The Far Himalaya, page 4
“There’s been no point in asking them,” said Ben, “since even suggesting such a thing to Boylan would be suicide, and it would be impossible to do it without his approval. If he even knew that she’s been talking with other scholars ... ”
Chamberlain nodded.
“There is one person I can think of ... the only person,” he said softly, as if to himself, apparently troubled, remembering. “But I don’t know where he is.” He gave his head a sharp, tight shake, and looked up. “We shall have to see what fate offers,” he said, “and for the time being, hope for the best. No problems with your card, by the way? With the authorities?”
Ben shook his head, smiling.
Chamberlain took up his cup and finished his coffee, and Ben did likewise. Chamberlain’s wife appeared from the kitchen and took the cups.
“There are a few passages that I want your opinion on,” he said to Ben. “They’re in a forgotten kāvya of the seventeenth century. No translation, not even a commentary in Sanskrit or any other Indian language. Devilishly difficult. Would you wheel me into the study?”
This room also looked out over the lake. A large desk faced the window, and bookshelves covered two of the walls. A stone sculpture of an almost nude apsarāḥ, a celestial nymph, tall as Ben’s shoulder, stood to the right of the desk.
“Here’s the kāvya” said Chamberlain, taking up a fragile old volume that lay open in the centre of the desk and putting it into Ben’s hands. “This is the only printed edition, 1931, one of the dozens of late kāvyas I’ve been reading in recent years for the last volume of my history. Nobody reads them anymore, not in India, not anywhere. I’m the first one in centuries to be reading most of them. It’s thrilling, a new frontier. As with any literature, most of them are dull, a few are execrable, and a few are masterpieces. This one is a masterpiece. Here are the passages that have stumped me,” he said, drawing a hard-covered black notebook into the centre of the desk. “As always, your insights may be valuable.”
Ben was perusing the book, murmuring one of the poem’s verses to himself. He put it back down on the desk and took up the notebook, leafing through pages filled with stanzas and fragments of stanzas in handwritten Devanāgarī script, with words underlined here and there. Looking at the most recently copied passage, he said, “I think this has to be a printing or copying error.” With his finger on one line, he bent down to show the page to Chamberlain. “This might not be a present participle. If you just amend tu to nu ... I think it all comes together.”
Chamberlain looked at the passage, silently mouthing a few words to himself. “Yes ... I think you’re right,” he said, beginning to smile. “I wouldn’t have thought of something as simple as that.”
“I’m not at all sure I’m right,” said Ben, “but this is what immediately occurs to me. I’ll go through these pages right now and just put down these impressions.”
“Yes, that will be good,” said Chamberlain. “That’s been a great help in the past. And as usual, you will of course be credited. Readers of the last volume may have begun to wonder about this non-doctor Benjamin Doheney non-PhD.”
Ben sat down in a nearby armchair and began going through the pages of the notebook with a pen from his jacket pocket, while Chamberlain sat looking at the lake across the vast desk. After some minutes, Ben finished and handed the notebook to Chamberlain, who leafed through the pages, nodding and commenting from time to time. “Yes, of course.” “Yes, why didn’t I think of that?”
At last, laying the notebook on the desk, he said: “I must make my usual comment that it is a great shame that your talent is ... not exactly going to waste, but not being fully realized because of your isolation. You wouldn’t necessarily have to earn degrees in order to find some place in the culture of Sanskrit scholarship. I am still a powerful man.”
“My future is absolutely dependent on Aditi’s,” said Ben. “If she lives through this PhD, I’ll follow her wherever she goes. As long as I live, however I’m living, I will always be a scholar. I used to live for that, being a scholar. Now, it’s just what I am: what I live for is her. If she succeeds, I will be a scholar with her. If she doesn’t succeed ... there’s nothing for either of us to think about. Her success, her survival, is all that matters.”
Chamberlain looked down at his hands resting on the knob of his cane. “I believe you have found the path that will lead her to success,” he said. “If she faces a challenge at the end of it, I may intervene. But you know that that will be very dangerous for me, and that I have everything to lose. As a scholar, Ian Boylan is a fraud, but as a fraud, he’s a genuine master, with a special gift for the art of blackmail—as Aditi knows.” He looked up at Ben. “But at this point, as I say, it doesn’t look like Aditi will need my help.”
