‘For all of them,’ he said, smiling faintly. ‘And for ourselves… for everyone.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A year later, Clare and Tammy were back in Chennai. In the early hours of 26 December 2004, they were woken by earth tremors. Their apartment shook but was largely unaffected by the giant wave that was to mark that day as cataclysmic. At first there was a huge sucking back of the ocean. The fishermen on the beach were astonished to see such a vast extent of the seabed, with its sands and clumps of seaweed, its rocks and coral, the protruding ribs of a wrecked fishing boat. Then, astoundingly, they saw the eroded remains of an ancient temple being revealed by the retreating sea. Several children gleefully scampered out to catch some of the scuttling crabs and the fish that wriggled in the sand pools. The tsunami itself at first appeared as a white fringe of water in the distance, but then it began to advance ominously.
The fishermen and children gazed in awe, not comprehending what was happening. Then the children began to turn back as the tsunami surged towards them with a mounting roar. Some fishermen rushed towards them, shouting in bewilderment. The enormous wave came on, swallowing the temple remnants in a rage of spume. The children were running now, screaming in terror. A fisherman scooped two of them up in his arms, while two more raced to the temple on the shore, clambering in panic up its stonework. A colossal wall of water, the height of a coconut palm, hurtled towards it. One of the boys was dashed from its surface, but the other boy managed to hang on, despite the water swirling up around him. A woman shot forward to save her child, holding out her arms and screaming, but the wave crashed down, and she was swept away, her sari inflating in the churning water. The water careered more than a kilometre inland. It shattered the flimsy shacks and sheds, scooping up the fear-struck fishing people, their boats and catamarans, their sails and nets. It overturned trucks and cars, adding them to the swirling flood of broken roofs and furniture, struggling dogs and cattle, and countless battered, drowning human beings.
Max was by Rick’s bedside in Los Angeles; he was watching the news on TV, horrified. He was thinking about Clare and Tammy and, of course, Narayan. He knew they lived a long way from the beach, but he was still extremely worried.
He squeezed Rick’s arm in the vain hope of communicating with him. He wiped the dying man’s emaciated face and then tucked the sheet around his exhausted body. He watched Rick in his coma before his gaze reverted to the appalling scenes of havoc being broadcast.
He was struck by the comparison: the slow destruction of a body by a lurking virus and the quick ravage of a coastline by an undersea convulsion of the earth. Max was shocked by the estimated numbers of the dead and missing and by news of other devastated shores around the Indian Ocean. The scope of the disaster was so huge that he felt numbed. There was some film of the coast of Tamil Nadu, which the wave had hit several hours previously. The waters had subsided into a muddy flood of floating wreckage and dead bodies, human and animal. The sight caused him to lean over and press Rick’s hand, instinctively seeking the solace of his company, but there was no returning pressure, no reassurance; he had sunk too deeply into unconsciousness.
Rick had been on combination therapy for quite some time before the virus reached his brain. His illness had intensified Max’s feeling for him, and he’d become determined to nurse him until the very end, which he now believed could be at any moment. As he stroked Rick’s hair and held his hand, he was also determined to do something to help the victims of the dreadful disaster unfolding before his eyes.
He rang Clare with a certain difficulty, since communications with Chennai had been affected. Eventually he managed to get through to her.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You and Tammy?’
‘We’re fine,’ said Clare.
‘And Narayan?’
‘He’s okay too. There’s been massive damage down by the sea front, though. The wave swept away the joggers and destroyed the huts of the poor around the railway station. It was terrible when the sea retreated. There were bodies all over the shore… one was hurled up by the wave into the branches of a tree. There are over a hundred dead in Chennai, Max… a thousand more in the suburbs. Tell me, though, what news of Rick?’
‘He’s in a deep coma,’ Max replied. ‘He won’t last more than a day or two. It’ll be a merciful release when it comes.’ He paused. ‘Look, I must fly out when he’s gone. I want to write an article about the tsunami victims. I want to do something to raise funds here in the USA to help them.’ He paused again. ‘So… Narayan’s okay?’
