A Fatal Inversion (3 page)

Life would go on more or less in tranquility, and time, a day or two in Tenerife, would dim the memory of that brown and shining face glimpsed between pale, anxious, stressful faces. Most probably it had not even been Shiva. In the neighborhood where Adam lived he seldom saw any but white people, so naturally he confused one dark-skinned person with another. Wasn’t it natural, too, that whenever he saw an Indian face he should retrieve Shiva from his memory? It had happened before in shops, in post offices. And it hardly mattered anyway, for Shiva was gone now, gone for another ten years… .

He humped their hand luggage off the baggage cart, passed Anne her handbag, and had recourse to a therapy he sometimes employed for turning away the rage he felt toward her. This was with a false niceness.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ve time to get you some perfume in the duty-free.”

3

EVIL WAS A STUPID WORD
. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, woolly, as applied to “love.” Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural. These thoughts had been inspired in her husband’s mind by a sentence from a review on the cover of a paperback novel Lili Manjusri had bought at the Salzburg airport. “A brooding cloud of evil,” the commentator had written, “hovers over this dark and magnificent saga from the first page to the astonishing dénouement.” Lili had bought it because it was the only work in English she could find at the bookstall.

Whenever Shiva considered the word, he saw in his mind’s eye a grinning Mephistopheles with small, curly rams’ horns, capering in a frock coat. Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed. Shiva thought most of the folly of the world was brought about by fear and greed, and to call this evil, as if it were the result of purposeful calculation and deliberate wrongdoing, was to show ignorance of human psychology. It was in this way that he was thinking when, with Lili by his side and their suitcases on a trolley he would abandon at the tube station entrance, he looked up and met the eyes of Adam Verne-Smith.

Shiva had no doubt it was Adam he saw. To him Europeans did not specially all look alike. Adam and Rufus Fletcher, for instance, though both white, Caucasian, and of more or less Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Norse-Norman ancestry, were very dissimilar in appearance, Adam being slight and white-skinned with a lot of bushy (now receding) dark hair, while Rufus was burly and fair, with curiously sharp-pointed features for so fleshy a man. Shiva had seen Rufus some years before, though he was absolutely certain Rufus had either not seen or not recognized him, while he was equally sure Adam knew perfectly well who he was. He began to smile from exactly the motive Adam had attributed to him, a desire to ingratiate and to defend himself, to turn away wrath. He had been born in England, had never seen India, spoke English as his cradle tongue, and had forgotten all the Hindi he had ever learned but he had all the immigrant’s protective reactions and all his self-consciousness. Indeed, he had
more,
he thought, since the events at Ecalpemos. Things had gotten worse since then. There had been a gradual slow decline in his fortunes, his fate, his happiness, and his prosperity, or prospect of prosperity.

Adam glared back at him and looked away. Of course he would not want to know me, Shiva thought.

Lili asked him what he was looking at.

“A chap I used to know years ago.” Shiva used words like “chap” now and “pal” and “kiddy,” words used by Indians wanting to sound like true Brits, though he would not have done this once.

“Do you want to go and say hello to him?”

“Alas and alack, he doesn’t want to know me. I am a poor Indian. He is not the kind of bloke who wishes to know his colored brethren.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Lili.

Shiva smiled sadly and asked why not, but he knew he was being unfair to Adam as well as to himself. Had they not all agreed when they left Ecalpemos and went their separate ways that it was to be as if they had never met, known each other, lived together, but that in future they must be strangers and more than strangers? Adam, no doubt, adhered to this. So, probably, did Rufus and the girl. There was something, some quality, more fatalistic, more resigned, in Shiva. He might deceive others, but he was incapable of deceiving himself, of pretending, of denying thoughts. It would not have occurred to him to attempt forgetfulness by inhibiting memories of Ecalpemos. He remembered it every day.

“It was at that place I told you about that I knew him,” he said to Lili. “He was one of the group of us there. Well, he was
the
one, it was his place.”

