Stranger to History (22 page)

‘Why do you stay?’

‘My land,’ Desiré muttered. ‘I don’t know. It attracts me wherever I go. I speak French, I speak English. I am an English resident. I had a husband, my son is in England, some of my family is there. Everyone asks me, “Why are you here?” I go there, I spend time there.’ Then, as if telling me a great secret, she whispered, ‘But then I want to come back. Krishna always says, “Wherever you were born is your root, and wherever else you might go, you always come back.’ She stopped, and those frazzled eyes glistened with a few stray tears. ‘I don’t know why. Shit, I hate it. But I’m comfortable here.’ Then, choking with fresh laughter, she added, ‘And it’s not comfortable.’

Desiré mentioned the word ‘Islam’ only once to me. At her trial she had asked, ‘You don’t know anything about me so how can you judge me? Is Islam something that has to judge people like this?’ Houshmand also differentiated between the ‘real Islam’ and the Islam of the Islamic Republic. It was true that, as I encountered the Islamic Republic in the lives of its people, I made no separation between the republic’s Islam and the ‘real faith’. Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the ‘real Islam’ or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?

The rush of sudden oil wealth, ‘the country moving too fast’, unstable, undemocratic governments interfered with by foreign powers: these were the components of the Islamic Revolution. This was what had mattered before the society was put through the Islamic filter. It was a distortion of the faith’s rule now, always happier dealing with trifles, to shut out those questions and to choose instead to harass Desiré.

Even as I heard these stories, my own luck was running out. It was as if tales of this unseen regime made certain our meeting.

Phone Booth

I
didn’t try to contact my father again until I was seventeen. I was in my last year of boarding-school in the hills of south India and about to go to college in America. The school had been started by American missionaries in the early part of the last century and grew into a ‘Christian international school’, drawing a bizarre mixture of Midwestern missionaries and hippies who wanted to spend time in India. The school therapist was an old American hippie who had set up a peer-counselling programme that I joined. She trained us in one-to-one meetings in her sunny office near the chapel. Together, we would invent hypothetical problems and work through them, employing the methods of parroting, paraphrasing and open-ended questions to arrive at a made-up solution. She was a large, blonde woman, with protruding blue eyes and thick spectacles. She listened carefully to everything I said, her lips adjusting themselves over the braces she had recently started wearing to take in an overbite. ‘I’m sorry, they still cut my mouth a bit,’ she would say, if she saw that I was distracted by the movement.

On one of these afternoons, playing shrink and patient, I found myself recounting the real facts of my life to the therapist. I suddenly felt awkward, but found it comforting to talk to someone so removed from my life. I also liked showing off my surprising indifference to my father.

‘But wasn’t it difficult for your mother to marry a Pakistani?’ the therapist asked.

‘Oh, yes, it really was. She was a total outcast,’ I exaggerated.

‘That must have been hard for you to handle those social pressures at such a young age.’

‘Well, yes, but I had a lot of support. You know, the Indian family system, so strong, so inclusive.’

‘And what was it like to grow up in Indian society without a father?’

‘Well, as my mother always says, it was the biggest favour he could have done me.’

‘Who? Your father? Why does she say that?’

‘She’s only joking.’

‘Oh, I see. Do you have any memory of him?’

‘No, none at all. He jumped ship when I was two.’

‘When you were two? And you never heard from him, no letters, no phone calls?’

‘I think he wanted it to be a very clean separation.’

‘And how does that work for you?’

‘It’s fine. See, the thing is that while a lot of children get messed up because of fathers that are there and then not there, for me the idea of a father never took root at all. And since these things are all social constructs, it’s possible to do without them just as long as you get love and attention from somewhere else.’

‘Uh-huh. And who were those people in your life?’

‘Oh, lots.’

‘Grandparents?’

‘Yes. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. You’re never alone.’

‘Uh-huh. And now?’

‘Now what?’

‘How do you feel about your father today?’

‘Nothing. I mean, the man is obviously a shit. He abandoned my mother with a baby to bring up on her own in India. Everyone gets shitty people in their lives. Some have shitty mothers or grandmothers, some even have shitty children. You take advantage of the good ones and let the bad ones find each other.’

‘You seem to be very decided about it. How did you come to feel this way?’

The therapist had an awful way of depriving any experience of its uniqueness. I felt threatened by the equalising character of her questions. I realised then that the particularity of my story had been a refuge and that much of what I told her was related to the peace my mother had found, derived in part from the thrill of the cross-border romance, the love-child, the challenge and excitement of an unconventional life. These things could get her through, but they would never have been enough for me because they were not of my making. Rather than comfort me, they made me feel the absence in my life more acutely, as though someone else had lived and I hadn’t.

The therapist’s technique prevailed; the seclusion of her office was too great; for once I shrugged off my stock answers.

‘And why,’ she continued, ‘leaving your mother’s problem with him aside, have you not tried to contact him?’

‘I honestly don’t think my mother would like that.’

‘Yes, but, Aatish—’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘No, I shouldn’t. It’s not for me to disturb whatever equilibrium you have come to. It’s really moving to hear you talk with this resolve about what must have been such a painful side of your life, but I feel you must also consider yourself when you make this decision about your father. It is your right to know him. It is your right not to have to live with his ghost.’

The therapist chewed her braces for a moment. ‘You are not betraying your mother by seeking out your father.’

