by Tim Parks
‘How did you hurt your leg?’ he asks. He will grasp anything but the nettle. When he does he will take it straight to Mother.
‘I was getting off a bus, in a hurry, it wasn’t the stop, and a motorbike, zoom, crashes into me.’
She looks away to the parapet and India Gate. ‘I was in a hurry, to meet Albert.’
Before John has time to comment, the waiter is back. The crows rise to greet the food. The man tries to slip napkins under the teapot but the wind snatches them. Two paper rectangles blow across the asphalt.
‘Very strong wind, sir. Perhaps a dust storm is coming, sir. You must be warned, when the wind is from this direction, sir.’
He sets their trays down: scrambled eggs for John; for Jasmeet, some kind of fried potato with yoghurt and pickle. She eats rapidly with her fingers, dipping her head sideways almost to the plate. She is hungry. John can see the strong jaws, the elastic lips. He pours tea. He likes the madness of hot tea on hot mornings. His head will clear.
‘You got up early?’ he says. ‘It’s not even nine.’ He doesn’t understand if she really meant that she left home today.
She speaks with her mouthful. ‘Do you think you can take me to England, Mr John? Can we just go to the airport and get a plane to London? I have a visa. Albert helped me. I have some money. I am twenty-four. With office experience. I can work.’
John can’t respond. Making an enormous effort, he says: ‘Tell me about you and my father.’ He pushes the fork in his mouth. He isn’t tasting the food at all. Mum will be forced to take him seriously when he goes to her about this, when he says, who is Jasmeet Singh? What was she to Father? Then she will have to tell him things. Then she will come back to England with him.
Jasmeet has her head over the plate, filling her mouth. He’s struck how red her tongue is. The colour is very intense. Like the inside of a wound. ‘Read the messages, Mr John,’ she says. ‘It’s too complicated.’
‘I’m not going to get upset,’ he protests.
‘Please. You will understand, if you read the messages.’
John doesn’t need to understand. He needs to know.
‘Read the messages,’ she repeats, pulling a napkin from under the sugar bowl. ‘I’m a bit afraid of travelling to London alone.’
‘What about this research, then?’ John asks. ‘This experiment with acting?’ Actually he isn’t interested in this at all. He couldn’t care less about Father’s so-called research. It was time-wasting. The man was burned out.
Jasmeet wipes her mouth. The breeze is blowing loose hairs across her lips. ‘We were meeting at the Delhi Drama School. Sudeep studies there. In the evening. We were learning to act things. We had to make catastrophes, he said, and then,’ she hesitated, ‘to dance. To unravel them, he said.’ She shook her head. ‘He wanted everybody to learn this, he called it a new way of behaving. There were five girls. Five boys. Sudeep could explain. You have to recognise a bad moment coming and then dance it, dance it away.’
‘I don’t understand,’ John says flatly.
‘Oh me neither really!’ Jasmeet smiles with her mouth full. ‘Everyone had to bring a story.’ She swallows, frowns. ‘Let me remember.’ She brushes thin fingers over her lips. ‘Okay. This was something Sudeep told: there are two Muslim people on the ground floor of a block – they are married many years, but not blessed with children, and upstairs there is a Muslim girl who is married to a Hindu man of a low caste with many relatives who are making a lot of noise all the time, always celebrating, always festivals late at night, and they have a baby too, he is very noisy, and the two families are insulting each other, also because this used to be a building only with Muslims and the Muslim woman downstairs thinks the girl upstairs shouldn’t have been marrying a Hindu, and then because she hasn’t had children herself she is angry about this noisy child, she is cleaning all the time, and hating the noise, she has bad headaches, and so the two Muslims plan to kill the Hindu baby and the mother when the father is away. This is a real story that happened in Sudeep’s building. I was acting the young Muslim girl who married the Hindu.’
John stared at her. What was this about?
