by Tim Parks
‘You did the right thing to organise a little party,’ Kulwant was telling her. ‘You need to have friends. You cannot spend your life mourning your departed husband, God rest his noble spirit. Let us drink to Mr Gandhi,’ he suddenly announced, and picked up the bottle again.
In desperation, Paul said: ‘Helen, can we talk about the book? Have you read the pages I sent?’
She looked at him. For a moment she seemed not to remember who he was or what he was talking about. Then she said, ‘All right, yes.’ And to the Sikh: ‘Kulwant, I’m afraid you’ll have to go now. I need to talk business to Paul.’
‘You can talk in front of me,’ Kulwant declared brightly. ‘I am a silent man on these matters. I am silent as the tomb. As two tombs!’ He laughed.
‘Please, Kulwant,’ Helen said.
The Sikh looked very hard, then got to his feet, hitched up his loose grey trousers, sighed, smiled. ‘A very good evening,’ he said in an unnecessarily loud voice. ‘And thank you very much, madam.’
‘Oh don’t be such a clown,’ Helen laughed.
As soon as she had shown him out of the door, she came back and said: ‘Stay the night here, will you? Please, Paul.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘I JUST FEAR I won’t be able to sleep now,’ Helen told him. ‘Then I’ll spend the night talking to Albert.’
She sat at the table and laid her hands on the wooden surface. The American irritated her, yet she had asked him to stay.
‘This place is so empty,’ she added. She was shaking her head. ‘To think I threw the party to force my mind elsewhere!’
Paul was embarrassed. When he had decided to write about Albert James it was because he wanted to take his work in a new direction, to free himself from the coercive mechanisms of publishing and grow up as a writer. On the other hand, he had never had plans to become part of the Jameses’ story.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.
‘I’m afraid drink keeps me awake. It happened the evening we had dinner together too.’
‘It can have that effect,’ Paul said.
‘Then I fall into an endless monologue, talking to Albert. Or dialogue. When you’ve been married as long as we were you can imagine the responses.’
‘I suppose so.’ Paul felt sympathetic but cautious. Her mixture of austerity with an edge of wildness unsettled him; and Helen was a good-looking woman. She must have been seriously beautiful when Albert carried her off to Kenya. Or she him.
‘As soon as I close my eyes, he is there.’
The air conditioning seemed louder now; the room was very still.
‘So what do you say to him?’ Paul asked. It seemed there was no way he could just start talking about the book.
‘I ask if he is happy, if he is calm, if he thinks we did the right thing … things, that is. Oh I know that’s stupid. I know he’s dead. Or I talk to him about patients. There’s a boy with TB now, for example, a kid Albert had got to know and liked. He’s very ill.’ She shook her head. ‘Albert had this theory that when a person is close to death, beyond the reach of this world, his mind enters into a special state that brings a superior wisdom. The Celts used to call it faery. I think there’s a word in Hindi too. He’d hoped he’d enter that state himself and stay there a while, perhaps even convey what he discovered.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘In the end all his ideas had something contradictory about them.’
‘Didn’t he say something about that in the conclusion to Postures?’
‘“An idea isn’t worth considering unless it contains a contradiction”,’ she quoted. ‘Want another drink?’
‘I’ve had enough,’ Paul said.
She poured for herself. ‘It’s strange but I’ve talked to him more since he died than in the five or six years before.’
Paul watched her; she tended not to let their eyes meet. Weakly, he said, ‘I guess one day it will pass.’
‘Sometimes it feels the less Albert actually did the more effect he had on people and the more he drew them to him.’
Then with a brusque change of tone, Helen said: ‘But of course, what you want to know is whether I’ll let you look at his papers, right, and these videos?’ She waved at the shelves.
‘That’s what I came to India for.’
She frowned. ‘I still don’t want you to write this book. It’s not that I’m protecting a secret. I just wouldn’t like you to expose the extent… well,’ she took a breath, ‘the extent of Albert’s failure, his sense of defeat.’
