Turbulence

by David Szalay

  ‘And after waking up the whole street, and terrifying the kids, and throwing the furniture around,’ Nalini said, ‘he just disappeared. I don’t know where he went. It was still the middle of the night. I don’t know where he slept.’

  ‘Is that when he hit you?’ Anita asked. ‘Last night?’

  ‘No,’ Nalini said. ‘That was this morning.’

  Anita glanced at her niece, still standing in the doorway, and wondered whether she should be hearing this. She thought maybe she would try to talk to her later, alone. She felt a kind of kinship with the silent girl, who in some ways reminded her of herself when she was that age. She wanted to help her. She wanted to make sure she was able to do what she wanted with her life. She wanted, more than anything, to make sure she understood that that was possible. ‘So he came back this morning?’ Anita asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘At first he was okay,’ Nalini said. ‘He ate something, he had breakfast with us. He even took the kids to school. He’d never seen her school.’ She nodded towards her daughter. ‘And then he came back here and looked at the furniture that was damaged. That’s when he got angry again, looking at the furniture, telling me how it was my fault it was damaged. He started shouting at me about how much his plane ticket cost to come here. One lakh rupees, he said.’

  ‘No,’ Anita murmured. ‘That sounds too much.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  It was cool inside the house, where the walls were painted greenish-blue. The floor was concrete, a complex map of cracks and discolorations.

  ‘And I said I wanted him to come back and live with us,’ Nalini said, looking Anita in the face. ‘I told him I couldn’t cope on my own, that’s why the fire happened. And he said he thought I started the fire on purpose to make him come back. I told him I’d never do a thing like that but I did want him to come back. I said I wanted him to come back and live here. I said that’s what I wanted, for him to come back and live here. And he started yelling at me to stop saying that. But it’s what I want, I said. That’s when he hit me.’

  Anita waited for a few moments, looking at the swollen place on her sister’s face. She thought her husband probably had a woman in Qatar, that was why he was so determined to stay there. She didn’t say that. She said, leaning towards her sister so that their noses were almost touching, ‘There’s a phrase for this now. It’s “toxic masculinity”.’ She said the words in English, and Nalini didn’t understand them, so she tried to find a Malayalam equivalent. ‘That’s what they call it now. And you can’t just take it,’ she said. ‘You can’t. Okay?’

  Nalini looked sullen.

  She let Anita squeeze her hand, without squeezing back.

  ‘Okay?’ Anita said again.

  She wondered what Nalini’s friends would say about this, what advice they would have for her. Probably something along the lines of That’s what men are like, that’s just how they are, he’ll leave again soon, why provoke him, what’s the point? Anita had grown up with women like that, and Nalini was the same. ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Well I think you should leave him,’ Anita said.

  She said it quietly, almost whispered it, aware of her niece still standing in the doorway.

  The fact that she had just a week ago ended her own attachment to an objectionable man made her feel more authoritative in saying it. Though Raj, who managed the IT department of an airline, was obviously incapable of physical violence. Perhaps that was only because he had so much more to lose than her sister’s husband did, and so many other ways of projecting power in the world. Still, it was impossible to imagine him hitting her. Nalini knew nothing of her five-year affair with him. She would have been shocked by it, Anita thought. That he had been twenty years older than her, and married, and a Hindu – all of it would have shocked her sister deeply. That was a different world, one that she would not understand. So Anita had never mentioned it.

  She moved uneasily on her orange plastic seat, still waiting for Nalini to respond to what she had said – I think you should leave him.

  From the wall Jesus stared blankly at them sitting there, his silky head enclouded in a puff of gold mist. Under the picture were the words Dona Nobis Pacem.

  ‘I think you’ve got to,’ Anita said. ‘There has to be some sort of consequence. He can’t just get away with doing something like that. And it isn’t the first time. I know it isn’t.’

