by Arnab Ray
She was going to settle down. In India. With Arijit. She reached out and held Arijit’s right hand, and he looked
at her calmly, smiling reassuringly. If he was nervous, he was not
showing it. Her papa had the mic now, his arm thrown lovingly
around Sudheer, and he was saying something she heard but did
not register. Standing in the shadows, away from the rest of the
family on the stage, she already felt detached, as if watching them
all from afar.
‘You sure you don’t want to join them up there?’ Arijit asked
softly, lowering his head, as he did to cover their difference in
height.
She shook her head, still looking straight up at her family. Would papa like Arijit? She was sure that ma would not. If
Arijit’s father had a diamond business or was the chief defence
secretary, she may have been happy. But his father was dead and
his mother taught Rabindrasangeet for a living in Calcutta. Arijit was not the type who would make it to Sudheer and
Mohan’s circle of rich baba log friends. He didn’t care for gratuitous
acts of macho Punjabisms, like drinking till he puked or peeing
from the roof down on to the garden below, which meant Sudheer
would have nothing to do with him. Neither was he into race cars
or clubs or Scotch or other things that rich men did and that meant
Mohan would smirk silently at him, with that superior half-smile
of his. In any case, it didn’t matter. Like ma, they would hate Arijit
without even trying to get to know him, because it had been her choice and good girls who give a damn for their family’s honour didn’t make choices, unless it was something like which shoes go
well with today’s dress.
But what about papa? In many ways, both the men were
similar, strong, gentle, loving, sensitive and always in control of
themselves. That was probably one of the reasons she had fallen
in love with him. Despite all they said about likes repelling, they
would warm up to each other, that’s what she had told herself.
Also papa loved educated people, if there was something that he
respected, it was a big degree. In that, there could conceivably be
no one more impressive than Arijit. Being a tenured professor at
MIT by twenty-five was impressive, even by papa’s high standards. Yet there was a problem, a problem that kept eating away at her
the more she came to know Arijit, a problem that she was afraid
would get between him and her papa, if not now then some day. Arijit was an idealist. He made no compromises. And papa,
well, he, and that much Riti knew, sold compromises for a living. It was because of Arijit that they were going to have to come
back to India. It was because of him that she was going to have to
break papa’s decades-old dream. She could hear ma telling papa,
‘You should have enrolled her in Lady Augustine’s down the road.
At least then she would have grown up proper and we wouldn’t
have spent a fortune on her education.’
Riti had never been the type to fall in love easily. Sure, there
had been the odd crush once in a while. Back in Switzerland, there
had been her Apollo-like Greek god of a gym teacher, straight
out of the pages of a romance novel, and then in freshman year,
her mentor in Greek drama class, married and stern with silverbrown hair, whose interest in her she could never fathom, purely
professional conscientiousness or something else. But all these had
been the silent gaze-from-afar, tiny flutterings of the heart, not to
be acted upon or even spoken of. She knew she was not ravishingly beautiful, but she was pretty, and she knew enough about dress and make-up and hairstyles and what to say and how to say it to be – to use a word that ma loved to use – ‘presentable’. She knew she attracted male attention whenever she was out with friends, or in class, or during her drama presentations, but this she waved away as more interest in the aura of affluence she gave off, even by Manhattan standards, than in her as a person. Whatever may have been the reason, she never reciprocated whenever anyone expressed interest in her. Any attempts to get her phone number or ask her out were met with polite yet firm brush-offs. Her best friend, Sally, whose father was a senator, used to affectionately call her a ‘frigid bitch’, and she had wondered if there was some truth in that. But no, the real reason she held herself back was because she did not want to betray her father’s trust in her. She did not want ma to say ‘See, that’s why girls should stay at home.’ She did not want another lecture on family honour from Sudheer or for Mohan to shake his head in silent disapproval. So, without taking a conscious decision to do so, she had been waiting for ma to fix her match, and avoiding any complication on the way
to that inevitability.
Then, and she still remembered the exact date, this man
had walked into a performance of Our Town. Her progressive
professor had been keen on colour-blind casting and so she had
been cast as Emily. She had not been at her best that evening, and
had been trying to leave quietly after her performance without
being noticed, when there he was, standing near the exit. There
was another man with him, an Indian, but that man had stood
back while he had walked ahead to shake her hand. She had to
stop because he was physically in her way. He had started to say
something and then she had brushed past, with a smile and a
nod, not really in the mood to talk. The next show, which was on
the weekend after, he was there again, this time alone, and once again he had stood at the gate. This one had gone considerably better and Riti had been in a better mood. When he said, ‘This was a much better performance,’ she had suddenly asked with a cocky arch of her eyebrow, and that was so unlike her, to speak to a stranger in this tone, ‘Really? How was this better than my last one? Explain.’ She knew it had been much better, but she did not expect a random Indian guy, with a rather unfashionable jacket and eightdollar-KMart jeans, to be able to understand the difference. In the next five minutes or so, the stranger had precisely described the differences between her performance this week and last, picking up on every nuance with the quiet confidence of a professor of drama, so much so that Riti immediately started feeling guilty for her arrogant presumption, to compensate which, when he asked her out for coffee, she did not give an excuse and rush away. His name was Arijit Banerjee, and he was a professor at MIT. He was visiting Columbia for a project, and, while in the city, had been making rounds of non-Broadway theatrical performances. He was interested in theatre, that was fairly obvious, but also films, Spanish poetry, and when she had asked what it was he taught at MIT, he had said, ‘solid state physics’. It was a fascinating evening, followed by a few more. She had introduced him to Sally, her roommate, and Sally had said, after he had left, ‘What a dreamboat. If you are not going to be fucking Che Guevara there, which I am
sure you aren’t, can you please leave him for me?’