‘You didn’t like the pages I gave you?’
‘I didn’t look at them.’
Disappointed, Paul watched her in silence. ‘So why invite me tonight, why announce in front of everybody that I am writing this book?’
‘Too much to drink,’ she said flatly.
He couldn’t fathom it. ‘But what if I don’t think Albert was a failure? The books alone constitute a major contribution. As I said, I’d be more than happy for you to see—’
‘You just won’t let go, will you?’ she interrupted. There was a note of anger in her voice. ‘You are like my brother. You can’t imagine not doing something that you, Paul Roberts, have decided to do, not getting what you want. You’re trapped by it, by that determination.’
Paul began to object but found Helen looking straight into his eyes. ‘Listen, Albert was obsessed by achievement, in a way, or by the issue of achievement. He came from a family of achievers. It was expected of him. His father expected it. His mother expected it. I expected it. He expected it of himself. But the ideas he had blocked his path. They were all ideas that said don’t do this, don’t do that, you’ll only do damage. Whenever he published something, he felt guilty. Did you know that? He thought it would be misunderstood. It would affect people. Why do you think he wrote in that difficult way, switched areas of study so often? He’d have a great idea, people started acting on it, and then he’d step back at once saying they hadn’t understood, he’d never meant them to act on it. Albert didn’t want a biography. He never read a single review of his work. He hated to see his name in print, his photograph, to see himself discussed. The moment you pay him any attention he’ll disappear. That was achievement for him. He’ll melt away. You’re wasting your time.’
Helen stopped and pushed her chair back from the table. Fleetingly, she thought of the Burmese boy. He too wanted to disappear, she sensed. Than-Htay and Albert were kindred spirits.
‘That’s it,’ she announced. ‘I’m off to bed.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’
Paul was taken aback. But precisely these rapid changes of mood made it hard to leave. Coolly, he said: ‘If you won’t be able to sleep, why don’t we watch one of Albert’s videos?’
She had gone to pick up the phone from a low table by the window. She held it a moment and he heard a recorded message. Then she put it down. She appeared to consider, sighed. ‘All right.’
‘Great.’ He reached over for the bottle and poured himself another half glass after all. At the same moment, the lights went out.
‘Blackout!’ Helen cried. ‘Dear old Delhi. Hang on. There are candles in the kitchen somewhere.’ She seemed pleased.
Paul sat in the dark, listening to her move round the table. Her dress brushed him as she passed, then she had gone towards the kitchen. She doesn’t wear perfume, he realised. Without the air conditioning the room was silent. He heard a small laugh. ‘It must be Albert,’ she called. ‘He doesn’t want us to watch his old videos!’
A flame appeared and flickered as she came back towards the table. When it guttered she had to cover it with her hand so that the light was thrown up on her face. She looked young and lively.
Then as she set the candle down and sat opposite him she leaned across the table and placed a hand on his. It was a very natural gesture, as though between old friends, or sister and younger brother. Her hand lay on his. ‘I’m sorry about this, Paul,’ she said. ‘I’m behaving oddly. And Albert and I were such scientific people.�
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Without thinking, Paul turned his wrist so that the palm was uppermost and the two hands clasped. At once he was startled by the intimacy of the touch; an eager energy was being transmitted directly into him. He looked up for her eyes but Helen was looking at their hands, hers sinewy and cool above, his heavy and fleshy beneath. ‘So no video, I suppose,’ she sighed and withdrew.
They sat in silence. Then, perhaps because the flame was too much between them, Helen slid the saucer with the candle to one side, across the table. Sliding, it tilted and almost toppled. Paul grabbed it.
‘Ow!’
A drop of hot wax had fallen on his hand. He pressed it to his mouth.
‘Damn, damn and hot damn!’
‘I’m so sorry! Are you all right?’
‘Just a small burn, it’s okay.’
‘It’s that stupid dent,’ she said. ‘Come to the kitchen and put it under the tap.’
‘No, it’s okay.’ He was blowing on the back of his hand.
