CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

OLD DELHI FLEW apart. Its sandstone walls had dissolved and were howling their release. Vision came and went with every breath, with every gust. A minaret a phone shop a tea kiosk swirled away in torments of dust and litter. John’s gut had dissolved too. He ached. Jasmeet had him by the hand, or he her. And his mind whirled. Thoughts appeared careered disappeared with debris in the murky air. His eyes were screwed to slits. He fought the wind, the sour air in his throat, on his tongue. Grit, leaves, petals: again and again the world made up and swept away. On the first corner they reached, a telegraph pole was down in a tangle of wire. The dusty wind seethed around a goat trapped and bleating in the broken cables.

‘We must go back to the hotel,’ the girl begged.

In the midst of the tumult John was intensely alert. Sirens shrilled. Crossing the road, he pressed his arm against his mouth to block the dust, breathing his skin. Start and end with breathing, he remembered. The other hand grasped Jasmeet’s. Why had Dad written that? Why do I keep remembering it? They were bent low. Then a curtain of dust dissolved to reveal half a dozen black and yellow autorickshaws sheltering between a low wall and acacia trees. He pulled the girl that way and she limped and hopped after. There were quite large objects in the air: a newspaper, a Coke can. This is the opposite of my laboratory; the idea blew through John’s mind, the opposite of my teamwork and controlled conditions. He felt elated. How volatile my emotions are. Surviving the toilet experience had done it. Or I’m in the centrifuge myself. He smiled. Over their heads, the acacia branches waved frantically. He didn’t feel afraid. This was Father’s world, he suddenly thought. All phenomena stormed about his senses. Yes, this was it. He honestly didn’t care if he ran out of money. Let them do what they wanted. Stumbling, John pulled aside a tarpaulin to get in the first rick. The small vehicle rocked as they slid across the seat.

‘Where’s the driver?’

‘The drivers are waiting for the wind to stop,’ Jasmeet said. She was clutching her knee. ‘No one is driving now. The motors will choke in the dust.’

John wanted to see his mother this minute, in this moment of clarity, of volatility. Now he would know the right thing to say; or rather, what he said would become the right thing. He wouldn’t be inhibited, he wouldn’t let his embarrassment get the better of him, or her severity. I will stay in Delhi with you, he would tell her. Why not? He might say anything. Communication would be immediate and total. He would tell her about Dad and Jasmeet. Yes. That was necessary. But it had suddenly come to him: perhaps Father had been onto something. Being here in India, in this storm. Onto, as it were, everything.

John’s mind took a sudden jolt: Father deliberately lost control, submerged himself in everything. Was that the experiment? It was ridiculous. As a scientist, Dad was ridiculous. He’d have done better to write plays like his brother, the way he always mimicked people. I will stay in India and continue Father’s work, he could tell Mother. But how could such an idea come into his head? That is the opposite of you, the opposite of what you want to say!

John wanted to take his mother back to London. He must check, he thought, what had been left on Dad’s computer. An explanation somewhere. It had been a waste of time reading those emails. Who cared about Dad’s feelings for this girl? Perhaps he was right to fuck her. Perhaps that too was an experiment. Jasmeet was beautiful. Perhaps I will fuck her myself. At the same time he knew his mind might switch back any moment to where it had been only seconds before. It was disgraceful. It was absurd. You love Elaine. He fretted. He wouldn’t know what he felt or who he was until he opened his mouth to speak to Mother.

‘When will the driver come?’ he demanded. ‘Where is he?’

‘We must wait, Mr John. You should be patient. They won’t drive in such a storm. They will stay in shelter.’

He tried to sit still but he wanted to be moving along with his thoughts, moving fast. ‘What are those?’ he asked. From twisted threads of red and gold an assortment of painted trinkets hung from above the steering bar. The garish things swayed when the rickshaw trembled in the gale. Jasmeet looked up from her knee. ‘Religious knick-knacks,’ she said. She wasn’t interested. ‘All the drivers have them.’ Her knee was obviously causing pain.

