Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  “Stop what, Charles?”

  “These dates. We’re too old for it and we know it.”

  “What is it you want, Charles?”

  “I just want everything to go back to normal,” he said, realizing the stress he put on the last word made him sound like a child.

  “You want everything to go back to normal?”

  Chandra nodded, and poured himself another glass of the Rioja which Jean hadn’t touched.

  “If it’s not too late,” he said.

  He wanted to tell her he loved her, but such histrionics did not come easily to him. In Hindi movies whenever couples leaned toward one another a rose always appeared between them, a symbolic reminder that romantic love was a fictional entertainment, that real love was far less demonstrative.

  “Well, I think it probably is too late,” said Jean.

  “It is?”

  Jean sighed. “I’m up the duff, Charles.”

  Looking back on it, Jean must have known such an expression would have been outside Chandra’s frame of reference, but still she permitted the longest of silences until he admitted he had no idea what she was talking about. Even after she explained, all he could think about was the phrase itself, and when they came home he looked it up in Green’s Dictionary of Slang and learned that “duff” referred to “dough” which referred to “pudding” which referred to the phrase to “pull one’s pudding” which was slang for masturbation, and when one stirred all of these etymological mixers together, it meant Jean was pregnant.

  “And how do you feel about it?” he asked, as a way of concealing his own confusion.

  Jean shrugged. “No point being sad, is there?”

  Jean was bored, Chandra decided; that Western ailment caused by the collapse of the joint family and the invention of labor-saving devices. But now it would be all hands on deck once more, every hour usurped by a red-faced, bawling, fist-clenching little dictator which meant no one would have time to criticize the breadwinner for retiring to the office in order to fulfill his part of the bargain because all actions were now in service of the common cause. Yes, he concluded, everything could return to a state of antediluvian normality.

  The following Friday, when they visited the doctor, they were warned this pregnancy might not be like the others. Jean was forty-four now. But Chandra wasn’t worried. Jean had been a champion swimmer in her youth, and Radha’s birth had been straightforward. “She barely broke into a sweat,” he’d told her sister, Jennifer, on the phone.

  By the end of her first trimester, however, Jean was looking gaunt and older than her years. She vomited a lot, lost her temper at least twice a day, and at night he often found her in front of the television or watering the plants. He wondered if she was sleepwalking, though she was perfectly lucid when he spoke to her.

  “Leave it,” he told her once, when he found her taking out the rubbish at two in the morning. “I’ll do that.”

  “What else is there to do?” said Jean, her dressing gown flapping around her pregnant yet still underweight body.

  “I’m sorry, Jean,” he said. “Let me help. I’ll do whatever you need.”

  “What are you on about, Charles?” she said, tying up the rubbish bag on her knees. “Just let me get on.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Why does it matter what time it is?”

  “Come back to bed.”

  “I’ll only be awake again in the morning.”

  “What?”

  “I said why go to bed when I’ll only wake up again?”

  “Jean,” said Chandra, moving toward her to take her arm.

  “Fine,” said Jean, and pushed past him, going upstairs.

  When Chandra consulted their doctor he was told that no, this was not exactly normal. “Is it possible she’s depressed?” the doctor asked, but Chandra shook his head. Jean had never suffered from depression. It wasn’t in her character. She had the values of a Third World migrant, though via the industrial North. Neither of them was self-indulgent enough for depression. It was one of the reasons he’d been so amazed when Jean said she wanted them to see a therapist.

  It was a Sunday when Jean went into labor. Professor Chandra was in the Marshall Library looking for an issue of the Indian Economic Journal he didn’t really need (but was nonetheless appalled they didn’t have) when one of the secretaries rushed in to find him. He took a taxi to the hospital where Dr. Button greeted him with the words, “Good of you to join us,” to which Chandra replied, “Mon plaisir,” reverting to the pseudo-French that was his habit in times of distress.

