Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  In the lobby he noticed that Steve was putting on a pair of bedroom slippers. Chandra was about to tell him how wet it was, before he realized why. He had thrown Steve’s boots into the trees. He would look for them when they got back.

  In the parking lot Professor Chandra’s SUV was covered in snow, a wall of it around his tires, while Steve, with that calculated prescience common to all men of dubious character, had parked his Lincoln under the cover of two fir trees. Chandra got inside while Steve threw a can of “Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso” into the back and started the engine.

  “So what do you think of TTIP, Chandrasekhar?” said Steve, putting the car into reverse.

  “What?” said Chandra, staring out the window at the huge drifts of snow.

  “The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Protocol,” said Steve.

  “Partnership,” said Chandra automatically, still staring, imagining he might see his daughter crouching behind a tree like a sniper in a war movie.

  “Yes, exactly,” said Steve. “You a fan?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chandra. “It will be good for trade flows. But please, do not discuss this in front of Radha.”

  “Sure,” said Steve. “Sure. Of course, I mean, I don’t think all leftists are against it. It’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?”

  Chandra shook his head. Such questions were not worthy of answers.

  They reached the main road. The sky was almost white, the valley beneath them too. They passed the Hindu ashram and the turn-off to Sunny’s, his house a hulking monolith at the top of the hill.

  “Interesting guy, your son,” said Steve finally. “He’s rented that whole place for himself.”

  “For all of us,” said Chandra.

  “Well, that’s generous. I suspect he likes being on his own, though. So do I. Grew up sharing a room with four others and couldn’t stand it.”

  Steve turned on the radio and began to hum, a gesture that, in Chandra’s opinion, was far too quotidian under the circumstances.

  “Yes,” said Chandra. “Sunny has done very well for himself.”

  “You must be proud of him.”

  “Of course.”

  “Bit of a narcissist though,” said Steve, turning right.

  “What? What’s that?”

  “Sunny. I mean, he’s a good guy but he’s…you know, like a caricature, wants everyone to know how important he is. My guess is he’s vying for your attention. Quite common among the children of successful men. He’d be in real trouble if he wasn’t successful.”

  “Sunny is fine,” said Chandra, counting his breaths and getting to four. “Thank you, Steve.”

  “Yes, of course. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Let’s just find my daughter, please.”

  They continued in silence, past the Tibetan monastery. Chandra rotated his gaze between the anorexic trees on one side, and the valley on the other.

  “Steve,” he said, “you have every right to speak your mind. You have been more of a parent to Jasmine than I, and, frankly, I could do with some advice. And I have not thanked you yet for sending me to Esalen. I needed it. If I hadn’t have gone I wouldn’t have realized how poor a father I’ve been.”

  “Nonsense, you’re doing great!” said Steve. “The important thing is that you’re here for them. What more could anyone ask of you? God knows you’re a better man than I am.”

  Chandra used to have a Professor at the LSE who would say to him, “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din Din Din.” Was Steve resorting to racial slurs now?

  “There,” said Steve, slowing down.

  “There what?”

  Steve pointed to the right. Professor Chandra saw only a canvas of snow, a low hill behind it.

  “The footprints.”

  “Oh,” said Chandra. “Oh, yes.”

  There they were, deep and black in the fresh powder. It irritated Chandra that Steve had proved himself the superior tracker.

  “I’ll wait here for you,” said Steve, “if you don’t mind.”

  Chandra looked at Steve’s feet. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, Steve.”

  He stepped out of the car and over the gutter. Hardly dressed for a Captain Scott adventure himself, he tried to place his shoes in his daughter’s footprints, avoiding the ankle-deep drifts around him. There was a solitary cloud ahead, slightly pink, the only color in this place.

  Chandra was panting and sweating when he reached the top of the hill. Looking back, he saw Steve’s Lincoln like a huge abandoned black boot in the snow. There was a parking lot ahead, a sign advising visitors to take care of their valuables, and another behind it which read, SMALL BUDDHA SHRINE 500M. He could see Radha’s footprints continuing toward the shrine and, his shoes saturated now, he headed toward it.

  Chandra remembered a cartoon he’d seen in the New Yorker in which a man climbs a sheer cliff face to meet a guru who tells him, “Buy low, sell high, stay diversified.” This was his sort of joke, though he doubted any of his family would have found it funny, Steve included.

  He could see a building in front of him now, almost square and made entirely of glass except for the roof. He could make out a large vase of flowers and a statue of the Buddha inside.

  “Dad, get in. It’s freezing.”

  Radha was standing in the doorway dressed in a baggy gray sweater and army pants, her hair tied back, snowflakes buzzing around her face. She was holding the door open for him. He felt afraid, a doomed disciple in the presence of a famously short-tempered ascetic.

  It was warm inside. There were rugs on the floor, a mandala on the north wall, all elaborate in a washed-out, threadbare way. The statue was not of the Buddha but of a woman in the lotus position with one arm outstretched, a crown on her forehead. Radha had made a nest for herself on the floor with cushions and shawls. There was a thermos beside her, a bag of sandwiches, and some fruit.

