The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  We lay for a long while in an embrace. I thought a whisky would be nice but didn’t want either of us to run into Ashim outside.

  ‘Or else it could just be that I cannot bring myself to abandon him again. I have to see them off on that plane, which is what I implicitly promised when I agreed to host them.’

  I pointed out that all the hold Ashim had over Abhay was expressed in that single unfair, inaccurate word he’d just used — ‘again’. ‘Don’t internalise the idea that you “abandoned” him once. It wasn’t abandonment, and it wasn’t you.’ I had previously always urged him to assign to their father his full share of responsibility for the decision, rather than blame himself or even characterise his Ma as having played some wicked stepmotherly part. But now, and I said it to Abhay as soon as the thought came to me, after what we had seen, I could imagine Sulekha’s role in the decision without immediately jumping to judgement.

  ‘Maybe she sensed something, from having watched him for two years. She could have believed that he meant you harm. I mean, even when you’ve described the factory to me where you spent the night, in which there probably were snakes and scorpions, if not homeless people, as a mother who’s now seen how low Ashim can go, I can imagine Sulekha believing this wasn’t an innocent plan gone wrong, that Ashim wanted you alone and at his mercy out in the middle of Howrah for some sinister reason. I mean, don’t you see that your conviction of his blamelessness and subsequent ill-treatment and misfortune stands entirely on one certainty that is in fact quite open to question — did he genuinely lose his way that night or was that a ploy?’

  We were talking in whispers, which I guess means we cared more right then about Ashim overhearing this than our sex. And that makes sense — one was defiance, whereas this was strategy.

  ‘Lena, I agree Dada has a lot to answer for with his behaviour on this trip, but the ridiculousness of this conspiracy theory that you’re ascribing to a twelve-year-old is underlined by the fact that I’m lying here beside you. No snakes bit me, which might have just been luck, but also no accomplices of Dada’s were waiting in the darkness to abduct or finish me off. We were lost, for sure, but there wasn’t one moment when I felt in any immediate danger from him or anyone else. And the other thing you well know is that the idea of taking shelter in the factory most probably came from me. I’m not a hundred per cent certain of this, I admit, but I remember the long discussion we had at the end of that road with the river before us, and I definitely recall listing the advantages of returning to the factory.

  ‘But let’s not do this, Lena: even legitimate hatred has its limit. In an era before mobile phones, how on earth would a twelve-year-old even go about arranging such a scheme? Don’t forget Didi could easily have come along with us; plus we only reached that end of Howrah station by chance, from where Dada spotted the market he knew.

  ‘And most of all, and let’s allow this to be the final nail in that particular theory — although I’m happy to entertain the pretty valid-seeming possibility that this fucker didn’t come to New Zealand meaning us well — we need to remember that the idea of exploring the station only came about once we got there and learnt that Thamma’s train would be late. It was just something to pass the time: it might even have been Baba who suggested it. So nothing about the rest of that night could have been planned in advance.’

  Abhay’s expression, facing me, lying on his side — both of us naked under the duvet — was of a schoolboy who’d rousingly closed out a debate. It was amazing (really the right word) to see him defend so strongly a version of an incident that had only made him feel awful for what … three-quarters of a lifetime?

  But glad to be close, not to mention apparently undamaged, though I was after what had been unleashed on us that afternoon, I was far from done with hating just yet.

  ‘What if on the spur of the moment, he decided to give you a scare? Get you lost in the bowels of Howrah, where your only way out would be through your big brother, and for once you were totally dependent on him? He saw himself as living in your house, sharing your room: suddenly, at the sight of that market, an opportunity had arisen to have you in his neck of the woods, unable to take a step without him.’

  But the boy debater only smiled at my stubbornness; then, to his mind, skewered me. ‘Again, you’re letting your emotions rule you. You hate him so much for what he tried to pull on us that you’re losing sight of facts you know. Right now he works for the Public Works Department in Hazaribagh, and I grant you that he might just be able to swing a stunt of that sort, by asking a friend or something, or else he just needs to request his mahatantrik to snap his fingers, but back then I doubt he possessed the amount of sorcery necessary to conjure up a power cut on demand. If the lights hadn’t gone out, even if we had been lost, I would have been able to find my way back to the market. Sorry, Lena, anything you want to surmise about his behaviour in the last fortnight, I promise I’m on board, but let’s not make this mistrust retroactive. It’s much more plausible and likely that the subsequent path his life took, the obstacles he feels he’s endured, have made him as manipulative and suspicious as he is.’

  ‘Admitting which, you nevertheless want five days alone with him, and suggest taking Mira along as well? Why, Abhay, why the fucking fuck? Why don’t we call Singapore Airlines instead and see if we can bring forward their flights? I’d not just be happy to lose the money on the holiday, but also to spend this extra bit just to be rid of him.’

  But Abhay was more concerned that Ashim would lose face with Moushumi and Tulti if for no apparent reason they returned home early, than with him trying his utmost to humiliate me a few hours before.

