Noon (16 page)

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I had sought isolation, but found myself more isolated than I knew. And this was not the innocence of my childhood. Though no less blinding, these isolations were of an India
whose worst nature was hidden from herself. A protective screen of encoded privilege – not simply as money, but as aspects of privilege, English, Western dress, values and manners: the things
that put me above caste in India – made injustice, and especially cruelty, of the most casual variety, appear always as the work of others. It was, and by extension, its taint, something that
just went on in the society, but for which its educated classes bore no responsibility. And with this sphere of deep remove in place, and the question of agency diverted, one could almost be
allowed to feel that there was no cost to living around this daily violence.

But there was one thing, one poison, in some ways the supreme evil, that was able to seep past these protections, setting slowly to its work of corroding the moral interior. Complicity.
Complicity, with its supporting cast of shallowness, indifference, apathy and inaction, was, in a sense, the most untraceable of the great evils. And yet like the salinity, invisible and caustic,
that travels in brackish water, it would bring its white and brittle decay to all those natures it came into contact with, decimating in them for ever the hope of finer feeling.

I, with my palate still sensitive, found its taste new and strong, but my response, arising out of habit, was weak and familiar. I cut short my summer in Delhi and called in the advantage of one
further degree of removal, the one that would always stand in the way of myself and the Indian reality: the advantage of retreat, of being able to leave.

And already, in the Zurich duty-free a few days later, a night flight behind me, a boarding pass to Boston in my pocket, Delhi felt far away, that hard hot land impossible to imagine. In the new
cooler place that awaited me, of air-conditioned bookshops and iced-coffees, of summer schools and internships, I would remake myself, I would find an intellectual stent to channel out the bad
memory of Steeple Hall. My sensitivities would return, the soul would purify and become once again presentable to Zack and my professors in Massachusetts.

And that is how it was. I returned the next winter to Delhi, a year after a devastating earthquake in the Kashmir valley, and weeks after I had met the Tabassums for the first time. The heat was
gone; the air was cool and smoky; and, erasing all trace of what had gone on there, were the new staff at Steeple Hall.

(2011)

A syntactically unfaithful translation: There is upon the horizon the anticipation of a stone-like sun/ As a mirror shattering, the night will scatter/ All those who worship
darkness, those who have been reared on twilight/ they must go as goes the night.

The Tabassums! Sahil Tabassum, you know, once said to me, years after I had met him, ‘I like a book to have a beginning, a middle and an
end.’ I thought to myself, answering cliché with cliché, if everyone has a book in them, mine cannot be that kind of book. The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too
few. And though I knew this, knew there was little to string life together, the tendency was still to appear as whole before the world, to let the imagination fill in the spaces that experience had
left blank.

A mistake, I now feel.

In writing this last episode, I tried often to see what I had not seen, to be places I had not been, to pretend that my view of Port bin Qasim had not only – and ever – been an
eclipsed one. In this, I was like a man, who peeping through a keyhole, is denied his vantage point, when leaning too forcefully against the door 
that has restricted (and excited) his vision, he causes it to swing wide open. A mistake, you see: for what we cannot know is as much a part of us as what we do know. And people, like places,
must learn to live with their absences, with those parts of the record that have been sanitized.

This story came to me during – and I think you will see why – a final visit to my father’s country. I was tempted many times to abandon it, for the material is strange and
distressing, and the tale without moral, unless you consider looking and recording with a sympathetic eye as moral enough. But, in the end, the writing need was too strong; and, for all my
misgivings, it made its way onto the page.

One morning in May, when the sun was already high over the tarmac, I stepped off the plane in Port bin Qasim for the first time. Even deep inland, where the airport stood, surrounded by pale
hard land, there was the briny breath of the sea. Overhead, casting the ominous shapes of birds of prey, were the frayed crowns of palm trees. There was in this play of short shadows and flickering
wind-blown sunlight a noontime menace. And about the young man, who appeared from a line of unfamiliar faces, with a piece of board that bore the name ‘Rehan Tabassum’ there was the
scent of guns, dollars and drugs.

