Low

by Jeet Thayil

  “I can’t help where I was born,” said Payal, putting down her glass with a heavy thud. “I can’t help my last name or my circumstances. But I know whom to trust.”

  Dominic Ullis at the head of the table – there and not there, distracted, listening to one woman’s voice and hearing another’s – took a deep mouthful of wine that brought back the nod: the conversation receded to a blessed distance.

  It was midwinter. He was on his way to Pennsylvania on assignment for the newspaper. She wore a faux fur coat and a wide hand-knitted scarf. Her sunglasses were tortoiseshell black ovals that covered half her face. She was all lips and tousled hair. She’d insisted on coming to see him off. She had nothing better to do, she said, and she was always a sucker for goodbyes. They burrowed into the deep leather armchairs near the lost and found office under Grand Central. Before he boarded the train, she gave him a gift-wrapped postcard and hugged him as if they’d never meet again. On the train he held up the card: the words IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN? in black capitals against a plain white background. It was her way of saying yes to his proposal of marriage made some days earlier. He had fallen asleep with the postcard on his chest, and woken with the sensation that the words had burned into his skin and burrowed inside his brain.

  Unwisely, he took another sip of wine. He got up quickly and rushed down the stairs to the toilet and vomited again. Which called for another line. When he came out, he noticed he’d left the bedroom door open and Mr Paul the oracular African Grey was nowhere to be seen.

  He paused at the bottom of the stairs. Tiredness had set up camp in his joints, all the tiredness in the world gathered inside his bones and skull. He counted the steps as he climbed, twelve from the bedroom up to the living room, a dozen ascending obstacles. There was no sign of the parrot anywhere. In the courtyard the guests had abandoned dinner. Payal stood by the bar smoking, deep in conversation with Petronella and Obi. It seemed that Brinda and Niranjan were preparing to leave. It was clear the argument about the tallest statue in the world had not been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.

  “Time for us to go, I’m sorry to say,” said Brinda, who didn’t look sorry at all.

  “We must go or we’ll miss last speedboat,” said Niranjan.

  Ullis said, “Back to Bombay?”

  “Yes, yes. We can give you a lift, if you’d like?”

  He hesitated only for a moment. “I don’t see why not,” he said.

  “Do come,” said Brinda.

  “Yes,” said Ninja, after the most minuscule of pauses, “you are welcome to join. Please come.”

  It took him only a few minutes to take his leave of Payal, who said a driver would take them to Mandwa jetty. She told him to feel free to drop in and see her any time he pleased.

  “Thank you for everything and especially for the slippers,” he said, pointing at the rubber flip-flops on his feet. He was oddly reluctant to say goodbye to her.

  “Such a pleasure, dear boy,” she said, lowering her voice. “Do come and see me again. After all, we’re blood brothers now, aren’t we, darling? Aren’t we siblings of the sibilance?” She tapped her nose meaningfully.

  Brinda waved goodbye, but Niranjan did not even glance in Payal’s direction as he walked smartly out of the courtyard towards the driveway. As the Range Rover set off for the jetty, a figure came running alongside. Yadav was at the window, panting gently. He handed Ullis his backpack with its precious white box.

  “Thank you,” he said to Yadav. “Awfully sorry to make you run.”

  “So thoughtful,” said Brinda, echoing Petronella with a slight edge to her voice. “I can hardly believe it.”

  Ullis thought he saw a flash of African Grey in the trees as the car pulled away. He hoped it was Mr Paul fending for himself in the wilds of Alibag, free at last to come and go as he pleased, learning new words for the old world, learning to forget the preparations for death. For a moment his nausea lifted and he thought of his dead wife’s spirit winging with delight, like a freed bird, across the orchards and into the sky.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  What does it mean to be at sea, to be off-line, untethered to the earth, bounded on all sides by deep water? You give yourself to sky that is the colour of water and water the colour of sky. You let the tide guide you to a place of odd mercy. For Dominic Ullis, the sensation of being at sea led not to confusion but to clarity – and to a funeral.

