No Country: A Novel (60 page)

“Can I make a copy of this picture?” I asked impulsively.

“It’s your turn to keep the original. Give me a copy when you can.” He handed me the picture, frame and all.

The last picture, in black-and-white, was of some other woman, cut from an old glossy magazine—but I recognized the face immediately: Merle Oberon. I knew her from
Wuthering Heights,
Baba’s favorite film—based on my favorite book. Baba had a black-and-white videocassette which we had watched many times.

“Why do you have her picture in a frame?” I asked him, unable to curb my curiosity.

He shook his head and said, “Another day.”

“Actually, Grandpa, you never did tell me either,” protested Neel.

“Another day,” he repeated, “I will, I promise you both.” Then he took out a long cloth packet, carefully wrapped in a length of faded silk.

“And what is this?” I asked.

“This I will tell you today,” he said, getting to his feet. “May I put that picture on the wall on this coffee table?”

“By all means, Mr. Aherne. Bring the house down.”

They smiled at my words, and I was surprised that I could smile again. I remembered how Baba and I would sit and chat about all things on earth and laugh at the silly jokes we made. It
cheered me to remember those times, and that Neel was here with me now. He helped his grandfather take down the large picture and set it down carefully on the table, before they sat on either side of me, looking down at it.

Mr. Aherne unwrapped the silk and took out an old envelope which once had a red wax seal, now faded and crumbling.

“An old letter?” I said in anticipation. “Is it about my grandfathers Santimoy and Monimoy? After what you told me, I don’t know what names to use to tell them apart!”

“No, Devi,” explained Mr. Aherne, “it’s not about them. It is from an earlier time. I brought it along because I thought it time for me to hand it over.” Neel held my hand, and I sensed that reading this old letter on occasion must have been his family tradition.

“You are part of this,” said Mr. Aherne, discerning my thoughts. “You and Neel and your child are very much a part of this letter written by my grandfather Padraig Aherne, who had come somehow to India, and your ancestor Doorgadass Mitra, the merchant prince, saved him from being executed by the East India Company.

“Did you know that Ramkumar had been given up for dead,” said Mr. Aherne, “left by the river according to ancient custom? It used to be called
antarjali jatra
—journey into the water. No longer practiced, thank God. My grandfather Padraig revived Ramkumar. Without these two persons, there would have been none of us.” He looked around the table, and continued. “Ramkumar gave me this letter, written to your ancestor Baboo Doorgadass Mitra.”

Baba should be here,
I thought, with a catch in my throat, imagining Ammu and him sitting here. Neel draped one arm over my shoulder, and he knew what I was thinking.

Mr. Aherne was laying the pages one by one on the picture of
the old mansion. The sheets looked frail and aged, and the black ink of the script on the brittle paper showed edges of red: So like Mr. Robert Aherne himself and his reddish hair, I mused.

“I thought I’d bring the picture of the mansion here, and put the letter on it, for I saw it first in Barisal,” he said. I nodded in agreement.

“From now on you and Neel are going to be the keepers of this letter,” Grandpa Robert said. Yes,
that
was what I would call him, I decided. He sat back, looking at us, letting the stories of his life flow into ours. I imagined our families gathering in the shadows, unseen but present all around us.

I thought of the story Baba told me once, remembered from the lost land of his childhood. Someone there had told him of a great and timeless tree—the Sidrat al-Muntaha in Paradise: For each birth the tree sprouts a new leaf. When a person dies on earth, it falls, but before it reaches the ground, an angel of Life flies to gather it for a celestial book, made of innumerable leaves. Each leaf, with its parting veins of doubts and reconciliations, green forever in that great Book of Names.

We read each page together, Neel and I, our heads touching, the picture of the great house under us, revealing different parts of itself as we lifted successive pages, our reading holding us together in no country I could name. We were in India, Ireland, and America, all together.

My debts of gratitude are many, beginning with my grandfather, Kumud Bhushan Ray, visionary, builder of railway bridges, and avid Tibetan scholar, in whose library I had free rein, where he taught me the alphabets of three languages and told me stories until the day he died, my childhood ended, and the library sold off soon after by his sons; Fr. G. K. Carlson of the Society of Jesus, who fed me wonderful books and daring ideas in the otherwise sterile school years; Amal Bhattacharji at Presidency College, who ignored the plodding syllabi and swept me through Dante in the first great travel of my life; A. N. Kaul, at Delhi University, and Brijraj Singh, who was my mentor and colleague when I began to teach at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. I was enriched by the numerous chats over poems and novels and bad English department coffee in Rochester, New York, with George Ford and Anthony Hecht, who taught me that the rigours of prose were no less than those of poetry.

To the numerous books of history, memoirs, and journals
that I used in my novel, my debt is incalculable. Just a small sampling will suggest the deep soil in which I planted my branching story of the various diaspora, identity, and hybridity. I found Cecil Woodham-Smith’s
The Great Hunger
a marvelous starting point; her insights are unfailingly sharp and clear. These were balanced by Thomas Campbell Foster,
Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland
(1846
), Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland
by W. E. H. Lecky, De Beaumont’s
Ireland
(1839), T. W. Freeman’s
Pre-Famine Ireland,
and Liam O’Flaherty’s novels. Nassau Senior’s nineteenth-century oeuvre
Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland
was full of information, as were Edward Wakefield’s
Ireland: Statistical and Political (1812 Vol. I),
Sir Charles Trevelyan’s
The Irish Crisis
reprinted in
Edinburgh Review
(1850), and Sir George Nicholls’s
A History of the Irish Poor Law
(1856). I ploughed through Alfred Smee’s
The Potato Plant, Its Uses and Properties
(1846) for an insight into contemporary understanding of the problem. An earlier work, Arthur Young’s
A Tour in Ireland
(1780), made for compelling reading. This is just a small sampling of what became a much larger bibliography.

