No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  Most outer walls of the college building had been painted over with slogans. Red handwritten posters were sloppily pasted along the entire length of the dirty corridors, on stairwells, and even on notice boards. One student group proclaimed that China’s Chairman was their Chairman. Another group deemed this a betrayal of Mother India, unpatriotic and pathetic.

  Just now someone had been caught tearing a Maoist poster—or had been arbitrarily accused of the act—and a fight was in progress.

  As the rampaging circle of students suddenly broke formation, I saw someone flung upon the ground, crouched and shielding his head. I caught a glimpse of the man, his mouth twisted, bloody. Niren Ghosh, a senior man from the History department.

  Niren-babu had been one of the few professors who noticed me in the college staff room as I entered awkwardly on my very first day.

  “New?” he had said to me. “Brand-new?” He was thoroughly amused by my reticence. “Sit down, young man. You are a teacher, so you can sit here. You see that lazy fellow in the khaki shirt? That’s Sridhar, a fourth-class employee. He can barely sign his name, but he is a great admirer of Karl Marx. He will get you a cup of tea—for money, of course. Drink only black tea. Never trust the milk. That is the most important thing I’ve learnt in my twenty-three years of teaching here.” I ordered the black tea. Some weeks later, when Niren Ghosh was not there, I had a cup of the tea with milk. Ghosh was dead right, I decided immediately.

  And here was Ghosh, on all fours, trying to escape like a beaten dog through the legs of the students who were jostling each other to land a blow or a kick. With no idea that I was about to do so, I flung myself on the circle of students. Thwarted by the heaving wall of bodies, I promptly lost my footing and fell on my back. Frantically, I tried to retrieve my new glasses before someone trampled them. I picked them up from beside the spit-smeared wall and put them on, but one of the arms was bent. On my knees in the dusty corridor, I tried to adjust it when Ghosh’s sharp cry instantly brought me back to the present: A student had twisted Niren-babu’s arm behind him, pushing it up while the professor screamed in distress.

  The jubilant young man was chanting with religious fervour, “Chairman Mao is our Chairman!” His friends chortled with pleasure and chorused, “Smash the black hand of revisionists who tear our posters.” After a final kick which had the air of an afterthought, they left the professor on the ground, their jubilant voices ringing out as they thudded down the corridor, “Red Guard Zindabad! Long Live the Red Book.”

  Niren Ghosh lay on the floor, his face bleeding, his shirt tattered. Gently I raised his head to my lap as I squatted on the filthy corridor.

  “Shame on you,” hissed Niren Ghosh. “You did not defend me,” he mumbled thickly.

  “Ghosh-sir,” I protested, “look, my glasses . . .”

  “You’re here to gloat.” Niren Ghosh was weeping now. “And now you will go to the staff room and tell everyone about this. Over tea.” Then he spat at me.

  I was aghast. “I . . .” I began, as Ghosh slowly rose to his knees. I stretched my hands to help the professor. Groaning, he twisted his body away from me and, in obvious pain, began to shuffle away. I noticed the wet stain spreading on the beige trousers of my senior colleague, the moist imprint of his torn sandal on the dusty corridor, and decided that it would be more seemly not to let the older man know that I had witnessed this last sign of humiliation.

  I waited for a few minutes, and then left by the rear staircase. From the side lane, I could hear another fight in progress at the main gate of the college. I knew that the fight would spill into the neighbouring streets. Local political parties would step in with their goons; passersby would be beaten up or pelted with stones, or have exploding soda-water bottles thrown at them, and bags snatched. I stepped down the stairwell, away from the fracas, and began walking home.

  I suddenly remembered how hungry I had felt in the classroom and bought some roasted peanuts from a roadside vendor, eating hurriedly, barely tasting what I chewed. On an impulse, I studied the piece of paper they were wrapped in, a scrap torn out of some book. Smoothing it, I read the only part still legible:

  Why should not you

  Who know it all ring at his door, and speak?

