The Far Himalaya, page 16
It was only at this late date that Aditi finally got to know Moksha directly, having heard so much about him over the years, but having spent very little time in his presence, and only in passing, when Ben was parting from one or the other of them. And what she heard from Moksha cast a new and sympathetic light on Ben, rendering his strangeness more comprehensible and less absolutely unique. The belief systems into which Ben and Moksha had been born had failed them, and they had come to India’s literature in search of answers to the urgent ultimate questions that that collapse had thrown up, running just ahead of the devouring void. Their conversation today was the continuation of one that had been going on since long before Aditi had arrived, and that had been radically disrupted by her arrival. Moksha’s perception of her as a threat had proven to be valid: she had brought to Ben her own crisis of belief, which at once recalled his own alienation from his birth religion and mirrored his devotion to his adopted one, and the fascination of this recognition, mixed with eros, had been irresistible to him. Old, ugly, a predatory pederast, another mere apostate and convert, Moksha hadn’t stood a chance. Ben’s destiny had reserved for Aditi the role that Moksha had dreamed was his, and so here was Moksha, alone again, again seeking solitary refuge in philosophy and other drugs.
The welfare office, ominously adjacent to the police station, occupied half of a typical government building set back from the main road at the edge of town, single-storey, red-brown brick, perpetually new, the other half being an employment centre. There was no sign of life from the outside this morning, and indeed, in a town like Seaton, both halves probably never did much business. Through the welfare office’s dark window were visible the waiting room’s unoccupied steel and plastic seats, and the service window, framing the indistinct shadow of a head. Outside the entrance, there was a heavy wood-and-concrete bench and a concrete ashtray with a single butt mashed into the fine white sand.
“We’ll leave you here?” said Ben to Moksha.
“Yes,” said Moksha. “This will probably take about an hour, if the system hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, since I last did this in Toronto.”
Ben held aside the left wing of his jacket and looked at the watch strapped to his belt. “Okay, we’ll be back at around quarter to noon.”
Ben and Aditi strolled into town on the main road. A ravishing young woman briskly descended, mail in hand, the concrete steps of the two-storey red-brick post office, an ancient building for this region at about a century old, got into her idling car and drove away, leaving the scene devoid of visible human presences other than Ben and Aditi. As they walked past the façades—a clothing shop, a restaurant, a variety store, a hardware store, a pharmacy, an art gallery—figures could be seen lurking in the darkness beyond the display windows. A superabundance of offices of lawyers and financial advisors, occupying what had clearly been more shops years ago, quietly indicated the town’s decline to a returning native like Ben, who knew how to read the signs, but anyone could interpret the ancient gravestones that had been the Empire movie theatre and the Algonquin Hotel, both boarded and hopelessly for sale. The sign in the window of the monumental stone library, a first-generation survivor, declared it open. In the adjacent cenotaph park, two old men sitting on a bench set back from the sidewalk with their hands atop their canes looked up with some interest at the unusual spectacle of a beautiful brown woman. Further in, a teenage boy and girl, she sitting on a bench and he leaning against it with one raised foot, alternately talked and sucked on jumbo soft drinks from the convenience store just up the street. The sunlight faded, blocked by one of the thunderheads gathering over the lake to the north.
“This must be similar to the town where you grew up?” said Aditi as they strolled on arm in arm.
“Yes, very,” said Ben. “And they’re both dying in the same way. I haven’t been back to New Cheltenham since I escaped more than a decade ago, but it was already going this way. You know, the economy here is still fine, but most young people don’t want to spend their lives in a place like this anymore if they’re middle class and have middle class tastes and needs. My case was extreme and unrepresentative because I was crazy and my parents were crazy, but even so it actually did fit into the trend ... Your relationship with your hometowns must be very different. Edmonton was a city, and ... it wasn’t your hometown. And Delhi?”
“My relationship to Delhi would be roughly analogous to your relationship to New Cheltenham,” said Aditi a little distantly, “insofar as I never want to see it again.”
