Ryman, Rebecca (120 page)

Yes.
Kinjal was right. There was a time when he was the rock, she the tide that
lapped timidly around it. Now the picture was reversed, as were their
functions. It was she who had survived, she who had translated hidden resources
into strength. He was unequipped, resourceless, rudderless. And she had been
wrong in her conclusions; he had not been spared either. Perhaps he too, like
the rest of them, was a victim. Yes, he too, for he was denied even the name of
his son. Olivia felt her eyes blur. She started to ache. And somewhere in that
ache, somewhere, she felt what could have been grief at what might have been
and was not.

"His
name is Amos."

"Amos."
He held the name in his mouth, balanced on the tip of his tongue, as if tasting
an elusive sweetness. "Amos. Yes, he will bear many burdens. It is apt and
appropriate. But then, you have always had an impeccable sense of the fitness
of things, Olivia. It is one more area in which I stand humbled."

"There
are no more scores to be counted, Jai!" She was alarmed by his humility,
alarmed by the inner dragons it threatened to unleash. "The past is
dead
—can't
you see that?"

"For
me there can only be the past. I exist now without a future." His despair
erupted with volcanic force, sending him leaping to his feet like one
possessed. "In a single glance at my son's face your life unfolded before
me like a mural unveiled. A carnal bargain for the privilege of a
name,
a
daily lie perpetuated alone in constant fear of exposure, a betrayal never
understood, never explained—"

"Stop
it!" Blinded by panic, not at his escaping demons but her own, Olivia also
sprang to her feet in fury. "I
forbid
you to—"

"And
then you sacrificed a second son." In the grip of helpless passion, he
remained unhearing, deafened by the roars of his own guilt. "Why? Was that
also part of the carnal bargain? Expiation for the crime of a begged and
borrowed name?" Raking fingers punished his hair with a rage he could not
contain. "And I, blinded by my own arrogance, demanded that you survive on
the strength of one miserable
letter
that failed to even reach you. Oh
Christ.
. .!
The wrenching turbulence peaked, then started to fade, then died away
altogether. "And I called you a whore, a
whore!"
Flattened
with horror, his voice could not sustain itself.

"Don't,
please
don't!"
Olivia cried, recoiling at the violence of his
self-flagellations, stupid with dread at the dimension of her own expanding
responses.
"Please
don't say any more, Jai, I
beg
of
you!"

But
he was beyond recall. "Why did you not run, Olivia— flee, hide, abscond,
anything,
anywhere!"
Insane with frustration, he fisted a hand and
rammed it against a stone ledge, uncaring of injury. "Why did you not
trust
me, damn you . . .?"

Anger
flared briefly and insulated her from her fear. "Why?" She looked at
him with scorn. "Because I did not wish my son to be born a bastard like
his father. It was as simple as that."

His
head jerked back as if struck. His face became bloodless. Slowly he began to
diminish, his rage evaporating. "Yes," he mumbled, devastated,
"yes. That was a stupid question. I am raving, Olivia, because I look for
a scapegoat and there is none. Because I want to reverse the clock and I
cannot. Because I have lost you. My hindsight, you see, is perfect."
Embittered again, he surrendered to the uselessness of his guilt. "In my
selfish search to redeem at least something of myself, however, I want you to
know that I would have returned within six months had I not learned along the
way that you had already married Freddie. I had tried once to renounce you; I
could not sustain it. It was not within my power to renounce you again. You
should also know, if only as an exercise in futility, that to find you I would
have ransacked the earth. I would have come to you wherever you were hidden.
Wherever."

Olivia
knew then that she should not have come. But having come, she also knew that
she could not now leave. "Would you have?" she asked dully.

He
sighed and bowed his head, weighted down with those burdens he could neither
carry nor cast off. "The fact that you are still driven to ask that is my
most despicable failure. And my most lethal punishment."

Once
again the stubborn fingers of pain crept around Olivia's body, refusing to be
repulsed, challenging her resistance. She could not bear his torment any more
than she could her own. "Mine or yours, our failures are shared. You could
not have known of my circumstances. I had no yardstick with which to measure a
man such as you. And time was against us . . ."

