That Afternoon on Verner Street by Adity Kay
Anil travels from one war-torn country to another, falls in love with an Irish research student with plenty of secrets, and wonders if he will ever again find home.
Anil strummed on the tanpura and thought of his father-in-law. The old man had just emailed, having heard of the divorce. It was the first time his father-in-law had written to him in any fashion. His father-in-law, who always feared the computer would explode the minute he touched a key, had still managed to make his point. More than one, Anil thought.
No one gets divorced in our family. Look at the example you have set, look at what everyone will think of you now.
The email put Anil off. He would not write to Eliza, as he'd intended. Eliza, with whom he had reconnected after two decades. Eliza, whom he had last seen in his grad student days in Belfast, and who had suddenly reappeared in his life.
Only Eliza knew everything about him, even though it'd been years since their last meeting. Otherwise, and Anil ran his fingers slowly down the tanpura, it was a lovely clear day and he was out in the patio. He was unemployed, but he would still have been in a good mood if not for his father-in-law's email. He would have finished that long email to Eliza. Telling her more about himself, to add to what she already knew.
She knew he had lost a friend recently, and how, to commemorate that friendship, he had made charitable donations to the temple at Edison. A small sum that he had been able to credit online. No questions asked.
Your kindness, I am sure, will be well remembered, she'd written and his heart swelled at her words. It was good to regain these lost feelings of romance. Feelings that erupted in him, like bubbles, kicking aside all warnings. Romance, he thought, was like a river in flood that swept past everything, all danger signs, and that was a good thing.
Now if his dead friend Rishi was around, he would call it spam. Or even a scam. 'Someone, not just Eliza, could just have Googled you,' he'd say.
Anil found that thought pleasing. That he was important enough to be Googled. He wanted to look around and rejoice, whoop with mad joy, dance incorrectly in his patio.
But then, his father-in-law had upset him, spoilt his mood. People were getting divorced all the time. Even the desis, the Indians in America who called themselves proud upholders of their old traditions and great culture, were doing it. And they weren't divorcing, they were living in, not even bothering to get married.
Anil remembered how years ago it was the old man who had nagged him about the marriage - the dowry he wanted to give, as was custom, and Anil had been so firm against the practice. Then two years after marriage, his father-in-law had begun worrying because they hadn't had children yet. All those letters asking them to get help. Goodness, children weren't really important any more. The man was so Victorian!
Anil strummed faster and harder, and the old man's email stayed in his mind. It was angry, demanding, and sentimental. Reminding Anil of things he'd rather forget. How brilliant he had once been, the scholarship he had been awarded, that had taken him out of his small hometown then part of Pakistan, to faraway Belfast. A place he had first looked up in his atlas.
His first school was in a small town then in East Pakistan. In 1971, after the war, that part became Bangladesh, a new country Anil had never returned to.
Every time after the final exam, his report card, a square foldable piece of cardboard, would be on display. Held up for everyone, young and old, by his grandfather, and Anil would get the first helping of paayesh, the creamy rice milk dessert served on festivals and important occasions. The cream lingered on the ambiguous mustache he had then, he could even see it like a white blob if he made himself go all cross-eyed, but he would be afraid to lick it, with a quick darting move of his tongue. That was bad manners. His grandfather, a former military man, would have none of it.
Grandfather reached out to hold up Anil's hand. Anil rubbed his arms in remembered pain and embarrassment. This boy is an example for all you boys to follow. Grandfather's voice boomed and an arrow of spittle cuffed Anil on the ear.
Anil strummed the tanpura gently, slowly, the plaintive striking like a backdrop to his memory. When they left, the grown-ups stopped to talk to him. You have done well. Now we hope you will become a doctor. We need one.
Perhaps they spoke in jest. Or their words had drawn the evil eye, and Anil was cursed.
People gathered once more when he left home for the first time, to go to university in Belfast. People collected on the verandah, his grandfather taking center stage, sitting very still in the lounge chair. He looked frail when Anil bent to touch his feet. He raised a shaking hand to ruffle Anil's hair and did not open his eyes. For that Anil was glad, he did not want to burst into tears. They both did a fine job in hiding their grief.
His real long journey began once he left Dhaka and headed west. Anil had no time then to remember, or to shed tears. There was much to focus on, many things to watch out for. He had to journey across countries, and continents. He had reached Dhaka by train from his village, then he had flown to Karachi, where he waited for two days before taking the flight to London. The last stretch of his journey was the most arduous. The distance and the many details to remember.
The train to Liverpool, then Holyhead, and the ferry to Dublin, and the last bus to Belfast. This last bit took him nine hours. He worried about missing any connections and mixing up places. He didn't want to ask anyone if he got lost. Seeing the white faces around him, some in uniform, everyone better dressed than he was, made him feel he had forgotten the English he had learnt in all his years of schooling.
Years later, when Belfast was long behind him, he would recall with surprise how quickly he had forgotten the stress, and the worry that had gnawed on him the moment he landed at Karachi. And he knew he had let himself forget, because of Eliza.
Destiny had brought them together. It was in the very manner of their meeting in Professor O'Brien's library. Belfast was a city broken up by violence, people were afraid, but Anil was soon in love and day after day he rode, walked, danced along with the hope of seeing Eliza smile, encountering her gentle, sweet nature every day.
Now that Eliza had written, he would tell her everything he remembered. He would bring back the love that he, that they, had lost. He would reignite it. The mind, his grandfather would often say to encourage him, could set itself to do anything.
That first week, Professor O'Brien had looked up vaguely, with a frown. He looked over Anil's papers, and then gave him a reading list, for which Anil had to head to the library. Anil shuffled along, reading the signs, till he came to the very cabinet whose top shelves Eliza was sorting. He hadn't seen her, only heard her startled yelp and he lifted his head, his gaze rising slowly, as he always recollected later, up the feet in plain black pumps, and her taut calves.
That way it all happened, accidentally and spontaneously, the sight of her legs made what came later like something ordained. Whereas she, amused by his effusive apologies, words she could not understand clearly, always asked him later if she still scared him like the time in the library. For some time, for some weeks, in Belfast, that was how their conversations began. Her question, followed by his blushing, a sudden lowering of his eyes.
Her first email to him, twenty years later had begun quite simply. Hey there, do you remember me?
Professor O'Brien was quiet and courteous, though Anil felt, even in the beginning, that he never really listened to him. Several months later, when it was all over, his thesis nowhere near complete, he knew the professor's other preoccupations. Was he really a government agent? Reporting on the activities on campus? That Eliza had been a tool, to size his students up, to report to him, so in turn he could report to the police. Had he even been a real professor?
Anil's bewilderment, his ignorance changed over time into anger when he finally understood what had happened. How could he know then? He had come from a land far away that had seen violence too often, too much trauma, too many tragedies, and in Belfast, everything was cast in a different way.
They had established a schedule early on. That he would report to Professor O'Brien, who insisted on being called Rob, every Monday, for an hour or two. They could meet at the popular Golden Perch bar, he suggested after a while, and so Anil rarely came to his office anymore. But he still ran into Eliza, who, as he found out, was the professor's office assistant, and his research student as well.
Those were days of terrible homesickness. Anil missed the heat, the rain, the walk through muddy, slushy fields, the smell of wet earth, and the musty and damp kitchen hearth, the call of the fisherwomen, the kitchen chatter, and then the image that never failed to make him weep: that of his grandfather raising one feeble hand to bless him. Every time he remembered his grandfather's closed eyes, Anil's eyes closed on their accord, to keep back the tears. Then he thought of his grandfather's mustache, the way the ends had drooped over his lips like two long bay leaves. He found that fascinating. He forgot then that he had to be sad.
How can anyone make you sad and laugh at the same time, Eliza had asked him then.
That first week Eliza went with him to his dorm at College Square Avenue. A plain-fronted building like others around, and only distinguishable by its number, they climbed the low front stoop, crossed a narrow hallway that led up a narrow staircase to a small room, with the barest of furnishings. It was cold, and gray, and he shivered in his long gray coat, the only warm thing he had then. He was so cold he didn't realize it was the first time he had a girl in his room, even if for strictly impersonal reasons.
'You poor thing,' she said, touching his arm, a look of maternal concern on her face, 'I am sure the Professor will have some old things you can wear,' she added. He felt poor, though every day in the streets he could see the despair and the sullenness. The children in patched clothes, snot on their noses, and the men walking the cobbled streets in beaten down shoes, hunched into their coats, shabby as his own.
He had already worn that coat everywhere, even placing it over himself to sleep. Now looking at the room, with its dreary brown quilt, that suspicious looking darker stain in the middle, he knew he might freeze to death one night. And so he bit down his shame and said nothing to Eliza's suggestion.
'Are you his student too?' he asked, knowing he had to ask her something, if only to show his gratitude.
She was startled by the question, and then laughed, 'Yes, a student. But not so intelligent as you are.'
He flushed, shy again. 'No, you know a lot.'
'Come,' she said, 'don't you want to ask me anything? Oh yes, this is where you can hang your clothes.' The wooden door, handle loose at the hinges, opened up to reveal a tiny storage space that would not even take in his suitcase and hold-all. 'And the bathroom is downstairs,' she said leading him down, and this time he noticed the stains again, like dots that marked several steps, and still red, as if someone had just recently been hurt.
He pointed that out, making his tone light. He had been imagining someone having fallen down, hurting himself on the steps outside, but a look of fright crossed her face, and her hand rose to her lips. She had gone all cross-eyed, and he was apologetic, as he always seemed to be then. 'I am sorry, I didn't mean...'
