All Is Given Page 2

  As far as I could tell he had more than one, but by then I was getting used to his lateral narratives. So I was happy to just nod my head and let him keep talking while we sipped coffee. I had a sense that he was telling me something important, profound even. But my attention span was short in those days. As he continued I was glancing over his shoulder to where I could see, outside, a little English snow starting to fall.

  Me and George Borges used to write, you know.

  Who? I swallowed abruptly.

  Apparently, he was a fan of the early Goon Shows. He used to get tapes sent over from friends in London. Evidently, he was somewhat of an Anglophile.

  I didn’t have a clue who he was talking about. Naturally I assumed he was raving.

  Borges, as in Jorge Luis Borges, the South American writer, who would start with a real event and weave a fantastic invented story from it. So convincingly that his readers couldn’t tell where the truth ended and the fantasy began. Like life really. Just like life.

  For a second I sensed he was sniping at me for not knowing about Borges and his storytelling techniques. In fact, my father used the same method to draw his audience into his fantastical verbal inventions. He did it for his amusement as much as for ours. Some might have said he liked the sound of his own voice. But I think, rather, he liked the sound of his own imaginings. Just as Spike did. So I knew how to be a good listener to stories that skirted the edges of credibility. And to understand the need for their creation – how they brought pleasure, solace and challenge to their inventors.

  But then I realised there were probably other reasons for Spike’s impatience. Perhaps he’d reached the age when he expected – or hoped for – less ignorance from those around him. Or perhaps he realised he was running out of time.

  Apparently, just as Eliot had written to Groucho, Borges had written to Spike, sending him long, beautifully penned letters about cricket, polo and Robert Louis Stevenson, which were also full of humble requests for packets of English breakfast tea from Selfridges and shortbread biscuits from Harrods.

  I drew the line at getting him cotton singlets from Marks & Spencer though. The bugger never sent me a cent for everything I shipped over to Argentina. So I’d be damned if I was going to go underwear shopping for him, no matter how bloody famous he was. Talk about your English eccentrics. He was more English and more eccentric than the worst of them! A bloody good writer though. And you know why?

  I knew he’d tell me. All I had to do was sit back for a moment while Spike swallowed the last of his enormous cup of black coffee.

  Because no matter how much you analyse him, his stories refuse to be known or be pinned down. Like they reinvent themselves over and over, according to whatever information you’ve got in your head at the time. I like stories like that. And I like life like that too. I like it when the line between truth and invention is permanently blurred. Sometimes that’s the only way I can bear it.

  He burped, excused himself, said he was experiencing a caffeine rush and lay down on the floor under the table. I smiled brightly at the waiter, who seemed to understand what was going on. This was Spike’s world, after all. Wherever he was he made it so, reinventing himself like a Borges story, from one moment to the next.

  Later, after helping him out to the footpath, where we stood in lightly falling snow, he asked me: Do you think that we come back?

  Come back where? I wanted to reply, tempted to keep playing along with this most playful of men. But I said nothing, only hoisting the collar of my coat up over my ears and rubbing my gloved hands together.

  Reincarnation. Death and bloody rebirth. Karma. Karma Sutra. The whole circle-slash-cycle of existence. Yes, indeed. I’ve come back so many times, yet sometimes I feel I’m having the same experience over and over. Except that each time, someone’s saying to me, ‘Okay, Spike, old friend. This time you’ve just got to look a little closer.’ Problem is, I always want to look further rather than closer. So they keep sending me back. You know what I mean?

  I knew what he meant. In a general sense. In the general sense that I could feel what he meant by the way he said it. But as for knowing what he meant, no. His brain, reassembled so many times, seemed beyond my comprehension. Some people, I thought, reduce themselves so they only have to look at easily comprehensible things. Others, like Spike, their brains just expand and expand, because they want to exclude nothing, because they want to experience the hugeness, not the smallness, of life.

