The Far Field E-Book

Madhuri Vijay

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 659

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

WINNER OF THE 2019 JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE An elegant, epic debut novel that follows one young woman's search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that takes her from Southern India to Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning. In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion. Cosmo's one of the best books by BAME writers to get excited about in 2019 Longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Leseprobe

‘Vijay probes grand themes – tribalism, despotism, betrayal, death, resurrection – in exquisite but unflowery prose, and with sincere sentiment but little sentimentality.’

—New Yorker

‘Ms. Vijay is an effortlessly assured prose writer. . . . The Far Field is illuminating about the persecutions in Kashmir, but at its heart it is about the ironclad laws of class by which all India is ruled.’

—Wall Street Journal

‘A story exploring the passage of time and the repercussions of one’s actions sets out to ask the charged question of what it is that we spend our lives searching for.’

—Vanity Fair

‘A ghastly secret lies at the heart of Madhuri Vijay’s stunning debut, Far Field, and every chapter beckons us closer to discovering it. . . . The Far Field chafes against the useless pity of outsiders and instead encourages a much more difficult solution: cross-cultural empathy.’

—Paris Review

‘I am in awe of Madhuri Vijay. With poised and measured grace, The Far Field tells a story as immediate and urgent as life beyond the page. I will think of these characters – tender and complex, mysterious and flawed, remarkably real to me – for years to come, as though I have lived alongside them.’

—Anna Noyes

This book was completed in part due to an Edwards Fellowship, and the author wishes to thank the Edwards family.

First published in the United States of America and Canada in 2019 by Grove Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © Madhuri Vijay, 2019

The moral right of Madhuri Vijay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.

The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 632 3

Export paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 482 4

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 913 3

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For MBK, who loved to readandfor X, who makes this island seem a world, and the world seem our island

Something else is yet to happen, only where and what?Someone will head toward them, only when and who,in how many shapes and with what intentions?Given a choice,maybe he will choose not to be the enemy andleave them with some kind of life.

Wisława Szymborska, “Some People”

I

1

IAM THIRTY YEARS old and that is nothing.

I know what this sounds like, and I hesitate to begin with something so obvious, but let me say it anyway, at the risk of sounding naïve. And let it stand alongside this: six years ago, a man I knew vanished from his home in the mountains. He vanished in part because of me, because of certain things I said, but also things I did not have, until now, the courage to say. So, you see, there is nothing to be gained by pretending to a wisdom I do not possess. What I am, what I was, and what I have done—all of these will become clear soon enough.

This country, already ancient when I was born in 1982, has changed every instant I’ve been alive. Titanic events have ripped it apart year after year, each time rearranging it along slightly different seams and I have been touched by none of it: prime ministers assassinated, peasant-guerrillas waging war in emerald jungles, fields cracking under the iron heel of a drought, nuclear bombs cratering the wide desert floor, lethal gases blasting from pipes and into ten thousand lungs, mobs crashing against mobs and always coming away bloody. Consider this: even now, at this very moment, there are people huddled in a room somewhere, waiting to die. This is what I have told myself for the last six years, each time I have had the urge to speak. It will make no difference in the end.

But lately the urge has turned into something else, something with sharper edges, which sticks under the ribs and makes it dangerous to breathe.

So let me be clear, here at the start.

If I do speak, if I do tell what happened six years ago in that village in the mountains, a village so small it appears only on military maps, it will not be for reasons of nobility. The chance for nobility is over. Even this, story or confession or whatever it turns out to be, is too late.

My mother asleep. The summer afternoon, the sun an open wound, the air outside straining with heat and noise. But here, in our living room, the curtains are drawn; there is a dim and deadly silence. My mother lies on the sofa, cheek pressed to the armrest, asleep.

The bell rings. She doesn’t open her eyes right away, but there is movement behind her lids, the long return from wherever she has been. She stands, walks to the door.

Hello, madam, hello, hello, I am selling some very nice pens—

Good afternoon, madam, please listen to this offer, if you subscribe to one magazine, you get fifty percent—

A long-lashed boy with a laminated sign: I am from Deaf and Dumb Society—

“Oh, get lost,” my mother says. And shuts the door.

Somebody once described my mother as “a strong woman.” From the speaker’s tone, I knew it was not intended as a compliment. This was, after all, the woman who cut off all contact with her own father after he repeatedly ignored his wife’s chronic lower back pain, which turned out to be the last stages of pancreatic cancer; the woman who once broke a flickering lightbulb by flinging a scalding hot vessel of rice at it; the woman whose mere approach made shopkeepers hurry into the back, praying for invisibility; the woman who sometimes didn’t sleep for three nights in a row; the woman who nodded sympathetically through our neighbor’s fond complaints about the naughtiness of her five-year-old son, then said, with every appearance of sincerity, “He sounds awful. Shall I slit his throat for you and get it over with?”

This was the woman whose daughter I am. Was. Am. All else flows from that.

When she died, I was twenty-one, in my last year of college. When I got the call, I took an overnight bus back to Bangalore, carrying nothing but a fistful of change from the ticket. Eleven people came to her funeral, including my father, me, and Stella, our maid, who brought her youngest son. We stood near the doorway, wedged between the blazing mouth of the electric crematorium and the March heat. The only breeze came from Stella’s son, who kept spinning the red rotors of a toy helicopter.

The evening after the funeral, after everybody had gone, my father shut himself into his bedroom, and I left the house and walked. Between the two of us, we had finished several pegs of rum and a quarter bottle of whiskey. I found myself standing on a busy main road with no recollection of having arrived there. People flowed around me, shops and bars glittered and trembled, and I tried to think of the future. In a few days, I would return to college; my final-year exams were just weeks away. After that? I would pack up my things and return to Bangalore. After that? Nothing.

