‘So now decide after careful thought. If you’re sure you have the right man, don’t forget that he would have noted your absence from work yesterday and your return today with no pain whatsoever. So he is aware that you have the power to reverse his magic. I suggest to you that this knowledge is enough, this clear evidence that his evil had no effect beyond the first day. I say it would be wise to leave it at this, and see what his next step may be. But the final decision rests with you. I still have the bones with me. If you’re sure, as I said before, in just under ten minutes this Subhas will not move again.’
After finishing our picnic on the beach on Christmas afternoon, Dada and I had at my suggestion strolled for a short distance along Karaka Bays, and now, in the ferry that had passed that very spot just ten minutes before, I set out this contrast of scenes for Lena, between the landscape and light around us and the darkness in the story I was being told. To our left had been beautiful ochre rock formations and exquisite little sandy coves, fringing the entrance to Wellington Harbour. On the other side of the charming, windy street were a mix of large new villas and vintage Katherine Mansfield-y holiday cottages, and I had just pointed out the red phone-box up ahead which was now used as a bus shelter when Dada told me — in that glittering, golden setting — that he had ridden home that night from Maheshji’s place thinking only of what lay ahead for the three of them in the coming months: himself, Tulti and Moushumi. And when he had pictured the long flights to and from New Zealand over vast stretches of sea, while Moushumi of course would be alone at home, he became certain that Maheshji was right. If Dada retaliated now, the scope for devastation was unlimited: they would all be sitting ducks for whoever was doing Subhas’ bidding.
I’m sure no one else would have noticed it, but for someone used to her normal degree of warmth, it was evident to me that Lena kept her distance from Dada throughout the holiday in Kaiteriteri, to the point where I regretted sharing that stupid story (which, in any case, Dada had probably not intended to go beyond me) that would now cast its cloud over the entire visit. Lena even insisted on doing all the story-times with the girls rather than us taking turns as usual. Dada would have understood it as her enabling the two of us to have time together; I felt she wanted to avoid being alone with him. And when she came out of the kids’ room (much to their delight, we’d allowed them to share a double bed here), she took two early nights out of three, claiming to be tired rather than joining us in the living room or on the outside deck with a drink, and on the middle night she suggested a movie. It was all very different from the happy evenings of Dada’s first ten days in Wellington leading up to Christmas, and my thoughtless sharing of the black-magic story was wholly to blame. Thankfully, Dada showed no sign of noticing or taking offence, and in any case our days in Tasman Bay were full and vigorous enough with two water-happy kids requiring constant watching on several stunning beaches for Lena to legitimately seek some early nights.
Correction: Dada showed no sign of noticing or taking offence until three days after our return to Wellington, when for thirty-six hours from the morning of New Year’s Day, we literally had no idea where he was. If it hadn’t been for one phone call, we would long since have gone to the police.
And soon after we got to the bottom of that, it wasn’t myself I was blaming any more, or what I had shared with Lena. Far, far more consequential turned out to be everything she hadn’t been telling me.
But before all that, on the second evening of our holiday, at Split Apple Beach not far from our bach in Kaiteriteri, in trying to mitigate some of the damage I had caused earlier, I shared with Lena another, much more poignant story, of one of the most important, and benevolent, ghosts in Dada’s life. Tulti and Mira were digging a formidable moat ten feet away from our towel around a castle studded with sea-shells; Dada was patrolling the beach with his impressively lensed Canon SLR.
‘Lena, he absolutely hero-worships Baba. It’s amazing, and almost hard to believe that you’re listening to an adult unless you hear him for yourself, let alone an adult who would be entirely justified in having very mixed feelings about his father. But when we were in Karori Park the other day playing India versus New Zealand two-a-side football, and our respective team-mates had got tired in less than four minutes and were enjoying an early half-time with their Popsicles from the café, Dada suddenly asked me if I remembered Baba holding me with one arm while juggling a football at the same time. When I shook my head, he claimed to have a clear memory of Baba doing this with him, and his mother had apparently confirmed it.
