Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  There was a long silence, as if the doctor and his wife were waiting for more. Paul thought he had said quite enough. Eventually, almost as though speaking to himself, Dr Bhagat murmured: ‘Yet there is a problem, I sense.’

  ‘A problem?’

  The doctor looked up, and spoke more confidently. ‘There is a problem with what you are saying. You do not sound so convinced. You say, it had seemed to me, not, I am sure.’

  ‘Well,’ Paul acknowledged, ‘the truth is that Albert James died before I could meet him and now that I have come to Delhi he seems to have led me into a sort of maze. I can’t find him.’

  ‘Seems again.’

  ‘I mean, it feels like that.’

  ‘You feel your dead man is hiding from you?’

  Paul shrugged. The Indian was amused. He began to run his tie through his fingers.

  ‘I believe the dead are dead, Doctor.’

  ‘But you said he was leading you into a maze.’

  ‘Metaphorically speaking.’

  ‘Ah,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Metaphors,’ the wife smiled.

  For a few moments none of them spoke. Dr Bhagat and his wife were a clever double act, Paul thought. They had imposed a strong mood. As always when he met a real couple, he tried to imagine the two of them making love. It was a habit he had never shaken off since his adolescent wonderment on discovering that his puritan parents actually got down to it between the sheets. For the first time, it occurred to Paul that, rather than meeting Albert James, the important thing would have been to have met Albert and Helen together, to have seen how they were together, to have seen them make love, he thought. The idea distracted him. Something twitched in his neck.

  ‘We feel there is something else, Mr Roberts,’ the doctor said.

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘There is something that is troubling you.’

  Paul hesitated, then thought, why not? ‘In the last few days,’ he said, ‘I have begun a relationship with Professor James’s widow.’

  ‘Ha!’ The doctor shook his head and rubbed the moles at the corner of his mouth. He seemed almost gleeful. ‘That is most interesting!’ He went on shaking his glossy head. ‘So you know what to expect,’ he chuckled rather merrily to his wife, ‘when a writer arrives to write a biography of me, Bala! Or no? Beware! Beware!’

  The lady remained expressionless.

  ‘Perhaps, Mr Roberts,’ the doctor resumed his more professional manner, but he was still smiling, ‘perhaps you would like me to draw up a birth chart for you? We could examine some of the decisions you have to make. Steer you out of this maze.’

  Paul looked at him. Nothing could have been further from the ethos he had been brought up in. Nothing would be more convenient than to know how to deal with the future.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ he said dryly.

  ‘Looking through my notes here,’ the doctor said now, ‘I find I have written down one thing that Mr James said which perhaps I could share with you. I do not think it would be a breach of trust.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Here. Let me see … when I asked him – this was at our first encounter – why he had come to me, he said he thought Ayurvedic medicine was, and I quote, “absolutely charming”.’ The doctor frowned, stroking his yellow tie again. ‘A strange expression, don’t you think, to describe a learned practice that goes back many centuries: absolutely charming.’

  Closing the door behind him a few minutes later, Paul decided to take the stairs. There were only three floors. But between the second and the first, as he hurried down the steps, he heard a voice call his name. ‘Paul?’

  Paul stopped and walked back to the landing. It was a man’s voice, he thought. There was no one there.

  Paul looked up the stairs towards Dr Bhagat’s office. But now he realised that the doctor didn’t know his first name. No one knows my name here, he thought.

  He stood on the landing, his breath a little short, wishing he could wind time back a moment. Paul. Paul. He turned and went back down the stairs. Outside, he found the street was a cloud of swirling dust.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  JOHN WANTS TO go to his mother now. He can see an end: an encounter, a crisis, then home. He wants to hurry it along and be on the plane back. Very soon he will go to some Internet point and send an email to Simon. He’ll think of an excuse: ‘Mother very ill.’ This interlude won’t destroy my life, he decides. He’ll text Elaine: ‘Coming back. Love you.’ But he doesn’t text her. Elaine has written: ‘If you knew how that shit Hanyaki is treating me you’d be ashamed of your accusations.’ And in another message: ‘I doubt if I’ll make it to the first night, never mind the last.’ Every time she writes, it seems harder for John to write back. ‘I HATE YOU,’ she tells him. She should stop.