A bus rattled past, mostly empty, only a few tired heads lolling in the windows. A waiter in a dirty banian dumped a bucket of chalky water onto the road in front of a restaurant. Earlier that day, while a gangly priest droned on and on, my father had overturned my mother’s ashes into a scummy green concrete tank, and then he had continued, somewhat helplessly, to hold on to the clay urn. Without thinking, I snatched it from his hand and dropped it onto a rubbish pile. It was something my mother herself might have done. The look on the vadhyar’s face was of shock and faintly delighted disgust. I waited for my father to bring it up later, but he didn’t.

I stood in the same spot until the waiter, now with two other men, emerged from the restaurant. They were dressed to go out, in close-fitting shirts lustrous as fish scales. They passed right before me. I heard a scrap of their laughter and tensed, ready for a fight, waiting for the leer, the catcall, the line from a love song. But instead they crossed the road and were gone.

Though he insisted on all the right rituals for my mother, my father claimed to have shed god and Brahminism long ago, in his own youth, finding a substitute in engineering, Simon and Garfunkel, The Wealth of Nations, and long-haired college companions who drank late into the night, filling the room with Wills smoke and boozy rants about politics, both of which eddied and went nowhere. Three years of a master’s degree at Columbia left him with a fondness for America, especially her jazz, her confidence, and her coffee, which, he liked to say happily, was the worst he’d ever tasted. When he returned to India, he worked for a few years; then my grandfather, as had always been the plan, provided him with the capital to start a factory manufacturing construction equipment, and, when that foundered and fell apart, more capital for a second factory, which flourished.

My father, in those years, liked to speak of rationality and pragmatism as though they were personal friends of his, yet it was he who inevitably rose to his feet at the end of our dinner parties, who raised his glass and declared, blinking away tears, “To you, my dear friends, and to this rarest of nights.” He had the intelligent man’s faith in the weight of his own ideas, and the emotional man’s impatience with anyone who did not share them. As he grew older and more successful, his confidence did not change; it merely settled and became wider, a well-fed confidence.

Only my mother could make him falter. She had, apparently, made him falter the day he arrived on a brand-new motorcycle to inspect as a potential bride the youngest daughter of a mid-level Indian Railways employee. He saw a woman standing barefoot on the street, wearing a shabby cotton sari. He asked if he was in the right place, and my mother replied, “Certainly, if what you’re here to do is look ridiculous.” My father used to love to tell this story, and also to tell how she had rejected suitor after suitor before him, one for asking about her family’s dental and medical history, one for inquiring whether the dowry would be paid in gold or cash, one simply for smiling too much. I have no way of knowing if any of this is true, since my mother never told stories, least of all about herself, but I’ve heard they went on a walk, during which my father outlined his plans for his life: grow the company for a couple of years, have a child in three, maybe another child the year after. At the end, he paused for my mother’s reaction. “Well, you do talk a lot,” she said thoughtfully. “But if you’re going to be working all day, I suppose I won’t have to listen to most of it.”

My mother, with her lightning tongue and her small collection of idols on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother, with her stubborn refusal to admit the existence of meat or other faiths, who crossed the street when we passed a halal butcher with his row of skinned goats, their flanks pink and shiny as burn scars. My father did not eat meat either, but he was quick to add that it was personal preference; according to him, there was “no logic-based argument against the consumption of meat.” I myself had sampled bites of chicken and mutton, even beef, from friends’ lunch boxes, and, apart from an initial queasiness, I liked them all. The one time I made the mistake of telling my mother, she held out her arm and said, “Still hungry, little beast?”

She could be vicious, and yet there were times, especially in a crowd, when she was pure energy, drawing the world to herself. She was already tall, but at these times, she became immense. Her mouth would fall open, and her crooked incisor, which looked like a single note held on a piano, acquired an oblique seductiveness. Men approached her, even when I was present. During a function at my father’s factory one year, his floor manager tried to flatter her. “That’s a beautiful sari,” he said, his eyes on her breasts. The floor manager was an energetic stub of a man, who had been with my father since the beginning, had slept on the factory floor so they could save on a watchman. I had attended his son’s birthday parties. Now he was looking at my mother’s breasts. She was eating a samosa from a silver-foil plate, and there were crumbs on her cheek. Without pausing in her chewing, she said, “The conference room is empty. Shall we go?” The floor manager swallowed hard then glanced at me, as if I, a child, might tell him what to do. He sputtered something about getting her another samosa, and almost tripped on his flight to the buffet table. My mother shot me a quick, arch look before walking away.

It was only when she prayed in front of her idols that she shrank, became a person with ordinary dimensions. Every morning, she tucked flowers around their brass necks and lit the blackened lamp and stood for a minute without bending or moving her lips. My father wisely refrained from making his usual speech about the irrationality of organized religion, and she, in turn, chose not to point out that his beloved college LP collection, carefully dusted and alphabetized, was as good as a shrine. Likewise, my mother never insisted that I prostrate myself or learn the names of her gods, though I sometimes wish she had. She never forbade me from joining either, but it was implicit. And in that lay the fundamental irony of our relationship, and the clearest evidence of how she saw the world: my mother considered me, her only child, a suitable accomplice for the greatest secret of her life, but when she prayed, she wanted to be alone.

