Abhay

Only on the drive home did I wonder if it had all been a setup. Motive? Who could know with Dada, for whom motives were like ricocheting billiard balls or carrom counters? But suddenly the feeling grew that a scene had been staged to take me in. It had all been too perfectly timed, too dramatic. How could something so big happen on my very first evening in Hazaribagh?

But when would Dada have had the time to prepare it? I’d called him from Calcutta only the day before to say that I was coming. Better to be rude than to be hoodwinked, I’d thought, and he had sounded genuinely surprised. And still he managed to pull this off?

It was 8.30 in the evening, and I’d arrived at Dada’s house in Nawabganj (Thamma’s house, the last time I’d visited in 1995) two hours earlier, in a rental car that he’d sent from Hazaribagh to meet me at Dhanbad station. We were discussing when would be a good time to go over to Praveen’s place the following day when Dada got a call from my twelve-year-old niece, Paakhi. Apparently her brother wasn’t answering his phone. From the way Dada described it afterwards, Paakhi didn’t expect her father Praveen to be home at that hour, or indeed to pick up her calls. I was told that most nights he returned much later, after drinking sessions with some mates. But Jhappi, who was seventeen, was usually home with his sister in the evenings after Bina, who took care of their house and all the cooking, had gone home to her own family for the night. Paakhi had called her uncle after an hour of being alone and unsuccessfully trying Jhappi’s phone.

‘This has happened before, so don’t worry. I’ll try Jhappi. He’ll probably answer when he sees it’s me,’ said Dada.

‘Where do you think he could be?’ I asked.

‘Out with friends. Sometimes doing the same thing as his father. But our Jhappi’s also a star performer, so it could be that as well, in which case his phone will be on silent.’

As it turned out, Jhappi didn’t pick up his uncle’s call either, so Dada sent him a text. Although I had no idea what Dada meant by ‘star performer’, nor with how much irony or sarcasm, I took heart from his relaxed manner, because inwardly I was shaken by two separate thoughts, the second worse than the first. A twelve-year-old girl, our sister’s daughter, all alone in her house at this hour, perhaps having to warm up her own food on a gas-lit cooker. And then her two male guardians, and her closest family, would stagger in drunk.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

‘Of course not. Don’t worry. You’ve been on the road all day. Moushumi, Tulti, tell him. How often does this happen, and what do we do?’

Tulti looked up only briefly from the Lego ice-cream shop set I’d got her. ‘If Paakhidi is alone, she comes here with her schoolbag, and goes to school with me in the morning.’ Wow, a six-year-old had also grown to regard such an occurrence as normal, even mundane.

‘I still want to come.’

Dada had his full-sleeved sweater back on, and was putting on a scarf. ‘If you insist. Then I won’t take the bike, in case we bring her here. Plus it’s cold. Let’s drive.’

In the car (the first time ever that he was driving me), on an impulse I asked: ‘What if all three of you had come to New Zealand? What if there had been such a night?’

Dada looked at me without slowing down, then turned away while he answered. ‘So you think we should always be here, like goalkeepers, because there’s no telling what Praveen and Jhappi might do?’

Of course I hadn’t meant that. Who was I to impose such an expectation on my brother? Dada laughed.

‘I’m joking. Jhappi’s basically a good boy. Sometimes he takes off, because he knows Paakhi will call us. When we were away, he would drop Paakhi off to spend the night with Moushumi, which they both enjoyed.’

‘And Praveen?’

‘Oh, he’s the same whether we’re away or not. But then he’s predictable, so we all work around him. He’ll be back at work in the morning.’

Dada mentioned that we were turning into the lane of Praveen’s house, and that this area was called Korrah, and then said, ‘What you can learn from today is who has actually handled Didi’s absence the best. Believe it or not, you’re about to meet the youngest, and yet strongest, member of her family.’

When we got there, Paakhi had her school backpack and another small bag ready, which Dada picked up. He asked her if she’d closed all the windows, switched off the bar heater, and if the gas wasn’t on; then, what about the TV and computer? It seemed like a familiar drill. Paakhi took me in with her gaze, but only when we were in the car did Dada ask if she could guess who I was. I turned around to help her out.

Paakhi shook her head.

‘Of course you can. Think carefully. Where have you seen his pictures recently?’

When she remained silent and began to stare at her lap, I piped up and introduced myself as her uncle from New Zealand. Dada said, now do you remember him from the photos, and Paakhi nodded.

‘When did you come?’ she asked me.

