Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  ‘Where are you staying?’ the immigration official asked when he stepped up to the desk. John stared. ‘Where are you staying, sir? You haven’t written an address on your landing card.’

  John was blank. ‘With my parents. Near the Lodhi Gardens.’ He gave the address.

  ‘You were here only three months ago, sir.’ The official examined his passport. ‘What is the purpose of your visit, please?’

  ‘My father is ill,’ John said. ‘He’s dying.’

  The official looked him in the eye. John shifted from one foot to another.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, sir,’ the man said and handed him his passport.

  Now John headed for the exit. He had no baggage to collect. Already people were grabbing his arm, offering taxis, hotels, sightseeing tours. ‘Sir!’ It was a man in brown trousers, blue shirt. ‘You are looking for a driver, sir?’ ‘Hello, hello! Hotel, sir, you are looking for a hotel?’ They all wore plain trousers, plain shirts, grey or brown. They all said ‘sir’. Suddenly, there was a woman whose skin was peeling from her cheeks in milky patches. She rose up in front of him. Her slack lips too might peel off, it seemed. She was pleading in Hindi, hands stretched out. John struggled across the concourse and out into the forecourt where he was met by a tremendous blast of heat and klaxons. How can I take a cab, he wondered, if I don’t know where I’m going?

  He was already sweating. He must wait for an answer to his message. He texted again, ‘Where can we meet and when?’ There was nowhere to wait. No shade. It was only 7 a.m. Perhaps the phone was off. Men constantly approached him. ‘Water, sir?’ ‘Snacks?’ ‘Juice, sir? Hello!’ Someone was blowing a whistle. I could call to find out, he thought. He didn’t want to call. He didn’t want to explain himself to a stranger on the phone.

  The brown cabs inched and pushed across the forecourt, they piled into the space like animals squeezing through a gate. A voice yelled ‘Pa-tai-yei, ma-ti-alli-yei!’ Something like that. Then again. ‘Pa-tai-yei!’ It was a bellow. ‘Ma-ti-alli-yei!’ The man was selling something. John stood with his back to the wall, waving away all comers. A tall man had three crates on his head. ‘No thank you. No, no thank you.’ The size of people’s suitcases was extraordinary. A man in a bright red turban laboured behind a heavy cart while an old woman with plump bejewelled belly kept up a harangue beside. A dog came to sniff John’s leg, an unprepossessing mongrel. He must wait.

  Then the phone vibrated and there was a message.

  ‘JO! WHERE ARE YOU? YOU CAN’T REALLY HAVE GONE TO INDIA. WHY?’

  It was the wrong message. He read the words twice but didn’t reply. I’m not ready to reply. He hadn’t felt ready to tell Simon either. He hadn’t even called in sick. The trip had imposed itself. I must go back to India. He must confront this turbulence that had seized his mind and made life impossible. It was not something you could say to an immigration officer. I must get well, he thought. He must punish Elaine. ‘Traditional scientific research can only be carried out from a position of stasis, from a level plane, in short in the most artificial of conditions.’ That was something his father had written. John had found the piece on the Net. ‘With sterilised gloves in sterilised spaces,’ his father had written. ‘With a clear and clinical mind.’ John’s mind was a pitching sea, a river that had burst its banks.

  During the flight, a series of dreams had left only an impression of hard labour. No images or stories. When he awoke his muscles were tired, his back ached. He had been pushing trolleys, carrying crates on his head all night as the Airbus crossed Europe, the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan. I was working to get comfortable, he told himself, working like a dog to find a comfortable position. Now there was a dog at his feet again. Another mongrel. All the dogs in Delhi seem to be the same dog, he thought, gaunt and nervy and mongrel. He watched a woman with a baby slung at her breast, an older child on her back. She walked through the honking, thrusting taxis without concern. A driver rolled down his window to spit.

  By eight o’clock John had begun to feel aggressive. He didn’t want nuts. He wouldn’t buy fresh molasses. There was a man grinding sugar cane. In a moment I’m going to hit someone, he muttered. I will. Then he was struck himself by the thought that Elaine must have texted her message in the middle of the night. It is 3.30 a.m. now in the UK. He watched the Europeans get themselves handed into limousines, or snatched into cabs. An elderly man fainted and had to be sat on his suitcase. Elaine was awake when she shouldn’t be. A Sikh held up a card saying MR TINOTY.

