No Country: A Novel

by Kalyan Ray

  • • •

  “WHAT KIND OF Bengali name is Aherne?” I asked Baba when I had stopped by at home a month into the fall semester. He says you can tell a lot about someone from India, just by his name.

  “Aherne! Not an Indian name . . . Aherne . . . someone once told me about that name, yes,” mused Baba, “but I cannot, for the life of me . . .” He trailed off, in a reverie.

  By this time, I had been seeing Neel for almost four months. I told Baba he was a graduate student from India, studying light in the physics department, almost done with his dissertation. He would probably go back to India, I confided to Baba, who asked me if we were serious.

  “I’ll tell you when I know,” I told him. But I had avoided the topic of his plans so far, unready to read more into my diffidence to address it.

  • • •

  NEEL STAYED OVER some weekends in my small upstairs apartment near the university, a couple of rooms with a kitchenette and a small deck in a clapboard house overlooking a maple-treed backyard.

  Lazing in bed one lazy Sunday morning in October, I could not resist my curiosity and started to ask him about his life back in India. Neel launched into a description of his favorite coffeehouse across from Presidency College, where he had been an undergrad.

  “It’s right across from Sanskrit College, up a broken staircase, bang in the middle of four blocks of decrepit buildings, chock-a-block with small publishing houses, their books spilling into corridors and tiny lanes, Devi, the biggest concentration of publishers in the world.” Neel seemed transported, a faraway look in his eyes.

  I was baffled, expecting to hear about his family and parents, but let him go on, childishly delighted to talk about the place. I had not seen this side of him before.

  “Oh well,” he reminisced, “actually, Devi, the coffeehouse was dim and reeked of the fumes of the Charms that we smoked.”

  “Charms?” I said, sitting up, “Those don’t sound legal.”

  “Naah, it’s not what you think,” he grinned, “Charminar cigarettes—strong and the cheapest. Packs a mule’s kick. You’d have to hold them horizontal, otherwise the tobacco drizzles down—like Orwell’s Victory cigarettes. We lived on those and shots of black coffee—‘infusion’ is what the waiters called them. None of us had money for anything else. But yes, some of my friends, like Nondon, smoked something really heady.”

  “Hash?” I leaned in for more details.

  “Don’t knock that fine old Hindu tradition. It’s the preferred whiff of Lord Shiva. They have a saying: ‘Hang it—it is hemp after all!’ ”

  “But Neel, tell me about the people important to you.”

  “In those coffeehouse days, they were Frantz Fanon, Gramsci, Lévi-Strauss, and even that frozen relic C. P. Snow. And dear old Hegel.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” I interjected, “this coffeehouse of yours was part Plato’s academy and part Haight-Ashbury. But what about home? Tell me about your family and those other things that matter.” I was not letting him get away that easily.

  “Well, madam,” he said, affecting a solemn face, “are you referring to my displaced bourgeois origins and the confused traces of multinational bloodlines, eh?”

  “I am about to pour coffee on your head,” I threatened.

  “Okay, I surrender,” he said, rolling over on his stomach, “but I could only think of one place at a time.”

  “And would you take me there?”

  “I would, Devi,” he said, then his face fell, “but I wonder if you’d like it as much I did. During the frequent power cuts—we call these ‘load-shedding’—it was hot as an elephant’s armpit.” I broke into helpless laughter, and he was surprised that I had found him funny. I kissed him, aroused by a new closeness, and before we knew it, we found ourselves making love.

  Later, as we held each other close, I thought aloud, “Mrs. Nolan probably heard us, Neel,” but he rebutted, “That pious lady is definitely in church this Sabbath morning, Devi. She’s not a heathen like you, despite what the nuns tried to teach you in your tender years.”

  I hit him with a pillow. It was the most carefree time I had spent with him, yet we had not yet spoken of the future.

  We went downstairs, took Mrs. Nolan’s rake and, just for fun, swept the backyard, hanging out under the riot of colors of the maples with a couple of bottles of Genesee Cream Ale, which Neel always brought over during his weekends. Mrs. Nolan was so delighted by the sight of her neat yard as she pulled in that she insisted we take half a pecan pie she had baked the previous day.