‘You’re sure?’ She watched him as he swelled his chest and blew. After a moment she said: ‘Can you believe, John did that, my son. The dent there.’
She recounted what had happened, how she and her son had gone to sleep on his last evening in Delhi. He had been rather belligerent. ‘Then I woke up and there was someone in the bedroom! He actually had his arm raised over me. For a second I was sure it was Albert. It’s so irrational, I know. Anyway, John ran in here and bashed this silly ornament he was holding on the table, right where I always work. It was quite a heavy thing.’
‘Very weird,’ Paul agreed.
Matter-of-factly, she asked: ‘Do you think he meant to kill me?’
‘For God’s sake! Why?’
‘There’s something resentful about him. He was holding that heavy stone thing over me, after all. What else would he have meant?’
Paul reflected. ‘In what sense resentful?’
‘He’s like a grown man with a little boy’s resentment. I don’t know why. I suppose Albert wasn’t cut out for being a father.’
‘Didn’t he want children?’
With a pop and a hum the electricity came back on. Helen jumped up and went over to the shelves across the room. ‘So, what movie do you want to watch, Mr Biographer?’
Paul shrugged. ‘Whatever you think might be interesting.’
‘I lost track of how he catalogued things.’ Helen pulled out three of the less dusty cassettes and found the remote on the sofa. As she sat down, the television came on showing an advertisement for some out-of-town nightclub. ‘You put it in,’ she said. ‘I’m almost afraid to watch.’
‘If it bothers you, let’s leave it.’
‘No, not really afraid,’ she said. Her voice dropped slightly. ‘I just can’t believe he’s gone. I don’t seem to be able to function without him.’
Paul left the table, took the video from her hands, slotted it in the television and stepped back to the sofa.
‘Get the light,’ she said.
He stood up again and turned off the light.
After thirty seconds of darkness, the tape started abruptly with an image of a man kneeling in the road, his right hand working back and forth with a brush in the gutter. There were big uneven paving stones, a telegraph pole with a battered plastic bag beside. It must have been the monsoon season because everything was wet and the light had that odd monsoon glare of humidity and veiled sunshine.
The man’s forearm moved rhythmically pushing mud along the gutter with a short stiff brush. People walked by, a long barrow with two men pushing, a donkey. The soundtrack was all street noises, motorbikes, the cries of a vendor. The camera must have been on a tripod because the picture was steady. Then a dog came, and sniffed in the gutter, a thin, hungry dog, and the man looked up and grinned broadly. His few teeth were brown, his eyes bloodshot, and he wore a loose orange turban with one end that dangled on his shoulder.
‘He’s cleaning the drains,’ Paul said.
‘I don’t think so.’
They were sitting about a foot apart. There was a pleasant tension between them, Helen thought. She would never have watched one of Albert’s videos on her own.
From the plastic bag the man pulled out a shallow bowl and began to scoop mud into it. Now they saw that he was missing the top of one forefinger. His wrists were scarred. The dog barked and the man looked intently into his bowl of mud. He poked in it, stirred it, lifted it and let it dribble back. He must have been aware of the camera because now he looked up at it, shook his head and said something, just audible over the noise of a motor.
‘What did he say?’
‘No idea,’ Helen said.
They sat on the sofa watching. It must have been two in the morning now. The camera remained fixed on the man kneeling in the gutter, again brushing the mud, gathering up scoops of sludge, examining, pouting, shaking his head so that the tassel of his turban swayed from side to side.
‘Ah,’ Helen sighed. ‘I know.’ She touched Paul’s sleeve. ‘It’s a guy in one of the streets off Chawri Bazar. I’ve seen him there.’
‘So what’s he doing?’ Paul too found himself at ease. This mystery of the video was much easier than the conversation earlier.
‘Watch.’
