No Country: A Novel (34 page)

As he looked up in confusion, I gave him the letter and watched him unwrap the silk swath and gaze transfixed at the name and address and the postal seal. He read as if the world around us on Elliot Road had ceased to exist. When finally he laid down the final page and looked up, I saw tears streaming down his face.

“I had a sister,” he said. “Maeve.”

He was mourning his dead. I had pored over the letter on the way back, and could easily recall the creak of the mast, the occasional snap of the sail, as if my sailing from Barisal had merged somehow with Padraig’s voyage.

“My father could never bring himself to speak of his grievous visit to Ireland. He must have thought of it every day of his life. What must he have felt, each time he called my name! Yet he needed to remember.”

“Do you think he ever discussed all this with Grandmother Kalidasi?” I asked doubtfully.

“I am sure he did,” said my father simply. “If you had known your grandmother, you would understand how soothing she was. Otherwise my restless father would never have retrieved what peace of mind he did. He learned to love again.”

“Then why did she not tell you about Maeve and Brigid?”

“I cannot tell, Son. I think she did not know how, and thought
my father should do it, and then the time never came. That is how stories are lost in all families.”

“But sometimes,” my father added in the silence, “our stories come looking for us.”

Mathur brought in the lamps.

“I need to get something else done,” I told my father.

“You will be back, won’t you, Son?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes,” I told him firmly. “Yes, I will come back to you, Baba.”

•  •  •

T
EGART WAS NOT
in his office. As I walked downstairs, Colson saw me and gestured towards the basement. “He’s expected there,” he said, surprised that I had not snapped him the customary salute.

I went to the basement interrogation room, where a snared suspect was being interviewed, but Tegart had not arrived yet. There was a strong smell of urine on the floor where the suspect was hog-tied, the soles of his feet crisscrossed with welts. A naked electric bulb dangled overhead, and a pasty-white gecko on the ceiling made a clicking sound, its blue organs pulsing within its translucent skin. Biswas and Lumsden walked in, nodded at me, and sat down sipping tea, oblivious of the others. The men I had worked with for seven years seemed different to me, feral and predatory.

“How much like them have I become in these years?” I wondered, gritting my teeth, smoking Woodbine after Woodbine as I waited.

I felt Tegart’s pale eyes on me the moment he walked in. “Has he said anything useful yet, Lundy?” he barked at Monty Lundy, who was holding a cane.

“He keeps repeating that his name is Sharma and he came from Chhapra by train three days ago looking for work and knows nobody.” Monty, a recent recruit, was sallow from exhaustion.

“Tch, tch,” Tegart commented, “but observe.” Effortlessly he kicked Sharma’s kidney. The man made no noise, but began twitching, teeth biting down in involuntary jitters on his bleeding tongue.

“Does he know where the post office is?” asked Tegart. “Other details? If he’s really come from Chhapra, he’s written home. When did his train arrive? Was that time checked with the railway boys? Did he come through Howrah or Sealdah station?”

“Er, no, Sir,” conceded Lundy, overwhelmed.

“Information, Lundy. Everything else is unimportant,” said Sir. “Everyone out of here.” He slammed the door behind us.

The door opened after just twenty minutes. I could hear Sharma moaning inside.

“We have the place and person—
we
pick the time to raid their nest: Just after midnight,” Sir announced as he turned to leave with the group. He opened his palm, looking absently at a couple of dice, then tossed them aside.

“Come up to my office, Aherne,” he said, starting for the stairs.

Standing in the stairwell to collect my thoughts, I lit another cigarette. In the brief flare of the match, I saw that the dice were, in fact, human teeth.

•  •  •

“Y
OU GOT ILL.”
Tegart stared keenly at me. The light in his office was harsh.

“Yes, but I completed my job first. I got sick. I recovered.”

“Ah . . . I was wondering if . . . if I needed to send Biswas to clean up after you.”

“It is done.”

“
Consummatum est
, eh? We do not need to think of Santimoy anymore?”

I looked him steadily in the eye. “No, Sir, no need.”

“And the gun?”