  “I thought you’d gone,” he said.

  Radha was leaning against the wall, the radiator behind her. “I just wanted a change of scene. It’s clearer here, more peaceful.”

  “Cold to walk all the way.”

  “I’ve got a good jacket.”

  “I thought you’d gone,” he said once more.

  “Oh, Dad,” said Radha. “It’s okay.”

  He was about to cry and she could see it. When she put her arms around him he had the sensation that it was the bronze goddess herself, climbed down from the altar. All his life seemed to be inside the gray inch of sweater he could see on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I know,” said Radha.

  “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  He shouldn’t have said sorry a second time. It brought him back to his senses, his sharpness returning. She was the one who had turned her back on him. She was the one who had banned everyone else from breathing a word about her doings and wrongdoings. Two years. She had defeated him and she knew it.

  Radha seemed to sense the change and let him go. He sat down cross-legged, his hands on his knees.

  “I just didn’t like what you said about Marco, Dad.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy I was living with, remember? The hardworking, decent corporate lawyer.”

  He had no memory of saying anything about Marco.

  “I remember you saying he wasn’t so decent,” said Chandra.

  “No, he wasn’t, Dad. That’s all there is to it. Actually, there’s a lot more to it, but God knows why you should have any opinion about it. You don’t even know him.”

  “Did he hit you?” said Chandra.

  “No, I hit him a couple of times.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was an asshole, Dad. Just take my word for it.”

  “All right.”

 
Radha sighed. “He was about fifteen years older and he’d made a lot of money and it gave him this crushing sense of certainty. Whatever I did, he told me I would ‘learn’ or I had a ‘way to go,’ or he’d pat me on the head and tell me it was cute that I got so agitated about things. I was living off him, and he thought that meant he could take out all his shit on me. He was this big swinging man and I was just a silly little brown girl throwing eggs at the cops, which meant he could treat me with contempt. Sound familiar?”

  It did, but Chandra didn’t think this made Marco an “asshole,” not yet. He moved his head in that South Indian double helix designed to convey everything at once.

  “I’m not blaming you, Dad. I’m just saying there’s a pattern. Like you get used to men putting you down so you go looking for it. You choose the thing you’re trying to get away from, because it’s all you know, because you’ve grown up associating contempt with love. Yeah. It took about a year of therapy for me to figure this out.”

  “Maybe I should also have therapy,” said Chandra.

  “Well, you did, didn’t you? You and Mum?”

  Chandra looked at the cushions on the floor, the thermos beside them.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, Dad, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  When he was a child Chandra had believed his parents had everything under control. Now he knew they’d been as lost as he was. Humans were like those snowflakes against the window, buffeted by winds no one understood.

  “Merry Christmas, Dad.”

  “Merry Christmas, Radha.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes until Radha looked away and said, “You can’t know this, but I was even angrier with Mum than I was with you, Dad. I couldn’t believe she left you for that…”

  “Yet you decided to cut me out of your life.”

  “That’s why,” said Radha. “I’m closer to you. Don’t you see?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t see at all.”

  “All my life I believed you were all-powerful, Dad. It was like I couldn’t see myself because your shadow was always in the way. I kept trying to break you. It felt like that was the only way I could be me. But I couldn’t. It was impossible, and that pissed me off. But then Mum did it. She did it so easily. She just dismantled you. And it hurt to see you like that. I wanted you to fight back but you just got more…I don’t know…defeated. I just needed to get away. I needed to focus on me. It sounds selfish, I know.”

  There were tears in her eyes, huge pools.

  “I suppose it wasn’t easy to see your father so pathetic,” said Chandra.

  “You weren’t pathetic, Dad. You were just human. That’s what I learned.”

  Once, when she was little, Professor Chandra had dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit. Radha and Sunny had taken him for the real thing, quite starstruck. For one wonderful half hour he had spoken in that pseudo-drunken baritone common to all Father Christmas impersonators and they had stared up at him as if he were no less than a perfect being.

  “Yes,” he said. “I had to learn it too.”

  “I was mad at you for being human. And I was also mad at you for pretending you weren’t. I don’t get it, Dad. Why do you all do this? Why do you pretend you’ve got everything down?”

  “Down?”

  “Like you know everything. Like everything’s under control. Like you’ve got no frailties and no doubts and no…anything. What is that? I mean, I actually believed it. How dumb was I? I really thought you were some kind of god. And don’t say everyone sees their parents like that—it isn’t true. There are certain types, like you, and Prakash Uncle—and Marco. It’s just so…convincing but, I mean, how can everything be under control? How? For anyone?”

  “I had a heart attack last year,” said Chandra. “I couldn’t control that. It was terrifying. I think people like me, and Prakash, maybe Marco, we don’t want to be frightened.”

