Homesick (25 page)

But it didn’t work, he and Deirdre, despite the good wage, despite the promises, and despite his being the perfect husband. He was attentive, kind, undemanding. He loved the movies she loved, bought DVD box sets of
Sex and the City
to show her what she would be missing if she did not come to New York, and what’s more, sat and watched them with her, commenting on the fashion, enjoying the shoes. He was a social being, to all intents the light that people followed: he was the energy, the laughter, the taut-bodied being in the middle of every social situation, knowing everyone by name, pouring the drinks. He was the one people asked to dinner, not Deirdre, and he was afraid that Deirdre knew this. Poor Deirdre was ten years younger than he, pudgy and not as bright as her sister, Louisa. Nandini once said, “You married the wrong sister,” but she said it quietly while holding the baby Carl on her lap as Deirdre thumped and bumped around their kitchen, pausing to stuff food into her mouth. He had looked up from his newspaper and sighed. His mother didn’t understand his relationship with Deirdre; but nor did he, unless it was mediated by his parents’ expectations. Preethi had been kinder, trying in a roundabout way to advise him on sex. He had laughed. He was much clearer in his understanding
of other people’s marriages, and that one was doomed, he could see. He thought when she talked of “sexual healing,” it would be unkind to mention that he suspected Simon was being healed elsewhere.

Rohan had left when Carl was two. And had remained in New York, being sucked into his work and his friendships, the parties, the human stories of his patients, the everyday routines of running in Central Park and drinking in Manhattan bars that he expected Samantha or Carrie or Miranda or Charlotte to walk into any day and put their arms about his shoulders and show him how to come out and be their new—celibate—gay best friend.

Deirdre had remained in England, living on his earnings quite happily, bringing up their son to hate Rohan (he imagined) and to speak like a south Londoner. He was taxied between his grandparents. Shamini, on the one hand, supporting her daughter in her project of depending on and reviling her son-in-law in equal measure, and Nandini and Victor spoiling the child and loving him and recognising their son in him in myriad ways, except the most worrying way. He just wasn’t like Rohan was at the same age—and that made them love Carl even more.

•

Rohan realised that the giving-up of things was the key to living a good and safe life. He had been a vegan now for two years. Alcohol was a problem, so he gave it up. He was too reliant on coffee, and that too went. Sex had gone years ago. In fact, what he had done to Deirdre to create Carl had been the only penetration since his twenties. He was now forty-one. He was closed down, shut down, his whole body ascetic and pure. He was thin, yes, but good-looking thin—not anorexic thin. At bars he was still hit on. He liked
to flirt: it just didn’t go anywhere. It was the key to living, this giving-up of things. To be tested all the time meant that you learned about yourself every day, that you understood yourself anew.

Yes, he had slips, spectacular ones sometimes. When Preethi called to say his father had died, he had just come out of theatre after performing a very straightforward valve replacement. (He remembered the time before she called so clearly.) After Preethi’s call he had gone straight to a bar with his friend (and regular anaesthetist) Noah, and they had got trashed. Noah drank beer with tequila chasers. Rohan had stuck to red wine. Nearly one bottle—he was thin, it didn’t take much—and then they’d hailed a cab, gone home to his apartment, and fallen into bed together. Noah held him as he cried. That was all. The slip was the alcohol. Noah was there the next morning, and when they had drunk three or four cups of coffee to clear their heads, Noah had said goodbye and gently kissed him on the cheek. It was nothing. But after, Rohan had been left with real and passionate yearning—not just for Noah but for love itself. Or maybe it was just for Noah.

They were friends. It was now exactly a year since Rohan’s father died. In that year, he had steadily distanced himself from Noah, and Noah had taken the hint. In theatre they were a formidable team, Rohan performing the percutaneous aortic valve replacements as Noah clowned about in the prep room, playing music, telling jokes, and talking about sports, teasing nurses, generally being a perfect foil to Rohan. And yet, when they happened to be alone, in an elevator or in the scrub room, they said nothing. It was fine, though. It was a tender silence.