Here is another story my father once loved to tell: When I was about two, I went through a phase where I belonged, body and soul, to him. I screamed bloody murder if he was in the room and not holding me, bloodier still when my mother tried to take me from him. I tolerated her while he was at work, but barely. One afternoon, seeing I was in a rare, calm mood, she hustled me out to go grocery shopping with her. It was a mistake. While she swiftly chose flour and oil, biscuits and tea, I’d started to whimper. By the time she was ready to pay, I’d launched into a full-blown tirade, howling, hitting her on the side of the head, clinging to any stranger that passed by. My mother was finally forced to ask the shopkeeper if she could use his phone. She called my father and explained, and thirty minutes later, he burst in with outstretched arms. He carried me home, a shameless, grinning trophy, while my mother trailed behind us, lugging the groceries.

I don’t know when my allegiance shifted, when I went from being his to being hers. All I know are the facts: I was my father’s daughter first, and then I became, gradually and irrevocably, my mother’s. It’s hard not to wonder how much might have been prevented if only I had loved him more, or, perhaps, loved her a little less. But that is useless thinking, and perilous. Better to let things stand as they were: she, my incandescent mother, and I, her little beast.

2

AFTER THE FUNERAL AND its gritty, exhausting aftermath, I went back to college for my final-year exams, which I barely passed. Without waiting for the inane graduation celebrations, I packed up my things and returned to Bangalore. Apart from my mother’s absence, nothing had changed. My father still woke early and drove to the gym, sweatband around his wrist, towel over his shoulder. Stella still came in the late mornings, after my father left for the factory. She let herself in with her own key, and, over the next few hours, she scrubbed the vessels, ran the washing machine, swabbed the floors, ironed our clothes, dusted the bookshelves, watered the plants, and cooked enough food for a family of five. It was only I, it seemed, who had nothing to do.

So I began to go out. I agreed to everything. People I hardly knew invited me to clubs to hear their DJ friends play, and later to someone’s flat, where the music was always too loud, the floor gluey with spilled beer, and the inevitable poster of Bob Marley grinned down from the wall like some affable, white-toothed deity. I remember faces floating from unlit corners to ask me questions to which my answer was always the same. Yes, I said when someone asked if I wanted another drink. Yes, I said when someone’s hot breath whispered into my neck, Does this feel good? I lived by the word, kept it ready under my tongue. Yes, I said when they asked if I would be all right.

Thinking about it now, it seems I wasted the better part of the two years after my mother’s death, but that isn’t exactly true. For about five months, I volunteered as an assistant teacher—a title vastly out of proportion with my actual role—at a government-run school for children with cerebral palsy. I don’t recall anymore how it came about, but for a few hours each day I helped a group of bright-eyed eight-year-olds build tottering colorful towers of plastic blocks, supposedly to improve their fine motor skills, while their mothers, usually tired domestic workers or anxious housewives, hovered in the corridor outside. I think I was probably happier there than I knew, and I might have stayed but for a little girl named Suneyna. From the beginning, I adored Suneyna for her shy smile and her habit of unconsciously reaching out to touch me whenever we were working together. Her little hand would wander out and graze some part of my face, my chin or nose, and then she would go on as before, busily choosing blocks, unaware that she had shaken me deeply. Her mother was a beautiful woman of tiny build, who had four other children and whose loud, lemon-sour voice could be heard as soon as she entered the school premises. She was always complaining, within earshot of the classroom, about how Suneyna seemed unimproved and how the school was wasting everyone’s time. One afternoon, while the children were practicing their gestures for food, drink, and the desire to go to the toilet, her strident voice floated to us: “Every day this girl Suneyna comes home and does soo-soo all over the floor. I really don’t know why I spend all this time bringing her to this useless school. In the end, let me tell you, all that works is a tight slap and a few hours in a room by herself. After that, she behaves like an angel.” I remember standing, blocks tumbling to the ground. I remember going into the corridor and addressing Suneyna’s diminutive mother for minutes together. I have no recollection of what I said, but by the end there was absolute silence in the school. Then I came back into the classroom. The teacher, as I recall, had some trouble meeting my eye. As for Suneyna, she continued building her tower, but she did not reach out once to touch my face for the rest of the day. That afternoon, I got into my car, drove home and never went back.

In the end, when it finally became clear to my father that I had no intention of helping myself, he got me a position with the daughter of one of his business associates, who had recently founded a tiny nonprofit environmental agency in Bangalore. I was to manage accounts for them, a job that, as far as I could see, consisted almost exclusively of telling them what they couldn’t do. “I’m sorry,” I would say in a firm, regretful tone, “the numbers won’t support that.” The agency, ironically enough, was located in a building overlooking an open sewer, and though I didn’t tell anybody, I thought the sludge rather beautiful, with its slow black currents that flashed green and gold during the hottest parts of the afternoon. Even the smell, ripe with rot, didn’t bother me.

The projects the agency tried to implement were small and mostly wishful. Money in the agency was like the sewage beneath it, creeping in with sluggish reluctance, and I, for one, celebrated its immobility. It meant I had less to do. Days, then months, passed as I stared out of my window, while on my computer screen, the numbers stayed in their slots, fixed and comfortingly final.

About a year after I began at the agency, I wandered into my parents’ bedroom one evening after work, as I did from time to time. Their cupboards faced each other in an alcove in the corner. As a child, I used to open the far door of each cupboard and hide inside, cradled by their odors: my father’s leather belts and ironed shirts and aftershave, my mother’s soap and perfume. I suddenly longed for her smell again, so I opened her cupboard, only to receive a shock; it had been swept nearly clean. My father must have, at some point, quietly given her things away. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, really. We had never been nostalgic people. Growing up, my drawings did not find a place on the fridge, my parents did not lovingly preserve my old report cards. Clothes, outgrown, were given away or ripped up for kitchen rags. Books were promptly donated to the library. We kept pace with the present, discarding as we went.

