Choice, page 7
Spencer looks up and heaves his bottom up to stair number three, pauses, looks away, tongue out, then lumbers up to step four, pauses again.
‘Ayush,’ Luke calls out, ‘Ayush, come here, please, for a second, will you?’
Ayush comes out of the kitchen. ‘What’s going on?’
Luke says, ‘Look at Spencer. Have you noticed this before?’
‘Noticed what?’
Ayush watches Spencer do his climb-stop, climb-stop movement for two more steps and understands immediately. He swallows all the exclamations that sprint to his tongue and says instead, ‘Lukey, can you lift him and take him to the living room? I’ll bring his bed downstairs after I settle the children.’
In the children’s bedroom, Ayush says to the puzzled faces, ‘Spencer’s getting old. He can’t climb the stairs as nimbly as he used to. Now, I think it’s even better that he stands guard in the living room downstairs, don’t you? That way he’ll catch anyone right at the entrance, at the very beginning. He won’t let them come up. What do you say?’
Ayush finds their slow, silent nods listless. It is worse to witness another’s deflation than feel one’s own.
Downstairs, Luke is sitting on the floor, his arms around the dog. Ayush puts Spencer’s bed in the corner between the bookshelf and the window. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Come, your bed is here now. Come on, good boy.’
The dog has trouble standing up and getting over to his bed. He gives Ayush’s neck and ears a ‘thank you’ lick and gingerly steps over into the hollow of his cushions.
‘Have you noticed this before?’ Luke asks again.
Ayush sits on the sofa and lowers his neck on to Luke’s and whispers, ‘No. No, I haven’t. You?’
Luke reaches up and puts his hands on Ayush’s face, his neck. ‘No,’ he says, after a long time. ‘So sudden. Or I’ve just not been very attentive. I’m not teaching day after tomorrow. I’ll take him to the vet’s.’
‘I’ll come with you. I’ll find a way to get out of work for a couple of hours.’
The young Bulgarian vet, Vassilena, confirms that it’s arthritis. ‘It’s so common among retrievers his age. He’s nearly ten, it’s to be expected.’ Her voice and manner are kind, caring, not rehearsedly so, as she takes Luke and Ayush through medication, diet, exercise, practical arrangements of what to do if Spencer finds it difficult to lift his leg to pee, to squat while shitting, if he wets his bed, if he becomes incontinent, if the side-effects of the drugs manifest swiftly.
They come out with a stash of Rimadyl. Ayush, concentrating on the lichen-blooms of ancient chewing gum on the grey pavement but seeing nothing, says, ‘You take him back home, I’ll be back a little late. Give the children supper. Tell them whatever you feel like.’ He squeezes Luke’s arm and makes his way to the Tube.
An important meeting, flagged up for weeks with frequent emails, about some momentous announcement and involving the presence of the MD of the division and the CEO of the company. Everyone, of course, thinks of redundancies and cost-cutting and restructuring, but plays the game: ‘How exciting, what can it be?’ they say, but there is no hiding the slightly high-pitched anxiety behind the words. The announcement turns out to be of a new imprint ‘dedicated to Diversity’. From the press release: ‘An imprint to reflect the enormously rich and enriching diversity of our times, to enable and encourage a whole new generation of writers, change-makers, and thought leaders, to find new voices that will create new understandings, new meanings, a new society.’ They have paid a management consultant hundreds of thousands to come up with a name for the imprint: Together. The logo is three hands clasped in a circle; the hands are uniformly beige with black outlines. Ayush can imagine exactly the conversations in which having one black hand, one brown, and one white – or two black and one white, or all black, or all brown – was discussed and shot down. Three people are going to be hired to run the imprint, and, ‘to be a microcosm of our fabulously diverse society’, they will all be ‘people of colour’. There is vigorous nodding of all the white heads at this junction of the presentation; self-satisfaction, like a gas released into the room, makes it difficult to breathe. Ayush’s face burns.
He stands up and walks purposively to the dais. No one seems to be surprised even as he positions himself at the lectern – maybe this was part of the surprise script the MD and the CEO have drawn up, this imminent speech by their one non-white editor. Who knows, maybe he is going to head up the new imprint, and this is the speech from the new head. Ayush begins: ‘This is not the way to go about things. I don’t need to remind this gathering what good intentions pave, but I do want to say how ill-conceived they are and how they can only result in further polarization, further ghettoization. Quite apart from the corporate black- or brown-washing that the creation of this imprint is, another predictable act of tokenism and virtue-signalling, everyone will treat the books and authors of Together as the “special needs” children at school. It will also have the effect of funnelling out all the non-white writers that the other imprints publish, making them whiter still. Did you think about this? Did you deign to consult a non-white writer during the hatching of this bullshit idea? Did a management consultancy outfit tell you what to do? Will you ever wake up?’ His voice rises higher at each question. Horror and embarrassment mark the very few faces that are not looking at the floor or at the handouts everyone has been given.
Stewing in his seat, his whole body now aflame, his heart a piston, he allows the fantasy to wash over him, leaving him stranded, like a wave that could have swallowed him alive but decides to spare him instead.
