As psychologist Alison Gopnik reminds us, in a child’s universe, parents are like stars – fixed and stable. But siblings are more like comets that sweep into our lives, lighting us up but sometimes scalding us.

Rilla’s notes

On Thursday, three days later, still desperate to get a sense of normality back into my life, I try going to university again. And this time, it isn’t as bad, maybe people do have short memories when it comes to scandal. I hold my normal office hours, I attend a seminar, and I even type up some notes. I am still getting missed calls from Simon every day, but I have switched off the notifications and so I only have to look at his name on my phone log briefly before I go to bed. Slowly, slowly, I can start to get my life back on track.

Late on Thursday afternoon, on the train back from university, I am hanging on for dear life. It is rush hour and the train is packed. People are standing in sweat-smelling distance, and I am trying to hold my breath. The people in my immediate vicinity must be acrobats because they all seem to perform complicated tasks while trying to stay upright on a moving train. A woman with a Chihuahua in her straw handbag is fanning herself with a receipt with one hand and feeding the miniature dog chicken wings with the other. A man with soft long curls and a borg-collar bomber jacket is reading Issue 97 of The Walking Dead. An attractive young man with red hair is teaching the woman next to him how to YOK2, which is apparently knitting jargon and not something to do with missiles. And an Indian man is having a phone conversation while also writing notes on his hand.

‘I said give me your CV,’ he says, ‘and she was like, I already told them my qualifications. I said to her what have you done in your life? How can I recommend you? I can’t put my name to this. And she started crying, man. I was like, what are you, a bloody nautanki?’

And just as quick as that, I can’t breathe. I grope blindly, I clutch at people. ‘I want to stop the train,’ I gasp. ‘I have to stop the train.’

People around me are staring. They look like they are going to arm-wrestle me to the floor if I say this again. They will do anything not to have to stop the train. Someone creates a bit of room, drags me down to a sitting position, puts my head in between my legs – I have no idea if this is so I can get breath back in my body or to make sure I can’t reach the emergency lever. I fight them, flailing, punching, kicking, but nothing works because I am surrounded by a savannah of legs. Jean-clad ones, nude pantyhose, varicose veins, and then there is a face. It’s a little girl.

‘More,’ she says in her baby voice, and hands me a wad of gummy tissue with mushy banana in it. At the next stop, someone practically throws me off the train. I run all the way down the platform, all the way up the stairs, and I stand outside in Lewisham next to a florist. I bend over double and gasp for breath.

My father disappeared into his study to write a book on Indian street theatre or nautanki when I was eight years old, soon after Rose disappeared. Before then, as far as I know, he had no ambitions of writing a book. When I was little, he taught drama in a college and he used to tell me – Rose and me – all about nautanki.

Rose and me. Yes, I suppose it’s time to talk about that now. To talk about Rose and me. Though it is also the hardest thing I can think to do right now.

That’s how it was for the first seven years of my life. It was always Rose and me. Rose and me did this or that, Rose and me are going out, Rose and me got into a fight. Rose and me are hungry, thirsty, tired, back from school, too awake to go to bed.

It was difficult, maybe impossible, to talk about myself without also talking about Rose. And Rose – she hardly knew what it was to exist without me either.

Our night-time stories were not the same as other children’s. We knew about Pippi Longstocking, the Wishing-Chair and The Bobbsey Twins from school. But my father didn’t read these stories to us. He read us the notes he made about Indian street theatre, gathered from books written in the Sanskrit script that would take him weeks and months to decipher. We would sit on rugs, the two of us in our pyjamas, the kind that had a matching top and bottom, and the top had a collar. I can see us now, all I have to do is close my eyes.

Me in my purple pyjamas, with the moon and stars dotted all over them. Rose in her lemon yellow top and bottom, printed with a dancing Popeye.

We would sit holding one blanket around us, skinny beans crouching together for warmth, and we would share a cup of hot chocolate. Or at least, our mother told us it was hot chocolate, but looking back it was mostly milk with the tiniest pinch, a smidge of brown in it, hardly there.

‘That looks like me,’ Rose would say, staring into the steaming milk. ‘Make it like Rilla, Mummy, please, please, Mummy!’ And our mother would. She would add another pinch to the cup and the brown would swirl and aria till it mixed with the milk. We would sit under our blanket, drink our hot chocolate, and listen to Dad tell us about nautanki.