John leaned forward. A tiny red and gold figure had snakes round his neck. The face smiled inanely. He reached out and took the next one in his hand. A miniature Ganesh was riding a rat. It was lacquered wood. The colours were bright. ‘It’s a miracle the guy can see through all this rubbish to drive,’ John remarked. ‘Everybody has trinkets,’ Jasmeet said again. ‘To bring good luck.’ John examined a female figure sitting on … what? An owl? How did they think of these combinations? Here was a woman with too many arms riding on a tiger’s back! How could that bring good luck? But it was a stupid distraction. ‘I’ll go and find the driver,’ he told her.

As he spoke the autorickshaw shuddered in a wild gust and the girl reached her arms round his waist to hold him. ‘Don’t go.’ She pressed her head against him. ‘You mustn’t tell your mum about me. She will think the worst things. My father will kill me. Seriously. He will kill me. He gets too angry. Remember, your mum and my dad are friends. They are close friends.’

When John didn’t reply, the girl pleaded. ‘Please take me to London.’ And then almost angrily: ‘You will never find anyone better than me, you know that, Mr John? Where will you find someone like Jasmeet?’

John didn’t answer. Lifting the rick’s tarpaulin on the scene outside, he saw a world so fragile it could be swept away in an instant; it would dissolve like a dream that seizes your mind one moment and is gone the next. A wind like this must brush away a million cobwebs, John thought. The girl held him tight.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

‘Your father and I never had real sex,’ Jasmeet whispered. ‘I hope you were not thinking that, Mr John.’

He could have throttled her. Just because he was set on going to Mother, she was backtracking. First she boasted, she showed him his Dad’s love letters, then she denied. Still, John let her hold him and even cuddle against him as they sat waiting for the rick driver. His body was tense and numb. He did not know what would happen when he saw his mother. He did not know what he might say, who he would become, how she would react. It would be decisive. She would be upset. He would shout perhaps. He would go down on his knees. Jasmeet pressed her softness and smell against him. He was aware of her smell now, the sweet tang of her skin, but it had no power over him. His head was locked up elsewhere.

‘Albert said he could not make love to me because he thought of me as his daughter, or his son’s girlfriend.’

‘What?’

There was a sound of glass crashing.

‘He kept saying it was like a dream, him and me. It was real and it wasn’t real. At the same time.’

She’s lying, John thought. She’s inventing. He was hardly paying attention.

‘He said he thought of me as your girl, Mr John. He liked to think of me like that. So he couldn’t make love to me. It started when we were playing the story of his brother, John. Sudeep was too jealous! Albert mimicked him really well. He wanted to help me the way a father helps his children, taking me to England.’

‘Dad never helped me at all!’ John snapped. Again he pulled back the rick’s tarpaulin and saw the wind had blown a rag against the pole of a signpost and was simply holding it there, flapping.

After a few moments’ silence, Jasmeet said, ‘I like you, John. I like you a lot.’

He felt the violence intensifying.

‘Let me stay in the hotel tonight,’ she whispered. ‘I can sleep on the floor, then we can go to London.’ She lifted her smock and showed a pouch fixed to her belt. It was a glossy plastic red against the flat smoothness of her belly. She unzipped it and pulled out a passport. He saw a wad of notes. ‘We only have to buy the ticket,’ she said.

They sat on. There was no sign of a lull, no sign of a driver. Occasionally there were horns, sirens, cries. John imagines a man lifting the tarpaulin. ‘Lodhi Gardens,’ he tells him. The man climbs in and the rick begins to trundle through the flying dust. But he had only imagined it. The rick was only shuddering in the wind. He sees the tarpaulin lift again. A brown face appears, a man with stained lips, crooked teeth, a dead eye. It is his rick driver the day he went to meet Ananya. ‘Lodhi Gardens,’ he says. ‘Quick!’