Yes, he is,’ she answered.
‘I’m so relieved,’ Max said. Another pause. ‘So he didn’t go through with his marriage to Mohini?’
‘No. There was a lot of opposition from Narayan’s uncles and aunts.’
‘On what grounds?’ Max asked.
‘Mainly because Mohini is ten years older,’ Clare told him. ‘Her parents weren’t pleased either, to put it mildly. Narayan and Mohini are just good friends now… I wonder if that’s really all they ever were.’
Tammy had resisted family objections to his marriage with Clare. They had once worried him but now he was determined to see them as rather comical.
‘I routed the Sergeant Majorette in combat, man to man,’ he claimed, as he and Clare lay in each other’s arms in bed one night. ‘And The Battleaxe, whose steely cries of protest I ignored! This provoked her to stomp around, directing a Medusa glare at me in the vain hope of turning me to stone.’
‘I suppose the aunts principally object to your marrying a European divorcee,’ suggested Clare, snuggling up to him. ‘They doubtless see me as a femme fatale who’ll lead you even further into decadent Western ways.’
‘And divorce me when she inevitably tires of me,’ he replied, kissing her gently on the face. ‘The uncles provide less stubborn opposition. I can soften their disapproval with the whiskies with which I ply them, much to the chagrin of both teetotal harpies.’
While Clare was in Los Angeles, Tammy had visited Shahpur and Kalyani in Mumbai. When Clare got back, he was keen to tell her about what he’d learned. They walked hand-in-hand around the garden.
‘Apparently there was an appalling row when her father discovered they were already married. He furiously disowned his daughter, as he’d threatened to. He’d said her name must never again be mentioned in his house.’
‘How monstrous of him.’
‘She wept bitterly but was consoled by her mother’s continued devotion to her. She doesn’t hide this from her tyrant husband, despite the marital friction this gives rise to. Well, Kalyani and Shahpur have been married for six months now.’
‘Has she stayed a Hindu?’ Clare asked Tammy, plucking a frangipani flower from the branch of a tree.
‘Yes, and he’s remained a Muslim. She sometimes goes to the mosque with him, but she says it’s with the figures of Shiva and Vishnu uppermost in her mind.’
‘Obviously he opposes her being veiled,’ Clare said, admiring the pale, waxen-looking petals of the flower in her hand.
‘Of course. He claims that’s an imported custom that is not in the original spirit of the Koran.’
‘Does he visit her Hindu temple?’
‘Yes, he sometimes prays to his monotheistic God within her temple. He claims to see the various images as expressions of God’s universal compassion and divinity. And now there’s some very good news.’
‘She’s pregnant?’ Clare asked, putting the flower behind her ear and laughing.
‘Yes,’ he answered smilingly. ‘And they intend to bring up their child in a spirit of veneration for both religions.’
Clare was extremely relieved to hear that the cripple’s widow had been found innocent of any knowledge of the assassination plot. Tammy had kept in contact with her.
‘She was severely interrogated but not tortured,’ he told Clare. ‘She didn’t break down in the courtroom but spoke out with dignity and clarity. She admitted she’d known her husband was
very close to his nephews, but she herself was kept strictly out of their affairs.
‘He was obviously an old fashioned husband.’
‘She said she now knew of the crimes he’d committed, but she couldn’t hate him. She thinks mainly of the good parts of him, and prays to Shiva for his soul.’
Although reassured about the cripple’s widow, Clare was horrified to hear that the boy assassin had been sentenced to be hanged.
‘I know such sentences are seldom carried out,’ Clare said to Tammy, ‘but to live with the possibility would be a continuous nightmare for him. It’d destroy all hope for improvement in his life. Max and I have always opposed capital punishment.’
She now put in a plea for clemency through his lawyer.
‘He’s so young,’ she said, ‘and he was pressured by his uncle and older brother, as I personally witnessed. Is there any chance I might visit him in prison?’
