While working as a paramedic, he met a Buddhist monk who’d officiated at communal cremations of both Buddhist and Hindu victims. This elderly Sinhalese with a shaven head just happened to be a published poet in English, and spoke with soft eloquence and equanimity.
‘Buddhists or Hindus, Sinhalese or Tamil, death makes no distinctions. For all of us, life is fleeting. The Diamond Sutra says that life is like a flash of lightning… a guttering lamp… a phantom or a dream.’
‘Do you think life is that brief and meaningless?’ Max asked.
‘No,’ the monk replied, earnestly shaking his head. ‘All things in life are but the seeds of sorrow, but there is hidden meaning in our sorrows. They give us compassion for all living beings, but we mustn’t cling to them. We should be free of all attachments, all passions and possessions.’
‘Can’t we take detachment a bit too far?’
‘Detachment is very difficult,’ the monk acknowledged. ‘I hate to see all these dead and dying people, the mothers weeping, the babies and children crushed or drowned. At first, I wept as well, but the words of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon came to help me: our minds are burning, not just with the quick flames of greed and anger but with the slow fires of despair and grief. If we don’t cling to the world, the darkness of our lives is vanished, and death itself is gently burnt away.’
Narayan phoned Max on his mobile that evening. It surprised Max that he should do so soon after their parting; he hadn’t thought he was that keen to keep in touch. Max told him what the poet monk had said.
‘You’re not intending to become a Buddhist as well as a Hindu now, are you?’ Narayan gently teased. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather overdoing things?’
‘Well, the two religions have much in common,’ answered Max, wanting to stay serious. ‘They both teach detachment from strong feelings and the world.’
‘I don’t want to be too detached from my feelings, Max. The world’s a horrifying place at times all right, but there are bits of it I like being attached to.’ Narayan paused. ‘I’d quite like to hold onto my feelings for you, for instance.’
‘That so?’ Max asked after a thoughtful pause.
‘Yes. I wish I could come with you to these disaster areas. I feel so useless. I’d like to help. I suppose it’s all very harrowing?’
‘It’s just about endurable,’ Max told him, ‘as long as I don’t stop to think too much and stay very active.’ He paused briefly. ‘Frankly, I’d rather do this on my own.’
Afterwards Max wondered why he’d snubbed Narayan so perfunctorily; perhaps he felt Narayan was pushing him too fast. He was quite glad their relationship was opening up again, yet he still felt a piercing grief for Rick and wished to experience it alone. He’d been surprised by his lack of desire for other men when Rick had become critically ill, especially his lack of desire for Narayan, which had once been so consuming and resistless. On reflection, he was touched by Narayan’s offer to help him. The idea of resuming their love affair did occur to him yet it appeared so unlikely. He still felt mostly deeply for Rick; by contrast, others seemed remote and inaccessible. But he felt slightly remorseful over what he’d said and vowed to ring Narayan when he flew on to Thailand. He spoke of some elephants that had seemed to anticipate the wave.
‘They stamped the ground and waved their heads before lumbering up into the hills.’
‘How could they have known it was coming?’ Narayan asked.
‘Their feet can sense the seismic vibrations. It’s strange how so few wild animals were caught by the wave, while man, with all his high-tech instrumentation, had no idea what was coming.’
‘They’ve dug up another granite elephant at Sandeha,’ Narayan told him. ‘It’s wonderful to think of this lost Tamil city being uncovered. It’s believed to have been a great port under the Pallava kings, used for trading in silks and spices throughout East Asia.’
‘I’d like to see that when I get back,’ Max said, ‘but I’ve a lot more travelling to do before then.’
The following day, Max flew on to Phuket, on the coast of Thailand. This area had been badly ravaged by the tsunami, and the medical authorities welcomed Max’s skills as a paramedic to help the survivors. The day he started work he met a Thai aid worker, a lecturer in English from a university in Bangkok. She spoke of the proximity of extreme wealth and extreme poverty in Thailand.
