I Am an Executioner (10 page)

To shed some light on the strange events narrated by Dhanu, that evening I finally visited R.’s house (it was a room, actually; a dark room rented in a shabby home) and looked in on his poor mother. But what I learned there only deepened the mystery of R.’s disappearance, for R.’s mother had even less knowledge than I did of the boy’s whereabouts. The nearsighted and anxious old woman told me that she had awoken previous morning to find R.’s bed neatly rolled, his shirt and notebook missing, and absolutely no sign of the boy. He had left without leaving any note, without any indication as to where he was going. He had, indeed, so far as she knew, simply disappeared.

The old woman was distraught and amazed to hear that R. had been observed boarding the
Madras Mail
.

“Mami,” I tried to reassure her, “surely he is only gone to some neighboring town to visit relatives, or to seek work.”

“What relatives?” she cried. “What work? He doesn’t know anyone; he doesn’t know to do anything. You understand this as well as I do, sir.”

The lady was inconsolable, alternately worried about her son’s fate, and furious with him. “His wedding day arrives in three weeks, sir,” she told me. “I was lucky to find a bride willing to marry a boy like him. It would have been understandable if
she
was the one to disappear.”

“Surely he will return in time for his wedding,” I ventured. “He is not
 … totally
incapable.”

“Just look at this, sir!” The old lady opened a cabinet. “These are his things. This is my son.” The shelves were stuffed full with loose papers, torn and wrinkled scraps and salvaged bits of newsprint—hundreds upon hundreds of pages. I began to take them out one by one and examine them. They were each completely covered in the same indecipherable scrawl—page after page. “This is my son. This is the boy we are talking about!” the old woman wailed, as my very skin began to crawl.

That week I telegraphed all my contacts in the Railway, all up and down the line, even in Madras, to see if anyone could report on R.’s whereabouts. But no one at all, anywhere, could recall even having seen him. Dhanu’s imaginative description began to seem more and more apt: R. had stepped onto the train and somehow evaporated.

Three weeks passed. The date planned for the boy’s nuptials came quietly and went with no word from him. Despite my concern for the boy’s fate, I resolved to carry on with life, to let none of it bother me. Whatever had happened to him, I insistently reminded myself, was no fault of mine.

A month passed. Then three months. I heard meanwhile that the bride’s family, furious, had demanded the return of their small dowry from R.’s poor mother.

It was pitiful to think of R.—lacking all social graces, who had never before left our village—lost and alone somewhere in vast South India. I imagined him driven to extremis—starving
on the roadside or throwing himself in despair into the ocean. In my heart, I cursed the train for having spirited the helpless boy away. Why existed such a thing? Where was ever the need to travel so quickly? I even wondered if Dhanu had planned the scheme, and somehow deceived R. into leaving; but my conversations, later, with people who had been on the platform that day confirmed that R. had clambered aboard the train of his own volition, without uttering a single word.

Fighting down my anxiety, I continued to reassure myself that his disapperance had nothing anymore to do with me. But then, walking home one evening and happening on a series of lines and scratches in the roadside dirt, I felt an excited panic. Were these R.’s designs? Had he here returned to us? I stooped and studied the marks and scuffs, trying to draw a familiar feeling from them. I pointed them out to two passing ladies. “What do you think it means?” I asked. In their disturbed glances, I realized my own foolishness, for these were only the frantic paw-prints left by some copulating street dogs!

I felt a plummeting disappointment. The boy was profoundly gone; and I saw then that despite my outward disavowals, my own preoccupation with him had reached a worrisome level. I had become infected with an idea: that R.’s writing had held some message for myself. Analogue and cause of my predicament, his writing was also the key to escaping it. Now, because of my own actions, R., and the meaning of his message, were lost forever.

Deeply distressed, I began spending long mornings in the Krishna temple. I watched the priest doing puja, then I sat and chanted Gita verses with some other scholars there. I found solace in the monotony of prayer, in the thought that my muttered words might find connection with the spiritual realm. But in the quiet of meditation, my mind wandered. Could R.’s markings, I considered, themselves have been some kind of prayer? And just as my prayers brought me closer to God, could I now find R.’s
whereabouts by praying to him? I tried: I meditated on his face, I repeated his name—until the sacrilege of what I was attempting too much disturbed me.

