by Tim Parks
John spent the afternoon wandering. He must decide what to do. When the heat became unbearable he went a stop or two in the metro, which was air-conditioned. He didn’t care where he was, but explored streets as if they might hold the answer to his questions. The tangled wires sagging from telegraph poles, the motley of shop signs, the schoolgirls piling into autorickshaws, held his gaze in a way street scenes never had in the past.
Near the main station in Old Delhi, he received another message from Elaine: ‘Am thinking of the time we went skinny-dipping in the Cam. I keep crying.’ John went into a fabrics shop and in the space of five minutes paid almost 3,000 rupees for a pure pashmina shawl. He didn’t reply to her. She was right not to marry me, he decided. The shawl was a pale purple with gold embroidery. Perhaps he had paid too much. It would go wonderfully with her frizzy black hair and camellia skin. He couldn’t afford it. He didn’t understand what a girl like Elaine could see in a man as old as Hanyaki. Perhaps it was just for the part in the play. Perhaps she was being smart. Only now did he realise he no longer had the bananas.
After another trip in the metro, another slow, stifling walk, he found he was by the river, in the grounds of a temple. ‘Sir!’ A lanky boy wanted to be his guide. ‘Sir, sir!’ John kept turning away. He climbed down the muddy bank and watched men diving from a low wall near the sluice gate of a barrage. It was a big dam. The boy followed him. The water boiled and swirled. There were three or four divers. They walked barefoot along protruding stonework between sluice gates, then plunged.
‘People throw things in water for good luck,’ the boy told him, ‘when relatives die, you know, maybe it is dead person’s ring or jewellery, they throw it there, from bridge’ – he pointed – ‘These men dive in the river to find it.’
‘Don’t the people who throw the things get upset?’ John asked. The moment he spoke, he knew he had accepted a contract and would have to pay.
‘Upset?’
‘Angry.’
‘Why angry?’ the boy guide asked. ‘If thing is in river, it is in river. You can get.’
John watched. Wearing shorts, the men dived into the churning water to emerge some twenty yards further down, dragged along by the current. He imagined their fingers grabbing at the muddy riverbed in the swirling dark. ‘It’s mad,’ he said. The boy was earnest: ‘Swimming here is very dangerous, sir. Sometimes they are killed. But they are cool in hot weather!’
John remembered the night skinny-dipping in the Cam after a party. Elaine’s skin was goose-pimpled but she looked beautiful when she dived. She stretched on tiptoe on the bank, her breasts high. It had been one of their best moments. I was walking with your mother by the river, he remembered his father’s letter. But there was no water, only mud. I have nothing of Father’s to toss in the water, John thought. ‘Get me a rickshaw,’ he told the guide. ‘Take me to the railway bridge.’
From five-thirty to seven, he waited for Ananya, at the same place where they had met before. He texted her and told her he would be there. She didn’t appear and didn’t reply. He was dizzy with the day’s long heat and paid fifty rupees for a bottle of water. At least his stomach had held out. At seven-thirty he arrived back at the hotel.
‘Somebody came to see you, sir.’
Behind the reception desk, the same rather efficient woman was sitting beside the bowl of water and the floating petals; when people walked by the water trembled in wide spirals of brilliant colour.
‘It was a young lady, sir. She waited a long time, then she went away.’
‘Did she leave a message?’
The woman smiled at his eagerness. ‘No message, sir. She waited, but when you did not come, she went away.’
In his room, after showering, John sat at the tiny table under the TV screen projecting from the wall. He found a pen in his bag and, after some searching around, a piece of paper: the hotel laundry list. He began to jot things down. He wrote a few lines about the dogs he had seen. ‘It is as if they were all the same dog,’ he wrote, ‘thin, brown, sniffing and shitting and begging.’ He wrote the name Dinesh. Why would people throw a valuable object in a river, knowing that other men would fish it out? All Dad’s dreams had been about meeting people beside water. The surf was majestic, he had written, but we did not dive in.
