Fog, a Novel

by Rana Bose

  From the crack between the curtains as the sun came up, I saw Feng squatting on the green lawn while a Star of David flopped on his chest. Mr. Berger had given it to Feng when he went back to the United States. Feng married an Indian woman, Radha, in the early fifties, and they had two children.

  I did say hello to Feng and we became friends. He spoke in short sentences and lifted his chin to make a point. One day, in the early afternoon, I asked him to have lunch with me. I sat with him at a Punjabi restaurant on the main road in Gariahat, Calcutta, and he told me his story between sips of chai and pieces of pakora.

  “My boss make silk scarves. He hired me as his driver. Big business. I take him everywhere. When my eyes go bad, he say that I become a gardener and stay in his building. I say okay.” He said this and then raised his chin, making sure it was clear.

  “And your wife? Radha?“ I asked with hesitation.

  “Oh, she leave me. She take my daughter with her. I don’t know where they are.”

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked out the window. A garishly coloured tramcar, with dents and scratches, rattled by with folks holding onto it precariously. “But Gary is in Canada. He send money every few months. He good boy. He do some college. And then he leave for Canada. He say I must come. I say what for? I am happy; I cut the grass, best lawn in Calcutta on the rooftop.”

  He smiled and I saw that he had gold fillings on his side teeth. “How come the grass is so green?” I asked with genuine interest.

  “Chlorophyll,” he pronounced it very clearly and stopped, his blue eyes waiting for me to understand.

  “Yes, I know grass has chlorophyll which absorbs blue and red light and bounces back green light, but what do you do to make the grass have so much chlorophyll?” I wanted him to speak to me. I wanted to tell Gary something insightful about his father and what he did. But mostly, I thought about RK and the connections he had that slowly unravelled on this trip.

  He said, “Oh! Nothing! Just put down some cow dung . . . aged. And lots of water . . . in the evening mainly. Yes.” He smiled a little.

  “What do you want me to tell Gary?” I asked after a long silence.

  “The grass is green! He can come and see it sometime, maybe?” His watery blue eyes stared at the street behind us. An arrow had burrowed its way through my chest and exited soundlessly past my vertebral column only to flop down on the Main. Another rickety tramcar roared by with passengers clinging to it.

  Gary had given me some light cotton shirts to give to his father and also a panama hat and a large jar of multivitamins. Feng examined everything very carefully and said, “Say thank you to him.”

  On my last day in Calcutta, Feng had two packages for me. He told me they were a special gift for Gary. He opened the first and showed me a blade of grass that he had had plasticized and mounted on a piece of sky blue cardboard with clouds painted on it, around which he had glued small strands of gold and red silk as if they were flying through the sky. The whole thing had then been framed in glass.

  He didn’t open the second package. He simply told me to give it to Gary. He bowed to me gently and stepped back. I bowed to him. I looked up at the wrought-iron rails for one last time and left for the airport. In the plane, my thoughts criss-crossed the cumulous clouds.

  I had lived a life between RK and Nat. RK was always an insider. He read, studied, thought, and remarked. He gave direction. Nat lived on the outside. He sensed, but did not discuss much. Now, although I missed all that, I was also past that. Here I was following a trail set by RK and Nat. Taking a break from what was to follow. Everything they had done or said triggered connected emotions. Egged you on. The crowd in you manifested in so many ways. The pasting of Mathieu was just the start to the tangle with the headquarters. Now followed the sojourn to find the friend who had left the playing fields, because those fields did not fit him well any longer.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nomad

  I trundled off the mini-bus somewhere just north of Arghandab district, northwest of Kandahar City. My backpack, though light, was unwieldy. I was not carrying many items in it and those I had kept shifting.

  Heavy vehicles swerved and careened along unpaved roadways. Helicopters thundered above, chopping the air and disappearing over hills towards mountains. The dull thump of occasional mortars resonated in the distance. My sojourn had begun, a hard journey following more than a year of recuperation. I was on an uncertain path after my abrupt departure from the fragile faces that were sad to see me leave.

