Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  He was nervous when he met her parents, tucking into the plate of roast beef they set in front of him as if it were his most favorite thing in the world. But they seemed uninterested in him, not unfriendly, only bored, which seemed to be how they felt about everything. They asked very few questions and replied in monosyllables to his own questions. The conversation was dominated instead by Jean’s younger sister, Jennifer, who had opinions not only on India but even on economics. Britain was in recession in those days and Jennifer blamed the Arabs for hiking up the price of oil, an assessment Chandra agreed with.

  “There’s no point us working three fucking days a week, is there?” said Jennifer, who used such language freely in front of her parents. “Where’s that going to get us?”

  “It’s to save on electricity,” said Jean.

  “We can’t even watch TV,” said Jennifer, and again looked at Chandra as if to signify that she blamed him for both the oil crisis and the three-day week.

  “She’s always liked a good joust,” said Jean later.

  “Yes, of course,” said Chandra, who had been telling her all year that this was the lot of the economist, that they were always society’s scapegoats.

  “Sorry my parents were so quiet,” said Jean. “They’ll warm up eventually.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” said Chandra.

  But this never came to pass. Their wedding, also in Bolton, was just as lackluster an affair with perhaps twenty guests, all from Jean’s side except for two of Chandra’s colleagues. Jean’s father made a very short, perfunctory speech welcoming “Charles” to the family before sitting down without saying another word for the rest of the evening. Jennifer made a speech too, bright and witty, but not even mentioning Chandra or the wedding.

  A month later there was a second reception in Hyderabad. It was Jean’s first trip abroad, Jennifer’s too, though their parents elected not to make the journey, declaring it “too far.” Chandra took the sisters to his parents’ home, a three-story villa in Banjara Hills which he described, somewhat preposterously, as his “ancestral home” (it was only twenty years old).

  He hired a driver to show them the city, trying not to leave the affluent suburbs in case the sisters saw pigs grazing in rubbish or beggars with no limbs, or barefooted sadhus, and pronounced his country a developmental failure. In the process he neglected to show Jean the places where he actually grew up, his coffee clubs and cricket grounds and bookshops, but he achieved his objective. At the reception both admitted they had expected more poverty.

  “I knew it wouldn’t be like on TV,” said Jennifer.

  “Nothing is,” said Jean.

  “Jean’s a realist,” said Chandra’s father, drunk since the afternoon.

  “I’m a romantic,” said Chandra, desperate for a cigarette.

  “You’re an idiot,” said his father.

  Chandra changed the subject, pretending not to have heard.

  An hour later, he was huddled in a corner with two old classmates when his father walked over and extended his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was wrong of me.”

  It was the first time in his life his father had apologized to him, or indeed to anyone, as far as Chandra knew. He was sure it was Jean’s doing, but he had no idea how she had accomplished it. When he asked her she answered, “Took his drink away.”

  Chandra’s father was a civil servant who had written two books on the Indian Constitution. Chandra’s mother had died eleven years before and ever since his father had consumed a regular glass of rum and water at eleven in the morning. It was the reason for Chandra’s strict rule about never drinking before sundown (a rule he had retired after turning sixty-five).

  “I could have been so much more,” was a refrain Chandra had heard for years, but he was never sure if his father was referring to his drinking, his widowhood, his failure to become a professional cricketer, or his position within the service. All he knew was that his father was incomplete, a circle three-quarters drawn, and it had made him mean.

  Professor Chandra’s father died four years later from a heart attack. They had spoken on the phone a week earlier when Chandra called with the news that Chicago had offered him an Associate Professorship, conveyed via a handwritten note from Milton Friedman himself who had told him he was “enamored of” his writings. Chandra braced himself for something along the lines of, “But Chicago’s not in the Ivy League,” or, “Why not a full Professorship?” but instead there was silence, and what might have been a sob.

  “Keep going, Chandu,” his father said at last. “You can do it, Chandu. You can do it.”

  There followed a brief spat about Indira Gandhi after which his father muttered, “Nincompoop,” and hung up the phone, but Chandra had tried to forget this. Sometimes he found himself inventing new memories, snapshots of purely imaginary kindness, as if mourning the relationship he had never had, the man his father had never been. The phrase “I could have been so much more” was etched in his mind now, closely followed by “You can do it, Chandu,” which he liked to think of as his father’s last words.

  It was at this time that he began to work with the sort of relentlessness that would become his signature in years to come. He claimed it was merely on account of being in the U.S. This was what they did, he said; they all ate dinner at their desks and ran straight from maternity wards into meetings. But Jean pointed out that he was beginning to adopt a new persona too, that he was developing a reputation for arrogance which meant that, along with admirers, he was acquiring enemies at a formidable rate.

  “It’s necessary,” he told her. “They’ll eat you alive here if you don’t play hardball.”

  Even after Sunny was born, Chandra tended to stay at the office until midnight, working on the manuscript that would eventually become his first book, Fast Unto Bankruptcy. He smoked more than he had in England, and drank twice as much coffee. On some mornings he would wake with his head on his desk and a cup of cold Nescafé in front of him at which he would lap before going to his first lecture of the day. Jean used to worry that he would fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand.