  It was impossible to say, at that point, what Nalini was thinking. She was looking at her own hands, at her intertwined fingers. She was only two years older than Anita but her hands looked twenty years older. She seemed deep in thought, and Anita was hopeful that her words might have had some impact. She felt that she had to make her sister see the importance of not just accepting things as they were as somehow inevitable. She had to make her see the importance of exerting some sort of positive agency in the world. It was the passivity, more than anything else, that infuriated her. ‘He’ll still have to send money for the children,’ she said, thinking this might be her sister’s main worry. ‘And if he doesn’t,’ she said, ‘I will.’

  Even then, Nalini didn’t look at her.

  And then they heard her son’s voice – he had been playing in the sand in front of the house – shouting, ‘Achan! Achan!’

  They heard the man say something to him, without being able to make out what it was.

  Anita, her pulse quickening, wondered whether he even knew she was there.

  He appeared as a silhouette in the doorway. The boy was jumping about excitedly behind him. ‘Ammayi Anita is here! Ammayi Anita is here!’ he was shouting, as if his father would be as happy about it as he was.

  He didn’t seem to be.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ he asked, pushing his daughter out of the way so that he could advance into the room.

  Anita stood up. Her chair made a scraping noise on the floor. ‘How dare you hit my sister?’ she said. And when the man just stared at her, she said again, ‘How dare you?’

  She had never been looked at, she thought, with more hatred.

  She was shaking.

  She wondered if he might be about to attack her. She felt his potential for violence. She saw it in his face, with its thick moustache and its shine of sweat, and it frightened her. She said, ‘She’s going to leave you.’

  And immediately she heard Nalini’s voice, strident in objection, saying, ‘I’m not.’

  The man didn’t look at his wife. He kept staring at Anita. He stood there for another second or two – long enough for Nalini to say again, ‘I’m not’ – then he turned and left, stopped for a moment to spit pointedly on the dirt outside the house, and walked away, with his son following him, asking what had happened.

  10

  COK – DOH

  THE FLIGHT LANDED in Doha just after dawn. For a short time, the sky was a delicate shell-pink and the world looked mild from the window of the plane as it taxied. Shamgar knew this hour. It was the only hour of the day when it was a pleasure to be outside, and he always was outside, stooped over some plant, with fragrant fragments of soil stuck to his hands. He had been in Kochi for five days and he had missed his garden. It wasn’t his in the sense that he owned it, of course. It was his in the sense that it had been entrusted to him, that he was the person who knew it most intimately, who understood it most precisely, and who probably loved it the most. Mrs Ursula sometimes told him to do things – to put in or take out this or that particular plant – but mostly she let him decide what to do.

  Shamgar was thankful to have work that he liked, part of the time anyway – there were other tasks he had to attend to, such as washing the cars and the outdoor furniture, and sweeping the swimming-pool area, and looking after the pool itself, lifting leaves and dead insects and other floating things from its surface every morning with a fine-mesh net on a long pole. He worked from six in the morning till six in the evening – from sunrise to
sunset – with two hours off in the heat of the day from April to September. Every Sunday morning he also had two hours off to go to the St Thomas Syro-Malabar Church, and every two years he had a month’s leave to visit his family in India.

  Mrs Ursula was his ‘sponsor’ as they said here – which meant, more or less, his owner. She kept his passport and his work permit, and he was unable to travel anywhere or do anything without her express permission. She was the dominant figure in his life, and he was lucky with her, he was aware of that. She paid him more than most men earned for the sort of work he did – about a hundred dollars a month – and she treated him fairly, kindly even. When he told her that his house in Kochi had been destroyed in a fire, it was she who had said he must go there immediately, and she who had lent him the money for his airfare. She said he could pay her back ten dollars a month for the next three years. ‘Thank you, Mrs Ursula,’ he said.

  While he was away someone had to water the plants twice a day – in the early morning and in the evening – and Shamgar had arranged for the man who worked in the house next door to do it. The man’s name was Krish.

