CHAPTER FOUR

NOTHING WAS SAID about Albert James over lunch. They had been taken, very simply, to the university canteen where they served themselves on tin plates with rice and dhal, then sat on benches either side of the busy plastic-topped tables. The president of the Theosophical Society spoke of a new biography of Annie Besant, while the younger folks, joined now by other friends, were arguing heatedly about the government’s plans to reserve college places for lower castes. The relationship between an individual and his surrounding ethos was at once undeniable and elusive, the theosophy man was saying. His small old face was smoothed of any expression. ‘In that sense,’ he added, ‘it is not unlike the relationship between father and son, don’t you think?’

Across the table, Helen James ate as though performing a duty. John wasn’t following the conversation. The young woman beside him, the beauty of the group, had begun to ask about his research and he eagerly started to describe the complex experiments his team was working on. He had become interested in the purely technical challenge, he explained, that so many experiments presented today. Above all you had to isolate the tiniest particles welded to each other in the most complex ways.

A small, dark girl and her earnest, bespectacled partner joined the conversation. The point of this present project, John told them, was to establish every, but really every condition that was required to support the life cycle of a certain tubercular mycobacterium after it had moved into the dormant state following initial infection: nutrients, protein production, cell-wall resistance, environment, conditions for replication and so on.

‘What you mean,’ the earnest man proposed, ‘is that you are looking at every possible way of killing the bacterium.’

But now a message had arrived on John’s mobile. He felt the vibration in his pocket. ‘Audition a disaster,’ he read. ‘Director a shit.’ John sighed and put the phone away.

‘Well, yes and no,’ he answered the man with spectacles. ‘We’re looking at how we can avoid reactivation of the dormant bacterium that about one third of people on the planet carry. Really, one third. So obviously we’re studying the conditions required for dormant life and reactivation so that someone else can consider ways of denying the bacterium those conditions.’

Then John explained that he personally was just one of a long and by no means linear or lineal chain of researchers seeking to develop a drug to nail this bacterium, or prevent it reactivating, but in the simplest, least toxic fashion. That was the progress they were aiming for: non-toxic prevention. No side effects. He would reply to Elaine later, he thought, some consoling message.

One team, he said, studied the life cycle of the thing, how it passed from active to dormant and vice versa, another its biochemistry, its cell structure – ‘to identify vulnerabilities, targets if you like’ – another studied what substances might efficiently attack those targets or in some way compromise one or more of the many conditions essential for its survival. Then someone else studied the toxic effect of those substances, someone else again thought about how to deliver and package them, and finally someone considered how to manufacture them.

‘Nobody begins to understand it all, you see,’ John concluded as if repeating a profound truth. ‘I mean, I don’t think it would be possible, really, to understand everything about even the most ordinary pharmaceutical project today. Nobody even tries. It would be like trying to hold the whole world in your mind.’

As he spoke, the Indians were flatteringly attentive, so unlike Elaine’s theatre friends. John smiled, sipping from a cup of disgustingly sweet tea. There was a pause. ‘The triumph would be,’ the theosophy man was heard to say into the relative silence, ‘as your dear Albert once wrote, I believe, to reach a point where one has no more biography than God Himself, can you imagine what liberation? To be utterly without a personal history.’

As he spoke these words, Helen James pushed her chair back, stood up and announced that she had to go. The clinic was always under pressure, she said, during these cold spells. John also wiped his mouth. His mother looked pale. ‘No, no,’ she told him quickly. ‘You stay here, darling. It’s so lovely to hear you getting excited about your work. So encouraging. Oh, John is eager to visit the Sufi tombs,’ she announced to the rest of the table. ‘If someone has time, perhaps they could take him this afternoon.’

There was an immediate buzz of offers. People seemed polite to the point of irony. ‘I’ll take you,’ the woman beside him said. She had a wide forehead, very fine dark eyes, but strangely narrow cheeks around pursed, full lips.

