The Man Who Would Not See

by Rajorshi Chakraborti

  Anyhow, I was in a much better frame of mind when we got home from the park, ready for a second take at welcoming him, except we were greeted by his dark-green bag which he’d deposited on the bedroom carpet before apparently taking off without a note or text or any concern that Mira had missed him these past five days and wanted to play with him, as well as ask about Tulti. And by the time it was 10.30, which is when he eventually returned — after having had his phone off the entire evening even though I called him three times, the last message letting him know that Mira was staying up an extra half-hour just to have story-time with him — shaven pussies, tiny g-strings or even apologies for having pulled out of the trip had all receded to distant corners of my mind. I wasn’t even especially mindful of Aranya’s death just then, I’m ashamed to admit; all I was thinking was what a pathetic thing to pull on the people who love you most: a cheap stunt copied from the very prick who just a few days ago used it on you! This piece-of-crap disappearing act! Really, Abhay? Are we going to have this sort of shit around here now as a legacy of that asshole’s visit?

  Turned out I hadn’t imagined the half of it. At eleven that night, after having a shower and pouring us both a whisky, Abhay announced that he had decided to look for a flat just for himself.

  Section III

  JANUARY

  Abhay

  The more I try to picture Dada’s life, the less I realise I know, and also what a chance I’ve squandered to ask him during his visit. In fact, how weirdly little I did end up asking, about him or Didi! It’s only now, during my working hours after his departure, having set my novel to one side for the immediate future to be able to concentrate on this, that I’m dredging up more of what he voluntarily shared, or what I noticed in passing. After the girls had gone to bed, we usually sat in the living room together, which would have been the perfect chance to talk, except I used the time to catch up on my daily note-taking and replying to messages, and Dada did the same or browsed the web. Afterwards we’d close the night with part of a movie or Crime Patrol.

  Just as one example, what did I seek to learn about Dada’s college days, or boarding school, or even about how he and Moushumi met? He must have told me some stuff long ago about his school during those holiday visits to Calcutta or the couple of trips that Ma, Baba and I made to Hazaribagh; at the time I must have been curious to know because, apart from everything else, ‘boarding’ was such a different beast to normal school, but what do I remember now? College of course happened after we’d lost touch, in different countries.

  Returning to the memory rather than rushing past on an unexamined assumption, perhaps I didn’t ask much about Dada’s school life even back then for the same reason I’m inhibited now — guilt. I still feel guilty that he was sent away, and seek to avoid the implicit accusations in his tone, words and gaze if I were to ask what life was like after being turned out by his own family.

  Then I remind myself they may well have been happy, liberated years: he might have had dozens of friends and revelled in being far from parental disapproval. It might only be my guilt that’s casting a shadow over this unknown decade of his life. But the fact is, I didn’t take a single chance to learn more during either of our recent meetings. Will I ever try to fill in these enormous gaps? I lost my chance with my sister years ago.

  A strange thing to realise about oneself, especially for a writer who claims to relish human complexity as a supreme value.

  In some pervasive, now glaringly apparent but hitherto pushed-from-sight pattern, I have sought not complexity as much as smoothness my entire life. Perhaps that is my supreme priority — smoothness in everything. The writer pays lip service to one value; the person walks the walk towards quite another.

  Consider the evidence — I fled to countries of ‘infrastructural smoothness’ the first chance I got (you know: roads, power, internet speeds, bank accounts, form-filling, bureaucracy — every single thing you ‘should’ be able to take for granted but that can consume days and sap so much energy in India), and never again returned home to live. In my current resting place, as Dada pointed out, even the forests are weirdly smooth to wander in. There never were any deadly predators here, give or take the giant eagle.

  I had a chance to move to London after finishing my PhD in Edinburgh, sleeping on the futon of a friend and working as an usher at the Prince Charles Cinema (it was the only job I landed after sending out dozens of applications — the interview included a test in which, against the clock, I had to organise and count up a large amount of change), when my department in Edinburgh offered me some extra tutoring, and of course Lena was still there, and I knew I could return to my waiter’s job at the French restaurant. London was where the agents and publishers and opportunities were, even if there was enormous competition and everything from rent to transport was forbiddingly expensive; the future on an usher’s pay would be uncertain and bumpy. Edinburgh, on the other hand, was familiar, easy to navigate, affordable and full of friends. I, of course, chose the smoother path, and perhaps it has made all the difference.

  Another example: when Dada once asked me why I’d waited for Madeleine to direct our scripts rather than shoot one of my own short-film ideas myself (‘use your friends here, shoot on the streets, edit using iMovie, post it on YouTube, let the public decide,’ he’d concluded, with a grinning nod to Jack’s exhortation to Miles in Sideways), I realised that with uncanny intuition he’d — once again! — alighted on a fundamental lack within me. Left to myself, and as much as cinema was one of my great loves, I clearly preferred the ease and smoothness of writing — my couch and computer, no other paraphernalia required, no moving of people and things hither and thither, no auditioning actors or blocking off traffic or dealing with Klaus Kinski or meeting fifty-seven potential financiers (each on average seven times) or dragging a steamship up and down a mountain in the rainforest for one single scene. A steamship on the page just showed up when I wanted it: the other kind of conjuring had always seemed so hard.