“There is no gun. I tossed it in the river. But I need to talk—” Tegart cut me off. “Well, Aherne, just so you know. We found the actual scoundrel who tried to do me in. But there was no way to let you know at the time. That Santimoy was just a student. Too bad about him, eh?”

I stood aghast, yet knew that this kind of thing would happen again. I almost missed the import of what he said next.

“I’m finished with India, Aherne,” he announced.
This is a trick
, I thought.

“No, it’s not what you think” Tegart was trying to read my face. “London needs me in Palestine. I’m asking you to come with me.”

“The Holy Land! Why?”

“Jerusalem, first. I’ll be rebuilding the police stations in Palestine into better strongholds, with the best interrogation facilities. They are calling them Tegart Forts! I also think a high wall through the entire country makes sound sense. The locals don’t understand, so we must persuade them to tell us what they are thinking.”

“So you are not going to retire in England—or was it Northern Ireland—and keep a dog or two?”

“Oh, there will be plenty of dogs.” He laughed. “I’ve already sent for trained Doberman and Alsatian dogs from South Africa. They’re most effective in controlling the locals there. Why not in Palestine? Man’s best friends, eh?”

“Sir,” I said, “I want to leave the police force.”

“Excellent, excellent. Great things to be done in Palestine, Robert!” He bent to show me some maps, unaware of my grimace.

“Sir,” I began.
It’s like tearing off skin,
I thought,
I will need to do it at one go.
“I want to leave you. I resign.”

“Think it over, son.” Tegart was watching my face carefully. “There’s time—and a whole world out there. Palestine!”

“No.” I refused to look away from his eyes. “No. I have no quarrel in Palestine. I am Indian.” I felt I had finally earned the right to say this word.

•  •  •

I
WALKED FOR
a long time in no particular direction, and in a sweaty daze found myself at the gates of the cemetery, where a boy was selling tuberoses and a single astounding bouquet of red roses. Buying the slender white flowers, I walked in. The trees overhead made it a private evening as I stood before the graves of my grandfather and grandmother.

I put the tuberoses on Padraig’s grave. Then I thought, how ungallant of me. I went right back and returned with the bouquet of roses for my grandmother. Red for the dark beauty of Kalidasi Euphonia Aherne. I stood there, absurdly and unexpectedly happy.

In this mood, as I walked along Park Street, then took a by-lane to return home, I glimpsed the shining marquee of the Elphinstone Picture Palace. On an impulse, I bought a ticket for the cinema and sat near the front on a cheap wooden seat. I had not even cared to find out the name of the show which had already started. I settled down under the great screen above me. And then I saw Queenie.

Through the long crepuscule of the theatre, smoky fingers
emerged from a hole in the back wall, and conjured before my astounded eyes my first love, whom I had lost to an incomprehensible world. When the show ended, the credits rolled, and I read the name she had christened herself:
Merle Oberon.

I came outside to the brightly lit lobby where a counter sold candy, sodas, and glossy picture magazines. I picked up a magazine with her picture on its cover. In it I read, incredulously, that she had been born to English parents in Tasmania. Merle Oberon, the Hollywood star, would have to lie to Estelle O’Brien Thompson all her life. There they were, twinned, on the shiny page: beautiful and unblemished to the eye.

Instead of making her real, the blue-grey pencils of light had transformed her into a being unreal and remote. The pain of her memory had long been a part of me, as if her shadow had replaced mine behind me. But now I felt it move and stir on its own, and begin to inch away. As I stepped out of the theatre foyer, I felt free.
I
was not born in Tasmania. I too knew what rebirth was and had earned the right to honour my dark grandmother with roses. I wanted, simply, to return home.

On the familiar sidewalk that led back to Elliot Road, I thought how, as a policeman, I had marooned myself. I felt a longing for my father’s music, my neglected books, and my lost friends. I knew Krikor now ran his father’s business. Tony still lived in his parents’ flat, although his father was dead now. I had not even gone to his funeral, I thought with shame. I resolved to visit Tony and his mother.

