What You Call Winter Read online

  “And what’s the sense of going if you won’t get paid,” his wife said darkly. “All the expense only, and none of the reward.” Since his retirement, Annabelle had succumbed to financial paranoia and increasing bitterness, as if they were teetering on the brink of ruin and the university alone was responsible. “They never paid you properly,” she cried. “And now see where we are!” She haggled over every purchase and accompanied the girl to the market to be sure every rupee was stretched to the fullest. She belonged to a Ladies Investment Club, where she discussed what to do with whatever she could shave from the household expenses.

  Her latest scheme was to sell their plot to contractors, who would knock down the house and put up a flat building in its place. One by one, the neighbors were giving in, trading their family homes for a down payment and two or three of the flats. Annabelle had taken to bullying Roddy each time they stepped out of doors. “See this place? A nice enough place!” She spoke night and day of what she would do with the money.

  Roddy had given up trying to argue with her. They had enough, in his opinion. He had shown her their accounts, in neat ledger books he had brought home from the university on his last day of work. He had taken a supply of twenty-five, one for each year until he was eighty. It gave him a shock to see only three blank ones left in the cupboard. He wished he’d taken more. He could not shake the feeling that a moment’s impulse had the power to circumscribe his days — that through his own careless thievery, only three more years were meted out to him.

  At the gymkhana, the boys were waiting. Roddy did not believe in ghosts, but the idea of his father cycling through the neighborhood could not be entirely overlooked. He had found himself stopping each time a bicycle came into view, shading his eyes, making sure. Delivery boys sped past him, a schoolgirl with a satchel, a stick-legged clerk. He shook his head and blew his nose vigorously into a yellowing handkerchief, as if to expel the day’s lunacy along with the dust of the road.

  They played on the upper veranda. Fans pleated the air, and young men smacked tennis balls on the courts below. Lulled by their lazy rhythm, Roddy began to relax.

  “Another week and she goes,” said Francis. At the gym he was known as “Frinkie,” a concession to the Parsee, who had a strong accent. Frinkie’s wife was traveling to America to visit their daughter. He had grandchildren in Ohio, a place Roddy had never heard of anyone living. Roddy’s own son, Stephen, lived in New York and worked in finance — a high-up, Roddy could tell anyone who asked.

  “No troubles with visas and all?” asked Bertie, rearranging the cards in his hand.

  “Just the hassle of it. They see we’ve gone and come back, so …” He shrugged.

  “We can’t get one for Mary.” Bertie’s daughter, Mary, had Down syndrome. Roddy could not remember the last time he had seen her, a large, dough-faced girl with thick lips and small eyes. It seemed to him he could more easily remember the time when she was born, the last of six. Bertie had said nothing until the child’s baptism, when they had all seen for themselves. For a few months he had stopped coming to the gym and then abruptly, as if no time had elapsed, he had returned again.

  “Why won’t they give one to Mary?”

  “Too risky, as far as they’re concerned. She’s older than most of these children last, no? Forty-three. They think she’ll land up in a hospital and they don’t want the aggravation.” He tried to laugh. “Bastards. They’re afraid she’ll die there.”

  Roddy looked down at the table. He did not say what he was thinking, that it might be true of all of them. He imagined his last hours in the flat where Stephen lived, the swift and silent lift, the tops of buildings outside windows, and knew he would not go back to the States again. He was seventy-seven and his son could come to him.

  “Tchah!” Roddy scowled. “I won’t go with my hand out to these people with their precious visas. I could get what I want, but see how they treat us!”

  Bertie picked up his cards but didn’t look at them. “Actually Mary’s been having trouble lately. Aching all the time and tired. We didn’t know what was the matter and then doctor told us, she’s doing too much. Running back and forth, involved in everything. She has her activities at the church and she likes to go to Puttu’s school and help the little ones. She lifts them up sometimes — heavy children, no? Four and five years old. And doctor says, ‘You cannot let her do these things anymore. She’s not like a forty-year-old. A girl like her, at this age. You have to think of her as old. She has the aches and pains of an old woman. You have to treat her that way now.’ I tell you—” He broke off. “It’s not what you prepare for, seeing your child grow old like that in front of your eyes. She is older than I am in her way.” He concentrated suddenly on his cards. “At any rate, they won’t give the visa.”

