CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
On 15 February 2005, at 10:32, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert
Sudeep is very nice but I will have to marry a Sikh. A Jat or nothing Father says! Hope I will be able to come very often.
Jasmeet
On 15 February 2005, at 09:46, Albert James wrote
Dear Jasmeet,
I’m glad you enjoyed yesterday evening. It was very promising. You ask what lies behind it. It’s simple. Each person takes a part – suitor/princess – robber/victim – Muslim/Hindu – employer/worker – guru/disciple – man/wife – spider/fly – then, as the drama approaches its crisis there is a dance and you reverse roles. Don’t worry why. It’s an experiment! Just enjoy the fun.
Everybody will start with an easy part from their own family or caste then switch. We’ll look at videos of people to help us. And animals too. Animals are useful because they don’t disguise their feelings. They just are. You and Ananya and Vimala can help a lot with the dancing. The reversal moment has to have a graceful, ceremonial feel, a kind of enchantment. It has to be beautiful. I hope you like the others. Sudeep is a nice boy, don’t you think? He’s studying drama at the university.
Thanks for coming along and do say hello to your father.
Albert
On 15 February 2005, at 09:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert
Thank you for a nice evening. I hope it is helpful to have me even if I don’t understand really what we were doing. Can you explain? Thank you also for dinner.
Yours sincerely
Jasmeet Singh
‘BUT THERE ARE hundreds of messages!’ John mutters. He hasn’t slept. He feels confused and his head is heavy. Clearly, this is the revelation he came to India for: this girl, this computer. Equally clearly, he isn’t ready. He doesn’t want to read his father’s emails. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to know about his father at all. The night with Sharmistha and Heinrich has unsettled him. John needs to shower. He wishes this girl was Elaine. He doesn’t want to meet strangers. He wishes he was here on holiday with Elaine. Or with Mum. He will send her a message: ‘Thinking of you, bought you a present.’
But right now he has this girl in his room. She is pretty enough with a full round pouting mouth and jet-black hair under a yellow headscarf, but she keeps crying. John feels inadequate. He hasn’t slept. I should have stayed in London, he thinks. In the end it would have worked out at the lab. It is his mother’s fault. Every turn this trip takes makes him angrier with his mother.
‘I was going to cancel everything,’ the girl murmurs. ‘But I couldn’t. I couldn’t destroy everything we wrote.’
She has followed him to his room. She has a strong accent. Not like Sharmistha. Sharmistha sounded almost American. John was surprised the receptionist didn’t object. He imagined some rule in Indian hotels that would keep girls from coming to your room, especially a single room. The place is a den, a burrow; it smells stale. He needs to sleep. There are his socks and underwear on the floor, grubby clothes on the table. It’s funny this mix of India and John: a bric-a-brac Ganesh beside his Imperial College tee-shirt. The girl is sitting on the only chair, by the TV, in loose trousers and smock, her strong chin pushing forward a little, slim hands clasped between her legs. He can see she has slim legs. The light comes from a greasy window where the room narrows beside the bathroom. It’s the reflected glare of the early day. The air conditioner is rattling. I need to shower and sleep, John tells himself. I’m ill. He knows he isn’t.
He sits on the bed with the laptop that the girl has put in his hands. The screen is glowing.
On 20 March 2005, at 13:56, Jasmeet Singh wrote
Dear Mr Albert …
John wants to be unconscious. ‘This is your father’s computer, Mr John,’ the girl had said. ‘The password is JohnJames.’ But he can’t sleep now. He can’t even lie down. His own name the password! Or his uncle’s name. The email account is swamped with messages from Jasmeet Singh.
On 20 March 2005, at 14:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote
You are so kind to answer so soon, Mr Albert!
‘And you are Jasmeet?’ John asks stupidly. His eye scans down the inbox. Every message is from the same address
Re: Sudeep
Re: Re: Sudeep
Re: Re: Re: Sudeep
Re: Caste and marriage
Re: Bandi Chhorh Divas
Re: Ananya and Vimala
Re: Spider webs
Re: Death
Re: freedom!
