Seahorse Page 13

  I was about to protest when she added, “Especially since I think there’ll no longer be a need for magpies.”

  Avian or not, this was the closest she’d come to talking with me about her relationship with Stefan. Aided, perhaps, by the mingling of a multitude of beverages through the evening, but also something I hadn’t noticed before. A quiet sadness. What, I asked cautiously, did she mean?

  “It’s hard to imagine sometimes, but it wasn’t always this way… Stefan and I lived in London… we were happy.” She said it simply, as though there was nothing else to add, that the word, by itself, contained everything. “Then he lost his job, and after ages found this one. A six-month contract to begin with… which seemed like nothing, really. Then, it was extended. And again. And yet again. He was meant to be back end of this year, but a few months ago, he called… and it was the same old story… He said he knew this wasn’t what we wanted or planned, but with things being the way they are… and we’re talking about jobs in journalism here… he felt he had little choice. Except it means he’ll be away six more months. People wonder why I don’t move to Beirut, but how can we plan such things when our lives move in half-yearly instalments like some sort of terrible repayment plan?”

  “Would you like to move to Beirut?”

  She shrugged. “I liked visiting the city… I don’t know. My life is here.”

  “And his?” I asked.

  “Here… or at least it used to be. Now… and it’s understandable… I’m not so sure.” The glass she held was empty, but she hadn’t noticed. “Before he left the first time, he promised to send me a reminder each week, to mark the passing of time…”

  I said I’d seen the lilies; they were beautiful.

  “It was romantic, at first, even exhilarating… now they feel like a notch on a prison wall.”

  I struggled, and failed, to find appropriate words. Did this call for anger? Or commiseration? I know what it feels like to be left behind.

  “I imagine,” I said feebly, “it isn’t easy.”

  “No,” she said, staring hard at the floor. “But not for the reasons you imagine…”

  In a moment, like a trick of light, her face had rearranged. Banished, that quiet sadness. Replaced by something more circumspect. She stood up briskly, as though that space, the chair, was tainted, and moved to the window. In her green dress, she looked like a slender leaf. She spoke softly, almost to herself.

  “Not only for the reasons you imagine…”

  “Is there something else?” I couldn’t bring myself to say “someone.”

  I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was small and tense. “I don’t know…” Then she turned, suddenly vehement, “No, to think that is to demean it…”

  She paced the length of my studio; she hadn’t far to cover. “How hard I tried, Nem… I avoided them all, those casual meetings… you know, to invert a Japanese proverb, burn your house to rid it of mice… careful not to place myself in situations where… well… things may happen…” She stopped and laughed. “At one point, I even turned down drinks with Santanu.”

  In my mind, I tried to discern a face, who it was that she could have met, but it remained misted.

  “I stayed home on weekends, on holidays when I couldn’t travel to see Stefan… I didn’t meet friends… well, by the end I didn’t have that many to meet. Who’d want to be around a moper? Talking incessantly about someone who wasn’t even there. I ended up working hours overtime, just to keep myself busy, but fortunately that’s when Tamsin joined us…”

  She glanced at me, as though to gauge how I’d react to the mention of her name.

  London can be the world’s loneliest city.

  Eva sat back down; her face pale with tiredness.

  This time, I reached out, and placed my hand on her shoulder, lightly.

  She turned to me, “Nem, I don’t know if–”

  “There’s no need to explain…”

  Her eyes held everything.

  After she left, I sat at the table, in the sudden strange emptiness of the room.

  All that remained was the faintest trace of her perfume. It was late, but sleep was more distant than dawn. I poured the rest of the wine into my glass, filling it uncouthly to the brim. Leaning back in my chair, I allowed the silence to quiet me.

  She’d used the word close. Close. Suspended between us like a snowflake, vapourising without further explanation. Now it lay in my hands, entirely pliable.

  Tamsin would visit often, she’d said. Spend long evenings at her flat, where they’d grow sated on botched homemade sushi and sake and laughter. Sometimes, it would get too late for her to travel back to her shared apartment in Tuffnell Park. They’d watch movies, stay up late, and talk. “It just seemed,” she said, “so… uncomplicated.”

