“I trust my mother and my aunt. And now you,” the boy says.
“Trusting too many people isn’t good,” he says, though he’s pleased to be part of Neel’s circle. “Sooner or later someone will put on a different face.”
“Like a mask?”
“Like take off their mask,” Jaryk says.
He begins to share stories of the performances in Warsaw. “We performed it twice,” he tells Neel on one of their walks in the forest. “The first time was during Passover, and everyone came to see it.” It’s a detail he hasn’t even told the professor, and in telling Neel he feels closer to him.
“What is Passover?” Neel asks. Jaryk explains the story of the exodus as best he can: Moses and the Israelites, the plagues, the flight from Egypt. “Kind of like your people running across the border from Bangladesh,” he says to connect it back.
“We didn’t run,” Neel says. “We walked.” It’s a point of pride with Neel that his family left of their own accord, though from what Jaryk understands, they’d barely avoided a forced fate. In Bangladesh, Neel’s family had been small landowners. They worked with men and women of a different religion who, when the time came, decided to drive the family out. Now they are just as penniless as he’d been crossing into the DP camp in Germany.
“I know you didn’t run,” Jaryk says. “Most of us don’t.” He doesn’t mean it as a compliment but says it gently enough that Neel can take it as one.
“Why do you think all of this has happened to us?” Neel asks.
For much of his youth Jaryk railed against the iniquity of the world. Why had his mother died after childbirth, why had he been born into a poor family, why had they come for the Jews? None of his childhood wrongs—a stolen piece of cake, or the time he shoved a cousin into the mud—seemed to justify his lot. So many had it better, and it was only in the orphanage, surrounded by children whose stories were like his own, that he stopped asking “Why me?” When he did feel that way, he learned to hide his feelings. He thinks Neel has mastered the same trick: little that happens seems to depress him, though it should by almost any standard. He knows the boy misses his father. Every afternoon he sees Neel dust the few good photos he has of his dad before setting them back beneath his bed.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Jaryk says. “But here’s a trick: when you say your lines, imagine that they can take you from this place to somewhere beautiful far away.” That had been Esterka’s advice to him, but he thinks it carries just as well for a boy who’s lost his father and his home.
They walk to the stage. Last week he sanded and painted the bleachers, secured bamboo poles to stake a perimeter of lights powered by a borrowed generator. They can fit hundreds in the space, and if the professor’s outreach is any indication, that many will come. They’ve turned a football field into an amphitheater, he’s proud of that, of leading the men and children from the village to do the work of building a stage. He squeezes Neel’s hand. “Tell me how many can sit in the space. Count the number of rows and columns of seats.”
“Four hundred exactly,” Neel says. “It is a wonderful sight.”
It’s nothing like the stage he built with Mordechai and Chaim and Misha, which they’d imagined out of nothing. Hollowed-out wood became windows. The Flower Girl’s flowers came from sewing together brightly colored pieces of cloth. No one had a proper costume, so they all wore mismatched clothes—as many bright colors merged together as possible—because that was what they thought children in India would do.
Days before they were to perform the play, an SS officer had come to inspect the orphanage. Pan Doktor was out on one of his trips, begging the last of the rich Jews for food, and Madam Stefa was taking her afternoon nap, so Misha and Esterka were left to show the officer around. He remembered the cleanliness of those boots, how they shined in the hallway light. The officer’s cap was without a crease, and he smelled of a leathery perfume. After visiting the girls’ and boys’ dorms, the officer noticed the set. Chaim had just finished putting up the curtain, which was nothing more than unwashed bedsheets tied together. Behind the curtain, they were to change from one costume to another.
“What is this?” the officer had asked, indicating the hung sheets and the windows of thread and the scraps of cloth.
