Children’s faces bloomed at different heights in a doorway hung with a flowered curtain. Tom smiled at a stumpy tot with plaited hair, who burst into tears. ‘Take no notice,’ said Eileen. ‘That one is needing two tight slaps.’
A girl entered the room bearing a tray of tumblers in which a bilious green drink was fizzing. It dawned on Tom that his cousins were teetotallers.
Cedric held an obscure clerical post in a Catholic charity. Before her marriage, Eileen had worked as a stenographer. They had applied to immigrate to the States, Canada and Australia, and been rejected on every occasion. There remained New Zealand, and what could be salvaged of hope.
Eileen summoned her eldest son: ‘Show Tommy Uncle your school report.’ On a settee covered in hard red rexine, Tom read of proficiency at chemistry and mathematics. A boy with fanned lashes stood beside him, breathing through his mouth. ‘He is pestering us all the time for a computer.’
The scent of India, excrement and spices, billowed through the house. On a radio somewhere close at hand, a crooner was singing ‘Whispering Hope’. A ziggurat of green oranges glided past, inches from the barred window. The walls of the room were washed blue, of the shade the Virgin wore in heaven.
Eileen brought out a heavy album with brass studs along the spine. From its matt black pages de Souzas gazed out unsmiling, each new generation less plausibly European.
On his return to Australia, Tom struggled to find a rhetoric suited to the episode. When Karen had travelled with him through India on their honeymoon, she had made up her mind to be charmed by everything she saw. It was an admirable resolution and she kept it, heat, swindles, belligerent monkeys, spectacular diarrhoea and headlines reporting communal murder notwithstanding; her tenacity boosted by air-conditioned hotels and sandals of German manufacture.
Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual
.
From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and flagrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed
superstitious nonsense
into
luminous grace
.
Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all. And then, there was the global nation: the India of the IT boom, the pavement-vendor of okra with his cell phone clamped to his ear, the foreign-returned graduates climbing the executive ladder at McKinsey or Merrill Lynch, the street children enthralled by Bart Simpson in a store window, the call centre workers parroting the idioms of Sydney or Swindon. The energetic, perilous glamour of technology and capital: spiritual India, existing outside history, was disallowed that, too.
Faced with Karen’s curiosity about his cousins, Tom thought of Cedric’s eyes travelling in opposite directions behind heavy-rimmed spectacles; of the way Eileen’s hand flew to cover the deficiencies in her smile. In India bodies were historic, tissue and bone still testifying to chance and time.
In the former French quarter of Pondicherry, Tamil gendarmes in scarlet peaked caps strolled the calm boulevards; bougainvillea stained colonial stucco turmeric, saffron, chilli. At sunrise, managerial Indians jogged the length of the seafront, where the waves were restrained by a decaying wall. The wines of Burgundy were served in the dining room at Tom’s hotel. The maître d’, who bore an unnerving resemblance to Baroness Thatcher, had once been a waiter at the Tour d’Argent. At mealtimes he was to be found surveying his domain with a cramped countenance. The table napkins, although freshly starched and mitred, were always limp from the heat. It is not the absence of an ideal that produces despair, thought Tom, but its approximation.
Eileen lived in a street of stalls and small, open-fronted shops on the wrong side of Pondi’s canal; the Indian side, the
ville noire
, encrusted with time and filth. A crow picked at something in the gutter by her door. Tom feared it was a kitten.
In Australia, separated from his wife by a length of Tasmanian oak, the racket and reek of the bazaar returned keenly to him. Eileen’s azure room was oppressive with calculation and yearning. Children were its familiars. It held fleeting, unique lives. Tom could not find a way to convert these things into narrative. The dailiness of India was too much with him.
Yet his wife required an anecdote. He spoke of the bureaucratic pettifogging that dogged his cousins, of immigration officials who didn’t have a clue; thus engaging Karen’s sympathy and deflecting her attention. She was given to causes, her imagination too broadly netted for the merely individual.
Tom had taken his camera with him when he visited Eileen. He came home one evening with packets of newly processed film to find Karen drinking wine with a colleague. The two women sifted through his photos of Pondicherry, exclaiming over flame-coloured blossom arched above a pair of rickshaws, and a brass-belled cow grazing in front of a bicycle-repair shop painted sugar-almond pink. They loved India, they agreed.
Eileen and Cedric sat side by side, posed on red rexine.
Tom recalled what he had noticed when taking the picture: that being photographed was not a casual affair for his cousins. The flash found them smiling and attentive. Their image would circulate where they could not. It was not something to be yielded lightly.
Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Well, the whole Christian thing—it’s not like it belongs in India.’
The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, floated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.
Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that floated and gleamed.
In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.
His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.
He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.
Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.
Whenever he thought of the waiting going on around the globe, Tom was afraid. He feared that the ground of his life would give way; that he would fall into a room where, powerless as a figurine, he would have nothing to do but wait. Transformed into a human commodity, he would find himself competing with thousands of identical products, all waiting to be chosen. It was an irrational, potent dread. It had visited Tom, assuming one shape, now another, for years. It whispered of the life led by millions, a phantom life characterised by stasis and the dull absence of hope; an unmodern life, where the best that could be expected of the future was that it be no worse than the past.
