Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City

She woke up with a shudder.

Jammu’s father had been killed in 1974 when a helicopter carrying foreign journalists and some South Vietnamese military personnel was downed near the Cambodian border by a communist rocket. A second helicopter captured the crash on film before escaping to Saigon. Jammu and her mother had learned the news from the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune , their sole link with the man. It was from a week-old Herald Tribune that Jammu, more than a decade earlier, had first learned his name. Ever since she’d been old enough to ask, her mother had evaded her questions, dismissing the subject brusquely whenever Jammu tried to bring it up. Then, in the spring before she entered the university, her mother spoke. They were at the breakfast table on the veranda, Maman with her Herald Tribune and Jammu with her algebra book. Her mother nudged the paper across the table and scraped a long fingernail across an article at the bottom of the front page:

TENSION MOUNTS ON

SINO-INDIAN BORDER

Peter B. Clancy

Jammu read a few paragraphs, but she didn’t know why. She looked up for an explanation.

“That’s your father.”

The tone was typically matter-of-fact. Maman spoke only English to Jammu, and spoke it with a perverse disdain, as if she didn’t accept the language’s word for anything. Jammu scanned the article again. Countercharges. Secessionist. Bleak vistas. Peter B. Clancy. “A reporter?” she said.

“Mm.”

Her mother wouldn’t say what he was like. Having acknowledged his existence, she proceeded to ridicule her daughter’s curiosity. There was no story to tell, she said. They’d met in Kashmir. They’d left the country and spent two years in Los Angeles, where Clancy took a degree of some sort. Then Maman had returned, alone, to Bombay, not Srinagar, with her baby, and had lived there ever since. Nowhere in this obituary narrative did she suggest that Clancy was anything more than a second set of luggage. Jammu got the idea—things hadn’t worked out. It didn’t matter, either. The city was full of bastards, and Maman, in any case, was oblivious to public opinion. The newspapers called her the “laughing jackal of real estate.” Laughing all the way to the bank, they meant. She was a speculator and slumlord, one of the more successful in a town of speculation and slums.

Jammu selected two Tylenols and a Dexedrine from her top drawer and swallowed them with coffee dregs. She’d finished the night’s reading sooner than she’d planned. It was only 6:30. In Bombay it was 5:00 in the evening—Indian time was a quaint half hour out of step with the rest of the world—and Maman was probably at home, upstairs, pouring her first drink. Jammu reached for the phone, got the international operator, and gave her the numbers.

The connection hissed with the difficult spanning of half a world. Of course in India even local calls hissed this way. Maman answered.

“It’s me,” Jammu said.

“Oh, hello.”

“Hello. Are there any messages?”

“No. The town seems empty without your friends.” Her mother laughed. “Homesick?”

“Not especially.”

“Apropos—has the Enlightened Despot called you?”

“Ha ha.”

“Seriously. She’s in New York. The U.N. General Session opened.”

“That’s a thousand miles from here.”

“Oh, she could afford to call. She chooses not to. Yes. She simply chooses not to. I read this morning—do you still read the papers?”

“When I have time.”

“That’s right. When you have time. I read about her mini-summit with American intellectuals is what I was going to say. Front page, column one. Asimov, Sagan—futurists. She’s a wonder. Study her and you can learn. Not that she’s infallible. I noticed Asimov was eating ribs in the picture they ran. But anyway – How is St. Louis?”

“Temperate. Very dry.”

“And you with your sinuses. How is Singh?”

“Singh is Singh. I’m expecting him any minute.”

“Just don’t let him handle your accounts.”

“He’s handling my accounts.”

“Willful child. I’ll have to send Bhandari over later this month to check the arrangements. Singh is not—”

“Here? You’re sending Karam here?”

“Only for a few days. Expect him on the twenty-ninth or so.”

“Don’t send Karam. I don’t like him.”

“And I don’t like Singh.” There was a faint sound that Jammu recognized as the rattle of ice in a tumbler. “Listen dear, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“All right. Good-bye.”

Maman and Indira were blood relations, Kashmiri Brahmans, sharing a great-grandfather on the Nehru side. It was no coincidence that Jammu had been admitted to the Indian Police Service less than a year after Indira became prime minister. Once she was in the Service, no one had been ordered to promote her, of course, but occasional phone calls from the Ministry would let the pertinent officials know that her career was being watched “with interest.” Over the years she herself had received hundreds of calls similar in their vagueness, though more immediate in their concerns. A Maharashtra state legislator would express great interest in a particular prosecution, a Congress Party boss would express great distress over a particular opponent’s business dealings. Very seldom did a call originate from higher up than the governor’s office; Indira was a great student of detail, but only in curricular subjects. Like any entrenched leader, she made sure to place plenty of buffers between herself and questionable operations, and Jammu’s political operations had been questionable at best. The two of them had spoken privately only once—just after Jammu and her mother concocted Project Poori. Jammu flew to Delhi and spent seventy minutes in the garden of Madam’s residence on Safdarjang Road. Madam, in a canvas chair, watched Jammu closely, her brown eyes protuberant and her head turned slightly to one side, her lips curled in a smile that now and then made her gums click, a smile in which Jammu saw nothing but machinery. Shifting her gaze a quarter turn, towards a hedge of rosebushes behind which machine-gun muzzles sauntered, Madam spoke. “Please understand that this wholesaling project won’t work. You do understand that, you’re a sensible young woman. But we’re going to fund it anyway.”

A shoe squeaked in Jammu’s outer office. She sat up straight. “Who’s—” She cleared her throat. “Who’s there?”

Balwan Singh walked in. He was wearing pleated gray pants, a fitted white shirt, and an azure necktie with fine yellow stripes. His air was so competent and trustworthy that he scarcely needed to show his clearance papers to get upstairs. “It’s me,” he said. He set a white paper bag on Jammu’s desk.

“You were eavesdropping.”

“Me? Eavesdropping?” Singh walked to the windows. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his light skin had received additional sunniness from some Middle Eastern ancestor. Only an old friend and ex-lover like Jammu could detect the moments when the grace of his movements passed over into swishiness. She still admired him as an ornament. For a man who up until July had been living in Dharavi squalor, he would have seemed remarkably—suspiciously—dapper if he hadn’t dressed exactly the same way among his so-called comrades in Bombay, whose tastes ran to velour and Dacron and sleazy knits. Singh was a marxist of the aesthetic variety, attracted to the notion of exportable revolution at least partly because Continental stylishness was exported along with it. His haberdasher was located on Marine Drive. Jammu had long suspected he’d forsaken Sikhism as a youth because he considered a beard disfiguring.

Singh nodded at the paper bag on her desk. “There’s some breakfast if you want it.”