But she was looking past him, up the stairs, at the door to his left. The door he recalled later that he never saw open, nor did he ever see anyone enter or leave it. She hustled him out, glancing all round as she stepped out, and then with a firm grip on his arm, she marched him off to a launderette on Palestine Street, two streets away. It was the names that made him feel at home. That a town with all its sameness - its dreariness, the stoned streets, the shop fronted buildings, the shabby people walking its streets, and the soldiers everywhere - also had these streets with names from all over the world: Palestine, Cairo, Jerusalem.
Two men operated the launderette and he later found they were policemen. One with a paunch, and that bulge visible on his left, despite the overalls he had on, who asked him one too many questions, none especially related to his subject of study. High speed photography, eh? The man looked quickly at Eliza, and you came from India? Inn-diya, was the way he said it. 'No, Pakistan,' he said, 'Dhaka.' Is that in Pakistan? The man had screwed up his eyes, turning his face up toward the skylight for an answer. Anil had laughed, not yet aware of their all-pervasive ignorance, about worlds they cared little about. 'It's to the east. East of Calcutta.'
Cal-Coota. Yes, we know that. Had a great uncle who was there during the war. Terrible.
'So if there's anything,' said the other man, who had been quieter, and who, Anil later realized, had been sizing him up all the time, 'remember we are here to help. This isn't a safe place. So if you notice anything about roommates, mind. Just let us know.'
There were cameras in Prof. O'Brien's room, Anil had noticed that right away. He knew the models from his textbooks, the ones his Dhaka professor had shown him. The Fastax ones, and the Kodak ones with their special lens, and the control levers. 'These are specialized equipment,' Professor O'Brien said, 'we must wait before we use them.'
And he did get the hint. Those days he was so polite, he understood the hints, and the fob-offs. Especially in Eliza's every gesture and word, but he missed the things glaringly evident. Like the stains. He never noticed when they appeared on his door one day. Four random stains, tiny pinpricks as if someone had tried to clear a knife by shaking it just outside his door.
Then the dead cat on the sidewalk just below the Professor's window, where no one, either on the steps, or anyone looking out from the window, could really miss it. He had seen the boy loitering outside and had assumed he was a delivery boy of some kind, or a cleaner. And so Anil waited for him, the next morning. He was always an early riser, preferring to spend his days at the library where it was always much warmer.
He wanted to impress Eliza, who had been badly shaken by the incident. He waited in the cold for an hour, but no one came and after that he was too cold. Still he felt brave, protective of Eliza when she asked him to accompany her to several places. The Great Victoria Street station, and the Crown Liquor Salon close by, where she ordered a pint of beer for both of them. They sat by the bartender and she left a packet or two for someone to pick up. She did this a couple of times. That first time he did ask her, as they waited to cross the street, about the packet; a file placed in a brown paper packet and she had laughed, in the sudden startled way she had. Then she took his arm and they crossed the street, and he joined in her laughter. Feeling a warmth creeping into his body and everywhere.
On email, Anil thought, it is hard to hear someone's laughter. With an emoji, everyone laughs the same way.
Why had you laughed, he had always wanted to ask Eliza. I thought you were so afraid.
'I feel safe with you around,' she said, once at the post office. And then again, when she asked him to meet her at the Europa Hotel, she didn't mind the stares, the sight of a brown skinned man with a fair red-headed freckled woman. She leaned against him, companionably, almost absently, as she looked up the menu.
They were only minutes away from the bar at Donegall Quay when the bomb exploded, and he had run with her, desperate to get to safety. Instead she had run into a tobacconist's and looked at the carnage over the piles of stacked fresh newspaper. We got away, she told him, a trembling hand on his chest.
Days after that, till she disappeared, she remained very shaky. Professor O'Brien would be stern with her these times, asking her to be more alert, not to give away anything, sentences that should have intrigued Anil, but instead he felt sorry for her. She was just too delicate, and which woman wouldn't be affected after witnessing a bomb like that. That week, for days bombs had gone off everywhere in the city, and he had seen the people in their torn rags, their faces bleeding and blackened walking away. And the fire, an angry red in colour, rising over the old gray buildings of the city.
He held her close the time they saw the bloodstains again, and just when they turned the corner, the dead cat that hung from a rope right in the hallway. And Professor O'Brien yelled at her, and at him too, for being so weak-hearted. There was a glassy fury in the professor's blue eyes when Anil protested. 'She is afraid,' he said, 'Please understand.' The professor's anger had turned to a sneer. 'She should then leave the job.'
And he, Anil continued to plead. 'You don't know the violence, sir. It's everywhere.' He knew by then the stories that had taken so long to reach him. Back in his home country, that would soon for him be neither home nor country.
It was 1971, and in South Asia, war appeared imminent between the two countries, India and Pakistan. Months later, a third country would emerge; his home town part of another new country. The massacre of students at the university hostel where he had lived not so long ago. He heard about this, and the other stories too. The women raped and killed with abandon, and left in the fields, in their homes, as a defeated, demented army wreaked its revenge. He didn't want to know the details, but he knew them automatically. It was the very thing that had scared his sisters, aunts, and his mother, every time a riot broke out, every time Hindus and Muslims descended to killing each other. The women were crushed in between, maimed, and tainted by the ultimate weapon of war: not an atom bomb, but rape.
Only a decade ago, Anil had finally been able to talk about Eliza, to bring her into any random conversation like a lost love. He lived in Toronto then. His name had begun to be linked with Anjali's and there was a lot of teasing. It was his friend Rishi who asked him things right to his face.
'How come you never married a white woman, you have lived so long in the west?' Rishi was always too jokey, and that Saturday evening, they were both high on beer.
'There was Eliza, and one day...'
Rishi was quick on the draw, and he cackled, 'You are not going to tell me that a boyfriend turned up from somewhere, into your romance.'
'No,' Anil said looking away, a sad, serious tone in his voice, 'she left to join Mother Teresa.'
Rishi looked at him in disbelief. Anil was trying hard to look mournful. Rishi was an easy man to befuddle and confuse.
'You mean, she came to Calcutta?' Rishi said, very excited now, 'but you could have gone and found her the time you went there.'
'Rishi, you are getting mixed up. I went to Calcutta in 1976, the last time I went there, to get married the first time.' Rishi understood the joke moments later, and then he laughed, his chest heaving in the bright Hawaiian shirts he loved. 'And it was she who followed me there.'
Rishi frowned, and Anil pre-empted his question. 'I managed to persuade her not to come to the wedding. Not that she would have made a fuss or created a scene. Even when she was frightened, she never made a scene.'
He would always remember how frightened she looked when they found the cats strung up in the courtyard. One a spotted brown and white cat, and the other a ginger, swinging from the streetlamp, the thin necklace of blood almost invisible, the brown stains below already dry.
She trembled but she did not scream. Anil knew it was because of Professor O'Brien's warnings, and he hated him now. It was as if the cats, with their dead presence, had a message: Everyone who saw had to be very quiet.
In Barisal, his coastal hometown in the east, with its palms, the booming sounds that came over the sea, people were noisier. Within seconds of a carcass being found on the mosque steps, crowds would gather, and people, once docile, would turn ferocious, demon-like in their rage. A dead animal could move men to become murderers, and here a dead animal silenced everyone, made them pitiable cowardly creatures.
A week after the fifth cat sighting, Professor O'Brien abruptly told him he was leaving. Back to Bristol, he said. Anil looked blankly at him, he didn't even know where Bristol was. Leaving.
The professor's hands were shaking, the way they always did, as Anil had noticed, when he looked through the camera, straining to view something in the distance. Now he saw other things the professor pointed to, the broken window pane, the fallen camera, and he asked him, sounding forlorn, 'Do I stay here?'
The professor turned to look at him, and Anil knew he had not even figured in the other man's thoughts. 'Ask admin, maybe they will assign you to someone, maybe Dr. Johnson. Look,' O'Brien said, shuffling papers hurriedly into a bag, 'I just wanted to tell you this. I really can't...'
'I understand you must be upset. Eliza is too.'
He heard the professor's sudden high-pitched laughter, his quick glance at the smashed windowpane, and his hands shook as he raised them to his glasses. The professor looked into his bag one last time, and Anil realized with a jolt moments after the door had slammed shut behind the departing professor, that he had seen the butt end of a revolver.
He was able to think clearly only after reaching Toronto, a year and a few months later. A newer city, its clear white buildings that glinted in the late summer sun, it took him less time to settle in this time. He found there were people from the home country too, the 'desis,' who expressed their feelings for each other too boisterously - except when it came to love, where they were too decorous. Even their quarrels were about the home they had left behind; distance only granted an added intensity.
'Eliza understood,' Anil told Rishi later, finding it easy to keep up the charade he had begun. 'She knew I had to marry someone my parents liked.'
'And that wasn't the truth either,' said the all-knowing Rishi. Rishi knew about Anjali, the woman Anil had met in Toronto, whom he had fallen in love with, obviously on the rebound. Theirs had been a love marriage that had thrilled, scandalized, and excited all the desis.
'It was my duty to marry her,' Anil said, defensively. 'I had to save Anjali, else she would have married a Muslim. You know how her family would have hated it. Her father was worried, petrified even, that she would marry someone, a Muslim here.'
Rishi remembered every detail. 'You are really a hero, dada, such an example you set us.'
They had once seen Anjali with a doctor in the Ontario General hospital. Sadiq Anwar was a young man with a giveaway beard, and she was having a drink with him at a seedy bar downtown. At that time, Anil had only a nodding acquaintance with Anjali. She was the nurse at the same hospital who had assisted him, had bandaged his head after his fracas with a turbaned Punjabi, the sardarji called Balbir Singh. That fight became a subject of conversation for many years, even after Anil's marriage to Anjali. They always knew he had a temper to watch out for.
