CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

JOHN HAD NEVER been alone for so long. It made him anxious, but he was unable to break the spell. ‘Just a word,’ Elaine texted. ‘You can’t disappear like this.’ Exhausted by another day of stomach pains, he dreamed of exams. Signs and numbers appeared under his pen, but dictated by an alien will. He didn’t rightly know what equation he was supposed to be solving. Panicking, he woke up.

In the morning, he took a shower and had breakfast on the roof. His clothes felt damp. The first day, when the receptionist had pointed him to the roof, he had imagined pretty tablecloths and a buffet under bamboo awnings. At the top of steep narrow stairs he found two plastic chairs and one battered table that wobbled on the uneven tarring of the empty rooftop. Everybody else had breakfast in their rooms, with their air conditioners.

John walked to the parapet. To one side were the glass façades of Delhi’s business centre, but on the other you could look across laundry lines and antennas toward India Gate. The sun was pale in a haze of heat. The warm air was alive with birds and bird cries, with honking and street vendors, smells of fuel and burning. When the waiter brought his scrambled eggs the man had to wave off the crows. He shouted cheerfully: ‘They are very hungry, sir!’ The birds gathered while John ate; he could hear their claws scraping on the corrugated iron over the stairs.

The waiter had laid a copy of the Times of India on his tray and he read an article about compulsory Aids tests for railway workers. A laboratory in Bombay claimed it had discovered a cocktail of proteins that extended life by up to twenty years. John didn’t check the details. Although Father had always been a maverick, it occurred to him, he never claimed dramatic successes. Rather the contrary. The patterns he wrote about were never susceptible to useful manipulation, only liable to destruction. John stopped chewing. Dad was a defeatist, he thought. He didn’t help me because he didn’t think help was possible.

Spreading jam, John watched the crows. It was hot hot hot. He was breathing heat. Today I will go and see Mother, he decided. A constant tension was drawing him to her. Equally constantly, he resisted. He didn’t want to see her. He needed to solve something before going to Mum. Solve what? Something that would force her to see reason.

Finishing his food, he felt frustration turning to anger. I’m marooned here. My career is ruined before it began. The lab would never want him now. Elaine will not want me. Nobody would give him money again. He sat at the table surrounded by the crows, which strutted on the parapet, the stair housing. His father had crow’s feet round his eyes. ‘If you want to study patterns, just look in a mirror,’ Mother laughed. The corners of Dad’s eyes were river deltas. He was always so tense, so concentrated. Concentrated on what, though? On dreams, dreams of young companions. And are both of those figures stand-ins perhaps for you, John? he had written: a young friend who put up a tent with the sick and ageing Albert James, who walked with him along the beach beside the surf. Dad’s forehead was always deeply furrowed. Elaine must be just such a companion for the Japanese director, John thought. A child. It was obscene with such a difference in age. ‘Don’t you see,’ she had texted, ‘that disappearing like this you’ll actually cause the thing you’re afraid of.’ I’ll go to Mum and demand an explanation, John decided. He pushed his chair back. Before he reached the stairs the crows’ beaks were clattering on his tin plate.

No sooner was he on the street than his intestine struck. He had to hurry back to the hotel. How can you do anything with your gut in this condition? Part of him was glad of it. Then he was angrier still. He was furious. Bananas were the solution. He went back down to the street and found a woman squatting on her heels between baskets of fruit. There were limes, pears, apples, things he didn’t recognise in heaps of bright colour. She was serving an elderly lady. On a barrow beside her a young man lay asleep.

‘Three bananas,’ John said.

Motorbikes were pushing their way through the crowd. The street was narrow. The vendor didn’t understand. She had set up an umbrella to shade her wares. The young man woke and said something. Then she picked up a large bunch of dwarf bananas and offered them.

‘Just three,’ John repeated. It crossed his mind that this paraphernalia of India was getting dreadfully in the way. He showed the woman three fingers, but she shook her head. He needed to act, to go straight to Mother’s, and instead here he was struggling to buy bananas to settle a stomach poisoned by the endless bacteria in this filthy country. How could you solve anything in India?

Yet there was something fascinating too: the baskets, the heaps of fruit, the blotch of crimson on the woman’s forehead, her thin wrists poking from the shadows of her sari. It was all so much richer and rawer than life in Maida Vale. It is beautiful, John suddenly thought.

Sitting up, the young man on the barrow spoke aggressively to the woman. He seemed upset. There was a gold thread round his neck. John pulled out a hundred-rupee bill and got fifty-five change. Now he had a dozen green bananas. It was stupid, but he was smiling. I’m glad to be distracted, he thought.

He stood with his back to a wall and was at once surrounded by children stretching out their hands. He shook his head, but they clamoured. It was hard to peel his banana, eat it and hang onto the bunch with all these small hands reaching out to him, touching his clothes. He tore off a couple of bananas for them, but now it was they who shook their heads. Not bananas! They wanted money. One banana broke in half. John pushed past the children and headed for the square and the autorickshaws.

