‘I lured him out into an alley to see what he’d do with no one else around. I ended up spending a month in hospital.’
‘Shit.’ As Prabir’s anger subsided, a fierce core of protectiveness remained. But anything he said would have sounded melodramatic now that Felix had reached the point where he could laugh the whole thing off.
‘Madhusree told me about the expedition.’ Felix kept his eyes on the arrowhead. ‘She can’t understand why you’re so set against it.’
Prabir was about to deny this and stick to his claim of insufficient funds, but then it occurred to him that Felix would probably offer to help. He said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. There are still pirates all around those islands.’
Felix didn’t contradict him, directly. ‘The expedition’s being led by experienced local scientists; I’m sure they’ll take sensible precautions. And I can’t think of many places a biologist would want to go that aren’t potentially dangerous, one way or another.’
Prabir shifted awkwardly on the lab stool. It was easy to laugh off the sense of betrayal he felt, at the thought of Madhusree and Felix ganging up against him. But when he brushed aside his paranoia and told himself that Madhusree was entitled to seek other allies—it couldn’t always be the two of them against the world—that realisation still left him feeling almost unbearably lonely.
Felix looked up and said bluntly, ‘She was a lot younger than you when your parents died. If she’s not worried about going back, why can’t you just accept that?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’re the one who always wanted her to be proud of them. Now she wants to carry on their work! And even if there’d been no new discoveries… don’t you think she might have wanted to return eventually? Just to see where everything happened? However much you’ve told her, it’s not the same.’
Prabir said, ‘Can we get out of here? They’re going to give our table to someone else.’
‘Yeah, I’ve finished.’ Felix packed up quickly, then grabbed his jacket. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not going to harangue you all night. But I promised her I’d talk to you.’
‘And now you have.’
Felix led the way out of the work room, into a maze of corridors. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, talk to her. Properly. You owe her that.’
‘
Felix snorted with amusement. ‘That’s one thing I love about you: you could have given her a lung and a kidney, and you still wouldn’t be able to milk it for sympathy with any conviction.’
Prabir was caught off balance. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’ The compliment pleased him, but this wasn’t the time to admit that.
Felix said, ‘This is a good thing for both of you, any way you look at it. And if you think it’s dangerous for Madhusree to go traipsing through the jungle for a couple of weeks, you can’t have much idea of what most nineteen-year-olds get up to.’
‘Oh, so now you’re the expert on that too?’
‘No, but I can still remember what it was like.’
Prabir had no reply. He’d always imagined that was how he understood Madhusree; by being young enough to remember. But nothing about his own life at nineteen resembled hers. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d had a child to look after; he’d also had any adolescent attraction to risk knocked out of him, well in advance. His entire adulthood had been devoid of excitement.
No, the whole point was to keep her safe.
Prabir stopped dead. There was a dusty display case full of tropical butterflies hanging on the wall, with fading labels that looked like they’d been produced on a manual typewriter. It had probably been hanging there since some era when this corridor lay on a route between public exhibits, long before the latest round of rebuilding.
He said, ‘Getting her away from there was the one good thing I’ve done in my life. And now everyone expects me to pack her bags and buy her a ticket. It’s surreal. Why don’t you just ask me to blow my brains out while you’re at it? I’m not going to do it.’
Felix backtracked, and saw what he was looking at. ‘What you did was get her away from the war. She wouldn’t be going back to that.’
Prabir had lost interest in trying to justify himself. He said flatly, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it.’
Felix wasn’t that easily intimidated. ‘No, but I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me. It’d be a fucking lonely world if that never worked.’
Prabir aimed lower. ‘Doesn’t it ever cross your mind that there are things I don’t want you to understand?’
Prabir worked late, to keep his mind blank for as long as possible. He tinkered for five hours with a perfectly good class definition template for tellers, trying to improve its eye contact and shave a few milliseconds off its response times. In the end he gave up, discarding everything he’d done, trawling through the automatic backups and erasing them all manually—the closest he could get to the physical experience of screwing up a sheaf of paper.
As he walked out of the building he felt a kind of defiant pride, in place of the usual sense of regret at his stupidity. It wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He didn’t want to be with Felix or Madhusree. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. Numbing himself with a few hours of vacuous make-work every night until he was safely asleep on his feet was infinitely preferable to taking up alcohol.
Sitting in the bus, he ached all over. He was shivering too, though he’d felt the usual blast of warm air as he’d stepped on board. With a shock he realised that he probably had some kind of mild viral infection. Despite the change of climate he hadn’t suffered so much as a cold since arriving in Toronto; the immigration authorities had inoculated him against everything in sight. But he hadn’t kept up to date with booster shots, and it looked as if some new strain had finally broken through his defences.
When he entered the apartment, Madhusree’s door was open, but her room was in darkness. Even from a distance, as Prabir’s eyes adjusted he could see that her desk had been tidied, everything cleared away or straightened into neat piles.
There was a note taped to the fridge. She’d never told him exactly when the expedition was leaving, but he’d been half expecting something like this for days.
He read the note several times, compulsively, as if he might have missed something. Madhusree explained that she’d raised part of the money working in a cafe, and borrowed the rest from friends. She apologised for doing everything behind his back, but pointed out that this had made it easier for both of them. She promised to reveal nothing about their parents’ work until she returned and they’d had a chance to discuss the matter properly; in the meantime, the expedition would have to rely on its own discoveries. She’d be back within three months. She’d be careful.
Prabir sat in the kitchen with tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d never felt happier for her, or more proud of her. She’d overcome everything now. Even him. She’d refused to let him smother her with his paranoia and insecurity.
He suddenly recalled the night they’d resolved to leave Amita. At the start of the week, Madhusree had announced that her class had begun studying the civil rights movement. Then, at dinner on Friday, she’d informed Keith and Amita that she finally understood what their work at the university was all about.
Keith had flashed Prabir a victorious smirk, and Amita had cooed, ‘Aren’t you clever? Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learnt.’
Madhusree had expounded with her usual nine-year-old’s volubility. ‘In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them.
