by Tim Parks
He felt simultaneously listless and tense. It was strange that he had visited so many countries in his childhood but never learned much about them. He had been enthusiastic about Chicago but his parents had left before he had had a chance to discover the place. Was it possible, John wondered now, that there was something shady in his father’s relationship with this Ananya? His parents’ perfect marriage had been the basis of the James family myth, it was the fixed point in all their moving. They were an exemplary couple, a partnership. ‘Partners in shipping,’ mother laughed. How could John ever form a relationship to compete with that?
The food was good. Afterwards, he wandered around the streets. It was too hot. He was wearing shorts and sandals now; it seemed amazing that the Indians could wear socks and shoes and long trousers in this heat. He needed water. At a crossroads he watched a little girl picking fleas out of her mother’s hair while the woman sat in the dirt beating her hands on a drum. The girl squatted shifting from haunch to haunch, her fingers lifting strands of her mother’s hair, plucking away the fleas. Meanwhile, the woman kept up a listless rhythm on the skin of her conga. John bent down and put a coin on the piece of sacking beside her.
It was not until the third morning that a message arrived. It was on his phone when he woke up. ‘Come to bridge near Red Fort. 6 p.m. I have bicycle.’
But now John had diarrhoea. Perhaps it was cleaning his teeth with the tap water. He called reception and they brought him pills, bananas, bottles of water. He spent most of the day on the loo, washing and washing himself. ‘Chaos,’ he muttered.
More and more John felt angry that he had come. He had been drawn against his will by an invisible thread. It was thousands of miles long. His spidery father had strung it out, drawing him to a place that made no sense. I was never attached to my parents, he thought, and here I am throwing away everything I’ve worked for to find out about a man who never produced anything. Why not wait for the biography? he laughed sourly. At five he left the hotel.
He had planned to walk. It was less than a mile, he thought. After a hundred yards he faltered. He was entering Old Delhi. The crowded pavements and busy traffic were hard work. His stomach seemed to give. Things were shifting.
‘You need help, sir?’
At once a man was at his elbow.
‘Hello, sir! Where you are going?’
The Indian was in his forties perhaps, with dark toffee cheeks under a mop of hair. One eye was still and dead, but the other brilliantly alive. He was constantly smiling, his head wobbling under the thick black hair.
‘You please come with me, sir!’
John tried to resist but a few moments later found himself high off the ground on a bicycle rickshaw.
He had never taken a real rickshaw before. He had never meant to take one. There was something obscene about the little man’s thin calves straining to pull him along. John clenched his bowels looking at the ferment of the streets.
Because the driver imagined he was a sightseer, he went out of his way to take him via Chandni Chowk. The rickshaw slowed to walking pace in the market throng. Peddlers were shouting their wares. Beads and fans were waved under his nose.
John felt dazed. When the Red Fort appeared, forbidding and solid at the end of the street, he instantly understood the attraction of a severe Islamic order. I need a walled place, he thought, a quiet place, where you can think and work. The Muslims had once been great scientists, he remembered. Had they? They created artificial spaces. With – what were they called – jawabs? For symmetry. Why on earth had Dad sent him off to the Taj? Now I am going to see a woman who knew Dad, he reminded himself. And I am seeing her behind my mother’s back. Behind my girlfriend’s back. This aspect hadn’t struck him before. As if I were to have a child with Elaine and in twenty years’ time that child were to visit a woman who knew me without discussing the fact with Elaine. Or as if the son of the Japanese director came to visit Elaine without telling his mother, the director’s wife. John smiled. ‘Even paranoids can be betrayed,’ he remembered. It was something Dad once said. He would never have imagined he remembered so much his father had said.
The rickshaw man took him to the left of the fort down a steep hill with fruit stalls, pigs and filthy gutters. It was actually a rather pleasant way to get about. The vehicle’s wheels were nicely sprung and the cushion beneath him thick. He was comfortable. Others on the street were labouring. The driver had to resist the momentum of the pedals as the slope dipped and the vehicle accelerated. They passed beneath a road bridge where bodies slept among rubbish and flies, then down to the grubby riverside and eventually to the bridge.
John realised now that he had seen it before in photographs: a long, rickety Meccano structure of two parallel one-way bridges, each with two tiers, the road traffic running back and forth on the lower levels and trains rumbling above.
‘You can leave me here,’ John said.
The driver didn’t want to leave him. ‘Where you are trying to go, sir?’
‘This is fine. Thank you so much.’
It was ten to six.
‘You would like to cross the bridge, sir? Or you are wanting to go to the ghats? Very beautiful. Vijay Ghat. Raj Ghat.’
John took out his wallet and gave the driver a hundred rupees. It was way over the top. He climbed off the seat. ‘I have to meet somebody,’ he said.
‘I am waiting, sir. Perhaps I am taking two people sir. Yourself and your friend, sir.’
Instead of encouraging him to go, the money had made the man more determined.
‘I don’t want you to wait. My friend will have a bicycle.’
