CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

JOHN WANTS TO go to his mother now. He can see an end: an encounter, a crisis, then home. He wants to hurry it along and be on the plane back. Very soon he will go to some Internet point and send an email to Simon. He’ll think of an excuse: ‘Mother very ill.’ This interlude won’t destroy my life, he decides. He’ll text Elaine: ‘Coming back. Love you.’ But he doesn’t text her. Elaine has written: ‘If you knew how that shit Hanyaki is treating me you’d be ashamed of your accusations.’ And in another message: ‘I doubt if I’ll make it to the first night, never mind the last.’ Every time she writes, it seems harder for John to write back. ‘I HATE YOU,’ she tells him. She should stop.

He unpacks the pashmina shawl. The material running through his hands is marvellously soft, liquid-feeling; the gold embroideries are intricately symmetrical on their lilac base. They are tiny elephants, he sees now. He hadn’t noticed. Tiny liquidy snakes. 3,000 rupees. Elephants in sets of three with their trunks raised and coiled like snakes round lilac borders that ripple with gold. Handwoven and embroidered by the girls of Kashmir. There is a hotel bill to pay too. John should be keeping track, but he isn’t. Smelling the cloth’s clean smell, he imagines wrapping it round Elaine’s frizzy, perfumed hair, the elephants and snakes framing her elfish and very English face. Do I love Elaine, or don’t I? Do I know what that question means? First he must peep inside his father’s coffin. The screen glows. ‘johnjames’, he types. ‘Forgotten your password?’ ‘JohnJames’. Case sensitive.

On 10 May 2005, at 08:35, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Can you believe Sudeep tried to kiss me last night after you left us!

On 11 May 2005, at 12:40, Albert James wrote

To solve this or that practical problem makes no difference, Jasmeet. Honestly. What matters is learning to be different. Better still, learning to learn to be different!

On 11 May 2005, at 17:20, Jasmeet Singh wrote

I must hurry now; we have to go to the temple to knead the bread. (Can I say Gurdwara? Do you know that word?)

John tries to read the emails in chronological order. He’s impatient. He only wants the facts, an outline of the facts, but something prevents him clicking on the last messages first. Elaine always reads the last pages of novels first. You get more out of a book, she says, when you feel relaxed about how it ends. You don’t hurry. John finds it hard to believe that the Sikh girl left home this morning. She had no bag with her. She walked off after breakfast as if she knew exactly where she was going. Limped off. ‘Very certainly a dust storm, sir,’ the waiter insisted. ‘I was going to meet your father when it happened,’ she said.

Actually, John doesn’t want the facts at all. He doesn’t care what the girl’s doing. He wants to go to his mother and persuade her to come back to London with him. She will be very upset by this Jasmeet story. She will need comforting. They will be together. Elaine and Mum will get on well. Elaine admires his mother. Mum will see the sense of going back to England now. She will tell Elaine how crazy it is to waste time with the Japanese director. John is beginning to feel confident.

On 16 June 2005, at 10:17, Albert James wrote

Jasmeet, I know you were all angry! But distractions are important. They unlock the trap. The automatisms get uncoupled. I never imagined Sudeep would get so mad, though.

John has to go back and forward to other messages to find out what all this is about. It’s confusing because each email contains many old ones and whereas his father’s computer is fixed so that the most recent message is always at the bottom, the girl’s is set the other way round with the new message added at the top. There’s no reliable sequence. He has to look at the dates, go back and forth between mail received and mail sent.

Is there any point? He has understood that Jasmeet works in a call centre replying worldwide to customer queries about software problems. Sometimes she pastes these queries into her mails, asking Albert James to explain things she doesn’t understand: queries from Hong Kong, Iceland, Portugal. She asks for his help:

The bios is snagged in prov mod. Utility tools function me not enter in menu drop.

