by M G Vassanji
Maskinia. That made everything fit. Did I want that?
Early the next morning I took my leave, after an uncomfortable cold wash and a cup of hot tea and a bun, my back sore from being prodded mercilessly during the night. Edwina was happy to be relieved of Presley’s notebook, but at the door she put a hand on my arm.
—I won’t get into trouble, Doc? For giving the man shelter?
—No, Edwina. If you’re bothered, I’ll speak up for you.
—Thank you.
—
When I got home, Joanie was tinkering in the kitchen.
—God, the mess you’re in! Where were you?
—I have to take a shower.
We stood apart, staring at each other. It was impossible to move closer in the state I was.
—But where were you?
—To see a patient. The patient. He caught it badly, the Nostalgia worm…It was painful to watch.
—I’m sorry. Is he dead?
—Possibly. He was taken away.
She put a mug of coffee before me and for a while there was nothing more to say. On the television in the inside room Good Morning America was without an audience.
—Why get so involved with patients, Frank? What was special about him? You’ve aged in the process—in just a few weeks you’ve become pale and lost weight. You’re tired and distracted. It’s as if nothing else mattered to you. I don’t matter to you.
—I couldn’t help it, Joanie. There was something about him that I couldn’t…I couldn’t explain. Something that I’d never before felt with any other patient. It consumed me, this relationship. But you always matter to me, you know that. More than anything else.
At this confession, she smiled.
—Well, now you should rest. Don’t go to work for a few days.
—I’ll take it easy.
But I was on a roller coaster, I couldn’t help but see this through—nor did I think it would let me go.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SITTING IN THE KITCHEN with a late breakfast, watching the snowflakes sticking to the bare branches outside, or descending lightly upon the grass—so beautiful, all this, the white and the green and the air itself shimmering in the sun—reason enough for life to go on. Ephemeral? Illusion, as Radha’s god Krishna on his chariot would put it? It’s real if we call it real, I say. We can touch it, feel the glorious snowflakes melt on our cheeks. If it’s a dream, let’s remain in the dream…
Such were my thoughts after Joanie had left for the day.
Then why didn’t I feel I belonged anymore?
I was normally a positive sort, an optimist who valued life. It could only get better, I had always believed. I had implanted new memories in people, given them pasts they liked and sent them off to live longer and happier. But my experience on Walnut Street the previous night had shaken me out of myself. All this glorious natural beauty that I admired seemed not for me. More than that, my beloved Joanie was not for me.
Earlier after Joanie tucked me into bed, as my eyes closed with relief, the sight of her and the smell of her suffused into my mind and my dreams, nothing else seemed to matter, I was back in bliss and the night’s experience was only a nightmare, Walnut Street on another planet that I need not see again. Presley was gone and would soon be forgotten, data in an archive, blown up into a zillion bits. But now that I was wide awake, it was this brightness around me that seemed the illusion, another world. And Presley was real, the agony of his breakdown clear in my mind as he lay on the steps at the bottom of the stage inside the church. The utterings from his mouth that suddenly turned him into a stranger to his friends, but not to me. A language I felt instinctively I should remember and understand but didn’t. The key was missing.
His notebook burned in my pocket. Give it to the doc, he’d said to Edwina.
My name is Amirul. I had a cousin and teacher called Elim. I lived in a compound…
And the compound was in Maskinia. There was another cousin, named Eduardo. And more…Broken fragments like loose threads connecting our lives, taking us back…there.
He and I and Holly Chu…that could be a line from a song.
I walked up to the river, sat down, stared longingly at its placidity, its seeming permanence. What stories it could tell. On the paved path, a group of people jogging, a bobbing bunch of bright colours. A woman pushing a stroller bent forward to talk sweet nothings to her child. Did I have to yield space to this newborn, or was there room for us both, for everyone?
Why go to other worlds when there’s all this here, my mother the nature-lover would tell me…
I recall walking with her in the woods outside our home. It’s cool in the morning and there’s a mist hovering over the ground; momentarily the mist breaks and a burst of warm sunshine pours in. She stops and looks up in delight. She laughs. Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it beautiful! It is, Mom. Her love of the earth, and of the wildflowers and trees and animals is awesome. I watch her spellbound. She’s in a long skirt and a wide hat, I’m in jeans and long-sleeved shirt, and also wear a hat. She stoops to pick a purple lupine cluster from a bush and recites to it lines from William Blake, Tyger, Tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Rose, Mother, you must have been real, I whispered…as real as the mother who went by just now pushing the stroller…You must be real to save me…
Back home, Radha’s face on the screen. Her full cheeks, smiling mouth, smooth forehead. How could she stay cheerful all the time—by assuming everything was an illusion?
—I need help, can you help me, Radha?
—I will help you. If you’ll let me.
It’s of dubious comfort, telling a happy person about your misery. By that unstudied law of conservation, your misery only increases her happiness. But Radha followed a different law. She generated happiness, radiated it like the sun.
—I feel eviscerated, Radha. I feel I’m evaporating.
—Let me help you, said Radha.
