Blind Faith

1

January 2001

ALQUERIA, GOA

When the plane from Delhi to Goa exploded in mid-air and plummeted into the Arabian Sea, the sky wavered momentarily like a computer screen ribbed by static.

Below the falling airliner, the sea curved into a bay. Smooth ocean’s forehead against a springy hairline of palm. The waters of the bay were calm, ploughed occasionally by barges carrying manganese ore to big ships parked on the horizon. When the plane plunged in, the bay became a painting in which the colours had dissolved.

At this very time, a fire raged on the seashore. In the seaside village of Alqueria, Sharkey’s Hotel burnt as strongly as the aircraft had before it hit the water. Fire engines along the beach sent blue flashes into the coconut trees. A lone figure sat upright on the beach, tense with accomplishment. Villagers gathered at the seafront, staring at the sky, at Sharkey’s, at the shards of plane sticking out from the water.

We are constantly reminded, noted Father Rudy, priest of the Church of Santa Ana, that even after centuries of evolution, the human remains as wild as any animal.

Alqueria. Tiny fishing village in north Goa. That night Alqueria was surrounded by fire. In the water, a burning plane. On land, a beach hotel in flames. The papers carried the news next morning:

South Wind Airways flight SW 448 from Delhi to Goa, crashed into the Alqueria bay in north Goa last night. There are no reported survivors and navy divers are continuing their search for bodies. The black box has been found. Eyewitnesses say they heard a thunderclap and an explosion that looked like a fireworks display.

The international conspirators who claimed responsibility for the bomb were the outer splinter of a cell gearing up to collaborate with more complicated international organizers elsewhere in the world. This explosion was only a small local rehearsal. A case study. A test of patterns of airport and aircraft infiltration.

The year was 2001 and it was January.

Eight months later, other aircrafts would cut through tall buildings on the opposite side of the world to herald a new century.

But in Goa the bombers had unknowingly interfered in another plan.

A plan that went unreported in the newspapers.

2

January 2000

LONDON

Mia saw him for the first time in London and at once realized the truth of the phrase, ‘not being able to believe one’s eyes’. He reminded her eerily of her father’s painting. He was a replica. A colour facsimile. A 3D projection of the man from the painting. A painting that had hung in her room for as long as she could remember. She frowned and looked again. Yes, unmistakably him. The man from the painting had leapt out of the canvas and walked into her life and the impossible had occurred as easily and as ordinarily as taking a train to work.

She stared around and upwards. Boundless city, once on the frontlines of the Luftwaffe, now swarming with nations, religions, sexualities. And miracles. Yet for her the city had become remote. She felt excluded from it, as if the drunks sleeping in hotel doorways along the Strand were trying to trip her up as she passed. Bankers, lunchtime joggers, newly arrived Serbs, blues guitarists and students from the Czech Republic shouldered past. She felt far removed, sitting alone on a high wall from which she couldn’t climb down. She was at once over-excited and bored, liable to burst into tears even at advertising jingles, sometimes wanting to fade out from the world, other times wanting to courageously lead it.

‘A rapidly alternating state of sorrow and elation is often believed to be one of the first symptoms of hyperactive psychosis.’ The Drama of Depression by T. Rosenthal and M.O. Silver, M.D., a book she had been reading on the advice of a colleague.

She had recently moved back into her parents’ nineteenth century, white, stucco-fronted flat in Belsize Park from her own apartment in Putney. She worked for a satellite television channel called SkyVision where the purple and pink studio sofas reminded her how unhappy reunited families could be.

She tried to find the sun but it was only a vague outline through the clouds. Every evening she watched the faces on the Northern Line and wondered why everyone wasn’ t protesting aloud that the sun should be more responsive to consumer demand; that by not providing adequate amounts of sunshine it was artificially driving up its own price.

Her parents’ apartment looked out onto a cherry tree and it was only a five-minute walk to the Eagle And Flag. After her father’s recent suicide, damp faces had begun to grimace through the wallpaper. His ghost lived on in the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine that hung about the rooms.

