What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Can we transform the possibilities we are born into?
A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century – displacement and migration – but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more.
Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives – formally daring, fierce but full of pity – delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.
A Life Apart
The Lives of Others
Neel Mukherjee is the author of two novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel. He lives in London.
‘An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.’
Rose Tremain
‘A State of Freedom is an extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multi-layered, it’s a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again.’
Sarah Waters
‘Neel Mukherjee’s breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a furious, unsparing, clear-eyed study of how a society’s gross inequities of money and power demean and deform the human condition. The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time.’
Hanya Yanagihara
‘Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you’ve turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.’
Karen Joy Fowler
‘This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity – a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece.’
Edmund White
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
‘Migrants? We are not migrants! We are ghosts, that’s what we are, ghosts.’
Syrian refugee at the border of Austria, August 2015
Christopher
While trying to check the bill before settling – an old habit, inculcated by his father, of giving any bill the once-over to see that he had not been overcharged – he realised that he had lost the ability to perform the simple function of adding up the individual items and the tax that together made up the grand total. Standing at the reception desk, he tried again and again. Then he took out his wallet and tried to count the rupee and US dollar notes nestled inside; he failed. Something as fundamental to intelligence as counting was eluding him. In the peripheries of his vision he could see a small crowd gathering to look at him; discreetly, nonchalantly, they thought. The news had spread. It was then that he broke down and wept for his son.
He had hesitated about taking the boy to Fatehpur Sikri right after their lunchtime tour of the Taj Mahal; two major Mughal monuments in one afternoon could be considered excessive. But, he reasoned, it was less than an hour’s drive and to fit the two sites into one day was the generally accepted practice. They could be back at their hotel in Agra by early evening and after an early night with the television and room service they could leave for Delhi, refreshed, the following morning. The reasoning prevailed.
When he mentioned part of this plan to the driver of his hired car, the young man, all longish hair and golden chain around his neck and golden wristlet and chunky watch, took it as a veiled order to go about the business in record time. He revelled in the opportunity to drive along the dusty, cratered slip road to Fatehpur Sikri at organ-jostling speed, punctuated by abrupt jerking into rest when impeded, and launching as suddenly into motion again. They passed a string of dingy roadside eateries, tea-shops, cigarette-and-snacks shacks. The bigger ones boasted signboards and names. There were the predictable ‘Akbar’, ‘Shahjahan’, ‘Shahenshah’, a ‘Jodha Bai’, even a ‘Tansen’, which was ‘100% VAGETARIAN’. There had been a speed-warning sign earlier: ‘Batter late than never.’ Not for the first time he wondered, in a country given over to a dizzying plenitude of signs, how unsettled their orthography was. A Coca-Cola hoarding adorned the top of one small shop, the brand name and shout line written in Hindi script.
‘Coca-Cola,’ the boy said, able to read that trademark universal wave even though he couldn’t read the language.
‘We can have one after we’ve done our tour,’ he said, his mind occupied by trying to work out if another order to the driver to slow down to prevent the boy from being car-sick would be taken as wilfully contradictory; he worried about these things.
The boy seemed subdued; he didn’t move from the bare identification of the familiar brand to wanting it. Ordinarily, he would have been compulsively spelling out and trying to read the names written in English on shopfronts and billboards. While he was grateful for his son’s uncharacteristic placidity, he wondered if he hadn’t imposed too much on a six-year-old, dragging him from one historical monument to another. He now read a kind of polite forbearance in the boy’s quietness, a way of letting him know that this kind of tourism was wholly outside his sphere of interest but he was going to tolerate his father indulging in it. After a few questions at the Taj Mahal, which began as enthusiastic, then quickly burned out into perfunctory – ‘Baba, what is a mau-so-le-um?’, ‘Is Moom-taz under this building?’, ‘Was she walking and moving and talking when Shajjy-han built this over her?’ – they had stopped altogether. Was it wonder that had silenced him or boredom? He had tried to keep the child interested by spinning stories that he thought would catch the boy’s imagination: ‘Do you see how white the building is? Do you know that the emperor who had it built, Shahjahan, had banquets on the terrace on full-moon nights where everything was white? The moonlight, the clothes the courtiers and the guests wore, the flowers, the food – everything was white, to go with the white of the marble and the white light of the full moon.’ The boy had nodded, seemingly absorbing the information, but had betrayed no further curiosity.
Now he wondered if his son had not found all this business of tombs and immortal grief and erecting memorials to the dead macabre, unsettling. His son was American, so he was not growing up, as his father had, with the gift of ghost stories, first heard sitting on the laps of servants and aunts in his childhood home in Calcutta, then, when he was a little older, read in children’s books. As a result, he did not understand quite what went on inside the child’s head when novelties, such as the notion of an order of things created by the imagination residing under the visible world and as vivid as the real one, were introduced to him. He made a mental note to stick to historical facts only when they reached Fatehpur Sikri.