So it took me aback for a moment, the loss I felt at the sight of those bare shelves. Where had her things gone? Stella might have taken a sari or two, the rest likely given to a charity. Her jewelry was probably locked in the safe-deposit box at the bank. Her talcum powder, her Pond’s cream, her jumble of safety pins, her comb, all of those were gone too. Only a few objects remained—a stack of stretched, discolored underwear, a snarled ball of drawstrings, and a peeling laminated photograph of the two idols in her ancestral village, which Stella, with her tidy gold cross, would have had no use for, but at the same time would not have had the heart to throw away.

I ran my hand across the knotted drawstrings and the photograph, and lightly touched the folded underwear, which slumped over. I was just about to close the cupboard when I caught sight of something small and pale peeking from behind the fallen stack. And even before I really saw it, I knew, by some dormant instinct, what I was seeing. I reached out and seized it, clenching hard, then, in a single motion, opened my fist and looked down.

In my palm sat the crude wooden figure of a beast, with stubby limbs and a featureless head. The wood was mottled and shiny with age, but the knife scar I remembered still showed clear across the belly, as if the animal had been injured in a fight. I had not seen it in years, not since I was a child. I’d thought it lost, in fact. I recalled how distraught I’d been when the wooden animal vanished from my room, the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees, scouring the house. Had it been in my mother’s cupboard this whole time? How had it come to be here?

For a long moment, I thought nothing. Then, very gradually, as if I might hurt myself by going too fast, I understood. The animal had not come to be here by accident. My mother had known it was here. No, not known. She had stolen it from my room and hidden it here.

A few months before she died, my mother called me at college. She had taken to calling at odd hours, at midnight or very early in the morning. This time it was just as I was dropping off to sleep, having studied late for a test the next day. I was tired and irritable, and, to make things worse, she didn’t seem to have much to say. As a way to get her off the phone, I told her, “Why don’t you go out tomorrow? Go shopping or something.”

“Shopping?” I could hear the slow, mocking smile in her voice.

“Or visit friends.”

“A quaint idea. Except that you seem to forget I’ve never had any.”

“That’s not true,” I said without thinking.

“Oh?” Her sarcasm, always deadliest when it was softest. “Enlighten me then.”

I paused before speaking his name. “What about Bashir Ahmed? Wasn’t he a friend?”

There was silence on her end. I waited for her to answer, already regretting having mentioned his name. Then she said, “You know, I’d forgotten all about him.”

“It’s been a while,” I agreed carefully. “Where do you think he is now?”

“Oh, who knows. Probably went back to that village he was always going on about.”

She hung up soon after that. To tell the truth, I’d been relieved that she hadn’t seemed all that interested in Bashir Ahmed. It had been seven years, after all, since the last time we’d seen him, and seven years were ample time for forgetting. But now, with the wooden creature balanced on my sweating palm, I understood that she had, ever so gently, lied to me. She had forgotten nothing.

I carried the creature back to my room, and stood it on my bedside table, the very spot from which my mother had stolen it all those years ago. For the rest of the evening, as I drifted through the rooms of our house, as I paged unseeingly through books, as I sat across from my father, eating the meal Stella had cooked earlier that day, the melancholic strains of Miles Davis’s trumpet floating in from the living room, I thought only of the wooden beast, sitting beside my pillow, and, out of nowhere, a huge, unbearable joy exploded in me. Just like that, the secret I’d once shared with my mother was alive again. Looking back, I think that must have been when I decided to find him.

I was six the first time he came, and I still remember it. How my mother had not ceased moving, even for a second, all week. How she had decided the previous morning that her lantana bushes were sick, somehow infected, and had spent three hours pulling them up, only to abruptly abandon them, leaving the garden looking like a war zone. How she had surges of intense laughter at nothing. How she cooked, a pile of vessels growing dangerously high in the sink, but how, at the same time, she claimed never to be hungry. How she seemed to have endless energy for play, devising elaborate games that soon wore me out but left her unaffected.

When the bell rang that afternoon, I was in the living room. I moved to answer, but all of a sudden she was behind me, one hand gripping my shoulder hard. With her other hand, she threw the door open. And there he was: a dark-haired man wearing a green kurta and white skullcap, carrying over his shoulder a distended yellow bundle twice the width of his torso. His thick hair fell over his forehead, which was the color of unpolished rosewood, and his eyes were a light, stunning green. For a second, he stood there (perhaps wondering about the wrecked garden); then, in a deep, resonant voice that would become as recognizable to me as my own, he said to my mother in simple, polite Urdu, “Madam, would you wish to buy these beautiful clothes from Kashmir?”

“Sure,” my mother answered, not missing a beat. “But if I do, what will you wear?”

The stranger laughed. Unhesitating, glad, as though he not only had been expecting her humor, but had traveled a long way just to hear it. My mother’s grip on my shoulder tightened, though I couldn’t tell whether it upset or pleased her. She was used to people being disconcerted by the things she said; this laughter was something new.

“Come in,” she said in a slightly milder tone. “Let me see what you have.”

And here I must ask the unavoidable question. Why him? Of all the people who came to our house over the years, to sell, to work, to visit, why should he have been the one she fixed her mind upon? It had to do with her mood that day, of course, the glittering in her eyes that had been there all week, but what else? The fact that he was handsome, in a style utterly foreign to our southern city? Those green eyes, which I’d never seen before, except in actors on TV? Had these things been enough, at least to start with?

He stepped inside with a ceremonial satisfaction, which I would come to think of as his trademark, as if our house were a dazzling place he’d been told of long ago. He hauled the bundle into our living room and tugged it open with an elegant motion, and there were clothes everywhere, spreading like a bright, choppy sea. My mother took a seat on the sofa across from him. I sat in between them. I did not know it then, but these would become our fixed places, our fixed roles: Bashir Ahmed speaking, my mother listening, and me watching them both.