‘Skyscrapers and hovels, luxury resorts and run-down shantytowns, billionaires and beggars. And yet this country is supposed to be a Buddhist one. Remember that Buddha was a prince who renounced his worldly riches.’
‘Like Saint Francis,’ said Max. ‘He left his wealthy father’s house, casting off his clothes.’
‘And taking up the begging bowl,’ she said, nodding in agreement. ‘Yes, I know… following Christ’s example. Well, Saint Francis may have believed in my Lady Poverty; for us weaker spirits, though, there’s surely nothing wrong with a moderate number of possessions. Don’t we all want to make poverty history now, even though it seems a bit unrealistic at present?’
Max rang Narayan, feeling a need for his supportive humour in the midst of the destitution. He was starting to realise that he missed his lively presence more than he’d foreseen. He had some difficulty reaching him, and this frustrated him. When he eventually heard his voice it was with distinct relief. He told him what the Thai woman had said.
‘You surely don’t expect me to take up the begging bowl?’ Narayan replied. ‘Or sail out of my father’s house, clad only in my birthday suit?’
‘Not really,’ said Max. ‘As much as I admire your birthday suit, that is!’ he adding wryly. ‘But no, I wish to see my Lady Poverty put into voluntary retirement.’
‘Is there any hope she’s willing to retire?’
‘There’d be more hope if we had more redistribution between nations. I studied King Lear at college, and I was struck by what Shakespeare had him say about the poor: so distribution may undo excess and each country have enough.’
‘Who’ll judge what is excessive and who’ll say what is enough?’ Narayan asked. ‘Still, let’s hope we may one day live to see it.’
Max flew on to the Andaman Islands, which in British times had housed a penal colony where some political dissidents agitating for independence had be incarcerated. Max was told that numerous snakes and crocodiles had rushed inland in an effort escape the tsunami, terrifying the already-frightened people. Max met an old, retired teacher who’d lost his entire family. In a cruel twist, his granddaughter had died from a snakebite after the wave had struck.
‘What have we done?’ he asked, the tears trickling down his withered cheeks. ‘First this horrible wave, and then the snakes and crocodiles. Why does God want us punished twice?’
‘Don’t think you’re being punished,’ Max told him. ‘It was just a terrible accident of nature.’
‘I’ve always tried to be a good Hindu. I’ve followed my dharma, my duty, without thought of a reward. God is all-powerful, all-knowing. I’ve called on the Lord Krishna and made him offerings. I’ve given him devotion from the depths of my old heart, so why does God let nature be this cruel?’ The man gestured hopelessly at the ocean. ‘Why didn’t the sea take me as well?’
When Narayan rang again, Max could barely hear him at first, and he desperately wanted to hear him. Eventually the line cleared and Max told him what the old man had said.
‘Yes, but perhaps he asks too much of both God and nature,’ Narayan replied. ‘Nature is pitiless and life ruthlessly unfair, but if God had made them perfect, what kind of moral challenge would he be setting for us? What spiritual progress could we make?’
‘Is life all about moral challenge and spiritual progress?’ Max asked. ‘What that old man most wanted from it was happiness. Just to be happy. Like most of us, I think.’
Max was pleased by Narayan’s persistence in keeping in contact. He felt lonely without him and had come to rely on these phone calls.
‘Next week I’m flying on to the town of Banda Aceh in Indonesia,’ he said. ‘That’s where the tsunami did its worst, I gather, being so close to the epicentre of the shock.’
When he arrived at Banda Aceh he learnt that the wave here had been eighty feet high and had swept a mile inland. Tens of thousands of people had died; freighters had capsized and boats had been smashed and tossed into the trees. Half-a-million people had been made homeless, and there were fears of outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery and hepatitis. Max took some photos but spent most of his time inoculating people against infection in the medical tents that had been pitched among the ruins. He’d just finished a fourteen-hour stint and was sweaty and exhausted when Narayan rang.
‘Is it as bad there as you’d been told?’
‘Worse, I think. There are some cases of cholera, and that’s such a horrible disease. We’re trying to control the water supply. I’ve inoculated about a hundred people already.’