At the cricket match, Rohan thought of Noah as he looked at his child, and the tenderness of everything in
Noah made him suddenly ache for the man. Noah was olive-skinned, pale-eyed—were they green or hazel?—dark-haired, always stubble-chinned. He had wiry forearms, something that Rohan continued to turn his gaze away from.

He and Carl had brought their drinks back to their seats. The stadium had begun to fill up. The pitch looked white, and the two teams were now in the outfield throwing balls to one another.

“Who’s that?” Carl asked, pointing to one of the Sri Lankan squad.

“Well, I wouldn’t really know, Carl.”

“Well, why don’t you look?”

“At what?”

“The programme. They have numbers on their backs. It will tell you in the programme.”

“Oh.” He looked. “That’s Sanath Jayasuriya.”

“You can just say Sanath. That’s what Papa called him.”

“OK.”

“Or you can say just their surnames. That’s what people on the radio say.”

“OK.”

The child watched for a while, sipping at the soft drink. “Mum says I’m not allowed Coke because it makes me hyper.”

“OK.”

“Do you miss Papa? Don’t say OK again, OK?”

“Er … yes. I do miss Papa. Do you?” An announcement: the Sri Lankans had won the toss and were batting first. “Did you hear that, Carl? Sri Lanka’s batting first.”

“Yes. I miss Papa. It’s all girls now. Mum and the two grandmas. I call them that, because they really
are
.” Rohan laughed. “What would you have called me if I was a girl?”

“We would have called you Smelly, because we wanted a boy.” Carl looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“What other names were you going to call me?”

“I wanted to call you Karl, with a K.”

“Oohhhhhh!” The child was animated. “You see! I want to be called Karl with a K! I think that would be so
cooooool
.” They watched the batsmen take their places and the fielders shout to each other. “When you operate on people, do you cut right down the middle and tear them apart with your bare hands? I mean,” and he turned to Rohan, placing the half-finished drink precariously on the side of the seat, and pushed his hands on Rohan’s chest, “do you take their ribs and pull them apart, one by one, like
plink, plink, plink, plink
?” and he pulled at Rohan’s T-shirt as if he were playing the harp, one finger and then the next. Rohan laughed, taking the boy’s hands and kissing them. He saw Carl wipe the backs of his hands down his sides.

“Do you want me to explain how I operate on people?” The boy had turned back to the game but he nodded. “I use needles and catheters, which are a type of tube, and I push them through people’s skin, and using tiny cameras down the tubes, I can see where I’m going, like I’m a tiny mole going down tunnels in the woods, and …” But he didn’t think the child was listening, so he stopped. The first batsman took a run, and they clapped.

“We’re going to win,” Carl said.

•

When he was nineteen, Rohan was sent to Sri Lanka for a few months in the summer. Preethi recovering from depression and being near death, his parents wanted him far from her—he and Preethi leaned terribly inward, toward each other and away from the world. And in Sri Lanka, he felt
an unfathomable understanding of his own identity, a place of such extremities of heat and flavour and dirt and poverty and music and laughter … extremes of himself. He found a beauty and a love within himself
for
himself, and his gratitude to his parents was immeasurable.

Nandini’s brother and his son—his cousin Maitri—took him to the top of Sigiriya, the rock fortress in the middle of the jungle, famed for its stone carvings of lion’s feet and its frescoes and fifth-century water gardens. He had been taken there as a child, but his memories of those trips were in photos and feelings: of Gehan crying to be carried, of Preethi skipping far ahead and his mother calling her back, of his father elbowing him saucily and winking at him to close his eyes when they reached the cave of the frescoes of the beautiful bare-chested ladies. When he saw the place again, he fell for it, for the whole of it: he understood its initial impetus in the brain of its creator. He understood that it was a palace of a prideful king, he understood the pride itself, for at the top of the long climb up the winding rock steps, at the summit of the red rock where the palace used to stand, he could breathe in the view across the whole of the island, it seemed, and he sucked it all in as if he were the king himself, and the beauty of what he saw belonged to him alone. In this view were gods, and he was a god, too, seeing it, and when he breathed out, his shoulders pulled back and he stood tall. The weight of London had left him, the weight of his family, of everything, and he was himself at last.

