The Death of Mr Love, page 8
I had also decided that I would go to see Maya. I’d buy tickets for the Royal Court and surprise her. The real reason, of course, was that I wanted to question her about Retribution and its peculiar companion piece. If the story was intriguing, I found the note, the tale of the eel-fisher and the insolent ghost utterly baffling.
I was convinced that Retribution was fiction, a character sketch for a film, but The Eel Fisher treated it as real. Could the story be true? During the period it covered we were in Ambona, but before that we lived in Bombay. Even after we moved to Ambona my parents regularly saw their Bombay friends. I remember Sybil very well. For three summers in a row, she and her daughter Phoebe came to stay with us in Ambona. Phoebe was my best friend. Was it possible that my mother, or Sybil, or someone known to them, had been mixed up in a murder? Even caused it? Surely not. The idea was preposterous.
Who was this Mister Love, whose spectre seemed to have taken permanent lodgings in my mother’s brain? Why had she chosen to represent his memory as a ghost? Apparitions are all very well in dodgy Elizabethan dramas like Hamlet and Macbeth (this is Piglet’s appraisal) but what place do they have in a mid-twentieth-century tale, especially one purporting to be a true story?
Then of course there was the familiar karmic theme, hallmark of virtually all her fiction. Usually I enjoyed her excursions into the minutiae of cause and effect, but in this case my sympathies were all with bitchy Noor. For Maya to hold herself responsible for the death of Mister Love was simply absurd. Did he bear no share of blame? What about the person who took a gun to his flat and then cold-bloodedly used it? No, my mother’s obsession with karma was surely a sort of mania. Some psychologist must have defined the syndrome, whose sufferers believe they are responsible for things with which they have no connection at all.
Maya had two ways to justify the karmic intrusions into her work. The first was a matter of dialectic. She said her doctrine of personal responsibility subverted the way history is commonly taught and received. Asoka won the Battle of Kalinga. Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo. This is what we learn. But battles are not won by kings and generals. They are the complex outcome of the individual actions of thousands of unremembered soldiers. Maya wanted the small people to recognise their importance and claim their place in history.
The second reason was ethical. Since even tiny actions have far-reaching consequences, we should be mindful of what we say and do. The problem was that this led directly to the paradox which Bubbles Roy called her ‘favourite unanswerable question’. If good actions can have wildly negative effects and vice versa, how are we ever to know how to act for the best? None of this helped me make up my mind whether Maya had written about a real murder, or whether Retribution and The Eel Fisher were two parts of an elaborate fiction.
I studied the pages several times. Looking for what? Clues to her state of mind? My mother had typically Indian handwriting. Her English letter forms reflected the fact that her first languages were Hindi and Urdu, whose scripts require the pen to be lifted between letters. It was a hand typical of someone who had learned to write, as I in my turn had, with a penholder whose nib must be frequently dipped, with resultant inky blotches on thumb, index and middle fingers. I used to suck them sometimes because the ink was salty and my lips, like a dying person’s, would turn cyanose. Handwriting reflects moods. If I am writing down something I don’t believe in, my handwriting grows weak and skulks across the page doing its best to hide. Confident characters stride. The words in The Eel Fisher raced boldly across the pages without pause for reflection. Maya’s manuscripts usually accumulated dozens of crossings-out as she searched for the right words. The Eel Fisher had nary a one. She was not inventing, not casting about for ideas, she was telling a story about which she had no doubts. Furthermore I could remember the afternoon she mentioned, when the hurricane lamps were lit (the power lines must have been brought down by the storm) and we listened to her tell the story. I even remember the story. It was the ‘sweet’ version of Nafísa Jaan.
Now other things occurred to me. If she was writing fiction, why would she have invented two women with virtually identical names? Unnecessary confusion. There is no need for it in the story. Why not call them Rachel and Emma? But no, they would have had the sort of names girls were given in the twenties, the kind of names you find in Enid Blyton books. Imogen and Margery, or Pat and Isobel. Why make them lookalikes? Again, there was no need.
