Spiral Road (12 page)

Zia is calmly decisive. There’s no point in panicking and calling the police straightaway, he argues. The driver, Moin, is instructed to take the car and search the main roads. I’m to cover the open grounds in front of the house while Zia walks along the residential streets.

Nasreen has the formidable task of looking after Ma. We’re worried about her blood pressure. She’s hysterical with anger, anxiety, frustration.

‘This has never happened before.’ She wants to blame someone. ‘Never!’

‘He doesn’t do these things deliberately to annoy us,’ Zia explains, as though Ma is ignorant of Abba’s condition. My brother hands me a mobile phone.
‘His behaviour is likely to become even more unpredictable.’

It’s just past seven in the morning. I’m still too groggy to say much. It’s a misty beginning to the day. The dawn shower petered out into a drizzle before most of the heavy clouds drifted away, leaving a thin coating of grey above the city. I’ve no specific plan in mind. Hurriedly, I head out of the house.

The urgency of the situation strikes me once I’m exposed to the vacant space ahead. I begin to run. I’ve had little to do with my father for two decades. The last time I was here on a visit, Abba was overseas, at a conference. He returned only a few days before I left. And now we’re on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm, lost to each other. Forever. Yet his living presence and his centrality are defining features of who I am. I think of him not as he is, frail and lost, but as the robust father of two mischievous teenage boys. We’re not likely to forget the tact and good humour with which he dealt with us. Never abrasive and always rational, he found time whenever we needed to talk to him.

He is out there somewhere—confused and afraid—and I run harder.

Near the first clump of banyan trees, a goat bleats and darts away. I figure that Abba might be walking in a straight line. The mobile rings. Zia hasn’t found him yet. Another five minutes and he will contact the police.

Within seconds of talking to my brother, I spot Abba in the distance, a white figure leaning on his walking
stick. I call out but he doesn’t move. As I get closer, I can hear his voice. It’s clear and without a quiver.

‘Anything! No, no…I cannot stay…They need me…But I also love you! Ice-cream? Chocolate? I love you! Don’t cry…’

‘Abba!’ I call.

My voice seems to break the spell.

He turns and scowls, pointing a trembling finger at me. His lips move noiselessly. He rubs his forehead. ‘My son…from Australia,’ he says at last.

‘That’s right!’ I hug him. He’s trembling.

I phone Zia.

Abba’s wearing a creased white suit. A red tie is wrapped around his neck like a scarf. His nightshirt is visible under the jacket. I look at his feet. He’s been walking in his bedroom slippers.

‘Where…where?’ He looks at me as if peering through an opaque pane of glass.

‘You’re in a field near the house,’ I explain despairingly.
Field…house…
even such simple words mean little to him. I feel inadequate, as if I am the one afflicted with an impediment that prevents me from getting through.

‘Sumita?’

‘Who?’

‘Sumita!’ He stamps his foot on the ground, as though impatient with my memory lapse.

‘She’s gone home,’ I venture to guess, without the faintest idea of who Sumita may be.

‘Home?’

‘House.’ I draw his attention to the buildings in the distance.

‘Uncle’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Walk,’ he frowns. ‘With Rani.’

‘Who is Rani?’

‘Rani…’ His steps quicken. ‘Talk to her…Rani! My daughter…’ He turns to me, his face registering anguish and confusion. ‘My son from Australia.’

He begins to shake his head and mumble incoherently as I guide him slowly back to the house.

I, too, am baffled.

N
ASREEN SEATS ABBA
in the veranda. Solicitously we mill around him. Ma fetches a tub of water to wash his feet. She’s gentle with him and dabs the scratches on his legs with antiseptic cream. Zia and I help him change. Abba points in the direction of his room, unable to articulate what he wishes to do. Finally he utters, ‘Lie,’ repeating the word several times before Ma deduces that he wants to sleep.

The house settles into a lull as we disperse. In the privacy of our memories about Abba, I suspect, each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It’s a clumsy try for the comfort of normality. Later, I come down from my room and join Zia and Nasreen for breakfast. We make artificial conversation about the state of the arts in Bangladesh. We talk about the movie industry, the paucity
of publishing opportunities for creative writers and the popularity of soapies on TV. We ourselves are players in a drama of illusions. Our words are rambling and spontaneous, interspersed with forced laughter.

