No Country: A Novel (54 page)

At a party on the University Quad during the first week of good weather, just before spring break, I first saw Neel. The students were making the most of the sun, for everyone on River Campus knew the tattered joke that Rochester has two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July.

They were playing Jefferson Airplane, then Jethro Tull. Some kids were dancing or throwing Frisbees, but Neel sat in the sun, soaking it in, and listening to the music, his hands busy, folding sheets of paper into animal shapes: giraffes, tortoises, birds. I knew the word
origami
, but had never seen anybody do this before. When passersby stopped to admire one or the other animal, he would tell them with a casual wave of his hand that they could take it. Intrigued, I walked over and sat down on the grass near him. A Frisbee wobbled and fell on the grass next to me. I ignored it.

“I am Devika,” I said, smiling at the two animals in front of him. One was an alligator and the other was a squirrel.

Glancing at my hands, he wrote something on the paper he was folding and gave it to me. It was a bird with its wings poised to take off in flight, beaks apart as if emitting a call, its ruffled wings shaped like seashells.

“This is a bird that doesn’t exist, Devika Mitra,” he said in Bengali.

I was absolutely flabbergasted. “How did you know I was Bengali?” I asked. “And my last name?” Then I understood: It was spelt on a wristband Kamala Auntie had made for me from pieces of copper. Because I loved the shape and design of the Bengali characters on it, I wore it a lot. He had read the name easily, although it appeared upside down from where he sat.

“What’s yours?” I asked, but he pointed at the bird in my hand.

“The bird will tell you,” he said, getting up with a laugh. “I’m late for a seminar. Bye, Devika Mitra.”

A phone number was written on one wing of the bird, which I unfolded. But I could not fold the bird back into existence. For that—and his name—I would need to call him.

•  •  •

O
VER THE NEXT
few weeks, we began to meet on campus, Neel and I, usually after my afternoon seminars. He would usually be lying on the grass in the quad outside Morey Hall, waiting for me, his head propped on his satchel. It was still mild, in the first part of October. We would stroll down to the Rathskeller where, over snacks or a beer, we chatted.

He would tell me about physics and his own research on light. And he listened with care when I spoke about the plays of Synge, for I was thinking of doing my doctoral research on him, working
with George Ford, a leonine old man who was my favorite professor.

A few days after I had told Neel, I found he had read three of Synge’s plays in that time. When I told Neel of my plan of going to Ireland next year to spend the summer doing research, he said, “Ah, my grandfather went there recently,” but added nothing more.

•  •  •

“W
HAT KIND OF
Bengali name is Aherne?” I asked Baba when I had stopped by at home a month into the fall semester. He says you can tell a lot about someone from India, just by his name.

“Aherne! Not an Indian name . . . Aherne . . . someone once told me about that name, yes,” mused Baba, “but I cannot, for the life of me . . .” He trailed off, in a reverie.

By this time, I had been seeing Neel for almost four months. I told Baba he was a graduate student from India, studying light in the physics department, almost done with his dissertation. He would probably go back to India, I confided to Baba, who asked me if we were serious.

“I’ll tell you when I know,” I told him. But I had avoided the topic of his plans so far, unready to read more into my diffidence to address it.

•  •  •

N
EEL STAYED OVER
some weekends in my small upstairs apartment near the university, a couple of rooms with a kitchenette and a small deck in a clapboard house overlooking a maple-treed backyard.

Lazing in bed one lazy Sunday morning in October, I could not resist my curiosity and started to ask him about his life back in India. Neel launched into a description of his favorite coffeehouse across from Presidency College, where he had been an undergrad.

“It’s right across from Sanskrit College, up a broken staircase, bang in the middle of four blocks of decrepit buildings, chock-a-block with small publishing houses, their books spilling into corridors and tiny lanes, Devi, the biggest concentration of publishers in the world.” Neel seemed transported, a faraway look in his eyes.

I was baffled, expecting to hear about his family and parents, but let him go on, childishly delighted to talk about the place. I had not seen this side of him before.

“Oh well,” he reminisced, “actually, Devi, the coffeehouse was dim and reeked of the fumes of the Charms that we smoked.”

“Charms?” I said, sitting up, “Those don’t sound legal.”

