All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  Rozario & Sons stood at one corner of the arcade below Miss Lisa McNally’s Home Away from Home, a series of rooms she let on long and short leases. To reach our house you had to walk all the way down the arcade past Prince Ideal Barber, Minerva Laundry, Peshawar Fruits, Books & Books, and Ishikawa, Dental Surgeon. The dental clinic had been closed from before I was born because (so I had been told) one morning, after he had already practiced in Muntazir for two decades, Dr. Ishikawa had woken up unable to speak any language but Japanese. His clinic still had a signboard across it showing fleshy pink lips stretched over two rows of white teeth, but he was sighted only rarely, tottering off to the market where he bought things using sign language or to the post office to retrieve money orders from Yokohama.

  Round the corner from his clinic, past a patch of wilderness that surrounded the tomb of a Muslim pir, was our house, a single-storied building in a line of four plain whitewashed bungalows with verandahs along the front. It was even then hidden by big trees. Today it is the only one left; Dinu’s was the last to go. Tall buildings now crowd our house on every side but the house itself is much as I remember from my childhood. Dim, cool stillness, high ceilings, long mirrors, heavy furniture. The smell of old books, furniture polish, and attar of musk. The dining room clock’s deep gong. The land around it was too unruly to be called a garden, but then as now, it had trees, grass, bushes—a stretch of mystery where chameleons went from orange to green as they turned themselves into leaves. Next door on one side was Dinu and on the other, two more houses which did not interest us. The road in front of our house sloped gently downward to the river that ran at right angles to it, and that afternoon in May, I was sitting on the riverbank with Dinu, fishing.

  We sat with our lines in the water in the shade of the trees that bent over the river where it curved round a corner. It had been almost an hour and we had caught nothing; perhaps the fish had come to recognize our footfalls and were no longer fooled by the worms we so diligently dug out of the earth and threaded onto our hooks. Across the water, with a red flag on its conical roof, was a small stone temple. It was from here that the man emerged. He stood on the opposite bank for a while, shading his eyes with his hands and looking in our direction.

  “It’s an Englishman,” said Dinu.

  We had seen Englishmen before. Big men surrounded by clusters of salaaming Indian flunkeys whose job it was to shoo away other Indians. An Englishman appearing on our riverbank was as unlikely as a penguin or a giraffe.

  Dinu did not take his eyes off the man as he spoke again.

  “He’s naked.”

  The foreigner was bare-bodied. He wore shorts and nothing else, not even slippers or shoes. Even as we argued over whether he qualified as naked or not, the man flipped into the water and began to swim towards us with strong, scythe-like strokes. The river was not very wide and we had swum in it too, but never across, always along the banks. We waited, immobilized with fear and excitement as he came closer. When he emerged to take a breath we saw his face—pale hair and a grimacing mouth.

  He hauled himself onto the bank right next to us, and like a ship he was bigger once he was out of the water. I had to tilt my head back to see his face, plastered with strands of wet hair. I remember being powerfully struck, even as a child, by his beauty—or perhaps it was just his unfamiliar coloring and the strangeness of the way he spoke. His eyebrows were a dark shade of gold and his forehead sloped high above a straight, rather long nose.

  He said, “You boys have not stolen my clothes, yes?”

