The Death of Mr Love, page 36
INTO THE BARDO
Above me, seen through the architecture of Phoebe’s great bed, the skylight was dark except for a few ragged smears of light, clouds lit by a hidden moon. A glowing green pinprick marked where the cassette player stood on the floor. Phoebe’s voice, punctuated by sobs so violent they sounded like retching, had abruptly cut to the hiss of virgin tape running through the heads. Eventually this was ended by a faint click, since when there had been silence and darkness. I don’t know how long had elapsed. I was thinking of something my father had told me about my grandfather’s last days. The old man had been ill for some time. His heart was weak. He had difficulty breathing and ordered his bed to be brought out into the courtyard, the same place where half a century earlier the scorpion had fallen off the roof onto my sleeping father.The women of the household fussed around him with decoctions of fennel and nutmeg. They brought Nepalese comb-honey from the bazaar and used it as a treat instead of sugar to sweeten the glass of milk which was the only food he would take. The old man grew impatient with them. He waved them away and demanded his hookah, swearing at them until they brought it, and again when the bowl was not correctly filled, the coals were improperly placed, and when they forgot to freshen the orange-water through which the smoke gurgled during its long passage from the brazier to his lips.
The women smoothed over the courtyard floor with a thin wash of clay and cowdung, inscribed yantras and sigils around it with coloured powders and performed pujas for his recovery. When this had no effect they called in a brahmin, who ensconsed himself like a living portrait in the frame of mystical emblems and immediately went to work, muttering the myriad names of God, stubby fingers working round his rosary of scrotal rudraksh seeds.
Grandfather was insufferably rude to him. ‘Why are you wasting my time with this bakwaas (nonsense)? Are you determined to spoil my few remaining hours?’
The priest, mindful of the dignity of his calling, or perhaps of his fee (one hundred and fifty rupees a day plus two full meals), swallowed his pride along with his rice, curd, dal and two sorts of vegetable, accompanied by home-made pickle and potato-stuffed parathas made with best ghee, and maintained his thankless vigil, ready to begin the whispering, the sky-map the old man would need in the beyond. His soul, once freed from its skull prison by the kindly blow of his son, my father, would rise from the funeral pyre, up into the air, which would open, like the hole in the hub of a bullock-cart wheel, like the bowl of a hookah, like the mouth of a hungry child. Grandfather had no time for suns and moons and godlings. All his adult life he had been a member of the Arya Samaj, a reformist Hindu movement which was impatient of ritual mumbo-jumbo, disapproved of idol-worship and campaigned for the emancipation of women and the abolition of the caste system, whose incantating representative now sat before him. So he lies on his bed, scowling and puffing smoke at the shaven-headed brahmin, who is provoked at last to complain, somewhat absurdly, ‘Baba-ji, smoking is very injurious to the health.’
‘But good for your bald pate,’ retorts Grandfather, determined to squeeze what enjoyment can be had from his final moments, and calls for last night’s hookah scrapings to be boiled up with mustard oil to make a hair-engendering poultice. The household chitter and chide him and the brahmin says, ‘Anxiety is making you bad-tempered. That is natural. Try to look forward to the next life, because whatever your karma, for that split-second before you are reincarnated, your soul returns to God in a realm without pain.’
‘To hell with you,’ Grandfather says. ‘There is no world without pain. And if there were it would not be worth living in.’
The picture in my mind changes. I see my mother. She is lying propped up on pillows. We – Ninu, Suki and I – are with her, kneeling beside her bed. Maya’s face is gaunt, her breathing harsh. She can no longer speak. Maybe she can’t hear what we are saying. Maya is terrified of her karma. But why? For her karma is not a question of reward or punishment in some future life. How often has she said this? Not for her the weighing of the heart in the feather hall of Osiris, or judgement before the great white throne of Revelation where the just and unjust are sorted, like the fit and unfit on the railway sidings at Auschwitz. Maya needs no gazetteer to the afterlife. She knows she will not have to go alone into the high windy places of the bardo: its naked rock, cliffs and desolate screes (this is the Tibetan, not the Hindu, vision, but Tibet is, by crow-flight, not very far from our village; from the roof of Grandfather’s house the Himalayas can be seen as a dirty smudge above the northern horizon). Like Grandfather, she does not fear being challenged by monsters, mocked by obscure, second-rate divinities, or lured towards dark cave mouths that lead to further births.