  Carrying on shamelessly under the all-explaining spell of the same idée fixe, Lena is open, complex, interesting, loving, self-aware and totally supportive, the most wonderful partner I can imagine, and for that reason our relationship has always been, in a word, smooth. No fault there: I’m emphatically not blaming her for not being tortured — just saying that maybe it shows that in people as much as things and occupations, I clearly prefer it easy.

  And easy it was to look away from my brother and sister once I’d understood I was powerless to bring them back, and guess which option only promised less smoothness with time?

  What an ultimately disappointing thing to find you’ve subconsciously pursued all along — may I in everything have a Swiss life. (It could catch on: people bidding one another farewell with ‘Goodbye. Have a Swiss life.’) Makes me wonder what on earth my books have been about. Anything but the shit in my own house, clearly.

  Although I should add a postscript so as not to totally denigrate the role that ‘looking away’ has played in my wellbeing — that would be both ungrateful and misleading. There have been all too many moments in recent years when I’ve felt I owed my morale as well as my resilience not only to what I’m able to focus on (Lena’s presence and incredible beauty, the utterly oblivious joy emanated by Mira), but also to the indispensable art of ignoring. It’s only by not facing squarely facts like three of my five books being out of print, or that the two films I wrote with Madeleine remain words on pages, that I’m able to keep going at all.

  However, I couldn’t have continued to function viably as a writer if I didn’t contemplate my various kinds of failure at least on occasion. In the case of Dada and Didi though, not looking became an unbreakable habit. An inertia of ignoring kicked in, where not only did it seem the easier option with time, but it came at no apparent cost.

  This was the most absurd illusion — that looking away from my brother, sister, their spouses, their children, and finally someone else I once knew well and loved deep
ly, was costing me nothing!

  In the last ten years of her life, pretty much after Baba’s funeral, I never saw my grandmother again, because Dada lived with her and Didi was also in Hazaribagh, and even I couldn’t pull off the trick of not noticing them while visiting Thamma.

  Abhay

  If there is no more to renting this new flat than to make some false drama, Lena would be right, and I’m even more abject than I suspected. I notice this supposed predilection for ease, and what occurs to me to address this is to make some bumps in the tablecloth myself. Rather than begin to engage with even one of the people or parts of my life I’ve looked away from thus far, I decide to manufacture some false turbulence in the only bit that genuinely works. And my wife and four-year-old daughter — suddenly their days, and their moorings in me, are overnight torn up for no reason.

  But I said to Lena this has nothing to do with Dada’s needling or his transparent efforts to manipulate us, which I noticed and despised as much as she did (‘although you then have to put four weeks of such behaviour side by side with my twenty years of committed apathy, before weighing up relative guilt’). And it certainly wasn’t about her coffees with Tony either, to which she was welcome even if she also suspected he had a thing for her. This is simply a hunch I’m trying out: to have an actual space away from the all-consuming daily life that blocks out everything else, which might help begin the job of breaking this habit I’ve just diagnosed — using my present as a blanket to cover myself. That’s why I want to try being somewhere for a few hours each day that means precisely nothing to me, where you aren’t there to look at or Mira to make dinner for or read to or bathe or do bedtime with — all the undeniably significant, noble things that I use so well as my alibis, my escapes, my fortress.

  To distil it, Lena, I have to move the two of you to one side to look properly at my brother and sister. Then there are sides to my parents I also need to see, and with all of that, hopefully, some more as well of the supposedly seeing me.

  Lena

  I guess it’s kind of working, at least the logistics of it. Mum picks Mira up from crèche at three and brings her back to our place, and I get home around half-five. They play together while I prepare dinner, and Mum has usually been eating with us. During the week, maybe four days out of five, Abhay comes home well after Mira’s bedtime, which means the father who has spent most of each day with her for Mira’s entire life, barring the hours at crèche or daycare, now catches up with her over a hasty breakfast each morning, apart from the weekends. And this massive change happened from one week to the next (a mate from Abhay’s tennis club ‘just luckily’ had a one-bedroom flat on Karori Road available to rent for three months; interesting, that, considering the decision — or to dignify it by its proper name, the EPIPHANY — was so supposedly spontaneous), and Mira’s expected to keep believing that everything’s OK, Baba’s just the same, Mummy and Baba are not fighting and, most of all, Baba certainly doesn’t want to see any less of her, how could he? It’s just that, well, for a while — indefinitely, shall we say — he sort of has to.

  I can’t seem to get a straight answer on this one point from Abhay — so, what you’re saying (rather, demonstrating), is that to focus on someone you’ve ignored, you have to ignore someone else who’s right here, still alive, even more innocent, and even more important?

  And how will you make up this lost time, this hurt that you’re causing?