He was riffling through the clothes, speaking rapidly but plainly in Urdu, a speech he’d obviously given many times before. “. . . six months for one piece, and everything is handmade. What shall I show you first, madam? You tell me. Kurtas? Shawls? Saris? Everything is guaranteed, one hundred percent, pure Kashmiri.”

“One hundred percent pure Kashmiri,” she echoed in a tone that could have just as easily been mockery as admiration. Then she waved her hand. “All of it. Show me all of it.”

He began with the shawls. Ruby with pink paisley, white with mint paisley, each edged by a row of soft tassels, sinking one after the other in soft layers across his lap. It was a performance, practiced until flawless. The whole time he did not stop talking, his green eyes moving between my mother’s face and the shawls. My mother watched their soundless descent, rapt, and even I, with my tomboy’s revulsion for all things feminine, had to admit they were beautiful. When he had shown her all the shawls, she blinked. “Anything else?”

He launched into the same routine with his kurtas, all of which had panels of delicate embroidery down the front. This time he looked deeper into her face, and spoke in a lower, more confidential voice, but she remained still except for her eyes, which stayed riveted to the rise and fall of his hands, as though they might contain some vital code. When he came to the end of the kurtas, he started in with the saris, translucent jewel-tone chiffon with chain-stitched pansies along the borders. And when those too were rejected, he sat back on his heels, surveying the disorder around him, biting his lip, trying to hide his exasperation.

“Hm,” my mother murmured, “now where are those beautiful clothes I was told about?”

His frown vanished in an instant. “Madam,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully, “I must be honest with you. I am feeling very bad right now. If I had known about you before coming here, I would have brought my friend with me.”

She smiled. “Your friend?”

“Yes. My friend, he sells spectacles, you see. Maybe with the right pair you would have been able to see my clothes properly, and you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself like this.”

I’d never heard anybody speak this way to my mother, with such liberty, such daring. She stared at him a moment then threw her head back and laughed and laughed. I imagined he would shrink at that wild, uncontrolled sound. But he didn’t. He just looked at her with his head tilted to one side, smiling. Then, as if he’d suddenly remembered, he turned his large head to me. “What about beti here?” he asked her. “Would you like to see something for beti?”

“Yes,” my mother said before I could speak. The man dug around in the pile and came up with a white cotton blouse, sprays of delicate pink roses edging the neckline and both sleeves. He shook it out then held it up to his own chest without a trace of self-consciousness. “It is so beautiful,” he declared, “it even looks good on an ugly fool like me.”

It sounds strange, but he was right. Not that he was ugly or a fool—he wasn’t either—but he did look startlingly beautiful in that girl’s blouse, with his dark hair falling over his forehead and his weathered throat rising so naturally from the pale, flimsy material. I glanced at my mother to find a strange expression on her face, a grimace that seemed to indicate real pain.

“Shalini,” she said, and if nothing until then had made me sit up and take notice, that would have. She almost never used my name. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

And even though the blouse was nothing I would have dreamed of choosing for myself, I nodded. It seemed like the only thing to do. Some aspect of her mood had communicated itself to me, but, more than that, I had sensed an unfamiliar thing in the room, a flash of new color for which I had no name. I was rewarded when she reached out and squeezed my hand.

“It seems we’ll be taking it,” she said.

“It makes me very happy to know that at least one of you isn’t blind,” the man said, and then he, too, smiled at me. I flushed under the weight of their combined attention, one set of eyes green, the other deepest brown.

The man coughed discreetly into his fist and named a price, and, oddly enough, my mother, who ordinarily never lost a chance to haggle, agreed. He smiled, a figure of modest triumph, and began to pack up his wares. For a few seconds, she stared at his hands, which were busy folding and smoothing; then she said, in a rush, “When will you come back?”

He glanced up, startled. He raked his hair back with his fingers, nudging the skullcap askew.

“Ah. I’m not sure. I think—I’m expecting some new items in two or three months.” He glanced quickly at her. “Should I—what I mean is, do you want me to—?”

He broke off, because she had started to scowl.

I braced myself. Now, I thought. Now she will destroy him. Now she will cut him down.

But, to my surprise, all she said was, “Yes. Please.”

Then she jumped up and walked away from both of us. I gazed after her in astonishment, but the man only laughed again, a little softer this time, and kept folding.

I stayed with him until he had knotted the bundle three times and heaved it onto his shoulder, and then I followed him out. I wasn’t sure why. As much as I liked him, I think I wanted to make sure he really left. He paused with his hand on the gate and gazed for a moment back at the house then down at me.

“I want you to tell her,” he said, “that I will not forget. Tell her I will come again soon.”

He spoke to me not as I was, a child of six, but as if I were an adult, his equal. That, combined with my mother’s erratic behavior, created in me a desire to match his posture, his dignity.

I placed my hand on the gate in imitation of his. “I will tell her,” I said.

I watched him walk up the road, the yellow bundle receding like a tiny sun. I kept watching until he turned left and disappeared.

Back inside, I found my mother upstairs in her bedroom, her head deep inside my father’s cupboard. “Go put on your new blouse,” she said, her voice muted by his fragrant shirts.

When she spoke like that, with that electric charge, that authority, I never disobeyed. I ran downstairs, threw off my T-shirt, and pulled the white blouse down over my shorts. It was so light I barely sensed it on my skin, but this only added to the prevailing atmosphere of unreality, and I took the stairs two at a time. Just as I reached her, my mother let out a muffled cry of triumph, emerging from the cupboard clutching my father’s old, treasured Nikon.

