“You did not answer my question,” she said softly.
“No, Anna,” I said. “I am single. I suppose I have never forgotten you.”
Bold utterances, which all at once surprise and silence. We looked at each other, suddenly shy. Sitting atop this hill, she and I, shy; it was the strangest feeling—more so than love, for we had always loved each other in all kinds of forms. But shy?
Anna plucked at a weed, dried and looking like straw. She held it to the light as if trying to focus outside ourselves, forcing our attention away from this moment, and said, “Remember our New Year’s old man, Peter?” as she held up a dried straw she had pulled up from the dry earth around the black mountain rock we sat upon.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Since Dad died a couple of years ago, Mother had taken to drinking a regular peg of scotch every night before dinner. Anna and I arrived home to a slightly sozzled Isabel, whose nervousness about our outing had taken her to her third drink. A crystal decanter and cut-crystal whisky glasses stood on the coffee table. A man taking to drink is intuitive—we are weak and crumble under stress and intense emotion—but Isabel matched most men in stalwartness and capability. Her nervousness seemed out of place.
Anna took the glass from her hands and set it down. Giving her a hug, she said, “Isabel, aunty, can we have dinner now? I have been dreaming of your cooking for so many years and I want to savour every taste before I return.”
Nothing was designed to trouble Mother more than that last statement. She looked at me and then at Anna. Not knowing who she was losing, she poured another shot of whiskey from the fast-depleting bottle.
“I will lay the table.” Anna, intuiting Mother’s condition, glanced at me, then left for the kitchen.
“So?” Mother whispered, just as Anna walked in once again, saving me from having to respond. She almost sprinted in and out of the kitchen, either very hungry or trying to prevent Mother from developing ulcers from drinking on an empty stomach—or just afraid to let the conversation go on without her. We sat down in silence.
“Anna, we were hoping you would extend your stay for a while,” Isabel finally said.
Anna put down her fork and knife and looked at her plate for what seemed like a lifetime to us who waited for the answer. Inconsequentially I remembered Joe’s observation as we waited in the queue outside the toilets in Billimoria Building: ‘Time is relative depending on which side of the door you are on.’ He’d wagged his finger in the air, head to one side and gold teeth glistening in the sunlight.
I chuckled, but it was short lived as Mother took out her box of snuff and unscrewed the top, still looking at Anna’s lowered head and the storm of curls that engulfed it. Absentmindedly Isabel laid down the snuff box on the table to steady her shaking hands, from drink or nervousness it was hard to say. The whirring fan above, circulating the air in the room, brought with it particles of snuff that set Anna and me sneezing into our plates. As we smiled at one another sheepishly, it served to ease the air, almost like releasing the valve of a pressure cooker.
“Isabel, it is hard for me to leave you. You are my second mother. But I have to get back to my life in Canada soon.”
“I ask for a week, Anna. We have lived for so long without seeing each other. All I ask is one more week.”
Isabel always knew how to get what she wanted. She did not have one style that said “Isabel.” She used any trick that might work, and now she was playing on Anna’s soft core.
Silence prevailed once again, broken only by silverware working on the porcelain dinner plates that Mother had taken out for the occasion.
“Tell us about your trip to Mangalore, Anna,” I said, trying to lighten the mood once again. “What did you go there for? Did you have a nice stay? Is your grandfather’s house still there?”
The next day, I went to work while Anna went to the travel agent to change her ticket. She decided to move her departure back a week. Isabel called me, ecstatic and rebuking all at once. Can’t you ask her? What’s wrong with you? Do you have another woman in mind? Time is running out…She is staying one more week, thank God… If I have to wait for you to do anything it will be never… Some things have to be done by you… you cannot depend on your mother for everything.
Unfair though that last comment was, I must admit that for once I was happy to have her interference. I was out of my depth with Anna—with romance—and could do with some help. I’d been reduced from Anna’s childhood hero to a bumbling mass of nervousness. Surely this was not love? If love was so good and wonderful, why was I nervous, stressed and choking?
