No Country: A Novel (55 page)

I know you will probably laugh at my sentimentality and tease me about my long-planned pilgrimage, or what you will. But I did need to make this journey.

When your great-grandfather Brendan died (I know it was years before you were born) he had a book of Irish landscapes next to him. When I found him, the page was open on a double-page panorama of the Glengesh Pass. He had never been to Ireland. I have often opened the book to these pages and studied them, inch by inch, with my magnifying glass, wondering what it was that drew him, time and again, to that book of Irish pictures. I came to know that landscape as if I had been there, many times.

My grandfather Padraig had come from an Ireland racked by famine—the kind of famine that I myself saw in Calcutta and the surrounding countryside in 1942–43. Again, that was a man-made famine. All the grains were taken from Bengal’s fine harvests for the war effort in Burma, leaving the Bengalis starving. Over a million people died in the streets, mothers begging feebly for a bit of rice-gruel (not even rice!) for their swollen-bellied children. These were Jim Gwynne’s pictures of the Irish dead—you remember them, don’t you?—brought to dreadful life again. What had the Empire learnt from the 1840s to the 1940s? Or perhaps, they learnt too well.

That British Army in Burma under handsome Lord Mountbatten withdrew in a panic when confronted by Japanese artillery. All that grain wasted or rotted in the rains. Poor Mountbatten, so wary of bombs, was blown up years later in his yacht by Irish militants in the harbor off Mullaghmore. But enough about blood and death. I know I am rambling, dear Neel, and in case you are wondering, let me tell you, because I miss our late afternoon chats at the store. The
Nahoum patties don’t have the same flavour for me, with you so far away.

As I was saying, I was always curious about this book of Irish landscapes that my father, Brendan, pored over. Well, I decided to make this trip to Ireland and walk in the landscapes of that book. I secretly wished to judge, to see, how Irish I was, or how I felt about the land itself. My father knew himself Indian and Irish. I was at one more remove. An irresistible curiosity, a tug in my heart, drew me. I have always thought of myself as an individual, one of millions in India, far from Ireland. I think of Elliot Road when I think of home. Some day, before it is too late, I will tell you how I came to comprehend this.

If I think of nations, it is when they are misbehaving, or are playing sports like good boys. What does it mean to belong to a nation? Is it the accident of birth? Is it a memory, a yearning for some obscure stamp on the soul, some tune that plays in the blood? Or is it what others insist you are—painting your corner of the room around you?

I so wish you had come to Ireland with me, dear Neel—you, the rationalist—isn’t that what you call yourself? And I, the fuzzy leftover of a colonial era. Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? We look at the lands of our ancestors and we are left with our own incomprehension, as if we are people who glance through biographies written in a recently lost language. Could I know, for instance, which sights would have brought my ancestors to tears of joy or inconsolable grief? Which cottage, which crossroad, which tree?

Have you ever—looking at yourself, your face in a mirror, your hands—wondered: Who is it that is looking at these hands, this face you think you know so well? What is this consciousness that is thinking all this, aware of this very instant in time? Who is this self, this I? Does this sentience have a name, a place in time? Can this deepest
awareness have a national stamp? Or are all identities like layers over an unnameable core, an infinite nova that is just mind—that has no home, that cannot be housed, named or held—and has no country?

When I reached the Glengesh Pass, I looked with my physical eyes at the landscape I already knew so well, the dips and swells of the land. The green Irish earth was firmly and undeniably underfoot. I had the strangest of sensations. It was as if the being of my father merged into mine, as if he were looking from inside my head. In the bright cave of my skull it was his lamp that seemed to flicker and come to life. I cannot explain it any other way.

I woke one morning, my second day, in Sligo, the town that I had heard my father speak of. My night had been full of dreams. I stepped out alone at dawn. The curve of the path stretching out of town seemed like a message. I saw two sparrows, feathers puffed and brown. They looked no different from the ones around our house on Elliot Road.

What was Irish about this land? I wondered. What is my connection to it?

