His fifty-fifth birthday came at the end of December when the city moved into its brief winter. She took a taxi to a Parsi bakery at Kemps Corner and bought a cake in the shape of a heart. On the way back she rolled the window down and felt the breeze against her face. It smelled of camphor. There was a traffic jam on Grand Road Bridge. For ten or fifteen minutes the cab stood in one spot, trapped in a tight squeeze of vehicles. Then a procession passed, a small group of mourners in single file, behind them four men carrying a bier. The body, covered in a single sheet, bounced with every jolting step the bearers took, bounced so much she wondered if it would fall to the bridge. The sight filled her with such unease that the pleasure she’d felt a moment earlier vanished and she remembered something a customer had read out from an English newspaper. It was a quote from the Mahabharata that the newspaper had placed on its editorial page as a thought for the day: Only eunuchs worship Fate. The girak had made a joke of it, asking her if it was true, but the words had stayed with her. For she did believe in Fate and ghosts and bad luck, and if this made her doubly a eunuch there was nothing she could do to change it. It was Fate.
The door of the khana was open when she walked in, late, the cake held in front of her. Mr Lee was on the floor with his eyes open, his knee bent under him. She took him to the hospital where they operated on his leg. The doctor told her he’d had a stroke, a minor one, but he would need to be looked after. He came home with his leg in a cast and fear in his eyes. His mind skipped years, slipping backward or forward without regard for chronology. He lost faith in linear time. He told her his autobiography by describing the rooms he had lived in: the house he’d taken as an officer, the mud-floored house he grew up in, hotels he’d lived in for weeks on end, rooms in Rangoon, Chittagong, Delhi and cities he’d forgotten the names of. His first place in Bombay was a shared room in a hostel near Grant Road and he ate in an ashram kitchen, the food vegetarian, heavy, hard to digest. Disgust, he said, meaning: it was disgusting. He said, I enjoy return to my room at night because I speak Cantonese to myself in mirror. I like to hear sound of my language. He carried on long interrupted conversations with the mirror about the city’s terrible food, the dirtiness and bad manners and the sharp body odour that all Indians shared, because spicy food smells were exiting through the pores. As he spoke, he became the person in the stories he told her, a young officer in the army, a student, a refugee driving from town to town, a child. He spoke of bicycles and books, a fur cap he received when he turned eight and a village of people named Lee. He spoke of a woman with rope burns around her neck and a man who froze to death in the summer. His voice rarely rose above a whisper and it regained its authority only when he uttered the word ‘China’.
Chapter Two White Lotus, White Clouds
His mother wore glasses with heavy black frames. When the frames broke she fixed them with tape. The glasses were not correctly aligned and they made her look cockeyed but she continued to wear them. He went with her to exchange their ration coupons for rice and he walked ahead and pretended not to know the woman with the bandaged spectacles. On the street a group of boys imitated her walk and crooked eyes. When they laughed at her the woman with the bandaged spectacles laughed too. She laughed shyly, covering her mouth with her hands like a child. The state of her spectacles did not stop the woman from reading the Red Flag every day. She refused to read anything else. She denounced the People’s Daily and other publications as reactionary organs, or revisionist, or feudal, decadent and counter-revolutionary. The woman worked in a factory and she complained to the bosses that her fellow workers were indulging in pornography. The seriousness of the charge brought the Deputy Secretary to the floor to investigate. When he discovered that the workers had been discussing a foreign news magazine, in particular the skimpy dresses worn by the models in the advertisements, the deputy secretary chided the woman, but it went no further than that, because after all she was an example of revolutionary fervour. She believed in herbal medicine and acupuncture. She carried a bottle of eucalyptus oil, which she used to treat everything from headaches, period pains, upset stomachs and inflammations, to more serious maladies such as burns and cuts. She wore black or blue tunics all year round and black canvas shoes. On her head was a green peaked cap, a man’s cap. Despite the lecture she received from the Deputy Secretary, she continued to denounce her fellow factory workers as decadent or reactionary, and she refused to have anything to do with them because they discussed frivolous matters such as clothes and monetary troubles. She had a hatred for money. She handed her wages back to the supervisor and said, I don’t want to be contaminated by filth. Then she told him: Be careful, be very careful or it will corrupt you without your knowledge. When the workers were given a bonus she refused to accept it, because, she said, a bonus was revisionism in its ugliest form. At the same time, his father looked after the expenses of the household, including food, clothes and medicines for the three of them, and for this service he received only contempt from the woman.