Instead of giving his mother’s address he asked to be taken to the university. Mother would be in the clinic, he remembered, and he didn’t know where that was. He was relieved. I can go to the flat this evening. A message arrived on the phone. ‘I love you, John. Why are you punishing me?’ He paid the driver and asked a passer-by where the department of zoology was. People sent him this way and that. The streets were leafy and might have been pleasant if it wasn’t for the heat. Then he recognised the building where they had eaten after Father’s funeral.

Still with his bunch of bananas, he found the canteen and, leaning against a tree, watched through glass doors as students went back and forth with their trays. How quickly, he thought, remembering the conversation that day, he had lost interest in his work, in microphages and granulomas, glycolysis and pentose phosphates. He felt no desire to find out if there were people working in his field here, maybe right in this building. He didn’t want to know what equipment their labs had. As if I were born yesterday, he told himself rather strangely.

John went back to the entrance, sat on a step, ate a banana and watched. Kids arranged themselves in drifting circles, one hand on a companion’s wrist, the other holding a phone. Girls and boys laughed. It was so familiar. What really mattered to me, then, about the work I was doing? he wondered. The position it gave me in a team, perhaps. He loved working with other people, he shone, but on matters that were quite impersonal: the microchemistry of the cell, the battle between infection and immune system. You worked together with people to understand something else, not each other. There was a clearly defined collective goal: a new drug. But away from the team he wasn’t interested in mycobacterial tuberculosis at all. He didn’t care about people who suffered from it. He was hardly interested in Elaine. My life has been one institution after another, he thought. He felt at home on the steps of a university. There had been the house cricket team, the college boat, the group lab projects. I always pulled my weight. If I went back to the lab I would be interested again, he thought. At once. Like a light going on when you enter a room. He knew he would. He would enjoy bending his mind to metabolic pathways, to hydrocarburic chains, in a team with the others, showing them what he could do. But Father had always been passionate about his research; he didn’t need to be in a lab or anywhere particular. And he studied alone. If there was a team, Dad left it. Yet what he studied always had to do with people, not impersonal things. With a woman who sold you bananas. Father would have made a video. A girl picking nits from her mother’s hair. Vaguely, wordlessly, John felt a glimmer of comprehension.

‘Excuse me? Is it Mr James?’

He looked up and saw the earnest, bespectacled young lecturer who had sat across the table from him months ago.

‘Hello,’ John said. His mouth was full. Embarrassed by the bananas, he scrambled to his feet. ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name. But how did you remember me?’

‘There aren’t many Europeans around, are there?’ the man laughed. ‘I’m Dinesh. But I don’t think I told you my name.’

Dinesh took him into the canteen for tea and John remembered why he had come to the university. ‘I was looking for Sharmistha,’ he said, ‘do you remember, the woman sitting beside me at lunch that day? I don’t know her second name.’

‘Puri,’ he said. ‘Sharmistha Puri.’ He began to say how interesting he had found John’s comments that day: that any vital phenomenon was too complex for a single mind to grasp, so minds had to connect together in a structure. He himself worked in communication theory, where of course most people just wanted to know how best to get a message across to someone else so as to have them behave in a certain way, to buy something or to vote for this or that party, forgetting that all communication was bidirectional.

The Indian laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Businessmen and politicians are so naïve! They imagine they’re calling the tune, but their behaviour is more determined by the public than vice versa. This was your father’s field, of course. He came to talk to the students a couple of times a year. I remember he said: Only a dead man can communicate without being altered himself. Or God of course. No feedback to the stars!’

John stared at the man. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’ he asked. ‘Sharmistha, I mean.’

Dinesh led him across the campus to the zoology department where they eventually found an office that would have Sharmistha’s phone number. A fan turned idly, stirring a muddle of papers. A middle-aged woman fussed about privacy rules. The upholstery was shabby and the ancient phones had locks on their dialling discs. ‘Please, madam, this is the son of Professor James,’ Dinesh protested. ‘Dr Puri will be delighted to hear from him.’

‘Call her from my mobile,’ he offered in the corridor. He seemed to have understood that the young Englishman was going through some kind of crisis. Perhaps he thinks I have a crush on her, John thought.

A man answered the call. Although John guessed from the accent it must be the German who had accompanied them to the Sufi tombs, he didn’t say hello, just asked for Sharmistha.

‘I’m John James,’ he told her.

‘Oh but that’s wonderful!’

At once he understood that he had called at an embarrassing moment.

‘I’m back in India for a few days. I wondered if we could meet.’

She covered the receiver to talk to the German. Then her voice was full of enthusiasm: ‘Come tonight, John, there’s a farmhouse party, out of town.’

John could hear the German’s voice in the background.

‘I’ll pick you up at your mother’s. Around nine.’

