My Brother’s Keeper

- 8 -

“Keep a diary,” said Sir Westcott.

“Why? I don’t need one, my memory’s always been good.” Better than yours, I was tempted to add — Sir Westcott moved through a cloud of mislaid books, forgotten appointments, and lost umbrellas.

“Never mind how good your memory is,” he replied. “Keep a diary — you’ll see why in a few months.”

That had been a few weeks before I was released from the hospital. I went along with his eccentric request, jotting down notes on events that I knew I’d be able to remember in detail months or years later.

Now I had the book out on my knee, drowsing through it as the plane flew steadily on through the night skies of northern India . We had left London the previous night. On the long journey east, losing hour after hour to the shifting time zones, we passed through Rome , Athens , Tehran , Bombay , and so to the final jump to Calcutta . I hoped the flight crew had taken the trip better than I had — blocked sinuses, eyes sore and gritty, and an iron filings taste in my mouth. The Persians next to me muttered to each other and puffed on a ghalian, passing the tube quietly from hand to hand. It didn’t smell much like tobacco, but at three in the morning the stewardesses weren’t worrying.

Don’t think my coordination is getting any better now, I had written. Seems to be at a plateau. And later that day, feeling guilty about the neglect of my business manager, Should call Mark, but it can wait a while longer.

The entries were innocent enough, and I could remember all of them. What I could not recall, what now seemed quite wrong to me, was their tone. It was nervous and diffident, reluctant to face Sir Westcott, oddly hesitant about approaching Tess. I was beginning to understand the surgeon’s flat assertion.

“It won’t happen the way you’re expecting. You seem to think that you’ll wake up one day and feel yourself merging thoughts with your brother. But you’re sitting there on the inside. There’s no way a person can get an objective view of the workings of his own brain. The only way you’ll see changes is by looking back at earlier behavior and comparing. Write things down. Otherwise you’ll have nothing to compare it with.”

It had been easy enough to do that when I was still in the hospital, with time on my hands. Recently there hadn’t been a spare minute. The new idea I’d had before going over to Tess’s house had been a winner.

I had to accept that the right brain hemisphere is pictorial and largely nonverbal — the medical texts had made that clear enough. That meant I was wasting my time trying to dig messages out of the right brain portions that came from Leo. Words were hard to get — Nymphs, Scouse, Valnora Warren, or any others. What I should be providing was picture inputs that might stimulate the right brain hemisphere and elicit a solid physical reaction from my body.

I was sure that Leo had been doing something in India . But where in India ? To answer that question, Tess and I made a trip to the British Museum and looked through the picture files. It was a long job. I stared at photographs of Delhi , Madras , Lahore , Bombay , Agra , and Calcutta ; and in that last city, when we came to a color picture of the Maidan, the big park-like rectangle at the city center, I felt a return of the vivid excitement that had hit me outside the bookstore.

Calcutta .

It was a city I had visited a couple of times on my concert tours, but never to play there. It had been a point of passage on the way back from Australia and New Zealand , little more than a hotel room near the airport. I could recall only one exchange with Leo about the place. I remarked on the poverty (which I had never been close enough to see) and he answered with a noncommittal shrug.

Now the plane was lowering flaps for landing at Dum-Dum Airport , and I still had no idea what I expected to find here. I only knew I had to look, to learn what Leo had been doing in those hidden months before our final meeting.

It was just after dawn when we landed, with a blood-red November sun steaming up over the Bay of Bengal . The monsoon was over, and this was supposed to be the cool season, but as we stepped off the plane the humidity curled around me like a blanket. The air seemed to bleed your strength away. The walk to the terminal and the wait for baggage became a major effort.

I went straight to the new Grand Hotel on Chowringhi Road , hardly noticing the flat, wet land and the drooping coconut palms. At the hotel I went to bed, but I was too nerved up and overtired to sleep. After an hour of tossing and turning I ran the deep bath full of rusty-colored water — a sign in the room warned me not to drink it — and stretched out to think of the day ahead.

