by Pasha Malla
So what was ‘Lines of Control’ actually about? The story shared the gently ironic, amiable tone of his novel, and the character was once again just a hapless and naïve version of himself—Ash, but inured to darkness. He did no wrong and every wrong he suffered was a ploy to elicit sympathy, to be likeable so in turn the author might be liked. When his novel had been published, readers had spoken to Ash as though he were his character; a stranger telling him, ‘I felt so bad for you!’ had been a type of victory. But Ash was not that sweet and sunny man, and ‘Lines of Control’ slouched one sentence to the next as if in acknowledgement of its own deceit.
But this was not his father’s critique.
My thoughts—
If one is to write about Kashmir one must understand a few basic things about the place. You have been to India if not Srinagar in recent memory. It is a shame you have not paid attention. Firstly if this story is meant to take place during the height of the Troubles the notion of dogs as pets is preposterous. Perhaps you have been confused by this new middle class which has been Americanized sadly. Now one sees dogs in homes and not simply in the streets. But it is a recent phenomenon. Secondly one wonders what message you are attempting with this pathetic ending. Such nihilism is disingenuous to the passion many people still have for the Valley’s autonomy. Also there are few if any cobblestone streets in Srinagar. Peaches do not grow there. Apples yes. Kashmir produces the best apples in the world. Walnuts also and saffron. You have made the city vague. You have missed its particulars. Where is Dal Lake? One must either go to Kashmir so one might write something accurate or one must write about some place one has been and knows. One has a debt to the people of any forgotten and ignored place. There are responsibilities. What you have done instead, is foolish.
-Brij.
Such vitriol! Brij’s penmanship furrowed the page. This from someone who so enjoyed Amerika, written despite its author never having set foot in the United States. Brij had especially delighted in the lampoon of Kafka’s Statue of Liberty lofting a sword. ‘Serves those stupid Americans right,’ he would chuckle.
Ash went over to the bookshelves to find the novel. Aside from a shrine-like section dedicated to his homeland (the Gervis and Molyneux histories, Midnight’s Children, some coffee-table mountain photography), Brij’s books were, as ever, a mess: medical journals stacked three and four deep, first editions tucked behind cookbooks, Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth crammed alongside two copies of Ash’s own novel, one each in paperback and hardcover to stir double jolts of humility. There were still, as far as Ash could see, no books by women in his father’s entire library.
One title had its spine facing in, a Neruda collection; a poem in Brij’s handwriting graced the inside cover. As he had as a teenager, discovering this inscription during the height of his dad’s Hispanophilia (Spanish classes, a week in Tulum, teabagged maté), Ash read only the first two lines—Entre las hojas/Dos amantes se encuentran—before hastily reshelving the book.
Oh, Brij’s phases: born from envy, enacted as parody (ultimately of himself). Upon moving to Montreal, he had taken to wearing cravats and serving cheese after supper, whether the meal were rogan josh or fondue. Later, inspired by Moroccan friends, there had been some misguided forays into the cultures of North Africa, which included the purchase of a fez (never worn) and a disappointing trip to Tangiers. ‘Idiot sightseers,’ Brij claimed, had ruined the package tour.
Midway through his graduate degree, Ash had visited Brij in the Townships and discovered a crop of basil plants thriving in the kitchen window and the Godfather trilogy stacked by the TV. Brij’s phases were always prompted by some man-crush, consummated in cultural appropriation and borrowed vocabulary. This time his muse was a Calabrian research fellow named Nico.
Ash was in the den pretending to understand Lacan when a voice full of portent growled down the stairs: ‘Join me in my study.’
Brij was stationed behind his desk with the jade-shaded lamp twisted away, a misty cone of light fanning up the wall.
‘Sit,’ said Brij.
Ash sat.
Brij pushed his car keys across the desk. ‘Take the Volvo to Nico’s.’ He wrote an address on his notepad and placed it facedown beside the keys. ‘He is in LaSalle.’
‘That’s like an hour’s drive!’
‘In the trunk of my car…is a lamb.’
‘A lamb.’
‘A lamb.’
