Shadow Play (12 page)

Yes, they are warm, yes, they are welcoming: it is obvious from every expression how pleased they are to see us. Squash is served and we spread ourselves out in their drawing room, Sr. da Lima's cane hung up behind him on a hook in the wall, its bottom muddy, just like our shoes. The lady steps in to fetch the highlight of the evening, their fifteen-month-old, who I've been informed they adopted after years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive. It has clearly brought joy to their home, but far greater than the surprise of hosting Sr. da Lima in Calcutta is my shock at recognizing the silent child immediately. He is curious, his eyes wander, he is swaddled for warmth, but even at a distance it is evident he is disabled exactly as it had been predicted by the doctors. Even at a distance it is evident he has Ana's round eyes and the burgeoning button-version of her unique nose, and what we'd imagined would be the perfect combination of
the shades of our skin and hair. And if there is any chance I am wrong, Sr. da Lima's cry within that absolutely slowed-down, silent instant seals my realization.

But Ma is smiling, even Baba seems pleased, and the pride of our hosts is boundless. So this is what happened to the child Ana bore against my wishes, the child every test had warned would be disabled. This is what my mother had in mind when she invited Ana to spend the last few months with her and deliver the baby in Calcutta. This is what happened in a dream one afternoon, in a universe where everything recombined differently, to my only son Sebastião C. da Lima.

 

Perhaps the extent of my imprisonment within my new life is best evoked by describing one of my attempts to escape. One day, within a week of arriving in the city of J., I took an innocuous-seeming walk beside the six-lane avenue that bisected its centre, secretly determined to continue past its end into the countryside beyond. It was only after an hour of heading southwards along blocks that continued for half a kilometre at a time – soiled white façades four floors high, with about a thousand windows each – that the city abruptly ended: a restaurant that jutted out in a triangle formed the final corner of the very last building, and then there was a shallow muddy river that acted as a natural boundary beyond which the road petered out into red earth.

Various trails branched off in different directions, separated by dusty vegetation. I picked one of them for no particular reason and continued until nightfall. Every five hundred metres or so, the thick bush and the bamboo groves were broken briefly by four or five huts – white walls, red-tiled roofs, and woven fencing all around. The same sights repeated themselves twenty times: old men and women sitting outside their doors while children of four and five ran around me in their games on the path below. All I could do was nod or wave my hand in greeting. I had none of
the language yet, and I didn't see a single car once I was outside the city, but I kept going out of some obstinacy that refused to acknowledge the hopelessness of my plan. I would possibly have continued even in the darkness if the path itself had not ended: there was nothing ahead but open, burnt, red country dotted with small outcrops of rock and scrub. And all along in a curving line from where I stood ran the verge of the forest, as if I would have arrived at this horizon no matter which path I took.

Or perhaps the true extent of my imprisonment emerges when I consider my daily life within it. I was assigned rooms a few minutes west of the main avenue in the old quarter, and was woken up late on my first afternoon by Gustavo, who introduced himself as an English teacher and thereafter became my regular point of liaison. He was short, cheerful and round where Bernardo had been strong and lissom enough to swing in huge arcs from the end of a long rope, but they both had a disarming openness in their eyes, which made them either as typically relaxed as I now expected these operatives to be, or the truly ingenuous pawns of an incalculable organization.

Gustavo had a city-map for me, a Portuguese grammar and a bilingual dictionary, two contact numbers, and a sealed letter full of instructions to the effect that there were none. I was to lead as normal a life as I was accustomed to in London: there were absolutely no restrictions on my movements or freedom of association. I was given five thousand reais with which to establish myself, but it was understood that like all immigrants I too would attempt to learn the language and find myself employment as soon as possible.

Gustavo smiled as if utterly unaware of the circumstances in which I'd been transported to Brazil, and asked me if I was
an engineer. He added that he would be very happy to take me out in the evenings after work to show me around the city. In fact, that first week he called three times, always with genuine-sounding enthusiasm and mischief in his voice, and disappointment at hearing my excuses. I asked him about the letter when he visited, and he claimed it had been handed to him at school; in the past, on many occasions, he had been assigned to act as a guide for foreigners. My heart momentarily beat faster at the thought that there might be others I could contact, but he immediately clarified this was the first time someone was to stay longer than a tourist. That was why he'd asked if I was an engineer, because he had heard stories of fresh prospecting missions about to be launched not far from the city. When I asked if he knew Bernardo, describing him and mentioning that he too spoke excellent English, Gustavo grinned naughtily and said I had misunderstood him. It wasn't as though there were so few people who spoke English that they would all know each other, or meet as a club for that reason.

The first few days I kept to myself and within my own quarter, venturing no further than the main boulevard to the east. I shopped at the store on the corner where people hung around and chatted as if it was a bar, and lived off croissant-like rolls, bananas and a delicious spreadable cheese. After dinner I filled the evenings on the balcony of my flat, composing a diary for the first time in my life. But it wasn't a record of the present, not yet; instead, I jotted down pell-mell anything important that passed through my head about London – stories, people, places, with no particular care for chronology, as if they were all in some danger of being erased.

