by Amitav Gosh
It was a relief to escape from those voices in the evenings; to step out of that bleak, cold building, encaged in its scaffolding of rusty steel fire escapes; to get away from the metallic echo of its stairways and corridors. There was something enlivening, magical almost, about walking from that wind-blown street into the brilliantly lit passageways of Penn Station, about the surging crowds around the ticket counters, the rumble of trains under one's feet, the deep, bass hum of a busker's didgeridoo throbbing in the concrete like an amplified heartbeat.
And of course there was the tea. The owner brewed it specially, for himself and Antar, in a chipped enamel pot, thick and syrupy, with a touch of mint – just like Antar remembered from his boyhood.
He ran a finger around his damp collar. It was clammy inside today: too hot if he shut the window and too damp if he left it open. Downstairs, the building's front door was opening and closing in a steady rhythm: he could feel the impact through the floor, every time it slammed shut. The people who worked in the warehouses and storage spaces on the first three floors were on their way home now, a little early because of the long weekend ahead. He could hear them on the street, shouting to each other as they walked towards the subway station on 7th Avenue. He was always relieved when the banging stopped and the building fell silent again.
There was a time when there were nothing but apartments in the building, all rented to families: large, noisy Middle Eastern and Central Asian families – Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks and even a few Egyptians. He had often had to knock on his neighbours' doors, asking them to keep it down. Tayseer, his wife, had become very sensitive to noise after she was confined to bed in the last trimester of her pregnancy. In the past she had never noticed when the neighbours made a racket shouting across the air-shaft, or when their kids skateboarded in the corridors. She had grown up within earshot of the canopied souks around the Bab Zuwayla in Cairo: she liked the bazaarish feel of the building, with everyone dropping in on each other and sitting out on the stoop on summer evenings, while children played around the fire hydrant. She liked the building, even though the neighbourhood scared her, especially the heavy traffic on either side of it – the West Side Highway at one end and the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel at the other. But she'd wanted to move there anyway: she thought it would be easier having a baby there, with so many women and children around.
In the end it didn't matter: an amniotic embolism killed her and the baby in the thirty-fifth week of her pregnancy.
They were all gone now, all those noisy, festive families that had so attracted Tayseer. They had been syphoned slowly away into small towns and suburbs by the demands of their expanding businesses and their ever-growing famillies. Antar had sometimes thought of moving too, but never with much conviction.
At first he had expected that the building would fill up around him after his old neighbours left – just as it had in earlier generations, with one wave of migrants moving out and another moving in. But somewhere down the line the pattern had changed: an alteration in the zoning regulations had prompted the building's owners to start converting empty apartments into commercial properties.
Soon the only residents left were ageing holdovers like himself: people who couldn't afford to move out of their rent-controlled apartments. Every year the building grew emptier of people, while the storage spaces expanded.
The man in the next apartment had been there since before Antar moved in. He was a keen chess player and claimed to be related to Tigran Petrossian. Antar played with him occasionally, losing badly every time.
Then one summer – was it fifteen or twenty years ago? – the chess player began to waste away. He couldn't play chess any more; he barely had the strength to move the pieces. His nephews drove up from North Carolina, where the rest of his family had settled. They cleared out his apartment and loaded everything into a yellow moving truck. Before they left they gave Antar a gunmetal chess set, as a memento; he still had it somewhere. Antar had watched from his living room window as they carried the chess player away in the truck.
Next it was the woman in the apartment below. She had been in the building since the sixties, when she first came to America from Azerbaijan. She had grown old in that apartment, brought up two children there; she had nowhere to go, especially after her eyesight began to fail. In that familiar space she could still manage on her own; she would have been at a loss anywhere else. Her children had let her stay, giving in to her entreaties against their better judgement. They'd fly in to visit, every other month, from the small Midwestern town where they lived. They arranged to have food delivered to her twice a week, from an uptown grocery.
And one day the delivery boy killed her, battering her head in with a cast-iron skillet. It was Antar who found the body. He had grown accustomed to the rhythm of her movements, and when he didn't hear the familiar tapping of her cane for a whole day, he knew something was wrong.
He'd lived alone on the fourth floor for four years. Then, a few months ago Maria, the Guyanese woman from the doughnut shop, brought Tara to Penn Station and introoduced her to the other regulars. Tara was small and birdlike, with a fine-boned beak of a nose. She was youngish – in her thirties, Antar reckoned – a good deal younger than Maria. He guessed at once that she was from India: the connnection was obvious really, because Maria was a Guyanese of Indian origin and he knew she still had relatives there.
The two women made an interesting contrast, although they seemed very easy with each other. Maria was tall, stately and unfailingly well dressed although she barely made minimum wage. Tara on the other hand seemed so uncomfortable in Western clothes that it was clear she'd just arrived: the first time she came to Penn Station she was wearing a loose white shirt that hung halfway down to her knees and a pair of dark trousers that flapped limply above her ankles.