I had just told her, and had added that I would be staying for four days, and we were back at the top of their lane waiting to turn left onto the main road, when it came to me out of nothing else that this might all be staged.

It wouldn’t be that hard to arrange after all, even with just a day’s notice. All Praveen and Jhappi had to do was to stay away for one night. Tulti and Paakhi might have been told we’re playing a big welcoming game for Uncle.

And then? Were their eyes solely on my conscience, or on my chequebook as well?

But soon I had far cheerier things to focus on, because learning who I was had a lovely, enlivening effect on Paakhi. Her look of worry disappeared, and she began talking about her day at school, and then remembered that tomorrow was a PT class, and she’d left her white shoes behind at home. Dada reminded her she had another pair at their place she could use. I should mention that we were speaking in Hindi rather than Bengali, because this was Paakhi and Jhappi’s first language at home.

‘Have you brought Mira with you?’

‘Not this time, I’m sorry. Everyone’s been asking me that, and everyone is disappointed. But next time when I come for longer I promise Mira, and your Lena Aunty, will be with me. Mira would love to be here with both her didis.’

‘I know where New Zealand is.’

‘I’m sure you do. Do you know which ocean we are in?’

Of course she did, and she also knew that we lived in New Zealand’s capital.

Suddenly I realised that Paakhi would soon see Tulti playing with her new Lego set. I had brought along a calendar, a tea tray and some coasters for their house, but had been unable to choose a present specifically for her or Jhappi, and I couldn’t have asked Dada or Moushumi while trying to keep the trip a secret.

‘Abhay Mama, what do you do?’ Paakhi broke into my thoughts. My sister and Praveen had named their son and daughter ‘hug’ and ‘bird’, by the way.

Before I could reply, Dada cut in. ‘Oh, your Abhay Mama’s a very busy man. He’s a famous writer. That’s why he can only be here for four days.’

‘Of course not,’ I said immediately. ‘That’s not why. The truth is that I work from home and also look after Mira. I take her to her kindergarten and bring her home, or to her friends’ houses to play. Right now your aunt is having to do everything while working as well. That’s why I can’t stay too long on this visit.’

To hide my anger from Paakhi I turned back around. We were passing through a market, with just a few shops open at 9.15 and not much bustle on the street.

‘Paakhi, tomorrow if you have some time after school, I’d like us to come here, or go to the mall, or wherever your favourite shop is in Hazaribagh. I was waiting to meet you before I bought you a present. I wanted you to choose.’

Paakhi immediately replied that she knew where she wanted to take me. Then she said, no, not there, somewhere else, and then again, shyly: ‘Actually, there are two places.’

‘OK, let’s go to both. Promise. And we’ll take Tulti along as well. And you must also tell me what size your brother and your Baba are, so that I can get them each maybe a nice sweater or a jacket?’

‘Paakhi, tell Abhay Mama what happened right here with your father,’ Dada butted in again, but she looked puzzled.

‘You know, the story with the army lorries. This is where it happened.’

‘Oh, that one,’ and Paakhi cheerfully narrated how her father had had too much to drink one night (in the unspecified past) when a convoy of army lorries had been passing through the market, and he’d stood in front of the first lorry shaking his fist and roaring at the soldiers to get down and meet him man to man. She was giggling more and more as she spoke, and Dada too was grinning broadly.

If it had been a convoy, it would have been a time of emergency, I thought to myself, perhaps a show of strength. There must have been a spate of incidents with the Maoists. Praveen could have been shot right there, or else taken away and never heard from again. My niece seemed to have no idea how close she came to becoming (effectively) an orphan.

‘And then?’ I asked tensely.

‘Then what?’ Dada was laughing hard by now. ‘He went from lorry to lorry inviting them down to fight, swearing away at these probably Tamil or Northeastern soldiers in choice Bihari expressions. God knows why he decided to take those guys on that night. Maybe they didn’t let him cross the road or something. But thankfully two people who knew him well rushed out from one of the shops and pleaded with the soldiers to let him go, because they knew him to be a family man.’

It was probably to avoid thinking about the absolute vulnerability of little Paakhi in the back, laughing away with her older uncle — her mother missing for years, her father with this level of disregard for his own, or her, wellbeing — that I began to wonder if this was the start of Act III in tonight’s performance. First you call, then we come get you, and as we drive through the market, darling, we’re going to tell your foreign uncle this particular story, and remember to laugh as hard as me. No, it doesn’t matter that it never happened, he’ll get a kick out of it anyway. He’s a writer, you see, he loves funny stories for their own sake. In fact, he’s coming here to put us in a book, so we owe it to him to give him some entertainment and drama.

