It is still dark as Jazz shifts carefully away from June, and goes to the bathroom. He doesn’t want to wake her, and so he doesn’t bother to shower, he simply splashes some water on his face, enough to wake him up, and shuffles back to the bedroom to dress, in last night’s jeans, but with a clean T-shirt. As he shuts the wardrobe, he hears a slightly piggy snuffling coming from the bed; June is snoring. She doesn’t believe that she snores, but she does, sometimes quite loudly. For some reason, this imperfection on her part suddenly awakens a tenderness in Jazz that he didn’t feel even while they made love; June has her flaws, but she is here, she comes to his home, she comes to his arms and she sleeps in his bed. That simple consideration, that simple kindness on her part has to count for something. He bends over her, and kisses her gently on the forehead; her nose creases in her sleep, and she turns away from him, pressing her face against the pillows. He smiles and leaves the room.
On the way out of the flat, Jazz passes the low shelf with all his editions. He doesn’t put them there from vanity, it’s just filing; he keeps a copy of everything for reference. He hesitates, looking at a proof copy of his latest book; he takes it out, but then replaces it. He goes downstairs to his usual parking space, and gets into his car to drive to the airport.
Jazz has told many stories, as his shelf of novels testifies, and he knows that he has many stories yet to tell; but somehow, all these years, he has shied away from telling the real story. From revisiting it even for himself. The story of when it all went wrong. This is the story he thinks about now, although he is unsure whether he is preparing for his meeting with Aruna, or distracting himself from it. The hardest thing about telling the story, he thinks, or any story, but especially this one, is knowing where to begin.
Arguably it began with their parents, or even their grandparents back in the Bengal, determining who he and Aruna would be, passing down both old and new flaws, just like that British poet had said. The one who looked like a banker, but was really a librarian. Larkin, that was it; Larkin knew where the story began. But Jazz supposes that in the impossibly practical brave new world of story-telling, where stories are circulated by bound and branded volumes no less than 80,000 and no more than 120,000 words, he would start the story here, in Singapore. The Lion City that wears many masks: Chinese, Malay, British. State, Town, Island. The place where all his imaginary worlds coalesced, floating on the edge of the Straits that merged with the South China Sea. A place of unutterable beauty to him now, as the velvet darkness fades to white dawn over the freeway, and the neatly trimmed palm trees in pots line the road in serried military ranks. The place he and Aruna called home. The story would start here, and it would open with a bolt of lightning from above; a death on a stormy day.
It was one of the worst storms in recent years, with electricity that seemed to crack open the whole sky with an eerie, almost nuclear light. Power was lost in several parts of the city, and falling trees damaged homes and blocked the roads. Aruna’s father died in the storm; he was in his sixties and he hadn’t been in good health for some time; in contrast to the showy pyrotechnics about him, his death was as low key and understated as the rest of him had been. He departed life casually, with as little fuss as someone popping out of the house for a stroll; he ate his traditional Sunday dinner with his daughter, complained of chest pains, had a heart attack and died shortly afterwards. Aruna had been back in Singapore for several years when it happened, having returned ostensibly for post-grad work, but really for Jazz. They lived in separate apartments, to avoid difficult conversations with their Muslim families, but really lived together, and had resumed their physical relationship after college with rather more success than when they first started. Given Mr Ahmed’s general frailty, his death shouldn’t have been so surprising, but Aruna took it harder than either of them thought she would. ‘He’s dead,’ she called to Jazz from the ward phone, her voice breaking into wild, guttural sobs. ‘He’s dead.’ She sounded as if she was choking, and Jazz rushed to the hospital. He found Aruna stretched out in the chair next to her father, her forehead swollen and bruised.
‘I gave her a sedative,’ whispered a nurse. ‘I thought it best. She was so upset she hit her head on the edge of his bed, I don’t know if it was an accident or not.’ The nurse took the still hand of Aruna’s father, and showed Jazz the blue-black bruising of fingerprints. ‘She did that in the ambulance on the way over here; she held his hand so tightly.’ The nurse tutted sympathetically. ‘They must have been very close.’
‘He raised her by himself from when she was three years old,’ said Jazz, uncomfortably aware that he was lying, as in truth a procession of servants had really raised Aruna, and she had raised herself. Her father had simply provided for her, and made an appearance at prescribed mealtimes. Their lives touched only slightly, glancing off each other; they hadn’t been close at all. Jazz found out later that this was what really hurt Aruna; he hadn’t been an awful father, but he hadn’t been involved or concerned enough to be described as good, and Aruna suspected that she had followed his example, and not been a good daughter, and now it was too late to do anything about it. She had wasted the last parent she had left, and that night she went a little crazy with regret; the death had opened the floodgates for all the dark emotion she felt, for her resentment at being orphaned before she had a chance to have her questions answered, before she had even worked out what those questions were. On his deathbed she felt a stream of helpless demands rise in her, with no shape or consistency: ‘Were you ever happy? Did you love Amma? Did your father love you? What do you regret most? What did you have left to do? What was your greatest fear? What did you dream at night? What sort of life did you want for me? What advice do you have for me? Answer me, damn it, you cold, old man. Answer me!’ And of course the cold, old cadaver of Mr Ahmed said nothing; the only answers she heard were from mocking voices in her own head that twittered like birds, ‘Too late, too late, too late, too late.’ Aruna had silenced the voices by bludgeoning them from her forehead, with a sharp crack against the hard metal of the bed. She let herself sink psychotically into her grief, simply because she could; she was now accountable to no one, apart from Jazz.