‘I really admire you for what you’re doing.’
‘Please don’t admire me. I’ve got feet of clay, as you once said to me about yourself. Do you remember?’
‘I’ve still got mine. If anything, they’re worse. Max, I can’t stop thinking of you. Be honest with me: is that rather pointless?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you again. Does that embarrass you?’
Max looked around and wondered if it was wrong to feel joy in the middle of such misery. An excavator was clawing its way through the chaos of ruined houses, while sniffer dogs searched for the bodies crushed under the rubble. Four-fifths of the dead were women and children. Less able to escape the wave, their bodies were found buried in the mud, in piteous jumbles of limbs and torsos.
Max found an unexpected gladness in what Narayan had said, even in these appalling circumstances. His openness had that old familiar appeal: it showed extraordinary trust. He exposed himself so unguardedly, not knowing whether Max would return his feelings.
‘I used to be so conditioned and conventional,’ Narayan went on. ‘I was always worrying what other people thought. I know myself much better now and feel freed by that.’ He seemed to screw up his courage before continuing. ‘Max, I want to live with you. You wanted to live with me, once. Is it too late for that now?’
Max was relieved he could still feel exultant. An almost shocking surge of hope invaded him, almost against his will. As he took in his surroundings, he wondered if the people here could ever hope again, if happiness could revisit their ruined lives.
‘If your aunts and uncles objected to Mohini, how will they react to me?’ Max asked.
‘I’m not that feeble now. I can stand up to them, pathetic as their prejudices are.’
‘And what about the part of you that’s so very hetero?’
‘I love you as a person, not a body. How often in life does anyone really fall in love?’
Max found it ironic that Narayan was taking the initiative. Last time it was Max who had started the affair and loved the more; now the situation was astoundingly reversed. If it had to be unequal, was it better to be more the lover or the loved?
‘Very seldom,’ Max answered him. ‘I’ve fallen in love only three times in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will again.’
He thought he’d once felt too much in Narayan’s power, and he’d occasionally resented it. But now it was he who had the power and he knew he must not abuse this dubious advantage. He was touched by Narayan’s feeling, of course. However, recalling his previous changes of emotional direction, he didn’t now entirely trust it.
‘I hope I’m one of the three,’ Narayan answered. ‘And I hope that in time you will fall in love again.’
‘Of course you’re one of the three,’ Max said, laughing with some embarrassment. ‘Who in the world knows what the future holds for us?’
Max was working hard while he was travelling, writing up his notes for the new book. He wished to emphasise the enormous amount of aid that would be needed to repair the damage. When he returned to Chennai he stayed with Clare and Tammy and initially avoided contacting Narayan. He tried to resist thinking of him too much, fearing it might affect the concentration he needed to write. He asked Tammy to come up with some conjectural figure for the losses in the fishing community.
‘About eighty per cent of the dead in Tamil Nadu were fishermen,’ Tammy said. ‘Almost forty thousand boats, plus miles of netting, have been destroyed. The remaining fishermen are already horribly in debt to the shark money lenders, as most of India’s poor have always been.’
In his book, Max decided to put the need to help the tsunami victims into the context of aid in general. He set the promises of Western governments against what they’d actually got around to donating. Tammy provided him with more figures to substantiate his argument, stressing that the West spent about eighty billion dollars on aid to the Third World in 2004, compared with a thousand billion dollars on munitions. Almost half of that was spent by the USA, whose foreign aid amounted to four per cent of its arms bill; in the UK it was one-sixth. Galvanised by these figures and the priorities they represented, Max decided to write more about the need for medical aid.
‘Yes, it’s health that divides the rich and the poor worlds most of all,’ Tammy said when Max told him this. ‘Western countries should be subsidising Third World medical care, providing hospital equipment and drugs India can’t afford for more than a privileged minority. Our so-called economic boom gives the wrong impression. So much attention is focused on poverty in Africa, but there are more poor in India than in that entire continent.’