‘I mean, I always knew Baba was good at football but I had no idea of how much he’d played at college until Dada told me that afternoon. Apparently he was selected after a trial with Mohun Bagan, but Thamma wouldn’t hear of him suspending his studies. But what amazed me was how much Dada knew about this part of Baba’s life — his college years in Calcutta — because it’s not a period I got told much about. And the reason for that is obvious too, and slightly petty I’m ashamed to say, because that’s when Baba met his first wife, Dada and Didi’s mother, while at an inter-university football tournament in Bardhaman. There was a politically motivated fire in the hostel in which the visiting teams were going to stay, which was why at the last minute they had to be accommodated in pairs in the homes of local students. One of the tournament organisers had a sister who came to watch the semi-final and final because she had been intrigued by one of their new boarders. Baba scored two goals in the semi-final, although he was later effectively muzzled in the final — Dada scrupulously gave me the footballing details right alongside the romance — and the rest is history that I never knew a thing about. Isn’t it amazing? I know only of another, entirely different creation myth, the one that brought together my parents at the ad agency many years later.
‘And which spelt the death of Dada and Didi’s family as they knew it, so I wonder how they in turn have been told that story. But like I said, this is the man Dada hero-worships to an amazing extent right to this day, the same man who sent him off to boarding school in the next state and hadn’t seemed to care when his first wife had had to live with their children right beside a factory in industrial Howrah. But what his stories also underlined for me is that I know nothing of so many periods in our father’s life, presumably because for us — myself and Ma — the first part of Baba’s adulthood is to be considered Jahiliyyah, the dark ages, the time before he met her. And likewise Dada knows very little about Baba in the final decade of his life, after they were sent away from Calcutta. It’s both incredible and sad how we’ve each been allowed to claim only certain parts of our father’s life, but I have to say, based at least on the evidence of his shining eyes when talking about Baba, that I’m in awe of the extent to which Dada seems to have forgiven him for all his absences, or indeed blocked out any negative thoughts about him at all. Baba is like a war-hero to Dada, or a Bond-type figure, who just had to be away to do his job.
‘As you’d expect, he also worships his mother and our grandmother, and only remembers wonderful things about them. So, Lena, what I want to get at is that there is room for much more in his heart than just anxiety and paranoia. Please remember what the man has been through, as well as the opportunities and exposure that he has never known which we take for granted, before you judge him for some of his beliefs. Can I honestly picture how I would have turned out if I’d lost my mother at the age of ten, and my father had abandoned me not once but twice? No, make that three times, because he left their family after meeting my mother, and then as far as I know didn’t maintain any kind of regular contact even with his two children until he was forced to take them in when his ex-wife died, which counts to my eyes as a second and separate abandonment. And then first chance he got, the first pretext that we boys stupidly gave him, he and his new wife, my otherwise wonderful mother, offloaded these kids again almost as if they were his stepchildren too, cleverly leaving my brother and me to bear the guilt for this decision forever.
�
��And mind you, apart from that one dreadful incident, I got twenty uninterrupted years of love and presence from this man, and still I feel this degree of ambivalence towards him. So please remember that as well about the man over there whom you seem to have decided to permanently mistrust, that his heart is much larger and more generous than mine, and his life has been knocked out of orbit into darkest outer space not once but twice or thrice, so for him to feel there are invisible forces in the world that need countering might not be so far-fetched.’
Thus concluded my defence of my brother. I meant every word I said, and yes, it did feel noble saying them.
People, to give you a brief flash-forward: Lena was right.
Not that it could save us when disaster struck.
Lena
It was our first meeting back in July of just our families, after the three days of Ashim and Abhay’s cousin’s wedding. Ashim, Moushumi and Tulti had come over to Abhay’s mother Sulekha’s house in Ballygunge.
