Gabrijela is on the phone and he takes a seat in front of her kidney-shaped desk. Next to her computer is a little plaque that says, “Be humble because you are made of the earth, be noble because you are made of the stars.” It describes her exactly, he thinks, this Serbian proverb that she keeps to remember her mother by. She is self-effacing to a fault, and fierce in her determination to live up to a higher standard than is the norm both in the way she conducts herself personally and in the way she leads her company. This sometimes makes her difficult to work for, but for all her prickliness he knows she will always be straight with him and will not let him down, traits that are worth much more than an insincere smile and assurances that mean nothing.
Gabrijela is on the phone for a long time. She doesn’t contribute much to the conversation. When she finally puts the phone down, she says, “That was William, he is off to New York tomorrow. Mortimer has asked for a meeting, he thinks Globish is going to sweeten their offer.”
“That’s not great, is it?”
“No it isn’t. I think we can continue to hold them off for a while but to be honest the mood among our shareholders at the moment is to take the money and run, unless we can come up with something really substantial. So, what do you have for me?”
“Not a lot I’m afraid,” he says. “Nothing that’s going to advance even 20K in hardcover.”
She says nothing, so he continues. He has decided to keep the incident involving Pam and Ron from her until Maggie and he can sort it out, so he only mentions the books they are having trouble with at the moment.
“There’s some bad news,” he says, “the Thames book is not up to scratch.”
“Fixable?”
“Probably. If we pad it with illustrations and call in a book doctor, we might squeak by.”
“We’re positioning it as a gift book, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do what you have to do, and let’s hope the reviewers won’t notice it’s a dog.”
“And Boris is being difficult.”
“What about?”
“A talking chicken – and I had a really tough meeting with his agent, who said if we didn’t play ball he would take the book elsewhere.”
“Christ! Sometimes I feel that I was happiest in the early days of Litmus when I did nothing but publish dead authors!” She says this without any heat and then adds, “Want to go out and get a coffee?”
“Sure.”
This is unusual and therefore alarming; Gabrijela is not known to rise from behind her desk except when there is a real emergency.
When they are seated with their coffees at the Costa Coffee outlet near the office, a latte for him and an espresso for her, she says nothing for a while, just looks pensively at the ebb and flow of people and traffic on the street outside. Then she says softly, “I remember thinking when I hired you that the reason most of us get into this business is almost exactly the same – a love of books, a chance to spend our lives in their midst, the fate of all bookish misfits whether we are from Belgrade or Bombay.”
He isn’t sure what to say to this. As the Americans might say, Gabrijela does not do warm and fuzzy, and she does not do nostalgia. His lack of a response does not seem to matter, for she continues in the same quiet voice that seems to be directed mainly at herself.
“When we arrived in the UK, my parents like all refugees were determined that I acquire an education that would get me the best jobs – when I landed the scholarship to the LSE, they were overjoyed but they didn’t know their daughter had already contracted a fatal disease –”
My God, he thinks, is she dying, is that why she’s being so contemplative?
“Do you know the Czech writer Kundera?”
“Yes, I was just thinking about him the other day. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being when I was in college and was blown away by it.” He wonders whether to mention that it informed his disastrous attempts to hook up with girls for more years than it should have and decides not to.
“Umm … I remember reading an interview with him where he said the reason he said he was so taken with the novel form was because it concerned itself with existence not reality. It didn’t examine what had already occurred – that was for historians and their like – what the novel was about was ‘the realm of human possibilities.’ He wanted, Kundera said, to delve into what a human being could become, he wanted to examine everything that a man was capable of. That is why he wrote novels, he wanted to be an explorer of existence, nothing less, and that was why I realized I wanted to read them. As I have never wanted to write, I enjoy reading and thinking about what I have read too much, I realized that nothing would please me more than to spend the rest of my life working with books. Poor mama and papa, they were disappointed, not that they should have been because it was papa who turned me on to Ivo Andric, and all the other great writers of the region …”
She takes a sip of her espresso. “I loved Litmus when it was really small, and everything was a struggle. But I thrilled to the fact that I was publishing some of the world’s most extraordinary writers – though it was sad that I couldn’t do more with them. At the time people here would only read European writers in translation if they had won the Nobel or were ‘adopted’ by a big name English or American writer. That is why when I had the chance to pump more funds into Litmus I didn’t hesitate. My writers needed it, I needed it to be honest. William taught briefly at the LSE when I was a student, then went off and became a successful banker. When he retired and showed an interest in investing in Litmus, I grabbed the opportunity.
“He was patient as we built the company, then you found Seppi, and we made tons of money for him and the other investors, so all was well. But as I’ve told you, I can’t hold onto him much longer. If I was any younger, I might have said to hell with him, I’ll go and find the money elsewhere, but things are what they are. Morty is hell-bent on expanding his presence in the UK, and as there is very little left to buy he has turned his beady eye on us.”
