The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  Bonnie had rung back to let us know she had given Dada a hundred and fifty dollars, because he’d said he might have to stay the night somewhere in case he wasn’t yet ready to return. She had apparently offered him ‘shelter’ (six houses down from us: the absurdity of it!) but he claimed to ‘need solitude’. Though Lena’s voice took on an edge as she asked what might take Ashim so long, Janaki said she didn’t know. Apparently she’d just trusted Ashim so much, and his need for solitary contemplation or anguish or something had moved her so strongly that she’d just handed over money without hesitation. Lena said we would slide the money under her door, or she could text us her account number, whichever suited, then hung up.

  The girls were changing into their togs in the living room in front of an episode of Shimmer and Shine (Mira was explaining their back-story in detail, as she loved to do with every new show she’d introduced Tulti to), because we’d decided even before Janaki called to give them as normal a day as possible. If Dada was going to play it cool, so could we. Why should we hang about the house all day waiting for him to turn up? I suggested to Lena that I leave a set of keys under the clay frog on the back deck and tell Dada by text, but then changed my mind and merely let him know we were going to be out, so he’d better call us if he was returning home. ‘… Happy to pick you up if needed. Enjoy your day.’

  On the way to Karori Pool, Lena told me that Janaki’s recent behaviour was down to whatever version of the childhood moving-out story Ashim had shared with her. Because there would certainly be a lot of familiar faces at the pool on a holiday, I asked Lena if she wouldn’t mind taking the girls alone. I would remain in the car on Donald Street, or take a stroll around the block. I needed some time to absorb this. She told me she’d known since Christmas Day but hadn’t wanted to upset me. She said that was when she’d begun not to wholly trust Ashim’s motives for being here.

  Mira heard our tones, and asked from the back if we were fighting. I stayed in the car for the hour that they were away.

  We had a lovely day without him, determined as the two of us were to make it more fun than usual. Thankfully Tulti seemed completely reassured by her father’s promise that he would return when ready, and I at least felt grateful to Dada for caring enough to do this. (‘Perhaps she’s used to it,’ I speculated to Lena, ‘when he’s away for work obviously, but also maybe for his black magic shit. Which I guess should worry us, but try as I might, it doesn’t. I don’t think Kiwi chicken bones are up to the job.’) Strangely, at this point I was looking forward to his returning that evening, once the afternoon had passed without a message, because I was thinking ‘Finally we’re on the same page and I’m wise to you.’ I say ‘strangely’ because no thought entered my head that he could be planning something bigger. We even made it a family thing and involved the girls by asking them to look out for Dada while I drove a bit slower through the empty streets of town, on our way to Oriental Parade.

  ‘So what do you think it could be?’ I asked Lena, while the girls were having a turn on the climbing ropes at the playground by the beach. Then it occurred to me in a thunderclap that we were being monumentally blind and selfish. What if overnight he’d received some bad news from home? Perhaps Moushumi had called, or someone else, and he didn’t know how to tell Tulti. We could have had this entirely by the wrong end.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Lena conceded without sounding convinced. ‘I doubt he called Janaki first thing in the morning, though, and remember he told Tulti he would be away last night.’

  ‘Yes, but it could be news a day old, and he’s still not sure how to tell her. Or it could be something from work. Basically, all I’m saying is consider the possibility that it might have nothing to do with us or his time here.’

  ‘Maybe he’s thinking about migrating. He could have gone house-hunting, you know.’ Now Lena decided to up the ante, and we both could laugh guiltily. But at least that thought did make the second half of the day easier — that perhaps something troubling from home needed digesting. We couldn’t rule it out.

  The only thing I’m ashamed of from that day is a misdirected barb, which I knew to be malicious, aimed at Tulti. We were having dinner at Asian Kitchen, and I said, ‘Thank God your Baba told you and Janaki Aunty he would be away, because otherwise if someone goes this long without answering his phone, the family has to tell the police.’

  Tulti was visibly worried at hearing that word, and Mira’s ears pricked up too, from the bowl of plain rice with soy sauce she’d been focused on.

