This second point is more petty, I admit, and might only have been an oversight, but in the many anecdotes about their everyday life that he’d related in Wellington, Dada had left me with the clear impression that their sole family vehicle in Hazaribagh was his motorbike. When I arrived here, the very first thing I saw when the gate was opened, even before I noticed Moushumi’s unbelievable covered nursery of two hundred and fifty separate plants, was a good-looking, late-model burgundy Honda City sedan. And Dada even had a driver, Yakub (a Muslim, mind, another of his innumerable contradictions: I had a vision of Dada’s Muslim driver taking him regularly to visit his tantrik!), who took Moushumi places while he was at work, and picked Tulti and Paakhi up from school. But I’d never have learnt about this car — unimportant as it is — if I hadn’t visited Hazaribagh.
Is it entirely my unfair misconception that Dada selects, frames and edits what I see?
Writers have some experience of these things.
Lena
Fair to say our first Skype with Abhay in Hazaribagh didn’t go well.
His picture kept freezing, over half his sentences were cut off and, most of all, Mira refused throughout to talk to him. She wouldn’t come to the computer, and when I carried it over to where she was playing in the dining room, she screamed, ‘I don’t want to’ and ran off to her bedroom, which she knows is outside the wifi range.
Vaguely thinking of trying to make Abhay feel better, I told him that this bad mood pre-dated our call. Yesterday, when we hadn’t tried to Skype because he’d been travelling, Mandie — Mira’s carer on Tuesdays and Fridays when she didn’t go to crèche — had reported having to send her for a time-out in the hall, after she’d repeatedly shoved Noah, who was only two, or snatched things from him. Then she’d refused to answer when Mandie tried to speak to her. Today at crèche seemed to have gone better in that no one had any erratic behaviour to mention, but then Mira had apparently run off into the car park as soon as she was out the gate, despite Mum’s frightened warnings about incoming cars not being able to see her. In the past, she’d run along the grass verge at the far end plenty of times, but not once directly across the parking spaces. And again, she’d absolutely refused to answer when Mum tried to get her to repeat in the car what made running onto a road or a driveway or car park so dangerous. In fact, it had soured her mood towards her Nana for the rest of the afternoon, and when I’d arrived to pick her up, Mum had given up trying to engage with her or play something together. Mira was just watching one of her DVDs of Doc McStuffins with some blueberries, cheese, crackers and strawberries before her, and refused even to say goodbye to Nana or give her a hug when we left.
I did wonder how much of all that Abhay heard if his sound reception was as clipped and interrupted as ours. But he did say when I was finished, in grammatically dubious French, which presumably was to evade Moushumi’s ear, ‘Merci cherie, pour me faire plus coupable. J’avais besoin de ça. C’était la raison que j’appelait.’
Partly because it would be futile on such a poor connection, and also for the same reason — that Moushumi was nearby — I controlled my immediate anger at this charge. Not for a moment had I intended to make him feel guilty. Instead, to try and end the call on a light-hearted note, I remembered to tell him an interesting thing I’d learnt this morning when dropping Mira off at crèche. Apparently Dan, the Welsh-English dad of Mira’s recent friend Meg who’d arrived at the same time, had a Calcutta connection. Several generations of his family, right up until his own father’s childhood, had been based in Calcutta as part of its Jewish community that had come over from Baghdad at different times in the nineteenth century. Dan’s dad had moved to England with his parents shortly after 1947, as a very young boy.
Because the picture was frozen while I was talking, I wasn’t sure how much of that story Abhay had caught. When I asked, he remained silent a little longer, then said, ‘Dada dreamt he saw Dan living and working in Hazaribagh.’
Now I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
‘Dada came along for one of Mira’s drop-offs, which also happened to be one where Dan rather than Judith had come with Meg. He’s met several other parents from either Mandie’s or crèche. But out of all of these different people, and with absolutely no awareness of Dan’s Calcutta connection, because Dan has never mentioned it to me, Dada had a dream about him in India, living and working in a factory and eating in the market just like a local.’
I’m in fact giving you the pieced-together gist of what Abhay said. Including all the interruptions and gaps would be annoying. I replied, ‘And so?’