'Eliza seems to have been the one girl who never knew of your temper, did she?' Rishi looked down at his drink, and he missed the startled expression on Anil's face. His anger was a later accretion. His bewilderment at the abrupt end of his thesis in Belfast, the suddenness with which he had to apply to a new program at the University of Ontario, transformed into anger only after he understood some things, when news of everything that had happened back home in the war of 1971 seeped in.
A blazing anger, part of which was directed at himself, for his own naivete, for not understanding Professor O'Brien, who had always been a police agent of sorts, had never let him appreciate the people who had still been kind. Dr. Johnson, who wrote to the department in Ontario, recommending him. Mrs. Harris, the secretary, helped him with his papers, and the ticket, and even the other modalities of accommodation, getting a map to help him. But Eliza was all he thought of, and he was dazed by the speed at which things were happening, to him, and everywhere around.
'Dr. Anwar went back to Karachi, didn't he?'
'Did he?' Anil shrugged at Rishi's prodding 'Good riddance then.' He remembered his exchange with the doctor in the hospital parking lot, days after seeing him with Anjali. To Anil, the doctor represented Pakistan, a country he had once belonged to, as his first passport showed. And Anil remembered how angry he had been, how he insisted that the matter of Pakistan's atrocities in the war of 1971 needed to be debated in the United Nations. He spent his allowance getting leaflets printed detailing every crime by Pakistan's military, news he had gathered from radio stations, and the newsletters he received. He addressed gatherings and desi get-togethers, even at temples, and gurudwaras, places he had earlier avoided.
Once he had given free rein to his anger, there was no stopping him. His eyes blazed as he looked at everyone listening to him. He stared back defiant, and unblinking. His voice soared, breaking in just the right places at the right time. The atrocities his country had suffered. First under the British, then by Pakistan. We need the world to know.
His words moved everyone, but not Anjali, the woman he married.
'My father lives in India now,' she had said calmly, stirring in the sugar - two spoons as she remembered by then - in his tea. 'What good will it do to stir up resentment between countries. India and Pakistan are neighbors and there should be peace.'
Anil stared at her in disbelief. How could she just accept things calmly. After all that destruction and damage. So much lost, even the home he and others like him had known once. She giggled on seeing his face, and soon her silly giggling at the wrong moments began to irritate him. She was too frivolous and flippant, incapable of looking at things with a dispassionate righteous anger.
Eliza had never giggled. She had been far too calm.
'I am relieved to get away from there,' Anjali said once.
'But that will always be home, not physically, but in the heart, that is where home is,' he never realized how his voice quivered, how his face had turned red. He pushed away Anjali when she tried to calm him down. He stormed out of the house.
The country, he once read out from one of his pamphlets, was like your mother. It remains so even after we have left for other lands. And we must honor and defend her.
When he spoke like this at the community hall, that was the punchline he used. It left them all crying, weeping on the ends of their saris, and on their kurta sleeves. There was some giggling too, and that just made him angrier. Was there a word he had used improperly, had he made some error?
They came to him then regularly with their stories, the letters and reports they received from home. And they contributed generously to the concert to raise money he organized with Rishi. Shambhu Nath, the sitar player, had played for six whole hours, till two in the morning, and they had raised funds for the 1971 war victims. The plan was to present a cheque to the president of Bangladesh, the world's newest country, when he came on a visit to Canada, or even London. But that never happened. The president was killed, along with most members of his family, and Anil was beside himself with anger.
He never remembered the next few days or weeks. There had been the quarrel with the Pakistani cab drivers at Brampton, and with the sardarji who ran the dhaba on Ontario street. And of course, the bitter exchange with his thesis adviser, Dr. MacDonald.
Anjali sat by his side, holding his hand, stroking his wrist, and told him that he was getting angry with everyone. Unnecessarily so - she stretched that word out, stumbling a bit. Her words made him almost weep, and he stopped himself because he remembered all the other times he had not cried.
Later, after several years, when they hadn't had children - who really had the time for children in a broken world, Anil always thought - Rishi brought the subject up again. 'It must be that you thought of her, of only her,' Rishi jerked his head to the right, to the east where he presumed Belfast was, and looked sadly down at his glass, 'and so you were never happy in your marriage.'
'Who are you to assume this?' By now Anil was so used to being angry that he could summon up this anger every time. Rishi looked dazed, then very apologetic, but Anil had had enough of Rishi's company. Sometimes the man irritated him, though he was the only one he considered a true friend.
It wasn't Eliza, but Eden. He had donated to Eden's charity too, small sums of money, but he had given so much more of his time.
A decade after their marriage, Anjali had first spoken that name - It's Eden! she'd screamed - and stomped out. She stayed at a friend's but returned after some days. It was a game she played. But for all the reasons she could have had for leaving him, the reason she gave this time was the flimsiest. That he was having an affair with Eden Phillips, the American woman who was into Buddhism, sacred chanting, and all kinds of weird things. The woman he had met at her impressive home, when he had accompanied Shambhu Nath who was to give a sitar recital there.
And Eliza, writing to him after many years, did not even mention this, though she knew about his charitable contributions, and praised him for it.
His friendship, and it was just that, with Eden begun innocuously. Anil offered to play the tanpura on one occasion, when the sitarist's usual accompanist was away in Chicago. What impressed Eden, a woman who wore a colorful bindi, and a long flowery gown, its straps thin enough to show up the liver spots on her shoulders, was Anil's response to her question after the performance had ended to a rousing applause: Did the slow churning of the tanpura encourage a retreat into one's mind for the listener?
For Anil, the question made no sense, and yet made perfect sense too. Yes, it assists meditation and all meditative practice. And all activities that require salient communication with the divine.
When Panditji, he gestured towards the sitarist, who too was looking at him fondly, hears the first strains of the tanpura, and Anil ran his fingers over the strings, making the ladies sigh in bliss and lift their heads towards the skylight, he thinks only of this secret communion, and how he must create his music, with this music of the cosmos in the background. This tanpura is the universal sound, it mimics the sound of Om, and the tabla rhythms reflect the music of nature. Nature and space, the things that bind us, and the music that floats over this all.
There had been applause again, almost like the way they had appreciated the sitarist. The three of them on stage - the tabla player, Mahadev was there too - seemed to float on their comfortable rugs, as they basked in this universal admiration. Anil felt light-headed. If the rug could feel, it would turn into a magic carpet and take them away.
That was the beginning of Eden Phillips' long conversations with him. She called later the next evening, and on other days too. Sometimes their conversations stretched far longer, especially when Anjali happened to be on night duty at the hospital.
Anil only had to listen. For she demanded it; there was something very self-absorbed about her that fascinated him.
She talked of her sense of feeling lost in childhood. 'The long empty roads we drove on, the road trips we made as we were dropped off at one grandparents' house or another when our parents left on their missionary trips to Africa. When you talk about experiencing the divine, that it is there everywhere around, that you must recognize the music in yourself, that is indeed what I felt then. The huge sky, the white clouds like... like a soda fountain in heaven, and the red mountains, I can feel the hum of the earth rise in me.'
'Yes, I could tell, Ma'am.'
'Eden, you must call me Eden. It takes us so long to find our own selves. I am so grateful. So grateful to you.'
Next she invited him to give a talk to the ladies on any subject of his choice. Anil prepared for this first lecture carefully. Still, the lecture overshot the time limit, but no one minded. His first lecture, and the others subsequently, was held in the same huge hall owned by the Philips family. It made him more popular than ever before. He spoke on the ancient civilizations of the east built on peace, non-violence, and ahimsa, the absence of any violent thought. This sentiment, he said, moved monks like the Buddha, and monarchs like Ashoka, and why conquerors came and made the land their home, and it took the power of non-violence to make the foreigners leave.
Sometimes you find what you love quite unexpectedly, he wrote, explaining his life to Eliza who had come back into his life suddenly. Sometimes what you love can change your life entirely, and then it becomes a millstone around your neck. Sometimes it's also that love is a duty. You can see I am making things too complicated. Sometimes it's best not to ask too many questions, and just go along with the flow.
Day after day, the ladies listened to him with the same unwavering rapt attention they had shown that first day. It was in the days before social media, before even YouTube, and sometimes he wished there were proper recordings. For he slaved over his lectures, spent sleepless nights over every slide, and in front of the mirror rehearsing over and over again.
His new life wasn't a façade. But it was Anjali's reaction to his obvious joy that was a dampener. She always gave him a moody smile, her lips all pouty, the heavy overdone make-up on her eyes that made her look tired and weepy before she left for her evening shift at the hospital.
But he was glad Anjali didn't know, nor care, about his lectures, about the women who hung onto his every word. All this and other things he didn't want Anjali to know about, not right yet. It was all right for her, and for her ever-sentimental, too-chatty father, to believe that he was just about finishing up his research. In another six months. Towards the end of that time though, he found himself applying for an extension, only to be rejected by the academic committee.
Since you have already used up the two extensions permissible by the committee, we regret to inform you that the committee has decided against any further extension. Your tutor fees will stand, but the financial assistance will be stopped forthwith.
He asked to meet his advisor, Dr. MacDonald, and then, the head of the department. Anil wrote to the bursar, and the registrar, and then the student coordinator as well. It took him a week and more to realize that there was a huge bureaucracy that managed all university affairs, and that, in unison, and in a concerted way, they controlled everyone's lives, and the money. It made him angry, furious. If one of Eden Phillips' friends had not known someone in the academic committee, Anil would never have gotten an extension - a third time - and then the next year, allowed to move to another department on a teaching assistantship. His dependency on the university system and on others made him angrier still.