‘Not living, I hope.’
‘A frozen lamb.’
‘Phew.’
‘Take this lamb—’
‘To your new boyfriend’s house.’
‘To Nico.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘He will know what to do with it.’
‘Can I ask how you got your hands on a lamb?’
Brij settled back in his chair with a furtive smirk. ‘I know…people. Now go.’
‘Should I kiss your ring first?’
‘Go.’
The delivery was clandestine. Ash arrived at Nico’s, a townhouse by the canal, at dusk. The lights were off. A shadowy figure lurked inside the open garage.
Ash idled in the driveway.
Nico approached, leaned in the window. ‘Did you bring it?’
‘The lamb?’
‘Sì.’
‘It’s in the trunk.’
‘Buono. Let’s have a look.’
This scene was a bit too much like the confirmation of a mob hit: the hatch wheezing open, the shudder of light over a carcass in tarpaulin. Nico pulled back the plastic and revealed the lamb’s face—it had a face!
‘Buono,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
Ash held the lamb at arm’s length and moved at a trot into the garage, its frozen musculature a little too articulated beneath the thin plastic. From atop the lid of a deep-freeze Nico removed a GT Sno-racer and a rolled-up Slip-and-Slide.
‘Here.’
The lid opened; a pale and icy light flooded out. Ash dumped the lamb atop some turkey burgers.
Nico closed the lid, casting the garage in darkness, produced a billfold and tucked a stack of twenties into Ash’s shirt pocket. ‘Tell your father—grazie.’
During this time his father had taken to reading Italo Calvino. A shelf down from Neruda, Ash found Invisible Cities wedged between Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! and An Area of Darkness. An expired Metrocard marked page 69; a section of text had been underlined in pencil. This was strange; often Brij ranted about respecting books. ‘Vandalism!’ he would cry. ‘A book is for reading. You want to write, write your own damn story.’ So Ash only folded down corners, though failing to locate the intended passage on a dog-eared page always seemed a betrayal of some prior version of himself.
The bit his father had highlighted was this, spoken by Marco Polo: ‘Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.’
Ash read this again, centering his mind upon what it might have meant to his dad, and lowered the book. His eulogy had focused on Brij’s nostalgia. My dad moved backward through life, eyes fixed on the receding horizon of the past, Ash had read aloud at the funeral, until it vanished. By the end he was left with an ideal of where he’d come from, which might have been the only real home he ever knew. Was this bad writing? Worrisome that he could no longer tell.
Out the window the evening light was settling over a yard strewn with leaves, pocked here and there with the granular scraps of the first failed snow, sooty and hushed. Framed in the window the scene looked like the sort of naturalist painting plied at craft fairs upon the aesthetically naive. Yet the stillness also felt expectant. Ash thought about ghosts: an absence so palpable it becomes present.
The house seemed suddenly stuffy, musty, oppressive. Ash, sensing that he ought to do something other than read, decided that the leaves needed raking. For once, he thought, bounding downstairs, his sister would come home to find him being useful.
Except the leaves, lef
t too long, had splintered to confetti. The rake clawed but the little shards danced through its teeth. Ash scraped and tilled; he was only making dust. He propped himself on the rake. The smoky odour of autumn whisked down from the woods on a chilly breeze. A few loose leafy bits swirled and went scattering. Everything was quiet. From a striation of purple above the treeline the sky ascended into blackness.
Of course, Ash’s eulogy hadn’t been a eulogy, really. He’d written it years before, when Brij was still alive, and even tried to get it published. In their rejection the editors at the magazine had commented, There’s a great piece in here about the son. Obediently Ash had excised his dad and angled things selfward. The revision was accepted; it won an award. At an agent’s encouragement Ash expanded those fifteen pages into a book: a book about a softer proxy who breezed through life’s foibles with naïve and hilarious folly. One who learned, and grew, and changed.