‘So, he felt that something about this white guy connected him to India. Don’t you see what an incredible coincidence that is?’ I guess in Abhay’s mind he thought he was complimenting Ashim, because it didn’t seem to concern him right then that Moushumi might be overhearing this.
We hung up shortly afterwards, following another futile effort to get Mira to at least say goodbye to her Baba. Despite great temptation, I decided not to take a needle for the moment to this absurd idea of Ashim’s clairvoyant powers (what if Dan had mentioned his Calcutta connection to Ashim while Abhay was inside settling Mira?), especially not in his wife’s hearing. She had greeted me warmly at the start of the call, when Abhay also told me with awe about her vast nursery, for which she employed two gardeners and had customers from all over Hazaribagh.
Just a little later though, while Mira ate her chicken noodle soup and toast at her table in the living room with a couple of episodes of Paw Patrol and I finished off some leftover vege lasagne seated on the sofa behind her, I felt a great, cold alarm, which seemed like a delayed reaction to that last, apparently trivial, part of the conversation. Of course the two of us were safe and Mira was right there in front of me, but suddenly I feared Ashim’s present hold over my husband.
In less than two months since his departure from New Zealand, and despite his most obvious plot against our family failing entirely to take off, Ashim had nevertheless managed to get Abhay to decide first to leave his own house and then to go over to Hazaribagh, a reaction Aranya’s disappearance itself had not evoked back in 2010. And now Abhay was there, on Ashim’s turf, succumbing to these ideas of his brother’s ‘special powers’. It all made him seem very vulnerable.
Was this how Ashim’s tantrik worked — by planting depth-charges in the weakest parts of the adversary’s psyche and simply standing back, waiting for them to crumble? I found just then that I could believe in this vision a lot more readily than in buried chicken bones that triggered headaches.
I also remembered several of the Crime Patrol plots that Abhay had frequently shared with me (the episodes are fashioned out of genuine cases from police files throughout India), as well as the stories that had struck, or shocked, him the most, which he would invite me to watch, pausing the action at several points to do a thorough job of keeping up with the translation from Hindi. Relatives who seemed much closer to begin with than Abhay and Ashim ever were turn out to have wreaked horrific things upon one another. In fact, back in June, a few weeks before we went to Calcutta for Chhotka’s wedding, Abhay had to go cold turkey on his addiction to the show for a fortnight and switch to watching Hrishikesh Mukherjee comedies instead, because he said the unrelenting landscape of misogyny, domestic tyranny, suffering and violence as depicted in story after story — and the overwhelming idea that these remarkable cruelties had all actually occurred — was affecting him to the absurd extent of not wanting to go home. ‘And why am I voluntarily taking my wife and three-year-old daughter into this hellhole of human misery?’ It had taken two weeks of watching Chupke Chupke, Naram Garam, a couple of Amol Palekar films as well as Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, to right the balance between that unflagging focus on the darkest aspects of Indian life (no matter how true) and everything else Abhay also knew his homeland to be about — lightness, comedy, nonsense and warmth.
And now was I letting Crime Patrol do the same thing to me — unfairly colour my
idea of my admittedly slippery brother-in-law?
But Abhay, answer me this: if you’d watched the first part of our story — that is, Ashim’s visit to us, with its many games — as an episode of Crime Patrol, would you be cool with the younger brother visiting such a Dada on his patch? No apprehensions whatsoever; honestly?
You want to hear an ironic confession? Back in December, after that holiday in Kaiteriteri — just as I do today — I had needed a close but uninvolved friend to talk to about Ashim. Someone who hadn’t met him and could hear out my account of the past fortnight and tell me if I was overstating my case.
You guessed it. I chose Tony, and that was the lunch Ashim, of all people, spied on. Of all the cafés in Wellington, he had to be walking past ours.
And now I’m slightly superstitious about calling Tony again, even though I probably need to hear another voice on this more than ever. Get a grip, Lena. The bad dream is back in Hazaribagh.
Thank God it’s only six more days until Abhay returns. I think we’re all losing it a bit, the little one neglecting her soup in front of me included. She’s missing her Baba more than she can say.
