The Assassin's Song (36 page)

Without Ma, I thought cruelly but not unreasonably, Bapu-ji would continue to live in his arrogant God-hood. And he at least had Shilpa, and all the other volunteer devotees who came to sit at his feet and administer to his needs. But I felt sorry for Mansoor. He had been so close to her. I still thought of him as my little brother, though he was a teenager now and I hardly knew anything about him, what he thought and felt, what he wanted to become. He had never replied to my queries, never asked for advice.

I was sad at my own loss, but I had lost the right to feel sorry for myself, for I had truly abandoned Ma. If she had only written to me. In standing my ground against my father I had taken the chance that I might never see her again; the gamble was called, and the price exacted. Along with the letter with his news about her death, Bapu-ji sent me a picture of
Ma, which I always put in a prominent place wherever I moved. I did not possess a picture of Bapu.

A few months after that news, Marge Thompson reentered my life. There was no reason to look back now.

When the student radicals rejoined mainstream society, older and subdued, how ordinary they looked: clean, middle class, and well mannered. And so did Marge, except that her given name was Mira, her father was Indian, and she was brought up a Canadian. I ran into her outside the English department late one morning, just as I entered the front hall, when she turned around abruptly after a fruitless scan of the jobs board. For a moment we stood gaping at each other, until she broke the silence with a soft “Still staring, I see.” There was a twinkle in her eyes, and we both laughed. And I knew this would be a different relationship from before. Expressing my surprise at seeing her, I took her to the Greenhouse Café, which stood on the site of the memorable Pewter Pot, where we had first met, and which had sadly been gutted by a fire. It was here during our long catching up that she made her confession.

“Canada?” I pretended surprise, for I had been told already by Bob long ago where she was from.

“Where all those cold fronts come from—in the weather forecasts,” she said, echoing exactly my thoughts. “Watch out for this cold front— brrr!”

“You are hardly a cold front,” I added unnecessarily, with an uncertain laugh, ready to add much more flattery in my excitement (for example, that her namesake was a medieval mystic much admired in the parts I hailed from), but I wisely held my peace. I recalled too well that time in the past when I had let out too much.

It was five years since I last saw her, so we couldn't help exchanging glances of renewed surprise at each other, for this was such a fantastic, unexpected reunion. I couldn't help but recall how poorly I had fared during our previous encounters, and was thrilled at this new beginning. We spoke as equals now. I had always imagined a fragility beneath that brashness she had presented as her personality; her shabby dressing had not convinced either; now there was not even a pretence of far-outness. Here she
was in a tan skirt and blue shirt, her brown hair parted and tied casually on either side, such a beautiful girl. There was a new, calm sensibleness to her. She had become what I had wished her to be. And I? I had a greater facility with the culture and had lost much of my awkwardness; and my accent, I believe, had lost its worst abominations—though there were instances still when I opened my mouth only to draw a smile from my friends. She told me she had taken a leave of absence from MIT to volunteer for Senator McGovern's presidential campaign, and after the disappointment of that 1972 election she had gone to finish her studies in Montreal. She was back in Cambridge, had moved in with a friend, and was looking for a job and hoping to go to graduate school. She had broken up with Steve not long after I had last seen her; he was in California studying mathematics at Berkeley. A slob he had been, but also, apparently, a genius. But to get back to Marge. She was brought up in Winnipeg, she said. Her mother was Cathy Thompson, born and bred in Iowa, and her father was Amrit Padmanabh, a Buddhist and medical doctor, and a poet and musician in his spare time.

Perhaps it was these enigmatic origins that had called out to me so urgently the moment I first laid eyes on her. I observed to her something to that effect, and she was embarrassed, flattered, and quite moved. On an impulse, she took my hand and squeezed it, then dropped it.