But now, as if to compensate for his death, her father’s painting had come alive in front of her eyes.

The painting had appeared in Hyde Park. Clothed in white, mystic, wonderful. Ebony skin rose out of his white clothes like granite crags in a landscape of snow. Under a thick beard and bushy, shoulder-length hair she sensed a careless slant of cheekbone and a thin line of jaw. He wore small round glasses. Windswept. Windblown. Someone who looked as if had recently touched down on earth. Perhaps he wasn’t real and she was hallucinating. Her brain had registered something other than the physical reality – the way she had recently mistaken a stranger for a neighbour who, she had known, was long dead.

Yet, there he was, standing in a crowd of people in Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, holding a demonstration of some kind, which she had been sent to cover for SkyVision. A group of men, in white shirts and trousers and no warm clothing despite the cold, held up banners. ‘Purification Journey’, the banners read. ‘Join the Movement to Purify Humanity’. ‘Your Water Is Pure, But Is Your Love?’

A red-haired man was making a speech: ‘This is the time for the Inner War! A war between the positive and the negative self! Don’t turn your back on this war! Look around you! We have returned to a world of lust and obscenity. What is our solution? Come and find out in the Purification Journey. Learn breathing exercises, the joy of being human, the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Learn about the Inner War.’

He stood a little apart from the group. The odd man out. She noticed that strapped to his back was a childish toy: a wooden bow and arrow. A hilarious, fancy-dress party accessory. His eyes were intense and watchful, a novitiate, recently inducted into a monastery, looking around and thinking: Ah-so-this-is-my-life-now, this-is-my-life.

Except for the bow and arrow, he was frighteningly, incredibly, similar to her man from the painting.

She couldn’t work any more today. She had to go home and look at the painting again. She folded up her notebook, waved to the cameraman and called: ‘Hey!’

‘Yah?’ he yelled into his camera.

‘I’m not feeling too well. I’ll call in and take the day off, okay? I’ll be back tomorrow. These guys are going to be here for a while.’

‘Bet they are.’ His voice came round his denim-jacketed back. ‘They’re pulling crowds. Jesus. Fucking Halloween!’

‘You carry on with some shots if you like’ – she pointed towards the bow and arrow exception – ‘and take some of Robin Hood. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, Robin Hood,’ he zoomed in. ‘Must be freezing their asses off.’

She turned on her heel and almost ran to the tube station.

It was January and freezing. Rivulets of dirty snow ran along the pavements. The streetlights looked wan in the gloomy afternoon. Cold rampaged through the city, curling into a dragon tongue of ice that licked at every footstep. At home, icy rain slanted down on the cherry tree outside her window.

‘What happened, Goldie?’ shouted Mithu as Mia walked in. ‘No work today?’

Goldie was Mithu’s name for her. It was a translation of the Bengali shona. It was a concession to England. It was an acknowledgement of the displacement of the family from India to Britain. It was an allusion to the cultural difference between mother and daughter. Only at the very bottom of this hierarchy of references, was it a grudging endearment.

She raised sheepish eyes to her mother. Mithu was a graceful, excitable Bengali from Kolkata who had met and married her father Anand on a trip to the tea gardens of Darjeeling. Mithu’s family was now scattered over Canada and the United States; she despised Kolkata almost as much as she loved and missed it.

‘Not feeling too well.’

‘Skipping work?’

‘Only for today. It’s such an awful day.’

‘Every day is awful,’ sighed Mithu, getting up from the sofa and throwing her magazine to the floor. ‘Have some cha.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

‘At your age you shouldn’t be coming home to a mother,’ Mithu slammed the kettle on the stove. ‘You should be coming home to a husband.’

‘Ma,’ Mia replied at once. ‘Listen, I’ll move back to Putney if you like. Don’t want to cramp your style. Besides,’ she looked around, ‘this place is a bit strange to me now.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that, Goldie!’ Mithu cried. ‘You always misunderstand everything I say. You twist everything.’