Or could it have been the terrible accident they had narrowly avoided witnessing yesterday at the moment of their arrival at the hotel? A huge multi-storeyed building was going up across the road, directly opposite, and a construction worker had apparently fallen to his death even while their car was getting into the slip lane for the hotel entrance. As they waited in the queue of vehicles, people had come running from all directions to congregate at one particular spot, about twenty metres from where they sat in their cars. Something about the urgency of the swarming, and the indescribable sound that emanated from that swiftly engorging clot of people, a tense noise between buzzing and truculent murmuring, instantly transmitted the message that a disaster had occurred. Otherwise how else would the child have known to ask, ‘Baba, people running, look. What’s happening there?’ And how else could the driver have answered, mercifully in Hindi, ‘A man’s just fallen from the top of that building under construction. A mazdoor. Instant death, bechara.’
He had refused to translate. He had tried to pull his son back from craning his neck, but as the queue of cars moved, and their vehicle moved forward, through a chance aperture in the hive of people around the death, he saw, for the briefest of flashes, a patch of dusty earth stained the colour of old scab from the blood it had thirstily drunk. Then the slit closed, the car started advancing inch by inch and the vision ended. He saw his son turning his head to continue to stare at the spot. But had the boy really seen the earth welt like that, or had he just imagined it? There was no way he could ask him to corroborate. Worries came stampeding in: had the child seen it? Was he going to be affected by it? How could he establish if he had, without planting the idea in the boy’s head? All of last night his mind had been a pincushion to these sharp questions until he had fallen asleep.
They returned now, summoned by the boy’s unnatural quietness. By the time they got out at Agra Gate, having shaved all of ten minutes from the journey, the boy was looking decidedly peaky, and he felt that his own lunch had risen in rebellion, to somewhere just behind his sternum. The driver grinned: there was just the right touch of the adversarial in the gleam of self-satisfaction.
More than twenty years of life in the academic communities of the East Coast of the USA had defanged him of the easy Indian ability to bark at people considered as servants, so he swallowed his irritation, even the intention to ask the driver to take it more gently on the journey back, in case he couldn’t control the tone and it was interpreted as a peremptory order. Instead, he said in Hindi, ‘We won’t be more than an hour.’
The driver said, ‘OK, sir,’ nodding vigorously. ‘I will be here.’
He checked the car to see if he had taken everything – a bottle of water, his wallet and passport, the guidebook, his small backpack, his phone, his son’s little knapsack – then shut the car door and held out his hand. The boy’s meek silence bothered him. Where was the usual firework display of chatter and fidgety energy, the constant soundtrack of his aliveness?
He knelt down to be on a level with the boy and asked tenderly, ‘Are you tired? Do you want to go back to the hotel? We don’t have to see this.’
The boy shook his head.
‘Do you want a Parle’s Orange Kream?’ he asked, widening and rolling his eyes to simulate the representation of temptation in the advertisements.
The boy shook his head again.
Behind him, on a grass verge, a hoopoe was flitting across. He said, ‘Look!’ and turned the boy round.
The boy looked dutifully but didn’t ask what it was.
‘It’s a hoopoe. You won’t see this bird in New York.’ He supplied the answer gratuitously.
The boy asked, ‘Is this a moss-o-moll-lom?’
‘No, sweetheart,’ his father laughed, ‘it’s not a mausoleum. It’s a palace. You know what a palace is, don’t you? A very good and powerful king lived here. His name was Akbar. I told you about him last night, remember?’
‘That was Shajjy-han, who built a big big marble stone on his wife and she died and he was very sad and cried all the time.’
Every time he spoke, the American accent made his father’s insides go all squishy.
‘No, this is different. Akbar was his grandfather. Come, we’ll look at it. It’s a different colour, see? All red and brown and orange, not the white that we saw earlier.’
They passed some ruined cloisters, then a triple-arched inner gateway, solidly restored and, slightly further from it, a big domed building that was awaiting restoration work. Touts, who had noticed a man and a small boy get out of the car, descended on them.
‘Guide, sir, guide? Good English, sir. Full history, you won’t find in book.’ Not from one voice but from an entire choir.
Beggars with various forms of crippledness materialised. From the simplest pleading, with a hand repeatedly brought up to the lips to signify hunger, to hideous displays of amputated and bandaged limbs, even an inert, entirely limbless, alive torso laid out flat on a board with wheels – this extreme end of the spectrum of human agony filled him with horror, shame, pity, embarrassment, repulsion but, above all, a desire to protect his son from seeing them. How did all these other people drifting around him appear to be so sheathed in indifference and blindness? Or was the same churning going on inside them? Truth was, he felt, he was no longer a proper Indian; making a life in the plush West had made him skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal. He was now a tourist in his own country; no longer ‘his own country’, he corrected himself fastidiously. He suppressed the impulse to cover the boy’s eyes with his hands and said impatiently, ‘Sweetie, can we move a bit faster, please.’ It came out as a command, the interrogative missing.