  Anyway, that was when I gave up and stayed back the following day in Wellington with Mira, which turned out to be the hardest part, because she had known about our upcoming trip and simply didn’t see why she should miss out on five days with her cousin as well as two plane rides, not to mention the beach and Auckland Zoo which had rhinos and hippos and elephants, unlike Wellington. Abhay had wanted to take her along, but no matter how lovely and unspoilt Tulti was by her sociopathic father, every voice in me screamed out against allowing Ashim any more time near our daughter. Ever again.

  To avoid talking about a family quarrel, I used the excuse with Mira that I wasn’t feeling well, and that the places we would have gone to would be too far from a doctor.

  ‘Well, why can’t I go then? Baba can look after me.’

  ‘Well, who’ll look after me? I’ll be alone in the house. What if I’m sick in the middle of the night?’

  It didn’t even trip her up for a second. ‘Nana can come and stay with you. I want to go.’

  It took Mira pretty much all of five days to get over her disappointment (the mornings and bedtimes — oh, and every bathtime too — were the worst), and we had to go through all the reasons three times a day for us staying back (‘Mummy, why didn’t we go to Auckland?’), which were struck down with equal assurance by her rock-solid objections, and followed by renewed bouts of grieving and accusations, even though every day we found extra-special things for her to do, including a repeat visit to Mission Inflatable (where Abhay had taken them a couple of weeks before), two play-dates with her friends Ella and Anna at our house, a trip to the beach in town, and finally an afternoon out at Kapiti, first riding the old tram in Paekakariki, followed by a play on the great splash-pad near my aunt’s house in Raumati and another dip in the sea there, which was cut short only because dozens of jellyfish had chosen that same afternoon to float about in the shallows.

  Abhay and I had judged it best not to Skype during this time, as much because the sight of Tulti might have upset Mira as that the proximity to Ashim, even if he didn’t appear on screen, would repel me, so we basically stayed in touch by text. I asked him if he was free to talk on the second night at around ten, and he called me back from the motel courtyard in Hahei, but spoke almost solely of what they had done during their trip — driving around Coromandel to get an overview of th
e scenery, Hot Water Beach this afternoon, disappointing weather otherwise and all that. I asked twice if Ashim had ‘tried anything more’, and he said no, except to say once in the car that he admired the amount of trust we shared. Apparently he’d added that he’d only done what he would have wanted his brother to do for him in the same situation.

  ‘Why don’t I trust a single word he says, Abhay, even if you’re right and life hasn’t been fair to him? I can take that into account and still say I don’t like or trust the person he has become.’

  Abhay changed the subject to say it was strange to be driving the RAV4, because the car rental at Auckland airport wouldn’t change their booking to a small car at such short notice, and so it was the three of them in the biggest car Tulti said she’d ever been in. She apparently loved the reversing-camera screen on the dashboard, which she hadn’t come across before, and had also said several times each day that she wished Mira was there, and asked when she would see Mira again.

  I didn’t reply ‘Only if you visit Calcutta or New Zealand with your mother sometime, sweetie. Or else I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until you’re both adults.’

  Abhay

  The second evening in our motel room in Hahei, just after talking to Lena, I began listing in a memo on my tablet the important confidences I’d shared with Dada in the course of this trip, and what he’d shared with me.

  I had told him about my regular frustration at being so far from ‘everything’ here in New Zealand, from friends and potential publishers in Britain, as well as from friends, family, literary life and whatever readership I had in India. The only important people I was physically close to were Lena and Mira, and only I seemed to be bearing the burden of sacrifice in keeping this arrangement going, which benefited everyone else so much (wonderful place for Mira to grow up; Lena’s great job; Rosemary having her daughter and granddaughter close by, blah blah blah). I’d repeated my favourite formulation: I was the (unpaid) goalkeeper of this family, but I never get a chance to score goals. Ever the enabler, the back wall, the railway-station platform from which others departed on fulfilling journeys. Once Mira is a bit older, I don’t know how long I’ll consent to playing this noble role, especially now that the dream of making a film with Madeleine despite being based here has ground to a halt.

  I’d told him about the shock of my first significant break-up, which had happened one day in Edinburgh fifteen years ago, and I’d only ever seen the person I’d loved for four years thrice more since.

  I’d talked about the months in Edinburgh after Baba died back in ’98, and asked Dada as well about missing him, although with care because Baba had seen him maybe a total of eight times since he left our home in 1988. So I didn’t mention all the good times that I thought about or the many family holidays, and was also careful in another way because I remembered how much Dada idolised the little of Baba that he knew.

  These were the big disclosures — career, one lost love, Baba — but especially the first, which came up more than once. I had told him how the sadness of feeling invisible and ‘underutilised’ manifested itself as temper, especially with Lena, as well as unfair accusations.

  ‘And maybe that was how, with the repetition of stuff like this,’ I continued in my tablet while Dada read through the Sunday Star-Times on the other sofa, ‘he got the idea that our marriage was in trouble, and misunderstood what he saw between Lena and Tony.’