  I frequently put the question to him the other way, because the connection refused to stop not just staring but socking me in the face. On the nose in the way that instantly produces tears.

  ‘Abhay, if a neutral person, not me or even Mum, were to point out that within ten days of your brother leaving, you’d found and finalised a lease for another place that kept you away from your family for effectively five days out of seven exactly as though you’d been travelling out of town, and two further things — that perhaps this is the outcome Ashim intended when he planted the idea in your head so dramatically that your wife might be having an affair, and also that this is an incredible tit-for-tat for him to have achieved, as anyone can see who knows the history, one eviction for another, except in your case it’s been entirely voluntary, remarkable as that sounds — how would you refute them?’

  ‘I would say there is no doubt in my mind that I love and trust my wife as much as ever, and the Tony insinuation meant absolutely nothing to me. And if I could prove this in some way once and for all, please tell me how. And for the other observation, I would point to that word “voluntary”. Yes, my brother has been a catalyst; it would be silly to deny that. The things I learnt during his visit were my eye-openers. I know it looks like I’m punishing Mira, and I absolutely promise you both that I won’t extend the lease on the flat, and who knows, I might not even need it for the entire three months, but Lena, this shift of my attention is long overdue. Think about it, even from a practical—’

  ‘Why, Abhay, why must there be a shift? When did you decide, what made you decide, that your attention has such a narrow beam that if it focuses on the past, it has to completely exclude the present, even if that means gravely unsettling your daughter? Why does it have to be this either/or?’

  ‘Because that is my precise illness, my condition, my weakness, what I have always done and need to combat, using the present to keep every uncomfortable question at bay, but also, as I was about to say, it’s even for practical things. Like I want to begin by having a few long conversations with Ma on Skype, and she is usually ready after her breakfast and bath at around nine her time, which is currently four-thirty for us. How would I do that at our place, with Mira home from crèche and running around and expecting to do ballet shows for her Thamma?’

  ‘Well, do them after her bedtime, like right about now, which is still only afternoon for Sulekha. And what will Mira’s Thamma say when she is denied meetings with her granddaughter for three months and meanwhile each day sees you in the kind of table-chair-kettle-and-nothing-else setting that screams only one thing — this man has left home, just like Milhouse’s dad in The Simpsons. You think she won’t connect this with Ashim’s visit — except, and I don’t know how much you’ve been telling her, from her distant vantage point she’ll only imagine wrong and worse. One thing I’ll say, Abhay: I don’t know to what extent you believe in his professed respect for black magic and the like, but from what I’ve seen, when he wants to get someone, Ashim doesn’t need to resort to any tantriks or rites. You might have become the writer in the family, but he takes his aim at actual people, using what he knows to hurt them most. Except in our case it’s so transparent what he’s doing — he believes he’s cutting you off from your family just as was done to him as a child — and yet we’re letting him succeed.’

  Abhay

  There was something fairly big Dada did that I haven’t got around to telling Lena about, mostly because it was overshadowed within days by his disappearance into the wilds of Wellington city to wrestle with his conscience — just as Jesus would have done — over the rights and wrongs of shattering his brother’s home (no matter what Lena thinks about this ‘machination’ having ultimately worked, it still puts a smile on my face to recall Dada’s bafflement at our collective under-reaction when we heard. Perhaps he’d imagined how a man — a ‘real’ man — might react in India to such a story, or at least a brother whose brain was over-inflamed by episodes of Crime Patrol).

  The evening we got back from Kaiteriteri, when Lena had gone to bed after a late bedtime with the girls, Dada out of the blue asked me for my time of birth and Mira’s, as well as confirming both our birth-dates and places. He then requested to borrow my laptop and excused himself to go to his room for what I expected would be a short time, but turned out to be the rest of the night. I remember idly going through the TV schedule and putting a couple of movies on record before doing some stretches after a full day’s driving and ferry-sitting, and then, still computer-less, heading to bed.

  The next day wa
s the 30th and, unusually, Dada was already awake when I came into the kitchen. He’d brought in the paper after a morning walk and had made himself some teabag tea, but was clearly waiting to talk about something.

  I would have closed the door anyway before grinding coffee because Lena and the girls were still asleep, but Dada got to it before me.

  ‘Abhi, do you know what I saw last night?’

  Over the noise of the grinder I shook my head.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. And this morning I was up by five. I tried to stay in bed, but in the end I had to walk instead because I couldn’t stay still until someone else woke up.’

  ‘I was awake till after midnight. You should have come back out. There was a good documentary starting on Rialto, about how American schools are becoming more and more like prisons.’

  Not for the first time, Dada looked frankly nonplussed at the divergence between what the two of us were saying. He shook off his evident irritation and looked like he was trying once more.

  ‘Abhi, listen to me. The reason I didn’t come back out was that I was too busy checking and double-checking, afraid to be wrong because my knowledge is so limited. And I would still insist that you have this verified by a genuine expert, or I can do that myself when I get home, I know the right person—’

  I was now stirring the coffee painstakingly as I love to do and everyone else mocks, but I still had to interrupt my brother.