His father smoked from the moment he woke to the minute he fell asleep. He smoked a Chinese brand made from Virginia tobacco that he bought by the carton. When there was no money for cigarettes he bought loose black tobacco that he smoked in a pipe. His father wasn’t much of a communist. At the height of the fervour, the villagers dug a tunnel through a nearby mountain, dug it with their bare hands and the most rudimentary of tools. Some army officers and a revolutionary leader visited the site and named it ‘Tunnel of the People’s Triumph’. His father took no part in the construction. He was heard to say that the villagers, his relatives, all of whom carried the surname Lee, would have spent their time more profitably by building a road around the mountain or by using a truck. He voiced this opinion loudly but there was no reprisal from the Party. The village of Lees was known not only for the ideological correctness of its inhabitants but also for his father, who wrote a series of novels about a tramp named Ah Chu. The tramp had a knack for disaster and his inner life was reflected on his face, which was covered in boils. Ah Chu’s life unfolded in real time, for there was a book every year or every other year, and readers waited to discover what foolishness he’d been up to since the last instalment, and how much further his life had unravelled. The reason for the popularity of the series, particularly with the communists, was because Ah Chu was seen as a symbol of Republican China and because there were plenty of jokes. The first of the series, The Childhood of Ah Chu, opened with a joke about Ah Chu’s father, a corrupt government official who carries his cynicism everywhere, on display, like a great open wound. He believes in nothing and trusts no one and has no interests except wine. One afternoon a friend visits and finds Ah Chu’s father calmly cutting off his pigtail. What are you doing? asks the friend. Have you gone mad? I’m cutting my hair because my son has left home, says Ah Chu’s father. The man notices something that surprises him even more than his friend’s mutilated pigtail. Tell me, he says, why are you sober today? I’ve decided to give up drink until my son returns to the bosom of his family, says Ah Chu’s father. Where has your son gone? asks the friend. To buy more wine, says Ah Chu’s father. It was not the best joke going around at the time, but readers loved it, for they loved jokes, even bad ones, and the book went into reprints.
*
Lee was still in school when his mother decided she wanted a degree, though she didn’t know what kind of degree or which subject she would study. She didn’t believe in culture. She didn’t believe in books. She didn’t believe in knowledge that did not benefit society as a whole. She believed that indiscriminate individual reading was detrimental to progress because it filled the populace with yearnings that were impossible to identify, much less satisfy. Societies with the highest literacy rates also had the highest suicide rates, she said. Some kinds of knowledge were not meant to be freely available, she said, because all men and women were not equipped to receive such knowledge in an equal and equally useful way. She did not believe in art for art’s sake; she did not believe in freedom of expression; she did not believe in her husband, whose stature as a novelist she regarded with suspicion mixed with shame. Despite her lifelong aversion to culture she would go to university because she wanted to be a teacher. Teaching was the noblest profession in the world, she said. It was selfless, revolutionary and critical to the nation’s well-being. It concerned itself not with money, which was irredeemably dirty, but with the future of the mind. As she made these stunning proclamations, Lee’s mother watched herself in the mirror. She held her head up and straightened her back. What was she doing? Was she imagining herself as the heroine of a revolutionary movie? Or was she imagining her role at the forefront of the new China? When she turned to face the boy her expression was cold and inhuman, as if she was staring at a pitiless desert landscape, a featureless yellow vista where all crimes were condoned and anything was possible except hope.