Small Days and Nights Read online

  Papi went on to study geotechnical and building engineering at the polytechnic in Turin. He promised my Nonno Danilo and Nonna Rosa that he would return to run the pharmacy, but had secretly relinquished his rights to his brother Fulvio, who, being unimaginative and overly attached to the town of his birth, was only too happy to take over a thriving business. Papi’s ambitions were taken as a sign of courage, and when he set off to work for Eni, first in Rome, then Egypt, and finally India, he was treated with even greater respect, a modern poster child for the kind of fearless Vicentini who had gone before him – writers and explorers like Trissino and Pigafetta, who gave their names to Vicenza’s statues and streets.

  I think Papi must have been terribly lonely when he arrived in India. He was stationed in Tharangambadi, or Tranquebar, as it was known then – one of the first places where Christianity and the printing press entered India. A small coastal town in Tamil Nadu with a warren of streets and a biscuit-coloured Danish fort, it was overrun by flocks of crows and white-socked goats. After a long day at his offshore site, he would walk from the fort along the seafront, picking his way across the rocks, past the fishermen fixing their nets and the coy young schoolgirls with ribbons in their hair. Outside the crumbling wreck of what used to be the Governor’s Bungalow there was an ancient Shiva temple on the beach, where he’d loiter, smoking cigarettes, wondering how long it would be before he could leave this wretched place.

  The story of how my father met my mother is an unreliable one. To hear my mother talk about it, she was the one who made the first move. My father claimed the opposite. When I was a teenager, rifling through the drawers of my father’s cupboard, I discovered his diary, written in unintelligible Italian, and found a few terse notes written by my mother.

  20 Dec, 1971

  Hello Mister,

  My friends and I would appreciate it if you could teach us how to smoke. Meet us at the abandoned temple at six?

  Meera Andrews

  22 December, 1971

  Hello again,

  I think perhaps you have the wrong impression. Probably in Italy there is a different way to go about such things, but here in India, we don’t go making loud announcements of wanting to make love to people.

  Kindly abide by the rules.

  Meera Andrews

  26 December, 1971

  Dear Mr Giacinto,

  I really don’t know what you were thinking, showing up at my house on Christmas Day. You cannot imagine the embarrassment it caused me and my family. My teachers at college sometimes scold us by saying, ‘Were you mad, dead or drunk when you came to class today?’ and I feel I must say that you must have been mad, dead and drunk when you decided to knock on our door with your cock-and-bull story. In any case, my father is on to you. And my mother, despite having fed you to the gills (which is in any case her great mission in life), said that if I ever tried to see you alone she would skin me like a chicken. These are not empty threats. Seriously, are you deranged? You should know I’m least interested in you.

  Meera

  PS: I want to be a veterinarian (hence the vegetarianism, since you asked).

  30 March, 1972

  Dear G

  Don’t leave. I couldn’t bear it.

  My mother was nineteen when she met my father. I can almost see her: reed-thin, double plaits and half sari, twinkling nose-ring. Her family were a hybrid of Tamil Christians who had intermarried with Hindus, and as such, they were a syncretic household, befitting the town of Tranquebar, where every evening you would hear the adhan intermingling with the sounds of temple and church bells. Jesus was the main point of focus in my mother’s house, of course, but there was a dedicated puja room where concessions were made for major Hindu deities.

  Grandpa Samuel was treasurer at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church, which is where my parents first met. Later, Auntie Kavitha would tell me that it was my mother who pursued my father. That ever since she had known her, my mother had had an irrational longing to escape. ‘Always, there was something calling her away.’ And here was this strange, brooding foreign man. Surely, he would help her leave behind this congested brick house and her doltish siblings, her father who would have her be a nun, her mother who, boringly, favoured her sons?

