Shadow Play (28 page)

It also seems ironic that someone with such a clear sense of purpose could fall prey to temptations he had so thoroughly diagnosed. Ellery is right: I too perceived him as a Don Quixote figure, and for several years I went along with it, deciding to be entertained, and played an amused but willing Sancho. Yet he was never just a cartoon, no matter how well he played one – his Cassius Clay persona with its chest-thumping rants was one of his favourite routines, except it hid much more than it showed.

Even now, I think it wonderfully schizophrenic how he habitually reveals different dimensions in his stories, playing scared characters, small characters, cowards, losers, weaklings. I have always loved the care with which he creates such lives, and the detail he infuses them with: Raj could create them because he was all those people, he carried them within him. He was the little boy bewildered in the backseat of his father's car, and the young man who never forgave himself for leaving his mother when he was seventeen, just as he never forgot what happened to Vera and Bryan.

The reason he was photographed so often in slums and ghettoes during the early years was simply that he wandered through them all the time – angry and powerless. And at least at the beginning, the reason he sought audiences with ministers
and tycoons was his impatience. Immature though it was, it was most of all that quixotic impatience that first turned him into a courtier of power. Because he's right about one thing – he never had the time to toil honourably, hidden somewhere amid the grassroots. He was going to muster his gifts to be the great galvanizer, the one who would affect millions by animating those who ruled their lives. ‘Hearts and minds will come round later,' he used to say, ‘they have all the time in the world to read my novels.' Systems had to be transformed first. For this, their workings had to be understood and then exposed, as also the ways of their masters. He only had contempt for those who ran in the opposite direction from worldliness and power, fearing to be tainted by their touch. Incorruptibly, inexhaustibly, he would inspire change from the very top, send it rolling downwards, gathering force, until it was an unstoppable avalanche.

Today the question has become, is he merely stuck amid all that manure or is he well and truly buried? Of course, he discovered very soon that writers don't affect anything visible, and certainly never on the scale that he envisioned. His achievements outside the literary have remained as lacking in shape and focus as his proclamations: he would have made probably the same footprint if he had stayed at his desk and merely written all these years, invisible behind the words.

It also strikes me that perhaps he was especially ill-suited to any such transformative efforts, simply because of his laughable attention span. Or, as he says, it was his self-defined mission to touch and discuss ‘everything', so how could he have spared the time to follow through on any one process he had initiated? He was the universal man: his voice was required everywhere. It was all he could do to imagine, diagnose (and decry), join
the dots and reveal the big picture; other people had to dedicate themselves and seize the cue to action. He treated entire societies and their issues as mere stops on one of his gigantic rock-star tours. Many, many times he sparked off controversy and debate with one or another of his essays and interviews, in Europe, Brazil, and most frequently in India. Often there was tremendous support, but on each occasion it dissipated because Raj was never there to ask the next set of questions, or duller still, to repeat himself patiently until there was a measurable response. He couldn't afford to be: by the time the fortnight had come around, he was on another continent, raising hell over an unrelated subject and managing to be spotted at two premières and an awards-night party within the same period.

This approach became a habit. Despite periodic bouts of frustration, he never experimented with the other way – settling into a rooted involvement with any one matter that had moved him. It's all very well to be obsessively independent, but to truly dislodge any single thing, you have to allow yourself to belong somewhere. Some corner of the world has to be granted the right to claim you, however temporarily. Even during the recent years of criticism and ridicule, which I have admittedly watched from a distance, it was as if he refused to recognize his lack of impact. Each time, his frustration fizzled out in grumbling that ‘the world' hadn't met him halfway, had never rewarded his energy with action. And of course, with Raj, such complaints were always a complaint about not being ‘loved' enough as well.