“It’s for the children,” Misha had said, but he didn’t protest when the officer told them to take it down. They had suspected from the beginning that the most disobedient act was the making of their art, and so had been prepared for this very moment. Along with Chaim, Misha took down the sheets and the windows hung with string and the watercolor pictures of the Indian sun. All the children watched. When the officer had left, they began putting everything back together. Jaryk remembered how Esterka had joked about the black boots not being fans of theater. A simple act of defiance. Esterka’s voice in his ear, asking him to help Chaim with the curtain. In the end it didn’t matter what they’d done, the Germans had their unbreakable plans, but still it’d felt powerful to pick up the pieces, to go against what they were told.
“Yes,” Jaryk now tells Neel, mussing the boy’s hair. “It is wonderful. And you, sir, are good at numbers.”
He likes giving Neel compliments—the harder-earned ones, mind you—and watching the boy’s face catch into a smile. He’s begun to think of himself as an uncle, an imperfect one, but still. He’s even daydreamed about taking Neel away to America, showing him the Statue of Liberty, then taking the boy to his favorite pizza spot on Staten Island, watching him eat with glee. He knows this is unlikely, but it doesn’t hurt to dream.
It’s only when he’s alone at night that he’s beset by doubt. What if performing this play does the opposite of what they’ve imagined—what if the black boots come to take Neel and his mother to a worse fate? The performance in Warsaw hadn’t protected the orphanage; alone at night, he can’t be sure that now it’ll guard Neel and the others.
Still, during the days as the mist clears, there are the demands of their production, the bits of carpentry and rehearsing left to be done. There’s an energy to the affair, an unbridled optimism that breaks the night’s fear. During the days things go well enough that he can forget both his life in New York and the tumult outside their village. Each morning Rohan brings the newspaper to the breakfast table, but he’s learned the front page isn’t for him. On Saturdays, he scans the comics. He prefers The Adventures of Tintin, which he’d read even in his youth, and is surprised by how little the plots have changed.
* * *
………………
One morning he finds the professor alone at the dining table. There’s a coffee stain on his place mat, and Rohan, who’d normally clean the mess, is nowhere to be found.
“They’ve taken him,” the professor says. “Rohan’s gone.”
The professor rarely refers to the butler by name, but there is an intimacy in the way the syllables come off his tongue. Rohan. He enunciates with force. “Abducted,” he says. “Taken by the police when he went to fetch the paper.”
“Why would they take him?” Jaryk asks.
The professor gazes at him pityingly, as if during this time he’s learned nothing at all. “To provoke me, of course,” he says, cleaning the coffee stain with his sleeve, not caring that he’s wearing one of his long white shirts. He stares into the middle distance between the rice fields and the horizon, gives his mustache a few good tugs. “Rohan was a sympathizer, and when I taught at Calcutta University, he was also one of my students. Back then, he used to do some work for the Naxalites. Mind you, he didn’t make bombs, nothing like that. Mostly, he handed out pamphlets, organized rallies. The police put his name on their list, and when he found out he came to me. He was a remarkable student. I wasn’t going to let them put one more boy in prison. I let him stay here. I didn’t think they would look for him outside the city.”
From the first day Rohan hasn’t seemed li
ke a butler. He eats his meals with everyone else, often wears the professor’s shirts. Sometimes, when Rohan carries coffee up to the professor’s room, he lingers awhile, and Jaryk hears the two of them engaged in what seems like lively debate.
“We’re not going to just sit here, are we?” Jaryk finally asks.
“No, we’re not,” says the professor, though he remains ensconced in his thoughts.
“You took him in. I know you meant to keep him safe,” Jaryk says.
The professor glances up from his coffee, but his sleepless eyes refuse to meet Jaryk’s. Here is a man who keeps few friends, though Rohan had found a place in his heart. Perhaps the police discovered this. They wouldn’t do anything to an American, but a hideaway rabble-rouser was another matter.
“I’ll help you,” Jaryk says. “I’ll help you bring him home.”