She marched me out of the house, her hand on my shoulder. “Now pose,” she commanded.

“What shall I do?”

She smiled, and a flash went off in my eyes. “Anything you want, little beast.”

How can I explain what it was to be around her at those times? It was like being sealed within an invisible, protective, soundproof chamber. I saw and heard and smelled nothing but her. She photographed me in the wreckage of our garden, out on the street, pretending to climb our neighbors’ gate while their ridiculous Pomeranian yipped itself into a frenzy. She photographed me in imaginary flight from the Pomeranian. Two young men were gaping at us, so she photographed them too. They fled, and that made her laugh so hard it seemed she would fly apart.

She photographed me until the roll in the camera ran out.

I don’t know what happened to those photographs. I never saw them. Within a week, I more or less forgot about the man with his green eyes and his yellow bundle, the strange, unfamiliar thing I’d so briefly sensed. The white blouse lost its magic. I had no further intention of wearing it, so I stuffed it into the very back of my cupboard, along with the clothes I’d outgrown.

Finding the wooden animal in my mother’s cupboard loosened something in me, to be sure, but not right away. For weeks afterward, life continued unchanged. My father went to the gym and to work. Stella came to clean and to cook. I went to the agency and out in the evenings. On the weekends, I would find myself wedged in a car between strangers, driving out of the city to somebody’s “farmhouse,” which usually meant a tasteless candy-pink monstrosity looming over some tiny, dusty village, whose impoverished residents we utterly ignored except when we took it into our heads to buy some of their cheap, home-brewed hooch. On the last of these excursions, I stayed awake drinking after the others had gone to sleep. It had been my twenty-fourth birthday, a fact I’d mentioned to nobody. At 3:00 a.m. I received a message from my father, wishing me a happy birthday from Tokyo. Just before dawn, I slipped out of the farmhouse and walked up the dark country road. Light was just limning the horizon, and the air smelled of woodsmoke. The first hut in the village had a thatched shed attached to the side. Deep groans of pain floated from the shed, so I approached. A pregnant cow lay on her side, the calf’s face and forelegs protruding, filmed in milky white. The farmer sat on his haunches nearby, his lungi pulled up over his knees. He looked up when I came in, and his eyes widened, but he did not speak. We watched as the calf pushed out, its small body slick, and the gray afterbirth slithered and dropped. When the cow turned and started to lick her offspring, the farmer rose to his feet and led me around the shed, where I sat on a wooden bench facing the horizon, and a woman I took to be his wife brought me a tumbler of fresh, steaming milk. I tried to refuse, but she offered it again. So I accepted and she stepped back to watch me drink it. Right then, the sun suddenly burst into view, spilling light everywhere. And I? Well, I started to cry. The woman watched me, a drunk, weeping girl in rum-stained jeans, with a lack of sympathy that, if I had been older, I would have known to be grateful for. But the truth was, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking of the woman at all. I was thinking, scared and lonely kid that I was: I have just witnessed something true.

At around the same time as I was weeping over calves, my father set about expanding his company, a project he pursued with such single-mindedness that even I could not fail to recognize it as his way of distancing himself from grief. Suddenly, he was always traveling. He went on business trips to Moscow and Tel Aviv. He flew to Houston, where he bought me a beer mug shaped like a snorting bull. He gave me our old Esteem and bought himself a sleek new BMW , and every Sunday night, he drove us in it to the same five-star restaurant, where he summoned the waiter with a subtle crook of his index finger—when exactly had he begun to do that?—and chatted easily with the head chef, who never failed to drop by our table to greet him.

It sounds obvious, I know, but it took me a while to see that my father, too, was changing in the wake of my mother’s death. Now he wore crisp linen shirts tucked into Levi’s, and his shoes, purchased in Milan, were of soft brown suede. Gone were his cracked Bata sandals, his old black rayon trousers, his faded T-shirts with yellow stains under the arms. He had turned into a reserved, polished version of the man I’d known all my life, and it was during those dinners that I saw him most clearly as others must have done: a handsome, tall, somber businessman of fifty-three, his hair not yet gray, leaning back in his chair, at ease with the world and his position it in. And I felt at these times a troubled wonder, the kind I imagine a parent feels for a grown child: pride, combined with the bittersweet notion that I had somehow, without noticing, without meaning to, lost him.

3

AT WORK, I KILLED midges. They floated up from the sewer in soft clouds, and I slammed them into my desk with a register I kept exclusively for the purpose. Otherwise I attended meetings, presided over by the agency’s founder, Ritu Shah. Ritu was tough and smart and had an MBA from Yale, where, she liked to keep reminding us lest we think her soft and privileged, she had been mugged four times, once at gunpoint. She drank oolong tea from a stained mug and was married to a World Bank man. The agency employed three other people, two bellicose women and a wilting boy. They were the ones who talked during meetings, vying with each other to offer ideas that Ritu listened to with her head cocked, rubbing her mug of oolong tea between her hands.

About a month after my twenty-fourth birthday and the calf, Ritu stopped by my desk to inform me of a meeting in ten minutes. “I’ll be there,” I said.

Gathering up some papers and a large file I’d never opened, I slunk into her room and sat at the back. The others were already there. Ritu clapped her hands. “Right. Let’s get started, people.”

The meeting turned out to about a new initiative to get roadside vendors—the ubiquitous stalls that sold tea or dosas or sugarcane juice—to stop dropping garbage on the pavement. Ritu rattled off numbers—thirty thousand vendors in the city center alone, dropping on average three kilograms of garbage per hour—and glanced at me, as if to verify the tragedy on a numerical level. I arranged my expression into one of grave despair. Ritu gave me a prolonged look then turned back to the others. “Got it?” she said briskly. “Now let’s brainstorm.”

