Small Days and Nights Read online

  The Venetians I encounter are a dolorous species, drawn inwards towards their bodies. They slope through the streets at a pace, with certainty. Perhaps it’s the effect of being surrounded by so much beauty. Perhaps it’s a form of containment – a result of being hemmed in by buildings, sky, horizon, the ever-present water and its multitude of reflections. But they are nothing like the throngs who have come in June, like me. Tourists. Dizzy as dragonflies in the narrow alleyways, confused and bedazzled, peering from one glass shop window to the next.

  I sleep with the blinds raised, poised for the morning sun to hit me in the face. Breakfast is at the Café Orientale, a tea room along the Rio Marin canal. Then I walk. Fortified by sugar, I walk for hours, getting lost, finding myself again. I eat lunch at the cheapest trattorias I can find. I could afford to do better, but I’m used to skimping. The food is mostly terrible, regardless.

  Every day brings new tourists, rattling the wheels of their suitcases over the cobblestones, peering behind each corner of the maze, hoping to find their pensiones. Midway they pause to gape at the perfection of a small bridge, the serendipity of a gondoliere passing beneath it, singing.

  Those dashing gondolieri in their striped T-shirts and straw hats – aren’t they tired of playing supporting roles in other people’s dreams?

  I am waiting for something to happen, but it must happen without any conniving. I must keep walking until the moment comes upon me.

  In the evenings, I stop at one of the bars behind the Rialto, for Spritz and cicheti. I don’t talk to anyone. I’m not interested in conversation. I stay away from museums and Vivaldi concerts and the Piazza San Marco. Nothing I want to happen will happen in any of these places.

  Sometimes I take the number 1 vaporetto all the way to the Lido, marvelling at how the light skates off the tops of buildings. What colour is that? Burnt sienna? Rust? They don’t look real, those Venetian houses standing in water, with their cornices and frescoes. It is all mirage – floating and shifting – and only when the Grand Canal sweeps into the lagoon after the Santa Maria della Salute does the vision open, whiplashed by light. Space. And more space. Giudecca gleams like a beacon on the other side. And beyond – the islands of Murano, Burano, Torcello – a kaleidoscope of bridges, buildings, colour upon colour.

  One day a man’s golden retriever leaps on to the vaporetto but the man gets left behind because of a stampede of Chinese tourists. The conductor says it’s okay. He knows this dog. His owner will find him at the next stop. And sure enough, there he is, at the Accademia, flushed and out of breath. ‘Amilcare,’ the owner says. ‘There you are, Amilcare.’ The dog bounds off loyally behind his owner. I long for a golden dog of my own.

  I return every night with blistered toes. I come home from walking and sit in the tub with bath salts for half an hour. The bath is made of boat wood and there’s a skylight in the roof, which makes you feel like you’re sailing away in the waters surrounding you.

  I keep few supplies in the apartment. Fruit, bread, pasta, peperoncino, a ruined knob of garlic, Parmesan, olive oil, several bottles of red wine. After a bath I prepare a goblet of wine with a plate of fruit and cheese and read till I’m slightly drunk. I’ve found the thing I’m looking for. Joseph Brodsky. Not the poems, but his book on Venice. He talks of the city in winter, how it is like Greta Garbo swimming, about the streets – how they are like library shelves, about feeling like a cat and saying meow!

  After reading Watermark I go to visit Mr Brodsky. His grave is overrun with rose bushes. Not far from him lie two compatriots – Diaghilev and Stravinsky. I feel the beginning of something changing in the San Michele cemetery under those long archways of cypress, amongst the cool brick walls and tombs.

  How different a burial is from a burning.

  I go looking for the members of my missing family who drowned in the sinking of the SS Bolivian on 9 April 1919. But I do not know their names. Tapetto, Bruno, Camilla, Felicita, Emilio, Pio. Could any of these people be related to me?

  There are seagulls everywhere. They are loud and huge like big flying cats. One of them swoops over me, lets loose a spray of shit and then springs away, squawking madly.

  I stop at the grave of a young ballerina. Her family entombed her pink satin slippers along with her. Expectantes Resurrectionem.