—
An hour later, on Masjid Road, off Rosecliffe Park Drive, a long line of men and boys in white long shirts and caps were quietly headed towards the mosque, as they’d been doing throughout the world through the centuries. For them space-time had shrunk to this point. It was Friday. This was another part of the city I’d never seen before. Rosecliffe Park was Radha’s neck of woods, and it was here that she had suggested we meet. Why couldn’t we meet elsewhere? At our café rendezvous? She said she wanted me to see another Toronto, watch people other than those I was used to.—You should see the rest of the world, Frank, she admonished gently.
We met at the intersection and, passing the mosque, which was a large, pale-coloured boxlike building of brick, we walked over to a strip mall at the dead end of Masjid Road and sat down for lunch at a crowded restaurant called Iqbal. We both chose vegetarian, but when it arrived I found it too strong and only had the flatbread.
Afterwards, as we had our tea, she said,—What’s the matter, Frank? You are normally so calm and sure of yourself.
—I was feeling a bit blue when I called. I’m all right now. Perhaps seeing you has calmed me after all.
—That’s nice. I’m your mood-lifter. The doctor’s medicine.
—The doctor’s doctor.
She was pleased and we said nothing for a while, mulling in silence. In her presence was comfort, security; I felt at ease with myself—though I was not sure myself had any meaning any longer, I did feel spontaneous and happier.
Much of the restaurant had emptied, and a girl came along with a trolley to clear the tables.
Radha was watching me intently, and I noticed for the first time the two dimples on her cheeks, and a blush, and I thought, Who are you? Where did you come from, where were you all this time; why didn’t I know you before?
—Yes? she asked, and I repeated my thoughts loud enough for the girl with the trolley to look back at us.
Radha gave a laugh.—I was born in Vancouv
er, my grandparents were of Indian descent. I mean, really.
—How do you know?
—I saw my grandpa die, and later I sat with my father as he died. They gave him morphine, and I watched him give up his last breath. Is that real enough?
—I’m sorry.
—Why, Frank? I feel fortunate. We all must die. I have a bond with them, even though they are dead, and with my mother, who’s alive. Tell me—she leaned forward,—have you seen a person die?
I shook my head. Presley, almost, perhaps. But I was in the life business. I gave the promise of endless life. We all must die? That’s not the way the world was going.
—I see. She turned pensive.—And you, Frank? Who are you?
—I was born in the Yukon, I began my litany.—I had wonderful parents, especially my mother…she was a poet who loved nature. She would speak of the earth. My father loved the stars. So I’ve believed, anyway, but it’s only my fiction. And it makes me sad because I so desperately want it to be true. But I know I have no connections. There’s no one in Yukon or anywhere else for me, there never was.
—You’re a lonely man.
—I’m a lonely man.
She reached out for my hand.—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.
—But it’s true. All of us with extended lives—rejuvies as you call us—are truly lonely people.
—Tell me what’s happening to you, Frank. Please tell me.
—It’s just that. Suddenly I feel disconnected. Until now it didn’t matter. I had my work, and Joanie, my girlfriend. I believed—still believe—in science and reason and progress. I live a privileged life and I am respected by my colleagues. I’ve received honours. I’ve made people feel more contented—removed misery—bad, unbearable memories…
—That’s good, Frank. But—?
—But now I have this strange feeling that I myself don’t belong…The world is not mine anymore. I who implanted idyllic fictions am a fiction myself and that fiction is falling apart.
—This morning when you called?
I nodded.
—Did you feel like ending your life, Frank?
—Perhaps I have had enough, as the young protester said the other day…I’m a fake. I’m a fiction. A character in a book.
—You’re not a fake, Frank. You’re real and you’ve done people good. Let me show you around, Frank. I want to show you something…something amazing and different from all your science and reason. I want to show you unreason. Magic. Come, let’s go for a walk. You’ll feel better afterwards.
—
We went out and walked up Masjid Road to the intersection where I had stood about an hour before, waiting and feeling lost as long-shirted men and boys in caps walked past me on their way to the mosque. Now, on the opposite side from us I saw something that in my alienation I had completely missed: a plain white wall standing some two metres inside the curb and in which, exactly at the corner, was an arched gate. Above it was a small but ornate sign that said, The Mall of the Spirit. Welcome.
—Have you been here before? Radha asked with a wondering smile. The question was rhetorical.
—No. But I heard about it, when it opened.
It’s been called by our cultural gurus a spiritual wonderland, and a god fair, by implication vulgar and kitschy. But today I was open, in sense and mind, to receive new experiences, and come what may.
Dozens of people walked with us through the gate. It was Friday, this was where they came to put an end to their long work week. As we entered, I beheld a spectacular sight—tall fantastic structures linked by paths, each proclaiming in its unique architecture a sense of beauty and a brand of happiness, worship, and everlasting life. At the centre was an elaborate garden surrounding a small lake. We walked along for a while, past buildings with names like Durka Temple, Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Shango of the Thunder, Shining Buddha of the New Lotus, and Nizamuddin Overseas, listening to a twanging drone, a bass drumming, fragments of a speech, and lastly a throaty male chorus sung to a wailing string, before we arrived at what Radha called the pièce de résistance. It was a pyramid of a very light blue colour, rising two-thirds of the way up before being crowned by a structure with the shape of an open flower, the actual shrine, with a red pennant flying at its top. Along the sides of the pyramid were steps.