  The day was growing hotter; the sky was smudged and smeared with heat. MR TINOTY didn’t arrive. The Sikh waited patiently. Then a line of women came carrying sand on their heads in broad shallow bowls. There was some scaffolding John saw now, to his left. The women went back and forth with their bowls of sand set on towels on their heads, their gaudy saris grimed with dirt. What if I receive no reply to my message?

  An air compressor started up, then a drill. What would Granny Janet say if she knew this was how he was spending her money? The drill ate into the cement paving. It was Father’s boast, John remembered, that he never did exactly the research he had described in his grant applications. Always something off at a tangent. What a stupid, stupid letter he had written! Plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas. ‘They would never understand what I was really planning to do,’ his father had laughed. ‘But he always gives value for money,’ Mother would add. Did she believe that? What value? When I’m ready, I’ll surprise her, John thought. I’ll turn up without warning and we’ll have it out. At nine-thirty he went to fight at the prepaid taxi window.

  ‘Connaught Place,’ he told them.

  John James had himself set down in the inner circle of the city’s central plaza. He wandered for a few minutes along the luxury shop fronts, but his clothes were too heavy for this heat. And hotels will be expensive here, he realised. He turned at random into a radial road and wandered along for perhaps a quarter of an hour, checking into the streets right and left for hotel signs, avoiding beggars under a railway bridge, waving away rickshaw drivers.

  Why am I walking so far? he asked himself. He had passed hotels, but not gone in. Why not? He had the impression he must be approaching Old Delhi and was struck by the thought that he knew nothing really about the town, or about India. His shoulder bag seemed impossibly cumbersome now. The crotch of his jeans chafed. I shouldn’t have come, he decided. Real sanity would have meant hanging on at the lab, forcing his mind back into accustomed channels. But he had been trying to do that for months. He had tried to confront Elaine. She must have written that message in the middle of the night because that was when she had got home and found his note. Then John realised he hadn’t tried the hotels because he didn’t really want to be here. He was still hoping the whole thing could be avoided. Find a room now, he told himself, or you’ll faint.

  ‘Hello, sir. How can I help you, sir?’

  John had climbed the stairs from the street. The Govind Hotel was on the fourth floor. A woman was pulling petals from a pile of flowers and floating them in patterns on a wide bowl of water on the reception desk. ‘900 rupees a night,’ she said.

  John watched her put a yellow petal on her fingertip. The pattern was a series of concentric circles. A bellboy took him along a long corridor, then round a stairwell, down some steps. There was a bolt on the door and a padlock. The room was narrow and brown with a small window opening onto a side street of broken stone, motorbikes and barrows. There was no loo paper but a hose to clean yourself as you sat. John showered, stretched on the bed and closed his eyes.

  ‘You are obsessed by having your life organised and sorted,’ Elaine had told him. ‘So that you can bury yourself in your stupid lab with your precious research.’ ‘You’re sick,’ she shouted, when he tried to talk about Hanyaki. ‘If you start coming to rehearsals to check on me, I won’t be able to relax, I won’t be able to move.’ Far from being sweet on her, she moaned, the director was constantly complaining that she
didn’t put in enough effort. She didn’t think hard enough about the part. That’s why she stayed so late. He was constantly humiliating her.

  Elaine made love eagerly now, but John had begun to wonder if it wasn’t all false. It was a mimed lust, like her voices on the phone. Sex was a cause for irony. Elaine mimed sex. She pulled him to the bed, but she didn’t really want to make love at all. So he sensed now. He couldn’t understand if she really had orgasms or not. It troubled him. She came theatrically, he thought. Perhaps she couldn’t do things if she didn’t act them.