  The roses are in full bloom. Red and white. And there’s a cacophony of birdsong. Palm trees seem incongruous, but here they are, their roots entangled in the dust of bones.

  Before I’d left to come here, Kavitha Raman had told me about a temple in Kerala where people went to find out about their lives. All you needed to supply them with was your name and date of birth. And then a priest would disappear into the archives and return with a papyrus bearing all the details of your meagre life. Imagine the folly of living in the face of an idea like this! All the destinies of all the people in the world predetermined and inked. A stranger could read the book of your life and tell you things you didn’t even know.

  ‘Would you go?’ she had asked. ‘After everything you now know, would you still go?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It would be too terrifying.’

  In the St Michele cemetery I search for a grave bearing my own name. It was common, wasn’t it? Italians, naming their children after dead grandfathers and grandmothers, never thinking how morbid it might be for a child to stumble upon a marker with their name etched in moss. I don’t find a grave with my name on it, but I do find a Giacinto Marisola. Even though I know it’s not my father, seeing his name on stone fills me with dread, a feeling of being orphaned.

  Later that afternoon I agree to meet with Ilaria’s friend Roberto, who brought me the keys to the apartment. An idea settles that I might allow things to happen between us, should they proceed in that direction.

  Roberto is a mathematician who works at the University of Ca’ Foscari. He is a small man made big with ideas. He’s wearing a waistcoast, a leather jacket and slim, mud-coloured jeans. He has delicate hands and disorderly hair.

  We get a table on the sunny side of the Campo Santa Margherita, close to his office. It is a busy place, overrun with students. Roberto doesn’t drink alcohol or coffee. ‘It overexcites me,’ he says, somewhat ashamedly. He compensates with pear juice and crisps.

  I order Proseccos and listen for an hour about the theories he’s working on. One is about how atoms reflect the movement of tourists on bridges in Venice. Another is about the dynamics of lists. Still another is about genes and homosexuality in men, and how this is in fact not a Darwinian paradox.

  ‘The research shows that homosexuality is linked to the X chromosomes,’ Roberto says. ‘It finds that women related to a gay man’s mother are more fecund; they have more children. And so it’s a kind of by-product evolved in women, a tax for this super-fecund woman. The gay male son balances the process. The genes don’t get washed out, but they spread around. We refer to it as the cock-loving gene. Passed on by the mother.

  ‘We were barking up the wrong tree forever. Of course, homosexuals are more obvious and noticeable than fecund women, so it was much subtler. But the penetrating gaze of science tells us we were looking at things wrong.’

  ‘What about lesbians?’

  ‘Oh, different story. It’s not clear yet. Do you have children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want them?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  We sit like this for a while longer, watching as children and dogs race around. There is a fearlessness about them. They have no need to worry about cars, to look left or right before crossing.

  Roberto’s phone rings. ‘Arrivo, arrivo!’ he yells into it. ‘I’m sorry, but I must go. Let’s meet again.’ He places €20 on the table, pecks both my cheeks and heads off with a strut.

  I walk back to the apartment and what I think is this: that my life seems to have passed without any great tumult of feeling. Only music has had the capacity to upturn me. I have longed for more, for all the grand emotion that stems from
sex, friendship, nature, art, God – but I have always found myself lacking. What has mattered after all? Not family. Not love. Not politics. Not literature. Only music, with its dark mutability.

  At home I speak to Blake on Skype with the video turned off. I tell him the internet connection isn’t strong enough. The truth is I can’t bear to see his face. We are still in the process of talking things through, but I wish he would just let me go. Everything in my life has changed. Surely he must understand that. But we persist with the talks, because to disengage from one another after a decade of togetherness without an adequate amount of tug and pull would suggest that there was little there to begin with.

  He tells me he doesn’t need to have children.

  I tell him he does, that he is exactly the kind of person who needs to have children. Just not with me.

  ‘Did you meet your sister before you left?’

  I tell him no. I am waiting to settle things first. Another lie.

  That night I fall asleep listening to the bmph-bmph whale-like noises of the vaporetti, wondering about the shapes of chromosomes – how one extra chromosome can alter the alchemy of things. It is a dreamless, seamless sleep.

