The utterly valid way in which Dada, and Didi, might well see it was that everything they had lost, not just in terms of paternal closeness and attention but also their material entitlements, had somehow always redounded to me, beginning with Baba abandoning them when he met my mother.
Anyhow, to drag myself back to the surface from my life’s unhappiest regrets and questions to the immediate incident I was recalling, Dada had no wish to make anything out of the Howrah mention on this occasion. He was about to say something entirely more beautiful, as well as enigmatic and moving, because it showed the light again in which he chose to view, and enshrine, his memories of Baba. Not as the weak, selfish, negligent asshole I couldn’t help judging (I was no doubt also deflecting my own share of any blame onto him with such a characterisation), but as this hero, whose story peaked (and then ended!) during his period of greatest happiness with Dada and Didi’s mother.
Otherwise how could an almost-forty-year-old himself-devoted father say the following to me, completely overlooking the end — as well as the aftermath — of that early fairy-tale, which was the death of his mother in a small nursing home in Bagbazar, the very neighbourhood he was presently eulogising, that our Baba may have visited at best a couple of times during the final two weeks of her life, after the hospital doctors had recommended stopping the treatment for her cancer?
‘Do you know what I sometimes think about? That Baba as a boy and Ma as a girl would have certainly visited their respective uncles’ houses in Bagbazar, and that it is entirely conceivable to imagine them being sent out for some errands or to get something from the market, perhaps sweets for a guest or something, and so they could have passed one another on that market street as teenagers or even younger, each unaware of the other’s existence, and unaware that they would meet and fall in love in just a few years. And who knows, maybe they were both out one morning during one such simultaneous visit, each with their uncle to help carry the vegetables or the fish, and the two uncles ran into one another, and Ma and Baba might even have shyly exchanged greetings, thinking to themselves with their hearts beating a little faster, hey, he’s pretty handsome, or she’s rather lovely. Isn’t that incredible to think about, how fate might be playing its games with you all the time, and you’re brushing shoulders with your destiny without being aware of it?’
Lena’s eyes filled up when I told her about this one afternoon in Kaiteriteri as the two of us walked down to the small supermarket. That was the night she chose to stay up with Dada and me instead of retiring to our room far too early as she’d been doing lately. After some happy chatter and looking through several of the holiday photographs on my laptop, we elected to watch Golmaal together from among the DVDs I’d brought along, and all I wished for on that perfect evening, although I didn’t voice this, was that Didi’s children (whom I had never met) could have shared it with us. My next objective, I decided, was to somehow bring them over for a visit, and I silently thanked my brother for opening this pathway for all of us.
Lena
It was the 30th of December, and we’d taken the bus to the waterfront on our first day back in Wellington because five of us couldn’t squeeze into the car. On the way home, Mira and Tulti were sitting in one corner of the last row in an almost empty bus, I was seated to the left in front of them and Abhay and Ashim were together on my right, with Ashim by the window.
Two people were chatting together a few rows ahead of us, an older white man and a (most likely) Arab woman with a headscarf. He was doing more of the talking and she was smiling, looking out the window and turning to him to interject from time to time. They seemed to be friends, and the only reason my eye stayed with them was that there was almost no one else to look at, not even outside (many people were away for their summer holidays: Ashim had commented during our waterfront walk that in India places became this empty only during a curfew or else after a major assassination). Another elderly man was sitting further ahead in the single seat just behind the driver.
Somewhere on Bowen Street, when my attention returned to them, I realised something had changed. The man’s voice was louder now, and the woman wasn’t smiling any more. She was just looking away from him, and as the bus waited at the lights to turn left onto Tinakori Road, she got up and moved past him to the very front, to the first row to the left of the driver.
Her companion hadn’t stopped her, and he didn’t follow, but he did raise his voice, and that’s how we realised he wasn’t a friend at all, or even a rowing spouse. On an empty bus in Wellington, with so many seats to choose from, this guy had placed himself right next to a Muslim woman to harangue her about the recent attacks in Paris! At present he was loudly demanding, ‘Answer my question. Do you know who your son’s friends are?’
I looked across at Ashim and Abhay: we were all watching the scene. The driver in his cubicle was still going, but the other man in the front had turned around once to look at the loud prick. The woman replied to him, ‘You don’t know my son,’ and her gaze took us all in as well. By now she was close to tears.
‘I want your name and address, so that I can tell the police,’ the man said from his seat. The woman didn’t turn around this time. I remembered to look behind me; Mira and Tulti were also watching by now. I told them not to worry; Mira asked why the man was yelling when he repeated his demand with a ‘Do you hear me? I want your last name.’
Abhay too had one eye on the girls, and I realised before he did that Ashim at the window seat was asking him to move aside. Ashim walked past the unhinged man straight to the woman and stood beside her, looked at the man, and asked, ‘Madam, is there a problem?’
She took him in, probably not sure whether someone else had decided to join the baiting crew. The man turned around for the first time, and said, ‘Oh great, there’s more of you on the bus. Is that your son’s mate?’