  When Jean saw him she only stared, as if trying to fathom who he was. Chandra took her hand and she held it tightly. She was in the medical profession’s preferred birth position, her blue nightgown bunched around her waist. Professor Chandra had recently read that this was an entirely arbitrary posture attributable to Louis XIV’s voyeuristic tendencies; crouching or squatting was far more natural and effective. He had already told this to Jean but now it was all too late—the baby was crowning.

  To Chandra’s amazement Jean was virtually silent throughout the birth, though afterward she cried when she held the baby in her arms. He took a picture of the two of them but left the flash on and the baby flinched, even with its eyes closed. He often wondered about this, whether it was the reason for Jasmine’s timidity later in life. He would always claim they named her after the flowers in the vase behind Jean’s head, the distinctive fragrance that filled the room. “Rubbish, Charles,” Jean would say, “there weren’t any flowers there,” but Chandra remembered a blue vase, delicate white petals stretching out to meet his gaze.

  Jasmine was underweight and spent five weeks in the incubator, but by the time she came home she was still the tiniest baby Chandra had seen. Jean also lost all her pregnancy weight in a matter of weeks, turning as thin as she had been when they first met, though her skin looked looser, as if waiting for her to grow back into it. For the first time in her life she started having migraines, would lie in bed for hours with a wet towel over her face, groaning softly. Chandra hired a nanny to give her some respite, but though she looked less worn and pale, Jean’s moods did not improve. She lost her temper over minor things, answered him with tight, clipped replies that felt as if he were perpetually reaching for a cigar only to have the box slammed shut on his fingers. On occasion she was silent for days, not even talking on the phone. The only times she looked relatively peaceful were when she was feeding or rocking the baby.

  As a shock tactic, Chandra suggested they revisit Cynthia Benson—in truth, the last thing he wanted to do—but Jean replied, “I’m not ill, Charles, I’m just pissed off.” When he proposed getting a dog, which she had wanted for years but forgone because of Chandra, she said, “That’s all I need, another creature to look after.”

  When Chandra spoke to Mohini, his brother’s wife in Delhi who was also a doctor, she assured him it would pass. “Postpartum depression is so common,” she said. “You mustn’t take it personally. It’s a chemical thing. Just be there for her. It will pass.”

  In some respects, Mohini was correct. Jean did stop sleeping through the mornings and, in time, became her old, efficient, hardworking self once more. But even after eighteen months she remained angrier than he ever remembered her being, and she began to sigh regularly throughout the day, sometimes seven or eight times per hour (he counted them), always unconsciously, as if living in her own soundproof bubble.

  In the meantime, Jasmine was a beautiful, charming baby, but remained fragile and small for her age, easily startled and prone to crying at the tiniest stimulus. This continued as she became a toddler. When Chandra retreated to his study in one of his cigar-and-coffee-fueled fugs, she would walk in with her hand on her hip and point downstairs saying, “Fun, Daddy?” Chandra would take her hand and let her guide him wherever she wanted, unle
ss he was too absorbed in work, too tense for interruptions, in which case she would stare at him for a few forlorn seconds before making her retreat.

  Jasmine usually knew whenever her mother was “having a turn” (Jean’s phrase) before Chandra did, and would say, “Mummy sad,” and Jean would pick her up and hug her while Jasmine’s face turned serious and beatific, a saint gazing out from a Renaissance painting.

  In 2003, a few months before Jasmine’s fourth birthday, Chandra decided to take his sabbatical at the University of Toronto, somewhere Jean had always wanted to go while they were at Chicago. Sunny was at the LSE, Radha still relatively civilized, and Jasmine young enough that it would have little effect on her schooling.

  “No,” said Jean, when he put the idea to her over breakfast. “Not on your nelly.”

  Chandra, who had already accepted the position, scooped off the top of his soft-boiled egg and poured Tabasco into the dormant crater.

  Jean sighed, her third of the morning. “You get it, don’t you, Charles?”

  “You don’t want to travel?”

