Lena

Fair to say our first Skype with Abhay in Hazaribagh didn’t go well.

His picture kept freezing, over half his sentences were cut off and, most of all, Mira refused throughout to talk to him. She wouldn’t come to the computer, and when I carried it over to where she was playing in the dining room, she screamed, ‘I don’t want to’ and ran off to her bedroom, which she knows is outside the wifi range.

Vaguely thinking of trying to make Abhay feel better, I told him that this bad mood pre-dated our call. Yesterday, when we hadn’t tried to Skype because he’d been travelling, Mandie — Mira’s carer on Tuesdays and Fridays when she didn’t go to crèche — had reported having to send her for a time-out in the hall, after she’d repeatedly shoved Noah, who was only two, or snatched things from him. Then she’d refused to answer when Mandie tried to speak to her. Today at crèche seemed to have gone better in that no one had any erratic behaviour to mention, but then Mira had apparently run off into the car park as soon as she was out the gate, despite Mum’s frightened warnings about incoming cars not being able to see her. In the past, she’d run along the grass verge at the far end plenty of times, but not once directly across the parking spaces. And again, she’d absolutely refused to answer when Mum tried to get her to repeat in the car what made running onto a road or a driveway or car park so dangerous. In fact, it had soured her mood towards her Nana for the rest of the afternoon, and when I’d arrived to pick her up, Mum had given up trying to engage with her or play something together. Mira was just watching one of her DVDs of Doc McStuffins with some blueberries, cheese, crackers and strawberries before her, and refused even to say goodbye to Nana or give her a hug when we left.

I did wonder how much of all that Abhay heard if his sound reception was as clipped and interrupted as ours. But he did say when I was finished, in grammatically dubious French, which presumably was to evade Moushumi’s ear, ‘Merci cherie, pour me faire plus coupable. J’avais besoin de ça. C’était la raison que j’appelait.’

Partly because it would be futile on such a poor connection, and also for the same reason — that Moushumi was nearby — I controlled my immediate anger at this charge. Not for a moment had I intended to make him feel guilty. Instead, to try and end the call on a light-hearted note, I remembered to tell him an interesting thing I’d learnt this morning when dropping Mira off at crèche. Apparently Dan, the Welsh-English dad of Mira’s recent friend Meg who’d arrived at the same time, had a Calcutta connection. Several generations of his family, right up until his own father’s childhood, had been based in Calcutta as part of its Jewish community that had come over from Baghdad at different times in the nineteenth century. Dan’s dad had moved to England with his parents shortly after 1947, as a very young boy.

Because the picture was frozen while I was talking, I wasn’t sure how much of that story Abhay had caught. When I asked, he remained silent a little longer, then said, ‘Dada dreamt he saw Dan living and working in Hazaribagh.’

Now I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

‘Dada came along for one of Mira’s drop-offs, which also happened to be one where Dan rather than Judith had come with Meg. He’s met several other parents from either Mandie’s or crèche. But out of all of these different people, and with absolutely no awareness of Dan’s Calcutta connection, because Dan has never mentioned it to me, Dada had a dream about him in India, living and working in a factory and eating in the market just like a local.’

I’m in fact giving you the pieced-together gist of what Abhay said. Including all the interruptions and gaps would be annoying. I replied, ‘And so?’

‘So, he felt that something about this white guy connected him to India. Don’t you see what an incredible coincidence that is?’ I guess in Abhay’s mind he thought he was complimenting Ashim, because it didn’t seem to concern him right then that Moushumi might be overhearing this.

We hung up shortly afterwards, following another futile effort to get Mira to at least say goodbye to her Baba. Despite great temptation, I decided not to take a needle for the moment to this absurd idea of Ashim’s clairvoyant powers (what if Dan had mentioned his Calcutta connection to Ashim while Abhay was inside settling Mira?), especially not in his wife’s hearing. She had greeted me warmly at the start of the call, when Abhay also told me with awe about her vast nursery, for which she employed two gardeners and had customers from all over Hazaribagh.

Just a little later though, while Mira ate her chicken noodle soup and toast at her table in the living room with a couple of episodes of Paw Patrol and I finished off some leftover vege lasagne seated on the sofa behind her, I felt a great, cold alarm, which seemed like a delayed reaction to that last, apparently trivial, part of the conversation. Of course the two of us were safe and Mira was right there in front of me, but suddenly I feared Ashim’s present hold over my husband.

In less than two months since his departure from New Zealand, and despite his most obvious plot against our family failing entirely to take off, Ashim had nevertheless managed to get Abhay to decide first to leave his own house and then to go over to Hazaribagh, a reaction Aranya’s disappearance itself had not evoked back in 2010. And now Abhay was there, on Ashim’s turf, succumbing to these ideas of his brother’s ‘special powers’. It all made him seem very vulnerable.

Was this how Ashim’s tantrik worked — by planting depth-charges in the weakest parts of the adversary’s psyche and simply standing back, waiting for them to crumble? I found just then that I could believe in this vision a lot more readily than in buried chicken bones that triggered headaches.

I also remembered several of the Crime Patrol plots that Abhay had frequently shared with me (the episodes are fashioned out of genuine cases from police files throughout India), as well as the stories that had struck, or shocked, him the most, which he would invite me to watch, pausing the action at several points to do a thorough job of keeping up with the translation from Hindi. Relatives who seemed much closer to begin with than Abhay and Ashim ever were turn out to have wreaked horrific things upon one another. In fact, back in June, a few weeks before we went to Calcutta for Chhotka’s wedding, Abhay had to go cold turkey on his addiction to the show for a fortnight and switch to watching Hrishikesh Mukherjee comedies instead, because he said the unrelenting landscape of misogyny, domestic tyranny, suffering and violence as depicted in story after story — and the overwhelming idea that these remarkable cruelties had all actually occurred — was affecting him to the absurd extent of not wanting to go home. ‘And why am I voluntarily taking my wife and three-year-old daughter into this hellhole of human misery?’ It had taken two weeks of watching Chupke Chupke, Naram Garam, a couple of Amol Palekar films as well as Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, to right the balance between that unflagging focus on the darkest aspects of Indian life (no matter how true) and everything else Abhay also knew his homeland to be about — lightness, comedy, nonsense and warmth.

And now was I letting Crime Patrol do the same thing to me — unfairly colour my idea of my admittedly slippery brother-in-law?

But Abhay, answer me this: if you’d watched the first part of our story — that is, Ashim’s visit to us, with its many games — as an episode of Crime Patrol, would you be cool with the younger brother visiting such a Dada on his patch? No apprehensions whatsoever; honestly?

You want to hear an ironic confession? Back in December, after that holiday in Kaiteriteri — just as I do today — I had needed a close but uninvolved friend to talk to about Ashim. Someone who hadn’t met him and could hear out my account of the past fortnight and tell me if I was overstating my case.

You guessed it. I chose Tony, and that was the lunch Ashim, of all people, spied on. Of all the cafés in Wellington, he had to be walking past ours.

And now I’m slightly superstitious about calling Tony again, even though I probably need to hear another voice on this more than ever. Get a grip, Lena. The bad dream is back in Hazaribagh.

Thank God it’s only six more days until Abhay returns. I think we’re all losing it a bit, the little one neglecting her soup in front of me included. She’s missing her Baba more than she can say.

Incidentally, here’s her oft-expressed opinion of her father’s favourite show, which she has heard mention of, even though he only watches it after she’s in bed:

‘Paw Patrol is far better than Crime Patrol.’