Then John started to sketch. It was a girl’s face. He tried to remember Elaine’s lopsided grin. The grin and its lopsidedness were Elaine. He couldn’t draw. The hair came out frightening. Then he was drawing an elephant. He chuckled, and turned the trunk into a fat snake. Link it all up with a complicated doodle, he decided. He began to hang lines between girl and elephant, snake and words. It was odd to look at the words as part of the drawings. Towards ten the phone rang. ‘There is someone for you in reception, sir.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IN THE CAR John found Sharmistha, Heinrich and another couple, Priya and Rajit. They were following friends in a white government Ambassador that was going too fast and kept disappearing. There were frequent phone calls to find out where they had got to. Rajit was driving, a slow, sad, cautious man with a thin moustache. John was in the back beside Sharmistha who was so small that he had a plain view of the scrubbed and bony Heinrich across her head. The older man smoked and laughed sardonically. Everyone was merry, everyone had been drinking. It was the party of a famous German architect who was going back to Europe. Nobody knew him personally, though someone in the car in front did. The venue was to the south of the city. The roads were unlit, chaotic. ‘It’s Friday night,’ Sharmistha exclaimed, ‘and my stupid book is almost written. God, am I fed up with spiders! I want out of those cobwebs!’
As soon as they were at the party, John wished he hadn’t come. On the edge of a slum of shacks the car turned into a gateway in a long, high wall. Completely segregated within, were a wide open lawn, trees, a low, extensive, white-stuccoed house. At a line of tables food and drinks were being served by a dozen servants all in white jackets while a disc jockey had set up strobe lights at the top of a low rise and was inviting people to dance to a crashing muddle of disco rhythms and oriental themes.
Sharmistha disappeared. An assorted crowd of Indians and Europeans milled and danced. John found a plate and helped himself to various foods. The tastes seemed at war with each other and with his stomach. At the drinks table he got himself a gin and tonic, then another. The night was warm. There wasn’t enough ice. I might as well get drunk, he thought. He tried to respond to a middle-aged Indian man who asked him something, but it was impossible to communicate over the boom of the music. The man would have continued to talk, he put his hand on John’s shoulder, but John gave up and moved away. He sat on the grass and watched the dancers. There was no great enthusiasm. The women’s bodies were graceful but not exciting. He wanted to be back at the hotel. It must have been Ananya who had come. He should have gone and seen Mum. That had been the plan. Then lights came on around the swimming pool.
The pool was beyond the tables, near the house. John walked over there. Half a dozen people were already in the water which was lit from above and beneath. Others sat on the side, drinking and pouring drinks into the mouths of the swimmers. You could talk here; the music was further away. Suddenly, Sharmistha was beside him, in her costume. ‘Jump in!’ She had a pleasantly sing-song voice. He hadn’t brought swimming things, he said. ‘The hell,’ she laughed. ‘Get in in your pants. Or with nothing! Who cares?’
Petite and shapely, she climbed down the ladder and launched herself across the luminous water. Her hair was tied above her head in a bun. Her costume was tight and black. She swam the short length, turned, and swam back. Her dark eyes sparkled with invitation. ‘Get in! Stupid!’
An older man pushed a woman into the water with her clothes on. There was commotion. Someone had broken a glass; two or three men were trying to find the fragments on the floor of the pool. John took off trousers and shirt and left them by some bushes. His pants were decent enough, he thought. When he got in the water Sharmistha
was immediately beside him. She splashed him. She seemed madly playful. ‘Oh I’ve had a hard couple of months,’ she laughed. ‘Working working working. On those creepy spiders and their ugly sticky yucky webs. But how are you? How’s your research going?’
‘Nothing special,’ he said. The drink hadn’t loosened him up at all.
‘You were so excited about it last time we met.’ She stood with her back to the side of the pool, her head just out of the water. Then she took his arm and pulled him to stand beside her.
‘So, why have you come back to Delhi?’
‘I don’t know.’
Turning, he looked down into her face and found it unspeakably beautiful. The eyes were so large and soft, the lips so full of promise, the cheeks sharp and high. She was beaming, mocking. She raised an eyebrow and before he could understand what had happened he was kissing her. She turned so that she was pressing against him and kissed warmly and deeply. John was bewildered, unsure even which of them had started. Now she was nudging a knee against his legs beneath the water. He kissed quite violently and all around there was the noise of the music, of laughter and shouting, and someone swam back and forth close to them.