Men came up with accordions of postcards, maps, guidebooks, magazines, photos, toys, current bestsellers in pirated editions, snacks, rattles, drinks, confectionery, tinsel, dolls, plastic replicas of historical buildings, books, whistles and flutes … He kept shaking his head stoically, a tight half-smile on his lips, and ushered his boy along.
The child, distracted one moment by a tray of carved soapstone figures, then another instant by a flashing, crudely copied replica of an inflatable Superman toy, kept stalling to stare.
‘Baba, Baba, look!’
‘Yes, I know. Let’s keep moving.’ He was so relieved – and grateful – that the cheap toys had diverted the child’s attention away from the suppuration and misery that he almost broke step to buy one of those baubles.
That small manifestation of interest was enough. The loose, dispersed assembly of touts and peddlers now tightened into a purposeful circle.
‘Babu, my child is hungry, hasn’t eaten for four days.’ The shrivelled girl with matted hair in the woman’s arms looked like the living dead; she had no energy or will to swipe at the flies clustering on a sore at the corner of her mouth.
‘Here, look, babu, babu-sa’ab, look …’ A button was pressed and a toy came to mechanical life, emitting tinny games-arcade sounds of shooting guns as it teetered forward.
A man came up uncomfortably close and, with the dexterity of a seasoned cardsharp, fanned open a deck of sepia prints of famous Indian historical buildings and temples. A picture of a naked woman appeared and disappeared so quickly that it could well have been the prestidigitator’s illusion. He was shocked; didn’t the man see that he had a small child with him? Or did he not care?
The surrounding gardens, well tended by Indian standards, shone in the white-gold light of the January afternoon, yet, looked at closely, all that riot of cannas and marigolds and manicured grass lawns could not really disguise their irredeemable municipal souls. There was the typical shoddiness – straggly borders; lines that could not keep straight; a certain patchiness to the planting, revealing the scalp of soil through the thinning hair of vegetation; the inevitable truculence of nature against the methodising human hand … and underpinning all this amateurish attempt at imposing order and beauty he could feel, no, almost see, what a battle it was to keep the earth, wet and dark now, from reverting to red dust in the obliterating heat of the Northern Plains in the summer. He bought tickets and entered the great courtyard of the Diwan-i-Am. The world transformed – in the burnished gold of the winter afternoon sun, the umber-red sandstone used for the whole complex at Fatehpur Sikri seemed like carved fire, something the sun had magicked out of the red soil in their combined image and likeness.
He looked at his son, expecting to see a reflection of his own wonder on the child’s face, but all he could discern in that mostly unreadable expression was … was what? Boredom? Across another courtyard, all blazing copper in the light, lay the palace buildings. He backtracked to consult the map etched on to a stone block towards the entrance, but with no reference point to indicate ‘You are here’ he felt confused.
While retrieving the camera and the guidebook from his backpack, he said to his son, ‘Stay still for a moment, don’t run off. We’ll go to all those beautiful little palaces, do you see?’ By the time he had slung the camera around his neck and opened the guidebook to the correct page, he could tell that the boy was itching to run across the courtyard. He tried to keep an eye on him while skim-reading the relevant page. Yes, he had found it – this must be the Mahal-i-Khas, the private palaces of Akbar. His head bobbed back and forth, like a foraging bird’s, from page to surrounding environment. When he had established beyond any doubt that the two-and-a-half-storeyed building on the left, which had a touch of incompleteness to it, was Akbar’s private apartments, he caught hold of his son’s hand and made to enter the building.
But he had been spotted leafing through the travel-guide, his hesitation and momentary lostness read shrewdly. A man materialised behind him and began to speak as if he was in the middle of a talk he had been giving: ‘The recesses in the ground floor that you will see were meant for his books and papers and documents …’
He wheeled around. The sun caught his eyes and dazzled him. All he could make out was a dark, almost black, sharply pointed face, a human face on its way to becoming a fox’s; or was it the other way round?
‘If you go up to his sleeping chamber, the khwabgah, on the top floor,’ the man continued, ‘you will see fine stone latticework screens along the corridor leading to the women’s quarters, the harem. These jaalis protected the women from the public gaze as they went back and forth from the khwabgah.’
The man spoke with practised fluency. If he was trying to advertise his skills as a guide to get hired, then there was nothing in his manner or his speech that betrayed this purposive bent. If anything, he seemed almost oblivious of his presence and his child’s.
The sun had blinded him so he turned his head away, both to face his son, whom he was afraid to let out of his field of vision for any duration, and to signal to the man that he was not going to be needing his services. The buildings that lay in the slanted shade were an earthen matt pink. Elsewhere, the red sandstone that caught the sun burned a coppery-gold. When he turned around to see if he had shaken off the tout, there was no one to be seen.