  My imaginings were shaped by memory, a night long ago, a party when I was in university. Or had it been a dream? A lamp-lit room. A small window. Two figures on the bed. Fingers swirling over skin and clothes. Slow, delicate circles. Fiercely interlaced. A slight tilt of the head. A dip closer. The taste of menthol and longing.

  There’s no beginning and there is no end.

  Perhaps it had also been that seamless for Tamsin and Eva.

  Their touch, time after time, over weeks and months, turning shield and saviour against the world.

  “Have you ever…”

  “No,” she’d flushed.

  For both, she’d said quietly, it was something new.

  “What about…”

  “Stefan?” A prolonged silence. Sudden sharp resentment. That, didn’t I see, if it wasn’t for him, it wouldn’t be… like this.

  I know what it feels like to be left behind.

  And as I walked her downstairs, to her waiting taxi, a last burst of incredulity. “It is impossible.”

  To truly map ourselves. To fully navigate the rooms we carve in our hearts.

  I could now feel the press of tiredness mingled with a strange empty desire.

  I thought of the Nepalese artist. His seashell skin. Weightless as a leaf. I wanted him to hold me as he did when he fell asleep.

  Of Nicholas. His kiss like an ocean. The smell I could not name. I wanted to lie with someone beside me. Pluck them out of my memory, and arrange them here, whole. Why couldn’t we do so when we carried everyone within ourselves? I looked around the studio; struck by its blankness. How could it be so physically bereft of its own past? I held the jade figurine, suddenly wishing to fling it against the wall, so it was marked or broken. Nicholas was wrong; things, even art, didn’t carry laden histories. Only people did.

  I placed my glass on the table, half-empty, and flipped the laptop open. Perhaps I’d write to the Nepalese artist… and see if he was willing to make plans to meet; I could travel, soon, to his flat in Hammersmith. Or I’d invite him here. The screen glowed; a page came up. The one Eva had opened earlier that evening. The Orpheus String Quartet. A list of its members. Andrew Drummond, Myra Templeton, Elaine Parker, Owen Lee. I glanced back, lassoed by a name.

  Myra.

  I opened a few new windows, clicked on several links.

  It was her. Nicholas’ step-sister. All this while, I’d focused solely on the note; I hadn’t really given a thought to the ticket. The clue. It was here all along. I picked up the jade carving. It sat on my palm, its smooth surface reflecting light.

  If nothing else all things are amulets.

  The wedges that fill us where we are incomplete.

  I turned the figurine over in my hand. It was cool against my skin, heavy as memory.

  My-ra. Swift as the space of a heartbeat.

  When my sister and I were children, my father would sometimes take us to an annual locality fair. Grand and exciting, I thought at the time, with stalls dispensing virulently pink candy floss, chilli-red hot chips, greasy chicken rolls, and dubious ice-cream soda floats, alongside an assortment of games—Lucky Dip, Ring the Bottle, Ball in the Basket. My sister was a sharper for these, while I mos
tly wandered away looking for Magic Box Man. So named for the stereoscope he planted in some corner of the fair. For the ’60s his trade didn’t seem at all vintage. I spent hours looking at Great Mammals, Great Cities, and my favorite, Wonders of the World. Bright, scratchy pictures moving in and out of my vision at the press of a button. Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, and, most wondrous of all, the Pyramids. Rising out of sand, filling the sky.

  “Amazing,” I’d exclaim.

  And Magic Box Man, whose features have faded from my memory and reappeared as wrinkle-lined, grey-haired and stubby, would say, yes, but only because of the people.

  “What people?” I’d squint.

  The ones standing, walking at the foot, peripheral to the picture but in every way necessary. “Without them,” he said, “the Pyramids could be a camel’s droppings.”

  It was similar, remembering Myra, seeing her name. A shift, a rearrangement of perspective, a face, blurry and unclear, emerging from under the lens.

  I hadn’t thought much, or often, about her, until now.

