by Tim Parks
‘They’re odd things to talk about, aren’t they?’ she said. Her tone changed. ‘Actually that was where his fascination with Shiva came in.’ For a moment she was presenting her husband’s work at conferences again, she was condescending. ‘Creator, destroyer. People see it as a contradiction but for Albert destruction was the completion of the act of creation: like cutting a string to the right length.’
Again Helen sighed. In her head the sounds around rose and fell like water lapping. She didn’t want to open her eyes. The man’s touch on her arm was holding her here, preventing her from sinking. But she wouldn’t look at him. In a way she had drowned months ago in the deep silence when Albert’s breathing stopped, when the embrace cooled. And beautiful though it had seemed when he seduced her to it, as soon as she was alone, as soon as the arms grew heavy and lifeless, she knew it had been a terrible mistake, a terrible, terrible mockery. It was the greatest mistake Helen James had ever made, the greatest mockery she ever suffered. Hurrying to take himself out of the world, Albert had invaded everything; he was in the smell of the grass, the thickening air of the summer evening, the feel of her body against the hard earth. She would never get beyond him.
But perhaps the American has understood, she thought now. Why not just tell, then? Helen held her breath. ‘When we left America,’ she began, ‘the idea was …’
There came a siren. The approaching wail drowned out the smaller noises. Paul turned to the road. The first siren was joined by another. A police car pushed through the traffic light and sped away shrieking along the Amber Road. There was a storm of honking.
‘Yes?’ He turned back to her.
Helen was relieved to hear his voice, but the moment had passed.
‘Speaking of the States,’ she said, ‘if you’re flying back via London, perhaps you could talk to John and tell me how he’s getting on. I think I should keep away from him for a while myself. I got the feeling he wanted to use Albert’s death as a reason for attaching himself to me. You know? It’s better if he becomes independent now. He’s old enough.’
Paul stubbed his cigarette on the dry earth. ‘No problem,’ he said.
‘When are you going back, by the way?’
‘I’m not sure. It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘It just depends.’
Helen took a deep breath, braced herself and opened her eyes. The floodlights pointed at India Gate were painful. She squinted. There seemed to be smoke in the air and birds stirring the darkness. Still touching her arm, Paul had his eyes elsewhere. She saw his strong jaw in the bullish head, his curly hair matted by the heat. Something had caught his attention.
She raised her head. Perhaps twenty yards away a flower vendor had put a garland of white jasmine over a pretty girl’s neck. Her young man pulled out his wallet. Sitting in a circle, their friends were laughing. The girl dipped and swayed in a couple of celebratory dance steps, shaking the flowers from side to side.
Helen lowered her head and closed her eyes again.
‘Touch me,’ she said.
He turned back to her. Despite the crowds and the bustle and the incessant traffic, there was something languid and suspended about this Delhi evening after the day’s torrid heat. They were suspended together in the long tepid evening, floating he thought. He let the back of his hand drift above her elbow, up the rounded inside of her arm. All this will prevent me from writing the book, he realised. Now it rested on her bare shoulder beside the strap of her dress where there was a small scar. Or perhaps it would be a different book.
‘Touch me,’ she whispered again.
His fingers moved round the blemish. They slipped into the sinewy hollow of her neck. Helen sighed. He saw her breast rise and fall. In a moment she will withdraw, he thought. She was smiling as if through pain. He opened the palm of his hand to move it firmly up the smooth skin below her hair. She will start talking about Albert again. He was sure. She will retreat.
Helen tensed her neck against his hand so that his fingers were forced into her hair. She liked the strong feel of his fingers meeting her resistance, sliding into her thick hair. Paul felt the strangeness of it; the woman wanted to annul herself, pushing against him. It wasn’t, he realised, a change of mind in his regard. It was something different and, for the first time he guessed, desperate. Helen was desperate. He would have liked to speak, to defuse the tension. But now it was she who didn’t want it. She was thrusting her face blindly against his bare hand. The strangeness of it excited him and he looked up and around to see if they were being observed.