'Why don't you write a book?' Rishi had advised.
'It's a racket, everything is a racket. Everything is dominated by money. How much you are able to pay into the system, and how much the system is able to fleece you. I would write a book, and who do you think will publish it?'
Anjali changed into a nagging woman, almost overnight. Their quarrels became bitter over weeks, and months. These were the fights the family came to know about, and then the stories of all the other fights emerged.
'We cannot start a family unless you have a proper job,' she told him.
'And didn't you want a family only when we have a bigger house. We have moved once already.'
'I never thought I would be the main breadwinner,' she shot back
'I didn't know you keep a chart of all expenses, who pays what,' he sneered. 'One day I will earn more than you, much more than you can imagine.'
He thumbed his nose at her, and she showed him her tongue. The world, even Eliza, with all her detailed knowledge of his expenses, and contributions, never knew how childish they could be.
But Anjali wasn't one to give up; she was never giving up, he told Rishi, the night before he walked off. And there began the strange arrangement of their married but separate lives, when they did some things together, promised to friends they would get back together, but they were actually happier living apart.
It was her father who had been so keen on the marriage, he wanted to tell Anjali at times. While his own family always believed he had married for the wrong reasons.
Hs younger cousin - now a woman in her thirties - told him why. We never thought you could marry her, even for love. Aunt always said that you had been trapped into marriage. That she found you eligible, and her family did too. You were a prize catch. A good boy from a good family with a promising career. She's not very good-looking, and fat too. That last bit startled him. He had never thought of all this in detail. True, Anjali was plump, when Eliza, the only woman before Anjali he had been acquainted with, had been reed-like thin. His heart caught when he remembered his old fears. That every time a bomb ripped through the streets of Belfast, or if the wind was too strong, she would be picked up, flown miles and miles away, like a paper doll, and that this was indeed what had happened that morning, the last day he had seen her.
Even now his recollections were framed with the thick gusts of black smoke that drifted out everywhere inchoate, and almost volcanic, in that city, that afternoon in July. He had wanted to see Eliza one last time, and so found himself on Verner Street that day. The secretary gave him Eliza's address, after he told her about having to deliver something to Eliza urgently. The old lady had been so kind, and curious. She gave him a packet of mint chocolates for Eliza.
'Just to keep her spirits up, you know.'
It was afternoon, and he had been munching on a wrap when he heard running footsteps behind, and the explosion came the very next moment. A sound so loud it seemed his ears had burst, and then another loud explosion that filled his eyes with water and smoke, that lifted him off his feet and threw to the ground some feet away. He saw a stranger's foot on his half-eaten wrap, its paper covering fluttering, and rolling away, and then crunched under several pairs of feet, people running in every direction, thudding past him, and toward him, people teetering on their feet, people wearing fashionable heels, shoes, oxfords, someone dragging a torn shoe with his foot as he made to catch up, and then as someone held his face down, breathing down hotly into his ear, he saw someone running past, in a pair of black pumps, and she was gone before he could say Eliza. A child running past looked back once and, pointing to him, had told someone, maybe the woman in black pumps, that he was dead.
When he lifted his head, he saw the black heavy wind everywhere, blowing things around. Paper, twigs, and even trashcan lids. From a gap in the road, he had a glimpse of the quay on Lagan river, the vendor stands with their drooping broken umbrellas, and the boat half smashed on the pier. That was why months and years later, he always thought there had been a storm too. A wind that had magnified the effects of the blast. Later in Ontario, he read there had been over twenty bombs in Belfast that afternoon in July. And that woman who had passed him, running for her life, could have been Eliza; but then what about the child who had pointed him out? Maybe she had believed the child's words, even if she had not been Eliza. Maybe a part of him did die then when he never saw Eliza again.
If one has seen death in this totally unexpected, violent way, how could one be so cheerful about it? He could never bring himself to ask this when Eliza came back into his life. Her emails were too cheerful, too all-knowing. He felt she already knew everything he could ask her.
That last day as he stood on Verner Street, outside Eliza's house, he saw the boy he had seen before on the college campus. He was sure it was the same boy who had left the dead cat on the lamppost. As he came up, Anil realized he was really much older, with his blackened teeth and the shifty expression in his eyes, and he smiled chummily at him.
'She won't be coming back, sir.'
'How do you know?'
Anil had been looking up at the window and now, without looking at him, the boy mumbled, 'I know where she is.'
They must have walked for fifteen minutes or more. He led him past the markets of Verner Street, skirting the damaged, potholed streets, the clear warning signs on the walls, the concertina wires behind which policemen idled. They could have been two students walking, their hands clearly visible so as not to arouse suspicion. In one corner, they found three men leaning as they faced a wall, and the policemen - Anil recognized their helmets and knew they were British - barking a series of orders at them. Following the boy, Anil raised his hands as well, and the police pushed them through. He felt the butt of their rifles quick on his shoulder.
In front of a slanting metallic wall at the end of a lane, the boy stopped, looked around, and then turned to the right. There was no gate, but a gap in the metal barricade, and sliding through, they crossed a rubbish strewn lane toward a warehouse. It was a part of the town he hadn't ever been to, and he was curious, and yet thinking ahead to the time he would see Eliza again. He thought over all that he wanted to say how he would watch her face closely those first seconds, for then he would know instantly what she felt about him: if she loved him or not. If she did, and his heart beat heavily at the thought, he would ask her to marry him. Then they could leave Belfast forever.
The bullet that came from a second floor window startled him, but the boy only laughed, holding out his cap, and waving, 'It's only us.' Anil laughed too, wanting to feel extraordinarily brave. But the moment he walked into a quiet room, the menace seeped into him when he saw the overturned chairs, the upturned glasses, the broken windows, the sound of shoes as men with guns entered the room. When one of them pushed him against a wall, placing the end of a gun against his neck, Anil looked around for the boy, his companion. But he had slipped away.
His head caught against a sharp nail, and his chin was raised painfully, and he saw the other men, five or six of them, all armed, near him. He felt their hot meaty breath on his face, and the knife that ran along his sleeves. He heard the slow tearing of his own shirt.
'What do you want with Eliza?'
'I work in the university,' he stuttered, his mouth full of his own saliva, and feeling the dampness all over his stomach, and below.
'You have been looking for something. Where are you from?'
'Pakistan,' he said first. Then he corrected himself, 'Bangla...'
This time he received a painful cuff on the head. 'You make up your mind. Tell us where you are from. India?'
There was another blow to his head, and he knew he had peed then. His legs felt damp, and his socks soggy. He heard someone shouting, 'Don't kill. He's not from here.'
Long minutes later, he found himself on the road outside, and he walked back to the university. He walked slowly with bent head like the men he had seen once, unable to avert his gaze from his damp, foul-smelling shoes. Only a week later, Professor Johnson looked at his bandaged head, and said he was lucky to be alive. He looked at him with clear sympathy in his blue eyes, but Anil felt the old humiliation rising in him. That he had peed in his pants, and how the men had stood around laughing at him. When people said he was such an angry man, he would always remember how his anger had been of little use. How it had deserted him the time he needed it most.
Eliza would never know this bit. Yet he didn't want to lose this person called Eliza who had just sent him another email. She was in trouble, she wrote. Lost her money in London hotel, could he transfer him some money?
I would do anything, he emailed back. We have known each other for so long. Do you remember what happened on Verner Street?
He pressed 'send.' He knew there was every likelihood now that she wouldn't reply. That he would never know if she was dead or alive. That it wasn't her ghost in cyberspace sending him these messages. Sometimes it was best to ask nothing. Yet no one, he thought to himself again, knew as much about him as she did.
There is life after death, that was what he had titled one of his lectures. Not that you become a ghost, but that your presence lingers; the things you believe in, what you might have said, remain. Even the things you wanted to hide away. They have a way of springing forth and popping into our lives. He laughed down at his astounded audience. I can feel all of you shiver. You have no need to be afraid.
And then they all felt it. The invisible presences that crowded this world and live in this world alongside us. All the presences that are ignored.
Anil always knew he would become one of those quiet presences too. That he, his story, would remain of interest. They would see him as a failure at marriage, or a coward, someone with a thesis never complete. After a while, it gets too late to change one's life. Even to unsend an email takes up a lot of time.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
No one gets divorced in our family. Look at the example you have set, look at what everyone will think of you now.
The email put Anil off. He would not write to Eliza, as he'd intended. Eliza, with whom he had reconnected after two decades. Eliza, whom he had last seen in his grad student days in Belfast, and who had suddenly reappeared in his life.
Only Eliza knew everything about him, even though it'd been years since their last meeting. Otherwise, and Anil ran his fingers slowly down the tanpura, it was a lovely clear day and he was out in the patio. He was unemployed, but he would still have been in a good mood if not for his father-in-law's email. He would have finished that long email to Eliza. Telling her more about himself, to add to what she already knew.
She knew he had lost a friend recently, and how, to commemorate that friendship, he had made charitable donations to the temple at Edison. A small sum that he had been able to credit online. No questions asked.
Your kindness, I am sure, will be well remembered, she'd written and his heart swelled at her words. It was good to regain these lost feelings of romance. Feelings that erupted in him, like bubbles, kicking aside all warnings. Romance, he thought, was like a river in flood that swept past everything, all danger signs, and that was a good thing.
Now if his dead friend Rishi was around, he would call it spam. Or even a scam. 'Someone, not just Eliza, could just have Googled you,' he'd say.
Anil found that thought pleasing. That he was important enough to be Googled. He wanted to look around and rejoice, whoop with mad joy, dance incorrectly in his patio.