‘Do you know what I’ve been saying to Moushumi since meeting you after all these years?’ Ashim had said. ‘That you resemble Baba far more than I do. You’ve won this battle also.’
You’ve won this battle also? I looked over when he said it, to gauge his expression after uttering those five strange words, and I noticed as well that he’d picked his moment when Abhay’s mother wasn’t in the room. What other battles had Abhay waged against him, or, rather, what battles had Ashim drafted Abhay into within his own head?
Moushumi had responded, apparently treating it as a light-hearted remark, ‘I don’t agree. The two of you are clearly brothers. I would have guessed that even if I saw you on the street.’
‘Oh really?’ Ashim turned to his wife with a Shah-Rukh-Khan-from-Baazigar smile. ‘And which one would you have picked?’
Moushumi gave him an exasperated look, then got up and said she would see if anyone needed help in the kitchen. But then, as though suddenly becoming aware that she had never met my mother-in-law before (hers too, of course, at least technically), or indeed come to this house, she sat down once more and asked me if I knew where the girls were. I nodded with a smile. She seemed very … transparent, was the word that had come to me. And on the back of it, the thought: how do complicated people often find these trustworthy partners to be their rock?
‘Achcha, then at least admit one thing,’ Ashim continued. ‘He’s maintained Baba’s legacy of physical fitness much better than I have. You can tell that he’s still a sportsman. Most people would guess he’s ten years younger than me.’
Abhay had dismissed that, and pointed out how neither of them yet had a grey hair, and their Baba too had hardly any even in his mid-fifties.
Sulekha, my mother-in-law, had led Jyotsnadi in at this point, carrying a full tray of snacks for kids and grown-ups. I got up and called Mira and Tulti downstairs from our room.
The subject changed once Sulekha sat down. I’d wondered what Ashim was feeling about the house he’d lived in for two years: I knew he’d come back a few times on holidays with his sister, but wasn’t sure when his last visit had been, or if he’d ever come as an adult. The evening carried on quite smoothly — the girls being the topic of much of our conversation, and their returning to us repeatedly with requests to join in their different projects also helped (pretend supermarket, Lego house-building, and a parallel soft toys’ tea-party) — until one moment when Mira approached me with the question ‘Mummy, is Tultidi my cousin or my friend?’
‘Both, sweetie, she’s both,’ I’d said, and Mira had seemed contented with this answer, and had turned her attention to a bowl of orange cheese balls to take some with her for their tea-party, when Ashim, who I hadn’t even realised had been listening, suddenly asked Mira if she wanted to see how exactly she and Tulti were related.
Mira had nodded, and Ashim asked her to fetch a piece of paper and a pencil or crayon. I said we can do that later if you want, but Mira said, no Mummy, right now, and headed upstairs.
Abhay, who’d been talking to Ashim, put on an approving smile, and said actually that would be useful. ‘I have explained it to her, but she’s never seen it all written down.’ Sulekha’s expression gave nothing away, but there was definitely no approval there. Moushumi asked her if she’d like some more tea, and she shook her head with closed lips.
Ashim called Tulti over from the tea-party outside the half-completed Lego house. No one was talking about anything else now. Mira, the 3.75-year-old we were all waiting for, returned presently with a green sheet of paper and a purple felt pen. On the way she remembered and popped over to the dining table to pick up a Dora hardcover book for her uncle to write on.
With all of us watching him — although Sulekha alternated between glancing over and looking away, apparently unconcerned — and Mira and Tulti on either side, Ashim drew several stick figures, with the largest one in the middle, which he named ‘Dadu, or Grandpa’. The two slightly smaller figures on either side he called out as he wrote ‘Thamma 1’ and ‘Thamma 2’.
‘Thamma 2’ reached out and passed a plate of sweets to Moushumi beside her. Moushumi took one with a small smile and asked the girls if they would like some. Both were too engrossed to reply.
‘Now, who can name the people in the next row?’ Ashim asked.