Us.
How cunningly that word had slipped out, and with what parodic timing in these
final moments before they went their separate ways!

Submerged
within himself, he did not notice her slip—that
seemingly innocuous little
two-letter word that so blithely melded them together again. "As an
avenger, I am a travesty. I did not spare even you—the only thing in my life
that made it worthy of being lived at all."

For
an instant, a mere whisper in time, Olivia was overwhelmed with feeling. So as
to force from her sight the nightmare of his face, she squeezed her eyes shut.
But it was useless. Every feature of his was etched forever in her brain.
Without even opening her eyes she knew that in his, once more, there would be
tears.

She
sighed and moved away from her feelings. As if in an odd chimera, weightless
and airborne she floated out of herself to watch him from above. With
dispassion and only vague surprise, she made another discovery. Kinjal had been
wrong in her judgement; she had not won after all. She could never have won.
And with that discovery came others, a succession of others. She wanted to get
up and go to him, to sit by his side, to rest her cheek against that defeated
shoulder. She wanted to sprout wings, to soar across those divides that had
segregated their destinies so irreversibly, to somehow erase the years of their
separate sorrows. She wanted to touch him again, as she once had, to be
reassured, warmed, by the closeness of his skin, to gather him in her arms, to
solace him. To love him and be loved by him. Released from their fragile,
insubstantial moorings, her sensations stampeded. Behind closed lids, she
ruffled his disobedient hair, even wilder in the blowing breeze, and in her
palm she felt again those long, tapered fingers that had prompted in her such
wanton responses. Next to her face she actually felt the rough weave of his
ever-present white mull shirt about which she had teased him so often. And
through the fabric came the incandescence of the blood that was now also part
of her son. With her finger-tips she gently stroked away the pain creased in
his forehead. She put an ear to his pocket to listen to his heart; it beat the
same rhythm as hers. And once more in her inner hearing was the soundless sound
of those words that she had not thought of for so long:
But yes, I do love
you . . .

"There
is a loose end that I too must knot."

Startled,
Olivia stepped out of her reverie to return to poignant reality. His manic
ferments were successfully quelled. He again spoke normally. She decided she
wanted no more instigations into insanity, but not wanting them, asked,
"Which loose end?"

"I
have to tell you how my mother died."

"No!"
So much, so late—what was the point?

"Yes.
You have unturned each stone of my life. This too must not remain unreversed.
You have a right to know."

"I
forfeit the right; it is no longer important!"

"It
is important." His contradiction was firm but gentle. "You cannot
forfeit a right that is not yours alone. Someday my son too will have the right
to know; you must then tell him." It was a cruel reminder of their divided
destinies and it cut deeply, but he was already lost in that distant world in
which had been laid the foundations of their own futures. "She died as she
had lived, a woman of no consequence, unloved to the end. The one whiplash she
had suffered in order to save me had wounded her badly. For eight years she had
not been a day without opium. It ran through her blood; her body craved it like
a hunger that nothing else could satisfy. I could not give her any, so the
appetite remained unsatiated, and with that hunger it died. Her heart and
spirit had died long before. She was not yet twenty-five."

He
spoke in an even rhythm, but she saw that each word exacted a toll as buried
emotions, never aired, lay quivering just beneath the surface of his control.
"Don't!" Olivia entreated. "Let it lie if it is so
hurtful."