It then struck me that, of course, a story can simultaneously be true and not true. There are many ways to dress real characters in masks, and a writer may have all kinds of motives for doing so. Thinly-disguised accounts of well-known people and events are often published as propaganda, or to generate sensation and sales.
Truth-in-a-mask could also be used to tell an important story while protecting the real people involved; to expose an injustice that would not otherwise be brought to light. One could imagine for example, a scenario where powerful interests might be able to stonewall a journalistic investigation, or quash it with a libel writ.
But to have any effect at all, fiction must be published. What had Maya done with Retribution? Nothing. Why write a story, show it to no one, send it nowhere, never again mention it? It was a conundrum. I could have picked up the phone, I suppose, but did not want to. My mother was very good at sending people in hot pursuit of wild-geese and (more water fowl) there was still the dying swan routine to be explained.
‘Bhalu,’ I told myself, ‘it’s not as if you have a business to run.’
I unscrewed my fountain pen and made a summary of what could be known, or reasonably inferred, from Retribution and its strange satellite:
Mister Love conducted indiscreet and unwise affairs with two Englishwomen who were alike as twins.
Each woman had cause to hate him.
He was murdered by an unknown hand.
He was maligned in a newspaper, Blitz (easy to check, if my contact did his stuff ).
In Maya’s mind his death was connected to her telling us a story one afternoon in Ambona.
There was a court case, in which someone must have been found guilty of the murder, because the murderer went to jail.
The murderer was subsequently freed and allowed to leave India, which strongly implied that he or she was a foreigner.
The freeing of Mister Love’s killer made it impossible to keep behind bars the men who had plotted Gandhi’s assassination.
It was a plot for a movie. It had to be.
And yet . . . what if it wasn’t? Here it came again, that old uneasy feeling of stories reaching out to each other, touching, merging, diverging, stories within stories, sliding in and out of one another – myself as a being made, not of flesh and blood with a life and choices of my own, but of stories and patterns created long before my birth. ‘We are born with free will, but are forced to expend it trying to un-live the lives of our predecessors.’ (One of Maya’s, of course, from the Collected Aphorisms.)
Something Maya had said the other night. She wouldn’t stop talking, fixing each of us in turn with huge kohl-rimmed eyes.
‘Ninu, do you remember when Bhalu hit you on the nose with a cricket bat? You were only three! I thought I’d have to report him to the police as a juvenile delinquent, but you kicked him in the eye and stabbed him in the head with a pencil. You could stick up for yourself.’
It was as though she wanted to recall every moment we had spent together, to relive them with us. ‘Suki, such a dreamy girl, always with your nose in a book, but I knew you had your head screwed on straight.’
She said, ‘Bhalu, I worried about. He was always a foolish boy. Once when he was six, your father’s friend Garg – oh, he was so dull, Bhalu can’t really be blamed for what happened – took him to the US Club. You remember the Club, at the southern tip of Bombay with a golf course and the sea on three sides? Well, the young Gargs weren’t particularly friendly and Bhalu got fed up with trailing round after them, but . . .’ here she paused and impaled me with a critical eye ‘. . . instead of doing what any other child would have done and put up with it, he lagged further and further behind and then hid behind a bush. It was quite some time before they missed him and raised the alarm. They were worried sick. All that rough ground, snakes too, and strong tides sweeping past the point – the shores were sharp black rocks covered in crabs – but they didn’t find him because by that time he was already halfway home to Cuffe Parade.’
I could actually remember this: scuffing moodily home past the fisher encampments with their big boats pulled up onto the shore of the Back Bay. I got home to find my mother dressing for yet another function to which children were not invited. She looked very glamorous that night, in a green silk sari with a gold border, and emerald eardrops. About an hour later the doorbell rang and our servant answered it. Outside I heard the voice of Garg asking for my mother. Then he caught sight of me and said, with a hatred in his voice that I shall never forget, ‘Oh you wicked, wicked boy!’
Maya said, ‘Yes, he’d come to give me the dreadful news that you had vanished – that they were searching for you in the dark with torches and the coastguard had been called out to scour the shoreline. But that’s why I worry about you, Bhalu, that you’ll go through your whole life running away . . .
