Seahorse (32 page)

“You start out reading about the genesis of the bodhisattva ideal, and end up intrigued by hagiographic literature…”

“Who is he?” Should I be jealous, I added in jest.

Ananda was the Buddha's faithful servant and inseparable companion. A most devout and beloved attendant.

“What scholars find puzzling is his apparent absence within the framework of Gandharan narrative art. He was important to the Teacher… so it's hard to believe he'd be wilfully ignored, or anonymous in a crowd.”

Was there much known about him, I asked?

“Buddhist texts offer accounts of their relationship, strange and non-linear as they may be. He was quite an odd figure… sharing this close yet awkward relationship with his master. Despite his devotion, he wasn't a particularly good disciple. He was weak and wavering, slave to his baser nature, persistently giving in to his passions…”

“Why did he choose him then?” I asked. “The Buddha, I mean… why did he choose Ananda?”

Nicholas' eyes were the color of stillness, between water and mist. “Because he was human.”

I sipped my drink. The smoky malt filling me with the scent of forests and pine.

“Ananda also knew the dharma best, even if he hadn't reached a state of
arhat…
worthiness or perfection… like the other monks. He alone is credited with hearing Buddha's enunciation of the Doctrine in its entirety: Ananda represents his historical memory.”

Seems a bit nasty then, I said, to exclude him from the visual narrative of the Buddha's life.

“Precisely… which is why I don't think that's the case. It's more likely that a criterion of transcodification was used that's now no longer recognizable.”

“That makes sense.”

“Don't you think? Now if only my supervisors were that easily convinced.”

“Perhaps, like me, they have no idea what transco-di-si-cation means.”

He laughed. “I could explain… but only if you're truly interest-ed…”

“Tell me…”

What I didn't mention was how this was spurred not by an incipient interest in Gandharan art, but that lately, for me, everything we shared was tinged with a current of urgency. I'd be gone a month, and although I'd return in early July, it seemed endless. Someday, Nicholas too would leave. When, I wasn't exactly sure. I wanted and didn't ever want to know. On the rare occasion I asked, he'd say, mysteriously, that he was staying in Delhi forever. Or melodramatically, that the city had captured his heart. If I persisted, he'd turn impatient. He could be mercurial, quick to anger.

And I? I was uncertain how much time we could claim together, a month or an eternity. Everything I could carry and cherish, every piece of him, his life, must be gathered now.

Later, in the study, as he talked of the elusive Ananda, I remember—not the academic details—but the way his fingers leafed through pages. How a terse line ran along his cheek, down to his mouth. And his hair, dark as a gathering storm.

“Here,” he exclaimed, holding a book open. “Vajrapani… Bearer of the thunderbolt sceptre… the Buddha's devoted acolyte. Vajrapani is Ananda. A suffering hero, who through his labors, like Hercules, transfigures himself. Remarkable, isn't it?”

Ananda artworks, he believed, were littered all over; the British Museum, Delhi's National Museum, and further away in Chandigarh. That's why he was here.

In time, all was revealed.

It might have been that night or another, lying half-awake, half-dreaming, when I asked him again about Ananda. Did he gain
arhat
?
Did he finally become worthy?

Nicholas was on his back, bare to the soft swirl of air from the fan. He tilted his head, his chin resting on my shoulder, speaking softly, murmuring like a stream. “After the Buddha's death, the monks gathered to listen to him share the Doctrine… but they thought his narrative faulty, full of omissions. The sole, incompetent heir of the master's words was forced to measure his inferiority in their presence, and they say this burning humiliation pushed him to conquer the
arhat
state. He was greatly tormented… in immense pain, and finally overcome by exhaustion, he fell asleep.”

Nicholas placed a palm on my thigh. Unmoving.

His hand trailed up, across my chest, the dip of my neck, my cheek.

“One of few instances… if not the only… where an awakening happens during sleep.”

I felt his mouth on mine, at the base of my throat.

My breath was short, barely enough to whisper, “When will you leave?”

“Didn't I tell you… I'm staying forever.”

The first night Philip was in hospital, Myra and I sat up in the letter room almost until dawn. Elliot was upstairs, sleeping; I presumed Myra didn't wish to be alone. Although in all honesty, I had little inclination to be on my own in the loft—either staring at those rectangles of blackness on the ceiling, or looking out the window at another, darkened now, no longer framing a familiar profile. So we lit the fire, as we did a few nights ago, even though it seemed more distant than ever, sat on the sofa, and cradled our drinks. Tea for her, neat Lochnagar for me.

For long spells, we didn't speak.

My gaze fell emptily on things, the upright Bechstein piano, the sturdy curves of a Georgian wing chair by the hearth, the long, pale fall
of floral curtains, undrawn, unable to keep out the night. Here too, as in the larger drawing room, few photographs or intimate memorabilia adorned the mantelpiece. Only a triptych painting, large, and taking up most of the wall opposite us. How did I not notice it the other evening? Perhaps I was occupied with board games, food, wine, and happiness. Some art can only be witnessed when you are bereft.

At first, it looked like an abstract collage of colors, skillful, unfigurative, yet the more I gazed and followed the lines, the more they seemed to swirl into shape. I could discern a figure, up close, painted from the neck down to just below the waist, hands held out and up, as though trying to push through the canvas.