In the rooms on the ground floor of the emperor’s private quarters he was held by the flaky painted decorations depicting flowers and foliage; these faded ghosts still managed to carry a fraction of their original life-spirit. They had been touched up, restored, but with a brutal mugger’s hand. From the vantage point of the courtyard, the interior had looked poky and pitch-dark and he had wondered about the smallness of the chambers and, correspondingly, the physical stature of those sixteenth-century people: did they have to huddle and stoop inside? Was it light enough to see things in there during the daytime? Why were there no doors and windows? What did they do for privacy? And then, the crowning question: did he know just too little about the architectural and domestic history of the Mughals?
Now that they were inside, the idea that the rooms were cramped somewhat diminished but the feeling that they were, or could be, dark remained. Was it something to do with his vision, or from having just come in from the brightness outside? He blinked several times. The interior seemed to shrink, expand and then shrink again, as if he were in the almost imperceptibly pulsating belly of a giant beast. In the pavilion at the top, where Akbar used to sleep, faded frescoes, nibbled away by time with a slow but tenacious voracity, covered the walls. But the fragments seemed to be under some kind of wash; a protective varnish, perhaps, but it had the effect of occluding them under a milky mist. A winged creature, holding an infant in front of a cave in a rockface, looked down at him from above a doorway. It looked as if it had been assembled from large flakes of once-coloured dandruff. His heart boiled against the cage of his chest.
‘Baba, look, an angel!’ the child said.
He closed his eyes, gripped his son’s hand, turned his face away, then back again and opened his eyes. The angel continued to stare at him. There was intent in those eyes, and even the very first touch of a smile in those delicately upturned corners, as if Persian artists had brought forth a Chinese angel. He shut his eyes again; the face of the fox-guide, accompanied by shifting confetti-links of floaters, flickered across his retina.
Outside, the courtyard, large enough to be the central square in a city where the crowd congregates for the beginning of a revolution, held scattered groups of colourfully clothed visitors. The spiky phalanx of red cannas blazed in their plots. A square stone platform, bordered by jaalis, rose from the centre of a square rectangular pool, filled with stagnant water, virulent green with algae. Four raised narrow walkways, bisecting each side of the square, led to the platform. The musical rigour that the Mughals had brought to the quadrangular form struck him again; he riffled through his guidebook to read something illuminating about this pool, Anup Talao.
‘Baba, can we go to the middle? There are lanes,’ the boy said.
‘I don’t think we are allowed to,’ he said, then tried to distract him by summarising the few lines on the feature: ‘Look, it says here that musicians used to sit in the centre there, on that platform, and perform concerts for the emperor and his court.’ After a few beats of silence, he added, ‘Wasn’t that interesting?’, hearing his own need to keep the boy engaged fraying with exhaustion.
‘Why aren’t we allowed to?’
‘Well,’ he thought for a second or two, ‘if people were allowed in, we would see a lot of tourists here walking in and out, posing on the platform, taking pictures … but there’s none of that, do you see?’
It was better outside – the relative darkness inside had, oddly, unnerved him. But the pressure of tourism was relentless, bullying. Surely they hadn’t come all this way to stand in the sun and look at pretty buildings from a distance, when they could be inside them, poring over the details, going into every room of every palace, absorbing what the guidebook had to say about each and then re-looking, armed with new knowledge?
In the strange and beautiful five-storeyed panch mahal, each ascending floor diminishing in size until there was only a small kiosk surmounted by a dome on top – eighty-four, fifty-six, twenty, twelve and four columns on each level, respectively, his guide told him – arches between columns took the place of walls and he had been glad of the light and the breeze that came in unimpeded.
Outside once again, he noticed the squares marked on the courtyard, with a raised stone seat at the centre of the regular cross formed by the squares, and pointed them out to his son. ‘Do you see the squares in the four directions, making the four arms of a big plus-sign?’ he asked, tapping a few with his feet and indicating the rest with his pointing hand, ‘Here, and here, and this … do you see?’
The boy nodded.
‘Show me the plus-sign then,’ he asked.
The child danced around, stamping on each square, repeating his father’s ‘Here … and here, and this one …’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do you know what they are for?’
‘This square has X on it, and this one,’ the boy said, jumping on each of them.
‘Yes, so they do. Do you know what these squares are doing here?’
The boy shook his head and looked at him expectantly.
‘This is a board game, like Ludo or chess. It’s called pachisi. Instead of having a small board at the centre, which is surrounded by a circle of a few players, they had a big one marked out permanently in this courtyard.’
His son stared silently, as if digesting the information.
