Arun John
ajohn@austincc.edu

Arun John grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. He taught at NYU and at various colleges within the City University of New York system before moving back to Austin where he now lives with his wife and daughter.

Arun was a recipient of the Stein Scholarship while at NYU and also won the First Words Literary Prize for South Asian-American Writers. He is currently at work on an episodic novel, an excerpt of which was published in First Proof: The Penguin Book of New Writing from India.

The Visitant

Nina and I were in school, Acha was at the doctor’s, and Mintu had sneaked out for a cigarette when the specter of the Japanese man visited Amma. It had rung the bell only once, the peal reverberating in the muteness of the flat, and as Amma opened the door, she felt a wash of familiarity, the stirring of a dormant consciousness. The visitant stood there by the door, its shoulders trembling nervously, blue strands of slicked hair whispering over its forehead under which auburn eyes fluttered with a tentative urgency.

“It’s like Banquo’s ghost,” Nina said later, over dinner. “Maybe you murdered someone and now he’s coming back to haunt you.”

“This girl needs to watch her tongue.” Amma waved the ladle with which she was serving Acha stew at Nina; a tiny sliver of onion flew off and dropped onto Acha’s vest.

“Are you sure he was Japanese? He must have been a bloody Maoist. Who knows with all these communists winning elections, they are moving door to door trying to brainwash us with their little red pamphlets.” Acha lifted the slip of onion from his stomach and put it delicately into his mouth. A speck of yellow remained on his white vest. He licked the fingers of his left hand and proceeded to rub out the spot, holding the cloth between wet thumb and forefinger.

“No no; this man was Japanese. What I don’t understand is, why Japanese? I have not met even one Japanese person in my whole life; and besides, this one was not like any of the others.”

Amma was right. The Japanese man was unlike any of her previous visions. The ones that had visited her prior to this were things inanimate-a mammoth couch with flourished armrests; a remote control attached to a color television by a cord of umbilical proportions; a rotary telephone that whispered chitchat from unseen lips; a sky-blue refrigerator containing a freezer piled high with meat and fish around which shimmering icicles arranged themselves in a delicate tableau-all of these were lifeless, and she had recognized them instantly as part of the encumbrances of living a previously luxurious life. But they had not moved, spoken to her, or rung a doorbell as this one had. Also if anything, these objects were familiar, companion pieces to the years of coziness she had snuggled up to on the Army barracks at Fort William with Acha before he had been court-martialed, unceremoniously discharged with a meager pension, and forced to move into a two-bedroom flat on Wellington Square, where the sagging floors afflicted with bitterness sighed words of inequity from under her feet, driving her to hallucination, causing her to be haunted by the instruments of convenience thus banished from her life.

However, over time Amma learned to adapt. She sent Acha twice or three times a month as needed, to the surplus store in Fort William where he still had a few contacts. There he bought subsidized cans of food and meat that the government provided to army personnel at lower cost. Instead of buying milk from the dairy she used the Amul powder that came in tightly sealed tins which could only be opened by levering the back of a spoon against the lids. Portions of food cooked by her were precisely adequate; in the rare event that anything was left over, Ameena the maid would carry the remains home in a plastic tiffin box which she brought back the next morning washed clean with cold ashes from her chula. The telephone we learned to live without-there was no one we could call anyway, and the only people we knew who had a phone were the Menons in flat 121, but their line had gone dead and had stayed that way after the floods in ’72. There was no point in owning a color television because most of the films on TV were in black and white anyway; and instead of a couch we continued to use the battered old divan (Acha called it a settee) that had been left behind by the previous renters who had disappeared—the landlord told us—like vapor into the vacuum of foreign lands.

Yet once in a while, the odd couch or refrigerator would appear magically in an appropriate corner of the flat before Amma’s eyes, and she would lapse into her old life. Her eyes would glaze over, and she would extend an unsuspecting hand towards a door that promised cool swirling mists of frost; or reach out to dial the number of an old friend or acquaintance left behind in the exodus from Fort William; or yet again turn around and lower herself gently into the pillowed softness of a magnificently ornate couch just to find herself falling headlong into the awkward disillusionment of air.