“I sometimes wonder where you’d be today,” he said, “if your father hadn’t decided to emigrate.”
“Thank god I’ll never know,” she said.
As they were walking back towards the welfare office, they heard Moksha’s voice behind them:
“Ben!”
They turned, and saw Moksha walking towards them, with his shoulder bag evidently full.
“It took hardly any time at all,” he said, “and so I just came over to the grocery to pick up some things before you came back. Not much, because I can’t get another check. But ... a few things.”
They began to walk back, talking as before, but now with long intervals of silence. By now, Ben had ceased to marvel at how completely like his normal self Moksha seemed, and so he almost didn’t notice when, well out of town, he zipped open his shoulder bag, pulled out a small bottle of Bushmills, cracked it open, and tipped a swig into his mouth, barely pausing in his discourse of the moment, as thunder thudded and rolled in the gathered darkness over the lake.
Ben opened his eyes to late-morning light from the bedroom window, and for a time remained lying on his side, lightly clinging to Aditi’s arm, inhaling the scent of her shoulder, as she continued to breathe the deep breath of sleep. He remembered being half-awakened by a second thunderstorm in the night, but now the sky over the lake was cloudless. Their midnight lovemaking, and the interruption of his sleep by the storm, had made him sleep well beyond his usual dawn waking time. Rain-chilled air wafted from the half-open window, slightly stirring the curtains on either side. He let go of her with the greatest delicacy, softly rolled over, lightly stepped onto the creaking wooden floor, stood for a moment looking at the glowing landscape of her dark body and the white water of the bedsheets pooled around it, turned away and slipped on underpants and pants before he could be aroused again.
Outside, the grass around the trail, protected from the strong morning sunlight by the grove’s trees, was still heavy with the night’s rain, and his pantlegs were soaked below the knee by the time he reached the āśrama. Moksha was gone, but although this almost made him despair for Moksha’s safety, it did not really surprise him, nor did the new poem lying on the desk.
Where the barely trodden grass
revealed the way beyond,
I turned from my own peace
to offer you my hand,
but you did not respond—
and yet, you understand.
I read the silent plea
that shimmered in your eyes,
the longing to break free
from the last bond of hate.
Our mingled destinies
stand on the threshold. Wait.
15
Aditi had heard the news at the department on the afternoon of the morning of their return, and had walked straight back to the residence, and gone to bed, and watched the remaining daylight age, fade, and die on the ceiling and wall. It was Tuesday. She knew that Ben would not appear again until Friday night. She rose in the ghostly light from the street, left the apartment and building, and walked along Bloor towards Philosopher’s Walk. It must be ten, eleven. He must be in the department, she thought, reading in the library. She descended the steps from the street into the Walk, reflexively glanced towards the Troll Bridge as she passed, walked on through the fatal spot where he had saved her from Sujay years ago, down to Hoskins, and along it to the Robarts Library.
She leaned against the corner of the ascending elevator, her blank defeated gaze fixed on nothing, did not even look up when the door slid open and she walked past the person who was standing waiting on the fourteenth floor. She rounded the corner and opened the library door. Ben wasn’t there, but his knapsack and the open volume of the Mahabharata lay on the table in his usual spot. She paused in the open door. He must have gone to the washroom. Leaving the door open behind her, she walked over to the open book, and touching the table edge with her fingertips, absently read the verse marked by the Buddha’s Vegetarian Restaurant card placed beneath it:
kecidīśvaranirdiṣṭāḥ kecideva yadṛcchayā
pūrvakarmabhirapyanye traidhametadvikṛṣyate
Some act at the command of the Lord, some act by chance, and some act under the influence of their own past deeds: but all three are drawn against their will.
She stared at the verse for a moment, then removed the black plastic hair clasp from the back of her head, letting her curls tumble free, placed it on the page next to the card, and left the library, turning to the left and climbing the stairs to the upper sub-corridor. Approaching, she saw that Boylan’s door was ajar. She heard him talking to someone, animated and cheerful. Her heart was pounding. What was she doing, what was she about to do ... She smelt the familiar odour of unwashed body, cigarettes, booze.
