Last Labyrinth Page 14

  ‘There is a block of shares that we can not trace.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The block was with Aftab Rai’s father. He passed them on to Mrs. Rai.’

  ‘Anuradha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is not Mrs. Rai,’ I cried angrily.

  Mr Thapar looked at me in bewilderment.

  ‘Anyway, carry on.’

  ‘The fact is that she does not have them any longer. She sold them off to someone. To whom, we do not yet know. There have been several transactions simultaneously and we have lost track of them.’

  ‘That is very strange.’

  ‘It happens sometimes. These shares are not on the stock exchange. It is not easy to know to whom they have been passed. I am sure we shall locate them in due course.’

  ‘I hope the “due course” is not very long.’

  ‘What would you like us to do. We are not detectives.’

  Some part of my imagination latched on to that.

  ‘You know, that is not a bad idea,’ I said. ‘Detectives are quite commonly hired these days. Even in India. Why don’t we hire someone to trace those shares.’

  Mr. Thapar was flabbergasted, then, quite uncharacteristically, blew up. ‘I worked twenty five years with your father, you know that?’

  ‘Of course, I do.’

  ‘And I have worked ten years with you. It has taken thirty five years to build this business.’

  He waved around the room and continued, ‘If something goes wrong with this share business, we will be finished.’

  ‘Nothing will go wrong.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I am sure.’

  I knew I sounded like a nit-wit prince but the fact was I could not think straight. Unknown to Mr. Thapar, I was in a panic: what if this one route of settling scores with them proved a dud. I leaned forward, ‘Don’t you understand, Mr. Thapar. I have got to go through with this to the end.’

  He stared back stubbornly.

  ‘You are being totally unbusinesslike. I can’t imagine that you are not aware of it. But I shall see what can be done.’

  With that he left.

  I sat back trying to control my own panic. When I could not, I stepped out.

  Coming down the lift I was afraid the electricity would fail and I would be left hanging between two floors. It would not return for hours. The doors would be jammed and the air would be short of oxygen. Anything could, then, happen. The management of the building claimed they had generators hooked on, but I doubted their claim. Of late, I doubted everything and everybody.

  In the foyer I approached a peon. He did not know where the generators were but his companion, the little teaboy, did. He offered to guide me. We went out through a side entrance, all the way to the back of the building. We went past the canteen, the boy announcing to his employers his business with me. Between the canteen and the building there was an opening that led to the basement. We went down a ladder. It was quite clearly not the official entrance. ‘There,’ said the boy triumphantly wiping his running nose on the shirt sleeve.

  There it surely was. In the dusty damp cold basement it glistened with oil. I walked up to it. The engine was a six cylinder job putting out seventy horse power, may be seventy five at a crunch. And there was the alternator, a fine job in its own right. I was all admiration when I realized there were no leads, no way it could possibly be connected to the distribution system of the building. In my excitement I addressed the boy, ‘The bastards have just dumped it here, just to fool us don’t you see?’

  The boy saw, had seen before, but did not seem worried. The problem of getting stuck in a life did not bother him.

  Of late, my fears, real or imagined, had exponentially increased. I was afraid of elevators, bridges, motor cars, sea breeze, electric switches, bridges, canned food. In short, there was nothing I was not afraid of. In spite of the tranquillisers, I was always dizzy, off-balance. I took medicines for my fears but nothing happened. I knew medicines would change nothing. In my heart, I knew my fears had nothing to do with my body or with my nerves. I was afraid, I knew, because Anuradha had left me.

  Coming out, I walked up the pavement towards the sea. The chauffeur watched me from the parking lot. I stepped off the kerb, pulling back the same instant, astonished by a fusillade of horns and screeching tyres. I hadn’t seen the traffic light they had put up at the crossing of the main road and what used to be a lane. Someone had put up a stall for hot dogs and hamburgers. I remembered an evening when I was nine or ten. I had driven down to this point with my grandfather. He wore riding breeches, a khaki coat and a toupee. His grey moustache drooped over a full, sensual mouth. He held my hand. There was mischief in his almost blue eyes. He winked at me whenever I looked up.