‘No, I’m not, but I will call the police right now,’ Ashim replied, totally steely, unafraid of sounding foreign (I remember this thought flashing through my head).
If not his voice, then perhaps his standing presence in his peripheral vision must have registered with the driver, who pulled over at the bus stop by the top end of the Botanics even though there were no passengers waiting. He was an older white man, a regular driver on our route, who now came out of his cubicle.
‘This lady was sitting over there, but this man kept disturbing her, so she moved but still he won’t stop,’ Ashim explained. The elderly man on the right nodded. I added loudly from my seat that he hadn’t just been disturbing her, but had been yelling racist abuse, and we were all witnesses.
‘Sir, how far are you going?’
The man didn’t reply.
‘If you say anything more to this lady, I’m going to ask you to get off the bus.’
‘What about him over there threatening me?’
In my own anger, I hadn’t even realised I’d picked up my phone, but at that moment I got up, walked to the front and said, ‘Driver, that’s not enough. I’m going to take a picture of this man in case she wants to file a complaint with the police,’ and I did.
Abhay said from the back, ‘And it’s all on CCTV as well.’
The man said to me that I couldn’t photograph him. I said I just had and if he came any closer, I would include that in the complaint too.
‘Driver, I want to get off this bus. These people are ganging up to threaten me and you’re not saying anything.’
The driver reached into his cubicle and released the middle door. Our charming gent left the bus. The driver returned to his seat, and so did Ashim, after asking the woman once more if she was OK. Her eyes were wet, but she nodded. Playing back what we had seen in my head, I realised that she must have tried to appear relaxed and good-humoured when he showed up next to her, hoping he would say his shit and go away.
We still had a few stops to go, but I didn’t know when she would get off. So I rummaged in my bag quickly for a piece of paper and a pen, and with one of Mira’s marke
rs that happened to be in there I wrote down my name and number in orange neon and walked over to her. If she wanted to file a complaint, we were here as witnesses, and I had a picture on my phone. The other elderly man had got off at the stop near Standen Street. The woman thanked me with a smile, although she still looked shaken. We all said goodbye as we got off a couple of minutes later. Ashim once again urged her, please go to the police. Mira and Tulti waved.
Let the record show that as late as the 30th of December, I was still able to see the good in my brother-in-law, who responded to this woman’s emergency even though he was the unfamiliar visitor, well before my husband or native-born me. My husband, whose name means ‘the fearless one’, who told me that night he was ashamed of his lack of reaction, and ashamed even more of the first thought that had passed through his head when he properly realised what the man had been doing.
‘I thought, if I step in, he’s going to look at Dada and me and all his stereotypes would be confirmed — angry Muslim men ganging up on him. He even used that expression, do you remember, “ganging up”. But I’m sorry, Lena. I’m sorry I didn’t say something. I was five minutes from home, and my brother from Hazaribagh knew the right thing to do.’
He congratulated me as well, and hoped the woman would prosecute, because it would give him a chance to atone. I said I just wanted to nail that bastard.
So my brother-in-law did this good thing. Then we woke up to the new year.
Abhay
This was not a dream.
In Cinema III at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, in either 2001 or ’02 (at any rate, I hadn’t yet met Lena), which is tiny and seats perhaps sixty or seventy or even fewer, the usher sits through the film on the corner seat of the last row nearest to the left-hand rear exit. On this particular occasion, I was seated one place away from her, with another man between us. She was a familiar face, one of a few staff members with slight learning difficulties employed by the Filmhouse at the time, primarily as ushers.
It must have been a daytime scene in the movie because the theatre was especially well lit right then, but I became conscious of some movement to my left. I kept facing forward, but stole a glance a while later. The man on my left was fondling the breasts of the usher next to him.
I was so startled that I peeked again. Yes, absolutely, I’d been right the first time; his right hand was roving on the outside of her black Filmhouse T-shirt, but with his eyes never leaving the screen. The young woman was facing forward too, and it was hard to be sure whether she was enjoying this grope, because she was sitting upright with her own hands in her lap (I remember now, there was a small exit light above her on the ceiling that must have also brightened the spot). But crucially, she hadn’t protested or pushed him away or made any sound, nor did she get up and walk out. The door was just to her left, with friends and colleagues immediately outside.
So the man could have been her boyfriend. In fact, the only reason I’d had this sudden doubt that she was being molested was her (mild) disability. In any other case — an adult woman in a familiar workplace who remained silent when someone was touching her — I would have assumed she didn’t mind. Right?
The groping continued for the rest of the film. Once I’d noticed, I couldn’t help being aware of it. Sometimes he took a break and switched hands. But her hands stayed in her lap; she never once touched him back, nor did he at any point touch himself (perhaps he deemed that one step too far with me right beside him). They remained impressively soundless throughout.
She was at the door as usual when the film was over, and replied normally to my goodbye, which made me more confident that I’d done well not to intervene. Afterwards I wondered for a long time whether perhaps she had been petrified — sitting bolt upright like that, her own hands unmoving — and that I had basically witnessed, and remained silent during, a public rape. I saw her again at many more films, but never the man. She was still working there when Lena and I started dating in early 2003, and one day, after watching Salma Hayek’s Frida together, I asked Lena for her opinion on this incident.