‘But do you know why it’s so big? I mean, so much bigger than a Ludo or a chess board?’ He was hoping the child was not going to ask what Ludo was: why should the ubiquitous board game of the endless afternoons and evenings of his Calcutta childhood mean anything to an American boy? That worn question of his son’s disconnection with his father’s culture reared its head again, but weakly. He pushed it down, easily enough, and offered the answer to the question he had asked, by reading an excerpt from a nineteenth-century book quoted in his travel-guide: ‘The game of pachisi was played by Akbar in a truly regal manner, the Court itself, divided into red and white squares, being the board, and an enormous stone raised on four feet, representing the central point. It was here that Akbar and his courtiers played this game; sixteen young slaves from the harem, wearing the players’ colours, represented the pieces, and moved to the squares according to the throw of dice. It is said that the Emperor took such a fancy to playing the game on this grand scale that he had a court for pachisi constructed in all his palaces …’
Again, that expression of wide-eyed nothingness on the boy’s face. He explained the quotation slowly, in simple words, pointing to the squares and the stone seat, to spark some interest in the boy. The child’s face lit up for an instant. He hopped from one square to another, then another, finally sat, cross-legged, on one of them and chirped, ‘Am I a piece in this game?’
‘You could be,’ he laughed.
‘What will happen when you throw the die? Will my head be chopped off? In one clean stroke?’
Before he could answer, a voice behind him intervened sharply, ‘Get that child out of that square!’
He wheeled around. It was the man with the face of a fox. His eyes glittered. The moustache looked animal too.
‘Don’t you know it’s bad luck to have children sit in these squares? Do you know what happened here? Don’t you know the stories?’
He was sufficiently annoyed by the man’s hectoring tone to protest: ‘Show me a sign that says children are not allowed on this board. It’s part of the courtyard, anyone can walk on it. And who are you, anyway?’
‘Look around you – do you see any children?’
Almost involuntarily, he turned around: to his right, the extraordinary symmetry of the detached building of the Diwan-i-Khas; behind him, the jewel-box of the Turkish Sultana’s house; and in the huge courtyard on which these structures stood, not a single child to be spotted. All those colourfully dressed tourists he had seen earlier seemed to have vanished. There were one or two to be seen standing in the shapely arches of buildings or colonnaded walkways, but there was no one in the courtyard and certainly no children. Incredulous, he turned a full circle to be sure he had let his gaze take in everything. No, no children. The man too was gone. There was a sudden, brief vacuum in his chest; then the sensation left.
‘D-did you see the … the man who was just here? Where did he go?’ he asked his son.
The boy shook his head.
‘But … but you saw him speaking to me, didn’t you?’ He was nearly shouting.
‘Speaking? What?’ the boy asked.
Of course, the child wouldn’t have understood a word; the man had been speaking in Hindi.
‘B-but … but …’ he began, then that futility was inside him again, making him feel weightless.
He extended his hand to his son and caught the warm little palm and fingers in his grip and wanted to hold on to them to moor himself and at the same to scrunch them, so fierce was the wave of love and terror that suddenly threatened to unbalance him. He took the boy and ran into the Turkish Sultana’s house but was blind to the ways craftsmen had made every available surface blossom into teeming life with dense carvings of gardens, trees, leaves, flowers, geometric patterns, birds, animals, abstract designs. At another time he would have been rooted to the spot, marvelling, but now his senses were disengaged and distant and all he saw was the frozen work of artisans and their tools. In one of the lower panels, the heads of the birds of paradise sitting on trees had been destroyed. An animal, crouching below, had been defaced too, making it look much like the lower half of a human child, decapitated in the act of squatting; it brought to mind ritual sacrifice. A small thrill of repulsion went through him. The mutilated carvings had the nature of fantastical creatures from Bosch’s sick imagination; left untouched, they would have been simply beautiful. Then the dimness started to play havoc with his perception. Shapes and colours got unmoored and recoalesced in different configurations. It was like discovering a camel smoking a pipe, formed in clouds in the sky, shift and morph into a crawling baby held in the cradling trunk of an elephant, except there was no movement here, no external change of shape to warrant one thing becoming another.
He forced himself to read a few lines from the relevant section of his guidebook but they remained locked too; signs without meanings. He asked his son, ‘Do you like what you see? Can you tell me what these are?’ He couldn’t make the words come out animated.
The boy shook his head.
‘All right, let’s go look at something else.’ No amount of beauty could counter the permanent twilight of the interiors.
The baize-table lawns and the begonia shrubs radiated light like a merciless weapon. A ripple passed through the blazing froth of bushes, as if the vegetation was shuddering at his presence. Almost dragging his son along, he ran towards a small, perfectly formed building, standing in the flag of shade that it flung on the pied stones of the courtyard. Mariam’s House, the guidebook said. It was the colour of something that had been sluiced indelibly in blood in its distant past. Under the stone awning three-quarters of the way up, the ventilation slots – surely they were too small to be windows? – looked like blinded eyes, yet the house gave the effect of looking watchful. It struck him then, suddenly, a feeling that the walls and stones and cupolas and courtyards were all, as one organism, watching him and his son.
