The flawed messenger who nevertheless roused me to this journey; that has to be part of the story.
And Ma too. Despite the wonderful moments this past week when we’ve spoken about Didi, and the obvious regret in her heart for what happened to their mother, there will come junctures in the book, if it means at all to try to be honest, when I’ll have to ‘confront’ Ma using her own testimony, offered with much grace and trust, about its blind spots and elisions. What about this whole period that we’re not speaking about, Ma? Or, couldn’t we interpret that incident a bit differently? And, while this was happening and we were here, did you or Baba ever wonder about how their mother was, or how they all were?
I will (have to) face those moments too in the writing when they come, and find a way to evoke these as-yet-unvoiced things so that neither my brother nor Ma will feel misrepresented or betrayed or, just as bad, judged by one who has no right.
Yeah, I just bragged about writing five novels, but I have never been on this territory before.
Abhay
Two nights ago, Lena and I had a big blowout. I arrived home just after dinnertime and had acceded to Mira’s demand — parental guilt exploited with uncanny timing — to have an ice-cream cone for dessert, with two scoops no less: Goody Goody Gumdrops below and some amrakhand on top (what a great Indo-Kiwi combination, I said). When she’d finally made her way to the bottom of this green and orange confection, her face was all ice-creamy and I took her to the bathroom to wash up and also brush her teeth before bedtime.
Knowing exactly the order in which to do things, Mira rinsed her hands and then turned to one of the drawers behind to pull out a face-cloth, with which she was about to begin wiping around her mouth. All I did at this point while watching in admiration (I had no idea she knew where the face-cloths were kept) was to take the cloth from her to wet it first under the tap, which unexpectedly upset her. I was explaining myself to her when Lena arrived and, without asking what had happened, told me to ‘let Mira do things her way, as she’s been doing peacefully every night’. I stared at Lena for a few seconds in disbelief, then felt so disrespected and undermined that I punched the bathroom door even though Mira was still upset and sitting between us. This sent her off on a fresh round of screaming through the house, beginning with the admittedly memorable line, ‘Why is Baba being so irritating?’
Anyway, in my rage I resorted to my favoured redoubt, used often before and never followed through, of letting Lena know that this ‘temporary arrangement’ (meaning not my time in a writing studio, but the six-year-ago move to New Zealand) was about to run its course, and soon I would have a new purpose to keep me occupied for long periods ‘in my actual home’. Which deliberate and pointed words achieved exactly their intended result, and within five minutes I was walking away from the house with a sleeping bag and my pyjamas. My studio had no bed, but there were rugs in both the living room and the bedroom, besides the two-person sofa. It was a beautiful Tuesday evening, windless, and glowing over the Makara hills to the west: my tennis mates would have been out for club night. I hadn’t even said goodnight to Mira, who’d been crying in her room for the past few minutes, by now certainly more upset about our fighting than from the original face-cloth peeve.
We exchanged no apologies by text that night, nor the next day when I went over at 7.15 to play my usual part in the morning routine. Mira gave me a warm hug of welcome, and I fully shared my sorrow and shame with her. Lena and I cooperated around getting Mira ready, and we even had our family hug at goodbye time at crèche. But then I dropped Lena off at uni without another word, and returned to my studio for the day.
Why did I call Dada yesterday afternoon (morning at 7.30 for him)? Did the bad taste in my mouth from the row with Lena have everything to do with it? I didn’t write at all, instead going for a run as a remedy (out to Wadestown via the cemetery and Kaiwharawhara stream, back along Mairangi Road and Northland), then making notes after lunch trying to look at the quarrel neutrally, but all this still didn’t result in me wishing to get in touch with Lena with something warm or softening. By now it was 3 in the afternoon, and I was due to Skype with Ma at 4. I decided not to try to write today, but to put it down as time for interviews and ‘stock-taking’ and, in that spirit, to tell Dada briefly as well about the remarkable progress I’d made in a month, including defining the underlying purpose of the project for myself and getting Ma on board as a willing interviewee. I suppose I also wanted to sound Dada out on whether he’d play a similar role in talking to me extensively about both Didi and himself. I didn’t mention during my part in the phone call that Ma and I had only been recalling Didi; nor of course did I forward Ma’s query for him about the Hazaribagh house.
For what he went on to say, it’s amazing that the phone call lasted just over fifteen minutes. By which I mean that he didn’t wait for another time to drop this massive truth bomb, when he would have had more of a chance to explain himself. I’d caught him during his morning routine, when they were all busy with preparing Tulti for her school drop-off on Dada’s motorbike. I’d expected that, and had only wanted to seal a quick pledge to catch up properly over Skype that weekend, after telling him about the momentum I had gathered.
Perhaps that’s why he let it out. He wanted it exploded and done before we caught up face to face (we hadn’t once Skyped since they’d got back). In fact, if anything, my account of the past month would have used up the bulk of those fifteen minutes, because I managed to tell him about the writing studio, the first week of interviews with Ma, and the plan to come to Hazaribagh within the next couple of months to see them and Didi’s family.