“All the better not to know him then,” said Lili.

She bought their tickets. Adam had been right, it was in an East London near ghetto that Shiva lived. Lili tucked the two slips of green cardboard into a fold of her sari. She was only half Indian, her mother being a Viennese woman who had come to England as an au pair and married a doctor from Darjeeling, a surgical registrar in a Bradford hospital. When Lili grew up and the doctor died, her mother went home and settled in Salzburg selling Glockenturm beer mugs in a souvenir shop. It was there that they went each summer, during Shiva’s holidays, their fares paid by Sabine Schnitzler who, having reverted to her maiden name and largely to her native tongue, sometimes wore a surprised, even bewildered look at being surrounded, as she put it, by “all those Indians.” For Lili, whose skin was nearly as white as Adam Verne-Smith’s, was more Indian than true Indians, wore the sari, grew her curly brown Austrian hair down to her waist, and took language lessons from a Bengali neighbor of theirs. In her voice were hints of the singsong tone, Welsh in its rhythms, so characteristic of the Indian speaking English. Shiva thought he should be grateful for all this, though he was not. How would he have felt, he sometimes asked himself, if he had married a woman who set herself against his ethnic origins?

He had told Lili about Ecalpemos before they married. It would not have been in his nature, nor would he have been inclined, to do otherwise… . But he had not gone into details, giving only the bare outline, the facts, and Lili had asked few questions. He bore in mind that the time might come when he would have to tell her everything.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she had finally said.

“It’s true that they never consulted me. If I had given my advice, it would have been ignored.”

“Well, then.”

He began haltingly to explain but stopped himself. He could tell the truth but not all the truth. Openness did not demand that he tell her he had suggested it.

“You should try to forget,” she said.

“I suppose I feel that would be wrong. I ought never to forget about the kiddy.”

And it was perhaps inevitable that he should see the death of his own child, his and Lili’s, as retribution, as a just punishment. Yet he was not a Christian to look at things in this light. He was not really a Hindu either. His parents had neglected this aspect of his upbringing, having largely abandoned their religion but for a few outer forms before he was born. Some lingering race memory remained though, some pervading conviction common to all Orientals, that this life was but one of many on the great wheel of existence and that reincarnation as someone better endowed or worse (in his case surely worse) awaited him. He saw himself returning as a beggar with limbs deliberately deformed whining for alms on the seafront at Bombay. The incongruity was that at the same time he was convinced of retribution in this world. He saw the death of his son, a placenta previa child who died during Lili’s labor, as direct vengeance, though he could not have said who was exacting it.

Crossing the hospital courtyard that divided the maternity wing from the general wards and administration building, hearing over and over in his head the words they had gently but coldly told him, the announcement of his son’s death, leaving Lili asleep, carefully sedated, he had lifted his eyes and seen Rufus Fletcher. Rufus was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He was walking very rapidly, far faster than Shiva was going in the opposite direction, from a building with long windows and white-uniformed men and girls behind them that looked like a lab, toward the main block. He turned his head to look at Shiva, cast on him an indifferent glance, and turned away. Rufus had simply not known who he was, Shiva was sure of that, had not recognized him as one of the other two male members of the little community in which they had all lived in such close contiguity for something like two months. Shiva was astonished to find that Rufus had in fact finished his studies and become a doctor. Of course he had known Rufus had this in mind, was three years through his time at medical school, had already considerable knowledge and
nous
—who could forget
that
?—but somehow he had imagined that the same fate would have overtaken the others as had overtaken him, a deathly stultifying, an inhibition on all that was ambitious and of ascendant character, a remorseful withdrawing into the shade. Only if they did not show their faces, only if they kept their heads low and lived in obscure corners could they hope to pass at least in physical safety through life. So he had thought. But the others evidently had not, or Rufus had not, walking jauntily and with swinging stride across the road, his stethoscope bobbing up and down, letting himself into the main hospital block, Shiva later saw, by a door marked Private, which he slammed behind him with a fine disregard for the notices exhorting all to silence.