‘Melodrama – you have to have melodrama in a nautanki. Without it, there is nothing. When you cry, you cry like you will die of sadness. You cry so loud, aliens on another planet can hear you and their hearts melt. When you are angry, you are full of rage. So much rage that if you tried to, you could swallow the sky whole. There’s no point feeling unless you feel big, see? And the nagara – the kettledrum – heightens the drama. Only when it reaches fever pitch is there an explosion. Get it? Try it. Show me.’

I would laugh, a shrill, high-pitched, over-the-top, machine-gun kind of laugh. But Rose would cry. And when she cried, she didn’t scream or sniffle. Her face turned inwards, her eyes swam and silent tears poured down her face in two long streams.

There was something about Rose’s eyes. They searched, they were always alert. She was always looking for things to go wrong, always on the lookout for trouble, something that could hurt her, and maybe me too. Yes, that’s true. She was always alert for anything that could hurt her or me. When she cried it was as if the world was coming to an end. It wasn’t the kind of melodrama that Dad was telling us about, but there was something about Rose’s tears. They broke your heart. Even our puppy was reduced to a pitiful moaning.

Gus-Gus. Yes, it is time to talk about Gus-Gus too.

When I turned seven, the same day that my sister Rose turned nine, Auntie Promilla’s Irish wolfhound Gus-Gus came to live with us and he was enormous. All he had to do was come and stand next to you – not lean on you or jump on you – but just stand next to you for you to fall over. Rose and I were in hysterics. He was easily, hands down, the best thing that had ever happened to us. I loved Gus-Gus. There was only one problem. He loved Rose more than he loved me. I was always giving him treats and throwing things for him to fetch. Smiling at him, singing, She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes (his favourite song), generally grovelling at his feet. But if Rose came into the room, quietly with hardly a whisper, as was her way, he would instantly drop what he was doing and go to her. Given the choice of going out for a run (his other favourite thing) with me or sitting under Rose’s feet, he would always choose the latter. In fact, I was sure that when we were playing he kept one ear pricked for the sound of Rose. If Rose was out and she was on her way back, even before she had come anywhere near our house, the other ear would prick up and his hair would coil tighter. He would start doing laps – front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, through the bathroom, back to the front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and so on, until she entered the house. Rose often had that effect on people.

‘Rose hasn’t washed her hands,’ I would complain. ‘And she’s putting her hand in the liquorice allsorts.’

‘Wash your hands, Rose,’ my mother would say. But with that indulgent voice she saved for her first daughter.

‘She’s giving the dog a sweetie!’ I would cry.

My mother would walk up to Rose and take the allsorts from her hand. Then she would turn to me.

‘Have you seen how dirty your frock is? Go and change, right now! Stop bothering Rose. If you don’t have any manners, you can stop going to school and stay at home and clean the house!’

I would glare at Rose, pinch her as I passed by her on my way to the bedroom. I knew my mother was bluffing. Of course I knew! No one would keep their child at home and get them to clean the house instead of going to school. Yet what a thing to say to your child! To someone you were supposed to automatically love!

‘Take your shoes off before you go upstairs, how many times!’ my mother would shout.

This was before my mother started teaching adult education classes. That didn’t come till much later. If you looked at my mother in those days you would think that we were always late for something. We never did things quickly enough for her.

‘Hurry up, Rose! Come on, we’re getting late. Can you drag your feet any more than you are, Rilla, for god’s sake? Wash your hands! Clean your teeth! You’re late for bed! You’re so slow, what’s the matter with you girls?’

She was tired. Two demanding young girls with itchy feet must have been exhausting work. Add to that my father who was good at telling us stories but not at helping with our homework, cleaning our school uniforms, shopping for groceries, or any of those things that fell to my mother. I guess there were other reasons as well, but kids aren’t conscious of these things. On top of everything else, an enormous dog had arrived for her to look after. All because my father had wanted a horse for his play, for our play, all because he was a failed actor. And this brings us full circle to the nautanki, our foray into street theatre, Rose’s and mine.

But I’ll have to come back to that later. To say some things, you have to work up the words.

For many minutes, after practically being thrown off the train where I had a panic attack, I sit outside the train station in Lewisham. The florist who has been watching over me says now, ‘You have to take care in these lurching trains, luv!’

I have the impulse to grab his arm and say, ‘Do I look mad to you?’ Not in accusation, but as a real question.

A week ago my life seemed like it was more or less on track. It was true I needed to work harder at my MA, I needed to show more discipline and focus, but I was getting married, moving to a new flat, becoming an adult, putting the past behind me.