  Next thing I knew, Spike’s red face was right in front of mine. I remember noticing how his capillaries looked like threads woven through the material of his skin.

  I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you coming to work for me?

  At any other time I wouldn’t have thought twice. But at that moment, outside The Tandoori Traveller with a London winter seeping slowly into my bones, I knew that I was at some sort of crossroads. And not just because Spike and I were standing where the roads to Camden and Notting Hill crossed and diverged. Besides, I didn’t know whether I needed a mentor just then. Or a father figure. Or, I thought, looking at the boyish twinkle in his eyes, a spring–winter romance.

  Can I call you? I said.

  You can. But you won’t, will you? He was smiling into my eyes and I could see he wasn’t drunk or crazy or insane. He knew exactly what he was doing and saying. And he had from the moment I’d met him.

  You know, he continued, when you’ve been alive a long time, it’s only your body that gets old. Everything else just gets fresher and fresher. That’s the irony of it all. Just when you could really enjoy yourself the most, when your spirit is free and you’ve got your bloody mojo back again, you look down at your flesh and … well, you realise that to anyone else you just seem old. That’s the illusion. That’s the utter absurdity of it, you see.

  I did see. I saw in his eyes that in non-physical time he was years younger than I was. That if life was circular and non-linear he was way ahead and way behind all in the same moment. He suddenly picked me up and whirled me around. I grabbed on to my hat with one hand and steadied myself on his shoulder with the other. And then he was laughing and laughing. No, not laughing. He was giggling. Like a kid. Or like they reckon a Buddha giggles. Lightly. As if all the cares in the world would fall onto his shoulders like raindrops, dissipating as soon as they touched anything solid.

  And then you see, suddenly your flesh isn’t as weak as you think it is either, he said, hardly winded at all, as he put me back on my feet. And then with a bow he was away, walking, no, striding up the street, arms swinging by his side, calling back to me: Don’t worry, we’ll stay in touch no matter what you decide to do.

  I wondered if snow was starting to fall again as I saw little white fragments float down to the ground around him. But as I began to run after him, calling out with sudden urgency – Spike. Spike! – I saw it wasn’t snow, but pieces of the white serviettes he had written on all during dinner, and which he was now systematically shredding as he disappeared around the corner.

  I called out again. Spike! Spike!

  I don’t know why I ran so desperately, why my heart was pounding, except that all of a sudden I felt an overwhelming rush of love for him, despite the fact he had forgotten to pay for our dinner.

  Spike, Spiiiiike, I yelled. How can I reach you?

  He had given no indication, during the few hours I’d spent with him, that he was capable of walking as fast as he did. Maybe his entire persona, the whole mad-old-guy bit, was an act, a fantastic coat of armour that made his movement through the world a little safer.

  I stumbled after him, picking up and stuffing into my pocket the shreds of serviettes he’d left like a trail behind him.

  Back at my flat, I found it hard to fathom if the whole thing had been a dream, a fantastic invention of the mind under lamplight. As I laid out the tattered scraps, I could see their tiny words here and there, faded by moistur
e, and little phrases torn in the middle, out of sequence. I heaped the bits into a pile and stared at them; they seemed to form a pile of hopelessly disconnected things, an impossible puzzle.

  Somewhere in London, Spike was laughing at me, and I was determined to get in on the joke.

  There were numbers, prepositions, Roman numerals, small verbs and one or two nouns. Moment appeared twice. The figure 2 was there, either as part of a list (1 was included as well) or as a substitute for to. Or perhaps too. Contained appeared in large well-defined letters. The Roman numeral V was there, as well as II and CX. Where they fitted, to this day I still don’t know. The word all was there, as well as the Italian tutti, which I think Spike may have included just to mess with my head.

  As I arranged and rearranged the words, I had no idea how many vital clues I’d left lying in the gutter. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe that was the point. To use just what I had to make whatever sense I could.

  Finally, some possibilities presented themselves.

