Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  “Study what?” said Chandra.

  “Whatever you like. Yoga, dance, chakra cleansing, primeval chanting, tantra.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Jean. “I mean, I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Big Sur,” said Steve. “One of the most beautiful places in the world.”

  “Oh,” said Chandra, “well, maybe I should visit one day.”

  Jean laughed, but Steve said: “I think that’s a great idea.”

  Chandra looked at his watch. “Where’s Jasmine?”

  “Ha!” said Steve. “You won’t see her till morning.”

  “No,” said Jean. “She’ll be back for dinner. That was the deal.”

  “That was your deal.”

  “It was our deal. She can go out with her friends tomorrow.”

  “Did you shake on it?”

  “I told her she needs to see her father,” said Jean.

  “Honey, no teenage girl wants to see her father. No offense, Chandra. My kids didn’t want to see me either. That’s just life.”

  “The deal was she’d be back for dinner,” said Jean, “so she’d better be.”

  “Rebellion’s a part of it,” said Steve. “You command, she defies.”

  “You can’t do without boundaries,” said Jean.

  “Boundaries are there to protect us. Teenagers don’t want to be protected. They’ll cross any line they see, which is why we have to be careful which lines we draw. Isn’t that right, Chandrasekhar?”

  “I almost think it doesn’t matter what we do,” said Chandra. “We can’t control our children, boundaries or no boundaries. We can’t control anything really. When I think about it, when I really sit down and think about it, I realize there are no boundaries. No boundaries at all. We only pretend there are.”

  Steve looked out across the valley. Chandra could feel Jean staring at him. He doubted she had ever heard him talk like this. The truth was he had felt this way for years but had never been able to put it into words until his accident, that sudden realization that if there was a meaning to life, none of them would ever know what it was.

  Jean walked to the cliff’s edge and looked at the sky, black now with a few stars emerging.

  “I used to think Jean was angry when she got like this, but she’s not, is she?” said Steve.

  In Chandra’s opinion, Jean was always a little angry. It was her level; a sharpness Northern Englanders had, a permanent state of depression they accepted wholeheartedly. Life’s a bitch and so’s the Prime Minister, Jean used to say, despite being a Thatcherite through and through. Professor Chandra wanted to believe Steve had just revealed something critical about how little he knew Jean, but perhaps the truth was that Jean was becoming a Californian too, or, harder to stomach, was simply happier now.

  “But Jasmine’s a great kid,” said Steve. “God, isn’t it funny how your definition of a kid changes as you get older? I bet you see your students as children.”

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “That’s the thing about child psychiatry. You realize so much of it applies to yourself. Like there’s always a child in you who never went away. And then after we die, we become children again. You believe that, don’t you, Chandrasekhar? That we’re reincarnated?”

  Chandra wanted to retaliate with something vicious and witty like, “Maybe you were a man in your former life,” but he felt compelled to tell the truth: it was that sort of evening.

  “I used to believe it when I was a child,” he said, “but then I stopped. I haven’t believed in anything since then. I haven’t had time.”

  “Wow,” said Steve. “I never heard that one before. ‘I’m an atheist because I don’t have the time.’ ”

  “In my case it’s true.”

  Jean was talking on the phone, her voice raised. Chandra could not see her face, but he knew it was red, a balloon about to burst. It meant Jasmine wasn’t coming home for dinner. He wished he could go back to his hotel and spend the evening under the covers with a book and a brandy from the minibar; he had started reading Angels and Demons a few days ago.

  “I admire that so much,” said Steve, “your take-it-or-leave-it attitude. In the West there’s a tendency to let spirituality get to the ego. We start thinking we’re better than other people because we meditate. That was the counterculture back then, and it’s what finally did us in. People like me went to India, grew beards, came home, then realized our grandmothers were the wisest people we knew. So we turned into conservatives. You know what I mean?”