As Zia prepares to go to work, I ask him about Sumita. He doesn’t know who she is.

‘She must have been someone in Abba’s life,’ I persist.

‘What did he say to you?’ He is testy, uncomfortable, and doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let’s leave things the way they are, shall we? We don’t need any more problems.’ And with briefcase bulging, he slams the front door behind him.

Nasreen has the morning off. She will be in the company of her bank’s executives later in the day. A delegation from the Bank of China is touring the country and she has to attend a formal lunch for the visitors.

We’re both shaken by Abba’s episode.

‘It’s such an insidious illness,’ she says in disbelief.

We talk about Abba and his pivotal role in our earlier lives. I remember his letters and papers, and that he kept diaries, which he locked in the drawers of his roll-top desk.

‘They’re somewhere,’ she frowns, trying to recall. ‘There are trunks and boxes crammed with files, letters and receipts. The diaries could be among them. I remember Zia sorting things out some years ago when we sold the house. The loft, I think…Remind me to find the key.’

‘I wouldn’t mind looking through them,’ I say hesitantly, realising she might not approve. ‘He’s been such
a stranger to me most of my adult life. And now it’s too late for me to know him…It’s not his fault. I’m the one who left and hardly kept in touch.’

I
N HIS BEDROOM
, Abba is curled up, sleeping on his side with his mouth open, snoring gently. Even in rest he looks fatigued. I have an awful premonition that he won’t last the year. I caress the top of his head, wondering whether his life has been as dull as Uncle Musa made it out to be. Was it unblemished, as we have assumed? It doesn’t matter now. But who are Sumita—and Rani?

Abba always indulged Ma and humoured her, even when she was unreasonable. They rarely quarrelled. As children we thought this meant a harmonious marriage. Of course, one learns later that incompatibility is not necessarily manifested in dramatic ways. She was seventeen and he was twenty-six when they married—the children of wealthy patriarchal families, where love was rarely mentioned and matrimony was intended to enhance status and wealth.

There were unwritten codes of behaviour for a married couple. As long as the institution of marriage was seen to promote the virtues of family life, a degree of fallibility was acceptable in men. Successful procreation and family fortunes more than made up for fleshly indiscretions. So if men did not seek to leave their wives, affairs were tolerated.

In Ma’s youth, women were expected to be patient, and understanding of their husbands’ weaknesses. In fact, it was said that widening the experiences of men made them more appreciative of the stability they enjoyed at home. Maintaining such tolerance was made possible by accommodating wives who were aware of their own lack of education and limited opportunity outside marital lives. They were compelled to develop stoical fortitude and pretended to be ignorant and scornful of any rumour about their husbands’ infidelities. Their compensations were domestic security, jewellery, expensive clothing and abundant supplies of money.

Women who married into our family became bored housewives. But they wanted nothing for their physical comforts. It could have been out of a sense of guilt that their husbands treated them gently at home and did not interfere in household matters. I know that Abba made Ma feel important in the way he listened patiently to whatever she had to say and encouraged her to make decisions related to our lifestyle.

‘What is love but an ideal, sometimes a disturbance that unhinges reason?’ Abba once said to me wistfully. On that day Ma had insisted he talk to me about my friends at university. She had found out that I was seeing a girl who was not from an affluent family. Shahana’s
khandhan
lacked pedigree. Her father was in the civil service and her mother was a school teacher. ‘Familial duty and honour must have priority,’ Abba went on, without a modicum of conviction.

I bristled, anticipating a lecture and an argument.

But then he locked my bedroom door, and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper:‘My son, follow your instincts. Be more courageous than I was.’

He sounded forlorn and bitter.

This was a moment of revelation for me. My father lived with personal regrets! But still he was my father and I dared not think him capable of anything
ignoble
. My questions went unasked. Unwittingly, in that moment, it was I who created the distance between us, by shrouding him in a layer of mystery.

Ma had led a sheltered existence. She had no formal education, being tutored at home only for her future role as a housewife. Abba had been educated in Britain and travelled extensively. He was tradition-oriented, a man of the world, compassionate, shrewd and a thinker. Everything in his life was transparent and orderly, our relatives said admiringly.