But there was nothing awkward or freshly arrived about her manner. She gave Antar a smile and a crisp nod when they were introduced and slipped into the chair next to his. 'What's that you're drinking?' she said, tapping his cup. Mint tea, he explained, the owner of the shop brewed it especially for him, Egyptian-style.
'Splendid!' she said. 'Exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. Would you be good enough to ask him if I might have some too?'
Antar was taken aback by her voice: the plummy accent and the unexpected turn of phrase.
On the way out, walking towards the Broadway exit, Maria took him aside to say that Tara was looking for an apartment; that she had just found a job and needed a place to stay, in Manhattan.
'What does she do?' Antar asked.
'She's in child-care,' said Maria.
'You mean she's a babysitter?' Antar was surprised: somehow Tara didn't strike him as someone who would choose to look after children for a living.
'Yes,' said Maria. She went on to explain that Tara had been brought into the country by a Kuwaiti diplomat and his family, to care for their children. The arrangement hadn't worked out so she'd found another babysitting job, in Greenwich Village. But the family she was working for now couldn't give her a place to stay.
Antar nodded. Although Maria didn't say so, he guessed that the change of jobs had made Tara 's status illegal and that she needed to find a place where she could pay cash without having to deal with a lot of questions.
He shrugged. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'There's nothing I can do.'
Maria raised her eyebrows. 'But I've heard there's lots of empty space in your building,' she said. 'Isn't there a vacant apartment on your floor?'
Antar was taken aback. 'How do you know where I live?' he said. One of the unwritten rules of the doughnut shop was that they never enquired too closely into the details of each other's lives.
Maria made a bemused gesture. 'Oh, I just heard from someone…' she said. Her voice trailed away.
Antar had grown accustomed to having the fourth floor entirely to himself: he balked at the thought of having a neighbour again. 'It wouldn't be right for her,' he said. 'The building's in terrible shap
e, and so's the apartment.'
But he gave in when Maria begged him to show Tara the building: the neighbourhood would scare her off anyway, he decided.
He was proved wrong: Tara took an instant liking to the apartment and moved in within the month. It still took him by surprise when he went into his kitchen and saw lights blazing across the air-shaft. For years he had kept the kitchen window curtained because all there was in the airrshaft were dead rats and pigeons. Now he frequently found himself lingering there longer than he needed to.
Antar's eyes strayed to the timeline once again. 'Is it a quarter to six already?' he said out loud, inadvertently.
Instantly Ava bellowed confirmation, calling out the hour in the style of a village watchman in Egypt, perfect in every detail, down to the tapping of a wooden staff.
Chapter 4
THE PHOTOGRAPH on the ID card had begun to take shape in the centre of the living room, top downwards. The first detail to appear was a patch of hair, carefully trimmed, but rather thin and discoloured: definitely a man's hair. Then came a pair of bright black eyes. It occurred to Antar to wonder whether he might be Egyptian, whoever he was: he could have been – but he could just as well be Pakistani or Indian or Latin American.
But once the cheeks and nose and mouth appeared, Antar had no doubts left. He'd always been good at placing people, he prided himself on it, it was a talent you developed when you spent a lifetime working for a global agency. The man was Indian, he was sure of that.
The image was huge now, and it was shaking a little, like a banner in the wind. The face was full, moonlike, the cheeks as puffed as a trumpeter's, the aggressively jutting chin ending in a carefully trimmed goatee. It was the nose that gave Antar pause – a boxer's nose, sunken at the bridge. It looked out of place in that well-fed, rounded face. And it also looked somehow familiar.
Antar got up from his chair and stepped back: it was oddly disconcerting to look at a flat, two-dimensional image in a three-dimensional projection. He stepped to one side and then to the other, keeping his eyes on the image's mouth. He noticed that the lips were slightly parted as though in mid-sentence. The beginnings of a memory began to take shape in his mind – of someone glimpsed in elevators and corridors, a tubby little man with a pot belly, always immaculately dressed – pin-striped suits, razoredged trousers, starched shirts, always buttoned at the wrist, even on the hottest of summer days. And a hat – he'd always had a hat. That was why it had taken Antar so long to recognize him. He had never seen the man's hair; his head was usually covered – no wonder, really, with hair like that.
The image grew clearer in Antar's mind: he remembered seeing the man strutting busily down corridors, shoes clicking on marble, with files tucked under his arm; he had a recollection of an unplaceable accent, neither American nor Indian nor anything else, and a loud, screeching, selfsatisfied voice; a voice that would fill crowded elevators and echo through the Trust's polished lobby, leaving behind a trail of amused glances and whispered questions: 'Who the hell is that?' and 'Oh, don't you know? That's our own Mr… '
He recalled a meeting, a conversation somewhere, years ago, sitting across a table. But just as the memory was beginning to take on an outline, it dissolved.
The name: that was the key. What was his name?
It began to appear, a few seconds later, slowly, letter by letter, and then suddenly Antar knew. Already, when there were no more than four letters in front of him, he had darted over to Ava's keyboard and fed it in, along with a search command.
The name was L. Murugan.