Of late, its mutter had grown louder. Tom knew that this crescendo was bound up with his mother. As Iris’s body failed, he felt her claim on him grow forceful. He felt the proximity of history. The present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming it, and rejecting what remains. But Tom could remember the aromatic streets of his childhood, where faeces, animal and human, lingered on display. The past waited too: odorous, unhygienic, surplus; refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.
Eileen and Cedric still lived on the black side of the canal,
New Zealand having deemed superfluous such talents as they possessed.
But recently their son had won a scholarship to a midwestern college. Tom pictured him in a laboratory, calibrating instruments; on a sidewalk, astonished by snow.
Realism argued that the scholar would in time buy a Lexus and alter his idiom; would transfer money telegraphically, and put off lifting a phone to hear of a sister’s disappointments, a parent’s decline.
Yet it was apparent to Tom that people, like nations, grew stunted on a diet of realism alone. To soar it was necessary to imagine the transcendent case.
Arthur Loxley, pinkly moist in the tropics, spoke often of the cold. He described childhood winters: his eerie morning face in the basin’s ice mirror; a flaw that opened under his skates on a frozen pond and raced, a flame along a lit fuse, towards the shore.
It was talk that horrified his wife. As a bride, Iris’s great-grandmother had visited Lisbon in January. The sky was blue enamel, mosaic pavements sparkled in the sun. On her ninety-sixth birthday Henrietta de Souza was still reliving the deception she had experienced on drawing off a glove and holding out her hand to a slanted ray. ‘The sun was cold!’ the old lady declared in cracked, imperious tones, and thumped her stick on a tile painted with a spouting whale. ‘The sun was cold!’
That unnatural reversal worked powerfully on her Iris’s imagination. The European Winter: she pictured it as a beast.
It lay open-mawed across the jewelled cavern of London, daring her to pass. In Lawrence Fitch’s embrace, envisaging her English future as wavelets travelled from her thighs to her throat, she saw herself the plaything of icy paws; and shuddered, so that the captain, finding her name circulating with the port and himself the object of regimental envy, felt justi-fied in referring to her as a ravishing little trollop.
When the earth cracked open in pre-monsoonal heat, Arthur evoked the geometric precision of snowflakes. Fanning himself with a newspaper, he spoke of wind-whipped sleet, and the brown slush on Coventry pavements. He described the sensation of grasping iron chains in a frozen playground, and how to fashion a man from snow.
He held his son entranced with tales of icy queens, and wolves howling through black, leafless woods. There was a story about a ship manned by wraiths that might be glimpsed in Arctic latitudes, hoar-frost diamonds in its rigging. A bookseller’s warren yielded a musty yellow volume written by a Dane; and a five-year-old who had never known cold shed warm tears at the plight of a small girl freezing with her tray of matches.
Tom tilted a glass of whisky, the better to observe the melting of icebergs.
In time he had encountered theories of cultural identity and discovered that his childhood had been deficient in reading that reflected the world around him. The argument had its force; and was, like all orthodoxies, blind in one eye. It viewed Arthur’s stories as nostalgic exercises in the colonial project of ignoring what was indigenous and vital in favour of alien constructions.
Tom saw the thing as more intricate, and himself as happy to have experienced, when young, the empire of imagination. Stories with Indian backdrops offered the pleasure of recognition. Those that brought outlandish elements into play posed India as one reality among many.
It was precisely the disjunction between Arthur’s anecdotes and the scenes unfolding before his eyes that had fascinated Tom as a boy. He was stirred by a tale of alpine snows as a northern child might quicken to palm-fringed lagoons: each thrilling to wonders that existed beyond the rim of perception.
The most blatantly trumped-up tale captured Arthur’s sympathy, so that swindlers of every stripe sought him out with stories of widowed mothers or failsafe investments. A lean, ageless individual who went by the name of Perry once laid siege to him for a month with whisky and sagas of the Brazilian interior; at the end of which time Arthur agreed to relieve him of three uncut diamonds he claimed to have wrested at knifepoint from a dishonest
garimpeiro
. The contract had been sealed with a fresh bottle when Perry’s angry blue eyes filled with tears. ‘You have driven me to honesty,’ he announced, and blew his nose violently. He reached for the soft leather pouch containing the pebbles and flung it over his shoulder into a bed of shocking-pink anthuriums.
The incident made its way back to Iris, who placed herself in her husband’s path with her hands on her hips. ‘I told you about that Perry,’ she began, her voice ominously even. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him, large as life and twice as ugly, didn’t I tell you, Here is a humbug?’
It was true. Even Tom, then aged eight, had been struck by the unreliability of Perry: flagrant in every facet of the man, from his winking tiepin to his golden-cornered smile. Perry’s Pebbles: it became family shorthand for the preposterous; for a tale too good to be true.
Arthur had been dead a decade when an exchange occurred that cast the episode forever in a different light. Seeking to amuse a girl he was involved with, Tom had set about skewering a bombastic acquaintance.
Lizzie said abruptly, ‘For Christ’s sake.’ She broke off whatever task engaged her, and turned to face him. ‘There are alternatives to seeing through people.’
‘Why don’t you run them past me.’ (Startled, but not out of irony.)
The girl opened and closed one hand. It was a gesture already familiar to Tom, signifying exasperation. She said, ‘Try seeing into them. That’d be a start.’
Lizzie proved transient. But the rebuke lodged in Tom. He thought of Perry, with his glinting, ready smile. Arthur had seen honesty in the man; and his son realised, with a little stab of surprise, that it was Arthur, after all, who had been right.