A dreamboat, of that Riti was not sure. He was handsome,
though. Lean, wiry, tall, and the unkempt hair and beard
together with the large poet’s eyes, liquid and tranquil, made
him look somewhat like Che, and the fact that he spouted Brecht
and Georges Lefebvre made the connect with the Argentine
revolutionary even more authentic. Being her father’s daughter,
she had discreetly put a call through to the physics department of
MIT to confirm whether Arijit Banerjee actually was a professor there, for he seemed way too young for the qualification, and his story had checked out. A
fter a few Broadway shows, a few walks through Central Park, a few street plays in Greenwich village and a drive out to Princeton, she realized she was falling for him, and she rationalized it always as ‘papa will like him’. Settling down in
the US with a professor from MIT, surely he would not mind. Of course, she had not told Arijit how she felt. Firstly, good
girls didn’t fall in love with strange men and even if they did, they
waited for the man to make the first move. He had gone back to
Boston and she had gone back to her life, though she found herself
flubbing her lines more than she should, and waiting, with more
anticipation than she had felt for anything in her life, for the phone
by her bed to ring. She thought he would propose some day, maybe
on his knees with a diamond ring from Tiffany’s right below the
huge Christmas tree at Rockefeller Square, or maybe during the
dropping of the ball at Times Square or maybe he would wait for
her to be in Boston, perhaps near the Wharf, to a Spanish poem
from the sixteenth century. She waited and she dreamed. Till one day she opened her apartment to find him already
there. The apartment complex had just installed new security
systems and her first reaction had been, ‘How did you get in?’ She
could immediately see Arijit was nervous, his eyes flickering from
one corner of the room to the other, as if searching for something.
‘I am sorry, Riti, but I have to leave.’
‘Where? And how did you get in, this place just had…’ ‘New security systems. I know. Very simple to break through
really, takes two minutes.’
She kept her shopping bags from Macy’s on the table with a
dull thud. Now she was worried.
‘You broke in? What’s wrong? What’s happened? And where
are you going to go?’
‘Back home. India. They have asked me to leave…leave this
country…I have two days.’
She had walked up to him, and despite herself, she wrapped
her arms around him.
‘Who are they? Please tell me what’s happened.’
He didn’t. He just kept looking out pensively through the
window. ‘I will understand and respect whatever decision you
take,’ Arijit had said, pale like a yellow leaf in autumn, holding
on by its last fibre in the face of a stiff October breeze. He was
avoiding eye contact, looking out at the tourists walking past
down below, clutching shopping bags and coffee cups and their
overcoats tightly, for it was cold in that cruel New York city way,
and the chill had seeped into her Manhattan apartment, heated
as well as any ten-thousand-dollar a month pad in the Upper East
Side would be.
‘Do you want to break up? Is that what this is all about?’ she
had asked, praying that the answer he gave would be the one she
had wanted to hear.
‘No, I don’t. I want you to come with me to India. ’ ‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
‘If I am going to make my family angry, if I am going to walk
away from all this, the least I can expect would be to hear it from
your mouth. No?’
‘Because I love you.’
This was not the way she had thought things would go. This
was not the proposal she had dreamed of.
‘Arijit, you have to tell me what’s happened.’
‘I would…rather not.’
‘If you can’t trust me…’ She left the rest unsaid.
It took him some time to tell her. That’s when she came to
know that Arijit had another life, a life that went beyond solid
state physics and drama and film, one that she had never known
of till now, a life that had gotten him into trouble.
A lot of trouble.
As the snow started falling softly outside, settling slowly down
on the sidewalks and on the streets and the shoulders of black
trenchcoats and red scarves, she poured two cups of coffee and
pushed one towards Arijit. There was a choice for her now, him
or her papa, a choice she knew she had made by the time she held
him by his shoulder and leaned into him for a kiss, feeling his
rough weather-chapped lips, bitter with coffee, with the softness
of her tongue.
But now, as she saw her father walking towards her, she was
scared about the choice she had made. She felt afraid of her father
for the first time in her life.