Mother and daughter looked away from each other in mutual exasperation. Without her father they were like a theatre company without an audience and had no reason to stay together in the same repertory.

Then Mithu fluffed her newly trimmed hair and said: ‘I’ve decided to get married again. And move to America.’

The man from the painting had stunned her. But normally marooned on her high wall of grief there was little that could touch Mia. Day-to-day life had been vital only in her father’s gaze. Without him, numbness came easily; a brain-dead state of robotic responses. ‘Great, Ma!’ she replied automatically. ‘Good news. Go for it. Is it Tiger?’

‘Who else? Tiger’s a very nice person. He’s easy-going and he doesn’t drink like your father used to. He always comes straight to the point. He’s being transferred to New York. He wants to take me with him. Lovely, no? The Statue of Liberty… It’s always so cold in London these days and see how dark it is outside.’

‘This is very good news, Ma, very good news,’ Mia said in the singsong that she and her mother sometimes spoke. ‘Everyone will be happy for you. Everyone will. No one will say, Oh no she shouldn’t have, oh no she shouldn’t have. No one will say that. Papa wouldn’t say it either. He’d say, Go! Go on and make a life for yourself.’

‘I don’t care about what your father would or wouldn’t say,’ snapped Mithu, shaking the teapot with menacing jerks. ‘I care about you. I can’t make a life for myself just like that. How can I make a life for myself when you are still unmarried?’

There was another silence.

‘In India,’ declared Mithu, ‘at your age, you would have been a mother-in-law by now. Understand? A mother-in-law!’

‘A mother-in-law at twenty-eight? That sounds like a criminal offence.’

‘Why not? It used to happen in Bengal. If you married at seven, had your first child at ten, then you would have a twenty-year-old son who could be married by the time you’re thirty, which is almost your age!’ calculated Mithu.

‘A bit competitive,’ Mia said, draining the last of the tea. ‘Everyone fighting around in the same generation.’

‘Not at all,’ returned Mithu sharply. ‘There would be no generation gap.’

She stared at her daughter. Not strictly beautiful but appealing. Definitely appealing with her crown of soft curls and her petite frame. Dark eyes and long eyelashes that blinked constantly with an excess of thought. The shy yet reaching-out quality of the only child in spite of her attempts at self reliance. Something sweet in the curve of her cheek. She spoke in an unusual and droll way and when she wept her whole being crumpled in silent sorrow. When she laughed (which, these days, was hardly ever) she looked as if she had never been happier in her life. Every emotion played out fully on her face, which looked fierce from some angles but innocent from others. She had her mother’s natural grace and her father’s black hair. If she dressed right, if she grew her nails or styled her hair, she might be quite attractive. But she was a discontent. As much of a grouch as Mithu was a blithe spirit.

And nowadays, Mithu suspected, Mia had lost her mind.

Mia had always been her father’s daughter. The dead Anand: Marxist-turned-Mystic. A radical in his student days at Delhi University, Anand had enrolled in Naxalism as an undergraduate, slinking through mountain villages in the dead of night with a couple of police packs sniggering about rich-kid revolutionaries, on his tail. On one of his trips to the north Bengal hills, to try and convince tea-garden workers to overthrow their masters, memorize the teachings of Lenin and strive for the workers’ and peasants’ Utopia, Anand had met Mithu, who had come to Darjeeling on holiday with her parents.

Mithu didn’t have any knowledge of Marxism, but she did have a lopsided grin and fawn-like limbs; Anand’s nascent artist’s eye was captivated.

Subsequently, all the Naxal uprisings were stamped out, the leaders were lodged in jail, and others were made to squat on burning stoves to get them to confess. Anand was tempted back to the bourgeois life in the nick of time by his businessman father. He completed his studies, published his thesis on farmers’ agitations in the north Indian hills, married Mithu, and moved to England to teach History of South Asia at London University.