Incidentally, here’s her oft-expressed opinion of her father’s favourite show, which she has heard mention of, even though he only watches it after she’s in bed:
‘Paw Patrol is far better than Crime Patrol.’
Abhay
Given that I am only in Hazaribagh for four days, and after the drama of the first evening, the following morning and afternoon are weirdly tranquil. I feel everyone is behaving as though I have a lot more time in hand, and with nothing major to accomplish, and I too am contentedly going along with this appearance.
I guess it’s nice to pretend, even for a while, that I’m merely on a normal winter holiday at my brother’s.
After my Skype with Lena, Moushumi brings out a wonderful breakfast of freshly-made luchis and alur dom. Dada is of course at work, after having dropped off the girls. Yakub the driver has just arrived in case we want to go anywhere. He has a warm, immediately sympathetic face, and looks like he’d be about thirty. Moushumi treats him with evident respect and affection, asking about his wife Najma’s ear infection while I eat.
Apparently Yakub’s big project is to have two doors put into his house before this year’s rains. He was able to buy this large one-room place last year close to his brother’s house, but until now they’ve been making do with curtains. Besides the other dangers and risks (robbers, Maoists, snakes, my embarrassingly prejudiced mind throws out in quick succession), Hazaribagh nights are easily single digits right through the winter, and Yakub’s family of four have been making do with curtains! Moushumi says she gave them all thick blankets as part of their Puja gifts, and adds once Yakub has gone back outside that Ashim has set aside money for the doors as well. But he wants Yakub to save too, and put up the first ten thousand.
It’s late February: winter is nearly over. How could they have been aware of this need for doors and yet held off helping, as if saving money for Yakub was a matter of eating his greens before he was allowed dessert? If Ashim, for whatever reasons of wanting to play the kind but firm benefactor, had meant to be strict about the ten thousand, he could still have helped him back in October, and then taken the money in instalments from Yakub’s pay. That way, the doors would have been in place before the cold arrived.
Well, at least I know what I’m going to leave as my tip for Yakub. I make a note to ask Moushumi (in Dada’s absence) how her gardeners and Saraswati, her cook and housemaid who arrived just a while ago, are doing.
In Dada’s absence, because I feel I’m learning things I wouldn’t have otherwise. I doubt she would have talked so freely about Yakub’s doors with him around.
I like Moushumi enormously, even though this is the first chance we’ve had to properly talk (we’d only ever met in group settings in July). In her sharing, she seems the opposite of Dada, with no sense of an agenda or any dodgy ‘editing’. She tells me without a trace of boasting that she has made up to forty thousand rupees a month from her nursery, just from word-of-mouth publicity within Hazaribagh. She says Dada would like her to make a website, but she refuses, even though she uses the internet for other things.
‘And half of everything I put in a savings account for Jhappi and Paakhi, or for Didi, if she returns,’ Moushumi adds unexpectedly.
‘That’s incredibly good of you.’ I’m truly surprised, and wondering if this is her own initiative, or one more facet of my unfathomable brother.
‘No, it isn’t. It was all Didi’s idea, the nursery. She helped me with every part of it. I learnt from her for two whole years, and then she was gone. So her share still goes into the bank.’
Moushumi carries on, before I can reply, ‘but Praveenda doesn’t know. Don’t tell him, because, you know …’ And she makes a drinking gesture.
I have to process my reaction to her earlier revelation before I can take this next thing in — the extent of Praveen’s problem.
‘Moushumi, you look after Paakhi like your own daughter; you’re putting away money for their future, or for their mother, and meanwhile Ma and I, who are supposedly family, knew nothing about them or the three of you. That is what Dada came to New Zealand to point out, didn’t he? That’s why he was so eager to come, even though we couldn’t fly you over. He wanted me to discover all this.’
I absolutely can’t let her see me cry, because that would be so bizarre, and pathetic, on a first conversation. This is the kind of stomach this guy has for his family’s realities. No wonder he lives so fucking far away. So I look at my lap, then pick up my phone, which is charging on the coffee table beside me.
