Shadow Play (15 page)

 

‘Your grandfather rarely wrote, but I grew to dread the letters from Ma. It was obvious she was ashamed to bother me, that she loathed those people as much as I did, and felt no kinship with them at all, but it was a peculiarly interlocked entrapment. She had no one else to share these occurrences with, and my father had no one to share them with besides her, even after the separation. I still have the letters: the incidents they describe are extraordinarily repetitive. Often they verge on the surreal, not in terms of the events which were without exception nauseatingly petty, but surreal for the degree of malice evident in those plots, surreal for the sickness of the minds that cooked them up. Surreal that he could even inhale in that atmosphere, this most criminally inoffensive of men, who never raised his voice to defend his own wife, not even from the filthiest of charges, some of which I only learnt about a few years ago. It shamed my mother even then to repeat them.'

‘And all this was why?' asked Seb.

‘Once again, because of the curse of the will. My great-aunt had transferred the title-deed of the house to my father, something she skilfully managed to conceal during her lifetime: otherwise
she would simply have been murdered. They wouldn't even have hired a killer – my younger uncles would have chopped her up themselves. But this curse landed squarely on Baba's head after she died, and of course in their fury and shock they turned all their heavy artillery upon him. Without sparing my mother, who'd lived apart for many years. Now the separation itself proved their goldmine. What tales they minted from it: why Ma left Baba, what she did now in her empty house to support herself.'

Seb had led me down this path, by asking about the present status of the Calcutta house, a long-running row that rumbled beneath the surface at a court hearing every couple of years, even though the guns rattled from within the trenches numerous times each day, since all the warring parties continued to live alongside one another on the disputed property. Thankfully, we'd washed our hands off it twenty years ago. The united front of his brothers and their families had collapsed the morning after my father wrote away his inheritance to one of them and moved out: now it was just plain schadenfreude to watch them rip chunks out of one another. Ma took little interest, but I can unashamedly confess to receiving reports of said behaviour with great relish from another cousin.

‘Once, Baba was accused of having vilified the family at length to his fishmonger, and the proof they presented was the apparent “testimony” of the guy who sat with his back to Baba's man and overheard the entire tirade. One of my uncles happened to be his regular customer, and the story was that he faithfully reported everything verbatim.

‘Now you won't recall meeting your grandfather, so you'll just have to accept my word as to the unlikelihood of this story, its sheer incompatibility with his personality. If only he'd been
feisty enough to complain at least to the maachchwala. But you know our neighbourhood: can you imagine a fish-market scene in Lake Market on a Saturday morning, the crowds with all the screaming, the scaling, the gutting and weighing, the top-of-your-voice contests for customers, the discarded gills, the intestines and the mud underfoot, the dogs, the boys who slice and pack everything swarming around, and my father with his whispery voice competing with that cacophony to slander the family? After my great-aunt's death, when her servant was found hanged, there was no one to shop and cook separately for Baba. It was only the conscience of this same fishmonger that kept him from being swindled each week. And even if Baba had said anything, it's a ludicrous idea that all of this would be duly recalled and reported by the other chap who sold fish to my uncle.

‘Of course, the question of truth didn't enter into it. Charges of that sort, and there were numerous other equally insane legends, like weekly episodes of some wild soap, spread like a pox down the corridors of the house from bedroom to bedroom, carried by servants and my youngest cousins. Nor did truth or its utter absence affect how much it tore up my father. It would silence him for weeks. He gave up eating in the dining room. It wouldn't occur to him to spread a few words of self-defence in retaliation, let alone some form of counter-propaganda. He would attempt to soak up the insupportable until it finally proved impossible to swallow, and then arrive a few weeks later on my mother's doorstep. No doubt Ma realized immediately the purpose of his visit, since no one came from that house with good news; yet it would take the third cup of tea for him to slowly unspool his story.'

It was the evening after our night at the pizzeria. We were traipsing round Lagoa for the second time, and the sun had just moved behind the humpbacked hills, some of which I'd always envisioned as gigantic whales run aground. As we talked, I was being reminded with renewed delight how many sides there were to Seb: he had his mother's gift for listening, but also for diverting a situation, especially as he sensed how much these recollections still wounded me. It made me feel even more embarrassed about my over-reaction the previous evening to our harmless little difference of opinion. I'd been directing the frustration I felt at Ana towards poor, unsuspecting Seb.

A girl promenaded towards us, chattering on her phone, wearing enough colours for a harlequin. She seemed wealthy and English, very West London, as if she were walking in Chiswick on Boat Race day along a different body of water: faux pink Pashmina, lime-green peasant skirt, brown suede boots, big beady fuchsia necklace, Chanel sunglasses hiding her eyes. As soon as we passed her, Seb pulled out his phone and dialled.

‘Hello, hello, is that Emergency?' he hollered. ‘I wish to report a brutal crime that has just occurred here in only slightly narrowing daylight. Yes, I'm the victim, and the assailant is sauntering away casually even as we speak.'

After a brief pause, he continued as I watched, probably gaping. ‘This evening at six-thirty my fashion sense was savagely assaulted in an entirely unprovoked attack, that too by a foreigner, a gringa, a guest of our country. The initial diagnosis isn't promising, and I advise that you send an ambulance straight behind the police. It is very urgent, especially as she looks like a serial offender, and I have almost no doubt she will strike again tonight, possibly within the next few minutes.'

Seb pulled things like that with a straight face, without breaking stride. Afterwards I realized he'd dialled his mother: it was a comfort and counselling service they provided each other, the two queens, to help them through the first, most traumatic moments of shock.