‘India seems to be two nations now,’ said Clare, ‘as England was in the nineteenth century.’
‘Yes, There a few MRI scanners for the prospering middle class,’ Tammy said. ‘But that obscures what happens among the disadvantaged. There’s a terrible lack of organised public health care. The poor have to rely on private doctors many can’t afford, and a lot of those medics have limited training. The immunisation of children is totally inadequate. Their under-nourishment leads to them being underweight and stunted, like that cripple’s daughter. The only hope for seeing any improvement is by publicising the facts more widely.’
Clare was intensely relieved to hear that the boy assassin had finally had his death sentence commuted on appeal. She was now allowed to visit him in prison, and she asked Tammy to accompany her. They were vetted for drugs, sniffed at by dogs, and even required to have their mouths inspected. They were then led to the visiting room, which was beyond the bleak prison yard, its high walls surmounted by huge coils of barbed wire.
Clare was having lessons in Tamil but Tammy helped to translate for them. A warder led the boy in, shackled and at first extremely shy. He glanced nervously at Clare and Tammy, as if puzzled why they wished to visit him or suspicious of their motives. He looked thinner; his hair had been closely cropped and he had a small bruise upon his forehead.
He spoke eventually of his sorrow for the crime he had committed.
‘What I did was horrible. I remember it now like a dream. A kind of madness entered me. I was very frightened. I didn’t really know what I was doing.’
He didn’t lay responsibility on his uncle and his brother for pressurising him. He said nothing about the fact they were now dead, as if mention of them would disturb him too much to go on. He didn’t speak of his parents, who had been killed in that communal riot, although he did talk about the village he’d been brought up in
‘I long again to climb the coconut palms… to hear the cocks crowing… to hear the jangling of goat bells and the lowing of the cows. I hope one day I’ll be free to go back.’
‘Do you have any relatives there still?’ Clare asked.
‘I have some aunts and cousins but they’re not allowed to visit me. One of them can write but I’m only allowed a letter once a month. I can’t read myself but I have an older friend who can.’
‘Were you ever tortured?’ Clare asked quietly.
Tammy murmured the question because a guard stood nearby, although he looked rather bored and inattentive. To her inexpressible relief, the boy said no.
‘Are you were ever bullied by the other prisoners?’
‘Just a bit,’ he answered, ‘but I stand up for myself. And I have this older friend who helps defend me.’
‘Will they give you some training in technical work for when you’re released?’
‘I don’t know, but I hope so,’ he replied. ‘There are classes in plumbing and electricity. These things are much needed in my village.’
‘The prison service speaks of training of this sort but seldom manages to put it into action because of the crowded conditions and lack of money.’ Tammy told Clare. ‘The prisoners tend to fall into three categories: mad or sad or bad. This one’s a combination of all three, I think.’
After half an hour, the warder fairly amiably said their time was up.
‘We’ll visit you again,’ Clare said. ‘I promise.’
The boy smiled as he raised his shackled wrists to shake their hands. As Tammy and Clare walked out past the high, secure walls, she wondered how long his imprisonment would last. It was obvious he must be punished for the murder he had committed, and society must be protected, but she hoped he wouldn’t lose all hope in life in the harsh years that lay ahead of him. These thoughts made her more acutely aware of her own easy, privileged existence.
A couple of days later, Clare went with Tammy to visit the cripple’s widow, whose name they now learnt was Kamila. She lived in a sprawling shantytown in the inland suburbs of Chennai, which had been spared the onslaught of the tsunami. Kamila lived alone in a ramshackle hut that had been patched with flattened kerosene tins and sacking. In the street outside was a malodorous, open drain. Rain was drumming on the corrugated iron roof when they arrived. Again, Tammy translated from Tamil.
‘I was married for fifteen years,’ Kamila said. ‘I miss my husband terribly, though I now know he did great wrong. I told the magistrate I didn’t know at the time what he was up to. He told me nothing. He wished me to stay innocent in case I was interrogated. I loved him very much. I was terrified appearing in the courtroom and answering all those questions. But in the end the magistrate was kind to me. He was like my father with his white hair and beard.’