I knew exactly one person in Calcutta : Chandra Roy; Chanter Chandra we called him, back in the old days when we had played together.

He had been a fiddle player, a child prodigy and still a fast-developing adult when he had suddenly abandoned his musical career, returned to India , and disappeared. Maybe that’s too strong a term — I still had an address for him at the University of Calcutta ; but he had certainly vanished from western life. I hadn’t seen him for more than two years.

Chandra. As I sat on the bed and dried myself I decided to head over and see him at once. But when I was half-dressed I lay back and closed my eyes for a moment, and when I woke the room was growing dim. It was suddenly seven o’clock at night.

I was very hungry, but I didn’t want to waste the rest of the evening. I took a native cab and we set off to hunt for Chandra’s supposed home address, passed on to me by an oboe player before I left London .

A combination of jet lag, medication, and low blood sugar made the ride through the darkening streets curiously unreal. What I saw was always distant or distorted, the mirror of an unpleasant real world. Since the hydrological project to increase the flow of the Hooghly River , many of Calcutta ’s worst abominations had been removed. Now at least there was adequate drinking water. But the bustis were still there, the ultimate slums that formed the home for over four million people. Life in them was still below subsistence level. The cab skirted one of the bad ones. The smell of decay, excrement, and underfed humanity was like a black canker on a rose-red evening. My driver, oblivious to the dull-eyed skeleton creatures that we passed, chattered on cheerfully in a mixture of Bengali and English, telling me how the city was improving now, how things had grown better all through the nineties, and how the new century had ushered in a golden era.

“I am telling you, we will be seeing the better times. Very good better times,” he said, in the curious Welsh-like Indian lilt. He swerved to avoid a legless man who was dragging himself slowly across the street. “I am seeing that you are a stranger here, and you maybe are finding this surprising. But it is so.”

Chandra, according to my friend the oboe player, lived in Alipore, a southern suburb of the main city. It took more than an hour to find his house, weaving back and forth along the flat streets. The driver leaned out of the window most of the time, singing out Bengali questions to the small groups of people who stood deep in unfathomable conversation on most street corners.

We found the house at last. It was certainly big enough to notice, a great pile of rambling Edwardiana that could have been transported to Henley or Thames Ditton without seeming at all out of place. A seven foot brick wall kept it safe from prying eyes.

After a brief negotiation (my driver’s hourly rate was less than I received for one second of concert playing) he agreed to eat chuppattis at my expense and wait for as long as I needed him — all night, if I wished it, he told me cheerfully. He was so pleased with the arrangement that I knew he believed he was overcharging me.

I was led inside by an old servant in a long, flowing robe. Chandra stood by a small table. He was almost unrecognizable. In little more than two years he had changed from a thin-faced ascetic to a roly-poly, smiling cherub. His eyes glittered with surprise and pleasure when he saw me, and that turned to a look of wonderment when he got a good look at my scarred face.

“I had read about your accident.” He shook his sleek head in concern. “No one told me how serious it must have been.”

In the world of music, news travels fast. Chandra must still be connected, even if he never performed.

He led the way to a sparsely furnished study. Over glasses of hot, sweet tea we sat down to talk. After playing catch-up on Chandra’s activities for the past two years, I offered a version (slightly edited) of my own past six months. People were mistaking me for my brother, I said. My brother had obviously left unfinished business — I thought it was in Calcutta . It was my wish to complete it, but my knowledge of what he had been doing was limited. He had mentioned walking in the Maidan before he died, but nothing of business detail. I even lacked his business address.

Chandra grimaced and nibbled on a marzipan plum. A servant stood discreetly outside the door, waiting for any request for food or drink.

“You have no company name or address?” Chandra waved a plump hand. “Hopeless. You can advertise in the newspapers, perhaps. But unless he was active in the business community here I think you will find it impossible to learn much. There is more chance for anonymity in this city than anywhere else in the world. Tomorrow, if you wish, I will ask at the University. He was your twin, was he not?”

I nodded.

