The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  ‘But you got yourself a scholarship,’ I would remind him. ‘From what you’ve told me, Ashim never especially cared about his studies.’

  ‘Perhaps he never had the home environment that would have motivated him to study, Lena. Not one day in his life did he have both parents happy under one roof, which is something I took for granted. His Ma raised them on next to nothing, from whatever scraps Baba threw her way, because more than scraps they couldn’t have been if that neighbourhood in Howrah was the best she could afford. These aren’t things you think about as a kid, and then Baba himself died before I could confront him with such questions as an adult. What kind of schooling would Dada have had before moving to live with us? Did Baba at least take care of that? And then he got turned out of his own father’s house, and was made to feel as if it was entirely his fault. Forget my guilt, imagine what he would have felt towards Didi for triggering such an earthquake in her life! Do you wonder that he found it hard to concentrate at school? He went through four schools in different places — Howrah, North and South Calcutta, and finally Namkum — just to complete his schooling, because he was uprooted so many times.’

  The last time I heard that was as recently as May, when we were firming up our plans to attend Abhay’s cousin’s wedding, and I had asked him one last time before putting the credit card details into the Thai Airways website if he was ready to meet Ashim after all these years. He’d insisted it was the only reason he was going. The strong possibility that Ashim would be there had decided him.

  I tell a lie. When I argued in August that it really didn’t make sense for Ashim to come with Tulti but without Moushumi, and that Abhay should kindly but firmly explain this in an email, we went through the entire A to Z of Abhay’s guilt odyssey once again! So persuasive was he that by the end I was actively looking forward to the visit. Perhaps I just wanted Abhay to at least begin to shake off this huge burden, and for that he needed to see his brother’s forgiveness in action, up close. And he needed to see his brother was OK and had landed on his feet, that his life was good now and he too had had a happy ending.

  Yeah, that change of heart worked out well for you, Lena.

  Abhay

  But let’s take the microscope off my brother for a while and direct it elsewhere; perhaps look a bit closely at the almost offensive degree of rosiness of my New Zealand life as I’ve depicted it thus far, the rubbing in of which was understandably getting up Dada’s nose.

  I had last published a novel (my fifth) about two and a half years earlier, on which most of the work had been done before Mira’s birth. It had been well reviewed, and a first run in India had sold two thousand copies, which wasn’t much. But I couldn’t travel to promote it, no festivals or launches, because Lena was back at work and Mira was still a few months away from being ready for daycare. Not to mention that on one full-time income, every long-distance airfare from New Zealand can feel like a body blow to your family’s savings.

  Once we’d found a good carer for Mira and started her off with three hours at a time, three afternoons a week, I was able to gradually resume my writing. Lena and Rosemary helped too, and soon I was working almost thirty hours a week, including evenings after Mira’s bedtime and weekends. But I wasn’t writing fiction just then: there was a new plan in motion, for which the odds seemed better of landing a decent pay cheque. I was collaborating with Madeleine — a director-friend based in LA whom I knew from her year doing a Master’s in Edinburgh back in ’02 — on a feature-length screenplay. Madeleine had made several commercials and music videos thus far, and wanted to direct her first film. Flatteringly, she had liked my second novel and sought my help with adapting it (she got in touch one day with the radical idea of working together through Skype: which struggling novelist with a baby at home would turn that down?). We switched Mira’s daycare times to four long mornings a week so that Madeleine and I could meet around nine each day. I also worked during Mira’s afternoon naps.

  I had high hopes for this collaboration because Madeleine was based in LA, and could attend parties and meetings on our behalf. Besides, she had contacts in the industry in Europe, from her film-school years in London. And most of all because we both believed in the screenplay we came up with, The Man Who Never Landed, a rich, complex and moving noir, clearly derived from my book but which now had a momentum and new mysteries of its own, and was also much better suited to playing out as a film. Yes, all right, I’ll leave the self-praise at that.

