The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer Page B

easy acceptance of cruelty – they concealed very well.
    They spoke rapturously of India, but dreamed of the West. Of European cities, of shops and duty-free goods. They spoke of eternal India, but, in their hearts, they were hungry materialists, who wanted nothing so much from life as a Japanese washing machine or a German toaster. Their contradictions were glaring and, in trying to hide them, they fell into cynicism and hypocrisy.
    For this class of person, Toby was irresistible.
    ‘Come here, this minute, you, Lawrence of Belgravia!’ Vandana bellowed, on seeing him enter the room. ‘Giving lectures on Ram, little swine. I’ll tell you about Ram. He was a bloody weakling. A wimp! Come here!’
    She was a great fat woman, loud and boisterous, with a fierce red bindi and the expressive eyes of a dancer, a Bharatnatyam dancer; she had, though it was hard to believe now, been trained as one. Like many bullies, she was painfully shy and unsure of herself, easily wounded. The daughter of Marxist intellectuals, and a graduate of the National School of Drama down the road, she would perhaps have wanted a career in the political theatre of the time, which was so vibrant; or the new-age cinema, of the Shabana Azmi ilk, who, incidentally, was a classmate. But nothing had materialized and her talents had been squandered on very successful impressions of politicians in general, and Mrs Gandhi in particular. This had given her a modicum of drawing room celebrity. Taking leave of Toby’s old friend, Mahijit, the Raja of Marukshetra, whom she had been flattering quietly in a corner, she rollicked across the room, swaying her great backside as she moved, flailing dimpled arms, spilling Scotch and ash.
    She was getting ready to do one of her famous performances, in which she mocked the epic hero, Ram, for forcing his wife, Sita, under public pressure, to prove her chastity through a trial by fire.
    ‘Sita, my dear, forgive me,’ she said, in a simpering voice, ‘you see Mummy says that your reputation is now tainted. And, because I’m a typical ball-less Indian wimp – the first, I might add, but not the last! The ā di-wimp! – I will please be requiring you to self-immolate your own good self.’
    Cries of laughter and amusement went up in the room. ‘O Vandana!’ ‘You’re too much!’ ‘Such a little performer.’
    Mahijit, spitting into his brass spittoon, jumped his eyebrows at his friend, who, all too familiar with Vandana’s antics, smiled at the others in the room, but was inwardly fatigued at her approach. Bapa, their host, the second son of a second son, and a great social figure in Delhi in those days, famous for organizing music recitals in his garden, came up quickly. He was dressed, as he invariably was, in white from head to toe. ‘Don’t listen to a word of it,’ he said to Toby. ‘You were brilliant. This lot are too colonized to know a thing.’
    ‘“Yes, yes, Sita,”’ Vandana pressed on, her eyes flashing wildly, ‘“Go on, jump in, burn yourself alive. So that Mummy and the rest of us can be assured of your purity. And then we’ll probably burn you alive anyway because your dowry was not large enough. Come on. Jump!”’
    She swung her bottom into the air, and made a little pushing gesture with her hands, as though really prodding someone to enter a pyre. Then she threw her head back and laughed raucously. ‘If it was me, I would have been on the first flying chariot back to Lanka. Give me dark sexy demons – dripping coconut oil – over wimpy Ram any old day. Or perhaps I would have stayed, and had a naughty little affair with Lakshman, who seems so much sexier . . .’
    Vandana, still performing, now firing invisible arrows into the air, now prancing around the room in imitation of the epic hero, was intercepted by those who could see – Gayatri Mann, namely – that Toby was in need of rescuing.
    ‘Namo Nama ḥ , Raja saab,’ Mann said smokily into his ear.
    He gave her a relieved