‘Oh, here’s poor Sybil,’ said my mother, looking through an old photograph album. ‘So kind, so good, but always in some kind of trouble . . .
‘And look, Bhalu, here’s you and Phoebe. Taken that last summer just before they returned to England. I often wonder what became of Sybil. The letters just stopped. I always said I’d find her when I came to England. But . . .’
There we were in the photograph, a fair girl and a dark boy. We were in our garden in Ambona, with the high ridge of Bicchauda rising behind us.
By the time the train reached Gatwick, I had almost decided that I would not, after all, mention Retribution. Just suppose, I said to myself – and yes, it is the tiniest, remotest, unlikeliest supposition – that the story is true, the fact that she has never mentioned it can only mean she wants it forgotten, and this is hardly the time to upset her by raking up old scandal. Nevertheless, I argued, as we came clattering across the sidings at Clapham Junction, if she still maintains this ludicrous charade that she is dying, then her own philosophy of karmic storytelling demands that this be investigated, and for one overriding reason.
‘Death deceives with a blow. The immediacy of pain disguises the deeper loss. Our own memories survive. It takes time to realise that the memories of the gone ones are lost for ever. They go, and take with them stories from childhood, anecdotes, dates, rhymes, songs, fragments of family history. But these things are not to be forgotten because what happened in the past is already shaping our unborn children’s lives . . .’ Her own words, from The Solace of Infamy.
I crossed the square to the Royal Court and bought two tickets for that evening’s performance of Via Dolorosa. Put them in my pocket ready to flourish when Maya opened her door. I pressed the bell, expecting Maya to come to the entryphone and buzz me in. A stranger’s voice answered. The door to the flat was opened by a nurse in a white uniform, who looked as unnerved to see me as I was to see her. Maya had had a fit. It must have happened during the night. Nina had found her at about eleven this morning and had rung in a panic for help. The doctor had been, and my mother was now sleeping. Nina had been trying to phone me. She’d had to go home, but would be back soon. The nurse said she was desperately sorry to give me such bad news, and I said it wasn’t her fault. With the strange detachment that seems to possess one at times of crisis, I noticed that she was barefoot, and that each of her toenails was painted a different colour. She asked if I’d like to sit with my mother and offered to make me a cup of tea.
Last time I had seen Maya she was sitting up in bed reading. Now there was a needle taped to her arm and a tube running into her nose. Her face was altered, the flesh had fled from the bone. Nothing else had changed. The pile of books was still by her bed. In their cage in the corner, Khurram and Mumtaz bobbed their heads and whistled. I sat down to wait.
A little while later the nurse beckoned me out of the room and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t know if I should give you this. Your mother woke for a while this afternoon. She wanted to write you a note. The thing is . . . I hope you won’t find it upsetting.’
She handed me a folded sheet of Maya’s writing paper. It read: ‘Mymy mydeardededear myyymy dedearerrer my dearearear Bhalu I I am sosorry nnot ttotoo see yoyou . . .’
When I went back into the room, my mother’s eyes were open. She looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Bhalu-alu-alu,’ which in Hindi translates to ‘Bhalu-potato-potato.’
II AMBONA
DUKE’S NOSE (AMBONA HILLS, FEBRUARY 1958)
The road up into the hills weaves in a series of steep hairpins past a small temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, at which there are always flowers left as insurance by lorry drivers, who grind up and down all day in first gear. On its roof long-tailed langurs sit, nibbling fruit and regarding the passing world with wise eyes. When you reach the top, what a view it is. To the west, a gape out across a forty-mile blur of coconut groves, tribal forests, flats and swamplands. To the east, the escarpment rises still higher, the mountains assuming fantastic shapes, vast rearing domes of rock wearing the sky like a wide blue hat.
It was the beginning of 1958. My father had just announced that he was retiring early from the Navy. He wanted us to move to my mother’s home-town, Lucknow, which had a climate ideal for the cultivation of roses, but Maya responded with one of her famous tantrums.
