Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  And then came the crash.

  Nowadays every economist and their dog claimed to have seen it coming, but this was not the way Chandra remembered it. Part of his problem was that he had never considered finance a legitimate discipline, so it wasn’t until 2008 that he even knew what a Credit Default Swap was. Unfortunately, the ones who did know were in the pay of banks or foreign treasuries, a practice Chandra considered vulgar, though it was only recently that he’d learned what these people were paid, untenured lecturers earning six figures for single papers.

  In 2009 Chandra began to consult for the British Treasury Department in the manner of a concerned citizen volunteering for military service. Millions had lost their homes in the U.S., and ten million factory workers in China had been made redundant. Chandra could only speculate on what lay in store for India, and for this, as always, he blamed himself, a thought he did not share with Jean, who would have called him an egomaniac.

  One Sunday, after Hank Paulson’s bailout act, Radha came for lunch. She, Chandra, Jean, and the ten-year-old Jasmine sat around the kitchen table eating shepherd’s pie.

  “I hope you’re being careful, Rad,” Jean was saying. “Everyone I know in Hackney has been mugged at least once.”

  “Hackney’s not what it used to be, Mum,” said Radha. “Anyway, mugging isn’t the worst thing that could happen.”

  “Oh?”

  “They just snatch your bag and run. And I don’t keep much in my bag.”

  “Or they stab you and run,” said Jean.

  Jasmine looked frightened. Chandra wanted to change the subject but couldn’t think of a safe area.

  “Have you ever been mugged, Dad?” said Radha.

  “Not yet,” said Chandra. “Touch wood.”

  “Yes, you have. We were all mugged. A bunch of bankers in shiny suits pulled a knife on us and took a trillion dollars from our back pockets.”

  “Oh, God,” said Jean, while Jasmine squeezed a glob of ketchup onto her plate. “No, they didn’t, Radha.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “What else could they do?” said Chandra. “Let the banks go under? There’d have been anarchy.”

  “So let there be anarchy,” said Radha. “Enough is enough.”

  “Grow up, Radha,” said Chandra. “Just grow up.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning,” said Chandra, “that without capital injection we’d have a global run on the banks which means key industries would fail, which would mean no food, nationwide blackouts, rioting in the streets, homelessness, suicide, and starvation. I think the bailout is an acceptable price to pay.”

  “Bullshit, Dad,” said Radha, dropping her fork onto her plate. “Thieves are in control and they’re royally fucking us over, and none of you care!”

  “I will not have this language!” said Jean. “This is unacceptable. Do you hear, Radha?”

  “I don’t care about the language,” said Chandra, throwing his napkin down. “But I don’t have time for this. Some of us don’t have the luxury of railing at Daddy. Some of us are actually trying to fix the problem.”

  “Yeah, you shaft people for a living, take every penny they’ve got, then ask them to pay your gambling debts. Problem fixed.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Chandra.

  “You,” said Radha. “You and your kind are perfectly happy to have a world run by bloodsucking bankers so long as they call you Professor and fly you first class and pay your big fat salary.”

  Professor Chandra stood, lifted his plate above his head, and dropped it onto the floor, an absurdly theatrical gesture that resulted in Jasmine bursting into tears while Jean said, “For Christ’s sake, Charles,” and Radha smirked in triumph, the same smirk she had learned in Delhi.

  Chandra went upstairs, locked the door, and did not come down until Radha had left. For weeks afterward he refused to answer her calls, screening with his answering machine or, if she called the department, walking over to his secretary’s office so that he could bellow, “Tell her I’m not in!”

  When he finally relented it was because he realized he missed their fights. None of his students dared speak to him the way she had, and debates with colleagues were never about anything other than departmental politics, which meant professional jealousy. It was good to talk to someone who spoke their mind, someone who actually cared about something.

  * * *

  —

  In 2010 Radha got her first real job as a campaigner for a group called Domestic which provided safe spaces for women and children at risk from abuse. Radha’s role was to petition the government to bring about policy changes.

  “Splendid!” said Chandra, when she told him the news. “That all sounds very laudable.”

  He knew this was patronizing, but he was genuinely pleased. This was real work in the real world.

  But instead of becoming sensible and practical, Radha discovered a new form of political idiocy, one far more pernicious than Third World Marxism. It was called “identity politics,” and it defied all rational explanation.

  Under the auspices of identity politics, all statements were narcissistically transformed from “I am against” to “I am.” Radha’s rants became prefaced with, “Speaking as a Woman…I find that completely offensive,” or, “As a Person of Color…I can assure you that isn’t true.”

  Whereas previously she had been possessed of a righteous wrath, she now was in possession of a self-righteous wrath, a neat shuffle forward from Old Testament to New, from rabble-rouser to firing squad that exterminated even the possibility of debate in favor of the supremacy of “being.”