  Just truth enough to show that his whole life

  Will scarcely find for him a broken crust

  Of all those truths that are your daily bread

  I looked up to scrutinize the sky, which seemed to be made of broken pieces of glass. The roar of the city bore down upon me. A tram turning in its curved track made a cutter’s screech, blade meeting whirling whetstone. I walked aimlessly into smaller and smaller by-lanes, until I was exhausted, swallowed into the hushed interior of the city. The only sound came from the babble of a news report on a radio left on a windowsill and the conspiratorial cawing of local crows. What have I to do with this place? I thought. Where do I belong? I contemplated the constancy of prime integers. I yearned for some far corner of Earth that was a Republic of Mathematics.

  In the oppressive midday heat, I sat down footsore and lost on the worn steps of a house that had clearly once been prosperous. The steps were marble, stained through decades of neglect, and the wide entrance revealed an inner courtyard, at the centre of which stood a broken altar. Under it, a stray dog lay curled up with a knock-kneed puppy, probably the only survivor of its brood.

  On a step, still tepid from the daylong sun, I found part of another soiled page, which I picked up, expecting another inscrutable message. The rumpled once-glossy black-and-white photograph revealed a broad classical building with a round columned tower above it. I could faintly discern some writing on the frieze under a dome. I squinted to read the faint print. Euclid, Aristotle, Pythagoras . . . The other names were smothered under snow. I carefully deciphered the soiled text:

  on the edge of Lake Ontario, one of the largest inland lakes in the northern hemisphere, this University in New York State houses distinguished departments of the Sciences and the Arts. Although one has to contend with formidable winters, the summer flower gardens and the autumn landscape are spectacular. All year round, concerts are held under the aegis of its own Eastman School of Music

  I thought of the bungalow where I had lived as a child, its unkempt garden and the bamboo grove at the back, thick and green in the swaying heat. With the sharp clarity of loss, I recalled the hidden mosque, my lost brother, Baba, and the dead pir. When I came back from my reverie, I saw about myself the filthy stones of the city lane, the walls stained brown with spat betel juice. Above, in red strident letters, slogans screamed at me: THIS Is NOT Our Homeland! and This Is the Decade of Liberation.

  I shut my eyes in exhaustion. I wondered if Professor Ghosh had been able to get a rickshaw, for he had been in no condition to walk. A single violin had begun to play in my head. I knew it at once, this beautiful and dreadful prelude that would sweep me into the strange country of a blinding headache, leaving me immobile for two days or three. The thin dog skittered past me, its puppy held in its mouth, back into the angry city. After a long time, I folded this second scrap of paper with the message, and put it away carefully as an idea started to seed and grow inside me.

  I needed to find my way to a land lost in snow, where there was a belltower on which were carved the names of Euclid and Pythagoras and all their shining, visionary company.

  Trudging home in the haze of heat, under layers of dust beginning to settle on the grimy leaves of pavement trees, peepuls, neems, and tired deodars, I climbed the broken slabs of the red cement stairs and opened the door to my room, where I smoothed the picture of the domed building and studied it. I took out a clean sheet of paper and, laying them both on the table, side by side, I cradled my head between my palms, holding my headache at bay, willing myself not to sink into bed. I peered close, reading again those famous names. Feeling tied to an enormous weight, I leant forward with effort and started my letter:

  Dear Professor . . .

  Someone, continents
away, would open and read me. I slumped, the writing done, my arms stretched out on the table in submission. There was nothing more I could do now. I would post the letter when I could. My headache was a hum around me, the room dwindling away.

  “I’ll take this picture of the house I have never seen—to that house I have only seen in a picture,” I said to myself, and fell on my bed and sank fast asleep.

  Kush

  Rochester, Upstate New York

  In the middle of a seminar, someone was reading a paper, occasionally writing on the blackboard. Engrossed in the complex calculations, I had been making notes for later clarification. Drawn into the intricate logic and linking of numbers, my mind rapt in the architecture of the equations which were suspended over my consciousness like an ethereal solar system, a mobile of balanced splendours, I felt open to some revelation.

  Looking up, I was amazed to see the windows white in a way I had never seen before. So this was snow! I rose like a sleepwalker, leaving my notebook open, my fountain pen forgotten, and left the room.

