Choice, page 8
‘One is small and white, the other is bigger and yellow,’ the boy answers.
‘Very good. We’ve noted the differences’ – he emphasizes the word – ‘now what about the’ – slow again – ‘similarities? How are they the same?’
So hesitantly that Ayush almost expects the interrogative uptick at the end, Masha says, ‘They are both flowers.’
‘Very, very good, again. Now, let’s move a little sideways with this game. Sash, you noted that the daisy is white and the dandelion is yellow. Can you think of other yellow things?’
A few seconds of thinking, then the boy says, ‘Egg-yellow.’
‘Yes, good, egg yolk.’
Masha says, ‘The sun is yellow. My yellow colour pencil. Lemon.’
‘Excellent, well done. Now, can we say The dandelion is as yellow as an egg-yolk? Do you understand what I did there? I compared two yellows – the colour of the dandelion, and the colour of egg yolks. Clear?’
The twins nod.
‘As yellow as. Or you can say The dandelion is like an egg yolk. Clear?’
Again, the children nod.
‘Now, pay attention to how I said it – I used as or like. One thing, in this case a yellow flower, is like another thing, in this case egg yolk, because they’re both yellow. They are similar in colour. This kind of comparison is called a si-mi-le. S-i-m-i-l-e.’ Very slowly, the spelling out.
If he starts this early, will it become a kind of hardwiring in them? Again, pay attention: if the cost is high enough, would they cherish the thing bought? He doesn’t have much time, three four maybe five years if he is – they are – lucky, before time enters their lives and lays everything to waste. Will this remain in their memory, make them look up and out, make them notice, and, much more importantly, notice again, slowly and carefully and deeply, counting bracts and sepals, the number of spots on an insect’s chitinous shell, the different cohorts of pink in different species and hybrids of perennial geraniums, all useless knowledge, all untradeable, all a waste of time, which must always be used to yield something, but what if noticing becomes, if nothing else – god knows, he’s not going to make any big claims for it – a haven, a small one, like a dot of a calm island in tempestuous, destructive seas that would swallow them alive and never spit them out, what if it gives them something, however small, that cannot be poured into readymade vessels of understanding, what if noticing is something they retreat to inside themselves and find and find –
‘It’s like smile, but with one more i,’ Masha says.
‘Yes, it is. Good. Now, we’ll step forward to another game. I’ll give you one thing, say, a colour or a quality, such as hot or cold or good, and you will find as many similes as you can. Like we did with yellow – yellow as egg yolk, but you can add to that, yellow as the sun, yellow like lemons. Right? Do you understand?’
There’s a brightness on their faces. They nod convincingly.
‘OK, let’s go. Black. Let’s find similes for the colour black. I’ll do the first one, OK? Black as ink. Now you go.’
They’ve stopped near the old stone water trough which is now used as a planter for Mexican fleabane, campanulas, geraniums, lobelias. The children are thinking hard. They consult each other in whispers, which gives Ayush a little hope that at least wherever competition reigns it hasn’t found hospitable soil in them. Not yet. Masha looks expectantly, encouragingly at her brother, who says, a little tentatively, ‘Black like your hair.’
‘Goo-ood,’ Ayush tries to skate over his own tentativeness. ‘Masha?’
‘Black as night.’
‘Great.’
‘Black as clouds,’ the boy says. They are on a roll now, and clearly enjoying themselves.
‘Brilliant. You’ve learned similes now. Shall we move on to something related called metaphor?’
‘What’s meta for?’ Sasha asks.
Life. Living. Fiction. Lies. Modelling. Representation. Numbers. Words. Data. Everything is metaphor. It rules your life. You understand everything, insofar as you do, because of it. Should he weigh them down now? Simile was enough for one day, he decides.
‘Let’s get very good at this simile business, then we’ll do metaphor another day. How does that sound?’
They nod. Now, he hears the piercing song of a blackbird and looks up. The male blackbird population of what seems to him like all of South London has learned the same tune, the one with a pleading, cajoling four-note up-down-up wave that ends the song before the coda begins. There, on the topmost branch of a lime tree, sits the singer.