  Dinu and I scrambled to our feet, our fishing rods entangled, standing at attention as we were used to doing at school when teachers quizzed us. “We have not taken anything, sir,” Dinu said. “On my honor, sir.” He was a few years older than me, a little bigger than me, his limbs had grown longer all of a sudden and he was like a bamboo in danger of toppling over. His loose, too-big shorts flapped above his scarred knees. The Englishman smiled. His eyes shone with amusement. “I’m not sir, I am Vaaltor,” he said. He bent to retrieve his clothes from behind a bush and discarded his wet shorts, his back to us. I had never seen the naked buttocks of a grown man before, the most extreme instance of nudity in my house being the rare sight of my father or grandfather with bath towels round their waists. Dinu’s eyes bulged with alarm, but the man chatted as if it were normal for him to be stark naked with two strange boys as onlookers. His English sounded different from the English we heard in school. Sometimes he stopped to search for words and said things in what sounded like a different language, and we had to half-guess what he was telling us. He was an artist, he said, he had been painting on the riverbank and had gone across to see the temple. He had arrived in search of a long-lost friend and planned to be in our town for maybe a fortnight, maybe longer. Did we come to the river often? Did we live nearby? He straightened, and by now fully clothed and shod, he hoisted a canvas bag onto his shoulder. Ah, Rozario’s, he said, he had seen it of course from his room at Miss McNally’s guesthouse. Wasn’t it an antique shop? Whatever it was, it looked interesting, perhaps he would go there. “Why not today? Take me there with you, boys, please? Maybe he has a folding table for me.”

  Which was why I took Walter Spies to my grandfather’s on a hot afternoon in 1937: to find a folding table in a doctor’s clinic.

  When I was a boy, Muntazir had a sense of village about it, a settlement from the Middle Ages that progress had pulled by its ears into the present day, where buildings poked their way out between orchards of lychee, mango, and custard apple, interruptions in a landscape with more trees than houses. When spring came, our town went scarlet with the explosion of huge fleshy flowers on the bare branches of hundreds of silk cotton trees and in winter the fields turned into sheets of gold as the mustard bloomed. At other times it was dark green with sugarcane or russet with wheat. In the far distance, on clear days, were the blue-green humps of the Himalayan foothills. I notice these colors when I turn the pages of my mother’s old drawing books now. I can see how the landscape had imprinted itself on her mind.

  The road to the mountains passed through our town, and our northbound railway line went on to terminate where the flat land turned into hills. Our railway station had vaulted roofs, tall windows, lofty pillars, and crenellated walls: a grand Gothic building even though only three or four passenger trains wheezed into it every day. All the others steamed past, billowing great clouds of black smoke, as if too weighty for pause in a town so slight.

  One of our favorite occupations, Dinu’s and mine, was to run to the railway line near our house at dusk and watch the fast trains flash by in their sudden storms of light and sound. We waited for the days when a train passed slow enough for us to see the people inside. If I asked my grandfather why such few trains stopped at our station he would explain in a sorrowful tone that in Urdu the meaning of the word muntazir was to wait for with anxious impatience. The destiny of our station was to live in the hope of trains stopping, but it was doomed to disappointment.

  The nawabs who once ruled our town had been deposed by the British, and many of the things in Rozario & Sons came from their decaying mansions, which were being sold off object by object. My grandfather’s clinic, not far from our house, was in the twilit region between the British-built cantonment and the old city of the nawabs.

  Walter Spies paused to examine the signboards outside the clinic and tapped the smaller one, Dr. Bhavani Rozario, with a puzzled air. He peered into the mullioned windows. My grandfather was often away on house calls, but today I could see him inside, talking to someone. I pushed open the heavy glass door, feeling important for having brought him a visitor—a foreign visitor. Dada was busy showing the workings of a cuckoo clock to a round-faced man with a bottle brush for a mustache, who glared at the clock as if daring the cuckoo to come out. They were speaking a mix of Hindustani and English and Dada was saying, “It won’t strike four any faster if we wait for it—in fact, I do believe clocks slow down when you do that.”

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sp; “What do you mean? Does this clock run slow?”

  “No, that is not what I meant. It runs correctly to the minute—why, I time all my work by the cuckoo’s calls now. In fact, I don’t know what I will do when you take this clock away. What I meant was that as watched kettles boil slower . . .”

  “Watched clocks don’t strike the hour.” Walter Spies completed Dada’s statement. He picked up the clock and turned it round to look at the back.

  The prospective clock-buyer’s mouth fell open, his round cheeks wobbled in alarm at a foreigner so casually close. “Hari Om,” he exclaimed, and then in a defiant tone, “Jai Hind.”