‘A civilised man must strive to control his anger and preserve the wholeness of his dignity,’ Abba would tell us repeatedly. ‘Always try to think through your problems and you’ll find solutions most of the time. When there are no answers, learn to compromise with your circumstances. We have to live within the framework of our limitations and the mistakes we make. Argue with Destiny, but never try to wrestle it into submission. If you do, you’ll end up losing.’

Now I’m beginning to suspect that the advice was grounded in personal experience. Or is that too
presumptuous? I imagine a little girl…then an adult, someone close to my age. Is she still alive? A parent herself, perhaps? Is
our
father shaped by her memory, someone she has to mostly invent, to placate a past she does not understand?

And hovering in the background is a shadowy and evasive figure. A part of me does not wish to profile
her
. Sumita, who must be Rani’s mother, can stay faceless, condemned to the realm of speculation. But I’m unable to ignore what must be my father’s deception. Yet am I unnecessarily suspicious? Sumita and Rani could be fabrications of a delirious imagination. It’s a forlorn wish, but one that I don’t let go; otherwise I’ll have to wonder: did Ma ever find out or suspect? If she had, I guess she would have suffered the pain silently. That was her destiny, she would have rationalised.

I wander through the near empty house, impatient to search the boxes and the trunks in the loft. There may be a revealing letter or a telltale photograph, perhaps an indiscreet diary entry.

In my room I flop on the bed to study maps of Jordan and Turkey and look over my itinerary. Petra, Bodrum, the ruins of Troy. My guide books help me visualise historical sites, the deserts of ancient lands, and the waters of the Aegean and Mediterranean. The hypnotic pull of all this lies in the prospects of tactile contact with history, and escaping to something entirely different for a few weeks. I want to live spontaneously, without thinking about schedules and chores. Lose all sense of time and drift
among strangers and unfamiliar customs. I don’t think of bombs exploding or terrorist attacks. Perhaps I’m becoming attuned, here, to a state of dangerous carelessness.

There are postcards to write and a letter to Amelia. I miss her and the inadvertent variation she has brought to my life. I trifle with the idea of giving more shape and direction to the future. Why live as if time needs no organisation beyond the next day? It’s more like a young man’s state of thoughtlessness.

Fragmentation has grown in me here. I feel emotionally torn. All these landscapes are too diverse to unify my thinking. The wandering migrant…The roaming atheist. The sense of loss is maddening because I’m unable to pinpoint the reasons for the regret I feel. I doubt if I’ll ever come back to live here again, and yet there’s an elusive being within me that wants to redefine belonging, and whispers about homecoming and mortality. About ending where I began. About a completion to the circle of life.

T
HE MORNING DRAGS
on. I dither about going for a walk. I look in on Abba. Ma is out shopping, but the carer is here.

‘I might go out for a while.’

Raffat Salaam cheerfully waves me away.

Outside it’s muggy. I avoid the large stores and the supermarket and head for the local bazaar, stopping
along the way to admire the liveliness of the street scene.

The bazaar is noisy. The pungent aroma of spices hangs heavily in the air. In a food stall, kebabs are being grilled over a charcoal fire. The skewered meat looks moist and tender. On a large aluminium plate there are freshly made parathas. It was standard fare in my university days. I remember long hours spent with friends in Darul Kebab, eating chicken tikka, naan and piping hot
jelabis
. We drank endless cups of cha and discussed our lives and sorted out the problems of the world. Now I resist the temptation to have a paratha roll. Eating in an open-air stall isn’t prudent. I have no inclination to prolong my stay in Dhaka. I must accept the restrictions of being a foreigner here. It’s sad to think what I’ve lost in my migrant years.

The shops are crammed with cheap trinkets, jute carpets and items of clothing. I can’t decide on gifts for Amelia and the girls. Perhaps something more upmarket from one of Alya’s shops.

At the next tea stall a group of bearded men has gathered. Among them is a mullah, delivering a fiery speech on the religious imperative of Bangladesh becoming an Islamic republic and helping fellow Muslims around the world.