Small Days and Nights Read online

  I walk up to the family. ‘Excuse me, I’m so sorry for interrupting.’

  The woman is in a striped long-sleeved T-shirt, her face an explosion of freckles. ‘My sister is like this,’ I say, and I look to the boy. ‘She lives in India. I’m sorry for coming over. It’s just I miss her, and I think she would like it very much here.’

  The woman nods. ‘This is Daniel,’ she says. The other two sons don’t get an introduction. Daniel smiles. He has widely spaced teeth and his eyes could be Lucia’s eyes.

  ‘Hello Daniel,’ I say, and reach for his hand. He flips my hand over and chivalrously plants a kiss on it. ‘How do you do?’ he says, with flourish.

  The parents gleam. It’s obviously a thing he does, but the effect on people is always different.

  I start crying. Silly crying, deluge crying. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say. They look at me, perplexed. I have momentarily broken the sanctity of their vacation. I hurry back to my table, pick up the bill that has been brought with the food, walk into the bar and pay at the counter. ‘All okay?’ the waiter asks. ‘Yes, yes,’ I stammer, ‘I’m not feeling so good.’

  Papi and I have philosophical arguments about happiness and suffering. He believes that both exist in equal measures of one another, refuses to be brought into any conversation that involves the word ‘decency’. ‘Morality is a false qualifier,’ he tells me, ‘it cannot have universal applications.’ His cough has become less severe and the doctor has suggested taking short walks on days that aren’t damp. He grants himself a cigarette a day. ‘You would not have me living with no pleasures at all, Grazia?’

  We stop at the café around the corner for aperitivos in the evening or coffee in the morning. Bangladeshi men shove roses in Papi’s face and look at me in a manner that is both leering and sweet. ‘She’s my daughter,’ Papi spits. ‘Idiots, get away from here.’

  He looks shrunken, his hands especially. He seemed so voluminous to me as a child, but now I see he has always been delicate in some ways. The eyelashes, the ears, the bony arch of his elbows. We walk arm in arm and I wonder what people looking at us might think. Whether we are from a far-off place? Whether we share the same blood? I catch sight of my reflection, at the lines around my mouth, which seem to have deepened over the last few months. I look exactly as I feel – a woman who is slipping out of the prime of her life.

  ‘What will you do?’ Papi asks.

  That question again.

  There are parts of the city I am getting to know. I understand the importance of narrow passages. I catch glimpses of secret gardens. One afternoon, in my old neighbourhood of San Giacomo dell’Orio, I notice Roberto, the mathematician from Ca’ Foscari, heading for the bridge that goes towards the train station. ‘Roberto,’ I yell. ‘Man with the keys!’

  I feel a strange sense of relief that he recognises me. It is important somehow to be known by someone other than my father here. It makes me feel less alone. ‘Come,’ he says, ‘let’s sit somewhere.’

  Later in the afternoon, we lie in a room that smells of cigarettes and basil. I lie under the blanket, while Roberto lies naked beside me. There’s a smoothness about him that’s unnerving. Barely any hair on his chest or arms. He’s like an anorexic seal making sounds of pleasure as he slides towards me. We hold each other and I wonder when I can leave. Already the act has become something forgettable and sad.

  Roberto insists on walking me to Papi’s flat. ‘So you will stay some time?’ he asks.

  ‘One more week.’

  ‘Let’s eat dinner soon,’ he says. ‘I know a wonderful fish place in the ghetto.’

  I wave before turning to open the front door. I know we will not see each other again.

  Kavitha is lifting the new puppies one by one towards the eye of her laptop. There are five of them – fat, fluffy things. Mostly black with tinges of white, except for one, who is completely white. ‘I’ve called him Giorgio Armani,’ she says. ‘He’s the coolest one.’

  She’s been staying at the house, looking after the dogs. Valluvan has just been released from the hospital. He has recovered, although he drags one foot around and there’s a palimpsest of scars on his arms, back, legs. ‘Tell her my wife was distraught. Tell her she must come back to the village, she must find a way to bring her sister back too.’ This is the message he sends.

