth always took great comfort in his reflection as given to him by his driver: the one and only person in the entirety of India who never had an opinion on anything of importance – or any opinion at all, for that matter.

  The driver turned off the cricket, knowing that sahib liked to read the paper in silence, and turned on the air filter of the Mercedes as the engine began to puff smoke over the perfectly trimmed lawn. There was so much pollution you couldn’t get from the farmhouse to central Delhi anymore without the air filter. It was the artificial lung that made this city liveable, the only way of cutting out the air that one had to breathe in between the farm, the office, the club and proper homes.

  Siddharth’s hesitation to dance was more complex than a mere case of lead feet. It was the heaviness in his heart that slowed him down, and turned what would have been a proper, traditional, Punjabi shaadi into a ‘wedding’. His son, Neel, was marrying that Australian girl he’d met in Goa.

  Mae.

  When his son had told him about the ‘girlfriend’ on the phone, Siddharth said, ‘Why did they name her after a calendar month?’ It was his way of pretending that the news was of no significance, and like the month of May she would pass. But somehow the name stuck: it spelled trouble, disruption, distraction and disloyalty, right from its first utterance.

  ‘We named you after a god,’ Siddharth said, to accentuate the chasm between the girlfriend and his son.

  ‘Yes, and why the hell?’ Neel replied. It was Neelkanth in full, a name for the blue-necked Lord Shiva that completely lost its sacred colour in translation.

  At the airport, both parents, both drivers and Buddhi Ayah, Savitri and Neel’s ayah, who had looked after them ever since they dribbled breastmilk, were waiting for his flight to arrive at Indira Gandhi International Airport, inside the terminal where it was air-conditioned. And in that same cool air, that girl, Mae, appeared next to Neel, pushing their shared luggage. She was wearing a dress down to the ground like Tota used to wear when she was back in college, and she had the kind of blonde hair that made foreigners look anaemic.

  ‘You must be June,’ Tota spurted out quickly.

  ‘Wrong month,’ Neel replied, hugging his mother, and began to make introductions that seemed strangely formal.

  Tota gave her an outsider’s hug – a brief and distracted formal embrace that was a simple recognition of existence, nothing more.

  Siddharth noticed that it was Buddhi Ayah, frail and wizened, with two missing teeth, and soft, loose skin under the layers of her white sari, who took Mae’s hand, kissed it, stroked her face, teased out her blonde hair, muttered something in her native Bihari and then burst into tears of joy. Mae gave her boyfriend’s elderly nanny a patchouli-scented hug and allowed herself to cry.

  ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ she told Buddhi Ayah, who kept murmuring meaningful vowels and consonants, and touching her hair again, examining it like she might have examined the bright yellow tresses of the Barbie dolls that Savitri used to play with as a child.

  As soon as they arrived back at the farmhouse, Neel announced privately to Siddharth and Tota that he intended to marry Mae.

  ‘What are you saying?’ his mother asked. ‘You hardly know the girl!’

  ‘Err, Mummy, we live together,’ Neel replied, ‘so I know her a lot better than you knew Papa before you got married.’

  ‘Is she pregnant?’ Tota asked, direct as a bullet.

  ‘Mae wants an Indian wedding, so no, she’s not pregnant,’ Neel responded emphatically, as if to ward off the premature assassination of his heirs. Then he added with a hint of cruelty, ‘And we have every intention of returning to Australia to settle after the wedding.’

  ‘What for does she want an Indian wedding, then?’

  ‘You’ll get to know her,’ Neel added. ‘You’ll see. She’s not what you expect from a firangi.’

  It was true that Mae had a passion for all things Indian, which was why Siddharth now found himself on his way to a dance rehearsal for their wedding – she had more passion for Indian dance than he ever could. Siddharth was far more comfortable pulling out his credit card to pay the wedding organisers than he was putting on his dancing shoes, but for now the dance was his ‘duty’, and if there was something that Siddharth had absorbed since he was a child, it was his obligation to ‘do the needful’ in the delivery of duty.

  The car pulled up at a detour due to a horrific incident on the road, which triggered Siddharth’s heart to go into one of its familiar involuntary spasms. But nothing to worry about. He turned on his GPS and navigated along an alternative road until they pulled up smoothly in front of the pillared lobby of the Taj – a grand entrance of the whitest marble with every square inch defying the Delhi dust. The doorman opened the passenger door for Siddharth to get out. He asked the concierge for the hall where the dance practice had been organised and was promptly shown to a room where some loud filmy music was playing.