Re: my father
Re: Re: my father
Re: Love!
Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Love!
‘Yes, I told you,’ she says. ‘That is me.’
‘I’m sorry. I had a rough night.’
The girl looks around at the hotel room, distracted and curious, wiping tears with the back of her forearm. Bracelets tinkle. One of her knees has started to jerk rhythmically. She’s a strong physical presence in such a small room, animal and girlish. Quite tall. She has a tall neck. John wonders what he is supposed to do. Is he supposed to read these messages? In front of her? There are too many. There is a book and more. He wants to know what’s in them, but he doesn’t want to read them. He wants to have known all along. I’ll have to confront Mother, he decides. He wants it all to be in the past, like an exam studied, passed and forgotten. Now he notices a smell; the girl has a perfume, something musky and different.
‘Was it you who sent me that letter?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr John?’
‘I got a letter from my father. Did you post it? It arrived in London after he died.’
‘Ah,’ she smiles and sniffs. ‘He wrote that letter at the Neemrana.’
‘The what?’
‘You don’t know?’ She seems genuinely surprised. ‘The Neemrana! It’s an old fort. A hotel. Very famous. On the road to Jaipur. It ended in my bag.’
‘It wasn’t finished.’
‘I found the letter in my bag. I don’t know how it came there. He was thinking a lot about you. He wrote the letter at the Neemrana.’
The girl is looking at him as she speaks. ‘Everything went wrong, Mr John. I posted the letter when he died. The address was in the computer.’
John is at a loss. He has come back after a miserable, drunken night and now there is this drama that he must face. He cannot avoid facing it. Things are going to come out. Like it or not. Father is coming out of his coffin. The awkward box has been bumping about too long in the flooded basement. John wants to go to his mother and demand to know who this girl is. He wants to send Mother down to sort out the basement. Explain this girl, Mum! His parents’ marriage was perfect, it was mythical. What other justification could there have been for their always ignoring him, their always disappearing together to one godforsaken destination after the next? John wants to be beside Elaine the night they swam in the river. If Elaine is fucking the Jap he’ll go crazy. He knows she is fucking him. John sits staring at the screen.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Symmetry
The Indian girl stands up and limps to the door. ‘I will leave, Mr John. You can read the things Albert wrote.’
‘No, stay,’ John says. He very much wants to be alone, but not with these emails. They will choke him. He will sink and stick in them. He can’t let her get away. ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he asks.
‘An accident.’
She is standing at the door. It isn’t properly closed. There are sounds of other doors banging, cleaners calling to each other down the corridor.
‘Stay,’ John repeats. Now he decides he must get the truth out of her. He would much rather hear the story from her than read all these messages. They will exhaust him. Then he’ll have the facts he needs to go to Mother. ‘What did you mean,’ he asks slowly, ‘that you’re responsible for Dad dying?’
She looks at him, wiping her cheeks with her fingers. ‘Mr John, I’ve brought you the computer. You can read it.’
‘Please, sit down.’
She sits on the edge of the chair. ‘I never cry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think I would cry.’
‘What was my father doing?’ he asked. ‘This research you were in.’
She shakes her head. ‘Please, take me away. Could you take me away, Mr John? Could I travel to England with you?’
John is out of his depth. ‘Let’s eat,’ he says. ‘I’m hungry.’
At reception, when John asks if they can have breakfast served on the roof, Jasmeet changes. She speaks confidently in Hindi, ordering things, trading brisk remarks, treating the receptionist as a servant. She asks for a tissue. In the water bowl the day’s petal arrangement is intersecting triangles of mauve and blue.
On the stairs, the girl limps heavily. It’s her right knee. She can’t lift it to the stair above. The left leg always has to lead and the right is pulled up to join it. But the ankles beneath loose trousers are slim. Her white sandals are pretty. John tries to gauge what size they are. Elaine has very small feet. Girlish feet. His own are huge. Pushing open the iron door onto the roof she seems untroubled by the glare and the crows, unsurprised by the bare asphalt, the lone plastic table.