And something was: another angel, this time above a doorway. Barely discernible through the slow, colourless disappearing act that time and the well-intentioned but wrong kind of preservative varnish had together enforced on it, it still managed, through some inexplicable resurrection, to fix him with its eye. It was like looking into the face of ancient light transmitted back from the beginnings of time.
He took hold of his son’s hand to return to the car, moving as fast as having a six-year-old physically attached to him would allow. The larger half of the site remained unvisited; he had had enough. The very air of the place seemed unsettled, as if it had slipped into some avenue where ordinary time and ordinary circumstance did not press against it. Then, with rising anxiety, he knew what was going to happen next, and it did. From the dark inside of a square building, the fox-man came out and stood under the domed canopy of a platform at one corner of the building. He could see the man so clearly, so close, that it was as if all the distance between them across the courtyard had been telescoped into nothing. Then the man retreated into the dark again. He had known the exact sequence of events beforehand, even known the bending of distance that would occur, known that the platform on which the man had stood was called the Astrologer’s Seat even though he had not visited that section of the palace quadrangle. He felt himself pursued by the place as they ran out, retracing the route through which they had made their way into and through the palace complex.
While waiting for the car, he dared to look up: the sky was an immense canvas of orange and red, not from the setting sun, it seemed to him, but from the red sandstone that burned, without decaying, under it. Everything was ablaze.
On the road back, a huge, slow procession of shouting men, hundreds and hundreds of them, coming from the direction in which they were travelling, stalled all traffic. The car windows were rolled up instantly; the protestors were within touching distance. The vast, crawling snake seemed to be an election rally, although he could not tell – the posters were all in Urdu, a language he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t make out a single word amidst the shouting of slogans. They could have been in an utterly foreign country. The boy had his nose pressed to the window; he had never seen anything like this.
‘We just have to wait until it passes, right?’ he asked the driver. A pointless question. The driver shrugged.
Time in this country flowed in a different way from the rest of the world. It was the flow that had carried him a long time ago, when he was a boy, growing up in Calcutta, but now he could no longer step into it: he had become a tourist in his own country.
The rally seemed endless. Occasionally, it stopped altogether. After forty minutes of sitting inside the car, the driver said, ‘They’re moving.’
A brave taxi up ahead had decided to cut through a narrow lane on the left – a dust-and-straggling-dead-grass path, really – with the hope of rejoining the main road at a point further up where it would already have been traversed by the rally. Like mechanical sheep, cars started leaving the main route and entering this side-lane. Their driver was quick – he manoeuvred the car sideways with manic energy and was into the path before the rush to get in there created total gridlock. But he was still behind a few vehicles and the juddering stop-start stop-start stop-start movement down an unmetalled alley was the modern equivalent of running the gauntlet. Soon they came to a complete halt. The procession, well behind them, still seemed to be in full spate, but at least they were now not in the flow of something volatile and unpredictable.
He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was a shadow blooming inside the car at the same time as he heard a timid pattering on the window next to the boy. A bear, standing on its hind legs, was looking in, its muzzle almost pressed to the glass. There was an irregular patch of mist that changed shape in rhythm to the animal’s breathing. Its pelt was a dark slate-grey shag-cushion of dust and tiny insects and bits of straw and grass. Up close, the hairs looked coarse and thick, somewhat like the quills of a hedgehog. Behind him, a man extended his arm forward and tapped on the glass with his black fingernails. The child pushed back on the heels of his palms and moved backwards, trying to burrow into his father’s lap, but couldn’t turn his fascinated head away. The man outside looked eerily familiar – he had the sharp, pointy face of a rodent’s and a moustache that seemed alive. Surely he must be dreaming? They were still in the country lane, and the terracotta late-afternoon light had turned to ashy dusk, but that … that man at the car window … He felt that the spinning of the earth carried him like dice in the slot of a roulette machine and delivered him to destinations that were endlessly repeatable, each ever so slightly different from the other, all more or less the same.
Encouraged by the unblinking gaze of father and son, the bear-wallah tapped on the glass again, and made a shallow bowl of his palm to beg. Those glittering, scaly eyes indicated a sickness that would finish him soon. Inside, he was too frozen even to shake his head in disapproval. At a signal from his keeper, the bear lifted its paw and replicated the human’s begging gesture. The chain, attached to the animal and run through the space between two of its fingers, obliged clinkingly. He saw the head of a huge iron nail driven through the paw – or was it a callus? The claws at the end were open brackets of dirty gunmetal. The paw could easily smash the window, reach in and tear out the child’s entrails. He tried to ask the driver to shoo the man away but no sound emerged from his throat. He tried again.
‘Driver, ask them to move on,’ he said in a kind of low rasp. He couldn’t bring up his arm to mime ‘Go away’ to the beggar.