‘What?’ Jasmeet asked. The girl had her arm round him, her face against his chest. She had been speaking. She was still saying things about herself and his father. About Sudeep, about going to England. ‘Maybe I will marry you, like he imagined.’ John hadn’t been listening. ‘Before it is too late, your dad said.’ ‘To Lodhi Gardens,’ John muttered. The brown face was grinning through the tarpaulin.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

John grinned, embarrassed. He knew there was no one there. The girl held him. The rick’s tarpaulin has turned purple; it is the curtain in the crematorium. John stared at it, waiting for the Indian’s face to appear again. Or his dad’s face. He remembers the undertaker with the yellow woolly hat. I should have asked him to open the coffin. Instead, he had sat still in the back of the car with Mother. ‘I kept up decorum,’ John mutters. He remembers very powerfully his mother’s elegant detachment behind her black veil. Immediate and intense, the memory passes over him in a wave. ‘I am not here,’ he announces. He remembers the strangely brooding, theatrical atmosphere of the cemetery with its Victorian angels, its hooded figures lying on the tombstones. ‘Perhaps I could live in the graveyard,’ he murmurs. ‘With the other destitutes.’

‘John!’ Jasmeet cried. ‘What is it?’

He had squeezed her tightly. Had he? He is vaguely aware of having squeezed the girl rather fiercely. The wind rocked the rickshaw. He was conscious of an ominous uneasiness in his head. His headache is a weather front. The storm edges closer. His thoughts are tangling in the acacia branches. They are thoughts the wind lifts from the dusty earth as the rain approaches. It wraps them round a pole and pins them flapping. He felt sick with expectation. The wind blows away the mind’s cobwebs, he thought. He must take shelter.

‘Where, where can we shelter?’

‘What’s the matter?’ the girl asked.

‘I was remembering his funeral,’ John shook his head. His voice is distant and mechanical. His jaw feels stiff. He mustn’t let her understand.

‘Whose funeral?’

Now he recalled the schoolgirls. Their little feet trooped past him. Green and gold uniforms. He was reliving the funeral. What pretty young girls. What pretty yellow petals they sprinkled on his coffin. Why is there so much yellow in India? he wondered. He saw faces painted saffron. ‘Why are you wearing a yellow scarf?’ he demanded. Jasmeet looked up and smiled. ‘I like yellow. I always wear yellow.’

The flowers meant something, John is sure. He knew now he should have kissed the coffin. At the very least. That was the solution. If he had kissed it, it would have ceased to plague him. If I had kissed the polished wood it wouldn’t have festered in the basement with the sewage and the stagnant water. The water was in his mind. Can’t the girl smell it? And even better if I had seen the body. Why had his mother prevented him? ‘Albert was all my life,’ she had said. She deliberately prevented him seeing his father’s body. ‘And I his.’ John is nothing, she meant. Instead of seeing his father, John can go and see the Sufi tombs, John can go to the Taj Mahal with its jawab and its mosque. John can see other graves, not his father’s. His father has been dispersed in the river. Disappeared. Dad has escaped forever, into water. My parents’ perfect marriage excluded me, John thought. The more they excluded him the more impossible it was to leave them alone. He shivered, though the air was warm, the wind was warm, the dust is warm and sour. He shivered uncontrollably.

‘Mr John!’ Jasmeet cried. She had been calling him for some moments. She was sitting up now and shaking him. John tried to focus on the driver’s trinkets swaying in front of the rick. Why does that tiny woman have so many arms? She is a spider on an owl.

‘John! Mr John!’

It went against the grain, but John made a massive effort to be himself, to get back into himself. ‘Jasmeet,’ he said. His voice was forced. ‘I can’t go back to England with you.’ It made him tired to speak. He breathed deeply. ‘I have a girlfriend in England. We are going to get married. My mother is coming to England for our wedding.’

‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ Jasmeet said. ‘Please.’

Then it came to John quite suddenly that his mother would be at her clinic, not at home. Why do I keep thinking of Mum at home when Mum was never at home? She was always away with the sick and dying. Cunningly, he asked, ‘Jasmeet? Where is the clinic where my mother works?’

‘Off Shadhanad Marg,’ she said.

‘And where’s that?’

‘The road from the station to Chandni Chowk. By the railway line.’

John knew where the railway station was. It wasn’t far from the Govind. He could walk there in fifteen minutes.

He sat rigid, calculating. Outside there was a crack of thunder.

Jasmeet was nervous. Timidly she asked, ‘Are you really getting married, Mr John? What is your fiancée called?’ She seemed genuinely disappointed.