In London, for many good reasons, he became convinced that Communism was stifling the religious genius of India. And turned to a spiritual quest. He began to paint and became a far better painter than an academic, revealing how much more excited he was by god than by Marx. His oils on canvas were technicolour and realistic and although there was always some confusion among critics about why a Leftist historian like Anand only explored godly themes, yet lots of people bought his paintings and the family moved to Belsize Park on his combined earnings as rational academic and mystic painter.

Mia was born in England. Anand and Mithu never went back to India except for fleeting trips to Delhi to visit Anand’s widowed mother, who died a few months after he became a British citizen. Anand had insisted that Mia understand well who she was and where she came from. He had pitched a wigwam for Mia in the back garden with a banner announcing, ‘I’m not a Red Indian!’

He painted the Sistine Chapel with Jesus’ shadow falling over the dome like a raincloud. He created Mount Kailash reflected in Lake Manasarovar like an upside-down pyramid in a pebbled sky. He painted the qawwals of Nizamuddin’s shrine in Delhi with whirling sufis reflected in their eyes. The Kashi Vishvanath temple at Benares with a demon-faced priest shrieking in a typhoon of incense. He even painted the church St. Martin-in-the-Fields in black and white strokes with only the plasterwork in colour.

Last year, Anand had gone to the Eagle And Flag, then for a walk by the river, fallen into it, and drowned. The police report said there was a massive amount of alcohol in his blood. Alcohol-induced suicide.

Mithu said it was just like him to go off and commit suicide when the daughter was still unmarried. He had become so English in his ways, so English and disconnected. Not tied up like Indians were, tied by this life and the next, tied up in an elemental, fire-and-water sort of way.

Father – efficiently incinerated in a crematorium. Nothing whatsoever left of him anywhere in the world. How foolish were those who believed in ghosts and spirits. Papa was gone, vaporized into the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine, no other shred, no remnant of him, anywhere at all.

Even greater than her sorrow was Mia’s puzzlement at his desertion. If he had died of illness or accident he would have simply and gracefully transmuted into an ancestor whom she would have missed and mourned for. But to throw himself into a drunken death by water – just as they were getting to be such good friends and setting up their debate along such promising lines, just as their conversation was beginning – was so unexpected, so shockingly uncharacteristic, that she couldn’t but see it as a terrible rejection of herself.

He had often said that she had been his favourite painting. But without him, she was only half-finished, the brush strokes dry but incomplete…

The undimmed focus on the good, the trekker’s upturned face towards the sun of new delights – all of that was gone forever. Poor old gentle Pop. Hope he wasn’t too disappointed if heaven turned out to be full of Marxists.

Now the oil-painting man had appeared. He had walked out of the painting and into her life and transformed Hyde Park corner into a festival.

‘Your father did a terrible thing,’ grumbled Mithu clattering the teacups into the sink. ‘But there’s no point missing him all the time. You’ll wander around all your life, trying to find a father here, trying to find a father there and never being able to find a husband. That’s what will happen to you.’

Mia stared apologetically at her mother. She had never been a companion to her. She, with her gloomy silences, could never be a companion to a childlike virago like Mithu, who needed pampering and cosy moments. Anand had been the unifier of mother and daughter. He had been mother to them both. He had spread his apron and let them pull in different directions.

Anand’s death had had a very different effect on Mithu. Mithu, after a few days of robust weeping, had rapidly gone global. She became re-sexualized. She cast off her dowdy, professor’s-wife clothes and mutated into a sari-clad Boy George with plucked eyebrows and powdered cheeks. She became lively and democratic in her friendships and dumbed down from novels to glossy magazines in relief that she no longer had to please Anand by pretending to be highbrow. She sprinkled gold dust on her forehead and streaked her hair with Natural Auburn 5.1. She painted her fingernails a rich red and dangled gypsy earrings from her ears.