His father’s answers are pathetic. The man knew nothing about computers. She must have sensed this. So she was only asking for the sake of writing to him. His father pontificates about the development of an international community that will ultimately communicate in computer code rather than language.

The difference between language and code is the difference between survival and destruction.

God knows what he meant by that or why he bothered writing it to this young girl.

Jasmeet says she is frustrated with her job. She wants to do something more creative. But the family has only paid for her brother to go to university and her brother does nothing. Her brother is the laziest creature in Delhi, in all of India.

He doesn’t study and he doesn’t go to Gurdwara. My father is always praising my brother but Gobind does nothing nothing nothing and then sometimes Father gives him a mad clout round the ear. He beats him hard. Gobind never hits back, he takes a thrashing. But he doesn’t change his life. It drives my father mad. You know Sikhs are proud of working very hard.

All this before John finally discovers that Albert James had arranged for a boy to come into the rehearsal room where the group were acting one of their stories and to make fun of them. The boy, who usually shone shoes at the railway station, had a whistle he kept blowing and strutted about making faces, then bursting into fits of coughing. He obviously wasn’t well and he didn’t seem to know a word of Hindi. He had a Mongol-looking face. A foreigner. Trying to concentrate on his acting, Sudeep had lost his temper. He came running down from the stage and wanted to throw the boy bodily out of the rehearsal room. There were insults. The boy crouched down in a tremendous fit of coughing. Albert James had to intervene and explain that the distraction had been planned. The boy was paid to do it. Meantime he had videoed the scene.

On 19 June 2005, at 12:15, Albert James wrote

Sudeep showed he’s missed the point of what we’re doing, I’m afraid.

On 19 June 2005, at 13:56, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Sometimes I think it’s you making fun of us, Albert. Of all of us.

There were scores of these mails. The older man and the girl had been writing for months. John feels superior but weary, lying in the poky room with its noisy air conditioning. He’s still hungover, his stomach is rumbling again. For some reason he has laid the laptop on the pashmina shawl. The black keyboard lies in a lilac lake with golden snakes and elephants. Oddly, he imagines taking the shawl into his old lab and draping it over the centrifuge. He imagines the snakes coming alive in a lake of lilac, the elephants swimming with their trunks held high. Where do these thoughts come from? John misses the calm organisation of the lab, the clarity of the given task shared with a team of sensible colleagues. Breaking off, he moves to the desk and begins to sketch quickly on the back of another laundry form. His father’s voice is coming through these emails much more clearly than it does through his articles and conference papers. John begins to draw him.

He has trouble getting his biro to flow. He licks the tip. For a moment he has that fretful feeling of trying to recover a dream that refuses to surface, as though the mind were pressing against a dark wall. Then all at once, with a dozen strokes, he has the lips, the nose, the drooping eyes, the amused, retiring look. He has Dad! Dad’s sticky-out ears, Dad’s wispy hair. He can’t believe it. He was never any good at drawing. He never even liked it. Father used to include drawings in all his letters when John was at school: drawings of insects and animals and natives in traditional costume, often invented. John hardly looked at them. He never drew in his replies, just asked what they would do on holiday, would there be anyone at the airport; that was always an anxious moment, when you got off the plane and there was no one there. Now his father’s face is mocking him from this piece of paper. It’s uncanny. John stares at his father on the back of a hotel laundry list. Albert James: that knowing, endearing, mocking smile. He scores six straight black lines to frame the man, in his coffin. Then he is tracing snaky ripples across it all. The image starts to drown.

On 3 August 2005, at 08:42, Jasmeet Singh wrote

My parents want me to marry a man from Jaipur, a Jat Sikh, a Khalsa. He is a representative for a pharmaceutical company in Ahmedabad. He’s quite nice, I suppose, very tall, a little bit stooped. Like you, Albert! He obeys the five K’s, oh-Kay! The big snag is I don’t really like him.

On 10 August 2005, at 10:07, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Sudeep is a bastard!