All these years later, writing about Brij had seemed impossible. How to sum up a life once it was gone? Ash’s attempts at a eulogy had felt like trying to sculpt fog in high winds. At one point he’d even emailed Sherene for help; she’d responded with the Beckett line she trotted out whenever he panicked. Easier said than done, Ash replied, when I’ve got so little to ‘go on’ to begin with. And then he remembered that old story, ‘My Dad, Nostalgic.’ In a box of memorabilia he found the original draft, the paper gone yellow and brittle, the paperclip bleeding rust. The writing was maudlin and seemed to be reaching for insights never quite attained. But at least it was something.
So that was what he’d read. And people had wept. Though his show, which attracted a modest but committed audience, occasionally taped live (a funny term—anything recorded surely died a little), Ash preferred the disembodiment of a darkened studio and reciting scripts into the ether. Getting up before the crowd, speech in hand, reminded him of piano recitals as a kid, that same looming threat of familial disgrace. Each expectant face mirrored Ash’s presence in the room. His hands had been shaking. He’d felt vulnerable and fraudulent. He’d been a bit too aware of his own face. And then everything had collapsed.
How had his sister spoken so naturally? She didn’t care about sounding familiar, for one thing. As a lawyer Mona trafficked in language with the practicality of a statistician pecking out numbers on a calculator. If a rote phrase expressed what she needed, in it went. And maybe tapping into some common experience was the whole point of a funeral—or a wedding, or any type of ritual. Clichés were the currency of such things. Whose dust might be so unique, anyway, to warrant some special send-off?
Part of Ash’s struggle to get at some elusive essence of his dad was that he lacked a firm footing from which to begin. Growing up, Mona had been the target of Brij’s instincts toward paternity (curfews, mistrust, fear), and even though they’d warred through her teens, it had at least made for a parental dynamic. Brij and Ash had been more like two joggers running in tandem: intermittently he might check over his shoulder, satisfied if his son were still there.
Forgoing the rake, Ash got down on the ground and with his hands tried to corral the powdery leaves into a mound. They crumbled; he was only spreading them about. The earth felt damp beneath his knees. And still he knelt there, as the night’s first stars or satellites blinked feebly into existence and the temperature began to plummet. Remarkable in the Townships how distinctly day ceded to night, and autumn to winter.
His sister and her man were coming down the mountain. Mona’s voice preceded them like a little stream murmuring down the hill through the dark. From the other direction tires crunched up the gravel road. Matt arrived first, his truck swinging wildly into the drive. Carrying bags of grease-roasted chicken, he was almost in the house before noticing Ash on his knees in the garden. ‘Doing some yardwork?’
Ash’s reply was froggy, strangled: ‘Hey.’
‘You okay?’
As Matt approached through the twilight, the skin behind Ash’s ears drew taut and his throat swelled. All week, what had begun as gathering himself had tightened into constriction. Now he felt choked by it, his heart knotted in his chest.
His old friend was upon him, setting down the takeout and hauling Ash to his feet. ‘Okay now,’ said Matt. ‘You’re okay.’
Ash was cradled. The smells were body spray and deep-fry and weed.
The voices of his sister and her husband approached. Ash couldn’t let them see him like this, clutched by this mawkish ox. He wriggled. But Matt held him fast.
‘Easy, bro,’ said Matt. ‘I got you.’
Ash swallowed the hard sharp disc lodged in his throat. Tensed as it scraped down through him. Closed his eyes. Clenched his body into stillness.
Matt seemed ready to let go, and then Mona and Harj were coming off the road onto the driveway.
‘He’s a brute,’ Harj was saying. ‘An alpha male monster.’
‘I just don’t know what he thinks he’s doing here,’ said Mona, ‘acting like he’s family.’
And Matt wrapped Ash even tighter.
His sister and her husband went in the front door, neither noticing the two men clasping each other in the shadows. Ash felt smothered. Lights came on inside the house. The only sounds were the faint huff of Matt’s breath and a distant drone from the highway. Still he didn’t let go. So Ash let his friend hold him, there on the lawn in the dusklight, and waited to be released.