‘You must also miss your daughter terribly,’ Clare said to her.
‘I do,’ Kamila answered. ‘The loss gets no better. Every morning I wake up to this weight upon my heart… this pain. I worry that I didn’t do enough for her. I took her to the mobile clinic but it was too late to stop the typhus. She had this purple rash and bad headaches. We put her to bed, where she soon became delirious. Her father was frantic about her. We tried to get a doctor to visit but there aren’t enough doctors. There aren’t enough drugs and medicines. She died in her fever, shaking and crying out.’
‘Tell her how deeply I sympathise,’ Clare said to Tammy, remembering Violet fighting for breath but then being put into an oxygen tent to relieve her suffering.
‘Is there any chance Kamila might marry again and have another child?’ Clare asked Tammy.
‘I think I’m unlikely to find another husband,’ Kamila replied when Tammy had posed Clare’s question. ‘There’s prejudice against men marrying widows. I can’t provide a dowry and I’m probably too old to conceive again.’
‘How old are you? Clare asked.
‘I don’t really know… perhaps forty.’ She smiled timidly. ‘Also I’m a Dalit and many village people look down on us.’ Clare felt she was quite unused to telling people this. ‘Also I can’t read or write. I’m trying to learn but I find it very difficult.’
She said she was helping to look after the daughter of a neighbour, who was an Adavasi. The little girl eventually appeared, overcoming her embarrassment in front of these strangers. Kamila stroked the girl’s cheek and kissed her, and the little girl buried her face in the embroidered sari Kamila had specially put on for their visit.
‘Adavasi?’ Clare asked.
‘The Adavasis are tribal people who make up eight per cent of the population,’ Tammy explained. ‘The Dalits have become a fairly vocal political force, but the Adavasis, who suffer even worse social discrimination, are not yet this organised.’
Kamila offered them tea. The water was boiled on a smoky primus stove, and the tea was the usual thick, milky and very sweet concoction that Clare had come to like. When they left, Kamila bowed her head and put her hands together. Clare stepped impulsively forward to kiss her on the cheek. Kamila looked embarrassed but also moved, so Clare didn’t think her impulse out of place.
‘Let’s provide the money for a dowry for her,’ Tammy suggested later. ‘It might help her marry one of the widowed fishermen who lost their wives and children in the tsunami.’
Clare jumped at the idea and suggested something else. ‘If needed, let’s also pay for IVF treatment so that she might conceive again.’
‘That’s very rare in India,’ answered Tammy. ‘Only the extremely affluent could afford it. It’s a good idea, though, so let’s ask when we see her next. She might be too shy and modest to accept such an offer, though.’
Clare was starting to conciliate Tammy’s relatives. She invited The Battleaxe aunt to a meal she’d prepared, having studied a Tamil cookery book, and managed to avoid making too many disastrous errors. As Tammy was seen as practically an alcoholic, The Battleaxe was impressed that Clare should drink only mango juice, unaware that such temperance had been briefly assumed for her benefit. A few days later, The Sergeant Majorette asked Clare around for a modest cup of camomile tea. At last she was prepared to overlook the disreputable fact that Clare was a divorcee, deciding she might even be sufficiently in love with Tammy not to capriciously get rid of him after a year or two in what she saw as the Western manner. She was also pleased to hear how much Clare wanted children, although disappointed when Tammy said they planned to have only two.
The elephantine uncles relented far more quickly. They were delighted to discover that Clare now cooked Tamil dishes, and didn’t stint in the amount she fed them, which they consumed with joyous appetite and the occasional appraising belch. They guzzled formidable amounts of whisky too, and laughed at Tammy’s jokes about the aunts, even when they were subtly scabrous. They overflowed their chairs, quaffing and interminably smoking, shaking with raucous laughter, triple chins wobbling and bellies quaking.