On the way down, in the shade of a natural cave sitting on a rock, he took Maitri’s face in his hands and kissed him hard. Maitri kissed him, too. And when they stopped kissing, Rohan saw his uncle’s back as he walked down the worn stone steps in front of them.

A month later, he went home. In a few weeks he would be leaving for medical school. There were friends to see, his last preparations and drinks and goodbyes, so that his father was easily forgotten—perhaps avoided, when he thought back—until the night before his last night, as Rohan was on his way out again, showered and perfumed, his father stopped him at the door. Victor was a hunched, little man by then, and his anger when it came was shocking.

“When you go,” he said, “you will not be a bugger,” and this word made Rohan laugh. It was scorching, the shock of it. “Laughing, ah?” his father said, and his hand involuntarily, it seemed to Rohan, leapt away from the stooped body and slapped Rohan’s face.

“Papa!” he whispered.

“Kissing boy,” his father replied, and hit him again. “I
know
,” he said.

Rohan remembered the kiss: it made him pull himself up, throw back his shoulders.

“You dirty, dirty bugger,” and with each word Victor hit him again. It had come from nowhere, it seemed. Rohan let him hit, let him say more words, because it didn’t hurt. At least, he made himself believe it didn’t hurt.

His father stopped when the anger ran out, and Rohan turned, left the house, and went to a nightclub with his friends and danced to electronic music until three. When he woke the next day, his father was at work, and that evening they sat down to a last family meal together as if nothing had happened.

•

Midmorning, the cricket ground was nearly full. Below them a number of hard-core England fans in white shirts
slashed with the red cross of St. George had taken their places. Directly below them were a family of four: a white father, a Sri Lankan mother in a blue floppy hat, and two browny-gold girls. The younger one read a Roald Dahl book, the older leant against her father and cheered for every run the Sri Lankans scored. The younger child occasionally put her arm through her mother’s arm and squeezed, and the mother took the hat off once and placed it on the child’s head. Rohan envied them: there was a grace to their intimacy. Every moment he thought he was closer to Carl was hard striven for, as if their relationship were a piece of work to be got through.

Relax, he said to himself. Let the child lead you. Now you’re here, you have all day. And as if Carl had heard, he leant against Rohan.

“Tired?”

“No.” Carl sat up, then slumped back. “I’m a bit, er … I’m a bit I-don’t-know-y.”

“OK.” Carl put his fingers on Rohan’s lips. “I’m still not allowed to say OK? But that’s
hard
, Carl.”

“You talk American. We
English
say ‘all right.’ ”

“Oh. O
-K
.”

“Aaahh!” Carl screamed, and Rohan laughed and hushed him. The child with the book turned and smiled. A run was taken, and they clapped politely. After a moment, Carl slumped back against him. “Shall we go and find an early lunch?”

“I’m not lunch-y yet. Let’s play questions.”

“How do you play that?”

“I ask you questions. Duh. Are you really stupid?”

“No,”
Rohan said, and wondered if he should be telling the child about respect, or how to talk to adults. It wasn’t his place, was it? Even though he was the father, it still
wasn’t up to him, was it? How easy to manipulate a child, he thought. And then it’s a lifetime’s work to undo. “Ask me a question, then.”

“You ask
me
a question first.”

“OK. Did you play this with Papa?”

“Not that type of question. Ask me a fact.”

“OK. Let me think of one.”

“No. You have to ask straight away, anything, like this,” and Carl clicked his fingers. “It’s a great game if you play
properly
.” Rohan smiled, because when Carl said the last word, he had grimaced the way Deirdre would make a face when they were married. He had no fond memories of their few years together, but with Carl in front of him, he felt nothing but affection for his ex-wife.

“You show me first, then. Ask me a question.”

“Do you think green is the best colour for cars?”

“Yes. Definitely. Now do I ask you a question?”

“No. I keep asking you until you can’t answer.”

“Go on, then.”

“How do aeroplanes fly?”

“They have hundreds of invisible hot-air balloons under their wings that get blown up by elephants farting.” Carl laughed very loudly.

“SIX!” people shouted. There was a cheer, and the mother and father below them clapped loudly, the older child holding up a card with a six on it. Rohan clapped, then took Carl’s hands and clapped them for him. The child laughed again.