‘We had to feel all the feelings very strongly, then learn the moment to dance. We must find a … trigger, that was Albert’s word. Before the catastrophe. There is a dance where you become the opposite of what you were in the story. It is a ceremony. You do your opposite. Your father was experimenting a lot. He said we must make it beautiful or it wouldn’t work. It had to be beautiful.’
‘Dad was crazy.’
‘Or for example’ – Jasmeet was getting excited, she was happy to remember this – ‘there is a family where the son is fighting his father because he wants to be a poet, you know, and on the contrary the father wants him to be a professor of science and they have arguments and the son’s girl, his fiancée, who is very beautiful but she is a snob and she is afraid of being poor, she agrees with the father, her boyfriend’s father – maybe she even likes the father and he likes her, you know, she’s very sexy and he’s a very powerful man – and the son starts drinking a lot, he is angry, really angry, and everybody argues and he is going to kill himself to punish them. I was the girlfriend and Sudeep the son and your father the father.’
‘That is my uncle’s story.’
Jasmeet looked at him coolly. ‘I know. It was your Uncle John.’ She hesitated. ‘Albert said it was a method that must be making a rabid dog a poodle, or teach a spider to undo his web.’ She laughed. ‘Your father worried very much. Then he was excited like a child. Then he drank a lot. You know he wanted to make a play of Alice in Wonderland, is that how you call it? He said …’
John doesn’t want to hear any more of this drivel. It pains him. He pushes away his plate. ‘So why did you say it was your fault he died?’
Jasmeet shakes her head. ‘Maybe I learned the lesson he was teaching. I wanted to stop the catastrophe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PAUL TOOK THE elevator to the third floor, leafed through a Hindi magazine in the waiting room and saw the previous patient leave on the stroke of ten. The young man didn’t look ill at all.
Paul waited to be called in. The magazine was glossy and appeared to be about astrology; it was one of the few subjects on which Paul and his religious parents had always agreed; which is to say that they had thought every form of divination was of the devil, while Paul just found the notion that his destiny was in the stars idiotic.
He went to the window. A dry wind was blowing, piling up litter, shaking the leaves off dusty trees. Were there circumstances, he wondered, or a state of mind perhaps, that prompted a person to consult a system of science, or pseudoscience, in which he had no faith whatsoever? If so, what was that state of mind?
‘Mr Roberts?’
Dr Bhagat was a trim fellow in his late thirties, wearing a smart suit and tie. He emanated a brisk confidence. ‘Mr Roberts, this is my wife, Bala.’ A small woman offered her hand with a smile at once kind and shrewd. ‘We work together,’ he explained.
Paul took a seat opposite the doctor who sat behind an impressive desk. His suit was light grey and his tie yellow. The wife arranged herself to one side, pen in hand and notepad in her lap. Everything was clean and very neat.
‘As I said on the phone,’ Paul began, ‘I haven’t come for myself, but to talk about a patient of yours who died some months ago. Albert James.’
‘And as my wife no doubt explained, our consultations with patients are strictly confidential.’
‘I understand that,’ Paul told him, ‘and of course I’m very grateful you agreed to see me at all at such short notice.’
He paused. With its lowered blinds and quiet air conditioning the room conveyed a mood of sensible modernity. Paul had expected something more fancifully charlatan: drapes, lamps, iconic knick-knacks.
‘I am writing a biography of Professor James,’ he said. ‘His wife thought you might be able to tell me something.’
‘You a
re a writer?’ the doctor enquired. He had the bland deference of one professional man showing interest in another.
‘That’s right.’ Paul hesitated. ‘I’m curious about your branch of medicine and about why Professor James chose to come to you.’
The doctor appeared to think about this. ‘Bala,’ he asked, ‘get Mr James’s file, will you?’
There were separate shelves for blue, green and red files. Albert’s was green. Paul was aware that he might ask about these colours; instead he enquired: ‘Were you surprised by Albert’s death?’