Helen burst out laughing. Abruptly, she sat up, jumped to her feet, brushed down her dress. She moved so quickly she felt giddy and had to clutch at his hair to steady herself.
‘Ow!’
‘I just remembered something, something Kulwant said about Prince Charles and Camilla.’
‘Is that right?’ he asked drily. ‘And what was that?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
She had left him, she was walking quickly through the people sitting and playing on the dry grass. Bewildered, irritated, Paul followed. She walked coltishly, he noticed, as she had the evening she got drunk. He followed without hurrying, lighting another cigarette. As he did so, stopping to touch the flame to the tip, he realised that he felt at home in India tonight. He felt good. He liked this scene of vendors and families on scooters, this mixture of repose and frenzy, the smell of burned dust.
‘Paul!’
She had stopped by a man with a tray. She was calling him.
‘Come here!’
He had to step round a boy and girl eating out of paper.
The vendor was in a pool of light beneath an old-fashioned lamp. She was paying him and as Paul arrived the man tried to drop a long trail of white flowers over her head.
‘No no no,’ she laughed.
Helen took the flowers and turned to Paul. She came abruptly face to face, lifted the garland and let it fall over him. Before he knew it, her pale lips pressed against his.
Then she stepped back.
Paul took the string of flowers in his hands. Her face had a wry questioning look. He sensed at once that it was false.
‘Is this some kind of ritual?’ he enquired.
‘Let’s get a taxi,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
On 15 February 2005, at 10:32, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert
Sudeep is very nice but I will have to marry a Sikh. A Jat or nothing Father says! Hope I will be able to come very often.
Jasmeet
On 15 February 2005, at 09:46, Albert James wrote
Dear Jasmeet,
I’m glad you enjoyed yesterday evening. It was very promising. You ask what lies behind it. It’s simple. Each person takes a part – suitor/princess – robber/victim – Muslim/Hindu – employer/worker – guru/disciple – man/wife – spider/fly – then, as the drama approaches its crisis there is a dance and you reverse roles. Don’t worry why. It’s an experiment! Just enjoy the fun.
Everybody will start with an easy part from their own family or caste then switch. We’ll look at videos of people to help us. And animals too. Animals are useful because they don’t disguise their feelings. They just are. You and Ananya and Vimala can help a lot with the dancing. The reversal moment has to have a graceful, ceremonial feel, a kind of enchantment. It has to be beautiful. I hope you like the others. Sudeep is a nice boy, don’t you think? He’s studying drama at the university.
Thanks for coming along and do say hello to your father.
Albert
On 15 February 2005, at 09:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert
Thank you for a nice evening. I hope it is helpful to have me even if I don’t understand really what we were doing. Can you explain? Thank you also for dinner.
Yours sincerely
Jasmeet Singh
‘BUT THERE ARE hundreds of messages!’ John mutters. He hasn’t slept. He feels confused
and his head is heavy. Clearly, this is the revelation he came to India for: this girl, this computer. Equally clearly, he isn’t ready. He doesn’t want to read his father’s emails. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to know about his father at all. The night with Sharmistha and Heinrich has unsettled him. John needs to shower. He wishes this girl was Elaine. He doesn’t want to meet strangers. He wishes he was here on holiday with Elaine. Or with Mum. He will send her a message: ‘Thinking of you, bought you a present.’
But right now he has this girl in his room. She is pretty enough with a full round pouting mouth and jet-black hair under a yellow headscarf, but she keeps crying. John feels inadequate. He hasn’t slept. I should have stayed in London, he thinks. In the end it would have worked out at the lab. It is his mother’s fault. Every turn this trip takes makes him angrier with his mother.
‘I was going to cancel everything,’ the girl murmurs. ‘But I couldn’t. I couldn’t destroy everything we wrote.’