  When Shamgar arrived at the compound it was mid-morning. The brittle seed pods of frangipani trees broke under his feet as he walked, and the trees themselves were still in flower. The simple five-petalled flowers showed creamily against the glossy darkness of the leaves. There were stretches of shade under the trees, and areas of spongy grass in front of the houses. There were three models of house – small, medium and large. Mrs Ursula had one of the medium ones.

  As he approached Shamgar saw immediately that Krish had not done the watering properly. With a painful sense of having been let down, he went to his room, which was a sort of shed on the other side of the house, at one end of the swimming-pool area, up against the wall that separated the property from the one next door. From the outside, with its tiny window, it looked like a storeroom – and indeed the equipment for maintaining the swimming pool was stored in there. He dumped his stuff, and then went out again and attached the hose to the standpipe in the garden.

  While he was going around with the hose, directing the flow of water with his thumb, Mrs Ursula stepped out into the shade of the porch holding a mug and wearing sunglasses. ‘Hello Shamgar,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  She asked him about the situation in Kochi. He told her that things were okay. The house, it turned out, was only slightly damaged.

  ‘I’m very happy to hear that,’ she said.

  So actually it hadn’t been necessary for him to go there after all, he said.

  He saw her straining to make out what he was saying. His accent, when he spoke English, was very strong. Sometimes he had to say things two or three times before she understood him.

  ‘Well,’ she said, finally catching the gist of it. ‘I think it was important that you went anyway, Shamgar. I think that was important. How’s your wife?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s fine, Mrs Ursula,’ he said.

  ‘It must have been a tough time for her. She must have been happy to have you around.’

  He didn’t say anything, and after a minute she asked him to please wash her car when he was finished watering the plants. Then she went inside and shut the door. Shamgar had never been inside the house. The housework was done by a man called Manoj who was there for a few hours every day.

  It was early afternoon. Very hot. He was lying on his bed, lying on his back with one arm under his head, staring at the ceiling. All around him the blue plastic pool equipment was piled up. The air conditioner whirred noisily. It made strange knocking sounds sometimes. It was an old unit. Still, he was thankful to have it. His quarters consisted of a small bedroom with a single window, quite high up, and a tiny bathroom with a shower, a sink and a toilet. The window looked into the narrow paved space at the side of the house, at the other end of which was the carport.

  At about two o’clock he had a shower. The water came from a tank on the roof and, being exposed to the sun, it was almost too hot. There was no cold water, except for a few months in the winter. When he had showered he put on fresh clothes. Standing in front of the cracked mirror he trimmed his moustache with a pair of nail scissors. The mirror had been in one of the bathrooms in the house. When it had been accidentally broken Mrs Ursula had suggested that he might like it. He had a last look at himself. Then he went out.

  There was, at that hour, a profound stillness everywhere. He left the swimming-pool area by the back gate, walked a little way along the neglected path behind the houses, and entered the swimming-pool area of the neighbouring property. He made sure that the carport was empty. Then he tapped on the back door of the house. After waiting for a few seconds he opened it and went in. The door, which was on a spring, snapped shut. Inside the house the air felt dramatically frigid and dry. Shamgar went through the kitchen and into the dining room where he found Krish sitting at the table.

  ‘What happened with the watering?’ Shamgar asked him.

  ‘I did it.’

  Shamgar wondered what to make of that. He hated the idea that Krish might lie to him. ‘Looked like it hadn’t been done for at least a day,’ he said. ‘When d’you last do it?’

  ‘Yesterday morning,’ Krish said. He was polishing silver.

  ‘That’s what it looked like. Why not yesterday evening?’

  ‘I thought you got back yesterday,’ Krish said, dabbing the grubby chamois in the tin of polish on the table. ‘Didn’t you get back yesterday?’

  ‘No,’ Shamgar said, ‘I got back today. This morning.’

  ‘I thought you got back yesterday,’ Krish said.

