The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  What was intended as a record of my tennis skills (in fact, I dropped serve in that game, although Dada had stopped filming before that) turned into a testament to my ability to ignore, an almost impressive talent of blocking out even the greatest contradictions in my vicinity if it didn’t suit me to notice them. And, I have to admit, unexpected proof of Dada’s film-making skills, because he achieved all this with one uncut clip, simply by the act of slowly panning to and fro, which to my shamed eyes provided all the commentary necessary. Somehow he was always able to come back at exactly the most telling moment from a long, still shot of the mourners contemplating their loss with exemplary dignity to a close-up of me about to serve, blithely calling out yet another deuce or advantage, concerned solely with winning that game, because after all, this one was for posterity.

  Abhay

  I’ve decided to tell Lena about Dada’s lie upon my return from Hazaribagh, presenting it as something I only learnt there. Her opinion of him will breach rock bottom (frack it, shall we say), but at least it will spare her days of worry.

  Likewise with Ma, even though I’ll stay with her on the way to and from Haz. The biggest revelation from our recent Skype interviews has been the depth of her mistrust of Dada. Not Didi, or even their mother, whom she displaced in Baba’s life: it’s as though all her discomfort and anxiety about the divide in our family is focused on the figure of my brother. I was amazed not just at the strength of her antipathy even after all these years, but also that I hadn’t once noticed it as a boy. At least now I was finally persuaded of one of her claims when she’d insisted that Dada had to leave our house — that they had never got along. I had disbelieved her then: I had genuinely thought we worked as a unit.

  But even now, despite my repeated exhortations to try to think of nicer moments, all she had recalled about Dada on Skype were incidents such as him kicking me in the crotch with his ‘Naughty Boy’ black shoes at my fifth birthday party, late in the evening after the other children had left and the two of us were playing with some of my presents. Apparently, an hour or so later I had even gone to bed, but then such was the pain in my abdomen that Baba had had to drive me to our doctor’s house at 10.30 that night.

  And the time a few months later he’d stuck some chewed gum into my hair and then ripped it off, leaving me with a small patch to this day on which the hair hasn’t fully returned. I remember well the aftermath of this incident, and not just from the spot on my head. Someone persuaded my parents that rubbing the juices of baby onions on the bald patch would stimulate hair growth (cross my heart this is true!), and for the next two months, one or other of them (usually Baba) religiously sat me down at the dining table each evening and rubbed away, both our eyes brimming with tears, Baba probably cursing Dada while trying to hold my head in place, while I must have been wriggling away from the onions and also struggling to read through the tears the comic or storybook in front of me. It’s a wonderful image from this distance, although Ma remains blind to its comedy; I keep telling her it was a kind of family time Dada had bestowed upon us.

  Or the three-day hunger strike he conducted about being given a bike of his own, shortly after moving in with us a couple of years later, which of course led to the outcome Ma was even more worried about — I insisted on the same privileges and also got my way, although mine was a smaller bike, which was the compromise my parents enforced (and Dada supported, for the obvious reason of maintaining his older-brother edge).

  Lena knows these stories too, and so now if I say that at the age of thirty-nine Dada messed with my head by lying about something as grave as our sister’s death, but that I’m going to visit him anyway, I think my mother and wife will put out an ad for a tantrik of their own.

  As for me, perhaps it’s only a denialist’s way of displacing some rightful and necessary anger, but I can’t help also seeing Dada’s side of things during each of these undoubted transgressions: where Lena and Ma focus on the harm done to us, I try in vain to point them in each case to their ‘villain’s’ context. Attending my fifth birthday party at our three-storey home from the single room the three of them were sharing at the time in Dada’s great-uncle’s crumbling house in Bagbazar — how different was that from glimpsing my privileged weekdays with Mira here in Wellington thirty years later? Wouldn’t you have wanted to give that lucky twit of a stepbrother the jolt of his life or a quick kick in the nuts when no one was looking?

  What I’ve often wondered as an adult is what Baba was aiming for in bringing Dada and Didi, although never their mother, all the way to south Calcutta to visit us on occasions like that (these stopped completely after the chewing-gum episode: the next time Dada and Didi came to our house was two years later, the night their mother was taken to hospital in what turned out to be her final battle with cancer). And why I was never asked — and never sought myself, I must admit — to attend any of my siblings’ birthdays in return.

  I also remember Dada’s closed-door satyagraha about his bike: he really stuck to his guns and ate nothing at home for three days (although he did make sure to have nearly two lunches from the school canteen each afternoon, and might have smuggled home a couple of samosas or sandwiches for the evenings). Where Ma tells me now that she saw only the wish to be spitefully disruptive, and a total disregard for the example he was setting for a younger brother who wasn’t yet ready to be out on the streets, I see a ten-year-old who might well have had the same argument with his own Ma if she’d been alive, who was both fiercely angry about the reason they had had to move here, as well as a little excited about this new, unexplored part of town. And most of all, someone who was looking to assert something at this most helpless moment in his life, when his father had had to take them into his other family only because their Ma had died. There had to be something he could head out with that was just his own.

