Read Online The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer - Free Book Online

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    Gayatri Mann was the consummate professional Indian. She lived abroad with her husband, the publisher Zubin Mann, and, at a time when her country felt closed and remote, when the news was all famine and insurgency, she wore saris and high heels in Belgravia. She made documentary films on Bangladesh, on secret India, on the timelessness of Hinduism. She wrote books on pseudo-spirituality and the Princes, many of whom were her friends. She appeared on television shows to chasten those who threatened to spoil the magic by overplaying the wretchedness of India. ‘Poverty?’ she once told Louis Malle, ‘I don’t know why people keep going on about poverty. Everyone I know in India has a car.’ And everyone she knew did.
    In the West, she traded on India; and, in India, starved for news of the West, she carried back stories of the latest fashions, of books and movies, of Polanski and Kapuscinski, of how London was changing. She had sole monopoly on the exchange of pop culture and exotica, and she could only have thrived in a world where the exchange of goods and ideas was restricted, where news and information were scarce, where distances were real. Anyone might have told her that she would not survive the Internet. And, truly, much later, in that other time, when change came at last, it singled her out for extinction with a fury that till then had only been reserved for such inanimate things as the post and the landline.
    Her father, the politician Sarat Mohapatra, was among those arrested the night before. And it was one of the many pretensions of this political family to refer to him – Mohapatra,
their
father – in the English way as simply Father, as though he were everybody’s father.
    ‘Wow-zee, Toby saab,’ she now began, ‘what times we live in! Father, you know, he was so stoic. He was ready for them when they arrived. And he, of course, was great friends with Pundit Nehru. So what a blow, so personal, you know. The daughter of your old friend sending around the police to arrest you. Horrific, and so bad for India, for her image. Forgive us for not being able to host you. Nixu’s been in a flap about it all morning.
Because
,’ and here, looking over at her brother who was in earshot, she gurgled with pleasure – nothing pleased her more than to run someone down, even her own brother – ‘apparently when they came around to take Father away, he told the servants not to bother to wake Nixu. So it was only this morning, when the servants brought him his orange juice and paper, that my darling brother discovered Father was gone.’
    ‘Shut up, Gayatri,’ Nixu said. ‘He’d have done just the same if it was you.’
    ‘Nonsense! Father and I, you know, Toby, were very close.’
    ‘
Are
very close, Gayatri. He’s in jail, not dead.’
    Ignoring her brother, she said, ‘If he was not so staunchly opposed to all this dynasty business, which frankly he considers the height of vulgarity, he would have quite liked me to follow him into politics. I was the only child of his that he would discuss these things with,’ she said, glancing at Nixu. Then seeing Toby’s attention drift, she added quickly, ‘But enough, enough political gup-shup, Toby ji.’
    Toby, even in that quick survey of the room, had seen the person who’d been on his mind since that afternoon.
    ‘Who—?’ he began.
    ‘Who?! Who, what! Tell me about yourself. You were marvellous today. I tell you, if only we’d grown up knowing these things. All they ever taught us, in bloody Tara Hall, was Billy the Bard, the Brontë-Shrontes, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” . . . It’s such a handicap, you know. They were so systematic, Les Angrez, in stamping out our culture.’
    ‘And a very good thing too,’ Nixu said. ‘Where would we be without them? Chanting-shanting. Burning women. Drowning girl children. The Horror that is India, I tell you . . .’
    ‘Gayatri, who—?’ Toby tried again.
    By this point, Mahijit had