  Early December meant Delhi had cooled to a mellow, amber winter.

  Tempers improved, gardens revived, and the city scrambled to new life, soothed and ameliorated by the weather. In many ways, it was spring.

  And I suppose, Myra, the unexpected April shower.

  By this time, I stayed mostly at the bungalow on Rajpur Road. Although I was careful not to be away from the residence hall for too long, in case people noticed, or Kalsang started asking questions. This was least likely—I’d snuck into our room after varying lengths of time away and my roommate, if he happened to be around, barely noticed.

  Yet I’d been at the bungalow long enough to have fallen into a routine.

  We creatures of habit, organising our days into tidy boxes.

  The weeks had passed leisurely and uneventful. I’d attend classes and tutorials during the day, when Nicholas also worked. After lunch, I’d head over, accompany him to the pool, or venture into Connaught Place, to the British Council Library or The Bookworm, for a coffee at India House, or a cheap gin and tonic at Volga’s. We didn’t venture to the south of the city. He seemed little interested in what it had to offer, preferring to wander in Daryaganj or Chandni Chowk. Nipping in only as far as the National Museum in Barakhamba.

  Sometimes, we’d sit in the study, with its vast, heavy table littered with pens and research material, and, in one corner, a small framed oil painting—of a woman looking into the mirror. Nicholas said it was a self-portrait by Malini. She’d gifted it to him before he left for India.

  I want you in me. All my love, M.

  He placed it there, I thought, to keep her close.

  Yet she was far away enough for me to feel only a brief, tender jealousy.

  In the evenings, he’d bring out the whisky. Or anything else that happened to be lying around, unopened or half-finished. But mostly, as he’d call it lovingly, the water of life. And when he could find it, a particular smoky brand that came, he explained, from the Isle of Islay, a remote, windswept island, southernmost of the Inner Hebrides.

  “Here,” he’d say, casting it under my nose, “you can smell it. The peat, and the Atlantic Ocean…”

  And, even though, all that rose to meet me were acrid, pungent fumes, I’d agree.

  “Some day,” he’d say, settling back, glass in hand, “that’s where I want to live…”

  “In the… Hebrides?”

  “No, my silly one. By the ocean.”

  Through the day, the gramophone would be left on, looping from the beginning of a record to its scratchy end. It was hooked to a number of speakers in the room, and he’d turn up the volume before a pre-dinner shower, and then leave it to billow through the bungalow late into the night. Playing, from what I could tell—rather, judging from the covers scattered on the floor—a host of classical-era symphonies. Haydn, in particular, seemed to be a favorite. (“The only place where I like order,” Nicholas once declared, “is in music.”) I didn’t think about it then, but I can see now how it suited him—the clean lines of those compositions, their elegance and balance. Yet marked also by fluctuation, by changes in mood, and sudden emotional surges. Tightly controlled perhaps, but always hovering on the fringes of chaos.

  Once, Nicholas asked what I would like to listen to.

  I wished I could have given him an answer that might’ve intrigued and impressed him, something suitably obscure and rare, not merely a composer, or title of a piece, but the specifics of a recording, a date and venue, a particular conductor. But I hadn’t listened to much—let’s be honest, any—classical music then, and I told him so. He was unperturbed.

  “Oh good. You’re my blank slate.”

  He turned to the shelf—Malini’s father’s LP collection spanned the length of a wall—and flicked through the titles. “Let’s see… something bright… fun…” He plucked out Franz Liszt, “and short.”

  He started with La Campanella. “By the magnificent Alicia…”

  And in 4:23 minutes, the time it took from its brisk allegretto beginning to reach the crashing complexity of the end, I was held in rapture. Music, they say, can be transportive, sweeping the listener away, but with Liszt it was an anchoring, each note a peg that fastened me to my place, willing me not to move. Leaving me short of breath.

  Nicholas laughed. “More?”

  “Yes… yes… please.”

  Next, Schubert, a delicate string quintet in C, lilting through the air in waves. A gentle plucking. A slow burning. When Nicholas mentioned it had been written two months before the composer’s death at thirty-one, it deepened, the sense of falling, the long, wistful contemplation, the sudden diving off a cliff into the sea.