But then, his father-in-law had upset him, spoilt his mood. People were getting divorced all the time. Even the desis, the Indians in America who called themselves proud upholders of their old traditions and great culture, were doing it. And they weren't divorcing, they were living in, not even bothering to get married.
Anil remembered how years ago it was the old man who had nagged him about the marriage - the dowry he wanted to give, as was custom, and Anil had been so firm against the practice. Then two years after marriage, his father-in-law had begun worrying because they hadn't had children yet. All those letters asking them to get help. Goodness, children weren't really important any more. The man was so Victorian!
Anil strummed faster and harder, and the old man's email stayed in his mind. It was angry, demanding, and sentimental. Reminding Anil of things he'd rather forget. How brilliant he had once been, the scholarship he had been awarded, that had taken him out of his small hometown then part of Pakistan, to faraway Belfast. A place he had first looked up in his atlas.
His first school was in a small town then in East Pakistan. In 1971, after the war, that part became Bangladesh, a new country Anil had never returned to.
Every time after the final exam, his report card, a square foldable piece of cardboard, would be on display. Held up for everyone, young and old, by his grandfather, and Anil would get the first helping of paayesh, the creamy rice milk dessert served on festivals and important occasions. The cream lingered on the ambiguous mustache he had then, he could even see it like a white blob if he made himself go all cross-eyed, but he would be afraid to lick it, with a quick darting move of his tongue. That was bad manners. His grandfather, a former military man, would have none of it.
Grandfather reached out to hold up Anil's hand. Anil rubbed his arms in remembered pain and embarrassment. This boy is an example for all you boys to follow. Grandfather's voice boomed and an arrow of spittle cuffed Anil on the ear.
Anil strummed the tanpura gently, slowly, the plaintive striking like a backdrop to his memory. When they left, the grown-ups stopped to talk to him. You have done well. Now we hope you will become a doctor. We need one.
Perhaps they spoke in jest. Or their words had drawn the evil eye, and Anil was cursed.
People gathered once more when he left home for the first time, to go to university in Belfast. People collected on the verandah, his grandfather taking center stage, sitting very still in the lounge chair. He looked frail when Anil bent to touch his feet. He raised a shaking hand to ruffle Anil's hair and did not open his eyes. For that Anil was glad, he did not want to burst into tears. They both did a fine job in hiding their grief.
His real long journey began once he left Dhaka and headed west. Anil had no time then to remember, or to shed tears. There was much to focus on, many things to watch out for. He had to journey across countries, and continents. He had reached Dhaka by train from his village, then he had flown to Karachi, where he waited for two days before taking the flight to London. The last stretch of his journey was the most arduous. The distance and the many details to remember.
The train to Liverpool, then Holyhead, and the ferry to Dublin, and the last bus to Belfast. This last bit took him nine hours. He worried about missing any connections and mixing up places. He didn't want to ask anyone if he got lost. Seeing the white faces around him, some in uniform, everyone better dressed than he was, made him feel he had forgotten the English he had learnt in all his years of schooling.
Years later, when Belfast was long behind him, he would recall with surprise how quickly he had forgotten the stress, and the worry that had gnawed on him the moment he landed at Karachi. And he knew he had let himself forget, because of Eliza.
Destiny had brought them together. It was in the very manner of their meeting in Professor O'Brien's library. Belfast was a city broken up by violence, people were afraid, but Anil was soon in love and day after day he rode, walked, danced along with the hope of seeing Eliza smile, encountering her gentle, sweet nature every day.
Now that Eliza had written, he would tell her everything he remembered. He would bring back the love that he, that they, had lost. He would reignite it. The mind, his grandfather would often say to encourage him, could set itself to do anything.
That first week, Professor O'Brien had looked up vaguely, with a frown. He looked over Anil's papers, and then gave him a reading list, for which Anil had to head to the library. Anil shuffled along, reading the signs, till he came to the very cabinet whose top shelves Eliza was sorting. He hadn't seen her, only heard her startled yelp and he lifted his head, his gaze rising slowly, as he always recollected later, up the feet in plain black pumps, and her taut calves.
That way it all happened, accidentally and spontaneously, the sight of her legs made what came later like something ordained. Whereas she, amused by his effusive apologies, words she could not understand clearly, always asked him later if she still scared him like the time in the library. For some time, for some weeks, in Belfast, that was how their conversations began. Her question, followed by his blushing, a sudden lowering of his eyes.
Her first email to him, twenty years later had begun quite simply. Hey there, do you remember me?
Professor O'Brien was quiet and courteous, though Anil felt, even in the beginning, that he never really listened to him. Several months later, when it was all over, his thesis nowhere near complete, he knew the professor's other preoccupations. Was he really a government agent? Reporting on the activities on campus? That Eliza had been a tool, to size his students up, to report to him, so in turn he could report to the police. Had he even been a real professor?
Anil's bewilderment, his ignorance changed over time into anger when he finally understood what had happened. How could he know then? He had come from a land far away that had seen violence too often, too much trauma, too many tragedies, and in Belfast, everything was cast in a different way.
They had established a schedule early on. That he would report to Professor O'Brien, who insisted on being called Rob, every Monday, for an hour or two. They could meet at the popular Golden Perch bar, he suggested after a while, and so Anil rarely came to his office anymore. But he still ran into Eliza, who, as he found out, was the professor's office assistant, and his research student as well.
Those were days of terrible homesickness. Anil missed the heat, the rain, the walk through muddy, slushy fields, the smell of wet earth, and the musty and damp kitchen hearth, the call of the fisherwomen, the kitchen chatter, and then the image that never failed to make him weep: that of his grandfather raising one feeble hand to bless him. Every time he remembered his grandfather's closed eyes, Anil's eyes closed on their accord, to keep back the tears. Then he thought of his grandfather's mustache, the way the ends had drooped over his lips like two long bay leaves. He found that fascinating. He forgot then that he had to be sad.
How can anyone make you sad and laugh at the same time, Eliza had asked him then.
That first week Eliza went with him to his dorm at College Square Avenue. A plain-fronted building like others around, and only distinguishable by its number, they climbed the low front stoop, crossed a narrow hallway that led up a narrow staircase to a small room, with the barest of furnishings. It was cold, and gray, and he shivered in his long gray coat, the only warm thing he had then. He was so cold he didn't realize it was the first time he had a girl in his room, even if for strictly impersonal reasons.
'You poor thing,' she said, touching his arm, a look of maternal concern on her face, 'I am sure the Professor will have some old things you can wear,' she added. He felt poor, though every day in the streets he could see the despair and the sullenness. The children in patched clothes, snot on their noses, and the men walking the cobbled streets in beaten down shoes, hunched into their coats, shabby as his own.
He had already worn that coat everywhere, even placing it over himself to sleep. Now looking at the room, with its dreary brown quilt, that suspicious looking darker stain in the middle, he knew he might freeze to death one night. And so he bit down his shame and said nothing to Eliza's suggestion.
'Are you his student too?' he asked, knowing he had to ask her something, if only to show his gratitude.
She was startled by the question, and then laughed, 'Yes, a student. But not so intelligent as you are.'
He flushed, shy again. 'No, you know a lot.'
'Come,' she said, 'don't you want to ask me anything? Oh yes, this is where you can hang your clothes.' The wooden door, handle loose at the hinges, opened up to reveal a tiny storage space that would not even take in his suitcase and hold-all. 'And the bathroom is downstairs,' she said leading him down, and this time he noticed the stains again, like dots that marked several steps, and still red, as if someone had just recently been hurt.
He pointed that out, making his tone light. He had been imagining someone having fallen down, hurting himself on the steps outside, but a look of fright crossed her face, and her hand rose to her lips. She had gone all cross-eyed, and he was apologetic, as he always seemed to be then. 'I am sorry, I didn't mean...'
But she was looking past him, up the stairs, at the door to his left. The door he recalled later that he never saw open, nor did he ever see anyone enter or leave it. She hustled him out, glancing all round as she stepped out, and then with a firm grip on his arm, she marched him off to a launderette on Palestine Street, two streets away. It was the names that made him feel at home. That a town with all its sameness - its dreariness, the stoned streets, the shop fronted buildings, the shabby people walking its streets, and the soldiers everywhere - also had these streets with names from all over the world: Palestine, Cairo, Jerusalem.
Two men operated the launderette and he later found they were policemen. One with a paunch, and that bulge visible on his left, despite the overalls he had on, who asked him one too many questions, none especially related to his subject of study. High speed photography, eh? The man looked quickly at Eliza, and you came from India? Inn-diya, was the way he said it. 'No, Pakistan,' he said, 'Dhaka.' Is that in Pakistan? The man had screwed up his eyes, turning his face up toward the skylight for an answer. Anil had laughed, not yet aware of their all-pervasive ignorance, about worlds they cared little about. 'It's to the east. East of Calcutta.'
Cal-Coota. Yes, we know that. Had a great uncle who was there during the war. Terrible.
'So if there's anything,' said the other man, who had been quieter, and who, Anil later realized, had been sizing him up all the time, 'remember we are here to help. This isn't a safe place. So if you notice anything about roommates, mind. Just let us know.'
There were cameras in Prof. O'Brien's room, Anil had noticed that right away. He knew the models from his textbooks, the ones his Dhaka professor had shown him. The Fastax ones, and the Kodak ones with their special lens, and the control levers. 'These are specialized equipment,' Professor O'Brien said, 'we must wait before we use them.'
And he did get the hint. Those days he was so polite, he understood the hints, and the fob-offs. Especially in Eliza's every gesture and word, but he missed the things glaringly evident. Like the stains. He never noticed when they appeared on his door one day. Four random stains, tiny pinpricks as if someone had tried to clear a knife by shaking it just outside his door.
