The Solitude of Emperors (16 page)

He paused for a while, and then said, ‘You settled?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Your mother not bugging you to get married, shoving eligible Tam-Brahm virgins at you?’

‘Well, she has brought it up on a couple of occasions, but…’

‘Resist, my friend, resist with all your might. That way lies mediocrity, a life more harrowing than death.’

~

That day I was given my first proper glimpse into Noah’s life, although it took all my skills as an interviewer to wrest it from him. As the day wore on, the story emerged in stops and starts.

He was the priest’s son, he said, and as I had suspected he and his father had fallen out quite early on because Noah had never had much time for religion. ‘The quickest way for you to be turned off religion is to have it served to you morning, noon and night,’ he said wryly over the best mutton biryani I have ever eaten, hot and perfectly spiced, which we bought from a hawker’s cart outside Mitchell Park. He and his father had grown further apart when his mother died. That year Noah had turned ten, and it was then he had finally lost his religion. About two years before her death, his mother had joined a fundamentalist Christian sect, as a result of which she had refused to see doctors or take any form of medical treatment when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, choosing to rely instead on the prayers of her congregation and her Saviour to heal her. His father had failed in all his attempts to make her see reason, and when she had died an agonizing death, Noah had blamed him.

The relationship with his father had continued to deteriorate until eventually the priest had sent him away to boarding school on a scholarship reserved for children of the clergy. ‘The school, St Jerome’s, is quite close to here, they don’t usually allow local boys to be boarders, but my father pulled some strings. He realized that it would be best for both of us, especially with Mum not around to keep the peace.’ Things had gone quite well until his senior year, when he had fallen for the most sought-after girl in the neighbouring girls’ school, St Catherine’s. ‘Maya was an almost perfect Punjaban—tall, fair, not the pallor of Europeans but that perfect complexion, you know what I mean, generous-breasted even though she was only sixteen, long legs—she was a queen, da, and I fell hard. It was the worst thing I could have done, but I’d do it again and again had I a chance to relive my life, because you have to fall in love, perfectly, at least once.’

The girl had reciprocated his passion, he said quite unself-consciously, because he had been one of the edgiest boys in school, a high hurdler and the student who was always on the verge of being thrown out for some act of insubordination or the other. Noah and Maya were soon inseparable. Until her father found out. He sent her to live with her grandparents in Delhi and almost succeeded in getting Noah thrown out of his school. His father had managed to enlist the support of the bishop and the expulsion was stayed but the damage was done. Noah began drinking, doing drugs, missing classes repeatedly and, I suspect, having brushes with the law, although he didn’t say so explicitly. At this point his father intervened again and gave him an ultimatum—if he didn’t pull himself together, it would be too late; he had no more favours to call in, he was just an ordinary pastor. Noah would have to go straight or fend for himself. When I asked him why his father had continued to look out for him, Noah said simply, ‘Because he was a good man. We didn’t get on, but that didn’t mean he was going to abandon me, he was my father after all, and a priest to boot. He didn’t really have an option now, did he?’

Noah behaved himself for a while, passed his school-leaving exam, even secured admission to a college in Coimbatore, but it hadn’t lasted. Maya’s grip on him did not slacken, although he hadn’t seen or heard from her in a year, and he began to drink and do drugs again. He was expelled from college and his long-suffering father, his earlier ultimatum notwithstanding, stepped in one last time. ‘He explained to me that he couldn’t do this anymore, although he was a man of God he couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive endlessly. I suppose I’d given him a really hard time, but was I in any way remorseful, grateful for everything he’d done…’ Noah shook his head and said, ‘Not on your life, da. I was an A-grade arsehole, but I wasn’t myself, I was just too intoxicated by Maya, the idea of Maya more like…’

‘Was she worth it?’ I asked. In my head danced an image of Meher as I had seen her in the Bombay restaurant, and I thought about what my life would have been like if she had shown even the slightest interest in me.

Noah was saying, ‘You don’t measure passion and romance with a calculator, da. Was she worth it? you ask. Of course not, but at the same time of course she was. You don’t get that sort of pulse-pounding passion too often in life, so you grab it when you find it… and do you know why? Because even though it may be fleeting, it’s the only thing that burns an indelible image on your soul, the only thing you will remember when you’re old and spent.’

This time his father tried to solve the problem of Maya by the rather simple expedient of sending his son to study in America. He wangled a scholarship sponsored by the Church on condition that Noah first obtain a degree in India. For eighteen months Noah steadied himself, went to evening classes, studied without a break, passed his examinations and finally boarded a plane to a small liberal arts college on the East Coast.

He loved America, its directness, its essential simplicity and lack of clutter. He read its poets, listened to its music, got caught up in the swirling energy of the country and gradually all the things that hemmed him in, most of all his obsession with Maya, began to fall away. But the freedom he was experiencing was illusory for addiction is progressive, and soon enough his obsession with the woman who had been taken from him returned.

He turned to the girls of America to help him fight off his despair. ‘American women were what I needed at that point in my life, da. They are direct, uncomplicated. They want everything clearly laid out for them: they like to discuss their feelings and every aspect of their relationships obsessively. It takes all the mystery away, but it was exactly what I was looking for. If they liked you and you liked them that was enough. No complicated bullshit, none of the baggage our women carry, you know, all the hang-ups, conditioning and shit that has been bred into them for centuries. It wasn’t love I was after, you understand, it was a sort of oblivion, and I got that in full measure. I screwed my brains out. I was from the land of the Kama Sutra after all, and if I didn’t know all the sixty-four positions in the manual, I made them up, and the women certainly seemed satisfied with what I had to offer. And I had a secret weapon that every woman I fancied seemed to find irresistible… Do you know what an acrostic poem is?’