The driver lowered his window and barked, ‘Ei, buzz off.’
The man paid no heed; the begging from both creatures continued. Presumably at another signal from the man, the bear nodded, then grinned. Where it met the teeth, the gum was a bright pink but further up the colour of cooked liver with a violet tinge. There were sticky threads of saliva gleaming whitely against all that dirty ivory and raw flesh. Then the animal started shaking, as if it was having a malarial fit. The boy screamed, once, twice.
He shouted, ‘Driver, why isn’t he going? Ask him again, now. Ask!’
The driver complied, his command issuing more forcefully this time. The traffic unclotted. As the car moved to life, the pinning gaze of those scaly eyes receding backwards seemed to have become a solid, unfrayable rope. Then motion and the gathering dark severed it.
The boy coughed all night and kept him awake. Occasionally, he cried out in his sleep loudly enough for him to turn on his bedside lamp, get out of his bed and go to his son’s to see what was wrong, to soothe his nightmares away.
Towards the end of the night, the child woke up with what he could only call a howl and continued to cry with an abandonment that brought back to mind the inexplicable and seemingly endless runs of crying during infancy. He couldn’t establish now if the boy was still lodged in his world of dreams during this fit or whether something in the real world, colic or feeling ill or an onset of some sickness, was making him scream like this. Questions had yielded nothing.
Should he ring for room service and ask for a doctor? Surely a hotel of this class would have access to one? The boy’s forehead and neck were not hot.
‘What is it? Tell me, what is it?’ he asked over and over again, reaching the edge of anger on the other side of his helplessness.
Then, a tiny chink in this wall of repetition: ‘I feel afraid,’ the boy managed to articulate.
He bobbed afloat on a swell of relief. ‘Afraid?’ he asked. ‘Afraid of what? There’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m here with you. Here, I’ll sleep in your bed, my arms around you. Everything will be all right.’
But the child wouldn’t stop. He caught something in his son’s gaze, a brief focusing of his eyes on something behind his shoulder, as if he had seen something behind his father, something that made him wail louder, before the focus dissolved.
He turned his head to look. There could be nothing outside the wall of windows – they were on the sixteenth floor of the hotel. The dark glass reflected back at him a dramatically lit-and-shadowed scene of his staring face, twisted around on the stalk of his neck; his son lying on the bed with his mouth open in a rictus of horror and pain; the white bed linen twisted and roped and peaked in the great turbulence that was being enacted upon it; the whole tableau shading off into the darkness that framed it. As his vision moved away from that sharp chiaroscuro foreground of the reflection, he could see, in the refracted light from the hotel grounds, the skeleton of the skyscraper on the other side of the road. On the very top few floors, he could make out the scaffolding – was it still the bamboo-and-coir-rope of his childhood or had they moved on to something more reliable and advanced nowadays? – and the billowing pieces of sackcloth or plastic or whatever it was that the workers had set up there. He wondered, not for the first time, what purpose those sheets served. A safety net, perhaps? They had certainly not prevented one of them from meeting a terrible end yesterday.
By the early hours, not far off from dawn, his son exhausted himself to sleep. He drifted off too, one arm around the boy. The light woke him; he had forgotten to draw the curtains in the night. Next to him, the child was dead.
When I think of her – not often, admittedly, before I decided to write this – the first image is always from an evening in July. The night before, it had rained like I had always imagined it must have done during prehistoric eras, the Pleistocene or the Triassic, say. It brought back my boyhood, lying awake, listening to the sound of relentless sheets of water coming down, imagining a low, red, early-era sky, and strange vegetation and fearful creatures and dangerous landscapes pelted by a downpour that must have been untempered, closer to a natural cataclysm than just simple, heavy rainfall. It even brought back the memory of Bible classes in school, of how all the fountains of the great deep woke up and the windows of heaven opened and it rained upon the face of the earth for forty days and forty nights.
There were dark rain-clouds covering most of the sky next morning but at least the rain had let up for a while. My parents’ living room, on the first floor of a block of flats in Bombay, had an unimpeded view of the sea, which was no more than a few metres away, across the Band Stand in Bandra where, in British times, the band used to gather and play every afternoon. Now between the window and the sea was a road, forked at our end by a narrow, triangular sliver of green, at the vertex of which stood a pair of solid-looking, heavy metal statues, all chunky cuboids and rectangular masses and straight lines, some city council’s idea of cubist primitivism. The pedestal on which the figures stood bore the legend Time is/Too late for those who wait/Too swift for those who fear/Too long for those who grieve/Too short for those who rejoice/But for those who love/Time is eternity.
As if in response, Band Stand, and the mile-long seafront promenade, dotted with concrete benches and sea-poison trees at regular intervals, had become the focal point for romancing couples in the afternoons and evenings.
