Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water.’

  Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning.

  A brilliant and controversial anthropologist, the nature of Albert James’s research, and the circumstances of his death, are far from clear. On top of this, John must confront his mother’s coolness, and the strangeness of the cremation ceremony that she has organised for his father. No sooner is the body consigned to the flames than a journalist arrives, determined to write a biography of the dead man. The widow will have nothing to do with the project, yet seems incapable of keeping away from the journalist.

  In Tim Parks’s masterly new novel, India, with its vast strangeness, the density and intensity of its street life, its indifference to all distinctions between the religious and the secular, is a constant source of distraction to these westerners in search of clarity and identity. To John, the enigma of his father’s dreams of rivers and seas appears to be one with the greater mystery of the country.

  About the Author

  Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives near Verona with his wife and three children. His novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Destiny and Judge Savage were longlisted in 2000 and 2003.

  Also by Tim Parks

  Fiction

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Cara Massimina

  Goodness

  Shear

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Talking About It

  Cleaver

  Non-fiction

  Italian Neighbours

  An Italian Education

  Translating Style

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Hell and Back

  A Season with Verona

  Medici Money

  The Fighter

  We go on doing research and thinking about all sorts of problems, as if we could one day reach the thought that would set us free.

  GREGORY BATESON

  Those familiar with Gregory Bateson and his work will realise that I have used elements from his life and writings to create the character of Albert James. Equally, it will be clear that only some aspects of their lives are similar: Bateson never lived in Delhi nor was he ever accused of any wrongdoing; then, unlike James, he married more than once and had many children. Readers who want to find out about his remarkable work should certainly not consult these pages, which are entirely fictional.

  PART ONE

  THREE ELEPHANTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON RECEPTION OF his mother’s brief phone call announcing his father’s death, John James took a deep breath, booked himself onto the first available flight for Delhi, had Elaine drive him to Heathrow, travelled towards the coming night and arrived at Indira Gandhi Airport to find the weather much cooler than expected. The funeral was to be the following morning. His mother was not in the apartment, but the elderly maid let him in and told him that Mrs James had gone as usual to the clinic. ‘To clinic,’ she said. ‘Madam has gone to clinic.’ John put his bag in the one spare room and sat on the bed. He stared at the bookshelves and sighed. Shall I take a shower? Suddenly he felt a loss of momentum, a faint giddiness. No, the important thing was to see Dad’s body.

  John stood up and went back to the kitchen where the maid was sweeping the floor. Did she have a phone number, he asked, for his mother? A mobile or work phone? The woman’s head wobbled strangely as she looked at him. She seemed to have trouble understanding. John repeated the question. ‘I need to phone my mother, at the clinic.’ ‘Clinic,’ the woman said, her head still wobbling. She began to give directions for how to get there. She used her arms, miming a person going out of a door and turning right. John decided the walk would do him good and set off.

  Outside, despite the cooler temperature, there was the same glazed and glaring light he remembered from other trips east, the same sour smell in the air, the same odd mix of frenetic traffic, roadside cooking, languid animals and persistent beggars. He liked it. He felt on holiday. I work too hard, he decided. This would blow away the cobwebs.

  Somebody tried to sell him postcards of the old town, trinkets, necklaces, sacred images. He smiled and shook his head. But he couldn’t find the clinic. The broad streets seemed one block of buildings after another, some at considerable distances, all enclosed by decaying red walls. There were big trees between the buildings and swarms of crows cawing in the foliage. John pulled a mobile from his pocket and texted Elaine: ‘Can you believe it! Mum not home, and left no phone number. Now I’m getting lost looking for her. Wish you were here. Kisses. J.’

  John’s father had died of cancer, but the end had come unexpectedly soon. From what John had found out about prostate cancer, there should have been no immediate concern. Even in India, such things could be kept at bay for many years. Some Westerners actually went to Delhi for cheaper operations. And Dad could always have come back to the UK if he needed special treatment. ‘John, your father died this morning,’ his mother had said. He hadn’t been able to gauge her voice. He had been in the basement lab at the Centre; the centrifuge was noisy and the signal poor. But she certainly wasn’t crying. Mum was a tough one. And his own response had been quiet to say the least. He hadn’t wept. He wasn’t close to weeping. So all Dad’s famous research has come to nothing; those were the first words that crossed his mind. It didn’t upset him. Rather the contrary, as if something poignant had been sensibly cut short.

  Only talking to Elaine, did he manage to feel the drama of it. ‘Oh my God, John,’ she cried. ‘My God! John!’ She forgot her own problems. There was the flight to arrange. ‘How awful – you must check if your visa is still valid. It’s so sudden. The poor thing, your poor mother!’ Was she going to bury him out there? Surely not. And what about money? That John had nothing in his current account was common knowledge. He used his credit card to pay for the flight. ‘What about the future, though: your poor mother, you
r allowance?’ Elaine found a cash dispenser and insisted he accept £200, though she too was living off her parents.