Maya does not believe in any kind of life after death, much less in life after life after life. She used to quote Nietzsche, who said, ‘The final reward of the dead is to die no more.’ To which she would add, ‘If he had been born a Hindu he would have phrased it differently. He’d have said “to live no more”.’
For Maya, karma is experienced in the here and now. She is still ‘here’, but only just, and there is not much ‘now’ left. Soon, she will stop experiencing her karma, but it will continue to work itself out through our lives. Hence her fear. When her eyes open to scan each of our faces for the last time, that look says, ‘I’m not afraid for myself. It’s you I worry about.’We kneel by her bed, whispering words of love and comfort; assurances that she has done well for us, that she can depart with an easy mind, because we are happy and strong and impregnable. My mother dies with her children around her and a small strange smile on her face.
Then I think of Phoebe, squatting on her heels in a storm of flies.
There was a troubling scent in the air. The sweetness of incense, but something else as well. Under the double doors to the other room, a line of yellow light showed. It wavered. Flickered. Alarm, the accumulated force of the day’s revelations, propelled me off her bed and hurled me at the doors. I threw them open and stood amazed.
In the darkness of her big front room burned two rings of fire: concentric circles of candles glued onto saucers, stuck into wine bottles hung with waxy stalactites; there were paper lanterns with nightlights inside, and clay lamps whose wicks balanced steady yellow flames. At the centre of this weird luciferan collection, Phoebe was seated on a rug cross-legged. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be meditating.
Her voice, out of the candledusk: ‘Come here, Bhalu.’
I advanced, but was halted by the first ring of flames. A demon conjured from hell by a medieval sorcerer could no more have penetrated that charmed circle. My feelings were in utter confusion. Shame, that I had doubted her. Pity, for what she had suffered. She was my oldest friend. I wanted to go to her, take her in my arms, stroke her hair, comfort her, but did none of these things. I stood, paralysed by the peculiarity of the scene, or perhaps by some instinct akin to self-preservation.
After a while she said, ‘I’m sorry I told you lies.’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Nothing could matter, after what I had just heard.
‘Unfortunately, it does. If you have to lie to someone it means you don’t love each other enough.’
‘We’ve always loved one another,’ I said. ‘Ever since we were small children. Nothing can change that.’
She did not turn her head or open her eyes, but I heard her sigh.
‘What was I to do, Bhalu? If I’d told you about myself – about this place, all the other things – what would you have thought? Would you have wanted to know me?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘How could I be sure, Bhalu?’
‘How could you not be sure?’
‘People change.’
‘No!’ I cried, with a vehemence that surely must have astonished her. ‘People don’t change, deep down.’ I hadn’t changed. I was still the boy who had led her to the Kathodi’s sacred grove, and to the haunted temple on Bicchauda mountain.
She opened her eyes. ‘Sit here. Opposite me. So I can see you.’
Like someone entering unknown territory, I stepped over the flames and into the realm of her madness.
‘Mummy changed,’ said Phoebe. She hunched forward and hugged her knees. In the uncertain light, with shadows changing the contours of her face, it was hard to make out her expression.
‘Phoebe, I am so sorry . . . about your mother. It must have been . . .’ Oh, the destitute vocabulary of solace. ‘If only we – that is, all of us, Maya . . .’ But now it was caution that tied my tongue, stopped me saying, lest it sound like a reproach, that had we known, Sybil need not have felt so alone.
‘It would have made no difference,’ Phoebe said in a harsh voice. ‘You’ve no idea how bad she was. I would go to see her and she would sit – look, like this . . .’ She began rocking back and forth as people do sometimes when they are disturbed. ‘Sometimes she wouldn’t talk the whole time I was there – two or three days at a stretch. It made me angry. I should have been kinder.’
