Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

The dancer came back and back every ten images or so, her bright yellow tunic and purple blouse offering a rhythmic punctuation to the rest. She was dancing on a low stage at some kind of party, hair glistening with oil, hands hennaed, face smooth and expressionless. Then her pirouette became a soldier swinging round with his rifle at the Red Fort, a fisherman turning to cast his rod.

  ‘It’s really too bad she damaged her leg,’ Paul said.

  For just a second Helen recognised the Burmese boy. He skimmed a stone across the river and was gone. The wrist flicked, the body turned, the face was framed. Helen stopped the video. She was surprised, disconcerted. Albert must have seen Than-Htay after he had left the clinic, after he had stopped taking the drugs. He hadn’t told her.

  ‘What is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh it’s all much of a muchness when you’ve seen what he’s up to, don’t you think? One more?’

  ‘I can’t believe there are so many of them,’ Paul said. ‘Why didn’t he sell something to the TV?’

  ‘He had them catalogued and cross-referenced in some way. There was a logic to these edits. He was always planning the definitive version. A compendium of all gestures, all patterns of gestures.’

  Paul took another. This cassette had the title Webwork scribbled on a sticker. Paul slotted it in and sat back. A spider was making its web.

  ‘The university grounds,’ Helen said. ‘Up on the Ridge. Where the student canteen is.’

  Paul watched the rapid back and forth of a huge yellow spider moving across a space defined by two branches, one five or six feet above the other, but displaced, so that the web was skewed, symmetrical in its main concentric circles but complex in its adaptation to each twig and leaf. There was no sound. Each of the spider’s legs trembled as it felt its way across the threads, intense and delicate. Then a moth collided with the silk.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Helen said.

  ‘I guess if my book is going to say anything, I’ll have to make sense of the zoological aspect.’

  They watched as the moth was wrapped in silk, then pulled upwards towards the top of the web.

  ‘Don’t write anything, Paul.’

  Suddenly and deliberately Helen leaned against him. After a few moments, she muttered: ‘Nobody admired Albert’s work more than I did, but he was sick at the end. He knew he’d failed. He only studied spiders because no one could imagine he was prescribing ways to change their behaviour. He’d got scared of humans.’

  Paul felt the weight of the woman leaning on him. The article Albert James had emailed, he remembered, described a species of spiders where the female spun the web and the smaller males risked being mistaken for prey when they approached her. ‘The anchor lines that pin the web are stronger than Kevlar,’ Albert had written. ‘So far attempts to produce the silk synthetically have failed.’

  ‘Helen,’ Paul said quietly. At the same time he was struck by the sheer size of the web this spider was weaving; it must be at least ten feet across, but the way the camera was set up it seemed that the creature was moving across the whole expanse of an old brick façade located about fifteen yards beyond the trees where the web was hung. Slightly blurred by the filaments of silk and the shift of focus, a constant trickle of young men and women hurried in and out of a swing door. Paul tilted his head and saw Helen had closed her eyes.

  ‘Please,’ she muttered, ‘turn it off, now. Albert wasn’t well at the end. I think the cancer had got to his head. He just wanted to die.’

  ‘How long was he ill?’ Paul asked.

  The spider was lying still in a fuzzy area just off centre of the web.

  ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

  Helen pushed her head into his shoulder as if she might burrow in there. She liked the man’s solidity, his straightforwardness and insistence, and these were also the qualities she found irksome. Then she had the odd idea that Paul had been sent. He had arrived the very day of the funeral, hadn’t he? Albert had sent him. He had sent the biographer. And Than-Htay too. They were emissaries.

  Still with her eyes closed, she said, ‘You know one wonderful thing about Albert was what a great mimic he was. When you went out with him he was always listening to people and copying them. After an evening like this he would have had so much fun mimicking Aradhna: Do you have any idea, Helen, how many untouchables have castrated themselves in East Bengal in the last month? Do you know how many widows have jumped on their husband’s pyres in Tamil Nadu?’

