by Olivia
Olivia froze. She was done with the brittle bones of history, done with autopsies on corpses already putrid with decay, done with weighing blame and counter-blame. Fighting for balance, she centred her world with a single touch. But then she immediately sent it awry again with the one subject she had vowed not to invoke. "Why did you have to send me that long-lost letter? It was an act of cruelty."
He shuddered and closed his eyes. "Why do you still have to ask all these questions?" He was too spent for anger. He sounded only beaten. "Because you sail tomorrow and must neatly knot all those unfinished ends your tidy mind has always hated?"
"If you wish."
"Unfinished ends!" He laughed a little, not replying to her question. "Yes, I suppose that is all they can ever be now. You, my own cursed life, my son..." Without completing the thought, he rose abruptly to pick up a stone and send it spinning across the water in a fierce spurt of energy.
My son. Olivia went cold. My son! For the first time it struck her that if they shared nothing else ever, that pronoun of possession would forever be common property. Angrily she shook off her numbness to steel herself and return to what was relevant. "On your side, the bargain is fulfilled. On mine, it still pends. The Templewood house is yours to take whenever you wish. The quarters remain intact."
He resumed his seat heavily, lilac shadows obscuring his face. "I have now even less need of possessions."
"Nevertheless I return to you what is yours as a . . . birthright." She stopped, swallowed hard and continued. "As is this, which I also return to you." Hands shaking, sick with shame, she placed the red velvet bundle as close to him as she could reach. Initially she had intended to have it sent back to him by messenger after her departure but had then willed herself the courage to do so personally. There, now it was over, this most hideous of all her missions! Now there remained nothing between them, except for that obnoxious pronoun that not even the gods could alter. Somehow she gathered more courage to say what else needed verbalising. "I'm . . . sorry."
He turned on her, all at once enraged. "You are generous in your remorse, but I deserve no such consideration. In war one uses whatever weapon comes to hand—a lesson you no doubt learned from me. I beg you, don't humble me anymore!"
"I did not come with the intention of humbling you."
"No. You came only to tie all your loose ends. Are there more?"
"One, perhaps." Her throat felt bruised with the effort of speech. "After tonight we will not meet again. I would not want to part on a note of that hostility, which is now obsolete. I have no more recriminations." One of the slumbering beasts within her stirred, yawned and then scratched—would she want to part at all ...? Ruthlessly, she crushed it out of her mind, but in her agitation she stretched a hand towards the black bitch lying near her feet.
"Don't, she is capricious!" Leaning sideways, he had stayed her hand with lightning swiftness. The unplanned contact was like a plunge into icy waters; it jolted both equally. Instantly, he let her hand drop. "No. We will not meet again." In his ready agreement he was callous. "But such nobly granted absolution is hardly the point! Loose end or not, I have a responsibility towards the boy—"
"I want nothing from you!" She sliced him off at once. "I accepted nothing from my husband, save his name. From you not even that is due. My son is my responsibility, mine alone." My son. She made no mistake with her own emphasis.
He winced, then threw up his hands in a gesture of abjuration. "I use words badly, you know that. I don't know how to say what I mean with delicacy. I am out of my depth, in a situation that has defeated me. I don't know how not to be offensive."
In his unaccustomed bewilderment he looked vulnerable, like a young bird that has lost its bearings, but Olivia did not weaken. "It is a situation that need not concern you. If it is outside your depth, it is also outside your life. I will manage well on my own."
The reminder of her essential aloneness slammed into him like a sledge-hammer, although that was not what Olivia had intended. He convulsed. With a groan, he covered his face with his hands. "Yes. I know you will manage well, but how will I? It is not you I seek to help, Olivia, nor can I, but my own misbegotten self. You see? As always I am selfish and coarse and conceited, with none of those social graces I once paraded before you with such pride. You must bear with me, Olivia, one last time for the sake of . . ." He stopped and looked up. "What is the name of the . . . boy? The ayah knew him only as 'baba.'"
Yes. Kinjal was right. There was a time when he was the rock, she the tide that lapped timidly around it. Now the picture was reversed, as were their functions. It was she who had survived, she who had translated hidden resources into strength. He was unequipped, resourceless, rudderless. And she had been wrong in her conclusions; he had not been spared either. Perhaps he too, like the rest of them, was a victim. Yes, he too, for he was denied even the name of his son. Olivia felt her eyes blur. She started to ache. And somewhere in that ache, somewhere, she felt what could have been grief at what might have been and was not.
"His name is Amos."
"Amos." He held the name in his mouth, balanced on the tip of his tongue, as if tasting an elusive sweetness. "Amos. Yes, he will bear many burdens. It is apt and appropriate. But then, you have always had an impeccable sense of the fitness of things, Olivia. It is one more area in which I stand humbled."
"There are no more scores to be counted, Jai!" She was alarmed by his humility, alarmed by the inner dragons it threatened to unleash. "The past is dead—can't you see that?"
"For me there can only be the past. I exist now without a future." His despair erupted with volcanic force, sending him leaping to his feet like one possessed. "In a single glance at my son's face your life unfolded before me like a mural unveiled. A carnal bargain for the privilege of a name, a daily lie perpetuated alone in constant fear of exposure, a betrayal never understood, never explained—"
"Stop it!" Blinded by panic, not at his escaping demons but her own, Olivia also sprang to her feet in fury. "I forbid you to—"
"And then you sacrificed a second son." In the grip of helpless passion, he remained unhearing, deafened by the roars of his own guilt. "Why? Was that also part of the carnal bargain? Expiation for the crime of a begged and borrowed name?" Raking fingers punished his hair with a rage he could not contain. "And I, blinded by my own arrogance, demanded that you survive on the strength of one miserable letter that failed to even reach you. Oh Christ. . .! The wrenching turbulence peaked, then started to fade, then died away altogether. "And I called you a whore, a whore!" Flattened with horror, his voice could not sustain itself.
"Don't, please don't!" Olivia cried, recoiling at the violence of his self-flagellations, stupid with dread at the dimension of her own expanding responses. "Please don't say any more, Jai, I beg of you!"
But he was beyond recall. "Why did you not run, Olivia— flee, hide, abscond, anything, anywhere!" Insane with frustration, he fisted a hand and rammed it against a stone ledge, uncaring of injury. "Why did you not trust me, damn you . . .?"
Anger flared briefly and insulated her from her fear. "Why?" She looked at him with scorn. "Because I did not wish my son to be born a bastard like his father. It was as simple as that."
His head jerked back as if struck. His face became bloodless. Slowly he began to diminish, his rage evaporating. "Yes," he mumbled, devastated, "yes. That was a stupid question. I am raving, Olivia, because I look for a scapegoat and there is none. Because I want to reverse the clock and I cannot. Because I have lost you. My hindsight, you see, is perfect." Embittered again, he surrendered to the uselessness of his guilt. "In my selfish search to redeem at least something of myself, however, I want you to know that I would have returned within six months had I not learned along the way that you had already married Freddie. I had tried once to renounce you; I could not sustain it. It was not within my power to renounce you again. You should also know, if only as an exercise in futility, that to find you I would have ransacked the earth
. I would have come to you wherever you were hidden. Wherever."
Olivia knew then that she should not have come. But having come, she also knew that she could not now leave. "Would you have?" she asked dully.
He sighed and bowed his head, weighted down with those burdens he could neither carry nor cast off. "The fact that you are still driven to ask that is my most despicable failure. And my most lethal punishment."
Once again the stubborn fingers of pain crept around Olivia's body, refusing to be repulsed, challenging her resistance. She could not bear his torment any more than she could her own. "Mine or yours, our failures are shared. You could not have known of my circumstances. I had no yardstick with which to measure a man such as you. And time was against us . . ."
Us. How cunningly that word had slipped out, and with what parodic timing in these final moments before they went their separate ways!
Submerged within himself, he did not notice her slip—that seemingly innocuous little two-letter word that so blithely melded them together again. "As an avenger, I am a travesty. I did not spare even you—the only thing in my life that made it worthy of being lived at all."
For an instant, a mere whisper in time, Olivia was overwhelmed with feeling. So as to force from her sight the nightmare of his face, she squeezed her eyes shut. But it was useless. Every feature of his was etched forever in her brain. Without even opening her eyes she knew that in his, once more, there would be tears.
She sighed and moved away from her feelings. As if in an odd chimera, weightless and airborne she floated out of herself to watch him from above. With dispassion and only vague surprise, she made another discovery. Kinjal had been wrong in her judgement; she had not won after all. She could never have won. And with that discovery came others, a succession of others. She wanted to get up and go to him, to sit by his side, to rest her cheek against that defeated shoulder. She wanted to sprout wings, to soar across those divides that had segregated their destinies so irreversibly, to somehow erase the years of their separate sorrows. She wanted to touch him again, as she once had, to be reassured, warmed, by the closeness of his skin, to gather him in her arms, to solace him. To love him and be loved by him. Released from their fragile, insubstantial moorings, her sensations stampeded. Behind closed lids, she ruffled his disobedient hair, even wilder in the blowing breeze, and in her palm she felt again those long, tapered fingers that had prompted in her such wanton responses. Next to her face she actually felt the rough weave of his ever-present white mull shirt about which she had teased him so often. And through the fabric came the incandescence of the blood that was now also part of her son. With her finger-tips she gently stroked away the pain creased in his forehead. She put an ear to his pocket to listen to his heart; it beat the same rhythm as hers. And once more in her inner hearing was the soundless sound of those words that she had not thought of for so long: But yes, I do love you . . .
"There is a loose end that I too must knot."
Startled, Olivia stepped out of her reverie to return to poignant reality. His manic ferments were successfully quelled. He again spoke normally. She decided she wanted no more instigations into insanity, but not wanting them, asked, "Which loose end?"
"I have to tell you how my mother died."
"No!" So much, so late—what was the point?
"Yes. You have unturned each stone of my life. This too must not remain unreversed. You have a right to know."
"I forfeit the right; it is no longer important!"
"It is important." His contradiction was firm but gentle. "You cannot forfeit a right that is not yours alone. Someday my son too will have the right to know; you must then tell him." It was a cruel reminder of their divided destinies and it cut deeply, but he was already lost in that distant world in which had been laid the foundations of their own futures. "She died as she had lived, a woman of no consequence, unloved to the end. The one whiplash she had suffered in order to save me had wounded her badly. For eight years she had not been a day without opium. It ran through her blood; her body craved it like a hunger that nothing else could satisfy. I could not give her any, so the appetite remained unsatiated, and with that hunger it died. Her heart and spirit had died long before. She was not yet twenty-five."
He spoke in an even rhythm, but she saw that each word exacted a toll as buried emotions, never aired, lay quivering just beneath the surface of his control. "Don't!" Olivia entreated. "Let it lie if it is so hurtful."
"Yes, it is hurtful, but it still must be told." Absently, his finger-tips stroked the red bundle beside him, that pathetic little childhood treasury. "She slipped away that very first night after we had left the big house. We had to sleep by the road. The cut on her arm still bled and she was in agony, her brain addled with her need for the little pellets that ensured her silent docility. But that night, before we slept, she told me many things—perhaps because she knew that night would be her last." He got up and turned his back to Olivia. "It was then that I learned for the first time about the opium. And about the identity of my father. The opium was beyond my comprehension, but that the man who had cut her open was my father dumbfounded me. I was awestruck. Before then, you see," restless in his recollections he started to pace, "I had always admired him from a distance—this fine figure of an Englishman who could read and write and command with such consummate ease. I used to watch him for hours, storing away all his actions, his little gestures and mannerisms, and imitating them when I was alone. There were times I wanted to touch him, because to touch an Englishman was to me the ultimate honour. And sometimes he spoke to me, gave me things, tried to be kind. But the sound of his voice petrified me. It was as if an idol from a temple had stepped down and spoken. I could never answer anything he asked and he would turn impatient. Even that impatience I took as an accolade, a reward, for it meant that I was important enough to make him angry . . ." He broke off, as if fearful of emotion, and again contained himself within parameters he had defined for himself.
"I had never seen death," he continued with calmness, regaining his seat, "I was not aware of my mother's. It was a passing water carrier who told me that she was gone, that she must now be consigned to flame. Together we carried her to the river bank and gathered wood. It was damp; it took a long time to light. I did not know what a cremation meant. It was only when the pyre began to burn that I cried. I saw then that she could never return to me."
To his monotone there was only a minimal quiver, nothing more, but Olivia saw how terribly he suffered. "Please don't go on," she begged, suffering with him, "I can't bear to hear any more!"
He turned harsh again. "For the boy you must learn everything! You allow me nothing else, let me give him at least this pittance of myself. In giving it I cleanse that infection you once called a canker. So you see," even his laugh was harsh, "in this too I am selfish."
Olivia remained silent. She did not protest again.
"The water carrier went. He had a living to earn." He had sprung up again, his interlocked fingers behind his back twitching. "He left me an empty coconut shell in which to gather the ashes when they had cooled. I did as he had instructed, then cast the shell into the river. The monsoon winds were strong; they carried the shell quickly towards the open sea. I bathed, as I had been told to, and a wandering barber, taking pity, shaved my head and trimmed my nails without charge, as this too, the water carrier had emphasised, was part of the cremation ritual. My wound was still raw and it bled again. I lay down somewhere, I can't remember where, and slept. When I opened my eyes, it was to find myself in the house of a stranger. Many days had passed since my mother died. I could remember none of it. My mind was devoid of all memory."
Ranjan Moitra's house. Olivia knew this but said nothing. Pin-points of heat seared her inner eyelids. The curiously impersonal tone in which he related this most harrowing experience in a child's life—as if he spoke of someone else, someone unknown—was a protective device. Inside, Olivia knew, he bled quietly.
"It was in t
his strange house that kindness and medication repaired my body. My mind was still blank. They did not know how to repair that. It was only two years later, when I chanced upon some travellers from Assam, heard their language, that a faint glimmer of memory told me that there were people of my own up in the hills. It took me six months to make the journey, but I could not find them, for I did not know who I was looking for. It was someone from the tribe who found me roaming the hills, recognised some of the jewellery I had, which the water carrier had removed from my mother's body before we burned it, and took me to the village. One old man, it appeared, was my grandfather. He cried, took me in, gave me his love and taught me everything he knew. He taught me about the soil, the forests and their fauna, the seasons and their crops; he taught me especially about those majestic tea trees that were, he said, part of my inheritance." In remembering this childhood love, he softened. In his eyes there was a faint smile of tenderness. Then the smile vanished and he was again impassive. "But he was an old man, made older by grief. In time he too died. It was I who closed his eyes, I who lit his pyre. And it was as I stood watching him too turn to ashes that all at once my memory returned to me. I remembered everything—how my mother had died, where and why. I remembered the big house, the cell of my birth, the opium pellets, the slash on her arm, all her final words. And I remembered Lady Bridget, Sir Joshua's mother and his whip. But most of all, most of all, I remembered Sir Joshua Templewood, my father."
In the nascent moonlight his eyes were like opals, hard and shining dimly. Somewhere, a jackal howled. Others picked up the refrain, obviously celebrating the find of a left-over cadaver. Olivia barely moved as she watched him. There was no question of an intrusion.