For a moment Helen held her gaze. ‘Thank you, Sharmistha. John: I’ll see you this evening, dear. Thank you everybody,’ she repeated, ‘thank you so much, you’ve been very kind,’ and she hurried out.

‘Poor old Helen,’ someone said after a brief silence. ‘She works so hard.’

One of the more elderly white men, three or four places down the table, leaned across to ask, ‘How is your mother taking it, John? Is there anything we can do?’

John was surprised. He swallowed his food. Mother’s motto, he said, had always been, Battle on regardless. Then he found himself telling an exemplary anecdote of how, in New Guinea – and this was big-time family legend – Mum had just gone on with her normal work at the clinic when the local tribe, complaining that Dad had put a spell on a girl that had caused her to lose her baby, had threatened to cut off and shrink her, his mother’s, head, not Dad’s, since it seemed that the way to take revenge in that part of the world was not to kill the man who had offended you, but his wife.

‘How very convenient!’ someone chuckled.

‘Well, these people were so surprised when Mum just went on running her surgeries and distributing medicines as usual that they left her alone. They sort of realised she wasn’t part of their world, I suppose. They couldn’t faze her at all.’

‘And Albert?’ someone said more soberly. ‘That must have been when he was writing Wau. How did Albert respond?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t born then,’ John told them, ‘I’ve only heard the story.’ But he added: ‘Dad was always anxious about everything, which was why he collected so much information but never actually did anything.’

It was a cruel remark, and at once John felt he ought not to have said this on the day of his father’s funeral.

The theosophy man was watching him. ‘There is more wisdom in what you say than you imagine, my boy,’ he said in his slow clipped accent. He smiled very faintly behind thick lenses.

It was some years since John had been called ‘my boy’. He pushed his chair back and felt ready to go.

The woman his mother had called Sharmistha must be twenty eight-ish, John thought, and quite short he realised now, but charmingly shapely, and she had brought along one of the older European men who turned out to be German. Were they in some sort of a relationship? John didn’t care. He still hadn’t replied to Elaine, who was used to receiving answers to her text messages at once, especially when some setback threw her into depression. On the other hand, it was the day of his father’s funeral.

‘For New Delhi, you need a good fast taxi,’ the German was saying brightly, ‘but in Old Delhi an autorickshaw is really the only way to travel; they have a better chance of sneaking through the traffic.’

The fog was even thicker now. The air was damp.

‘And I only brought light clothes!’ John protested. ‘I never imagined it could be like this here.’

‘Women aren’t allowed to go right into the tombs,’ Sharmistha was saying, as if to explain why she had had to bring Heinrich along. ‘Are you cold?’

‘A bit,’ John said.

Even with the heavy tarpaulin hanging over the frame of the autorickshaw the air was chill when they started moving at speed. The driver had what looked like a towel wrapped round his head. When they stopped at a light, John moved the tarpaulin to one side and found three helmetless boys sitting on a scooter only inches away, one carrying a milk churn in each hand. They were shouting and laughing in the exhaust fumes.

Looking out, then, through the vehicles squeezing into the junction and overflowing onto dry mud beside, the pedestrians picking their way between trucks and buses, a donkey cart piled high with scrap metal, John was struck by the frenzy and density of life here. Why had his father always chosen such places? Why had he never lived in a sensible town where you could get things done?

‘I’m sorry, I should have asked you what you do,’ he turned to Sharmistha. ‘I’ve only talked about myself.’

‘Heinrich is in psychiatry,’ she said. ‘He’s been in India twenty years.’

The man leaned forward and smiled. They were cramped in the autorickshaw.

‘But I’m not really at the university,’ Sharmistha went on. ‘I just write for scientific magazines and so on. At the moment I’m working with some people in the zoology department who are studying a spider that produces an unusually strong kind of silk. I’m writing a book about it for them.’

John made an effort to arouse some interest but was suddenly distracted by her perfume. He hadn’t noticed it before, something sweet and strong that drew him powerfully.