He knew me immediately. His tall, slim figure pushed its way out of the crowd; he was smiling knowingly at me.

‘My God, saab,’ he said, extending a sunburned hand. ‘You are Mr Sahil exact. Even more than your brothers, you look like him. And Mr Narses gave me this . . .’ He waved
aside the name card, now folded in half. Some strands of his long hair blew across his face; his eyes were very black; his lips had a chiselled prominence that made them ideal for the expression of
amusement; and, I suppose, though there was not a trace of it now, cruelty.

He was wounded by my initial lack of recognition.

‘You don’t know who I am?’ he said, adding loudly, ‘Mirwaiz! From the train in Kashmir? The year after the earthquake? The lake? Don’t you remember?’

‘Mirwaiz, my God! I don’t believe it. What are you doing here?’

‘Bas,’ he said, smiling sheepishly now. ‘I drifted around, started looking for work. I applied at Qasimic Call for the job of a peon, and as I was waiting in the corridor, who
should walk by but your brother, Mr Isffy. I stopped him there and then and told him who I was, and, I hope you don’t mind, used your name too. I said you were my friend, and when Mr Isffy
heard my story, he said he had already heard it once before from you. So, at least, back then you remembered, Rehan saab! Bas, that was what did it; when he put two and two together, he gave me a
job on the spot. I worked with him a while, and later he arranged for me to be transferred to Mr Narses’s private residence. That’s where I am now.’

All I could do was congratulate him. And he, as if feeling we had shared beginnings, congratulated me in turn.

‘What for?’

‘For your re-entry into the family, of course.’

Then glancing at his watch, he said abruptly, ‘Come on. Mr Narses will be waiting. The car is just here.’

He pointed at a dark green SUV and was about to turn on his heels, when he remembered my bags. He returned to lift them with the extreme graciousness of a man deigning to do work below his
station. It drew my attention to other things about him – his impeccable toilette, his good looks, his fashionable clothes, the brushed and shampooed hair. And, for a moment, I had a
suspicion about whether Mirwaiz was really a servant. There had always been a lot of strange talk about my father’s brother-in-law, Narses ul-Hijr – a short, and, by all accounts,
unconsummated marriage; no woman since; obesity in later life; and an unhealthy obsession with the Tabassum men, especially my father, and their love lives. I wondered if Mirwaiz was not the most
recent chapter in a familiar tale.

He, for his part, was still full of seductions. On the drive into town, within moments of my saying that it was my intention to stay some weeks in Port bin Qasim, then travel gradually by road
to La Mirage, he offered to drive me. ‘I’ll take you,’ he said, laughing jauntily, ‘Narses saab, and I have been many times. The roads are beautiful now. We’ll stop in
little-known towns. You’ll see desert first, then fertile fields in Punjab. There are famous shrines along the way, and all the country’s rivers. The Indus, the Sutlej, the Jhelum . .
.’

‘Have you been working for Narses long?’ I asked.

‘No, well, yes. Off and on,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I ran away in the middle, but then came back.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Dubai,’ he said, looking quickly over at me.

‘You really get around! What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why did you leave?’

‘This happened,’ he answered, and turning his face from the road, caused a smooth and vicious scar to uncoil and stretch itself out across his neck.

‘How did you get that?’

‘Football. Knife,’ Mirwaiz muttered.

‘And that was why you left Dubai?’ I asked, forming a new sense of his restlessness.

‘Yes. Why else?’ Mirwaiz replied. ‘It’s the people that make a place. And if the people do this to you,’ he added, trailing a finger down the scar, ‘you have
to move on.’

Not a servant, for sure, I thought to myself, and vain too. He had evidently seen a lot in the five years since we last met, and the exposure had sharpened his instincts, made him more a man of
the world. He was strangely of a piece with the mood of this new city, with the hint of threat that seemed contained in its pale cloudless sky and the distant presence of sea.

Traffic lights flew past us, palms lay felled over the highways, which merged fast with new highways. Eventually the traffic slowed and the city approached. Its appearance made real my arrival
in Port bin Qasim, forcing me to consider why I was really here.

