Chapter Thirty-Seven

Brushing the cobwebs from my forehead and lips, I felt I’d spent an age away from my apartment; really it was a short time away, entertaining and wooing Anna, running errands for Mother and working in between. Premibai had obviously decided to stay away too; with little activity in the apartment, the spiders had taken over. Dusky shadows danced on the ceiling, reflecting the plants in the corner as I switched on the light. I walked directly to the washroom and showered to take off the fatigue I felt. Stepping out with just a towel wrapped round my hips, I sat in the living room hoping to immerse myself in reading Dickson’s, History of the Theory of Numbers, vol. three, and resurface as close as I could to reality.

As if on cue, I heard a key turn in the lock. Premibai, I suppose, back as if she’d been watching for my return. However, the bony frame of Dr. Apte slipped into the room.

“Doctor! How did you get in?”

“I have a key to your apartment, Peter.”

“Only Premibai has one.”

“Oh, she will not be coming for a few days and has asked me to inform you. She gave me the key.”

I stifled a sigh. “She does some weird things, but anyway, Doctor, I am not in a very social mood so you will have to excuse me.”

“Excused,” he said with a wave of his hand and picked up a National Geographic and thumbed through the pages. I stood and walked toward my bedroom, knowing I would have to bear his presence in the drawing room.

“She said no, I suppose,” he said to my retreating back as I opened my door, stepped in, and shut it.

Staring at the ceiling is therapeutic. If one concentrates long enough one can decipher patterns in the strokes of the painter’s brush and even see the odd spot that escaped. Sometimes my attention leapt past the walls and ceiling of my room to the noise of the television playing in the drawing room. No, Dr Apte had no intention of letting me be. I knew he would even sleep on my couch and I would wake to loud snores at some early hour of the morning, and yet I felt unable to step outside and face him. Finally the noise of the television died down and all that I could hear was the horn of the traffic in the distance. Perhaps now I could get that glass of water that I so thirsted for.

Trying to be surreptitious, I carefully slid the door handle in slow motion, but the creak seemed so loud that I was afraid I would wake him. I opened the door to the realisation that my fears and caution were unfounded. Dr. Apte, far from being asleep, had stationed himself outside my door and was listening for my heartbeat or whatever he thought he would hear with his ear to my door. Of course he did not have the grace to blush; or perhaps he did and it did not show under his brown skin in the low light.

“What are you doing here?”

“Checking if you are ok,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world to listen at doors. But in that action, perhaps, he had made it the most natural thing to do; set the standards for social behaviour, so to say. On many an occasion my ideas of good manners and boundaries had been totally pooh-poohed by this man, “Peter, you are so conditioned by the British who left this place so long ago. Who is interested in their standards on anything at all?”

I walked towards the kitchen in silence. Good manners, good friends, well meaning interest—who cares! Right, wrong, boundaries, privacy…close on my heels, I could hear him breathe down my neck.

“Leave me alone, Doctor.”

“Not possible, Peter.”

We sat in the living room, the two of us, keeping a great amount of space between us. He on a chair under the lamp and I in the far opposite corner in the darkness, where he could not see my face, at least perhaps not my expressions. I did not want to talk, I wanted to be alone, but I also knew Doctor Apte felt that I should not be allowed time alone at such a crucial moment of my life… Sometime during this evening I knew I would have to talk to him, or be burdened with his presence for the night and the next day.

After a long silence in which the clock could be heard ticking from the kitchen, Doctor Apte started wheezing, now challenging my irritation to guilt. I think I had fatigued him, but he did not give up. “Peter, I am waiting.”

In fits and starts, I began.

“And that is the folly of my reality,” I concluded many minutes later. Dr. Apte had let me go on uninterrupted, a phenomenon that I had never encountered in the past.

“And is that it?” he scoffed. “Your discovery. I mean, is that all it is—this construction of your life on an unreal premise? Have you no emotional sense of loss, disappointment, a disbelief in the eternal nature of love?”

“Love? Yes, I discovered love. In all this I discovered love.”

“Ah Peter, interesting. But you speak without emotion, without the true feelings of one turned down by a loved one.”

“But don’t you see, Doctor, that is precisely the point. At first it shattered my world. When one builds a narrative inside one’s mind, a narrative based on pre-lived experiences and imaginary projections, it is not built on the love I had for her. I had objectified her, wanted to possess her, legalise that possession, and all this was based on my fear. The strange feeling in the pit of my stomach…I thought it was my fear to love.”

“Peter, you speak like a robot! Don’t you think you are intellectualising a very basic human emotion?”

“I don’t know, Doctor… perhaps. But then, that is how I am wired. I do not deny the feelings Anna brought on. Fear, then loss. Loss of so many things. Loss of illusions can be a very great loss. The mind tricks us, our reality, our sense of creation. Everything is possible in its realm.”

“You still speak of the mind, Peter. Love is not an emotion of the mind, it is an emotion of the heart.”

“But if you speak of emotion, you still speak of the mind. Emotions, sensations are related to the neural system controlled by the brain. The senses need the presence of the object, but the mind can function beyond. Mine did. The direction I took it relied on a memory of Anna that had stood still since she left. So my emotions, corrected by the discovery of my folly, do indeed fall flat on their face.”

“You say that the love you felt for Anna no longer exists?”

“I am saying the sensation and that emotion that objectified her, that stemmed from fear of losing her, of needing to touch, see, hear her speak, all that comes from the libido, is just that. Emotion is an event. It has been there in the past with other women, and I reckon will be there with other women. In your own definition it could not be love, since all emotion is of the senses linked into the nervous system, which is in turn controlled by the mind. If the loved one is physically removed from one’s presence, would we then continue to love? How could love be eternal if so?”

Dr. Apte sat there looking at me in bewilderment, and I stared at the wall, trying to explore my feelings, my thoughts, and what went on in that body, the spirit and my heart. He waited patiently, my friend. Waited as if there was more, something I needed to tell him, so I went on.

“There is something that is running inside of me. Uncontrolled by the brain. Anna did not reject me, in essence. She said it was an act of love. Eventually, I did understand love. Not ‘understand’ in a thought process, nor a sensation or emotion, but my heartbeat, my blood circulation, powered from no object but within my own.”

Dr. Apte waited a while. Finally he broke the long silence with, “So you admit you still have feelings for her.”

“Yes, Doctor. The coursing through my blood is undeniable. Anna is definitely part of it, but my love for her is no longer distressing as when I thought, feared, and let my mind rule me. She’s freed me from her, yet kept me with her in some strange way.”

We both now lapsed into a restful silence. A silence that allowed us to hear the molecules of air jostling one another as we breathed the night; listened to larvae nibbling through the chrysalis to fly away as butterflies. Like Anna in Canada and me in India, their wings flapping on one side of the globe caused waves to beat ashore on some sandy beach in a far removed longitude. Above this noise, a kitten cried like a baby missing its mother; and out there in the cosmos the debris of a dying star passing through a cloud of gas and dust, millions of light years away, compressing to become a new star that would be seen only several millions of years later when its light travels into our solar system.

Amidst this loud din out there in the cosmic heaven: Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Love and Hatred, Fear, Truth and Falsehood, Reality, Right and Wrong, Living and Dying—all of it seemed insignificant, almost a comical exertion set in motion by a God who has ceased to watch this repetitive farce play over and over again under what they call History.