  They cleared the driveway of Payal’s bungalow and gained a narrow tree-lined road on which moonlight fell in leaf-shaped shards. Niranjan disliked being in Payal’s SUV, driven by Payal’s driver, but he would bear his animus in silence. He and his wife had left their car at home and taken a speedboat to Alibag because they did not want to go the long way round from South Bombay. He’d looked forward to an evening away from politics and politicians, a light dinner, local seafood, some whisky and conversation and a fresh sea breeze. Instead there was poached and seared this and that, soulless chef’s fare served in a pit of cobras, with Payal as chief cobra, the most dangerous nagin of them all. And now they were stuck with the man in the black suit, one more self-hating Englishwallah, like all of Payal’s friends – snobs and scoundrels who pretended not to know their own language and hoped never to be caught speaking Hindi or Marathi or Tamil. Westernised liberal elitists were the true enemy of the nation, on a par with Pakistanis and terrorists. He went out of his way to have no interaction with the type, but the black suit fellow had begged to come with them. What to do but bear it too? Though this would not be borne in silence.

  “Payal mentioned you recently became widower,” said Niranjan, comfortably splayed in the back seat. “My condolences.”

  It was the kind of word you never expected to hear, widower. It was the kind of word you never thought would apply to yourself. It reminded Ullis of a photo feature he had seen, a black-and-white magazine supplement about the widows of Varanasi, women of all ages from all over the country, their personalities obliterated by the Indian woman’s bereavement uniform of white sari, no bindi, no jewellery, no colour. The dazed faces said it all, how it felt to be the defunct wife, the embodiment of regret and renunciation and the worst bad luck. What about the widowers? Did they too wear white for the rest of their lives, taking to mourning as if to a new job? They did not. They’d invented the system, old men with dying on their minds, who wanted to ensure their wives remained enslaved even after they were gone. But who was Ullis to complain about Indian funerary practices? He could hear them now: What kind of widower is he, out and about in his black suit? Doesn’t he care that the Indian colour of mourning is white? And what kind of name is Dominic Ullis? Sounds Greek to me.

  “Yaar,” said Brinda tiredly, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Is that the Indian yaar or the American yeah?” said Niranjan unexpectedly.

  Ullis kept his eyes on the road, glad to be sitting in front, grateful for the unbroken silence that ensued. He hoped it would last all the way to the waterfront and he wouldn’t have to console people he did not know. He kept his eyes on the road and his feet squarely on the ground. He watched for signs and portents, tremors in the trees, a rent in the salt air. He listened for the hum of disturbance.

  They passed a small market village, a collection of ramshackle storefronts and sleeping dogs and a battered red postbox. New concrete in wet squares took up most of the road and the driver had to slow the car to a crawl. They passed a sign that named the village as Chondhi. Then they were back on the road turned now into a strip of black silver in the moonlight.

  “Hurry, or we’ll miss it,” said Brinda when the Range Rover stopped at Mandwa jetty.

  She was first out of the car, walking fast in her city heels, Niranjan following, running now and then to catch up. Ullis grabbed his backpack and joined them in the long dash to the end of the pier, past speedboats and ferries and small vessels battened down for the night. The jetty, newly built by a clothing company, ran parallel to the skeleton of an older jetty whose antique con
crete pilings sat stolidly in the water. In the dull light of the moon everything was shadow and pity. At the jetty’s end they saw a sign, Juggie’s Marine Service, and came to a boat that had not been built for speed. There was a bench along the back and no life preservers. A man sat on deck watching a video on his cell phone, his face white in the light of the screen. He got up to greet them as they climbed aboard one by one, careful not to lose their footing on the small buoyant vessel. Brinda, shaky on her heels, grabbed Niranjan’s arm. The night was settling into the boat, seeping into its woodwork, turning its edges blood red. Ullis held firm to his only possession, the backpack.

  “Thank God,” Brinda said, dropping her handbag on the bench and taking off her shoes. “I thought we would surely miss the last boat. All that natak at Payal’s, I’m tired. I want to go home, Ninja.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Niranjan.