  Neel decided to stay back and drive into campus together next morning, because Mrs. Nolan’s pie merited serious attention. As I heated up a frozen tray of Baba’s Hyderabadi biriyani for what Neel called a real intercultural meal, Neel folded sheets of paper to make a rhinoceros and a large imaginary insect for Mrs. Nolan’s two grandsons.

  We turned in early, draped over each other on the saggy sofa which had come with the apartment and, turning on the TV, found that they were about to show an Aparna Sen film on PBS, the only channel that ever showed the occasional foreign film, and luckily, the only one my set received properly, without wavering; I had, by now, grown used to seeing a wraith-like Dan Rather intone the daily evening news on CBS. Tonight’s film turned out to be about Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, and I noticed Neel leaning forward, rapt.

  “That’s just the kind of place and people among whom I grew up, Devi!” Neel said softly, as the credits rolled up. “My great great-grandfather Padraig had come from Ireland,” he began, which explained the name Aherne.

  His grandfather Robert Aherne had married a Bengali botanist, Amala Martha Basu, a daughter of Christian converts, who had died of malarial fever contracted when she had gone to the Kaziranga forest in Assam on a botanical survey trip when their daughter, Mary Aherne, Neel’s mother, was fifteen. Neel had lived with his mother, a schoolteacher, in his grandfather’s house. He had no siblings. Mr. Aherne ran a shop which sold old and new books, prints, and sheet music on Calcutta’s Free School Street. “A stone’s throw from where Thackeray had been born and spent his childhood,” said Neel.

  “William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist! Did you also live in one of those old houses?”

  “Oh, it is old and creaky enough.” Neel grinned. “My Irish ancestor Padraig built it on Elliot Road, half a mile away through small lanes, if you know the way.”

  The family used to leave together in the mornings, his grandfather Robert to open his shop, his mother, Sarala, and he to their respective schools. After school Neel would walk to his grandfather’s shop, where he would leaf through books and reproductions and listen to music, usually jazz. “We always sent for the big chicken patties from Nahoum’s, a dozen everyday,” he concluded.

  “You must have worked up quite an appetite!” I interjected. Neel shook his head. “Some of them were for my grandfather’s visitors. His friends would come by. Old Tony Belletty, who always carried his hip flask of rum, Krikor Aratoon, the retired businessman who had a special wide chair for himself—he’s th-a-a-t wide, Devi! Often we would all listen to LPs of jazz, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, you know. Young local musicians like Lew Hilt, Amyt and Anjan Dutt used to drop in all the time. So did Pam Crain, the lovely jazz singer. Nondon Bagchi used to show off his percussion on teacups with his spoon! They were beginning to get gigs at Trinca’s on Park Street. Yeah, they were a lot of fun. The store is a favorite for collectors. People drop by, jazz lovers, musicians, just plain folks, everybody. They love to hang out with him. He listens, and not just to music.”

  Neel mentioned his father just twice, as if he was a long-dead relative. Divorced from his mother when Neel was barely one, he had left town and remarried, never once returning. By second grade, he had learned not to ask his mother about him.

  I could not imagine a universe without my father. “Is that why you took your grandfather’s name?” I was puzzled.

  “Well, that kind of happened,” mused Neel. �
�My mother got an affidavit reclaiming her maiden name after the divorce. When I was enrolled in the nearby school, the clerk had automatically written my name down as Aherne. My mother did not correct him. So Aherne it remained.” And so they lived together, the three Ahernes, until his mother died of breast cancer when he was in college. I knew he missed her too much to talk about her yet.

  “Where is your father?” I asked.

  “Australia, I think,” he replied, in a tone that did not invite conversation. His usual reticence had returned. We had not spoken about his plans, but the moment was gone.