I felt like a traveler millennia ago, a hunter-gatherer, a tribesman, walking, not knowing how the earth would unspool before me, walking on until I felt the urge to stop. My naming the land came from my urge to settle down. What I named the land came also from my memory of where I had been: an Aryan tribesman from a far land, calling this land Erin in honour of his lineage and ancestors. I knew that another long-lost member of my early relatives from pre-history had taken a different path in that primeval diaspora, and the land where he settled with his kin, he named for the same reason, Iran. So many lands, so many variations of the same names.

I think of how our families were spread over the earth: How these names turn against each other, their languages having grown apart,
their eyes only upon their own piece of ground, jealous of others, fierce and grasping. I raised my eyes from the earth and saw the expanse of the endless sea, glittering and admonitory. It was of a color no map ever showed.

Glengesh Pass was so inextricable from my father’s dreams of it that it was no place on earth; and I was not just sprung from the blood of the Ahernes. My Irishness melted like sea-salt within this temperature of my being, making it possible for me to be Indian as well—a human being descended, who knows, from how many sources, the product of so many lineages which are unknown to us and will forever remain unknown: Erin, Iran, Aryan, human . . .
maanush,
the same word for “humankind” used in Bengali and by the Gypsies all over Europe! I felt sure that my father knew—in the last moments of his life, his mind’s eye on the landscape of Glengesh Pass—that we all stand at the same great isthmus in the geography of time. We are all related: Our mortality is our one common nation.

You value the rational; I feel the limits of logic. You decided to study light; I ponder obscurity. Neel, I take comfort in the mystery of that opposition and celebrate the elusive nature of our histories.

You tell me about the snows and maples of America, and I rejoice in your sight of them. You have told me how the leaves change colours in variegated splendour in the weeks before winter comes. Please remember to pick many leaves this autumn. Put them in an envelope and mail them to me. Your letters are so short, dear Neel, so factual. At least that envelope will be a letter of many leaves.

Next year I shall definitely come visit you in America, in the autumn. I am saving every penny. I’ve been looking at reproductions of the great paintings in its Metropolitan Museum. I want to discover Greenwich Village together, Neel, and we must go to the Blue Note to listen to jazz and stay up all night! There is so much to do. I so look
forward to exploring New York together, then visit your university, and go for walks in those maple woods of yellow and red. I miss you.

Your loving Grandpa

Something in the letter reminded me of my own, very different, father: intent, open, and wondering, as if those two men who had never met had come together in my mind. I felt a growing tenderness, knowing that Neel had included me in this letter, although I was not its intended recipient.

When Neel returned, his anorak smelt of snow, and I held his cool hands in my warm ones.

Four and a half years. Shit, it’s been that long. Closer to five. I wanted to marry Gillian, but she insisted that we complete our twelve steps before standing at the altar. But we went ahead and fixed the date, for a week before Christmas.

But there was still one step I needed to complete: To make peace with those I had hurt. I had to square things with Mom. I owed her that much.

“Billy, you gotta do it,” my basement friends urged. It nauseates me to think of being turned into Billy the kid again, Archie’s shitty son. The ghosts of all my humiliations lurked, a line of wounded soldiers from a disastrous campaign. I argued back and forth with myself, Gillian, with my sponsor Jerome. Gillian was certain that I would live through the reconciliation, as she called it. Jerome too.

“Ya’ll be the stronger for it,” he assured me, coughing before and after the sentence.

“He ain’t got no power over ya,” announced Jerome, smiling, wrinkling the greenish veins around the rheumy estuary of his
eyes. Flicking away the butt, he announced, “Ya’ll see, Bill. Hey, five years of sobriety, man. Yo’mum—she’ll be proud o’ya. When’s ya anniversary?”

“You don’t know Archie Swint,” I grumbled.

“Yeah,” he said, his chest burbling with phlegm, “but he don’t know what y’are now. Ya need to get this off ya mind. Once and fer all, Billy. Ya’ll do it.”

“He won’t care,” I said with dead certainty.

“It’s for your mom, Billy,” Gillian reminded me. “She’ll be glad to see you for Thanksgiving. That’ll be nice for her.”

“He’ll be nasty,” I began, but Gillian just kissed me and said, “Call me when you are through, and I’ll drive over and get you.” She was having Thanksgiving dinner with her sponsor, Rachel. She was going to bake a pumpkin pie and a big batch of my favorite cookies, and expected me back for dessert.