  “You’ll set the department on fire one day,” she said.

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Chandra replied.

  And now he was a year away from being seventy and had set not only the department but the world on fire, and yet he could not shake the feeling that he had squandered his years, drained them of all that was worthwhile. Fun! Joy! Laughter! Play! The same qualities he had so derided in his colleagues, even in his children.

  Professor Chandra took off his clothes and stared at himself in the bedroom mirror. Most men his age did not like what they saw when they did this and tried to make up for it by buying sports cars or taking mistresses or making yet more money, but Chandra had no objection to his body. His paunch was gentle and inoffensive. His hair was more silver than gray and neatly parted, though with his forelock hanging wild like Denis Compton’s in his Brylcreem days. He had those spindly legs common to so many South Indian men, but even they were elegant in their own way, slender and deer-like.

  Most important of all, he did not look like a man who had had a heart attack, silent or otherwise. As he stared at his reflection he couldn’t see the grim reaper’s bony finger draped across his shoulder. Yes, he was at an age when, in days of yore, men would retire to forests for blissful austerities, but Sunny was right: this was the modern era. He could live to be over a hundred. Soon heart transplants would be as common as vasectomies, cancer no more troubling than the common cold.

  “It isn’t over yet,” he told his reflection and crossed to the bed, trying to whistle the tune to “California Girls.”

  UC BELLA VISTA was not what he had expected.

  It resembled a glorified retirement community, row upon row of prefab homes interspersed with the occasional playground. Green deci
duous plants that had no business existing in such a climate grew alongside palm trees and cacti, and every street—they all looked identical—was named after a famous writer or scientist, most of them Nobel laureates. Professor Chandra saw acres of unused land on which cranes and diggers were busy at work. He didn’t want to ask what they were doing for fear they might be building a cemetery.

  “Welcome to California,” said Felix, who had met him at the airport.

  “Where’s the town?” said Chandra, peering at the horizon.

  “It’s all out there waiting for you. So what do you think?”

  “It’s quite something.”

  “Isn’t it?” Felix clapped him lightly on the back.

  He felt better when he saw his new home, which had four bedrooms, a TV the size of a whiteboard, and a hot tub in the garden. Chandra was also provided with an SUV, his first ever, which, after a bath, he drove into town, noting that the mirror allowed him to see no more than a third of the road behind him which left him in a permanent state of anxiety.

  The town revealed itself to be a giant retail outlet with shops the size of airport terminals. The same chain eateries recurred every two or three miles, and Chandra realized he could get the exercise Dr. Chaney had insisted upon simply by walking from one Starbucks to the next (he counted four in the space of ten minutes). That evening, Felix and four other faculty members took him to a Mexican restaurant where, in accordance with his low-fat, low-sodium, low-sugar diet, he ate a whole-wheat tortilla with grilled chicken and avocado. Felix tapped on his margarita glass and made a speech after which the waiters produced a flan with sparklers sticking out of it in Chandra’s honor. It was hardly High Table.

  Over the following days, the drive to LA proved neither as dramatic nor as glamorous as Chandra had hoped. He was at the mercy of the GPS which had the habit of saying, “Turn right now,” when he was in the leftmost extremity of a five-lane highway, and on three separate occasions tattooed could-be gangsters gave him the finger (and once, the sign for a pistol). To make matters worse, he found the SUV near impossible to park and so opted for valets with their exorbitant rates until, eventually, he stopped going to LA altogether. He spent most evenings in his backyard after that, listening to the sound of hoses on lawns and reading Dan Brown, or else he found himself at one of his neighbors’ houses, identical in layout to his own, discussing departmental politics over barbecued chicken and iced tea.

  As for the university itself, it was a relief to be in less exalted surroundings, to have an office inside a twentieth-century, air-conditioned concrete block instead of a sixteenth-century castle, and to interact with staff who didn’t call him sir or wear bowler hats. But the undergraduates were even worse than in Cambridge: arrogant, unhygienic, and brazen, convinced that lazy platitudes and fallacious arguments would earn them nothing but praise if delivered with sufficient conviction. It remained Professor Chandra’s unshakeable belief that university was wasted on ninety percent of these unctuous recidivists but, after his reprimand in Cambridge, he tried to keep his thoughts to himself.

  The best thing about being in California, however, was his proximity to Jasmine and, Jean’s warnings notwithstanding, he was thrilled when, in March, he found himself waiting for her at John Wayne airport holding the bag of chocolate Easter eggs he had brought over from Mr. Simms in Cambridge.

  Jasmine was staring into her phone when she emerged. She was wearing some sort of pale foundation (the Gothic look; he remembered it from Radha) beneath black mascara and lipstick. Her clothes were black too, including her raincoat, ridiculous in LA. She didn’t smile, but she did put her arms around his neck for at least a minute.

  On the drive home he kept telling her how delighted he was to see her, prattling on for most of the journey, trying to avoid the subject of her college applications so as not to send her into a rage early on. But Jasmine didn’t seem angry or depressed. She asked about his health, whether he had been smoking or eating red meat, and told him swimming was by far the best exercise.

  “I can’t swim,” said Chandra.