Yet Dada had a much bigger story for me, although it took him at most seven minutes to tell it. I remember wondering if Tulti and Moushumi were overhearing this, or if he’d taken the phone elsewhere.
‘Listen, Abhi, it’s great that you’re writing about Didi, and you and your mother are talking about her. I’m very pleased to hear it. Now it’s time for you to learn something surprising, especially since you’re planning to come here, which again I wholly commend, and let me say in my defence that was my principal intention. But you should be aware that Didi was not found dead. I made that up. She hasn’t stayed in direct contact with me, and I doubt she talks very often to Praveen, but Didi didn’t commit suicide in 2012. As far as we know, she’s still following her sadhu on his wanderings.
‘I’ll have to leave soon, and we can talk again later, but there were several reasons why I told this particular lie. Above all, I wanted to see how you’d react. Do you know I debated with myself for a couple of days, because the other one I had in mind was to come back here and phone you one night to say that Tulti had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers know that I have a wealthy brother living abroad and want you to cough up the ransom. But superstition got the better of me, and I chose this story instead. I’m sorry, but yes, my intention was to shake you up and see how you responded. I always planned to tell you well before you took any further step, but in the past month you haven’t called once. I honestly have wondered whether you’d just decided Didi was gone now, so there was nothing more to be done, and I’m pleased this isn’t the case. I’m going to text you Praveen’s number, as well as that of our nephew Jhappi. You can call either of them, or both, and confirm that Didi is still alive and ask when she last contacted them.
‘I have to go, Moushumi is signing to me, but before you decide to hate me, remember some of the things you said while I was there. How much you care about our family; how much you hate your isolated life, including the endless sitting involved in writing a novel. You wished there was more to do than spend your working days with your computer on your lap, so I thought, let’s see if he’s serious. And also, I must confess, I was curious what bait would actually draw you out, because you were hungry not only to connect with Didi and me, but also for a big career success. So I decided to offer you the lure of an irresistible real-life plot twist and see what you did with it, and why. Wou
ld it really be love for Didi and a wish to know her family that would bring you here, or the attraction of an unbelievable story that happened within your own home, and might well make you a literary star? I wanted to see what you would do, after twenty years of no contact, and I’m embarrassed to say I added some masala to Didi’s story.
‘Those were my reasons, and it’s time for me to ask forgiveness. Your next steps are up to you. You don’t have the drama of an unexplained suicide, but everything else is exactly the same. Her family is still here; they remain yours to embrace if you choose. I’m here as well, always ready to host you, although I’m sure right now you despise me. But that was my only deception, I promise, and I knew I would come clean the very first time you called, as I have today. Because I was sure there was no way for you to get Praveen’s phone number other than to go through me, and that’s when I was going to tell you.’
He hung up shortly after, my brother, who claimed to believe in black magic so strongly, but didn’t think of himself as a master tantrik. And because I’d chosen this day to call him (perhaps I’d wanted to prove something to myself and defiantly touch base with my ‘other’ family), I couldn’t immediately share with Lena what I’d learnt. We were still at cold war, and how do you hand your adversary such a decisive advantage?
Forget today — how would I ever explain to Ma or Lena why Dada had done this? And what remained of my ‘project’, as he’d also sought to know: what would now motivate my ‘great search’?
After all, Dada had half-believed that I was in it for nothing more than the chance of a sensational book.
Section IV
FEBRUARY
Abhay
I’m going to Hazaribagh because I’m greedy for a book.
I’m going to Hazaribagh as the only atonement I can offer.
Since January, I’ve been doing everything possible to wreck my own home as though it’s a way of saying sorry to Didi and Dada, for all that I have ever incidentally gained at their expense.
My brother has run rings around me so successfully (‘exposed’ is another word many would use) that I wasn’t even immediately delighted to learn my sister was still alive, and that one day we might all see her again.
Bullet points can be so clarifying.
Lena, I’m going despite everything, not just because I owe this visit, and so much more, to Didi, but also because really I should have expected nothing less from my brother.
What less than precisely this much complexity would be commensurate to his history?
Although I can see you shaking your head and replying — like any good hunter, he made sure to match bait with prey. If ‘complexity’ is what’s needed to draw you out, here you go, muthafukka. Suck on this!
Here’s something else I wrote back in January that will entertain you, Lena, not least in that I cheerily discuss my brother, a real-life murderer and Tom Ripley in the same paragraph.
I guess that’s what I think of the man whose ‘hospitality’ I’m shortly about to accept.
He is definitely a monster egotist, a bit like that Crime Patrol episode of the career criminal who killed his wife while always sincerely believing that he was the victim who’d loved her so much. This genuine self-pity, and capacity to deceive oneself — a psychopath who hasn’t yet realised he is one?? If I use as one criterion someone who will always put themselves first, and when they do so, a fog appears over everything else, everything dubious they’ve done, and the morality of whatever they’re planning. Perhaps he’s a psycho coming to be, as in the very first Ripley book when Ripley kind of muddles along making discoveries about his own nature in different situations that greatly take him by surprise. His more cold-blooded talent of manipulating others before destroying them is not yet the honed superpower it will become. That is the stage at which I have encountered my brother Lucky me. It could have been later!