  This was our most optimistic period, Madeleine’s and mine, late 2013, after we’d completed and revised the script and were feeling incredibly pleased with it. In the new year, we tried everything from applying for screenplay competitions and festival workshops to contacting producers and prominent screenwriters’ agents, and even, at the end, writing directly to the agents of actors we had envisioned in the main roles (Michael Fassbender, you would have been so perfect for the lead, if only your agent had told you about it!) — everything, I should say, that was within the limits of our circumstances, with Madeleine still working on a number of assignments in LA alongside our movie, and me unable to venture far from Wellington because of our finances and Mira.

  Long story short, no fucking cigar. We actually won a contest that turned out to be fraudulent: the sponsoring production company folded before they could commission or indeed pay us (some German construction tycoon who’d suddenly lost a lot of money on incomplete projects in Poland and had to rein in his film-producing dreams was what Madeleine heard from another friend). Another similarly star-struck wolf in dreamer’s clothing who’d sold his corporate risk-analysis firm and was looking to produce with some of the proceeds (an Englishman this time; I Skyped with him and must have gasped visibly the first time, because what we were dealing with here was Sydney Greenstreet in the flesh, the cheerily rotund villain from The Maltese Falcon), wanted us to sign over all our rights in perpetuity to the entire first season of a TV series that we would write for him for a total of $3500, without even a clause guaranteeing that we would get screen credit or future writing involvement if ever the idea got picked up by a network.

  Sample gems from his emails, each of which qualifies as genuine ‘found art’:

  Yes correct that I would want all rights, subsidiary rights, follow-on rights, merchandise (i.e. All) forever. [ …] You can use any agents or lawyers at your cost. I personally suggest not too much as I will not be using many or any since the cost is prohibitive. I am as you know sceptical of the value they add. What matters is that we both know how each are going to behave and expect and that we respect these. That said I claim, and you may of course verify, a personal reputation for being very fair and generous when in a position to be so. i.e. In the case of Spectacular success. […] We are decent people and expect to be trusted as such, but at this early stage of the project we would not contract to any of these rights other than with the vaguest of intents.

  ‘Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding,’ as Sydney Greenstreet in the role of Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon memorably toasted. In fact, I feel a great urge at this point to include a YouTube link to a scene between him and Bogie from the movie, where they first meet to talk about the bird: watch out especially for that priceless leading into the room by Gutman fondly holding, almost stroking, Bogie’s arm with both hands — what a touch! I tell you, in my three Skype conversations with our prospective producer I could hear those same violins in the background, mournful, ominous, warning, and in the end, my friends, I was afraid, of signing ourselves away down a tunnel of unpaid work without end. Neither I nor Madeleine followed Bogart’s lead and threw a hissy fit as a bluff, no matter how ridiculous the man’s proposals, because while we were dealing with a hustler of perhaps the same calibre as Gutman, we both knew we were no Sam Spade.

  And so it continued with the slings and arrows of outrageous disappointments, effort after effort coming to naught over a period of two years — a couple of other pitching contests for which we fleshed
out ideas that didn’t get noticed, a call from Mumbai about a TV series based on my fourth novel that briefly seemed promising but then got dumped for looking too expensive, a call from another Indian TV director who liked my work and wanted me to join a writing team that would adapt the Danish drama The Killing to Mumbai, except she didn’t know I lived in New Zealand and therefore couldn’t attend daily group-writing sessions in a building in Oshiwara, Northwest Mumbai, and finally (in this highlights reel of my let-downs from the past couple of years), another email about co-writing a film from a Bollywood director who was notorious for not paying crew members living right near her in Versova who ran into her every other day, so how on earth would I enforce payment from darling ol’ Middle Earth after forking out for extra childcare and putting in months of work?