So in our flat on the second floor at 4/1B Wellington Square, we cohabitated with the phantoms of Amma’s past. They crouched under the table, perched on our shoulders, squatted on the dresser, soared up menacingly over our heads, waiting to lull Amma into her brief moment of remembrance and pain.

Only this time it was different. There was a certain familiarity to the man that she could not quite put her finger on.

“It was not like I knew his face or anything, but there was something about him that I felt I recognized. Maybe it was his eyes. Red like marbles, you know. He was also wearing some kind of suit, I think. Plain with pockets,” Amma broke off a piece of chapatti and folded it over a chunk of browned beef.

“I thought as much—a Mao suit,” Acha muttered under his breath and kept on eating.

That night, amidst the release of sleeping breaths, Acha had his recurring dream of being overrun by Chinese soldiers on the ridge at Thag La—they come tramping over the snow, rifles in hand, the air in their nostrils forming fearsome puffs around the red stars on their caps; and Acha finds himself abandoned by his jawans. “Jawans, dhiraj rakkho!” he shouted in his sleep; his Hindi, distorted and thickened by his Malayali accent, sounded comical and made me giggle.

On the divan, I couldn’t sleep, troubled by my proximity to the door where the Japanese man had appeared. I twisted and turned, got up a couple of times to pad up to the peephole and peer out at the empty hallway beyond, a hallway lit by a 25-watt bulb that, according to Acha, was “power-efficient.” In the meager pools of light that disappeared into darkness, I saw nothing but murky stairs and shadowy banisters.

Mintu who was sleeping across the room, in the camp-cot he folded and slipped away out of sight under Amma’s and Acha’s bed every morning, picked up a volume of Jiddu Krishnamurthi that he had been reading, aimed it in my direction and said, “If you don’t stop moving around, I’ll smack you on the head and throw you out, so you join Amma’s friends outside that door.”

I fell asleep, and like Acha dreamed of war. A Japanese soldier from a Commando comic chased me through a charcoal jungle. I leapt over soggy black buttresses, burst through pallid patches of sunlight coming in through gaps in the canopy. Drooping lianas caressed my bare legs with grayish-sketched feelers. Behind me the soldier held his rifle out in front of him, thrusting his bayonet forward from time to time, while a big white bubble above his head kept screaming Banzai.

The specter appeared many times after that, but to Amma alone and when no one else was home. Drifting about in the scraps of daylight within the confines of the flat, cleaning or cooking or attending to the numerous chores that could only be fulfilled in solitude, she was disturbed over and over again by the pealing of the doorbell. Looking through the peephole she would confront auburn eyes and a burning sinking question staring back at her. As the days went by, the specter’s routine did not change and after rejecting suggestions—Acha told her to see an ophthalmologist; Mintu suggested a psychiatrist; Nina bluntly said only a priest could help her—Amma gradually tried to come to grips with the situation. After all it was just a nuisance, she said, similar to the beggar who waited by the bus stop every day asking people for money, and when denied let out a round of abuse before moving on to the next victim.

“I have to simply ignore it, and then I won’t notice him anymore.’

With that said, she proceeded to try and live her life around the apparition, but the weight of ringing doorbells and unanswered questions seemed to quell her resolve. A delicate change overcame her and manifested itself in brief telling moments. She grew visibly weary and distracted—sometimes the food wasn’t cooked through, at other times it was bland. When I came home from school, I would find her sitting with her legs up on the divan looking outside the window into the afternoon where solitary kites circled over the heat ascending from the streets. Her hair, which she usually pulled back into a compact bun that squatted on the back of her head like a glistening plum, now stayed in disarray, little wisps scattered hapless and heavy about her face. I would be quiet so as not to wake Acha who was taking his afternoon nap in the bedroom, and she would smile absently at me as I stood by the open door; then the thought would strike her, and she would look past me with affliction spreading over her face into the hallway where the stairs tumbled into the streets; and this I took as my signal to shut the door.

