by Tim Parks
John never had trouble sleeping. Not normally. He admired Professor Wilson, though the distance between concept and experiment was vast. It was strange that Elaine hadn’t replied at once, he thought, to such a momentous message. She always had her phone handy. The first response will be some jokey de-dramatisation, he decided. But there was no doubt Elaine was the right woman.
John turned on the bedside light and found The Ritual of the Serpent. ‘Written in mental hospital,’ the preface began, ‘as a form of penitence …’ John shook his head. In the margin his father had written: ‘Ecstasy of defeat and the final bow!’ It was weird how his father wrote things that had nothing to do with the pages he was reading. Beneath one of the drawings of snakes were the words: ‘No chemistry, no knowledge.’ The phone buzzed so loudly, John started.
‘So sweet of you, Jo, but maybe not a great idea right now. All kinds of things happening! Big party. See you tomorrow, Handsome. Good flight. Kisses. E.’
Some time in the night John got out of his bed, picked up the three elephants, crossed the sitting room, opened the door to his mother’s room, stood at her bedside. The rhythm of her breathing rose with a slight snore. The stone object was heavy as he raised his hand. The two internal elements shifted slightly inside the larger.
‘Albert,’ his mother muttered. She seemed to have sensed a presence. ‘Oh Albert!’
Helen sat up abruptly. John turned, rushed back into the sitting room and crashed the elephants down on the wooden table top.
PART TWO
DREAMS
OF
RIVERS AND SEAS
CHAPTER EIGHT
EVERYONE IMAGINED THAT to sprinkle his ashes in the Yamuna she was going to Allahabad, or even the Yamunotri temple. Or at least to Agra, to the broad sands below the Taj. They didn’t know Albert. ‘The Yamuna in Delhi,’ he had said. Her poor son hadn’t even realised the Yamuna flowed through Delhi. ‘Right in town,’ he insisted, ‘with the rest of the rubbish. Or from the Wazi Bridge if you like. Not the ghats, please. And not where the washerwomen work.’ He wouldn’t like, he laughed, to turn up as a speck on some office wallah’s starched shirt.
‘Your ashes will be the cleanest thing in the river,’ Helen had told him. ‘The place is a sewer.’
‘So be it,’ he smiled.
It seemed strange to her now that there had been those conversations. Thirty years together had ended. ‘If only it could be done beautifully,’ he had said. She had told him a hundred times he was mad, he must fight. But Albert had been determined. ‘Before it’s too late,’ he said. He must have said it a dozen times: ‘Before it is too late.’
Now for two weeks Helen had kept the ashes in the apartment, she had put off the trip to the river. Her husband’s remains had been given to her in a small plastic box, not unlike the boxes, she remembered, that people bought ice cream in at American diners. And it turned out the administrative people at the crematorium had known Albert well. He used to go and observe the mourners at cremations, the same way he went to weddings, or to the stock exchange, the various temples, cricket matches, the zoos and game parks. He had asked for permission to make videos. It would have been for the new edition of Postures. Nobody understood the messages people communicated like Albert, and the thousand ways every message can be misunderstood. ‘In every movement and gesture, there is always something beyond the necessary,’ he said, ‘its aesthetic aura.’
‘Was it a hard death, madam?’ the lady at the crematorium had enquired kindly. There was a long form to fill in. Helen had asked for a pen. ‘My husband used to say death was only hard for the living,’ she replied.
For two weeks she kept the ashes on the table. The small plastic box exactly covered the spot where John had smashed the ugly ornament he had bought. Why had he done that? It did not bother her that the table was damaged, but her son’s behaviour had been frightening. For half the night the boy sat on the sofa shaking and repeating over and over that he felt ill, when clearly he wasn’t; John didn’t know what illness was. She had been so relieved when he was gone.