  No one quite knew what to do. This was not the usual tone of their meetings. They came to the card tables to escape such conversation, which waited for them at home. Here they spoke of sports matches, memorable club occasions, university days. Families were confined to the distant good news in letters: a grandson entering university or a daughter’s new house. They kept to only the most general politics, topics upon which all would agree, and even their talk of the neighborhood centered on the way it used to be when they were influential forces within it.

  “I know some people,” Roddy began, then stopped. Whom did he know anymore? Stephen must have important contacts, but in another country where his position could not benefit his family.

  Bertie shook his head, smiling his rabbity smile. His eyes were yellowed. “Don’t worry. I told Celeste, our other children have left our house, but God has given me this child to keep. Go on, play.”

  Roddy leaned back in his chair. The room had begun to fill with other cardplayers. Their table attracted attention; he and Francis were among the gymkhana’s oldest members. Roddy lifted his hand in greeting whenever anyone called his name. They played until the morning session was nearly finished, and then one by one the members stood up. Roddy stretched, ready for lunch, and made his way toward the door.

  He did not see his father until he had nearly walked past him. Dominic was sitting at a table in the far corner, reading the newspaper. He turned the page, frowning, and reached for his specs.

  Roddy stopped and stared. He dimly felt a hand on his shoulder, but he would not turn. He stared and stared at the image of his father reading the paper. “Do you see that?” he tried to shout to all the others. “Do you see him there?” He did not hear their replies, distant as if he had cotton in his ears. Darkness edged his vision and began to close in a grainy circle. Only his father was still in view—the black-rimmed specs, the huge knuckled hand. Roddy’s limbs felt limp and boneless, as if he must either sink or float, and then the circle closed completely. The last thing Roddy remembered, magnified and terrifying, was the whispery sound of a newspaper page.

  The fainting spell left him with a broken forearm. His hand had struck a table as he fell, and his arm folded awkwardly beneath him. He woke to searing pain and was taken to All Saints Hospital in an autorick. There was an operation to set the bone, and the next morning his arm was encased in a plaster cast. Someone’s son, a hospital administrator, had recognized him. “Thank God!” Annabelle sat near his bed, feeding him dahl and rice. “He has taken you with no cost, and he called in the other doctors to see you. ‘This is Roddy D’Souza,’ he told them, ’one of our best university men.’” She glowed, transported by the memory. “‘Madam,’ he told me, ‘your husband will have every possible attention.’”

  Roddy’s throat was dry; he accepted the sip of water she offered. “Bertie brought you in the rick. Even after I arrived he wouldn’t go. He waited with me until doctor came and Celeste brought us something to eat. Now she’s gone to tell the girl what to make for tomorrow. Nothing too heavy. Maybe a piece of fish.”

  Roddy did not remember. The ride was obscured in a haze of pain and confusion. Had his father reappeared? Had Roddy called out to him? “Did
I say anything?”

  “What? When?”

  “At the gym. When I fell. Or in the autorick?”

  “Nobody said.” She hesitated, and he wondered if he dared tell her. I am having hallucinations, he experimented silently. My mind is going.

  But she was patting his hand, looking both eager and worried. “Did Bertie tell you his news?”

  “What news?”

  “He and Celeste have gone with a contractor.”

  “The whole world has gone with contractors.”

  “Three lakhs, and a flat for them, and another to spare. Big ones, he said.”

  “Annabelle—”

  “Only think about it, Roddy. How long can we keep the house?”