  “Me,” said Ullis. “I don’t, not just yet. Maybe never.”

  “Chalo, Captain Jagdish,” Niranjan said. “Time to go.”

  “You call me Juggie, short for Jagdish,” said the boy, pointing at the Marine Service sign.

  “Okay then, Captain Juggie.”

  But Juggie hadn’t finished with his sales pitch and the words floated off his tongue with the ease of long practice.

  “Juggie stays open later than other boats your safety is my concern,” he said. “Charges are lesser you can pay Juggie now or after landing by cash or GPS card machine as per your wish!”

  Seventeen or eighteen at most, gym-built, wearing a muscle tee and falling-down jeans, he wasn’t old enough to drive, much less take a boat into choppy waters. But his confidence was supreme. He was the new Indian, uninterested in the past, dazzled by a future indistinguishable from money. Aki and the boy captain were separated by less than a decade in age, but she might have been from a different species. She’d grown up in the same city, in an apartment in a far suburb, an only child left to her own devices. She listened to the cries and entreaties from the playground nearby, and wandered among rooms filled with her father’s books, the smell of spider dust and paper in the air. The boy captain had none of her anxiety or damage or glorious doubt. His imagination circled around visions of cash money. His pride lay in his printed T-shirts and embroidered jeans, and his pastime was watching Hindi music videos on his phone. He was happy. He and Aki had nothing in common.

  The small boat rocked as Ullis took a seat, and his thoughts returned to the afternoon he first met Aki’s father.

  It was the summer of the year they moved back to India. Aki hadn’t seen her father since leaving the country at the age of eighteen. Her father had never met her husband. When they got married, she’d mailed photos of the wedding at City Hall. In return he’d sent a rambling letter with his thoughts on marriage and a photocopy of an article he’d published on the subject. Written in Marathi, in his unreadable hand, Aki had had to decipher and translate line by line. Her father wrote that he did not allow himself to be swayed by the common conviction that marriage occurred only once in a person’s lifetime. In fact, it was his theory that it was necessary to marry again and again until one got it right. As Aki read the letter out in English, she laughed. It was provocation, something her father liked to do in his articles. He meant no harm, Ullis would see.

  They flew to Bombay and took a taxi to the suburb in which he lived, an old mixed neighbourhood of residential buildings and office blocks that Ullis had never visited. It was a Saturday afternoon, hot and very quiet. They walked down empty streets where plane trees dropped bristly seed balls on wide sidewalks and shaded low-rise buildings. There was no traffic. The parks were empty. Even the dogs had gone away. It was as if they were the only people left alive in the world.

  They came to a small Hanuman temple, the front pillars covered with brass bells, uvulas slack like knotted tongues. Turned translucent by sun and rain, the bells had acquired the colour of unglazed pottery. There were hundreds of them, placed around the pillars in orderly rings. The ceiling and portico supported bigger bells that hung from blood-red iron beams. Near the inner shrine great metal maces stood bunched like giant vegetables. And in the innermost space tiny finger bells were arrayed across every surface.

  Aki said each bell was an expression of gratitude by someone whose prayers had come true. On Tuesdays and Saturdays they rang for hours, building to a crescendo heard throughout the neighbourhood. She’d loved the sound as a child. When she was sent away to live with relatives, she would listen for the bells and sometimes she would almost hear them. Even now she missed it. Even now she associated the pealing of the bells with the happiest time of her life.

  She took him in through the gates and they each rang a bell in their bare feet and they each made a wish. Later, holding hands, they walked through the old neighbourhood towards her father’s house, the streets unexpectedly quiet and lovely for a far Bombay suburb. How were they to know that those wishes made in the hope of happiness would turn to ashes in less than three years? In time to come, he would be convinced that it was the making of the wish that had crushed theirs into a small white box. The bells had turned against them.