On 14 August 2005, at 09:10, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Albert, I’m sorry I didn’t come last night. I don’t want to come any more. You have Ananya and Vimala and Bibi. Sudeep can put his filthy pig paws on them.

On 14 August 2005, at 11:35, Albert James wrote

You are a very special person, Jasmeet. It would make me very sad if you left the group. You have a special and beautiful energy and you are the only Sikh. It is good for us all to have you with us. We all feel that. You are a wonderful dancer. I will talk to Sudeep. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be disrespectful.

On 27 August 2005, at 18:43, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Avinash does business with my father and his pharmaceutical company will pay for my dad to go to London soon. Everybody is keen for me to marry him. Avinash says his prayers, even the Sandhana, and never cuts his hair (never never never, not even the most split split-end!) and when he travels he takes parautha and pakoras that his mother bakes for him. I will be preparing his lunch box all my life. They don’t want me to work after marriage. I will be buried alive, watching television and going to Gurdwara like my mother.

On 27 August 2005, at 18:52, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Ps. His beard will suffocate me!

On 29 August 2005, at 14:01, Albert James wrote

Imagine evolution as a path through a maze of obstacles, like those computer games where you have to keep growing and rearming and looking for secret doors while all kinds of dangers are coming at you so you can never stay still. There are dead ends and you have to double back and start again and some dead ends are longer than others. Well, imagine that we have all been going down a dead end for more than 2,000 years! Imagine that the dead end is leading to a monster we can never overcome, not even with all the fruit we’ve found. The catastrophe is very close now. Question: can we still turn round and double back to a better path?

John wonders what the girl made of this. She was still after Sudeep it seemed, for all her supposed aversion to his wandering hands. Jasmeet is a live wire, John senses, a flirt, a drama queen. She has a high opinion of herself. She is excited by men’s interest in her.

I love my family, Albert, but it’s all such a bore sometimes, you know, Sikh virtues. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but they’re not. My mother prays at the temple and bakes the bread and saves for the poor and my father looks at pornography on the Net and spends his spare money on whisky!

Sandhana is when you get up two and a half hours before dawn, take a cold shower (very cold) and then spend an hour and more chanting the name of God or the name of all the gurus. All eleven! For hours! Dad praises Avinash for doing his Sandhana before going out and selling medicines to doctors by promising them free trips to London or New York and meantime he has his computer full of real filth (my Dad not Avinash!) He doesn’t even bother changing his password!

There was an anxious message from Albert James:

Dearest Jasmeet, I really can’t see the point of your telling your mother. You will only upset her. I’m sure deep down she knows the man she married, if you understand me. You risk destroying your family.

My father is a villain! What do you mean she knows him? My mum doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer!

Some barrier has come down between the Sikh girl and the older anthropologist now. As he reads, John feels a growing alertness and revulsion. They are talking more freely. The girl tells him that she was always molested by her uncle, her father’s brother, but her father pretended to ignore it. He wouldn’t believe her when she complained. Albert James’s responses are alarmed, but cautious. It’s not clear what he really thinks about Jasmeet, but he answers five, even ten emails a day. Looking away from the screen, John is distracted by the window. The sky has dimmed. Dust is swirling through the street. When it gets serious he will go and take a look. He has never been in a dust storm.

In the story we are doing now, I can’t see really why Indira would stay with such a man. Does she want poverty? Is it because they are very physical together???!!! You know what I mean. I don’t think Vimala understands her part. She doesn’t get angry enough. But I’m sure Jamal likes insulting her! If you don’t give us a pukka script, Albert, something serious will happen one day because it will be like real people! We will make it up so well we will start hitting each other! Then we will have a real catastrophe!

Is it true Vimala is sometimes the maid in your house? That you paid for her school? She’s very pretty. More than Ananya. Doesn’t Mrs James mind? I think Vimala is in love with you.

Sudeep says you only bring pretty girls! He thinks you romance with us all! Sudeep is one-track minded. I told him you are always the most correct gentleman. Unlike him! Mr Paws!