  He unpacks the pashmina shawl. The material running through his hands is marvellously soft, liquid-feeling; the gold embroideries are intricately symmetrical on their lilac base. They are tiny elephants, he sees now. He hadn’t noticed. Tiny liquidy snakes. 3,000 rupees. Elephants in sets of three with their trunks raised and coiled like snakes round lilac borders that ripple with gold. Handwoven and embroidered by the girls of Kashmir. There is a hotel bill to pay too. John should be keeping track, but he isn’t. Smelling the cloth’s clean smell, he imagines wrapping it round Elaine’s frizzy, perfumed hair, the elephants and snakes framing her elfish and very English face. Do I love Elaine, or don’t I? Do I know what that question means? First he must peep inside his father’s coffin. The screen glows. ‘johnjames’, he types. ‘Forgotten your password?’ ‘JohnJames’. Case sensitive.

  On 10 May 2005, at 08:35, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Can you believe Sudeep tried to kiss me last night after you left us!

  On 11 May 2005, at 12:40, Albert James wrote

  To solve this or that practical problem makes no difference, Jasmeet. Honestly. What matters is learning to be different. Better still, learning to learn to be different!

  On 11 May 2005, at 17:20, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  I must hurry now; we have to go to the temple to knead the bread. (Can I say Gurdwara? Do you know that word?)

  John tries to read the emails in chronological order. He’s impatient. He only wants the facts, an outline of the facts, but something prevents him clicking on the last messages first. Elaine always reads the last pages of novels first. You get more out of a book, she says, when you feel relaxed about how it ends. You don’t hurry. John finds it hard to believe that the Sikh girl left home this morning. She had no bag with her. She walked off after breakfast as if she knew exactly where she was going. Limped off. ‘Very certainly a dust storm, sir,’ the waiter insisted. ‘I was going to meet your father when it happened,’ she said.

  Actually, John doesn’t want the facts at all. He doesn’t care what the girl’s doing. He wants to go to his mother and persuade her to come back to London with him. She will be very upset by this Jasmeet story. She will need comforting. They will be together. Elaine and Mum will get on well. Elaine admires his mother. Mum will see the sense of going back to England now. She will tell Elaine how crazy it is to waste time with the Japanese director. John is beginning to feel confident.

  On 16 June 2005, at 10:17, Albert James wrote

  Jasmeet, I know you were all angry! But distractions are important. They unlock the trap. The automatisms get uncoupled. I never imagined Sudeep would get so mad, though.

  John has to go back and forward to other messages to find out what all this is about. It’s confusing because each email contains many old ones and whereas his father’s computer is fixed so that the most recent message is always at the bottom, the girl’s is set the other way round with the new message added at the top. There’s no reliable sequence. He has to look at the dates, go back and forth between mail received and mail sent.

  Is there any point? He has understood that Jasmeet works in a call centre replying worldwide to customer queries about software problems. Sometimes
she pastes these queries into her mails, asking Albert James to explain things she doesn’t understand: queries from Hong Kong, Iceland, Portugal. She asks for his help:

  The bios is snagged in prov mod. Utility tools function me not enter in menu drop.

  His father’s answers are pathetic. The man knew nothing about computers. She must have sensed this. So she was only asking for the sake of writing to him. His father pontificates about the development of an international community that will ultimately communicate in computer code rather than language.

  The difference between language and code is the difference between survival and destruction.

  God knows what he meant by that or why he bothered writing it to this young girl.

  Jasmeet says she is frustrated with her job. She wants to do something more creative. But the family has only paid for her brother to go to university and her brother does nothing. Her brother is the laziest creature in Delhi, in all of India.

  He doesn’t study and he doesn’t go to Gurdwara. My father is always praising my brother but Gobind does nothing nothing nothing and then sometimes Father gives him a mad clout round the ear. He beats him hard. Gobind never hits back, he takes a thrashing. But he doesn’t change his life. It drives my father mad. You know Sikhs are proud of working very hard.