Now Helen James took advantage of people’s assumptions and announced that she would be away from the clinic for two days to accomplish a ceremony that in fact would require no more than a few moments. When had she last taken two days off? All her life she and Albert had lived in countries that attached the utmost importance to sacrament and ceremony. They had gone to the Third World to alleviate poverty and Albert had ended up studying people’s ceremonies and accepting poverty. She felt he did accept it. There was always a continuum, he claimed in the preface to Postures, between how a society prayed, how it made love, how it killed; but Helen and Albert had had no ceremonies of their own. They didn’t pray and they would never have dreamed of killing.
Then after his withdrawal from medical work, each had kept going in his or her different way. Helen would always be animated by suffering or injustice, always saw herself most clearly when reflected in the eyes of a feverish child or infuriated by some ritual mutilation, some pointless taboo that left a man dying by the side of the road. Then she was a rebellious daughter again, fighting selfish parents, her callous, opportunist brother. But Albert had imagined a world where everything was balanced in some magically self-correcting system of individual impulse and collective feedback. ‘The catastrophes we experience in our lifetimes constitute only a fraction of the rhythmical pulse of the universe,’ he wrote. On his bad days, though, he feared the world might end at any moment; humanity was destroying itself and he, Albert James, had done nothing to prevent it.
She placed the box with the ashes in a plastic bag and was pulling a shawl over her shoulders when the maid’s daughter and teenage granddaughter arrived to take away the laundry. The older women chattered in Hindi, folding sheets with rapid, identical gestures. They wore bright saris and shared an obvious togetherness. But the girl sat quietly at the sitting-room table, her big eyes glancing around the room with troubled curiosity.
‘Your son was not staying very long, Mrs James?’ the girl said politely. She was small, darker skinned than her mother, her thick hair yanked back from high cheeks, a bright bindi on her forehead. As she spoke, the girl noticed the deep dent on the tabletop and reached across to touch the splintered wood with her fingertips.
‘Yes, it’s a shame you couldn’t meet him,’ Helen said. ‘He had to go back for his work.’
The girl turned away and her mother came hurrying across the room with the small bundle of washing. There would be less now Albert was gone. ‘Vimala is being so lucky,’ she said. ‘We have happy news to tell you Mrs James!’
A cloud of irritation passed over the girl’s face.
‘She is going to be married!’ the laundry woman announced. ‘Oh it is such a happy thing,’ said the grandmother, following and clapping her hands. ‘It is a good family. He is a good boy, and the family is also good. They are known to us – and from the same community. Also in the laundry business.’
The girl forced a smile, but a few moments later she turned abruptly from the door and looked straight into the Englishwoman’s eyes. ‘I am sorry about Mr Albert,’ she said.
Before Helen could take in the intensity of the gaze, mother and daughter had gone, their sandalled footsteps slapping on the cement stairs. The grandmother was already turning back to the kitchen, humming some Hindi song.
‘Is Vimala pleased with her man?’ Helen asked.
‘Why not?’ grinned Lochana. ‘Nothing is more beautiful for a girl than marriage.’
‘Albert,’ Helen muttered as she stepped out into the street. ‘This is our last walk. Let’s enjoy it.’
The sensible thing to do would have been to find a taxi. Nobody walks in Delhi. Instead, Helen set off, the bag swinging in her hand. It was a quiet day, and the air was warming. The cold season was over. She met Hoshir Singh Road, then crossed to Lodhi Road. Autorickshaws slowed beside her, but she shook her head. Vimala had gone to St Anne’s, she remembered now, where Albert taug
ht. Instead of paying Lochana, they had helped with the girl’s fees. ‘It was illogical of you to teach,’ she muttered, ‘irrational to help with a girl’s education if you didn’t believe in intervention.’ She remembered the schoolgirl who had cried at the crematorium, a girl who had listened no doubt to Albert’s strange lessons, the way he would hold up a dead starfish – ‘If you had never seen one of these, children, how would you know anyway that it was once a living creature?’ ‘There are things you know that you don’t know you know.’ Albert loved to say that. People loved to hear him say it. He also said it would be far better if one could avoid growing up altogether.
