My Brother

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 su

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 ski

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 spi

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 u

“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.