  The stream of cars before me was unending although I was no longer the object of their derision. The traffic lights had undergone a couple of changes without my being able to cross over. A car now braked opposite me, making me step back in a reflex. The driver and I stared at each other until I realized it was my car. Twisted in his seat, the chauffeur held the door open. I jumped in thinking of Tarakki and off we went through a set of amber lights.

  That evening when my grandfather and I had stood at the crossing, a parade was passing down the street. My grandfather, neat, restless, mischievous, informed me it was the army that was parading. Why? I asked. They want to show off their boots and belts, that’s why, he said. He patted the pocket of his breeches. I said I did not understand. Madness, he said, patting his pocket some more.

  In the pocket of his breeches that evening, my grandfather carried a gun, a Colt. 38 revolver. India had been divided, rioters stalked the lanes and the alleys. My grandfather carried a gun, for protection and also out of a sense of humour.

  My grandfather died a rich man. He had done his civil engineering from London, in the last year of the last century, as he put it. He gave up his job with the Public Works Department to start contracting when the city of Delhi started to get built. His idea was to cash in on the whims of the British rulers, and cash in he did.

  In the fifteen minutes that I had been in the car, we hadn’t moved far. There were the traffic lights of course. The offices, too were disgorging their thousands. Wind-blown men swarmed the road. A crowd of women, their sarees fluttering against the radiator pelted the bonnet of the Mercedez with groundnut shells. Everyone declared that the city was ungovernable. But the city was a monster with a life of its own. And, now, the monster had produced high-rise offices where I was certain one day to be trapped in a dead life because someone had forgotten to connect the generator.

  My father avoided these high-rise offices. ‘Why?’ he had said when I first suggested it to him. ‘Why? What have those buildings to do with us?’ It wasn’t rhetoric; he wanted to know. We couldn’t explain to him and he continued to sit in the little room at the factory, surrounded by his journals and the fumes of chlorine.

  These questions for him were elementary. He was given to bigger interrogations which he probably carried on during those nights of insomnia. Once I wandered into his room on a Sunday morning. Mother had been dead some years. He sat amidst a heap of unopened Sunday papers. I sat and smoked and read the papers. There was an item on plastics and I mentioned it to him. He did not reply. When he spoke he waved the little book at me.

  ‘You know what it says here?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Just listen. “There was neither death nor immortality, then.” Then, mind you, “nor a sign of day or night. And darkness hidden in darkness...” Have you read these... things?’ I said I hadn’t. He warmed up and carried on.

  ‘ “Who knows the truth? Who can tell whence and how arose the universe. The gods are later than its beginning: Who knows, therefore, whence comes this creation? Only that God who sees in highest heaven; He only knows whence came this universe. He only knows. Or, perhaps, He knows not.” What do you make of this?’

  ‘Make of what?’ I sai
d.

  ‘Of this, for example: “Or, perhaps, He knows not.” ’

  ‘I don’t know what to think of it.’

  ‘Do you think it is so: Even He does not know.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You had religion at Harvard, didn’t you?’

  ‘One term. They didn’t explain these things.’

  After a spell of silent thought my father said, ‘You see, this is the problem. This is what bothers me. “Or, perhaps, He knows not.” If even He doesn’t know, then who does? Quite frankly, I don’t like all this vagueness.’

  He looked at me as though expecting a reply. I made none. His disappointment with the arrangement of the universe was unexpected. Perhaps it was not disappointment but creeping melancholia. Everyone has a way, a short-hand of grief.

  He began again.

  ‘ “And when the sun is set, Yajnavalkya, and the moon is also set, and the fire has sunk down and voice is silent, what, then, is the light of man?” ’

  He did not seek my views on that. He did not even look at me. He paused, his eyes on the book and, I thought, I saw a shadow cross his face.

  Nothing of all this made any sense to me, then. I was twenty two and it was not the light of Yajnavalkya that I sought. What I sought was the spotlight of the stage, red and violet and blue, hot and blinding. If, beyond their iridescence, beyond the heat and the glare, loomed the pit and the darkness of the night, it was all right by me.