Helen turned left before Humayun’s Tomb. She had already been walking half an hour and more. ‘I want to dissolve into the dirt,’ he had told her. There were the inevitable tourist buses. He said he had begun to feel he was already part of Delhi’s muddy red earth, the heavy sediment in the Yamuna. ‘You don’t invent ceremonies,’ he insisted. ‘They have to come naturally.’
‘And it did,’ she whispered now; ‘it did, Albert, in the end.’
He didn’t answer. She pictured him walking beside her, his tall, slightly shambling walk. She heard his footsteps.
‘We made mistakes with John,’ she muttered.
She didn’t raise her eyes to India Gate. A boy was raking the sand by the pavement. If there was one part of Delhi Helen disliked more than others it was the Delhi of the Raj. Cooking smells from a string of kiosks on Mathura Road could not turn her head. You need to eat to work properly, she told herself severely. She would have liked to hear Albert tell her this. ‘You need to eat, Helen!’ But he was clattering against her knee.
Helen began to think about the biography. She was approaching the Mahatma Gandhi monument and half the morning was gone. Why did people travel so far to see what were no more than a few stone slabs when the man was best recalled by reading his work? It was curious, she remembered, that this American had written a biography of Gandhi. Albert had thought him a monster of manipulation.
She walked as far as the parapet and looked out across the river. She had planned a cheerful and orderly recall of their life together: do you remember when we met; the argument at Timothy’s dinner party; when we arrived in Kankanamun and the boat sank by the landing stage? But the mental effort seemed too great. She had never guessed it might be so hard to fill the world without him.
The meagre winter water of the Yamuna was some way off, sluggish and brown between mudbanks thick with litter. Two or three scavengers worked their way along, turning over anything promising.
‘Where do you want me to sprinkle you, then?’ she asked.
She started to head north, another half mile, beyond the ghats toward the Red Fort. She had to leave the river here. The city was enormous, the traffic exhausting. She stood aside to let a procession pass. She didn’t recognise the images they were carrying. The dance steps and drumming were always the same: the clatter and motley. She saw these manifestations as a tiresome hangover from the past; she hated the pujas and Diwalis her colleagues invited her to. Albert loved them. He loved to be the non-participating guest. Helen stopped and took a deep breath.
There were the usual crowds around the fort: the hawkers, would-be guides and milling Americans. The hawkers knew at once that she was not there to buy. Only the rickshaw wallahs bothered her; they could see she was tired. How could her son have bought a stone elephant of all things? ‘When he came into the bedroom, I thought it was you, Albert,’ she said out loud.
She followed the road through a throng of cart wallahs and makeshift dwellings down to the river and then along to the old iron bridge. The press of trucks and ricks and taxis was frenetic. As she set out on the pedestrian walkway a train rumbled overhead. The structure shook. Looking up through the ironwork, she saw men and boys hanging out of open doors. Then a legless creature with a bright red cloth on his head was propelling himself toward her on a trolley. She turned back. She would not give to beggars.
Helen walked on. It was infuriating how hard it was to get down to the river’s edge. You were constantly forced back to the big road. I just need a quiet place, she thought, somewhere private. We were always private as a couple. A half mile on, she hesitated by the entrance to the Hindu cremation area. She had been here when patients she’d got to know had died. She had seen the pyres and the smoke and the mucky ordinariness of the body’s destruction. ‘I won’t mix your ashes with theirs,’ she whispered.
A little later she entered the compound of a small Sikh temple and beyond the parked cars found the river. A boy was bathing. Three or four women stood in the water scrubbing at clothes. Behind her, a haze of pollution hung over the city. My life is over, she thought. She had enjoyed wearing a veil at the funeral. Perhaps I could only really work when Albert was there to tell me it wasn’t the right thing. ‘It’s the only thing I’m capable of,’ she would answer. ‘Do it,’ he had whispered. ‘Please, Helen, do it now, this evening!’ She turned back to the road. This wasn’t the place.