  All moment is contained to moment.

  This:

  All is contained moment to moment.

  Or my favourite:

  Moment to moment all is contained.

  I didn’t really know what any of it meant. There were no particular conclusions I could draw. Somewhere in London, Spike was laughing. I don’t think he was laughing at me. Or anyone in particular. I think he was just laughing.

  Bahut Acha in Bharatpur

  Like the travel agent in New Delhi, I’d expected The Birder’s Inn in Bharatpur to be no more than a one-star hotel. These had become depressingly familiar on my travels through India, and I knew by heart the grim reality of such places: a sparse room with a dusty fan, a tap with a bucket in the bathroom, a bed with a thin foam mattress, a broken lamp. This time, however, the brochure hadn’t lied; the hotel really did offer a ‘newly appointed room, off the well-beaten road close to the bird lover’s paradise’, though it was dark when I arrived from Agra, so I didn’t know if the road was well beaten or close to any kind of paradise. But I was charmed and relieved by the attractive freshness of the new rooms at The Birder’s Inn, the marble floors, the blue linen curtains and matching bed covers. And especially by the size of the bathroom.

  My eyes watered when I saw the deep bathtub, the shiny new faucets, the stand-up shower. After two months in India I could smell my own hair, knew the weirdly acrid scent of the dust and grime that had settled in its thickness, the premature greyness suggested by the layers of mist and smog. The usual hand-held showers never offered enough pressure to properly penetrate my thick curls, so I couldn’t ever really wash my hair. For a month I’d relied on surface moisture, perfunctory cleansing and leave-in conditioner. Subsequently, my hair had developed textures that had nothing to do with hair. It hung from my head now like a kind of matting: inorganic, hybrid, with odours and consistencies that changed its colour more than any dye I might have used.

  The bath looked new. Oh dear Lord, my grandmother would have said. How the marble gleams! The showerhead was fixed high to the wall, meaning if I wanted to I could stand under its spray like I was standing in a waterfall. Two plump white towels lay side by side on a bathroom rack.

  The whole thing was a vision. For weeks I’d dreamed about lowering my body into a tub of water and washing off the grime that had accumulated on my skin. Even the colour of my eyes had changed, from a green to a muddy grey. There’d be no showering tonight: I intended to luxuriate in a long, hot bath.

  On my way downstairs I could see, in front of the lodge, a fire burning. It was surrounded by people holding their palms towards its warmth. The owner called out for me to join them, but I declined – I was hungry after the long drive and kept walking towards the dining room.

  The lights went off almost as soon as I reached the corner table in the dining room. This was also something I’d grown used to: the temporary nature of electric power.

  The cook called out from the kitchen: Don’t worry, madam. We cook with gas!

  I was too content to be worried. In India I’d become used to things that would have irritated me back home. I liked the way my thoughts formed themselves dreamily in darkness, the way the lights went out unexpectedly all through the day and night. I liked the waiting, the empty quality of time that couldn’t be ordered or controlled. It always brought me back to the languid days of childhood, when the slow unfolding of things was both exquisite and excruciating.

  The cook called out again. Don’t worry, madam. We have generator.

  The dark lessened my gnawing hunger. I could hear myself breathe. I thought about the bath in my room, how the lack of something in one place intensified an experience that might be ordinary in another. Oh dear Lord, I whispered to my grandma’s ghost, as I imagined heat on my spine, water softening the muscular ache brought about by hard beds, rickety buses, the incessant bruising crush of skin against skin.

  I’ll just have some dal, I called out.

  Bread, madam?

  I wanted bread without oil, cooked in dry heat, like the chapattis I bought in the street. There was something honest about fresh heat. I saw red, orange, a slick of blue rising from the centre of a furnace. Felt the quick sharp burning desire in my stomach.

  Tandoori naan, I called back.

  Had he heard me?