One of the women thrust out a pugnacious chin and suggested marshaling a core group of vendors, who would form the nucleus of a proud cleanliness brigade. “Not bad,” Ritu said.

The other woman, not to be outdone, suggested that vendors be rewarded with stickers that proclaimed their commitment to hygiene. Ritu thoughtfully rubbed her mug of oolong for a while. “Yes, I see where you’re coming from,” she said at last, and the woman beamed.

Then the wilting boy, in the tone of someone announcing a coup, leaned forward and proposed that the vendors form an alliance with a group of artists, who would use the discarded garbage to create massive public art installations that would raise awareness. He did not specify whose awareness would be so favored but fell back in his chair, as if exhausted.

Then Ritu turned to me.

“What about you, Shalini?” she said.

“Me?” I looked down at the papers on my lap. “I’ll check the numbers.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I mean, do you have any ideas. Comments? Suggestions?”

“Oh,” I said. “No.”

“I see,” she said and that was all. The meeting ended, and I forgot all about the exchange. So when Ritu appeared beside my desk at the end of the day, I was idiotic enough to be surprised. She set her mug on the edge of my desk and coughed.

“I want to ask you,” she said, “if you’re happy here.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The reason I’m asking,” she continued, “is because you don’t seem, how shall I say, fully engaged.” Her voice changed, became, of all things, tender. “I know you’ve had a tough time since your mother died,” she said, as if she’d felt the toughness inside me like some kind of rock. And, before I knew it, I was sobbing at my desk. I dropped my head, mortified and shaken.

I heard her cough. Her hand brushed the top of my head, a touch like a breeze.

“I think,” Ritu said, “that you need some time off. Why don’t you treat yourself to a holiday? Then, once you feel ready, we can talk about where you fit in with the agency.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. “You’re firing me?”

She picked up her mug and stepped back, surveying me and my midge-stained desk. When she spoke, it was with boundless pity. “Go home, sweetheart,” she said. “Go home.”

Twenty minutes later, I stood in the middle of our living room, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. I’d driven too fast; I could still feel the tingle of speed in my palms. From the kitchen came the sound of a knife thudding against a board—Stella.

“It’s me,” I called.

She came out of the kitchen. Compact, with oiled hair pulled back into a perfect bun, her gold cross lying on top of her crisp red sari, she looked impeccable, even after hours of housework.

“What happened? Are you sick?” she demanded in Tamil.

“No.”

She eyed me skeptically. “You look sick.”

Stella had begun working for us half a decade before my mother died, and I still knew only a handful of things about her. She had three children who could do no wrong. Her husband, a part-time salesman, part-time drunk, could do no right. She was devoted to the Virgin Mary and took her family on at least two church pilgrimages a year, for which she regularly requested money from my father, who gave it to her, but not before a lengthy lecture on the follies and perils of blind faith. She would hear him impassively to the end, then tuck the money into her blouse and proceed to do exactly as she pleased. But in her work, she was constant in all the ways my mother had been erratic. Even when my mother had been alive, it was Stella who remembered to buy the vegetables we needed, Stella who could recall when the gas cylinder had last been changed, Stella who knew which medicines were running low in the medicine cabinet.

Now I had the urge to follow her into the kitchen and tell her what had happened, but something prevented me. The idea, perhaps, that she was put out by my early return, that even though the house was ours, she might count on having these afternoons to herself, a spell of quiet before being sucked back into the clamor and claims of her own family life. I went up to my room and sat on the bed. Inch by inch, I slumped back until I was looking at the ceiling. I stayed that way until I heard Stella leave, and still I didn’t move. It was only when it grew dark that I dragged myself up. The house felt forsaken. There was a message on my cell phone from my father, saying he was with an out-of-town client and would be back late; I should go ahead and eat without him.

Stella had left our dinner on the table: four bowls covered with steel plates. Beside them, a strip of ibuprofen. I stared at all of it for a long time. Then I walked from room to room, flicking on every single light and fan. I turned on the TV and raised the volume as high as it would go.

Then I got into my car and drove off, leaving the house ablaze.

I drove, inevitably, to Hari Dinakaran’s. Hari was twenty-one and a photographer. I’d met him at a Japanese Buddhist ceremony a few months after my mother died. Someone, I’ve now forgotten who, had cajoled me into attending. The ceremony was in a bland one-story flat in Whitefield. In the main room a shrine had been set up, draped in a red velvet cloth fringed with gold tassels, a large Buddha in the center. We were greeted by a trim, elderly Japanese woman, the only real Buddhist there. The rest of us were merely young, wealthy, and quite obviously adrift. She took me to a back room and gave me a form to fill out. Someone else was already in the room, filling out a similar form. His whole lanky body seemed to be one nervous tic: his knees bounced, his shoulders shook, his toes curled. But his hand, I noticed, rested quietly on the bulky, complicated-looking camera beside him, as if it were an infant that drew comfort from his touch.

During the ceremony, the women were ordered to kneel in a row, the men behind them. As the trim Japanese woman moved amongst us, saying, “This is the seat of the soul in the body,” I was acutely aware of his constant shifting and fidgeting. When it was over, he jumped up and started photographing the Japanese woman beside her shrine. I watched for a while; then I went up to him. Looking straight into his eyes, I asked to see more of his work. He actually blushed.

Hari lived in a tiny rented room on the terrace of some family’s bungalow in Ulsoor. As soon as I saw it, I fell in love with that terrace. There was a warped, sun-faded ladder in one corner, which led up to a ledge with a black water tank, and many times I climbed up there when I was too drunk or high to remember how to come back down. I would sit with my back against the tank, my feet scraping air, while Hari sat below, editing photos on his laptop, the worm of a joint glowing in his fingers, glancing up now and then at me, his face, small and worried, lit up by the screen.