  A strange feeling, walking on a road covered with flying debris, red dust, and reddish-brown pebbles, not along the carefully sculpted, brass-plate-inserted, block-by-block address-providing, cemented, pristine sidewalks I was used to. As the ground below my feet rumbled, I gazed up. The sky in Afghanistan wasn’t the same, either: it was spectacularly clear above me.

  I had come to spread his ashes. And I had come to meet him.

  I continued forward, bewildered by the glare of the sun and thinking about the more recent jottings in my diary. “When would I again hear the sound of Myra’s clicking heels on the pavement along the Main as she strode towards me in her large sunglasses? Would I ever? Would I smell again her warm sweaty fragrance, a combination of some pleasant hormonal release and the gentle trace of last night’s perfume? Would I ever grab her and lift her high?”

  My legs wobbled. My limbs felt both uninhibited and uninhabited, with neither discipline nor vigour. The repairs done to my shins had given them a life of their own. Sometimes my right leg kicked out without having asked permission to do so. I felt a systemic decay throughout my body: in my toes, between them, behind my ears, in my groin, in my knees. My face still felt partially entombed, the skin of my jaw raw and stretched as if nylon threads held it together.

  Myra used to wash my chest, back, and arms with warm water and isopropyl alcohol to provide temporary relief. Then she’d put unscented cream around my elbows and heels, which were dry and cracked. She finished with warm socks on my feet, which the nurses appreciated. She had helped recover my body as much as it had been recovered, and had done it slowly and meticulously. I had never known she could be so patient, or so determined.

  For months after surgery—with the help of antibiotics, analgesics, and the sub-conscious drifting in and out of disjointed words and phrases that repeated themselves inside my mind—I slowly pulled myself together into a new entity capable of humming tunes that hadn’t previously existed.

  But while I carried the past with me, I was no longer the same person. In the middle of the night I’d wake up to hear the sounds of a bewildering set of people about my bed. Their hazy forms floated, mumbled, whispered to each other: words of concern, of despair, of warning. I distinctly remember being visited by two dark shadows in the room ready to strike me and kick me when down; I saw again the glow in the doorway behind Mrs. Meeropol as I lay down on her living room sofa; I suffered the grimaces of the gargoyles on the rooftops of Boulevard St-Laurent as icy water dripped from their nostrils; I again saw the freeze frame of Nat leaning against a lamppost, cigarette hanging loose from the side of his mouth, a few days after his dad passed away. I was again visited by Myra entering the café with the runs in her stockings spreading geographically, furiously chewing gum, reporting on recent sightings with the energy of a leaping impala. Then she transformed into the brooding Malia, the dark dancer with lips on fire who wrapped herself around me.

  Before RK departed he had written a note for me. He suggested, very politely, that I visit Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata, and take a walk along the Strand beside the River Hooghly. I’d eventually reach the man-o-war jetty, where I’d most probably find a boat at anchor. I should ask the boatmen to take me some distance into the river and then quietly release his ashes into the river when no one was watching.

  So I had to go, not for my father, but to be with RK in his own world. It
was not a religious ritual, just an appropriate return waiting to be accomplished.

  I had slowly opened the lid of the ceramic urn and emptied the ashes into the Hooghly, the boatman urging me to lean far over so the ashes wouldn’t drift back towards me. I did so. I watched as the remains of a PhD candidate from Montreal found their way into a muscular swirl of the muddied Hooghly and then drifted away in a twisting torrent of palm twigs and tears. Looking to the distance I saw the foggy outline of the majestic second Hooghly Bridge claw the sky.