The driver wouldn’t go. He pulled his rickshaw off the road onto the muddy riverbank. John’s bowels were rumbling again. Leaving the man on the bank, he went to stand at the point where pedestrians and cyclists were crossing the bridge on a walkway separated from the road by iron railings. Everything was old black iron. He gritted his teeth and clenched his stomach. Twenty feet below, the river was brown and sluggish, speckled with trash. Boys swam like rats in a yellowish foam. Broad and melancholy, the further shore seemed disconnected from the noisy back and forth on the bridge. What kind of woman will it be? he wondered. Europeanised? In her fifties? Her thirties? A fat Sikh trundled a broken scooter. Two Muslim girls passed in burkhas. Who had Father given his mobile to?
‘Are you Mr John?’
He turned and found a nervous, pouting smile, bright, uneven teeth. A girl in her teens, wearing loose trousers and smock, stopped her bicycle and put down her foot. ‘I am Ananya. Come, you must walk beside me.’
She climbed off her bike and began to push it onto the bridge. ‘I don’t want people to see us,’ she said.
He didn’t ask why, but fell into step beside her along the wooden boards. She was much smaller than himself, gracefully quick. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the rickshaw driver was following.
‘I thought you would be older,’ John said.
The girl turned. She wore her hair in a single heavy braid of satin black. Her cheeks were round and dark.
‘Mr Albert had many young friends,’ she laughed.
The bicycle was between them. It was an old-fashioned lady’s bicycle. Her trousers and smock were pea green, with a maroon scarf tied round the neck. Her hands on the handlebar were tiny. The traffic thundered and the bridge rattled and shuddered.
‘Mr Albert was very kind.’ She had to raise her voice. ‘We were trying to help him with his research.’
‘What research was that?’ John asked.
‘Research,’ she said vaguely. She smiled, leaning forward to push the bike. ‘There were a lot of us. Ten, twelve. Acting things.’
‘And did my mother know about you?’
The girl looked puzzled.
‘But how did you meet him?’ John asked. ‘Why did he give you his phone?’
She seemed pleased to tell the story. ‘I was dancing at a wedding. I work for my father; he has a sari shop. It was a wedding. Mr
Albert asked me and the other dancers to help him. He knew one of the other girls. Vimala. We had to act things. It was a theatre. It was very beautiful. He wanted girls who were not actors. We must stop catastrophes.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
There was a storm of klaxons now. About halfway across the bridge an autorickshaw had broken down and its driver was changing a wheel. Between the iron rails each side there was only just room for other vehicles to pass. John was struck by the urgency of the klaxons and the contrasting calm on the drivers’ faces. As if these people were simultaneously in a frenzy and at peace. Changing his wheel, the autorickshaw man remained quite unperturbed by the clamour he had caused. John’s rickshaw driver held his position a few paces behind them. When John turned, he smiled extravagantly from stained lips.
‘What do you mean, stop catastrophes? And the phone?’
‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘you have so many questions!’
As they talked, they were constantly having to step aside for pedestrians coming the other way. Beyond the river, day suddenly dissolved into night and smoke rose in luminous smudges from the sandbanks.
‘Albert wanted us to tell these stories,’ the girl said, ‘and also to make dances and act things.’
‘But why?’
She shrugged her shoulders, then stopped the bicycle a moment. Her forehead wrinkled. ‘There was an expression he used. I’ve forgotten. We were having fun with him. I got some new friends. We must prepare a performance. Everybody was very excited. Then Mr Albert died.’
The bridge was a good 400 yards long. They walked on, stepping aside for a man with a goat. It was just another of Father’s anthropological projects, John thought. I have thrown away hundreds of pounds to meet a dumb girl Dad had roped into one of his zany projects.
‘People are rabid dogs,’ the girl announced. Her face brightened. Again she stopped her bike. ‘People are rabid dogs. That was something Mr Albert said.’
‘Rabid dogs? And?’
‘We must stop them biting.’
‘But how?’
She shook her head. ‘It was his research.’
When John caught her eyes he saw she didn’t understand herself why she had been involved. Quite probably his father hadn’t wanted them to understand.
‘It was fun for us.’
They were nearing the end of the bridge. John could see a policeman directing the traffic at the junction where the vehicles crossing the river met the embankment.
‘But why did he give you his phone?’
‘I don’t know. He said he was going away. Your other friends’ numbers are on the phone, he said, if you want to meet when I am not there, if you want to go on with the performance.’
The girl looked at John rather defensively.
‘So he gave you his phone when he knew he would die.’
‘The battery is no good,’ she said. ‘It only works when I can use the charger. In my father’s shop. And I am not going there every day.’
They stepped off the walkway onto the bank. ‘We must say goodbye,’ she told him. ‘My father will pass soon on his scooter.’
‘But …’ John cast about.
She watched him, catching a lip under protruding teeth. ‘Also I wanted to say … you are his son?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t look like him.’
‘Of course I’m his son.’
‘Your father did not seem so ill, Mr John. It was strange he gave me the phone. He said he was just passing my father’s shop and he came in. He said we must go on even without him, I must use the phone, but the others were all arguing and we stopped.’
‘Look, did you post a letter to me from him?’
‘I am sorry?’