  I see Papi on my twenty-second day in Venice. He’s sitting in the shade of the Santa Maria della Visitazione in Zattere, eating an ice cream – chocolate and hazelnut, his staple. He’s wearing a trilby and sunglasses so I cannot see his eyes, but it’s him. The lines around his mouth have grown deeper, and his skin is papery, darker than it ever was in India. He’s watching people pass by as if all of this were pleasant. An afternoon in the sun with a gelato. As if the horns of those big ocean liners weren’t tearing into his nerves. As if it were a damn pleasure to have those feathered rats hover so close to him.

  I watch him for a few minutes, wondering, will he turn towards me? Will some mysterious force make him aware of my presence?

  Watching him, I understand that it is perfectly possible to exist in the world without being aware that someone close to you, someone of your flesh and blood, is moving about in the same air as you, occupying the same streets. That it takes all kinds of coincidences for trajectories to collide. But mostly we move about the world without collisions.

  It reminds me of when I used to make those long trips between America and India. Getting off at the other end and looking for a face. Blake in America. Ma in India. Would I see them first, or would they see me? It was our game. Who was more in tune with the other? There was magic in walking into a place you didn’t quite belong to, in the knowing that at least one person from that entire mass of people belonged to you.

  I walk up to stand right in front of Papi, blocking the light.

  He looks up, confused, blinking. Removes his hat. ‘Grazia? Cara?’ My father has never been one for surprises.

  These past few weeks in Venice I’ve been trying to recollect all the meaningful conversations I’ve had with Papi. Moments when he might have imparted something close to wisdom, or at least given me clues as to how I, his daughter, should live.

  He was certainly the more active of my parents. Besides teaching me to swim and conquer algebra, besides music and constellations and poetry and whatever passing interest I may have in trees and the habits of birds, Papi was the parent who confided in me, who allowed me into his moods. My mother was always at a remove in that sense. Whenever I had questions she neatly deflected them to my father. He could be strict, forbidding even, sending me alone on errands to the bazaar saying, ‘Nothing will happen to you.’ And always I wanted to ask, ‘How do you know? Is it worth the risk?’ Nothing ever happened. The world mostly ignored me. He was the parent I understood as a child, the one I grew estranged from when I left home, but still, I cannot think of a single real thing that was ever said between us.

  ‘What are you doing here, Grazia? When did you arrive?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ I leave him under a church awning with a melting ice-cream cone.

  Later that evening I ring the bell of his apartment in the Calle del Fumo near the Fondamente Nove. I take my time walking up the four floors. Papi holds me for a long time at the door. His place is exactly as it had been since he moved here – crowded with books, a bust of Leonardo da Vinci that he’d bought at a flea market, boxes of records, the same heavy, dark furniture. Not a single object to signify that he’d spent twenty-five years in India.

  He prepares spaghetti alle vongole for dinner, taking great care with the mussels, coating them in garlic and wine. Shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  ‘Who’s that singing?’ I ask.

  ‘Mariza. She’s a fado singer. Wonderful, isn’t she?’

  We listen to this voice booming over us – sad and sweet. She’s singing about love, undoubtedly, but if she’d been singing about plastic carrier bags, she would still have had the same effect – of installing orchestras in our diaphragms, complete with an audience of cheering people, as if we were somehow responsible for the enchantment she alone was creating.

  We listen and drink and eat, and after there is no more music, in the long silence of an October night, my father begins.

  ‘The baby was born a Mongoloid,’ he says. ‘It was 1973 in India, and no one knew what to do. You should have seen the hospital, Grazia. People on the floors. Dirty. Clueless people. Your mother and I were not equipped. The doctors gave us our options. They said there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive. We decided together. I want you to know that. Whatever your mother has made you believe, this was something we decided together.’

  5

  I find my sister at the Sneha Centre for Girls in Injambakkam. It is November in Madras. Roads laid waste by rain. Mosquitoes vying for every inch of exposed skin.

  Nothing about it is scary. Not the narrow funnel of Periyar Street or the lone, crooked laburnum leaning over the gate. Not even the towers of plastic clogging the exposed drains.