Then the dead cat on the sidewalk just below the Professor's window, where no one, either on the steps, or anyone looking out from the window, could really miss it. He had seen the boy loitering outside and had assumed he was a delivery boy of some kind, or a cleaner. And so Anil waited for him, the next morning. He was always an early riser, preferring to spend his days at the library where it was always much warmer.
He wanted to impress Eliza, who had been badly shaken by the incident. He waited in the cold for an hour, but no one came and after that he was too cold. Still he felt brave, protective of Eliza when she asked him to accompany her to several places. The Great Victoria Street station, and the Crown Liquor Salon close by, where she ordered a pint of beer for both of them. They sat by the bartender and she left a packet or two for someone to pick up. She did this a couple of times. That first time he did ask her, as they waited to cross the street, about the packet; a file placed in a brown paper packet and she had laughed, in the sudden startled way she had. Then she took his arm and they crossed the street, and he joined in her laughter. Feeling a warmth creeping into his body and everywhere.
On email, Anil thought, it is hard to hear someone's laughter. With an emoji, everyone laughs the same way.
Why had you laughed, he had always wanted to ask Eliza. I thought you were so afraid.
'I feel safe with you around,' she said, once at the post office. And then again, when she asked him to meet her at the Europa Hotel, she didn't mind the stares, the sight of a brown skinned man with a fair red-headed freckled woman. She leaned against him, companionably, almost absently, as she looked up the menu.
They were only minutes away from the bar at Donegall Quay when the bomb exploded, and he had run with her, desperate to get to safety. Instead she had run into a tobacconist's and looked at the carnage over the piles of stacked fresh newspaper. We got away, she told him, a trembling hand on his chest.
Days after that, till she disappeared, she remained very shaky. Professor O'Brien would be stern with her these times, asking her to be more alert, not to give away anything, sentences that should have intrigued Anil, but instead he felt sorry for her. She was just too delicate, and which woman wouldn't be affected after witnessing a bomb like that. That week, for days bombs had gone off everywhere in the city, and he had seen the people in their torn rags, their faces bleeding and blackened walking away. And the fire, an angry red in colour, rising over the old gray buildings of the city.
He held her close the time they saw the bloodstains again, and just when they turned the corner, the dead cat that hung from a rope right in the hallway. And Professor O'Brien yelled at her, and at him too, for being so weak-hearted. There was a glassy fury in the professor's blue eyes when Anil protested. 'She is afraid,' he said, 'Please understand.' The professor's anger had turned to a sneer. 'She should then leave the job.'
And he, Anil continued to plead. 'You don't know the violence, sir. It's everywhere.' He knew by then the stories that had taken so long to reach him. Back in his home country, that would soon for him be neither home nor country.
It was 1971, and in South Asia, war appeared imminent between the two countries, India and Pakistan. Months later, a third country would emerge; his home town part of another new country. The massacre of students at the university hostel where he had lived not so long ago. He heard about this, and the other stories too. The women raped and killed with abandon, and left in the fields, in their homes, as a defeated, demented army wreaked its revenge. He didn't want to know the details, but he knew them automatically. It was the very thing that had scared his sisters, aunts, and his mother, every time a riot broke out, every time Hindus and Muslims descended to killing each other. The women were crushed in between, maimed, and tainted by the ultimate weapon of war: not an atom bomb, but rape.
Only a decade ago, Anil had finally been able to talk about Eliza, to bring her into any random conversation like a lost love. He lived in Toronto then. His name had begun to be linked with Anjali's and there was a lot of teasing. It was his friend Rishi who asked him things right to his face.
'How come you never married a white woman, you have lived so long in the west?' Rishi was always too jokey, and that Saturday evening, they were both high on beer.
'There was Eliza, and one day...'
Rishi was quick on the draw, and he cackled, 'You are not going to tell me that a boyfriend turned up from somewhere, into your romance.'
'No,' Anil said looking away, a sad, serious tone in his voice, 'she left to join Mother Teresa.'
Rishi looked at him in disbelief. Anil was trying hard to look mournful. Rishi was an easy man to befuddle and confuse.
'You mean, she came to Calcutta?' Rishi said, very excited now, 'but you could have gone and found her the time you went there.'
'Rishi, you are getting mixed up. I went to Calcutta in 1976, the last time I went there, to get married the first time.' Rishi understood the joke moments later, and then he laughed, his chest heaving in the bright Hawaiian shirts he loved. 'And it was she who followed me there.'
Rishi frowned, and Anil pre-empted his question. 'I managed to persuade her not to come to the wedding. Not that she would have made a fuss or created a scene. Even when she was frightened, she never made a scene.'
He would always remember how frightened she looked when they found the cats strung up in the courtyard. One a spotted brown and white cat, and the other a ginger, swinging from the streetlamp, the thin necklace of blood almost invisible, the brown stains below already dry.
She trembled but she did not scream. Anil knew it was because of Professor O'Brien's warnings, and he hated him now. It was as if the cats, with their dead presence, had a message: Everyone who saw had to be very quiet.
In Barisal, his coastal hometown in the east, with its palms, the booming sounds that came over the sea, people were noisier. Within seconds of a carcass being found on the mosque steps, crowds would gather, and people, once docile, would turn ferocious, demon-like in their rage. A dead animal could move men to become murderers, and here a dead animal silenced everyone, made them pitiable cowardly creatures.
A week after the fifth cat sighting, Professor O'Brien abruptly told him he was leaving. Back to Bristol, he said. Anil looked blankly at him, he didn't even know where Bristol was. Leaving.
The professor's hands were shaking, the way they always did, as Anil had noticed, when he looked through the camera, straining to view something in the distance. Now he saw other things the professor pointed to, the broken window pane, the fallen camera, and he asked him, sounding forlorn, 'Do I stay here?'
The professor turned to look at him, and Anil knew he had not even figured in the other man's thoughts. 'Ask admin, maybe they will assign you to someone, maybe Dr. Johnson. Look,' O'Brien said, shuffling papers hurriedly into a bag, 'I just wanted to tell you this. I really can't...'
'I understand you must be upset. Eliza is too.'
He heard the professor's sudden high-pitched laughter, his quick glance at the smashed windowpane, and his hands shook as he raised them to his glasses. The professor looked into his bag one last time, and Anil realized with a jolt moments after the door had slammed shut behind the departing professor, that he had seen the butt end of a revolver.
He was able to think clearly only after reaching Toronto, a year and a few months later. A newer city, its clear white buildings that glinted in the late summer sun, it took him less time to settle in this time. He found there were people from the home country too, the 'desis,' who expressed their feelings for each other too boisterously - except when it came to love, where they were too decorous. Even their quarrels were about the home they had left behind; distance only granted an added intensity.
'Eliza understood,' Anil told Rishi later, finding it easy to keep up the charade he had begun. 'She knew I had to marry someone my parents liked.'
'And that wasn't the truth either,' said the all-knowing Rishi. Rishi knew about Anjali, the woman Anil had met in Toronto, whom he had fallen in love with, obviously on the rebound. Theirs had been a love marriage that had thrilled, scandalized, and excited all the desis.
'It was my duty to marry her,' Anil said, defensively. 'I had to save Anjali, else she would have married a Muslim. You know how her family would have hated it. Her father was worried, petrified even, that she would marry someone, a Muslim here.'
Rishi remembered every detail. 'You are really a hero, dada, such an example you set us.'
They had once seen Anjali with a doctor in the Ontario General hospital. Sadiq Anwar was a young man with a giveaway beard, and she was having a drink with him at a seedy bar downtown. At that time, Anil had only a nodding acquaintance with Anjali. She was the nurse at the same hospital who had assisted him, had bandaged his head after his fracas with a turbaned Punjabi, the sardarji called Balbir Singh. That fight became a subject of conversation for many years, even after Anil's marriage to Anjali. They always knew he had a temper to watch out for.
'Eliza seems to have been the one girl who never knew of your temper, did she?' Rishi looked down at his drink, and he missed the startled expression on Anil's face. His anger was a later accretion. His bewilderment at the abrupt end of his thesis in Belfast, the suddenness with which he had to apply to a new program at the University of Ontario, transformed into anger only after he understood some things, when news of everything that had happened back home in the war of 1971 seeped in.
A blazing anger, part of which was directed at himself, for his own naivete, for not understanding Professor O'Brien, who had always been a police agent of sorts, had never let him appreciate the people who had still been kind. Dr. Johnson, who wrote to the department in Ontario, recommending him. Mrs. Harris, the secretary, helped him with his papers, and the ticket, and even the other modalities of accommodation, getting a map to help him. But Eliza was all he thought of, and he was dazed by the speed at which things were happening, to him, and everywhere around.
'Dr. Anwar went back to Karachi, didn't he?'
'Did he?' Anil shrugged at Rishi's prodding 'Good riddance then.' He remembered his exchange with the doctor in the hospital parking lot, days after seeing him with Anjali. To Anil, the doctor represented Pakistan, a country he had once belonged to, as his first passport showed. And Anil remembered how angry he had been, how he insisted that the matter of Pakistan's atrocities in the war of 1971 needed to be debated in the United Nations. He spent his allowance getting leaflets printed detailing every crime by Pakistan's military, news he had gathered from radio stations, and the newsletters he received. He addressed gatherings and desi get-togethers, even at temples, and gurudwaras, places he had earlier avoided.
Once he had given free rein to his anger, there was no stopping him. His eyes blazed as he looked at everyone listening to him. He stared back defiant, and unblinking. His voice soared, breaking in just the right places at the right time. The atrocities his country had suffered. First under the British, then by Pakistan. We need the world to know.
His words moved everyone, but not Anjali, the woman he married.
