Choice, page 9
‘He calls out to his charioteer, “Chandaka, harness Kanthaka, my horse. Prepare my chariot,’ ” Ayush reads.
‘Why do they have such names?’ Sasha interrupts.
‘What do you mean, such names?’ Ayush asks. He knows exactly what the boy means, but he wants the child to articulate it better.
‘The horse has a funny name. If I had a horse, I would call him Spencer.’
‘No, you numpty,’ Masha chirps, ‘Spencer is our doggy. How can we call the horse and the dog the same name? What will happen if we want to call the doggy, and say, “Spencer, come!”, and the horse comes?’
She is on a roll. Ayush debates whether to interrupt and give them a lesson in diversity and why people have different names or whether to use this little debate between the children as his stepping-off point for the night. He is, however, puzzled by the question about foreign names – hardly any child in school has a traditional Christian name, given that their parents come from all over the world. Off the top of his head, he can think of only non-Christian names of the children’s friends: Reza, Fissaha, Shumi, Daljit, Ayad, Zuneera . . . It was a kind of joke that Sasha and Masha, with their white English and Thai genes, should carry the first names that they did: Alexander and Marielle. Ayush had been given the privilege of naming them – since everything else had been Luke’s preference – and Ayush had activated his lifelong obsession with Russian diminutives, inspired by the novels that ruled his inner life. He had worked backwards, settling on the diminutives first, Sasha and Masha, then moving to their original forms, Alexander and Marielle (Marielle because Maria was too boring to even consider as an option). Here they are, named after literary obsessions, with their mixed heritage, asking why a horse in ancient India around the fourth century BCE is not called Spencer.
After some half-hearted ‘Come, now’ and ‘OK, that’s enough’ from Ayush, the children stop their bickering. The story will now deal with the four great scenes of suffering that Siddhartha witnesses on this ride in his chariot: poverty, sickness, old age, and, finally, death, sending him into such a deep introspection about suffering and the causes of suffering that he will renounce his material life, his wealth, his wife, his little son, his life of a prince, and repair to meditate under a bodhi tree, where he will find enlightenment and become the Buddha. This much Ayush knows from books he read in his childhood and in the class on ‘World Religions’ when he was ten or eleven. What appears instead when he resumes reading is totally unexpected: the writer has united all ‘four sights’ into one using a dead, dried-up river as the cohering force to string them together. The drama of poverty, sickness, a miserable old age, and an even more squalid death plays out along the banks of the river that once gave life and prosperity and health. Now, the pictures of earth fissured into irregular geometric shapes, dead trees, rotting animal carcasses with the ribs exposed, hungry, grieving people, dead children all render a portrait of such communal anguish that Ayush has to turn his head away from the page and stop reading. Here he is again, immersing his children in the intractable foundation of human existence, this time without having intended any such thing. He is aghast. On the page, a child looks up at an old man, who appears to be saying something to him. The words underneath the image tell of a river that the child never knew; he asks the old man ‘What is a river?’, and the answer that results fills up the page with the river’s life-giving history. In the child’s eyes, Ayush reads bafflement – how to understand someone else’s grief for a thing one didn’t know oneself? Ayush feels a warm pressure behind his eyes and sits up straight. It is time to kiss the children goodnight and turn off the overhead light.
‘I’ll stay here for a little bit while you fall asleep, OK?’ he says to them. He can see their eyelids growing heavy. He goes and stands at their window for a long time, looking out into the garden below, as the July evening turns bluer and bluer, edging towards black but never quite falling into it. The white globes of the hydrangea are lamps in the increasing gloom outside. When the darkness devours everything under and around them, they are still visible, looking like closely clustered bobbing heads in dark waters, floating for survival.
He can no longer bound to the door, tail a wild weathervane in the breeze, squeaky toy in mouth, squealing with joy (impossible to tell sometimes whether the squeal is his or the toy’s), turning round and round in erratic half-circles and circles as if wanting to be stroked and touched on every part of his body all at once, surprised by joy, impatient as the wind, when any member of his family comes in. Now it’s a lifting of his head, a bark, his doggy smile, and the repeated thump of his tail on his bed or, on rare occasions, a slow arising and a cautious walk to the door. Movement, restlessness, speed, in all this is joy, not in this measured, halting slowness.
‘Sweethearts,’ Luke says to the children, ‘be gentle with him, OK? He’s getting old, he cannot tumble around with you anymore.’
‘He’s only ten-and-a-half years old,’ Masha replies, ‘so two years older than us.’
‘Yes, that’s right, but dog years are different from human years,’ Luke says. ‘His first year is equal to fifteen years, his second year is equal to nine years, so can you tell me, quick mental arithmetic, how old he is in human years when he is about to turn three?’
‘Five plus nine is fourteen, carry over one, one plus one equals two, twenty-four, he is twenty-four,’ Masha says, doing the calculation with her fingers.
‘Great, Masha, well done. OK, now something a little difficult. Every year from his third birthday is five human years. Can you tell me how old he is now in human years?’
Luke will handle this brilliantly, Ayush knows. He slips out of the living room.