‘What about Heinrich?’ he asked, breathless.
‘That’s not a problem, sweetie,’ she whispered. She began to kiss again. John felt excited and anxious. She was touching him under the water and he put a hand on her breasts.
‘I need another drink,’ she said abruptly and swam to the ladder. John got out of the water, hurried to his clothes, pulled out his phone and checked it. Sure enough, there was a message. But not from Elaine. ‘I am giving your hotel address to a person who knew your father very much more than me.’ It was Ananya.
‘Perhaps you came to Delhi to see me again,’ Sharmistha laughed. She had reappeared with two glasses. ‘It’s vodka. Come and meet some people.’
They sat in the warm evening with their feet in the water and talked to an Australian and his Indian girlfriend. Living in Delhi allowed him to write because life cost so little, the Australian explained at once. He was in his early forties, a novelist. ‘In Sydney I’d be fighting just to pay the rent,’ he insisted. His girlfriend was smoking quietly. John saw Heinrich standing in the shadows, a plate in his hand. I have lost all sense of time, he thought.
‘Let’s swim again,’ Sharmistha grabbed his hand. She seemed to have no problem showing the others that they were on intimate terms. Getting to his feet, John asked: ‘Do you think my father was in India because it was cheap?’
‘Maybe!’ She accepted a cigarette from someone then climbed down into the water, tapping the ash into a glass by the side of the pool. In a moment John was beside her and smoking too. The night had taken on a velvety atmosphere, blurred and greenish. He inhaled deeply. He had always thought smoking the most stupid of habits. Two or three people were swimming and they had to hold their cigarettes high out of the water.
‘It’s funny how like him you are,’ Sharmistha said. ‘The way you talk, I mean.’
‘I don’t feel like him,’ John said. ‘Actually I’m feeling rather dizzy. By the way, did you know that Dad had put together a group of people to get them to act out their lives or something? So someone told me.’
‘There was a young show-off from the drama school at the funeral,’ she said. ‘Remember?’ She stood right beside him, brown skin lit by the underwater light. ‘Albert was a fantastic man,’ she added.
‘And at the same time he was studying spiders! You know it gets me angry sometimes,’ John’s voice became urgent. ‘I mean how Dad just wasted his talent. Doing weirdo stuff. It drives me crazy.’
Sharmistha watched the boy. She seemed to find his intensity attractive. ‘All I understood,’ she said, ‘was that he liked to spend a long time observing the most different things, different people, and then seeing if he could map them onto each other. That was a favourite expression of his. Mapping something onto something else. He always told us we’d never have any new ideas about spiders’ webs unless we mapped them onto something quite different: subway systems, leaf patterns, choreography.’
John shook his head, but all at once she had her mouth against his ear. ‘Why don’t you map onto me tonight, sweetie? Do you want to?’ She was kissing his neck. She spoke breathily. John looked up and saw that others were seeing. One fat old Indian woman smiled as she shambled by in a dressing gown.
In the car going back, Sharmistha again had Heinrich on one side, John on the other. Again they could look at each other over her thick hair. The man seemed quite relaxed. She had undone her bun. Up front, Priya was driving now, while Rajit, who had drunk a lot, kept turning and frowning and scolding Heinrich. ‘You should be watching out for your woman,’ he told him quite audibly. His moustache stretched and bristled. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Sharmistha kept giggling. She leaned heavily against John and stroked his legs. ‘We’ll drive you back to your hotel,’ Rajit told the English boy, but Sharmistha insisted John would sleep at her place. ‘The hotel will be locked at three in the morning, Rajit! Isn’t that right Heiny?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Heinrich said.
John hadn’t properly understood until they were all taking their shoes off in the entrance that Heinrich and Sharmistha actually lived together. I’ve drunk too much and smoked too much, he thought.
‘Make some coffee,’ Sharmistha told the German and she led John by the hand down a corridor to the bedroom. Her bare feet scampered. She was almost running. John followed. The proximity of the woman had overwhelmed him, the smell of her skin, the willingness of her kisses, the soft, certain touch of her hand on his body.