John felt clarity coming and going. It is pointless saying anything, a voice told him. The words were spoken quietly and convincingly, as if across a table in a quiet room where everything is calm and reasonable. It is pointless saying anything. John listened and saw at once how true that was. It was a wise voice. Talking is pointless. He hadn’t really been listening to the girl, after all, had he? And she hasn’t been listening to him. Why say anything? She just wants to take advantage of you. She’s been telling you lies. Elaine had certainly lied. All the messages Elaine sends are lies. Text messages were invented for lying. John soon realised that. It’s too easy. Then he was overwhelmed by an image of Sharmistha’s body, her golden nakedness swam into his mind. She is right beside him. Her lips covered his. Her hair is on his face. And he started at the touch of Heinrich’s hand.

‘No!’

‘John! Mr John!’

John looked at Jasmeet’s yellow scarf. How had Father managed to escape through the gap between the yellow and the purple?

‘Okay, we’ll go back to the hotel,’ he said quickly.

‘Oh yes!’

He would leave her there. He would say he was going down to reception a moment and he would walk to Mum’s clinic. By the time she realises he’s gone, it will be too late.

Jasmeet was already sliding off the seat. She pushed back the tarpaulin and hopped out.

As they moved beyond the relative shelter of the wall, he saw that the wide expanse of Connaught Circus was now a lake of sand flowing in fast waves, and swimming through them, head held high, body undulating in liquid ripples was a snake, a long snake. Four feet. Perhaps five. It slid effortlessly through the orangey dust, its head swaying rhythmically back and forth, sending a fluid yellowish wave rippling down the length of its body.

John was fascinated. The creature seemed one with the dust, but streaking across it. Jasmeet hadn’t noticed. She pulled his arm. He was standing still. He recalled the drawings in the book Dad had scribbled in: snakes as lightning bolts. That was the night I asked Elaine to marry me. That was when he picked up the three elephants and went into his mother’s bedroom.

Pulled along by Jasmeet, his eye still searching the point where the snake had disappeared, John marvelled at this astonishing flux, violent and fluid, dark and bright, and he recognised in the awful tension in his head, in this feeling of pressure and sickness but also of vistas opening, forming, dissolving, an intensification of his feeling that morning when the boy had sold him those three elephants. He must buy another set as soon as he had money in his wallet.

In less than ten minutes they were back at the hotel. ‘You’re not well, Mr John.’ Slipping into the hallway, she smiled with puzzlement and tenderness. ‘You remind me of Albert so much. He also had bad moments.’

John was impatient. On the stairs he thought: The girl is dragging her foot on purpose, she isn’t lame at all. It was a ploy she had thought up to get sympathy. She invented that daughter-in-law story too. It was a trap.

‘Room seventeen,’ he said at reception.

There was a young man on duty. Someone he hadn’t seen before.

‘I’ll come down in a few moments to settle last week’s bill,’ John told the man in a loud voice. That would be his excuse for going out. Then, approaching his room, he saw that the padlock hadn’t been closed, the door was ajar. He pushed it open and knew at once that the computer was gone, yes, and his phone was gone. The pashmina shawl is gone.

Jasmeet didn’t understand. All she saw was that her blond Englishman was shouting. He rushed to the window. The sky was black. It’s pointless saying anything, the calm voice repeats. Don’t say anything, John. It’s his father’s voice. Lightning flashed. Everything has been taken from me, he thought. Things are given to John only to tease him. Beauty is sent only to be taken from him. How Mother mocked when his girlfriends left him! How she chuckled. ‘Let’s hope it goes better this time,’ she had smiled that evening. She was mocking.

John turned to Jasmeet, shouting, waving an arm. All over the walls are drawings of strange animals. There are drawings of figures with elephants’ ears, with snakes on their heads, with too many arms. There are rats and strange birds. Dad. Dad has been in here, drawing on the walls. Dad has taken his computer back. It’s his revenge because I drew him. God. Where is his drawing of Dad? Where is it?

Jasmeet is on the bed sobbing. ‘Mr John. Mr John. Stop it!’

When she lifts her face he sees her nose and mouth are bleeding. He backs away alarmed, then rushes to the bathroom to be sick.