  Shamgar tried not to show how much it upset him that Krish thought he had been back for a whole day and had made no effort to see him. ‘Why didn’t you answer my text?’ he asked.

  Krish slightly smiled, no doubt thinking of the text that Shamgar had sent him in the middle of the night. He said, ‘I was planning to. I’ve been working all day.’

  ‘That’s no excuse.’ Shamgar put his hands on Krish’s shoulders and felt the warmth of them through the shirt he was wearing. ‘It only takes a minute,’ he said. When Krish said nothing, Shamgar squeezed his neck. He shoved his fingers through his thick fur-like hair and then took hold of it and pulled, quite hard. ‘It only takes a minute,’ he said again.

  He had pulled Krish’s head back until he was looking up at him, into his eyes, and he was about to lean down and kiss him on the mouth when they heard a sound from the front door, the tentative scratching of a key. For another second they looked into each other’s eyes – there was alarm there now, and a sort of excitement too – then Shamgar let go of Krish’s hair and walked silently towards the kitchen. He slipped out of the house, taking care to ease the back door shut without a sound, and traversed the swimming-pool area, turning only once to confirm the presence, in the carport, of the large white SUV belonging to Krish’s sponsor.

  He lingered on the path behind the houses.

  Krish’s sponsor – an Australian man – usually didn’t appear until much later in the afternoon.

  Shamgar wondered whether to go back and see if the car was still there. Possibly the man had just had to return home to pick something up, and would soon be gone again.

  Shamgar lingered on the path. It still hurt him that Krish thought he had been back since yesterday and had made no effort to see him. If the situation were reversed he knew that he would have been unable to think of anything other than the hour of Krish’s return – which he would have known precisely – and that he would have hurried to see him at the first opportunity. It was that knowledge, more than anything else, and the strange painful anger it stirred in him, that stopped him going back.

  Instead he walked slowly along the path and pushed open the gate to the swimming-pool area of Mrs Ursula’s house.

  Unexpectedly, Mrs Ursula herself was there, lying on a sunlounger in the shade of the umbrella. She was fully dressed but had pulled her skirt up to the middle of he
r thighs. At the squeak of the gate she looked up. Her face was flushed. ‘Oh, it’s you, Shamgar,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Ursula.’

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ he said. He had to say it a few times before she understood. Then she said, ‘A walk? Now? It’s a bit hot for that isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Ursula,’ he said.

  They were talking across the blue corner of the swimming pool. Bougainvillea blossoms floated on the water like scraps of pink tissue paper. They moved slowly across the surface, carried by the unseen currents of the circulation system.

  Mrs Ursula frowned, as if she didn’t understand something, and then shut her eyes again.

  After a few moments Shamgar went into his little room and lay on the bed, listening to the knock and squeak of the air conditioner. All he was able to think about was whether Krish would appear there after dark, and what would happen if he did. With what sounded like a sort of urgency, the air conditioner squeaked more and more loudly and then was suddenly quiet. Father Shobi, the priest at the St Thomas Syro-Malabar Church, would be saddened, Shamgar knew, by the thoughts he was having.

  11

  DOH – BUD

  ‘MY GARDENER,’ URSULA said. ‘You remember my gardener – Shamgar?’

  ‘Yes,’ Miri said. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I think he might be gay.’

  ‘Yeah? Why?’

  Ursula laughed. ‘I think he might be having some sort of affair with the man who works next door.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Miri said. She didn’t seem very interested – her mind seemed elsewhere. Still, Ursula went on with it. ‘Once I saw the man from next door coming out of Shamgar’s room very early in the morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep and I was up before dawn and I’d just stepped outside when the door of Shamgar’s room opened – and I expected it to be Shamgar of course, but it wasn’t. It was this guy from next door. I don’t even know his name. “Oh, hello,” I said. And he just nodded and hurried off. And when I mentioned it to Shamgar later he was very embarrassed. I didn’t pursue it.’