  Roddy tried to shift in bed. He was propped up against pillows but found it difficult to move without the use of his hand, and Annabelle leaned forward to help him. The hair of her scalp had thinned, he noticed. How had he not seen it before? Her arms were still strong, but the skin had begun to pucker. Her face was not wrinkled — she had looked after her face with a mysterious regimen of creams and remedies—but age spots had darkened to an insistent brown. He watched in fascination as she resumed her argument. The skin near her lips and brow stretched and tightened as she spoke. Her cheeks lifted, a glimpse of teeth, the spoon raised to his mouth once more. Each movement of her face and hands produced another, each word another.

  Do you believe in ghosts? It struck him that he did not know even this much about his wife, this woman with whom his days had been tangled for more than fifty years. Annabelle, do you believe in ghosts? She might; it was just possible. He couldn’t be sure. She was a silly woman at times, an unreasonable woman. She wore a Saint Christopher medal around her neck night and day for protection, on a string of green yarn that irritated Roddy. “Buy yourself a decent chain,” he told her. She read the prophecies of Nostradamus and called Stephen after every unsettling dream. “Be careful, darling. I saw you at the bottom of a ditch last night.”

  Nest eggs, taxes, investments. She prattled on. How inevitable each word seemed, as inevitable as she herself seemed after so many years of marriage. He could form no words to interrupt her.

  I saw my father today. He was riding a bicycle.

  Of course Annabelle would know that he did not believe in ghosts. Of that Roddy was certain. He had kept no secrets — he had made his character perfectly clear. She would not, after so many years, feel obliged to wonder what he was thinking.

  I don’t think he saw me.

  But a ghost Annabelle saw would have done something worth telling. She was not capable of such a bland fantasy. Even her most mundane moments were colored by a sense of lurking drama. Her ghost would have Dickensian flair, rattling chains and bearing messages.

  “Promise to think on it. Promise to speak to Bertie.” The pleading in her voice surprised him. Her cheeks were soft and flat, the soiled plate empty in her lap. This was his wife. There had been a time when he could not drag his fingers through her hair for its thickness.

  He promised.

  At night in the hospital he could not sleep. The pills dulled the pain in his arm to a diffuse ache, which he felt in his head and back and throbbing fingers. He could hear other patients in various states of sleep and wakefulness: coughs, moans, labored breathing. In daylight they seemed separated by walls and corridors, but at night these were lost in a brown film — not quite darkness — and he felt both exposed and alone.

  He remembered a night long ago when he and Annabelle had slept, slumped in chairs, in a hospital room. Stephen was two and had broken his leg. Annabelle refused to leave him in a strange place, and Roddy stood by, not knowing how to stay or go, until the moment for leaving had passed and he found himself, for the first time, staying up all night with his son.

  It had happened when they took him to a nearby park. Annabelle pushed Stephen on the swings while Roddy read his newspaper. After a time he had put down the paper and watched the mothers and children moving in front of him, as if they were figures on a film set. Outside the gate, men hoisted children onto ponies with bells and spangles, flowers drooping from their harnesses, and led them in slow circles around the park. I can do that with Stephen one day, thought Roddy. And then he heard a cry and turned just in time to see his son standing at the top of the slide. “Sit down, Stephen, down!” The panic in Annabelle’s voice cut through the sleepy air of the park, turning heads. But Stephen jumped.

  Later, after the screaming, the hospital, the surgery to set the leg, Roddy could not shake from his mind the picture of his son standing calmly at the edge of the slide. Did he know he would fall? Had he believed he could fly? The boy had always seemed inscrutable to him, a package Annabelle brought home from her mother’s house in Bangalore, where she had gone to give birth. Roddy received a telegram, and eight weeks later his son came home. Every cry was a new mystery to him. What does he want now? Roddy wondered. What’s wrong with him now? He did not expect to feel such fierce love or sadness; he looked on, helpless, while Annabelle took up the baby and rocked, or nursed, or murmured nonsense. How joined they were! When Roddy and Annabelle learned they could have no more children, Roddy felt he was only hearing what he already knew. How could anyone else interrupt the perfect understanding between mother and son? Even he was an outsider. Stephen jumped from the slide and Roddy watched, dumbstruck. It was Annabelle who crumpled to the ground, as if even then their bodies were one.

