Shadow Play

Shadow Play

Rajorshi Chakraborti

MINOTAUR BOOKS

A Thomas Dunne Book
New York

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and
events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS
.

An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

SHADOW PLAY
. Copyright © 2008 by Rajorshi Chakraborti. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. For information, address
St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chakraborti, Rajorshi.

   Shadow play / Rajorshi Chakraborti.—1st U.S. ed.

        p. cm.

   “A Thomas Dunne book.”

   ISBN 978-0-312-64234-1

 1. Novelists—Fiction. I. Title.

   PR9499.4.C433S53 2010

   823'.92—dc22

2010012887

First published in India by HarperCollins
Publishers
India,
a joint venture with The India Today Group

First U.S. Edition: August 2010

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

 

 

 

 

For Didi and Kishoreda

Editor's Note

B
OOK
O
NE
: The Writer of Rare Fictions
(The Uncollected Memories of Raj Chakraborti)

Preface

Two Old Women

B
OOK
T
WO
: The Perfect Worker
(The Unusual Career of Charles Robert Pereira)

No One Else Saw Anything

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Early Errors

The Perfect Worker: Pursued!

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Early Errors

The Perfect Worker: Inside the Whale

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Later Losses

The Perfect Worker: Inside the Whale

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Later Losses

The Perfect Worker: London Diary: Martina's Story

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Self-Evidence

The Perfect Worker: London Diary: Asif's Story

The Writer of Rare Fictions: ‘Unknown Author Dies'

The Perfect Worker: The Turn

The Writer of Rare Fictions: Shadow Play

The Perfect Worker: Shadow Play

The Writer of Rare Fictions: ‘So Great a Sweetness…'

The Perfect Worker: Brooklyn Pyre

Editor's Note

An Epilogue: I'm Not Rosebud

An Ordinary Story

The Ghost with Lovely Eyes…

…And a Story about Myself

Acknowledgments

I have been associated with Raj's work for twenty-six years, from one brown paper envelope to another. The first one arrived without a return address on my desk in July 1980. I was an assistant at a small publisher's, and we had a hell of a time tracking down this crazy talent, which made it not entirely unlike the events of the last few months. This lad had troubled himself to inform us, in a long list at the bottom of his letter, of all the other houses to which he was sending his work, but omitted to mention where he was doing this fierce dispatching from. The ambitious and wide-ranging list seemed the outcome of dubious research – he'd included a pair of Californian soft-porn purveyors, and another mid-Western publisher of motivational fiction best known for fables illustrating the hard-won joys of premarital abstention, or the long way back to Jesus from hookers, wife-beating and drink – as well as motive: perhaps he meant to rush us all into signing him up pronto, terrified by the competition. The story goes that I actually had to take someone from a rival house out to dinner under false pretexts and later spend the night with her before I was passed on his whereabouts.

On rereading that I notice how I might be misunderstood. It sounds as though I'm grumbling. Therefore I should clarify:
sleeping with her was in no way a necessary or unpleasant part of the task. At my age I would hate to anger the gods of getting lucky. So if you're listening, no ingratitude is intended towards any favours shown me, past or forthcoming.

Perhaps this isn't the occasion to be silly, no matter how excited in anticipation I feel. Not knowing what I do now, I had to drive straight to the police, in order for the unopened envelope and its contents to be pored over, fingerprinted, analysed CSI fashion. After all, though no charges (against Raj, or anyone else) have been filed, a murder inquiry remains very much open. I experienced no sense of disloyalty: Raj would have been aware I had no other option. The resealed package was returned after a fortnight, and I was permitted finally to read, edit and publish as I thought fit. I have no idea about their findings, whether they kept any of the pages for themselves, or what it means, months later, that Raj remains without a return address.

There hasn't really been much editing for me to do here, not of the usual sort. Raj enclosed a handwritten note with firm instructions. Pay attention now: this might be useful. You'll find that the chapters alternate between two distinct books, the second of which is clearly fiction. Book One however is a memoir, and the idea of alternating chapters rather than publishing them as separate volumes was Raj's. In his letter he insisted on this particular sequence. Why Book One isn't chronological he justifies in his preface, and I've respected his demand to re-arrange nothing.

I guess all of this means he intended a confusion of categories: he wanted Books One and Two to meet, merge somewhere near the horizon. What he'll hopefully divulge
when he is here again and taking questions is why – what began resonating so powerfully between his own plight and that of his character? Was it literary and thematic compulsion, or an urgency of a different order?

But none of those itches need scratching just yet. For now you can tell I'm pleased to an unseemly degree that he is safe, he is in the clear, and well enough to be writing. Beyond that, for those of us who've found it difficult getting on without him, this volume, whatever its status as fact or story, will be a welcome re-encounter.

At this point, before you begin, there are a few rumours I should lay to rest. Some of the stuff that's been coming up on search-engines to do with this matter has been preposterous (especially in the last couple of months, ever since news of this manuscript broke). To be specific, first, it was
not
found by a tramp inside a bin in Manhattan, who recalled another deadbeat scribbling away for the better part of three months in a doorway, before he jumped off Brooklyn Bridge to his death. Nor was it, as has been hotly speculated on at least a few blogs, delivered to me by agents of any corporation or government, friendly or hostile, complete with specific sequencing instructions, which might contain codes to various concealed parties. As I said before, it arrived through the post in a brown envelope, and you can be sure I'm on the job myself, nosing around for further information, hoping even to come across the right person to sleep with once more.

 

Ellery King

London, 2006

The Writer of Rare Fictions

(The Uncollected Memories of Raj Chakraborti)

 

 

 

 

He owns the world who knows its law,

He who feels its truth loves it.

–
Rabindranath Tagore

 

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance, and this (fantasy?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

God has gilded me all over. I like that, God has gilded me all over.

–
Moses Elkanah Herzog in Saul Bellow's
Herzog

 

When such as I cast out remorse,

So great a sweetness flows into the breast.

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything.

And everything we look upon is blest.

– ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul',
W. B. Yeats

Reaching out to people, reaching right inside of them – that's my thing, it's what I do, it's what I've been world-famous for. That's the legend about me, and there's no point in lying, God knows I loved that legend. For over twenty years, I nourished and watered it with more care than I ever invested in my own son. Yet I'm about to take an axe to it in public, to record my own fall and understand my numerous failings. Under such circumstances, you'll have to forget chronology and forgive incompleteness, and accept my excuse that this is how the memories stack up and highlight themselves in my head.