Shadow Play (25 page)

I furnished myself with several reasons – originating from long before Sharon entered my life – why I too could well be in their sights. After all, you only had to examine my career cursorily to agree that the same track record which qualified me to be her aide, might also make me an equally undesirable irritant to such a coalition. Unknown as their names were to me, wasn't it supremely likely that I had baited more than one of them in a column at one time or the other? If big shots were ganging up and issuing ‘fatwas', was it so improbable my name would be mentioned during the awarding of contracts? And the threat I posed was far more specific – it would not have escaped their notice that Sharon visited me twice within four days. Perhaps they too were hunting for the notes of
The Leap
. What if Sharon had made me a partner and revealed to me where they were? That would explain their gesture of intimidation, the overcoated figure charging at me with such menace. What worse might unfold if I remained passive?

Once I allowed myself to proceed along those lines, the pieces fell into place thicker and faster. Day or night, various sentences and portions of text from different articles and books of mine drifted through my head. In my personal crusade to be involved with everything around me, while remaining rigorously independent-spirited, I had given so many influential parties
reasons for wishing me dead. Just as one example, I remembered my syndicated series of articles on last year's gang wars in Rio, in which I prominently discussed before an international audience da Lima's (yes, my erstwhile pa-in-law's) interest in encouraging the escalation of the drug feuds of the past three decades, both to eliminate rivals as well as to influence outcomes in forthcoming local and national elections.

In the same vein, numerous sections floated before me from hundreds of columns about India, and there were other opinions, countless others: on dams and patents, treaties and their unreported clauses, Indo-Pak relations, Islamic machismo, landless movements, privatization, military rule and caste and education, tax havens in Monaco and refugee camps in Lebanon, the geopolitics of water in the Occupied Territories and of hydrocarbons in central Asia, Maoists and hospitals in Bengal – a different subject each fortnight for the past fifteen years. Understand me clearly: I wasn't exceptional for writing about these subjects, and certainly not alone in any of my views. What singled me out was that I had written about such thorny matters regularly in at least three different countries, with no ideological consistency or programmatic loyalty whatsoever. It was a career which at different times succeeded in pissing off
everyone
.

And what had probably been especially irksome was that I was friends with many of those I bitterly criticized, and friends with many of their enemies. I was disloyal, duplicitous, ungrateful, impossible to predict or control. Which is why that night and whenever I have thought about it since, whenever I have begun a mental list of those with reasons (and the required reach) to organize my disposal on such a scale, I came up with
so many names that after a while I gave up, convinced of the preposterousness of such an exercise.

Because the implications were as absurd as they were terrifying, evidence either of a frightening degree of insanity, or worse, of truth! I was discovering that I couldn't bring myself to rule out almost any of the powerful people I knew. It could well have been someone acting alone, potent enough to undertake such steps out of sheer irritation, without any need of consultation or alliances; or perhaps a tacit syndicate had been formed by various parties with nothing else in common, who had agreed to co-operate covertly in this small, one-off and mutually beneficial matter. Even at sixteen, my son had spotted the danger when he repeatedly wondered how it didn't bother me that I was considered ‘friends' with everyone, ‘people who hated each other, as well as people hated by everyone else'. And Ana, who hadn't spoken to her own father in fifteen years, would reply to him that it had never been enough for me to be a writer, that I had always considered it a minor-league occupation to sit behind a desk and merely describe the world. No, his father had to go out and play-act with the big boys who ‘ran' it.

Now suddenly, after years of surprisingly elastic tolerance, they weren't play-acting any more. They had decided – correctly – that my friendship had gained them nothing while it cost very little to finish me. Quite characteristically, the hunt had begun without any last chances or warnings. Their cunning was remarkable: they could have simply blown a vehicle or room of mine into orbit. But that would have betrayed the involvement of major players and initiated an equally high-profile investigation. Sharon's murder and the (probable) attempt to attack me in New York deliberately had the mark of the crazed amateur working
alone. When the real blow came, the detectives would go off looking for a non-existent Mark David Chapman, rather than a much murkier front-man working for an inconceivable coalition of interests. Plus, in the meantime, they earned themselves the inexpensive pleasure of watching me scurry.

I had always wanted to dance with wolves: apart from all my hot air to Sharon about curiosity and involvement, I suppose I simply had a childish weakness for the glamour, the thrill of sheer proximity to those who jerked the strings of power. Well, here I was finally savouring a first-hand prey's experience of the very qualities I wished to understand, tasting the whip-end of the ruthlessness that had made my ‘friends' the ‘never encountered but ever present kings of the world.'

There was one other remarkable night during that first week, which might have been thoroughly incongruous or a gift only made possible by my particular state of mind. I was lying in the dark as usual, unable to sleep, when I began to dwell upon this or that instant from among my memories. It began predictably enough, with sex – I was idly trying to hold down different phases of my life by evoking the women from the period. But an hour later I found myself on my back, enchanted by what had passed, yet certain that I hadn't slept. I realized I had been going over entire first encounters, recounting first undressings frame by frame: kisses, expressions, my first glance at the curves of various shoulders and breasts, each so particular that the phantom women actually began to move, touch me back, alter expressions and speak. What returned overwhelmingly in the darkness during that bewitched hour, along with the varied
settings, the rooms, the voices and life-stories, was the force of the obvious yet suddenly vivid truth that there had been
other people
– each of whom had drawn close to me, but had somehow long since vanished. And people led on to people, and places, and walks, and shops and habits once so regular and present, yet carelessly unvisited in decades.