Mithu’s survival skills were admirable, thought Mia. Lost in the Amazon rain forest she would speedily contract a marriage with the king of apes so he would take her into his protection. Abandoned in the Sahara she would jump on the back of the passing captain of the Bedouin and take over the best tent. Mithu’s need for marriage was equivalent to the immigrant’s need for an air ticket. Marry with steely determination and give birth to a range of new passports.

‘Don’t worry about me, Ma,’ Mia climbed the wooden steps to her room. ‘You deserve all the happiness in the world. I’ll meet someone, there’s no hurry. You go ahead. Get married. Go to America. I’ll stay here with SkyVision and move back to Putney.’

Since this morning, between the time I left for work and came back, I’ve made an extraordinary discovery. A false discovery perhaps, but for me, a discovery nonetheless. What would Rosenthal and Silver say? They would say that the man was nothing but a delusion, a mirage caused by the drunkenness of grief.

‘No hurry?’ shouted Mithu. ‘What do you mean, no hurry? Of course, there’s a hurry. You might get prolapse of the rectum! Mejo Mashi had it and nobody would stay with her because of the smell. Only her husband cared for her. Until his dying day. Even though they were staying in a leaking place overlooking the basti because they had no money left. Oh god,’ Mithu shuddered at the memory. ‘Thank god, I never have to go back to that horrible country.’

‘No point thinking of rectums and all, Ma, and you don’t ever have to go back,’ Mia called down from her room. ‘You’re on your way to America.’

‘Only if you help me, Goldie!’ Mithu called up the stairs. ‘I can’t get married before you. I can’t. First you. Then me. If you don’t, I won’t. You have my life in your hands. Remember that. You must get married. Married! Married! Married!’

The silence of death was the most annoying thing of all. The hushed wipe-out, the impossibility of further contact, the irritatingly vacant space. Quiet runways stretching towards other quiet runways. Everything as it was, yet everything in mourning. Why had he not stormed into death more grandly? Drowning was such a weak surrender, such a slothful fall. Do not go gentle into that good night, Papa, Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

The streets, the billboards, the trees would remain, but she would be gone one day too.

Gone where?

Perhaps to some Hollywood-created studio where there were layers of shining clouds or an oily pit crawling with spindly arms.

Rain whispered in the cherry tree outside. In her room – where Mithu had often burst in smelling of chicken essence demanding explanations about men and music; where Anand had knocked softly when she had a fever and laid his palm on her hot forehead – was the painting that contained him. She kicked off her shoes, sat cross-legged on her bed and peered at it on the wall. Yes, the face in Anand’s painting was exactly like that of the man at the Purification Rally. She could see no difference.

She had seen him every day for the last seven years. She had watched him looming above her Raggedy Anne. She had studied him in the evenings, glowing in the light of her bedside lamp. Her father’s gift to her on her twenty-first birthday had been his painting of the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious festival in the world.

‘What an experience, Maya,’ Anand had exulted. ‘How can I describe it so you will understand? Imagine a huge Hindu Woodstock … a spiritual Glastonbury… crowds of people! Thousands! Hundred thousands! The water with the sun overhead, mist along the banks, sadhus and nuns, tourists, yoga teachers, a giant celebration of being a nobody.’

‘A nobody?’ she had asked.

‘Sure, a nobody. That’s what we are. Non-entities next to a river that is millions of years old. One of India’s greatest contributions to world civilizations is the idea of the naked body. The naked body not as a pornographic product, but as a civilizational ideal, the most pristine surrender to being a nobody, a non-individual, nothing but a technological member of the Milky Way.’

Anand had bought her a dog-eared copy of GS Ghurye’s Indian Sadhus written half a century ago. The sadhus and their ascetic reformist spirit was unique to India, Mia read. But while some are beautiful lotuses, the vast majority have become unhealthy scum. Only when the water begins to flow again and the people are awakened to life, then, and only then, will the scum be carried away. Until life returns to that