She has followed him to his room. She has a strong accent. Not like Sharmistha. Sharmistha sounded almost American. John was surprised the receptionist didn’t object. He imagined some rule in Indian hotels that would keep girls from coming to your room, especially a single room. The place is a den, a burrow; it smells stale. He needs to sleep. There are his socks and underwear on the floor, grubby clothes on the table. It’s funny this mix of India and John: a bric-a-brac Ganesh beside his Imperial College tee-shirt. The girl is sitting on the only chair, by the TV, in loose trousers and smock, her strong chin pushing forward a little, slim hands clasped between her legs. He can see she has slim legs. The light comes from a greasy window where the room narrows beside the bathroom. It’s the reflected glare of the early day. The air conditioner is rattling. I need to shower and sleep, John tells himself. I’m ill. He knows he isn’t.
He sits on the bed with the laptop that the girl has put in his hands. The screen is glowing.
On 20 March 2005, at 13:56, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert …
John wants to be unconscious. ‘This is your father’s computer, Mr John,’ the girl had said. ‘The password is JohnJames.’ But he can’t sleep now. He can’t even lie down. His own name the password! Or his uncle’s name. The email account is swamped with messages from Jasmeet Singh.
On 20 March 2005, at 14:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote
You are so kind to answer so soon, Mr Albert!
‘And you are Jasmeet?’ John asks stupidly. His eye scans down the inbox. Every message is from the same address
Re: Sudeep
Re: Re: Sudeep
Re: Re: Re: Sudeep
Re: Caste and marriage
Re: Bandi Chhorh Divas
Re: Ananya and Vimala
Re: Spider webs
Re: Death
Re: freedom!
Re: my father
Re: Re: my father
Re: Love!
Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
‘Yes, I told you,’ she says. ‘That is me.’
‘I’m sorry. I had a rough night.’
The girl looks around at the hotel room, distracted and curious, wiping tears with the back of her forearm. Bracelets tinkle. One of her knees has started to jerk rhythmically. She’s a strong physical presence in such a small room, animal and girlish. Quite tall. She has a tall neck. John wonders what he is supposed to do. Is he supposed to read these messages? In front of her? There are too many. There is a book and more. He wants to know what’s in them, but he doesn’t want to read them. He wants to have known all along. I’ll have to confront Mother, he decides. He wants it all to be in the past, like an exam studied, passed and forgotten. Now he notices a smell; the girl has a perfume, something musky and different.
‘Was it you who sent me that letter?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr John?’
‘I got a letter from my father. Did you post it? It arrived in London after he died.’
‘Ah,’ she smiles and sniffs. ‘He wrote that letter at the Neemrana.’
‘The what?’
‘You don’t know?’ She seems genuinely surprised. ‘The Neemrana! It’s an old fort. A hotel. Very famous. On the road to Jaipur. It ended in my bag.’
‘It wasn’t finished.’
‘I found the letter in my bag. I don’t know how it came there. He was thinking a lot about you. He wrote the letter at the Neemrana.’
The girl is looking at him as she speaks. ‘Everything went wrong, Mr John. I posted the letter when he died. The address was in the computer.’
John is at a loss. He has come back after a miserable, drunken night and now there is this drama that he must face. He cannot avoid facing it. Things are going to come out. Like it or not. Father is coming out of his coffin. The awkward box has been bumping about too long in the flooded basement. John wants to go to his mother and demand to know who this girl is. He wants to send Mother down to sort out the basement. Explain this girl, Mum! His parents’ marriage was perfect, it was mythical. What other justification could there have been for their always ignoring him, their always disappearing together to one godforsaken destination after the next? John wants to be beside Elaine the night they swam in the river. If Elaine is fucking the Jap he’ll go crazy. He knows she is fucking him. John sits staring at the screen.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Symmetry
The Indian girl stands up and limps to the door. ‘I will leave, Mr John. You can read the things Albert wrote.’
‘No, stay,’ John says. He very much wants to be alone, but not with these emails. They will choke him. He will sink and stick in them. He can’t let her get away. ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he asks.
‘An accident.’
She is standing at the door. It isn’t properly closed. There are sounds of other doors banging, cleaners calling to each other down the corridor.
‘Stay,’ John repeats. Now he decides he must get the truth out of her. He would much rather hear the story from her than read all these messages. They will exhaust him. Then he’ll have the facts he needs to go to Mother. ‘What did you mean,’ he asks slowly, ‘that you’re responsible for Dad dying?’
