The Hand that Trembles

FIVE

If there was anything that frightened him, it was the thought of having to leave Bangalore for good. Where would he go? He had spun himself a delicate net in which to rest. At the least movement the threads would tear and he would fall down into an old age of poverty, perhaps destitution, and even worse, isolation.

Lester and his family were a thread that gave him a feeling of family life he could take part in. Sven-Arne followed Lester’s children as if they were his own flesh and blood, he took delight in their successes at school and worried about them when they were sick. They celebrated family events together. He could remember the first one, six days after Lilian’s birth. A steady stream of relatives, neighbours, and friends came by the flat, admired the newborn, and presented little gifts.

It was a matter of some notoriety that a foreigner was taking part in the ceremony, and he thought for a while that this was the reason for his presence – that Lester in some way wanted to brag about the fact that he was close to such an exotic personage – but then he realised the invitation was well intended and that Lester genuinely appreciated his attentions for his daughter’s chatthi.

His work at the botanical garden was the other dominant thread. At Lal Bagh, he felt useful, he carried out practical work that meant something. He had been there so long that he could point with pride to the trees he had planted. Some had had time to become tall and offered a welcome shade in summer. Others flowered beautifully. His favourite was the temple tree.

The lessons at the school that was very close to his home was a third thread. For the past five, six years, on a volunteer basis, he had been teaching a group of children English, European history, and what one could call social studies. This took place outside of regular scheduling and had nothing to do with the children’s official educational program, but the four hours a week were always well attended. Some thirty children in their early teens followed his lectures on the breakthrough of industrialisation in Europe, of technical advances and developments in production methods, but also of terrible conditions, child labour, and the budding struggle for human rights, against drunkenness, and for freedom of religion.

He also lectured in geography and after every lecture would congratulate himself on having imprinted the countries of Europe in the heads of his pupils. Most of them could pick out Germany, Italy, Poland, and about twenty other countries on a blank map. He thought it was more than most Swedish children could manage with regard to Asia.

These were the areas he knew – European geography and history – and these were what he confined himself to.

They always concluded with conversational exercises in English. In his youth, Sven-Arne had only attended community college, but in connection with being drawn into county politics and from time to time receiving international visitors and guest researchers who came to the university, he had studied his way through primary and secondary school English.

Class after class went through his lectures and discussions. Young people who had graduated several years ago could stop him on the street, still with an embarrassing amount of respect, and tell him how much they appreciated his teachings. Sometimes he was moved to tears by their kindness.

Through these young people, he even gained a place in the world of their parents. He became known throughout the area and was received with goodwill in the small shops in his neighbourhood.

He was a volunteer teacher not only for the sake of the children. He did it as much for himself. Something of the skills he had gained in his old life could be drawn upon in the planning of the lessons and in the actual instruction. He always tried to encourage discussion in his classroom, inviting the students to articulate a point and to use their imagination. He was not always successful in this. Even in this sense, he recognised situations from political life in Uppsala.

Perhaps he also taught in order to assuage his bad conscience. He had chosen not to delve deeper into this, just acknowledge that he was privileged. He had chosen a simple life. Planting trees and bushes placed him far down on the social scale. He observed almost daily the surprise of the more well-to-do Indians who came to Lal Bagh. They would stare unabashedly at the white man who was dressed like a Dalit or Untouchable, bare feet in rough sandals, dirty, with calloused hands, engaged in highly unusual behaviour: He was doing the dirty work, the heavy, manual, poorly paid labour. This was somewhat of a shock to the middle-class population. They took him for a fool, a failure, who perhaps had come to India to seek God but had found a spade. They pointed, they laughed at him, and thereby felt themselves somewhat elevated.

Some of them spoke to him and found to their astonishment a well-versed man who spoke good English, frequently even better than themselves, and who explained his position with a smile – how he had freely taken on the work of gardening because he wanted to make a contribution – but who painstakingly avoided mentioning anything about his background. Sometimes it sparked respect; there was something Ghandian about the gaunt man that was appealing to a faithful Hindu. But mostly it brought him ridicule.

These threads, the contact with Lester and his family, his contributions as volunteer teacher, and his work in the botanical garden, constituted the safety net of Sven-Arne Persson, former county commissioner. The net that transformed the officially deceased county commissioner into a living being.

Now all this was threatened. An unlikely encounter had brought two Uppsala citizens together.

Suddenly it occurred to him that this might not be a coincidence at all. Was there a possibility that Jan Svensk had in some way been informed of his whereabouts? Had he been sent out from Sweden for this purpose? What was his profession? Could he actually be a police officer? Sven-Arne had no idea. If he was, he was the right person to send to Bangalore as a spy, old neighbours that they were. If this was the case, then there was every likelihood he was working with the Indian police, and then the situation was even more precarious.

Sven-Arne tapped the driver’s shoulder and gave him a different address.