“I’m sorry, you know, I’ve been racking my brain –”
“I have no doubt you have, and I’ve made a few calls myself so I am aware that there is nothing out there. But, you know, when I worked for one of the big firms, my boss, a brilliant man, once said to me that even when it seems as if there is nothing you can do, you have to do something, you can’t just stand still, you have to make something happen.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I was reading the other day about the standoff between the executors of Stieg Larsson’s estate and his partner, who claims to have an unpublished manuscript on a laptop. I know we talked about the Seppi estate at the board meeting but I was wondering if that was something you should follow up.”
“It was one of the first things I did. I e-mailed his translator. Nothing –”
“But if she and the family didn’t get on she might have something hidden away that she doesn’t want to talk about.”
“I don’t know. Also, we aren’t exactly her favourite publishers.”
She dismisses his objection with an elegant wave of her hand. “Look, it’s worth a shot. If we spread some money around, gain the confidence of the translator, there’s no telling what we might find. I don’t want this done on the phone, I want you to get on a plane to Toronto ASAP.”
“Are you sure?”
“Never been surer. We have to do something fast, and if Seppi doesn’t work out, I’ll have to go to my backup plan, which I don’t want to share with you just yet.”
They rise to go, he hasn’t finished his latte, but he has worked with Gabrijela long enough to know when a meeting is over. As they head out the door she says, “Oh, and tell Lea to route your ticket through Delhi, I don’t want the people there to feel as though they are being neglected. Ten years from now, they will be Litmus’s fortune.”
The day before he is due to leave for India, he walks down to the river late in the evening. There are many things he loves about his city
: its great cathedrals and parks; its cobblestoned streets lined by buildings perpetually cobwebbed in scaffolding; the hustle of the Portobello Road market; Notting Hill before the movie destroyed the particularity of one of his favourite neighbourhoods; scruffy pubs (now alarmingly smoke free, although he has never smoked) ironed into his memory by unforgettable evenings he has spent in them with friends or lovers. But in the years that he has lived here his likes and dislikes have moved around; the only thing that has remained constant is his fascination with the great waterway. It is one of the reasons he had been looking forward to publishing Zogoiby’s book, and partly why he is disappointed it hasn’t turned out well.
Long before the Thames had become a part of his life it had filled his imagination; he can still remember how that came about – reading, as an impressionable teenager, Conrad’s extraordinary description of its lower reaches: “The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.” He hasn’t got around to visiting Gravesend yet to drink deeply of the master’s vision that had so captivated him that hot afternoon in Delhi but it is a river of “abiding memories” for him all right. To get to his favourite spot he crosses the bustle of the Strand and cuts through one of the quiet streets that twist down to the river, the noise of his shoes loud on the pavement. At this time of day it is usually deserted, which is how he likes it; he wanders across to one of the benches and sits down. The dying sun lays down leaves of gold on the broad back of the river that flows so slowly along this stretch that it could be made of stone. A cruise boat and a barge of some sort are the only visible traffic, and on this bank there are few people to be seen. A jogger passes, a young woman, sleek as an otter. Barely has she passed his field of vision when he hears a rattling and sees a homeless man approaching. His hair is long and wild in the standard homeless person cut, and he is badged with the hallmarks of his tribe – several layers of ragged clothing, shoes without laces, shopping cart piled high with plastic bags and junk. Instinctively Zach tenses and prepares for a distasteful encounter, but the man has no interest in him and heads straight for a dustbin a few metres away and begins rooting through it. As he watches through the corner of his eye, he wonders how the man landed on the street; surely he wasn’t born to this life, at some point he must have had all the trappings of respectability, a home, a family, ambition. When had the slide started, why had he been unable to stop it, why does he bother to keep on going? He wonders if there is a book in him, they could do an Orwell in reverse – the tramp turned writer. Wasn’t there a book like that some years ago that became a bestseller, about a homeless man and his dog? The vagrant has finished his inspection of the garbage can and rattles away. As Zach watches him go, he thinks about how lightly the man is attached to life, without any of the things that tether a person to an everyday existence, a strong gust of wind could whirl him away into nothingness and it would be as though he had never lived. Zach is no tramp and he hopes he will never be, but he and the homeless man do share one thing – an absence of rootedness.
When he was younger he prided himself on his ability to pick himself up and move anywhere, be with anyone at a moment’s notice. But does his great need to get back with Julia have something to do with the fact that he is beginning to find the gossamer insubstantiality of his existence no longer satisfying, does this mean he is now ready to settle down – a phrase that has always filled him with horror in the past, conjuring up as it does visions of needy children, overbearing in-laws, and hordes of other relatives, all those people hemming him in, suffocating him. But perhaps settling down doesn’t need to mean that, perhaps it could mean that he is settling into himself, anchoring himself a little bit more to this earthly plane, putting down roots, the grass becoming a tree.
