The Death of Mr Love, page 3
‘What do you say, Bhalu?’ asked Bubbles, turning to me. ‘Is your mother right? Does what she’s saying apply to all stories, or only to true stories? What about fiction? What about a story that deliberately tells lies? What about fairy tales?’
I thought about this for a long time, then said, ‘I don’t know, Uncle. What is the answer?’ Bubbles laughed so much he had a coughing fit and had to give his pipe to Maya to hold. It was in her hand when she led me back to my bed. As we went I could hear Bubbles still laughing and the boom of his voice.
‘What is the answer? Wah! Such innocence!’
Such innocence! It ought to be my epitaph. I was in awe of my beautiful, clever mother and it took me a long time to realise that she was not as brilliant and successful as I imagined her to be. Her aphorisms, which sounded profound to a child, and inspired loyalty enough to figure in the diaries of my student years, came gradually to seem like old lovers for whom one can remember having felt passion, but not why.
‘The past is never finished with,’ she once told me, ‘because the present is its perpetually unfolding consequence.’
I remember all Maya’s stories, but the one I loved best – it still moves and horrifies me – was Silver Ganesh. I don’t mean the film they made of it, Doraaha (Two Ways, 1962 – not, incidentally, directed by Bubbles Roy), but the tale as told that night in Ambona more than forty years ago. It haunts me, the image of that child walking alone into the dark. For years I have followed him in dreams and in obscure byways of the waking imagination. Always, I lose him. Always, the blackness is pricked by points of wavering light and I find myself back in our candle-lit drawing room, with its book-lined walls, Persian carpets, and carvings that were once part of Goan churches and South Indian temples; back among the chink of glasses and the sweet smoke of cobra jasmine.
Maya would later claim that she had based her screenplay on something a friend had told her, and couldn’t remember whether the whole thing had been invented, but in truth I no longer recall more than a few images she conjured that night for Bubbles Roy.
When I think of that boy now, it’s my own memories I see.
BURNING ANGEL (LEWES/LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1998)
I was making a cup of tea in my bookshop in Lewes (if you know the High Street you would recognise it at once, it is one of those crooked timber houses made from the bones of old sailing ships, more or less opposite the castle), when the phone rang. It was Maya, to tell me about an interesting new play at the Royal Court. As an afterthought, she informed me that she was dying.
‘I don’t want you to make a fuss, Bhalu,’ she said, not giving me a chance to interject. ‘These things happen. As I was saying, it’s just the author on stage talking about his visit to Palestine and the people he met. Jew and Arab both.’
‘Oh!’
‘If it’s any good, I’ll write to Zafyque. He could adapt it for Bombay—’
‘Wait!’
My immediate thought was that she was testing my powers of repartee. It may seem odd to have had such a consideration at such a moment, but my mother had a wicked streak of – what? Humour? Mischief? She loved saying things to cause commotion and I could never be sure, when she behaved outrageously, whether she was being droll, or engaging in some subtle form of banter and I had missed the point. She was notorious for spiking conversations, when talking to people she disliked or who were boring her, with what she called ‘durrellisms’ – remarks like ‘We live by selected fictions,’ or ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time’ – always adding with a sweet smile, ‘Don’t you agree?’ She once gave my father, who prided himself on being an expert crossword solver, a cryptic clue, something like ‘Backwards leaning platonic in catastrophic endgame (8–3),’ and watched him puzzle over it for three months. There was of course no answer. Shortly before we moved to the forest-covered hills of Ambona, my father joined the Bombay Natural History Society and attended lectures on birdspotting. Maya found this hugely amusing. ‘What’s that?’ she would ask, pointing to a tree, in order to hear him reply, ‘Oh, just some sort of brown bird.’
