The collected stories (23 page)

A Love Knot

On rainy nights in that part of Boston, the Charles Street area, antique gas lamps lighted the narrow side streets which were swollen with a paving of cobblestones. Like the lamps, the stones had been left intact, and they were so carefully preserved in a way that caused such inconvenience that the nostalgia they represented was vulgar, an obnoxious pride. There was no love in it. It is that way with keeping old things: they are flaunted and handled and gaped at. Collectors and conservers are arrogant; many Bostonians are that way, and several I knew flinched when I told them how I had once seen my cousin tear the brass guts out of an expensive Victorian oil lamp and solder in a light socket. He thought it looked better with a plastic flex trailing from a hole he punched in its base. My cousin should have seen those gas lamps in Boston. Their clean windows framed small bags of white light and made the cobblestones gleam like glazed loaf tops.

With the love knot in my pocket Walnut Street was my destination, but all those streets had the same effect on me: turning into one from the traffic and honkings of busy Charles, I began to walk more slowly, as if I had been hurried back a hundred years and cooled on the way. I didn't see the nostalgia as arrogance: the discovery of this oldness was private and all my own, not urged on me by an anxious host. Because I was young and a stranger and because my first experience of that city had been vicarious in the most distancing way - through reading about it in novels - I wished to prolong these sensations of the age I understood, the cit) of quaintness and crime. By slowing down and remembering, I exhumed in my memory of grateful reverence for the solidness and the apparent calm, and hoped that the feeling would remain at least until 1 reached that crusted hydrant or that angular leaning house with the mulhoned windows at the corner. I strained to hear the hoofbeatS and creaking leather of a gasping horse, the wobbling clatter of carnage wheels approaching, or the man in the black opera cape tapping his cane tow aid a doorw av draped in tog boas.

A LOVE KNOT

I saw no one's face and I sensed that behind the brick walls of houses lay intrigue's moist dread and expectancy: a shadowy drawing room, chairs arrayed facing each other like old aunts who refuse to die, a cold fire, untouched sandwiches curling on the edges of a plate, a mantelpiece clock set in porcelain, an odor of foreign tobacco, a male corpse lying in a posture of frozen hilarity, some blood running into the pile of an expensive carpet - all the props in the literary stage set of a finished murder.

I was a student then, and on an errand, and if I made a great deal of the atmosphere it was because I had recently arrived from the worst city in the world, my birthplace, Calcutta - not, as I was often forced to explain to Americans, a fancifully named town in a Midwestern state, but the real place, in Bengal. Having left Calcutta I knew I would never go back, though I was bonded to the Government of West Bengal and I had promised that on my return I would work at a low salary for five years in the civil service to repay the loan that had been given to me. I am not a liar by nature; it hurt me to make the promise of returning after I earned my degree. But my family no longer exists for me: most are dead, and those who are not dead I never knew well. It was my plan to flee. The university in the Boston suburb was also part of my plan - I would not have gone anywhere else.

The idea of crime in those parts was not wholly literary remembrance of Bostonians with swords sheathed in walking sticks or genteel poisonings (strychnine has the sound and feel of a long, sharp knife — the sword-cane and the poisoning are linked in my imagination). All this was ten years ago, a time when so many women, most of them elderly, were sexually outraged and then strangled - I may have reversed the order here — by a lunatic handyman. On my first visit to Walnut Street a daily newspaper displayed in a steel rack in front of a drugstore had the alarming headline fear stalks the hill. Idling foreigners were reported to the police, and I expected to be stopped and subjected to a frisking and made to explain my errand. I was a total stranger in that place. Although my mother was a white American and my father a German, my passport was Indian and so is my accent still: I speak with my lips pursed and subtly transpose the first letters of the words very well. I had always been taught to think of myself as an Indian, more particularly Bengali, for in addition to being born near Calcutta, I lived there until the age of twenty-one, at

SINNING WITH ANNIE

which time I received my bursary. In Boston at the time of these stranglings, I felt that I, an Indian, was conspicuous. I was surprised that no one took the slightest notice of me. In coffee shops and, occasionally, buying subway tokens, I was asked to repeat myself; the requests were extremely polite. But in large cities speech is seldom necessary, and when it is used it is functional phrase-book language; except for the few times when I was asked to repeat what I said, a number or the name of a subway station, my accent went unnoticed. My color, of course, blended perfectly. At that time the word colored was still used to describe black people. I was not taken for, though I felt, colored.