  Chandra thought of his own grandmother, a cruel manipulator who died of a chest infection after immersing herself in a supposedly holy lake at the age of eighty-three.

  “Absolutely,” said Chandra.

  Jean tossed her phone onto the sofa. “Well,” she said, “that’s that then.”

  “Feelings and needs, Jean.”

  Steve had morphed into a professional, eyes closed, hands on his knees, breathing deeply.

  “All right,” said Jean. “I feel angry as hell and hurt and sad because my need for respect is not being met.”

  “And?”

  “And love, and friggin’ consideration—”

  “That’s a judgment.”

  “Then just love…and respect.”

  “Can we isolate the two?”

  “I feel hurt because my need for love is not being met, and angry because my need for respect is not being met.”

  “That’s nonviolent communication,” said Steve. “It takes blame out of the equation.”

  It sounded like management-speak to Chandra’s ears, which had never sounded nonviolent to him but more a form of silly, confusing passive aggression, like bashing someone to death with a balloon.

  “So when is Jasmine coming?” asked Chandra.

  “God knows,” said Jean. “She said she’d be back by midnight, which could mean anything.”

  Jean’s eyes were still locked onto Steve’s. Chandra hoped no one would ask how he was feeling.

  “Well,” said Steve, leaning forward and putting his hand on Jean’s waist. “I guess I’d better see about dinner.”

  Steve stood and, to Chandra’s surprise, Jean pulled him toward her and they embraced like shameless exhibitionists for what felt like hours but was probably seconds. So far as he could tell it was entirely unselfconscious and not a performance. He had always thought Jean so practical, so admirably unsentimental, but perhaps that had been him all along, and not her.

  “Hungry, Chandrasekhar?” said Steve.

  “Always,” said Chandra, who wasn’t certain he could manage even a mouthful.

  “Excellent.”

  “Food’s very simple here,” said Jean. “Not exactly Cambridge fare.”

  He was about to reply, “Simple is my middle name,” but hung his head instead, his anxiety finally getting the better of him. Steve and Jean proceeded into the house with Chandra following, as if connected by a slack but high-quality length of rope.

  To his relief, there was a baseball game on TV that Steve wanted to watch so they ate dinner in the open-plan kitchen, talking only during commercials. Chandra tried to explain the rules of cricket but Steve didn’t seem interested, so he allowed baseball to be explained to him for what might have been the fortieth time in his life.

  The dinner was Indian food, dal and aloo gobi, neither authentic nor inauthentic, but obviously made from superior ingredients. “Rafa grinds the spices himself,” said Steve, and pointed to a giant mortar and pestle by the dishwasher.

  After dinner Chandra took out his iPad, sitting at the kitchen counter and pretending to look at his emails, muttering, “Okay, okay,” and, “I thought I’d replied to this,” though in reality he was watching Steve and Jean who, it was evident, were happy, happier than he and Jean had ever been, eve
n at the beginning.

  He left shortly after eleven, accepting Jean’s assurances that Jasmine wouldn’t show her face until dawn. Steve hugged him goodbye, and Jean kissed him on the cheek, which she never used to, as if she were too joyous now to feel any bitterness toward him.

  “Rafa will see you out,” said Steve, but there was no one there, so Chandra opened the gate and drove through the darkness, forgetting to turn on his lights until he was halfway up the road.

  JEAN HAD LEFT him for the first time in 1997, three years after they moved back to Cambridge from Chicago. She called his rooms to tell him she was in Bristol with her sister. She had made arrangements for the babysitter to pick up the ten-year-old Radha.

  “Why, Jean?” he said. “What is this?”

  “We’ll talk when I get back, Charles.”

  He’d been Head of Department for exactly a year by then, a role he had approached like a samurai trapped behind enemy lines. Declaring it a scandal that a department as illustrious as theirs should find itself beneath the Paris School of Economics in the league table, he made it his mission to go after the department’s weakest links, the ones who believed a tenured position at Cambridge gave them the right to deliver the same lecture for twenty years, or to write English so sloppy they might as well have been living in Paris.