Lili had had no more babies. Perhaps they would have another child one day. Lili was still under thirty and there was no reason, the hospital staff had said, why such an unfortunate thing as a placenta previa should occur again, or if it did, they would be ready for it. Shiva was not too keen. The area in which they lived was overcrowded and unsalubrious, and if there was rather less unemployment than in the north of England, that was about all that could be said for it.

The name of their street was Fifth Avenue. It is not the custom in English cities to name streets by numbers, but it has happened. There are, for instance, no less than fourteen First Avenues in the London area, twelve Second Avenues, nine Third Avenues, and three Fourth Avenues. The only other Fifth Avenues are in West Kilburn and Manor Park, which also possess a Sixth, while the latter possesses a Seventh. Shiva’s Fifth Avenue was a long, curving treeless street that dipped steeply down and switchbacked up again, though the neighborhood was not in general a particularly hilly place. At the end nearest the tube station was a block of shops containing a small supermarket run by Pakistanis, a Greek restaurant run by Cypriote, a triple-fronted emporium given over to the sale of motorcycle spare parts and equipment, and a newspaper shop run by people who when asked where they came from ingenuously replied that they were Cape coloreds. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, where Pevsner Road crossed it, was another small grocer’s and a pub called The Boxer, and at the far end, opposite each other, a unisex hairdresser’s and a betting shop. These were linked by belts of houses in infrequently broken blocks, composed of bricks in a dull purplish-red or khaki yellow, and all now between ninety-seven and ninety-nine years old. A double line of parked cars ran parallel to the sidewalks from the newspaper shop to the pub and the grocer’s to the hairdresser’s. If you half-closed your eyes and looked at it, you might have likened it to a string of colored beads.

Shiva went into the newspaper shop. There were two Jamaican boys in there and they made a point of crowding the counter, holding their elbows akimbo, so that Shiva was unable to pick up his paper from the pile in front of them. Quietly he asked for the
Standard
and handed across his money between the jutting arms; he didn’t want any trouble. It was the Indians they hated down here, not the whites. Well, there were few whites left except for very old people who couldn’t have moved if they had wanted to.

Lili was waiting outside, standing between their cases. She was very brave, he thought, to wear the sari and shop in the Indian shops and have her Bengali lessons when all these things drew attention to her. It would have been easy for her to pass for a white girl. Only her eyes, that distinctive dark bluish-brown and with somewhat protuberant bluish whites, betrayed her. But people were not that perceptive and for God’s sake this was London, not Johannesburg in the fifties. She could have gotten away with it, and he had more than once suggested she should, begged her almost. But it was her identity, she said, it was all she had, and she went on putting a caste mark which she had no right to on her forehead and wearing all her gold bracelets and cooking sag ghosht and dal instead of the defrosted hamburgers and chips that most people around there ate. He picked up the suitcases and she took their hand luggage and they walked home, passing three separate black people who looked at them with silent hostility and two elderly white women who did not look at them at all.

Lili would start unpacking at once. She would put all the light clothes into one bag and all the dark into another and take them to the launderette in Pevsner Road. He knew it would be useless to try to hinder this; she would be fidgety and fretful if there were dirty clothes around. So long as she wasn’t out after dark, he supposed it would be all right. Nothing much could happen to her on a sunny September afternoon between here and the launderette, and Mrs. Barakhda, who ran it, was a friend of hers, or the nearest Lili had to a friend.

He made her a cup of tea while she sorted the washing, closed up the valises, and pushed them into the closet under the stairs. At least they had a whole house with three bedrooms. Most of the houses down here were divided into two flats, two front doors squeezed in under the tiny porch. He offered to carry the bags for her but she wouldn’t hear of it. In her reactionary way—for Lili had been brought up by an independent feminist mother—she thought it all right for men to carry suitcases but not bags of wash. With his second cup of tea in front of him, he sat down to look at the newspaper.