  ‘I can’t mimic to save my life,’ Paul said.

  ‘Me neither, as you just heard.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He pointed the remote and turned off the television. They were in the dark again.

  ‘Did you like Kulwant?’ she enquired.

  ‘Very much. A funny guy. And nice too.’

  She didn’t move but he found he had put an arm round her shoulders. Perhaps she wanted comfort. All the same, without thinking, he said: ‘Actually, if it had been any other situation, you know, I might have imagined he was a lover.’

  The air conditioning laboured on. Why had he said that?

  Eventually she replied, ‘Might you indeed?’

  ‘I said, in any other situation.’

  Helen sighed. ‘And aren’t you worried that being here in the middle of the night with Helen James might compromise your relationship with little Miss Massachusetts?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil anything important for you.’ She still had her head against his shoulder.

  ‘Why the heavy irony all the time?’ he objected.

  ‘Maybe defence.’

  She dug her fingers viciously hard into his thigh and jumped to her feet in the dark.

  ‘Ow!’ Paul started.

  ‘I’ll make up the spare bed for you,’ she said in quite another voice.

  She was gone. The light came on in a room behind him. His leg still hurt. After a moment he stood and went to watch her as she tucked in a sheet round a narrow single bed. It was all very brisk, very feminine.

  ‘This is really kind of you,’ he told her lamely. ‘I could still get a taxi if you want.’

  ‘Please stay.’

  She didn’t look up as she spoke. Her voice was neutral. Leaving the room a few moments later, she added: ‘You dream of your little girl now. I’ll talk to my ghost.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JOHN HAD NEVER been alone for so long. It made him anxious, but he was unable to break the spell. ‘Just a word,’ Elaine texted. ‘You can’t disappear like this.’ Exhausted by another day of stomach pains, he dreamed of exams. Signs and numbers appeared under his pen, but dictated by an alien will. He didn’t rightly know what equation he was supposed to be solving. Panicking, he woke up.

  In the morning, he took a shower and had breakfast on the roof. His clothes felt damp. The first day, when the receptionist had pointed him to the roof, he had imagined pretty tablecloths and a buffet under bamboo awnings. At the top of steep narrow stairs he found two plastic chairs and one battered table that wobbled on the uneven tarring of the empty rooftop. Everybody else had breakfast in their rooms, with their air conditioners.

  John walked to the parapet. To one side were the glass façades of Delhi’s business centre, but on the other you could look across laundry lines and antennas toward India Gate. The sun was pale in a haze of heat. The warm air was alive with birds and bird cries, with honking and street vendors, smells of fuel and burning. When the waiter brought his scrambled eggs the man had to wave off the crows. He shouted cheerfully: ‘They are very hungry, sir!’ The birds gathered while John ate; he could hear their claws scraping on the corrugated iron over the stairs.

  The waiter had laid a copy of the Times of India on his tray and he read an article about compulsory Aids tests for railway workers. A laboratory in Bombay claimed it had discovered a cocktail of proteins that extended life by up to twenty years. John didn’t check the details. Although Father had always been a maverick, it
occurred to him, he never claimed dramatic successes. Rather the contrary. The patterns he wrote about were never susceptible to useful manipulation, only liable to destruction. John stopped chewing. Dad was a defeatist, he thought. He didn’t help me because he didn’t think help was possible.

  Spreading jam, John watched the crows. It was hot hot hot. He was breathing heat. Today I will go and see Mother, he decided. A constant tension was drawing him to her. Equally constantly, he resisted. He didn’t want to see her. He needed to solve something before going to Mum. Solve what? Something that would force her to see reason.

