She stood and pulled me up and hugged me, close, hard, as if she wanted to merge into me. Not wanting any more conversation to stretch this moment of total union and separation, we held each other. Anna was mine, and I was hers, even in her rejection.
We climbed down the hard rock of the Deccan Trap, which, ironically, originated from the ancestral Réunion hotspot that welled up beneath India in the late Cretaceous, killing dinosaurs in its wake, trapping frogs and other creatures in its folds, and cooling down into this porous, dark trap—dead, cold rock, as all molten lava is bound to become over time.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“To be or not to be: that is the question…”
- William Shakespeare
Hamlet
I had dropped Anna to the airport amidst tears shed by Isabel, who unashamedly wailed—not for me or Anna but for herself, her own separation from Anna, her daughter. I stood there waving at Anna, and she at me, while she got swallowed into the large bowl of partings and reunions.
We returned to Mother’s apartment, driving through the streets silently. Mother nervously sniffed and kept fidgeting with the snuff box. The endless drive culminated in Mother’s living room.
In the fading light of evening, Isabel and I sat at her dining table, drinking whiskey. She finally laid down her empty glass, after drowning at least three when I was counting, and picked up the snuff box. She inhaled deeply, some of it resting on the upper lip hairs she had grown in her later years. These details being unimportant to a woman living on her own, she sneezed, her disappointment in her son unspeakable.
Finally I said, “I tried.”
“Yes I know. I am sorry not just for you but for myself. We have lost Anna all over again, but this time I know it is final.”
“We can still hope, Mother.”
This somehow seemed to trigger Mother. She stopped short, looked at me and jumped back into her skin.
“Peter, now you listen to me. You may have fantasised about Anna, and I admit, so did I. But that should be put behind. Hope is good, it gives meaning, helps us live. But find your meaning in something real and tangible. You can fight for love, but not with a country, not with geography. You need to find a girl here, marry and give me the grandchildren any dutiful son would give their mother.”
Picking the Times of India that lay carelessly at hand, she ignored the headlines that had smudged with some of the flying wet particles that sneezing sometimes ejects, and flipped the pages rapidly, stopping at the classifieds. Thumbing through the advertisements, she stopped at the Matrimonials, and began circling an advertisement here and there, sniffing and sometimes snivelling loudly, the crockery and cutlery on the table set for three quivering in response.
She looked up at the mantelpiece, a needless decorative structure without a fireplace, and her eyes fell upon the sculpture of a wooden sailboat that Joe Marchon had whittled from what was once a clothes beater. Staring at it for several long moments, she finally walked up to it, picked it up and carried it, like the offensive object it was, to the kitchen, where she dropped it into the garbage bin under the sink. She then washed her hands with soap and water several times before drying them on the tea towel at hand.
Soon after, I found myself on my last journey to Mazagaon, the cradle of our life together and the destroyer of our innocence. It was different, devoid of memories, devoid of emotion as I looked around its familiar, yet unfamiliar roads, buildings and people.
I walked subconsciously towards the one place I’d always run to in the past, when in trouble: St. Anne’s Church. My belief in the existence and essence of God, being a trifle weak, had steadily dwindled over the past few years. Making my way to St. Anne’s was an act of expunging all memories and associations I had of this place and its history in my life. The church was closed, as churches are wont to be nowadays—no longer sanctuaries but buildings of utility, conference halls of the faithful that must shut after the meeting is over. I sat on the stone border at the grotto just as I had all those years ago when my sense of abandonment had dominated any other feeling.
Now there is no feeling of abandonment. My overwhelming emotion at this time is one of loss: loss of hope that comes from belief. I did not know what I believed in, nor where I had lodged my faith. Anna’s rejection made the world I had clung to for a very long time merely illusory.
All that I considered the basis of my life was the life I had shared with Anna, and now, suddenly, I realised we had added to that reality in very different ways and separately. Knowing this, knowing Anna was not really part of me as I imagined, I felt bereft: not of a woman, not of a love, not of a lover; but of my own reality; my understanding of the very subjective selection I had made of memories to retain, people to value, love to feel. The colour I’d given my life so far, none of it was real—none of the life in my head could be real to anyone else but me.
I walked down Nesbit Road once again, looking around and seeing nothing and nobody familiar. None of them would be. Finally, standing at the foot of the stairs of Billimoria Building, I scanned the space. The smells were unfamiliar and the stone steps at the bottom that led to the wooden staircase were cracked in several places. I moved up the wooden stairs that I had spent years walking up and down, but the hollows in the wood no longer fit my footstep. No, this was an unfamiliar stair. I stood in the passage on the very spot Anna and I had, all those years ago when she handed me her book. I thought I had read love, and indeed it was love, but was it the romantic love I had dreamed of? Did Anna, in her kindness, look at me with love and compassion as one does a brother and a friend? I looked up at the high ceiling and at the pigeon’s nest that had dried, old and unused, but not swept away even after all those years; and if it had remained because the pigeons still lived there, then they apparently had been the least affected by our history.
