And who knows what might have happened, or of what, in the grip of the revenant fury, he might have become capable, if it hadn’t been for Neela, if she hadn’t been standing a whole head taller than him in her high heels and looking down like a queen, like a goddess, on his full head of long silver hair; or if she had lacked the wit to see the terror flooding across his soft, round, boyish face, the fear quivering at the corners of his Cupid’s bow mouth; or if in that last of all possible instants she had not found the inspired daring, the sheer emotional brilliance, to break the last taboo that still stood between them, to go into uncharted territory with all the courage of her love, to prove beyond all doubt that their love was stronger than fury by stretching out a long scarred arm and beginning, with great deliberation, and for the very first time in her life, to ruffle his forbidden hair, the long silver hair growing out of the top of his head.
The spell broke. He laughed out loud. A large black crow spread its wings and flew away across town, to drop dead minutes later by the Booth statue in Gramercy Park. Solanka understood that his own cure, his recovery from his rare condition, was complete. The goddesses of wrath had departed; their hold over him was broken at last. Much poison had been drained from his veins, and much that had been locked away for far too long was being set free. “I want to tell you a story,” he said; and Neela, taking his hand, led him to a sofa. “Tell me by all means, but I think it may be one I already know.”
At the end of the science fiction film Solaris, the story of an ocean-covered planet that functions as a single giant brain, can read men’s minds, and make their dreams come true, the spaceman-hero is back home at last, on the porch of his long-lost Russian dacha, with his children running joyfully around and his beautiful, dead wife alive again at his side. As the camera pulls back, endlessly, impossibly, we see that the dacha is on a tiny island set in the great ocean of Solaris: a delusion, or perhaps a deeper truth than the truth. The dacha diminishes to a speck and vanishes, and we are left with the image of the mighty, seductive ocean of memory, imagination, and dream, where nothing dies, where what you need is always waiting for you on a porch, or running toward you across a vivid lawn with childish cries and happy, open arms.
Tell me. I already know. Neela, with her heart-wisdom, had guessed why, for Professor Solanka, the past was not a joy. When he saw Solaris, he’d found that last scene horrifying. He’d known a man like this, he thought, a man who lived inside a delusion of fatherhood, trapped in a cruel mistake about the nature of fatherly love. He knew a child like this one, too, he thought, running toward the man who stood in the role of father, but that role was a be, a lie. There was no father. This was no happy home. The child was not itself. Nothing was as it seemed.
Yes, Bombay flooded back, and Solanka was living in it once again, or at least in the only part of the city that truly had a hold on him, the little patch of the past from which whole infernos could be conjured forth, his damn Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi, which had shaped his destiny and whose memory he had suppressed for over half a lifetime. Methwold’s Estate: it was more than enough for his needs. And, in particular, an apartment in a block called Noor Ville, in which for a long time he had been raised as a girl.
At first he couldn’t look his story in the eye, could only come at it sideways, by talking about the bougainvillea creeper climbing over the veranda like an Arcimboldo burglar, or like your stepfather at your bedside in the night. Or else he described the crows that came cawing like portents to his windowsill, and his conviction that he would have been able to understand their warnings if only he weren’t so unintelligent, if only he could only have concentrated a little harder, and then he could have run away from home before anything happened, so it was his own fault, his own stupid fault for failing to do the simplest thing, namely to understand the language of birds. Or, he spoke about his best friend, Chandra Venkataraghavan, whose father left home when he was ten. Malik sat in Chandra’s room and interrogated the distraught boy. Tell me how it hurts, Malik begged Chandra. I need to know. That’s how it should also hurt for me. Malik’s own father had disappeared when he was less than a year old; his pretty young mother, Mallika, had burned all the photographs and remarried within the year, gratefully taking her second husband’s name and giving it to Malik as well, cheating Malik of history as well as feeling. His father had gone and he didn’t even know his name, which was also his own. If it had been up to his mother, Malik might never have known of his father’s existence, but his stepfather told him the moment he was old enough to understand. His stepfather, who needed to excuse himself from the accusation of incest. From that if nothing else.
What had his father done for a living? Malik was never informed. Was he fat or thin, tall or short? Was his hair wavy or straight? All he could do was look in the mirror. The mystery of his father’s looks would be solved as he grew, and the face}n the glass answered his questions. “We are Solankas now,” his mother rebuked him. “It doesn’t matter about that person who never existed and who certainly doesn’t exist now. Here is your true father, who puts food on your plate and clothes on your back. Kiss his feet and do his will.”
Dr. Solanka was the second husband, a consultant at Breach Candy Hospital and a gifted composer of music in his spare time, and he was indeed a generous provider. However, as Malik discovered, his stepfather required more than just his feet to be kissed. When Malik was six years old, Mrs. Mallika Solanka—who had never conceived again, as if her absconding first husband had taken the secret of fertility away with him—was declared incapable of further childbearing and the boy’s torment began. Bring clothes and let his hair grow long and be will be our daughter as well as our son. No but, husband, how can it be, I mean, is that okay? Sure! Why not? In privacy of home all things decreed by paterfamilias are sanctioned by God Oh, my weak mother, you brought me ribbons and frocks. And when the bastard told you that your frail constitution, all wheezes and colds, would benefit from daily exercise, when he sent you away for long walks at the Hanging Gardens or Mahalaxmi Racecourse, did you not think to ask why he did not walk by your side; why, dismissing the ayah, he insisted on caring for his little “girl” alone? Oh, my poor dead mother who betrayed her only child. After a whole year of this, Malik had finally screwed up enough courage to ask the unaskable. Mummy, why does Doctor Sahib push me down? What push you down, how push you down, what nonsense is this? Mummy, when he stands there and puts his hand on my bead and pushes me down and makes me kneel. When, Mummy, he loosens his pajama, when, Mummy, when he lets it fall. She had hit him then, hard and repeatedly. Never tell me your evil lies again or I will beat you till you are deaf and dumb. For some reason you have a down on this man who is the only father you have ever known. For some reason you don’t want your mother to be happy, so you tell these lies, don’t think I don’t know you, the wickedness in your heart; how do you think itfeels when all the mothers say, your Malik, darling, such imagination, ask him a question and who knows what he’ll come out with? Oh, I know what it means: it means you are telling whoppers all over town, and l have an evil liar for a child.
After that he was deaf and dumb. After that when the pushes came on the top of his beribboned head he thudded obediently to his knees, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. But long months later things did change. One day Dr. Solanka was visited by Chandra’s father, Mr. Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan the important banker, and they remained closeted together for more than an hour. Voices were raised, then swiftly lowered. Mallika was summoned, then swiftly dismissed. Malik hung back at the far end of a corridor, wide-eyed, speechless, clinging to a doll. Finally, Mr. Venkat left, looking like thunder, pausing only to pick up and hug Malik (who was dressed for Venkat’s visit in a white shirt and shorts), and to mutter, with high color burning in his face, “Don’t worry, my boy. Quoth the raven: nevermore.” That same afternoon, all the dresses and bows were taken away to be burned; but Malik insisted on being allowed to keep his dolls. Dr. Solanka never laid a forger on him again. Whatever threats Mr. Venkat had made had had their effect. (When Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan left home to become a sanyasi, ten-year-old Malik Solanka had greatly feared that his stepfather might revert to the old routine. But it seemed Dr. Solanka had learned his lesson. Malik Solanka, however, never spoke to his stepfather again.)