‘Your clothes are damp,’ she said. He’d put his trousers on over wet underwear. She was already pulling off her tunic. He was in a daze, rather proud of himself, relieved that he had stopped thinking about his father and mother. In a moment he was beside her on the bed. He was telling her how beautiful her skin was, how lovely her voice. He didn’t know what he was saying. Vaguely, he mumbled some formula about protection. Her lips were at his neck; she seemed to be covering him with her saliva. ‘You don’t need anything,’ she murmured. ‘Honestly, sweetie.’ Their bodies wrapped together. I’m living, he decided. It was good. And he thought, maybe this was just the thing that would free him back into his own life. Back to Elaine even. Sharmistha was pulling him hard against her. She wanted him. Then he felt cold fingers on his foot.
At once John was electrified by a terrible, negative alertness. A hand had settled on the top of his foot. It was stroking his ankle. Yet Sharmistha’s hands were both at his shoulders. He struggled to get his head off the pillow. Over the girl’s shoulder, Heinrich raised bushy eyebrows and smiled. In an instant John’s body was limp.
‘Oh God. Don’t worry yourself about him,’ Sharmistha whispered. She tried to make her voice reassuring. ‘Don’t touch,’ she hissed to Heinrich. ‘Shit!’
John had closed his eyes. He was flat on his back.
‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ Sharmistha asked. ‘Just ignore him.’
‘I don’t want to be here,’ John murmured.
‘Please.’ She was whispering with her mouth pressed against his ear. ‘Please, sweetie.’
Heinrich said calmly. ‘Sorry, Shasha. I’ll leave you young guys to it. Don’t go, John. Enjoy. She’s drunk.’ And he left the room.
When John opened his eyes he found Sharmistha’s looking into them. He let her kiss him, but a gelid soberness had taken possession of his body. ‘I really can’t,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should have gone back to the hotel.’
‘Oh fuck,’ Sharmistha sighed. ‘Or rather,’ she smiled, ‘no fuck.’
They lay together for some minutes. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck.’ She was shaking her head.
‘I’m sorry.’
She laughed harshly. ‘Don’t be, why should you be sorry?’
‘I just wish …’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
She was
stroking his hair. ‘You remind me so much of your father when you talk. You know? Though you don’t look like him at all.’
John was lying on his back, his head on his hands. Without thinking, he said, ‘Do you think Dad had other women? I mean, he and my mother had the perfect marriage, they were such a team.’
‘It hardly matters, does it?’ she asked.
‘I feel angry with him,’ John said.
‘So you said.’
‘I feel I want to hit him. Really hit him. I need to.’
She propped herself on an elbow. ‘He’s dead. How can you hit someone who’s dead?’
‘I just feel like that,’ John said weakly.
She chuckled to herself. ‘If you want to know the truth, I would have loved to go to bed with Albert. I adored him. And he liked me. We spent some afternoons together, we took walks. He said some beautiful things to me, but he would never do anything. Not even a kiss.’
‘So he was faithful to Mum?’
Sharmistha sighed. ‘When I told him about our problems, me and Heinrich, he said it was normal: for couples not to make love.’
John tried to imagine his father saying these words. Eventually he asked: ‘But why would a woman like you be interested in a guy like my father, so much older? You are fantastically beautiful and Dad wasn’t even handsome.’
‘I like you too,’ she said. ‘Heinrich is much older than me if it comes to that.’
John said nothing.
‘Albert was so knowing. I think he understood me completely. He didn’t have to say anything. And without ever criticising either. He just knew you and you felt it. It made him very sexy. I thought it would be such a victory to make love to him. Like a big achievement, if I could draw him in. But I never came close. He had very strong defences. Or inhibitions.’ She laughed rather sourly. ‘The only thing he ever said …’
Sharmistha stopped.
‘Tell me.’ John half sat up.
‘Well, when I told him that we, me and Heinrich, had done what … well, what we almost did with you this evening, you understand, don’t you?, he said he envied Heinrich, he envied him watching me make love to someone else.’