  Finishing his food, he felt frustration turning to anger. I’m marooned here. My career is ruined before it began. The lab would never want him now. Elaine will not want me. Nobody would give him money again. He sat at the table surrounded by the crows, which strutted on the parapet, the stair housing. His father had crow’s feet round his eyes. ‘If you want to study patterns, just look in a mirror,’ Mother laughed. The corners of Dad’s eyes were river deltas. He was always so tense, so concentrated. Concentrated on what, though? On dreams, dreams of young companions. And are both of those figures stand-ins perhaps for you, John? he had written: a young friend who put up a tent with the sick and ageing Albert James, who walked with him along the beach beside the surf. Dad’s forehead was always deeply furrowed. Elaine must be just such a companion for the Japanese director, John thought. A child. It was obscene with such a difference in age. ‘Don’t you see,’ she had texted, ‘that disappearing like this you’ll actually cause the thing you’re afraid of.’ I’ll go to Mum and demand an explanation, John decided. He pushed his chair back. Before he reached the stairs the crows’ beaks were clattering on his tin plate.

  No sooner was he on the street than his intestine struck. He had to hurry back to the hotel. How can you do anything with your gut in this condition? Part of him was glad of it. Then he was angrier still. He was furious. Bananas were the solution. He went back down to the street and found a woman squatting on her heels between baskets of fruit. There were limes, pears, apples, things he didn’t recognise in heaps of bright colour. She was serving an elderly lady. On a barrow beside her a young man lay asleep.

  ‘Three bananas,’ John said.

  Motorbikes were pushing their way through the crowd. The street was narrow. The vendor didn’t understand. She had set up an umbrella to shade her wares. The young man woke and said something. Then she picked up a large bunch of dwarf bananas and offered them.

  ‘Just three,’ John repeated. It crossed his mind that this paraphernalia of India was getting dreadfully in the way. He showed the woman three fingers, but she shook her head. He needed to act, to go straight to Mother’s, and instead here he was struggling to buy bananas to settle a stomach poisoned by the endless bacteria in this filthy country. How could you solve anything in India?

  Yet there was something fascinating too: the baskets, the heaps of fruit, the blotch of crimson on the woman’s forehead, her thin wrists poking from the shadows of her sari. It was all so much richer and rawer than life in Maida Vale. It is beautiful, John suddenly thought.

  Sitting up, the young man on the barrow spoke aggressively to the woman. He seemed upset. There was a gold thread round his neck. John pulled out a hundred-rupee bill and got fifty-five change. Now he had a dozen green bananas. It was stupid, but he was smiling. I’m glad to be distracted, he thought.

  He stood with his back to a wall and was at once surrounded by children stretching out their hands. He shook his head, but they clamoured. It was hard to peel his banana, eat it and hang onto the bunch with all these small hands reaching out to him, touching his clothes. He tore off a couple of bananas for them, but now it was they who shook their heads. Not bananas! They wanted money. One banana broke in half. John pushed past the children and headed for the square and the autorickshaws.

  Instead of giving his mother’s address he asked to be taken to the university. Mother would be in the clinic, he remembered, and he didn’t know where that was. He was relieved. I can go to the flat this evening. A message arrived on the phone. ‘I love you, John. Why are you punishing me?’ He paid the driver and asked a passer-by where the department of zoology was. People sent him this way and that. The streets were leafy and might have been pleasant if it wasn’t for the heat. Then he recognised the building where they had eaten after Father’s funeral.

  Still with his bunch of bananas, he found the canteen and, leaning against a tree, watched through glass doors as students went back and forth with their trays. How quickly, he thought, remembering the conversation that day, he had lost interest in his work, in microphages and granulomas, glycolysis and pentose phosphates. He felt no desire to find out if there were people working in his field here, maybe right in this building. He didn’t want to know what equipment their labs had. As if I were born yesterday, he told himself rather strangely.