‘Oh, please, stop it. This isn’t America. What am I going to do after all these years? Just call him and say, “Hello, Abba, this is Aatish”?’

‘No, deciding the best approach is another matter. First, you have to be willing to address the subject.’

That day as I left her office I knew I would do it. Her words had binding force; it was harder not to act.

I took advantage of the free period after my meeting with her to go back to my dormitory. Everything felt vivid and new: the wooded road leading up to the dormitory, the occasional views of blue eucalyptus hills, the old colonial club where retired army officers gathered in the evening to play bingo. Why should this hill station in deepest south India, full of hippies and Christians, be the setting for one of the most important decisions of my life?

I slipped into the dormitory building without my housemistress noticing and went into my room. Leafing through my address book, I already felt a tinge of guilt. I was looking for the number of an old friend of my mother, an ex-friend, really, because he had remained friends with my father after the split. He was the friend who had asked my mother to leave the Baker Street flat. I chose him because my mother wouldn’t find out. I found the number and scribbled it on to a phone pass. Then, to avoid coming back for another, I changed the ‘number of calls’ from one to two, and in place of my father’s telephone number, I put the country code for Pakistan. It was all I knew of his whereabouts. I approached my housemistress who spent several minutes searching for her spectacles, then examined the pass closely.

‘First call, England. And second to which country, please?’ she asked.

‘Ma’am, to my mother’s mobile phone.’

‘Mobile phone?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Mobile phones require international standard dialling?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I lied.

‘Oh, God, please save us from this new technology,’ she said, and signed the slip.

I made my way along the uphill road, past the chapel and the therapist’s office to the telephone operator in the main administrative section of the school. There was a ten o’clock assembly and a degree of commotion in the normally quiet corridors. There were two phone booths: a cramped wooden one with graffitied walls and a naked yellow lightbulb, and a newer one with a window and stool.

I handed the signed phone pass to the operator and asked for the wooden booth. I was reading the graffiti when the phone started ringing. I answered it and the operator’s voice bellowed, ‘Trunk call from India. Mr Nath? Mr Nath?’

A sleepy voice answered, ‘Yes.’ I realised that in my excitement I hadn’t taken into account the time difference.

The man, though surprised to hear from me, was friendly and gave me my father’s number so quickly and with so few questions that it felt as though he had been expecting my call for years. I wrote down the numbers and apologised for waking him up.

The assembly was still going on when I left the phone booth. I walked in its direction hoping to find the therapist. I caught sight of her in a far corner, leaning against a pillar. When the assembly was over, I rushed up to her and asked if I could see her in the next class period. I would have to miss Hindi, but was sure I could get away with it. We agreed to meet back in her office in ten minutes.

Sitting again on the sofa in her office, I asked, with new purpose, the same question: ‘So what am I going to do? Just call him and say, “Hello, Abba, this is Aatish”?’

‘Well, first,’ she began, ‘it’s important to establish that he’s in a position where he can speak to you. He has a new wife and more children, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do they know about you?’ she asked.

The question stung, but I could see that she hadn’t intended it to. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Well, then, you’re going to want to make sure it’s a good time. You don’t want to phone him just after he’s had a big fight with his wife and suddenly say, “Hello, it’s me, your long-lost son.”’

I heard her out, then left her office. My only thought was that I would telephone my father later that day, and that I had to convince the operator to connect the call with my dormitory. I hoped my father, like my mother, was better disposed to dealing with important matters in the evening.

The operator said his colleague would be taking the evening shift, but that he would pass on the request for the nine-fifteen call.

‘Operator, one other thing,’ I said. ‘When you connect the call, could you not say where it’s from? It’s a surprise of sorts.’

The operator didn’t object so I left the slip with him and headed off to my classes.

It was a difficult day to get through, with a double-science period in the afternoon, during which my thoughts were fixed on the evening call. Practical considerations troubled me most. How would I make sure that my housemistress or friends wouldn’t interrupt me? Would I take the call in the corridor or in the housemistress’s apartment? If a servant should answer, who would I say was calling? How would I greet my father? Surely not ‘Abba’, but by his first name then? I’d never addressed any Indian adult in that way.

I decided to return to the dormitory early and make some headway with my homework as I was sure it would become harder to do as nine fifteen approached. I met my housemistress on the way and told her I was expecting a trunk call that evening so that I could wish my mother a happy birthday.

‘Your mother’s happy birthday today?’ She grinned.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good, good. Please also convey my very best wishes to her. Please feel free to speak in my apartment.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I said, sidling off to my room.

The study hour began, and my two roommates came in. I wished I could tell them of the error I was making. I felt in unsafe hands with the therapist, yet in a day she had reduced the greatest gulf in my life to a tantalising two-hour wait. For all that I didn’t trust her, I was excited and willing to believe. My caution was just fear of disappointment.

By nine, the study hour was over and I escaped the clamour of the corridors for the quiet of my housemistress’ apartment. In the fifteen minutes I spent by the phone, I took in every minute detail of the apartment, from my housemistress’ shrine to the late Princess Diana to the needlework pastoral scenes, with religious messages.

At ten past nine, I focused on the task ahead, as if I were doing last-minute revision for an exam. I prayed the call wouldn’t go through. But the operator was following a simple instruction, and the line was connecting as it had before, and the phone rang.

I answered it, expecting to be flung straight into conversation with my father, but the operator’s voice spoke instead. ‘Call to Lahore, Pakistan. Should I connect?’