Ben looked out at the lake. “I hope you’re right,” he said.
6
The young April night smelled of spring, but it was already cold as Ben made his way up Philosopher’s Walk towards the Royal Conservatory, where he expected to find Moksha Das already ensconced in the recess beneath his Troll Bridge. Ben was more than usually eager to talk to him tonight: at the tail-end of his reading session in the Robarts Library, he had written a poem, his first non-Sanskrit poem in several months, and was looking forward to hearing the old editor’s opinion of it.
Philosopher’s Walk was deserted, as usual at this hour, and the Conservatory was silent as he approached its shadowed bulk, the last late-night practicers—pianists, violinists, flautists, singers—having long since been forced to vacate the three storeys of study-cells from which fragmented, obsessively repeated music poured through the windows and onto the Walk throughout the day. He was feeling good after a day of daydreaming labour at the carwash, a massive plate of mixed vegetable and tofu noodles at Buddha’s Vegetarian Restaurant on Dundas, two hours of exceptionally smooth reading of the Mahabharata, and the unexpected inspiration of this poem. Its arrival would not have been quite as perfect on an Aditi night, since Aditi cared less for poetry than Ben and Moksha, and in any case she was always more or less distracted by anxiety over her doctorate, a years-long ordeal that was hopefully soon to end.
Reaching the Conservatory, Ben turned aside from the paved path onto the recently thawed lawn, cold and damp. The Walk’s last dim yellow lamp was ahead, at the bottom of the staircase up to Bloor Street; another was behind. Here, all was more or less dark: trees, bushes, the benches against the Conservatory wall. As he approached the concrete staircase of the fire escape, he saw a shadowed figure standing beside it, someone far too tall to be Moksha. He stopped.
The person was talking: a man’s voice, one that Ben recognized.
“If you won’t come out on your own, I’ll drag you out myself.”
That Hindi-accented voice, with the menacing and implacable cheerfulness of the professional bully who loves his job ... Ben restrained his impulse to step forward immediately. He had nothing on him yet.
The figure moved, suddenly and violently, and there was a dull sound of impact, and Moksha’s grunt of pain, and the voice: “Get up.”
Swiftly and silently stepping forward, Ben emerged from the darkness, standing close to the figure, staring. The cop snapped his head round to glare in alarm and indignation at Ben’s shadowed face, a few inches higher than his own.
“What do you want?” he said sharply.
“You kicked him,” said Ben calmly. “I saw you kick him.”
“Who are you?” said the cop. The sharp features of his broad face were ugly with hate. “This person is trespassing on university property. So are you.”
Moksha had raised himself into a sitting position, and was looking up at them from under his Troll Bridge. Ben glanced at him. He was in the most advanced stage of inebriation, a state in which it would be very difficult to influence his behaviour. His mouth was slack. He was clearly about to begin babbling, and his babbling would reveal too much.
Ben muttered sharply, “tūṣṇīm āssva,” keep quiet.
Amazingly, despite his condition and his somewhat limited spoken Sanskrit, Moksha got the message: his toothless mouth comically snapped shut.
Surprise and confusion darkened the cop’s face, and he began to scrutinize Ben’s.
“No, I’m not trespassing,” Ben said flatly. “I’m a student at this university.”
“Show me your student card,” the cop said without missing a beat.
Reaching into his already unbuttoned overcoat, Ben took a cloth wallet from his suit jacket’s inner pocket, opened it to reveal a blue and white student card behind its plastic window, and handed him the wallet. The cop suspiciously inspected Ben’s photo, several times looked up again at Ben’s defiantly serene face, then took the card out from behind the plastic window and turned it over and around, examining it with ostentatious care. Ben put out his hand, and the cop placed the wallet and the card into it, glaring at him through his television-screen lenses.
“You could be a professor or the head of a department,” said the cop, “and it would make no difference. Homeless people are not allowed to take up abode on university property. This man is a trespasser, and it is my job to remove him.”