  Madeleine is expecting her first child this coming March, which is wonderful news, but if I’m honest also left me feeling, when I heard about it in September, like we were calling time on a failed business venture into which we’d both poured two years and countless unpaid hours. And with that shaming confession — that my thrill was not undiluted when I first heard the news of Madeleine’s pregnancy — I’ll stop with my complaining, although to Lena I often moan in addition about how I’d had no idea and no one ever warned me in advance (‘no one’ meaning Lena, of course, the native-born Kiwi) that it was virtually impossible to get published in New Zealand if your work wasn’t related to New Zealand life in some way, and yet, at the same time, in my present role as Mira’s stay-home parent, I was also cut off from visiting or saying yes to opportunities that arose in India, the only place where my work was somewhat known and had a however-small readership. Very long, boring, not to mention reductive and unfair story short, here’s what the essence of my self-pity and grievances boiled down to: who had ended up sacrificing more in order to maintain our current state of affairs, in which Lena got to further her career in her home city close to her mum and have her ‘cake’ of parenthood as well, whereas I of course got room and board and countless hours in Mira’s incomparable company, but any other dream I may have had for myself, of my books reaching more people and new projects arising as a result, seems impossibly hamstrung by this self-sabotage, i.e. this vast distance at which I’ve agreed to place myself, literally at one end of the earth, so far from the crazily competitive cities where I’d hope to be remembered or noticed — Delhi, London, New York, Mumbai, LA.

  My brother was visiting, and after a lifetime apart I wanted to be close to him. He believed that my life was airbrushed and wrinkle-free, and that I had never been touched by misfortune. For many reasons, this was not the impression I wanted him to leave with, even though I tried every hour of their holiday to show both him and Tulti a good time. Which was why, after the first few days of projecting near-constant good cheer, and even as we kept up with our usual quota of fun things for children and grown-ups each day — ferry rides, visits to Mission Inflatable and Laughalots Playland and a trip to the zoo (on these I took Mira and Tulti; Dada stayed home or asked to be dropped off and picked up afterwards in town), Johnsonville line train ride followed by bush walk along the stream in Trelissick Park — I myself started pointing out the cracks in the surface to Dada, the price I felt we paid for this blessed life, my feelings of being cornered and cut off from my professional dreams that all the tennis and running and play with Mira only did so much to balance out.

  It seems impossibly foolish now, but I’d believed this sharing would help ‘equalise’ things between us — if one brother didn’t feel that the other inhabited paradise. What I never imagined (and to her credit Lena did, even though I would remain deaf to her many warnings) was that somehow it would all add to his anger, which of course had never gone away, and give him the first ‘opening’ to initiate what I can only imagine he saw as legitimate payback.

  Yes, if I add them up, that was the second of three openings I gifted my brother, beginning with the welcome to New Zealand. Perhaps such is the nature of cockeyed atonement. Any observer, Lena foremost among them, would have fairly concluded that I wanted him to destroy me, or at least to have a point-blank shot.

  We’ll get there presently, but for the third, I actually delivered myself into the ill-wisher’s mouth. I went over to his corner of the world, believe it or not, where the forests are definitely not miraculously predator-free.

  What the fuck was I seeking? Aha, therein hangs a sorry tale, of more than grubby guilt.

  Sample gems this time from the crap I frequently hurled at Lena, and which I shared with Dada — and bear in mind, my aim was to establish that our marriage and home life, my whole fucking situation here next door to the South Pole, was not as embarrassingly jammy as it looked. I’m way unhappier than I seem, bro! Does that make anything up for you?

  ‘You know, sometimes I say to Lena that I must have owed her, and her mother, some huge debt from an earlier life, otherwise why would I willingly do so much for them at such cost to myself for so long? It’s like I took on the duty of bringing, and holding, this family together, over the corpse of my own most cherished dreams. I’m this family’s cook, its chauffeur, its constant Plan A for everything Mira-related, its substitute fielder, its goalkeeper. And sometimes I feel even less than that — I’m just the netting between the goalposts.’