They are near the corner where the path bends right along Cressingham Gardens estate on the other side. He kneels down to their level and asks, ‘Do you hear that bird singing? There, do you hear?’
Notes drop like silver through the clear air. The twins nod.
‘If you look up, you can see him. He’s a blackbird.’
‘Black like a blackbird,’ Masha says and looks at her father for praise.
‘Well done. Now, look up, look where my finger is pointing. Now look beyond the tip of my finger, in the same direction, in a straight straight line, like an arrow. There’s another simile: straight as an arrow. There. Do you see? Can you see him? He’s sitting on the top branch, right on the top.’
The children look up and nearly topple over backwards. Sasha spots it first. ‘Yes, I can.’ As if to reward him, the bird lets out that silver stream again. Then the girl sees him too.
‘Why do they sing from the top of a tree?’ the boy asks.
‘Good question. They sing to attract female blackbirds who will come to them, lured by their song, then they will build a nest, lay eggs, and have baby blackbirds together. He is sitting on the top branch so that it’s easy for a female blackbird to see him and think Oh, this is a lovely song, let me mate with the singer. Now where is this wonderful singer, where is he? Ah, there he is.’
Wonder is easy to read on a child’s face, but Ayush cannot interpret the expression that flits across the twins’ faces, simultaneously, as he finishes his little speech about courtship rituals.
‘Did you sing for Daddy?’ Masha asks. ‘But Daddy is not a female.’
He has already said, with a little laugh, ‘No, that Daddy is not’, before he pays attention.
‘Neither of us is,’ he adds. There seems to be intent, it appears to him, in the way the twins are not looking at each other. Or does it appear to him later, when he is running and rerunning the reel in his head?
‘You and Daddy are two males,’ Masha says, looking at the grass, but not at Ayush, not at her brother. The words seem like a mumbled aside.
‘Yes, you’ve known this forever, no?’
‘In school, Elizabeth and Sanjeev said it is wrong,’ Sasha joins in.
Ayush feels a brief rushing in his ears. He cannot, will not, believe that this aria-duet has been rehearsed by them beforehand, that they had it all planned to bring it up on this walk.
‘Did they, now?’ A surface as calm as a mirror. Another simile, but he doesn’t point it out to them since it is internal to him; they wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.
They nod in unison. Is it true that twins think the same thought together in time, that there’s an invisible arc connecting their brains?
‘Yes. They said that everyone has a daddy and a mummy,’ Sasha explains. ‘Having two daddies is wrong.’
‘But you don’t have two daddies’ – calm as before, and now, even playful – ‘you have a daddy and a baba. See? Magic!’ The blackbird is continuing with its infernally repetitive song; he wants to wring its little neck.
‘No, but you must have one daddy and one mummy,’ Masha says. ‘One man and one woman. Not two men, and you and Daddy are two men.’ Clear, unhesitant, like something learned by rote, delivered without thinking, like a slap.
In that same playful voice, Ayush says, ‘Well, some things are wrong to some people, and to others not. Let us take an example. You, Sash, and I think that eating meat is wrong, but Daddy doesn’t think so. We can live together happily, with each of us, or groups of us, thinking different things, doing different things, but loving each other. Do you understand? Things don’t have to be the same. In fact, it’s better if things are all different, it keeps everything interesting. What is better, only one colour, say, blue, blue sky, blue trees, blue grass, blue birds, blue dogs, blue skin, blue water, blue everything, or what we have now, all different colours to different things?’
He sees them nod almost imperceptibly and thinks he also sees a knot inside them that is beginning to loosen. The difficult bit will come later.
‘Also,’ he continues, ‘the idea of a family as a mummy, a daddy, and two children has changed over the years, many, many, many years. Don’t you think Spencer, who is a dog, is part of our family of human beings? In many countries, daddy, mummy, and children live with daddy’s parents or mummy’s parents. But we don’t do that here. That doesn’t mean that we are wrong or the people who do it are right. Or the other way around –’ Then the rushing in his ears returns and the energy and conviction behind the performance leach away, leaving him stranded. The fucking blackbird is still going.