  After I finished in India, I took a plane from New Delhi to Kabul and then on to Kandahar by bus. That bus trip was advised by a well-meaning idiot in Delhi who had thought it would be more pleasant than another flight. So, when the extremely well-mannered and kind bus driver swerved precariously around one poorly repaired bomb crater only to descend into another, this happening all along the 482-kilometre stretch, my eyes closed in agony as my tibia rose to butt against my patella while the meniscal cartilages desperately tried to shoulder the responsibility of the bus’s missing shock absorbers. I yelled whatever came naturally. My frequent tabernacs, however, had no effect, falling as they did on deaf ears.

  At Qarah Bach, halfway through, I got off the bus and lay down on the ground in absolute agony. I even lifted my jeans to show the bus driver the deep scars on my knees and ankles. I also pointed out the lateral gashes that swept around my shin bones where the fire escape steps had interrupted the descent. The kind bus driver nodded, convinced I had lived the experience of being blown up by an IED. I tried to make him understand that there were no IEDs happening in Canada, not as yet, and that I had fallen down some stairs and was saved by snow. He smiled compassionately and said “Oh! Ya! Snow! Good! Good!”

  Perhaps he believed in my story, perhaps he was convinced I was a lunatic, in any case after we climbed back on the bus he cleared a space between the two wheel wells and arranged for me to sit there. A Dutch reporter who had earlier grabbed the spot felt he was being unfairly treated and went to the back complaining.

  I again looked up. There were no birds in the sky, just the icy trails of fighter jets criss-crossing in the northern sky. The hills were bare and rocky. The dull thumps could still be heard. Who would spot me? How would they know who I was looking for? Why would they bother to meet me?

  Nat had been incommunicado for months and Mrs. Meeropol had slowly shrunk into a tentative old lady. Ava’s glow was gone. I found it difficult to look at her as she gazed at me with her head tilted to the side, asking in silence an unanswerable question. When she finally received an email with the recent details of his whereabouts she almost broke down. He had told her that he was no longer working for the company that had hired him to run security operations for Canadian NGOs.

  “Then why is he still there?” she exclaimed, pleading. “What is he doing there? Why isn’t he coming back?”

  I decided then to tell Mrs. Meeropol that I was going to Calcutta to deliver RK’s ashes and would return via Afghanistan. She had looked up, smiled, and hugged me lightly. She clearly thought that was the right thing to do. She looked into my eyes and once again I realized that there is something about her and people like her that profoundly moves me. They don’t have their noses to the ground sniffing for opportunities; rather, like RK, they breathe the air for fresh scents of hope. She and RK were similar in this way, they not only remembered, they respected.

  I didn’t bother to tell her that Kandahar was far from Kolkata, that between India and Afghanistan lay Pakistan, that between the Ganges and the Amu Darya and the Arghandab rivers lay ranges, deserts, plains, mountains, caves, towns, villages, sandstorms, hostile tribals, insane fanatics, and reckless invading soldiers. Kandahar was not a simple ride away. But I was deeply involved in her and her son’s lives, and no matter what, he was my buddy.

  I sent a return message giving him my date of arrival and asking where to meet. He eventually sent back one very short sentence. I was to find the bus station, not wander far, have tea if I wanted, and wait.

  Simple.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ten Paces Ahead

  It wasn’t easy to wait calmly. No one but the merchants stood around long. Everyone else kept moving. Heads covered by shawls. The tension was palpable, with the repeated IED blasts that happened in the area.

  I was wearing a worn pair of jeans, a dark shirt that hung low over them, an old imitation DKNY jacket and a brown shawl around my neck like a scarf. As I looked up I saw columns of buildings, sometimes three stories high that had been sliced down like a multi-layered cake, nothing remaining except sheer walls with exposed bricks and the remnants of door frames and windows. There were piles of bricks around the feet of these sheared buildings. There were walls around some of them, but they, too, were in various stages of collapse. It didn’t reassure me that American soldiers assigned to Company A, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, wearing full regalia—sand camouflage uniforms, robot headgear, chest plates, radio mikes, and dark shades—walked around single file pointing their outsized assault guns at everyone’s knees.