She lifted her face and looked at me, and I could see the wet tracks on her cheeks. ‘Bhalu, people who talk of the blackness of despair don’t understand. Despair isn’t just darkness, the absence of hope, a night without stars. It’s worse. Bhalu, try to remember what the nights were like, in Ambona . . .’
I looked, and saw a landscape in utter darkness, a sky lit by a vast river of stars.
‘Despair is being afraid of the stars.’
I remembered what she had said on the tape, about being filled with nausea by the monstrous reality of everyday objects.
‘When she died, her depressions passed to me. My sole inheritance, the only thing of hers I kept. The house was sold, but the things in it . . . I never knew what became of them. I left everything. I could never go back. One cupboard, I heard later, she had filled with books. The walls were damp and the books round the sides and on the bottom had rotted together into a pulp. They had to be scraped away with a spade . . .’
Her body convulsed and her hand jumped to her mouth. She was no longer thinking of books. I sat helpless, unable to enter this further realm of pain that she and her mother had shared. I was remembering a day, long ago, when a woman wearing dark glasses got off a train, followed by a little blonde girl in an Alice-in-Wonderland dress.
‘Bhalu, I used to think I was a good person. But I can’t be. How could I have abandoned her?’ She covered her eyes with her hands, and resumed rocking to and fro. It was no longer a demonstration of her mother’s misery, but of her own. Looking at the wretched figure before me, I knew she had been right not to tell me her secrets.
‘Despair is like emotional suicide, Bhalu. Anger turned against oneself. Wulf said, you do this when anger can’t be directed against its proper target. He asked who else, other than myself, I was angry with. I said, Mummy, but then realised that I couldn’t be angry with her any more. She’d suffered too much. Wulf kept pressing. So I said I was angry with Daddy, for abandoning us . . . but he had suffered too.’ She fished a handkerchief from somewhere about her person (women are infinitely resourceful about handkerchiefs) and blew her nose. She looked so forlorn, sitting in her circle of candles and lamps. I wanted to hug her, squeeze the grief out of her.
‘You never knew my father, Bhalu. He wasn’t the monster that Mummy made him out to be. He was a kind man, Bhalu, my father. He did his best to save their marriage . . . Do you know what the real tragedy was? She need never have worried.’
I suddenly realised what she was now going to tell me. That Killy had known all along, about Sybil’s affair.
‘He told me, that time he came to England. He blamed himself. He would have stood by her if there had been a scandal. He was prepared. He knew about everything except the blackmail. If only he had spoken to her . . .’
The irony of if only! Had Killy, forty years ago, opened his heart to Sybil, she could have told the blackmailer to fuck off! No – they would have done it together. Exposed him. Probably ruined him. Maya would not have got involved. We might never have left India. Sybil’s slow, lonely disintegration – Phoebe’s pain – all would have been avoided. But Killy had chosen not to speak, and from that choice proceeded the consequences. Could there be a clearer demonstration of the futility of Maya’s view of karma as a guide to moral action? It was nothing more than ironic hindsight.
‘Why didn’t he tell her?’ I asked.
‘He thought it was kinder not to. If you found out something someone didn’t want you to know, what would you do?’
I thought of Katy, and said nothing.
‘It was a kind of lying,’ said Phoebe. ‘Pretending he didn’t know. He didn’t love her enough to clear away the lies.’
‘Why do you keep insisting on this?’ I asked, feeling suddenly irritated. ‘Your father lied because he loved your mother. Perhaps she wasn’t ready to receive the truth. It takes two.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It takes two. Bhalu, do you know what love is?’
Even at the best of times there is never an adequate answer to a question like this, so I made a noncommittal motion of the head.
Phoebe said, ‘I’ve read all the authorities on love and not one from Ovid to Stendhal, from John the Beloved Disciple to Fromm has said what it really is.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, unable to resist.