'My father lives in India now,' she had said calmly, stirring in the sugar - two spoons as she remembered by then - in his tea. 'What good will it do to stir up resentment between countries. India and Pakistan are neighbors and there should be peace.'
Anil stared at her in disbelief. How could she just accept things calmly. After all that destruction and damage. So much lost, even the home he and others like him had known once. She giggled on seeing his face, and soon her silly giggling at the wrong moments began to irritate him. She was too frivolous and flippant, incapable of looking at things with a dispassionate righteous anger.
Eliza had never giggled. She had been far too calm.
'I am relieved to get away from there,' Anjali said once.
'But that will always be home, not physically, but in the heart, that is where home is,' he never realized how his voice quivered, how his face had turned red. He pushed away Anjali when she tried to calm him down. He stormed out of the house.
The country, he once read out from one of his pamphlets, was like your mother. It remains so even after we have left for other lands. And we must honor and defend her.
When he spoke like this at the community hall, that was the punchline he used. It left them all crying, weeping on the ends of their saris, and on their kurta sleeves. There was some giggling too, and that just made him angrier. Was there a word he had used improperly, had he made some error?
They came to him then regularly with their stories, the letters and reports they received from home. And they contributed generously to the concert to raise money he organized with Rishi. Shambhu Nath, the sitar player, had played for six whole hours, till two in the morning, and they had raised funds for the 1971 war victims. The plan was to present a cheque to the president of Bangladesh, the world's newest country, when he came on a visit to Canada, or even London. But that never happened. The president was killed, along with most members of his family, and Anil was beside himself with anger.
He never remembered the next few days or weeks. There had been the quarrel with the Pakistani cab drivers at Brampton, and with the sardarji who ran the dhaba on Ontario street. And of course, the bitter exchange with his thesis adviser, Dr. MacDonald.
Anjali sat by his side, holding his hand, stroking his wrist, and told him that he was getting angry with everyone. Unnecessarily so - she stretched that word out, stumbling a bit. Her words made him almost weep, and he stopped himself because he remembered all the other times he had not cried.
Later, after several years, when they hadn't had children - who really had the time for children in a broken world, Anil always thought - Rishi brought the subject up again. 'It must be that you thought of her, of only her,' Rishi jerked his head to the right, to the east where he presumed Belfast was, and looked sadly down at his glass, 'and so you were never happy in your marriage.'
'Who are you to assume this?' By now Anil was so used to being angry that he could summon up this anger every time. Rishi looked dazed, then very apologetic, but Anil had had enough of Rishi's company. Sometimes the man irritated him, though he was the only one he considered a true friend.
It wasn't Eliza, but Eden. He had donated to Eden's charity too, small sums of money, but he had given so much more of his time.
A decade after their marriage, Anjali had first spoken that name - It's Eden! she'd screamed - and stomped out. She stayed at a friend's but returned after some days. It was a game she played. But for all the reasons she could have had for leaving him, the reason she gave this time was the flimsiest. That he was having an affair with Eden Phillips, the American woman who was into Buddhism, sacred chanting, and all kinds of weird things. The woman he had met at her impressive home, when he had accompanied Shambhu Nath who was to give a sitar recital there.
And Eliza, writing to him after many years, did not even mention this, though she knew about his charitable contributions, and praised him for it.
His friendship, and it was just that, with Eden begun innocuously. Anil offered to play the tanpura on one occasion, when the sitarist's usual accompanist was away in Chicago. What impressed Eden, a woman who wore a colorful bindi, and a long flowery gown, its straps thin enough to show up the liver spots on her shoulders, was Anil's response to her question after the performance had ended to a rousing applause: Did the slow churning of the tanpura encourage a retreat into one's mind for the listener?
For Anil, the question made no sense, and yet made perfect sense too. Yes, it assists meditation and all meditative practice. And all activities that require salient communication with the divine.
When Panditji, he gestured towards the sitarist, who too was looking at him fondly, hears the first strains of the tanpura, and Anil ran his fingers over the strings, making the ladies sigh in bliss and lift their heads towards the skylight, he thinks only of this secret communion, and how he must create his music, with this music of the cosmos in the background. This tanpura is the universal sound, it mimics the sound of Om, and the tabla rhythms reflect the music of nature. Nature and space, the things that bind us, and the music that floats over this all.
There had been applause again, almost like the way they had appreciated the sitarist. The three of them on stage - the tabla player, Mahadev was there too - seemed to float on their comfortable rugs, as they basked in this universal admiration. Anil felt light-headed. If the rug could feel, it would turn into a magic carpet and take them away.
That was the beginning of Eden Phillips' long conversations with him. She called later the next evening, and on other days too. Sometimes their conversations stretched far longer, especially when Anjali happened to be on night duty at the hospital.
Anil only had to listen. For she demanded it; there was something very self-absorbed about her that fascinated him.
She talked of her sense of feeling lost in childhood. 'The long empty roads we drove on, the road trips we made as we were dropped off at one grandparents' house or another when our parents left on their missionary trips to Africa. When you talk about experiencing the divine, that it is there everywhere around, that you must recognize the music in yourself, that is indeed what I felt then. The huge sky, the white clouds like... like a soda fountain in heaven, and the red mountains, I can feel the hum of the earth rise in me.'
'Yes, I could tell, Ma'am.'
'Eden, you must call me Eden. It takes us so long to find our own selves. I am so grateful. So grateful to you.'
Next she invited him to give a talk to the ladies on any subject of his choice. Anil prepared for this first lecture carefully. Still, the lecture overshot the time limit, but no one minded. His first lecture, and the others subsequently, was held in the same huge hall owned by the Philips family. It made him more popular than ever before. He spoke on the ancient civilizations of the east built on peace, non-violence, and ahimsa, the absence of any violent thought. This sentiment, he said, moved monks like the Buddha, and monarchs like Ashoka, and why conquerors came and made the land their home, and it took the power of non-violence to make the foreigners leave.
Sometimes you find what you love quite unexpectedly, he wrote, explaining his life to Eliza who had come back into his life suddenly. Sometimes what you love can change your life entirely, and then it becomes a millstone around your neck. Sometimes it's also that love is a duty. You can see I am making things too complicated. Sometimes it's best not to ask too many questions, and just go along with the flow.
Day after day, the ladies listened to him with the same unwavering rapt attention they had shown that first day. It was in the days before social media, before even YouTube, and sometimes he wished there were proper recordings. For he slaved over his lectures, spent sleepless nights over every slide, and in front of the mirror rehearsing over and over again.
His new life wasn't a façade. But it was Anjali's reaction to his obvious joy that was a dampener. She always gave him a moody smile, her lips all pouty, the heavy overdone make-up on her eyes that made her look tired and weepy before she left for her evening shift at the hospital.
But he was glad Anjali didn't know, nor care, about his lectures, about the women who hung onto his every word. All this and other things he didn't want Anjali to know about, not right yet. It was all right for her, and for her ever-sentimental, too-chatty father, to believe that he was just about finishing up his research. In another six months. Towards the end of that time though, he found himself applying for an extension, only to be rejected by the academic committee.
Since you have already used up the two extensions permissible by the committee, we regret to inform you that the committee has decided against any further extension. Your tutor fees will stand, but the financial assistance will be stopped forthwith.
He asked to meet his advisor, Dr. MacDonald, and then, the head of the department. Anil wrote to the bursar, and the registrar, and then the student coordinator as well. It took him a week and more to realize that there was a huge bureaucracy that managed all university affairs, and that, in unison, and in a concerted way, they controlled everyone's lives, and the money. It made him angry, furious. If one of Eden Phillips' friends had not known someone in the academic committee, Anil would never have gotten an extension - a third time - and then the next year, allowed to move to another department on a teaching assistantship. His dependency on the university system and on others made him angrier still.
'Why don't you write a book?' Rishi had advised.
'It's a racket, everything is a racket. Everything is dominated by money. How much you are able to pay into the system, and how much the system is able to fleece you. I would write a book, and who do you think will publish it?'
Anjali changed into a nagging woman, almost overnight. Their quarrels became bitter over weeks, and months. These were the fights the family came to know about, and then the stories of all the other fights emerged.
'We cannot start a family unless you have a proper job,' she told him.
'And didn't you want a family only when we have a bigger house. We have moved once already.'
'I never thought I would be the main breadwinner,' she shot back
'I didn't know you keep a chart of all expenses, who pays what,' he sneered. 'One day I will earn more than you, much more than you can imagine.'
He thumbed his nose at her, and she showed him her tongue. The world, even Eliza, with all her detailed knowledge of his expenses, and contributions, never knew how childish they could be.
But Anjali wasn't one to give up; she was never giving up, he told Rishi, the night before he walked off. And there began the strange arrangement of their married but separate lives, when they did some things together, promised to friends they would get back together, but they were actually happier living apart.
It was her father who had been so keen on the marriage, he wanted to tell Anjali at times. While his own family always believed he had married for the wrong reasons.
Hs younger cousin - now a woman in her thirties - told him why. We never thought you could marry her, even for love. Aunt always said that you had been trapped into marriage. That she found you eligible, and her family did too. You were a prize catch. A good boy from a good family with a promising career. She's not very good-looking, and fat too. That last bit startled him. He had never thought of all this in detail. True, Anjali was plump, when Eliza, the only woman before Anjali he had been acquainted with, had been reed-like thin. His heart caught when he remembered his old fears. That every time a bomb ripped through the streets of Belfast, or if the wind was too strong, she would be picked up, flown miles and miles away, like a paper doll, and that this was indeed what had happened that morning, the last day he had seen her.