Maybe he will not make others understand. Maybe he will not
even understand himself.
Arjun looked tiredly at the piles of paper strewn in front of him on the table, pushing back with his fingers whatever was left of his hair. Abdul Ismail, that indefatigable procurer of information, had been as thorough as always.
This was a lot to digest. At fifteen, Arijit had won a scholarship to go to the US. He graduated at seventeen, had a doctorate by twenty and went on to be a professor at MIT. ‘That’s the best place in the world,’ Ismail had told him, and he had no reason to doubt he was right because that’s also what Riti had said. There was a list of his patents, and cuttings of his awards, all very impressive, and his mind went back to that little boy taking apart and assembling a radio, all those years ago.
Why had this happened?
Luck? Bad luck?
Luck is what men say when they are too stupid to understand the
connection.
This was too much to have been done without design, for two people in the world to meet like this, and as he looked over to the other pile on his table, he was even surer that it was not.
It had been five months since Arijit had come back to India for good. That’s when it had started – labour troubles, newspapers carrying stories not in the interests of Arjun’s clients, inspectors getting tough, one in Madhya Pradesh, a few in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and even at the new petrochemical plant in Gujarat. It was not that these little things didn’t happen all the time in the kind of business he was in, not even that any of them had caused him much damage. Just the timing of it all, and the critical mass of the incidents, had seemed to be too much to blame on coincidence. He had bled RP slowly once and he could damn well tell if someone was doing the same to him. Of course, he had no way to be sure for now. There was no evidence linking any of this to Bangali’s son.
Maybe I am being paranoid. Maybe I am finding order where none exists.
‘How are you, uncle?’
Arjun could not forget that smile. There had been something there that was not quite politeness, it was like the edge of a sharp knife, flashed quietly and then put away in the pocket, a challenge, deliberate and well thought out.
‘How are you, uncle?’
He wanted him to know that he knew.
Or maybe I am being paranoid.
Of course Arijit knew who he was, he was not that young that he would not remember his face. Had he figured everything out or had Nayantara told him?
It didn’t matter. He had revenge on his mind.
I am being paranoid.
He had played his moves well, the boy. He hadn’t told Riti anything about how he was connected to this family. That was his bargaining chip, the little tick-tick bomb in his pocket that he had kept to keep Arjun in line. Of course he had no proof, but that was the thing about love.
Trust.
Arjun thought about his daughter, the conversation they had after everyone had left, out on the lawn, because he had not wanted anyone else in the family to know. He had pretended to be very angry by her supposed betrayal, using that word ‘trust’ and ‘break’ several times, till s
he had cried. She was in love, of that Arjun was sure, and he knew what dangerous things that little word made people do. He had made her confess to everything, when they had met, and how, and how long this had gone on, making little mental notes in his mind as to the things he would tell Ismail to check up on.
Then she told him why he had been deported from America. It was an amazing story, which he realized would have perhaps been more amazing if he had understood everything about it. Computers. He had a vague idea what they were. A year ago he had worked with a few American companies bidding to computerize national banks, and that’s when he had come to know what they were. But he had not warmed to the business of computers, because the margins were not enough to retain his interest. Mohan, though, had been particularly keen on computers and felt that ‘infotech’, which is what he called computers, had a future, so Arjun had let him spend his energy on it, if only because it would keep him out of his hair.
But what Riti had told him went beyond anything he had known about computers. Apparently, the Americans kept their big secrets in computers which were connected through phone lines and could talk to each other like people. Arijit was, and this Preeti had explained to him, like an expert cat burglar who could break into computers and telephone systems. He had broken into the computer network of the CIA and the US Army, and had stolen loads of information that he had planned to publish in a magazine he and some of his friends ran. It would be the embarrassment of the century for the US government. But the FBI had a mole in the magazine and the agents had come for him in Boston within hours of his getting the information and they had shoved him into a black van and driven away. In the story Riti had told Arjun, the Americans had asked Arijit to tell them how he did it and then to work for the government in secret, and only if he did this, his life would continue as it had. Else he was to leave the country in two days and never come back. Her man had not compromised, Riti had said with stars in her eyes, and Arjun had shaken his head in disbelief. This was too fantastic to be true.
Since the eighties, one of Arjun’s biggest clients had been the CIA. The Americans knew that Arjun Bhatia ran the best illicit money laundering network in this part of the world, and so he managed for them an intricate web of front companies and offshore accounts and money channels to move money to Afghanistan and Pakistan for the fight against the Russians. He kept the Americans informed on KGB moves in the corridors of Delhi, reminded ministers encashing cheques signed by the ‘Great Big Imperialist’ to go easy on the Israel-and-Coke-Pepsibashing rhetoric from time to time, and during critical votes in the UN, he would make some personal calls to diplomats. Over the years, Arjun Bhatia had done enough for the Americans to be considered a ‘Class A strategic asset’ at Quantico. And he just called in a big favour.