‘It’s a fire,’ she said, ‘in which one must be prepared to sacrifice everything. It’s a blowtorch to burn off the secrets that cake the chambers of the soul. It’s being totally truthful, giving oneself completely, withholding nothing . . .’
‘Did Wulf tell you this?’
‘We’ve talked about it.’
‘Do you love Wulf?’
For the second time, she looked directly at me. All traces of tears were gone and she was smiling. ‘Not like I love you, Bhalu.’ She leaned forward and said eagerly, ‘When two people accept each other completely, there is no further need for secrets. Nothing need be hidden. We can accept each other just as we are. And who are we? What’s in here . . . and here.’ She tapped her head and laid a hand on her heart. ‘Wulf says, “With nothing we come into the world and with nothing we leave it.” That’s who we really are.’
I listened with astonishment to this jejune philosophising. At any other time I might have said something cynical, but not now.
‘Bhalu, could you trust someone that much? With anything? Can you love someone so much that you refuse to hide from them? That you are willing to be yourself completely?’
‘I thought I could,’ I said, thinking of Katy.
‘Can we two be together as we are, fundamentally? Nothing but ourselves. Can we?’
‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what she meant.
‘Take off your clothes.’
I thought I had misheard, but she stood, crossed her arms and pulled off her T-shirt. The white line of her bra fell away and was tossed on the sofa. She undid the waist of her jeans and must have stepped out of them and her underwear together, because then she was naked. I looked again on the body I had seen before, this time with more terror than desire.
She sat down again on the rug, cross-legged as before. Closed her eyes. Paid me no attention at all.
Candle-flicker. Oh Lord, I was thinking, this is the weirdest moment of my life. How have I, from my humdrum existence, come to this? This person, whom I have loved since she was a child, has lied and lied to me. Everything she has done since we met again has been calculated, staged, a series of initiations through which I have had to pass in order to be close to her. Now she admits her lies, and by doing so turns them into evidence that she loves me. But what is the meaning of such a love?
I sat, watching the soft light sculpt her body, moving on its planes and hollows. I took in every part of her, without desire, just seeing a human female, heavy breasts – almost too heavy for the narrow ribcage – the dimple of the belly-button and smooth swell of flesh around it, the faint swatch of hair where her belly curved below. I did not know what to do. One part of me was saying, ‘This woman is confused and perhaps not quite sane.’ Another, ‘This is something to which I have been destined since a child, when we played under the waterfall, and were scolded.’
I bent down, took off one shoe, then the other. Socks, shirt. Undid trousers. Hesitated. Then the last bit of clothing. Stepped over and laid them all neatly on the opium chest. Stepped back into the circle of flames, self-conscious about my body. One year short of fifty. But I stood before her and she opened her eyes and let them pass over my body: lean, for the most part, scrawny, some might say. Ribs showing, slight belly, from lack of exercise. The eyes descended, did not linger, and passed without any change of expression to thin shanks, big feet.
‘Sit down, Bhalu. Opposite me. Over there.’
Her white body, my brown one.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘there’s just you and me. No more bookseller, no more painter. No more married, no more unmarried. Just you and me. Bhalu and Phoebe. There is a beautiful story from India about Siva and Kali. They say that when Kali dances, it is Siva who moves within her limbs, and when Siva dances, it is Kali whose power moves inside him. That is what love really is, two people who have surrendered completely to one another’s wills, who act as one . . . Bhalu, we are together again like years ago. The things that started then have got to be resolved.’
‘Phoebe,’ I said, ‘where is this leading?’
‘Imagine how powerful that love is, then imagine a hate just as powerful. Bhalu, I can’t forgive that man who tortured my mother. I still feel terror when I think of him. And rage. Wulf said this was my despair. When I understood it, it would vanish. But it hasn’t. Then he said confront it and let it go. So I told you, that day in the hotel, I was planning to go to India to find the man. I want to look him in the eye and show him that he no longer has any power over me. Remember? I said I couldn’t do it alone. I asked you to come with me.’