She had decided that I must be educated properly, which to her meant the Russian authors. (India was in the honeymoon stage of its affair with the Soviet Union.) We had Russian children’s books, and I know Russian tales – Baba Yaga the Witch, The Malachite Casket, The Adventures of Dunno – far better than the Brothers Grimm. At the age of eight she started me on Gorky and when I complained that Childhood was depressing (it opened with a funeral) she said sharply, ‘Don’t be so childish!’ then broke into giggles and said, ‘Oh, but I keep forgetting, you are a child!’ Paradoxically, as I grew older she perfected the knack of making me feel more and more like one. All of these things were subsumed in my replies of, ‘Oh!’ and ‘Wait!’ Then I collected myself and said, ‘What do you mean, these things happen? This isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.’
‘I told you I don’t want a fuss,’ said my mother, with a testy edge to her voice. ‘I was not feeling well. In my dream a burning angel folded me in its wings . . .’ She allowed a silence to let this enigmatic statement sink in and then, to my astonishment said, ‘Bhalu, you remember when Zafyque came to London and told us about the riots? All those years he’d lived in Bombay, it was the first time he’d ever felt unsafe—’
‘Maya!’
‘—the mobs were going to areas like Malabar Hill looking for Muslims. Poor Zafyque kept an iron bar by the door of his flat.’
‘Oh, Zafyque is all actor,’ I said sourly, remembering the visit, his insistence that we all go to see a trans-gender Othello in which the Moor was played by a petite actress, and how ludicrous was the scene where she smothered a hulking male Desdemona:
DESDEMONA: (bass-voiced, blond-bearded, in striped pyjamas)
O, banish me, my lady, but kill me not!
OTHELLO: (slim, wearing lacy negligée, brandishing pillow)
Down, strumpet!
and how Zafyque had entertained us all in the trattoria afterwards by flirting with the waitress in what he imagined to be an Italian accent. As Maya segued into memories of Bombay in the mid-fifties, when she had been a member of Zafyque’s Theatre Troupe, my feelings were a mixture of irritation, worry, resentment and relief. When my mother babbled, it meant she was invoking a tabu and the real, forbidden subject must not be mentioned, except on her terms. Thus had it always been. We must never, for example, allude to her strange marriage. Although she had not lived with my father for twenty-five years, and had clapped eyes on him only once in the last dozen, they were still officially man and wife. In the early seventies she had followed me and my sisters to England, where we had been sent for our education, on the grounds that children should not be in a strange country without a parent, but when Suki, the youngest, graduated, she showed no sign of wanting to leave, thus effectively making sure that we also stayed. Such violent upheavals in a family do not occur without reason, but what the reason was she would never tell us, save only that after two decades of marriage she had tired of my father’s irritating habit of stroking his moustache, his obsession with roses and his lack of interest in his children. She had not sought a divorce, she said, because it was unthinkable in our family. There was no more she would say on the subject, except to drop the occasional grenade.
‘Your father has got a woman!’ she announced once, when we were gathered for lunch at her flat. ‘Homi wrote to warn me. What should I do?’
‘Go back and be a wife to him?’ my sister Suki suggested. She had always had a soft spot for poor old Captain Sahib. But Maya glared and the discussion was guillotined. She had never, so far as we knew, taken a lover herself, although one of her closest friends was an elderly Greek gentleman, a Mr Sefiriades, an expert in early Christian apocrypha, with whom she lunched regularly and had once joined on an over-sixties’ cruise to Ephesus and Patmos, ‘Separate cabins, no hanky panky’.
So I did not know what to make of this latest drama except that it was probably another false alarm. I remember her phoning once in the middle of the night screaming that the man downstairs was trying to break into her flat. In fact the poor chap was ringing her bell and banging desperately on her door to tell her she had left her bath running and it was about to bring his ceiling down.
‘Anyway,’ said my mother, ‘I can’t stay here talking, Marjorie’s coming to lunch. Come and see me.’ Click. Whirrr.
