Abhay

• I’m going to Hazaribagh because I’m greedy for a book.
• I’m going to Hazaribagh as the only atonement I can offer.
• Since January, I’ve been doing everything possible to wreck my own home as though it’s a way of saying sorry to Didi and Dada, for all that I have ever incidentally gained at their expense.
• My brother has run rings around me so successfully (‘exposed’ is another word many would use) that I wasn’t even immediately delighted to learn my sister was still alive, and that one day we might all see her again.
• Bullet points can be so clarifying.

Lena, I’m going despite everything, not just because I owe this visit, and so much more, to Didi, but also because really I should have expected nothing less from my brother.

What less than precisely this much complexity would be commensurate to his history?

Although I can see you shaking your head and replying — like any good hunter, he made sure to match bait with prey. If ‘complexity’ is what’s needed to draw you out, here you go, muthafukka. Suck on this!

Here’s something else I wrote back in January that will entertain you, Lena, not least in that I cheerily discuss my brother, a real-life murderer and Tom Ripley in the same paragraph.

I guess that’s what I think of the man whose ‘hospitality’ I’m shortly about to accept.

He is definitely a monster egotist, a bit like that Crime Patrol episode of the career criminal who killed his wife while always sincerely believing that he was the victim who’d loved her so much. This genuine self-pity, and capacity to deceive oneself — a psychopath who hasn’t yet realised he is one?? If I use as one criterion someone who will always put themselves first, and when they do so, a fog appears over everything else, everything dubious they’ve done, and the morality of whatever they’re planning. Perhaps he’s a psycho coming to be, as in the very first Ripley book when Ripley kind of muddles along making discoveries about his own nature in different situations that greatly take him by surprise. His more cold-blooded talent of manipulating others before destroying them is not yet the honed superpower it will become. That is the stage at which I have encountered my brother Lucky me. It could have been later!

So you see, darling, I have calmly contemplated the possibility that my brother might be a budding psychopath. And nevertheless I decided:

You have to be on full alert around him, while simultaneously retaining an equal awareness of his context — so very complex and multifaceted is this reunion! So many pasts are shaping, and WARPING, this encounter, but what we choose now can still redirect this family’s future.

Complex and multifaceted? Exactly. What other words even come close? Everything with Dada has many meanings. In the five weeks since they left, for instance, Lena and I have received four emails from him, each without words but with five scanned drawings of Tulti’s attached, of ‘places that she [was] remembering from New Zealand’. In crayons, felt pens, watercolours: scenes from the Sunday waterfront market in Wellington, Kaiteriteri beach (Dada put in the titles for our clarification at the top of each drawing), Christmas dinner on our deck and jumping on the trampoline next door that the girls were allowed to use. The pictures were bright and lovely and all of us were happy to see them (they inspired Mira to start a series of her own, which I in turn titled, scanned and emailed back), but as Lena asked after the third email, is Tulti really producing them spontaneously in such quantities? Is she missing New Zealand that much?

‘I find that entirely believable,’ I said. ‘They had a great time here, and kids are always being taken places and then wrenched away without having any say, and I’m sure that has an impact.’

I knew Lena had to agree with that, and she didn’t say anything more also because Mira was in the room watching Doc McStuffins with her dinner, but in fact the same thought had come to me an email ago. That Dada was urging these drawings out of Tulti, and sharing them with us in these numbers, for less simple reasons of his own.

What do you want, Dada, I nearly came out with asking in my fourth reply. Do you want us to offer to adopt Tulti, or merely send over large sums of money for her upkeep? Is that the form in which you would like to be compensated for your historic grievance — that we help raise your child ‘in the way in which she might have been raised’ if you’d never been forced to leave?

You want me to take ownership of my part in Didi’s catastrophe, and you want me to pay my reparations into a fund for Tulti (and perhaps for Didi’s children too, or do you even care about that)? You’ve got a whole atonement plan mapped out for me. Fine, whatever Lena thinks, I’ve carried this for most of my life, and I agree it’s probably no less than what my parents and I collectively owe you all.

But Ripley wouldn’t stop at mere atonement, would he, especially not when he felt so profoundly wronged?

And it’s not only my brother who’s multifaceted; it must run in the family. Consider some of the resolutions I have made in the time since he left, and debated with myself whether these needed to be implemented straightaway, even before I go to India. If I’ve identified a great need for thorough self-reform, it’s best that I begin immediately, right?

Also interpretable as the mind searching frantically for any evasion it can put up, lesser challenges against the greater.

I MUST visit Janaki ASAP and tell her everything about our childhood, whatever she wants to know. It’s important if I’m to live with dignity on my own street.

I must meet up with Will and learn more about teaching in those creative-writing workshops in prison. I’ve been meaning to do that since I first heard about them a year ago and have kept putting it off until I’d finished my novel. Well, it doesn’t need to be an either/or, or else it’s just my pattern of using one thing to duck another. In fact, I should do both of these right away — no reason to wait until I’m back from India. They might even give me a moral boost.

And when I’m back, find out from Ellie and Fleur about joining the English-teaching programme for refugees, another thing I’ve been mentioning to people as a possibility for what, two years now!

Use this as a wake-up call, Abhay, not just to the past which is all-important, but also to the missed opportunities to get involved with people around you.

Comic, right, the amount of stuff someone would pile on their plate to put off doing the one thing they need to? Refugees, prisoners, neighbours, anybody — please rescue me from having to face up to my own brother and sister.

I have to go, Lena, because Aranya is still alive. That is so fucking obvious, right? No need to say any more, even if I’m unable to tell you this before I go.

So when will I tell you, and Ma?

Aye, there’s the rub.