One night after he bit into an uncooked potato, Acha extracted the offending piece from his teeth, laid it down on his plate, shook his fingers over the table, looked at Amma and said, “Bloody Hell!”

Bloody Hell. He uttered the words like his ex-commanding officer Brigadier-General Varma had said it to him on the sweeping glacier at the foot of Aksai Chin after Acha had clambered down the side of the plateau with two of his jawans to request reinforcements because they had seen a massing of Chinese troops on the other side from their outpost on top of the Thag La ridge. Brigadier-General Varma had looked at him and laughed, “Bloody Hell George! Don’t tell me that you and your chaps are afraid of a few chinkies.” It was then that Acha became aware that the unyielding ice upon which they stood was creeping at a snail’s pace toward a historic and private doom. He climbed back up to Thag La with his jawans after that, not knowing what he couldn’t stand more—the Brigadier-General’s condescending tone, or the idea of being overwhelmed by Mao’s hordes. As night swooped in over the Karakorams, he stood there on the ridge, his back to the heckling winds, not daring to look down below at the myriad points of light winking like sardonic eyes on the blanching snow where he knew the Chinese had set up camp.

“Bloody Hell! Sabita, what needs to be done? This has become very tiresome; eating meals like these—uncooked, without any masala or anything.”

He shook his head and put his rice-encrusted hand on the tablecloth.

“I am going to take you to see Doctor Mitra in the morning. One cannot live like this, thinking and seeing things that are not there.”

I noticed that Amma had hardly touched any of the food on her plate. Her fingers sifted fattened grains of rice, moving them to and fro, grouping some, excluding others until her dinner assumed a certain geography that was marked by craggy potatoes, teetering valleys of rice, labyrinths of spinach, crumbling amidst viscous seas of dal.

But when she looked up at Acha, there was a calmness accompanied by an inkling of dogged determination to her voice.

“I cannot stay in the house during the day. I need to get out, so I am thinking I should take up a job. Mrs. Sinha told me last week that she could get me a job as an invigilator at the West Bengal Board of Examinations.”

Mrs. Sinha lived with her husband in the flat above us, and taught history at Our Lady Queen of the Missions school. She also doubled as a grader for the Board of Examinations. In the summer, thick brown packets veined with tightly wound twine would arrive by special courier—a graying peon in a patched up uniform that was too big for him. Red congealed sealing wax dimpled by official seals lined the edges and folds of the brown paper. Usually it was Mr. Sinha who answered the door and signed for the packages. He had lost his job at the Writer’s Building four years ago and had been unable to find another one since. Everywhere he went, they told him that he was well-qualified, but too old. For three years Mr. Sinha jockeyed for positions, stood in long lines outside employment agencies rubbing shoulders with men half his age who brandished smart leather folders like weapons and peppered their Bengali with English. Finally he gave up and stayed at home where he flew into fits of rage and hurled things against the walls while his wife was away at work. Once he picked up a huge bundle of examination papers that Mrs. Sinha was grading and threw them out the window where they fell to pieces in the breeze. Amma who had just left the flat on some errand that day saw that sheaf of paper explode over her head and tried to rescue as many of the errant pages as possible, but some escaped and strayed under the wheels of cars, tripped up passersby on the street, escaped into gullies, or went into hiding in the secret spaces between buildings; sheets of recounted history, marked in red ink that crisscrossed and coursed over the margins like pulsing veins.

Mrs. Sinha was always indebted to Amma after that day, and the two women discovered that they had things in common like embittered husbands and the ennui of inadequacy.

“Mrs. Sinha said she will get you a job? Who made you decide this?” Acha’s words carried a tinge of panic.

“Nobody decided. I’ve been cooped up in this house too long and that’s why I think all these things are happening to me. The children are all grown up; they can take care of themselves. Besides I don’t think he wants me to stay in the house in the daytime.”

Amma looked up at the door when she said this last bit.

Acha pushed back his chair, strode to the door and flung it open. Granules of rice glued themselves on to the doorknob where his hand had touched it.

