A Fatal Inversion Read Online Free Page A

Had they not all agreed when they left Ecalpemos and went their separate ways that it was to be as if they had never met, known each other, lived together, but that in future they must be strangers and more than strangers? Adam, no doubt, adhered to this. So, probably, did Rufus and the girl. There was something, some quality, more fatalistic, more resigned, in Shiva. He might deceive others, but he was incapable of deceiving himself, of pretending, of denying thoughts. It would not have occurred to him to attempt forgetfulness by inhibiting memories of Ecalpemos. He remembered it every day.
    “It was at that place I told you about that I knew him,” he said to Lili. “He was one of the group of us there. Well, he was the one, it was his place.”
    “All the better not to know him then,” said Lili.
    She bought their tickets. Adam had been right, it was in an East London near ghetto that Shiva lived. Lili tucked the two slips of green cardboard into a fold of her sari. She was only half Indian, her mother being a Viennese woman who had come to England as an au pair and married a doctor from Darjeeling, a surgical registrar in a Bradford hospital. When Lili grew up and the doctor died, her mother went home and settled in Salzburg selling Glockenturm beer mugs in a souvenir shop. It was there that they went each summer, during Shiva’s holidays, their fares paid by Sabine Schnitzler who, having reverted to her maiden name and largely to her native tongue, sometimes wore a surprised, even bewildered look at being surrounded, as she put it, by “all those Indians.” For Lili, whose skin was nearly as white as Adam Verne-Smith’s, was more Indian than true Indians, wore the sari, grew her curly brown Austrian hair down to her waist, and took language lessons from a Bengali neighbor of theirs. In her voice were hints of the singsong tone, Welsh in its rhythms, so characteristic of the Indian speaking English. Shiva thought he should be grateful for all this, though he was not. How would he have felt, he sometimes asked himself, if he had married a woman who set herself against his ethnic origins?
    He had told Lili about Ecalpemos before they married. It would not have been in his nature, nor would he have been inclined, to do otherwise… . But he had not gone into details, giving only the bare outline, the facts, and Lili had asked few questions. He bore in mind that the time might come when he would have to tell her everything.
    “It wasn’t your fault,” she had finally said.
    “It’s true that they never consulted me. If I had given my advice, it would have been ignored.”
    “Well, then.”
    He began haltingly to explain but stopped himself. He could tell the truth but not all the truth. Openness did not demand that he tell her he had suggested it.
    “You should try to forget,” she said.
    “I suppose I feel that would be wrong. I ought never to forget about the kiddy.”
    And it was perhaps inevitable that he should see the death of his own child, his and Lili’s, as retribution, as a just punishment. Yet he was not a Christian to look at things in this light. He was not really a Hindu either. His parents had neglected this aspect of his upbringing, having largely abandoned their religion but for a few outer forms before he was born. Some lingering race memory remained though, some pervading conviction common to all Orientals, that this life was but one of many on the great wheel of existence and that reincarnation as someone better endowed or worse (in his case surely worse) awaited him. He saw himself returning as a beggar with limbs deliberately deformed whining for alms on the seafront at Bombay. The incongruity was that at the same time he was convinced of retribution in this world. He saw the death of his son, a placenta previa child who died during Lili’s labor, as direct vengeance, though he could not have said who was exacting it.
    Crossing the hospital courtyard that divided the maternity wing