Seahorse (15 page)

In Bloomsbury, I walked past the spectre of Senate House, its bold Art Deco lines towering against the grey clouds, and entered the museum via the back entrance, off Montague Place. Through the spacious Wellcome Trust room and into the Great Court with its high vaulted glass ceiling, soaring above me like a stupendous sky. The section I sought lay beyond the Egyptian and Middle East galleries. Room 14,
or “Greek Vases”, was wedged between “Athens and Lycia” and “Greece 1050–520 BC”, smaller than the others, less crowded. Sparsely furnished apart from tall glass cabinets lining the walls.

I wandered around; uncertain now what I was doing there, or looking for. On the shelves, neatly arranged, edge to edge, were rows of urns, distinct in their black and golden-red colorings, astonishingly fresh and intact.

Impossible to imagine they were a few thousand years old.

There, on a deep, wide
krater,
a depiction of the return of Odysseus, slaying Penelope's suitors. On a glistening rotund amphora, whose handles were shaped as graceful snakes, a ribbon of carousing clay-red figures, holding horns and flowers. Another more slender pitcher with a cup holder at the tip of its neck, showed Poseidon pursuing Amymone. Both kept apart by long mended cracks running along the side. I couldn't remember the word for it… the art of repairing pottery… and understanding that the piece was more beautiful for having been broken.

Studiously, I inspected the vases, moving from one to another.

Yet even after I found it, I was still unsure.

No doubt, the urn was exquisite. A robed Helios perched on a carriage, rising across the curve, his head haloed by the sun, pulled by a quartet of winged horses. There was movement, and lively color, the figures and motifs glazed in a bright burnish against shiny black.

But it told me nothing.

I'd suspected Nicholas wasn't being literal in his note.

I had the strongest feeling he was giving me a clue. I simply wasn't sure what it was meant to lead to, or whether as in some bizarre treasure hunt, they were placed in a sequence. Something, I was certain, was missing. I was peering through a peephole, oblivious to a picture, vaster and more complete beyond me.

Yet wasn't that how it had always been?

With Nicholas. With anything to do with Nicholas.

I could lift moments from my life, hold them, study them closely like rare jewels, and then put them away still wracked with incomprehension.

It could be consumptive. I'd spend hours searching for his name on the Internet. Finding snippets. Fallen crumbs. He'd frequently been a visiting fellow in Turin, an assistant lecturer for a short stint in New York, a talk, a few years ago, at the Asian Institute in Venice. Conferences in Chicago, Brussels. Now that I was searching, I found traces of him everywhere. Currently, he was teaching at a university in a town by the sea. An hour away from London. It was easy, so utterly tantalisingly easy to reach.

A quick ticket, a step into the train. A short, swift journey.

He had never been closer.

One evening, Santanu, Yara, and I watched a play.

If that's what it could be called. For Beckett's
Acte sans paroles I
was just that—a mime. An act without words. We strayed far beyond our usual central London comfort zones. Yara, who preferred, as she said, life on the fringes of the city, knew of this theatre in the suburbs, in the far south-east, in a neighborhood below the deep bend of the Thames.

“Do we need a visa?” teased Santanu, as we rattled there, first on a train from King's Cross to London Bridge—swarming with commuters—and then changed to another bound for Deptford. She chose to reply by prodding him in the stomach.

They'd grown comfortable with each other since they'd met at Eva's, it was easy to tell. How she relaxed against his arm in the carriage, how he placed his hand lightly on hers as they alighted and disembarked. We'd discussed it, of course, Eva and I, but when we asked Santanu, he'd say cryptically that “things were proceeding as they were.”

“He's infuriating,” complained Eva, keen to sweep up credit for having made the introductions, and I agreed too, if only because it was quite flagrantly obvious. When Yara was around, he followed her—not literally, of course—with all the sense of her being there. Aware of her presence, I could see, as a cold traveler of a fire.

So when we stepped out into Deptford High Street, I was unsurprised to see them linking hands, their fingers intertwining in familiar nonchalance. The road was strewn with a hearty ethnic jumble—a Euro-Afro fusion kitchen, Chinese supermarket, Vietnamese restaurant, Halal butchers—and by the time we arrived, the theatre seemed anomalously brown-bricked and quiet. We had a quick drink at the bar, and then moved into the darkened confines of the auditorium.

The stage was bare.

There are few works that stay with me this long. Cavafy's
Ithaca,
Chopin's Nocturne in F major, Hariprasad Chaurasia performing at Music in the Park, Kieslowski's short film about love, Pessoa's
Book of Disquiet. I
suppose the greatest works of performance art become everyone's stories.

It was brief. Pithy. A mere forty minutes.

A person stuck on stage. With clearly no exit. Gifted things, a pair of scissors, a length of rope, cubes of varying sizes, a palm tree. And also things that were taken away. A carafe of water, suspended perpetually out of his reach.

When it ended, the actor stood on a bare stage looking at his hands.

Santanu and Yara discussed it on our way back on the train, quieter now at past eleven.

“It's a behaviourist experiment,” he said. “Within a classical myth… you know, what was his name… Tantalus, who stood in a pool of water, which receded when he bent to drink it, and under a fruit tree, which raised its branches every time he reached for food.”