Mira was still looking at the diagram with its several unnamed smaller figures, and then at her uncle for a clue, but Tulti had piped up immediately, as if she was more familiar with this sort of family tree. ‘Boropishi and you,’ she’d said, pointing to the figures beneath ‘Thamma 1’.
‘Very good, darling,’ Tulti’s father replied. ‘Mira, do you know who Tulti means? That’s your older aunt too, next to me, your Aranya Pishi. So now can you tell me who this is here, under Thamma 2?’
Neither of the girls answered, so Ashim supplied Abhay’s name himself.
‘Mira has never heard me called “Thamma 2” before. That’s why she’s confused,’ Sulekha said.
‘That’s true,’ Abhay had jumped in. ‘And sweetheart, below me is you and below your Ashim Jethu is Tulti. And that’s your Mummy, and there’s Moushumi Jethima.’
‘And where’s Thamma 1?’ Mira asked.
‘Thamma 1 died, sweetie. She was Ashim Jethu and Aranya Pishi’s mother,’ Abhay said.
‘Come, darling, I want to join your tea-party for a while. Let’s take some cheese balls with us, and how about some mishti to share?’ That was me.
‘I want to come over to your tea-party as well, except I can’t sit down on the carpet,’ Thamma 2 said.
‘We can get a chair for you, Thamma,’ said Mira, and ran over to the dining table. The family tree’s unfilled blanks were for now forgotten, though Mira did return to them during our bedtime chat in the dark that night.
Abhay told me later he’d seen Moushumi give her husband a look that was both upset and resigned. But a few weeks later, when Ashim basically invited himself over to New Zealand (and that too without whatever restraining influence Moushumi probably has), Abhay after a little hesitation pretty much carried on with his approach of all-accepting civil obedience.
The rest of that evening passed without any further visible ripples, although Sulekha never did return to the gathering around the coffee table from her chair beside the kids. The following day we’d invited the three of them to lunch at the Calcutta Club Chinese room, but Sulekha pulled out in the morning, telling Abhay in her room that she’d seen a few too many people over the past few days, what with Chhotka’s elaborate wedding, and needed some time by herself.
‘Ma, Dada will think you’re upset with him,’ Abhay had said.
‘Let him. I don’t think what I feel matters very much to him.’
‘Ma, he didn’t say anything wrong. That is the way the family evolved. He was just trying to explain it—’
‘Yes, by labelling me Thamma 2 to my own granddaughter in my own house, and you said nothing to defend me. Since I don’t know what he plans to “explain” today to the children, but
I am aware now of your supreme tolerance towards his behaviour, I will take my own steps to protect myself from being humiliated in a public place, especially where on a Sunday there might be several people who know me at the adjacent tables. Since we each have different ideas about how to “explain” the family’s history, I think it’s the best way to avoid a scene. You please go, and have a good time.’
Abhay told me he’d tried for another half-hour, and had even apologised for being passive the previous evening, promising to step in any time his brother said something hurtful, but Sulekha had insisted that yesterday proved it was too late for reconciliation.
‘No, Ma, it doesn’t prove that at all. It just shows that first meetings can be awkward after such a long time, and that it’s easy to misinterpret intentions. Didn’t you like Moushumi and Tulti? Wouldn’t it be nice to suddenly have another gorgeous granddaughter, and be a grandmother to someone who never saw her other Thamma?’
But his mother had refused to be persuaded by Abhay’s grand optimism, and it had been just the three of us hosting lunch at the club that afternoon. It was the last time we saw Ashim and his family on that visit; Abhay more or less told the truth about his mother’s reason for staying away — her exhaustion after attending most of the events at the wedding. Putting it another way: her probable exhaustion at feeling judged — even if this wasn’t the case — by her late husband’s many relatives (Chhotka was Abhay’s dad’s younger sister’s son), which Ashim’s likely innocent remarks had tipped over the edge.
The Man Who Would Not See Page 8