  John was lost. Something unfathomable had happened between them. It started when he went to India, or when she had got the part in the play. It was about a terrorist attack in an airport. Or perhaps when I asked her to marry me. They made love, then she cuddled him and smothered him in baby talk. He didn’t want baby talk. He was an adult. She had been acting her dismay when his father died, he thought. That was the first time he noticed it. She acted to prove she could act. Her family wanted her in an insurance office, or behind the counter of a bank. The real world, her father said. She acted her ability to act. Walking home one evening, John pulled his mobile from his pocket and called the number on his father’s out-of–office emails. He was on the Edgware Road. The code for India was 0091 he remembered. At once there was a ringing tone. A recorded voice spoke first in Hindi then English. ‘The person you have dialled is unavailable.’

  He had sent a text message. ‘Who is that? I am Albert James’s son.’ Perhaps if he returned to India he could undo whatever had gone wrong last time. Then he could come back and really be here. There was no reply. Reading a research paper on the use of radioactive beacons to trace gene expression in cancer cells he found himself writing in the margin: ‘It is enigma that traps the mind.’ He looked at his uneven handwriting beside the neat column of the printed article. It wasn’t something he normally did. ‘Please be in touch,’ he texted to the number he had found on his father’s email. Only then did he realise that Simon was standing in the doorway watching him. ‘We’d like you to put together a presentation for the guys from Glaxo,’ the director told him. ‘The usual PowerPoint stuff. But we need to impress.’

  John was efficient at the lab through April and May, but he was going through the motions. People supposed the fall-off of energy was due to his difficulty getting a grant. It was understandable. He put together the presentation for Simon. It said the obvious: there were thousands and thousands of permutations to go through before they could reconstruct the way a bacterium passes from active to dormant, then years later from dormant to active. He knew Simon couldn’t object – it was lucid and well documented, the rhythm of delivery was fine, John was good at that – but he wouldn’t be satisfied either. Something was missing, the excitement of a deeper engagement, an imaginative idea. As they sat down to show the slides to the Glaxo team, a message arrived on his mobile: ‘I am a friend of your father. My name is Ananya.’

  Was it a woman’s name or a man’s? John had made that mistake before. He checked as soon as the presentation was over. Google’s first entry was a fashion shop, then a charity. He clicked on a site: Ananya Discovering India. ‘Ananya means “no other” in Sanskrit,’ he read. ‘And India is like no other country, extraordinary, unalloying.’ Unalloying was a strange word for a tourist site, John thought. What did it really mean? That it doesn’t mix. It doesn’t spoil. But India was all mixing. He selected Images and found photographs of Indian women. Ananya Chatterjee, Ananya Roy, Ananya Das. ‘A friend of your father.’ What kind of friend?

  John had been distracted during that presentation to the team from Glaxo. He hadn’t impressed. But he couldn’t bring himself to worry. ‘I feel taken for a ride,’ he had said to Mother that evening after the trip to the Taj. How is it possible, John wondered, to say things without having planned to say them, to make complaints that make no sense, even to yourself? In what way taken for a ride? But that is how ideas come, of course, when you least expect them. They are in the air.

  Not in the air of the lab though. He was having no ideas at work. ‘You are seeing this Hanyaki or whatever he’s called,’ he accused Elaine, ‘aren’t you?’ He started the conversation right after they made love. ‘I can sense it, Ellie. I know there’s something happening.’

  Elaine was silent. ‘If you don’t believe me when I deny it,’ she said, ‘what’s the point of my saying anything?’ She added dryly: ‘Actually I’m screwing all the guys on the cast. And the girls too. Hmmm, darling, will it be a threesome or a foursome tonight?’

  Deep down, all John wanted to do was work. He couldn’t. Perhaps deep down was not deep at all. Now that he had some money he took to drinking while Elaine was at rehearsals. He kept a few bottles of beer in the flat, then some whisky. It had begun with Father’s funeral, he thought. There were the girls, the yellow petals, the short speeches, but the ceremony was over before it began. Some figure I desperately need, Dad had written. As he/she perhaps … The funeral wasn’t proper somehow, John thought. And I needed nothing till this happened. ‘Albert was my life,’ Mother said, ‘and I his,’ and she had pressed the button at once. Dad had disappeared between the gold and the purple. ‘Were you there when my father died?’ he texted Ananya. Three days later she replied: ‘I would like to meet you.’