“Who doesn’t want you to stay in the house? Him! Look, there’s nobody there. You must be mad to think that I’m going to let you go to work because some vision you had in your bloody head told you to.”

Outside in the hallway, past the door he held open, a draft blew in from the streets and carried up the stairs the smell of impending rain. In the room the curtains flounced about their edges, and the newspaper on the teapoy rustled as its pages opened; by the doorway scraps of paper and dust whirled up and hung about Acha for a moment and then fell routed and incapacitated to the floor as the air gave out beneath them.

The rain came by fits and starts all night, sometimes beating out a tattoo on the windowsill, occasionally softening to a hush, and then pouring down all over again—the first shower of the season and through it all we heard them—Acha and Amma, their muffled argument spilling out from under the bedroom door. Some time in the night Nina came out of her room and crawled into the divan with me; her legs felt cold and thin against my back as her whisper groped its way into me through my sleep—This time Amma’s going to see it through to the end.

Nobody knew what happened to Acha after he had been captured by the Chinese at Thag La. In the early hours of the morning he and his company had come under heavy mortar fire. The first shell fluted through the air and killed Acha’s batman who was boiling some water to make tea. The kettle, miraculously intact, landed at Acha’s feet searing and hissing, steam rising from its spout. He shouted to his jawans to hold their positions as he dug into the snowdrift in front of him, clapping his hands over his ears as the shelling intensified. Around him flashes illuminated the expanse of white being torn up; the body of one of his jawans tossed carelessly into the air and fell into an embankment a few meters ahead; from where he lay, Acha spotted the jawan’s hand bounce up and slap the ground, making handprints in the snow each time a shell landed. Someone behind him was crying loudly, and it was only when Acha threatened to shoot the responsible party that the voice turned into muffled sputtering sobs.

The barrage kept up for about an hour, and then everything went silent. Even the sobbing had stopped. It was so quiet that Acha thought his eardrums must have ruptured. In the distance the Chinese set off flares and he heard someone say, “Looks like Diwali’s about to start.” Hysterical giggles followed and feet shuffled away. The warm smell of urine drifted up from behind him and Acha felt the tickle of a million pins on his face and the back of his neck. He looked up and saw that it was snowing—little flakes mingled with ash floated down from the blackened sky. But the ground beneath him, he noticed was starting to melt.

The Chinese came soon after that, tramping over the snow, air puffing out from around their mouths and nostrils. Their olive caps had red stars on them, and Acha gripped his service revolver and shouted, “Jawans, dhiraj rakho!” But his remaining soldiers had deserted him. They had clambered down the sides of the plateau to the glacier below where Brigadier-General Varma decided it was prudent to wait to hear from Headquarters before sending reinforcements. So Acha lay there marooned on his rapidly melting island of snow until a Chinese officer carrying a rifle yelled out in Hindi and asked him to surrender.

Official reports said that the Chinese had treated all Indian prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Convention, yet Acha refused to talk about his period of internment. When released six months later, he filed a report in which he accused Nehru and Krishna Menon, the Defense Minister of colluding with the Chinese and of being part of a wider communist conspiracy to turn India into a socialist state. In the report he also insisted on referring to the Brigadier-General as “that scoundrel Varma.” Because he had been a POW and due to the fact that there were others in the military who had similar feelings about the whole affair as he did, Acha was not discharged. Instead he was demoted to the rank of Lieutenant and transferred to a desk job at Fort William where the sound of shuffling papers and barked orders needled him and ate into him like an acid until his insubordination became intolerable for those around him, upon which they drew up a history of his noncompliance, had him court-martialed and then dishonorably discharged.

The next day there was no mention of a job or the Japanese man, but Amma stopped answering the door.

“If the bell rings, you open the door,” she said to all of us, “but I am not running over there every five minutes.”

The food showed no marked improvement, and shadows began to creep in and out of the kitchen in the middle of the night. I found Acha stuffing bread dipped in molasses into his mouth at two in the morning. When he saw me, he slapped two slices of bread down on the counter and slid the jar over. I ate out of politeness even though I hated molasses, and we stayed that way standing by the counter without saying a word, chewing quietly in the dark.