  “Of course I want to travel,” said Jean.

  Forgetting about his egg, Chandra stared out the window into the rain. His hands were trembling slightly.

  “I wanted to go to Canada twenty years ago, Charles,” said Jean.

  “I know,” said Chandra. “I’m trying to make up for it. I’m trying.”

  “Maybe it’s just too late,” said Jean. “Maybe I wouldn’t even enjoy it now.”

  “Jean, please,” said Chandra. “I think you will. We all will.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Professor Chandra endured two weeks of uncertainty during which neither of them so much as mentioned the sabbatical. He telephoned the department in Toronto and told them there might be a complication, but did not give any further details. He did, however, attempt to sway his wife’s opinion in subtle ways, buying maple-glazed bacon and leaving it in the fridge, playing “My Heart Will Go On” first thing in the morning in the manner of a wake-up reveille at summer camp.

  If Jean noticed these things she did not comment on them, but the coup de grâce came when he “accidentally” told the children that they might be going on a “long holiday” to Canada, that they’d see the tallest building in the world, that it was so cold in the winter your nose could drop off. From then on it was all the children spoke of, while Jean only became even more silent. Chandra waited in a state of just beneath terror until, finally, as he was falling asleep one night, he heard her laughing.

  “All right, Charles,” she said. “Let’s go to Canada.”

  He turned on the light and looked at his wife beside him who was grinning like an android suddenly gifted with sentience.

  “Thank God.”

  “I wanted to go from the beginning, Charles. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course not. How could I know that?”

  “I just didn’t like being told I was going.”

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Yes, yes, I get that. It’s fine. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Chandra turned off the light. He felt like the Greek Pheidippides who ran twenty-six miles from the Plains of Marathon to save his kingdom (and later died).

  “But I’ve got one condition, Charles.”

  He turned on the light once more.

  “Yes?”

  “We go on a road trip afterward. I’ve wanted to go on a road trip for years.”

  “Yes,” said Chandra, who had known this for years. “Yes, of course.”

  “With Jennifer.”

  Chandra turned out the light. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  Over the years, Chandra and Jean’s sister, Jennifer, had maintained a cordial if frosty relationship. Jennifer had never married, and was not close to Sunny or Radha, seeming to enjoy making faces at them when they were babies but losing interest when they began to talk back. “It’s just the way Jen is,” Jean had said. “She’s not like us. She’s a cool one.” Chandra had an aunt who was just the same, but he didn’t see it as coolness; he saw it as a livid misanthropy, though this was still better than believing she had an issue with him in particular.

  Jennifer rarely made directly aggressive remarks to him anymore, probably on account of the children, but when she and her sister got together for a few drinks they often made jokes at his expense. When Jean first left him she had gone to Jennifer’s home in Bristol where Jennifer had her own company selling 3D printers. A road trip with Jennifer would not be easy.

  To his relief, Jean did brighten up in Toronto. It was a pleasant enough city, but Chandra found the winter unbearable. When Jean and Radha took the train to Montreal in November, he stayed at home draped across the radiator like a cardigan left out to dry. He was relieved when spring came, although with it came Jennifer and the promised road trip in a rented Ford Galaxy, first to Vancouver, and then across the border to Seattle.

  He had expected it to be difficult, but was taken aback by the sheer ferocity of the ribbing he received for the following week, with Jennifer and Jean treating him like the court whipping boy, their sharp Lancastrian tongues forever drawing blood at the expense of academics or Cambridge dons, or Chandra himself. He resented it most when they attempted to include Radha in their merrymaking, a move he viewed as below the belt, a contravention of the rules of engagement (although, before arriving in Seattle, he hadn’t realized they were engaged at all).

  “We should go and see the Hendrix exhibit,” said Jennifer one day.

  “What about Charles?” said Jean.

  “J-I-M-I H-E-N-D-R-I-X,” said Jennifer, miming playing a guitar. “You know Jimi Hendrix?”