  As the days passed, John realised it was only a question of time. They were empty days. He was frightened. He still worked twelve hours at the lab, but in his mind he was no longer part of the team. He still saw Elaine most days and they made love, but he wasn’t with her. You have become a loner, he thought. This Japanese bloke was twenty years older than Elaine if he was a day.

  At the lab Simon asked if something was the matter; he had put in a request, the supervisor said, for an extra research grant: ‘I’ll do whatever I can to keep you, John.’

  Elaine asked why he was so distant. She did little favours. She brought him sweets and cakes. John had a young man’s sweet tooth. He wolfed them with whisky. She tried to get him involved in bitches about her father who was now offering to buy her a flat on condition that she find the proverbial proper job.

  ‘They’re scared of anyone who has a vocation,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll have to run away to the Third World before they’ll take me seriously.’

  John listened but couldn’t muster the indignation with which he had wooed her in the past. ‘I’d like to know what Dad was working on when he died,’ he said experimentally. ‘I’d like to know why he was interested in spiders of all things.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe he didn’t die of cancer at all. Maybe he was bitten by a tarantula.’

  Elaine asked if he was still having those strange dreams about the coffin in the flooded lab. He wasn’t. ‘You know, Dad never owned a car,’ he told her, ‘he never learned to drive.’ ‘So what?’ she asked. ‘He used to say drivers were locked into a logic of killers and victims, chasing each other through a grid of streets.’ ‘Your father was nuts,’ she told him. ‘No doubt he got your mum to drive him around.’ ‘They always lived in the sort of place where you can afford a taxi,’ John explained. ‘Assuming there were any roads.’

  ‘Can I email you?’ he texted Ananya. As always the reply came some days later. She didn’t have email. ‘I’d like to meet you,’ she wrote again. ‘Are you in Delhi?’ He kept her messages on the phone and reread them. ‘I am a friend of your father. My name is Ananya.’ ‘I would like to meet you.’ ‘I don’t have email.’ It wasn’t much. John wrote an email to his mother: he had seen Granny Janet, he said, and she had given him some money. ‘She spent most of the time bad-mouthing you of course. By the way, Mum, do you know of anyone living in Delhi called Ananya?’

  He read what he had written: ‘living in Delhi’ was very vague. He remembered how Mother had finally given way to emotion on his last night in the flat. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone, John. I just can’t believe it happened.’ She had said the words as if literally she could not believe it. There was no acting there. ‘I don’t know what to d
o, or who I am,’ she had said.

  He didn’t send the email. But it seemed scandalous to John that his mother hadn’t written again to find out what had happened to him, whether he had got some money or was sleeping on the street. Vaguely, he wondered what would become of her. She would grow old and die in a foreign land. What would happen if she fell ill? She wouldn’t ask for help. Perhaps there won’t be anyone to inform me when she dies. Do these things matter? Elaine told him she would love to go to Delhi to meet John’s mother. He couldn’t see when she was ever going to get the time, he said sourly, with first the rehearsals then the play’s run in the theatre.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said.

  The moment came when he could resist no longer. It was a physical thing, or it felt physical. Towards the end of May. But there is no difference, John realised now, between physical things and mental. In the space of a few hours he was at Heathrow, he had his ticket, he was in the air. There was still £600 of Granny Janet’s money to spend.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN THE HOTEL Govind John woke shortly after midday. His mouth was dry from the air conditioning and there was a mosquito on the loose. He scratched an ankle. It was strange, he thought, to find himself in the same city as his mother but without her knowing. Then he remembered and reached quickly for the phone. There was another message from Elaine. ‘One day you ask to marry me, the next you run away. What am I supposed to think? I haven’t slept all night.’

  John needed to eat. He went out, found a place open to the street and sat down. He felt nervous being the only white person and seeing groups of young men looking at him. There were only men in the place, their heads bowed over bowls made of tinfoil. ‘Some dhal,’ he said. ‘Please. A chapatti. Some lamb. A bottle of water.’ It is madness to be here, he decided. The heat was suffocating. Granny Janet had been right that it was madness to spend your life away from home. There is a place that has meaning and there is everywhere else. Fans pushed air at him through a grill. But John had no home. He never had. Unless the lab. ‘I am staying at the Govind Hotel off Bhavbhuti Marg,’ he texted. ‘Please be in touch.’