2
SINCE MONA AND HARJ HAD CLAIMED the master bedroom, the remaining sleeping spots were in the den: Ash on the pull-out and Matt on a foam mattress on the floor, face hidden beneath the mask Brij had diagnosed to regulate his sleep apnea. Between stabs of rotisserie-induced heartburn and the machine’s percolations and Matt’s Darth Vader rasping, Ash couldn’t sleep. Not that he was an expert sleeper anyway, but now at least he had someone to blame. What was the guy doing here?
As kids their friendship had begun easily, instantly. They were sports fanatics with divorced parents who lived a block apart in London’s north end; were ten-year-olds still monarchs, such harmonies would be enough to end wars and merge kingdoms. And while Matt acknowledged, with mild astonishment, what different paths their adult lives had taken, he seemed to believe that the childhood unity of their friendship remained.
After high school, when Ash moved to Toronto, he became something like the island nation upon which Matt had long ago staked his flag. With each reunion he grew a little more sovereign, a little harder to claim. So Matt preferred to reminisce: ‘I don’t care what you’re up to,’ he’d say. ‘With us none of that matters.’ And while anything new, any change or development, only strained the tether of history between them, occasionally he’d offer a surprising show of support: showing up at Ash’s MA defence like it was an Olympic trial, for example, where he’d torn around the room slapping high-fives when the committee announced a ‘pass with changes.’ This from a guy who’d dropped out after two semesters of an undergraduate degree, buried by debt and, possibly, dyslexia.
Shortly after Ash landed his show Matt had coaxed him back to London ‘to celebrate,’ which meant watching ski videos and smoking weed in his basement apartment. Ash arrived to discover that Matt’s girlfriend-of-the-moment had been missing for three days, stranding him with her pug, Gertie. ‘I figure if she’s dead I’d have heard something,’ he reasoned between bong-hits. ‘She’s probably just somewhere getting nailed by some Japanese guy.’ (Matt’s imagined sexual rivals were, inexplicably, always Japanese.)
Midway through Extreme Moguls 6, the dog began whimpering, and before Ash could suggest a walk, a turd appeared gleaming on the living room floor. Matt tented a magazine overtop, and then they were out on the streets with Gertie snarling at the end of her leash and Ash blinking like an unearthed mole in the daylight and Matt beaming at passersby, demanding, ‘How’s your day going?’ with an edge to his voice, a challenge. He often pursued excuses to feel slighted, to cast adversaries. ‘You see that?’ he spat when someone snubbed him. ‘Dumb homophobe thought we wer
e gay.’
Out at the bar a similar offence would have been enough for Matt to flip a table and start swinging, though this ‘homophobe’ was a middle-aged woman in business casual who disappeared into a taxi. Matt turned the corner in a black mood, yanking Gertie along. But everything was forgotten minutes later at the jingle of an ice cream truck. ‘Ice cream!’ he cried and bounded off, stranding Ash with Gertie on the curb.
Lying a few feet away and masked like a spaceman, Matt’s sleep-face contorted between peaceful and scowling, like a puppy externalizing its dreams. Slave to his own id, a mind possessed by itself. ‘My mind’s got a mind of its own,’ he liked to say, by way of apology, whether for a momentary lapse of reason or a lifetime of mistakes. ‘Ash, honestly?’ he’d continue, suggesting confession, though what followed was usually some equivocation: ‘I’m no teddy bear’s picnic, but…’
Honesty. This too was big for Matt. Albeit a curated and capricious version, one that served grander narratives of integrity and self-worth. Even so, through every career change and relocation and marital engagement and STI, Ash had done his best to support his friend—skeptically, sure, but also with genuine hope that this might be the thing to finally work out.
‘Dhar?’ The mask was off; Matt cupped it in his hand while the machine puffed away on the floor. ‘You awake?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash, feeling ambushed. ‘Can’t sleep. Gut’s a little jumpy.’
‘Right, the muscles. From trying so hard not to cry.’
‘No, that’s not why, you lunatic. From dinner. Too much grease.’
The meal had been depressing: brown chicken and brown fries with brown gravy heaped onto Brij’s best dinnerware. Ash regretted not cooking. What they’d needed was nourishment, sustenance. Something green and lively. Something he could offer. ‘Anyhow,’ said Matt. ‘I was thinking.’