  It was his interrogations, I believe, that gave my father melancholia just as someone given to debauchery might contract syphilis. My grandfather, on the other hand, was a man-about-town, a gourmet, fond of women and drink. He had mistresses among the young starlets. He was a good friend but a terrible enemy, not above taking recourse to the gun. He lent and borrowed millions. Twice he lost fortunes without losing a night’s sleep. Anything to do with God embarrassed him. He disappeared whenever my grandmother held kirtans. If he was bothered about connections he didn’t go loony thinking about them. Why wasn’t my father like him? Reckless, happy, unburdened by philosophical speculation. He was, of course, a scientist and had delved more deeply into truths that lie at the heart of the universe. He knew things beyond anything grandfather could imagine. Was it his knowledge, then, a knowledge of verities sparsely known among ordinary men, that had pushed him over the brink, had convinced him that there were no verities at all. And where did I fit in? I was a womanizer all right, and a boozer, but my womanizing and boozing had not settled anything. I had inherited the afflictions of both of them — for what were they if not afflictions, afflictions that had led me into unbearable entanglements. A year ago, although battered, I was getting by fairly reasonably. I had a loving wife. I worked more or less regular hours. I had ambition of sorts. And, where was I at now? I still had a loving wife. I had lost a lover whom I couldn’t forget even though I was busy devising every possible stratagem that could destroy her. I was probably running down perfectly good companies. I could die any day, any moment. While I lived I made a fool of myself. For K, for Geeta, for many others I had become a pain in the ass. So where was I at? And why? Why else if not for the afflictions bestowed upon me by my genes. I was in deep trouble. And I knew it.

  I reached home and went to my room. There in the rosewood cabinet I kept my grandfather’s revolver which he had left me. I unlocked the cabinet and took it out of its holster. It smelled of gun oil even though it had been ages since I had oiled it. I opened the chamber. It was empty. I let out the safety catch and aiming at the windows pulled the trigger about. There was much that one could do with that gun. With a gun like that one could settle scores easily enough.

  In another drawer, along with my shirts, I kept Anuradha’s forgotten handkerchief. Its undying fragrance had permeated my clothing. The other night, in bed with me, her lips pressed against my shoulder, Geeta remarked at the strange perfume. It was Anuradha’s perfume, I told her, and also how it had come to be in my clothing, on my body. I had expected resentment, protest, even withdrawal. But Geeta, to my disbelief, responded with sudden powerful thrusts, as though the vision of me locked into Anuradha, was somehow more erotic to her than I by my plain self. The labyrinth, as I can see, stretches to the Maya, to Geeta, to the very edges of this beach.

  Anuradha! Anuradha! My dark and terrible love.

  I had thought I could do without her. The fact was I could not do without her at all. Wherever I went during the day, she stayed with me. At night I stayed up lusting after her. I tried to move my thoughts off her body, on to other things, some bit of business or my health prospects, but it was only her body that I could resurrect. I walked about the room, beyond the limits of K’s permission. I tried to read. I tried listening to the radio. Strains of music would fl oat in on the microwave. Australia, America, England, Russia. But I could not push her out of my mind. Nor could I push out that other image of hers, of her standing beside a window, tapping the panes as though she knocked at a door, staring at a purple mountain and saying, (To me? To whom?) saying in deep sorrowful tones: ‘There is a god in those mountains.’

  I went into the bedroom and lay down. I felt tired, high strung. Through all the humming and the arguing that went on in my head, I felt sleep coming over me.

  I awoke with Geeta’s car driving up the driveway, the tyres sounding off the loose manhole cover, as they always did. In her usual rapid step she came into the room. She looked grand in a light blue chiffon. She had been to the hair dresser.

  K, who had been waiting for me to get up, also came in. I wondered why he had come in early today. They stood on either side of me as though unsure if I was still asleep.