So you see, darling, I have calmly contemplated the possibility that my brother might be a budding psychopath. And nevertheless I decided:
You have to be on full alert around him, while simultaneously retaining an equal awareness of his context — so very complex and multifaceted is this reunion! So many pasts are shaping, and WARPING, this encounter, but what we choose now can still redirect this family’s future.
Complex and multifaceted? Exactly. What other words even come close? Everything with Dada has many meanings. In the five weeks since they left, for instance, Lena and I have received four emails from him, each without words but with five scanned drawings of Tulti’s attached, of ‘places that she [was] remembering from New Zealand’. In crayons, felt pens, watercolours: scenes from the Sunday waterfront market in Wellington, Kaiteriteri beach (Dada put in the titles for our clarification at the top of each drawing), Christmas dinner on our deck and jumping on the trampoline next door that the girls were allowed to use. The pictures were bright and lovely and all of us were happy to see them (they inspired Mira to start a series of her own, which I in turn titled, scanned and emailed back), but as Lena asked after the third email, is Tulti really producing them spontaneously in such quantities? Is she missing New Zealand that much?
‘I find that entirely believable,’ I said. ‘They had a great time here, and kids are always being taken places and then wrenched away without having any say, and I’m sure that has an impact.’
I knew Lena had to agree with that, and she didn’t say anything more also because Mira was in the room watching Doc McStuffins with her dinner, but in fact the same thought had come to me an email ago. That Dada was urging these drawings out of Tulti, and sharing them with us in these numbers, for less simple reasons of his own.
What do you want, Dada, I nearly came out with asking in my fourth reply. Do you want us to offer to adopt Tulti, or merely send over large sums of money for her upkeep? Is that the form in which you would like to be compensated for your historic grievance — that we help raise your child ‘in the way in which she might have been raised’ if you’d never been forced to leave?
You want me to take ownership of my part in Didi’s catastrophe, and you want me to pay my reparations into a fund for Tulti (and perhaps for Didi’s children too, or do you even care about that)? You’ve got a whole atonement plan mapped out for me. Fine, whatever Lena thinks, I’ve carried this for most of my life, and I agree it’s probably no less than what my parents and I collectively owe you all.
But Ripley wouldn’t stop at mere atonement, would he, especially not when he felt so profoundly wronged?
And it’s not only my brother who’s multifaceted; it must run in the family. Consider some of the resolutions I have made in the time since he left, and debated with myself whether these needed to be implemented straightaway, even before I go to India. If I’ve identified a great need for thorough self-reform, it’s best that I begin immediately, right?
Also interpretable as the mind searching frantically for any evasion it can put up, lesser challenges against the greater.
I MUST visit Janaki ASAP and tell her everything about our childhood, whatever she wants to know. It’s important if I’m to live with dignity on my own street.
I must meet up with Will and learn more about teaching in those creative-writing workshops in prison. I’ve been meaning to do that since I first heard about them a year ago and have kept putting it off until I’d finished my novel. Well, it doesn’t need to be an either/or, or else it’s just my pattern of using one thing to duck another. In fact, I should do both of these right away — no reason to wait until I’m back from India. They might even give me a moral boost.
And when I’m back, find out from Ellie and Fleur about joining the English-teaching programme for refugees, another thing I’ve been mentioning to people as a possibility for what, two years now!
Use this as a wake-up call, Abhay, not just to the past which is all-important, but also to the missed opportunities to get involved with people around you.
Comic, right, the amount of stuff someone would pile on their plat
e to put off doing the one thing they need to? Refugees, prisoners, neighbours, anybody — please rescue me from having to face up to my own brother and sister.
I have to go, Lena, because Aranya is still alive. That is so fucking obvious, right? No need to say any more, even if I’m unable to tell you this before I go.
So when will I tell you, and Ma?
Aye, there’s the rub.
Abhay
While in Wellington, Dada had even left me a wake-up call on my own phone.
That time he came to Makara to watch us play tennis on the courts adjacent to the children’s plaque lawn, I’d handed him my phone and asked him to record one of our games, just because I’d never seen footage of us playing before. I thought it would be fun to see how we looked in a clip, exactly how slow or clumsy, whether there were any swift or elegant moments at all in an average passage of play. And Dada did record us, from the far end, close to the preschool building and away from the cemetery, but what I realised only afterwards in the car when I watched the film with him seated next to me was that he’d panned away from ‘the action’ for almost a minute at one point to record a woman who’d arrived, parked and, without looking in our direction, gone to place flowers on a plaque on the opposite hillside and sat down beside it. Then Dada had returned to our tennis (we didn’t seem to have noticed what was happening behind us), but again, a minute later, for thirty seconds before he finally switched off, he’d turned away and held the camera on what looked like parents and a teenaged daughter, arriving at another plaque ten metres behind me on the other side of the fence, as I called out ‘Advantage us’ and prepared to serve.
The Man Who Would Not See Page 19
