The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  Her son, my father-in-law, then passed away from a (second) heart attack in Calcutta in 1998. After making sure that her mother-in-law and two stepchildren would receive everything they were entitled to, Sulekha kept no real contact with the rest of her husband’s family (Abhay of course had moved to Edinburgh to study in ’97).

  Aranya had apparently begun teaching at a primary school in Hazaribagh six months into her marriage. Hopefully her share of her father’s estate would have reached her two years later, although in truth I’ve never asked whether Abhay or Sulekha had attempted to ensure this, or had merely left the matter to Ashim and their grandma.

  Wow, that is one complicated summary, but you try capturing years of any family’s life in a few sentences, especially when that family has two distinct parts, and much of this happened before you even appeared, and to the part you were never introduced to.

  Abhay and I started going out in early ’03, and this is as much as I heard about his half-sister. They hadn’t had so much as a phone conversation since their father’s funeral, he told me: whatever he now knew was all second-hand news from their grandmother (who later passed away in Hazaribagh in 2008). He wasn’t in touch with Ashim either, Abhay argued in his own defence when I pointed out that his silence that had lasted for years had probably been understood by Aranya as a disapproval akin to their Thamma’s: effectively, what was the difference between two prolonged silences?

  ‘Well, after … I don’t know, years of not speaking, not even during the Pujas or on her birthday — which, by the way I still remember, January 6th — what do I call her and say? “Hi, I’m calling from Edinburgh. Sorry I haven’t shown any concern for your fate for nearly a decade, during which time you got married and had two children, but I assure you it wasn’t ever out of disapproval or not caring! How are you?”’

  ‘If you’re asking my opinion, I think you should just skip to the “How are you?”’

  ‘Lena, don’t you realise you’re asking me literally to phone in my concern? It is the case that I haven’t been in touch with my sister for years, and I take responsibility for that, although I should say as far as I know she has never tried to contact me either. Thamma’s always had a physical address and a current phone number for me. Anytime they liked, either Dada or Didi could have called or written to their little brother. I could have got in touch as well, I admit: I’m not trying to play the hurt card. But now, calling out of the blue for ten minutes, wouldn’t that just be hypocritical? Clearly I haven’t cared enough even about my niece and nephew to find out once how they are, or to send them a single present …’

  ‘So you’re saying this silence will just grow to be permanent and nothing whatsoever can be done about it? Even though you care about your sister and would like her to know this, you simply can’t take a first step?’

  ‘No, I’m saying there are things you cannot resume or put right over the phone.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be ten minutes, Abhay. Take an hour. Then call again the following weekend. Call Ashim too. Call them both twice a month. Then visit Hazaribagh next time you’re home. By then they’ll believe in your wish to reconnect.’

  Not then but two nights later he agreed my suggestion might work. If I call repeatedly, they’re bound to accept that I care.

  Then he wondered about writing a letter first, or an email, or sending a parcel with a letter but also presents for the kids, perhaps before the Pujas so that it wouldn’t appear totally random. He admitted to me his biggest barrier was shame. The ‘fucking silence’, which didn’t reflect at all how he felt, and would have given both his sister and brother the wrong impression, now had a massive presence of its own. It had to be dislodged.

  ‘It’s our father’s fault,’ he would say sometimes, on our walks to or from uni. ‘If he had maintained just a normal relationship with his other children, that would have left the door open for me. But growing up I passively took the cue from my parents, as you do. When they invited my brother and sister to come and spend a holiday, I loved having them around. We would do so much together: Dada and I insisted on sharing a room and we’d happily stay up chattering until two or three. But then their next visit would be twelve months later! Twelve months, Lena, isn’t that absurd, when they were an overnight journey away, or just a day’s driving? And in between, I can probably count up the number of times my dad would have called me to the phone to come chat with them, just because he hardly kept in touch either, although I don’t know if he called them more often from his office in order to speak more freely. But at least at home we did our own thing, as if this other family didn’t exist. Even when he spoke to my grandmother, which was every few days, I doubt Baba always asked to speak to his own kids. And so when we heard that Didi had taken off with this guy Praveen, it was in effect a transition from one invisibility to another, which only seemed even further away. And then Baba died two years later, and that link was snapped as well.