‘The team I’m working for,’ she was saying, ‘is mainly interested in the chemical processes by which the spider makes its silk. They are attempting to reproduce it synthetically. But your father was interested in patterns and layers of communication. That was how he got involved. He was convinced the whole web-making process was essentially a communicative structure.’

‘He would be,’ John replied.

‘And why are you so eager to see the tombs?’ she asked. ‘You have heard all about them?’

‘Not at all.’ John realised he was feeling ill. ‘Apparently Dad said I should go and see them, and the Taj Mahal. It’s in a town near here, isn’t it? God knows why. I only came for his funeral.’

There was a brief silence, then Heinrich leaned forward again. He had a high, bony, solemn face, a strong German accent. ‘It is because the Taj is another tomb,’ he said, ‘the most famous tomb in the world. It is your father’s way of inviting you to think how death is celebrated.’

‘That’s right!’ Sharmistha laughed. She was shaking her head. ‘That’s him! That is just the way your father did things, inviting others to think.’ Then in a lower voice she added: ‘It was very strange, you know, John, listening to you talk at lunch, because it was like listening to your father again. Yes! The same manner, the same voice, also sometimes the same facial expressions, even if you have very different faces. Albert was always very excited too about what he was doing, you know, though of course he would never have said the things that you said.’

John didn’t know how to respond to this. ‘How do you mean?’ he eventually asked, but the woman didn’t reply. They had arrived.

John had expected something grand, so when they climbed out of the rickshaw at the Red Fort he supposed it must be that. It seemed frighteningly solid and ugly with its huge ramparts; a great stronghold of death. Instead, Sharmistha took him by the arm and they set off in the opposite direction, through streets so crowded and confused and narrow, he felt alert, threatened.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Heinrich said.

Boys sat on broken walls and men wrapped in white gowns squatted on the ground in the thick of the passers-by where gaudy little temples were side by side with food stalls and carpet stores, a cluttered window advertising mobile phones.

They turned into narrower and narrower streets, passages even, and perhaps because of the fog, or maybe it was later than John imagined, the air darkened and there were steps now and arches, until, under what looked like a small portico, they had to stop and a man wanted to take their shoes and put shower-caps over their hair. They couldn’t go bareheaded to the tombs. They must turn their mobiles off.

John crouched and undid his shoes. Heinrich was explaining about the Sufi tradition and who were the holy mystics buried here and saying it would be wise to drop a banknote beside a tomb at the appropriate moment, a twenty or a fifty, to have one ready anyway, as a sign of respect, even though there was absolutely no obligation, but John was hardly listening. What am I doing wasting my time here? he kept thinking. He still hadn’t had a proper talk with his mother. Perhaps I should have booked the very next flight back after the funeral.

Descending steps to the tomb compound proper, he became aware of the noise. Beside a small shrine a dozen men were sitting in a cement courtyard, swaying in white gowns to the steady beat of the drum, clapping their hands and singing tunelessly. Two smoking torches on the opposite wall made the place both darker and brighter than the day outside.

‘I cannot go in here,’ Sharmistha said, as Heinrich approached one of the small buildings. There was incense burning. A man stood on guard at the gate; a little boy tapped John’s arm and said, ‘Guide. Hello, sir. I am your guide. Twenty rupees.’ John felt ready to hit him. For some reason that mindless chanting and drumming made him shiver. He hated it with all his heart.

Inside the tomb, a building no bigger than a small bedroom, four men were sitting cross-legged at the corners of a green mound that must be the grave of the most holy man. Heinrich began to circle the grave silently. It was as though a mound of cement or compacted earth had been painted bright green and then lavishly sprinkled with the same marigold petals that the schoolgirls had spread on his father’s coffin. Another visitor was completely prostrate, blocking their path, murmuring prayers, actually kissing the ground, and evidently in an altered emotional state. And now John noticed that there was money in the shallow trough that went all around the tomb mound, quite a lot of money. But he was determined not to add any.

‘The tomb is guarded every moment of every day, for all eternity,’ Heinrich whispered.

John felt furious. There was a way, he was sure, in which his father had always been an utter fool.