  Aki’s father was then in his seventies, a shirtless man wearing a pair of pale cotton bell-bottoms rolled to his knees. Ullis noted his hairless bony chest and extreme thinness as he let them into an apartment dominated by a large front room, the room dominated in turn by two desks in the shape of an L, surrounded on all sides by piles of newspapers and books. On the wall behind his chair were phone numbers and names scrawled thickly in pencil, and doodles and reminders in Marathi, some of the markings crossed out and written over. Her father had asked no questions about their journey to Bombay or their life in New York. He had shown no curiosity about the daughter he hadn’t seen in six years. All he wanted to talk about was his life, his work, his day.

  “This is where I sit,” he said to Ullis, pointing to the cluttered desks. “I am freelance journalist in Hindi and Marathi, daily columnist for Dainik Bhaskar. Have you met Colin Wilson?”

  Startled, Ullis said that he had not.

  “Then you must meet him,” said Aki’s father. He picked up a well-used copy of a book by the writer and flipped through so Ullis would see the copious annotations he had made in Marathi. “I meet him regularly.”

  Ullis, looking around for Aki, said, “I once read his attacks on H. P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. I think he called them biographies.”

  “Yes!” said Aki’s father. “Yes! Do you have them? Please send to this address.”

  And he presented Ullis with a card and said something in Marathi to Aki. Blank-faced, she paid no attention. She was walking around the room she had known as a small child, picking things up and putting them down. She examined a battered photo album and a pressure cooker placed on a waist-high pile of old newspapers. As Ullis accepted the card, his father-in-law launched into a lecture on Colin Wilson’s ‘most brilliant’ The Outsider. His main point was the book’s continuing relevance to ‘modern questions of existence and nothingness’.

  From across the room Aki said, “What modern question of existence? What modern nothingness? Nobody I know cares about that stuff. Existentialism is so twentieth century.”

  She was looking at a calendar that had all twelve months arranged across a single page. It was September but her father’s scribbles extended to December and beyond.

  “I am writing series of articles on Colin Wilson for Dainik Bhaskar,” said her father, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Colin Wilson is extraordinary writer. Can you guess how many books?”

  “Sorry?”

  “How many books Colin Wilson has written?”

  Ullis became aware that a young woman had entered the room from the kitchen. She carried a tray with a teapot and mugs.

  “I couldn’t imagine,” said Ullis.

  “Guess,” said his father-in-law. “Don’t be scared. Just guess!”

  “Fifteen?” said Ullis, aiming for as large a number as possible. “Twen
ty-five?”

  There was a manic, hysterical sound: his father-in-law was laughing. Ullis noticed that the old man had no teeth, and it struck him that he’d seen a pair of dentures in a saucer on a stack of National Geographic magazines. The girl who had entered stayed where she was at the far end of the room, still holding the tray.

  “More than hundred. Colin Wilson wrote more than hundred books,” he said. “Have tea. Have tea. Kamala, three cups!”

  The girl put down the tray and wiped her hands on her salvaar. Her red nail polish was chipped and bright against her dark skin. Self-consciously she smoothed the straightened hair that fell stiffly to her plump shoulders.

  Aki returned from her perambulations around the room with a book that had broken into pieces. She held the slabs carelessly in her hands. The front cover was adorned with fountain pen markings in her father’s tight, illegible scrawl. There was some comfort in this. It reminded her of the books of her childhood, the covers marked by his fountain pen, the pages dog-eared, marginalia spilling into the text.

  “I want this,” she told him unhappily, holding up the book. Her eyes were on the girl pouring tea into three mugs.

  “This is Kamala,” said her father. “She is living with me. Her parents requested me to help.”

  Kamala, dark and round-cheeked, was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, younger than Aki by several years. She smiled shyly but the smile faltered and faded.

  “I’m from Baroda,” she said, and took a step back towards the kitchen as she became aware of Aki’s unsmiling scrutiny.

  There was a short exchange in Marathi between Aki and her father. He took the book from her hand and examined it as if for the last time. He brushed with his thumb the ornate lettering of the title The Art of Loving and the graphic, a pink heart shape that enclosed a bouquet of flowers, and then his thumb traced his own inky rounded scrawl that trailed across the title and the cover image. With a flourish he presented the book to his daughter.