Clare had resigned her job as a charity fundraiser in Los Angeles, and applied to teach media studies in the university in Chennai, having gained a degree in that. If she succeeded, Tammy and Narayan would be her colleagues there. Maria would not be in Chennai, though, unless her Roman plans failed. Maria had phoned Clare recently.
‘The combat between Antonio and Sam, which is not always unarmed, seems to be drawing to a merciful conclusion. The Animal’s decided The Putto takes after him in looks, apart from his designer stubble and mane of greasy hair, which he mistakenly imagines to be so sexy. Certainly, they both favour the same malevolent expression when not having their own way, but they also share the same sweetie smile when they fondly imagine that they are. To tell the truth, I’m rather enjoying having two males in my affections. I’d only return to find a pacific, soulful Indian if a lethal civil war again breaks out between them.
Clare now had even more of a soft spot for Maria. She relished hearing of the extravagant drama of her life, which she knew she partly created for Clare’s entertainment, and hoped she’d hear more of it through her impressively inventive exaggerations.
After a fortnight, Max, now confident his work was progressing well, went to see Narayan, who seemed hurt that he’d not done so earlier.
‘I was starting to wonder if I’d scared you off,’ Narayan said, taking Max’s hand and holding it for several seconds, as was his wont. ‘With what I said on the phone, I mean, when you were in Banda Aceh. You didn’t think I was flinging myself at you, did you? If you did, I could always take it back.’
‘I flung myself at you once,’ Max reminded him, ‘but then I started to worry in case I’d scared you off! So, no… please don’t take it back.’
‘Here I am in love with you again, I think. Do you love me back or are you playing hard to get? Are you just trying to lead me on?’
‘These embarrassing leading questions,’ said Max. ‘I won’t answer them, thanks, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Why not? Because you like to keep me in suspense or pay me back? You’re really horrible, Max.’ Narayan laughed. ‘I think I may go off you once again… if I still can.’
Max found his directness as appealing as ever. He wasn’t yet sure if he was in love with Narayan again, but he was certainly beguiled by his amusing, unsentimental frankness.
One morning, Clare divulged that she was pregnant. She and Tammy were both delighted. Max was x delight, a twinge of regret mingled with his delight and a sense of wasted opportunity. For a while he regretted losing her, but he knew he must stop these backward-looking hankerings and exult in her being pregnant by a man he much respected. He should now concentrate on the possible revival of his affair with Narayan, about which he ought to be more open with himself – more self-aware and so less unforgiving.
Tammy and Clare were friendly with Narayan and invited him and Max to supper several times. Tammy stimulated Max with his opinions, and lent him his computer to carry out research.
‘Much of this financial aid will doubtless disappear into the wrong pockets,’ said Tammy, although Max thought he had lost some of his cynicism. ‘What does get through will be frustrated by the usual, bumbling officialdom. What’s more, people in the West will forget about the issue as soon as they’ve slaked their short-lived consciences.’
‘You miserable old pessimist,’ Clare said. ‘The tsunami’s revolutionised the situation. Individuals are giving to the destitute as they never have before.’
‘Bully for the bleeding-heart Western individuals. What about their stingy, dawdling governments?’
‘Their stingy governments are waking up to the problem,’ Max answered. ‘They’re now cancelling some national debts in Africa.’
‘Not before time,’ said Tammy, ‘even though some debts were incurred by monstrously corrupt dictators who salted the loot away in foreign bank accounts.’
‘Let’s hope that’s not used as an excuse to be less generous,’ Max replied. ‘Further aid needs to given, but I agree it needs greater control so it’s spent wisely and where it’s needed.’
Prompted by these discussions, Max arranged to sell most of his securities and real estate, intending to donate the proceeds to the tsunami survivors. ‘One day I’ll probably have no capital at all, apart from what I can earn as a writer,’ he told Narayan.
‘You’ve always wanted that, and I love your wacky idealism,’ Narayan said. ‘I want us to live together, and I do have a salary of my own, you know.’
Narayan’s airy carelessness about the matter of money charmed Max. He wanted to talk only about this plan to live together, and Max found himself responding with a keenness that surprised him. The next time they met, Narayan brought up the idea again, becoming more urgent the more Max opposed it.