  Their wedding photo shows a small, unremarkable gathering outside the church. My parents look like people I don’t know and never will. They aren’t smiling exactly, but there’s a sense that whatever they have around them is something of their own making. No one from my father’s side of the family is present, although the family ring had been sent with a shipman from Vicenza – a simple cluster of emeralds and diamonds in the shape of a cross, courtesy of Nonna Rosa. My mother wore that ring every day of her life, the gold getting worn and dark, until she passed it on to me on the eve of my own unsuccessful marriage.

  3

  In the weeks after Ma’s death I plummet into childhood. None of it seems credible.

  Auntie Kavitha tells me I will learn nothing by confronting my father, but she understands my determination.

  I called him the afternoon after Ma’s funeral. It was as if he’d been expecting the news. ‘I was in Guidecca, after dinner with a friend, walking by the water, and I saw a flash in the sky. I don’t know why, but I thought of your mother. It was something so real, so powerful. I marked the time. It was five after midnight.’

  I told him we hadn’t established the exact time of Ma’s death. She had had an unremarkable day. All morning and afternoon in the house. At five Murali had driven her to Nilgiris to do her weekly groceries. She’d complained of the heat. The maid who came to cook three times a week had been the last to see her alive. She left at 8 p.m. Dinner was paratha and vegetable stew. Ma got into bed and never got up.

  ‘She always hoped for this,’ Papi said. ‘She was so scared of death, of pain, of any kind of physical hardship. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all decide when we’ve had enough, climb into bed and that could be the end of it?” She told me that once. She was always a lucky woman.’

  I wanted to say, ‘And was Lucia a lucky thing that happened too?’ but I hadn’t met Lucia yet, and she was as unreal to me as Ma’s death.

  ‘How do you feel, Papi?’ I asked.

  ‘I feel alone,’ he said, ‘as ever.’

  We are in Ma’s apartment in Pondicherry. Every evening we walk along the beach, and for a few hours in the morning, we sort her belongings into boxes. Auntie Kavitha’s grief is different from mine. She looks like a person demolished. She has no appetite for anything but whisky.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense to distrust the past,’ she tells me. ‘Everything that happened, happened.’

  ‘But you mean when she was taking all those overnight buses to Madras, she wasn’t going to bridge tournaments?’

  ‘Your mother was an average bridge player at best. Far too impatient.’

  My grief is filled with anger because she has overwritten every memory with a kind of deception. There – young, beautiful mother, how could you keep the lie up for so long?

  I don’t know what it means that I am dreaming of houses, but it must be a sign of insecurity. In the nights after Ma’s death I am always in the rooms of a house, the walls crumbling, doors and windows flung open. I am frantic, searching for something or someone. The dream often begins in the house on Gilchrist Avenue in Madras, but inevitably it turns into Mahalakshmi, our house in Kodaikanal, where we moved when I was eleven. Sometimes the house is a ruin. Sometimes it’s exactly as it was when Ma, Papi and I used to live there.

  I see the manic play of a white dachshund and his ball on the grass. I stand at the edge of the garden looking all the way down to the plains, a shimmering rust patchwork of land 7,000 feet below, like a mirage in the heat. Some nights I wake in a sweat because it’s as though one of them is standing behind me, ready to push. Papi. Ma. I can make no sense of it. This house with ivy, with brambles of raspberry and Queen Anne’s lace growing in wild bushes all along the compound wall. This house
that my father found and which I fell in love with as soon as I saw it. Mahalakshmi.

  We moved there soon after Papi’s incident with Moses Paulraj. It was decided we needed to live in a quieter place. Papi found it – a grey stone cottage with a portico and columns, nestled in the corner of the Kurinji Temple Road. The watchman used to tell stories of previous owners who had either hung themselves or lost children at birth. He’d look at me slyly to see if I was scared. ‘But we live here now,’ I’d say adamantly.

  I’d spoken of my longing to return there with Auntie Kavitha the day we cremated Ma. ‘I can go with you,’ she offered.

  It’s as though everything was set forward in motion because of that house.

  Papi left Madras first. He was a superstitious man when it came to travel. A large part of his family had drowned in the sinking of the SS Bolivian in 1919, a tragedy his grandmother never tired of despairing about, so we usually travelled separately, to ensure that if disaster struck, it would not eliminate our family in entirety.

