Ithaca (32 page)

PART    THREE

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;
Without her you wouldn’t have set out on the road …

And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you
.
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience
,
You will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean
.

– from “Ithaca” by C.P. Cavafy

A
month later, on an idle afternoon, Zach watches a documentary about a Slovenian man called Martin Strel whom he has never heard of before. A difficult childhood had led to a life lived on the margins until one day Strel decided to start swimming the greatest rivers in the world. He began with the Danube. A few years later he swam the entire length of the Mississippi. Next, he tackled the Yangtze, one of the most polluted rivers in the world, and nearly died. Finally, in his fifties, fat and washed up, he decided he would swim possibly the most dangerous big river in the world, the Amazon, a feat no one had ever attempted before. He was no Michael Phelps, he had high blood pressure, his resources were meagre, his training poor, and he fuelled himself with wine and beer while he swam. His son, who narrates the story of the quixotic feat, says the reason his father made up his mind to swim the Amazon was because he wanted to stop the destruction of the rain forest, but nobody
quite knew how he intended to do that. If Strel knew, he wasn’t explaining it very well to his people. Everyone thought he would die, his doctor made him sign a waiver saying she would not be responsible for the consequences if he went ahead. Strel signed, and by the time he got to the end of his journey he was almost out of his mind.

He returned to Slovenia and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest went on. We are not told if this disheartens Strel, the only thing we are told is that he is done, his days as the Big River Man are over. There is no real point to this story, except that you probably shouldn’t swim the Amazon on cheap Slovenian wine. All it illustrates is that as we make our journey through life, deep down we have no real idea of why we do what we do and even less control over what the outcome will be. All we can do is make the journey.

I
n the old house in Yercaud, midway up the hill, with its timbered rafters, tiled roof, uneven floors, and its immense character, well remembered from the years he spent growing up there, Zachariah Thomas sits at an octagonal teak table in the glassed-in front verandah, drinking tea and looking out at the mist sculpting a fantastical bestiary out of the trees and shrubs in the garden. There is work to be done on the house and the garden, and he will also need to settle his parents’ affairs, which he has been guilty of neglecting. All this will take at least three months if not longer.

It’s been almost six months since he was fired from Globish. At first he did very little, simply mooned around their London flat, reading, listening to music, or watching incredibly violent Hong Kong cop movies in Mandarin (a language he does not know) without subtitles, which he found oddly soothing. Lately though, Julia and he have begun trying to figure out the future. For the moment their
finances are holding up, but it is clear he will need to find a job fairly quickly. The big decision is where that job will be – in London where the publishing industry is tanking, or here in India where the prospects are much better? But if he were to move to India, would Julia give up her job or would they have a long-distance relationship? They haven’t really talked about it, it is not a question that lends itself to easy resolution, especially so soon after their rapprochement.

He has been up since dawn, when he drove out to the cemetery to tend to the graves of his parents. And although the place could be better maintained, their final resting place is well chosen, with its long view of the hills and the mist rolling in over the trees. He has found the cemetery conducive to silent reflection, and has visited it often since coming to the Shevaroys a fortnight ago. In this quiet place, he has found that the anger and dismay that have corroded his life for much of the past six months are slowly seeping away. This morning, as he was sweeping fallen jacaranda flowers off his parents’ graves with an improvised broom of twigs, he had wondered, as he has done often since returning, about the trajectory of his life, the odd symmetry of it. Would it end here, where it had begun?

Manjula, the housekeeper, comes into the room and announces that he has a visitor, Nagesh, the postman. Nagesh has been retired for decades now, but he’s continued to keep in touch with the family, with his parents when they were alive, and now Zach whenever he visits. The invisible network of watchers that records all the comings and goings in this small town had alerted Nagesh as soon as Zach had returned,
but he had been busy with workmen the last time the old postman visited. This time he offers him tea, gives him his full attention.