Even now his recollections were framed with the thick gusts of black smoke that drifted out everywhere inchoate, and almost volcanic, in that city, that afternoon in July. He had wanted to see Eliza one last time, and so found himself on Verner Street that day. The secretary gave him Eliza's address, after he told her about having to deliver something to Eliza urgently. The old lady had been so kind, and curious. She gave him a packet of mint chocolates for Eliza.
'Just to keep her spirits up, you know.'
It was afternoon, and he had been munching on a wrap when he heard running footsteps behind, and the explosion came the very next moment. A sound so loud it seemed his ears had burst, and then another loud explosion that filled his eyes with water and smoke, that lifted him off his feet and threw to the ground some feet away. He saw a stranger's foot on his half-eaten wrap, its paper covering fluttering, and rolling away, and then crunched under several pairs of feet, people running in every direction, thudding past him, and toward him, people teetering on their feet, people wearing fashionable heels, shoes, oxfords, someone dragging a torn shoe with his foot as he made to catch up, and then as someone held his face down, breathing down hotly into his ear, he saw someone running past, in a pair of black pumps, and she was gone before he could say Eliza. A child running past looked back once and, pointing to him, had told someone, maybe the woman in black pumps, that he was dead.
When he lifted his head, he saw the black heavy wind everywhere, blowing things around. Paper, twigs, and even trashcan lids. From a gap in the road, he had a glimpse of the quay on Lagan river, the vendor stands with their drooping broken umbrellas, and the boat half smashed on the pier. That was why months and years later, he always thought there had been a storm too. A wind that had magnified the effects of the blast. Later in Ontario, he read there had been over twenty bombs in Belfast that afternoon in July. And that woman who had passed him, running for her life, could have been Eliza; but then what about the child who had pointed him out? Maybe she had believed the child's words, even if she had not been Eliza. Maybe a part of him did die then when he never saw Eliza again.
If one has seen death in this totally unexpected, violent way, how could one be so cheerful about it? He could never bring himself to ask this when Eliza came back into his life. Her emails were too cheerful, too all-knowing. He felt she already knew everything he could ask her.
That last day as he stood on Verner Street, outside Eliza's house, he saw the boy he had seen before on the college campus. He was sure it was the same boy who had left the dead cat on the lamppost. As he came up, Anil realized he was really much older, with his blackened teeth and the shifty expression in his eyes, and he smiled chummily at him.
'She won't be coming back, sir.'
'How do you know?'
Anil had been looking up at the window and now, without looking at him, the boy mumbled, 'I know where she is.'
They must have walked for fifteen minutes or more. He led him past the markets of Verner Street, skirting the damaged, potholed streets, the clear warning signs on the walls, the concertina wires behind which policemen idled. They could have been two students walking, their hands clearly visible so as not to arouse suspicion. In one corner, they found three men leaning as they faced a wall, and the policemen - Anil recognized their helmets and knew they were British - barking a series of orders at them. Following the boy, Anil raised his hands as well, and the police pushed them through. He felt the butt of their rifles quick on his shoulder.
In front of a slanting metallic wall at the end of a lane, the boy stopped, looked around, and then turned to the right. There was no gate, but a gap in the metal barricade, and sliding through, they crossed a rubbish strewn lane toward a warehouse. It was a part of the town he hadn't ever been to, and he was curious, and yet thinking ahead to the time he would see Eliza again. He thought over all that he wanted to say how he would watch her face closely those first seconds, for then he would know instantly what she felt about him: if she loved him or not. If she did, and his heart beat heavily at the thought, he would ask her to marry him. Then they could leave Belfast forever.
The bullet that came from a second floor window startled him, but the boy only laughed, holding out his cap, and waving, 'It's only us.' Anil laughed too, wanting to feel extraordinarily brave. But the moment he walked into a quiet room, the menace seeped into him when he saw the overturned chairs, the upturned glasses, the broken windows, the sound of shoes as men with guns entered the room. When one of them pushed him against a wall, placing the end of a gun against his neck, Anil looked around for the boy, his companion. But he had slipped away.
His head caught against a sharp nail, and his chin was raised painfully, and he saw the other men, five or six of them, all armed, near him. He felt their hot meaty breath on his face, and the knife that ran along his sleeves. He heard the slow tearing of his own shirt.
'What do you want with Eliza?'
'I work in the university,' he stuttered, his mouth full of his own saliva, and feeling the dampness all over his stomach, and below.
'You have been looking for something. Where are you from?'
'Pakistan,' he said first. Then he corrected himself, 'Bangla...'
This time he received a painful cuff on the head. 'You make up your mind. Tell us where you are from. India?'
There was another blow to his head, and he knew he had peed then. His legs felt damp, and his socks soggy. He heard someone shouting, 'Don't kill. He's not from here.'
Long minutes later, he found himself on the road outside, and he walked back to the university. He walked slowly with bent head like the men he had seen once, unable to avert his gaze from his damp, foul-smelling shoes. Only a week later, Professor Johnson looked at his bandaged head, and said he was lucky to be alive. He looked at him with clear sympathy in his blue eyes, but Anil felt the old humiliation rising in him. That he had peed in his pants, and how the men had stood around laughing at him. When people said he was such an angry man, he would always remember how his anger had been of little use. How it had deserted him the time he needed it most.
Eliza would never know this bit. Yet he didn't want to lose this person called Eliza who had just sent him another email. She was in trouble, she wrote. Lost her money in London hotel, could he transfer him some money?
I would do anything, he emailed back. We have known each other for so long. Do you remember what happened on Verner Street?
He pressed 'send.' He knew there was every likelihood now that she wouldn't reply. That he would never know if she was dead or alive. That it wasn't her ghost in cyberspace sending him these messages. Sometimes it was best to ask nothing. Yet no one, he thought to himself again, knew as much about him as she did.
There is life after death, that was what he had titled one of his lectures. Not that you become a ghost, but that your presence lingers; the things you believe in, what you might have said, remain. Even the things you wanted to hide away. They have a way of springing forth and popping into our lives. He laughed down at his astounded audience. I can feel all of you shiver. You have no need to be afraid.
And then they all felt it. The invisible presences that crowded this world and live in this world alongside us. All the presences that are ignored.
Anil always knew he would become one of those quiet presences too. That he, his story, would remain of interest. They would see him as a failure at marriage, or a coward, someone with a thesis never complete. After a while, it gets too late to change one's life. Even to unsend an email takes up a lot of time.
Fantastic piece. I loved the place setting, conveying Asia, Britain, Canada, Anil's life sketched in quick strokes, in an economy of words. You've covered a lot of track here in a short piece. The metaphysical musings especially resonated for me.
ReplyDeleteAnd at the end, the reader knows that Eliza's message is most certainly a pitch for fraud, but the protagonist doesn't care. Sometimes we just don't care if the voice is really the other person - our desire makes it real.
Thank you for this lovely story. I will be thinking about it all day. You are a gifted writer.
thank you so very very much. This means a lot to me.
DeleteThis piece brought to mind several friends who are or were international students. The cultural divides…the precariousness…the confusion…the events back home.
ReplyDeletethank you so much; i am glad you understood so much what I was trying to do with this story.
DeleteThis story has moments of expressive language: “Romance, he thought, was like a river in flood that swept past everything, all danger signs, and that was a good thing.” It is also the story of a young man, through middle age, who is eternally outraged and angry and perhaps for good reason. I’ve never lived in a nation that was literally at war with itself, as Bangladesh and N. Ireland were in the 1970s, so I have no first hand point of reference. Anil is unlucky at love, at life, despite an auspicious beginning and the story ends much as it began, with his inveigling by a woman or her surrogates, who now use the internet to misuse him. Anil seems a willing patsy, however, and maybe he enjoys being emotionally extorted. The dialogue is sparse, which runs afoul of one of the undying precepts of creative writing: show, don’t tell. However, the fiction does not suffer for it. Nice job, Adity, your story completely held my interest throughout.
ReplyDeletethis is so incredibly helpful! Thank you, i am truly grateful.
DeleteThe story is fresh, interesting, captivating. I enjoy how you juxtaposed the main character’s difficult past in war-torn India/Pakistan/Bangladesh against the troubles in Ireland in the 1970’s.
ReplyDeleteThe story is mostly summaries and expositions but with so few scenes and sequels.
I encourage you to consider that if you expand out your many summaries and expositions into scenes and sequels - this could easily be a novel.
I suspect the main character has clinical depression - which in men more often expresses as “anger” than “sadness”.
I love the ending where it is obvious, the reader at least, that Eliza is an internet scam.
thank you; your detailed feedback and suggestions are really very helpful. Yes this character has been with me for a while. As an admirer of Alice Munro (still am, despite all the sordid complications) I tried, in some way, to encapsulate an entire life in a few pages. Now, and all thanks to you, I am encouraged to remain with this character a bit longer.
DeleteDo you kindly have an email address, Adam Strassberg?
DeleteDear Adity,
ReplyDeleteI want you know how much sympathy and support you have here in this community. I fully understand that constructive criticism on published work online can be EXCRUCIATING. Especially, when it's unwarranted. You could've alerted journalistic and creative writing contacts you were having a story published here. The fall is hard. Bones break. I pray you find strength and are brave. YOUR STORY IS BEAUTIFUL.
thank you, Anonymous; this is kind of you. I'll really hard not to have my bones broken.
DeleteYes, this short story could easily become a novel. It also reminded me of Alice Munro's work. You covered so much with such an economy of words. I am very impressed. Well done, Anil.
ReplyDeleteHello Adity, please excuse my last comment where I called you Anil. Clearly, I was so taken with the story that I mixed up your names. Best, Roz
Deletethank you, Rozanne. I really appreciate all that you said.
Delete