Ritika gives a short laugh before she says, ‘But I wouldn’t know how to go about writing a whole book.’
Ayush says, ‘I’ll help you. You know how to do it, you just don’t know that you know it. Trust me, I’m an editor.’
‘But what on earth am I going to write about?’
Ayush has given this some thought, but faced now with the direct question, he feels as if he’s going to flub his lines. He takes a deep breath and says, ‘About the biases and elisions and blind spots of your discipline. About the collusions and orthodoxies and limitations of your priestly class. All the bullshit – trickle-down, Laffer curve, wage–price spiral, incentives in healthcare markets – all of which have had, continue to have, such oversize destructive effects on the lives of ordinary people. The ways advances in behavioural economics are being used as tools to wring every last drop of blood out of workers and, generally, fuck over the labour side of things.’
‘Wow. Ayush.’
‘Can you write me a book about that? About the human cost of that? From what I’ve heard from you ever since we met, it seems to me that you’re unhappy with your lot too.’
‘But you want me to tell a story. Our work is quantitative, data driven. Data rule everything. It’s not easy to make that into a book readable by the general readership.’
‘But human beings are at the origins of data, if you see what I mean. You take certain aspects of real human lives and stylize them into data. There must be humans, embodied, feeling, alive human beings, standing at the beginning and at the end of what you do, no?’
‘Yes, true, but that stylization, or abstraction, is the key. Unfortunately, data are faceless, not individual. Life is not data. For that, you have to go elsewhere.’
Ayush is silent. He cannot rebut this argument.
‘Why do you want me to write this book?’ Ritika asks.
‘I’m a publisher, I’m always on the lookout for interesting books to commission.’
‘Is that the real reason? The real real reason?’
Phone held to his left ear, Ayush paces the living room, aligning exactly the corners of the books with the bottom left corner of the coffee table. He counts the number of steps he takes in each direction – seven – along the wide black margin of the rug, his feet stringently within the margin. He doesn’t want to hear her answer her own question. Instead, he says, truthfully, ‘I want you to write this book because you too are at war with your own world. You, too. You know that it’s the only war worth fighting.’
13
The children are in school. Ayush is working from home – the only way to get what he considers his real work done. There’s a brief text from Luke: ‘Are you at home? Stay there, I’m coming back.’
He’s found out. Ayush also knows why it has taken Luke so long. In fact, the reason why Ayush knows is because Luke long ago had explained some point about behavioural psychology to him, something about how and why most people procrastinate and ignore certain unpleasant tasks, or leave them until the last minute, or even beyond: deadlines, of course, but also filing tax returns, opening bank statements, looking at credit card bills. Eight months after the deed Luke has opened one of his e-mail updates from the brokerage company that manages several of his – their – investment funds.
The knowledge doesn’t defuse the anxiety at the imminent confrontation. Luke comes straight to the top of the house, to Ayush’s study.
There’s no beating about the bush. ‘I spoke to Peter Dirks at Gaveston’s,’ Luke launches in. His lips seem oddly white. ‘Is it true that you took out two hundred thousand pounds from the children’s education fund?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Ayush is struck by the fact that this is the first question, not the one he thought would open the discussion.
‘Because you wouldn’t agree. Because it would defeat the whole purpose, telling you.’ He’s quivering inside. With every human being, regardless of how well you know them, of how much, how unquestioningly they love you, you can cross a line.
‘What purpose? If you needed money, why didn’t you ask me?’ Only after this does Luke ask, ‘What did you do with it?’
‘I gave it away to three different climate change charities.’
Luke’s face wears an expression Ayush has never seen before: the struggle between shock and disbelief is so picture-perfect that a column of laughter begins to build up inside him.
‘Why? Why? I don’t believe this, this is fucking insane. Are you mad? Have you taken leave of all your fucking senses?’ His voice is low, hoarse, and suddenly Ayush realizes that this is what the rage of a calm, patient, even-tempered man sounds like.
‘We have so much. So much to consume and waste, and forget that we even have so much, we just take it for granted . . .’
‘That was for the children. All the consultancy that I do on the side, all that money goes into that portfolio. You robbed their future to give to charity, where the money is going to make zero difference. Zero. Nada.’
‘They’re not going to have a future anyway.’
‘And you were trying to make it cast-iron certain that they don’t. What were you thinking?’ This comes out in a whisper.
‘I’m going to pay it back.’
‘How? With the pin-money that they pay you in publishing?’
Before he can answer, Luke moves closer to Ayush, lifts up the heavy brass Nataraja that he has on his desk, and hurls it at the window. There is a disfiguring snarl on Luke’s face as he does it, teeth bared, white lips in a thin rictus. The statue shatters a windowpane and flies out. In a second or two, they hear it fall with a splash into one of the water butts in the garden three floors below. He sweeps his right arm across the table, cleaning it of the stacks of paper and the laptop, the pen stand, the notepad in one clean move. The computer, open like a butterfly, lands with a clunk in the strip of floor between the desk and the bookshelf. Several sheets of A4 follow it in a flutter. Ayush stands frozen: who would have thought that crossing that line could be transformative in this way, for this is a different, a wholly new, man he is watching. He feels no fear, no distress, just wonder. In the odd, dissociative calm that has settled upon him, he worries about putting all the pages back in the right order, the edited ones face down on a pile, the unedited ones in a different stack, facing up. He feels that thing again where he is perched somewhere on the upper levels of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and looking down on himself looking at Luke, thinking about ordering the pages of the manuscript he is editing, and Luke standing in a ridiculous pose, knees bent, arm not yet fully retracted, mouth open, as if frozen by a mistimed click of a camera, watching, the tremor running through him now visible.