Outside the Marchons’ apartment a young, handsome boy stood staring idly at Nesbit Road across the compound. I did not recognise him. The three coconut trees were still there, a bit taller, older, and lean from lack of sustenance, whispering in a language I did not understand. Finally I knew this memory I had hung on to, of Anna, of her loving me, not just as brother and friend but as a lover, had been spent. I don’t know where, or whether I had suppressed it, and whether it would surface at odd moments, but for now it seemed like an uncertain reality of an uncertain memory. Isabel was right. I needed to embrace what was in front of me.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Brushing the cobwebs from my forehead and lips, I felt I’d spent an age away from my apartment; really it was a short time away, entertaining and wooing Anna, running errands for Mother and working in between. Premibai had obviously decided to stay away too; with little activity in the apartment, the spiders had taken over. Dusky shadows danced on the ceiling, reflecting the plants in the corner as I switched on the light. I walked directly to the washroom and showered to take off the fatigue I felt. Stepping out with just a towel wrapped round my hips, I sat in the living room hoping to immerse myself in reading Dickson’s, History of the Theory of Numbers, vol. three, and resurface as close as I could to reality.
As if on cue, I heard a key turn in the lock. Premibai, I suppose, back as if she’d been watching for my return. However, the bony frame of Dr. Apte slipped into the room.
“Doctor! How did you get in?”
“I have a key to your apartment, Peter.”
“Only Premibai has one.”
“Oh, she will not be coming for a few days and has asked me to inform you. She gave me the key.”
I stifled a sigh. “She does some weird things, but anyway, Doctor, I am not in a very social mood so you will have to excuse me.”
“Excused,” he said with a wave of his hand and picked up a National Geographic and thumbed through the pages. I stood and walked toward my bedroom, knowing I would have to bear his presence in the drawing room.
“She said no, I suppose,” he said to my retreating back as I opened my door, stepped in, and shut
it.
Staring at the ceiling is therapeutic. If one concentrates long enough one can decipher patterns in the strokes of the painter’s brush and even see the odd spot that escaped. Sometimes my attention leapt past the walls and ceiling of my room to the noise of the television playing in the drawing room. No, Dr Apte had no intention of letting me be. I knew he would even sleep on my couch and I would wake to loud snores at some early hour of the morning, and yet I felt unable to step outside and face him. Finally the noise of the television died down and all that I could hear was the horn of the traffic in the distance. Perhaps now I could get that glass of water that I so thirsted for.
Trying to be surreptitious, I carefully slid the door handle in slow motion, but the creak seemed so loud that I was afraid I would wake him. I opened the door to the realisation that my fears and caution were unfounded. Dr. Apte, far from being asleep, had stationed himself outside my door and was listening for my heartbeat or whatever he thought he would hear with his ear to my door. Of course he did not have the grace to blush; or perhaps he did and it did not show under his brown skin in the low light.
“What are you doing here?”
“Checking if you are ok,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world to listen at doors. But in that action, perhaps, he had made it the most natural thing to do; set the standards for social behaviour, so to say. On many an occasion my ideas of good manners and boundaries had been totally pooh-poohed by this man, “Peter, you are so conditioned by the British who left this place so long ago. Who is interested in their standards on anything at all?”
I walked towards the kitchen in silence. Good manners, good friends, well meaning interest—who cares! Right, wrong, boundaries, privacy…close on my heels, I could hear him breathe down my neck.
“Leave me alone, Doctor.”
“Not possible, Peter.”
We sat in the living room, the two of us, keeping a great amount of space between us. He on a chair under the lamp and I in the far opposite corner in the darkness, where he could not see my face, at least perhaps not my expressions. I did not want to talk, I wanted to be alone, but I also knew Doctor Apte felt that I should not be allowed time alone at such a crucial moment of my life… Sometime during this evening I knew I would have to talk to him, or be burdened with his presence for the night and the next day.
After a long silence in which the clock could be heard ticking from the kitchen, Doctor Apte started wheezing, now challenging my irritation to guilt. I think I had fatigued him, but he did not give up. “Peter, I am waiting.”
In fits and starts, I began.
“And that is the folly of my reality,” I concluded many minutes later. Dr. Apte had let me go on uninterrupted, a phenomenon that I had never encountered in the past.
“And is that it?” he scoffed. “Your discovery. I mean, is that all it is—this construction of your life on an unreal premise? Have you no emotional sense of loss, disappointment, a disbelief in the eternal nature of love?”
“Love? Yes, I discovered love. In all this I discovered love.”
“Ah Peter, interesting. But you speak without emotion, without the true feelings of one turned down by a loved one.”
“But don’t you see, Doctor, that is precisely the point. At first it shattered my world. When one builds a narrative inside one’s mind, a narrative based on pre-lived experiences and imaginary projections, it is not built on the love I had for her. I had objectified her, wanted to possess her, legalise that possession, and all this was based on my fear. The strange feeling in the pit of my stomach…I thought it was my fear to love.”
“Peter, you speak like a robot! Don’t you think you are intellectualising a very basic human emotion?”