The train journey is designed for introspection. Smashed between bodies, body odours and microscopic views of skin, pores, and the anatomy of sweat droplets, the mind travels into oneself—implodes, so to say. This feeling within me was not unlike the feelings as I stood behind the door that winter night in January of 1993, listening to the screams and the silence, not knowing what to expect and frightened of what was happening out there, beyond my control.
But that was fear, anticipation of fearful, unknown happenings; happenings that would hurt me or those close to me. The very same feeling I had right now as I thought of Anna. Fear of love? Fear of Anna? Fear of what she felt for me or I felt for her? Fear of losing her—that which I have not? I could not answer those questions, but I was sure what I felt was fear.
Fear is a strange feeling. It accompanies horror, love, hate, and most emotions—like the shadow on the street at the crossroads. A painter understands light and shade, the light from the back casting shadows in front, almost as though foretelling who you will be as you walk ahead. My own shadow from the past was throwing distorted designs in front of me. I could step over it, and yet the fear stays around, ready to spring in all we do.
Near the window of the teachers’ lounge, Sheila sits reading a book. I look at her now, anew. She is not an object of fear—but one of compassion? Friendship? It is hard to say.
“Asked her?” she said, without much ado.
“No.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
The very history of mankind is rife with insects, though we’re relatively new to their world, which dates from more than 200 million years prior to man’s present mutation. Their persistence in survival is well known, transmuting from form to form, never really going away. And right there, before mine very eyes, this insect transmuted.
Whether from irritation at the inquisition or a display of my own inadequacy, it is hard to say, my voice was gruff, unwelcoming—one could almost say rude. Ms. Raikar sniffled in loud bursts. Good heavens, didn’t she know that men don’t know what to do with a crying woman? What had I said that was so terrible?
“I’m sorry,” I said after wrestling my irritation under control.
“For what?”
“Being rude just now.”
As if by magic, her tears dried and she sat upright, looking at me as if I had just entered the room.
“You were rude? Why?”
“What were you crying about?” I asked, now certain I did not understand women at all.
“He called me last night.”
Was this a game of guess who? I of course did not risk prompting another burst of moisture.
“He thinks of me when he is with her. He wants to continue seeing me.”
“Is he not married?”
“Yes, but he loves me.”
Finding it hard to reconcile this with my own Catholic conscience, and marvelling at the ease with which such young men keep women interested in them, I could barely conceal my revulsion toward him. “What’s with you? You are settling for trash. How can you let this piece of excrement snack on you? You deserve better!”
“I love him.”
There was that word once again to haunt me. Love is a verb, not a noun—over and over again, Ms. Faria, our third grade English teacher, explained that a verb is a doing word.
When, and what, would I choose to do?
-----
“Marry me,” I said.
Outside cave no. 44 at Kanheri, I looked it in the face, this fear to love beyond myself. As Anna stood chewing a straw she had pulled out from the crevice of the dark black rock as we ambled upwards, I knew that there was nothing more right than loving her.
A long silence followed my declaration; all the while, she looked at me. How have those before me gotten down on one knee and declared undying love? Does one need youth? Never a drinker, I was now longing to gulp some fiery tonic down my throat, which had suddenly dried up.
“Peter,” she said softly, reaching for my hand, “can we sit down? I need to process this.”
I sat on a rock facing her, my eyes never leaving hers, hoping that somehow this would help her make a decision, hoping my fears would be unfounded, hoping that Anna loved me like I did her.
Like Mother and her mother before her, I waited nervously, fingers entwined as if in prayer, as if everything I’d ever wanted in my life was at stake. Finally, an eternity later, with what seemed like a torturous fire in my belly swirling in rings, I knew Anna was holding my sanity right there in her wide-eyed gaze.