* * *
………………
They nearly drive past the prison. There’s a hastily arranged barbed-wire fence around the property, and through a gap in the fence the professor steers his jeep. Several guards emerge from what appear to be barracks, wearing only shorts, bare-chested potbellied men staring at them with suspicion, hands close to the revolvers on their hips. Next to the barracks there’s a pool filled with dead water, where clumps of mosquitoes hover on the surface. One of the men converses with the professor, and they are led farther down the path.
As they walk past the pool, a swarm of flies hurries their progress. A guard accompanies them to a building with a sign that hangs askew: 42nd Prescient of the Police, West Bengal. It’s intended to read Precinct, he assumes, but the spelling only imbues the place with more of a strange aura.
They wait. Occasionally a guard emerges to have the professor complete a form. Sometimes it’s the same form handed out again, and though Jaryk protests, Rudra Bose puts pen to paper every time he’s asked. “The warden is out and about,” they’re told. “It’s best to have all documentation.” Some of the guards speak English well enough to try to enlist Jaryk in a hand of gin rummy, which he refuses.
“Why is he being held?” Jaryk asks variants of the question throughout the morning.
The response remains the same. “There is always a reason. Only warden will know the reason.” The guards smoke so much it’s difficult to see into the back rooms, where they’re told Rohan is being kept.
The professor grows despondent as the day wears on. At one point he tells Jaryk, “I don’t have a family. I suppose Rohan was the closest, someone who needed me for food, shelter, and even guidance. All he’d done was put up some flyers in the city, and he ran to me to protect him. In the end, I failed him.”
“You protected him as well as you could,” Jaryk says. He thinks of all the rooms in the mansion that remain empty, all the covered history from hall to hall. In ways that matter, he and the professor are of a similar breed. It’s been easy to get along with a man who holds his past at bay, makes few allowances for love or fellowship. He won’t ever know Rudra Bose deeply, and there’s a pleasure in this distance, at least some comfort.
Were it not for Lucy he might’ve lived his life by the same rhythms. No one to look or judge. At night when the professor drapes the boudoirs with sheets, it’s as if he’s putting curtains over the eyes of his ancestors; Jaryk can understand this desire—this need to burrow into oblivion.
“We don’t know why they picked up Rohan. We don’t know if it has to do with the play.”
The professor nods, as if he’s been tossed a philosophical argument. “Time will tell.”
After four hours of waiting, Jaryk says, “Maybe we should just try and force our way.” It’s the kind of thing he would’ve expected Rudra Bose to say. In truth, he has no desire to storm the guards. Though they’re smaller men, he’s seen a whole barracks’ worth of them, and his treatment for roughing an officer would likely be worse than what he’d received at the military hospital. The comment’s more to prompt the professor to action, but it doesn’t have an effect.
“Don’t even think about it. They’ll only beat him more if we do that.”
“Are you sure they’re mistreating him?” Jaryk asks. “Wouldn’t we hear something?”
“Oh, he’s not here,” says Rudra Bose. “They’ve got him holed up somewhere else. They’ll bring him around when they’re ready.”
The warden comes to see them as the sun begins to set. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. The warden’s snow-white hair and the glasses that sit on the rim of his nose make him seem like an academic, as if in another life he were a dissertation partner with Rudra Bose. “Any tea for you?” he asks. It’s the first time that day they’ve been offered anything, and though he’s thirsty, Jaryk answers for them both, “We’re fine, thank you. We just want to see our friend.”
They’re led past the dirty pool, where the guards have dumped their fruit peels. A crow skims the surface and takes a mango skin in its mouth. They follow the warden to a small hut that’s anointed by the falling sun in colors of burn.
“You remain outside,” the professor says.
“We go together,” Jaryk says.
He’s seen enough in the ghetto, men degrading other men with spit and fists and batons and rifles, children following suit, playing out the ways their fathers and mothers tortured the Jews. Still, it comes as a shock when the warden lifts the curtain to the hut and says, “On his way here your supposed butler fell once or twice.”