  Yet all this urgent talk, John sensed as they drove to the airport, was just buzz. His girlfriend was getting a chance to see how her man reacted in a crisis and to show how practical and sensible she could be. He adored her, but this was theatre. She was playing. Her vocation was theatre after all. Everything dramatic was fun for Elaine.

  No, the only significant thought, he realised now, of these twenty-four hours that had followed his mother’s phone call, had been the knowledge that he would never see his father again. The words had come to him on the plane. They had been showing a movie in Hindi about a man who was supposed to be marrying one woman but in fact was very evidently in love with another who, for reasons John hadn’t grasped, was quite unsuitable. ‘You will never see him again,’ he suddenly found himself muttering.

  The moment the words came into his head he felt a fresh alertness. It was much sharper than the phone call or anything Mother had said. Then, trying to picture his father, while at the same time watching the film, because the girls were pretty and he liked the brilliant colours and a certain charming artificiality you get in these Indian romances, he realised that there was no image of Dad in his mind: greenish-grey eyes, lanky, balding from the front, sandy hair, fine nose, a slightly distracted, sometimes aloof air. It wasn’t much more than an identikit. Or not even. I won’t see Dad again, he thought. And he decided that the first thing he must do on arrival in Delhi was view his father’s body. He would see his dead father and fix the man in his memory for life to come. Except that now, wandering down a broad avenue of New Delhi with dry grass waving on the verges and here and there destitutes wrapped in rags, he couldn’t find Mother’s clinic; he didn’t know where his father was.

  It was fantastic that you could send text messages back and forth between India and Maida Vale, you could chat with Elaine 6,000 miles away, and yet you couldn’t find your mother round the corner. The maid had seemed very confident. ‘Straight, sir, just straight!’ She had made a confident gesture with her hand, lifting the purple cloth of her sari. ‘Just straight. Then left turn at the red light. Yes. Yes. Road very long, sir.’ She wore a yellow blouse. Perhaps she had imagined he had a driver. ‘I wish I could be with you too,’ Elaine wrote back. ‘Audition at the Rep today. Fingers crossed.’ ‘Good luck, Beautiful,’ he replied.

  I should ask someone, John decided, but there were no pedestrians in this part of town. A man squatting with his back to a tree simply shook his shawled head. He had his fingers in a bowl. Eventually an autorickshaw pulled in and began to follow him at a walking pace.

  John turned. ‘Is there a clinic near here?’ he asked.

  The vehicle stopped. ‘Clinic, sir, which clinic?’ The man’s eyes were sunk in deep hollows. ‘You are not well, sir? You need doctor?’ He too had a shawl round his head, loose robes on his body. His wrists on the handlebar were uncannily thin. ‘Yes, I take you, sir. Get in. I take you.’

  John remembered that you were supposed to agree on a price first. ‘Fifty rupees,’ the man said. Only fifty rupees. It hardly seemed worth haggling. They swerved about through chaotic, honking traffic. When a jam forced them to stop, the driver shooed away beggars. A little girl moved her arms in a quite unnatural way. The driver shouted in Hindi. This really can’t be what the maid meant, John thought, and in fact when he walked through mud and broken brick into the reception of a small private hospital they had no knowledge of Dr James.

  ‘Helen James,’ John repeated.

  ‘No, sir. I’m afraid not, sir. There is no one of that name on our staff, sir.’

  John took a regular taxi back to the apartment. The maid let him in. It seemed pointless recounting his adventures. Looking at his watch, he realised it was still very early, only lunchtime. I’m jet-lagged, he decided. He went to the fridge and found it almost empty but for two six-packs of Coca-Cola. He smiled. Even in these circumstances, Mum had remembered his Coke.

  John opened a can, found some dry biscuits and cheese and went to sit on the sofa. The furnishings in the room were Western, but spare. It was typical of the Jameses. In all their travels there had never been any question of going native; they were largely impervious to the cultures they helped and studied; but nor did they seem to need the comforts that other expats demanded. John munched. The only impression of fullness came from the walls, which were stacked from floor to ceiling with books, box files, old audio cassettes, carefully labelled videos. I’ll find a photo album, he decided.

  He couldn’t find an album. The folders were scientific journals, many of them photocopied. There were files full of notes, typed notes, handwritten notes. Some of them were very old. The videos were his father’s work and wouldn’t contain images of him, nor would the audio tapes have his voice. John knew these things. It was a family that produced generation after generation of scientists. If anything his father had been the least of them, too meditative to be a real achiever. A castles-in-the-air man. I will overtake him, John reflected. Perhaps I already have.