  And at thirty-nine, he came to New Zealand, heard our national spiel from all and sundry about earthquake preparedness, and decided to give me a shake himself. The shame, Ma, is not just his for the trick he chose to play: what about the fact that neither you nor I knew enough about my sister to spot this most absurd of bluffs?

  In short, the basic import of this entire section of arguments carried out with people who never once got to hear them: how I justified not telling the two most important grown-ups in my life about the most reckless thing I ever did.

  Lena

  One evening in mid-February, Abhay surprises me by picking me up from the bus stop outside uni at 5.15 with Mira in the back, exactly as he would have done until a month ago. He’d decided to come back early to the house from his flat, because apparently he’d been missing seeing Mira while she was awake. These days he dropped her off at daycare or crèche by 8.30, and most nights came home around 9, when she was already in her room with the lights out.

  By the time we’re on the viaduct, we’ve started a bad row, and the only reason neither of us is screaming is that Mira had looked up from a game on the iPad and reminded us of our oft-repeated, and equally often betrayed, promise not to fight. I admit I was the one who ‘started’ it, this particular session at least. Even before we reached Kelburn shops I’d said that Abhay needed to ask himself why this new routine suited him so much, and whether it was something he’d subconsciously wanted for much longer: ‘a space free of the two of us for up to thirteen waking hours each day’.

  Abhay ignores my query to instead make the point, with his eyes on the road and his voice controlled to a comical degree to stay under Mira’s stern no-fighting radar, that it was obvious why his mother would want to shut out any discussion about Dada, because she first of all had had an affair with a married man and stolen him from his family, and had then refused to embrace his kids when they lost their mother. Those were some attractive incentives for denial. Then, at the lights after the tunnel, instead of turning left to come home, he carries on straight up towards Karori Road and I wonder if he’s taking us to his flat (which would be a first since he started workin
g there), or if he’s driving around because he has more to say.

  ‘I thought you told me you weren’t doing this to judge anybody,’ I say, but Abhay again appears not to hear.

  ‘And it’s obvious why most of me would want to look away, because pretty much everything that landed the wrong way for Dada and Didi right from the start turned out to be quite beneficial for me. But you, Lena, you have the least to lose by being compassionate. All I’m asking for, after six years of being here and showing total dedication to our family, not to mention thirteen years of love between us, is this one opportunity to try to learn what may have happened to my sister, and this is what you grudge me. You’re being like Ma all over again, in focusing on this incredibly narrow idea of “your” family which turns out to be just the people in this car. And do you know what I also realised? That unless we bridge this divide now, we’re setting up the one behind us for a repetition of exactly this scene twenty years from today, when Tulti will get in touch with her out of the blue and ask the simple but devastating question — we got on so well, Mira, so why did you forget about me all these years? And Mira will be even more blameless than I was, because she’s only four, but all she’ll be able to offer by way of excuse and apology is exactly what I have — it wasn’t me, Tultidi, it was my parents’ decision. I loved having you over, but why Mummy and Baba didn’t stay in touch, I don’t know. I was only four, remember? I had no way of reaching you, and never again were you mentioned in our house.’

  ‘Baba, I’m four and four months, not only four,’ our peace-keeper from the back chimes in to say, having heard her name and the magic number of her age.

  ‘You’re right, darling, you are four and four months. I’ll see you later, OK?’ And with that her father takes us both by surprise as he pulls over outside his block of flats, and says he’ll walk home a bit later after completing some more work.

  Abhay

  I’ve planned for four days in Hazaribagh on this first visit (my Indian visa came through yesterday), and three days in Calcutta both before and after. Yes, it’s all very timid and conservative: after 3.8 billion years of no contact, to expect any meaningful conversation with my sister’s family in a first encounter of four days is characteristic pie-in-the-sky from me. But it is the utmost I could extract from Lena and, truth be told, the most I could bargain with myself regarding being away from Mira, especially for these strange and baffling reasons I was presenting to her.

  Yes, Abhay, it’s just about Lena and Mira, and nothing to do with minimising the time in your brother’s hometown in which he could harm you.

  So here in summary — after a bento box lunch in the departure lounge at Auckland airport, and before I head off on an odd mission to get some Kiwi-themed gifts for a brother-in-law’s family that I’ve never met — are some of my other mind-bogglingly false positions as I begin this great journey towards truth and healing:

  The whole trip is still a secret from my ostensible host. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll just stay in a hotel in Hazaribagh.

  Nor have I called Praveen to announce my intention to visit them — for the first time ever — in under a week.

  And finally, Didi’s ‘suicide’ has of course now morphed into my great lie to both Lena and Ma.

  In other words, I am concealing or misrepresenting something big about this trip from every single person who is going to be affected.

  Good omens, eh?

  At Bangkok airport, I add one more name to this list of deceived.

  Mira, the most innocent of all — the one whose everyday life had been upset the most ever since her uncle and cousin had departed, and the one who was being told almost nothing.