“Naah, it’s not what you think,” he grinned, “Charminar cigarettes—strong and the cheapest. Packs a mule’s kick. You’d have to hold them horizontal, otherwise the tobacco drizzles down—like Orwell’s Victory cigarettes. We lived on those and shots of black coffee—‘infusion’ is what the waiters called them. None of us had money for anything else. But yes, some of my friends, like Nondon, smoked something really heady.”

“Hash?” I leaned in for more details.

“Don’t knock that fine old Hindu tradition. It’s the preferred whiff of Lord Shiva. They have a saying: ‘Hang it—it is hemp after all!’ ”

“But Neel, tell me about the people important to you.”

“In those coffeehouse days, they were Frantz Fanon, Gramsci, Lévi-Strauss, and even that frozen relic C. P. Snow. And dear old Hegel.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I interjected, “this coffeehouse of yours
was part Plato’s academy and part Haight-Ashbury. But what about home? Tell me about your family and those other things that matter.” I was not letting him get away that easily.

“Well, madam,” he said, affecting a solemn face, “are you referring to my displaced bourgeois origins and the confused traces of multinational bloodlines, eh?”

“I am about to pour coffee on your head,” I threatened.

“Okay, I surrender,” he said, rolling over on his stomach, “but I could only think of one place at a time.”

“And would you take me there?”

“I would, Devi,” he said, then his face fell, “but I wonder if you’d like it as much I did. During the frequent power cuts—we call these ‘load-shedding’—it was hot as an elephant’s armpit.” I broke into helpless laughter, and he was surprised that I had found him funny. I kissed him, aroused by a new closeness, and before we knew it, we found ourselves making love.

Later, as we held each other close, I thought aloud, “Mrs. Nolan probably heard us, Neel,” but he rebutted, “That pious lady is definitely in church this Sabbath morning, Devi. She’s not a heathen like you, despite what the nuns tried to teach you in your tender years.”

I hit him with a pillow. It was the most carefree time I had spent with him, yet we had not yet spoken of the future.

We went downstairs, took Mrs. Nolan’s rake and, just for fun, swept the backyard, hanging out under the riot of colors of the maples with a couple of bottles of Genesee Cream Ale, which Neel always brought over during his weekends. Mrs. Nolan was so delighted by the sight of her neat yard as she pulled in that she insisted we take half a pecan pie she had baked the previous day.

Neel decided to stay back and drive into campus together next
morning, because Mrs. Nolan’s pie merited serious attention. As I heated up a frozen tray of Baba’s Hyderabadi biriyani for what Neel called a real intercultural meal, Neel folded sheets of paper to make a rhinoceros and a large imaginary insect for Mrs. Nolan’s two grandsons.

We turned in early, draped over each other on the saggy sofa which had come with the apartment and, turning on the TV, found that they were about to show an Aparna Sen film on PBS, the only channel that ever showed the occasional foreign film, and luckily, the only one my set received properly, without wavering; I had, by now, grown used to seeing a wraith-like Dan Rather intone the daily evening news on CBS. Tonight’s film turned out to be about Anglo-Indians in Calcutta, and I noticed Neel leaning forward, rapt.

“That’s just the kind of place and people among whom I grew up, Devi!” Neel said softly, as the credits rolled up. “My great great-grandfather Padraig had come from Ireland,” he began, which explained the name Aherne.

His grandfather Robert Aherne had married a Bengali botanist, Amala Martha Basu, a daughter of Christian converts, who had died of malarial fever contracted when she had gone to the Kaziranga forest in Assam on a botanical survey trip when their daughter, Mary Aherne, Neel’s mother, was fifteen. Neel had lived with his mother, a schoolteacher, in his grandfather’s house. He had no siblings. Mr. Aherne ran a shop which sold old and new books, prints, and sheet music on Calcutta’s Free School Street. “A stone’s throw from where Thackeray had been born and spent his childhood,” said Neel.

“William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist! Did you also live in one of those old houses?”

“Oh, it is old and creaky enough.” Neel grinned. “My Irish ancestor Padraig built it on Elliot Road, half a mile away through small lanes, if you know the way.”