“Peter, will you understand that I love you? That I have always loved you in so many ways, as brother, friend, my hero, and mentor all these years?”
This did not seem right, though it seemed like the right words. There was something in her tone and the phrasing of the question that was once again tightening the muscles of my stomach. Out in the cave, two birds were doing a dance, more, I suspect, from landing their feet on hot basalt than a seductive mating.
“I must say no to your proposal of marriage, but I also must say it is wrenching my heart in several directions. I want you to know that. I want you to understand that my decision is rooted in the deepest love I have for you, rather than lack of it. Will you remember that, will you remember this as an affirmation of life and love of you, above all others?”
I looked down the hillside. The black of the rock was more apparent with dry grasses peeping through and the air, hot and heavy. Somewhere down there a million ants could be copulating while I struggled with confusion. Perhaps it was the environment. Perhaps I was not romantic enough? Should I have waited for the moon? I looked at Anna and my heart skipped. There is nothing more attractive than when someone loves you and looks at you the way she was looking at me. And yet I was confronting a parting from her.
“I don’t understand this, Anna, but I cannot deeply trust you and yet doubt that you truly believe what you say. So I must too.” Empty words. Silence can be graceful, it can be the beginning and end of music, but it can also be oppressive. Does one fill it with small talk, or carefree flippancy? Tears? Because right now I was dangerously close to it. I looked up and saw Anna’s wet eyes spit one down her cheek. Needless, I thought. She could just say yes. Weren’t we both single—hadn’t we loved each other all our lives?
I cannot say I had dreamed of this moment consciously. In all those fifteen years we were apart I had never believed I would see her again—I had rejected thoughts of her, yet found every other woman wanting: they were not Anna. So I sat tongue-tied, trying to see the absurdity in my situation, trying to make sense of my destiny, my life.
“Anna,” I said eventually, then hesitated, my lips opening and closing like a fish’s. If I was trying to woo a woman with manliness and strength I was failing without doubt. I closed my mouth and sat still, looking at her—an impartial observer may even go so far as to say begging her with my eyes, my heart, my entire body. The alternative of not having her, wrapped a bony hand around that reported seat of emotion, my heart.
She shed steady tears while looking at me; not for herself but for me. She was feeling my pain and living its life with me, but she shook her head like it would never change. Like all those years ago, she read me, she felt me, and yet her strength moved her always towards what she deemed right, pure and unselfish. This was one time I wished she would take the lower road.
“Marry me,” I repeated. My pride was no longer a barrier, nor my dignity; I knelt on hard basalt, pleading with every cell of my body. But she only sat there silently crying, every tear oozing pain—hers, mine. My heart left my body. I died, I hope I died, because my heart was not in there pumping blood to keep my body alive. Instead, Anna was holding it and offering it back, making choices that caused every cell in my body to scream with despair.
Eventually my flesh, aware of itself, began to hurt at the knees. In silence, I stood, pulling Anna to her feet after me.
“Peter, Peter my dearest…I don’t want to inflict any hurt on you.”
“You don’t have to Anna. Marry me… or tell me if there is someone in Canada you have not told me about. If you love me, is that not enough to commit to a life together?”
“No, Peter, no. There is no one in Canada but Canada itself.”
“Anna, right now, I feel like my world is ending. I need simplicity, something I can understand. What has Canada to do with you and me.”
Anna moved away from me, releasing her hands from mine. She walked up and down towards the cave and towards me. There was emotion, but I could not tell what, for, in the flutter of her hands I saw oblivion.
“Our lives changed that year of 1992-93, when we really should have had nothing to do with it. We had built a safe world of Catholics. Yet, we could not protect ourselves from the larger events that sucked us in. Our worlds changed immensely.”
“Can’t we leave that in the past? We are grown, different and love… why, love can conquer all. And anyway, where does nationality feature in your relationship with me? Where does it figure in love and marriage?”
