The Man Within My Head Read Online Free Page B

Japan, with Hiroko, thousands of miles from the nearest relative, in a land where officials were inclined to strip-search me every other time I entered, so improbable did my presence seem. I didn’t quite say that a physical location is unimportant so long as you live among values and assumptions that strike you as your own—or the ones you’d like to learn. I didn’t even go so far as to assert that home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down. I noticed him putting a hand on the girl’s arm, and so another question was answered, and a life began to form behind the counter.
    Why Mexico? Why not the Gulf States or East Africa, or even Kobe, in Japan, where there would be other Indians like himself to share the burden of displacement? My ancestral people are an itinerant lot, given to putting themselves in faraway places where the law of supply and demand will sustain them even if that of cause and effect does not; in the battered Alaskan town of Skagway, a few years later, I’d run into a man from Bombay, with his wife and daughter, draping gold necklaces and pendants over the hands of cruise-ship passengers, in a tiny Gold Rush settlement that for seven monthsof every year saw no visitors at all. In Alice Springs sixteen months on, the man who checked me in to my hotel during a sudden downpour in the desert was a friendly émigré from Bombay, another Bombay exile smiling behind the counter of the next hotel down the street.
    But this man was alone, in terms of obvious kin, and I wondered about his nights, whom he turned to in the dark. Hiroko and I walked back to our hotel in the hot afternoon—knowing we’d be away tomorrow, in the next town of exiles—and yet I never really left the man behind. When I got back to Japan, I wrote a story imagining his life and now, more than fifteen years later, I’m still thinking about him, much more than I think about the ruins at Palenque or the see-through green waters running along the beach at Cancún.
    Other writers had offered me a version of the man, in similar places, but no one had found him so persistently in every corner of the globe as Greene had. I remembered, long after returning from Mérida, that Greene, in his nonfictional account of a trip across Mexico in 1937,
The Lawless Roads
, had, everywhere he turned, found Germans curiously settled in the middle of a forbidding landscape, solitary Americans riding the trains, people who ended up in an alien and sometimes terrifying country as if in some haunted place within themselves. “I wondered what odd whim of Providence had landed him here,” he had written of a German, “a teacher of languages in a Mexican mining town.” I didn’t remember then—or know—that Greene had written once about a stranger from India he came across when he was twenty-one. “He stayed in my mind—a symbol of the shabby, the inefficient and possibly the illegal.” I might, again, have been walking through a plot he’d dreamed up years before.

    I t is often night in Greene’s fiction, and the scene usually turns around those two men together. They’re in a foreign place and circumstances are treacherous. They’ve nurtured all kinds of unflattering impressions of each other and, in a simpler world, they’d always remain apart, safe in their sense of enmity.
    But—in
The Quiet American
, say—Fowler and Pyle find themselves in a lonely watchtower above the rice paddies of the Vietnamese countryside after night has fallen, and two young local soldiers cower in the same space. Mines and gunfire explode outside as the evening deepens and somehow, brought closer by their sense of danger and the need for companionship, the two foreigners begin to talk of God and death, the women they have and haven’t loved. Each ministers to the other, just by listening, and honesty and intensity rise quickly as neither knows if he’ll make it through the night.
    The scenes rarely turn around a man