‘Miss Ahmed,’ said the nurse softly, shaking her a little. ‘Aruna, you’ve got family here now, to take care of you. You should go home and get some rest; we’ll look after your father, and we can sort out the paperwork tomorrow.’
The nurse left, and Aruna, her eyes puffy and small, her face a crumpled map of tears, looked accusingly at Jazz. ‘Why did she call you family? Did you say that you were? Is that what you told her?’
‘No,’ said Jazz, wondering why she was fixating on this tiny point. He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, but she suddenly seemed too angry and distant.
‘So why didn’t you correct her? You’re not my fucking family. The only family I ever had is lying dead in the bed,’ she hissed.
‘I was going to, but then I thought that perhaps she only let me in here because she thought I was a relative,’ said Jazz, a little scared by her behaviour. Unsure what to do, he just stood there, and finally said, ‘Come on, Rooney. Let’s get you home.’ He went to take her by the arm, but she shoved him away so violently that he almost fell back on the bed.
‘Don’t fucking touch me. Don’t fucking touch me ever again,’ she screamed hysterically. ‘You’re not my family, you never were. He was.’ And she pointed accusingly at the peaceful, prone figure of her father.
‘I’m not trying to replace him,’ said Jazz, although he thought that over the years he already had. No wonder Aruna resented them both so much now. ‘I’m just trying to be here for you. Like I always have. Like I always will.’ He approached her cautiously, and took her in his arms. ‘OK, Rooney,’ he said soothingly, and hugged her, holding her tightly as she banged the table with her fist, and wailed like an injured animal. She made such a noise that the nurse came back in, and administered another sedative. It was several minutes before Aruna calmed down.
‘I never told him I loved him,’ she finally said to Jazz, her voice muffled against his chest.
‘He knew you loved him, you didn’t have to say it,’ said Jazz reassuringly.
‘He never told me he loved me either,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if he did, really. But I would have liked him to say it.’
‘Of course he loved you,’ said Jazz. ‘You made him very proud. When you got your doctorate, I don’t think any dad could have been prouder. He said he always wanted a doctor in the family.’
‘He didn’t tell me that. He didn’t tell me anything. And I never told him anything either. I never even told him that we were together; I was going to wait until we were engaged.’
‘He knew we were friends; he probably knew more than you thought,’ said Jazz. Aruna didn’t answer, and he realized that she had slumped into his arms; he wasn’t sure if she had passed out, or fallen asleep, like an exhausted child in the middle of a tantrum. He picked her up gently and carried her out.
She woke up or came to as he walked out of the air con of the hospital into the stickiness of the warm evening air, still heavy with humidity after the storm. ‘Why does that keep happening?’ she murmured. ‘Why do people keep getting us wrong?’
Jazz guessed that she was talking about the nurse’s mistaken assumption. ‘It’s just because we’re both Bengali,’ said Jazz. ‘Just like those Westerners who used to think all Chinese people look the same. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘But what if they’re right? What if you are my family, after all?’ murmured Aruna ambivalently. It was unclear whether she thought this was a good thing or not, and she passed out again.
Aruna’s moods got worse over the following months, so much so that she was asked to take a leave of absence from her work as a lecturer in the Literature and Language Faculty. She reluctantly agreed to see a doctor, who referred her for tests, but advised her and Jazz that she was probably just going through the mourning process. The doctor even specified the precise stages of grieving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression; he explained that after these, she would reach the final stage, Acceptance. The doctor made it sound so easy, as though dealing with bereavement was no more complicated than dealing with an unexpected cold: Red Eyes, Runny Nose, Sneezing, Sore Throat. Neat little boxes that could be ticked off as she danced down her yellow-brick road to recovery. But it turned out that Aruna’s depression couldn’t be contained by a box of any size; it was physically invasive, growing with the vegetable speed of a jungle devouring human remains; it crushed her in a muscular embrace, collapsing walls to become the world around her. Aruna was completely incapacitated, the dark terror left her shuddering on the sofa or in bed for hours at a time; Jazz moved into her flat and looked after her. She was given tablets that helped, and eventually began to have good days as well as bad. On one of these good days she went relatively cheerfully to keep an appointment with the doctor. ‘I think I’m getting better,’ she said to him, ‘I think I’m going to be OK.’
She and Jazz waited confidently for the doctor to make his smug, predictable pronouncement, for his I-told-you-so claim that she was finally reaching the promised land of Acceptance, just as he had predicted. Instead, the doctor smiled uncomfortably, said he had the results of her psychiatric profiling, and asked Aruna if she wanted Jazz to leave the room.
‘Of course not,’ she said, glancing at Jazz and squeezing his hand.
‘We think you may have bipolar disorder. Manic depression. The onset of the disorder tends to peak in early adulthood, and sometimes it takes a stressful event for it to present sufficiently for diagnosis; it’s not curable, but it’s manageable. You’ve probably been managing it for years, somehow, without even realizing. And it may well be years before you have another episode like this. But if we’re to prevent relapse, there’s really no substitute for appropriate medication.’ Aruna said nothing, but squeezed Jazz’s hand so tightly that he later found blue-black fingerprints blooming on his skin, which faded to autumnal yellows over the next few days.
Yes, thinks Jazz, pulling up and parking in a bay at Changi airport. The storm is where the story starts. A bolt of lightning, and a death.