Now, merely a few days later, the past seems to be chasing me. The faster I run, the harder it seems to run after me.

The thing is, I don’t want to go back to the past, I don’t even want to unravel it. I’m not pushing for answers that I don’t have the courage to face. All I’m asking for is a version of my life that makes sense, a narrative that people can agree on, or even one that I can agree with myself about. I want to find a few missing pieces of the jigsaw.

Yet, whether I resist or not, the memories are trying to claw their way back up through the canyon now, knocking at the door. And their Gollum neediness is starting to gnaw at my insides.

I thank the florist for his patience with me, I don’t ask him if he thinks I am mad. Instead, I pick up my bag and the water bottle handed to me by a stranger, and slowly through the streets of Lewisham, I start walking back towards my flat.

9
An Incoherent Narrative

The Sufi poet Rumi says it isn’t for us to run after love, but instead to look within, to see what is stopping us from loving. He says that our task in life is to find all the obstacles we place around us, the shields we build that keep us from love.

Rilla’s notes

‘A coherent narrative, Rilla,’ my supervisor said a month ago when she gave me the warning about my MA. ‘That is what you need, and that is what you don’t have yet, not after three whole years here.’ Professor Grundy sat behind her desk, looking thoughtfully at me, tapping her fingers. ‘The thing is, I do like you. You’re a good teaching assistant, the students respect you. They like your honest feedback about their work.’

She looked around her like she was searching for something more to say. We were sitting in her office, her walls covered with old invites for conferences, framed certificates, pictures of her receiving awards from important-looking people. On her desk there was a statue of Michel Foucault wearing a turtle-neck and a pair of seventies-style trousers, his head an egg, his lower lip cheeky but sensual, his hands crossed behind his back. She looked at him for many moments before she spoke again.

‘You don’t really like people, do you,’ she said finally.

I flinched. ‘That’s a little harsh.’

‘Oh, it’s not meant to be. I am the same way. To be a philosopher, you have to be a little removed.’

My breath caught in my throat. Not liking people was one thing, but being like Professor Grundy, that was too much. She once made a student wait for six months to hear if he had passed a re-sit of his dissertation. She had known all along that she would pass him; I later saw a dated confirmation of this. But she didn’t tell the student. She made him wait, she made him cry, she turned him into a shadow of his former self. And all because she didn’t like him. ‘He needs to learn respect,’ she said at the time.

And she thought I was like her. This made me die inside.

‘You are making no progress in your work.’ Professor Grundy was caressing Foucault, her thumb slowly stroking his egg-head back and forth.

‘I like this stuff,’ I muttered. ‘I want to make sense of it.’

‘Rilla. Are you going to complete your MA? Can you? Do you even want to?’ She sat back in her chair and looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say.

When I applied for an MA, with Tyra’s encouragement, I wanted to explore the connections between what a culture thinks about love and what it thinks about other things like life, work, and war. I had imagined finding a kernel that was at the heart of a culture, its most basic beliefs around which everything else was organized. I had thought at the time that it was a good, concrete idea, that it was something I could focus on and develop for three years. But recently the idea seems to have evaporated.

The more I read about what other people have said about love, all I can think about is how little I know about it myself. How there is a blankness in my brain where there should be an understanding of love.

Why do we form an attachment to another? Who attracts us? How do we form the bonds of love? And when love is lost, then what happens, how do we go on living?

After three years doing an MA, I am nowhere near answering these questions, and in fact I am further away than I was when I started writing my thesis.

Well, I say writing my thesis, but at the moment I am reading it more than I am writing it. I do a lot of reading and I make a lot of notes. But that’s what you are meant to do, isn’t it? You’re meant to read what everyone else has written on your subject before you can say what you want to say. If there’s nothing else I’ve learned from my father, surely I’ve learned the art and craft of methodical application. Having grown up in a family of artists and academics in Bombay, he should know how it’s done.

The only thing is there is a heck of a lot written on the subject of love. Every poet, philosopher, mathematician, mother, baker of treacle tarts, damaged teenager turned death-row inmate – everyone seems to have said something about love. Until I’ve read it all, how am I supposed to know what my take on it is? How do I know when I’ve learnt enough about love?

Federico says love is the same as breath, that as humans we are programmed to go after it, the same way we have to go on breathing to be alive. ‘And such a basic thing, it is not something one can analyse, is it? Why don’t you do something else?’

Do something else, says Federico-the-fixer. But what else can I do? I have no other skills.