"Yes,
it is hurtful, but it still must be told." Absently, his finger-tips
stroked the red bundle beside him, that pathetic little childhood treasury.
"She slipped away that very first night after we had left the big house.
We had to sleep by the road. The cut on her arm still bled and she was in
agony, her brain addled with her need for the little pellets that ensured her
silent docility. But that night, before we slept, she told me many
things—perhaps because she knew that night would be her last." He got up
and turned his back to Olivia. "It was then that I learned for the first
time about the opium. And about the identity of my father. The opium was beyond
my comprehension, but that the man who had cut her open was my
father
dumbfounded
me. I was awestruck. Before then, you see," restless in his recollections
he started to pace, "I had always admired him from a distance—this fine
figure of an Englishman who could read and write and command with such
consummate ease. I used to watch him for hours, storing away all his actions,
his little gestures and mannerisms, and imitating them when I was alone. There
were times I wanted to touch him, because to touch an Englishman was to me the
ultimate honour. And sometimes he spoke to me, gave me things, tried to be
kind. But the sound of his voice petrified me. It was as if an idol from a
temple had stepped down and spoken. I could
never answer anything he asked and he
would turn impatient. Even that impatience I took as an accolade, a reward, for
it meant that I was important enough to make him angry . . ." He broke
off, as if fearful of emotion, and again contained himself within parameters he
had defined for himself.

"I
had never seen death," he continued with calmness, regaining his seat,
"I was not aware of my mother's. It was a passing water carrier who told
me that she was gone, that she must now be consigned to flame. Together we
carried her to the river bank and gathered wood. It was damp; it took a long
time to light. I did not know what a cremation meant. It was only when the pyre
began to burn that I cried. I saw then that she could never return to me."

To
his monotone there was only a minimal quiver, nothing more, but Olivia saw how
terribly he suffered. "Please don't go on," she begged, suffering
with him, "I can't bear to hear any more!"

He
turned harsh again. "For the boy you must learn
everything!
You
allow me nothing else, let me give him at least this pittance of myself. In
giving it I cleanse that infection you once called a canker. So you see,"
even his laugh was harsh, "in this too I am selfish."

Olivia
remained silent. She did not protest again.

"The
water carrier went. He had a living to earn." He had sprung up again, his
interlocked fingers behind his back twitching. "He left me an empty
coconut shell in which to gather the ashes when they had cooled. I did as he
had instructed, then cast the shell into the river. The monsoon winds were
strong; they carried the shell quickly towards the open sea. I bathed, as I had
been told to, and a wandering barber, taking pity, shaved my head and trimmed
my nails without charge, as this too, the water carrier had emphasised, was
part of the cremation ritual. My wound was still raw and it bled again. I lay
down somewhere, I can't remember where, and slept. When I opened my eyes, it
was to find myself in the house of a stranger. Many days had passed since my
mother died. I could remember none of it. My mind was devoid of all
memory."

Ranjan
Moitra's house. Olivia knew this but said nothing. Pin-points of heat seared
her inner eyelids. The curiously impersonal tone in which he related this most
harrowing experience in a child's life—as if he spoke of someone else, someone
unknown—was a protective device. Inside, Olivia knew, he bled quietly.

"It
was in this strange house that kindness and medication repaired my body. My
mind was still blank. They did not know how to repair that. It was only two
years later, when I chanced upon some travellers from Assam, heard their
language, that a faint glimmer of memory told me that there were people of my
own up in the hills. It took me six months to make the journey, but I could not
find them, for I did not know who I was looking for. It was someone from the
tribe who found me roaming the hills, recognised some of the jewellery I had,
which the water carrier had removed from my mother's body before we burned it,
and took me to the village. One old man, it appeared, was my grandfather. He
cried, took me in, gave me his love and taught me everything he knew. He taught
me about the soil, the forests and their fauna, the seasons and their crops; he
taught me especially about those majestic tea trees that were, he said, part of
my inheritance." In remembering this childhood love, he softened. In his
eyes there was a faint smile of tenderness. Then the smile vanished and he was
again impassive. "But he was an old man, made older by grief. In time he
too died. It was I who closed his eyes, I who lit his pyre. And it was as I
stood watching him too turn to ashes that all at once my memory returned to me.
I remembered everything—how my mother had died, where and
why.
I
remembered the big house, the cell of my birth, the opium pellets, the slash on
her arm, all her final words. And I remembered Lady Bridget, Sir Joshua's
mother and his whip. But most of all,
most
of all, I remembered Sir
Joshua Templewood, my father."