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, I arrived unannounced at his room, high up in the Valentine Tower. I liked its monastic simplicity, the odd percussion of the heating system, the high window view of the canal that led to the river. I had brought with me a cassette of an early Mozart flute sonata I knew he would like. It was just beginning to snow, glimmering evanescent lake-effect snow under a rare cloudless sky, a local phenomenon.

  “I just got a letter from my grandfather,” Neel announced. “He wants to see New York.”

  “But isn’t he really old?”

  “He’s just over eighty, Devi, but spry and really independent. You’ll like him.”

  “Would he like me?” I countered. “Does he know of me?

  “He will be here in just a couple of weeks, Devi,” he said with a teasing smile, “and you can give him the third degree.”

  “Why don’t you bring him to my parents’ for Thanksgiving? Will he be here by then?”

  “He’s arriving right before Thanksgiving—he knows there is a holiday in America, and says he wants to wander around New York with me for a week, at least. He particularly wants to see Greenwich Village and has already booked rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. Don’t ask—it’s where his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, stayed. He wants to see everything. The Met, the Frick. And yes—the Botanical Garden up in the Bronx. My grandmother Amala used to mention it.”

  “Oh,” I said, my disappointment showing. “Can’t you go there after Thanksgiving?”

  “How can I let him down, Devi? He’s been talking about this for months now. It’s a big deal to come, and I didn’t really think he would. All my life I knew I could count on him. He’s never asked anything of me.” He held my hands in his. “I’m sorry, Devi, really. You asked me about him before, and I’ve been meaning to share this with you, something he had sent earlier.”

  From his desk, Neel picked up an old envelope with several Indian stamps on it. He took out a letter whose pages were creased by many foldings and refolding, and handed it to me. Postmarked at Elliot Road Post Office, Calcutta, a year and a half ago.

  “Devi, he’s the only family I have.”

  “You want me to read it now? This old letter?”

  “Yes. I need to drop off this research paper. I’ll be right back, so please, please don’t leave. Devi?”

  I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he repeated, and left.

  I began to read slowly, with the flute and the waft of snow in the background.

  19 September, 1987

  My beloved Neel,

  I have now settled down in Elliot Road, my dear grandson, back from my trip to Ireland. It seems so strange to return to the familiar old house; I still expect your mother to walk in any minute. The memories follow me around all my waking hours, and even in my dreams.

  I know you will probably laugh at my sentimentality and tease me about my long-planned pilgrimage, or what you will. But I did need to make this journey.

  When your great-grandfather Brendan died (I know it was years before you were born) he had a book of Irish landscapes next to him. When I found him, the page was open on a double-page panorama of the Glengesh Pass. He had never been to Ireland. I have often opened the book to these pages and studied them, inch by inch, with my magnifying glass, wondering what it was that drew him, time and again, to that book of Irish pictures. I came to know that landscape as if I had been there, many times.

  My grandfather Padraig had come from an Ireland racked by famine—the kind of famine that I myself saw in Calcutta and the surrounding countryside in 1942–43. Again, that was a man-made famine. All the grains were taken from Bengal’s fine harvests for the war effort in Burma, leaving the Bengalis starving. Over a million people died in the streets, mothers begging feebly for a bit of rice-gruel (not even rice!) for their swollen-bellied children. These were Jim Gwynne’s pictures of the Irish dead—you remember them, don’t you?—brought to dreadful life again. What had the Empire learnt from the 1840s to the 1940s? Or perhaps, they learnt too well.

  That British Army in Burma under handsome Lord Mountbatten withdrew in a panic when confronted by Japanese artillery. All that grain wasted or rotted in the rains. Poor Mountbatten, so wary of bombs, was blown up years later in his yacht by Irish militants in the harbor off Mullaghmore. But enough about blood and death. I know I am rambling, dear Neel, and in case you are wondering, let me tell you, because I miss our late afternoon chats at the store. The Nahoum patties don’t have the same flavour for me, with you so far away.