  As I settled into my chair I recalled various facts about Bharatpur listed in the hotel’s brochure that the travel agent in Delhi had assured me cheerfully were ‘all lies’. The town was on the popular driving route from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur that took just over three days. Indians and foreign tourists came for birdwatching and to find accommodation when all the hotels in Agra were full in high season. Nearby there was a national park and a large number of local artists selling paintings of birds, from tiny studios dotted around the main hotels. Bharatpur, though, had something even more unexpected than bathtubs, stand-up showers and birds, something that the brochure neglected to mention and that I now discovered in a kind of ecstasy: it had silence. My ears searched out peripheral sounds, listening first for the honks and beeps of the never-ending traffic, the underscore of human voices speaking in multiple tongues, the glorious babble of India. But there was nothing familiar in the surrounding silence. Or in the soft aloneness I felt suddenly in the dining room of The Birder’s Inn.

  The lights stuttered back on. A few seconds later my plate of dal arrived with a basket of tandoori bread delivered by the cook – a man in a turban, a Sikh perhaps. The dal was yellow and warm and perfectly arranged in a dish shaped like a boat. It had sailed across a vast distance to arrive at my table, gathering its lentils and spices from faraway lands. I pushed my nose down towards it; it seemed a gentle dal, not too oily, lentils lightly swollen in its juices. The cook waited anxiously at my side. I tried to remember how to say very good in Hindi. Another cook, Rahul, from the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, had taught me the word one evening in his kitchen.

  Actually, Rahul had taught me three things in Hindi that night:

  how to say how are you?

  how to say thank you

  how to say very good.

  They were useful words and phrases to know in a country where most people would ask me in English:

  How old are you?

  Are you married? and

  How many children do you have?

  The words for very good started with a b and sounded like a dance. Rahul couldn’t read or write so I’d only learned to spell it phonetically. But for the moment I couldn’t remember a thing Rahul had taught me. I nodded my head and gave the turbaned cook a delighted smile.

  Okay, madam? Okay?

  I wished he wouldn’t bow. I couldn’t let him bow to me without bowing back. I was the one, after all, who was receiving his graces, who should be bowing to him.

  Where you from, madam?

  I bowed my upper body and said: Australia.


  Ah, Australia. Number one cricket team in the world.

  Yes, but India very good too, I reassured him.

  Australia: number one. India: number two. You like Sachin Tendulkar?

  Not as much as I liked the look of this dal and bread, I thought, wondering why in this land of eternal things I’d had more conversations with Indians about Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting and Shane Warne than I’d had about almost anything else.

  I like Sachin and Sourav.

  Ah, Ganguly? A very fine cricketer, but a bit, how you say, hoity-toity!

  And also VVS Laxman, I enthused.

  Who can forget his thrilling knock at Eden Gardens in that memorable series of 2001? A double century in the second innings. Supported by my personal hero, Mr Rahul Dravid. I was very proud to be an Indian that day, madam.

  I always liked cricket talk. It seemed to distil centuries of cultural differences into some simple numbers and concepts: twenty-two players, two twelfth men, three umpires, four consecutive innings. You could hit fours and sixes and not have to run. You could run for twos, threes, fives and score incrementally numbered milestones: half-centuries, centuries, double centuries, triple centuries. You could be not out at stumps. Declare. Retire. Run with a runner. Not run with a runner. Run without a runner. Just run. Appeal. Bowl a yorker. A bouncer. A flipper. A googly. Hit to the boundary and over the top into the crowd. You could stand and field in slips. Hit to silly mid-on, be caught in leg gully, and bat before pad.

  I’d met Indians who could recite by heart every score of every innings ever played by Sachin Tendulkar. And by Ricky Ponting as well. Children had been pushed forward to me at gatherings and they would list every wicket ever taken by Shane Warne since he began playing cricket. Hearing the numbers roll effortlessly from the lips of these children was like listening to music, like listening to something spiritual, intuitive, irrational yet utterly logical in its simple and random incantations.