“But Tantalus was punished for a reason,” said Yara. “Didn't he steal the elixir of the gods, or something? Here, it's not certain the person is being punished for a crime… other than that of existing in the first place.”

We'd almost reached London Bridge—from where I'd walk home, and they'd continue elsewhere, together. I thought it more appropriate to make an excuse not to join them.

“And what did you think?” she asked, turning to me.

I shrugged. “It could be a parable.”

“Of?”

“Of resignation. One disappointment after another, but yet never learning to stop. Or… it could be, at the end, a small victory… a conscious decision to disobey. Ironically… the protagonist is most active when inert. That's when life acquires meaning.”

And that, I decided, was the best way to deal with Nicholas. To do nothing.

Instead, I allowed myself to be courted by the city.

I was here for less than a year; it would serve me well to make the most of it. No one, I was adamant, not even Nicholas, could pilfer that from me. This would not be a repetition of Delhi, of that final year at university, when even a sighting of the Ridge from across the college lawn engendered despair. A loss made munificent, more wretched, by being in a place that reminded me, almost constantly, of him. They had once held his presence—the café and senior common room, the shade of the peepal tree, the corridors and forest pathways—and then they didn't. I'd venture often, all resolutions forsaken, past the bungalow on Rajpur Road but it stayed empty; Malini's parents, at least while I was there, did not return. How the pith of those months was a famished longing.

With a fervor, I stomped around, as Eva prefixed it, the “recently fashionable” East End. Not so much for the restaurants and bars in the area—transformed in the last few years from poverty-stricken to gritty, grimy chic—but its liveliness. What Yara said was true; the edges of the city didn't contain the sweet, despairing benignity of places like Bloomsbury and Hampstead, the ostentatious luxury of Kensington and Mayfair, the bourgeois smugness of Richmond. I'd walk from Bethnal Green to Aldgate, and pass seedy balti houses and Sylheti sweet shops, a crumbling mosque, and Huguenot silk stores. I sensed, in the air, the raggedness of Delhi. In the city I'd left behind, waves of history remained as fissures, between buildings and street names, foodstuff and clusters of communities. Here too were invisible fractures, somehow miraculously woven into a human lattice, what a poet called his “giant tempered cloth.” People who moved as the birds, across seas and continents. Like the artist who created the fiberglass tree.

There was also adventure close to home.

Once, as I was leaving my front door, I heard the sound of bells.

On an impulse, I crossed the road, and turned into the yellow-stone gateway to the church, topped with a trio of grisly stone-carved skulls. It opened into a small, paved garden with a magnolia tree, drooping with blossoms, and tilting grey tombstones. At the back rested a three-tiered chapel, joined to a square stone and brick tower—“damaged by bombs during the Great War in 1941 and restored in the 1950s.”

The church was open but empty, its medieval wooden ceiling rising in an intricate pattern of beams and cross-beams. Pews scattered with hymn books and liturgy, waited in silent, expectant rows. Ceramic saints perched on tall stands with pools of wax at their feet. Behind the altar, a large, ornate window carried a portrait of Christ, oddly similar to the picture hanging above the fireplace in my parents' drawing room—haloed head, pierced palms, and burning sacred heart. I walked around the edges, deciphering the stories on stained-glass windows—
the Annunciation and Last Supper, Jesus at various stages of condemnation and resurrection. On my way out, I almost missed it, hunkering heavily in the shadows, a confession booth of dark wood, elaborately carved around the top and across the plinth. More ornate than the one I was lead to as a child.

Thinking of it now, it was the stuff of nightmares.

I recall my fear in surprising clarity: the cavernous space of our town cathedral, incense-laced, sprinkled with the knuckled fury of praying faithful. That disembodied voice, a hidden priest, floating through the wooden panel.
Through the ministry of the Church, I grant you pardon and absolution for your sin.
And worst, as I grew older, the fact that I wasn't sure which “sins” I should confess. Often, I made them up—a fight, a rude reply, a lie to my History teacher—and embellished them with detail. The same sins, reshuffled and reimagined. Clutching secretly to the ones I didn't mention. My thoughts, my encounters. The things we did, my classmate and I, in nooks and crannies around school. The boy in math tuition. A girl, my sister's friend, who teased and tempted.

So when I was made to repent, to say prayers in succession, muttered quickly back at the pews, I'd always add an extra Hail Mary or Lord's Prayer. Just in case.

My pietical visits grew less frequent, stopping entirely when I moved to Delhi. Nicholas said he found my Catholic upbringing charming—I was destined to live a life joyfully burdened by guilt. Unless…

“Unless what?”

I could be converted to a new faith entirely.

And he'd add something ridiculous: “Come here… let me baptise you.”

I smile still when I remember that.

Around me the church lay quiet and empty. No one there to see me creep inside the booth. It was smaller than I remembered, the dark and cloistered interior separated from the world by an intricate filigreed
screen. And smelled of damp and faded incense, the sweet, bitter scent of reproach.
Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

Sometimes, even if there was a listener, there could be no catharsis.

When I stepped outside the church, the bells had stopped ringing and the evening restored to stillness. At the foot of the tower, near the door, stood a young girl, with a sheet of golden hair, wearing a floral skirt and green cardigan.

“Hello.” She smiled. She was pretty, younger than twenty, bringing with her all the freshness of the English countryside.

“Are you here for the bell ringers class?”