There was Sahil Tabassum, of course, my father, the man of small beginnings, who had lived many lives, and made good in each one. He had been a finance man in Dubai in the days he had known my
mother; after their relationship was over, he had returned to La Mirage to be a politician, fighting General Gul’s military tyranny; when that ended, he spent some years in and out of power;
then, with the return of military rule, he became a businessman, building a news and telecom empire out of nothing. That was what he had been, a media tycoon of a kind, a man of dark suits and
sunglasses, when I first met him in La Mirage five years before. He had married again and had three other children with Shaista, a young wife twenty years his junior. Though there was much that was
interesting about him, I found him a difficult man to reach. It was as if the many lives he had lived had made him intolerant of the past. And I, who sought him out from the deepest folds of his
past, was not someone he could easily communicate with.

We had blood and almost nothing else in common.

But blood was something and, in those first few years, we tried to make a go of our unlikely bond. Our relationship progressed haltingly and was marked by a kind of stage fright in each
other’s presence, as though we were both aware that if we had met under different circumstances, we might have seen better men. Our uneasiness made us, each in our own way, create proxies,
people and conditions through which and under which we could be both together and apart. His were his wife and daughters; mine were my brothers. Through these people we felt our relationship
deepen, felt indeed its warmth, without ever having to face its discomfort. And though he wasn’t here, Port bin Qasim now was one such situation, a way to be both near and aloof. My true
reason, though, for being in the city was not my father at all but older brother, Isphandiyar Tabassum.

I had missed out on Isffy when I first met the other Tabassums. He had still been in the cold then and I was told specifically not to contact him. At the time, the reason for his banishment was
kept from me. My siblings said that he and our father didn’t really get along; that was all. But one night in La Mirage, my eldest sister, born of my father’s first marriage, spoke to
me about the real truth, and once she had, it was not hard to see why it had been withheld.

My brother had slept with, then lived with, and then threatened to marry, an old girlfriend of my father’s. I say girlfriend, but she was really just someone my father had slept with on
more than one occasion. What made the whole affair the more distasteful to the Tabassums, and especially to my father, was that the girl was nearly ten years older than Isffy, and of damaged
reputation. Sahil Tabassum had said when he heard: ‘Why does he have to bring home the girl the rest of the world just fucks?’

His reaction was, I learned from my sister, characteristic. For, apparently, he had always interfered in Isffy’s love life, and my sister spoke almost fearfully of Isffy’s
motivations for dating our father’s ex. ‘What Abba can’t escape,’ she had said, ‘is not that the girl was ten years older, of bad reputation, and an ex-flame of his,
but that it was
because
she was all of these things that Isffy loved her. Abba knew it was his way of taking revenge.’

‘Revenge for what?’

‘For all the times in the past that Isffy had been trifled with, when Narses and Abba would get in the way of him and his girlfriends. I remember one summer he had brought home a girl from
the LSE. She was Moldavian, I think; Nadia was her name. A very nice girl, pretty, and bright too. But Abba, from the moment he saw her, wouldn’t address two words to her. If he passed her in
the corridor, on the way to the pool, his eyes would run cold. Behind her back, and encouraging the little ones to join in too, they – Shaista, Abba, Narses – would make fun of her,
referring to her as “Isffy’s Bosnian refugee”. It was terrible. The girl, feeling unwelcome, began to lose her nerve, and having been perfectly relaxed and plucky when she
arrived, became sulky and needy. Isffy, who had been so in love with her in the beginning, began to doubt his judgement. Worse still, Narses, with Abba’s approval, made it seem that the girl
was a bad influence on Isffy, disrupting his studies and generally holding him back. And Isffy, because he was still young then, believed them. I can’t tell you: it didn’t happen once;
it happened ten times! Those first break-ups were made like offerings to Abba, who accepted them with love and blessings. But as Isffy got older,’ my sister had said, ‘he grew wise to
what they were up to and the break-ups became harder to extract, often needing threats and ultimatums, all, invariably, presented by Narses.’