The moment unkinks and time flows again. Luke collapses onto the sofa and puts his head in his hands and clutches his hair. After what seems a very long time, Ayush says, ‘I have to get the children from school.’
Luke looks up but not at Ayush. To the broken windowpane he says, ‘I’ll get them. I’ll take them to my parents’ for the weekend.’ He gets up to leave, then turns around and says to the scattered paper and sharpened pencils on the floor, ‘I’d like you to think about what you’ve done.’ Ayush thinks Luke has finished talking, that he’ll leave the room now, but he keeps standing. ‘You think I don’t know that you showed them that abattoir film when they were little?’ Luke says. ‘You think they didn’t tell me? What are you trying to do? I’d like you to think carefully about that too.’ Then he’s gone.
Ayush can hear Luke move downstairs, opening drawers, closets, going into the children’s room; presumably throwing things into an overnight bag. Now that Ayush is alone in his study again, he feels frozen in the aftermath of what he has witnessed. He cannot get out of his chair to retrieve the laptop and check if it’s damaged, gather up the pages of the manuscript, sweep up bits of glass on the floor near the window. That division he had felt earlier is now gone, leaving him entirely trapped inside himself, sealed, unitary.
All weekend Ayush speculates about the reasons, apart from the obvious one, behind Luke’s decision to get away for the weekend to his parents’ in Gloucestershire. Luke’s family is wealthy – his father is a former banker, and there’s money stretching back generations in his mother’s family. While Ayush understands how Luke’s father has made money, he has only ever received vague, airy non-answers from Luke about where the wealth from his mother’s side originates. Maybe the real reason for Luke’s impulsive decision is to strategize about how the money appropriated by Ayush can be best recouped? Or whether they can give him a temporary loan until he has made back the sum in consultancies? If this is the reason that Luke has taken off for Gloucestershire, Ayush simply doesn’t know what the exact contents of these conversations would be, what details they would entail. His soul feels burned enough after each acquisitions meeting for which he has to produce a P&L for the books he wants to take on. Then a corollary to this path of speculation occurs to him: in the unlikely event that Luke tells his parents why the twins’ education portfolio is short of £200k, what kind of thoughts and judgements about Ayush would be going through his parents-in-laws’ minds? He cannot prevent himself from falling into the rut of this rumination. Unbidden, and surprising him, the thought of M.N. Opie suddenly visits him. Ayush can understand some of the many reasons for a person to want to disappear from his own life but what were his author’s? A stripping away of the self or the necessary insulation of hiding? The former is the highest definition of courage, but who is to say that the hiding is cowardice? It could be an act of defiance, two fingers to the world, or an act of desperation. When Ayush emerges from the churn of his mind, he has managed to banish any misgivings, any feelings of residual guilt, about his small act of redistribution; if anything, he is adamantine in his defiance of any opposition, real or imagined. He is not sorry.
On Sunday afternoon, he gets a text from Luke: ‘I’m sorry. Will buy you a new computer. Back by six.’ Then, as an afterthought, or maybe an invitation to note its stand-alone salience in a separate message: ‘xx’. Ayush knows that Luke is not just apologizing for his utterly out-of-character outburst and the material damage he has inflicted, but also – perhaps chiefly – for that spiteful dig at how low-paying Ayush’s job is. In their twenty-five years together, Luke, with the charitableness of the comfortably powerful, a power that springs both from his intellectual discipline and the money he makes, has never brought up money or earning differential simply because he hasn’t needed to: to believe, and articulate, that ‘economics is life, life is economics’ is enough. The rest can be filled in by others. In one of their frequent – bitter and tense – clashes about economics, Luke had said, with touching candour, ‘I’m pretty confident about the way I view the world and its workings’; only a certain kind of power can speak like that. Whereas he, Ayush, is left out, will forever remain outside, of that charmed set of people who have achieved equilibrium – comfortable in their skins, comfortable in the world, comfortable inside their heads.
They can only get into the same bed together after Friday’s row in the study because Luke doesn’t bear grudges, doesn’t let things play on in his head. Ayush lies wide awake in the dark. Time behaves the way it does during insomnia: small increments seem of enormous passage. He feels like he is in the open ocean, right in the middle. The only path left is drowning. Luke’s hand, in his sleep, comes to rest on Ayush’s shoulder. It takes the barest increase of pressure for him to register that there is intent in it, that Luke too is lying awake. A car passing outside creates a thin moving wand of light on their ceiling through a tiny chink in the curtains; no amount of magic is going to mend things and make the world whole again.