  Chandra hadn’t known he could talk like this. He had been brought up on emotional blackmail: his grandmother, his father, two if not three of his aunts and uncles. He was a master of it himself, of scrolling between pathetic, pitiable, intimidating, unreasonable, and mortally wounded. But now he and his daughter were simply talking.

  “I guess I was doing it too,” said Radha, “for a while. It was bullshit, the whole thing. I mean, it was never about politics. I was just trying to break you.”

  “Well, it worked,” said Chandra.

  “It didn’t. You just got bigger. Bigger than I could ever be. And I don’t want to be big, Dad. It’s exhausting.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “I actually thought I could do it, you know. I thought if I tried hard enough, worked hard enough, I could control everything. I thought it would work on your mother too. I didn’t realize she didn’t care whether I won the prize.”

  “You thought if you won the Nobel then everything would be all right with Mum?”

  “I thought she’d come back if I won.”

  For years Chandra had had a vision of himself in white tie and tails with Jean in a silver sequined gown bowing before Carl XVI Gustaf while his children applauded and couples the world over hugged in front of TV screens knowing that in Stockholm two beings were glowing with a light so perfect that the universe would always be benevolent and secure in its moorings.

  “That’s mental,” said Radha.

  “I know.”

  “I’d be proud of you if you won the Nobel, Dad,” said Radha.

  “It isn’t important.”

  “I know,” said Radha, looking into his eyes.

  “What could I do?” he said, spreading out his hands. “I thought it was everything.”

  “You did it to us too, Dad,” said Radha. “You made us feel that because we hadn’t achieved as much as you we weren’t as important.”

  Professor Chandra wanted to crawl under the cushions and emerge in his bed in Cambridge, or better, in the office with a pile of work and a cup of triple-strength coffee.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see that.”

  He closed his eyes, imagining his daughter dancing on his body, drunk with blood. She had taken it all now, his years of training and striving, the thousands of pages he had filled with a soft pencil in an overheated office, the confusion he had never admitted to, the heart he had driven to failure, to breaking.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” said Radha. “I just needed to say it.”

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “I’m proud of you for knowing all this, all these things you are telling me. You know so much more than I do. I am trying to learn this kind of thing too. It’s difficult but…it’s nice to know you’re doing it while you’re still young.”

  “Dad,” said Radha. “I’m just trying to be normal, you know? A normal person.”

  “But you’re not,” he said. “I don’t think you are normal at all.”

  “Neither are you,” said Radha.

  “At Esalen they called me a character.”

  Radha laughed. “You are a character.”

  “Maybe we all are,” said Chandra.

  “Steve isn’t,” said Radha. “He’s so fucking ordinary. He’s normal.”

  “I don’t blame Steve,” said Chandra. “He’s been good to Jasmine. And to me in some ways. He drove me here. He’s waiting for us on the road. I threw his boots into the trees so he’s in his slippers.”

  Radha snorted. “You threw his boots into the trees?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Go on, Dad,” she said. “You can say it. It’s okay.”

  “Say what?”

  “Come on. Steve’s a prick. Say it.”

  “What is this, Radha? Of course not.”

  “Go on, Dad. Just for you, me, and the goddess over there. Say it.”

  “Steve’s a prick,�
�� said Chandra.

  “Again.”

  “Steve is a bloody fucking prick.”

  Radha grinned. Chandra grinned back.

  “Shall we go to the monastery?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  “I want to stay and meditate for a while, Dad.”

  “What about Christmas?”

  “It’s not even ten o’clock.”

  He looked at his watch. It was true.

  “So I’ll come back for you, when you’re ready?”

  “It’s a half-hour walk,” said Radha. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Thank you for coming, Dad.”

  It was like the end of a job interview. “Thank you for coming, your CV’s in the shredder.”

  “So I’ll see you later.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He lifted himself to his feet and crossed to the door. Radha was already on her cushion, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders.

  There was no sun or even pink in the sky now, but there were several more clouds, which made the valley look smaller. He felt like the yeti as he lumbered his way down the slope, his feet so wet he didn’t care where he stepped anymore.

  Professor Chandra was shivering when he reached the car. Steve had tilted his seat back and was listening to the radio, but sat up when he heard the door slam.

  “You find her?”

  “Yes,” said Chandra. “She was meditating.”

  “Shall we wait for her?”

  “She’ll be all right.”

  Steve turned off the music and restored his seat to the vertical. “Great,” he said, and put the Lincoln into gear.

  “Steve,” said Chandra, as they pulled away. “I am sorry for punching you. It was wrong of me, and everything you said about me was correct, my need for power and so on. You were quite right.”

  “I appreciate you saying that,” said Steve.

  Chandra laughed.

  “Is something funny, Chandrasekhar?”

  He was remembering how Radha had made him call Steve a prick.

  “But I had my reasons, Steve.”

  “And I apologized, Chandrasekhar.”

  “I mean Jean,” said Chandra. “You took her. It was a cruel and cowardly thing to do.”