Song Of Time (11 page)

Dad, in his newly exalted position of Head of Year, bought us into a family health scheme. Medical insurance, he announced when he came home with the glossy paperwork, was exactly what all responsible families obtained for themselves these days with the health service so over-stretched, and Mum and I both nodded, knowing that Leo would never have been eligible. Still, it was pleasing to think that, in those days of impossible premiums, we could now afford such a thing.

There was a plush clinic situated in a new out-of-town complex on the fringes of Solihull. Some of the buildings were shops. Some were offices. Some were warehouses, set off from their neighbours by high fences and warnings about automatic machinery. There was a lake. There were ducks. Our appointments had been spaced across the same after-noon, but Dad had had to call off because of some security crisis at school. By the time Mum and I approached the bleak blue and silver monument to wellness to which the talking card had directed us to on that breezy, gritty, sunny day, we felt nervous as penitents.

Mum’s appointment was before mine, and I sat waiting and staring at the adverts which glimmered on the walls. This was more like some expensive health club than a hospital. There wasn’t a single trolley, nor was there an ill person in sight. The only smells were of coffee and cut flowers.

Finally, Mum emerged. “Well, that was thorough,” she sighed as she sat down.

It was my turn. The doctor who examined me hardly touched my flesh. Basically, I just had to stand, or sit, whilst things occasionally clicked or hummed around me. Tall and gaunt with Slavic cheekbones, she pursed her mouth and made small tocking sounds as she considered all the many items of information about Roushana Maitland which her many screens displayed. They were getting to the stage, she explained to me in her lulling accent, when such visits wouldn’t be necessary. Steel and ceramic anteater snouts sniffed and studied me, then drifted away.

Apparently, there existed what she called
a significant measure of data
70 about my Maitland and Ashar ancestries, for all that the documentation on Gujarati Indians and the west coast Irish was much thinner than that available for Anglo-Saxon whites. Still, she mentioned distant cousins, long-dead relatives, deaths and births and emigrations in centuries both new and old. She told me that I was tired, and that she was so terribly sorry about the tragedy of my brother, and that I needed more sleep. And then she asked me how much more about my future life I really wanted to know.

There were times when I could have turned back, requested more or less information, backed away from whatever truth she was about to reveal. But I gazed forward unflinchingly into the coming years. If I only had a short time left to make my impression on the world, I wanted to know. But my oracle was kind, her voice was soothing. The decades fell away.

“You’re in good shape, Roushana. You’ve absorbed the strongest traits of both your inheritances. With your temperament and metabolism, you are unlikely to incur significant weight gain, nor will you suffer from any serious addiction, although of course that does not mean that high-risk drugs are safe. Allowing for normal environmental factors, your chance of contracting any of the major cancers lies in the bottom ten percent. Depression is unlikely, although without stimulus these factors grow a little higher, so I would strive to avoid large periods of inactivity.”

“Who will I fall in love with, and marry?”

She smiled. “We cannot go quite that far yet…”

I smiled back at her—I rather liked the
yet
.

“…but I can tell you that you can expect to have a more than satisfactory, ah, love life. Or if not…” The smile between us grew mischievous; this was strictly girl to girl. “You can tell them it’s their fault, not yours.”

She was offering me a mirrored pool within which visions of my future came and went. What after all, did await? Whose hands would take mine, and draw me on? What would I give, and what had I already given?

“Would you like to pause, Roushana? We can cover this in a further appointment. Or it can be downloaded at your leisure…”

I shook my head.

“You will live, in all likelihood, to a considerable age, and in good health, both physically and mentally. You have strong bones, although you should avoid anything more than small amounts of dairy products. There are also some other substances, but nothing, I think, that will inconvenience you…I’ll have a list prepared.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course, you should exercise. I suggest you will find stretching exercises such as yoga useful in later years, for the lower back and hips, especially on the right side. Before that, it does not really matter. Your heart and lung prospects are excellent, even if you are silly enough to smoke. And you are not the sort of person to sit around doing nothing?”