The man was staring into his dirty plastic bowl. But this time he looked up and smiled. He set the bowl down, reached in his bag and pulled out an old tobacco tin. The camera made no attempt to zoom but shifted slightly as the man moved to squat on the broken pavement. He took a pair of tweezers from the tin box then bent over the bowl and very carefully picked something out. There was a tiny glint as he placed whatever it was in the tin, closed it and went back to brushing the mud along the gutter.
‘What was that about?’
‘It’s the area where the jewellers and goldsmiths are. There are guys who pan the gutters for gold, there must be stray grains and tiny crumbs that finish up in the drains.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘I suppose they sell it back to the shops. Waste not want not.’
The camera was still fixed on the man who had returned to work with renewed care. The minutes passed. Paul turned a moment and saw Helen was watching the screen intently.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.
‘Of Albert being behind the camera.’
The man stopped to light a cigarette, sitting on his haunches. He grinned and shouted something at the camera, apparently offering a smoke. There was no sound of a reply. Then, as abruptly as it started, the long take ended. There were a few seconds of fuzz and another image appeared. This time a boy was squatting on beaten earth, one hand behind his back.
‘Marbles,’ Paul smiled. ‘I haven’t seen marbles in ages.’
The boy was rolling them towards a hole about ten feet away. He had a supply in a plastic tub. The glass with its twist of colour moved erratically on the bumpy earth. The boy shouted, willing it on. He used his hand to smooth out a bump, breaking up the soil, then stamping it down. In the background people were flowing in and out of a wide entrance at the top of a flight of steps.
‘It’s a similar movement to the guy brushing the mud,’ Paul remarked. ‘That swing of the arm when he tosses the marble. And this attention to the ground, the earth.’
‘Could be.’
When finally a marble hovered on the edge of the hole and dropped in, the boy turned to the camera, laughing and pointing.
‘Images of success?’
‘I’ll fast forward,’ Helen said.
There must have been fifteen minutes of this stringy boy with his marbles. Then another sequence began: this time a young woman was on her knees at the ghats, rubbing a sheet spread out on stone. She rubbed with a stick of soap. Again there was the same outward thrusting movement of the arm. She stopped and poured water on it from a bucket; the Yamuna flowed muddily across the top of the frame. The girl began rubbing again. There was a rhythmic elegance to her slim arm moving back and forth across the sheet in a lather of soap.
‘No gold or hole to aim for this time.’
‘Whiteness,’ Helen said. ‘Purity.’
The camera stayed focused on the girl’s body swaying in her dark sari. Then she too turned to the camera and smiled. Paul recognised the girl who had served them their food earlier that evening. She wore the same green bindi.
‘It’s your girl who was serving.’
‘Vimala. Her father runs a laundry.’ Helen stopped the video. Let’s find another. ‘This is dull.’
‘I was enjoying it,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t know why. It’s relaxing.’
‘Watching other people work?’ Helen said wryly. ‘That was Albert’s life.’
‘Kind of hypnotic. You get a feeling of their presence.’ He took another cassette from her and went to put it in the player.
‘Didn’t he have a DVD?’
‘He switched to some computerised thing just a few months ago, but I never saw the results.’
Now there was dancing. But this video was different. No image or subject lasted more than a few seconds, but every gesture was picked up and continued by another movement in a different situation: a dancer’s extended arm became a man reaching to shake hands, then a woman stretching her hand to turn a tap on, now a barber moving to scissor hair in the courtyard outside the central station. When the dancer moved her arm around, so did a guide outside the Red Fort, a woman saying her puja in the water of the Yamuna, a cook swinging a tray of small cakes from oven to table. Flashing in between, were stills of Hindu deities from statues or paintings, always filmed to occupy the same space on the screen, always continuing the gesture of the other subjects. It was as if the same person were constantly transformed while always going through familiar, compulsive motions: crouching, swinging, waving.
‘Intriguing,’ Paul said.
Helen touched his sleeve. ‘That’s Jasmeet, Kulwant’s daughter.’
‘The dancer?’ The image had already changed.
‘Yes.’
‘Lovely girl.’
‘Isn’t she?’