  His methods were appreciated by the brighter, more productive members of staff, but he became a figure of hate for the mediocrities, those dough-faced, black-tied port swiggers who draped their frames across the velvet thrones of the SCR as if in a Saint-Denis bordello, reading the Times two or even three times during those long empty hours before dinner that everyone else called “the day.” Many had been fine minds once, but they had let themselves go in their fifties, victims of pomp, circumstance, and the college wine cellar. Chandra made it his task to expose them, pinning invisible dunce caps to their shiny foreheads in the hope that this might galvanize them into becoming scholars once more. Sometimes he corrected their work himself, applying Wite-Out with the zeal of a house painter. And many did emerge from their torpor, but with one goal only—to destroy their new tormentor so that life could return to the way it had been before the days of tyranny.

  And so his life became a war, and through it all he continued to publish, cutting back on consulting and the only other thing he could afford to reduce—time spent with family. In any case, he had become a liability in the home, a short-tempered rogue who yelled at his children when he could not find his glasses, regularly stormed out of the house on Sundays in favor of the office, and twice kicked dents in the side of the car when the engine wouldn’t start.

  The night after Jean left, Sunny, then fifteen, asked where his mother was, to which Chandra replied, “Stop saying the first thing that comes into your head!” Sunny shrugged and replied, “I was only asking,” at which Chandra yelled, “You’re always only asking!” Sunny stayed in his room that night, refusing to come down for dinner.

  When Jean returned three days later she behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was only when they were in bed with the lights off that she dropped the bomb.

  “A marriage counselor!” said Chandra. “Whatever for?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “But I don’t beat you. I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “I’m not as content as you are, Charles. I’m not happy with our marriage.”

  “My God,” said Chandra. “You think I’m content?”

  “I think you’re absorbed in what you’re doing. I think that’s enough.”

  “I didn’t choose to be absorbed,” said Chandra. “I have to be. Do you understand? I have to.”

  “We’ll see,” said Jean, watching him while he crushed his face inside his hands. It felt as if she were analyzing him, taking notes on his symptoms for future reference.

  They saw the counselor the following week, Jean making the appointment herself without consulting him. It was a woman, a Ms. Cynthia Benson, who listened quite sympathetically to Chandra’s side of the story. Chandra agreed that becoming a departmental wife had not been what Jean had wanted, but she had agreed to do this, he said, agreed to move to Chicago and then Cambridge, agreed not to work after Sunny was born. To his surprise, Cynthia Benson considered this important.

  “Is this true, Jean?”

  Jean nodded.

  “Then you have to own it.”

  “Yes,” said Jean, after a silence. “Yes, that’s fair.”

  “It’s important to take ownership of our decisions.”

  “I agree,” said Chandra.

  “And do you agree with your wife that you choose to work the hours you do?”

  Chandra looked from Jean, who was staring at him, to Ms. Benson, who was cleaning her glasses. Of course it wasn’t a choice: if he didn’t work, then how would he pay for their house, or their cars, or the televisions in every room, or the sums he doled out to cousins in India, some of whom he had never even met? And did anyone have the slightest idea what it was like for him in that department, how hated he was by those mediocrats, how he had to work twice as hard as all of them, not including the Senior Common Room somnambulists who barely worked at all? If that was a choice, you might as well call breathing a choice.

  “Well, Chandra?” said Cynthia Benson.

  “Yes,” said Chandra. “I agree.”

  “There’s more,” said Jean. “Charles won’t say this, but he doesn’t think the rules apply to him. He thinks he’s not an ordinary person, that his work has to come first because it’s vital for humanity and if his children have to suffer, then so be it.”