  Eventually, he found a small black and white contributor’s photo. ‘Towards an Epistemology of Instinct’, Dad’s article was called. John peered at the grainy image. The paper was poor and yellowed. There was a wry grin on his face. John looked more closely. He remembered that grin. Or was it just a pained twist of the mouth? He took the photo to the window, but the image seemed to dissolve in the Indian glare. He couldn’t make it out. Still, clear or not clear, it was definitely Dad. There was a way his hair had of falling in wisps, a mild cragginess about the jaw. Outside, in the distance, a column of smoke was rising above the apartment buildings, rather as if rubber tyres were burning on the edge of town. John went to take a shower.

  CHAPTER TWO

  RETURNING FROM AN eight-hour shift at the clinic, Helen James came home to find her maid pointing excitedly at the bedroom, one finger over her mouth. ‘Mr John is here! Your son, madam!’ Helen opened the door to the spare room. John lay on the bed, fully clothed, his handsome face smoothed in sleep, a blond forearm on the pillow. What an improbable presence, she thought. He bore no resemblance really to herself or Albert, so lithe and so relaxed.

  Helen had been very much tempted, two or three days ago, not to tell her son about this at all. Why tell anyone? She would definitely have preferred to wind up her marriage by herself. She would have preferred a funeral with no public but herself, or no funeral at all, the bare cremation. In a dream, not three weeks before, she had seen herself carrying her husband’s body to a funeral pyre by the riverside – he wasn’t heavy at all – laying him down on the mud at the water’s edge while the crematorium wallahs heaped on the wood, then holding his hand and talking to him while he burned and sang and the river flowed by. An oddly Indian dream, she thought. When she woke he was shuffling back from the bathroom. She would have liked to cremate him herself, push the coffin into the furnace herself, collect the ashes herself, sweeping them into the skirts of her dress, and hide them herself, on her own, in a place that only she knew. Yes, yes, she had dreamed of doing that; she daydreamed. Yet the morning after the long and terrible last night she had called John on his mobile. ‘Your father died this morning.’ It was a duty. You can’t deny a son the death of his father. John is a duty and a burden to me, she thought. She shook her head. What fine clothes he was wearing. He seemed unthinkably large and adult. There were two empty Coke cans beside the bed. ‘We’ll have to talk about money, my boy,’ she muttered.

  Helen changed out of her work clothes, then sat at the table in the sitting room looking through the newspaper and drinking tea. Every few moments she stopped, her head cocked, as if listening. These are fragile days, she thought, but in the end she would get through. The death of a partner is not the worst way for a relationship to end. Suddenly, Helen decided that she didn’t want to eat alone with her son. She called a colleague, then woke the boy towards seven. ‘John, love, we’re going out to eat,
do you mind?’

  When John appeared in the sitting room, Kulwant Singh was already there. A Sikh. The young man had meant to ask at once how it had been, how his father had died so quickly when only a couple of months before the doctors had been talking of normal life expectancy; had he left any special message for his son? But Mrs James was already shooing them out of the apartment; there was a small place she hadn’t been to for a long time, she said. ‘I don’t digest properly if I eat late.’ She seemed so much her ordinary self that her son was taken aback.

  Kulwant was a jowly, jovial, heavily built man recently returned from a trip to London and very much amused, he declared, by this marriage of Charles and Camilla. ‘It is too funny,’ he kept saying as they ate their meal, ‘these old folks marrying, you know. It’s too funny.’

  Exactly as if he were in a pub with Elaine’s friends in London, John began to get worked up about the complete idiocy of royalty. It was incredible, he protested, that even foreigners were seduced by this soap opera.

  For a moment the Indian doctor seemed offended – ‘Indians are not ordinary foreigners’ – he complained. Then he chose to be indulgent and chuckled. ‘No, it’s too funny!’

  ‘How old are they, exactly?’ Helen asked. She couldn’t recall.

  ‘Late fifties,’ Kulwant said. ‘Far beyond childbearing age, you see.’

  ‘But who cares how old they are?’ John insisted. ‘It’s the attention they get from the press that’s so maddening and mindless, when anyone who’s halfway talented is eternally ignored.’

  ‘We must not speak only of talented people,’ Kulwant laughed. ‘There are so few of them!’

  Eating quietly, Helen was grateful that no one had mentioned Albert. She herself was fifty-three.

  ‘I like it here,’ John talked enthusiastically as they walked a little way before finding a cab. Kulwant had hurried off in an autorickshaw. ‘I like the way the air smells and the rickshaws and animals.’ He was looking at a girl in a sari swaying side-saddle on a scooter. ‘Are you going to stay?’