fine.” Did I really think it was? “We’ll talk next week.”
She didn’t pick up the next week, when I called, or the week after. I was piqued. Why should I keep trying? A letter arrived the week after that.
It’s not that I don’t want to be in touch at all, Ashwin, but obviously I’m not part of your decisions any longer. I’m hurting. I didn’t see this coming. It looks to me as if we’ve broken up just because you had to go back and not because of any problem in our relationship. Our relationship had no pull? I’m hurting badly.
She was right that I had seized on an opportunity and an excuse: the work, the illness. Though my father seemed largely to have recovered, there was also pressure from my mother that her only son should be closer than the very farthest point on the globe. I didn’t fool myself that her complaints would lessen in proportion to my proximity, but my father also was glad to have me closer.
Rosslyn was also right that these were reasons to return to India but not reasons to break with her. I hadn’t known, until she wrote, that I had broken with her. The shock of understanding also brought me to acknowledge the discomfort I had been denying, through these six months in India. While living in Canada, I had been able to avoid thinking of the many ways that I had always felt alienated from my native society. I am a naturally anti-social creature, born into the most social of places. Perhaps I had left India before I could articulate my own non-belonging. But then, the vocabulary of non-conformism was only coming into flower in the West when I arrived there, and it is only now, thirty years later, starting to gain a foothold in India. Spending nearly fifteen formative years in the West had, yes, formed me, in ways I had been denying. My thinking, my way of being, even my English, had changed. I could write about Indians, but perhaps I could have written about Canadians, as well, if I’d tried harder. I wrote to Rosslyn about these realizations, but didn’t press her to come. I suppose I was still not sure of what I was doing. She didn’t write back.
By October, I was ready to consider visiting Canada. I wrote to Rosslyn to suggest I return for the winter holidays, when she would have time off. I said that we should talk, in person, about the possibility of a shared future. I said, since I was finally starting truly to feel it, that I missed her. I was also very much missing Kritika’s children, who I used to visit once a month.
I wasn’t sure at all how the conversation with Rosslyn should go. I had recently made an offer on a flat. I wasn’t entirely unhappy staying with my parents, but would be more content to live alone again—one of the ways I had become Western, or had always been different from my countrymen.
My stay with my parents had been congenial enough, though. They had a large house, which we had moved into some twenty-five years earlier. I had continued to attend high school across town and then left for university, so I never formed attachments to the place. My parents were by now quite settled here, however, and I had met a few neighbours through them.
My cousin, Vivek, his wife and their children were also staying with us. His parents, down south, were unhappy about his unemployability and his indifferent attempts to renounce alcoholism. They had appealed to my father, the family patriarch, who obliged by taking their son in and trying to find him a job. Vivek’s wife had started vending saris and nightgowns out of the house, which brought in a little cash, though she also had to tolerate cracks from my mother about the hoi polloi tramping through the main hall. Vivek himself was forever running after pyramid schemes. He had recently cornered me in my room on his return from a revival meeting on expanding one’s potential. I don’t even think he had been drinking; he just had some questions.
“Where is mind?” he inquired, aflame with insight. “Is it here?” he wanted to know, pointing at his temple. He pointed at his chest. “Here?” At the heavens. “Here?” I resisted the urge to point at my elbow, my ass, my open door.
The best thing about the living arrangement was their children. Vivek and Jana had two, a boy and a girl a bit younger than Kritika’s kids. Their presence attracted others into the house, which throbbed with slamming doors and bell-like shouts, with childish vitality itself.
Their favourite thing was to ask about Canada, and when they learned about Halloween, they begged for a dress-up party. They chattered all week about costumes; I was to provide sweets. I was thrilled about hosting a children’s party, to a degree that (the IRDS secretaries informed me) compromised my dignity and my public image as a curmudgeon. I planned to dress up as a bad-tempered female vegetable-seller: I had cajoled an old sari out of my mother and fitted a wig with a wooden tray to fill with candy instead of peppers or eggplants. For days already I had shooed youngsters from my door as I transformed my bedroom into a haunted house.
The night before, I phoned Kritika and spoke to Asha. She and a gaggle of her friends were dressing up as characters from The Wizard of Oz. She would be the Tin Man. Anand got on the phone at his mother’s behest, cool and laconic. I asked him if he was too old to dress up. He didn’t answer, but seemed interested in my party plans.
I recall ticking off the final arrangements on my commute to work that morning. I had three clients to see that day and a meeting with a subset of my colleagues to discuss a multidisciplinary research initiative on the descendants of Partition. Though still in early stages, we were gaining momentum, and already had the sense the project would be massive.
When I think back now to the moment I entered the IRDS that morning, my memories are cinematically exaggerated. I could see no one, which was very unusual: the office was typically bustling by the time I got there, not with the senior fellows, who tended to keep later and more irregular hours the more senior they became, but with the office staff and junior academics, who were always ready to exchange a friendly word. Office doors were open as a policy: much of the point of the institute was to encourage dialogue and cross-fertilization. I only closed my door when seeing clients, and had been given a special room for this on a less-trafficked floor.
I was whistling as I entered. I am competent at whistling, perhaps more so than at conversation, and was feeling jaunty. The sound, in my recollection, was sucked away from me in the emptiness of the corridors. I entered one of the conference rooms to find everyone huddled around a radio.
Indira Gandhi: shot.
Shot. The word in English is more onomatopoeic than ever we realize.
Shhh. The smooth sailing of bullet through barrel, fricting iron against iron, joined and separated by the hastening oil.
Ahhh. Iron against unresisting air, a fleshly sigh of admission.
T. The consonant finality of the bullet coming to rest.
We dispersed after some time and went about our business as slightly conflicting reports trickled in by radio and telephone: two men with turbans had assassinated the prime minister. There had been an attempted assassination on the prime minister and she was being rushed to hospital. Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards had shot and killed her in apparent retaliation for her having ordered the storming of the Golden Temple in June.
It was the last version that was borne out, exactly the sort of thing that many at the IRDS studied: communal conflict and cycles of revenge.
In my case, I saw therapeutic clients. All made reference to the news, but then turned to their own problems, the intimate narratives and narratives of intimacy that were more under their power to direct than ever they had thought.
Events in the democracy, however—the ones we as a nation had thought we had the power to direct—turned out to be beyond us.
Early that afternoon, when we