Tyra helped me deal with the aimlessness I felt after university. She didn’t know about Rose, of course she didn’t, but that’s the thing with Tyra. She doesn’t push, she doesn’t try to draw out anything about you that you don’t want to tell. She saved me. She got me out of my room and into the world, she got me out of myself, and she pointed me in a direction. Now, three years later, I don’t know if it is the right direction or not. But it is a direction, the direction of the books that have saved me in the past.

And I need a direction right now.

‘I can do it. I know I can,’ I told Professor Grundy.

I tried to keep at bay the trickle of panic that was trying to climb up my skin. I couldn’t go back to having no direction. I couldn’t.

‘Hmm,’ Professor Grundy said. ‘The thing is, we ask you to do a report on something you’ve read, you can do that. You can do a critique. When pushed, you can deliver a summary, a decent one. But we ask you to develop your own writing on the subject, and, well, how much of that have we seen so far?’

‘Not enough?’

‘No, Rilla. We haven’t seen anything. Not a page, not a word. We can’t have you be a student here for life. You can’t just be here in this programme so you can take notes. You have to make a choice. Either write something or leave. You’re not a romantic, you know how things work. Which is it going to be, Rilla? Sink or swim?’

You’re not a romantic.

My professor says I’m not a romantic, and Tyra says I’m too much of one. So, which is it? You know, I just don’t know.

10
Romancing the Chickpea

For Slavoj Žižek, the falling in love is important. He makes love an event or an encounter. It isn’t just a being in love, but the moment of falling in love that matters, it changes the rest of your life. It is such an important event that not only is it a catalyst for everything that will follow in your life, but it feels like everything in your life has been leading up to that moment.

Rilla’s notes

The day after we met, I really thought I would never see Simon again. Maybe that was the unromantic side of me. I had had such a good evening that first night when he took me out to dinner, but I had convinced myself that it must have been a one-off, something not real. We had talked nonsense for three hours over our shared platter of injera (Simon had wanted to know if it made him a cannibal that he liked bread that felt so much like human skin), shiro, yellow split peas, red lentils and the house speciality, lamb stew. Over the enormous platter we discussed – well, everything. Victorian pocket-watches. Fondue and Simon’s complete abhorrence for liquid cheese. Rye crackers and how they were really hyped-up cardboard. Whether or not Liv Tyler looked like a Disney princess version of Steven Tyler. Whether or not the Steps reunion would reveal that members of that band had frozen their bodies back in the nineties and they had now re-emerged from the freezer. If concept art was actually art or just something produced by people who couldn’t paint. And whether Theresa May looked like Arrietty’s mum in the Studio Ghibli version of The Borrowers.

We played a game where each of us said something about ourselves and the other had to guess if it was true or false. If you guessed wrong you would have to take a gulp of your prosecco and if you guessed right, the other would have to take a drink. The scale of this game varied from Simon saying he didn’t vote in the last election and that he nearly joined the army, to me saying that I had a girlfriend in college. We moved on from there – after several glasses of prosecco – to talking about our families. I was holding a hand up at this point and looking through the keyhole made by my fingers to see if Simon looked any bigger if I looked at him through a telescope. It was possibly time to lay off the sparkly.

I bit my lip and eyed him. ‘I have an enormous family where everyone has a say about everything you’re doing,’ I said. I don’t know what it was that made me start talking about my family. Maybe I wanted to lay it all out there, get the worst over with. Maybe I wanted to test if it would put him off me. Or maybe I just couldn’t stop picking at scabs. ‘There’s no polite reticence about giving advice. It’s all, Why aren’t you doing this in your life, and, Why are you doing that. Like why don’t I have a real job, when am I finishing my MA, why am I doing a pointless MA in the first place. When am I getting married to a nice Indian boy, and having two children, one boy and one girl.’ I shut one eye. ‘You do look bigger, I’m sure of it.’ I put the other hand up to the other eye – would binoculars have the same effect? But then I started speaking again. It felt like now that I had started talking about the GIF, I couldn’t stop. What was this, a confession? ‘There are so many of them. Don’t ask how they’re all related to us – because the thing is they’re probably not – but everyone is family.’

I gave up trying to focus through my binoculars – the telescope had worked better – and tried instead to spear one yellow split pea with my fork. It kept slipping away, but finally I had it. ‘Ah ha!’

‘That’s nothing,’ Simon said. ‘If you can get the tiny red lentils, then I’ll be impressed.’

We both tried this fruitlessly for several minutes.