  ‘Hello,’ I said wiping the perspiration off my face. K came closer. ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘I had a tiff with Mr. Thapar.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Geeta said.

  K took my pulse.

  ‘Anything else?’ he said thoughtfully, letting my arm drop.

  I thought of the dream I had just had. I realized now that I had been having this dream off and on ever since I fell ill. I had had it even under the blanket of pethidine. In bits and pieces, perhaps, but pieces nonetheless of the same eerie tale. I had it the night K spoke to Anuradha on phone and she refused to come.

  I sat up with effort. Why did the dream leave me so exhausted? Geeta handed me a wad of eau-de cologne.

  ‘What is it?’ K said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A silence followed. Very far away a ship sounded its siren. I had never before heard a ship’s siren this far from the harbour. I leaned out from the bed and pushed open a window. The noise of the surf immediately filled the room.

  ‘There is a dream I keep having,’ I said.

  ‘Tell us about it,’ K said.

  ‘It is something about flying. Or, so it always seems. I am flying towards a mountain. Mountain, with a snow-covered peak. The plane is one of those yellow trainers you see at the Flying Club. I am in the front. Someone else in the back. I cannot make out who it is. The person in the back has all the gear of pilots and I cannot really see much of him. We fly through clouds and mist, we fl y over hills. Endlessly. The sky above is black as pitch. As you see it in the pictures of space-flights. And all the time the mountain is there, snow-covered, towering, glowing. Even though the sky is black and there is no sun, the mountain glows. From within as it were. All of a sudden there is more mist and fog and rain. Sheets of glassy rain. I ask the man behind where the wipers are. The man laughs. ‘ “Planes don’t have wipers,” ’ he says.

  ‘Of course, they do.’

  ‘ “You are a fool,” ’ he says.

  ‘But I can’t see,’ I tell him.

  ‘ “That’s your bad luck.” ’

  The rain beats on relentlessly.

  ‘Where are we going ?’ I ask him.

  ‘ “To the mountain, of course. Over there. Can’t you see it?” ’

  ‘I can. It is very far.’

  ‘ “Not as f
ar as it may seem,” says the man.’

  ‘Time passes. Then, I am flying again. The rain has stopped. We fly over a continuous floor of clouds. It is very cold. Cold and still. The sky is black as before.

  ‘Where is the mountain?’ I ask the man.

  ‘ “It is there,” the fellow says. “Look.” ’

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask him.

  ‘ “Don’t you recognize me?” ’

  ‘I look back and it is Aftab sitting behind me, goggles and all. He smiles in his weird way. “Look” he says again. I look at the mountain and let out a shriek. It is very close now. No farther than the sea from here. Staring me right in the face. It looks enormous. A blinding glare off its slopes. It is very close and blinding and enormous and absolutely frightening. I say to myself: it is only a dream. Presently, I’ll wake up and switch on the light. But the dream carries on. I say to Aftab, ‘Look, we are going to crash into the mountain’. He keeps quiet. I repeat, nearly scream into his face. And, all the time we hurtle towards that blinding peak. At a fantastic speed. Like those space crafts in the movies. I start to scream.

  ‘Aftab still makes no reply. I turn around but the cockpit is empty. He is gone. Then I crash into it. Crash right into that blasted mountain. It was like crashing into a volcano or into the fires of the sun. I would not have thought one could dream a crash so real.’

  Sitting on the bed, I shuddered involuntarily.

  I stared at the dark sea and brooded. Why had it occurred so often? Was there a mystery into which everything fitted? Reality was so like an iceberg. You never saw the whole of it.

  ‘How are you sleeping now?’ K said.

  ‘Same as before. Around two in the morning. Nothing seems to work.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Can’t you give him something else?’ Geeta said.

  ‘We have tried everything.’

  Geeta looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she said.

  ‘I think so. I think all those hours of darkness work on his nerves. He has dreams or imagines things. Anyway, he should be out of the woods in another month.’

  He discussed me as though I were not present. After a pause he addressed me: ‘What is all this about detectives?’ He said it gently enough but it somehow sounded harsh.