  Tota glared at Siddharth as he entered, and Neel and his cousins started complaining that this was no time to arrive, halfway through the class.

  The ‘master’ was a young boy, lithe and, most importantly, accommodating. After Tota whispered something in his ear the dance master said, ‘Madam, no problem, we will be giving him a separate dance to perform so we won’t have to be starting from the very bigning. Sir, you can come here and please start making this step like this like this like this.’

  Rolling his eyes, Siddharth joined the others at the front of the line. It was clear that the joke was on him. He was the klutzy-footed father of the groom and somehow that meant that he was the perfect foil and centrepiece.

  The master showed him some awkward moves, which Siddharth mimicked, making them more awkward still. His was a different routine, but he couldn’t see what the others were doing because they were all behind him, and tittering – probably at him rather than each other.

  ‘Now, I want you to be putting your foot out and turning it like this like this. Backwards, left side, right side’ … Siddharth’s foot twisted from left to right, taking off in any direction, like a deserter, while the rest of him jiggled from side to side, his body inside his jacket almost as still as a mannequin.

  Siddharth couldn’t see the gyrations of the small family group behind him, but he could hear their giggles and the way their feet tapped to the rhythm of the song, intoxicated by the dreadful beat.

  ‘Perfect,’ the master shouted out. ‘There’s only one problem, sir. You are forgetting to smile!’

  Siddharth squinted and let one corner of his mouth rise to the occasion, reproducing the exact smile of Amitabh Bachchan in an early performance as Don – an arch gangster’s undecipherable, undecided smile.

  ‘Yes, we are all happy now,’ the master concluded. ‘We will make everyone dance with us for the shaadi. Everyone will be happy!’

  THE USE-BY DATE

  SAVITRI’S GRANDMOTHER HAD felt it was almost improper to cross over the chalk line that separated ‘her’ century from the new millennium. The future, however, was shamelessly waiting. Slowly it encroached on her life, presenting an endless track of noughts. Sometimes it felt as if she’d be using those noughts as stepping stones for the next thousand years – if only she could take steps. As it was, she was pushed into the twenty-first century on wheels, thanks to the damned multiple sclerosis.

  Everything about her room remained as it had always been. She had a display cabinet with exquisite glasses from a business trip to Czechoslovakia she’d taken with her husband as a younger woman. In those glasses the Iron Curtain still hung, and she still told stories of the guards at the country’s borders. In her room, Gandhi was still alive in a statue carved out of sandalwood, even though it had long ago lost its fragrance and had half lost a hand, which now dangled loose, holding a book. Even so, with his head stooped, Gandhi had travelled with Dadi into the Asian century.

  She also had a broken cuckoo clock from her trip to Switzerland, where as a young woman she’d spent a month at the famous Bircher Institute, trying to solve her digestion problems. Unlike Dadi, the cuckoo had long ago transcended time, giving up on the precision of the coil fashioned by its makers. If anyone asked why it had stopped working, she would tell them about how Siddharth, aged six, had stood on a chair to take the bird from its perch and tucked it under his pillow. Then she would move on quickly to stories about the Bircher Institute, especially the one about the discovery of amoebas in her stool. So rare was the discovery in the alpine purity of Switzerland that everyone in the institute was invited to look through the microscope at the squirming splodge, with its pseudopodic dance of rearranging endoplasm.

  There was nothing about the twenty-first century that ever entered her room, except her grandchildren, and they continually tried to drag the new century in with them, brandishing its temptations.

  ‘Dadi, why don’t you stop using that landline? We can give you full wireless access, no problem.’

  Dadi didn’t need a phone that could slip out of her hands and find a new home in her bedsheets. She liked being able to reach out to the Bakelite receiver by her bedside, neatly connected with curling wire, and let her fingers dial the numbers of her beloved ageing cohort with ritual accuracy. Every morning she’d do what Savitri called ‘the rellie rounds’, ringing each of them up to ask them how they felt on that particular God-given day.