  ‘But I’m also related to them by blood — I don’t need, I never needed my father’s permission,’ he once defiantly added. ‘I can call them whenever I like. It’s not even any of Ma’s business.’

  These conversations between us, in one or other familiar form, date from the mid-2000s, but until our visit to Chhotka’s wedding as a family with Mira last July, as far as I know, Abhay had had no contact with either of his half-siblings. The good intentions to call or visit or send emails never quite bore fruit: apparently, there was a wall of something that he sometimes called shame which he just couldn’t scale.

  Then, relative to the past, things happened astonishingly fast and, as you know, Ashim and Tulti were visiting us five months later for Christmas. But we’d also learnt from Ashim himself (rather, I should say we ‘reconfirmed’) — at a lunch in Calcutta after the wedding, the day before they returned to Hazaribagh, while Mira was giving Tulti a guided tour of her apps on my iPad — that any such reconnection with Aranya would be much more difficult, because no one had known for years precisely where Aranya was.

  Judging from what Abhay shared with me, it might be that the subject of Aranya didn’t come up between the brothers for the first fortnight of Ashim and Tulti’s stay in Wellington. Then it did, I know for sure, because it occasioned a major turn in our story.

  Aranya had been a primary-school teacher for several years in Hazaribagh while raising two kids with Praveen, who now worked as a manager in a furniture showroom. In February 2010, a Hindu holy man came with a small retinue to stay at a local devotee’s home, and Aranya was taken along by two colleagues from school to hear him speak. He was in Hazaribagh for five days, and she went on the second evening, but apparently returned twice more during his stay. Whatever this sadhu said at these gatherings appeared to have had an especially strong impact on her.

  Aranya left home a week after this man moved on from Hazaribagh (apropos of nothing, this dates to the time her brother Abhay and I, in entirely other lives, were preparing to move from Edinburgh to Wellington). In doing so, she left behind a son who was eleven and a girl of six, and her husband Praveen, who apparently insisted there had been no signs of sadness or unusual behaviour in the days and weeks before this sadhu’s visit. The only indication of a link with this man was a letter Aranya had left for her family, in which she declared she had decided to make her life following him.

  At the time, Ashim had called Sulekha in Calcutta, who duly informed us — I remember the phone call; the Edinburgh flat had been full of boxes — that Aranya had left home, but after much anxiety and indecision, Abhay ultimately didn’t call Ashim, or Praveen, or go to India, or get involved in the search in any way. In late February, we flew to Wellington via Hong Kong exactly as planned. And that had remained the status quo until this July, five-and-a-half years later, when Ashim spoke at length about Aranya during lunch at the Calcutta Club. To my shame, and I know Abhay’s too, it was the first time we were hearing him speak first-hand about the biggest tragedy to have hit our family in years.

 
; Although he lived in the same town, Ashim wasn’t sure how much of an effort Praveen had made to go after his wife and persuade her to return (‘As well as understand her reasons for leaving,’ I’d added), but in any case, it seems nothing anyone tried had been able to change Aranya’s mind. Five years on, as far as Ashim knew (and the strangeness of this truth stuns me to contemplate), Aranya remained at large in India somewhere, perhaps following a sadhu on his wanderings. Ashim was also uncertain about the level of contact she had maintained with Praveen and her children, but knew that she didn’t carry a mobile.

  ‘What is it with your family, Abhay?’ I had felt compelled to ask him later that day, after giving him five hours to remark on the pattern himself. ‘You’re the ultimate “out of sight, out of mind” crew, all of you. Your dad with his first wife, then with two of his kids. Your brother with his sister. Your brother-in-law with his wife. What the fuck?’