  I found myself in front of Rush Rhees Library, which seemed to float in space. A distant violin began in my head, joined slowly by a delicately plucked santoor. But I knew this to be different—not the familiar violin which was a prelude to pain. Underfoot, the world had turned white, and all about me the light had been trimmed cerulean by a careful and mysterious brush. This world was silent, on tiptoe. What should I name it, I wondered, remembering how Laub and I would make up phrases in English, our secret language: a slink of foxes, a stir of ants.

  I opened my eyes, my mouth, slowly. Before and during the rain, it smells of the earth. Before and during snow, I decided, it smells of the sky. A flight of snow, Laub, we’ll call it a flight of snow. It was the first time in many years I had spoken to my brother. In all this time, his loss was a phantom pain, familiar in my chest, my missing rib.

  Snow stirred and floated in the pantomime of a cataract which poured over me. I remembered that each minute snowflake was like no other: Like individual numbers, I thought, enthralled. I walked on blindly into the billow, this eternity, into the innumerable white numbers, walking on them, breathing and smelling them. The numbers possessed the great elms, the tented pines, the smothered maples, and transformed the pillared buildings into receptacles of all the numbers of infinity, as they swirled down on this new earth.

  Behind me, my footsteps were smoothed under fresh snowflakes as I walked. I am Shunya—shunya itself, I thrilled. With a shiver of delight, I remembered that shunyata, the Sanskrit word for emptiness—the empty vessel of the mind—was also the word shunya used by everyone in India, too casually, to denote the Mathematical Zero. But here I was, held in this evanescent shunyata. I let my mind become the zero underlying the white plenitude of all the snowflakes dancing around me. I suddenly understood: Even the existence of a single snowflake—or all the snowflakes—upon the shunyata of my mind denoted mathematical Infinity!

  were all Infinity, the supreme supine helix, a sleeping Buddha, the ∞ endlessly closed upon itself. In this swirl of snowflakes, I wondered how I could bear to live with the thrill of this moment for the rest of my life, through all those uncounted ordinary days that lay before me.

  I closed my eyes, feeling tears down my cheeks, and in the white, blind world around me, an intimate presence. Shutting my eyes, I held out my hands, palms outstretched, and stood still, absolutely still, to hear that voice better. Is that you, Laub? I whispered. Laub, I called from behind the darkness of my closed eyes. Laub, is that you?

  When I opened my eyes, I saw my empty palms fill with snowflakes, ashes from some celestial heatless fire. In the middle of the quadrangle, I did not turn my head, for to do so would have been a breach of profound trust. I knew there had been a second set of footprints, twin to my own, rapidly covered and kept secret by the torrent of falling numbers.

  • • •

  HEADING AWAY FROM the wide quadrangle in front of Morey Hall, I took the steps past the pillared auditorium, to the river, its black water beginning to yield to the pale traces of sky. I lingered by the small interfaith chapel perched above the wintry river, turning finally towards home.

  Soon I reached my tiny apartment by the canal, near the curve of the Genessee River in the blue rumour of light. At the kitchen window, hungry, I was unable to bring myself to break the perfect whiteness of an egg I held in my palm. Outside, the last edges of the world were turning white before my eyes. I felt inexplicably comforted by the soft wax and moulding of snow that fell, and fell, and fell all about and within me. Lying on my narrow bed beside my curtainless window, I noticed the immaculate ceiling.

  Waking up some hours later, I looked out of the window and saw that it was still night, but it felt as if I had levitated. The low azalea bushes had turned into a row of sleeping sheep. A diaphanous glow tilted up into the room. I felt lightheaded with hunger. On the kitchen counter, I found the egg which I had not broken. There was nothing else to eat. I opened my fridge and watched a small mist wisped out from its empty lit interior.

  Then I remembered. Wandering the aisles one late night at Wegman’s, a vast store lit like an ocean liner, not knowing what to buy until I had been confronted by a vast number of identical tin cans on which were pictures of batter-fried chicken; I had picked one of these unnaturally heavy cans and gone to the counter.