“I don’t know, Doctor… perhaps. But then, that is how I am wired. I do not deny the feelings Anna brought on. Fear, then loss. Loss of so many things. Loss of illusions can be a very great loss. The mind tricks us, our reality, our sense of creation. Everything is possible in its realm.”
“You still speak of the mind, Peter. Love is not an emotion of the mind, it is an emotion of the heart.”
“But if you speak of emotion, you still speak of the mind. Emotions, sensations are related to the neural system controlled by the brain. The senses need the presence of the object, but the mind can function beyond. Mine did. The direction I took it relied on a memory of Anna that had stood still since she left. So my emotions, corrected by the discovery of my folly, do indeed fall flat on their face.”
“You say that the love you felt for Anna no longer exists?”
“I am saying the sensation and that emotion that objectified her, that stemmed from fear of losing her, of needing to touch, see, hear her speak, all that comes from the libido, is just that. Emotion is an event. It has been there in the past with other women, and I reckon will be there with other women. In your own definition it could not be love, since all emotion is of the senses linked into the nervous system, which is in turn controlled by the mind. If the loved one is physically removed from one’s presence, would we then continue to love? How could love be eternal if so?”
Dr. Apte sat there looking at me in bewilderment, and I stared at the wall, trying to explore my feelings, my thoughts, and what went on in that body, the spirit and my heart. He waited patiently, my friend. Waited as if there was more, something I needed to tell him, so I went on.
“There is something that is running inside of me. Uncontrolled by the brain. Anna did not reject me, in essence. She said it was an act of love. Eventually, I did understand love. Not ‘understand’ in a thought process, nor a sensation or emotion, but my heartbeat, my blood circulation, powered from no object but within my own.”
Dr. Apte waited a while. Finally he broke the long silence with, “So you admit you still have feelings for her.”
“Yes, Doctor. The coursing through my blood is undeniable. Anna is definitely part of it, but my love for her is no longer distressing as when I thought, feared, and let my mind rule me. She’s freed me from her, yet kept me with her in some strange way.”
We both now lapsed into a restful silence. A silence that allowed us to hear the molecules of air jostling one another as we breathed the night; listened to larvae nibbling through the chrysalis to fly away as butterflies. Like Anna in Canada and me in India, their wings flapping on one side of the globe caused waves to beat ashore on some sandy beach in a far removed longitude. Above this noise, a kitten cried like a baby missing its mother; and out there in the cosmos the debris of a dying star passing through a cloud of gas and dust, millions of light years away, compressing to become a new star that would be seen only several millions of years later when its light travels into our solar system.
Amidst this loud din out there in the cosmic heaven: Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Love and Hatred, Fear, Truth and Falsehood, Reality, Right and Wrong, Living and Dying—all of it seemed insignificant, almost a comical exertion set in motion by a God who has ceased to watch this repetitive farce play over and over again under what they call History.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
- Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
A few mornings later, I woke as usual and swung out of bed, picked up the newspaper, read the not so unusual news of war, crime, disasters, and every depressing news that could be compressed between the pages of a daily. Life had resumed in a living room devoid of Dr. Apte, with the din of trucks, honking traffic and pungent smells from the fertiliser plant. Out there, crows and sparrows dug into bins, picking on man’s excesses, unwilling to find the open air spaces where searching for food might tighten their muscles and build their voice boxes. They had rejected that life for one of greed and easy prey, filling the dull aches in their bellies with food that had just decayed.
Premibai, for who I seemed to be the ideal employer, had returned to her daily chores; she cooked, cleane
d and packed some of my stores to take home. Somewhere in the distance the trains rushed in and out of Chembur station, and women furiously wove flowers for other women with oily hair or for businessmen to hang around a statue or a picture frame of some God or Godmen, as is their way of worship or appeasement, all for the few rupees that would feed their skinny bodies and those of their many children. Almost anyone could find work: cleaning streets, houses, dishes, roads and sometimes people’s ears; almost everyone could find work and food, but shelter, water supply and sanitation? Right now, along streets and in open view, children, women and men sat with little tin pots beside them, unashamed, doing what the body demands, some relieving themselves on the walls, others just squatting.
It must be noisy out there if we stop to listen. There must be sounds of distress if we can hear, but the cosmos shouts loudly somewhere out there unheard, while stars die, meteorites spin out of control and gas clouds implode into new stars and new life; and the earth, offering its north to the sun, brings down rain with the drafts that rise from the oceans.
I put my coffee cup down and left my apartment, walking to the station through hovels and hawkers, mud and slime and bodies that look just like mine yet in different motion, walking to and from the station. I entered the platform where I was pushed into and out of a train, walked through the crowds, zombie-like; but for once, protesting this search for survival, I turned instead toward the sea front. There I sat on its walls. The rain, selective as usual, had skipped this part of the world, and its dry concrete wall was a temptation for many a lover with no access to privacy in this city; they could peck at each others lips, feeling secluded and private in full view, like ostriches with their heads in the sands while they sat with their backs facing the road. I walked along the wall, taking in the cool air, ignoring any signs of sexual bliss emanating from the concrete.
A Matter of Geography Page 21
