A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

Shikha said, “Papa…”

  “Is he unwell?” This is how you build barriers against the truly bad.

  She spoke calmly, “Satya, you’ll have to tell her.” A pause. “Or do you want me to?”

  I said, “No, I will. But she’ll want to know what happened.”

  She said, “The gardener comes on Thursdays. He needed money. It was he who discovered the body by looking through a window. Heart attack.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t know how you will tell her this, but he had been dead two days. We can’t keep the body. We are going to cremate him this afternoon.”

  I said quietly, “You are going to have to tell her that right now. Let me wake her up.”

  When I went to the bed in the next room and touched Vaani’s shoulder, I felt her shudder. She was sobbing.

  During the days that followed, I wanted to be there for Vaani, supportive and sharing in her grief, but I sensed that she wanted to be alone. She mourned in silence. In a month, Thanksgiving came. Vaani said she didn’t want to go to dinner at anyone’s house or invite anyone to our home. More surprising, she said she wanted us to drive to Niagara Falls. I didn’t question or argue. We drove in the cold, past fields and frozen lakes, arriving there in the late evening. From the highway, we saw the lights ringed around the white frozen water and in the middle the cascading falls. Vaani wanted us to head straight for the motel where we had booked a room. Above the reception desk in the motel, there was a sign, niagara falls: the world’s top honeymoon destination. I nudged Vaani and pointed to the sign with my chin. She smiled a strained smile. That night during dinner at a nearby Applebee’s, she told me that when her father was a trainee in the air force, he was sent for three weeks to the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. She had wanted to feel a connection with him. I nodded my head. I was glad that we had come, but the revelation also caught me by surprise. It made me think that we don’t know everything there is to know about someone we love and are living with. Oddly, I thought of the plastic mask that our neighbor had worn a month earlier for Halloween. The mask’s features were immobile, the mouth slightly agape, and what was scary was that we couldn’t know whether that expression was one of wonder or pain or panic.

  Work had always absorbed Vaani. She plunged back into her regular routine. Home, lab, library, home. She walked to the grocery store some afternoons to get the provisions we needed at home. One evening she returned home looking shaken. She had seen someone who, from the back, looked just like her father. He was holding the hand of a child, clearly a grandchild. Vaani had followed the two as they walked away from her. Then she speeded up to get a good look at the man. He had her father’s erect back and sense of style. She heard him speak a few words to the child. The language sounded like Arabic. I got up from the chair I was sitting in. I wanted to comfort her. She let me hold her and with her face near my ear she said, “Let’s make a baby.” So, from that sorrow also came, a little less than a year later, our daughter. And yet, a different thought also took hold of me and I’ve never let go of it. As long as Vaani’s father was living, I had thought my relative youth would save me. I was going to win. But now I lost hope. I could never win against a ghost.

  * * *

  —

  I WROTE THESE words at an eerie hour, near two in the morning. Outside, it is quiet, no lights on around the villa, only the reflection of a single bulb blinking in the water, on a pier at the far edge of the dark expanse of the lake. In writing about Vaani, I have conjured her ghost. Earlier in the day she had written to tell me that I should stay and work. If everyone followed safety protocols at the villa, I would be okay. Her reasoning was simple: the maximum chance of exposure to contagion would happen if I took the train and then the transatlantic flight back to America. If everyone sheltered in place and washed hands regularly, we would all be safe. She wrote that she would remain in the apartment in Cambridge with Piya. Outside over the lake’s dark waters, the wind carries Vaani’s voice. She is saying, over and over, “Don’t panic, stay calm.”

  When she was in India and then when she was new in the United States, Vaani claimed to have read my reportage in newspapers. But, over the years, I have found that she has time only for her research. I quite admire her sense of focus. There is nothing in our daily life that she doesn’t address as a scientific problem or a puzzle. For instance, when Vaani and I walked on the streets near our home in the summer evenings, a shout or a howl often came from a passing car. Sometimes a honk, followed by laughter. Especially after Trump’s election, I found myself flinching. I had my theories. But Vaani wasn’t prepared to condemn Americans. She said that research shows that humans everywhere are trained by evolution to trust people who look like themselves and distrust those who are different.

  She obviously hadn’t read the Psychologist-in-Chief Barack Obama, who, speaking to the press at the White House after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, didn’t think this was a universal phenomenon. Trayvon Martin was a teenager armed with a bottle of Arizona fruit juice and a bag of Skittles. Obama told the press: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” He said that there were very few Black men in this country who hadn’t had the experience of being followed around in department stores. That includes me, he had added. And that there were very few Black men who hadn’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of the cars they passed. He said that was what usually happened to him. Or getting into an elevator and seeing a woman clutch her purse nervously and hold her breath till she had the chance to get off. Check, check, check.

  When I mentioned this, briefly, while trying to match her pace during that one particular evening, Vaani said research has shown that conservatives have larger fear centers in their brains than liberals. Therefore, they are more concerned with physical safety than liberals. In fact, the psychologist whose work demonstrated this had found the truth of his research in his own life. After his daughter was born, he felt his neighborhood was growing so dangerous that his family had to move. This is because when people become parents of a tiny, vulnerable baby, they begin to believe that their local crime rate is going up, even if it is falling. Evolution has shaped us to behave in this way.