‘You’re far wackier than I am,’ Max teased him. ‘You decide on things with such crazy suddenness. You change your mind and your affections, as you did with Mohini. You burn out your feelings by acting on them too fervently and too fast.’
‘Maybe I did once,’ Narayan conceded. ‘I was attracted to Mohini, but I didn’t love her as much as I should have… not enough to marry. I feel guilty about that, although she wasn’t as much in love with me as she’d imagined. I think she wanted to remarry to please her over-demanding parents, not anticipating how choosy they would prove to be. Look, my feelings for you won’t burn out, I promise.’
‘They did once before, remember?’
‘Why remind me, Max?’
‘I was horribly in love with you… certifiably insane!’
‘And don’t you think for my sake you could go insane again?’
Max paused. For an instant he remembered Rick with all his old vitality and fun, diving clowningly into the swimming pool, twisting in the air and pulling loony faces. This led to his recalling Narayan strenuously climbing the temple a year ago, laughing at Max below for being so slow and tentative. Rick and Narayan: his memories of them seemed to briefly intermingle, and he was surprised by the exhilaration suddenly welling up within him. At last he answered with a certainty he didn’t know he had, in an attempt to match Narayan’s humour.
‘Yes, for your sake, I do think I could go insane again.’
‘Enough to want to marry me?’
‘Yes.’
His answer came out so suddenly that Max couldn’t quite believe he’d actually said it. He leant forward to kiss Narayan on the mouth.
‘So you love me again?’ Narayan asked, kissing him back, and holding him. ‘Why did you take so long? His body was shaking in Max’s arms, shaking with the laughter of his intense euphoria. ‘Look, India’s light years away from gay marriages, I know. But let’s do something special, even if Tammy thinks it embarrassingly schmaltzy.’
‘He married Clare by exchanging rings,’ Max pointed out. ‘He refused to follow the Hindu custom. What’s the Hindu equivalent of a ring, incidentally?’
‘The man gives the woman a thali, a reddened cord. He puts it around her neck and ties it with a knot.’
For a day they deliberated before telling Clare and Tammy.
‘We’re planning a kind of personal symbolic marriage. We want our close friends to know about our love.
‘I’ll be telling a few select relations, Narayan said, ‘and if they don’t like it, they can bloody well lump it. I won’t flaunt it in their faces, but I refuse to be furtive about my gayness any longer. I hope they’ll at least acknowledge it and not treat it as some shameful secret… or some rare, unmentionable disease.’
Clare was really pleased.
‘I’ll certainly stand by you,’ she said.
‘I’ll do so too,’ Tammy promised, ‘whatever the ignorance and bigotry you’re bound to meet, especially among the middle-aged and elderly.’ He laughed. ‘Just when straight people start to give up marriage, gay people decide to take it up. I thought you gays were so independent, yet here you are aping us benighted straights.’
‘Tammy, if you go on being so cynical,’ Clare said, ‘Narayan may not ask you to be his best man.’
‘I don’t want Tammy as my best man,’ Narayan said. ‘He’s far too sarky and phlegmatic. Anyhow, we’re each other’s best men, Max and I. We want it to be just the two of us.’
‘So that’s my reputation, is it?’ Tammy protested. ‘Cynical, sarky and phlegmatic.’
‘You’re still such an ersatz Englishman,’ Narayan said. ‘You’re terrified of showing emotion of any kind.’
‘The result of your education at that frigid English school,’ Clare added, ‘where the warmth of human feeling is so suspect. Thank God I’ve managed to cure you just a bit.’
As Max and Narayan approached the sea temple in the dusk, they had to make their way past the new discoveries. Another granite elephant had been revealed; someone had hung a string of marigolds around its head. The archaeologists were digging down around another piece of sunken stone, and the couple wondered what image would eventually emerge. Possibly Vishnu and Lakshmi, symbols of married love. Possibly Hanuman, a symbol of human loyalty. Just possibly a holy serpent.