  “You can, Dad. I’ve seen you.”

  “I can float,” he said. “It isn’t the same.”

  “Hey,” said Jasmine. “Can I drive?”

  She had been learning for two months. Jean couldn’t drive herself, but had reported that Steve was doing “a super job.”

  “Certainly,” said Chandra, and pulled over.

  Chandra watched as Jasmine settled into the driver’s seat and spent several minutes adjusting the mirror, a difficult task in an SUV, before pulling away. To his relief, she proved a slow and conservative driver (which had not been the case with Sunny or Radha), and on reaching home, parked the SUV in the driveway far more neatly than he ever had, before handing him the keys.

  “So,” he said. “This is it.”

  “Yeah,” said Jasmine. “It looks all right.”

  “Nothing like Boulder.”

  Jasmine shrugged.

  “So how are your friends?” he asked, feeling like an idiot. “Suzie and…everyone else.”

  “They’re okay.”

  “Your mother said you’ve been talking to someone,” said Chandra. “Is that, you know, going well?”

  Jasmine sighed. “I don’t need therapy, Dad. I’m just having it to keep everyone happy, okay?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Everything’s all right. Mum’s all right. Steve’s all right. School’s all right. Life’s all right. It’s not brilliant, it’s not great, it’s not wonderful, but it’s not like I’m planning on slashing my arteries with a potato peeler. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  That night as he got out of the bath, wrapping a towel around his waist, he looked out the window and saw Jasmine in the garden smoking a cigarette. She stared at him defiantly before turning her back. With that baseball cap on her head, she looked exactly as she had at thirteen; he could easily imagine a sticking plaster on her left knee, the two of them playing Ping-Pong on that rusty table in the garden or painting the shed while making up nonsense rhymes.

  They visited the Getty the following morning, and again he let her drive, but this time the SUV got the better of her and in the parking lot she pressed too hard on the accelerator and slammed the car into a concrete wall. Sunny was right: airbags were pretty safe, if uncomfortable.

  Chandra prepared himself for tears, contrition, an inconsolable child, but instead Jasmine squeezed her way past that plastic bubble, tearing her skirt, and into the car park where she began to scream, short, sharp and repeatedly, like someone thrusting a dagger. A security guard came and helped Professor Chandra out through the backseat after which the two approached Jasmine from behind, carefully, as if stalking a bear.

  “I wish you’d both just disappear!” she shrieked, not even turning around.

  “Now what did I ever do to you?” said the guard.

  “You and Mum! You and your little lives, as if every fucking thing in the world is about you!”

  Four women had stopped to gawk and were talking in French, which Jasmine understood perfectly.

  “Allez vous faire fourtre, bande de salopes!”

  The women fled, a flurry of calf-length designer skirts and heels. Chandra looked at the security guard for help but he only shrugged and said, “She’s your kid, man.”

  “I am nobody’s fucking kid! Do I look like a kid?”

  “No,” said the guard, who was about forty-five, with flecks of white in his beard. “But you sure sound like one, and if you were mine I’d put you over my knee and spank you, I don’t care how big you are.”

  “Yeah, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” said Jasmine. “You’d love to get your pedo hands on my ass. Be a nice change from schoolgirl porn!”

  “Sorry, friend, you’re on your own,” said the guard. “I can call a pickup truck
, but that’s as far as I go.”

  “I thought you wanted to spank me?” said Jasmine. “Come on, big man, spank me!”

  The guard walked away, his image receding into the darkness like the silhouette of a distant shoreline.

  For the rest of her visit Jasmine was just as Jean had described. After he tried to talk to her about her college applications she went into her room and locked the door while Chandra stood outside repeating her name, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. When he smelled marijuana he almost started shouting but checked himself and knocked again, slowly and methodically. “All right,” came Jasmine’s voice, “I’ll come down,” and for the rest of the evening they watched television on the sofa in silence.

  The following day he took her to the airport where she hugged him for exactly three seconds before saying, “See you around,” and walked away, looking at her phone. Chandra stayed in the airport for two more hours, drinking lemonade and watching the planes take off. His conditioning told him to be stern with his daughter, that her behavior was villainous, disrespectful, wanton, and abhorrent—but he couldn’t make that mistake again, not after Radha.

  He called Jean that night and told her everything had gone splendidly, “save for a few hiccoughs.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jean.

  “Yes, she’s become quite a personality.”

  “That’s not how I’d put it. I’d say she’s shut herself down. You can’t even see her personality.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Chandra. “Come now.”

  “So tell me, Charles,” said Jean, slipping into scorn. “What did you learn about Jasmine? What did she tell you?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “I want details, Charles. Come on.”

  “Well…” said Chandra.

  “Sorry, Charles,” said Jean. “But I don’t think this is normal. I don’t care what anyone says. Not you, and not Steve.”

  He wondered if Steve was in the room, perhaps massaging her shoulders, whispering, “I know you don’t, honey, and that’s fine.” Their home was nothing like Chandra’s Grantchester cottage: lights and music were activated by handclaps; there were four taps, for hot, cold, filtered and sparkling water; and Jean had said there was no plastic in their house. None.