The Arabian Sea, a placid pond for most of the year, became ruffled and turbulent in its bathetic, minor-mode way during the monsoon, and this morning it looked wild by its standards, with white breakers crashing, one after another, on to the black, rocky shore, which was now totally submerged, the sea having swollen and reached the brim of the sea wall. The horizon was an inky bank of clouds. Far away, I could make out the painted red hull of a fishing boat. It looked like a child’s paper contraption that would soon unravel on the wild slate-grey surface which it rode, tossed almost rhythmically like a seesaw.
I had a meeting in Colaba at 10 a.m., which meant that I had to leave early in order to avoid the notorious morning traffic. These were the days before the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, so it could – and sometimes did – take two hours to travel a distance of twenty kilometres. In another couple of years the Sea Link would open, shocking everyone that something which had nominally been under construction for decades, with nothing except a few fist-like stubs rising from the surface of the sea across the Reclamation (as it was called) to show for it, could be finished so quickly. Who knew what kind of pressure the World Bank, which funded the majority of the project, had brought to bear on the stalled rusty machinery of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and construction companies to get it moving again?
Last night’s rain would mean flooded roads and waterlogging, so the prospect of a long, stop-start journey into town seemed almost inevitable. I left home just after eight. Amit, my father’s driver, usually reported for duty slightly later in the day but he had been asked to come early that morning. By the time the car reached Mahim, the skies opened again. Despite the windscreen wipers semaphoring furiously back and forth, I could barely see anything in front and nothing very much at all through the streaking wall of water which was the passenger window. The whole world seemed to be deliquescing. After twenty minutes or so, the strafing abated somewhat although the rainfall continued; a seen-through-streams-of-liquid kind of visibility was restored; the world became that of an Impressionist painting. At the obligatory traffic standstill at Haji Ali, I saw that the long walkway on the sea leading to the offshore mosque was nearly obliterated to the sight by the spray, so that the mosque, wreathed in low mist, looked as if it were floating in the air, untethered from its umbilical cord connecting it to land. Normally the walkway, a gauntlet of seriously maimed, crippled and diseased people begging, would be a seething corridor of people, either making their way into or out of the mosque. I was too mesmerised by the fairytale dream-vision castle it had transformed into to pay much attention to the long-range view of plagued humanity seeking succour. Then the traffic lights changed, the boys selling pirated copies of bestsellers, self-help books and glossy magazines, out even in this weather, dispersed and the car left the scene of accidental enchantment.
It was that evening, around six o’clock, while Baba and I were debating whether to bring forward our routine pre-dinner drinking – a couple of whisky-and-sodas for each of us – by half an hour to six-thirty, that the doorbell rang.
‘Who could it be?’ Ma asked, almost to herself. ‘It’s too early for Renu …’ Renu was the cook.
I got up, went to the door and opened it. Renu was standing on the other side of the threshold. Or not exactly standing; she had one hand stretched out, holding on to the doorjamb to support herself, as she swayed on the balls of her feet. On her desiccated face her bloodshot eyes were swimming. Her hair, normally oiled and combed tightly on to her scalp and tied into a loose bun at the neck, was dry and frizzy, escaping in disobedient wisps all over.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked her, then turned my head to say to my mother, who was already halfway to the front door, ‘It’s cooking-aunty.’ I could never bring myself to call Renu by her name and add a suffix such as ‘di’, older sister, or ‘mashi’, aunty, either of which would have been the expected or normal thing to do.
‘I had no sleep last night,’ Renu began. ‘The police came in vans and asked us to get out of our rooms. The sea was rising because of the rain, they asked us to get out, they thought our jhopri was going to be swallowed under water.’
She could barely stand straight on her feet.
‘Not a wink of sleep,’ she said. ‘They chased us out at ten, then asked us to go back in around midnight, then they came at two again and drove us out. I’ve had to work all day after a night of no sleep … I can’t keep my eyes open. So I was thinking, I know it’s too early, but if I start now and cook something quickly, I … I could …’
Something about her unbending sense of duty pierced me. I said, ‘Nothing doing. You go home right now, there’s no need to cook tonight. You go get some sleep.’
Ma added her voice to this – ‘Yes, Renu, don’t worry about cooking this evening, you go back home.’
Renu hesitated. Even in this state of extreme exhaustion, she felt some compulsion to resist something so easily given – it wasn’t right, it wasn’t the normal order of things for families to intercept a servant’s unarticulated request and accede to it. And yet I could see on her face relief, so much stronger than professionalism.
Before she could make another weak attempt – not because she was insincere but because she did not have the necessary energy – I forestalled her and repeated, ‘Shush, not another word. We’ll see you tomorrow morning. You need to sleep. Go.’
She was not a person much given to smiling, or expressing any kind of pleasant emotion, but the imprint of gratitude beneath that wrung-out face was unmistakable, a silver-gelatin film beginning to take on the lineaments of the photographic negative in its chemical bath.
I asked, ‘Where did all of you go when you left your homes?’