Ithaca (13 page)

Long before the Thames had become a part of his life it had filled his imagination; he can still remember how that came about – reading, as an impressionable teenager, Conrad’s extraordinary description of its lower reaches: “The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading
to the uttermost ends of the earth.” He hasn’t got around to visiting Gravesend yet to drink deeply of the master’s vision that had so captivated him that hot afternoon in Delhi but it is a river of “abiding memories” for him all right. To get to his favourite spot he crosses the bustle of the Strand and cuts through one of the quiet streets that twist down to the river, the noise of his shoes loud on the pavement. At this time of day it is usually deserted, which is how he likes it; he wanders across to one of the benches and sits down. The dying sun lays down leaves of gold on the broad back of the river that flows so slowly along this stretch that it could be made of stone. A cruise boat and a barge of some sort are the only visible traffic, and on this bank there are few people to be seen. A jogger passes, a young woman, sleek as an otter. Barely has she passed his field of vision when he hears a rattling and sees a homeless man approaching. His hair is long and wild in the standard homeless person cut, and he is badged with the hallmarks of his tribe – several layers of ragged clothing, shoes without laces, shopping cart piled high with plastic bags and junk. Instinctively Zach tenses and prepares for a distasteful encounter, but the man has no interest in him and heads straight for a dustbin a few metres away and begins rooting through it. As he watches through the corner of his eye, he wonders how the man landed on the street; surely he wasn’t born to this life, at some point he must have had all the trappings of respectability, a home, a family, ambition. When had the slide started, why had he been unable to stop it, why does he bother to keep on going? He wonders if there is a book in him, they could do an
Orwell in reverse – the tramp turned writer. Wasn’t there a book like that some years ago that became a bestseller, about a homeless man and his dog? The vagrant has finished his inspection of the garbage can and rattles away. As Zach watches him go, he thinks about how lightly the man is attached to life, without any of the things that tether a person to an everyday existence, a strong gust of wind could whirl him away into nothingness and it would be as though he had never lived. Zach is no tramp and he hopes he will never be, but he and the homeless man do share one thing – an absence of rootedness.

When he was younger he prided himself on his ability to pick himself up and move anywhere, be with anyone at a moment’s notice. But does his great need to get back with Julia have something to do with the fact that he is beginning to find the gossamer insubstantiality of his existence no longer satisfying, does this mean he is now ready to settle down – a phrase that has always filled him with horror in the past, conjuring up as it does visions of needy children, overbearing in-laws, and hordes of other relatives, all those people hemming him in, suffocating him. But perhaps settling down doesn’t need to mean that, perhaps it could mean that he is settling into himself, anchoring himself a little bit more to this earthly plane, putting down roots, the grass becoming a tree.

And if so, where might that be? He is forty-four years old and in just a couple more years he would have spent half his life in London. Does this fact, coupled with his mother (who was more Indian than most Indians but was born in England nevertheless) and wife, make him British, or at the very least
a Londoner, or is that an illusion given depth and substance by things like his job at Litmus and the fact that he lives here at the moment? Maybe, no matter where he is, he will remain resolutely Indian (he smiles to himself at the thought that in all these years he has never traded in his Indian passport, the lions for the crowns). The country of his birth has never ceased exerting its pull on him, especially in recent years as he travelled there more often to be with his ailing mother. Or perhaps nationality doesn’t really matter to people like him anymore, so many millions live simultaneously in more countries than one these days, by choice or by circumstance – a twenty-first-century way of being in an interdependent world where the rising South and East are moving into balance with the North and the West.