The family used to leave together in the mornings, his grandfather Robert to open his shop, his mother, Sarala, and he to their respective schools. After school Neel would walk to his grandfather’s shop, where he would leaf through books and reproductions and listen to music, usually jazz. “We always sent for the big chicken patties from Nahoum’s, a dozen everyday,” he concluded.

“You must have worked up quite an appetite!” I interjected. Neel shook his head. “Some of them were for my grandfather’s visitors. His friends would come by. Old Tony Belletty, who always carried his hip flask of rum, Krikor Aratoon, the retired businessman who had a special wide chair for himself—he’s
th-a-a-t
wide, Devi! Often we would all listen to LPs of jazz, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, you know. Young local musicians like Lew Hilt, Amyt and Anjan Dutt used to drop in all the time. So did Pam Crain, the lovely jazz singer. Nondon Bagchi used to show off his percussion on teacups with his spoon! They were beginning to get gigs at Trinca’s on Park Street. Yeah, they were a lot of fun. The store is a favorite for collectors. People drop by, jazz lovers, musicians, just plain folks, everybody. They love to hang out with him. He listens, and not just to music.”

Neel mentioned his father just twice, as if he was a long-dead relative. Divorced from his mother when Neel was barely one, he had left town and remarried, never once returning. By second grade, he had learned not to ask his mother about him.

I could not imagine a universe without my father. “Is that why you took your grandfather’s name?” I was puzzled.

“Well, that kind of happened,” mused Neel. “My mother got an affidavit reclaiming her maiden name after the divorce. When
I was enrolled in the nearby school, the clerk had automatically written my name down as Aherne. My mother did not correct him. So Aherne it remained.” And so they lived together, the three Ahernes, until his mother died of breast cancer when he was in college. I knew he missed her too much to talk about her yet.

“Where is your father?” I asked.

“Australia, I think,” he replied, in a tone that did not invite conversation. His usual reticence had returned. We had not spoken about his plans, but the moment was gone.

•  •  •

T
HE FOLLOWING
W
EDNESDAY,
I arrived unannounced at his room, high up in the Valentine Tower. I liked its monastic simplicity, the odd percussion of the heating system, the high window view of the canal that led to the river. I had brought with me a cassette of an early Mozart flute sonata I knew he would like. It was just beginning to snow, glimmering evanescent lake-effect snow under a rare cloudless sky, a local phenomenon.

“I just got a letter from my grandfather,” Neel announced. “He wants to see New York.”

“But isn’t he really old?”

“He’s just over eighty, Devi, but spry and really independent. You’ll like him.”

“Would he like me?” I countered. “Does he know of me?

“He will be here in just a couple of weeks, Devi,” he said with a teasing smile, “and you can give him the third degree.”

“Why don’t you bring him to my parents’ for Thanksgiving? Will he be here by then?”

“He’s arriving right before Thanksgiving—he knows there is a holiday in America, and says he wants to wander around New
York with me for a week, at least. He particularly wants to see Greenwich Village and has already booked rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. Don’t ask—it’s where his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, stayed. He wants to see everything. The Met, the Frick. And yes—the Botanical Garden up in the Bronx. My grandmother Amala used to mention it.”

“Oh,” I said, my disappointment showing. “Can’t you go there after Thanksgiving?”

“How can I let him down, Devi? He’s been talking about this for months now. It’s a big deal to come, and I didn’t really think he would. All my life I knew I could count on him. He’s never asked anything of me.” He held my hands in his. “I’m sorry, Devi, really. You asked me about him before, and I’ve been meaning to share this with you, something he had sent earlier.”

From his desk, Neel picked up an old envelope with several Indian stamps on it. He took out a letter whose pages were creased by many foldings and refolding, and handed it to me. Postmarked at Elliot Road Post Office, Calcutta, a year and a half ago.

“Devi, he’s the only family I have.”

“You want me to read it now? This old letter?”

“Yes. I need to drop off this research paper. I’ll be right back, so please, please don’t leave. Devi?”

I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he repeated, and left.

I began to read slowly, with the flute and the waft of snow in the background.

19 September, 1987

My beloved Neel,

I have now settled down in Elliot Road, my dear grandson, back from my trip to Ireland. It seems so strange to return to the familiar old
house; I still expect your mother to walk in any minute. The memories follow me around all my waking hours, and even in my dreams.