I was in love. Years before, a simpleton foreigner, I had been in thrall to the wonderful tease and radical Marge Thompson and had desired her as my special friend in a vaguely pure way. I had even thought I was in love. But now my feelings for her were profoundly certain, as I sat across from her and watched her tell me about herself, and as I in turn confessed to her about my recent life, though cautiously, all the while staring at her and admiring her and smiling inanely, my insides in an awful clutch, my head dizzy with unspoken thoughts and this single refrain: I love this girl. She's come back, unattached, and I must not let her go.

We agreed to meet later that day, ended up having an early dinner together, agreed further to meet again soon, which quickly—and much too slowly—became the following morning. Soon we began to see each other frequently.

But she had to discover me anew, and be convinced that this time I was safe, no longer the complicated Indian dragging behind him miles of background.
There was so much we had to talk about and learn from each other. Now my attachment to my home was slender and I had no intention of going back to live in India. I was just another graduate student, an aesthete and an intellectual, a little vain perhaps, with hopes of one day teaching my pet theories at some college. And she was no longer the posturing loudmouth radical, hustling revolution on the streets, but a beautiful, sensitive girl who needed attention and devotion; I had all of that to give her.

Those initial days of our courtship were as sweet and tender as they were anxious and uncertain. I would wake up joyfully every morning, thankful for another day; a nervous tingle worrying my spine as I showered and brushed and tortured myself: what if this was all a dream; what if she had changed her mind, having realized her folly, and mocked me when we met again. I would hasten to our meeting place. And no, every time, no: she was real and she was there for me as promised.

We usually met first thing in the morning, had coffee in a restaurant, or out in the sun on the steps of my department building or a bench in the Yard. I would head off for a class or a teaching duty or to the library, and she would wander off to the jobs boards, where she was not having much luck. Spring was not the time to look for campus employment. There was a certain shyness in our manner, a modicum of edginess; a decision was pending: to commit or not. And so although we always parted reluctantly every time, the absence also gave us a respite in which to recompose. We met again in the late afternoon, by arrangement or on a pretext. Evenings she preferred to spend with her friend, and I had my own work to do; they were not to be toyed with, anyway. But there was one day when we did not meet at all; I spent that evening in an agony of anxiety close to the phone, yet afraid to pick it up lest I seemed pushy and drove her away. Had my dream ended, was she, after all we had recently said to each other, the same tease she had once been? But the next morning she was again waiting for me at the corner where I emerged on Harvard Square. Big smiles of relief. We went to have our coffee and did not discuss the previous day but had a long, drawn-out parting; after a few steps on our separate ways we both turned to wave again at each other. I think of that day as the turning point in our new relationship.

Why do I go into these details, so trivial in retrospect? To remind myself that I lived—“became of the world,” as my father would have said.
This was what I had desired, to be a thinking, feeling person like anyone else, for which I had spurned my calling.

Marge Thompson with Karsan Dargawalla: I recall repeating the names, getting a thrill from their unlikely, gobbledygook togetherness. What did she see in me, this gawky village cartoon from India with a name to match?

She liked my naivety and honesty, she said. She had seen enough of the cynicism, the bitterness. It was as if I were new to the world, I was like a
poem
…

“Stop BS-ing me!”

“There, you can't even swear properly, QED—” she teased, and gave me a push and ran, and I gave chase and brought her down. But what do you do then, Karsan Dargawalla, you clumsy oaf? And so she taught me how to kiss—in public, in full view of picnickers, on the banks of the Charles River. Applause. A public blessing by the water. It was done.

Her past—to use a euphemism for her previous intimacies—caused me no anxiety; whatever its details, she had found her destiny in me; and, paradoxically, I was swept away by her. She would confess to me, years later, what I should have long guessed even if only to flatter myself: that my running into her outside my department had not been a complete accident. She had inquired about me. All the better for my fragile self-respect, of course.

That night we had dinner at my place, to which she arrived dressed as for a formal occasion, bringing paraphernalia with which to decorate our evening. While I cooked, a skill I had taught myself, she busied herself with the table and setting up a suitably romantic ambience. And later that evening as we relaxed on the cushioned, carpeted floor (such was student living), I discovered the wonder of female closeness, the terrifying tastes of tender intimacy. We had became lovers, certain and complete together.