He has to confront the difficult bit now, and he has to do it, not Luke. He tries out several drafts of the phrasing inside his head before he asks gently, in his most Luke-like impersonation, ‘Did Elizabeth and Sanjeev call you names?’
They shake their heads in unison.
‘Did the other children call you names?’ He cannot ask all the things that he wants to ask in order to establish an empirically sound he-said-she-said-then-they-did account for fear of putting fears and anxieties and ideas in their heads.
They shake their heads again. Ayush cannot tell if they are hiding something. From his own childhood he knows that bullying, especially at their age, can be the most difficult thing to talk about.
A slightly different question this time. Over lunch at a Middle Eastern place in Soho, Ayush asks Emily Zhao, whose debut novel, Disassembled, he is publishing next January: ‘And why do you want to enter the literary world?’
A shrug of her shoulders; no writer this young should be subjected to the question he has just asked. Despite that awareness, Ayush continues, ‘Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’
She does not understand what is being asked of her, whether there’s a right or a wrong answer, and she’s too intimidated by her first lunch with her publisher, so she shrugs again, waiting for him to answer his own question.
Ayush obliges. ‘Misreading,’ he says. ‘Pure misreading. Or deliberate limited reading. They’ll be like horses with blinkers. You’re not white, the blinders will go on immediately. So much of what one finds in a book is what one allows oneself to find in it. Conversely, it’s possible to trivialize and mock and be negative about any book – Lolita, Anna Karenina, Beloved, which a much-loved hack called a “hysterical ghost-story”. They go in already prepared to find range, intelligence, allusion, formal innovativeness, Marx this, Agamben that, in any number of white writers, because they think it all belongs to them, but that won’t obtain with you. You could signal the whole world in your text, but in your case, they either won’t see it or they’ll call it extraneous, straining for learnedness or relevance, the polemical sitting uneasily with the fictional, that kind of bullshit, you see?’ There’s a devil inside him. ‘A white writer will just have to drop in the word Marxist in an ironic description of, say, a floral arrangement in the foyer of a Philippe Starck hotel, or not even in her work, but in an interview that she’s given – every writer or freelancer reviewing the work will write paras about the profound entanglement with Marxist thought that’s going on in that writer’s work, the political utility of the novel this, the querying of atomized labour under late-capitalism that. But your book? No. Never. Not in a year of thirteen moons. Are you ready for this? The sheer wilful blindness, the illiteracy?
‘Do you want to publish under a nom de plume? Under a neutral – by which I mean white, of course – a neutral name? Emily Smith? E. Smith? And no author photo or bio?’
Emily looks stricken, then alarmed. She holds the table as if trying to force herself to remain seated.
Of course, this conversation doesn’t happen.
What does happen is this: he puts a small phrase in the jacket copy of Disassembled – ‘exposing the ever-renewing, more hectic forms of erasure of labour under late-capitalism’ – just to give her book a small fighting chance. A vanishingly small one.
12
At the entrance to the cool basement of the restaurant in the Strand, Ayush and Ritika, out for dinner, bump into one of Anna’s authors, novelist, historian of cartography, even a frequent radio pundit, now in his impressively august seventies. The current chair of the Royal Society of Literature, he seems to be heading a group of five or six, mostly writers and literary types, Ayush can tell, although he can vaguely put a name to only one of them, maybe two. The chair of the RSL recognizes Ayush, just, and says hello, so Ayush feels compelled to say what a coincidence, what brings him and his party here.
‘Oh, we just had the most wonderful event at the society on an Italian writer. Just fascinating. So well attended. Such great speakers. Really terrific evening.’
‘Which Italian writer?’ Ayush asks.