  Vaani’s point about evolution drew me onto another path of thought.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I believe that evolution has primed males to see a beautiful woman like you and loudly signal their mating calls?”

  She barely smiled and continued with that walk of hers that said, as it always did, I’m free and I take delight in my body and its movements. Vaani’s swift, swinging gait took her away from me, six or ten steps if I wasn’t paying attention. I watched her as I followed her, slightly out of breath, and, without wishing to draw attention to myself too much, made small animal noises just loud enough for her to hear. She didn’t respond.

  The female of the species will keep her distance from the male she doesn’t fully trust. Or whom she trusts but wants to convey annoyance or impatience to. Any mistrust she has is heightened in public, where she is exposed to the gaze of others, including other suitors for her attention. She will not easily give herself away. Poor behavior on the part of the male is ignored because evolution has trained her to—is husband the word we want?—husband her meager resources in the wild. On occasion, in the face of comical behavior on the part of the male, she will burst into loud laughter, which both surprises and pleases her partner.

  * * *

  —

  HAS EVOLUTION ALSO trained us to be a couple? I don’t know. I’m asking this because the other side of the question about the boot in the face is the question of someone’s lips on yours. As I try to calibrate the details in our past that made it possible for us to fall in love, I wonder also about a line I read in a book: “The hal
f-life of love is forever.” What is the story those next few years will tell? The truth is that years earlier, when Vaani’s divorce came through, I felt that the question of our future had been settled. I gave up the idea of returning to India and applied for a job teaching writing and journalism. My first appointment was at a community college in Rockville, Maryland; my employers sought an H-1B visa for me. Overnight, I discovered a new professional identity as a postcolonial scholar; this new identity was my real passport to America. I was suddenly reading and teaching Jamaica Kincaid, Tayeb Salih, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V. S. Naipaul, Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Arundhati Roy. Vaani continued with her doctoral work on gendered behavior among the rhesus macaques. She was studying the behavior of the alpha males and the hierarchy they imposed. The alpha male would snatch the food it wanted and it also got sex on demand. The passive male that had been courting a female would move away at the approach of the alpha male. And the young monkeys arranged their behavior and picked up cues. What interested Vaani most of all was the question why in such a brutal environment there wasn’t more violence. I joked that it was because monkeys didn’t have access to guns, but Vaani’s inquiry was a serious one: How did power articulate itself through a complex and even subtle language? When I asked her about it, Vaani clarified that, though she was investigating power, the idea of language was central to animal life. Language was the complicated web through which any society communicated and exerted control. The monkeys, she was saying to me, were as sophisticated in their response to symbols and signs as the students I was teaching in my classes.

  Re: language. Vaani does not use emojis. Actually, she doesn’t even like to use her phone and often doesn’t respond to my messages until days have passed. (“Can you get milk?” I ask on a Tuesday. On Saturday, I hear back. “When did you send this message?”) But then, one day, after I sent her a poem about a hedgehog—a poem by Philip Larkin, possessed of a trademark acid wit but, in it, suddenly tender about the animal he had accidentally killed with his lawn mower—Vaani responded with an emoji. No words, just an emoji that I hadn’t seen before, a tiny hedgehog, looking whole and unharmed. Hitherto, she had only used fully formed sentences in her texts, spell-checked, with proper punctuation and words like hitherto. What could have occasioned this turn from a grammarian to a vulgarian?

  “Emojis?” I texted.

  “See email,” she responded.

  And I found, waiting in my in-box, courtesy of the British Psychological Society, this piece of edifying, if also unsatisfying, information:

  There is growing evidence about the way emoji are affording emotion and sentiment detection within textual discourse.

  Researchers within the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) often use computational models to study social media content containing emoji. These models are becoming increasingly accurate at learning representations of emotion in such content, and it seems that emoji are facilitating this capacity (Felbo, Mislove, Søgaard, Rahwan & Lehmann, 2017; Sari, Ratnasari, Mutrofin & Arifin, 2014).

  Similarly, emotional hashtags (#) have been found to successfully map onto emotional categories within Twitter content (Mohammad, 2012), and research moving beyond computation models into human inference shows similar findings. Namely that even non-facial emoji play a role in communicating emotion and can disambiguate text messages (Riordan, 2017). Etc.