‘No.’

‘Never mind, give me a woman’s name, any woman’s name.’

‘Meher,’ I said.

‘Someone you fancy?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Uh, no…’ I stammered in confusion.

‘Hey, take it easy, da, didn’t mean to pry, OK…’ He cast around for a twig and scratched something out on the dirt of the path:

M
ellifluous tone spells my doo
M

E
yes of flame in a flawless fac
E

H
er beauty is bracing and fres
H

E
nchanted I slide into her gaz
E

R
ealize I can’t ever escape he
R

The whole poem took him less than five minutes to write, with all the elisions and substitutions he had to make to get the letters to line up exactly. When he had finished, he said, ‘That’s probably the worst poem I’ve ever written and I’ve written some pretty awful ones, I can tell you. But if you give it to Meher, whoever she is, it doesn’t matter if she’s never read a book in her life, let alone poetry, it’ll win her over. It didn’t fail me once when it came to ensnaring women, and I ranged far and wide. You see how the letters of her name align on both sides of the poem, well even the most stand-offish beauty is guaranteed to melt in seconds when she thinks that she has not only driven you to verse but to a poem that you’ve created especially for her, no abstract one-size-fits-all rubbish. Believe me, it worked better than presents or flowers or chocolate, which was just as well because I didn’t have any money.’

He laughed and said, ‘Within months I was a bona fide slut. I read in a magazine there’s a formula to know if you’re one or not: you take your age, subtract fifteen from it, multiply the result by five, and if you’ve slept with more people than that, then you’re officially a slut.’

He paused, pulled out a joint and lit it. ‘Sure you won’t have a drag?’ he asked. ‘Last chance.’ I refused, and he shrugged.

‘You know what, after all that, after a couple of years of non-stop fucking, I discovered it wasn’t working—I still hadn’t been able to let go of Maya. I realized then what I needed was to give myself to a woman and for her to really give herself to me, not just sexually, that would be too basic. What I needed was essentially to fall in love again, even temporarily, that was the only antidote.’

He took another deep drag, held it and let the smoke filter slowly through his nostrils, then said, ‘There’s tons of stuff that’s been written about love but do you really know how it works until it happens to you? I’m asking this rhetorically, da, I’m not trying to excavate your romantic life. The point I’m trying to make is that all the theories we have about love are bullshit—it’s got to happen to you for you to know what it’s all about. I had had that with Maya, I now needed to find it again. I had encountered infatuation, plain animal lust, women who thought they were in love with me, women I thought were special, women I’d misread, women who had misread me, but I hadn’t found the person who would give herself to me in exactly the same way and with the same degree of intensity with which I was prepared to give myself to her.’

He put out his joint, thought a bit, then said, ‘The sort of connection I’m talking about, the special moment when two people make contact in a way that overrules the information hard-wired into their genes, is unmistakable. It can happen very early in a relationship or in the middle or after a long time, but you recognize it immediately—it’s something to do with the eyes, with the mind, with the space inside the heart, that empty space that you can only show another person when you’re ready to make yourself wholly vulnerable, know what I mean?’

It wasn’t really a question he was asking me, he was interrogating himself, but for a moment I thought wistfully about the lack of romance in my life. I could see why women were drawn to Noah, there was an essential weightlessness about him, an air of unpredictability, recklessness, intelligence, worldliness, depth and wisdom that was very compelling. I wondered what it would be like to be him. It was only a momentary fancy—the pragmatic side of my character soon kicked in—and I thought it was a good thing I was nothing like him, otherwise I too would end up having to use a gravestone for a dining table.

While I was thinking these thoughts, Noah’s narrative had advanced. He was telling me how he had finally found what he was looking for two months before he was due to leave the States. College was over, and a friend and he had decided to drive along the West Coast, a leisurely journey through a part of America neither had seen, taking in the sights and unwinding before they got on with the business of their lives. One day, in Oregon, they came to a small coastal town that advertised itself as ‘The Whale Watching Capital of the World’. Finding rooms in a small B & B, they had bought tickets on one of the boats that took the whale-watchers out. There were a dozen customers on the pier early the next morning. Soon after they boarded the vessel, Noah and his friend were drawn to a busty blonde who managed to look inviting despite the decidedly unsexy orange life jacket she had on. They took it in turns trying to impress her, and when it was clear that she preferred his friend, Noah had shut out the woman and concentrated on the experience of being in a small boat on the sea.

‘Americans use the word “awesome’’ indiscriminately to the extent that it has lost all its meaning, but I have never forgotten our first sight of the whales: it was truly awesome.’

The captain spotted their quarry when they were not too far out to sea—it was still possible to look back and see the scribble of the shoreline through the light morning mist—but out in front of the boat there was nothing but the limitless ocean, stretching to the very end of the world. What had appeared to be wisps of smoke now resolved itself into spume issuing from the blow-holes of whales, six of them, who drifted immense and grave through the green water. They paid not the slightest attention to the boats—for others had come up now—circling them and Noah had allowed himself to be taken over by the grandeur of it all. A light rain began to fall, and the woman next to him had exclaimed in annoyance as her spectacles fogged over. Momentarily distracted, Noah had turned irritably to see who was interrupting his contemplation of the whales and had looked into eyes the colour of a mist-whipped Nilgiri sky, grey-blue eyes he wouldn’t have noticed if the spectacles hadn’t come off, but eyes he would never forget now that he had looked into them.