I reached London in the grey pigeon-light of a September dusk. Maya’s flat was in one of those overheated mansion blocks round the back of Sloane Square. Coming out of the tube station I saw the Royal Court was running a play called Via Dolorosa and wondered if it was the one she had mentioned. I would have gone over, but the foyer was full of smart people and I was suddenly aware of being still in my bookseller’s gear, baggy jumper holed at the elbows, trousers with knees like ears. I hate being conspicuous. If I had been wearing a suit and the theatre had been thronged with shabby second-hand booksellers I would still have avoided it.
I knocked and let myself into Maya’s flat, and found her sitting up in bed flicking through a magazine. She was wearing lipstick, as if expecting visitors. Her eyes were made up as they had been ever since I could remember, swipes of kohl lifting the outer edges to emphasise their hugeness. I had always thought this made her beautiful when she was young; it did not seem incongruous at seventy-six, although her hair was white and there were deep lines running down either side of her mouth. She looked up, and performed a small moue of unexpected pleasure.
‘So you have come.’
‘Well, naturally. What did you expect?’
She offered her cheek to be kissed. I perched on her bed and held out the bunch of flowers I had bought at the tube station, a spray of freesias wrapped in cellophane.
‘How lovely,’ she said, not taking them. ‘Put them in some water. You’ll find a vase in the kitchen.’
With what adeptness she could turn me back into a small boy, stupid and awkward, always doing the wrong thing. I found a pot, sluiced some water in and stood the flowers on her bedside table.
She leaned over and wrinkled her nose. ‘Wonderful. It always reminds me of mogri. You remember there was a wild one growing by the door in Ambona and it perfumed the whole house.’
There seemed nothing wrong with her and again I felt that familiar mixture of irritation and relief.
‘Come nearer.’ Her kiss settled like a fly on my cheek. ‘I don’t want you to be upset,’ she said. ‘That’s not why I telephoned. But I wanted to see you. How are Katy and the lovely I & I?’
‘Katy sends her love.’ Our twin daughters were in Greece. I & I. Imogen and Isobel. We’d had a postcard from Crete. ‘Maya, what has happened?’
She sighed and leaned back on her pillows, shading her eyes as if the light hurt them. ‘Now Bhalu, please, no fuss. You know how I hate all that blather. As a matter of fact, I want to discuss my will.’
She must have misinterpreted my expression, because she said, ‘Don’t look so horrified. It’s a good Hindu tradition to execute your will before you die. The idea is to get rid of all your stuff, make sure your duties are done. To depart without leaving a trace.’
‘You’re not departing. You’ve just had flu.’
‘Your sisters are coming over later. We’ll settle who’s having what and you can start taking it away. All these things,’ she said, waving her arm. ‘I want them all gone.’
I looked round the shabby room, full of relics of her past. It was furnished in a stubbornly Indian manner, as if she were trying to pretend she had not spent the last quarter of a century in England. From one corner, perched on a carved pillar, a gilded angel stared at us, its hands thrust forward cupping nothingness. Once they had held a beeswax candle to light a Goan church. Beside it, on a small table, stood a cage from which came a sudden scutter of wings. For as long as I could remember, my mother had kept bulbuls. She played old gramophone records to them, hoping that one day they might open their beaks and sing like Bhimsen Joshi. It occurred to me that these things had combined to fan her fever into a nightmare.
‘I’ll move the candlestick. Let me put it in the other room.’
‘Take it away with you,’ she said. ‘I want you and Katy to have it anyway . . . Great-grandfather’s case of butterflies, take that too. I’m leaving Khurram and Mumtaz in your care. Promise you’ll look after them.’ Her bulbuls. ‘But leave them until after I’m gone.’
I can’t bear to cage birds. If they really did outlive her, they could take their chances in the Sussex woods.
‘Maya, why are you so sure that—?’
She said, ‘Don’t start again. I warned you not to get upset.’
‘I’m not upset. I want to know what the doctor said.’