The first search drew a blank, so then Antar took Ava hurrying into the Council's vast archives where the records of all the old global organizations were kept. It took a full ten minutes before the doorkeeper systems allowed him into the stacks, but once he was in, it was a matter of moments.
He smiled when the old-fashioned file turned up in front of him: a tiny little character, the Arabic letter 'ain, blinked at him from the top of the screen, above the heading 'L. Murugan'. He knew that symbol: he had put it there himself. Someone in the office had started a pool, taking in bets to see who used Spellcheck most often. They'd all devised symbols for themselves, to mark their work. He'd chosen the 'ain because it was the first letter in his name, 'Antar.
But the file surprised him: he had expected something longer, bulkier; he had a recollection of feeding in a lot of material. He flipped quickly through it, going straight to the end.
On reaching the last line, he sat back, rubbing his chin.
He remembered it now – he had typed it in himself, just a few years ago.
Subject missing since August 21 1995, it said, last seen Calcutta, India.
Chapter 5
WALKING PAST St Paul 's Cathedral, on his first day in Calcutta, August 20 1995, Murugan was caught unawares by a monsoon downpour. He was on his way to the Presidency General Hospital, on Lower Circular Road, to look for the memorial to the British scientist Ronald Ross.
He had seen pictures of it and knew exactly what to look for. It was an arch, built into the hospital's perimeter wall, near the site of Ross's old laboratory. It had a medallion with a portrait and an inscription that said: In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes.
He hadn't far to go when the rain caught up with him. He felt the first drops on his green baseball cap and turned to see an opaque wall of rain moving towards him, across the green expanse of the Maidan. He quickened his pace, swearing at himself for having left his umbrella behind at the guest house. The snack vendors at the Fine Arts gallery, racing to cover their baskets with tarpaulin, stopped to stare as he trotted past, in his khaki suit and green baseball cap.
He had packed an umbrella of course, a Cadillac of an umbrella, which opened at the touch of a button: he knew perfectly well what Calcutta was like at this time of year. But the umbrella was still in his suitcase, in the guest house on Robinson Street. He had been so eager to make his pilgrimage to Ross's memorial that he had forgotten to unpack it.
The rain was hard on his heels now. He spotted the gates of the Rabindra Sadan auditorium standing open, a short distance away, and began to run. A honking minibus sent a jet of water shooting up from a puddle as it roared past, drenching his khaki Prado trousers. Still running, Murugan made a forefinger gesture at the conductor, who was hanging out of the door of the bus, watching him. There was a shout of laughter and the bus sped away, spitting parasols of grey-green exhaust.
Murugan turned into Rabindra Sadan just ahead of the rain, and went leaping up the stairs. The outer gallery of the auditorium was brightly lit and hung with posters: he could hear a microphone scratching and humming inside. He could tell that a big event was under way: people were pressing in around the door of the auditorium, trying to push through. A television crew went rushing past, as he watched, carrying cables and cameras. Then the light; dimmed and he was alone in the gallery.
Turning away, he looked out through a window, at the walls of P. G. Hospital, in the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the memorial to Ross. But just then the auditorium's loudspeakers came alive and a thin, rasping voice began to declaim. It forced itself on his attention, insistent in its amplified gravity.
'Every city has its secrets,' the voice began, 'but Calcutta, whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere, by the workings of paradox, secrets live in the telling: they whisper life into humdrum street corners and dreary alleyways; into the rubbish-strewn rears of windowless tenements and the blackened floors of oil-bathed workshops. But here in our city where all law, natural and human, is held in capricious suspension, that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life; like any creature that lives in a perverse element, it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld – in this case, in silence.'
Taken by surprise, Murugan looke
d up and down the glass-fronted hall. It was still empty. Then he noticed two women running up the stairs. They came pelting into the hall and stood by the door, wiping the rain from their hair and shaking it off their saris. One of them was in her midtwenties, a thin aquiline woman with a fine-boned face, dressed in a limp, rather bedraggled sari. The other was taller and older, in the beginnings of a youthful middle age, darkly handsome and quietly elegant, in a black cotton sari. She had a broad streak of white running all the way down her shoulder-length hair.
As he made his way across the hall, Murugan noticed that both women had press tags pinned to their shoulders, over their saris. When he was a few paces away he recognized a familiar logo: both their tags bore the name of Calcutta magazine.
It gave Murugan a twinge to see the magazine's Gothic masthead again: his parents had been faithful Calcutta subscribers. The sight of that familiar lettering, reproduced in miniature, created an instant sense of connection with the two women.
Craning his neck he saw that the younger woman was called Urmila Roy; the tall, elegant one was Sonali Das.
Murugan stepped up and cleared his throat.
Chapter 6
URMILA WAS just about to ask Sonali a question when she was interrupted. She spun around, in annoyance, and discovered a short, odd-looking man standing at her elbow, clearing his throat. Her eyes widened as she took in his green cap, his little goatee and his mud-spattered khaki trousers. Then he said something, very fast. It took her a while to work out that he was speaking English: the accent was like none she had ever heard before.