  ‘Why do we need to tell the police, Baba?’

  ‘We don’t, because we know Ashim Jethu needs to be away. He’s told us he’ll come back. You need the police only when someone’s disappeared without telling you.’

  ‘And Ashim Jethu’s not a burglar,’ which was the main thing Mira associated with the police. I reassured her of this, regretting my silly remark already, because Tulti’s face had clearly darkened.

  ‘Baba will return tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘How are you so sure? Did he say that to you?’ And that was when we learnt that Tulti ‘just knew’, and that my brother had always encouraged her to listen out for and tell either of her parents about these intuitions, ‘because they might be windows into the future or else into someone else’s mind, and they come to you for a reason and you should be alert to them.’ She’d just had one of those, exactly after I said the word ‘police’.

  Lena and I stole a glance, and I said that was wonderful, and offered her my phone to leave her Baba a message to make sure of that outcome. ‘Tell him how much we’re missing him,’ I said, while she was speaking into voicemail. ‘There’s less than a week left and we want him back.’

  Driving home, we learnt one further unorthodox thing about my brother’s parenting philosophy: that along with inner voices and feelings, he encouraged his daughter (although interestingly, not Moushumi, Tulti clarified when I asked) to watch out for coincidences, the unlikelier the better, and to tell him as quickly as possible so that he could write them down and judge ‘what they might mean’. According to her, he first checked to see whether each one was ‘truly special’, and she explained that for instance, ‘If something was in the newspaper or on TV and then someone mentioned it, that wouldn’t count.’

  What an incredible conversation this was, especially with a six-year-old, and one impossible to imagine with Dada seated in the front beside me. I asked Tulti to tell us (for Mira’s sake, I claimed, so that she could learn to spot them too) what kinds of coincidences she watched out for. She said anything that she saw or someone said that was itself unusual and she’d also heard or seen it earlier that day, Baba wanted to know about. ‘And also the next day, or the day after,’ she added, after some reflection. ‘Actually, within two days,’ she finally decided the window could be.

  I asked her to think of a recent example that Dada had got excited about. In the car she said nothing had happened in New Zealand, but then half an hour later, just when Lena had finished their first story at bedtime, apparently Tulti told her that on the flight to Auckland from Singapore, Baba had put on a Hindi movie for her in which a man wrote things down like someone’s name or number on his hand, and then at Auckland airport this woman Trish who had sat next to them wanted to write down her address for Baba when they were saying goodbye but no one had a piece of paper handy, so Baba gave her his email address, which she wrote on her hand. As soon as they were walking away towards the Ibis hotel, Tulti had pointed this out — that just a few hours before, someone in the movie on the plane wrote things down on the back of his hand. Baba was very pleased, and had given her a kiss as he pushed the trolley, then had asked her to jump on board and sit on the suitcases while he pushed. ‘You got a sign that this would happen,’ he’d said. ‘Even in New Zealand, it still works!’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t suggest to Trish that she write the address down on her hand when no one could find any paper? You had just seen it in the movie,’ my immediately sceptic
al better half had inquired. (When told about it a little later, I thought this was slightly harsh — what’s the harm in letting her believe she has a special gift? — but Lena argued it was important that someone asked these questions now, because this kid was being set up ‘for impossible expectations in the future. She’s basically being told to deliver prophecies!’)

  ‘No, I didn’t say anything, but when it happened, I noticed immediately,’ Tulti had replied.

  ‘OK, how about this?’ Lena had persevered. (I wrote in my diary that night that it had been a weird day, during which we both seemed to have taken out the frustration we felt towards Dada on poor Tulti, not to mention Janaki.) ‘Your Baba watched the same film and he had the idea, and mentioned it to Trish.’ But no, Tulti had continued to insist that no one had suggested it. That’s what made the coincidence special. ‘If Baba had said it, he wouldn’t have been so happy when I told him. It was because he didn’t know about it.’