Professionally he is excited by what has been happening in India – the wave upon wave of great writing, the burgeoning publishing scene; indeed, there had even been a time, before Litmus had absorbed him completely, when he had vaguely thought of returning and finding a job with one of the many publishing startups. When Gabrijela had decided to open an office in Delhi and given him charge of it he had been thrilled. He hasn’t paid much attention to the company in India for a while now, preoccupied as he has been with the many challenges he has been facing, but suddenly he can’t wait to get on the plane tomorrow. No matter what awaits him in Toronto, Litmus India should prove to be a welcome diversion. He should get going, he thinks, he should get organized for his trip, but he decides to linger, the pull of the water is magnetic. The river is silver and black with the
coming of the night; as he gazes into it, another river a continent away rises in his memory, an unnamed mountain torrent on the banks of which his family and he would often picnic when he came home from school on vacation. Its steep mud banks were overhung with clumps of bamboo that sometimes attracted herds of wild elephant, and in its deep pools he would occasionally get lucky and land a fish with the primitive bamboo rod his father had fashioned for him. It was one of the totemic places of his youth; he is suddenly filled with the desire to revisit it even though he has no idea whether it still exists, but he should make the effort, perhaps he and Julia could go together. He yawns and stretches and wishes she were with him. She is the only person he has brought to this spot; it would have been unthinkable to come here with anyone else. She is busy tonight, but it won’t be long before they will resume their rambles along the river, he is sure of it. He wishes he knew how to speed up the process of reconciliation, but maybe the only thing to do is leave it well alone and let things come together on their own. It is not really his style but maybe he has no choice in the matter.

J
orge Luis Borges, no slouch at dreaming up fantastical scenarios, once wrote a story whose premise was so implausible that he thought he had no option but to situate it in India. Zach wonders what the Argentine master would have made of Delhi traffic. He had always thought the city had the least disciplined drivers in the country, but every time he has visited the capital it seems the traffic situation has deteriorated further. Their car has been immobile for fifteen minutes at a crossroad just short of the Defence Colony flyover. From where they are he can see the traffic lights change from green to amber to red and not one car of the seventy or so vehicles around them has moved. A bulky man on a scooter, engine revving madly, swerves through the tiniest gaps left in the haphazard lines of traffic and then stalls; his vehicle buzzes like an irritated wasp as he shouts pointlessly at the cars on either side. Southbound traffic, of which they are part, is all knotted up because it is meant to
travel along two lanes, one for vehicles moving straight ahead and the other for cars wishing to turn right. There are now four lanes of traffic squeezed into that space, and all the cars in front have their right-turn indicators on, effectively blocking the route of the cars that want to drive straight through; further complicating the tangle are two westbound cars that were attempting to jump the lights and got caught as northbound traffic got going. Muttering “behenchod” under his breath, the driver switches off his engine; the man on the scooter, the visor of his crash helmet pushed up, is now arguing with great vehemence with the driver of the car on his left; two traffic policemen are chatting on the curb. Nothing moves, and Zach thinks of the terrifying ride from the airport the previous night when the driver of his taxi gunned his engine all through the journey to the hotel in a heavy monsoon downpour, missing other equally maniacal drivers by inches, treating red lights with contempt. White-knuckled speed and a dead stop, the way its traffic behaved could be the perfect metaphor for the new India, he thinks.

When he left the country two decades ago, it was barely stirring, although that was an improvement over everything that had taken place over the previous fifty years; now it seemed to roar ahead, stop in its tracks because of some improbable event, and then race ahead again. The newspapers this morning have been full of editorials criticizing the annual budget for this and that but the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, is imperturbable – India will get to and maintain a nine per cent growth rate, he declares. The astonishing thing is that nobody is willing to bet against Mukherjee. In
today’s India anything is possible; what a change, he thinks, from when I was a child and every ambitious Indian’s eyes were trained on escape to the West.

“I have a solution for this nonsense,” Apoorva Joshi says, her eyes travelling from the idle policemen to the driver of the scooter up ahead, who appears to be on the verge of a fistfight with one of the drivers beside him, with the angry honking of every other vehicle providing the soundtrack for the action. “Fine every motorist who flouts traffic regulations ten thousand rupees and give half that amount to the constable who challans the culprits. It would stop this nonsense in a second.”

“You think?”

“Not really,” she says with a laugh. “Each culprit will bribe the cop five hundred rupees more than his share of the fine and continue to break the rules. Everyone in India is constantly figuring out ways to beat the system, which is both a blessing and a curse.”