My background was of interest to the girls I dated, and the information that I had resolved to suppress I found myself elaborating upon, as soon as I saw that it caused no discomfort to the listener. I am not a gregarious person and these petty details of my life were a relief from small talk. It soon reached the point where if I was not asked, I offered, saying, 'Did you know that I'm an Indian?' which never failed to produce the question, 'You mean an Indian Indian or the other kind?' I was envied for my origins but I selected, leaving many details unspoken, for I had once dwelt on some squalid aspects of my upbringing with a girl I especially liked, thinking of ways to interest her and casting about in my memory for impressive sorrows and hardships, and I was so absorbed in this that it was some time before I looked up and saw that I was making her cry.

The love knot, in gold, I found among my mother's possessions after she died, of an illness diagnosed as cerebral malaria, in our house in Calcutta in 1957. It was in an envelope sealed on the flap with red wax, a buff-paper envelope, much thumbed and furry with use, bearing on the front an address in my mother's handwriting, To: George Chowdree, 22 Walnut Street, Boston, Massachusetts. It was with three bangles, an out-of-date passport, my birth certificate and some things of my father's (his spectacles, some old coins, green-brown paper money, his copy of the Ramayana in a German translation), items of no value. He had died years before, alone my mother said, in another city in India. The sealed envelope had been addressed a very long time ago, and it looked as if it had been carried around, for the corners were tearing and the wrinkles and bulges in the envelope were a shadowy pattern the shape of

A LOVE KNOT

the small object inside. It could not be mailed. I opened it, for these reasons and also because I was curious. There was no note inside, only the love knot, worked in the most delicate filigree perhaps by one of our Bengali goldsmiths. That the name was George Chowdree amused me. He was obviously a Christian Indian, one of a group my mother detested: she spat at the sight of a black priest and she said that if I ever entered a Catholic church she would kill me. This anger in her was rare. She was a peaceful soul, and she was a very devout Hindu.

I am, I suppose, a Hindu myself. My interest in the name George Chowdree lay in the fact that its pattern was nearly my own name in reverse: my first name is Hindu and my surname European. Danny, as I'm called, is given as Daneeda on my passport; my surname, Schum, which is German, rhymed with zoom in India and now, in America, it rhymes with thumb. Persons of mixed identity like me find it simpler to agree with the stranger's assessment. I am what other people take me for; I never challenge their assumptions. When they say, 'I guess your father went to India during the war,' I say he did. They are probably right. I never knew my father, and the little I know of my background is enough to prevent me from wondering further. It was my mother who raised me, her only child; she took me to the temple, she enrolled me in school and stitched and mended my uniforms, she encouraged me to get a job in the civil service, she tried to keep me innocent. While she was certainly puritanical, she had developed the Indian habit of going to the movies on Saturday afternoons; it was her one recreation, and I shared it purely to please her. The films were extremely boring, their plots predictable and melodramatic (defiant lovers, feuding families, women dying in childbirth), but the songs - a dozen or so in each movie - were pleasant. My mother hummed them as she cooked, crouching next to a smoky fire and stirring and slapping dough cakes and turning from the smoke to sigh and push her hair - which was light brown - out of her eyes. I know now that my mother was a very beautiful woman; it is something that one discovers late - it may even be the mark of manhood to see one's mother as a woman who was once beautiful. As an orthodox Hindu, my mother never wore jewelry; her only ornament was a vermilion caste mark, the shape of a narrow candle flame, on her very white forehead. It surprised me that she had owned a love knot.