  I’m sitting in a transit lounge opposite the actual spot where, on last July’s trip to India, she’d played with an Israeli child who was on her way to Vietnam and an Australian-Bangladeshi girl returning home from Dhaka to Perth as though they’d been friends for years. I wish desperately that I could be in two places at once, because none of this was intended to leave Mira feeling alone or confused for even a day. And I think of the great powerlessness of children, whether they are four as Mira is now, or five as Didi would have been when one day her father left their house forever to be with my future mother, or even nine as I was when I’d begged my parents not to send Dada away to boarding school.

  And what about the ages of my unseen nephew and niece when their mother had decided to walk away from their lives? Was that a part of this same chain, an endless line of dominoes that began toppling when my brother was one, and is still claiming victims?

  I have to come back in one piece — this is the thing above all that I owe my daughter. There should be no one she is blindly seeking twenty years from now.

  Abhay

  Addressing a portrait of the Buddha at Bangkok airport:

  Dear Buddha, sometimes being mindful just ain’t enough. I know you strongly refuted all beliefs in any kind of continuous selfhood, and it is profoundly sound advice — to let oppressive, mostly fictitious chains of continuity go. But I can’t, not unless I’ve helped Dada slip free of his as well. We’re weighed down by the same burden, the same moment in our different stories.

  As Dada never tired of reminding me, there is perhaps no country better set up than New Zealand for someone of my circumstances to believe that the good life consists of nothing beyond paying attention to the immediate present (which in my case is often just the tennis ball I’m about to hit, or the pretend tea-party that Mira is hosting, or the sentence I’m trying to sharpen), but how can I turn away from what I’ve seen of his pain? Surely his release would be mine as well. And then for me to learn a little more about Didi, if only to find out that much else happened in her adult life that Ma and I cannot feel responsible for.

  How lucky am I to have so many ‘good life’ options before me? I could close my eyes to my faraway siblings and practise a ‘narrow’ Buddhism back home. Or, now that Mira is a few months from starting school, I could act on my resolutions to get involved with refugees, prisoners and others who it would be rewarding to meet.

  All the while keeping a mindful distance from those in my own home I know to be mired in sorrow. Surely that cannot be the path to choose.

  O Buddha, even before I land in Calcutta, it’s apparent to me that my sister’s disappearance is a limitless, unknowable thing. Yes, I am hoping to meet her family (perhaps twice in my four days if I’m very lucky!), but Baba, Thamma and Didi’s mother are no more, and Ma’s recollections have their reasons to be partial. It’s stupid to imagine that I’ll even glimpse any definitive ‘answers’, especially in the absurdly tiny peep-hole of time that I’ve granted myself.

  But Buddha, although I’m certain you will be smiling, there is one disagreement with your teachings that I will respectfully register. It is clearer to me than ever that there are all sorts of continuities which leave their imprints on our bodies, memories and habits, including forces that form us as we grow, from within and around, but also circumstances that begin their sculpting before we’re even born.

  Both Dada and I are still the boys lost in Howrah, no matter what else we are. I will always be the brother whose birth sealed the loss of my siblings’ father. From earliest childhood, I have been encouraged to look away from this fact; Dada is unable to see anything but. So many other habits flow from these.

  That is my view, Great One. One question I’m travelling to ask is — are new habits possible for us? Is history nothing but entrapment?

  Meet back here in just under a fortnight?

  Section V

  THE LAST DAYS OF THE PAST

  Lena

  Ever since Tulti left, Mira has been trying to fill her absence. I’ve done my best to step in as an understudy for all the elaborate spy games and toy birthday-parties they organised together (with passing the parcel and pin the tail and musical cushions using the iPod), but it’s obviously not the same. We host or go on at least one play-date every weekend, and often two; we choo
se different things to make from her Mister Maker book and go shopping for bits we don’t have; and Mira helps me with every part of baking and cooking that doesn’t involve anything hot or sharp.

  But the fact starkly remains that in just a few weeks she’s gone from an all-time high of having two constant playmates in the house, and three when I was home during the evenings and Christmas holidays, to just one. And perhaps I was leading the witness, although when I asked the questions she readily said yes both times, but I’d posit that Mira was sort of mentally prepared for Tulti departing at the end of their visit (even if that void has hit her hard), but Baba’s near-total disappearance shortly after has been a shock of a different order. Why would he do that? He lives here, works from home, has always picked me up and taken me to most things.

  Abhay himself says that Mira exemplifies how energy is one measure of joy, and joy a fount of energy. Most days, most of the time, our daughter literally bounces, not just on the trampoline at our neighbour’s, but also on sofas, beds, the big orange exercise ball; she hardly ever walks from one room to another because, well, why wouldn’t you scamper instead? She arranges for herself a leaping circuit in the living room by pulling the easy chair and the footstool between the two sofas. She’s too heavy for me now, but she still loves her Baba to wrap her, and usually four soft toys alongside, in a duvet and transport her from room to room, pausing to do vertical ‘bundle boings’ (no trademark on that; feel free to borrow with your little ones) with this squealing, giggling, wriggling bundle on every bed and cushion.