The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer

Author:Aatish Taseer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

15

Sanyogita didn’t like the writer. She felt he wasn’t kind; that was her word. She had begun many books of his. I think she read them for my sake rather than out of any real interest; and later I felt she left them unfinished for the same reason. One lay by her bedside now.

‘I can’t!’ she said, standing in front of a dressing-table mirror, her head cocked to one side as she put in an earring, ‘I just can’t. I’ve tried, but they’re so dry. And he’s not kind to his subjects.’

‘What do you mean “not kind”? What’s kind got to do with it?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think he shows any compassion to the people he writes about.’

‘Isn’t just being plain honest a kind of compassion? Doesn’t it give back to people a kind of dignity, just to judge them by your own good standards and not as people who’ve been colonized, defeated, oppressed or enslaved?’

She didn’t answer; she was having trouble finding the hole. The earring slipped and clattered across the floor. Sanyogita, already in her heels, squatted down in one movement. But when she found it, it was broken. It was one of Ra’s earrings, the one with the moonstone and the ruby. The moonstone was missing. It left a visible vacancy.

‘Baby!’ Sanyogita cried, and squatted down again, feeling around the floor for the stone. We found it under her dressing table, covered in wisps of dirt and dust. She handled the little paisley-shaped stone as though it were a chick that had fallen from its nest. She found these small, inauspicious tragedies very moving; they could almost reduce her to tears. Then she saw that I was squatting down next to her and she smiled. She reached a long arm up to my ear, rubbed its rim between her fingers and rose in one movement.

‘No big deal, right? I’ll get Ra to fix it. When are we meeting your mother?’

‘Now.’

‘OK, I’ll hurry.’

My mother had flown in from Bombay for two nights. She was having dinner with Sanyogita and me tonight; the following night, she was having her dinner for the writer. We were meeting her at the new Italian restaurant in the Oberoi.

Outside on the garden terrace, the frangipani, its branches now completely bare, had shrivelled in its pot. But my premonition had been wrong. It was not the first casualty of a larger pestilence; the other plants were flourishing. From the shaft of light falling on the corridor, I could see the door to my study. Its brass Godrej lock hung heavily from the bolt; it hadn’t been opened since my return.

Sanyogita herself had only come back the night before. She appeared in the corridor a few seconds later.

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