11
‘No, nine can be broken down into three times three, so it’s not a prime. You know what factors are. So, a prime number can have only two factors: the number itself and one, because anything multiplied by one is that number itself.’
Ayush can only hear not see them in the other room, so he imagines, from the silence that follows, that the children are either puzzled or processing what Luke has just said. Wasn’t eight years in any case too young to be learning about prime numbers? Luke had begun to teach them about numbers during the lockdown and, finding that he enjoyed it, had continued.
Luke’s gentle, confident, reasoning voice again: ‘OK, let’s do this. What are the factors of twelve?’
‘Six and two’. Masha.
‘Very good,’ says Luke.
‘Three and four’, pipes up Sasha.
‘Very good. You’re both correct. Now think again. Can any of those numbers – six, two, three, four – be broken down further into factors that are not one?’
Such calm kindness, such patience. They spring from a mysterious source of love. Did everyone have it, something lying dormant, awaiting the arrival of children to be activated? Ayush remembers Luke melting while looking at the twins in their crib when they were only a few months old, trying to swallow their fists or eat their toes, giving both adults a gurgling beam or an inexplicable grin, while he, Ayush, had noticed only the nappies, and was insulated from their uncalculated charm by the mental arithmetic of working out how many nappies per week, per month, per year until the children became continent and potty-trained.
From his study window Ayush can look down on to the garden. It’s too cold and windy to sit outside, but the clematis – Clematis montana var. wilsonii – is a white froth over the boundary wall with the neighbour’s house. Will the children learn about the things that really matter in both life and in the living of a life, things such as plants and flowers and insects and birds and trees, not just about prime numbers, and market forces, and resource allocation, and preferences? What matters more, the surface of the world that one experiences or the forces under the surface? There is an intrepid magpie sitting on one side of the steeple under the chimney breast on the roof next door. The wind blows the bird’s long black tail up in an enthusiastic tick-mark as he tries to balance. The bird doesn’t give up, clutching at the mossy bricks as the gusts buffet him. Then he admits defeat and hops off onto the gentler gradient of the slate roof, where he appears to feel less precarious, but also less heroic to Ayush.
These sights take him elsewhere, places where he thinks he can live forever. He is doing a tranche of his regular weekend chore – or it should be regular – of four hours of reading manuscripts that are on submission. The four hours are spread out over the day, as they would have to be since he and Luke have long not been a self-contained family of two in control of time and its management. Time. He had once read a memorable line in a review of a Per Petterson novel: ‘The only true problem of the realist novel is time.’ After the instinctive reaction, not entirely frivolous, ‘Of that other realist thing called life, too, my friend’, he had returned frequently to that sentence, so dense with meaning, in his mind. He now thinks that so much of the frequent articulations of impatience and boredom with plot and plotting by writers is nothing more than an inability to know what to do with time, its representation, the modelling of its passage in 200 or 350 or 600 pages. These writers, all enthralled by the self, are hectically caught up in signalling the breaking of new ground when, in reality, they are just trying to dress up their limitations as cool, daring, new, adventurous.
But life, too, to go back to his first response: why is the abiding experience of life a struggle with time; why is this experience so pervasive, and so acute of late? All the stuff at the foundation of Luke’s discipline, which commands the world and all the lives in it, such as efficiency, outcome, productivity, growth – what are these but functions of time? How much can you get done, how much can you produce, in a given chunk of time: that’s the dynamo at the heart of everything, from the smallest to the biggest. Giving children breakfast, getting them ready for school, getting them to put their shoes on (has someone aggregated the hours of a life lost in getting them to put on their shoes and jackets and coats?), replying to thirty-two emails between 6 to 7:20 a.m., three manuscripts to read before lunch, a PowerPoint slide: in the last year, e-book sales in the first and second quarters were up 7 percentage points compared with physical book sales while in the third and last quarters physical books showed, etc. Another slide: across imprints and divisions, revenue fell by an average of 6.34 percent for three, etc. etc. And how would the day’s calibrations be for Lukey? ‘Revise and resubmit’ due last week, finding two extra hours in the week to write reader’s reports on three journal articles, two extra hours to write letters for students, 588 calories burned in 60 minutes, three extra hours to reply to all the emails that keep mounting up if you don’t reply to twenty an hour every hour every day every week every month every year. The only accurate descriptions of life as they live it in the first world are all metaphors: a treadmill, a hamster wheel, a perpetual-motion beltway, a non-stop carousel going round and round and round. The clock’s running, running out, running down, time is flowing, flying, snapping at your wheels, its chariot is behind you, rushing to run you over, run you down, run you under its wheels, run run run to keep ahead, till you are a hit-and-run statistic, roadkill, as we are, always already are. Time, time.
His eyes close.
Ritika is saying, ‘So the only way to understand what works is to actually do a kind of lab experiment but in the real world. A kind of intervention in the real lives of real people.’
Ayush is agog. ‘How does, how would, that work?’
‘Say, you have a theory that X, an asset, might diminish poverty. When you give the ultra-poor that asset, it may pull them out of their poverty trap. You conduct a controlled experiment to check if asset transfer can truly alleviate poverty.’