‘Dad is working on a book,’ I told him, spearing him a chickpea since he was having no luck with the red lentils, and popping it in his mouth with my fork. ‘So he can’t talk about anything but indexes and references and tables and things at the moment. But if you do talk about those things, he can go on for hours. He comes from a very academic family. Research oozes out of his pores.’

‘Did he train to be an academic?’

‘Dad studied history at university. Mum and Dad both did. They both love it in their own way – Dad with his obsession for studying the same thing for years, and Mum picking at morsels like a bird. Dad comes from a family of academics but Mum’s the first teacher in her family – her family is made of businessmen, so everyone thinks of her and Dad as starving academics. Mum—’ I fiddled with a piece of injera.

‘Your mum?’ he prodded.

It was ridiculous that at the age of twenty-five I still found it difficult to talk about my mother. But how to explain to him the strained relationship we’d always had, a strain that you couldn’t even pinpoint, that was hardly visible to anyone else – except perhaps my father.

I sat back in my chair. The restaurant was decorated in red and brown and orange striped curtains, little cane stools and chairs, and there were metal ornaments everywhere – silver glasses and curly jugs, platters and bells and little lyres. A man walked into the room, lifted a mike up onto a raised section in the corner, sat down on a stool and started playing the lute. We listened to him for a few moments. I drew circles on the rim of my glass. Talking about the GIF, this was new territory for me. But there was something about Simon. Something that made me want him to see the real me – or at least something of the real me.

‘I don’t know. I can irritate her pretty easily.’ I tried to think back to when I was a child. ‘I love this bunny rabbit, I said once to her at a jumble sale. I love it so much, I love it so much, Mummy, can we please get it, Mummy please, I’ll die if we don’t! And she got it for me. It was this patchwork thing, all floppy, with enormous ears, one blue, one pink. But then on the way back home its ear – the pink one – started falling apart. I hate this bunny rabbit, I cried, I hate it, it’s so ugly, I hate it! I actually started wailing and beating my fists about.’ I shook my head ruefully. ‘It was like the end of the world. I was five.’

‘Ears are kind of important,’ Simon said, taking a sip of his prosecco. ‘What did your mum say?’

‘She got really cross about how my feelings were always going from one extreme to another. She wanted me to be level about things. We used to get into spats like that all the time, over just about everything. She found my feelings unnerving, that’s the only way I can explain it. If I was crying, it would make her anxious. Stop crying, Rilla, she would say, please, just stop making such a scene, can’t you ever think about other people, you’re so selfish! Anyway, that time she took the bunny rabbit and threw it out of the car window. I cried about it for a week. I imagined it being squashed under cars and dying slowly and painfully, and it was all my fault for making such a fuss about its ear. Mum said it was my fault. But it was like the harder I tried to please her, the more impossible I found it to keep my feelings level. I know it sounds stupid.’

I abruptly stopped talking. I felt stupid. Why was I talking so much about my family? But Simon was looking at me like he wanted to hear what I was saying, like he wanted to know – everything. I felt self-conscious all of a sudden. Yet I couldn’t look away from him either.

‘Do you still do that?’ he asked suddenly, softly.

I looked at him in surprise. ‘Try to keep my feelings under control? Around people, I guess, sometimes,’ I said defensively. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Oh, totally. I try my best to show my dad I don’t care about anything at all.’ He grinned. ‘God, he’s so uptight. He hates me making jokes about everything, so I do it even more.’

‘That’s funny. I didn’t think you’d react to what he thinks. Or even care what he thinks, come to that.’

He was playing with the cork of our bottle. He looked up at me and gave me that lazy sideways smile. ‘I care what you think.’

I gazed back into his eyes. I had had too much to drink. I stared at his dark hair, the way it fell onto his forehead, the ear with the scar he had got when he fell off his bike as a boy because he was carrying a rescued mouse in one hand, the eyebrows that made him look slightly concerned about something, his way of looking up at you with a direct gaze.

‘You are way too cocky to care what I think.’

‘Too cocky, makes too many jokes, doesn’t care what anyone thinks. That sounds annoying.’

I looked at those ocean eyes. ‘It’s …’ I couldn’t find the right words ‘reassuring,’ I said finally. ‘And kind of sexy.’

That’s when we ended up in the toilet of that particular restaurant, with my arms and legs wrapped around him, my back pressed to the green tiles, his hands tangled in my hair, kissing to the lute of the man on the stool outside. Now I remember.

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