  I think of my mother; my newly dead mother who has bequeathed me land, a house, a sister.

  The place is more terrible inside than out.

  All the walls are a uniform concrete grey, and the corkboards – the only splash of colour in the rooms – are filled with pictorial charts of vegetables and types of professions. Sad, uninventive socialist charts, left over from when India used to be friends with Russia. The windows are barred with intricate grilles, and the bedraggled children stare off into nothing, holding themselves, rocking. Some of them have gimpy legs and they drag themselves across the floor with their hands.

  Mrs Gayatri, who I first met at Ma’s funeral, shows me the dark room with the wooden bench where the epileptics are hauled off to be strapped down, the kitchen, the terrace, the activity room, where the more advanced children make bags out of newspapers.

  There are thirty girls in all. Girls, I say, though most of them, including my sister, are women.

  One of them is an albino. Sugandhi. She sits in a dark corner. A giant, ghostlike creature with a disproportionately huge head, pink eyes, ash-white hair. When I enter the room she lifts a long arm to point at me. She is relentless with her questions. Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing here? Are you married?

  Mrs Gayatri shoves me towards her. ‘She wants to shake your hand.’

  I take that ghost hand in mine. Those long, musical fingers. Somebody’s child. Maybe even somebody’s sister.

  I tell her my name. ‘I’m Lucy’s sister,’ I say.

  No one at the Sneha Centre has ever called my sister Lucia. Lucy is easier on the Tamil tongue.

  Mrs Gayatri guides me through her office, up the stairway to the large hall where the girls sleep. There are twenty-eight jute mats rolled and standing up against the wall, twenty-eight pillows and twenty-eight sets of folded sheets. A single shelf built into the wall runs all the way across the room, where the girls store their clothes, toys, towels, toothbrushes.

  Only two girls have private rooms. One has cerebral palsy, the other is my sister. Rich girls.

  ‘Lucy�
�s waiting,’ Mrs Gayatri says. ‘Quite excited, naturally, but also nervous.’

  Mrs Gayatri is a remarkable woman, almost two-dimensional if you look at her sideways. The paragon of a woman who works in social services. Completely flattened out by life. Trying to look optimistic and cheery but, having seen too much to be angry about, just looks perpetually worried.

  ‘What should I call you?’ I ask, after we had been acquainted a few weeks.

  ‘Everyone calls me Teacher,’ she laughed. ‘Even my husband.’

  The first sight of my sister.

  She looks like a jumbo peach. Round glasses perched on a snub nose. Perfect almond upturned eyes. Tiny little ears that grow away from her face like flowers in search of light. Peach kurti, blue wide-legged jeans, peach plastic hoop earrings, peach slippers. Hair – limp and brown and long.

  She is heavier than me. Plump everywhere – shoulders, breasts, hips, thighs, bum.

  ‘Hi Grace.’

  She smiles. Two rows of tiny, jagged, widely spaced teeth.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Come and meet my babies.’ She slides off the bed and takes my hand. Laces her fingers through mine. Gives them a squeeze.

  There are rows of stuffed animals of varying size, colour and condition, perched on the shelves of my sister’s room. A frame sits on the bedside table with a photograph of my mother and Lucia. Ma is skinny, unrecognisable. She’s looking down at Lucia at her hip, who’s fat and bright-eyed, clutching on to a yellow teddy bear in a red-and-black vest. The same bear lies in a heap on the bed, looking somewhat diminished by the years.

  ‘That’s Baloo, the first of the birthday toys. Your mother used to bring one every year. Sorry, they’re a bit dirty. Lucy gets agitated if we even talk of washing them.’

  Lucia is introducing me to each of her babies. Many named from The Jungle Book, her favourite story. The newer ones have nonsense names like Pootchie and Booboo.

  ‘You know your mother used to come every week? She always took Lucy to see a film, whatever was playing. Hardly any English films in those days, but it didn’t matter. Birthdays were extra-special. She’d stay overnight and organise a party for all the children. Cake, balloons, mutton biryani, colouring books and crayons for everyone. We all looked forward to your mother’s visits. She always brought her lovely homemade bread.’