Sitting at his desk, Boylan looked up when she appeared in the door. He beamed at her, radiant with a chilling, incomprehensible amalgam of malice, triumph, pleasure and goodwill. Sitting across the desk from him, facing away from Aditi, was a tiny person, silver-haired, a man, in a brown tweed blazer. He too was animated and cheerful, talking in a nasal voice, and concluded a phrase with a burst of sniffling laughter.
“Hey Aditi!” said Boylan, grinning. His interlocutor stopped talking.
She was about to faint. She stumbled away from the door, back the way she had come, down the five steps, holding the metal handrail, with the air conditioning roaring behind her through the fire escape’s metal door. She almost fell through the library door. Ben still wasn’t there. She stumbled down the hall to the men’s washroom and burst through the double doors.
Washing his hands in the basin, Ben looked up, startled.
“What ... ?” he said, alarmed, standing facing her, holding his dripping hands in front of him as the water continued to hiss into the basin.
“It’s all over,” she whispered, leaning against the wall, looking down, and strangely not touching him. She sighed heavily, and tears spilled from her eyes, though her face remained inert.
“What is it, baby?” Ben said softly, turning off the faucet, wiping his hands on the seat of his pants, and advancing to hold her by the shoulders.
She looked up. “Chamberlain,” she said. “He’s gone.”
Ben lay staring at the ceiling, palely lit by the still lights of the midnight street, with the slow rhythmic breath of her sleep at his shoulder.
The medics and police had reconstructed the scene afterwards. Kamala, Chamberlain’s wife, had collapsed to the floor, felled where she stood by a massive heart attack. Chamberlain had either seen her fall, or had rolled into the room afterwards, perhaps drawn by her cry or the sound of her collapse. Seeing her, he had had a heart attack himself and slumped onto the floor in front of his wheelchair, comatose. They had been lying there for more than forty-eight hours when a maintenance person let himself in after vainly attempting to get them on the phone, alerted by other tenants’ reports that Kamala had not been seen for two days on her usual daily round in and around the building. Kamala was dead, and Chamberlain was almost dead. He now lay in the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Parkdale.
Aditi had despaired at the news. Her viva was next week.
He would visit Chamberlain tomorrow, in the evening—he had already taken too many days off work recently. Chamberlain and Kamala had had no children, and both had outlived their families in England and India. Ben had no idea who else might care about Chamberlain’s state. There were innumerable former students and colleagues, but how many were still in or around Toronto, how many would find out, and how many would care enough, had known him intimately enough, that they would want to visit him in this condition? Chamberlain was revered, and he was liked and loved, but the reserve of the British Brahmin enveloped and insulated him, whether he meant it to or not, and deterred overtures of more than formal friendliness. His relationship with Ben may have been unique in his life, and was certainly unique now, at least. There might be no hope that he would ever wake up again, and he would certainly not wake up when Ben would be there tomorrow. But Ben would go.
Though of course, this would do nothing to help Aditi. They had been counting on the silent warning menace of Chamberlain’s availability as she walked into the possible ambush of her viva, an ambush that had become probable rather than possible now that Boylan would know that he faced no consequences, during or afterwards, for lies and distortions that only another indologist could perceive. Now she would have to face this without an ally, and without an ally she would not be able to survive. The slimness of her hope had been reflected in the weary defeat in her face this evening, during which she had spoken a total of maybe twenty words, words which had sounded to him as if they were coming from further and further away.
“What is your relation to Professor Chamberlain?” asked the nurse behind the glass, an elegantly attractive woman in middle age.
“I’m his PhD student,” said Ben. “I can show you my student card, and I can ... tell you all sorts of things about Professor Chamberlain and my relationship with him, but I don’t have anything on paper: that would take time, and trouble with bureaucracy, and I—we—just wanted to get down here and see him as soon as possible, after we heard the news yesterday.”