The doctor opened the file and began leafing through notes and receipts. He had two small moles above the left corner of his mouth. ‘We didn’t actually know Mr James was deceased until your phone call. The last time he visited us was’ – he glanced at the uppermost sheet of paper – ‘15 November. Many months ago.’ Dr Bhagat looked up. ‘But no, I am not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised.’
‘He was very ill, then?’
‘Ill?’ The doctor raised an eyebrow.
‘He had prostate cancer.’
The Indian’s small wife leaned forward: ‘We wouldn’t actually be thinking or talking about a patient in quite those limiting terms, Mr Roberts. A man is not just a cancer.’
‘I have spoken to his urologist at the Sir Ganga Ram hospital,’ Paul told them.
‘He had a urologist at Ganga Ram?’ Dr Bhagat asked. ‘Now you do surprise me.’
‘He had consulted one, yes.’
‘Ah. Consulted.’ The doctor pursed his lips. ‘What was written on the death certificate?’ he enquired.
Paul was taken aback. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.
‘Ha!’ the doctor came back. ‘I would be very interested to know.’
Paul reflected. ‘Perhaps you could talk about him more generally. I mean, your impression, things he said, without betraying a doctor’s trust, naturally. Though, of course, Professor James is dead now and I am a great admirer of his work. I can assure you that this will be a very positive biography.’
‘I have treated quite a number of Westerners over the years.’ Dr Bhagat sat back, fingertips on the edge of the desk, legs stretched beneath. ‘Of course they grew up in a culture that relies almost exclusively on scientific instruments, on measurements of determined chemical substances, on photographic images of a foreign body or an area of alteration in the muscles or organs.’ The doctor made a show of reflecting on this. ‘A culture at once technically sophisticated, sometimes marvellously efficient, for certain conditions, but spiritually primitive.’ He scratched at the corner of his mouth. ‘Many come to India to flee that; they go to the opposite extreme, the mystics, gurus, meditation centres, to the exact opposite of what they are used to. This is rather naïve. From the frying pan to the fire as it were.’
Paul waited.
‘Those who come to an Ayurvedic doctor …’
When he hesitated, his wife chipped in: ‘It is because they are aware of the need for a more integrated approach. Allopathic and homeopathic.’
Dr Bhagat sat up. ‘Mr James was not ill, Mr Roberts. Not just ill. Not in my professional opinion. He was full of vata. He was bursting with it. Blocked vata.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It is ether,’ said the wife. The high collar of her blouse gave her a rather prim look.
‘Vata, Mr Roberts, is an energy that runs in our body and needs to be kept in constant circulation. One of the five key elements. It needs to be balanced and to balance other elements. In Mr James the vata did not flow. That is not so unusual. It gathered and poisoned. What was unusual was the intensity of this condition in Mr James’s case. He came to see me and began speaking of the symptoms of what you call prostate cancer. Certainly, he did have these symptoms. I am sure that is no secret and his wife will no doubt have confirmed this for you: the very frequent and difficult urination; certain pains, some quite strong, yes, in the belly, the abdomen, and a general and sometimes very intense discomfort, in the bladder area. In fact, his problem was vata. It couldn’t flow because of the tussle in his mind. A very fierce tussle. I told him that within five minutes of his walking into this room. Or even sooner. Even before he was telling me his problems I told him.’
‘I remember,’ his wife said.
‘Because of the tussle in his mind,’ Paul repeated.
‘You would have needed to be blind not to see it. And then if you have my experience …’
‘And what was this tussle about?’ Paul enquired.
‘Ha!’ Dr Bhagat cried.
‘A tussle like this is not really about anything,’ his wife explained. ‘It is part of his prakruti.’
‘The personality, Mr Roberts. Or if we want to put it in a finer fashion, we might say: the collision between the inherited personality and its acquired traits. Yes. A grave tussle can manifest itself in this or that dilemma, but the tussle does not go when the dilemma is resolved. No. The tussle is simply looking for the dilemma so it can appear in the world. When one dilemma goes it finds another.’
Paul was sceptical. ‘So, how do you treat a condition like this?’
