* * *
I had sent a brief missive to a journalist I knew, one of the most beautiful women I had ever laid eyes upon. She lived in Park Slope. You wrote last week that you would write a longer note “in a minute.” You didn’t. I haven’t moved since then. I haven’t eaten, or slept, or made love. Such longing.*2 Until that note got sent to Cai by mistake, accidentally mailed to India along with the detailed letter I had written for her about my work, a mistake that resulted in the abrupt end of our relationship, I received her reports from Delhi or towns in Bihar or Madhya Pradesh, where she was doing research.*3 She was studying Hindi while living for six months in a town called Amarkantak. It delighted her that she had learned all the names of the local trees. The town’s inhabitants were fond of her—a Chinese girl in Indian clothes. A nun had been raped in a village an hour away but the person who gave her this news said that Cai was safe because she wasn’t a Catholic. In her letter to me, Cai wrote that she was going to interview the nun. I reached the end of her note, and when I turned the page I saw my own handwriting. For a moment, I was confused. Without a word of commentary or a question, Cai had returned to me the letter I had stupidly sent her. You wrote last week that you would write a longer note “in a minute.” You didn’t…I didn’t write to Cai to apologize. What was the point of saying sorry? Oh, I was contrite, of course, but I knew I had done irreparable damage. I didn’t receive another letter from her.
I thought of Cai constantly and read her earlier letters over and over again. During her first weeks in Delhi she had watched a play called Netua. A netua is a man who puts on women’s clothes and dances during weddings and festivals in the villages of Bihar. The play was about a netua called Jhamna, who gets married and brings his bride back to his village. During Holi celebrations, the drunken, upper-caste youth in his village watch him dance and then they come for his bride. Jhamna lets go of his inhibition and hits out at the oppressors, but when they flee he falls upon his wife. The writer had skillfully transferred all the violence of the ruling class onto poor Jhamna and his rage. Cai said that, inspired by what she had seen our friend Pushkin do long ago in his translation work, she was going to collaborate on the translation of the Hindi short story on which the Jhamna play had been based. The writer was Ratan Verma from Muzaffarpur, and she was going to meet him in a fortnight.
This information had startled me. Muzaffarpur was where my father had gone to college when he left his village and I still had distant cousins living there. One of them owned two buses and another ran a timber business. I used to visit them when I was in Patna. If my cousins saw Cai Yan, a Chinese woman in a salwar-kameez, in a crowded street near their home, would they ever guess that she was my lover? No one there could imagine how hard she had worked to journey to a place where her present met my past. I also had other worries about Cai wandering around alone in a town like that. When I was a boy, maybe seven or eight years old, I was on a visit to Deoghar, walking on a street near a hill with my sister. Our parents had gone to the temple for which the town is famous. The guesthouse where we had found a room was a little distance away from the center of the town. It was a pleasant evening, small green trees, red earth, a winding road leading to the rocky hill maybe half a mile away. A motorcycle passed us, and then after it had gone a few hundred yards down the road it turned around and approached us. There were three young men sitting on it. They parked the bike and came to us. One of them asked my sister if she needed a ride. She didn’t answer them. The fellow who had asked the question took out a small plastic comb from his pocket and started passing it through his hair. The youth ignored their bike and fell in step with us. My sister jerked my hand to make me walk faster. One of the young men, a fellow in a tight blue shirt, stepped close to my sister and just pulled her dupatta off. Neither my sister nor I said anything. We kept walking, but I was conscious that my sister was breathing hard. Then I realized that she was crying. We walked like this for about ten or fifteen minutes, I’m not sure.
The boys trailed us. They sang songs and passed lewd comments, never letting us hope that they’d fallen far behind. Had one gone back to fetch the bike? I didn’t look back. My sister didn’t let go of my hand. Beyond a tree on our left, a path appeared leading down to a small cottage. I could now see an old couple sitting on cane chairs. My sister turned on the path. She went to the old man, who was easily seventy or eighty, and wearing a dhoti and a vest.
—Those boys are following me, she said.
That was the word, follow. A simple word whose meaning for a long time held a specific threat in my mind. The old man and his wife both looked toward the road. The woman remained silent, but after a while the man told us that we were welcome to go inside. The young men disappeared in the direction they had been originally going. While we were in the old couple’s home, my sister had an asthma attack, the first of her life, and this added to her helplessness. Later in college, asthma would cripple her, and she was prone to anxiety attacks for many years, but that evening in Deoghar the old couple were calm and helpful, as if they were quite used to young women rushing into their garden and collapsing breathless on the ground. They suggested that my sister lie down on their bed and then gave her honey and ginger tea. My sister became calm, her breathing returning to normal, in about half an hour. It was still light out when we left their house. The old man accompanied us to the road. He carried a large flashlight in his hand.
Now when I thought of Cai at the bus station in Muzaffarpur or standing in the marketplace in Barauni, she took my sister’s place in my mind and for a moment I was a boy again filled with fear. The problem, of course, was that I was older now and therefore closer in age to the young man I still remembered from the road in Deoghar, the one in the blue shirt who had snatched away my sister’s dupatta.