Just before the Wazi Bridge she found a path winding among mounds of earth and grasses and leaning trees. Here and there men squatted under tarpaulins; the women carried baskets and sacks. In a small clearing, a makeshift shrine had a cluttered tinsel look of reds and blues and bits of sugar and cake in gaudy offering to some god or other.
The river was a hundred yards away when she came across a small monument, a single flat sandstone slab, in memory, the inscription said, of a group of schoolchildren who had died in a bus accident. Helen vaguely remembered having read in the papers about the monument being broken and defaced. She stopped. Someone had shat on it. The grass round about was white and dry, waiting for rain. ‘Twenty-eight schoolchildren,’ she read in Hindi. Their bus had plunged through the railings on the bridge. Eight years ago.
She turned. The Wazirabad Bridge carried the inner circular road across the Yamuna. It was booming with traffic. She sat on the broken memorial stone. Somewhere a drum was beating. The article, she remembered, in the Times of India, had deplored the fact that because the monument was so badly defiled the parents had been obliged to perform their annual havan by the water’s edge under the bridge.
Helen shook her head: this madness of communicating with the dead, she thought, of keeping anniversaries. This madness of believing in souls and lighting little lights and burning incense and offering plates of fruit whilst walking waist-deep in filthy rivers supposedly holy. All at once the widow was angry with herself. ‘You can’t talk to Albert now,’ she muttered. ‘The dead are dead,’ she said out loud. ‘He’s gone. Everything you are doing is false and stupid.’
In an action she had not imagined, she reached inside the plastic bag, pulled out the box and tugged at the lid.
It wouldn’t open. She tried again, pushing her fingernails under. How silly. She prised at it. It wouldn’t come. Is it vacuum-sealed? How bizarre. And she was reminded of Three Men in a Boat and the can of pineapples. ‘Albert!’ she cried. Perhaps it was peaches. Albert had loved Three Men in a Boat. Or apricots. He had loved Alice in Wonderland too. ‘Albert, help me get you out!’ There was a way in which her husband had always been very English.
Now she laughed rather wildly. Here I am talking to him again! A nail bent painfully. Perhaps I should just leave the box on the monument with the schoolchildren. He always said his greatest pleasure was teaching children, even if he never wanted a child. ‘Children are beautifully unfinished,’ he said, ‘they are beautiful propositions.’ But if she didn’t actually scatter the ashes, someone might take possession of them. Someone could carry Albert away.
She studied the box. How had they sealed it? It was simple white plastic, a lid sunk into a tight rim. Again she placed it on the monument, half overgrown with grass and dead lichens. There was definitely a human turd. Albert would say that respect and vandalism called to each other, the monument and the turd were part of the same pattern. Then she put a foot on the box and shifted her weight onto it. It didn’
t give. Carefully, Helen lifted herself until she was actually standing on it, on Albert. Nothing. Why had they made it so strong? She bounced a little. The box gave a sharp crack. Stumbling, she had to put down a hand not to fall. The plastic had split open and there he was: grey grit.
Helen walked away. She felt extremely agitated. What am I doing here? For a moment she stood by the riverbank, looking up at the busy bridge from which the school bus had fallen. The water slid by. Then she came back and circled the monument in the deep dead grass, looking at the box. She walked round it two or three times. The air was windless so that the gritty ash had spilled a little and lay still on the stone slab. Helen crouched and looked. She lifted the box with both hands and shook it violently over the slab. Her husband’s ash drifted into her face. She licked her lips. The taste was sour.
‘Teach the children, Albert,’ she muttered.
She took a taxi back. Even so it took forty minutes. Why had she disobeyed his orders? He had become fascinated by water. He had understood something, he said, about the relation of water to the question of patterning. He wanted to be washed away. The completion of a pattern is its dissolution, he said. He was glad the Yamuna was a dirty river. That was where he wanted to go. Then it occurred to her she no longer had the plastic bag or the broken box. She couldn’t remember checking if it was properly empty. I’ve added to Delhi’s litter, she thought. Some little boy gathering waste to sell would pick it up.