‘There are many ways of treating an accumulation of vata.’ The doctor’s tone became more practical. He turned a pen back and forth between his fingers. ‘There are massages using oil mixed with certain herbs. When the vata has gathered in the bladder and groin areas as in this case one can also prescribe an enema of oil: one hundred centilitres of sesame oil with appropriate herbs to be held in the colon as long as the patient finds possible. Certainly not less than forty minutes.’
‘Enemas? And Professor James did that?’
‘I certainly prescribed it. Whether he did it or not is another matter. Your Mr James was like a man looking in from outside. Perhaps he was just curious.’
‘Westerners put a high value on curiosity,’ the wife said.
‘In any event,’ the doctor concluded, ‘I warned him that these treatments would only be palliatives. He must address the tussle in his mind.’
‘You have no cure for that?’
Dr Bhagat reflected. ‘It is not easy to cure the prakruti. In a way you are asking a doctor to undo someone’s life. Do you see? There are approaches rather than cures. Astrology is very useful in these cases.’
‘Astrology?’
‘You are surprised, but I have a great deal of experience, Mr Roberts, in using astrology both for diagnoses and cures.’
‘For tussles in the mind?’
‘This is part of Ayurvedic medicine, Mr Roberts. The body’s balance of elements is very much determined by the position of the planets. We must understand who we are dealing with before trying to help. However, Mr James did not allow me to make a birth chart and pursue this line.’
‘He didn’t believe in astrology?’
The wife smiled: ‘Your professor said he was afraid he would start believing in it if my husband did it successfully.’
‘This is the typical contradictory response coming from a man with a tussle in his mind,’ laughed Dr Bhagat. ‘I have helped many such patients with astrology,’ he repeated, ‘though I never came across such a severe case. I am sorry he died. He was an interesting man.’
Paul watched the doctor. ‘Sorry, but not surprised?’
‘No.’
Paul tried to make his perplexity apparent. ‘Can I ask why not, if you didn’t even think he was ill? I don’t understand. I mean, do you die of this … vata?’
Leafing through his notes, the doctor again appeared to reflect. ‘Mr James told me nothing about his private life. He was very reserved. To be honest I did not know he was a professor. He gave his name only as Mr Albert James. He seemed a modest man.’
The doctor frowned, scratched lightly beside his moles. ‘Of course I cannot disclose all the symptoms he presented; no, some of them were rather unusual for the illness he believed he had. I feel it would be wrong for me to reveal those things; they were presented to me in confidence and of a rather intimate nature. Let
’s say’ – he hesitated – ‘yes, let’s say I had the impression that Mr James’s situation was not sustainable, without really understanding what that situation was. He appeared to be – how can I put it? – running out of time.’
The man relaxed and his voice altered. ‘But now Albert James’s problems have been resolved, have they not, one way or the other, or at least taken to another life?’
The doctor’s wife said: ‘Often there are deep feelings that prevent us from wanting to be healthy.’
Her husband added: ‘Maybe the easiest thing we can say is that some way of living this patient had developed was becoming impossible for him. That can happen. A man can stand on one leg for so long.’ He smiled. ‘Although, in my experience, it is remarkable how very long some people can stand on one leg, and even run sometimes.’
Paul’s exasperation peaked. He stood up and reached for his wallet.
Dr Bhagat didn’t move. ‘You are in a hurry, Mr Roberts?’
They had agreed on a fee of 400 rupees. Paul counted it out.
‘Perhaps you could tell us why you are writing a biography of Mr James. What is it that attracts you to this man?’
‘You yourself also seem a little fretful,’ the wife said.
Paul stayed on his feet but lifted his eyes from his wallet. Okay, he thought, and sat down. He would stay for his money’s worth.
‘It had seemed to me,’ Paul said, ‘reading Professor James’s considerable body of anthropological and scientific writings, that he had gone further than anyone else in understanding how people behave in relation to each other. Also, he had a fascinating life and marriage.’