  Abhay looked up at me from his laptop. ‘You don’t have to hold back. Give the other examples too. Me with my Dada and Didi. The woman in the next room with her stepchildren.’

  Abhay had said this himself, and for once I didn’t demur. Yet my outrage proved short-lived, and I apologised to him later that night. There was another pattern evident as well.

  After they had moved to Hazaribagh, Sulekha appeared to have washed her hands of her stepchildren’s day-to-day lives for good. Perhaps in this she had taken her cue from their father, arguing to herself they must primarily be his responsibility. Abhay the adult, years after protesting himself hoarse over their ‘banishment’, had had the buffer of his parents’ apparent apathy, and then the pretext of the distance between first Hazaribagh and Edinburgh, later New Zealand.

  Yet now, these past five years, I too had walked in the same line, and my buffers in turn had been Sulekha, Abhay, their distance from everyone in Hazaribagh and, of course, my most obvious card: that I was a foreigner to this story in every sense. Yes, Ashim and Aranya were family, but only technically, right? I mean, they’d always been abstractions for me. How could a faraway latecomer like myself initiate anything to bridge such rifts?

  And so years passed during which Abhay did nothing to contact Ashim or Aranya’s family; nor did I ever seriously urge him otherwise. Ashim called his stepmother maybe twice yearly, at Bengali New Year and during the Pujas, and we were content to pick up any updates second-hand via Sulekha.

  And even after the July conversation — which, to his credit, Ashim initiated — Abhay and I returned to Wellington exactly as planned, and neither of us proceeded to do anything further. Despite what we had now learnt about first-hand for the first time, despite discussing it frequently for a while, our distance from Hazaribagh — and wherever Aranya might presently be in body as well as state of mind — resumed its place as an ironclad excuse, just as it had five years ago. What can we do from so far away, especially when her husband and children seemed to have accepted the situation?

  That is the second pattern I noticed in July, which caused me to apologise to Abhay. Yes, they were a family full of people with this apparently effortless trait of looking away, but over the past thirteen years, I too had adopted this habit so easily.

  Aranya: the girl and then woman of whom no one in her family could draw me a clear picture was how I thought of her sometimes (but only passively, as a far-removed conundrum): survivor of her mother’s death after her parents’ divorce, uprooted by her father’s and stepmum’s sudden decision to move her and Ashim out of Calcutta, she then presumably chose to elope, but thereafter her everyday life as a wife and working mother was yet another unknown, culminating years later in (apparently) deciding to follow a sadhu, and inflicting a new form of abandonment upon her own family.

  If I was honest, it was only after Ashim and Moushumi spoke about her at length in July that it was driven home to me that for years now, two more children of this family had been living around a long-absent parent, exactly as Ashim and Aranya themselves had done (a parent, moreover, who had sent both the kids to school that final morning with their usual perfectly prepared lunchboxes!). And the rest of us were quite unconcernedly letting it happen all over again.

  But thoughts, regrets … and nothing more, just as though Aranya and her family were as distant from us as the suffering residents of Homs or Gaza: that had been the state of play until the first week of January 2016 when, on the second-last night of Ashim’s New Zealand visit, he decided enough was enough of this fucking bubble and shattered what we thought we knew about his sister.

  And it wasn’t even his first attempt to blow us up in the still-very-new year.

  Section II

  NEW YEAR

  Abhay

  My brother disappeared on the morning of Jan the 1st: there’s really no less dramatic way to put it. Thankfully he showed up again on the 2nd, but that’s when he had his real shock for us. The disappearance turned out to be mere preparation, his run-up.