Will my lost friends forgive and accept me?
I wondered.
Can they find it in themselves to take and bind me into their circle of affection again?
I felt tears I could not control. Through the familiar lanes a cool breeze stirred the trees along the street, its moist aroma presaging rain.

My father sat in his small locus of light, listening raptly to his phonograph, while I stood at the threshold watching him, letting
the music possess me. When I entered and sat on the floor next to his chair, peering into the sheet music spread on his lap, the violins wove around the cello, and the piano stepped in on tiny feet, and soon I was the one turning the pages while my father rested his palm on my shoulder.

A gentle monsoon arrived upon our land, dropping slow and long. We were together, father and son, our silence sending entwining roots deep into the common ground of our old floor, while music rained above us, greening all the sere days leading up to this night.

•  •  •

T
HE IDEA CAME
to me one evening when my friends Krikor Aratoon and Tony Belletty joined us for what had become our daily
adda
session, sitting around my father’s study. A jaunty Artie Shaw tune played on the phonograph; Krikor lolled with his teacup in one hand and an old copy of
Punch
in the other, while Amala Martha Basu, a botanist and friend of Tony’s wife, Cheryl, leant over to listen to my father discourse on his books of landscapes. Tony sat leafing through a pile of
Life
magazines. Ben Zachariah walked in with some of his friends who wanted to meet us.

As I looked around me, taking in the walls full of books, the comfortable chairs, the aroma of tea, I realized how happy I was. I thought if I could spend time in such a space every day, a place, say, like a bookstore, I would be lucky. Tentatively, I mentioned the idea, and my father sat up animatedly.

“I’ve just the place for rent on Free School Street,” Krikor broke in. “It’ll be a great place for books, and conversation and tea, and music.” He added, “There’s even a lovely deodar tree in front,” as if that settled that.

Tony, forever the clown, sang out his rendition of Louis Armstrong:

Life’s a cabaret, old chum,

Life is a cabaret !

•  •  •

A
ND SO THAT
is how we became, father and son, sellers of used and new books, old maps and magazines, sheet music and art reproductions, piles of records which people were welcome to play on our phonograph, and fine tea always. It was as if my father’s study had spawned its twin, and it had become a haven for young and old, writers and lovers of music, a meeting place, the only shop of its kind in the metropolis.

I had no idea that I could make a decent living doing all the things I was learning to love again, which my father had loved all his life. He never missed an evening, while I opened shop in the mornings, returned home for lunch and a siesta, then reopened in the late afternoon, following the rhythm of life here in our city. By early evening, the groups from the shop would take over the space on makeshift benches under the deodar tree, while people walked in and discussed and bought books, and played music.

•  •  •

M
EANWHILE THE WORLD
outside was growing darker, with the papers full of news of another groaning war, brother to the earlier Great War, which we had been told was fought to end all of them. Again countless Indian men were fighting, dying in British uniforms.

Over breakfast at home, a month before my thirty-fifth birthday, my father leant into the newspaper and let out a strange, exhilarated laugh.

“What is it, Baba?” I asked him curiously.

“It took a long time but it was done,” he blurted. “Gandhi-ji will feel differently, certainly, for he always advocates nonviolence . . . but I am so glad that I . . . I must . . . rest,” he trailed off, making no sense to me. He shut his bedroom door. Since I was already late to open the shop, I did not detain him with questions.

I hurried through my breakfast, glancing at the headlines before I left. There it was: a picture of Udham Singh, a boy who survived the Jallianwala Bagh massacre because he had been pinned under the bodies of his dead relatives. It had taken him almost twenty years to save money for the passage to England. He had gone to the public meeting at Caxton Hall in London where Sir Michael O’Dwyer was addressing the India Question, waited politely for the lecture to end, and then shot O’Dwyer dead. Singh’s bullets had concluded the Question and Answer session.

When I returned in the afternoon, Mathur told me that my father had not yet woken up. I took a leisurely shower, thinking I would wake him up for lunch. But when I knocked on his door, I found him still in bed. By his side lay open his favourite folio-size book of pictures of Irish landscapes.

I sat beside him for a long time, holding his cold palm. My father, my
da
, my Indian-Irish Baba lay still, as if fast asleep.