I nodded. She knew me so well by now.

“And you’re a musician? The violin? Ah, you’re so
lucky
. You have drive, talent…” Her gaze grew unfocussed. Perhaps she was considering the dreams which she’d once nursed in her Slavic homeland, then had to obliterate for the sake of money and a career in a foreign country.

But there was one question I had to ask. “How will I die?”

For a moment, something like surprise crossed her features. “I cannot tell you that, Roushana. All I can say is that if you treat yourself sensibly and do not succumb to something unforeseen and take care when crossing the road, you should live to witness the end of this century.”

I felt deflated; a mere hundred years suddenly didn’t seem long to me then, any more than it does now. “And after that?”

My doctor smiled a faraway smile. “Who knows,” she murmured, “what will be possible by then?”

Like all oracles, she’s turned out to be right, but not in the ways I thought. I
would
live out my designated century—but barely for longer, at least in this flesh.

Mum and I went to a shopping mall after we’d finished, clicking through the turnstiles with our IDs while the passless and disaffected lounged semi-threateningly outside. All things considered, I was happy with my prospects, and Mum seemed equally content. She hummed to herself as she swished around the designer shops, although I noticed that here, just as at the medical centre, we were amongst the few non-whites who weren’t employees. She was wearing a sari, as well. In fact, I’d got so used to seeing her wearing Indian costume lately that it took me a while to realise just how much she stood out.

But Mum was oblivious. Mum, now that she had picked her way across the ice floes of Leo’s death, was becoming determinedly happy. She’d put on a little weight too, and had started eating using her fingers, as she began her resolute drift towards Indian-ness. The difficulties she’d found getting people to accept that she was Leo’s mother remained with her—she’d had parents at school asking what the likes of her could possibly know about teaching English, and this was her revenge. I noticed the fading henna markings on her hands as she picked at the huge muffin we shared at a Starbucks. She’d also developed a habit of talking about something called the “the village”, by which I’d realised by now she meant not Moseley, but the place in Gujarat which the Ashars had originated from. She’d only visited there once, and then as a sulky and determinedly English teenager—she’d been a rebel herself in those days, and had refused to learn Gujarati—but now her conversation was peppered with
haas
and
nas
and
ajuos
, whilst her long talks with Nan Ashar had drifted entirely beyond my comprehension. “It’s all about the falsity of pride”, she said as she finished off the muffin and sipped her
cappuccino grande
. “Pride is
nothing
. That’s the one thing you must learn Roushana. Do you understand me?”

My mother was turning into her mother. Dad and I, on the other hand, had started to grow closer in those Leo-less years. He, too, had taken his comforts in sad and angry sounding music, although for him it had been the
Sturm und Drang
of heavy metal rather than the glummer Romantics, but whatever revelation was made when he attended his re-arranged appointment at that clinic had a cheering effect on him. He set off later for work, and often walked there, and arrived home sweatily happy, his briefcase no longer straining with paperwork. When I looked inside it once, all I found were sandwiches. His taste in music changed as well. He’d always had a liking for minimalist composers like Glass and Reich and Pärt, whom I’d previously thought to be boring fraudsters, but now, as their sounds murmured through the house like the unwinding of music boxes, I came to understand them. The trick of this music lay in its simplicity. It came without emotional baggage. You could dance to it, or cry. If you met minimalism half way, it became a revelation. And all these things I learned from my Dad.

He even began to make music again himself. Not that Dad was a good musician—with the greater wisdom about my genetic heritage which my Slavic doctor had given me, I understood that my physical dexterity came primarily from Mum—but he had a good ear, and he enjoyed playing, and the slowly unfolding figures of serial minimalism suited his abilities. He treated us to a swish new computer, and spent many hours transferring and re-ordering our old family pictures and recordings. It was, in retrospect, an important task, for much of the data about my early life would have slipped between the endless waves of different formats and new equipment if it wasn’t for his efforts.