Yet the same boy never flinched from anything difficult. In fact, he was hungry for every story I shared from my Calcutta life, especially if it involved his grandparents. He adored his Thamma. She was some sort of paragon for him.

‘You know, when I first met your mother I would often secretly compare our backgrounds. She was exactly the person she remains, already fully formed, and I wondered from where she derived that unassailable cheerfulness, that unerring instinct for handling everything just so, with precisely the right detachment. She never appeared to carry any excess weight on her shoulders: she just didn't give the impression of being subject to the law of gravity. Everything seemed possible for her, and by extension everything seemed possible around her, within her aura. I adored her too much to envy her, but it was as though she never had any doubts about her entitlements, and no scars of disappointment or loss. The next thing she wanted would invariably be there, at exactly the right moment. When we spoke about childhood, and our families, initially I was ashamed. It seemed to me that all her confidence was founded upon the successes of her father – the imperiously benevolent master of the glorious fazenda I could only imagine, the provider of those idyllic holidays she described, and the trips to New York and Europe.

‘So I'd conceal my real feelings, my abhorrence of falling victim to what I'd already grown to privately term the curse of the Chakrabortis. I never mentioned the sensation that I
couldn't have escaped far enough to feel safe, safe from the infection of the ill-luck stories that arrived from home in a relentless fount, long before the era of ISD, stories solely of disease, malice, greed, desperation and failure. Which ignored great-uncle is languishing from an incurable illness because he can't afford the treatment; which cousin has been cheated out of some measly amount by his brother; which aging uncle has lost his job as a petty clerk and is now begging my mother to shelter his entire family in her tiny flat. And worse, much worse, suspicions of incest, allegations hurled at one another of the most twisted sexual connections, all within the fold of the mythic Indian family, whose embrace I couldn't escape even in England. No letters ever brought news of any special achievements, or of someone who'd attempted something beautiful and unusual, or simply of someone who was happy. And every last character in that cast, both the oppressors and the victims, was an acquaintance or a relative.

‘Some of those episodes are so sordid and frankly unrealistic, I never used them in any of my novels. Did you know you have an uncle who is so fixated upon his daughter, your cousin, two years older than you, that he follows her to college to make sure that's where she really goes, and then spies upon her after classes to see which boys she speaks to? He takes half-days off from work at random to do this, he monitors her mobile, decides what she should wear, everything. His wife, a cousin of mine, confided in my mother. She's desperate to send her daughter to another city to study.

‘It wasn't as though there was no one decent at home, or generous, or loving. But I was too young and insecure myself not to equate character and circumstance, not to blame everyone for
their miserable condition, and to see that sometimes survival, in some recognizably human form, is the only possible success story. Or perhaps everything was too close to the skin: I feared succumbing to identical weaknesses in myself, the same excuses for lifelong mediocrity, or worse, a reactive impulse to bully and oppress if I ever had the chance.

‘Because all these tales were topped by that of my father's, a man who had completely surrendered control over his own fate, whose example I feared as much as it repelled me, even though we never once came near to discussing it. Sometimes, standing beside Ana, especially in my darker moments, I felt like a fool running on a stairway, forever struggling to keep pace with her as she effortlessly sailed upwards on an escalator.'

‘You never gave her the chance to empathize.' Seb spoke calmly, unsurprised, as if he was familiar with these stories and justifications, though I had never shared them with him before.

‘That's true. I honestly feared I would scare her off. You see, from everything I heard I believed home for Ana was actually the ideal that the Christmas industry defines it to be: the escape from the trials of the world, the sanctuary from all its pressures. How could I explain that for me and Ma it had always symbolized the opposite: the most demanding test, the focal point of our repeated violation?

‘In fact, I went further. Despite numerous pleas, I kept Ana from visiting India with one excuse after another until well after the success of my first novel, which meant we could stay at the Grand, invite Baba over every other day by telephone, and take Ma on a holiday to Himachal. Instead we visited Brazil thrice, at my insistence, and each time I was more certain this was
where I was meant to be, where I should have been born. It had so many of the things I loved about home – the light, the trees, the warmth and the chatter – but it was two continents away from everyone I hated.'

‘And it didn't bother you what the Bomber did, in order to provide this paradise?'

‘Sweetheart, when one is a tourist, one gratefully accepts the luxury of not interpreting, of not taking responsibility for one's surroundings, and so it proved with me. Whatever is wrong with Brazil, it's not my country. Of course, my early visits were during the dictatorship, yet I emphasized everything that was beautiful, and allowed my brain a holiday, both in the house and when we walked around in the city. This happy approach continued almost until you were born, when we decided to move back, and this became my home.'

‘Did you never feel you'd abandoned Thamma? What about missing out on all those years with her? You could have shielded her from so much. Or at least, you could have brought her to live abroad with you. I know Mum would have welcomed her.'

‘Hey, that's a lot of explanation being demanded for one evening. You remind me of your mother's lawyer, only you're far better looking. Ana will tell you how many times we invited your Thamma to join us in London, and then here in Rio, long before you were born. She always refused because her friends were in Calcutta. She loved her teaching job, and felt she'd be unemployable in Britain at fifty. And if she didn't work, how would she make friends? Overnight she'd turn into an old lady, she insisted, and then steadily become a burden, because she'd depend on us for everything – money, conversation, company.
In Calcutta she had her own circle, even though it included the crap Baba brought in periodically with him.