Perhaps he is right, and it boils down to something as simple as getting soft on the lifestyle. The stream of essays and interviews that habitually caused a few hours of discomfort had become his comfort zone long ago, and then there was the effect
power had on him – his lifelong attraction to the secrets and mannerisms of those who wielded it. It was already obvious twenty-seven years ago, on his first visit to my father's fazenda, a few months after we met; he was fascinated by the way Pai dealt with a servant he suspected of stealing. It had been going on for some weeks while Pai was away in São Paulo, but that first day after we arrived, he watched the man as he cleared the breakfast things and soon after took him aside and confronted him. The man confessed within fifteen minutes. Pai closed the door while he questioned him and emerged an hour later. Even I don't know what his punishment was, all Pai said was that he'd realized the truth from the way the man's eyes met the gardener's during one particular exchange of glances.

Raj was hypnotized, and it was the beginning of a friendship that has long outlasted our marriage, and my own relationship to my father. He hated my amateur psychoanalysis, such as when I (frequently) theorized to him that the reason he was so attracted to my father was his memory of his own. Raj remembered his Baba as a weakling, a man who managed to mess up the simplest tasks (who couldn't even steal a file with panache), who toiled away pointlessly at a job he hated, who didn't have the courage to leave the family roof even though it cost him his own family.

It was amusing in those early years how he unconsciously imbibed certain gestures of dismissal that Pai used. At the time I thought it male and childish, but perhaps it was the weakening resolve of a Bhishma, that Raj was having doubts about his own vow to keep clear of wielding power the more he glimpsed of its possibilities. He was also bothered by that old dichotomy, of being ultimately a describer and not a doer. And though he
insisted he wanted to learn the qualities required by a ‘warrior' without ever wishing to wage war, it is not just a matter of style how much he loved striking the poses.

Striking the poses: it seems odd that Ellery who knows him so well should not have considered the possibility. Raj has always been openly fascinated by the quality of mass charisma. Playing the part, before as large a public as possible – maybe to shift a few books – but more to know and feel for himself – for Raj – what it is to be hunted, and stripped down (metaphorically) to a bum. Yes, another shade to add to his spectrum, because Raj has always been multiple, expects himself to be multiple, just as in the past he sought after the roles of celebrity, lover, artist, father, amateur diplomat, television activist and general bearded ‘saviour', each performance so operatic, so public. Besides, everyone does what they can to grab themselves a headline: some have sex in the pool on
Big Brother
, and Raj Chakraborti is supposedly on the run from murderers.

So what are we expected to do, I wonder. I could put out a multi-media appeal saying ‘come back home, we love you, all is forgotten', but perhaps I would just be luring him out for some grateful sharpshooter to take aim? I know my response sounds a lot like the village that ignored the fantasist's cries of wolf, but is Raj really helping his own cause? Is it really believable that Sharon chose him to reveal so much about her book, and did not drop even a single name?

Please Raj, either admit you're genuinely afraid, and let us empathize with you. There's no shame in abandoning your integrity in the face of such a threat. Or else, Ellery, there's been enough hoopla already. If the two of you are trying to stage a comeback by making a splash, the end of this volume is just
the time for a confession. It is beyond vulgar to build all this on the back of a young person's killing. This absurd game of hide-and-seek can stop, and I'm sure Raj will stand up and admit it was his idea. Why would so many world-important people (including, it appears, my father) risk being implicated in his murder, when no matter how much he annoys them, they have him exactly as they want him, flitting about from place to place with steadily increasing irrelevance? As a social force, he couldn't be less influential now than if they'd specifically designed him.

I went up to London myself and spoke to the detectives concerned: there are many aspects to his testimony that strike them as genuine and troubling. But there were other options open to Raj besides involving the whole world in his conspiracy theory. Just a quiet disappearance under protection would have been honest, but he would never be content with the simple humanity of a leave-of-absence. For many years now he has been humble only in his novels. Only in those does he concede his smallness, his bewilderment, his great fear of drowning in the all-ness of the world. That is why his true gift emerges there.

The rest I always thought pathetic and slightly scrawny: all of the personas he considered so influential and glamorous were to me the weakest of his fictions.