Holy? Max recalled the old man on the Andaman Islands, whose daughter had been bitten by a snake from out of the sea, and how he’d thought of the inexplicable cruelty of the world of nature. It was believed the tsunami had caused over a quarter of a million deaths altogether, and had left five million homeless. About fifty thousand had died on the coast of Tamil Nadu alone, and the cold anonymity of their deaths appalled Max. Their destruction seemed so arbitrary and final. He thought of Subramaniam’s words: ‘The souls of the departed are beyond destruction. They migrate into other earthly forms or merge at last into the Atman.’
Max longed to accept this difficult belief, as he’d longed to do when Rick had died. He had set up a trust fund to help the surviving fishing community in Sandeha. He’d named the trust after Rick, wanting to commemorate him as well as all those whose names would soon be lost, especially the unknown children swept out to sea, drifting for a while with the silent undercurrents or lying among the coral ridges. He was determined that Rick’s life should not to be forgotten, that he shouldn’t fade into the oblivion that had seemed to quietly haunt him as he lay dying.
They’d reached the sea temple and up they climbed, he and Narayan. The also time they did this was in the intense head of the day, but now night was falling. As Max reached up for the handholds, some of the scenes of destruction he’d witnessed came to mind, but the memory, like the memory of Rick’s death, seemed to be losing something of its pain. He remembered Rick’s last ironic smile, the sudden laughter of some children among the horrors of Banda Aceh, the laughter of the archaeological divers as they put to sea to film the nameless underwater temple.
He wished for laughter for himself as well, believing it went with the detachment the Bhagavad Gita taught: the release from pain and grief as well as from fear and anger. He’d taken that little book on his travels, reading it repeatedly so as not to be overwhelmed by the suffering he’d seen. He recalled a passage about the terrors of Arjuna, which ended with the face of Krishna bending down upon him, bringing him peace of spirit at last. More than ever, Max longed to love one god, ultimately benevolent in some mysterious way. Krishna’s claim to be both the father and the mother of the universe, an intelligent light in its fathomless obscurity, made Max long for it to be true, if only as a metaphor to give some transcendent meaning to our precarious existence on this lonely little planet.
He thought of Kamila and how she had found light and meaning in the existence of her stunted little girl. It was a sadness that much haunted him. But Tammy, true to his word, had provided her with a dowry and she had indeed married a widowed fisherman; and Clare was looking into the possibility of Kamila having IVF.
As Max and Narayan climbed, they placed their feet gently on the stonework. Max turned to look at the immensity of the ocean, the beauty and the peace of which seemed ruthlessly ironic when he thought of the recent destruction it had caused. As he thought of the survivors, he hoped that his book would make some contribution, however modest, to growing world opinion in favour of far more foreign aid. Yesterday he’d watched the many Live 8 rock concerts being broadcast across the globe, and he felt cautiously optimistic about their ideal of reducing poverty in Africa. He’d already decided that his next book would be about AIDS in Africa: he’d focus on the hospitals and drugs that were so urgently required and the widespread need to educate people about prevention through the use of condoms, which he believed should be free. He also wanted to learn the cost of arms sold by the West to African governments, relative to what they spent on health. He’d already discussed this with Narayan, who had offered to help with his research and to come with him on his travels when his job allowed. Narayan hoped as much as Max did that this challenging shared enterprise would strengthen their bond.
Max suddenly became aware of the risk of falling so far to the beach, which intensified the excitement of feeling Narayan so physically close, breathing fast and sweating. Soon they neared the finial of the temple. At the prospect of holding Narayan tightly in his arms, Max felt the blood pulse in his veins. Narayan was the first to reach the top and he stretched down a hand to help Max up.
They stood there in solitude, the sun gone down. Narayan took the thali from his pocket, hung it around Max’s neck and then tied a knot in it. Then Max put the ring he held on Narayan’s finger. After they’d embraced and kissed, a long lingering kiss, they stood in silence to watch the moonlight glisten on the emerging buried carvings far below and the gently rolling and withdrawing waves.