“Peter, all those years ago we should have understood how vulnerable we were, and are. We cannot just insulate ourselves from everything else taking place, no matter how little it has to do with us. When I arrived in Mangalore last month, it was the Catholics that were being targeted. I was there only to take over the property I had inherited.” She hesitated. “But it was hot, and after dealing with the solicitors, I went to a pub. I downed two beers and of course I needed to go to the washroom, which was just as well. A mob of young men rushed in, dragged the women out into the streets and assaulted them. This was not an isolated mob; mobs all over the city were dragging women out from the pubs. Their point? Women had no business being in a pub!”
“Anna, you would be my wife. I would protect you from such encounters,” looking at her, I remembered the readiness in which I would have swung the cricket bat at the Surve boy all those years ago.
“You see? I don’t want to be protected as I live my life making my choices. I want to make choices because that is my right, my entitlement as a human, as you would have. I don’t need to protect you, do I?”
“But Anna, that is the way of the world.”
“Not my world in Canada, Peter.”
“What is your world in Canada? Surely it cannot be greatly different. You will have issues there too.”
“Yes, we do. But there is a rule of law that is respected and hence we have recourse.” She shook her head. “Somehow I feel we have more rights there than we ever had here–a place we were born in. You see, Peter, growing up in India we made the best choices we had, but not really the ones we wanted to.”
We were both quiet for a moment, and then I said, “Then let’s make the choices we want to. We’ve been speaking of everything but ourselves: of you, of me, of love.”
“Oh, Peter, there is nothing to discuss about love. We feel it and it will be what it is. But marriage has a physicality of presence. I could never live in India, not after living in Canada.”
“I could live in Canada with you, Anna.”
We both sat on the rock and looked towards the mouth of the cave. It had a dark, ominous emptiness. Did young lovers live there, unmindful of the world?
“Peter, we never did talk of our lives after we left. Immigration is not easy. Ivan, Susan, Francis and I were happy for most part. Our lives had rene
wed and we made friends easily. We were students, but Mum and Dad…their lives changed in so many ways. Dad never got a job. I mean a real job. Mum got a job and supported the family. You know Dad. It killed him not to be the breadwinner.”
“Why did you choose Canada? If your dad had no job or a plan, it was a big risk.”
“It seemed to give us hope that somewhere out there we would find the acceptance, justice, safety, and above all, overcome fear. Father never did feel safe after that incident with Surve’s son. What if someday the inquiry was reopened? So we left. Who said ‘home is where the heart is’? My heart was in so many different places, scattered around the earth, in homes I have never lived in and with people who I might never see again. Restless—as if there was another place I must be in all at once. Then finally we had to stop the tearing since it did not allow us to settle. We gave up the memories that tugged us and accepted our home in Canada. It is like a long exhale after an unconscious holding of one’s breath.”
“I could exhale in Canada, too, Anna.”
“You would have to restart your career all over again. That is not easy. How could I condemn you to a life of an immigrant who could possibly never work as a professor of Math again? Time and time again I have seen people come to Canada with a light in their eyes. Hope lights up the darkest sky. But the light gradually dies out as they pick up any job they can, to survive. Maybe you’d drive a cab, or perhaps spend a few years as a security guard at some condominium, saying, ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ ‘Good day, sir,’ till that light of excitement in your eyes died too. Dad, Mum, those that come to the community centre, talking of their homes, ‘back home’ where they had maids and life was not so hard? If not for their children they would return. Too late, they realise that they came as immigrants and settled as exiles. That is survival, Peter. That is not living. Would our love be enough to stop living and just survive? I don’t know. Is love a sufficient ground for uprooting your home and discarding your history and very identity? A man with no history or identity is a broken man. A broken man forgets how to love.” Anna was shaking her head, thinking of private thoughts, and I stood outside that zone as a slight quiver shook her body. She turned back and looked at me and said with a finality, “I don’t believe love conquers all.”
A Matter of Geography Page 20