  At this point, it had been 9.15 and Mira was getting increasingly impatient with this baffling conversation and its unclear objectives, so Lena had moved on to the final book of the night. But as soon as she came out, she told me about the incident and said Dada could have noticed it, or else the woman herself, on Tulti’s screen, and either it was latent in their minds, or else Dada had suggested it while Tulti wasn’t paying attention. In any case, much more interesting to her than the questionable coincidence was the kind of thing Dada was teaching Tulti to look out for. ‘He’s training her to be a human shield, Abhay, to watch out for harm-doers of the kind he believes in, his personal early warning system. And it’s a win-win, he probably believes, because he’s also training her to make him a fortune.’

  To hide my shame at what I’d inflicted on my family, brought into my own home, and also because I could tell from Lena’s expression what she was truly concerned about, I tried to make light of her worries. ‘Just another week, sweetheart, and then all this will be incredible material that we’ll dine out on, far away and utterly harmless. Mira will retain none of it, I’m certain,’ I added. First ghosts, and now ‘intuitions’, coincidences and predictions, all within earshot of a four-year-old who routinely ran over to our room at 1.30 in the morning claiming to have had a nightmare.

  ‘I never thought I’d say this, but even if Moushumi’s coming next time, I’m not sure I want Ashim to visit. Don’t forget Mira will be that much older, and much more susceptible to this sort of talk. She already slightly hero-worships Tulti, and chooses everything that she wants.’

  Lena looked at me and exhaled loudly before continuing. ‘How did we get to this point, Abhay? It was meant to be the great reunion, the rediscovery of one another after all these years, and a chance for Tulti and Mira to each find a sister. I know that’s why I agreed to this visit. When did it all go so wrong?’

  I knew exactly what she meant, and I had the same feeling of something that had been playing out around us without our noticing. Had Dada really come here with an open heart, looking to reconnect and embrace as I was, or had there been another agenda all along? I’d forgotten none of my anger from the morning at the underhanded way in which he’d told Janaki about our past. Sometime in these next six days, I needed to confront him about it. I planned to live here for the foreseeable future: these were my neighbours. Why would he seek to shame me in their eyes?

  And shame both Lena and me by taking off in this way? What was Janaki to think of this move — that our unwelcoming behaviour had forced him towards this extreme step, and that he couldn’t trust us enough to share what was bothering him, or even to ask for a hundred and fifty dollars? Would word of this not spread in our neighbourhood?

  Gosh, he really had turned our street into a little India in just two weeks, or at least in these apprehension-filled images of mine. So Janaki now thought she knew everything about Dada and Didi’s departure, and here Ashim was, over twenty-seven years later, still not welcome in his brother’s house. The evident malice behind this stunt of his — staged clearly with an audience in mind, so that the cloud of that ancient incident would hover over me even in this faraway home, and from here on I’d always wonder about the judgement and condemnation behind my nearest neighbours’ gazes — the brilliance and the evil genius of it, made me inadvertently shudder. It was like a plot device from one of those interminable soaps that were once huge in India (and probably still are), of joint families and relentless malice churning under one roof. And who needed chicken bones when you could conjure up magic like this on a visit of just four weeks, leaving behind a shadow that would trail your brother — no, come out and say it at least now, Abhay, don’t be mealy-mouthed even after what you’ve just realised — not just your brother, your oldest enemy, forever?

  What masterful scouting of territory, using the first week to figure out the terrain and its inhabitants before settling on Janaki as your cat’s paw, because she is alone, vulnerable, still recovering from her husband’s death and also, very importantly, and a real boon for Dada’s purposes, from the subcontinent after all (her family were Jaffna Tamils who had migrated long ago to Malaysia), and therefore extra susceptible to stories of family division and treachery.