‘Are you mad?’ she yelled. ‘I’m a writer not a dung-shoveller! The film studios are here! My friends are here! I absolutely refuse to leave!’
‘But,’ protested poor Captain Sahib, ‘you can’t grow roses in Bombay.’
One of their friends, a sculptor called Mohan Apte, came up with the answer. Why not live in the Ambona Hills? They were a six-hour drive from Bombay, less by train, and at close to four thousand feet the air was clear and dry. Roses would love it, and it was peaceful, good for thinking and writing.
‘You will not be lonely,’ Mohan assured my mother. ‘All week long, my dear, you will work hard, and at weekends friends will come to stay. They’ll be queuing up for invitations. You know how desperate everyone is to escape the city, especially in sticky weather, and the evenings are deliciously cool in the hills. You’ll have parties, soirées, musical weekends. And it will be marvellous for the children.’
Mohan had a friend in the area who would keep an eye open for a suitable house we could rent.
My father was to go ahead to get things ready for us. He drove off in our old Humber, in convoy with two M.E.S. trucks carrying our furniture and belongings. With him went my two-year-old sister Suki and our ayah Shashi. Maya could hardly be expected to supervise the packing with a toddler underfoot. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘a child needs its ayah. Someone has to feed her and take care of all that other business.’
Emptied of our familiar things, the flat seemed vast. Nina and I, hilarious with excitement, spent our last day skidding in the corridors, went eagerly to bed and rose with the crows to hang over the balcony waiting for the Humber to return with my father’s new driver, Babu, who had the reputation of being a shikari, a hunter. Sure enough, when he arrived, he wore a hunter’s moustache and the arms that lifted our suitcases into the car were brawny enough to wrestle with pythons.
At last, we were moving, leaving the city, leaving the building that held my first memories. Goodbye to Pallonji Mansion, full of cooking smells and the laughter of servants, to Mrs Shroff in the flat above us shouting at her cook, to her little dog Cutty and the stray cats he loved to chase. Goodbye to the sickly papaya tree in the courtyard, the banana by the gate and to chowkidar Zarak Khan in his long Pathan shirt and pyjamas. Goodbye to the twang twang twang of the mattresswallah coming along the road with his cotton-fluffing harp over his shoulder, to the peanut-men of Cuffe Parade, paper cones of hot roasted nuts and savoury charcoal smoke, to Cuffe Parade and sea breezes, and the Back Bay where the fisherfolk set nets in the brown water among the mangroves and long jetties reached out through smells of salt and rot and swamp to the sea.
Babu was a movie buff and as we drove through Bombay he had a word to say about each of the films advertised on the hoardings.
‘So Bhalu, who’s your favourite star? Let me guess, it’s . . . ?’
Correct! Who else? The funniest comic ever. In his new picture CID, he’d sung a song so catchy everyone was humming it.
Ai dil hai mushkil, jeena yahaan
Jara hatt ke, jara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
Oh heart, it’s so hard to live here this way,
Just dodge by, somehow get by, oh my life, oh my Bombay!
Kahin buildings, kahin traamen, kahin motor, kahin mill,
Milta hai yahan sabkuchh ek milta nahin dil
Buildings, trams and motors, mills in every part,
Everything, this city has, but it does not have a heart.
Babu laughed. ‘Forget this song. You’re no longer a Bombay-ka-babu. You’re now an Ambona-ka-babu, like me.’
It was noon when we crossed the marshes at the northern edge of the city. ‘I want you to keep your eyes open,’ said my mother. ‘Tell me if you see anything extraordinary.’
I didn’t know what she meant. To me it was all extraordinary. Everything seemed magical, even everyday things like bullock carts. In the city they hauled bales and boxes and tanks of water, but here they creaked along under loads of hay and wood and leaves. The women walking by the road wore their saris in the same tail-twixt-legs fashion as the fishwives of Sassoon Dock, but on their heads they carried the strangest things: a tree branch, cowdung cakes, a pair of bicycle wheels . . .