  Ma followed a week later. And I was brought soon after by Kavitha Raman. I had never been separated from my parents before, but I remember completely trusting Auntie Kavitha. I was quite unafraid of the journey and the new life waiting for me.

  When we arrived at the Kodai Road Station we climbed into a taxi that Papi had organised, which took us up winding roads and through deep shola forests where bands of monkeys appeared and disappeared, and a great waterfall called the Silver Cascades washed down the cliffs. Auntie Kavitha frequently said, ‘Oh, Grace, isn’t it beautiful! Don’t you think it’s so beautiful?’ And even though I felt slightly ill in my stomach from all the winding curves and bends, I nodded in assent.

  I remember being in the taxi a very long time, and it was only after we stopped at the five-fingered lake at the entrance of town – Auntie Kavitha pointing to the boats in the mist and the horses whinnying and stomping in a cluster by the bicycle-rental stand – that I actually began to think it really was very beautiful. Ten minutes later we arrived at Mahalakshmi, where my parents stood on the front steps holding hands and smiling widely. Something about the sight of their togetherness, or the relief of being reunited with them, cracked a dent in my bravado, and I stumbled out of the car onto the front lawn to vomit and cry simultaneously.

  Our first months in Kodai were difficult. Ma, who had grown up by the sea, found the mountains cruel and isolating. Papi, who had spent his youth skiing in the Dolomites and camping on the Monte Cornetto, tried convincing her that it was not all harshness. He knew, after all, what it meant to be separated from everything you knew. He had given up his life in Italy to be here with us. After a while, he said, the hills would offer a kind of peace the sea could never bring.

  For my part, everything would have been fine if I hadn’t been forced to go to the convent, which shall remain nameless, at the end of the long road that led from our house to the Naidupuram market. My friends and I called it the Prison for Poor Catholic Girls (PPCG), even though more than half the girls were from Hindu families. The indoctrination, in any case, was Catholic to the extreme.

  I was one of the few day scholars at PPCG. Most of the girls were boarders from wealthy families in Madras, Madurai and Coimbatore. They weren’t allowed out of the compound unless it was for authorised walks, or if a family member came to visit. Newspapers, films and magazines were banned, and if you were caught with cigarettes or alcohol, you faced certain expulsion. For birthdays, girls were allowed to have a supervised outing, providing their parents sent enough money. And in the eleventh and twelfth standard, you were allowed to attend the much-anticipated annual dance with the international school, which was exciting primarily because it involved boys.

  As we lived just five minutes down the road, the sisters allowed me the privilege of going back home at the end of each day, but it was always cited as the main reason for my many perceived shortcomings. ‘Grace Marisola,’ they’d admonish, ‘just because no one disciplines you at home, don’t think you can come here and corrupt the other girls.’

  Papi was the only truly happy one among us. He was a different person from the father in Madras. Jovial, relaxed. The climate in Kodai suited him, the trees and flowers were familiar to him, and there was finally some quiet and calm. Every weekend he went off on a trek with the local hiking club, and in this way made Indian acquaintances without my mother’s intervention. He continued to work as a consultant for Eni on a part-time basis, forced to make site visits every few months, but otherwise allowed to work from home. The company would send him large dossiers, which he’d go through in his studio – a shed at the end of the garden. Here he’d work from ten to six every day, spreading sheets of paper on the table in front of him, fountain pen in hand, equations and formulas scribbled on notepaper and stuck on the walls around him. For lunch he would come into the kitchen and make himself a sandwich and an espresso, smoke a cigarette on the front lawn in the sun and then return to his desk. At four he’d take a break to pick me up from school. My father’s hands were soft and stubby. Walking home, I would put my hand in his until our palms became sweaty, after which I’d draw away.