“You assaulted him,” said Ben calmly. “You kicked him. I saw you.”
The cop was looking at him with naked hate.
“And I’ve seen you before,” said Ben.
A touch of fear flickered into the cop’s face.
“Moksha Das is my friend,” said Ben. “After spending the day in the Robarts Library writing my PhD dissertation, I’ve come here this evening to relax and have an enjoyable conversation with my friend. Is that all right with you, officer Ganesh Malhotra? Or do you need to consult with your superior Professor Boylan first?”
Officer Ganesh Malhotra stood silent for a moment. Then he stepped back, still looking at Ben with a face dark with brooding revenge, turned, and walked south on Philosopher’s Walk. Ben watched him until he disappeared into the darkness.
“What was that about?” said Moksha in the nasal, drawling voice that characterized his stage-four drunkenness.
“An old acquaintance,” said Ben. “You know, I’ve mentioned him before: the Indian one, the one who literally kicked me off the steps of the Department of Religion when I was eighteen, and then assaulted me on a bench in Queen’s Park in the middle of the night a couple of years later. And Aditi once saw him talking with her professor, so the two old scumbags know each other. You once told me you’d never had any experience with him.”
Moksha wagged his head violently back and forth. “What do I know?” he said. “I didn’t even see the person who kicked me just now.” And this was true. How many mornings had Ben met Moksha in the Scott Mission chapel, bloodied and bruised in some assault of the night before that Moksha couldn’t remember. For all they knew, Moksha and officer Ganesh Malhotra might go way back.
Raising himself to sit cross-legged, Moksha reached into the darkness of the recess under the concrete staircase, brought out the familiar juice bottle, twisted off the cap, and took a swig, the sherry making a delicate little splashing sound as he tipped the bottle back and returned it to his lap. Ben already knew that the enjoyable conversation with his friend that he had been so looking forward to would have to happen on another night.
“So what are you doing here?” Moksha slurred. “I had given up on you for tonight. I assumed you must be porking your girlfriend ... what’s her name ... Aditi.” He laughed his sniffling drunken laugh, grinning toothlessly. “I can never get used to these Indians with their names of gods and goddesses. Aditi mother of the gods, mother of the sun, and her boyfriend Benjamin Doheney.” An extended burst of sniffling.
“No, I’m outside tonight,” said Ben. “I pork Aditi Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Saturday if she’s still horny.” Moksha guffawed, which pleased Ben, though he felt bad about acquiescing to the crass banter into which Moksha always tried to drag Aditi, a veiled expression of hostility to his victorious rival. “Other nights, she works on saving herself from the clutches of that psychopath Boylan.”
“I’ve never really understood what all that is about,” said Moksha, slumping his head on his chest as if the effort of holding it up had become too great. “This is the person for whom we translate this Yogayukta whatever the hell it’s called, right?”
“Right,” Ben said, “the person who will then take credit for translating it himself, when it’s published as a book, as he’s taken credit for our previous work when it’s been published in the form of articles in scholarly journals. Though he thinks it’s Aditi who’s doing all this work, and has no idea that you and I exist.”
Moksha remained slumped in the same attitude of dejection or indifferent disgust. Finally he said, “You know that the only reason I’m helping you with this is because I love you and lust after your body.” He took another swig. “I must have asked you before why you don’t just do it all yourself.”
“I don’t have time,” said Ben. “I actually have to earn a living. I have my own reading and writing. And I don’t know yogaśāstra, which you do. And that’s why this work is good for you, too: to get you out of the morass of alcoholism and despair into which you’ve sunk, and back to translating the Yogavāsiṣṭha, and your other writing.” Moksha remained silent, looking straight down at the bottle in his lap. “It’ll be puṇya for ya, Moksha,” Ben said, now jocular, “get ya a better rebirth in a less shitty loka.”
“Hm, and what about your merit?” said Moksha. “What about your rebirth in a less shitty world?”
“I’m actually hoping to be reborn in this one,” said Ben, almost to himself. “After I’ve made it a little less shitty.”