  As I was saying, I was always curious about this book of Irish landscapes that my father, Brendan, pored over. Well, I decided to make this trip to Ireland and walk in the landscapes of that book. I secretly wished to judge, to see, how Irish I was, or how I felt about the land itself. My father knew himself Indian and Irish. I was at one more remove. An irresistible curiosity, a tug in my heart, drew me. I have always thought of myself as an individual, one of millions in India, far from Ireland. I think of Elliot Road when I think of home. Some day, before it is too late, I will tell you how I came to comprehend this.

  If I think of nations, it is when they are misbehaving, or are playing sports like good boys. What does it mean to belong to a nation? Is it the accident of birth? Is it a memory, a yearning for some obscure stamp on the soul, some tune that plays in the blood? Or is it what others insist you are—painting your corner of the room around you?

  I so wish you had come to Ireland with me, dear Neel—you, the rationalist—isn’t that what you call yourself? And I, the fuzzy leftover of a colonial era. Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? We look at the lands of our ancestors and we are left with our own incomprehension, as if we are people who glance through biographies written in a recently lost language. Could I know, for instance, which sights would have brought my ancestors to tears of joy or inconsolable grief? Which cottage, which crossroad, which tree?

  Have you ever—looking at yourself, your face in a mirror, your hands—wondered: Who is it that is looking at these hands, this face you think you know so well? What is this consciousness that is thinking all this, aware of this very instant in time? Who is this self, this I? Does this sentience have a name, a place in time? Can this deepest awareness have a national stamp? Or are all identities like layers over an unnameable core, an infinite nova that is just mind—that has no home, that cannot be housed, named or held—and has no country?

  When I reached the Glengesh Pass, I looked with my physical eyes at the landscape I already knew so well, the dips and swells of the land. The green Irish earth was firmly and undeniably underfoot. I had the strangest of sensations. It was as if the being of my father merged into mine, as if he were looking from inside my head. In the bright cave of my skull it was his lamp that seemed to flicker and come to life. I cannot explain it any other way.

  I woke one morning, my second day, in Sligo, the town that I had heard my father speak of. My night had been full of dreams. I stepped out alone at dawn. The curve of the path stretching out of town seemed like a message. I saw two sparrows, feathers puffed and brown. They looked no different from the ones around our house on Elliot Road.

  What was Irish about this land? I wondered. What is my connection to it?

  I felt like a traveler millennia ago, a hunter-gatherer, a tribesman, walking, not knowing how the earth would unspool before me, walking on until I felt the urge to stop. My naming
the land came from my urge to settle down. What I named the land came also from my memory of where I had been: an Aryan tribesman from a far land, calling this land Erin in honour of his lineage and ancestors. I knew that another long-lost member of my early relatives from pre-history had taken a different path in that primeval diaspora, and the land where he settled with his kin, he named for the same reason, Iran. So many lands, so many variations of the same names.

  I think of how our families were spread over the earth: How these names turn against each other, their languages having grown apart, their eyes only upon their own piece of ground, jealous of others, fierce and grasping. I raised my eyes from the earth and saw the expanse of the endless sea, glittering and admonitory. It was of a color no map ever showed.

  Glengesh Pass was so inextricable from my father’s dreams of it that it was no place on earth; and I was not just sprung from the blood of the Ahernes. My Irishness melted like sea-salt within this temperature of my being, making it possible for me to be Indian as well—a human being descended, who knows, from how many sources, the product of so many lineages which are unknown to us and will forever remain unknown: Erin, Iran, Aryan, human . . . maanush, the same word for “humankind” used in Bengali and by the Gypsies all over Europe! I felt sure that my father knew—in the last moments of his life, his mind’s eye on the landscape of Glengesh Pass—that we all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.

  You value the rational; I feel the limits of logic. You decided to study light; I ponder obscurity. Neel, I take comfort in the mystery of that opposition and celebrate the elusive nature of our histories.

  You tell me about the snows and maples of America, and I rejoice in your sight of them. You have told me how the leaves change colours in variegated splendour in the weeks before winter comes. Please remember to pick many leaves this autumn. Put them in an envelope and mail them to me. Your letters are so short, dear Neel, so factual. At least that envelope will be a letter of many leaves.