The Other Language(57)
At lunch the two of them sat in the shade at the table by the pool. He was relieved to be alone with his wife, so they wouldn’t have to sustain a polite conversation with strangers. Thank God the prince never joined them at lunch, only at breakfast and dinner. Evidently two meals with his guests were more than enough for him as well.
The waiter brought a plate of golden fried zucchini flowers. A starter, he announced.
“You and the prince made these?” he asked his wife.
She nodded.
“Very tasty. The batter is nice. What is it?”
She was looking beyond the pool, beyond the trees, somewhere out of focus.
“Chickpea flour, I think.”
He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. They ate in silence. The waiter took away the plates and presented the main course, shrimp sautéed with chilis served with mango slices over arugula. The food here was tasteful, understated and the staff didn’t wear funny turbans or garish Bollywood-style outfits. They had a simple uniform like that of the staff in a house where one didn’t have to show off or pose in front of a camera all day long.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
She turned to him, surprised, as if shaken from a thought.
“What?”
“In the kitchen. With the prince.”
“Yes, we did. It was a lot of fun.”
“Are you all right? You look tired.”
“Maybe. I didn’t sleep very well last night. I might take a nap after lunch.”
“Good. Then I’ll do some work. I think I’ve just had an idea I want to get down.”
She didn’t ask him what the idea was. She just smiled with a blank expression, not having listened to what he’d just said.
When he came down from the room around seven, the guests from Delhi were sitting on the terrace around the low table set for the evening drinks. He had a hard time getting their names right when the prince made the introductions, the names being always so complicated in India. One of the guests was an older playwright—our living legend, the prince had said—a thin, elongated man who resembled a stork, with fine birdlike features and an impressive mane of flowing white hair. The playwright stood up and shook his hand, emanating a subtle aroma of sandalwood. He wore a finely tailored silk kurta that reached his shins and had a very fine, soft shawl wrapped around his shoulders. His wife, an ex-dancer, was a beautiful woman in her early sixties, draped in a blue and gold sari. Her ears and nose were studded with diamonds. There was a middle-aged choreographer, a tall, bald, bulky man in loose white pajamas and tunic who had lived in New York in the seventies (and had danced with Martha Graham and then performed with Peter Brook, it was explained). His friend, or perhaps his companion, was a younger man, a translator, who was the only one wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and had longish, uncombed hair. Unfortunately the translator spoke with a very thick Indian accent that was hard to understand, so he made sure to sit at the opposite end of the table, in order to avoid having to decipher him.
The bald choreographer had just come back from London and had brought a rare bottle of gin infused with cucumber and rose petals. Everyone was having cucumber gin martinis, so he agreed to have one and found it deliciously refreshing. In order to include him in the conversation the group was eager to know what kind of books he wrote and whether they could read them, had any of them been translated into English? Yes, a few had, so everyone made a mental note of the titles so they could look for them in Delhi. They mentioned names of the few Italian writers they’d read (Eco, Calvino), then mentioned Fellini and Antonioni’s films so that the conversation could seamlessly shift from them to him and he could take the lead. He felt at ease, well liked, especially after the second cucumber gin martini. This was what it must be like to live here, he thought, to have a normal conversation with people who do not address me just as a foreigner but as an intellectual: these people could easily be my friends as well. Then he asked them about Indian literature, a subject to which he—unlike his wife—hadn’t given much thought until that very moment, but the company inspired him and he wanted to return the courtesy. They discussed the problem of translation, how Indian literature was written in so many different languages and so much of it couldn’t be read by the rest of the country. There was an immense amount of excellent literature bound to remain unknown. It was so unfair. The young translator with the impossible accent was indicated as one of the best, if not the best, translators of Tamil literature into Hindi. He had translated epic novels, contemporary essays and poetry that would have been lost otherwise to all the Indians who didn’t read Tamil. There were twenty-two major languages, and most of the regions that spoke them had their own flourishing literature. What to do? He mentioned the few Indian novels translated into Italian he had read and praised them, to show them that not all Indian literature had been lost to foreigners. They pointed out that those novels were of a different kind, though, as they were originally written in English by writers who no longer lived in India or were born abroad and either wrote about their parents’ origins or wrote about the discovery of their roots as adults.
“We have a word for them, you know …,” the playwright said with a hint of a smile. The choreographer joined in and finished his sentence.
“We call them Indonostalgics,” he said, and everyone laughed.
Indonostalgics, he repeated, savoring the word, and making a mental note. That was exactly the kind of inside knowledge he enjoyed.