  I find such language confounding. It is without love—there is no passion, no poetry. I confess that I have more than once, even it seems in the pages of this novel, mocked Vaani’s academic language. The coded speech of the psychology professor. You might ask: Has anything given me pause? Yes! Have I learned anything? Yes! I have learned that it’s not that one language reveals and another language hides; instead, what happens is that someone’s truth, the searing pain of experience, bursts through, can burst through, any tear in conventional language. Here’s an example. Piya must have been six or seven then. I had picked her up from school and was sitting in our living room making her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why the living room instead of the kitchen, where I asked her to sit down and wait for me? I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the TV, that’s why. Senator Patrick Leahy asked the woman who was testifying about her strongest memory of the sexual assault on her by the Supreme Court nominee. The serious, bespectacled woman who was being asked this question—also a psychology professor, as it happens—was trying to smile instead of crying. She said, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter…” I believed her and that night I wrote a letter of support that I sent to her university address. But at that moment when she was speaking on television, I was trying to hide my tears from my daughter. I wanted to drop the knife and go running out of the door, running down a long street that would take me back to when Vaani was also only fifteen. A morning in March. She had long hair then. The festival of Holi fell on that day. Celebrations were being held all over the country. Her mother was dead and her father had taken the two girls to a relative’s house in Roorkee. Why did they even go there? Because it was close by? Two hours on the road the night before Holi. Vaani had an older cousin, she was in that house with her husband. This husband, an electrical engineer, rubbed red and green color into Vaani’s hair. Everyone was laughing. Not Vaani. Then the cousin’s husband, tall and with a thin sword-shaped mustache, put color on her face. Vaani struggled and turned her face away. Now her face was hidden and only inches from the wall. The man pushed two of his fingers in Vaani’s mouth so that she feared she was going to choke. When she freed herself and turned toward the people in the room, fighting to hold back her tears and her rage, someone said, “Oh, these English-medium girls, they haven’t played Holi before.”

  * * *

  —

  TWO SUMMERS AGO, Koko, the gorilla, died in California. She had been taught sign language by the developmental psychologist Penny Patterson, who had met Koko in the San Francisco Zoo when the gorilla was a year old. By the time the much-loved gorilla died, she was forty-six. I read somewhere that Koko had in her repertoire more than 1,100 signs. She could make signs for food or drink as well as emotions like sad or love or good or sorry. And more complex constructions, like stupid dirty toilet. When I read about Koko, I sent a link to Vaani thinking the story might be useful for her work. But Vaani wasn’t very impressed. She said that she wasn’t thinking of humans teaching animals. Her focus was on the magic of language in nature. Adult male canaries, she said, learn a new song every year in order to attract mates. We were in the kitchen when she tossed off this observation, but I hurried to my study to write this down in my notebook.

  Each year, I promised to myself, I would fashion a new song for Vaani.

  I wander in the forest of humanity, listening to the sounds released from more than a billion throats.

  This song is for Vaani.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER BEV’S DEPARTURE, six more fellows left the villa, including Nikki, who flew back to Newark from Milan Malpensa. I was tempted to join Nikki on that flight, and return home to my family, but Vaani was adamant. “It is clear that flights are the vectors of contagion,” et cetera. We were in the third week of February now. There were sixteen cases of patients suffering from the virus in nearby Lombardy, and then, with a speed that seemed astonishing, by the end of the month there were fifty-four new cases. Did I find myself seized at times by fear and panic? I did. Meanwhile, Trump had visited India and there were riots in Delhi with Muslim homes and businesses razed to the ground while police watched. Bigotry was an old virus that had killed more people than whatever was new on the horizon. Neither Trump nor Modi said anything about the impending crisis even though scientists were certain that the disease was going to explode in the coming weeks. In fact, after his return to the United States, as the days passed, Trump had downplayed the threat of the virus. He tweeted that the virus was under control in the United States and that t
he stock market was looking good to him. On February 26, Vaani called me after watching a press conference where Trump announced he had asked Vice President Pence to lead the Coronavirus Task Force. Vaani was in a rage. She said that the country already had fifty-seven confirmed cases of virus-affected, but Trump had glibly said at the press conference that “we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people, and we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time.” She said the virus must already be in the bodies of thousands and the symptoms would appear in two weeks. For my part, I found myself unable to write the fictions I had been writing so far about my past. It was likely that I would leave the villa too, although it was by no means certain. Till the uncertainty ended, I was going to devote myself to the task of scouring my journals and compiling for Vaani a writer’s report on news.

  I had two insect bites on my left leg that had first turned red and then yellow, but I didn’t go down to the town to buy a tube of ointment. Instead, I asked one of the waitstaff to buy me cigarettes. Although I didn’t tell Vaani this, I felt I needed to start smoking again. When I gave a few euros to a youth named Armando, and mimicked smoking, he showed he understood me by saying Marlboro, Marlboro. No, no, I said, I wanted to smoke whatever our friend Anna Duranti had smoked while she was still at the villa. Armando, who noticed everything and was attentive about everything, nodded. And, from that day on, this was the new me. Smoking Chiaravalle cigarettes, drinking coffee, and, with a mixture of anxiety and denial, making notes about the news. The reports about the virus were often based on hearsay. This showed that the popular imagination had remained a mix of pedestrian curiosity and familiar prejudice even in the midst of a pandemic. In a world of suddenly greater insecurity, this might be oddly reassuring, even if not pleasing, because it offered proof of continuity. For instance, on the morning I left the villa, March 6, these were the top searches at Snopes.com on the subject of the coronavirus: