Wow, and wow again, I didn’t say. This was eleven o’ clock at night for me: Lena had gone to sleep with Mira. It was of course only half-four in the afternoon for Dada.
‘Sure,’ I eventually decided on. ‘Let’s plan something during our next trip to India.’ Then I had what felt like a brainwave. ‘What do you say we all go away together? On holiday, I mean. Somewhere like Kerala, or Goa? Or Orissa? I haven’t been to Puri and Konark since I was eight.’
That felt like something achievable and also potentially awesome. Wonderful images exploded in my mind. I would naturally offer to pay for all the big things, flights and accommodation. Not just offer, insist.
But my brother was pursuing his own line of thought. ‘But you said the next visit might be a year and a half away.’
That was true. We did try and go only during winter in Calcutta, when the temperatures were most comfortable for Mira. The trip in July for Chhotka’s wedding had been an exception, although Mira had surprised us by almost never complaining about the humidity. Lena and I had reasoned that it must be the many adoring people that had occupied her, and new friends like Tulti to play with. She was too busy to notice she was uncomfortable. Plus there had been mangoes, at least three each day.
I hadn’t yet responded when Dada wrote again: ‘I was thinking that maybe we should come.’
‘You mean, meet again in Calcutta?’
‘No, come there. Bring Tulti to see Mira in Wellington.’
And that was how it started. In early September we began the visa process, which took just three weeks. I’d already couriered him a cheque from one of my Indian accounts for the airfares. And before that, I had explained clearly and truthfully in a Facebook message that Lena and I couldn’t afford to fly all three of them over. December, which was when Dada wanted to come, was the most expensive time to fly to New Zealand, because of all the tourists, as well as Kiwis returning home. Likewise for leaving in early January to be back before Tulti’s school reopened.
‘Let’s plan a bit more and really make this happen,’ my message had suggested. Perhaps during Tulti’s summer holidays (even though the weather wasn’t necessarily great at our end in April and May, often wet and turning cold), or else in just another year, when hopefully the novel that I was working on would be complete and I would have a great new agent.
Of course I assumed that would be that. Those were more than hints I’d dropped. You don’t hear that degree of unwillingness or, in my defence, unpreparedness, in your host’s voice, and still resolve to set off for New Zealand! I did want them to come; it really was a great idea (Why should my only brother and I meet solely in India? Why couldn’t his family visit me here?), but each of my objections was also reasonable and true. I did want to sponsor their entire holiday, and show them a great time and lots of stunning scenery once they’d travelled this far, but we honestly didn’t have ten to twelve thousand dollars to spare just now, lying around at short notice.
Still, I could see she was right when Lena pointed out that I might be letting a noble ideal stand in the way of the possible. What if Dada was willing to go halves, or a third, or something? I should allow him the chance to say so. Hence that is what I wrote to ask. If you could contribute one airfare, maybe it could work. Everything else would be on us.
Dada, and Moushumi presumably, took two days to consider. ‘Moushumi is fine with the two of us coming. She wants Tulti to have the experience.’
And hence this odd configuration, just father and daughter visiting us over Christmas. Dada and Moushumi — who I’d learnt in July was a year and a half younger than me, which is why I don’t call her Boudi — had not seemed unhappy back in Calcutta (although he did dismiss her opinion a few times while we were all chatting: Lena hadn’t liked his manner, but I’d argued Dada meant no harm by it. ‘Back home we all interrupt and take sharper tones with one another. You’ve seen that before; it’s not necessarily a gender thing’), yet it was he who had insisted on leaving her behind. Perhaps there had been a mild element of bluff-calling: Dada might have thought we would turn up the extra money after all. But we were being realistic about what we could afford, and believed he would take the offer to come the following year.
And that was the reason why on the ferry to Days Bay, as well as at each of the lookouts on Mount Vic, Wrights Hill and the Paekak Hill Road, when he made a point of mentioning how much Moushumi would have enjoyed all this, I had to really fight the urge to remind him why she wasn’t here. Who had insisted on this mildly weird situation? Who had been so impatient about coming this year itself? Had it truly been little Tulti’s uncontrollable desperation to see Mira?
So this was the pattern of slightly irritating ‘pinching’ that had persisted throughout the first half of the holiday, up to and including Christmas and our arrival on Boxing Day at the stunning holiday house that Lena had found online and booked for us in Kaiteriteri on Tasman Bay. My reasonable degree of physical fitness was wholly down to the luck of living in such favourable conditions, which included the luxury of being able to work from home, and the financial security enabled by Lena’s senior lectureship at Vic that allowed me to focus on writing and looking after Mira. All entirely true, of course, which was why I shut up and acknowledged it, just as when he pointed out each of the facilities here that Mira could enjoy — the pool, the well-stocked libraries, the numerous playgrounds and parks — and Tulti would miss when she returned. Moushumi would have loved the greenery, our garden, the holiday house, the beautiful beach at Split Apple Rock, my monkfish kebabs, the sheer quiet of our neighbourhood, and so many other things Dada wanted to share with her every single day. Well, I’m certain you’re right, Dada, and I wish she was here too, but this scenario was avoidable, and brought on entirely by your insistence. There wasn’t a single moment when I’d pledged to fly all three of you over. So if you’re actually regretting your own decision to come without her, why not just keep that to yourself?
But when I shared with Lena in bed one night that, wonderful as it was to be with my brother under the same roof after so many years, and especially to watch Tulti and Mira together, I was finding it hard to stay patient through all the little guilt trips I felt Dada was springing on me, she told me not just to remember the big picture of our long-overdue reunion but also that he might have some higher idea of his own in deciding to visit us. Perhaps he had been eager for some time alone with me, but in this utterly new environment it was taking some building up to. After they had come this far, I had to see this fortuitous turn of events for the great possibility it was, thank Tulti and Mira for making it happen because they were its actual architects, and just stay patient and open. Our father would have wanted this. He would have been thrilled to see us together, grandkids and all. Your Dada must have made this unusual choice to come without Moushumi for a reason. There must be some connection he was restless for.
That Saturday afternoon I decided to go to Makara to play tennis at least once before Christmas and our trip to the South Island, and invited Dada to come along, because even if he didn’t play, we could easily make a trip of it with other fun things (Lena had volunteered to take Mira and Tulti over to her mum’s by bus — Rosemary lived in Mount Vic — from where they could go down to the beach on Oriental Parade and later get ice blocks at Mr Patel’s dairy). Makara is perhaps Wellington’s best-kept secret, and I feel extraordinarily fortunate as well as continue to find it unreal even after six years that such a place is less than fifteen minutes from our house. The drive down the hill from Karori is like passing through a sort of magical rabbit-hole, because suddenly, a couple of minutes out of Wellington’s largest suburb (green and pleasant though it is), you’re winding your way down a pine-tree-lined mountain road that would pass casual scrutiny as rural Switzerland. Or somewhere remote in the North Island, far from any town. And all of Makara is like that, winding one-and-a-half-lane roads with horse paddocks and streams to one side and rock walls on the other, sheep and cows grazing on the hills
ides below the pine-forest line, and all this leading to a rocky beach and mountains by the sea, reminiscent of the northwest Scottish Highlands — the unreal flipside of a national capital, a rural idyll not even half an hour from Parliament, or indeed the ultra-suburban strip mall at Johnsonville, if you were approaching from the other side.
I wanted to show Dada perhaps the most beautiful setting for two tennis courts that certainly I had come across, but also point out another strange juxtaposition. The Makara courts are at the very bottom of Wellington’s largest functioning cemetery, which you have to drive through to reach them. So this is an already unsettling part of the journey — imagine yourself in tennis clothes on a beautiful weekend afternoon, driving down a mountain road looking forward to three hours in the sun and four or five keenly contested sets of doubles, but suddenly you’re behind a procession of cars which all enter the cemetery gate just as you do, except these are mourners attending an actual interment, and you drive past the turn they make, hoping they won’t guess your purpose for being here. Then you park by the children’s plaque lawn, of all places, and walk over to the courts which are adjacent, and for the rest of the afternoon you and your friends are less than twenty metres away from parents and other family who would be reliving the saddest journey of their lives, and are here to spend some time in silence on the grass next to their child’s plaque, while one of you calls out the score or yells ‘Long’ or ‘Let’ just across the road — not being callous, just playing tennis where some city-council committee had decided it ought to be played. And meanwhile all around are more gorgeous hills with their high fences and grazing sheep, and the nearby back road beloved of boy racers and biker groups. Unimaginable grief and weekend recreation never rubbed shoulders like this before.
My friends had been playing here for years and had all made their peace with this weird juxtaposition: in fact, there was a preschool and a playground just behind the tennis courts, which meant kids happy and playing every weekday perhaps seventy metres from the children’s section of the cemetery. But I had joined this group only recently and still found it strange to enjoy myself so much this close to a site of inconceivable sorrow.
Anyhow, my plan was for Dada to meet my friends and see the courts, perhaps watch me in action a little bit, after which I’d drive him to Makara Beach, where he could spend an hour or so following one of the trails along the seaside while I returned and played a set, and then I’d pick him up.
It was a gleaming, windless afternoon (the Makara coast is almost never windless: that’s why they put a wind-farm there), and the car put the temperature at 18.5 degrees. After a few walks in the sun, Dada had begun heeding my advice about applying sunblock: he hadn’t been singed yet, but I think what made an impression on him were the totally bleached spines of all the books in our living-room bookcase. And one day, we’d left the newspaper open on the dining table, which gets the morning and some afternoon sun: it was slightly parched and brittle by the time we got home around seven, in just nine hours. Tulti, of course, had been wearing her very own sunhat and using block from day one. Yes, the Indian sun is crazy fierce, but you don’t go out in it as much because of the humidity and forbidding temperatures, I had pointed out, and secondly, no ozone hole to worry about.
I was in a great mood, looking forward to tennis, delighted to be able to show off this unique ‘urban’ escape to Dada on this most gorgeous of days. I had just told him he could cross off the Scottish Highlands from his must-see list if he liked, because this coastline we were approaching would give him a very good idea of it. And on his next trip, we could all drive to Wanaka together, and the lakes and mountains an hour or so out as you head down from the northwest, that is Scotland on steroids. I kept talking about Scotland because that was where I had lived, studied and worked for thirteen years (Lena and I met there as well, as postgrad students).
‘And you’re right, Dada, I do owe my fitness entirely to this environment, this gentle climate, this beauty all around, so near at hand, that always makes you want to be outdoors as though every sunny day spent inside is a wasted opportunity. And then there is the constant sight of other people your age or much older running, cycling, surfing, sailing, playing every imaginable kind of sport. I mean, you’ve seen them all week, running in Anderson Park at lunchtime after which they’re going to shower, have a sandwich, and return to a full afternoon’s work at their desks. Then some of them will change into biking gear and cycle all the way up the hill back home to places like Karori and Khandallah. That’s some relentless peer pressure on the rest of us not to get too squishy.
‘But for me, it’s about more than fitness, you know. I mean it’s great to feel strong and confident when you step onto a tennis court or set off for a run, but what I love having back in my life is simply the daily opportunity to play. That’s one of the biggest things I owe to New Zealand — the incredibleness of having one-and-a-half to two hours most days, as a fucking thirty-seven-year-old, during which I run or play tennis. Just like we looked forward to “khelte jaoa” all those years ago from four-thirty to six-thirty each evening, the sacrosanct hours of play. To still have that in my life in some form, to be able to feel close to my boyhood in this way, that’s what I feel really lucky about. I mean, I’ve told you about how sporadic and downright absent money has been from my life these past few years, and if it weren’t for Lena’s job none of this would be possible, but where I feel blessed is that of all the things I do each day, there is not one activity that I don’t enjoy, or would choose not to be doing. Each day is a slightly varying permutation of looking after Mira, writing, running, playing tennis, reading and time together in the evening after we pick up Lena from work. Those are my days, full and busy to be sure, but full only of things that I love. What would other working parents give to have these priceless hours with their kids during the middle of a week, time that will never come back once they are older?’
That was the kind of mood I was in, full of energy and gratitude, the ‘New Zeal’ I liked to joke about that had been a gift to me from my adopted land. And here is what Dada said just before he stepped out of the car at Makara Beach, having made no comment yet about the mountains or the sea before him.
‘Maybe that’s one of your talents … that you can always ignore the cemetery right beside where you’re playing.’
Dada had made another remark in this vein that I’d successfully overlooked two days earlier (Tulti had been with us), in another beautiful setting that I had made the effort to take them to (a walk in the Town Belt beneath Mount Vic), and one which also drew for its malice on an innocent observation of mine. Visiting New Zealand from anywhere else, and especially from the tropics, you’re struck by the absence of certain things as much as by its beauty and light. No creepy-crawlies to watch out for when you sit on the grass, for example, no sweat or searing heat even when you’re under the afternoon sun, and of course the strangest one, especially to a visitor from somewhere like India: no big animals to be wary of, no matter how far you venture into a forest, because there never were any to begin with. No wolves or snakes or monkeys, no scorpions or tigers, just harmless birds and nocturnal possums and the beauty of the forest, just totally safe for you! Isn’t that strange and amazing, was what I’d tried to say, like an almost airbrushed version of nature? Nothing unpleasant shall lurk here.
‘But that’s how you like it, right, with everything unpleasant airbrushed? I would say you’ve found the perfect landscape for yourself.’
Lena
The story has more to it, I admit. Even the Devil, which is what Ashim had decided to be, in our lives at least, needs something to work off.
The likely source of Ashim’s grudge you will have heard of from Abhay: God knows Abhay never tires of talking about it. Ashim held Abhay responsible for their ‘banishment’ to Hazaribagh.
Abhay, why didn’t you tell Baba, and most of all your mother, how innocent my plan was and why it went wrong? Everything unfolded in front of your eyes
: did I know that power cut would happen, and last through the night?
But I did, Dada, I did insist. Over and over.
Well, clearly not persuasively enough. The prospect of having your house, and your father, back all to yourself was just too tempting, huh?
No, Dada, I did, I told Ma repeatedly that we had so much bad luck, and there was no one on the streets to help us. And that all you wanted was to see the house that would briefly bring your mother back, but everything worked against us.
Of course, this isn’t a confrontation that Abhay has ever had with Ashim, certainly not as adults in the past twenty years. Maybe they had it out a few times before Ashim and his sister left the Calcutta house all those years ago, but never again since, not even in writing.
But I know it’s a conversation that Abhay, my husband, the far more fortunate and therefore guiltier of the brothers, still has regularly with himself, because he’s told me so. He’s told me the streets from Howrah, and that factory, return in his dreams as well, even as the setting for other incidents, always nocturnal.
Ashim is a sort of Rama in Abhay’s vision of the incident, unjustly sentenced to exile in the forest with Didi as his Lakshmana. What Abhay leaves unsaid is that this makes his mother the Kaikeyi, the unscrupulous manipulator seeking only to corner everything for her own son.
There are three separate burdens of guilt he carries (again, his words). First, about not having adequately conveyed his brother’s bad luck to his parents; then about his mother’s decision (a questionable conviction on Abhay’s part, perhaps) that changed the course of her stepchildren’s lives forever; and finally, an especial sorrow for how their sister Aranya’s life had been upended as well, because of her loyalty to her brother.
Sometimes he adds, ‘And don’t forget how differently things turned out for each of us from there on. I went abroad, got all my opportunities. As far as I know, neither of them left Jharkhand again.’
The Man Who Would Not See Page 4