  For weeks I had been living off cardboard containers of soup. Sometimes I boiled noodles, and dumping them into the soup, ate from a large cereal bowl, draining the last of the soup by tilting the bowl with both hands. Then I would make tea, relieved that I would not have to think about hunger for another day, and sit at my bare table to immerse myself in my books.

  But tonight—was it still night?—I was troubled by a strange appetite. I took the can out, picturing the meat inside. I did not own a can opener, so I got out my lone knife, braced the can on the kitchen table, and wedged the thin end of the knife into the top edge of the tin circumference. Then I hit it with my heaviest book, a hardcover Oxford University Press tome on mathematical logic. It worked. The knife cracked through the top and sank into what seemed to be Vaseline. I moved the knife, poised for the next mathematical blow. The crack widened. I was pleased with my ingenuity. After making a circular gash of a few inches, I prised open a corner. All I could see within was an oily slosh, like melted soap.

  I carried the can to the sink and began shaking out the contents. I studied the side of the can again, a close-up of perfect fried chicken, breaded and toothsome. Then I read what was written on its side: Crisco. Vegetable shortening.

  I had no idea what “shortening” was, but understood that all I had to eat in this hungry winter dawn was a can of whitish frying medium. I lit the stove, poured out some of the ooze, cracked the solitary egg, and ate it straight off the pan. But my body was still full of hunger, as if a zest for life had woken inside me and would not be denied.

  So out I went, plodding through the knee-high snow, muffled in my thin anorak, mittened hands stretched out for balance. The sky had cleared, and a small bent moon hung overhead. So did a variety of floodlights over white-quilted parking lots near the hospital. I waded alone down Crittenden Boulevard. The parking lots ended; so did the lights. Apart from my plumed breath, it was silent. The houses huddled together, and the end of the road was lost in a milky darkness.

  Then I saw them, a group of slender deer gathered at an intersection far beyond, their delicate brown fetlocks kicking up powdery snow. The world belonged to them as they crossed the broad white avenue, towards the large, hilly cemetery beyond it. Aureoles of light above the avenue magically changed hues, red, amber and green and back again, reflected in the drifts of snow.

  Just as I reached the store, I realized I had forgotten my wallet, and began to laugh. It was a laughter that shook the plinth of all my sorrow and I felt some great weight falling off me. I shivered with pleasure and cold.

  That is how my future wife first saw me.

  Having fi
nished her gruelling medical intern’s shift of close to thirty-six hours, she had gone straight from the hospital’s pediatrics ward on the fourth floor to the supermarket, bought groceries from her neat list, and returned to her car in the deserted parking lot. But Dr. Seetha Rathnam’s temperamental car would not start. She pumped the accelerator several times in irritation. As a faint smell of gasoline seeped through the rusty Saab, she realized she would have to wait a little while before she could crank the engine again. She possessed a strong sense of the pragmatic and refused to panic, sitting quietly and biding her time, when a man appeared out of the night, clearly having walked a long way.

  He stood as if in a trance under a solitary lamppost, then began to laugh by himself like a child beguiled by the sheer absurdity of some tale. He pulled back the hood of his parka, his eyes glistening brightly with tears of mirth.

  Seetha could see plainly he was Indian. Another eccentric grad student! she thought. Then she rolled open her car window.

  “Give my car a push, please,” she said decisively.

  • • •

  I COULD NOT have been more startled if the car had spoken. I nodded and got behind the small car and pushed. It began to move, slowly at first, and then with gathering speed. Seetha turned the ignition and put her car in gear. It coughed and lurched forward. She looked in her rearview mirror, but I had disappeared from sight. Putting her car in neutral, engine idling comfortably now, Seetha stepped out.

  “I think I have twisted my ankle,” I mumbled in embarrassment, lying on the narrow layer of ice the car track had made.

  VII

  The young

  In one another’s arms

  Billy Swint

  Clairmont, Upstate New York

  1974

  Mom likes to keep her special pictures on her dresser. In her wedding picture, I can make out Dad’s birthmarks, one on his face, and one on the back of his right hand, with which he holds Mom close to himself. But the picture is black-and-white. His birthmark on his cheek glows red when he is angry. When he clenches his fist, I can see the other birthmark before it lands on me. No one can protect me.