What’s it like being married, Albert? I’d like to meet your wife. I need to understand. I need to decide if I am going to obey and marry Avinash. Vimala is the kind of girl who always obeys. They say I must decide now. But I can’t. My father will kill me. Sudeep says marriage is crazy. He’s a modern kind of person. If my father knew about Sudeep he would kill YOU! He thinks I’m safe in your care preparing a performance for the theatre, and instead … In the new world there will be no marriage, Sudeep says, if there is still a world. He thinks the world will end and we must enjoy now. He says a time is coming when no one will be able to breathe and there’s nothing we can do about it so we may as well have fun now. Sudeep wants me to join the DDS but my parents would never give me money for that even if I wanted. I don’t want to be an actress. I don’t want to marry Avinash. I want to travel, like you, Albert. Your life is the ideal life for me. You have lived everywhere and you are a good man, always with the same woman, not running after every girl. I envy your wife too! You have always let her do the work she wants. She doesn’t sit at home and she doesn’t go to Gurdwara. My father says Mrs James is crazy because she works for free all hours of the day, but I think she is doing it from a real love of poor people.

Sudeep says I should cut my hair, THERE, IN THAT PLACE. HA HA HA! A Sikh girl can never do that. By the way, did you know my dad rinses colour in his beard to look more sexy.

They’ve decided the dowry. A small apartment in Indira Vikas Colony. An apartment! For Jasmeet! I can’t believe it. I didn’t know we had so much money. Gobind is furious. Father told me I am his favourite now. My brother is a disgrace to the family name.

Oh I am too silly! The dowry is only the DOWN PAYMENT on the apartment. Avinash must pay the mortgage from his salary FOR THIRTY YEARS! The parents are all agreed. They are writing a contract. Today an Australian customer asked if I would send him a photo. I sent him this. Do you think it was wrong?

John clicks the attachment and a photo appears. It shows a round-cheeked Jasmeet smiling from under very long, thick beautifully brushed hair. There is a flirtatious twist to the corner of the mouth, a wild warmth in the eyes, a small blemish along the line of the upper lip. Since the photo has opened in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, John clicks on the arrows right and left to see what else is stored here: Jasmeet at some kind of ceremony in lavish red; various close-ups of a yellow spider on a web sparkling with dew; diagrams of a steady-state, thermostatic feedback system; Jasmeet dancing at night in garish purple and green on a low stage outside with two other girls; Jasmeet standing beside an older woman against a backdrop of mountain peaks; Jasmeet as a schoolgirl sitting in a rickshaw beside a fat boy; Jasmeet side by side with a conceited young man wearing European clothes, neatly groomed and clean-shaven. John recognises the face from the crematorium, the speaker who nearly fell off the podium. Sudeep.

Dearest Jasmeet, mightn’t it be that happiness lies in going the way your parents want you to go? I will always give you what help I can, if you decide differently, but experience tells me there is a wisdom in these traditional arrangements. I would be very happy, for example, if my parents had chosen a person like you for me.

What strange things you say, Albert! How could your parents ever have chosen me?

What is beautiful is the idea of coming together with a partner without having to act to take her, without calculating or grabbing. That is a great gift.

My father looks at pornography of boys too! I hate him. And you’re wrong. Vimala is NOT happy with the man her parents have chosen. She told me she thinks he is gay! There are lots of gays but everyone pretends there aren’t. She is definitely in love with you, Albert, you know. She is always talking about you.

I chose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jasmeet, because it’s the story nearest to what we’ve been doing, where nothing happens, everything dissolves into beautiful equivocations. Do you see? Perhaps that’s the only way some stories can go on for a long time without coming to grief. What I want to do is introduce the five pieces we’ve been practising into a sort of Alice frame, like so many dreams. So one of the characters in our stories is always Alice, or an Alice-like person. Do you see? And it is always she who begins the dance, at the right moments, to stop things happening. Then all the other characters dance around her.