“You might be having dinner, or watching the football game,” I said. It was my desperate Hail Mary pass.

“I’ll come when you call, Billy. I promise.” We looked at each other, and I remembered the odds we had overcome and felt a surge of confidence. I am going to be fine. It’s been five years, goddammit. He could even be dead. Or paralyzed.

“Why don’t you let me drop you off?” Gillian persisted.

“I’ll take the bus.” I was sure. “I need some time by myself going there.”

So it was decided. Gillian would drive our trusty blue Datsun. I would join her later, as soon as I was done.

•  •  •

I
HAD KEPT
away from my folks all this time. Three years ago, I saw Mom carrying a heavy grocery bag. I was about to cross the
street to help when I saw Archie inside her car, tapping the steering wheel impatiently.

Lost in these thoughts, I got off the bus and started to walk toward our old house at Haddon Place, then had to snap myself back into the present and realized I was almost a mile away from Mom’s apartment.
I am calm, I am calm
, I told myself as I walked.

Camelot Apartments
, declared the flaked sign. I half-hoped that they had moved again. They would have had no way of letting me know. Or, he could be dead.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, sweet Baby Jesus, oh yeah.

“Fuck this, I am going to pull myself together,” I told myself. I’ll see Mom and return her pendant in my gift box. I will tell her how I made this box, about the delicate tools I used, about Peter Foley and my job. And Gillian.

I turned the corners of the fake-brick apartments, laid out like a kid’s building blocks on the scarred lawn. When I came to 114D, I recognized the dried flower and pinecone garland my mother used to hang on the front door of our Haddon Lane house, dusty and tatty now, with Mom’s Ford Turd Pinto rust buggy, parked in front. I rang the bell.

I could not see into the dim stairway when the door opened, even under the cobwebby stairwell light. Mom stood on the mat, its gray plastic bristling around her bedroom slippers, her hair flurried with gray, as she peered at me uncertainly, her face eroding into a shy grin of recognition. Then he came.

Archie Swint loomed over her, standing squarely behind her on the first stair, his thick fingers proprietorially on her sweatered shoulder. “They said they’d taken the garbage away,” he sneered, “but here it is, on our doorstep, see?”

“Oh Archie,” began my mother, reaching out to me. His fingers closed on her shoulder, holding her back.

“What brings you here?” my father asked.

I held out the Saran-wrapped parcel of chocolate cookies Gillian had baked at home. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I managed to say, out of breath.

•  •  •

I
STARED AT
the dull glaze of the plastic under which the patterned tablecloth lay limp and fuzzy, a far cry from my house-proud Mom’s previous home. I looked surreptitiously at my father. Gaunt, hard, indestructible. His sour, masculine odor infested the apartment. Gray stubble stretched over his bony jaw. Flared nose over thin lips. The birthmark on his cheek seemed to have grown larger, a drop of clotted blood. Ropy muscles slid snake-wise under the wrinkled cover of his skin. He had been about fifty when I was born. It seemed impossible that he had ever been a boy, a child, anyone’s baby. He looked more than ever made of rock and embedded metals.

Mom, only sixty, looked as if he had kept her long submerged under stagnant water. Her skin had grown loose and porous, and her nostrils drooped between puffy cheeks, filamented with tiny veins, and gray pillows under her eyes which had no light in them. She moved slowly, uncertain of her feet. I glanced at them. Toenails overgrown, ankles shapeless as undone pink socks. She smiled, at nothing, as if trying to listen to some whisper, her mouth vague and wet around the fissured edges. I wanted to hold her, but felt Archie’s swiveled gaze, under tangled, complicated eyebrows, alert to every move.

A bare tree branch clawed at the fogged window pane. Mom had put zucchini and carrots into a plastic colander. Steam rose from it, and the kitchen was close with the smell of vegetables past
their prime. The kitchen occupied all of my senses, pushing out everything else, taking over the recesses of my memory. As she puttered about, he sat on his chair facing the dim window. I could see his nostrils cavernous, his downturned mouth, his presence seeping into everything, like sludge-drip from under a car.