  Kavitha has locked up her Madras home and brought the couple who used to look after it to stay in Mallika’s house. They are middle-aged people unused to living so close to the sea. They complain there’s nothing to do – no teashop, no market, no cinema. But she trusts them, so she gives them money to water the garden and wash the dishes, to lie in the heat of their room watching television the rest of the time.

  Mallika has vanished. Nobody seems to know anything about it. At the Cheyyur police station where Kavitha went with Praveen to file a missing person’s report, the constable had asked what their relationship to Mallika was. ‘Any husband, children, parents?’ he asked. ‘There was a flair about him,’ Kavitha tells me, ‘the way he said, “A woman who has come from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.” He told us to forget about it, as if we’d been robbed on a bus, the likelihood of recovery so minuscule.’

  Of Lucia I hear little. Kavitha has not managed to see her yet, but we know she is with Teacher at the Sneha Centre. There has been an exchange between lawyers. ‘They’re going on about you hitting her,’ she says, ‘and this thing of you leaving her for days, they are making a big deal out of that. But I think we can find a way to come to a settlement.’

  I listen to her like I’m listening to a story that isn’t mine. It feels distant – that place, that wilderness, Lucia. I stand in Papi’s kitchen, the windows open to the sound of people walking below, pigeon wings.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Auntie Kavitha says. ‘We’ll sort it all out.’

  Papi has gone to buy fish from the Rialto market. He’s turning the key in the door and walking through, setting the bags down. ‘Bye then, bye,’ I say, quickly, slamming down the lid of the computer.

  ‘You behave like a child of divorced parents,’ Papi says, laughing. ‘When Father comes in, get off the phone with Mother.’

  ‘I am the child of divorced parents,’ I say. ‘I just know you have issues with her, so I don’t want to get entangled in all that.’

  ‘She was a good friend to your mother. Too good, perhaps.’

  He never asks about the situation, isn’t curious about the outcome of all these lives I’ve spoken about. There’s a friend of his he wants me to meet. She’s coming over for dinner. Her name is Marcella. He tells me nothing more except she can be a little grand.

  Papi sets to work in the kitchen. He’s a good cook, able to put together meals that are simple, but over which you can linger. Nothing like my hearty, one-pot dishes that made you want to immediately lie down. ‘You make nothing well,’ he complained when he’d been in bed with pneumonia. ‘How is it possible that you learned nothing in the kitchen?’

  Marcella arrives early and is dressed in that slapdash aristocratic way that Italian women of a certain generation have – elegant, but nothing too thought over. Slacks, a silk shirt, beads from an interesting country, impeccable shoes. Face clear of make-up except for a smear of coral lipstick. She has maintained herself well: there’s a slight thickening around the waist and hips, but she keeps a straight back and when she looks at you, it is with a kind of hunger. I feel the mysterious need to be liked by her.

  ‘Why did you leave America?’ she asks. She listens sympathetically. ‘Matrimony is such a bore, but oh, North Carolina,’ she scowls. ‘No, no. A person like you should really be in New York.’

  When I tell her how I’ve come to hate cities, she smiles at me as though I were a child telling a lie.

  I watch them sitting side by side across the table from me. Jack and Marcella. There’s a warm octopus salad with fennel and potatoes, anchovies with parsley, a caprese salad, and gnocchi in cavolo nero sauce. For dessert Papi brings out a chocolate
salami – beautifully dark and nutty. He looks pleased about the way Marcella eats. Her arms are long and white. One of them stretches across the bench she shares with Papi. ‘You always feed me too much,’ she coos. A mock complaint.

  Afterwards, she stands by the window in a feline pose, blowing smoke circles away from us. She is a woman contained, nothing like the hysterical Italian female prototype Papi was so fond of conjuring.

  ‘This city was made for night,’ Marcella says. ‘We should go for a walk.’