—Let’s go up, shall we? Radha said with a laugh.—Do you have the stamina to climb?
—Right to the top? Why not?
—Come along.
The path, protected against the weather by a glass cover, had been laid out in such a deliberate manner as to render the walk long and arduous, winding up and down and at times staying level, with periodic stops along the way to sit and catch breath. There was a thin stream of people climbing up with purpose, and a few kids were running about for whom the occasion was evidently one of play. From these heights the entire city lay exposed as though cut open neatly by a surgeon: downtown in the distance, the World Peace Tower shooting up; from there the roads leading north, pausing at the tall towers of the Centres of Enterprise, before proceeding finally to melt into the haze where lay the winding highways and endless suburbia. From our vantage point, the Mall of the Spirit was an island in the middle of a suburb, skirted by its white wall and a road going around.
We arrived at a station where flowers and sweets could be purchased to offer at the shrine and chai was served. This was the gathering place before the final stretch and it was crowded. There were people from Miami and Los Angeles, Nairobi and New Delhi, feeling good and exchanging pleasantries. The last climb was twenty steps straight and steeply up and packed with worshippers. Squeezed within this soft human mass slowly nudging forward, patiently grabbing every possible inch, and breathing the stale air of perfumed exhalations, I felt an uncanny, unknown sense of exhilaration. It seemed to me that I was regaining what I had lost and missed. Is this what it was like to belong? Is this what I’d come from, somewhere in the past? There was not an anxious face to see, only expectation and joy. Oh, but to believe! Periodically Radha turned to flash a smile at me. Her face was flushed and damp, her yellow sari dishevelled. We reached, almost stumbled, to the top where for a moment a cold hard breeze greeted us. Following her example I hit a bell hanging from a lintel and crossed the threshold into a dark and cool room. To our left an ancient-looking stone platform was lit by oil lamps, behind which in a niche sat a small black icon that looked like a shapeless lump.
—It is the goddess Kali, Radha whispered.—The statue is two thousand years old.
Beside the stage stood a bare-chested attendant, wearing a white wraparound below the waist. An overhead electric heater spread a warm glow upon the scene. Following my companion I joined hands, received a small powdery sweet with blessings in exchange for my offering, and departed through the exit doorway. Going down was not crowded. When we reached the base, we rested on a bench.
—I thought you worshipped Krishna, I said to Radha.
—That was Kali.
—But they are all the same, she replied.—That’s why all life is connected, don’t you see?
I looked blankly at her, and she laughed.
We resumed walking and immediately came upon a domed structure, a mosque. The outside was impressive, dazzling, the surface covered with minutely detailed geometric designs in blue, green, and gold that looked like inlays in stone. It turned out, as a plaque outside proudly explained, that the artwork had been produced optically, and was periodically replaced. The creator of the current display was one Shabaanu Robert Patel. Inside the building was a large hall with a forest of carved pillars, distributed evenly in a square array in what seemed to my mind a Cartesian simulation of infinity. A few people were on the carpet floor, praying as though to this mathematics, bowing and kneeling. The pillars too were optical, reaching up to another intricate geometry on the ceiling. I lingered, mesmerized by the repetitions.
—Does it do something to you? Radha whispered.—Do you feel like kneeling and praying to a higher being?<
br />
—It does feel strangely compelling, an homage to illusion. Or mystery. I don’t know what I would pray to, or even how.
We came out into the garden. It was colder and getting dark, though the glowing prayer halls and shrines and the lampposts on the paths provided sufficient illumination. People walked on the track around the garden for their exercise, others sat in the heated alcoves designed to beat winter outdoors. Kids played.
I am a rational, modern man. I believe in the physical universe and its laws…they constitute my faith, and the great minds of the past are my prophets and gods; it’s with them that I commune. I believe in the life and intelligence that has emerged from this universe, and in its continuity. You could call me a high priest of this materialist faith.
Such were my thoughts as we went out through the gate, but I did not say them aloud. I had been provoked. I had been impressed and humbled. Like an ancient sage Radha had taken me through a wonderland to show me alternative ways of perceiving the world. I acknowledged them, but did not quite understand them.
TWENTY-NINE
THAT EVENING JOANIE WENT OUT with the Friend. She was dressed up in tight-fitting jeans, black blouse, and stiletto heels she never wore with me. An enticing perfume, the heady citric scent of La Divina. All for him? She gave me a kiss before she stepped out, and as she left a look passed between us that said I must forget that I knew the man, the somewhat hysterical young man called Musa, who had called me the elderly elite, and she must forget that I knew and had forgotten him. Then we could continue our life together. I wished desperately to ask her, Do you stay with me only for the security? for a price? Isn’t there some love you feel for me? A love I come back home to, a love I drink to at the admittedly elite Brick Club? Of course there was. Of course there was. A qualified love.
Roboserve brought me my scotch and sandwich.
I tried Radha. Her radiant face came up, once more to warm the heart.
—You look forlorn—are you alone?
—Yes, I’m afraid so.