Usually when I completed an episode, I took a break by studying Gustavo's map, and my attention would return to the
street-life below – mostly the motor garage and the open-air bar whose activity occupied the opposite pavement. Then, on the fifth morning, I undertook the walk I have already described. I knew I would never make it back unnoticed to the airport, which was anyhow in another city, and the remaining alternative would have been the bus-station, where someone was probably assigned to look out for me. On the last day of that first week, I had a letter ready in my hand as I entered the post-office: it was addressed to Patty, care of the Three Bells. In the first draft I had told her
everything
, inserting a sheaf of pages from my new diary – that went back even further than the annual nights on the commons, all the way to my youth in India – to explain why I had always been so impossibly sealed-off. In the version I was about to post I said merely that I'd had to move to Brazil for professional reasons – there was a sudden opening for some editing work that was likely to last a few months.

There actually arrived a moment during my second week when I decided to try and stop being miserable. I had been out by now with Gustavo, though no further than the bar opposite. By night it was easy to lie back and be overcome by all that had enveloped me – pursue wild plans or ward off wilder fears – but not in that bar or at the store. The ease and familiarity that had developed over a few months in The Three Bells seemed to be taken for granted by my third day here, even though I was as reticent as ever. I was immediately deemed ‘Doutor' by everyone, and the stream and variety of questions and opinions on all matters relating to England and London were unstoppable. Besides the curiosity, there was a certain goodwill underlying every overture after Gustavo mentioned that I had come here to stay. But the moment that really sealed my status
was when I unthinkingly got onto the subject of being Indian. There were a few loud and knowing exclamations, which went no further than the repetition of the word India, and people nodded their heads as if attempting to conceive the distance I had travelled to be here. Someone knowledgeable asked me if I was Hindu, to which I replied that I was born a Catholic.

‘A Catholic? In India? What's your full name?'

‘Charles Robert Pereira.'

‘But that's a Brazilian name, Doutor. Was your family Brazilian?'

I explained about Goa and how the Portuguese had only left forty years ago. Gustavo translated for everyone else.

‘So, Doutor, you speak Portuguese?'

‘Not really, because I grew up in Bombay where everyone spoke English. My grandmother spoke it at home so I know a few words. But I don't understand much any more because this was thirty years ago.'

‘Mas fala Doutor, fala alguma coisa em Português,' insisted Gustavo, and I could tell the others were just as curious.

So I said the few things I genuinely remembered, and a few others that had been brought back to memory during my time here and from looking into the dictionary. The roof came down; those at the table invited other people to listen, and passers-by stopped to see what was so funny. The mechanics showed up from the garage. I had to repeat my stock of expressions five times. I had never attracted such an audience before or had such an effect on anyone.

‘A Hindu, from India, born a Catholic, lived in London, moved to Brazil, speaking Portuguese with a Portuguese accent' was how Gustavo summed up my curiosity value. ‘God, now I've seen everything.'

That evening, and for many more to follow, whenever I was introduced to new faces, this sentence was repeated with emphasis on each of its different parts, as if the speaker paused to underline the implication of each separate link to his audience, so that the cumulative significance of the whole would register satisfactorily. It became the standard line with which to present me:
this
was the man sitting before them, such had been the arc of his life. It didn't matter that I never quite rose to those heights of charisma again, and after a while I began trying my hand at broken Portuguese in what probably resembled the local accent. Even more than the occasions when I was actually sitting in the bar, the thought of belonging there overcame me when I was alone in my room. Horizontal in the semi-darkness, I would re-experience my delight at the stir I occasionally caused when one of my risk-fraught attempts to find the mot juste – from combining (on the spot, at a furious rate of thought) what little Portuguese I had picked up with whatever I imagined could be translated from English – would take off so spectacularly that it shot over the edge of the known language itself.

One such instance was my dredging up of the little-employed word ‘conseqüentemente' at the end of an argument I was making. My friend Victor asked me to repeat myself. Then he walked over to the bar and used it in another sentence. People came up and congratulated me throughout the day, for the rate of progress I was making and the choice terms I was employing along the way. ‘Demais, Doutor, demais. Con-seqüente-mente. Really, too much. The truly rare Portuguese of an Indian visitor.' How many times that week did I hear someone round off a paragraph with the flourishing, savoured use of my sonorous archaism?

I knew that the extent of my emotion was both incongruous and disproportionate the first time I heard my name being called to join them downstairs. I even dismissed perfectly legitimate suspicions about how many of them were actually paid to befriend and watch me: what could I do, how could I tell, and why should I miss out on the friendship of those who were genuinely warm, especially when I had no idea how long I was going to be kept here? Surely the professionals had to be in the minority – this was after all a real, living city going unconcernedly about its business. Any other possibility seemed too grotesque to consider.

Often I was asked questions about what they saw as my extraordinary travels, and I replied through Gustavo with discreet stories, but on the evenings when he couldn't come, I had no more to say than my pocketful of words. Yet these were the occasions when a smile or an arm around my shoulder moved me most. Sometimes I could make out that one of my stories was being retold at a nearby table. Within a few weeks the novelty would wear off, but by then my place at the bar had become permanent. For my part, I began treating it as another room in my own house: I would take what I called my ‘homework' there, adding chapters to my London diary or my study of vocabulary and grammar. I regularly ate there – the pork stew, the fried chicken, the daily rice and beans and manioc chips accompanied by the occasional omelette. I would consider the changes that had crept over me when I saw myself shouting out a word to another table, asking for its meaning. I had never raised my voice for anything in a public place before.