Paakhi slept beside Tulti that night (I was in Dada’s guest room: he told me there would be ample space for Mira and Lena too, when they visited, because the upstairs floor he was adding would have two more bedrooms), and the following morning they went to school after a breakfast of cornflakes and two pooris, respectively. I had been up since 5.20, and watched everyone’s morning routines around me with my third cup of instant coffee: at 7.30, when Dada left with the two girls, Rosemary would be picking Mira up from crèche in Wellington. I was going to Skype with them in an hour and a half, power and internet connection permitting.

My haywire body clock had proved useful for one thing: I’d had some time to write before Dada and Moushumi woke up.

So everyone acting a part, even the kids, is my strongest hypothesis? Because that’s how high the stakes are when their moneybags uncle is visiting! He needs to believe we’re in distress, and being the guilty type who will run back home anyway in just four days, he’ll react by throwing money at the problem. Paakhi, he knows Tulti is doing fine, so you’re our best bet to draw his sympathy. Praveen, Jhappi, you guys have the easiest parts. All you have to do is keep away for four days, or appear briefly when I tell you, but make sure you’ve had a great time first so he can smell it on your breath. Then be ready to clown around a bit — Jhappi, I’m going to present you as our ‘star performer’ — and I guarantee that will add zeros to his donation. My finder’s fee for this particular donkey is only 25 per cent, promise!

By ascribing such plots to him, even as an exaggerated thought experiment, I was basically saying my brother had turned the rest of the family into a begging syndicate with me as its target.

Why stop there, Abhi? Like Martin Amis, have the balls to take your ‘thought experiment’ further. Perhaps Didi ‘disappeared’ years ago just to enable this day. They went large, for big stakes, like the undercover family in The Americans.

And purely incidentally, how convenient this cynicism happens to be for you. On a four-day visit, your worst possible imaginings about your brother are confirmed, so you can return to New Zealand for a second, guilt-free, lifelong innings. An unprecedented lightness of being, yours forever in another seventy-two hours.

I knew as I sat there registering my own words that I had to talk to Lena. I wasn’t thinking straight, and perhaps she couldn’t either about Dada, but at least she currently had the advantage of distance. All I could see was this one ‘pattern’ that overwhelmed everything else — in which Dada had manipulated me at every stage towards what he wanted me to see and believe. Didi’s alive; no, she’s dead; uh, no, actually she isn’t.

Your brother-in-law and your nephew are drunks, but you live in Wellington. As I see it, Abhi, there’s only one way you can help your little niece.

But can you blame me entirely for harbouring such reductive, dehumanising visions? Consider for a moment this second floor Dada was adding. It was going to be a whole other unit on top of Thamma’s existing house, with a drawing room, kitchen and two bedrooms. Leave aside the question of accomplishing this on a PWD engineer’s salary in a single-income family, but could this same, rather comfortable-seeming engineer not have funded three tickets to New Zealand? Lena and I had been given the (entirely believable) impression that the total cost of the holiday would amount to more than an average annual middle-class salary, which we assumed was what Dada made.

Perhaps that bit of smartness had had another motive — concealing holdings disproportionate to income. Dada’s neighbours and colleagues must legitimately believe that the money for the trip was coming from New Zealand. There were all sorts of ‘evil eyes’ to avoid in these parts, not just the anti-corruption agency and envious neighbours. You didn’t want the Maoists to know you could afford intercontinental holidays. Remember that crack he’d made about considering telling me that Tulti had been kidnapped because of her wealthy foreign uncle?

This second point is more petty, I admit, and might only have been an oversight, but in the many anecdotes about their everyday life that he’d related in Wellington, Dada had left me with the clear impression that their sole family vehicle in Hazaribagh was his motorbike. When I arrived here, the very first thing I saw when the gate was opened, even before I noticed Moushumi’s unbelievable covered nursery of two hundred and fifty separate plants, was a good-looking, late-model burgundy Honda City sedan. And Dada even had a driver, Yakub (a Muslim, mind, another of his innumerable contradictions: I had a vision of Dada’s Muslim driver taking him regularly to visit his tantrik!), who took Moushumi places while he was at work, and picked Tulti and Paakhi up from school. But I’d never have learnt about this car — unimportant as it is — if I hadn’t visited Hazaribagh.

Is it entirely my unfair misconception that Dada selects, frames and edits what I see?

Writers have some experience of these things.