For a period of six months, before writing the Ireland segment of my novel, I immersed myself in reading contemporary journals from the 1840s, such publications as
Freemen’s Journal; Nation,
which was founded in 1842 by Daniel O’Connell himself;
The Times of London,
which had not yet spawned its many namesakes in various parts of the world;
The Famine in the Land
(1847), written by Isaac Butt, who was a friend of W. B. Yeats’s father; Sir Robert Peel’s
Memoirs
(1856); W. J. Fitzpatrick’s
Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell
; and a veritable pile of contemporary pamphlets and posters. Later historical research often corrected contemporary perceptions of events, but I needed to keep in mind that for a novelist, the first
reactions, even rumours—especially early rumours—are of prime value and must dye the tempera of the narrative.

I spent many hours, often with a magnifying glass in hand, peering into Victorian-era cityscapes of Dublin and, like Brendan Aherne, at Irish landscapes of that period. So I did at photographic archives of Bengal in general, and Calcutta in particular, for use in the later segments of my novel. I mourn the destruction by fire of the extensive and irreplaceable photo archives of Bourne & Shepherd in Calcutta, parts of which I had the good fortune to look at years ago.

For the Indian sections, apart from English language sources, I delved into a wide variety of vernacular books, newspapers, reminiscences—too numerous to set down in the context of a work of fiction. Anyone who researches my novel will find these multiple roots that fed the narrative. “Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shown, and there alone . . . ,” as Yeats himself put it.

I shall not belabour the point that considerable research went into imagining New York City in the 1910s. Again, archival photographs in various libraries were invaluable, as were books such as Kathie Friedman-Kasaba’s
Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York 1870–1924.
Before writing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, I read and re-read Leon Stein’s definitive
The Triangle Fire,
excerpts from the trial testimony of
People of the State of New York vs. Isaac Harris and Max Blanck,
and David Von Drehle’s
Triangle,
a fine synoptic book. I was thus enabled to use the backgrounds of each worker I mentioned in my narrative although, of course, Bibi Sztolberg and Ijjybijjy Malouf and the cause of the fire are my invention. Josephine Grunwald is part fiction, as she is modelled on my friend Rosalind Fischell’s aunt Josephine Greenwood.

For the exigencies of the fictional narrative, I pulled some events closer together or placed a historical figure in a place where he, in fact, was not, but I have been mindful that the essential truth of the times was not tampered. The most unlikely events, however, are based on actual events, such as the foundering of the fictional ship
Rose of Erin
on an iceberg and the subsequent rescue; O’Dwyer’s assassination by a massacre survivor; the eruption of Vesuvius and the resultant devastation around it. Boscotrecase has now recovered, rebuilt; when I last went there, I cast a wary eye on the implacable bulk of Vesuvius.

Needless to say, different segments of research needed to be done in several countries, and without the help of librarians in each, I would have been stuck at dead ends or shut doors on three continents. I salute their separate but related tribes.

Mr. Neal O’Brien, former Member of Parliament, welcomed me to his home in Calcutta and his journal resources. He reminisced about his Anglo-Indian childhood and youth, while Mrs. O’Brien graciously added her comments on typical Anglo-Indian recipes and festivities. I recounted anecdotes of my Anglo-Indian teachers and classmates at Miss B. Hartley’s School, the first magical classroom I attended before being transferred to the mercy of the Jesuits at St. Lawrence School.

I wish to thank a number of individuals on three separate continents for their unflagging interest and faith in my work: Eugene Datta, Rosalind Fischell, Tuli Banerjee, Ethan Shapiro, Rama Lohani and Philip Chase, Dona and Dipanjan Chatterjee, Kunal Basu, Anjali Singh, Carol Zook Shapiro, Janet Eber, Geetali Basu, Deb Dimatteo, John Murray who passed away before he could see
No Country
in print, and, in particular, Gillian Stern in London. In India, my debts to people are too many to enumerate. Suffice
it to say that I shall thank them individually, preferably over dinner. And if it is possible to thank a much-maligned city—exciting, maddening, nurturing—I want to thank Calcutta for continuing to be itself, a difficult mother.

My bi-continental agent Elizabeth Sheinkman is brilliant, discerning, and a striking beauty. None of these attributes prevented her from doling out measures of tough love when necessary. I also wish to thank Millicent Bennett in New York, who graciously took
No Country
under her wing; Alexandra Pringle in London has been a delight to work with, and her teams, headed in India by Diya Kar Hazra, and in Austrailia by Hannah Temby, have given me much-appreciated support.

At home, my elegant and intelligent wife, Aparna Sen, my first reader, endured untidy desks (on both continents), piles of papers and books, and my absent-mindedness, yet found it in her heart to love and support me steadfastly through the years, reading the chapters and all my revisions with a keen eye.

© ETHAN SHAPIRO

Kalyan Ray is the author of the novel
Eastwords
(published by Penguin India) and has published several books of translations of contemporary Indian poetry into English, including
City of Memories
(Viking Penguin India), which has a preface by Allen Ginsberg. He has recently hosted a twenty-six-part series of interviews with writers, musicians, actors, and directors for a popular prime-time TV program in India.

Educated in the United States and India, Ray directed the India Program of the International Partnership for Service-Learning, which was affiliated with Portland State University in Oregon. He began teaching at St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi and has subsequently taught in Greece, Ecuador, Jamaica, and the Philippines, where he was a visiting professor of comparative theology. He has long been associated with Indian social service organizations, and collaborated with Mother Teresa, doing the translations and voice-over for the first documentary on her work (directed by Ann Petrie). He currently divides his time between the U.S., where he teaches, and India, where he has acted in several films. He has been married for the last twenty years to the film director and actress Aparna Sen.