‘From my father. Did you find a letter he had written and post it to me?’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
John returned to the hotel with the rickshaw driver who was waiting nearby, grinning and signalling and sure of his prey. They plunged into the overheated chaos of the traffic going back into the city. Beneath a balcony a goat stood on a large block of wood, its neck chained in such a way that if it stepped off the block it would be choked. From the towers of the Jama Masjid a wail to prayer tensed the darkness. A crowd surged up the steps through smoky lamplight. John felt that all power and purpose had been sapped out of him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dear Helen (if I may),
I will shortly be returning to Boston, but before I leave I wanted to show you the opening pages of this biography in the hope that you might change your mind about assisting me.
As you will see, the introduction offers a brief overview of your husband’s life, suggesting the scope and ambition of his work. To whet the reader’s appetite I have dared to surmise that his ultimate goal was to find a new state of mind, or pattern of behaviour, that would provide the departure point for a solution to many contemporary crises: political, environmental and existential.
In the second chapter I have outlined the major formative incidents in Albert’s childhood, and here I would be very grateful if you could correct anything I have gotten wrong.
It goes without saying that your decision not to give my work your backing is not only a major setback but a source of considerable personal regret. It would have been a great pleasure to work with you.
Sincerely,
Paul Roberts.
PAUL HAD TAKEN this letter together with fifty pages of typescript in person to Helen James’s clinic, receiving, less than forty-eight hours later, a phone message inviting him to dinner at her flat. He was hugely encouraged. His work had convinced her, he thought, and he would now be rewarded with a view of Albert James’s home. Preparing to go out in the evening’s stifling heat, Paul shaved carefully and dressed to charm in a light linen suit and maroon-coloured shirt.
But on arrival at the James’s apartment, the American found he was not the only guest. ‘Meet Kulwant Singh,’ Helen James said in a bright voice as she led him into the main room. It was some kind of party. A burly Sikh with a handsome blue turban and thick beard sat cross-legged on the floor in loose old trousers, his back against home-made bookshelves, while a middle-aged lady with sizeable midriff was kneeling forward on a cushion in the centre of the room, holding forth most earnestly to a gaunt Englishman and his younger Chinese partner.
Removing his shoes, Paul apologised for not joining the others on the floor – ‘I’m just not a flexible guy,’ he confessed – and took a place on the sofa where he was at once served some kind of cocktail by a tall girl who hurried back and forth prettily barefoot with drinks and snacks. No sooner had Helen sat down beside him to make the necessary introductions than she was on her feet again to welcome another couple, this time two elderly and jovial Indians. In a simple white cotton dress she seemed rather girlish for a woman of her age. Heading for the door, she called, ‘Oh by the way, Aradhna, Mr Roberts is an expert on Gandhi,’ and coming back, among a flurry of handshaking, she announced of the woman speaking intently from her cushion: ‘Aradhna Verma is president of the Delhi Gandhi Society.’
So even before he could take a proper look around the apartment, Paul found himself embroiled in a polemic about the way India’s media would only pay attention to the plight of the rural poor if some celebrity or other happened to say a word on their behalf. ‘And even then,’ Mrs Verma complained, radiant with disgust, ‘the journalists are always more interested in the celebrity than the poor! They want to know what are Arundhati Roy’s holiday plans or where is her husband shooting his next film when she is trying to tell them about a rescue package for small debtors. Have you any idea,’ the woman demanded of the gathering group, ‘how many poor farmers have committed suicide over their debt problems just in the last year? It is quite disgraceful. Thousands! Many of their wives have also killed themselves. And in almost every case a life could have been spared by the gift of just 1,000 rupees. 1,000 rupees! Or of course by the arrest of the moneylenders who are
all miscreants of the worst calibre. The police should nab them at once, but of course they take backhanders. And these journalists want to know if Arundhati is going to the Cannes film festival!’
Elegantly dressed in a silver grey sari and orange blouse, be-ringed fingers twined over her knees, Aradhna Verma swayed persuasively back and forth as she spoke. The decision to kneel had put her in a position of command over those who sat cross-legged and whenever there was a hint of interruption she raised a voice that seemed to resound from deep in her solid belly. It was only when she accepted another gin and tonic that Paul was able to remark: ‘Of course Gandhi himself was very much a celebrity.’
The woman turned on him. ‘What I am saying is that the Mahatma’s lesson has been quite forgotten by today’s media men and so we have to find more aggressive and creative ways to bring his agenda to their attention.’
‘Aggressive?’ Paul asked. The young girl offered a tray of snacks on sticks. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He loved to eat.
‘Non-violence doesn’t mean we must be passive,’ the woman told him. ‘That is a confusion you Europeans are constantly making. Either you are colonising the world with your assault weapons or sitting back doing nothing but whine and talk of peace and love.’
‘I’m American,’ Paul laughed. ‘Which is worse, I guess.’ Raising his eyes to draw in the rest of the company, he said: ‘Perhaps the problem is that celebrities really are more interesting to readers than the rural poor. Gandhi was certainly more interesting than the people he was trying to help.’
‘But is news for you only a question of what is interesting?’ Aradhna Verma came back. ‘A man kills himself for lack of 1,000 rupees and you are worried about entertainment!’