  ‘Aapka tabiat kasa hai?’ she’d ask again and again, as if the ailments of her cohort were the social glue that kept them all here in the twenty-first century. ‘And did you have a bowel movement today?’ She was always happy to discuss bowel movements with the ancient ones – indeed, they could all pontificate on them for hours, and you didn’t need a Blackberry or an Apple for that.

  Her deepest wish, the one that she would never articulate in public or in private on the phone to her contemporaries, was to be no longer held for trial in God’s waiting room. Her only constant companion in this whole business of ageing was Buddhi Ayah, the grandchildren’s nanny, who had long ago stopped spoon-feeding Savitri and Neel and begun to look after Dadi’s ablutions instead. Buddhi Ayah was getting old herself, though, and it wouldn’t be too long before she would need someone to be doing the same for her.

  You could say that it was a mistake to have come this far, but it was more than that. Dadi had been pulled into the future by a prediction that Arunji once made: a prediction that she would only be able to rest in peace once Savitri was married and the future was secured, and that this in turn would secure a spiritual destiny for her heirs – all of them – for the millennia to come. A transformation of sorts. A legacy.

  When Arunji had first come up with these words, Savitri was a literature student specialising in feminist writing and sacred texts written by celibate seers from the Vedic era – two fields of study that didn’t lend themselves to marriage. Nor did her Manglik status, an astrological curse that stated no man could marry her without some threat of death in doing so. She adored her granddaughter, but she seemed to ‘suffer’ from too much education. What to do about her stubborn nature and her refusal to get married?

  Dadi decided to call Arunji over to see if there was anything she could do to help the girl, especially with the whole problem of … the problem of … she didn’t like to say the word Manglik. She didn’t like to think of her granddaughter as someone with a curse – not now that they’d entered the twenty-first century. She didn’t like to think of her granddaughter as anything but a goddess.

  Arunji had failed to report the exact troubles around Savitri’s chart, even though his own destiny was bound to the Kailash family’s in a cosmic collusion of the most outrageous proportions, and you could even say he was obliged to tell them about the upcoming incidents. He had never offered to explain how Savitri’s mathematics of destiny and Dadi’s commitment to seeing Savitri married could be untwined. Yet Dadi remembered every prediction her ‘son’ had delivered, including his promise that she would live to see her granddaughter married – and yet Savitri’s marriage was not even on the distant horizon. What was he thinking?

  ‘Arunji, tell me more about my tryst with destiny?’ she asked when he came to see her.

  Arunji understood this euphemism – taken, as it was, from Nehru’s Freedom at Midnight speech.

  ‘Mataji, I am not knowing what kind of independence you are seeking,’ he replied.

  Dadi made it clearer still. ‘All right. No tryst with destiny. Tell me one thing: what is my use-by date?’ She was not one to have a tantrum, but she was getting impatient.

  There was no escaping her question this time. What Arunji’s spiritual mother meant was that she wondered when Savitri’s date with destiny would arrive, given the fact that she had rejected every eligible bachelor her parents had introduced to her and was in no hurry to find herself a suitable boy.

  Arunji began to randomly write some numbers and rewrite a few more.

  ‘Tell me, is there some kind of problem with Savitri? Apart from the Manglik, which we can of course manage.’

  He didn’t respond. Instead, his comb-over fell off the top of his head, which was otherwise boiled-egg bald. He recognised the hair falling down as a sign that he was lying. It always happened when he refused to speak the truth of his numbers. The hair fell, and his bald head was revealed like a brown crystal ball that spoke only the truth. There must have been a hunch in the back or a twitch in the neck that made this happen whenever Arunji had to present the future as if it were unknown and adopt the innocent ignorance of events that were either too obvious to highlight or too disastrous to unveil. Yes, the hair always fell, and the bald patch was always exposed, yet it was invisible to anyone else as a sign. What’s more, this sign occurred regularly with the Kailash family, because just as they had triggered an intervention in his destiny, he had conspired to intervene in theirs, with love and compassion, whenever there were issues that simply needed to be concealed. It was a sacred duty, he believed, this whole business of concealment, and by some strange twist, an act of cleansing not too different from the original role he had played as their washerboy in the old house when he was a child. There were so many secrets in those stars that needed to be wiped clean of significance before he could possibly present them to his patrons as predictions. He readjusted his comb-over and continued to draw some signs and circles and tokenistic gestures in honour of the science of Jyotish.