When I finally fell asleep that night, I dreamt of flying over a much emptier earth. I was showing my mother around Edinburgh, where I wrote my first novel. It lay below us, recognizable enough at first, though different bits of the city had been reordered in the usual manner of dreams, discontinuous in space as much as in time, so that we wandered through New Town streets I knew well, only to turn and arrive among crowds in a misplaced market scene from five hundred years ago. Later on, I was flying with my father beside me, in a light pre-Great War aircraft in extremely watery yellow-green sunshine over what I recognized to be the rolling fields and the shallow loch surrounding the volcanic plug upon which Edinburgh castle would one day come to stand. And afterwards I was skimming exhilaratingly unsupported on a clear day over an empty, densely forested Gangetic plain, rich and wetly green, before heading gradually over the Himalayan foothills and its higher, barer areas towards the first traces of snow.

As this chewed-up, discontinuous account nears its close, I see it has not been without rhythm or the binding undercurrents of common themes. I find that I have meditated insistently on the recurrent fact of absence, my absence from almost all the lives that have mingled with mine – the important ones as much as the episodic; an absence of care, understanding and attention which seems to have added up lapse by lapse to an immense absence from my own life. Who were my parents? What became
of my father after we quit that room? How did my mother really feel about my decision not to live in India? What were Ana's reasons for not returning to me? Who is Sebastião becoming, and where was I while all this happened? How was Vera killed by Bryan whilst I lived between them?

In trying to reach out to everyone, I find that I repeatedly failed to arrive inside of anything. Far from being the ringmaster of a varied, stupendous circus, it looks as though I might well have been one of its dumbest animals. So vainly absorbed with my gift for juggling multiple lives, countries, masks and disguises – joker, dabbler, genius, clown, born free and impossible to imprison – I ended up being taken in by everything and noticing nothing.

Perhaps it has been an error that will ultimately prove to be deadly, yet today I'm moved by the thought that so much of my unvisited, under-lived real life returned to me that night just as I was on the verge of losing everything, and I interpret those later dreams as an obvious longing for escape. But then I must have been swayed off-direction by the winds because I landed south of where I was headed, in the tiny narrow pathways of the medieval temple town of Bhubaneshwar. I wandered away from the market crowds around the temple walls, looking for a suitable point from where I could again launch myself and fly off unnoticed. I was afraid of being shot down as a wizard or a shaitan in case I was spotted.

 

(A sequence of dreams noted in my diary, from April 2006, just after I left the flat in New York)

 

I've dreamt of Ana often these past few weeks. The first time was many nights ago, and I was trudging a long distance over various
parts of the city. Ana never actually appeared that night, but it was a dream about her, because I knew throughout my walk that she was my destination. I covered many bridges: we lived in a hilly, medieval town and once I even came across a cricket match being played on an extremely sloping crossroads, where the bowler sent the ball down to the batsman a few feet below him, and the fielders were positioned down the smaller streets that branched away. The surface beneath their feet was cobbled.

I remember wooded lanes along railway lines, and greeting a group of friends seated outside a café behind a white fence, separated from me by a fast-flowing river. Though it was a fine day, I shouted that I couldn't stop and even told them why. Most of it was in the daytime but it seems to have grown darker as I walked. At one stage, I raced down a wide grassy slope on a bicycle until I arrived at the gates of a huge estate. I followed a red earth road and by now it was pouring, so I took shelter in a folly designed to resemble a Roman temple. Later I was still walking, but found myself trapped in a snowstorm on broad eighteenth-century streets that resembled Kensington or Edinburgh but all opened in parallel onto vast white meadows at either end. I tried each of them but failed to find a way out of this open maze.

I remained awake for a while, trying to fix a print of every stage before it faded from memory. When I fell asleep again, I was miraculously returned to its sequel. After a brief climb through the streets of the medieval centre – where the buildings tower to one side and I can see the town spread out in the valley on the other, with a train arriving through the woods covering the opposite hill – I emerge through a narrow alley on my way to a restaurant in which I work, and who should I bump
into but Ana and one of her men. She is aware of my purpose, and despite being with her present boyfriend glances at me sympathetically, draws me aside and gives me a promise and a time. That is when I wake up, exultant at first, but gradually I realize there might never be such a meeting.

But I am proved wrong a few nights later when I arrive at her house, which is just beyond a small bridge over a narrow river. She lives in a mock castle, with windows and turrets at its many corners. The thick wooden door is open, and I walk up the wide stone stairs to the first floor. I'm about to continue upwards when I notice Sergio, whom I haven't seen or thought about in twenty-five years, packing his things in a small room in one corner. He is working by the early morning light, and his suitcases are on his bed that occupies most of the tiny area. Sergio was in love with Ana when I met her, and even though he didn't get anywhere and I assumed his place, I decide his leaving must be a good sign. But I'm cordial enough to disguise it, and stand by the door making polite conversation to keep him company while he packs.

This is when I notice Ana walking down the stairs from the second floor. She is radiant even at such an early hour. As I approach her, she signals to me to keep quiet; we should slip out while her man is asleep.

But slip out we don't, and our date never begins because that is when I wake up. I spend the whole of that day inconsolably weeping, even though I'm supposed to be on the lookout for assassins, and am expecting another interview with detectives from London that evening. It is as though I'm being toyed with and denied even in my dreams, or that even in fantasy I'm unable to elude my fate.

For many nights afterwards there is just darkness, whether my eyes are open or shut. Then suddenly Ana and I are on the streets of Calcutta, near Golpark, a few minutes from my childhood neighbourhood. It is almost dawn, there is no one else, and I find her very close to me – we are walking with our arms around each other. And now we are kissing, and though it is a dream I vividly sense my lips melting: I feel myself turning weightless. The kiss continues forever and I know it is a good omen. This is the return my life has been leading up to. Everything else has come true, the false starts, the disappointments, the delays. I reason even as I kiss that after all these years I would not have been granted such a meeting if it is to culminate in nothing.