  We crowd over Papi, making sure he’s warm enough to step out. He has the face of a victim – stoic in his acceptance. Hat, scarf, coat. Marcella leads us over bridges and along small canals where boats are moored and bobbing in moonlight. There’s always music coming from somewhere in the streets of Venice. We are in San Marco now, a place Papi and I hardly ever pass through because of the tourists. It is peaceful at this hour, even though every table is filled. Two competing quartets play on opposite ends of the square. People leaning back in their chairs have a look of deep satiation.

  ‘Isn’t it strange that it’s never too much?’ Marcella says. ‘It’s always a surprise.’ We walk past the statue of the Lion of Venice, around the corner towards the Bridge of Sighs. Gondolieri are singing the usual songs, and the lights of San Giorgio gleam across the Grand Canal. Now we are back into secret passages. ‘This place has the most divine hats,’ Marcella says, turning to look at me. I’m trying to take note of the shop – a name, or a landmark, but it’s hopeless. I’m lost. All the streets have started looking the same. Night closes in with a gradual September chill, our feet move noiselessly over cobblestones, and all of Venice feels like the inside of a cathedral, sacred and unreal. Here is a perfect scene – a cluster of trees, restaurant tables with red-and-white checked tablecloths, dogs curled at table legs waiting to go home. A man on a saxophone is playing ‘Come Fly With Me’. Papi grabs Marcella by the waist and she emits a small cry, a pretence of not wanting to. But then they move away from me, slowly, in circles and with great care, as though a river were sleeping beneath them, as though they had lungs of glass.

  29

  These hours between countries are a kind of limbo. Timelessness and stupor, a place where everything stops and moves. I look through the aeroplane window and my nostrils imagine seaweed, decay. I see the fish shape of Venice below, and it is all clarity now. I understand her streets and bridges. There and there. I see now, that’s how it all connects. This winter, when Papi sends me a photograph of the snow in Cannaregio, the avenue of bare trees, Marcella standing at the entrance of the Biennale in a red beret looking like one of Modigliani’s women, I will be back at the beach, Lucia might be with me, our best days ahead of us – sun, dolphins, a legion of dogs.

  I had sent an email to Vik before leaving, knowing I’d have a day of erasure, of travel, before expecting any kind of reply. I think of Madras as a barren place, I’d written. I wrote loftily of the man he might become, as if the great encounter of our love might transform him into something more than he could have been by himself. I hope to still know you, I might have written. Or a version of that. A future where we could come together and acknowledge one another, because to have given so much only to let it fall to the wayside seemed wasteful, a derelict approach to love.

  There are other words in my handbag. Ma’s letter. I had received it at Mr Sriram’s office in Teynampet a few weeks after her death. I had taken a taxi there from my hotel. It was a warren of a place. A haphazard office in a ground-floor corner of a haphazard building. There was a reception area that smelled of old newspapers and stale agarbathi smoke. Slow-turning fans hung from the ceiling, and a few scattered administrators – women who seemed to have been unlucky at everything in life – sat at large pachydermal desks in front of typewriters. One of them led me to Mr Sriram’s office, a coffin-shaped room with a file cabinet slung against one wall and a row of wispy plants by the window.

  Mr Sriram did not sit at a desk. There was no room for one. He padded softly across the perimeter of the room like a dancer testing the length of the stage. ‘Bring tea,’ he said, to the secretary. ‘And two chairs.’

  We sat facing each other. Me staring into Mr Sriram’s small, ruined face. Him holding Mother’s letter, and perhaps feeling some of the messenger’s burden. ‘You have all our support,’ he said.

  I touched the cup and saucer lovingly. There was something poignant about the design of a small orange flower etched into the corner of a cheap china saucer. The gift of tea.