‘Yes, sir,’ he answered, with a nod of his head, and made a daring U-turn that caused the rickshaw to lurch and the drivers of surrounding vehicles to throw themselves on their horns.

He turned onto Regency Road and drove north, passing Brigade Street and taking a left onto MG Road.

Sven-Arne Persson leant back in the rickshaw but observed everyone who drove up alongside them and he scrutinised the pavements as if he were a newcomer to the city.

Somewhere in the crowd was Jan Svensk.

Hotel Ajantha was located at the end of a side street on MG Road. He had never been to the hotel before but knew that its clientele consisted of Indians from the lower middle class as well as the occasional European on a tight budget. His chances of encountering Jan Svensk here were minimal.

A man was snoozing on a couch in the dingy reception area, but he woke up when Sven-Arne walked in. The man blinked at him but made no attempt to get up. Sven-Arne greeted him in English and asked if there was a room for the night.

The man got up reluctantly and walked over to the front desk, opened the ledger, and pointed at a row without saying a word, then turned and pointed to a posterboard that stated the cost of the room was 990 rupees per night. That was more than he spent on food for a week.

‘Okay,’ he said, and wrote down a name that he made up that instant: Lester Young.

‘Passport number,’ the receptionist said, unselfconsciously scratching himself in the crotch.

Sven-Arne wrote down eight numbers without hesitation and said he was Australian.

‘One night, pay now.’

Room 101 was spartan: a bed, a chair, a rickety table with a television set. That was all. Sven-Arne lay down on the bed. He stared at the blades of the fan and noticed the grey layer of dust that had sprouted like a fungus over the base attached to the ceiling. Somewhere a telephone rang and someone hollered ‘Hello.’ Muted voices floated through the open ventilation to the courtyard, steps on the stone patio and a man’s hoarse laughter. There was a life out there, a contextual web that had been torn from him in the blink of an eye.

Images of his former native land came and went over the next few hours as he lay on the bed, incapable of getting to his feet, much less undressing and crawling in between the sheets. It was images of his past that he was fishing up out of his inner depths. He rarely or never read about Sweden in the Indian newspapers and was completely cut off from the great, decisive political events. Sometimes he accidentally came across a news item on Sweden, often about sports or amusing writings on climate or other rarities that had to do with the country’s exotic placement on the globe. It could be some ice hotel in the north, or now most recently a storm that had struck the southern parts and apparently taken out forests. Of course he had read about the killing of the foreign minister. He had met her during her time in SSU and recalled an enthusiastic young woman, and he remembered thinking she would either be broken or go very far. Now she was dead.

About the small world, about Uppsala county politics, his old friends and acquaintances, who had married, had children, or died during his twelve years abroad, he knew nothing.

From time to time he experienced a burning anxiety, a longing to meet someone from the past who could tell him. This happened especially in the beginning of his stay in Bangalore, but now and then this gnawing desire to get the information that created connections returned.

Out of nowhere he had the thought that Jan Svensk was perhaps the person who had been dispatched by an unseen hand as a messenger from his former life. Perhaps he had messages such as… well, what? What kind of information could seriously mean anything? What was there to gladden the expatriate, to add anything to his life? What did he need? Wouldn’t the knowledge of births and deaths, about neighbours’ and local politicians’ lives, simply knock him off-kilter, perhaps risk his entire existence?

He did not need this knowledge! But sometimes he wondered if his wife was still alive, and if so, how she was doing. Had she taken up with someone new?

Sven-Arne suddenly stood up, walked over and turned on the television, found the remote control, and started to cruise through the channels.

He sank down on the bed and stared unseeing at a film. A woman ran up a gentle slope, paused at a tree, melodramatically surveyed a valley, and then started a languishing song. Sven-Arne gathered that she had run away from her husband and was now looking for the man she had loved from early youth. Always the same story, he thought, convinced that she or her beloved would die before the film came to an end.

He pressed the remote and came to the local news channel. There was a picture of the Swedish king in the background, as well as Taj West End hotel, one of the more luxurious in the city.

Sven-Arne chuckled. The events of the afternoon and evening were such an unlikely chain of events that it was almost a parody. First the memories of his childhood streets, then the meeting with the Swedish couple in MG Road, then Jan Svensk at Koshy’s, and now the Swedish head of state on the television screen. Maybe Jan Svensk was in town for the Swedish activities that the news anchor was talking about? The Swedish Trade Council was opening an office in Bangalore and had invited King Carl Gustaf for the event.

The streets were probably crawling with Swedes. He had to be careful. It was completely possible that there were others among the accompanying Swedes, beyond Jan Svensk, who would recognise him as the missing politician.

Sven-Arne Persson fell asleep very late. The last conscious thought in his head was centred on the children of St Mary’s school. How would they react if he simply disappeared from town, as much as he had always lectured them on the importance of punctuality?