  “Yes,” said Chandra. “Thank you. I know Jimi Hendrix.”

  “FYI, Jen,” said Jean. “Charles has no idea who you’re talking about.”

  “I know Jimi Hendrix and I know Kurt Cobain,” said Chandra, who had looked up the history of the city only that morning in his guidebook.

  “Maybe we can see a Cobain concert while we’re here?” said Jennifer, winking at Radha.

  “Oh, stop,” said Jean, stifling a laugh.

  “He died on 5 April 1994,” said Chandra, whose recall remained impeccable. “A self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

  “Oh, God, you’re right,” said Jennifer. “So maybe we should see ABBA then?”

  “Whatever you prefer,” said Chandra, knowing it was a trap and heading for the door. “I really don’t mind.”

  The mockery continued the following day, becoming so unpleasant that on the Friday Chandra invented a fictitious lunch appointment with a “Professor Gundappa Viswanath” (in reality a brilliant wristy batsman from the seventies) and wandered the University of Washington’s campus with Jasmine, visiting the bookstore and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to her in a corner.

  When he returned to the hotel, Jean and her sister were in high spirits. They had visited the oldest Starbucks in the USA where they had shared a table with two psychiatrists who were also brothers. They kept making jokes about Frasier and Niles, references that went over Chandra’s head, and the following day they went out to a bar and came home drunk, arguing in that thick-voweled Northern way. All he could glean was that Jennifer appeared to be unhappy with something Jean had done and, for the first time that vacation, was on Chandra’s side.

  By the time they returned to Cambridge, Jean had changed again. The sighing stopped, and she no longer seemed so exhausted all the time, but she did not go to bed at her usual hour anymore, but stayed up late staring at her computer screen, smelling of the perfume she would often apply after dinner, a possibly superfluous touch to a phenomenon Chandra had no understanding of: a twenty-first-century affair in the age of broadband. It was only years later that he realized Jean had been chatting with Steve, one
of two brothers she had met in Seattle.

  Steve and Jean were pen pals—if this was the correct term—for years afterward, but they also met physically on several occasions, though Chandra only pieced this together later, realizing Jean hadn’t been making solo trips to Bristol, but had been going to London, staying in a hotel. At the time, all he was aware of was that she was paying less attention to him and simultaneously seemed happier, but it had never occurred to him that another man was involved.

  He still did not know about Steve until after she left him for good, when she told him everything. He began sleeping with the brandy bottle under his pillow then, calling her number at three, four, and five in the morning, even though he knew she turned the ringer off at nights. When he agreed to the divorce it was only because he was convinced this was the most efficient way to win her back, that only by closing the door and locking it would she realize that true separation from the man on the other side was impossible.

  The problem was that Chandra’s head had been ripened by centuries of South Asian conditioning which convinced him that no matter what Jean might say, deep down she and he shared a love and devotion that was inviolable, as if they had walked hand in hand across the earth for several previous incarnations. But the hammer blow came when Jean announced she was moving to Boulder. Chandra was defiant, arguing that Jasmine was too young, that such a change would be terrible for her. But Jean had spent her whole life making compromises: this time she would not back down.

  “Jaz wants to go,” she said.

  “Of course she does,” said Chandra. “She always wants what you want.”

  The truth was that Jasmine always wanted what he wanted too. She was that sort of a child, and this was a situation that called for the judgment of Solomon. In Solomon’s absence Chandra decided he had no option but to give in, for Jasmine’s sake.

  Jean didn’t even tell him she was getting married until after the wedding. Chandra was in shock for days until he realized this wasn’t about love. For legal reasons, Jean had to marry Steve if the three of them were to live together in the U.S. But Jean had always been more practical than Chandra, sharper too, when it came to what she called “street smarts.” Looking back on it, he felt he ought to have gone to court, to have forced Steve to move to England if he wanted to be with Jean so much, and perhaps he would have done so had not part of him still believed their estrangement was temporary.