  What do I believe Dada hoped for with his bombshell? The outcome that resulted, where it turned out Tony was a friend of Lena’s from uni whom I knew well, and Dada claimed to be relieved to hear that? Or had he wanted the opposite, as Lena believes? That somehow, through a miraculous bit of luck on just a four-week visit, he’d chanced upon the rock that would smash our world for good, the ‘airbrushed’ life of ease and comfort he seemed to both despise and envy? This is the obvious question to ask him on any of these evenings alone. He’s probably expecting me to bring it up, the equal and opposite reaction to his own dramatic build-up. So when are you going to do it, o ‘fearless one’?

  With Dada’s reaction in mind to the tipsy girl on Willis Street, where he’d seemed both to want and despise her, and to the young women I’d noticed him eyeing at the beach as well as on Courtenay Place, I’d made the case to Lena the day before we flew to Auckland, in a last effort to change her mind, that ‘it could be a genuine case of cultural misunderstanding, or a cultural gulf for a first-time visitor to the West. The two of you were sitting on the same side of a table. He’d never heard us mention Tony before. He believed the first suspicion that came to his head, unfortunately with every embedded prejudice about white women that Indian men often harbour, but at least for him his agony over what to say to me might have been real.’

  ‘It was lunchtime. We’d invited two others to use the other side of the table,’ countered Lena drily. ‘All he had to do was walk in and say hello, see how I reacted, whether we looked in the least bit scared. His second option was to come and ask me at home.’

  She was a hundred per cent right to be unforgiving. ‘Lena, you don’t have to come, and neither does Mira. I promise I won’t ask again. And also this is the final time I’ll request this understanding of you, but because of the history and the setting and the future ramifications of abandoning them for the final few days or sending them back early, and how Moushumi and indeed Tulti would interpret that, and also how Dada would probably spin it to them to save face in their eyes and the further permanent damage that would cause, I have to appear to believe his version of his state of mind, that he agonised and acted in good faith. Will you trust that I totally trust you, but that I also have to avoid the worst possible end that could have been imagined to this trip — that Dada leaves early and our relationship is worse than ever?

  ‘And that he leaves one more time legitimately nursing the grudge that no one believed his insistence on his own good intentions.’

  Returning to my list of what Dada had shared with me, there was the black magic conversation as well as his view of God, his many stories about Baba, and an odd anecdote casually dropped in sometime about being invited by a Muslim colleague for dinner and politely turning him down.

  ‘I know others might condemn me, and only I know that in my relationships with them [my italics] through work or outside I have never shown any bias, but I believe, from what I have understood about our traditions and what it implies to be a Brahmin and to be wearing this thread around my body — it would be wrong for me to eat in a Muslim home.’

  But then, to add to his own enigma, and leaving me not for the first time totally unsure of what to think, a few days later, seemingly propelled by instinct, he stood up to that asshole on behalf of the Muslim woman on the bus.

  I had also asked about corruption within the PWD or the Hazaribagh municipal corporation in general, regarding contracts and building materials and the like, but got nothing. Dada said, ‘Whatever happens elsewhere also happens with us. No more or less.’

  I put that down as a yes, which in truth made me worry a little less about his finances.

  I had also tried a couple of times, using different approaches, to get Dada to talk some more about magic. Once, while in Kaiteriteri, I asked if he really believed that people had ‘enemies’ who plotted to harm them. He said he would find it impossible to believe too, if he lived in my surroundings and had had my life, and saw no more than family and child-carers and tennis friends of a week.

  ‘Someone who has only walked in a New Zealand forest, will they believe what creatures we have in our jungles?’

  Then I remember trying to rationalise his view of how malice worked. In a town the size of Hazaribagh, people only needed to introduce spite into the air: sooner or later, it would find its way to its target, because whatever was said could grow and spread so easily and acquire reality in this way.

  To which watered-down concession to his beliefs Dada responded with a kind of wistful incredulity: ‘People really change depending on their lo
ng-term environment. If I hadn’t seen you, I wouldn’t have believed how true this can be. I’m not even going to try to convince you, sitting here in Tasman Bay, of what is real somewhere else. If someone hasn’t seen any feline bigger than a cat, will they believe in the strength of a tiger? If someone has only ever seen a pond, will they immediately accept your description of the sea? No, because the sea is genuinely unimaginable until the first time you arrive at it — the reality that water can cover everything in front of you. Look, if you are truly interested, either as a writer or simply out of curiosity, you have to take the trouble to go where the sea is. Then you won’t need any arguments from me.’

  It was clear I’d offended him, so I’d asked if there was also good magic. Could a tantrik bring about something good for you, or even for a neighbour?

  ‘Maheshji can. But you don’t need a tantrik for that. Simple karma is enough. Act with confidence, and accomplishment will follow. Do good, and transform the atmosphere around yourself.’

  ‘So that’s what I’m failing to do,’ I joked. ‘These low-confidence toxic emissions from me must stop, aka my novels.’

  Then I’d said it was wonderful to see that Tulti believed in the power of good magic, because she’d told me she regularly prayed for the wellbeing of passing strangers.

  ‘Wow, she’s told you many things. Where was I when she shared all this?’