7
It was evening, a warm May evening, perhaps, perhaps the moment when the last trace of twilight has just vanished in the western sky. Ben was walking up one of his favourite lanes, between Robert and Brunswick Streets, towards the lane-side rear of Harbord Bakery. He was feeling good, feeling the peace of the evening and the season. He could hear a voice, probably his own voice, singing a song which had been a huge hit a few years before:
Take my hand, take everything.
There’s nothing I wouldn’t die for,
with you by my side.
As he walked, he imagined himself with a guitar, singing this for Aditi, invisibly present. He rounded the corner into the second lane, but the fragrance of bread that usually emanated from the bakery’s tall blue plastic recycling bins was absent. Ahead of him, where the lane met Robert Street, was a spot that he loved: the first house on the block, on the right, had a beautiful garden-like front yard with a huge ancient tree and a trellised, ivy-covered gate. He could hear the tree breathing the night breeze. The singing had stopped, and a voice (his voice, probably) was speaking: What have I done to you, poor child? What have I done to you, poor child?
A dark figure was standing on the sidewalk in front of the trellised gate, admiring the ivy. The cold hand of fear clutched his heart. He couldn’t see the shadowed face. It was a woman. Far back in his mind, there was a scream, perhaps his own. His own voice was saying, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
She turned her face to him, innocently surprised. It was her—his mother. Nothing but space between the two of them, three paces and she could touch him, or he her. Horror and panic flooded him like freezing water, swirling almost audibly, propelling him violently upward through the waters of darkness, out of the darkness, awake.
He lay on his back with pounding heart, staring up into the night-breathing shadows of the trees. The sky showed no hint of dawn. He shifted onto his side on the wooden bench, so that he was looking towards the church, his mother’s church, on whose sanctuary-giving grounds he was sleeping on these lovely May nights. On the grass next to the College Street sidewalk, someone was sleeping on his side in a posture that suggested alcoholic collapse. There was still no traffic on the streets, except for the occasional taxi. The clock tower of the fire station across Bellevue Avenue would not resume sounding the hours until 7 a.m.
The song was still sounding in his mind. He continued to feel himself singing it, fingering the chords.
Take my hand, take everything.
There’s nothing I wouldn’t die for,
with you by my side.
Beautiful. Vulgar but beautiful, and expressing a simple wisdom that would have saved him and Aditi years ago, if he had been capable of it.
Aditi. Working alone this night, now collapsed in her bed alone. Seventeen, eighteen more hours. His penis stirred and began to stiffen, but he turned from the impulse, not wanting to sully his newly bathed cleanliness and fresh underwear. Shifting onto his back, he saw the sky was now tinted with the first degree of dawn. He closed his eyes and drifted off again.
His shallow sleep was broken by a voice that was marked with the characteristically soft gruffness of the Anishnabe: “Brother, you got a smoke?”
Opening his eyes to full daylight, he saw a man stooping over him, one he knew by sight but not by name, waving twinned fingers before his lips in the street’s familiar dumb show of smoking.
“No, sorry, I don’t smoke,” Ben mumbled.
“Don’t smoke! A skid that doesn’t smoke!” said the man in surprise and disgust, turning sharply away, as Ben sat up and leaned forward with his arms on his knees.
He shook his head, paused to gather his consciousness, then sat back, stretching his arms out on the bench’s backrest. Another gorgeous May day. The sharp, rapid note of the clock tower’s small bell began to sound: three, four, five, six, seven. The Corner, a drop-in centre for the homeless that was nowhere near a corner, would be opening right now on Augusta Avenue, five minutes away in Kensington Market.
Ben stood, hoisted his heavy knapsack onto the bench and then onto his back, and set off south on Bellevue Avenue. Reaching one of the Market’s old synagogues at Denison Square, he turned left, walked to Augusta, and crossed to The Corner, which occupied the upper half of a dismal split storefront. Four or five skids were standing on the broad sidewalk outside, smoking and drinking coffee from small styrofoam cups. Inside, he climbed the stairs, entered the already crowded space, and poured himself coffee from an urn on the counter. Two of the drop-in’s employees were busy preparing and dispensing wretched sandwiches of white bread and baloney.
