THAT FRIDAY DR ABIR BANNERJEE left his surgery early and went to the airport. The weekend of golf with his brother Abhijit was something they did every year, usually somewhere inexpensive in South East Asia. This time it was Vietnam. From Hong Kong, it was not a long flight – not much more than two hours – and it was only mid-afternoon when he landed in the city he still thought of as Saigon. He sat in the back of the taxi looking out at the noisy, energetic poverty of modern Vietnam. His driver, a talkative fellow though without much English, tried to engage him in conversation but Abir’s monosyllabic answers eventually discouraged him, and they passed the remainder of the journey in silence. For part of that time Abir’s thoughts were taken up with someone he knew, a woman he had been seeing. She was married and she had decided, in the end, to stay with her husband. When she had told him that, the previous day, over a drink at the Conrad Hotel, he had tried to be philosophical. That was life. He approved of her decision in principle, and he was thankful for what they had had together. For an hour afterwards he had walked the streets, trying to work out how he felt. There was a sort of numbness that made it hard to say. When he wasn’t thinking about her, he was mostly thinking about the money his brother owed him – earlier in the year he had lent Abhijit five lakh rupees and he was supposed to have paid it back by now.
The taxi arrived at the Song Be Golf Resort.
It looked, Abir thought, like an upscale Florida shopping mall.
It had been Abhijit’s idea to spend a weekend here.
Abhijit himself didn’t arrive until later. It was nearly ten o’clock when he thumped on Abir’s door. ‘It’s me,’ he shouted. ‘Are you asleep or what?’ Abir had in fact been thinking of turning in. He was lying on his bed trying to focus on the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He put his tablet down, opened the door, and said, ‘No, I’m not asleep. Hello, Abhijit.’
They hugged.
Abhijit smelled of a mixture of sweat and smoke and stale aftershave.
‘Drink?’ he suggested. ‘Come on – drink! Let’s have a drink. Just one. We can’t not have a drink.’
Abir let himself be persuaded. He put on his shoes, and they went down to the bar, which was an open-sided area at one end of the lobby level, a sort of veranda, with wicker furniture under turning fans.
‘There is no fucking direct flight from India to Ho Chi Minh can you believe it?’ Abhijit said, agitating the ice in his Wild Turkey and Coke.
‘There is from Hong Kong,’ Abir said.
‘Yes of course there is from Hong Kong!’ Abhijit shouted, enjoying himself. ‘You can fly fucking anywhere from Hong Kong!’ Derisively he threw out the names of some obscure destinations. ‘Almaty. Port Moresby. Brisbane. Budapest.’
‘Seattle,’ Abir added.
‘Seattle?’
‘Yes, I know someone, she flew in from Seattle a few days ago.’
‘One of your walking corpses?’ Abhijit asked with a jolly laugh.
‘No,’ Abir said. ‘Not a patient.’
‘Lucky her.’ Abhijit slurped from his drink.
‘Actually she was a patient,’ Abir said. ‘It was a false alarm.’ He was aware of a desire to talk more about her. ‘You came via … where then? Bangkok?’ he asked instead, though he wasn’t actually interested in the details of Abhijit’s itinerary.
Abhijit nodded. ‘Sure, yes, Bangkok,’ he said. ‘Thai Airways. They’re okay.’ He slurped again from his drink, and padded sweat from his forehead with a napkin – the night was humid. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
Abir shook his head.
They talked, for a while, about other possible connections – KL, Yangon – and Abir agreed, dispassionately, that the lack of direct flight destinations from India’s major airports was a national disgrace.
‘The fact is,’ Abhijit said, ‘as in so many other areas, we’re twenty years behind the Chinese. And you live among them, you traitor!’
‘Hong Kong isn’t China.’
‘You’re not allowed to say that there,’ Abhijit pointed out.
‘Well, you can say anything in India,’ Abir said. ‘There is that, on the plus side.’
Abhijit frowned. ‘I’m not sure if that’s true any more actually.’ He tended his damp forehead. ‘What did you fly, then?’ he asked. ‘Cathay?’
‘No, VietJet,’ Abir said.
Abhijit seemed amazed. ‘VietJet? The cheapo outfit? Why?’
Abir shrugged. ‘It’s not a long flight.’
There was a silence, and he wondered if this was the moment when Abhijit would bring up the subject of the loan.
Instead Abhijit signalled to an ancient-looking Vietnamese man in a white jacket that he wanted to sign for the drinks.
‘I’ll get these,’ he said, and Abir wondered if he expected to be thanked. It did irritate him that Abhijit was making a show of paying for the drinks, was taking the social advantage of that, while at the same time owing him money, and showing no sign so far of being willing or able to pay it back, or even of mentioning it.
‘I’ll get these,’ Abhijit said again, as the waiter approached, as if Abir might not have heard him the first time.
Abir just nodded and looked away.