  Dada’s door was closed, and we naturally took him for asleep, but it was actually Tulti who alerted us to his absence. She awoke in the bed next to Mira’s (we’d allowed them to continue sleeping in the same room because they had enjoyed it so much in Kaiteriteri), then apparently came straight out to the kitchen to inform Lena and me that we wouldn’t find her Baba in his room this morning ‘because he had some important work to do.’ The previous night, New Year’s Eve, was the first time during his stay that Dada had volunteered to do story-time and lights-out with the girls: Lena and I had assumed it was a sweet gesture to give us half an hour to ourselves on the final evening of the year, and also a sign that he was feeling fully at home here. But we now learnt there was another reason: so he could tell the girls something (or at least his daughter; maybe he spoke in Bengali so that Mira wouldn’t understand) too important to share with us.

  Five minutes later, we confirmed that Mira hadn’t known about her uncle’s ‘important work’.

  ‘Sweetheart, did he say where he would go, or what kind of work it was?’

  ‘No, but he told me to tell you as soon as I got up so that you wouldn’t worry, and he promised he would come back when the work was ready.’

  I walked back to our bedroom to get my phone off the charger and tried calling him. It went straight to voicemail. This was the New Zealand number he was using. I asked him to call and let us know as soon as he was ready to be picked up, or if he needed any help. I said many things were likely to be closed today, including banks. But I could use my ATM card if he needed some money, and we could look up what shops were open if it was something to buy.

  We had a fairly normal breakfast after that, although I could see Lena wasn’t comfortable. I walked into the bathroom behind her to say that Dada was an adult who was used to running his own life at home: he probably above all needed a breather from being dependent on us for everything. Just to be out and about on his own for a bit, like a grown-up.

  ‘Well, he certainly picked the day for it. He would have had to walk at least as far as the tunnel, because there’s no 21 running today.’

  ‘True, and yes, he could have just told us he needed some space, but maybe he didn’t want to say it last night. I mean, we watched Sideways and had fun, didn’t we? Maybe that’s what made him think, “I need to get some air”.

  ‘No, that can’t have been it, because we watched that after the girls’ bedtime,’ I corrected myself. ‘But in any case, sometimes you do need a break even from the warmest welcome. As I said, just put yourself in his shoes, or simply remember how it always gets to you at least once on each trip to India how dependent we become on other people for so many things. When will the driver be here, or the maid? Well, he probably needed to feel that he too could go out when he wanted to, and not have to be driven everywhere like a kid.’

  The phone rang while I was speaking, which was just as well because it was plain I wasn’t making much headway with persuading Lena. I gave her a hug and a grope as she entered the shower and ran to answer, especially because it mi
ght have been Dada.

  It was our neighbour Janaki, and I was surprised because I knew she was a night owl, watching Sky Sports or ESPN till two or three in the morning (motorsports, tennis or fencing were particular favourites), or else old movies on TCM. Nine-thirty a.m. on New Year’s Day was highly unusual for her.

  ‘Abhay, you, is it? Happy New Year.’

  ‘And to you, Janaki. Thank you for ringing.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably wondering why.’

  Still none of the warmth or teasing that had bafflingly taken flight from her tone towards me in the past week, so probably some box needed bringing down from a loft.

  ‘No, but how can I help, Janaki? We’re open twenty-four seven,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘I wanted to pass on a message from Ashim. He’s fine, and I dropped him in town this morning. He’ll be home as soon as he’s ready.’

  My immediate spike of rage was a surprise to me, and keeping it (mostly) out of my voice a genuine achievement.

  ‘Oh, very kind of you to let his family know, Janaki. See you.’

  That I enjoyed. Suddenly I didn’t have to be my neighbour’s errand boy any more, and in a few days my irritating, supercilious, ungracious brother would be gone. What was not to love about this new year, beginning with this unexpected gift of several hours without him?

  ‘Sweetheart, Janaki with great pleasure rang to let us know that she’d known of Dada’s plan and had given him a ride into town this morning, and I found equal release in slamming down the phone on her,’ I informed Lena when she came out from her shower. The house phone began to ring again and I asked her to answer, certain it would our elderly Bonnie to Dada’s Clyde.