  All this before John finally discovers that Albert James had arranged for a boy to come into the rehearsal room where the group were acting one of their stories and to make fun of them. The boy, who usually shone shoes at the railway station, had a whistle he kept blowing and strutted about making faces, then bursting into fits of coughing. He obviously wasn’t well and he didn’t seem to know a word of Hindi. He had a Mongol-looking face. A foreigner. Trying to concentrate on his acting, Sudeep had lost his temper. He came running down from the stage and wanted to throw the boy bodily out of the rehearsal room. There were insults. The boy crouched down in a tremendous fit of coughing. Albert James had to intervene and explain that the distraction had been planned. The boy was paid to do it. Meantime he had videoed the scene.

  On 19 June 2005, at 12:15, Albert James wrote

  Sudeep showed he’s missed the point of what we’re doing, I’m afraid.

  On 19 June 2005, at 13:56, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Sometimes I think it’s you making fun of us, Albert. Of all of us.

  There were scores of these mails. The older man and the girl had been writing for months. John feels superior but weary, lying in the poky room with its noisy air conditioning. He’s still hungover, his stomach is rumbling again. For some reason he has laid the laptop on the pashmina shawl. The black keyboard lies in a lilac lake with golden snakes and elephants. Oddly, he imagines taking the shawl into his old lab and draping it over the centrifuge. He imagines the snakes coming alive in a lake of lilac, the elephants swimming with their trunks held high. Where do these thoughts come from? John misses the calm organisation of the lab, the clarity of the given task shared with a team of sensible colleagues. Breaking off, he moves to the desk and begins to sketch quickly on the back of another laundry form. His father’s voice is coming through these emails much more clearly than it does through his articles and conference papers. John begins to draw him.

  He has trouble getting his biro to flow. He licks the tip. For a moment he has that fretful feeling of trying to recover a dream that refuses to surface, as though the mind were pressing against a dark wall. Then all at once, with a dozen strokes, he has the lips, the nose, the drooping eyes, the amused, retiring look. He has Dad! Dad’s sticky-out ears, Dad’s wispy hair. He can’t believe it. He was never any good at drawing. He never even liked it. Father used to include drawings in all his letters when John was at school: drawings of insects and animals and natives in traditional costume, often invented. John hardly looked at them. He never drew in his replies, just asked what they would do on holiday, would there be anyone at the airport; that was always an anxious moment, when you got off the plane and there was no one there. Now his father’s face is mocking him from this piece of paper. It’s uncanny. John stares at his father on the back of a hotel laundry list. Albert James: that knowing, endearing, mocking smile. He scores six straight black lines to frame the man, in his coffin. Then he is tracing snaky ripples across it all. The image starts to drown.

  On 3 August 2005, at 08:42, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  My parents want me to marry a man from Jaipur, a Jat Sikh, a Khalsa. He is a representative for a pharmaceutical company in Ahmedabad. He’s quite nice, I suppose, very tall, a little bit stooped. Like you, Albert! He obeys the five K’s, oh-Kay! The big snag is I don’t really like him.

  On 10 August 2005, at 10:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Sudeep is a bastard!

  On 14 August 2005, at 09:10, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Albert, I’m sorry I didn’t come last night. I don’t want to come any more. You have Ananya and Vimala and Bibi. Sudeep can put his filthy pig paws on them.

  On 14 August 2005, at 11:35, Albert James wrote

  You are a very special person, Jasmeet. It would make me very sad if you left the group. You have a special and beautiful energy and you are the only Sikh. It is good for us all to have you with us. We all feel that. You are a wonderful dancer. I will talk to Sudeep. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be disrespectful.

  On 27 August 2005, at 18:43, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Avinash does business with my father and his pharmaceutical company will pay for my dad to go to London soon. Everybody is keen for me to marry him. Avinash says his prayers, even the Sandhana, and never cuts his hair (never never never, not even the most split split-end!) and when he travels he takes parautha and pakoras that his mother bakes for him. I will be preparing his lunch box all my life. They don’t want me to work after marriage. I will be buried alive, watching television and going to Gurdwara like my mother.

  On 27 August 2005, at 18:52, Jasmeet Singh wrote

  Ps. His beard will suffocate me!