My hands, I noticed, hadn't quite stopped trembling.

Myra pulled her woollen shawl closer, and leaned back, tilting her face up to the blank ceiling. Finally, she said, “How do you think it feels?”

I had no answer.

“Isn't it strange,” she continued slowly, “that there's no way of imagining unconsciousness that distinguishes it from a blank in the memory…”

An irreconcilable imbalance.

“There's light and darkness… a contrastive definition that's justifiable since we have experience of both… but with this…” With consciousness and unconsciousness the experience is inevitably, perpetually one-sided.

“Descartes said when we sleep, the soul withdraws from the body.”

“Then where is it now?” She looked at me; I couldn't hold her gaze. “And if… and when… he is back, will be remember? Will he have memory? Is consciousness itself possible without memory?”

She stood up and approached the fire, holding out her hands to the warmth.

“I read this strange story once, about a French footballer who was given anesthetic that should have knocked him out for a few hours…
and thirty years later, he's never awoken. He doesn't change, he doesn't age… his wife still looks after him, in a house she named
Mas du bel athléte dormant…
the House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete…”

I placed my glass, empty, on the side table. “Myra, there's little chance of that happening. The doctor said your father is physically strong…”

“For his age,” she completed.

“For his age,” I repeated, moving closer to her. The smell of the hospital still clung to her clothes, her hair. The sharp, nauseating smell of disinfectant. I placed my hands on her shoulders, slight under her jumper.

“He will wake up.”

But something in my voice betrayed me. Perhaps it was the memory of that afternoon, played out before us as something altogether distant, a series of events removed by a thin veil of disbelief.

“What does that mean?” Myra had asked.

A ruptured blood vessel, he explained, in the space between the skull and the brain.

And so we had waited, outside closed doors, within pristine white corridors, with figures in light blue gowns gliding around silently as angels. It was, in a way, a church, where confessions spilled behind doors, where there was a steady plunging into secrets—held aloft like birds and stabbed with needles.

Nothing here was delicate anymore.

Was it like this with Lenny?

Did they also rush him to the hospital? Was it already too late? Had he fallen asleep in his bed and never woken up? I remembered my dream, suddenly certain it was a premonition. That somehow, it had been a warning of this eventuality. Sitting on a bench, clutching a paper cup of cold, insipid tea, it wore off—the shock of the chase, the ride, the fall—and the words pierced me, sharp and steely as the silver instruments I'd seen on trays and trolleys.

It was my fault.

We left the hospital sometime after seven, after the surgeon in-formed us the operation had been carried out as best they could. For now, it might be better for us to wait at home. The patient was in a medically induced coma. If the swelling reduced by morning, they'd decide how to proceed.

“Doctor…” Myra had that look on her face again, firm, resilient, “what should we be prepared for?”

In a diplomatic turn of phrase, clinical as our surroundings, he replied that her father was physically strong… for his age. That the situation would look more promising if he pulled through these early days.

All the way back to Wintervale, I waited for Myra to question me on what had happened. Instead she switched on the radio, catching, mid-way, the shipping forecast. She left it on, the nightly litany of the sea, and the forecaster's slow, methodical delivery filled the silence, soothing and hypnotic.
Tyne… Slight or moderate, becoming slight… Fisher… Variable, becoming mainly southwest… Thames… Variable 3 or 4… Sole… Easterly 3 or 4. Moderate. Fair… Shannon… Moderate, occasionally poor in northwest. Fog patches in southeast… Malin… Hebrides… Bailey… Faeroes…

When it ended, the news began on the hour. Headlines intent on the recent floods. The newsreader's calm, clipped voice of emergency.

“The paramedic spoke to me earlier,” said Myra. Her father had regained consciousness, for a short while, in the ambulance, on their way to the hospital. He was disoriented, muttering repeatedly…

“What did he say?”

“I've often told him to be careful with General… that he was a good horse but with a nervous disposition. At first, we tried to train him to jump ditches at home… you know, with poles and black bin sacks, or have him graze near one, but it didn't help, and eventually we gave up…”

I repeated my question, gently.

She kept her eyes on the road. “He kept saying, I knew this would
happen…” she added, “Like it was some kind of prophecy.”

The next day, I stayed behind at Wintervale.

Myra said she'd call, from the hospital—“If anything happened”—but for now she'd prefer I kept Elliot company at home.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, slipping on her tweed coat, adjusting her beret.

At the door, I stopped her, my hand on her arm, but the words faded in my throat. “Drive safe.”

All morning, we lingered in the letter room, Elliot and I. He stayed well away from the piano, squatting instead on the floor, which he littered with paper and broken crayons.

“Where's Mummy?” he asked once, lifting his head, and looking around as though she might suddenly materialize.

“She's visiting your grandpa… he's hurt, remember? He's in hospital.”

“Oh.” He stooped back to his drawing, then sat up again. “Will he be alright?”

“I don't—yes… he will be alright.”

And, for him, the world slipped back into place.

I was in the wing-back chair by the window, attempting, pretending to work on my article for Nithi. Watching the rain strike the glass with a quiet and relentless fury.