  Once a week I’d be dispatched to the post office in the bazaar to make sure that a dossier was couriered to Madras or Rome. And in this way, a kind of communication existed between him and the outside world. Our wealth must have been greatly diminished, but as with many things at that age, I had no understanding of relativity. I never felt anything but richness in those early years. We lived in a beautiful house, we had our health, my parents battled frequently but always made their peace, and I had only the nuns to mar my contentment.

  When I think of my parents now, I try to think of them in happier times. In those days before I entered their lives – the languid year they spent in Tranquebar after their marriage, the excitement of those first years in the house on Gilchrist Avenue in Madras.

  I was witness to scenes of love from time to time, occasional moments of togetherness in Mahalakshmi, the drawing room lit with a fire, the books glowing on the shelves. It was enough, then, to hear my mother in the kitchen preparing a meagre supper of soup and bread. Papi emerging from his studio after a day’s work, entering the house with a volume of Ungaretti or Zanzotto. I think poetry was the only luxury my father allowed himself, the only love my parents shared. How many times he tried to get me to learn Italian by reading poetry – ‘A ogni nuovo clima che incontro mi trovo languente … Godere un solo minuto di vita iniziale cerco un paese innocente.’

  But I had no ear for languages, no love for them either. I was more interested in the music Papi played after dinner. While Ma and I cleared the table, he would pick something from his record collection, depending on his mood – Louis Armstrong or Paolo Conte or Sarah Vaughan. Whatever he chose, whatever their most recent argument, Ma would dance with him.

  It was their way of salvaging the day, of forgiving. And it was marvellous to watch. My father in his perfectly tailored Italian shirts and trousers, always so formal for every occasion. My mother in a sari or a floor-length dress and cardigan. The two of them sliding across the wooden floors of Mahalakshmi like two serpents in their battle dance. It was the most civilised thing about my childhood, and though I remember exactly when they stopped dancing, it was only much later that I figured out why.

  4

  A city such as this shouldn’t have the right to exist. It is a dream on water. A seaweed-stinking dream.

  I’ve been here three weeks, staying in an apartment off the Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. A light-filled place with large windows that look out onto small canals where singing gondolieri steer their sleek black vessels through labyrinths of water. At first I used to stand by the windows, listening to strains of ‘O sole mio’, ‘Volare’, ‘Santa Lucia’ – music I didn’t know I knew, but which must have folded into the grey of my cerebral cortex as a child. After days of listening to the same songs over and over, I close the windows because they are ruining the dream.

&nb
sp; The apartment is mostly white except for two purple velvet armchairs, a Turkish rug that covers the entire floor, and a wall of books. Every evening, after my long day of walking, I slide a title off the shelf, purely on whimsy, hoping the pages will bring some kind of revelation.

  The woman, Ilaria, who owns this apartment, is a photographer. Her black-and-white photographs of semi-nude men and women are framed in discreet corners. I found Ilaria on the internet. She had been looking for someone to sublet the place while away on sabbatical in Marrakesh.

  India is a mother country!! Ilaria had written in her email. Every time I go there I remember one of my past lives. It’s the only place where I feel I’m coming home. Sorry not to be able to meet you, but my friend Roberto will bring you the keys and explain everything to you. It’s easy!

  Along with Ilaria’s welcome note, which included a list of instructions of things not to tamper with – crystals in the bathroom, runes on the bedroom floor, seashell sculpture above the bed – she had enclosed a pamphlet that someone had passed to her in a street in Calcutta. It was one of those New Age self-help things, on which she had scrawled – I hope you find everything you’re looking for in Venice.

  Play cosmic with your mind and body!

  Protect nature and remove poverty!

  Being is simple, being somebody is complicated.

  Silence is simple, speech is complicated.

  Last century was ‘use and throw’,

  Now ‘be mother to each to grow!’

  The pamphlet, though ridiculous, makes me wistful for everything I’ve just left behind. I carry it around in the side pocket of my handbag as a kind of talisman.

  I am alone here in Venice, and this is not a city that is built for loneliness. Too many honeymooning couples and groups of families and students, wandering around hypnotised by their tour guides’ coloured flags.