The following month I visited Winnipeg with her.

After the hubbub of Boston and its blithely chaotic streets, Winnipeg seemed destitute and bleak, in its flatness, its spareness, seeming more like a town from the old Wild West of the movies. And yet the prairie held its mystery and beauty, its clinging flatness suggestive of the infinitude of earth and sky; and the people, as though always aware of the
modest human circumstance, had a refreshing openness about them. Dr. Padmanabh was waiting for us outside the suburban family home when we arrived on a Saturday afternoon, straight from Boston, having hitched a two-day ride. He was a small man with a ready smile, wearing shorts that day, and he took me straight inside, Marge and her mother following. As soon as I had sat down on a living room couch, he handed me two slim volumes of his poetry, as though he had been waiting all morning to do just that, and then began plying me with questions about myself, not interrogatively but apparently out of genuine curiosity. The fact that I was a student of poetry at a prestigious university had won me over long before I arrived; what I replied about my background was neutral and safe, nothing to bewilder. His wife, Cathy, a fleshy woman with yellow hair, brought us lemonade and stood at the doorway. It was she who rescued me, as I wondered how to respond to the books in my hands, saying, “Let him freshen up first, Paddy. Then I'll make you some tea. I know how much all you Indians like tea!”

She showed me to the guest room and as she left me at the door, she gave me a hard look that said she wondered exactly what type of relationship I had going on with her daughter in these permissive times. I had come as the boyfriend, and Marge had thrown in, with her description of me, just the hint of an impending engagement.

“Thank you, Mrs. Padmanabh,” I said, and she replied quickly with a smile, “Call me Cathy. We 'll get to know each other a lot, won't we?”

“I hope so,” I said, elated.

That night after dinner we all sat in the living room for tea and dessert and the doctor entertained us with his saxophone, cutting a droll figure, the instrument coming down almost to his knees. But he was a good player, and I was told to my surprise that he sometimes played in clubs. He sat down and a family moment followed, touching in its togetherness, especially when I recalled my own circumstance. Before we retired Paddy was convinced, without much difficulty, to read from his poetry, which he did briefly in a dry and mildly expressive voice. It was the kind of confessional poetry of alienation that I was still unfamiliar with, clashing images from the East and West, and I made comments that I later thought were silly if not quite insulting to him. This was all the more galling to me when I realized that the doctor too had sought approval during my visit.

Marge—as I continued to call her—had a ten-year-old brother, an impish, fleeting presence in the house, called Gautam; he was present only for a part of that first evening, after which he disappeared into his room, from which we heard the dim but distinct thumping from his own brand of music. Cathy was a devout Christian; therefore to compensate for the large black wooden statue of the sitting Buddha in the living room there were many images of Jesus in the house, including a reproduction of the Last Supper that hung prominently on a wall in the dining room. In time I would become aware of the religious tension that existed between the couple. Gautam's other name was George.

“Do you like my family?” Marge asked.

“Very much,” I replied.

It was late the following evening, the summer sun was on the horizon across the flat landscape, and we were out on a walk in the neighbourhood, hand in hand. My answer was the one she expected, of course, and she looked happy and contented. And it pleased me to see her thus; I felt I had achieved that. It was a balmy evening with just a trace of coolness blowing in with the dark. The silent soft-lighted bungalows on either side of the street, set amidst their broad, rich lawns perforated by the occasional flower bed, composed a picture of sublime beauty and perfection. Marge hopped around naming flowers for me, and some varieties of maple. A few walkers with dogs passed us, then a couple of cyclists, an adult and a child; a lawn mower sputtered off somewhere, and we skipped past a couple of sprinklers. The whiff from a barbecue at the back of a house added surprise to the odour of earth and grass. I was moved enough to tell her I could easily live in a place such as this, be part of this serene suburban existence and raise a family. She squeezed my hand.

“And my father?” she asked. “What do you think of him?”