  A man was selling green and yellow vegetables, which, from the distance, I took to be squash. Beside him stood another man wearing a brick-coloured caftan with a black jerkin over it and a dark brown turban on his head. He looked from side to side, but never at me. Behind him a white minivan had sunk into the ground, tire-less, bullet riddled, and with all the windows gone. I heard radio chatter coming from an Indian-made Mahindra jeep parked nearby. I also heard an ominous drum being thumped in the distance.

  Pashtun men walked by, speaking quietly, their dusty faces barely visible behind their shawls. Where I was standing there were no women in sight. The boys walking with them were quiet and, like the men, wore no socks.

  A delegation of Canadian families arrived and gathered under a grey sand tent. I imagined they had come for “final closure,” a program introduced by the Canadian government to allow families of killed soldiers to visit the land where their loved ones had perished. It was, I thought, a feeble yet brave exercise, and I wondered if any other nation had undertaken the same. But there are ways in which the death of one’s young can be made acceptable, and perhaps this was one of them. I walked to another section of the bus terminal, which seemed sufficiently large to function as a kind of town centre.

  It started to drizzle. The rain didn’t bother anyone. No one, nor did I, try to take shelter under the many tent-like stalls. There were women visible here, almost all of them in pale blue burqas. I also saw, sitting under a tent awning, two extraordinarily pretty young girls in their teens with brilliant smiles that revealed their gums. They wore chadors on their heads and giggled. There was a dusty tone to their skin and I imagined the enormous mix of ethnicities that might be racing through their veins. Their roots could be Greek, Jewish-Aramaic, Babylonian, Syrian, Persian, Uzbek, Mongol or, of course, Pashtun; just some of the people who had once upon a time set foot in Afghanistan to never leave. In fact the very name of Kandahar was said to be a derivative of Alexander, which in Pashto was pronounced Iskandar. All these races had mingled in this land—some long before the birth of Christ. In fact, the Pashtuns themselves could very well have started out as a mix of Jewish and Persian tribes.

  I was looking for Nat, the Canadian, from Montreal. I returned to the tea stall where I had first stood. I finally decided my knees needed the rest and I walked into the tent. I sat on a bench and a young boy immediately handed me a milky mug of tea with buttery froth floating on top. I sipped it carefully and enjoyed it, feeling its thick warmth spread through my body. It tasted like goat’s milk.

  The few dark eyes peering from the deeper recesses of the tent were staring at me. I looked at the ground with a simultaneous sense of wariness and reflection. Myra drifted by in my mind and I immediately straightened my back and thought of her eyes, the warmth of her hugs, and again heard her voice. Chuck, you won’t do anything silly, right
? Chuck, if you don’t find Nat now there’ll be another time. I’m not stopping you, but think of what we have here. It’s not finished yet, Chuck, so don’t walk away from me. You have to come back, you know that, don’t you baby?

  Outside the tent an all-terrain vehicle kicked up dust and roared away, crates of oranges visible on the back. Had some local managed to find supplies meant for the GIs and was transporting it home however he could? Who knows the values of the supplies that never made it to their intended destination, whether it be oranges, grapes, or grenades?

  When the dust settled, I saw the tall Pashtun man who had been standing next to the squash seller come toward the tea stall. On the other side of the street I saw another tall person standing against the shadow of an isolated pillar. She had a shawl wrapped around her head, covering most of her face. I could only see her very sharp aquiline nose. She watched the first man crossing the street. I held my breath for a few seconds, knowing something was about to happen. He came straight towards me, bent his tall body so he could get into the tent and said “please,” pointing outside with an open palm.

  I immediately put down my mug of tea, left some money on the wooden table, and followed him. The woman had already started walking and was about fifty paces ahead of us. There was no conversation for the next two hours as I walked quickly behind the two of them. We walked the length of several streets, then emerged behind a grouping of houses, followed several dustier alleyways before passing a soccer field and, finally, walking through an open field with pebbles, rocks, and clumps of underbrush growing at irregular intervals.