His lawyer said it wasn’t likely but advised her to persevere. She intended to as she waited apprehensively for a final verdict.
Rick died the day after the tsunami struck. He managed to communicate with Max briefly before he sank into a coma.
‘Remember me as I used to be,’ he said, lifting up his wasted hand.
Max knew he’d never forget the extraordinarily vital man he had been as well as the man with the pitifully ravaged body. At the end, Rick’s face was very thin but strangely beautiful; his cheekbones were now so prominent that his eyes seeming larger and startlingly brilliant.
‘I dreamt you’d died when it should’ve been me,’ Rick said, smilingly faintly. ‘I dreamt you’d died and I was totally alone.’
‘You’ll never be alone,’ Max answered, kissing Rick’s head, hoping to lend courage to the frightened brain within, as if he might briefly touch the invulnerable soul Max wanted to believe in, the soul that soon would be escaping its ruined body. ‘You’ll never be alone, I’ll be always with you.’
‘Does that mean you’ll be following me?’ Rick joked, as usual not wanting to appear sentimental. ‘But maybe I’ll be coming back… just when you thought you’d finally got rid of me.’
Then, thinking his joke a bit harsh, he grinned ironically and reached for Max’s hand. He died twelve hours later. Max kissed his face, whispering his name over and over as if Rick could miraculously hear him still, intently hoping for some form of immortality or at the least some other lasting, personal significance.
Max approached his old friend Jimmy, who’d once inadvertently precipitated the trouble over Narayan’s present. He asked him to arrange Rick’s funeral.
‘I want to get out to Tamil Nadu to try to help the surviving victims as soon as possible. I feel I could do more good to the living than the dead. I think Rick would approve.’
Max caught a plane next day. On the flight to Chennai, he thought about his donation to the tsunami appeal that had already been quickly organised. He recalled Christ’s advice to the rich man – go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor – and it seemed less reproachful than it once had. The advance they’d received for their book on India had encouraged him to think he could now rely on what he earned. As a result, he’d put his house on the market, intending to give most of the money it would yield to help the tsunami victims and to support an institute for AIDS research. Subramaniam’s enduring influence, the ideals of Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita, the simple life he’d witnessed in the ashram, even Narayan’s joshing about his decadent materialist lifestyle had all helped to turn those words of Christ from a nagging message into positive inspiration.
As the plane flew in, Max had a view of the Coromandel coastline, with its sprawl of shattered villages, and he thought how especially cruel the disaster was in striking at an area of the world where the people were so vulnerable already. And he thought about how the AIDS that had killed Rick had now become the scourge of Africa, the earth’s poorest continent.
Clare and Tammy met Max at the airport. He wasn’t sure how he would take to seeing them as a married couple. There was an awkwardness between them at first, but they soon got over it.
‘Rick’s end was peaceful,’ he told them. ‘He was put onto a morphine pump and he just slipped away after a few hours.’
‘You’re going to miss him horribly,’ said Clare.
‘I want to do something to commemorate him. That’s one of my motives in wanting to help the tsunami victims. I’d sort of feel I was still helping Rick. I hope my paramedic training can be of use.’
‘They’re desperately in need of any medical assistance,’ Tammy said.
Tammy drove them to Sandeha in a four-wheel truck that managed to negotiate the ravaged roads. He had arranged for Max to meet the chief medical officer.
‘Do you know enough to dress minor wounds?’ the man asked him. ‘And inoculate survivors against the diseases that now threaten them?’
‘Yes, I’ve been trained to do those things,’ Max replied, believing that in this work he’d find a purpose that would help to take his mind away from the grief he felt. The practical urgency of it would lessen the spiritual despair that so heavily oppressed him. He shared this with Tammy and Clare.
‘The tsunami… why has this terrible phenomenon occurred? And why this merciless pandemic of AIDS that’s now devastating Africa especially? Is there any ultimate moral intention in the world, or is everything a matter of unmeaning accident?’