And if so, where might that be? He is forty-four years old and in just a couple more years he would have spent half his life in London. Does this fact, coupled with his mother (who was more Indian than most Indians but was born in England nevertheless) and wife, make him British, or at the very least a Londoner, or is that an illusion given depth and substance by things like his job at Litmus and the fact that he lives here at the moment? Maybe, no matter where he is, he will remain resolutely Indian (he smiles to himself at the thought that in all these years he has never traded in his Indian passport, the lions for the crowns). The country of his birth has never ceased exerting its pull on him, especially in recent years as he travelled there more often to be with his ailing mother. Or perhaps nationality doesn’t really matter to people like him anymore, so many millions live simultaneously in more countries than one these days, by choice or by circumstance – a twenty-first-century way of being in an interdependent world where the rising South and East are moving into balance with the North and the West.
Professionally he is excited by what has been happening in India – the wave upon wave of great writing, the burgeoning publishing scene; indeed, there had even been a time, before Litmus had absorbed him completely, when he had vaguely thought of returning and finding a job with one of the many publishing startups. When Gabrijela had decided to open an office in Delhi and given him charge of it he had been thrilled. He hasn’t paid much attention to the company in India for a while now, preoccupied as he has been with the many challenges he has been facing, but suddenly he can’t wait to get on the plane tomorrow. No matter what awaits him in Toronto, Litmus India should prove to be a welcome diversion. He should get going, he thinks, he should get organized for his trip, but he decides to linger, the pull of the water is magnetic. The river is silver and black with the coming of the night; as he gazes into it, another river a continent away rises in his memory, an unnamed mountain torrent on the banks of which his family and he would often picnic when he came home from school on vacation. Its steep mud banks were overhung with clumps of bamboo that sometimes attracted herds of wild elephant, and in its deep pools he would occasionally get lucky and land a fish with the primitive bamboo rod his father had fashioned for him. It was one of the totemic places of his youth; he is suddenly filled with the desire to revisit it even though he has no idea whether it still exists, but he should make the effort, perhaps he and Julia could go together. He yawns and stretches and wishes she were with him. She is the only person he has brought to this spot; it would have been unthinkable to come here with anyone else. She is busy tonight, but it won’t be long before they will resume their rambles along the river, he is sure of it. He wishes he knew how to speed up the process of reconciliation, but maybe the only thing to do is leave it well alone and let things come together on their own. It is not really his style but maybe he has no choice in the matter.
3.
DELHI
Jorge Luis Borges, no slouch at dreaming up fantastical scenarios, once wrote a story whose premise was so implausible that he thought he had no option but to situate it in India. Zach wonders what the Argentine master would have made of Delhi traffic. He had always thought the city had the least disciplined drivers in the country, but every time he has visited the capital it seems the traffic situation has deteriorated further. Their car has been immobile for fifteen minutes at a crossroad just short of the Defence Colony flyover. From where they are he can see the traffic lights change from green to amber to red and not one car of the seventy or so vehicles around them has moved. A bulky man on a scooter, engine revving madly, swerves through the tiniest gaps left in the haphazard lines of traffic and then stalls; his vehicle buzzes like an irritated wasp as he shouts pointlessly at the cars on either side. Southbound traffic, of which they are part, is all knotted up because it is meant to travel along two lanes, one for vehicles moving straight ahead and the other for cars wishing to turn right. There are now four lanes of traffic squeezed into that space, and all the cars in front have their right-turn indicators on, effectively blocking the route of the cars that want to drive straig
ht through; further complicating the tangle are two westbound cars that were attempting to jump the lights and got caught as northbound traffic got going. Muttering “behenchod” under his breath, the driver switches off his engine; the man on the scooter, the visor of his crash helmet pushed up, is now arguing with great vehemence with the driver of the car on his left; two traffic policemen are chatting on the curb. Nothing moves, and Zach thinks of the terrifying ride from the airport the previous night when the driver of his taxi gunned his engine all through the journey to the hotel in a heavy monsoon downpour, missing other equally maniacal drivers by inches, treating red lights with contempt. White-knuckled speed and a dead stop, the way its traffic behaved could be the perfect metaphor for the new India, he thinks.
When he left the country two decades ago, it was barely stirring, although that was an improvement over everything that had taken place over the previous fifty years; now it seemed to roar ahead, stop in its tracks because of some improbable event, and then race ahead again. The newspapers this morning have been full of editorials criticizing the annual budget for this and that but the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, is imperturbable – India will get to and maintain a nine per cent growth rate, he declares. The astonishing thing is that nobody is willing to bet against Mukherjee. In today’s India anything is possible; what a change, he thinks, from when I was a child and every ambitious Indian’s eyes were trained on escape to the West.
“I have a solution for this nonsense,” Apoorva Joshi says, her eyes travelling from the idle policemen to the driver of the scooter up ahead, who appears to be on the verge of a fistfight with one of the drivers beside him, with the angry honking of every other vehicle providing the soundtrack for the action. “Fine every motorist who flouts traffic regulations ten thousand rupees and give half that amount to the constable who challans the culprits. It would stop this nonsense in a second.”
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