The saddest thing, I see now, was that Hari never understood what I wanted from him. I barely understood it myself then. We would get high, the two of us lying on his mattress, and eventually his hand would float up to rest on my breast the way it had rested on the camera, and I would let it build, let him lift my shirt, and then, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would push him away and sit up. He would look wretched but never protest. And maybe that was it, the sum of us and everything I’m grateful to him for: Hari allowed me the simple luxury of resistance. He allowed me to push back—in a way that was small and mean and unworthy, yes, but nevertheless to push back—against a world that had shown me it could beat me down whenever it wanted.

Now I parked and climbed the outer cement stairs that hugged the building and led directly up to the terrace, pausing before the final one. This was the moment I cherished most: stepping onto the barren red tiles, the black sky opening above, and the lighted room like a beacon at the far end. Inside, I found Hari on his mattress, wearing one of his three Free Tibet T-shirts, surrounded by squares of rolling papers and a giant box of weed. He smiled as I entered then returned to his task.

There was no furniture in Hari’s room apart from the mattress and a low table, which was black with cigarette burns and ash. A small collection of books was stacked on a hot plate that he never used. The Motorcycle Diaries. A biography of the Dalai Lama. Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. It was a bohemian setup, but there was no truth to it. Like me, Hari received a generous allowance from his parents, graduates of AIIMS and Harvard Medical School. They would have gladly bought him a spacious two-bedroom flat if he’d asked, but Hari took his role as poor, struggling artist seriously and accepted only the cash. Likewise, his photographs focused on the plight of the poor, of whom Hari, with no irony whatsoever, considered himself a part. He thoughtfully shot toothless old women huddled next to stray dogs on broken pavements; hijra prostitutes applying makeup in rooms that were closer to dungeons; malnourished toddlers chasing each other in gray construction sites while their parents carried backbreaking loads of concrete just outside the frame. The more picturesque the poverty, the more he loved to shoot it. But if I’d said this to him, he would have been crushed, so I never had. In retrospect, that was my only act of consideration as far as Hari was concerned.

I sat down on the mattress and waited. Eventually, he produced a pale, bloated joint, which he held up to the light. “Hopeless, man,” he sighed. Hari called everyone man, including his mother.

As we smoked, the night slowed to a crawl. At some point, I found myself lying with my head on Hari’s lap, half listening to him go on and on about a virtuoso Finnish drummer who was coming to play in Bangalore next month, “a total mindfuck, I’m telling you, man, you can’t even imagine.” His fingers tapped the ashy table without pause, and, at that moment, I was seized with the sensation of falling. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it only made the falling worse, so I opened them again. I still felt Ritu’s hand heavy on my head.

Once you feel ready, we can talk about where you fit in. I knew I should stand up and leave, but I thought of our glowing, vacant house, and right then something cracked open within me.

Without knowing what I was doing, I reached out and began to fumble with the button of Hari’s jeans. My fingertips were freezing, the denim as pliable as rock. Hari gave me no help. He just sat there, weirdly still. I managed to get the button open, then awkwardly tugged down his jeans, along with his underwear. His cock lay across his thigh, half erect.

I got to my knees, running my tongue in vain over my dry, aching teeth. Hari’s eyes were fixed on the wall, a distant look on his face.

“Condom,” I croaked.

He didn’t move.

“Hari! Condom!” I couldn’t believe the harshness in my own voice.

Startled into movement, Hari got to his feet. He pulled up his underwear then his jeans. He zipped them up. Smoothed down his Free Tibet T-shirt. Stubbed the joint out on the table with an odd tenderness. “You can’t keep doing this, man,” he said finally.

“Doing what?”

He shook his head. “You know.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Yes,” he said wearily. “You do.” He looked away and said something I didn’t catch.

“What? What was that?” I demanded.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Just say it, Hari.”

He sighed and turned back to face me. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me.”

I don’t remember driving back home. I do remember the house being completely dark when I pulled up, my father’s closed bedroom door. I remember banging my shin against my bedside table so hard the wooden animal clattered to the floor. I remember the pitching of my bed, the storm-tossed violence of it. I remember drowning, then surfacing, then drowning again.

I continued to leave the house in the mornings. Because I had nowhere else to go, I went to the club where as a child I’d learned how to swim, and where, for a few heady years, I’d even believed I might become a professional swimmer. In those years, I’d known each one the coaches, attendants, guards, and cleaners by name, but now they’d been replaced by strangers. I sat at one of the wrought-iron tables beside the pool and watched the new coach, a man with dark, bedraggled hair and a beautiful, tapering torso, as he conveyed nervous wives in frilly swimsuits across the shallow end, one hand under their stomachs, the other behind his back, like a careful waiter bearing a series of expensive trays. Later in the day, groups of children arrived, practicing their freestyle strokes on a long bench, then holding on to foam boards and kicking the water white, while at the tables around me, their mothers talked and laughed with each other.

When I first started swimming, the same year Bashir Ahmed came into our lives, my mother had sat at these very wrought-iron tables, ankles in the sun, the rest of her in the shade of a sagging umbrella, while I practiced pointing my toes as I kicked. The other mothers sat clustered together, but mine sat splendidly alone. For weeks, she talked to nobody. Then one evening, I saw her stand and walk casually over to them. By the time practice ended, twenty minutes later, she had them all in her thrall. “Oh my god,” I heard her drawl in a simpering accent that was not hers, “when I saw what her husband looked like, I’m not lying to you, my darlings, I fainted