  The more I sat there taking it all in, while Lena was on the other sofa answering a few emails, the more awe, and fear, I felt. If this had been his plan from the start — as soon as he saw us at Chhotka’s wedding in July, and perhaps the dormant malice within him had been awakened and reinforced because we’d seemed so happy — what a masterstroke it was not only to insist on coming right away but also to bring Tulti, even if we couldn’t afford to fly over her mother, because Tulti, adorable and wonderful as she was, would be for those very reasons the perfect Trojan horse. To use my own guilt against me to wangle this visit, and then additionally to hold Tulti up and say — would you deny Mira and her the chance to be close? Will this absurd divide between siblings continue for another generation? And that’s the perfect one-two with which he smuggled himself, fully paid for, all the way to New Zealand: my pathetic guilt and Tulti’s absolute innocence.

  And here was the clincher — that he was probably certain all along that no matter what he demanded or how he behaved on this trip, the one thing I would never do to this brother of mine was forbid him entry into my home. Not him, not twice in one lifetime, not without some far more extreme provocation.

  Because imagine his sense of vindication at being able to tell people in India, as well as the new ‘friends’ he’d made in Wellington: ‘All I did was tell one of Abhay’s neighbours the true story of our childhood and why we didn’t grow up under one roof, and for that I’m apparently banned from New Zealand.’

  That is some proper voodoo! And perhaps it was my shame at being taken in to this extent, or else the different shame of admitting that I believed a brother of mine could have so much hatred in his heart, that kept me that evening from sharing my fears with either Lena or my mother in Calcutta. Not that in looking back I think a great deal could have been averted at that stage. He was here, and too much was already underway. So I kept silent, and switched on some old tennis on YouTube while doing my stretches.

  But as ever — even in my worst imaginings about Dada — I was guilty of woeful underestimation.

  This disappearance was so a false peak. His plan for me had just reached base camp.

  On most construction sites in New Zealand, there’s a board warning the passer-by or casual visitor against unauthorised or unprotected entry. Its first line loudly goes: ‘The NUMBER ONE hazard is YOU!’

  The number one weakness that Ashim (which means ‘the limitless one’) in his three weeks of scouting had spotted in this landscape through which to work his mischief, was not elderly, susceptible Janaki.

  The number one hazard was me.

  Lena

  Walking along Dixon Street by himself on the afternoon of the 31st (Abhay had taken the girls for a bush walk), Ashim noticed me and my friend Tony seated next to one another at a table in the Dixon Str
eet Deli, where we were meeting for lunch. This is what precipitated his great moral crisis, and caused him to disappear for a day the following morning.

  The ‘crisis’ to which another response might have been to walk into the café, and go ‘Hey, Lena!’

  Ah, but that wrings all the drama out of it.

  Abhay decided to go on the trip on the 3rd as planned with Ashim and Tulti — fly to Auckland, drive to Coromandel, two days at Hahei, then a couple more in Auckland before seeing them off on the Friday and flying home. He said it would be a win-win: the alternative — given that I was sure I couldn’t be around Ashim any longer — was five awkward days in the house in Wellington, and also it gave Abhay some time alone in which to think.

  I pointed out that he wouldn’t be alone — his brother would have unhindered days to influence him any way he liked. He said have some respect for me, Lena; I now know, as I probably didn’t before, who I’ll be travelling with.

  Famous last words, I didn’t reply. But then again, what worse could Ashim do, short of actual murder? He’d already struck out at our marriage, aimed his blow straight at our home. Tony was evidently my lover, he’d decided (and perhaps even told Janaki), based on that passing glimpse.

  ‘Maybe I need to give him more rope, see his next move; watch what the man will do who has dared, so far from home, to try this. But he hasn’t succeeded, Lena, don’t you see? Our having this conversation, our still being in the same bed, proves that.’

  We’d also just had some incredible sex, primarily because Abhay (yes, and OK, me slightly as well) had suddenly got so turned on by the very substance of Ashim’s accusation, and that had been the fantasy we fucked out (kind of like that late scene in Sideways, one of Abhay’s favourite films). I think it was also great because it was fuck-you sex — for the very fact of us being so close despite what Ashim had just tried to do, and also because we left him in the living room after I’d done the girls’ bedtime and then never came out of our bedroom again, which was right next door. We’d supposedly gone in to talk, but if Ashim had hung around in the living room, he would surely have heard me barely twenty minutes later. I for one sure hoped he had.