* * *
The only time that Cai called me from India was to tell me that Peter had died. I had just woken up and was confused by the news. Cai was telling me that I should go and look after Maya till Peter’s parents got there from Hamburg. The phone connection was poor. I asked Cai where in India she was at that moment, but she didn’t hear me. I went to the building where Peter and Maya had been living for the past six months; their apartment was larger because they had been given married students’ housing. As I hurried along to the apartment, rushing past people who were headed for classes or for work, I wondered how Cai had heard the news of Peter’s death. The answer presented itself when I arrived at the apartment. Ehsaan was sitting on Maya’s couch with her. At my entrance, Maya got up and said that perhaps I could make tea for Ehsaan and myself. She said she was going to lie down for a bit. Ehsaan said to her, Yes, you go but know that we are here if you need us.
I stayed silent as I made strong tea, with ginger, cardamom, and cloves also thrown in. After the milk came to a boil, I let the mixture simmer. Ehsaan stepped into the tiny kitchen.
—This smells good. You know, make a bit extra. Let’s try to get Maya to drink some tea.
He spoke in a very low voice, as if Maya were really trying to sleep in the bedroom. Naturally, I too fell into a whisper.
—Where is he?
—The police have the body.
—How?
—Hanged himself.
—In here?
—No. In the basement.
Ehsaan went out of the kitchen, perhaps to check if Maya’s door was still shut. When he came back he told me that another resident had found Peter in the basement early in the morning and called 911. There was no medical intervention because a fire department squad arrived almost as quickly as the police and declared him dead. The belt that Peter had used was looped from one of the metal pipes that crisscrossed the basement ceiling. He had wrapped duct tape around his wrists so that his hands were tied together. He must have done this last before kicking away the stool. Ehsaan arrived at four in the morning after Maya phoned him. The police were in the apartment. They found a suicide note in Peter’s pocket but Maya had put it away. When the police
left with the body for the autopsy, Ehsaan urged Maya to call Peter’s parents. She also called her own parents in Delhi and asked them to tell Cai.
The tea was ready. Ehsaan walked back to Maya’s room and spoke her name. He said that she should perhaps have a cup of tea. Surprisingly, she stepped out.
We drank the tea without talking. Maya’s eyes, or maybe more the area around them, had become dark. She seemed miles away from us, sunk into a silence that also had a madness in it.
Ehsaan said softly, The boy was in a lot of pain.
Maya pressed her lips together.
In a burst she was soon telling Ehsaan that just the following week the doctors were going to start ECT, electroconvulsive therapy. Peter ought to have waited. He would have been put under anesthesia and the doctors would have passed small electric currents through his brain. The delay had been because Peter had withheld consent; perhaps irrationally, he feared memory loss. But it was the only hope. Neither the Nardil nor the Restoril was working, Maya said, as if we knew what those names meant.
—You can’t blame him, Ehsaan said gently. He was sick. He was in a terrible place.
Maya allowed herself a single sob that was like a spasm.
—The drugs confused him. I suspect he was flushing them down the toilet or something, and pretending to me that he was taking them.
I remembered Maya sharing this fear with Cai. I didn’t say anything.
—I don’t know what—
Ehsaan said, You can’t blame yourself. We should keep our best thoughts of Peter in our hearts and pray for him.
Tears sprang into my eyes. I sat down next to Maya and touched her shoulder for a few moments before taking the empty cup from her. I think she thanked me for the tea.
When Maya went back to her room, I learned from Ehsaan that Peter’s parents would arrive by evening. I asked him if he had seen Peter’s corpse and he said that when he arrived they had him on a stretcher downstairs with a sheet covering his body.
—I removed the sheet from his face and then spread my hands and recited the Fatiha.
I had never known Ehsaan to be religious. Did I look surprised?
He said, Let me tell you a story about prayer.
He began telling me about the time he was in Beirut. He had gone to the Hizbullah headquarters in south Beirut with a French journalist who later became the ambassador there. Ehsaan interviewed the Hizbullah leader Sheikh Nasrallah. The piece he wrote was published under the title “Encounter with an Islamist.” There was so much irony in that title because the man he had met was unexpectedly practical and not terribly weighed down by ideology. There were very few armed men in sight at the headquarters, and to Ehsaan, this suggested intelligence and efficient security arrangements. The women were moving around freely, dressed modestly, of course, but not wearing the hijab. And then there was the sheikh, quite free of doctrinal armor, a man unwilling to defend the eternal or universal nature of the Shariat.