“Then if you have no picture of him, perhaps we could put your photograph in the papers, and ask for information.”

I hesitated. “Maybe in a few days,” I said at last. “Let me settle in here first, and get used to the city. There’s no rush.”

“Would you care to stay here, rather than in a hotel?” asked Chandra. He smiled. “The Calcutta Zoo is in Alipore — a mile or so from here.”

He knew my habits. I shook my head. It had not escaped me that Chandra had made no move to show me most of his house, or to introduce me to members of his family. It was past midnight — the talk had rambled all over the world, following our mutual acquaintances — and he was beginning to yawn. “All the world passes through Calcutta ,” he had told me. “I do not need to travel to keep up with people.” But as eldest son in a thriving family jute business, he did need his sleep. He was up these days with the sun — when he used to be ready to go to bed.

“And the violin?” I couldn’t resist the question as we stood again at the front door, waiting for my driver.

For answer he held up his left hand, the fingers facing towards me. The horn-hard calluses built up by twenty years of daily playing had reverted to become soft pads of tender flesh. Forty thousand hours of practice, down the drain. He would probably never play again. As the cab took me north to the hotel, the difference between East and West ceased to be an abstraction, something that Kipling had invented for a poem. And I wondered again what the time in the Orient had done to Leo, how it had changed him inside the western exterior.

In a perverse way the meeting with Chandra cheered me up a lot. He had managed to construct a new life that did not revolve around music. If he could do it, so could I.

At 120 rupees, the three-color map of Calcutta I bought at the hotel was robbery. It was badly printed, the colors bled across the line borders, and the names were poorly spaced and hard to read. Unless I was willing to seek out a city bookstore, though, it was all that I would get.

I was afraid it would make little difference. Having come this far, I seemed to be at a dead end. It had looked to be easy when I was back in London . Leo would feed me the information I needed, somehow or other. But apart from the conviction that the Maidan, here in the center of Calcutta , was an important part of Leo’s past, I had found nothing to guide me to a special part of the city. I wandered, map in hand, looking for some new idea, all the way from the Howrah Bridge, with its great web of cantilevered steel and its teeming cars, oxcarts, rickshaws, bicycles, trucks and people, down south as far as Alipore and the Calcutta Zoological Gardens. I spent half a day in the Zoo, marvelling at the great thirty-eight foot reticulated python that had amazed the world when Funyatti captured it live in the Sumatran jungles in ’02. The zookeepers impressed me less than the animals. One of them, more foolhardy than rational, moved unprotected through an enclosure containing two splendid specimens of Dendraspis polylepis, black mambas that to me are the most unpredictable and dangerous of the poisonous snakes. I watched until the man came out alive.

But I found it hard to watch anything else for very long. Always, my steps drew me back to the Maidan. I sat there, hour after hour, looking at the white marble pile of the Victoria Memorial. It was a mixture of English and Moghul styles, and as ugly in its way as the Albert Memorial in London . I soon learned to hate it, but I went back day after day, wondering what I was doing there. Chandra twice invited me to attend University functions, and I resolutely refused both of them to sit out in that dull park and stare at that awful monument.

It was an unhappy and frustrating time. The weather was miserable, cold and windy. It wasn’t until the ninth day of my vigil, when my stomach and head were both thoroughly adjusted to the change in time and diet, that the break came.

The weather turned warm and sunny. I was sitting on the same bench as usual, looking north towards Fort William . I had occupied benches that faced north, south, east and west, like a dog turning round before it can settle, but always an indefinable discomfort took me at last to a bench that looked north.

I was reading the International Herald Tribune, my only real link with the West. I had lost patience with the Indian radio and television in my first day, and took all my news from the paper, several days late. When I looked up, a woman was sitting on a bench across the green from me, perhaps thirty yards away.

She was very dark skinned, clearly Indian, and dressed in a green sari with flecks of yellow-gold in the long skirt. Her dark hair was drawn back from her forehead, and in the center, an inch above her eyes, I could see the glint of a single golden ornament. She was looking straight at me, her face calm and disinterested. But at the sight of her I felt myself beginning to tremble, with a wave of tension and excitement in my stomach that was too much to endure.