  Or this: ‘The saddest thing is, as much as I’ve loved looking after Mira and it’s been the single most valuable experience of my life, when people ask me, as they inevitably do, whether we’re thinking of another one, for my part I can never say an unambivalent yes, because I don’t know if I want to give all my energies once more to this extent to another child. I want to return as well to full-time writing, and also give myself a chance to travel again once Mira is a tiny bit older, to spend time in those cities that would be useful to my career, and meet and work with new people. But till I get a major break, and I don’t see where that will come from until I have the undisturbed time to focus on and complete a new project, Lena will naturally continue to be our primary earner, and if we have another child, she wouldn’t be able to scale back even if she wanted to, which means once again it would be me deferring my dream of serious, concentrated writing for another two years at least. And writing something deep and good is the only way I can hope to break out of this corner I’ve painted myself into, but there would be no chance of that if I say yes to stay-home parenting another child. And yet Lena gets upset if I point this out as my dilemma, that it seems only I have to choose between committed parenthood and committed work, and that it always seems to be me making the sacrifices upon which our present life stands, from which everybody else benefits.

  ‘You know, sometimes after another day or week has gone by just getting through chores and all the ferrying around you do as a parent, I feel like a Ferrari that’s only ever taken out to go to the supermarket. The Ferrari of Karori, that never goes further than the local mall. There’s so much more I have to offer, so much that never gets a chance to reveal itself in everyday life, but somehow I’m never allowed a taste of the open road.’

  Little did I know that my brother was thinking he would give me this ‘open road’ I craved — change, excitement, adventure, with twists and corners truly worthy of a Ferrari.

  But first he was going to strip me of the life I had — and clearly had had enough of, aside from the pieties about Mira. This trifling thing he achieved in just four weeks.

  Then he went one better. He gave me a chance to atone.

  Actually, even more. Would you believe it if I claimed he offered me something greater still?

  He gave me the subject for my dream book, the one that promised to be the making of me.

  Lena

  I was walking home from the bus stop on the second Tuesday of Ashim and Tulti’s visit (it was three days before Christmas; my second-last day of work), when I noticed Ashim coming from the other direction, i.e. the cul-de-sac end of our street. I knew Abhay had taken the girls to the zoo that afternoon, which was why I�
�d got the bus. I was going to make lasagne for dinner (with lamb), a dish Tulti had liked the sound of.

  Ashim, when he noticed me, said he’d gone for a half-hour walk and had taken the steps up from Croydon Street (‘It’s your husband’s fault, or I should say his credit. He makes me feel so unfit. Did you know once upon a time there was no way he could keep up with me in a cycle race? Of course I had a two-year age advantage, but today he’s still young whereas I’m well and truly middle-aged.’). But then almost like a movie, twenty minutes later while he was having tea and Skyping with Moushumi in the living room, and I had just got changed and begun chopping an onion for the sauce, Janaki, our friend from the cul-de-sac end of the street, called to say that Ashim had forgotten to take along the lamb curry she’d wanted to send for us all.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Janaki. That sounds wonderful, and it’s a coincidence, because I’m about to cook lamb as well. Did you run into Ashim during his walk?’

  ‘Not during his walk, no. He came by to see me. He was here just a while ago, and then said he should be leaving before the girls got home from the zoo. But he forgot to take the Tupperware box which I’d put on the dining table.’

  I was struck by this odd omission on Ashim’s part — what a trivial thing not to want to mention — but took the phone along to the living room. A little later, Ashim walked in to say that Janaki wanted us to have some lamb curry she’d made, and he would go along to collect it, but still left out telling me that he’d visited her a short while before.

  The girls fell asleep quite easily that evening from all their running around at the zoo, and then we watched half of the Anil Kapoor-Madhuri Dixit movie Beta together on YouTube (it had subtitles), largely so Ashim and Abhay could go on a nostalgia trip about lusting themselves silly as kids after Madhuri in the song ‘Dhak Dhak’, before I turned in for the night. The following morning, when our body clocks had awakened us both at around ten past seven but we were still in bed because the house was quiet, I asked Abhay for no particular reason if Ashim had mentioned visiting Janaki yesterday afternoon.