  John went back to the entrance, sat on a step, ate a banana and watched. Kids arranged themselves in drifting circles, one hand on a companion’s wrist, the other holding a phone. Girls and boys laughed. It was so familiar. What really mattered to me, then, about the work I was doing? he wondered. The position it gave me in a team, perhaps. He loved working with other people, he shone, but on matters that were quite impersonal: the microchemistry of the cell, the battle between infection and immune system. You worked together with people to understand something else, not each other. There was a clearly defined collective goal: a new drug. But away from the team he wasn’t interested in mycobacterial tuberculosis at all. He didn’t care about people who suffered from it. He was hardly interested in Elaine. My life has been one institution after another, he thought. He felt at home on the steps of a university. There had been the house cricket team, the college boat, the group lab projects. I always pulled my weight. If I went back to the lab I would be interested again, he thought. At once. Like a light going on when you enter a room. He knew he would. He would enjoy bending his mind to metabolic pathways, to hydrocarburic chains, in a team with the others, showing them what he could do. But Father had always been passionate about his research; he didn’t need to be in a lab or anywhere particular. And he studied alone. If there was a team, Dad left it. Yet what he studied always had to do with people, not impersonal things. With a woman who sold you bananas. Father would have made a video. A girl picking nits from her mother’s hair. Vaguely, wordlessly, John felt a glimmer of comprehension.

  ‘Excuse me? Is it Mr James?’

  He looked up and saw the earnest, bespectacled young lecturer who had sat across the table from him months ago.

  ‘Hello,’ John said. His mouth was full. Embarrassed by the bananas, he scrambled to his feet. ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name. But how did you remember me?’

  ‘There aren’t many Europeans around, are there?’ the man laughed. ‘I’m Dinesh. But I don’t think I told you my name.’

  Dinesh took him into the canteen for tea and John remembered why he had come to the university. ‘I was looking for Sharmistha,’ he said, ‘do you remember, the woman sitting beside me at lunch that day? I don’t know her second name.’

  ‘Puri,’ he said. ‘Sharmistha Puri.’ He began to say how interesting he had found John’s comments that day: that any vital phenomenon was too complex for a single mind to grasp, so minds had to connect together in a structure. He himself worked in communication theory, where of course most people just wanted to know how best to get a message across to someone else so as to have them behave in a certain way, to buy something or to vote for this or that party, forgetting that all communication was bidirectional.

  The Indian laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Businessmen and politicians are so naïve! They imagine they’re calling the tune, but their behaviour is more determined by the public than vice versa. This was your father’s field, of course. He came to talk to the students a couple of times a year. I remember he said: Only a dead man can communicate without being altered himself. Or God of cours
e. No feedback to the stars!’

  John stared at the man. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’ he asked. ‘Sharmistha, I mean.’

  Dinesh led him across the campus to the zoology department where they eventually found an office that would have Sharmistha’s phone number. A fan turned idly, stirring a muddle of papers. A middle-aged woman fussed about privacy rules. The upholstery was shabby and the ancient phones had locks on their dialling discs. ‘Please, madam, this is the son of Professor James,’ Dinesh protested. ‘Dr Puri will be delighted to hear from him.’

  ‘Call her from my mobile,’ he offered in the corridor. He seemed to have understood that the young Englishman was going through some kind of crisis. Perhaps he thinks I have a crush on her, John thought.

  A man answered the call. Although John guessed from the accent it must be the German who had accompanied them to the Sufi tombs, he didn’t say hello, just asked for Sharmistha.

  ‘I’m John James,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh but that’s wonderful!’

  At once he understood that he had called at an embarrassing moment.

  ‘I’m back in India for a few days. I wondered if we could meet.’

  She covered the receiver to talk to the German. Then her voice was full of enthusiasm: ‘Come tonight, John, there’s a farmhouse party, out of town.’

  John could hear the German’s voice in the background.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at your mother’s. Around nine.’

  ‘I’m not staying at Mother’s.’ He gave her the address of the hotel. Just off Bhavbhuti Marg.

  ‘But why’s that?’

  ‘I’m not here for my mother,’ he said flatly.

  ‘How interesting. Why are you here?’

  John hesitated. ‘It’s complicated.’

  Dinesh was watching him. ‘You want a cigarette,’ he asked.

  John accepted. ‘What’s a farmhouse party?’ he asked.

  ‘A sort of late-night garden party for the rich and chic,’ Dinesh said. ‘I hate the things.’