‘I don’t think so. I think he genuinely wanted to reconnect with you. He’s very happy you’re here. If he had known earlier, he would have been able to take this week off. He was telling me last night how sorry he is that you’re only here during the week.’
Which was of course part of my cunning plan, dear sister-in-law, don’t you know, because that’s how moronic I am. I’m the brother that sees the plot in everything, and none of the love.
There’s a light knock on the front door, and immediately Moushumi gets up to answer. She turns to me with a smile and says that only one person knocks like that, because they can’t reach the doorbell.
She opens the door and picks someone off the floor. It’s a girl in a red frock, whose name I soon learn is Aaliya. Aaliya is two-and-a-half and lives directly across the lane. Her ayah has dropped her off, because apparently Aaliya likes to spend much of each day here, with Moushumi Maasi and two adoring didis. She goes back and forth between the houses up to six or seven times each day.
Yes, Abhay, I’ll articulate what you’re thinking. It’s all a bit too good to be true, right? But if Ashim is good enough to arrange all this on a single day’s notice — the story about the nursery and keeping money aside for Didi, and now this adorable kid looking absolutely comfortable in Moushumi’s arms as she is taken into the kitchen for a couple of her favourite biscuits while trying to suss out the stranger on the sofa, just as comfortable as Paakhi had seemed this morning getting her things together for school and laying the breakfast table at this house — then why don’t you just relax your guard and consider a total change of approach? Think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and sit back and enjoy being part of the cast in an unbelievable performance, a reality show by a conductor of people who is moreover an artist — go on, say it — far greater than you’ll ever be.
If he’s fucking with your head, boss, he’s doing it in style!
It turns out to be a day that is mostly about children, at least for me, beginning with Paakhi and Tulti in the morning, when I felt odd about not taking part in their routines and just being able to sit with my coffee and watch. It was like being a key player of a team watching a rare game from the bench. I guess it reminded me this wasn’t my team.
I hardly got to see Mira during the Skype, but then Aaliya came, and after
eating her biscuits and simultaneously subjecting me to a long stare from a safe distance, she headed off confidently into Dada and Moushumi’s bedroom, and emerged a little later with a red, pink and orange cloth purse hanging from her shoulder. Moushumi told me it was Aaliya’s own purse in which she kept her treasures and collectibles. Aaliya proceeded to overturn it on the sofa right beside me, which might have been a first overture of friendship. I admired her hairclips, hairbands, bangles, sunglasses and a couple of expired pay-as-you-go phone recharge cards. In exchange for my compliments, she offered me one of them.
Moushumi asked what kind of sightseeing I planned to do during the day. Basically, aside from picking up Tulti and Paakhi from school at half-two, Yakub was available to drive me around wherever I wanted. I replied truthfully that I had had absolutely no such plans for this visit, and had come entirely to spend these few days with them and with Didi’s family. So I was looking forward to just being around the house, if that was all right, although Moushumi should carry on as usual with everything she needed to do, including outside in the nursery or errands elsewhere. But when could we expect to finally meet Jhappi and Praveen, because if possible I’d like to see them more than once?
‘Ashim sent them both messages last night, and then again this morning, asking if they were free to meet today. Jhappi replied today to tell us to keep Paakhi here, and he would come in the evening to pick her up and to meet you. Praveenda still hadn’t replied when Ashim left, but hopefully he’ll make time now that he knows you’re here.’
Aaliya followed Moushumi into the covered part of the garden, from where she soon returned home for the morning. She was back a couple of hours later to have a paratha at lunchtime. She allowed me to rip the hot paratha into pieces, and then polished these off without needing any TV whatsoever, dipping them in some raita, followed by six slices of cucumber from the salad plate. A role model for our Mira, who still has to be distracted at most mealtimes into eating adequately. It also amazed me, despite Aaliya being two years younger than Mira, how much longer she could remain on Moushumi’s lap apparently listening to our talk. Mira would have been yelling ‘Boring!’ within a minute of the kind of things we were chatting about, and would have directed us to either play with her, or else ‘talk about something that’s interesting for kids as well’.
The Man Who Would Not See Page 22