And one day in the earliest dawn, unable to sleep, I walked to my office and confronted the canvas bags of mail that had arrived from Madras previous day, some to be distributed here, others to be sorted for transfer to other stations down the way. Suddenly it occurred to me that therein might be some message from the boy. I upended the bags and spread the mail across the floor of my office—so many correspondences, so many people with things to communicate to each other! None of it mattered. I sought only one letter; it would be written in an unintelligible gibberish, but it would contain a profound and reassuring message, for it would mean that R. was alive, that he was trying to reach me! With patient madness, I sat on the floor and searched missive after missive, until Dhanu arrived for his morning duties. He laid his hand on my shoulder, guided me gently from the floor to my desk, where I sat and quietly wept while he cleaned the place. (Sat and wept? Looking at my photograph, my chap, do I really strike you as one who would give in to softness of mind, to weeping?)

Why had I turned R. away so harshly? I saw very painfully that my concern for the boy had come too slowly, piecemeal, and too late, and that this lapse could no longer be remedied. Indeed, after that time, R. was never again seen in our village. Why had I not looked out for this boy who had always been—but was now so irrevocably—lost to the world?

The final occasion I went to visit his mother, taking with me some small money and a packet of food, as I walked along the road, I heard the sound of her wailing through the window of her quarters. Amid the old woman’s cries of lonely grief, those who shared her house and lived nearby continued blithely about their daily tasks. Whether she was really crying, whether R. was really gone, one could not have told for all the concern
shown by the people on that street. But perhaps they could not be bothered to acknowledge what they could not first of all understand: R.’s absence was as complete, as profound, and as indecipherable as those intractable letters he had composed in my name.

My own wedding, you will be relieved but not surprised to hear, was after all not called off. My position with the Railway also remained quite safe. The bride’s family of course realized that they would have suffered as much scandal as mine had they been part of so public a fiasco as a canceled wedding, and we were therefore united in grand fashion before some two hundred of guests.

Married life was both more and less than I had expected. At first I found my wife quite a nuisance. Coming home to contend with this new person was like lying down to sleep and finding the bed covered in mosquitoes—one had longed for comfort and familiarity, but found only irritation. Shall I give you an example? So many times I came home from office, and had not even had time to wash my feet, when she would call out peevishly from wherever she sat working, “Aren’t you even going to say
hullo
to me?”

It is true, over time I did become somewhat fond of the girl, like a friend, or a sister, or the sister of a friend—someone whom I teased and abused, but who became very useful to my mother, and on whom, finally, I also began to depend.

Our relationship only fully began to sour perhaps two years or more into our marriage. I was leaving the house one evening, hoping to find some relaxation with a new friend of mine, a young man named Rishikesh, who had come to our home twice or thrice to whitewash our kitchen walls, and who also proved adept at clambering up the palm tree in the garden, and cutting down the coconuts. This talented young man Rishu proved to
be a kind and affectionate friend to me, and a more agreeable presence than Dhananjayan, whose daily appearance in the station I could scarcely anymore abide. In fact, I was quite seriously considering replacing Dhananjayan with this alacritous Rishikesh, although Dhanu had tearfully implored me to keep him on, saying impudently that all of his neighbors looked at him askance now that he had worked for me, and he would have great difficulty ever finding a comparable position.

In any event, as I walked out the door to visit this new friend Rishu, my wife called to me and asked where I was going.

“What is your interest in asking?” I responded. “Why shouldn’t I go where I wish to go?”

“No matter,” she said. “I already know where it is you’re headed.” Then, as I turned again to leave, she added (and with a note of such spiteful derision in her voice!), “But other women’s husbands—other
men
—don’t do such things.”

All the anger that had ever been in me, all the humiliated rage, rose up again at that moment, and I gave my wife such a thrashing as you can scarcely imagine. Then I walked quietly out of my home, leaving her to my mother’s ministrations.

(I must say that my relationship with my wife is not something I would have preferred for you to have mentioned. I fear you have finally gone too far. You think you have license based on the distant chance she was some great-great-grandmother to you, or someone whose life otherwise sheds light on your own. But you don’t understand the least of it. And neither did she understand me. We lived a life of utter intimacy, yet how little she knew of my secret heart, and I of hers. I grew to be a fiend in her eyes, I’m sure; and she always remained an inscrutable problem for me. She suffered a lot. Yes, you have gone too far, but I suppose the remedy would be to go further still; if you write another story, perhaps you ought to write one about her.)