‘But how? Like, what asset? Something that will generate income indefinitely? And who gives it to the ultra-poor? The government?’ He is still at a loss to understand.
The waiter comes out with their glasses of orange wine, which he has described a few minutes ago as ‘unfiltered and funky’. Ayush and Ritika are sitting in the outdoor space – the pavement, in reality – of a wine bar called Diogenes the Dog in Elephant and Castle. If someone had told Ayush last week that he would be in a wine bar, which had extraordinary and unusual wines from unexpected places on the menu, in Elephant and Castle he would have laughed, but even this stretch between Walworth and the Old Kent Roads has been gentrified beyond belief.
‘Something like, say, knitting machines given to women in an area we are studying. Or – here’s a recent example from a successful intervention – giving cows to rural women,’ she says.
‘Cows? You mean, the animal?’
‘Yes, the animal. Cows generate income, in answer to the question you asked. You sell the milk, use cow dung to make fuel cakes to sell, etc. But the experiment has to be set up carefully and, most importantly, has to be randomized.’ She takes a sip of her wine, looks at him, and says, ‘I hope you’re not going to think I’m being condescending if I ask you whether you understand what randomization means. Or what it entails, in this kind of an action. It’s essential that you get this part of the experiment.’
Ayush shakes his head. ‘Not really. Is it like trials for medication and things like that?’
‘Absolutely. But how do you control for other causalities in a field that is not a lab but life? How do you nail the fact that it is this particular asset transfer that has worked? How do you measure success in this experiment? That’s the beauty and challenge of this method.’
‘Can you explain using an example? Like a real trial that you did in what you call the field? I find it easier to understand with concrete illustrations.’
Ritika takes him through a recently conducted experiment in which random women in randomly selected villages in a district in West Bengal were each given a cow to improve their lot. It was a stupendous success: consumption – the metric used by economists to measure wellbeing among the ultra-poor – went up and continued to hold up at the raised level two years after the asset transfer.
Ayush absorbs all this thirstily. It must be nice to work in a field in which success is evident, tangible, in which measurable good can be done in the world. He feels at once enthused and slightly deflated. ‘Wow’ is all he can say, like a callow teenager.
‘And it was a success with all the women you gave cows to?’ he asks.
Ritika narrows her eyes and looks at him in a pointed way. ‘Why do you ask that?’ She stumbles a little in getting the words out.
‘No reason. Just like that, as we would say when we were children.’
Ritika looks down at her glass. She peers into it as she says, ‘No, not all the women. But over ninety-nine percent of them.’
‘What happened to the tiny fraction that was not a success?’ Something has just begun to take shape in his mind.
Ayush takes the children for a walk to Brockwell Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon in late May. The park is crowded, but not as heaving as he had thought it would be. The daisies are like discrete, dense constellations in a green sky.
Ayush asks the children, ‘Do you know what a comparison is?’
They look at each other, then Sasha says, ‘It is when you compare something to something.’
‘And what is compare?’ Ayush knows it’s a difficult question to answer – all things that we take for granted as part of our foundations of understanding are difficult to express when faced with a question like that – but he wants to push them a little.
‘It is when,’ Sasha begins haltingly, ‘when there is one thing and there is another thing and.’
‘And,’ Masha takes over, ‘and the two things are’ – she brings her hands together, palms open and facing him, as if she’s miming curtains or doors closing.
‘Yes, correct, I know what you’re thinking, but do you want to try and put it in words? Try?’
‘And, and,’ Masha tries, scrunching her eyes tight shut with effort, as if she’s got bad constipation and is straining, ‘one thing is like the other thing.’
‘Very, very good. One thing is like another thing. We compare when we bring two things together and see how similar they are. That is called a comparison. Now, think about this: can we set two things side by side and they’re both a little bit similar to each other, but also different from each other?’
They look at each other and turn their heads back to him and – he can see the thought passing through their heads – think about nodding but don’t quite do it.
‘Let’s find some examples, shall we? Look at the daisies in the grass. Do you see the little white flowers? Here, and here, and here’ – he points to the ground. ‘These little white flowers are daisies,’ he says. ‘Do you know where the name comes from? They used to be called day’s eyes, as in the eyes of the day. You open your eyes first thing in the morning, right? These flowers open first thing on a new day, so they’re called day’s eyes. So, from day’s eyes, to dayseyes, daysyes, daisyes, daisies. Do you see?’
The twins nod but he cannot tell if they have understood or are even interested.
‘Now, comparison. Look at this other flower’ – Ayush points at a yellow dandelion in full bloom – ‘that’s called a dandelion.’ He pauses, thinking whether he should subject them to another etymology of a flower name, and decides against it.
‘I know, I know,’ Masha chirps out, ‘we do phoo phoo phoo on it and it blows away and that’s a clock and we can tell the time.’
Time, again. It’s always time. ‘Well, yes, but you’ll have to wait for a little bit before this flower turns into a clock. Now, look at the daisies. And look at the dandelion. Can you now compare the two? Are they similar? Are they different?’