  On 29 August 2005, at 14:01, Albert James wrote

  Imagine evolution as a path through a maze of obstacles, like those computer games where you have to keep growing and rearming and looking for secret doors while all kinds of dangers are coming at you so you can never stay still. There are dead ends and you have to double back and start again and some dead ends are longer than others. Well, imagine that we have all been going down a dead end for more than 2,000 years! Imagine that the dead end is leading to a monster we can never overcome, not even with all the fruit we’ve found. The catastrophe is very close now. Question: can we still turn round and double back to a better path?

  John wonders what the girl made of this. She was still after Sudeep it seemed, for all her supposed aversion to his wandering hands. Jasmeet is a live wire, John senses, a flirt, a drama queen. She has a high opinion of herself. She is excited by men’s interest in her.

  I love my family, Albert, but it’s all such a bore sometimes, you know, Sikh virtues. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but they’re not. My mother prays at the temple and bakes the bread and saves for the poor and my father looks at pornography on the Net and spends his spare money on whisky!

  Sandhana is when you get up two and a half hours before dawn, take a cold shower (very cold) and then spend an hour and more chanting the name of God or the name of all the gurus. All eleven! For hours! Dad praises Avinash for doing his Sandhana before going out and selling medicines to doctors by promising them free trips to London or New York and meantime he has his computer full of real filth (my Dad not Avinash!) He doesn’t even bother changing his password!

  There was an anxious message from Albert James:

  Dearest Jasmeet, I really can’t see the point of your telling your mother. You will only upset her. I’m sure deep down she knows the man she married, if you understand me. You risk destroying your family.

  My father is a villain! What do you mean she knows him? My mum doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer!

  Some barrier has come down
between the Sikh girl and the older anthropologist now. As he reads, John feels a growing alertness and revulsion. They are talking more freely. The girl tells him that she was always molested by her uncle, her father’s brother, but her father pretended to ignore it. He wouldn’t believe her when she complained. Albert James’s responses are alarmed, but cautious. It’s not clear what he really thinks about Jasmeet, but he answers five, even ten emails a day. Looking away from the screen, John is distracted by the window. The sky has dimmed. Dust is swirling through the street. When it gets serious he will go and take a look. He has never been in a dust storm.

  In the story we are doing now, I can’t see really why Indira would stay with such a man. Does she want poverty? Is it because they are very physical together???!!! You know what I mean. I don’t think Vimala understands her part. She doesn’t get angry enough. But I’m sure Jamal likes insulting her! If you don’t give us a pukka script, Albert, something serious will happen one day because it will be like real people! We will make it up so well we will start hitting each other! Then we will have a real catastrophe!

  Is it true Vimala is sometimes the maid in your house? That you paid for her school? She’s very pretty. More than Ananya. Doesn’t Mrs James mind? I think Vimala is in love with you.

  Sudeep says you only bring pretty girls! He thinks you romance with us all! Sudeep is one-track minded. I told him you are always the most correct gentleman. Unlike him! Mr Paws!

  What’s it like being married, Albert? I’d like to meet your wife. I need to understand. I need to decide if I am going to obey and marry Avinash. Vimala is the kind of girl who always obeys. They say I must decide now. But I can’t. My father will kill me. Sudeep says marriage is crazy. He’s a modern kind of person. If my father knew about Sudeep he would kill YOU! He thinks I’m safe in your care preparing a performance for the theatre, and instead … In the new world there will be no marriage, Sudeep says, if there is still a world. He thinks the world will end and we must enjoy now. He says a time is coming when no one will be able to breathe and there’s nothing we can do about it so we may as well have fun now. Sudeep wants me to join the DDS but my parents would never give me money for that even if I wanted. I don’t want to be an actress. I don’t want to marry Avinash. I want to travel, like you, Albert. Your life is the ideal life for me. You have lived everywhere and you are a good man, always with the same woman, not running after every girl. I envy your wife too! You have always let her do the work she wants. She doesn’t sit at home and she doesn’t go to Gurdwara. My father says Mrs James is crazy because she works for free all hours of the day, but I think she is doing it from a real love of poor people.