  He had preferred it by far when his daughter had merely been a leftist—their problems, after all, were largely emotional. They were angry and wanted to stay angry, and refused to compromise even when it was in their interests, which was something Chandra even admired on occasion. A few years ago at a GATT summit one of them had thrown a cream pie in his face and, while he licked his lips, had bared her teeth in a gesture of simultaneous hate and respect, a muscular leopard snarling at a great elephant. The two had remained like that, locked in queasy equilibrium, for several seconds before the police arrived to whom Chandra reported, with a wink, that his assailant had already fled.

  This was how he had viewed his sparring matches with Radha until now. They merely had different opinions. He could even accept her need to take out her anger on him, but what he could not bear was this anti-intellectualism, this insistence on dismissing his point of view not only as wrong but as irrelevant. He tried to tell her that his goal had always been the same as those leftists who so despised him: to alleviate poverty, to put food in the mouths of those who had none, even to reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots. But Radha didn’t seem to care about goals anymore. All she cared about was blame. There were the guilty, and there were the victims, and his daughter, it seemed, was judge, jury and, if she had her way, executioner. It hardly needed to be said into which camp he belonged.

  Unlike when they used to fight about economic policy (or “capitalism” as Radha reductively called it), Chandra was out of his depth in these new debates. More often than not Radha would rage about films or books Chandra had never heard of, but would defend anyway. The breaking point, however, was an incident that he would always refer to afterward as “Poohgate.”

  Radha was visiting and had come to his rooms to use his printer. She was sitting on the sofa sorting some flyers (for a demonstration; he didn’t ask for details) into piles, when her gaze fell on the small Winnie-the-Pooh that Chandra usually kept on his bookshelf. It had been hers as a child and she had loved it (which was why Chandra kept it), but now she glared into its black, beady eyes and declared, “I hate Winnie-the-Pooh.”

  “What?” said Chandra.

  “Every character is male, Dad,” said Ra
dha. “Have you even noticed that? Except for Kanga who’s defined exclusively by her motherhood.”

  “Well, she happens to be a mother,” said Chandra.

  “But why is she the only one who’s a mother?”

  “Because men can’t be mothers!” said Chandra, hoping nobody could hear them.

  “She does nothing else,” said Radha. “Nothing! Just sits around and tells off the boys for being silly and reckless because boys will be boys and girls will be mothers, right, Dad?”

  Chandra hated it when she said, “Right, Dad?” He had a tendency to nod without even realizing he was nodding which, to Radha, was the equivalent of severing a finger in a seventeenth-century duel.

  “But she is one,” said Chandra. “What do you want her to do? Be a father?”

  “So why isn’t Owl a woman?” said Radha. “Or Rabbit?”

  “Because he’s not!” said Chandra, his voice turning hoarse as their conversation crashed through the boundaries of sanity. “And in any case, he’s a rabbit! And not even a real rabbit!”

  “Text is real in effect,” said Radha, unfurling one of those statements that so baffled Chandra. “Little girls read Winnie-the-Pooh and grow up believing that all they’re good for is making babies. It’s called gender annihilation.”

  “No,” said Chandra. “Little girls read about talking animals and they have a good time and then, hopefully, they grow up!”

  He looked at the red-jerseyed, yellow-faced figure on his sofa which looked back at him mournfully.

  “What makes you so sure, Dad?” said Radha.

  “Because Winnie-the-Pooh isn’t important!” said Chandra. “For God’s sake, there are people starving in the world, and you’re talking about stuffed toys!”

  “It isn’t important to you,” said Radha, “as a cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class male.”

  “Fine,” said Chandra. “I am a male-gendered sissy. And what about you? You’re a bloody Eeyore!”

  “Eeyore was male!” said Radha.

  “You’re crazy!” said Chandra.

  But Radha was already on her way out, slamming the door after delivering her customary death blow:

  “That’s what men have been saying about women since they burned them at the stake!”

  * * *

  —

  In 2014 Radha quit her job to go traveling around Europe with three friends. When Chandra asked why she felt the need to do this, she told him she was “burned out” and needed time to “reassess.” He wanted to put a few hundred pounds in her account, but knew she would yell at him if he did, so he took her to dinner at a new Indian restaurant in Mayfair instead.

  They spent much of the meal in silence, so aware were they that nearly any topic of conversation would end up in mutually assured destruction. He wished they could talk about sports but, like Sunny, Radha had no interest. This only left health and the weather, which could lead, respectively, to the privatization of the NHS and the inevitability of global warming under the free market. At last, unable to hold his tongue any longer, Professor Chandra asked her:

  “So, are you seeing anybody these days?”

  Radha, who had ordered a slab of paneer with nothing on it for her main course, stared up at him, her paneer untouched.

  “Why?” she said. “Are you?”

  He shook his head. “No. I am not.”

  “So your question,” said Radha, “is am I seeing anyone?”

  “I mean,” said Chandra, sipping at his Merlot as casually as he could, “do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Why should it be a boyfriend?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you assume it’s…a…boy?”