‘So, what time are we up tomorrow?’ Abhijit asked, signing with a flourish, snapping the little padded folder shut, and handing it back to the waiter. ‘What time are we on the tee?’
Abir did not sleep well. Abhijit’s failure to mention the loan needled him for much of the night. He had had a dream in which he was in some vague hotel setting – on an island somewhere – with the woman he had been seeing. Her physical presence had seemed very palpable in the dream, the slightly damp feel of her skin. When he woke up, in the total darkness of the Vietnamese night, he had been surprised for a moment that she wasn’t there. After that he hadn’t been able to sleep again for a long time. It was then that he started to think about the money Abhijit owed him. He spent what seemed like hours lying there in the dark, trying to find a form of words with which to approach the subject himself in the morning, if Abhijit did not. He drowsily imagined whole exchanges, some of which ended with Abhijit tearfully apologising, others with one of them storming out, or even with physical violence. What he did not do was decide on an actual form of words, though he did decide, lying there in the dimness of dawn, that the subject would have to be tackled. Since they were kids, Abhijit’s ability to get away with things had infuriated him. He would not let him get away with not even mentioning this loan.
In the morning, however, he ate his fruit salad in silence while Abhijit talked about this and that, about Bitcoin and what fortunes were available there.
‘Hasn’t it lost, like, half its value in the last few months?’ Abir objected.
Abhijit insisted that was a positive sign. He was thinking about making an investment himself, he said as they walked to the first tee.
Abir lost the toss, and stepped up to the tee with his one wood – an undistinguished specimen he had been using since he first took up the sport at Stanford med school.
He tried to empty his mind. He was still thinking about the loan and it distracted him. It stopped him being fully present in the moment.
Aware that he had lost focus, he stood back from the tee, shut his eyes for a few seconds, and then stepped up to it again.
He inhaled slowly through his nostrils. He made a tiny adjustment to the position of his feet. Then another, which simply undid the first. Then he snapped into the swing, and the little white ball went.
He knew immediately that he had hooked it, though he wasn’t sure exactly where it had ended up. The dazzle of the sun had snatched it away.
‘Oh dear,’ Abhijit said, smiling plumply under his Ping visor. ‘Let’s see if I can do any better.’
The sun was out, shining down through a thin haze, and they sweated lightly as they stood over their shots. Abhijit had a maddening ability to make the ones that mattered and he was soon several strokes ahead. Abir was obviously out of sorts. He felt the match slipping away as he pathetically missed short putts, then missed them again, and finally sent several shots in quick succession into the weed-filled lake. When the fourth one found the water, he just dropped his iron onto the turf and walked away. ‘Hey!’ he heard Abhijit shouting from the green. ‘Hey, you need to play a shot. What are you doing? Where are you going? You need to play a shot!’ Abir ignored him. He had arrived at a path that led back to the hotel and without thinking he flagged down a resort employee at the wheel of a golf cart that was passing. It was only when he was sitting in the golf cart and it had moved off again under some trees that he was able to take in what he had just done. It seemed incredible that he had actually done it. He never did things like that. As the golf cart trundled along, he found himself thinking of the woman he had been seeing in Hong Kong, of the way she had spoken to him at their final meeting. When she told him her decision he had been silent for a while. Then he had smiled and said, ‘Well, I hope we’ll still see each other sometimes.’ And she had said, ‘No. No we won’t.’
At the hotel Abir went up to his room and then wondered why he was there. The room had been made up since he was last in it. He sat provisionally on one of the French-style armchairs – perched on it, leaning forward – and stared at the wall. He sat there for some time. Then he went down to the bar, and he was there when Abhijit appeared, dripping from the exertion of finishing the Palm Course on his own. Abhijit sat down and asked the waiter to bring him a large watermelon juice. ‘What was that about?’ he asked, meaning the tantrum.
‘Nothing,’ Abir said.
‘Are you okay?’ Abhijit padded his face with a napkin.
‘When are you going to pay me that money?’ Abir asked.
‘Money?’
‘The five lakh rupees.’
‘Oh that.’
‘Yes, that. Were you hoping I’d just forget about it?’
The tone was so hostile that Abhijit, perhaps taken aback, said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘Are you okay, Abir?’
At that moment his huge watermelon juice arrived and he let the waiter place it on the table and thanked him, and then asked him for an ashtray.
As soon as the waiter moved away, Abir said, ‘When are you going to pay me?’
‘I think you need to calm down,’ Abhijit said.
‘Don’t tell me to calm down. When are you going to pay me?’ Abir seemed in danger of losing his temper again.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Abhijit said.
‘When are you going to pay me?’
‘What’s your problem?’
‘When are you going to pay me?’
‘It’s only five lakh rupees …’
‘When are you going to pay me?’
‘I’m going to pay you,’ Abhijit said. ‘I am going to pay you. Okay? What the fuck is your problem?’