But the main reason Ehsaan had wanted to meet Sheikh Nasrallah was that he was interested in him as a person. He had wanted to interview him ever since he had watched news footage of him on television. This is what he had seen: seven coffins had been placed in a village school in south Lebanon, close to the border with Israel. A convoy of cars drove up before the burial. Sheikh Nasrallah came out of one of the cars and proceeded inside accompanied by his son Jawad. The bodies in the coffins were of Hizbullah fighters returned by Israel in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier. Nasrallah stopped in front of each coffin and offered the Fatiha. When he reached the coffin marked 13, he stopped and whispered in the ear of an aide. The aide summoned two workers of the Islamic Health Association, which is a Hizbullah outfit. They opened the coffin, exposing a body wrapped in a white shroud. Sheikh Nasrallah’s eyes closed, and his lips trembled as he recited the Fatiha. The body was that of Sheikh Nasrallah’s firstborn, his son Hadi, killed in battle with the Israelis. Slowly, Sheikh Nasrallah bent down and stroked the head of his dead son. Jawad, the dead boy’s younger sibling, remained quiet and pale behind his father. Sheikh Nasrallah stood with his hand resting on the chest of the body in the coffin. A deep silence had fallen in the room.
—Ehsaan said to me, I was unsure whether death had granted these people a grandeur that was denied them all their lives. But I felt that through his prayer Sheikh Nasrallah was giving their suffering and his own suffering some dignity. You understand?
* * *
The playbill said Pushkin Krishnagrahi’s Satish Sadachar in His Heavenly Abode. Pushkin’s play was about a man on his deathbed telling the story of his family. In the darkened theater I immediately thought of Peter, but Pushkin’s character was an old Indian man. The bed was empty, the lights shining bright on a white sheet, while the man’s disembodied voice filled the auditorium. Then the action started with all the other characters, his family members, in different corners of the stage. Sadachar, the play’s main character, was dead and we only heard his voice. Whatever was new wasn’t really better, but there was no reason to remain nostalgic about the old. This was the play’s uncompromising message, its alert skepticism. I was sitting with Ehsaan’s old student Prakash Mathan and a girl from NYU whom he had started dating. Ehsaan was there by himself, but he readily agreed to come to a bar with us. After we had got our drinks, he asked me quietly whether I had heard recently from Cai. I told him of our breakup.
—Your decision or hers?
—Hers, I said. I didn’t have the courage to tell him what lay behind the split.
—Is this what you want?
—I don’t know. My head says I should write to her. My heart knows she won’t have me back.
He gave me a half smile.
—Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a woman in the form of a dialogue between his head and heart. Do you know it?
I shook my head.
The love letter was addressed to a married woman named Maria Cosway, an artist. He wrote the letter after meeting her in 1786. Jefferson was the U.S. ambassador to France at that time. He had been out on a stroll with Cosway and he leapt over a fountain. He fell and hurt his hand.
—The letter was written slowly with his left hand because he had broken his right wrist when he fell at the fountain.
Maybe I ought to write a letter to Cai with my left hand, I thought. But it was Jefferson’s leap that I identified with. And the fall.
—The letter was several thousand words long, Ehsaan said. This was the same man who had composed, ten years earlier, the Declaration of Independence. Which, incidentally, was much shorter than the letter.
Ehsaan wanted me to visit the library and read the letter.
Then he told me that Maria Cosway had remained with her husband till his death, and later moved to Italy to start a convent school.
Ehsaan looked at me. His eyes had a half-mischievous glint.
—Her husband was said to resemble a monkey. Jefferson became president around 1800.
Prakash and his girlfriend, Maeve, were drinking cocktails.
I turned my back to them and, summoning some feeling of urgency, told Ehsaan that I shouldn’t wait any longer.
—I must go ahead and do the work I need to do in China.
Ehsaan could deliver a lucid lecture at any place and at any time.
—You must remember three points…
Deng Xiaoping was going to die soon but he was the model that the Indians were perhaps following. Deng had said that he wasn’t interested in a socialism of shared poverty; he wanted capitalist growth. How were literature and art going to respond to these vast changes? Ehsaan said that I could go ahead and write a bit about Lu Xun, and Agnes Smedley, and maybe Saadat Hasan Manto on the subcontinent, considering the role of writers during a time of great upheaval, but I had to remain mindful of the present moment. This third point he felt was the most important.
He stopped and asked, So, what is your position? Where do you stand vis-à-vis the unfolding present?
My presen
t position was that I was standing in a bar drinking a bottle of Sam Adams.
A good thing about Ehsaan was that he would often answer his own questions.
—You must travel from Beijing to Shanghai and then to places like Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The new zones wouldn’t exist except for Deng. What is life like there? Take a look for yourself and let your perception frame how you write about the past in which Lu Xun lived. You know enough about India and Pakistan to write a commentary on Manto. Let’s see how quickly you can do this so that you can then look for a job.
* * *
For four months, at 10:15 in the morning on each weekday, I was to be found on the twelfth floor, in the class right next to the men’s room, of the Beijing Language Institute. The institute was in the Haidian District. For an hour and a half, my official task was “to share and advance the bilingual/bicultural competence, extralinguistic/encyclopedic knowledge, and translation strategies/techniques” of about thirty students. The work was uninteresting because I learned nothing about the lives of the people I met. From time to time, a sentence would be read out to me in English and I would nod my head or try to reframe it. Simple sentences: You can’t be too careful. Is that correct? Or I would be asked questions that I didn’t have any answers for: Why does English have such extensive use of passive voice? Don’t you think English has more impersonal structures than other languages? Impersonal structures! What were they?
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