  It was the cruelest thing she had ever said to him. Could he help it if he was a brilliant man? Yes, why not say it? B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T. It was a fact acknowledged by far greater authorities than Cynthia Benson. And yes, his work mattered. As he never tired of telling Jean, he had been born into a poor country, truly poor, not the sort of kitchen-sink poverty she complained of but the sort where millions died in famines, where homelessness meant homelessness instead of a preference for inferior wines and an al-fresco lifestyle. Chandra’s work saved lives. It didn’t mean he was more important than Jean or that he didn’t love his family, but it was a fact.

  “My work is important,” he said.

  “Important to you,” said Jean.

  “Yes,” said Chandra, adding, “and to the world” in his head.

  “I wonder if Jean would see it as an act of love if you were to sacrifice some work time for family time,” said Cynthia Benson.

  “I would,” said Jean. “Absolutely. I feel invisible, Charles. As though you see your work but not me. I mean, you know I’m there, but you don’t see me. I’m just your wife. Like an armchair. Like a rug.”

  Chandra shook his head. “No,” he said. “I do see you.”

  “But you have to accept this is the way Jean feels,” said Cynthia Benson.

  Chandra nodded.

  “And what about you, Chandra?” said Cynthia Benson. “Is there anything you’d like from her?”

  He looked Jean in the eye and struck a magnanimous pose, his head tilted as if modeling a Renaissance beret. “Nothing at all.”

  “Good,” said Cynthia Benson. “So, I think we all agree that it’s healthier for Jean to accept responsibility for her own decisions and try not to blame you for the past, while you, Chandra, will agree to come home earlier and spend less time at the office. We can discuss specifics, hours, days, and so on, or we can leave it at that for now. Third…”

  For the first few weeks, Chandra and Jean upheld their sides of the bargain. Jean spoke openly about how she wished she had pursued her studies further after marriage, but how she had resigned herself to being a departmental wife because she’d been afraid to fight her own battle, not because Chandra had oppressed her into doing it. But the battle had meant very little to her anyway, she to
ld him. Chemistry had never excited her: she had never wanted to work in a lab, or to teach, or to join some company that made a product with a name she couldn’t pronounce and a function she didn’t care about. She had studied chemistry because she was good at it, because women didn’t usually do science, because she’d wanted to be different. Marrying Chandra had been far easier than figuring out what she actually wanted to do.

  “So you married me for something to do?” said Chandra.

  “That isn’t what I said, Charles.”

  Jean had promised not to exhibit what Cynthia Benson, and now Chandra, called “passive aggressive” behavior, though he was still not sure what this meant. Chandra had always found much of her behavior simply aggressive, wasn’t certain there was even a difference.

  He himself was making genuine attempts to spend less time at the office. He began to work in front of the fireplace at home, or in bed, and Jean seemed satisfied with this, as did Sunny and Radha. Sometimes Sunny would sit and read drafts of articles with his father, making arcane, unintelligible comments, sharing Chandra’s outrage at a colleague’s idiosyncratic grammar and syntax, repeating phrases like “This would be hogwash if it came from an undergraduate!” and “This is actually rather good; I wonder where he stole it from.” Radha, despite her age, seemed to understand the situation better. She would put an arm around Chandra or pat him on the back as if to congratulate him for being at home. “We really have fun with you, you know,” she’d tell him, looking at him with those planet-sized eyes.

  Chandra and Jean also fulfilled the third condition of their agreement, one entirely at the behest of the therapist, which was to go on a weekly “date.” Usually Chandra would suggest the cinema or theatre, afraid that if they went to dinner he and Jean would have little to talk about and, because these dates were self-conscious by definition, would simply stare at one another with mounting anxiety before deciding to skip dessert and go home to watch The Poseidon Adventure on video.

  It was on one such evening that Jean dropped her second bomb of the year. They were in a Spanish restaurant and she was talking about the garden and whether they should cut down the fir tree that blocked the light to the east, when Chandra interrupted and said, “You know what, Jean, perhaps we should just be honest and stop this.”