Calypso, ah Calypso! I often think about her. She loved Odysseus. They lived together for seven years. We do not know how long Odysseus shared Penelope's bed, but certainly not so long as that. And yet we extol Penelope's pain and sneer at Calypso's tears.

– Milan Kundera,
Ignorance

We spent a week in Bombay before moving on to meet Raj's mother in Calcutta, on the visit when I first heard of Sunayani. We arrived at his friend Ajit's house in Bandra, and on Sunday afternoon we were moving to another friend's in Cuffe Parade at the very bottom of the city. Raj decided it would be a great idea to make the trip on a horse-drawn carriage, driving along the shoreline. He would brook no discussion and at eleven-thirty had even arranged for the carriage to draw up and wait outside our building.

But he was right; it had rained hard the night before, and we wound our way down Mahim and Worli, fanned by a churning sea on one side and enjoying the overcast washed-ness
of the city to our left. Everything was perfect, trotting down Chowpatty and even through the smells of the reclamation, but just when we were taking our suitcases off the tonga opposite the World Trade Centre, the tongawallah decided to stick us up with a knife.

Perhaps it was our obviously foreign-returned look and the sheer hippie dopiness of hiring a Victoria for such a long journey that convinced him we were easy game, but it was a deserted afternoon and we couldn't take any risks screaming. Raj had just about opened negotiations with him when two men scrambled through a hedge behind us and made off with a large suitcase.

The tongawallah was the first to notice and he couldn't help shouting out ‘Saab, woh dekho, Chini log suitcase lekar bhag gaya' (‘Look Saab, the Chinese ran off with your suitcase'). A quite baffling remark from your average mugger, especially if you haven't noticed what on earth he is referring to, but Raj, thinking equally quickly, responded with ‘Come, follow them with me and I'll give you a huge reward,' and set off through the hedge.

The tongawallah, who had a sweet smile, had given us no previous impression of being either a toughie or a rogue, and the sudden acceleration of the situation brought out the boy in him once more. He too had very little time in which to decide, and ordered me ‘Memsaab, wait here,' forgot all about the stick-up and set off right behind Raj. ‘Keep the knife in your hand,' Raj shouted.

Two men trying to get away with a suitcase were no match for two men chasing them without one, especially when one of them had a large switchblade. I could hear Raj blustering
away loudly at the thieves, and when I made my way through the hedge, holding Seb, I realized they were indeed Chinese. They too were passers-by who had just been trying their luck because they didn't even have a getaway car nearby or a weapon. Anyway, Raj let them off with a big shouting (in which Hari the tongawallah joined in as well), and we sent him on his way with a hundred-rupee tip. He was so pleased, he smiled and waved all the way until he turned the corner.

That was our life the week before we arrived in Calcutta. Exactly a week later, the two of us were standing at the gate of an asylum for women, outside Ranchi. We'd left Seb with his grandmother. Someone called Sunayani had been admitted here about three months before, someone whom Raj said he'd briefly dated in his teens. It must have been brief but important, because we were on a train here the day after he heard the news from his mother. I was requested by her to go since Sunayani had apparently especially asked to see me.

We were standing at the large, locked gate, waiting to sight a watchman. Far away in the distance, at the end of a six-hundred-yard drive, we could make out a long, low single-floor cluster of buildings. All the rest of the area was an immense playing field fringed by familiar-seeming trees, some of whose Indian names I already knew – flaming orange gulmohur, the magenta of bougainvillea, deodar, neem and mango. In one lonely corner we watched a large group of women in white saris playing together. They were throwing upwards what looked as light as a beach-ball and following the direction of its float.

As we watched, one of them caught it and ran away from the others, throwing it ahead of her and arriving below to catch it again just in time. She was approaching the gate and a few
yards behind her – giving hard chase but looking as weightless an apparition as the multi-coloured ball floating in the breeze before them – was a much larger group of women. I can still recall the image just before we heard their shouts: it was as noiseless and rapid as a dream, especially with the waves of heat that shimmered and warped our vision.