I stood up, looking for some reaction from her — she still seemed to be staring straight at me. When she did not move, I began to walk slowly around the gravel footpath that bordered the small square of green.

It was perplexing enough to make my head ache and drive me dizzy. Obviously, Leo knew her. She should recognize him, and that meant she should recognize me. But I walked in front of her, almost near enough to touch, and there was no glimmer of recognition on her face. Close up, I saw that she was beautiful and young. I guessed no more than nineteen.

She had a dark, flawless complexion, and her huge dark eyes were carefully made up with a layer of kohl on the eyelids. The features were regular, with prominent cheek bones and a broad forehead. And in the center of that forehead was the thing that sent my mind reeling and spinning. The golden ornament was not the smooth metal bead that it appeared to be from across the square. It was a tiny beetle — an exact copy of the beetle that Leo wore on his tie clip at our final meeting in London Airport .

I paused in front of her, cleared my throat, and then indecision moved me on. What could I say to her? That my brother knew her, though I did not, and I wanted to ask what he had been doing in Calcutta ?

As my brain dithered, my legs carried me halfway around the plot of grass, back towards my bench. Instead of sitting down again I stood and watched. After fifteen minutes — endless minutes in which she did not register my presence by a look or a blink — an older man approached her. He came slowly across from the north side of the Maidan, helping himself along with a black wooden cane. I found his age indeterminate, anywhere from forty to seventy, and his loose white robe made it hard to tell if his left leg was crippled by age or by injury.

He came up behind her and spoke. I heard her laugh, and she turned her head as he moved around the bench to sit next to her. As they talked together her face lost its calm appearance. She laughed again, expression alight and animated, and after a moment she patted him on the arm with a small, shapely hand. Her fingernails were lacquered a purple-red.

Another few moments, and they both stood up quickly. She took his arm and they began to walk across the park, heading northwest towards the exit. The Maidan had become suddenly filled with people, thousands of strollers taking a midday break from the offices in Dalhousie Square . It would be easy to lose sight of the two of them in just a couple of minutes.

I hurried after them across the grass, panting more than the effort could explain.

“Excuse me…” My long legs brought me close behind them. “Excuse me…” I had thought of nothing to say to them after those first few words. More speech turned out to be unnecessary. They paused and looked back at the sound of my voice. The woman seemed politely interested and a little puzzled. But the old man gaped up at me and rubbed a wrinkled hand across his forehead.

“Sahib Singh!” His voice quivered. It was clear now that he was at least in his sixties — old for Calcutta . At his words the woman gave a strange cry, mingled disbelief and excitement. I could see just how good-looking she was, with superb brown eyes and white, even teeth gleaming from a luscious mouth. Her hand went up to her throat and she remained motionless for a moment. Then she spoke to me in a long, questioning sentence.

I shook my head. It sounded like Bengali, but though I had worked hard over the past few days to pick up a sprinkling of phrases I had nothing like enough to follow a spoken sentence.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand you. Do you speak English?”

She gasped at my voice and stepped closer.

“Ameera!” said the old man warningly.

She reached out her hand and placed it on my chest. I towered over both of them — neither was more than five feet tall. She stretched up to touch my face, while I stared down into those dark, jewelled eyes. Less than a foot away, they showed a hint of diffuse light in their depths, a cloudiness behind the pupils. While I was still struggling with the significance of that, she moved her right hand to run it inquiringly over my nose, lips, and chin, then fell backwards swooning into the arms of the old man.

I was feeling dizzy, too. At that soft, careful hand on my face, my heart leaped up to my throat, and the rhythm, “Over the hills and far away,” pulsated again inside my head.

I stood panting and helpless, watching the old man as he held the girl. Two powerful and conflicting urges conspired to hold me frozen: overwhelming physical desire, and the visceral urge that told me to flee and hide in the busy streets of Calcutta .