SINNING WITH ANNIE

But there it was, after her cremation, in my hand. I slipped it into a clean envelope and wrote out the address of George Chowdree, and for weeks afterward I repeated the address to myself. I took the same comfortable refuge in it that one does in an incantation. Studying for my Higher School Certificate, I copied this address on the flyleaf of my volume of The Secret Agent, which was one of the set books in English that year and which, now that I think of it, may have provided some of the London atmosphere that I later associated with that area of Boston: Verloc could have managed his seedy shop on Charles Street, and Winnie's carriage bumped over cobblestones just like those I saw on Walnut. I made one alteration in the address. Instead of Chowdree's name, I wrote, with the yearning one feels in the solitude of early youth, my own name, and under it Walnut Street and the city. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to escape from India, and now I had a place to escape to. It might have been the reason I did so well in my examinations.

In my mind I saw a street in America lined with walnut trees; there was only one house on the street that I could see clearly, the others were smaller and much blurred. Number twenty-two was a cheerful house, freshly painted, and it resembled a colonnaded house in Calcutta I was fond of walking past, an elegant but deserted one, where an Englishman had once lived. My scholarship went through after some delays; I was given a folder of directions and authorizations, printed on villainous paper; and I sailed from Madras.

I did not go to Walnut Street immediately. I wanted to discover the place slowly, as one does a painting in a museum, approaching it from a great distance and picking out details as one draws nearer for the close, final dazzle. I bought a map; I studied that. I walked in other parts of the city, where the docks are, where the insurance companies are, the bookstores, the Irish bars with old photographs of bare-fisted boxers in the windows, along the river near the hospitals, the Chinese district of four streets bordered by strip clubs and a large school of dentistry. And when I had explored the peripheries of the Charles Street area, noticing on the way a gloomy building housing the Theosophical Society, many antique shops and boarding houses (the doors ajar, pay phones on the wall), I walked to the corner of Beacon and Charles and then down Charles, pausing often, to Walnut, where 1 first saw that newspaper headline. 1 examined my map one last time. It was late on a rainy afternoon

A LOVE KNOT

in August and I shielded the map in my hand as I looked from it to the street sign and then down the sidewalk. People walked quickly past me in the warm drizzle with their heads down, holding bright umbrellas or, if they had no umbrella, making visors over their eyes with their hands. I was splashed by a car just before I turned into Walnut; but this was not the street I expected. The antique gas lamps were lighted, and so were most of the cobbles beneath them, glazed individually in pools of illumination. But the rest was dark, and there were few trees, all with wet, heavy green leaves, planted in holes in the sidewalk and protected by cylindrical wooden fences. The houses were all three-storied, most of them joined, with narrow plots of grass at the fronts. The even numbers were on the opposite side of the street. I went cautiously and found number twenty-two, watched for a moment, then walked around the block to a coffee shop where I had a sandwich and tea. The darkness outside was false, caused by the storm; I wanted night, and I walked until it enclosed the city. I went back to Walnut Street again, and passing the house, I saw through the lighted front window a girl's face, laughing at someone I could not see, and the face of the girl was as dark as all those I had left in Calcutta.

That was strange. I had prepared myself for a man's face, and, even more, for a particular man, one I had seen in a Bengali film, a plump-necked actor who always played the role of a businessman, a frequent traveler, a man of some importance; I had superimposed this important actor's face on George Chowdree. He was my stereotype - healthy Indians traveled, skinny ones stayed at home. Here I betray the theatrical side of my plan. It was melodrama, worthy of the Indian film which is filled with such paraphernalia: my dead mother's piece of ornate jewelry always in my pocket, my cleverly obtained scholarship, my search, my wanderings about the city -striking poses as if I was being watched. And soon I fitted that dark girl's face into this melodrama, as more appropriate than the man's I expected.

It was not my purpose to knock on the door and introduce myself. The busy strangler made everyone suspicious, doors were closed to strangers; it was not even a time for casual visiting, for people were no less anxious on an unfamiliar sidewalk than they were in their own houses, and footsteps behind one took on the jarring insistence of summoning nighttime knocks on a door.