  On other evenings, I was silenced by Verdi—Dies Irae from Messa de Requiem. Nicholas turned up the volume further, and the voices echoed through the bungalow, dashing around corners, spilling through the rooms, the bass drums making the windows tremble. “This is magnificent,” I shouted. It was the first time I’d felt music coursing through my veins.

  Once, Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite had barely begun, its first few compelling notes, when Nicholas lifted the gramophone needle. “Impossible,” he said, “for this to be heard and not seen…” He played Ravel’s Boléro instead, and just when it was beginning to build up, underpinned by the lowly snare drum, running through it like a heartbeat, he switched it off. “I’d forgotten how much I hate this.”

  When he picked Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, I sat on the sofa, almost afraid to take a breath, as though the smallest of disturbances would alter the perfection of the piece, the precarious balance of one note on top of the other, vastly soaring into the deep blue air, into nothing, nowhere. Endless.

  We were in the study one afternoon; I was trying to finish an assignment while Nicholas sat at the desk, a book open on his lap. Neither of us was getting much work done. Plans to visit Connaught Place, or anywhere beyond the bungalow porch, had been discarded; it was a wretched blustery day, punctured by sharp, unpredictable bursts of rain.

  “Shall I play something?”

  He turned to gaze at me, but looked as though he hadn’t really heard my question.

  “Well… shall I?”

  “Only if it’s my favorite…” He was teasing now, a smile lingered at the corner of his mouth.

  “Your favorite? Is it one of the pieces you played for me?”

  He laughed. “Lord, no.” He’d made me listen to the Romantics—“easy on the ears” he said—but he found most of their music greatly melody-driven, relying heavily on synthetic emotion. “I wouldn’t,” he added, “opt to take any with me to a desert island, no… apart from maybe…”

  “What?” I asked, a little embarrassed, a little hurt. Did he think my ear that juvenile and untrained? He wasn’t far from wrong, but I’d been listening carefully, paying great and undivided attention.

  “Apart from this,” he moved to the gramophone, picking up an LP that had been lost und
er the ones on the floor. Schumann’s Dichterliebe. He slipped out the black disc, blew on it gently, and placed it on the turntable, sliding the needle into place.

  The room filled with the plucking of a piano, and a voice. A man singing in German.

  Nicholas sat on the sofa, and leaned back, not saying a word, closing his eyes, the light and music arranging itself around him.

  I couldn’t follow the words, but they were rich and voluptuous. Tinged with incredible beauty, and sorrow.

  When Nicholas spoke, his voice was barely audible; I had to abandon my place on the floor and move nearer, bringing my face close to his. “This song cycle moves in circles… composed to float, always, in a state of uncertainty. The pieces dither, hesitate… the idea of a neat, rounded ending becomes, in principle, impossible. Schumann’s songs start with a gesture… and that’s where they stay…”

  I placed my hand on his chest, casually, as though I could claim him anytime I wanted. “So nothing by the Red Hot Chili Peppers then?” In my room back in college, their latest album, in cassette form, was lodged in Kalsang’s Walkman. I’d listened to it on my most recent foray back.

  “Who? Listen… ich liebe alleine die kleine, die feine, die reine… this is when he says now I love only the little, the fine, the pure: you yourself are the source of them all.”

  Apart from Lenny, I’d never met anyone else who lived so much out of time.

  On non-musical nights, Nicholas and I would head to the lawn, armed with mosquito repellent coils, perched on little tinplate stands, and our drinks. We’d settle ourselves on the wicker chairs, pleased to be out in the cool, November air that carried the faintest twinge of winter. As the night wore on, our words would flow easier, unclasped by alcohol and the darkness. Time was marked by the refilling of glasses, the growing line of ash that fell in a spiral below the coil. I told him about my father, a doctor, and how he started out in a humble government hospital in town, and stayed until it transformed into one of the biggest in the state. By then, he was head of the intensive care unit.