Nagesh was an integral part of his adolescence when his parents first came to live in this corner of the Shevaroys. At the corner of the driveway, where it takes a sharp turn to go downhill, stands an old cypress with a branch that sticks out just low enough for a teenage boy to rest his forearms. From this vantage point he would look out across the valley to the winding road that led to town. At some point in the morning, depending on the number of stops he had had to make that day, the tiny figure of the postman would come into view, sliding jerkily down the road like a dun-coloured beetle, the bearer of good news, bad news, and all the neighbourhood gossip.

It is hard to tell how old Nagesh is, the broad flat planes of his face are only lightly dusted by wrinkles, but one eye is clouded with cataracts, and he tells Zach that his once powerful legs, which used to carry him effortlessly over the hill roads, have given way; he is practically crippled by arthritis in the winter, and he finds it painful to walk even on the good days. He has had to make the journey from Yercaud town, where he lives, by bus, where once he would have walked.

Nagesh reminisces about Zach’s parents, and then tells him about his own family, his children, and his grandchildren. The visit stretches on, but Zach is in no hurry – he realizes with some surprise that this is probably the longest he has ever spent in the company of Nagesh. It is no imposition, he has the time, but more than that he finds himself genuinely fascinated by the stories the postman has to tell, real stories of
triumph and tragedy, of lived lives, not stories strained through the filter of fiction, which has been his preferred way of seeing the world for far too long.

In the old way of the hills, Nagesh lets it be known that he has heard of Zach’s misfortune only towards the end of his visit. He leans forward, earnestly takes Zach’s hand in his own, and quotes a Tamil proverb: “The letters of fate are written on your head, you cannot escape your fate even if you shave your head.”

Ah yes, Zach thinks, fate or karma or kismet, or whatever you choose to call it, that old standby to explain why things do not work out as expected or when your life is dramatically altered. At one time he would have cast such reasoning aside, but who is he to scoff at the wisdom of the ancients, especially when it is relayed to him by a man who has had a deep and intimate view of the lives of others?

Nagesh gets up to leave, puts his hands together in a namaskaram. Zach returns the greeting and they walk down the driveway together. When they reach the old cypress on the corner he tells the postman about how he would watch out for him every day. “I know you did,” Nagesh says with a smile. “My eyes were very good back then.” Before he goes, he has one more thing to share. “I know these hills better than anyone else,” he says with pride, “from walking up and down them every day of the week. Sometimes though, because of a sudden storm or landslide or accident, I would find the road blocked, and I would have to patiently find another route to complete my rounds.

“You cannot escape your fate,” he continues, “but your
journey hasn’t ended. All that has happened is that you have been pointed in a different direction – keep on, keep on.” One more namaskaram and a refusal of Zach’s offer of a ride home, then the old man makes his way slowly down the hill.

Zach walks back to the house. The insights of the postman are not new, it’s just that somehow they have a weight to them because of the place they have been drawn from, that is why they are so compelling. And so that is what he will do. Piece by piece he will begin to reassemble his life, point it in a new direction, taking his time about it, and one day the angels will take wing again.

I would like to thank the following people (family, friends, and publishing colleagues) for helping in a myriad ways during the writing, editing, designing, and publishing of this book – K.D. and Nini Singh, Ruth and Rajendra Swamy, Dilsher and Pia Sen, Arjun and Mallika Nath, Mooma, Erik, and Shakuntala Carlquist, Doug Pepper and Susan Burns, David Robertson and Simone Lehmann, David Godwin, Pragati Sahni, Bipin Nayak, V.K. Karthika, Thomas Abraham, Michael Levine, Eva Frank, and Michael Zachs, Nilanjana Roy and Devangshu Datta, G. Mihajlovic, Khushwant Singh, Andrew Franklin, C.S. Richardson, Kendra Ward, and Anne Holloway.

I would also like to thank the following copyright holders for giving me permission to use material within copyright in the book:

“Ithaca” translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, from COLLECTED POEMS by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn,
translation copyright © 2009 by Daniel Mendelsohn. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Nineteen Eighty Four
by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1949) by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Encyclopedia of the Dead
by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim, translation copyright © 1998 by Michael Henry Heim. Used by permission of Northwestern University Press.

“Duino Elegies” from
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

The Alexandria Quartet
by Lawrence Durrell. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.