  In the hospital, the baby slept badly. His cheeks burned and occasionally he cried out, eyes still shut. Annabelle soothed and petted him, singing songs that Roddy did not know. Just before dawn, Roddy left to bathe and change before work. Stephen had fallen into a fevered sleep, and Annabelle said not to worry, to go on, go. They would be fine.

  After the accident, Roddy stayed close to home. He was given a sling and wore his left arm like a wing folded against him, but he needed Annabelle’s help to put on his shirts and fasten his trousers. She stood a breath away from him, humming, eyes fixed on his chest. He lifted his chin as she reached the top button and her head bobbed near his shoulders.

  He looked beyond the top of her head to their image in the mirror and remembered the first time they had danced, at their wedding. He had been surprised to feel her hand, so cold and small in his own, like a frightened child’s. The match had been arranged; though both consented, they had met only four times before. He had wanted to tell her not to be afraid but did not know how to speak without feeling something stiff and steadying break open. Something was holding them up, some force propelling them across the floor. Was this how my father felt? he had wondered then.

  Now he wondered how his father would have grown old. His mother had died slowly of cancer, the year Stephen was confirmed. By the end, she was in so much pain that she could hardly recognize the people around her. “Son,” she whispered in a rare moment of clarity the last time Roddy saw her. “Son, water.” He had poured a glass for her and held it to her mouth. Her lips were cracked and gray, and the water dribbled down her chin. “Sleep now, Mum. I’ll be back in the evening.” That morning he stood in the open doorway of the train, letting the foul air of Mahim Creek wash over him. He knew he should go back, but he let the stations slide away. Slum children squatted near the tracks, and men stared as the train went past. By the time he reached the university, Annabelle had called to say his mother was gone.

  “There.” Annabelle patted his arm. “All finished.” He felt an urge to hold on to her with his good hand, but how could he explain such a gesture? And anyway, she had carried on with her morning business, leaving him dressed and alone in the mirror.

  Over the next several days, Roddy saw his father frequently. Waiting in the queue at the chemist’s, strolling on the seaside promenade along Carter Road, even in the shop where Roddy bought sherry, whose sweet, wiry taste he had always preferred to liquor. A week went past, then another. He was no longer agitated by the sight of his father but felt a growing sense of longing. He would have lik
ed to call out to him, but he sensed that Dominic D’Souza was still beyond his reach. He did not feel haunted; his father had not even glanced in his direction. But he felt a circle drawn around his world, tightening.

  Was he dying? Was that what the ghost had come to tell him?

  He thought of consulting a doctor but rejected the idea. In practical moments, when the ghost had not appeared for some time and the sun shone so brightly that even the shadows seemed unmistakably clear, he realized he must be hallucinating. He could not bring himself to admit such a possibility to a doctor.

  But when his father invariably turned up again, riding past on his bicycle or strolling near Sunset Park, Roddy knew what he was seeing was real. Otherwise why would Dominic D’Souza’s tie be stained? Roddy did not remember his father in such a disrespectful way. Why would his father wear his reading specs on the road? Why, above all, had his father come and not his mother?

  Beyond these questions were smaller, troubling ones. Accidents had begun to happen. Annabelle stumbled on the step and stubbed her toe badly. A crow flew over the balcony railing, flapping in desperate circles around the front room, until Annabelle drove it squawking from the house. A pipe burst, leaving a large rust-colored puddle on the bathroom floor.

  “High time we make a change. This place is going to rack and ruin,” said Annabelle. She had elicited an agreement from Roddy: they would meet with Bertie about the deal he had struck with the contractor. In the flush of this victory, she could no longer resist any opportunity to press her advantage.

  Roddy was too distracted to argue. He could not determine whether the accidents were somehow the products of his father’s arrival or the ordinary pitfalls of a household. It occurred to him that he was not in the habit of paying attention to what transpired beneath his own roof. “Is she always so clumsy?” he asked Annabelle when the girl dropped a platter of fried fish.

  She sighed. “These girls, they’ve got their heads in the clouds,” an answer so broad that he did not know what to make of it.