If things had turned out differently Apoorva would probably have been born in Africa, inherited the family importexport business, and been lost to the world of publishing forever. But fate had intervened in the form of Idi Amin, and her parents had been expelled from Uganda and forced to remake their lives in Britain. When he ran into her at a party at a mutual friend’s house in Hampstead, she had just completed a degree in publishing and was considering an offer to intern at a major London publishing firm. When he asked her whether she would be interested in moving to Delhi she hadn’t hesitated for a moment; Gabrijela was as taken with
her as he was and as easily as that they had an operation in India. Even if for some reason they are taken over he does not think Litmus India will be shut down, as Globish doesn’t yet have an Indian company.

The traffic eventually gets moving again (he wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising Indian geek came up with a fiendishly entertaining iPhone app called Delhi Dodgem) and within half an hour they have skirted Lodi Gardens and are pulling into the shabby forecourt of the building where the Litmus offices are located. At the moment the company is housed in three small rooms, an office for Apoorva, another room that an assistant and a part-time accountant share, and a third that is the domain of the sales and marketing manager, seconded to them by their joint venture partner, an Indian book distribution company.

The company’s launch list is due out this fall, and they’re hoping to take their first books to Frankfurt to show around. Apoorva can’t wait to show him covers and samples of text design. She is especially excited by a brilliant history of Kashmir she is publishing to which she has somehow managed to secure world rights. All the dejection and dullness of the past days are pushed aside as he plunges into the various processes that go into the making of Litmus India’s first books. He envies Apoorva. He remembers how excited he was when, at her age, he had been propelled into the world of publishing because of an encounter with one of the world’s great publishers who ran a Big Seven company with a mixture of chutzpah and sheer publishing brilliance.

He had just won acceptance to a prestigious British
publishing course, which he had decided to take for no other reason than the fact that he was bored at the advertising agency where he had spent the last three years as a copy writer. On the morning of his first day, he had found himself in a classroom that held eighty-four other aspirants to the world of publishing, mainly Oxbridge types with a smattering of foreigners, listening to a disquisition delivered by the legend, a diminutive man with a wispy beard. He had astounded them all when he lit a cigarette as soon as he got to the podium, despite the No Smoking signs prominently displayed everywhere; this was evidently a man who could not be contained by boring rules and regulations. Zach can recall nothing of the speech now, but he does remember something that happened shortly afterwards during the Q and A session.

He had always been shy, and this occasion was no different; the air was filled with the voices of aggressive English undergraduates airing their opinions and questions with the confidence bred in them by their pedigree, but the foreigners in the class were quiet; then, for reasons that he doesn’t remember now, the speaker had asked the class to spell the word
millennium;
amazingly several attempts failed to get it right. He had raised his hand and spoken for the only time that morning. “Two
l
s, two
n
s,” he had said; that effort had won him a brief audience with the great man, who had nodded off during the ten minutes they had spent together, woken up, apologized, saying he had just flown back from visiting his company in Melbourne, and then offered him a six-month internship with his company in London.

One of the truisms of life is that each of us, provided health and social circumstances permit, gets two or three lucky breaks; if we capitalize on these we’ll be fine, if we don’t things won’t go as well. This was one of his breaks and it firmly confirmed him in the profession he was to follow for the rest of his life. At the Big Seven firm, despite his lowly rank as an intern, he was adopted by a group of young editors. Their days and nights were filled with talk about books, encounters with authors whom he had scarcely thought he would be fortunate enough to meet, epic drinking sessions in smoky pubs, trips to the country, and gossip about the world of publishing. Their little group was presided over by a gentle, courtly scholar, the publisher of the company, who was ice to his boss’s fire. It was the best time of his life, although like his mates he was abominably paid, overworked, and without position or privilege. He hopes that Apoorva will find a similar circle of mates here, a fraternity that will enrich the profession for her and enable her to look back at this time of her life with fondness and nostalgia.