Rohan lies on a straw cot. His hands are covered in poorly tied bandages. One of his eyes is swollen shut, and the one that isn’t looks at them with a dreamy scorn, as if he isn’t ready to receive them after all. His shirt’s been ripped; blood has pooled and dried at the base of his sternum in a heart-shaped pocket. The professor squats by Rohan’s side, strokes his hair, says something into his ear.
“Why have you done this?” Jaryk asks the warden.
“Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code,” the warden says. “This fellow has been engaged in illegal acts. He has also written subversive poetry. He has also put up advertisements against the state. You come from a country without morals, sir, but here we have our limits.”
“You’ll have hell to pay,” the professor says under his breath.
“Who will? Who has committed the act?” the warden asks. “I have simply brought you to see your friend. I did not punish him in any way. None of my men laid a hand. Though we were in the right to incarcerate him for years, we gave him breakfast. Afterwards, if it happened that he opened his mouth and insulted an officer, then that was dealt with accordingly. If it happened that he insulted yet another man of rank, then that was also dealt with. Now, it is only my job to return him to you.”
Rohan swats away a fly that’s landed on his neck and closes his one good eye. His carotid artery pulses like a trapped snake, the work of his heart in plain view. Jaryk looks at the professor to see what can be done. He wants to punch the glasses off the warden’s nose, spill a little blood. When the terror had come for them in the ghetto, he’d been only a child. Perhaps that can be forgiven, but now he’s a grown man. “What do we do?” he asks the professor.
“We leave,” Rudra Bose says, helping his former student to stand. “Please tell Rajan Datta and his cohort that the message has been received.”
“Excellent,” the warden says. “Please also know that your foreign friend no longer provides you cover. One could even wonder about his visa, for instance, whether it remains valid. Shouldn’t he return home to his country? One might wonder about his general health here.”
The warden’s lips are so thin that when he smiles they stretch indiscernibly into his face. He scratches his snow-white hair, releases a plume of dandruff. “Good evening to you all,” he says. Bare-chested officers escort them to the jeep.
The professor drives, and Rohan and Jaryk sit in the back. Though it’s warm and humid, Rohan shivers aga
inst him. He tries to avoid looking too closely at Rohan’s face.
Back at the Bose mansion, the professor helps Rohan into his room. Jaryk waits at the dining table, keeps seeing Rohan’s bloodied face in his mind. Whenever Misha had gotten rowdy enough to punch someone at the bar, Jaryk had stepped in. Violence sobers him, salt on sunburnt skin. But he’s come all this way for a purpose. He’s let Lucy return to America alone. As the night wears on, he drinks the professor’s coffee to stay awake, considers what he can still do to save Neel and the village.
When the professor returns, he pours himself the last of the coffee and slurps it down, getting his mustache wet in the process. Then he says, “I’m sorry you had to see that. Today’s politicians are not like the ones who fought for independence. They sow terror in the soil. It used to be different.”
“Is Rohan going to be all right?” Jaryk asks.
“He has a bruised eye, a split lip, possibly even a broken jaw, but I have handled worse.”
The professor stares into his cup, then continues. “This whole government is rotten. The Naxalite boys had the idea to tear everything down. Were they so wrong? You need a proper revolution. You can’t have incremental progress and hope the disease will be dealt with. You can’t elect the same kind of crony over and over, hoping for magic. That’s why City Hall needs to burn. Only then can you get to the beauty underneath.”
“But what if you burn the good?” Jaryk asks. “Not everything was made by the corrupt or the greedy.”
The professor looks at him a long while. “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Mahatma Gandhi as a child? It must’ve been winter, because he was wrapped in homespun wool, walking along the main avenue of Dehradun, where all those who loved him waited to touch his feet. I was a boy of seven, beside my mother, who was screaming hysterically, “Bapu, Bapuji,” and as the Mahatma stopped for a moment, his sandal strap came undone. I rushed past the security and helped the old man hobble back into his shoe. When I held his hand, I could feel the thinness of him, the hallowed bones. Nowadays all we have are our loudspeakers, our cronies, and our capitalist Communists.”
A Play for the End of the World Page 22