I found one particularly treasured recording only a few days ago when I made my first tentative forays into this country of memory. It’s audio only, but the sound brings with it everything else about that warmish spring day.

“That’s fine, Roushana,” the soft vowels of Dad’s mild Brum accent murmur at the start. “Who needs silence? We’ll make it part of the piece…”

Our new computer no longer came in a plastic box. In fact, it didn’t really exist in one place at all, although there was a power supply some-where, and there were nodules spread like some silvery infective fungus. The part of the interface Dad was using hung before the open piano on a wing of glass, and he nodded to it as one might nod to a page tuner as the guitar arpeggio he’d recorded earlier started to unwind its way through major to minor, then climb back to its resolution. Over that he played an even simpler piano figure, which he embroidered a little each time it came around. In the recording, the birdsong, overlaid from outside through the open French windows, becomes raucous. Then it fades. For a while the loud slam of a car door somewhere down the street adds a neat counterpoint. So does the squeak of my youthful hands as I raise my violin close to the microphone. My turn to make a contribution, although it seemed a shame to add more, and I waited. I understood better now the need for simplicity; I believed in the glory of silence, and of the single well-chosen note. Then a phrase suddenly shaped itself out of nothing and I played.

When the piece finished, Dad and I gazed at each other in stunned surprise. On re-listening, the piece now sounds more pretty than profound, but nevertheless, we knew we had conjured something resembling beauty out of thin air.

“Well if…” Dad’s voice begins.

Then the recording cuts off, and I never heard him speak again.

Next day, he must have gone off to work as usual, although I, as a later riser, have no recollection of his departure. All I remember is being summoned from lessons at school just before lunch, and finding Mum sitting waiting for me on the sofa in the head teacher’s office, her face white and entirely blank. The head seemed embarrassed, and mumbled that it was probably better if she left us both alone.

The day of Dad’s funeral was far colder and windier than Leo’s. Huge puddles lay across the crematorium lawns, gathering and shattering the chasing sky. There were many young people there, for Dad had always been a popular teacher. His parents seemed thinned and shrivelled by the loss of their son. Granddad Maitland was especially stick-like, the tube of his neck seemingly too thin to support the weight of his head. He, too, would soon succumb to a stroke similar to the one which had felled Dad, but, for him, the process of dying was protracted. Every time that I saw him askew on his pillows with his mouth drooling and his eyes helplessly blank, I felt even more certain that Dad, by taking no treatments and whistling quietly towards oblivion, had made the right choice.

I scanned the figures standing out on the gravel, looking for Blythe Munro. But we had drifted apart in the time since Leo’s death, and I had no idea whether she’d even been told about Dad. So I headed instead towards my cousin Kapil, who was looking surprisingly spruce in a black jacket and white collarless shirt, and sported a touchingly frail beard. He was considerably taller than me now—tall, in fact, for any Indian—and had become handsome in a doe-eyed sort of way.

A discreet pin badge for the RSS glittered at his lapel. Every weekend, every evening he could spare, was devoted towards the Hindutva. With brisk, decisive gestures, he enunciated how easily all the problems of the world might be solved if people could simply see things as they really
were
. The main difficulty, of course, was the Muslims. Unlike the all-inclusive Hindu faith, they clung to the arrogant insistence that all other religions were wrong.

“Don’t the Christians say that as well?”

He gave a complicated shrug. “Those that do are just as bad as the Islamics. But there are long histories of tolerance. Take the Catholics…” he gestured towards one of the floral tributes. “They, too, have their major and lesser expressions of the Brahman. The Trinity. Mary…”

“So why doesn’t everyone just get along?”

He sighed. If only people would see…But there was so much wrong-headedness…There were so many heretics…Hinduism was essentially the best of every religion—and it was big enough to accommodate the entire world. But there were those who fought, those who resisted—

“Hold on, Kapil. Let me get this right. You’re telling me that Hinduism permits all other expressions of belief, but because other religions claim to be exclusively right, and Hinduism doesn’t, you believe those religions are wrong?”