Just the barest microsecond of a pause – beyond calibration, Ayush feels; besides, it could always be his imagination; it is always in your head, isn’t it? – before the answer, directed, with a slight turning of the head, at the air six inches to the side of Ayush’s head, ‘Primo Levi?’ Another pause, an infinitesimal fraction longer than the previous one. ‘You know, The Periodic Table?’ It’s not upspeak – he belongs to a different generation altogether – but a genuine interrogative.
Both Ayush and Ritika look at the floor. A waiter comes and escorts them to their table. Not a word passes between them as they both fall into a careful study of the menu, as if it were a manuscript, or a dataset, until Ritika looks up and says, ‘I’m sorry.’
Reading to the children at bedtime is now a twice-weekly treat instead of a daily occurrence. Every time it’s Ayush’s turn, he cannot help but cast his mind back to that night two and a half years ago, maybe a little longer, when he had shown them the underground animal rights film. Do they think about it when it’s him instead of Luke reading? Luke had taken over bedtime reading entirely for months after that incident. Who knows how long memory persists, or how sharp it is, at that age? How do children process it? Could it be buried deep and have a pervasive, ongoing effect on their lives, a spring oozing unstoppably, or could it lie just under the surface, ready to break out into blood, to hurt, yet not be deep and damaging? Could it be both?
Ayush allows himself to notice consciously something which has been developing right under his nose: the children are beginning to express their Thai features. They are very subtle – an olive shade to their complexion instead of the wholly English milk-and-roses (Ayush used to call it ‘blotchy’ until he had been corrected by a friend at university); an upturn to the outer ends of their eyes, as if an artist had, with utmost delicateness, moved the brush up the barest stroke while holding his breath in – but once seen they cannot be unseen, not at least by him. And he feels cold fear toll through him again like a bell. They are not going to be at the receiving end – hopefully – of the kind of behaviour that is the usual content of mental images sparked off by the word ‘racism’: someone calling them chinky, or saying they have Jap’s eyes; that kind can and will be easily laughed off, more or less. The kind he is worried about is the one that takes the form of white liberal inclusiveness and its regular need to be fellated: come and be the one non-white judge on this book-prize jury because, look, we’re so diverse; come and speak at our famous literature festival, but only to its ethnic chapter that happens at a different time of the year from the main festival.
‘Baba, Baba, what story, what story? Are there pictures?’ Masha asks while brother and sister are getting ready to go to bed.
‘Only little children want pictures in their books,’ Sasha says. ‘I can read, I don’t need pictures.’
‘I can read too’, Masha says.
‘It is a story about a prince,’ Ayush offers gratefully.
In the bedroom, the usual entanglements about duvets and blanketies, about which stuffed toy’s turn it is to sleep with whom, about who decides tonight when the rotating scenery of the night-light has hit optimum speed. Ayush lets everything wash over him, hoping that conserving the energy that otherwise might have been expended on his own responses to the children’s chatter will at least not exacerbate his exhaustion. He has a blurry memory of complaining to Luke about the sheer, inexorable boredom of parenting . . . or has he thought about it so much inside his own head that the false memory feels real now? When the children are at last settled down, Ayush can barely lift the fifty-page book and turn its pages. He takes up his usual position between them, propped up against a big pillow, and starts to read.
‘Many years ago, in a town called Lumbini, in the country that is now called Nepal, there was born into a noble family of kshatriyas a prince called Siddhartha Gautama.’
‘What is sh-shu-sh-shat . . .?’ Sasha begins.
Ayush was hoping for plain sailing. He repeats the word ‘kshatriya’ a few times then attempts a version of the Indian caste system for eight-year-olds. He is dreading all the follow-on questions, but the novelty of the material seems to have turned that switch off, at least for now.
They continue unimpeded until Siddhartha, protected in a cocoon of wealth and luxury by his father, witnesses an old, dying man one day who says to the prince, ‘Suffering is the lot of humans. Everyone suffers and dies. You, too, Prince, are subject to that law.’ Siddhartha replies, ‘I am subject to no laws, I am a prince. I give out the laws that rule life.’ But something in the encounter snags at the prince’s mind, some inchoate notion that there might be a life outside the palace walls that is different from the life that he knows . . .