  To see her handwriting on the envelope – the letters narrow and blue and upright. The same hand that had written to me when I was in America. Those first years before email. The thrill of reaching in my letter box, seeing those stamps, knowing that inside was a voice of a living person. Dear Grace. She always wrote the way she spoke, but this letter was different. She had taken time over it. She might have written several drafts but this is what I’m left with:

  Nothing I say will make you understand this, so I can only plead forgiveness and ask you to read this through. If this comes at a point in your life when you are happy with your own family, in a place far away, then I hope you will make the time to know your sister, even in the slightest possible way. A visit, once a year. Some connection, whatever you can manage, because you are together in the world, bound by your father and I. I can hear you saying, It’s impossible. I know, kanna. We never imagine the kind of decisions we have to make. There is no guide for such things except the body, the heart. And these are changeable things as you know. I was afraid. That is the truth. Your father was lost. When we heard the news, there was so little anyone could give us. Where should we go? What must we do? We were young, not that it’s any excuse, but we were alone in the world together, and we could not decide. My instinct was to bring the baby home and care for it. I wanted to change our lives but your father thought it would flatten us. I heard him speaking to his brother on the phone. The baby is a Mongoloid, he said. He kept using that word even though I told him that’s not what it’s called. The baby isn’t right, he said, it’s got one extra chromosome, like Cousin Emilio. They’d had a cousin with Down syndrome when they were growing up. He’d stayed with the family and it had been difficult. It embarrassed your father to think of having to raise a child like that. What about other children we might have? he said. How can we put them through this? We went to look for places that might help, and you should have seen them, Grace … horror chambers. Children and grown-ups with nappies on because there weren’t enough staff to toilet train them, children in straitjackets and, sometimes, chains. I told him to leave, to go back to Italy, that I would manage alone. Although I knew I would not manage alone. I thought I’d go back to Tranquebar, however difficult it would be, but I might have done it. Then I met Mrs Gayatri. She was teaching at the Clarke’s School for the Blind at the time, but she wanted to start a centre for girls with disabilities. We drove out one day to see the plot of land she had bought. She needed money to build her centre. She said if we could help her with that, she would take Lucia, and it would be a way for us to continue our lives. I thought I wouldn’t survive, that I would lie awake at night and everything would be broken. What I felt was a kind of relief. The kind of work Mrs Gayatri does requires a selflessness, and perhaps your father was right in recognising that neither of us would be capable of it. You are wondering why we stayed together, why we had you so many years later. And the answer is I do not know. I’m writing this in Pondicherry, looking out of my window, where I cannot see the sea but I can smell it. It was a kind of love we had. Not the best, not glorious, but there was deep peace in those days with your father. I know you will not remember it this way. But those outbursts were so few. When I think of our life, it was a cocoon, and we had you, our happiness. I wanted to tell you, many times. I tried. But it is difficult to rewrite the story of your life, especially when you have been telling it one way for so long. I wonder how you are now, if you feel my presence, if you believe in any of that.
You should know that whatever you decide, no one will judge you, because in this you are not culpable. Live your life. Your father and I have made provisions so that Lucia can live her life, regardless of what you decide.

  The letter had made me sick. Everything about it was cloying, desperate. I’d read it in the taxi to the Connemara. Auntie Kavitha had asked me to stay at her house but I had wanted the anonymity of a hotel. I didn’t want her scratching around, inserting her ideas, because she’d been complicit too. It was only later, when Mr Sriram took me to Paramankeni to see the house – the rutted village road, the brick wall and the heavy wooden gate, a kingfisher flying in front of us, the blaze of its blue wings winking all the way down the driveway – that I understood Ma had made plans for an alternative future. That I might find my place in it.

  We land in Madras to the usual scrum and rush. A darting-up of bodies to drag luggage from cabin bins. I want to stay in this place of resolve where everything is clear. ‘Are you okay?’ the flight attendant says, coming up to me after the plane has emptied. ‘Do you need help?’

  At immigration, people constantly jump queues trying to figure out which line is the fastest. A shift of gears. Outside – there it is. The heave.

  Where’s Kadar? ‘Madam,’ he shouts. He takes the bags off me, and I let him. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asks. Cheerful man. He’s always asking about the state of my stomach. We stop at one of the roadside restaurants for idlis and filter coffee. ‘Come and eat with me,’ I say, but he shakes his head, ‘I’ve finished.’ He waits in the taxi, pushes the headrest back and plays the radio softly.