‘Remember what Narayan said on the subject of the physical world,’ Clare answered. ‘Don’t the laws of physics imply there must be some purpose in the universe? How could nature evolve such a complicated thing as a living body, as a human brain, without some designing intelligence.’
‘An idea most modern biologists furiously object to,’ interpolated Tammy.
‘But if there is this intelligence and it’s supposedly benevolent,’ said Max, ‘why such pointless, arbitrary destruction?’
The single good thing the tsunami had done was to scour away the accumulated sands of many centuries to reveal the ruins of another ancient temple and a rock covered with animal carvings, but this sole happy accident did nothing to stop the questions that troubled Max more urgently than ever.
Clare wondered why Max didn’t wish to contact Narayan, even though he knew he was no longer with Mohini. It was mainly because of Rock, she supposed. Perhaps the sense of his own survival after Rick’s death also connected with his resolve to give even more of his inheritance away. In their divorce settlement, Max had already provided more than adequately for Clare, but she worried lest he would later on regret his more extreme generosity.
Clare knew how long Max’s resolve had been quietly developing and how he always avoided sounding at all self-righteous. He hadn’t made her feel obliged to follow his example: she was grateful for the settlement, which she would use responsibly. But she wondered about Narayan’s reaction: he’d teasingly disparaged Max’s riches but hadn’t he been attracted to them too, even if he didn’t admit it to himself? But she must now resist being cynical about him.
She’d phoned Narayan.
‘Why not came out to Sandeha to meet Max,’ she asked.
‘Do you think he’d want to meet me?’
‘I’m sure he would. You made him happy once. To be perfectly honest, I once loathed you for it. But now I’m happy myself I want to see him happy too. I really hope you could make him so again.’
‘I don’t know that I can now, but I’ll certainly come to see him if you think that wise.’
Maria had finally decided to risk flying back to Rome to see The Animal, and she’d left a month ago. Clare had seen her off at the airport. Maria had been in quite a fluster, searching desperately for the passport she’d temporarily mislaid, dragging along the infant as it bawled its disapproval.
‘I’m going with extremely cautious expectations,’ she’d said as she was about to leave. ‘I’m going to miss you all terribly, and I really hate leaving my beloved India.’
The day after her arrival
she’d phoned Clare to say.
‘The Animal forgot the time of my arrival, of course. He finally put in an appearance an hour late, finding me very cross and The Putto even crosser. He seized The Putto in his loving, hairy arms, but it didn’t entirely reciprocate. It’s been uses to having a whole mother to itself, so it’s taken against its father with alarming animosity.’
‘Oh no!’ Clare exclaimed.
‘Narcissistic as The Animal is, he hasn’t found this at all endearing. At present, an erratic civil war rages between the two of them, with me as mediator and unenviable victim.’
‘Poor you,’ commiserated Clare.
‘You can say that again. What am I to do, torn between the bonds of motherhood and the even more dubious bonds of marriage with The Animal? I wonder now if I was wise to abandon the prospect of a gentle, faithful Indian husband.’
‘Only you can answer that,’ said Clare guardedly.
‘I know, darling. Of course. This is no sentimental fantasy. In affairs of the heart, I’m an iron realist’.
Max was going through the photos he’d taken of the tsunami victims, but at times his mind was elsewhere. Clare had told him that she’d contacted Narayan, but Max still wondered if he really wished to see him. He recognised it was partly owing to his pride, which had been more sorely injured than he’d at first acknowledged. But he also suspected that the cruel contrast between Narayan’s healthy and strong body and Rick’s diseased and weakened one had possibly, paradoxically, dulled his once vibrant memories of Narayan. Rick had crucially needed Max, and his dependence had made Max feel disloyal in recalling an attraction that had once been so potent and exclusive.
Max recalled a conversation during one of Rick’s more lucid moments towards the end.
‘I’ve had a dream, Max.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I dreamt I was sprinting along a shore… vigorously splashing through the sand pools. I woke with this frail body and such heavy disappointment.’
The Assassins Page 22
