Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Eileen lived in a street of stalls and small, open-fronted shops on the wrong side of Pondi’s canal; the Indian side, the ville noire , encrusted with time and filth. A crow picked at something in the gutter by her door. Tom feared it was a kitten.

In Australia, separated from his wife by a length of Tasmanian oak, the racket and reek of the bazaar returned keenly to him. Eileen’s azure room was oppressive with calculation and yearning. Children were its familiars. It held fl eeting, unique lives. Tom could not find a way to convert these things into narrative. The dailiness of India was too much with him.

Yet his wife required an anecdote. He spoke of the bureaucratic pettifogging that dogged his cousins, of immigration officials who didn’t have a clue; thus engaging Karen’s sympathy and deflecting her attention. She was given to causes, her imagination too broadly netted for the merely individual.

Tom had taken his camera with him when he visited Eileen. He came home one evening with packets of newly processed fi lm to find Karen drinking wine with a colleague. The two women sifted through his photos of Pondicherry, exclaiming over flame-coloured blossom arched above a pair of rickshaws, and a brass-belled cow grazing in front of a bicycle-repair shop painted sugar-almond pink. They loved India, they agreed.

Eileen and Cedric sat side by side, posed on red rexine.

Tom recalled what he had noticed when taking the picture: that being photographed was not a casual affair for his cousins. The flash found them smiling and attentive. Their image would circulate where they could not. It was not something to be yielded lightly.

Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘Well, the whole Christian thing-it’s not like it belongs in India.’

The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, fl oated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.

Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that fl oated and gleamed.

In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.

His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.

He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.

Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.

Whenever he thought of the waiting going on around the globe, Tom was afraid. He feared that the ground of his life would give way; that he would fall into a room where, powerless as a figurine, he would have nothing to do but wait. Transformed into a human commodity, he would fi nd himself competing with thousands of identical products, all waiting to be chosen. It was an irrational, potent dread. It had visited Tom, assuming one shape, now another, for years. It whispered of the life led by millions, a phantom life characterised by stasis and the dull absence of hope; an unmodern life, where the best that could be expected of the future was that it be no worse than the past.

Of late, its mutter had grown louder. Tom knew that this crescendo was bound up with his mother. As Iris’s body failed, he felt her claim on him grow forceful. He felt the proximity of history. The present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming it, and rejecting what remains. But Tom could remember the aromatic streets of his childhood, where faeces, animal and human, lingered on display. The past waited too: odorous, unhygienic, surplus; refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.

Eileen and Cedric still lived on the black side of the canal, New Zealand having deemed superfluous such talents as they possessed.

But recently their son had won a scholarship to a mid-western college. Tom pictured him in a laboratory, calibrating instruments; on a sidewalk, astonished by snow.

Realism argued that the scholar would in time buy a Lexus and alter his idiom; would transfer money telegraphically, and put off lifting a phone to hear of a sister’s disappointments, a parent’s decline.

Yet it was apparent to Tom that people, like nations, grew stunted on a diet of realism alone. To soar it was necessary to imagine the transcendent case.

Arthur Loxley, pinkly moist in the tropics, spoke often of the cold. He described childhood winters: his eerie morning face in the basin’s ice mirror; a flaw that opened under his skates on a frozen pond and raced, a flame along a lit fuse, towards the shore.

It was talk that horrified his wife. As a bride, Iris’s great-grandmother had visited Lisbon in January. The sky was blue enamel, mosaic pavements sparkled in the sun. On her ninety-sixth birthday Henrietta de Souza was still reliving the deception she had experienced on drawing off a glove and holding out her hand to a slanted ray. ‘The sun was cold!’ the old lady declared in cracked, imperious tones, and thumped her stick on a tile painted with a spouting whale. ‘The sun was cold!’

That unnatural reversal worked powerfully on her Iris’s imagination. The European Winter: she pictured it as a beast.

It lay open-mawed across the jewelled cavern of London, daring her to pass. In Lawrence Fitch’s embrace, envisaging her English future as wavelets travelled from her thighs to her throat, she saw herself the plaything of icy paws; and shuddered, so that the captain, finding her name circulating with the port and himself the object of regimental envy, felt justified in referring to her as a ravishing little trollop.

When the earth cracked open in pre-monsoonal heat, Arthur evoked the geometric precision of snowfl akes. Fanning himself with a newspaper, he spoke of wind-whipped sleet, and the brown slush on Coventry pavements. He described the sensation of grasping iron chains in a frozen playground, and how to fashion a man from snow.

He held his son entranced with tales of icy queens, and wolves howling through black, leafless woods. There was a story about a ship manned by wraiths that might be glimpsed in Arctic latitudes, hoar-frost diamonds in its rigging. A bookseller’s warren yielded a musty yellow volume written by a Dane; and a five-year-old who had never known cold shed warm tears at the plight of a small girl freezing with her tray of matches.

Tom tilted a glass of whisky, the better to observe the melting of icebergs.

In time he had encountered theories of cultural identity and discovered that his childhood had been deficient in reading that reflected the world around him. The argument had its force; and was, like all orthodoxies, blind in one eye. It viewed Arthur’s stories as nostalgic exercises in the colonial project of ignoring what was indigenous and vital in favour of alien constructions.

Tom saw the thing as more intricate, and himself as happy to have experienced, when young, the empire of imagination. Stories with Indian backdrops offered the pleasure of recognition. Those that brought outlandish elements into play posed India as one reality among many.