‘You’re right, it is impossible to be sure. He could have just brazenly been taking advantage of her fear, and perhaps inexperience. Or they could have been together at the time. I guess what I’d say is, if you’d seen or heard the slightest hint of resistance from her, you would have had to intervene. But otherwise, yes, given what you saw, and her silence over the entire film and remaining in her seat when she could have easily walked out, I have to agree that the primary reason for your doubt was her disability and not the groping itself.’
And so Lena let me off the hook that time. On this occasion however, with the woman in the bus, after our initial mistaken assumption, which the three of us were able to confirm for one another, that the man was her partner or friend, it had become emphatically clear that his attention was unwanted. He was loudly violating her in public.
And yet I had again sat and watched. It was my brother and Lena who immediately knew how to react.
What is missing in me?
Abhay
Dada has his own distinct picture of God, which I told him sounded like a vision of universal cloud storage but with a heart. He described it at my prompting because I was curious to know how God sat among his other beliefs, including his sense of potential malice all around.
‘All the things that only you know but no one else can vouch for, blows you withstood, your efforts to get back up and carry on … God for me is the only one who witnessed all that, whom you can turn to for corroboration. Just that omniscience, that is divine justice for me — the sense that at least He knows. In my prayers, that’s what I most often find myself seeking reassurance about: God, you know such-and-such happened even if no one else does, or claims not to. You saw what we went through. Time carries on; other people forget or deny or saw it differently or simply weren’t there, but God is all I have to underwrite what I know I experienced, what I know I endured. And I cannot emphasise, although perhaps you can relate, how important a need that is. As a witness to one’s struggles, and to one’s invisible efforts, because without that sense of a back-up, that at least God can confirm your account of what happened and what it felt like, so much of our lives leaves no tracks in the sand, Abhi. If no one else cares about or remembers something, did it even take place? And if you can’t be sure of your own recollections, then you have no grip on your life story that could explain or justify why things have turned out a certain way, why you are where you are. God to me is the only one who cares and has the power to be with you through everything; and He needs to be, because this is His role too, so that He can evaluate accurately the account you give of yourself when you return to Him, whether you indeed did your best with whatever was thrown at you.’
And I inwardly applauded the care and clarity of Dada’s answer, but made no further remark myself even though I had more questions, because as with so much Dada said whenever he was being introspective, I felt he was always (sometimes involuntarily, unawares, rather than pointedly) talking about the fallout of what my parents and I had done to him.
Two days later I wrote a few lines in my diary about something so startlingly big I was newly amazed at the narrowness of my habitual gaze for not having considered it before.
I feel guilty towards you, Dada, even though, as God is my witness (which now I know is a phrase so vital to you), I had no inkling of what Ma and Baba would unleash. And I felt so guilty towards Didi, but what I had never envisioned until it hit me like a bolt, driving from Blenheim back to the ferry this afternoon while all of you were dozing in the rental car, and perhaps that silence is why the thought came to me, is the separate guilt you might feel towards your sister. The anger towards your father and stepmother for the cruelty of their decision — this I have frequently imagined; anger towards me for what you saw as insufficient protest, as well as resentment at my vastly unequal punishment (none, really, if I’m honest, except the loss of both of you) — I think about these above all,
including their still-unfolding consequences. But then there’s another burden you carry which I never considered before: your shame when you faced your sister for the havoc all this wreaked on her life.
How has this not occurred to me until now?
And for you to carry all this, and more that I’m sure I’m still not seeing, of course you need the presence of an invisible friend. Because truly, only God would know, aside perhaps from me, how innocent and genuine and natural and right your wish was that night, to see a house in which your Ma lived with you.
Lena
I mentioned my sister-in-law, and it probably needs to be me who reveals some more about her if it’s ever going to happen. In Abhay’s family, she comes up often in conversation, but usually in the distant past, as a figure from their youth, because her present is a (literal) darkness no one seems to know how to face.
Well, the first thing to confess is that I’ve never met her.
Aranya has two children, who would be twelve and seventeen now, a daughter and an older son. They still live with their father Praveen in Hazaribagh, although I haven’t met them either, because … neither has Abhay!
Praveen was a junior clerk in the office at Aranya’s college: that was how the relationship began. Ashim told us back in July that after they eloped (in 1996), even though he wasn’t happy about it he’d visit them occasionally at their home. Thamma, paternal grandmother to all three siblings and with whom Ashim still lived in Hazaribagh, was much harsher and refused to allow Aranya back into the house. She felt betrayed that after years of raising the two of them, Aranya would have got married to a clerk in secret and given up on her dream of studying for a doctorate. Abhay speculates — and he knows something about his grandmother’s inflexibility of spirit from her lifelong coldness towards his mother — that she might also have felt humiliated among the Bengali community in Hazaribagh, because Aranya’s husband wasn’t a Bengali, nor (apparently) was he especially well-educated.
The Man Who Would Not See Page 10