There’s a warm breeze blowing. The waiter arrives. ‘These crows, sir, they are beastly!’ The man is hamming. He waves the birds away. ‘Beastly, shoo!’ It’s a way of showing his amusement that John has found himself a girl. It’s theatre. He imagines we slept together. Meanwhile, John can consider the girl more carefully. She’s in her early twenties, he decides, older than Ananya, my own age probably. Jasmeet is looking rather shrewdly round the rooftop view.
‘I think you have met my father,’ she says sitting down. ‘You had dinner with him the day before Albert’s funeral. His name is Kulwant Singh. He is a friend of your mother.’
‘Of course! God. I didn’t realise. That was your father?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t smile.
‘He was talking about the royal family. A doctor, right?’
‘I’ve left home now,’ the girl says. ‘I’m not going back.’
‘You’ve left home. I don’t understand. When?’
‘Now.’
John’s head throbs. There must have been three or four gins, four or five vodkas. He sits looking across the table at the strong young woman in her pyjama outfit and lemon yellow headscarf that flutters in the hot breeze. Never having lived at home, John never had a chance to leave. ‘Don’t come out this summer,’ Mother wrote from Chicago, ‘your father isn’t well.’ John wants to bang on his father’s coffin, with a stone maybe, a stone elephant, and he wants to make sure it stays shut too. He doesn’t want to read those emails. He needs an argument.
Jasmeet is looking straight in his eyes. ‘I am going to go to London, Mr John, I have decided to leave India. I have some money. I have a visa.’
In his room she had been crying. Now in the glare of the rooftop she is hard and resolute. ‘I am not tolerating my father any more,’ she says. Her voice has an attractive lilt. At first he thought she didn’t speak very well. Now he realises it’s a way of speaking.
‘You don’t know the hours and years he spent telling me how a Sikh girl must behave: Guru Granth Sahib this and Papa Ji that. My brother does what he wants. He studies law. He went to a better school. He has better English. I must be a secretary, a wife. They want me to marry a Jat doctor. But when I hurt my leg, his family got cold feet.’
She stopped. ‘That is too funny? I hurt my leg and they got cold feet.’ She laughed loudly. ‘Your father, Mr John, said I was a crazy girl. Jasmeet, you are a crazy crazy girl!’
John can’t keep up. It seems impossible this young woman could have had anything to do with his father, with a man who never remembered to pull up his fly, who wore shoes without socks, or sandals with socks. Not a woman’s man. Distracted, self-absorbed. A saint without a religion. And ill in the end. An older man with prostate cancer, sick in his most intimate parts. John looks at the girl. Still, it is more possible with Jasmeet than with Ananya. Her manner tells him that she knows things. Her eyes and a sly twist of the lips. And her body.
‘How did you hurt your leg?’ he asks. He will grasp anything but the nettle. When he does he will take it straight to Mother.
‘I was getting off a bus, in a hurry, it wasn’t the stop, and a motorbike, zoom, crashes into me.’
She looks away to the parapet and India Gate. ‘I was in a hurry, to meet Albert.’
Before John has time to comment, the waiter is back. The crows rise to greet the food. The man tries to slip napkins under the teapot but the wind snatches them. Two paper rectangles blow across the asphalt.
‘Very strong wind, sir. Perhaps a dust storm is coming, sir. You must be warned, when the wind is from this direction, sir.’
He sets their trays down: scrambled eggs for John; for Jasmeet, some kind of fried potato with yoghurt and pickle. She eats rapidly with her fingers, dipping her head sideways almost to the plate. She is hungry. John can see the strong jaws, the elastic lips. He pours tea. He likes the madness of hot tea on hot mornings. His head will clear.
‘You got up early?’ he says. ‘It’s not even nine.’ He doesn’t understand if she really meant that she left home today.
She speaks with her mouthful. ‘Do you think you can take me to England, Mr John? Can we just go to the airport and get a plane to London? I have a visa. Albert helped me. I have some money. I am twenty-four. With office experience. I can work.’