Mintu stopped eating dinner at home. Every evening he would go over to a friend’s house on some pretext or the other and stay until dinnertime when his friend’s mother would come in and say “Why don’t you eat dinner here? It’s late and I’m sure your mother will not mind, will she?” And Mintu learned to alternate. He went to see friends that he had not looked up in years or did not care to keep in touch with. He would come home afterward, pull out his camp-cot from under the bed, burp loudly at Nina and me and go to sleep. But the varied diet took its toll on him—he developed a pinched look on his face; I couldn’t decide whether the reason for his anguish was his stomach or the sinking understanding that it was just a matter of time before he ran out of friends. Only Ameena seemed happy; she went home almost every night now with a tiffin box packed tight with food.

Then one morning Acha forgot to take his keys with him on his daily walk. Stuck out in the hallway after ringing the bell incessantly and pounding on the door for over an hour, he stopped. Over the sounds of muffled traffic floating up from the street and the footfalls of Amma moving about in the flat, he heard the remote echo of familiarity, a whisper from the past—the words of a Chinese officer pointing his rifle at him over melting snow. Held captive by the ghosts of his memories and Amma’s visions, Acha sat down on the stairs leaning his head against the banister, and for the first time in his life, fell into a dreamless sleep. He stayed that way snoring softly, until the afternoon when I tripped up the stairs and came upon him sleeping soundly under the failing light of a 25-watt bulb.

Amma went to work the next week, dressed in a simple jacquard sari and flats. She paced up and down past furiously scribbling girls with ribboned pigtails in high-ceilinged examination halls; tapped pencils on desks and stood guard over examinees whom she suspected of trying to cheat; always judicious with time but kind enough to let a straggling student finish up her last sentence or write down the last step to a math problem before taking away the booklet. Her days became encompassed by the sounds of shuffling paper, the scratching of nibs, the ringing of school bells, the shambling of nervous feet, the stuffing and sealing of thick brown paper envelopes; so much so that when she came back home in the afternoons, she did not seem to hear or see anything unusual. She became extremely industrious and possessed by a renewed energy she made dinner everyday, supervised Ameena to make sure she swept and mopped under the bed, packed our tiffin boxes in the morning before she left for work, and went about her other tasks as usual. She preempted complaint: the issue of the Japanese man seemed to dissipate into thin air and if anything, things went back to normal. Except for Acha, who stopped shouting out in his sleep. He was a lot quieter now and the martial yells that we had learned to sleep through ceased. In a sense, it seemed that he had lost the capacity to dream.

He also became clumsy. Things broke a lot more round him, glasses smashed, plates chipped, even the crystal decanter from England that his father had given him developed a crack. But Amma did not seem to mind; she replaced the plates and glasses with new ones and bought Acha a whole set of Diplomat glasses with peg measurements engraved into the sides.

A few months later she even bought a fridge, a tomato-red Kelvinator. It was a squat little Mastercool with a modest freezer, and the manual said that most of its parts had been imported from Japan. The day it was delivered, I had to stay in school standing in for Ronnie in a rehearsal of The Winslow Boy directed by the English teacher Mr. Gomes. I was originally in charge of prompting, but the boy playing Ronnie had been suspended indefinitely because he was caught stealing paperweights from the rector’s office. By the time I got home in the evening, the fridge was already up and running. Acha was sitting on the divan swirling ice cubes into his whiskey. The cubes chimed dully against the sides of his glass. The fridge was in the far corner of the dining room, purring calmly outside the entrance to the kitchen. Its color contrasted awkwardly with the bright sky-blue walls. Inside, there was a bottle of milk and some potatoes. Other than that, it was empty and bright. In the kitchen, Amma was refilling the ice trays. She carefully poured the water into the molds and smiled indulgently at me. When she opened the freezer door to put the trays back in, a soft swirl of vapor puffed out and moved towards her as if volunteering a certain explanation.