‘I’m not staying at Mother’s.’ He gave her the address of the hotel. Just off Bhavbhuti Marg.

‘But why’s that?’

‘I’m not here for my mother,’ he said flatly.

‘How interesting. Why are you here?’

John hesitated. ‘It’s complicated.’

Dinesh was watching him. ‘You want a cigarette,’ he asked.

John accepted. ‘What’s a farmhouse party?’ he asked.

‘A sort of late-night garden party for the rich and chic,’ Dinesh said. ‘I hate the things.’

John spent the afternoon wandering. He must decide what to do. When the heat became unbearable he went a stop or two in the metro, which was air-conditioned. He didn’t care where he was, but explored streets as if they might hold the answer to his questions. The tangled wires sagging from telegraph poles, the motley of shop signs, the schoolgirls piling into autorickshaws, held his gaze in a way street scenes never had in the past.

Near the main station in Old Delhi, he received another message from Elaine: ‘Am thinking of the time we went skinny-dipping in the Cam. I keep crying.’ John went into a fabrics shop and in the space of five minutes paid almost 3,000 rupees for a pure pashmina shawl. He didn’t reply to her. She was right not to marry me, he decided. The shawl was a pale purple with gold embroidery. Perhaps he had paid too much. It would go wonderfully with her frizzy black hair and camellia skin. He couldn’t afford it. He didn’t understand what a girl like Elaine could see in a man as old as Hanyaki. Perhaps it was just for the part in the play. Perhaps she was being smart. Only now did he realise he no longer had the bananas.

After another trip in the metro, another slow, stifling walk, he found he was by the river, in the grounds of a temple. ‘Sir!’ A lanky boy wanted to be his guide. ‘Sir, sir!’ John kept turning away. He climbed down the muddy bank and watched men diving from a low wall near the sluice gate of a barrage. It was a big dam. The boy followed him. The water boiled and swirled. There were three or four divers. They walked barefoot along protruding stonework between sluice gates, then plunged.

‘People throw things in water for good luck,’ the boy told him, ‘when relatives die, you know, maybe it is dead person’s ring or jewellery, they throw it there, from bridge’ – he pointed – ‘These men dive in the river to find it.’

‘Don’t the people who throw the things get upset?’ John asked. The moment he spoke, he knew he had accepted a contract and would have to pay.

‘Upset?’

‘Angry.’

‘Why angry?’ the boy guide asked. ‘If thing is in river, it is in river. You can get.’

John watched. Wearing shorts, the men dived into the churning water to emerge some twenty yards further down, dragged along by the current. He imagined their fingers grabbing at the muddy riverbed in the swirling dark. ‘It’s mad,’ he said. The boy was earnest: ‘Swimming here is very dangerous, sir. Sometimes they are killed. But they are cool in hot weather!’

John remembered the night skinny-dipping in the Cam after a party. Elaine’s skin was goose-pimpled but she looked beautiful when she dived. She stretched on tiptoe on the bank, her breasts high. It had been one of their best moments. I was walking with your mother by the river, he remembered his father’s letter. But there was no water, only mud. I have nothing of Father’s to toss in the water, John thought. ‘Get me a rickshaw,’ he told the guide. ‘Take me to the railway bridge.’

From five-thirty to seven, he waited for Ananya, at the same place where they had met before. He texted her and told her he would be there. She didn’t appear and didn’t reply. He was dizzy with the day’s long heat and paid fifty rupees for a bottle of water. At least his stomach had held out. At seven-thirty he arrived back at the hotel.

‘Somebody came to see you, sir.’

Behind the reception desk, the same rather efficient woman was sitting beside the bowl of water and the floating petals; when people walked by the water trembled in wide spirals of brilliant colour.

‘It was a young lady, sir. She waited a long time, then she went away.’

‘Did she leave a message?’

The woman smiled at his eagerness. ‘No message, sir. She waited, but when you did not come, she went away.’

In his room, after showering, John sat at the tiny table under the TV screen projecting from the wall. He found a pen in his bag and, after some searching around, a piece of paper: the hotel laundry list. He began to jot things down. He wrote a few lines about the dogs he had seen. ‘It is as if they were all the same dog,’ he wrote, ‘thin, brown, sniffing and shitting and begging.’ He wrote the name Dinesh. Why would people throw a valuable object in a river, knowing that other men would fish it out? All Dad’s dreams had been about meeting people beside water. The surf was majestic, he had written, but we did not dive in.

Then John started to sketch. It was a girl’s face. He tried to remember Elaine’s lopsided grin. The grin and its lopsidedness were Elaine. He couldn’t draw. The hair came out frightening. Then he was drawing an elephant. He chuckled, and turned the trunk into a fat snake. Link it all up with a complicated doodle, he decided. He began to hang lines between girl and elephant, snake and words. It was odd to look at the words as part of the drawings. Towards ten the phone rang. ‘There is someone for you in reception, sir.’