Spiral Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

reality. It was all about the past. He rambled on about the efficiency of theBritish civil service, partition and its calamities, how well the family hierarchy worked when he was young. If I spoke about practical matters, like selling the land we owned in Manikpur, he stared blankly at me and then tapped the floor with his walking stick to indicate he’d had enough.’ Zia recalls Abba’s behaviour good-naturedly. ‘If you wanted to end a chat quickly, all you had to do was mention land sales. But now…his language has almost gone.’
    ‘Must be difficult for you.’ I wince at how hollow my concern sounds. ‘How do you cope with so many people living in the same house?’ Immediately I regret asking. We grew up in a house with aunts, uncles and cousins. But now I shudder at the prospect of living without a sense of space and, more importantly, silence.
    ‘We manage,’ Zia says. ‘What’s the choice? The company’s given me a big house. I have to bear the family’s responsibilities.’ He pauses. ‘No one else will.’
    ‘You’re being very generous.’ I’m not exaggerating. Zia’s never been mean-spirited with those who’re close to him. Despite his addiction to power and the luxuries that money can afford, I’ve never known Zia’s self-indulgence to be deliberately at the expense of a relative’s well-being.
    ‘I don’t suppose you’ve any intention of coming back home permanently.’ He makes no effort to conceal his displeasure at this foregone conclusion.
    ‘Home? It’s not a physical location any more. More like several places in the mind. I like the flexibility of such an arrangement.’ I manage to nettle Zia. Hedoesn’t like abstractions, especially when he wants to argue a case.
    As for myself, I’m not entirely convinced by what I’ve just said, now that I’m back in the city where I was born fifty-three years ago. I look out of the car window with mixed emotions. Regret, nostalgia, dread and curiosity create a mesh in which I feel myself trapped and my sense of selfhood already splintering.
    I think of a little boy running past sweet shops with a handful of coins, and then stopping to watch a snake charmer piping a tune and mesmerising a cobra. There’s the old fortune teller who scares the lad with talk about ghosts and strange lands. A performance by monkeys and a dance of eunuchs. But interspersed among these memories are more recent images of winter days and the roar of footy fans at the MCG. The aroma of hot chips and the greasy crust of a pie. I’m walking along Bridge Road, window shopping, stopping for a short black. Losing my grip on time as I browse in a bookshop in Carlton. I don’t fully appreciate the pace of my lifestyle until I go overseas.
    The indigenous man of the subcontinent and the migrant will never reconcile their differences and live as an entity. With each passing year, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide where I’d rather be. There will always be an awareness of the pieces that are missing. Now I’m unable to silence the voice of lament that whispers about denial and loss. But regret has given way to resigned acceptance.
    We pass by ramshackle shops and open-air bazaars. On either side of the road, there’s a kind of distorted order in the haphazard enactments of life’s dramas. I connect sporadically with the spontaneous rhythm of living. In this city of my childhood there’s nothing to be grasped with any sense of permanence. Tomorrow is encased in an entirely different dimension of time, unconnected with the present, unworthy of worry. Life is to be lived according to the dictates of here and now. Suddenly the swirl of colours, the noise, the people and their movements grip me with an intensity that is both exhilarating and intimidating.
    The truck in front of us groans to a stop. Zia slows down. ‘Shit! Not another demonstration!’
    Hordes of people approach. Hoarse, outraged voices. There’s a display of posters and placards. A faded