John can’t respond. Making an enormous effort, he says: ‘Tell me about you and my father.’ He pushes the fork in his mouth. He isn’t tasting the food at all. Mum will be forced to take him seriously when he goes to her about this, when he says, who is Jasmeet Singh? What was she to Father? Then she will have to tell him things. Then she will come back to England with him.
Jasmeet has her head over the plate, filling her mouth. He’s struck how red her tongue is. The colour is very intense. Like the inside of a wound. ‘Read the messages, Mr John,’ she says. ‘It’s too complicated.’
‘I’m not going to get upset,’ he protests.
‘Please. You will understand, if you read the messages.’
John doesn’t need to understand. He needs to know.
‘Read the messages,’ she repeats, pulling a napkin from under the sugar bowl. ‘I’m a bit afraid of travelling to London alone.’
‘What about this research, then?’ John asks. ‘This experiment with acting?’ Actually he isn’t interested in this at all. He couldn’t care less about Father’s so-called research. It was time-wasting. The man was burned out.
Jasmeet wipes her mouth. The breeze is blowing loose hairs across her lips. ‘We were meeting at the Delhi Drama School. Sudeep studies there. In the evening. We were learning to act things. We had to make catastrophes, he said, and then,’ she hesitated, ‘to dance. To unravel them, he said.’ She shook her head. ‘He wanted everybody to learn this, he called it a new way of behaving. There were five girls. Five boys. Sudeep could explain. You have to recognise a bad moment coming and then dance it, dance it away.’
‘I don’t understand,’ John says flatly.
‘Oh me neither really!’ Jasmeet smiles with her mouth full. ‘Everyone had to bring a story.’ She swallows, frowns. ‘Let me remember.’ She brushes thin fingers over her lips. ‘Okay. This was something Sudeep told: there are two Muslim people on the ground floor of a block – they are married many years, but not blessed with children, and upstairs there is a Muslim girl who is married to a Hindu man of a low caste with many relatives who are making a lot of noise all the time, always celebrating, always festivals late at night, and they have a baby too, he is very noisy, and the two families are insulting each other, also because this used to be a building only with Muslims and the Muslim woman downstairs thinks the girl upstairs shouldn’t have been marrying a Hindu, and then because she hasn’t had children herself she is angry about this noisy child, she is cleaning all the time, and hating the noise, she has bad headaches, and so the two Muslims plan to kill the Hindu baby and the mother when the father is away. This is a real story that happened in Sudeep’s building. I was acting the young Muslim girl who married the Hindu.’
John stared at her. What was this about?
‘We had to feel all the feelings very strongly, then learn the moment to dance. We must find a … trigger, that was Albert’s word. Before the catastrophe. There is a dance where you become the opposite of what you were in the story. It is a ceremony. You do your opposite. Your father was experimenting a lot. He said we must make it beautiful or it wouldn’t work. It had to be beautiful.’
‘Dad was crazy.’
‘Or for example’ – Jasmeet was getting excited, she was happy to remember this – ‘there is a family where the son is fighting his father because he wants to be a poet, you know, and on the contrary the father wants him to be a professor of science and they have arguments and the son’s girl, his fiancée, who is very beautiful but she is a snob and she is afraid of being poor, she agrees with the father, her boyfriend’s father – maybe she even likes the father and he likes her, you know, she’s very sexy and he’s a very powerful man – and the son starts drinking a lot, he is angry, really angry, and everybody argues and he is going to kill himself to punish them. I was the girlfriend and Sudeep the son and your father the father.’
‘That is my uncle’s story.’
Jasmeet looked at him coolly. ‘I know. It was your Uncle John.’ She hesitated. ‘Albert said it was a method that must be making a rabid dog a poodle, or teach a spider to undo his web.’ She laughed. ‘Your father worried very much. Then he was excited like a child. Then he drank a lot. You know he wanted to make a play of Alice in Wonderland, is that how you call it? He said …’
John doesn’t want to hear any more of this drivel. It pains him. He pushes away his plate. ‘So why did you say it was your fault he died?’
Jasmeet shakes her head. ‘Maybe I learned the lesson he was teaching. I wanted to stop the catastrophe.’