  Continuing in Hindi, the man said to my grandfather, “As you know, I refuse to have anything to do with the British as long as we remain their slaves. It is abhorrent to me that they breathe the same air that I do. I will be their friend once they treat me and my countrymen as their equals, not one moment before.” He tapped his cane on the floor perhaps to test if it was still strong enough to receive his weight, then rose from his chair. “I’ll come back later . . . maybe.” He slid past Walter Spies, and after a burst of blinding sunlight when he pushed open the door, the clinic sank back into its usual penumbral gloom.

  There was an awkward pause. My ever-calm grandfather appeared disconcerted by the brusque departure. I did not make matters easier, asking in a shrill voice, “Why did he say he hates the British for breathing the same air? Is there any other kind of air?”

  “I am not British, I am from Germany. We have these clocks there,” Walter Spies said. “In my childhood home we have one. I see the cuckoo as a child, I think it is a real bird and I grow fond of it—and then my mother finds pieces of bread near the clock. I gave it food every day. Every single day.” He put the clock down and his eyes roamed the clinic. The place could have been the overcrowded sitting room of a haphazard collector. The cuckoo clock was one of five that hung there, chiming out of time with each other when the hour approached. There were mysterious bottles and globes, music boxes and hookahs, books, peg tables, mismatched chairs left for sale. It was these chairs that Dada’s prospective patients occupied as they waited to be called into the inner sanctum, which was sectioned off with a wooden partition and a swing door.

  On the other side of this door was the usual paraphernalia of consulting rooms, including charts depicting the human anatomy in grisly detail. One jar on a high shelf fascinated me. It was filled with a clear liquid in which floated a hand with two limp extra fingers, fingernails and all, dangling from the thumb. Whose was the handless body from which it had been severed? It was the bottled essence of everything I feared and loathed yet could not keep away from. I was sure it would escape the jar someday and come for me.

  Walter Spies peered at the jar with a bemused smile, ambled further inside, turning back once, saying, “May I?” and carrying on without waiting for a reply. When you found the inside door, you saw that the clinic opened out quite unexpectedly into an inner courtyard. A staircase led down into it from Lisa McNally’s and she hung all the guesthouse’s laundry in lines across the yard.

  “Ah! That is where the staircase goes. I was wondering.”

  “I’ve begged Lisa not to hang those sheets . . .” Dada said. “Come this way, let me show you . . .” He tried to draw Walter Spies away from the squalor of the back. He had plucked up courage once and told Lisa that the sheets lowered the tone, but she had said wet sheets won no wars, and the declaration flummoxed my grandfather enough to silence him.

  If Walter Spies noticed what a shambles the courtyard was, he gave no sign of it. Once he had finished his tour, he came back in and settled into one of the For Sale chairs as if he intended staying for a long time. It was only after two cups of tea and half an hour of conversation that he told Dada it was neither accident nor tourism that had brought him to our town.

  “I come hunting,” he said, “for one Gayatri Sen. I have met her and her father in Bali. She is like a friend of mine. I went to her house in Delhi and I was told that her father is long deceased and she is married here in this town? I have an address, even. Here—this notebook of mine—somewhere here. Ah, yes. Number Three, Pontoon Road. Is that close? Perhaps you know her?”

  A scene from my mother’s childhood comes back to me. It is so vivid after her many retellings I can see it before my eyes. She is thirteen or fourteen, running along a red-earthed pathway through a forest in Bengal. Above her is a canopy of chhatim trees in full bloom, and, though the flowers are hardly worth a second glance, their scent makes her head spin. Around her everything is vast and wild, and the sky is a brilliant blue cut into jagged edges by leaves. Her father’s voice sounds dimly in her ears, “Gayatri, the birds! There!” She looks up at egrets floating away like white paper that the wind has torn from the books of children in the nearby school. Her arms are outstretched as if she is flying and she wheels round and round till she is dizzy. She runs without pause or direction, is brought to a halt when she reaches the school. She can hear music. A song. It is a new school Rabindranath has started, a serene ashram where she can see girls and boys her own age or younger singing in Bengali, a language she knows but does not read well enough despite a tutor. The song stops her in her tracks. The blood rushes to her head, she has to hold a tree trunk for support. The egret-streaked sky, the leaves and flowers. The song feels both sweet and painful, a sensation she has never felt in all her years, and she turns to her father and cries, “I want to stay here! Let me be with them here!” Even as she says this she feels in her heart the weight of the hundred things that tie them to their life in Delhi. Her mother never stops ailing and will not get up from her bed. Her father needs her at home to be his little friend, which is what he always calls her.