‘I have already told you.’ She picked up her magazine. It was one of the Indian titles – Stardust, Filmfare – she had delivered from the ABC in Southall, ‘to keep track of my friends in the monkey business’, by which she meant the Bombay movie industry. ‘People from a time when Indian cinema could have become something worthwhile,’ she used to say. ‘Before all this Bollywood nonsense.’ Most of the people she had known, however, Shailendra, Guru Dutt, A.K. Abbas, Bubbles Roy, were dead.
‘Pan made a fuss too,’ said Maya. Panaghiotis Sefiriades, her Greek boyfriend. Extraordinary that she should have given him her news before her children. ‘When I told him he urged me to pray.’
‘Maya, I don’t believe you’ve seen a doctor.’
‘We Hindus don’t have the comfort of the confessional and wiping the slate clean at a stroke. It isn’t that simple. I have never understood the store that Christians set by sincerity of repentance. Sincerity changes nothing. It’s insulting. What use is regret when one’s actions are already at work in the world? I told Pan, it is not dying that frightens me, but thinking of what I’ve set in train. Things done, things undone.’
‘You haven’t seen a doctor, have you?’
She sighed. ‘Honestly, Bhalu, it’s impossible to discuss anything with you. As a matter of fact he was here this morning.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He told me what I told you.’
‘I mean, what was his diagnosis? What is wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How on earth can you not know?’
‘I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know. I said to him, “Are you sure? Is there any possibility of a mistake?” And he said no. So that was that. That’s all.’
‘Surely something can be done. A second opinion, if we know what’s wrong.’
‘What is wrong? Why do you keep on asking what is wrong? Nothing is wrong. I’m seventy-six. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Grandfather lived to be ninety-six.’
‘Yes and you know what they used to say in Kumharawa?’ she retorted. ‘That the old man lived so long because he was so fond of you. He was hanging on, waiting for your visits, which never came. And when you did go it was because he’d given up.’
My grandfather’s funeral, twelve years earlier, was the last time either of us had seen my father.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, determined not to let her change the subject. ‘I’ve never heard of a doctor making such pronouncements without a second opinion. You say he came here? What tests did he perform?’
‘He felt my pulse.’
‘Hardly conclusive.’
‘And read my palm,’ said my mother defiantly.
‘My God!’ I suddenly realised what she had done. ‘You called in Srinuji.’
‘Well, of course. I had a fever and that dream – an angel with wings of fire. I had a headache like monkeys crouched on each shoulder pounding nails into my skull. Look!’ She leaned forward. ‘One on this side, one on that. Little faces fringed with fur. Nasty sharp teeth. Small orange eyes.’
‘Srinuji! What did he do, chant mantras over you?’
‘Their nails, I fancy, punch neat holes through which ideas leak away. There are worrying blanks in my thoughts, sometimes even in sentences. A word I have known all my life is no longer there when I need it. There are gaps in memory too.’
‘Let me call the doctor,’ I said, getting up to do so.
‘What for? I am taking Srinuji’s ghee naswaar.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. I meant your real doctor.’
‘Real? You mean western? What does he know about medicine?’
‘You could at least let him take a look.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There is nothing he can do.’
‘He could give you some pills for your headache.’
Maya hunched her shoulders and lowered her head to hide her face. Her body began to shake. It took me a few seconds to work out that she was laughing.
‘Oh Bhalu, you are so funny. Pills for my headache! And please tell me, what pills will he give for my karma?’
KARMA
Srinuji was her astrologer, an elderly, bleary person who moved in a pother of stars and planets, aspects, ascendants and exaltations, and was held by her in unfathomable regard. His pudding-basin belly rode on two stick legs. Trousers belted tightly just beneath the breast pocket swallowed up most of his shirt front. A scrawny neck and thrust-forward head, mouth often crimsoned by paan, gave him the air of a short-sighted but bloodthirsty tortoise with its shell on back-to-front. He had originally been her accountant, but as he aged and his interests inclined more and more to the supernatural he started offering his clients mystical as well as financial consultations. Maya took to asking his advice about her personal affairs and when my sisters and I protested she said, ‘I won’t allow you to laugh at him. He is a remarkable man.’