  “Oh, God,” said Chandra, putting his head in his hands.

  “So the thought that I could be with a woman is so unbearable to you, is it, Dad?”

  “No,” said Chandra, straightening his back and rearranging his blazer. “No, the fact that you have to do this to me is. All I am trying to do is have a civilized dinner with my daughter and you have to make it so…horrible.”

  “Horrible?”

  “It never stops!” said Chandra. “All the time, Radha, with this nonsense.”

  “So my life is nonsense, is it?”

  “Yes,” he said, slamming his fist against his thigh. “All this obsession with he, she, P.O.C. There are serious problems in the world. You’ve had a good education, a good upbringing, and all you do is complain.”

  “What’s nonsense,” said Radha, “is your refusal to even contemplate that I may have ideas and principles of my own. Have you ever considered that, Dad?”

  “Why do you hate me so much?” he said, putting his glass down. “What did I do to you?”

  Radha fixed him with her eye. She had started to wear a lot of eye makeup again, as she had in her teens. Her eyeliner extended outwards into her face; a “cat’s eye,” he believed it was called.

  “Can you see me, Dad?”

  “Yes,” he said, angrier than it was safe to be in public.

  “When did you ever see me, Dad? When did you ever see any of us?”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “This is nonsense.”

  “When did you ever see Mum?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you think she left you, Dad?”

  “How dare you!”

  “Right. You never even thought it could have anything to do with you, did you?”

  “What do you think you are?” said Chandra. “You little hussy!”

  “Yeah, that’s all you’ve got. Cheap slut-shaming slurs. And then you’ll take out your credit card and slam your blood money down and everything’s taken care of. Man make bill. That’s all you need to do, right, Dad? God forbid you actually notice anyone else’s existence, or listen to anyone, or give a shit about anyone except yourself and your oh-so-important career. Go on, Dad, do your thing. Pay the bill.”

  “You pay it,” he said and threw his napkin in her direction before walking out of the restaurant.

  He had no idea whether Radha paid the bill or not. It must have come to well over a hundred pounds (he had ordered a very good bottle of wine). He always wished he had looked back. No, he wished he had gone back, paid the bill, said goodbye. But he didn’t. He went home to Cambridge and when Radha left for Europe she did not say goodbye. He assumed that when she returned they would make up in their usual way, pretending neither could remember having argued, starting again from square one (even though square one had long since been torn up from its foundations).

  But Radha did not return, nor did she email, and eventually Jean told him that his daughter did not want him to know where she was.

  “This is absurd,” he said.

  “She made me promise, Charles.”

  “She can’t do that.”

  “She said you’d say that.”

  “What?”

  “She said you’d say she belonged to you and I guess this is her way of proving she doesn’t.”

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Let her prove it. It’s the only thing you can do, Charles. Wait it out.”

  “Tell me where she is, Jean. I won’t contact her. Just tell me where she is.”

  “I’m sorry, Charles. I can’t. I promised.”

  In a fury he called Sunny who told him the same thing, and from that moment on Chandra refused to believe a word that any of them said. He also refused to believe that Jasmine could be in on the conspiracy, so he never asked her, though he was dimly aware that he was almost certainly deluding himself on this front. He gave himself to frenetic Google searches for “Radha Chandrasekhar” instead, but came up only with information prior to her disappearance, as if she had paid the NSA to erase all trace of her. It was impossible to find any information on Facebook either. She
didn’t even have a proper photograph, only a quote by Audre Lorde: There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives. He couldn’t see her page or her friends, only the words, From North Pole, Alaska.

  He emailed every other day, and then every day, sending increasingly desperate messages consisting of statements like:

  Where are you? Worried. Please write.

  Love, Dad

  No word for seven months. What is this? Not good.

  Dad

  And:

  Reply!

  Best, Chandra

  When a year had elapsed, he began writing bundles of three or four messages at a time. He told her how sorry he was, how he loved her and couldn’t they just talk about it and maybe he was wrong and Marxism was correct and he was just a silly old fool with too much pride and if she would only reply with one line telling him she was all right he would finally be able to sleep at night because the only thing that mattered to him was her health and happiness.

  Except he didn’t send these messages, not one of them. They just lay there in his drafts folder like withered pieces of his heart while Radha remained in Europe, or was it India now?

  In his darkest moments, he remembered all those vicious words in the restaurant, his daughter staring at him with those Anubis-like eyes, sleek and lean with hatred. Somewhere, along the way, he had done something terribly wrong; this was the only conclusion he could come to. He just wished he had a way of knowing what it was.

  PUTTING HIS NOTEBOOK in his pocket, Professor Chandra marched away past the vegetable gardens and the lodge and onto the ramp that led to the hot tubs. At the entrance he grabbed a towel, stripped off his clothes, and walked into the sunlight, trying to fight away a vision of everyone else dressed in cocktail attire turning toward him like Marie Antoinette and her chambermaids, parasols pointed at his appendage before ordering its precipitate removal.