“And this is ... ?” said the nurse, glancing at Aditi.
“I’m his—Ben’s—fiancée, and fellow PhD student,” said Aditi, barely raising her tone from the monotonous, devastated dullness with which she had been speaking since yesterday, “and Professor Chamberlain was also helping me with my PhD, but that was unofficial, still, at this point.”
The nurse looked down at what must have been some relevant piece of text on the desk in front of her. Ben had judged her to be a reasonable person, and she did not disillusion him.
“It seems that the professor had no family in the world but his wife?” she said, looking at Ben. Her voice and eyes were slightly tinged with pathos. “That’s what his faculty at the university told us.” She looked down again. “The department of ... East Asian studies?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Ben. “He had been very well known and influential, during his career, had known everyone, but of course he had to retire many years ago, so he had fallen out of touch with his colleagues, and most of his contemporaries had died.”
“Hm, that’s what we thought,” she said, “but we did have two people inquiring about him... another professor, a ... Ian Boylan?”
The merest shadow of disgust flitted across Ben’s face. Aditi’s registered no change at all.
The nurse glanced at Ben, and went on: “And the other... a former colleague of his at the university, he said. He actually came and visited. He lives very near, he said, just over on Roncesvalles.”
Ben’s eyes became almost wild. “Who...?” he said.
“A ... Saul Rosselli?” she said.
Ben’s face took on an expression of intense concentration. “I don’t remember the name, actually,” he said.
“He must have been in his forties,” she said.
“Did he give you a phone number?” said Ben.
“Yes,” she said, “and he asked us to call him if there was any change in the professor’s condition. He sat beside his bed for about half an hour. I think he was talking to him, too, for a while.”
“Could you give me his number?” said Ben with guarded eagerness.
“I’m ... not sure if I can do that, actually,” she said, “but I can certainly call him and give him yours.”
Ben glanced over at Aditi, who was looking down with blank eyes and had clearly stopped hearing the conversation. Then he looked back at the nurse. “I’ll give you ... our number.”
He softly suggested to Aditi that she wait for him on one of the chairs in the hall, and she did not protest. The nurse then led him to Chamberlain’s room. The walls were yellow-orange with the light of late evening before she turned on the light. Chamberlain was hooked up to the machinery of life support. The window looked out over the flashing traffic of the Queensway and the Gardiner Expressway, and beyond, the coast of Lake Ontario curving round to the monolithic apartment tower at the mouth of the Humber some kilometres to the west, which had been Chamberlain’s and Kamala’s home for decades, and where she had died.
“Let me know when you leave,” the nurse said gently, and left, leaving the door open.
Ben sat down in the chair next to the bed. He had been prepared to be more or less overcome by emotion. Morbidly self-aware since childhood, he was conscious of his reasons for feeling the things he felt, and so he knew what Chamberlain was for him, knew the historical wounds and deficiencies of the soul that drew him to Chamberlain, starving for redress. In the years before Aditi appeared, Ben had been almost in love with him, in a way that he could not be with Moksha, whose flaws and limitations were daily before his eyes, and who was sexually dangerous besides. Ben was a superior linguist to both of them, but Chamberlain’s enormous experience, and the fact that he knew India, gave him something that he could revere and aspire to.
Their first meeting had set the tone for the whole relationship. Ben, seventeen years old, was sitting in a carrel in the undergraduate library, Sigmund Samuel, copying out verses from the Mahabharata, upon which he was already obsessively fixated. As he fluently filled line after line of his notebook (found in a library trash can) with Devanāgarī script in blue ballpoint, he became aware of a presence behind and above him, but he continued without pausing to look, determined to accomplish as much as he could before being challenged or thrown out, as he expected, by whoever this was, probably a library technician who had caught a whiff of his stink. This was before Ben’s discovery of the Harrison Baths, and of the pleasure of being at least as clean as circumstances allowed.