  “One day, I’ll live far away,” she says to me at the end of the story, solemn hand on heart as I gape at her. Her nostrils are flared, her eyes focus intensely on me, her thick straight eyebrows are joined together in a frown. She is scratching her head with the wooden end of a paintbrush and her hair stands up in an untidy clump as she pushes the brush. “I’ll take you with me, Myshkin. We’ll wander the world, have lots of adventures. We’ll join a circus and live in a tent. Not a circus like the one with the magician. A good one. With baby elephants.”

  “Let’s go today!” I cry out. I am seven, I cannot imagine waking up and not curling up against her, warm and sleepy. My stomach churns. “Are you going away? Will you really, really take me?” When she doesn’t reply, I say, “Will you take Lisa Aunty?” Lisa McNally is her best friend, they see each other every day, at least once. My mother cannot possibly leave her or me behind, and if she tells me she won’t go without Lisa it means I am going too.

  My mother laughs one of her inscrutable laughs and says, “Whatever you do, don’t stop dreaming.” She presses both my ears back, perhaps one day they will stick out less, her eyes say. She springs up from the sofa we have been sitting in and shakes out her sari. When she dresses up to go out she is always in something sparkly and pretty and wears earrings that match; at home she doesn’t bother, she wears old, soft cottons stained with turmeric, darned blouses in faded colors. But she has a sweet-smelling strand of flowers around her bun every day. The gardener picks white jasmine from the bushes at the edge of the courtyard and makes a string for her each evening after watering the plants. Or she wears one or two red champas. When I am sitting close enough to her, I have the droopy scent of plucked flowers in my nose. She tweaks my ears and says, “Time to get dinner started. And have they filled the water or not? Go, see where Banno Didi is.” She jangles the keys to her cupboard as if it’s just another day. As if one day after another will follow this one in exactly the same way.

  Some nights, my mother sings the song from that day in Santiniketan. She only sings it when she and I are alone on the roof and (she tells me) if the sky is like a pincushion of stars so that she can count at least two thousand and twenty-two of them. It is our song, mine and hers, she says, and if ever I feel sad or afrai
d, I must sing it. When I was littler she would scoop me up in her arms and whirl me in a circle as she sang, now she wafts around the shadowy rooftop with her arms outstretched, a bird in flight. In seconds, she forgets I am with her.

  Skyful of sun and stars,

  This universe exploding with life,

  And in the midst of this: I!

  I have found a space.

  In wonderment it is born—

  That is why it is born—my song.

  In the infinity of time

  Spins the earth.

  With the ebb and flow of tides

  Sways the world.

  In my veins, in my bloodstream,

  I feel a throb.

  In wonderment it is born—

  That is why it is born—my song.

  I’ve opened my ears,

  I’ve opened my eyes,

  I’ve poured out my soul

  Upon the bosom of the earth.

  I’ve searched out the unknown

  Within the familiar.

  In wonderment it is born—

  That is why my song is born,

  Under a sky full of sun and stars.

  As I write this, I pause, I put my pen down. It is a broad-nibbed Sheaffer that has drunk up many bottles of ink and blackened my fingers. I think back to that afternoon in Rozario & Sons and wonder if that was the moment when everything changed. If Walter Spies had not thought up his improbable plan to search out a girl he had met more than a decade earlier, would my father and mother have remained together, fitted uneasily within one domestic box, their edges rubbing against each other until worn down and smoothened over the years? That is how it appears to be with most married people I come across. Or was my parents’ destruction inevitable, a matter of time?