Very glum and sour of mood following this altercation, I walked out that evening to meet with Rishikesh. As I walked, I
felt that my outwardly easy life was in fact entirely insupportable. And upon entering that poverty-stricken and unpleasant part of our village where Rishikesh lived, I heard people call out in the darkness and I suspected they were mocking me. A pebble hit me in the leg; I yelled angrily toward the shadows. Had I become nothing but a laughingstock, propped up only to be played the fool? Was the world in cahoots against me?

Rishu tried but could not extract from me the cause of my unhappiness that evening, and in my bitter mood I had half a mind to give him a thrashing as well! I asked out loud why I had even bothered to come there, for I suddenly seemed to have lost all affection for the boy.

And it was in a similar state of glum and angry dejection, the next afternoon, at the station, opening one of the newspapers from Bombay, that I read a brief article that caught my eye:

I know nothing of maths. It was my worst subject in school, and of course I had never heard of this “Leumens Paradox” nor of this fellow “Rogerson.” It did not even seem an Indian name. But I was intrigued by the story, and I studied the picture that accompanied it: a skinny young man in a dark-colored American
suit, a wide nose, a spotted cravat, a thick black cream of hair. His eyes were large and sunken and strangely, sadly calm, and they seemed also familiar to me.

Yes, I had seen eyes like this before. I knew that gaze: focused beyond the thing at which it was looking, angled at some unearthly perspective, but earthbound and sad, bearing up quietly to the world’s eternal misunderstanding. I had once looked deeply into such eyes, and they had disconcerted me. But at first, the precise resemblance escaped me.

It was only sometime later, before leaving for home, when I glanced back on that picture, that it occurred to me: Could those be R.’s eyes?

But R. was no mathematician, was he? Moreover, the face in which R.’s eyes were sitting in that newspaper was nothing like R.’s face. R. had been full-cheeked, not wan and sharp-cheekboned, like the man in the picture. R. had sported a shaved head and short ponytail. He had no well-groomed, flowing mane of hair, like this “Rogerson.” His nose was bony and round at the end, as I recalled, and not so wide and flat. R. was daily attired in nothing but the shirt I made him buy; and when not at work, he wore no shirt at all. He would not have known what to do with a cravat! And the markings R. was wont to make looked like no mathematics that I or anyone else had ever studied. And, of course, R.’s name was not “Rogerson.”

That day, I read eagerly through the other papers for some mention of this story, some corroborating detail, but found nothing. Finally, I tore the photograph from the page and hurried out of the station.

Later, I chastised myself for my foolishness. The prospect of R.—who could scarcely dress by himself, or walk the half kilometer from his home to the railway station without getting lost—somehow finding his way by steamer to America, gaining a post at a famous university, solving an ancient mathematical Paradox (I had asked my old maths teacher on the Leumens
Paradox, and while most of his answer escaped my understanding, I gathered roughly that it had to do with the impossibility of forming a square or perfect “parallelogram,” as it is called, by connecting four given or imaginary points, which occupy similar or identical positions on each of several grids, but which are separated from each other by actual or imaginary dimensions or factors of impossibility, separated from each other even by space and time—an impossibility unless one formed a shape that appeared to exist but did not in fact exist)—the prospect of R.’s having solved such a puzzle, and earning international acclaim thereby—why, it was all so wonderful that I felt I must be crazy to believe it. (Not crazy, I must interject. Perhaps mistaken, but not crazy. Are
you
crazy, let us ask, to imagine that you can imagine me? To think, upon finding some ancient photograph which excited your nostalgia, that you could fill in the gaps using your twisted imagination? Are you crazy, to think that you can draw this strange story, create this absurd conversation between us? That despite my indubitable deadness, I am so close you can imagine to feel the breath of my voice in your ear? Perhaps you and I are related; and so are all people related. More likely I am imaginary; but mustn’t all people be imagined? Crazy? Just as I am lost to you, R. was lost to me, irrefutably—how people so close to us can become so unreachable, how people unreachable can feel so close: there’s your paradox—and yet I longed to have him near to me; in my longing, I
brought
him near to me. Not crazy—as you hear these words, as you reach past the years to touch my face—not crazy, no.)