She looks at him, wiping her cheeks with her fingers. ‘Mr John, I’ve brought you the computer. You can read it.’
‘Please, sit down.’
She sits on the edge of the chair. ‘I never cry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think I would cry.’
‘What was my father doing?’ he asked. ‘This research you were in.’
She shakes her head. ‘Please, take me away. Could you take me away, Mr John? Could I travel to England with you?’
John is out of his depth. ‘Let’s eat,’ he says. ‘I’m hungry.’
At reception, when John asks if they can have breakfast served on the roof, Jasmeet changes. She speaks confidently in Hindi, ordering things, trading brisk remarks, treating the receptionist as a servant. She asks for a tissue. In the water bowl the day’s petal arrangement is intersecting triangles of mauve and blue.
On the stairs, the girl limps heavily. It’s her right knee. She can’t lift it to the stair above. The left leg always has to lead and the right is pulled up to join it. But the ankles beneath loose trousers are slim. Her white sandals are pretty. John tries to gauge what size they are. Elaine has very small feet. Girlish feet. His own are huge. Pushing open the iron door onto the roof she seems untroubled by the glare and the crows, unsurprised by the bare asphalt, the lone plastic table.
There’s a warm breeze blowing. The waiter arrives. ‘These crows, sir, they are beastly!’ The man is hamming. He waves the birds away. ‘Beastly, shoo!’ It’s a way of showing his amusement that John has found himself a girl. It’s theatre. He imagines we slept together. Meanwhile, John can consider the girl more carefully. She’s in her early twenties, he de
cides, older than Ananya, my own age probably. Jasmeet is looking rather shrewdly round the rooftop view.
‘I think you have met my father,’ she says sitting down. ‘You had dinner with him the day before Albert’s funeral. His name is Kulwant Singh. He is a friend of your mother.’
‘Of course! God. I didn’t realise. That was your father?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t smile.
‘He was talking about the royal family. A doctor, right?’
‘I’ve left home now,’ the girl says. ‘I’m not going back.’
‘You’ve left home. I don’t understand. When?’
‘Now.’
John’s head throbs. There must have been three or four gins, four or five vodkas. He sits looking across the table at the strong young woman in her pyjama outfit and lemon yellow headscarf that flutters in the hot breeze. Never having lived at home, John never had a chance to leave. ‘Don’t come out this summer,’ Mother wrote from Chicago, ‘your father isn’t well.’ John wants to bang on his father’s coffin, with a stone maybe, a stone elephant, and he wants to make sure it stays shut too. He doesn’t want to read those emails. He needs an argument.
Jasmeet is looking straight in his eyes. ‘I am going to go to London, Mr John, I have decided to leave India. I have some money. I have a visa.’
In his room she had been crying. Now in the glare of the rooftop she is hard and resolute. ‘I am not tolerating my father any more,’ she says. Her voice has an attractive lilt. At first he thought she didn’t speak very well. Now he realises it’s a way of speaking.
‘You don’t know the hours and years he spent telling me how a Sikh girl must behave: Guru Granth Sahib this and Papa Ji that. My brother does what he wants. He studies law. He went to a better school. He has better English. I must be a secretary, a wife. They want me to marry a Jat doctor. But when I hurt my leg, his family got cold feet.’
She stopped. ‘That is too funny? I hurt my leg and they got cold feet.’ She laughed loudly. ‘Your father, Mr John, said I was a crazy girl. Jasmeet, you are a crazy crazy girl!’
John can’t keep up. It seems impossible this young woman could have had anything to do with his father, with a man who never remembered to pull up his fly, who wore shoes without socks, or sandals with socks. Not a woman’s man. Distracted, self-absorbed. A saint without a religion. And ill in the end. An older man with prostate cancer, sick in his most intimate parts. John looks at the girl. Still, it is more possible with Jasmeet than with Ananya. Her manner tells him that she knows things. Her eyes and a sly twist of the lips. And her body.