What a mess! Today a man tried to touch my breasts on the bus! They should have buses only women can use, like the train carriages. I stamped on his foot. He was ancient! There was a real hullabaloo!

I think you made a bad choice making Ananya play Alice and Sudeep thinks so too. She’s so ignorant! She doesn’t really understand your ideas. Do you like her most? I’m sure I could do it better.

The Australian sent me his photo! He’s called Sean. He’s really gorgeous. What do you think? Maybe too old for me!

John clicked on an attachment and opened a JPEG showing a sporty type, in his late thirties, with white shirt open on a solid chest, square, complacent face, a determined sincerity about the eyes.

Maybe we should play a play about me and Sudeep and Vimala. Except that might be dangerous! It could end with me killing him! Really!

Jasmeet, what do you want me to tell you about marriage? I can’t help you. It’s something people do impulsively in Western culture because no one offers a clear path for us and we wouldn’t follow it if they did. Helen and I met when she was your age and I was a bit older. She wanted to be a doctor in poor countries and I admired her very much. We had many fascinating years travelling around and dealing with all kinds of situations. You imagine there are just people who are ill and need help and instead you find complicated political and cultural tangles. You have to negotiate with gangs who want to protect your clinic or control who works there. There’s always a local doctor who spreads bad rumours about you. In Kenya they tried to burn our clinic down.

Reading this, John reflects that his father never said any of this stuff to him. He knew nothing about an attempt to burn their clinic. All the same, Jasmeet isn’t satisfied.

You’re not telling me very much, Mr Albert! You know I want to know more. What about sex? Did you ever betray your wife? Please tell me. Wouldn’t you like to have sex with Vimala when she comes to your house? It must be soooooooo tempting. I know my father would. My mother would never let a maid like Vimala anywhere near our apartment. She is too beautiful. I told Sudeep, one day a woman will castrate him! He is an animal!

Would you like to come and see me dance, Albert? There is an evening of bhangra to celebrate an anniversary. I’m quite wild when I dance to bhangra. You won’t believe it. You could bring your wife.

Sex is beautiful, Jasmeet, but difficult, and sex between people over many years is a thing that comes and goes.

I’d get bored. Perhaps I’m a rascal like my father! Maybe that’s why I hate him sometimes. Because I am like him. Anyway, I don’t want to be like my mother. She is a doormat! You know Jamal stopped me outside the toilet and told me he fancies me like mad! It’s too crazy. Surely, I’ll never kiss a Muslim!

Albert, I just read your message about sex again. I think it is very sad. My dad told me you had talked to him about a serious problem. Are you ill, Albert? I wish I could make you better.

Yes, Jasmeet, yes, it seems I am ill.

John stands and goes to the window. The air is swirling with smut and ripples of sand are running like water along the uneven road. He doesn’t like reading these messages. Heading for the door, he hesitates, stops, turns and, scrolling up the endless list, clicks at random.

Re: Re: Re: Update

On 25 October 2005, at 17:55, Jasmeet Singh wrote

Albert! You know you’re too funny when you mimic Sudeep. Really, you’re as sexy as he is!

Re: Re: Re: Re: Update

On 25 October 2005, at 18:43, Albert James wrote

I love your slim hands, Jasmeet. And how nice to have tea together!

John shakes his head, clicks again.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Update

On 25 October 2005, at 19:15, Jasmeet Singh wrote

And I love your eyes, Albert, when you are always looking at me. There is something mad about them.

John is on the edge of a precipice. He doesn’t want to click again, but he does; it’s a message from early November. His eyes flicker reluctantly over a full screen of type.

… as if I were dissolving into beauty, Jasmeet. Jasmeet! Sweet flower. When …

John forces himself to his feet and stumbles away along the corridor. He leaves in such haste he doesn’t even stop to snap the padlock.