The Garden Spy is from Aamer Hussein’s anthology, Restless. The book is a collage of fugitive fictions, reminiscences of friends, and personal essays which, when read in sequence, offer an unofficial picture of one writer’s private and public lives.
Read a connected essay by the author titled The Yellow Notebook from the same collection here.
One
Robin
1.
The roses were running riot in June. Evenings fell late; the long hours of light made him restless. He waited for the comforting shadows of night. That evening he stepped out before sunset to buy something he didn’t need, walked past the delicatessen where he usually got his cigarettes, and stopped at the church where red roses were blooming among yellow and white flowers in a little walled and elevated garden. A poster in the middle of the flowers announced:
Coronavirus affects all of us
We are a church that prays
Can we pray for you, your situation, your family and friends at this time?
He stopped to think about the people he knew of who were afflicted by the virus: his childhood playmate’s son in Karachi, and a dear friend of his youth in Islamabad. But he’d forgotten how to pray.
He took his phone out of his pocket to photograph the poster and the flowers. Just then, a gingery freckled man in shorts came out of a side door and removed the poster with both arms in one quick gesture without noticing Mehran, who said: Do you mind if I take a photograph of that before you take it away?
Oh sure, said the gingery man, replacing the poster and moving away from the camera’s eye. I thought you wanted to photograph the flowers.
I often come here to do that, Mehran said, or I just look at the flowers…
See that tree? The gingery man pointed upward. In March it produces masses of yellow flowers. But I can’t remember what they’re called.
They paused. Then both said in one breath:
Mimosa!
But he couldn’t remember the mimosa flowering in March, neither this year when the lockdown was starting, nor last year when he was convalescing and homebound. He remembered, instead, filming the mimosa tree in a windstorm, three years ago, when the world seemed safer. And he remembered another film, another tree, rather a bush, a rose bush, flowering exactly a year ago. He’d seen the roses with his sister, and photographed her beside them on one of his first walks after his illness, not knowing that she wouldn’t live to see another season: she died before the year ended, of a cancer that took her away in three months. She was born at the end of March, and he in the second week of April. For a few days every year they’d been twins.
2.
I saw a red-breasted robin in a box with a withered rose beside it. The robin was dead. The box had a glass lid and pattern of bare feet on its base. There was about an inch of water that didn’t quite cover bird or flower, and a sign that said: Please protect the robins. They are a dying species. Then I woke up.
Mehran was on a long call to Mimi, who had been self-isolating since before the official start of lockdown. London no longer felt like a city, but a huddle of settlements divided by invisible barriers.
In our stories and folklore, robins make their homes in boxes, Mimi said. And drawers.
He dreamed about the dead robin just after his encounter with the mimosa man. But he couldn’t find a connection between dream and encounter; only that the Urdu word for drawer, khana, came from the Persian word for home.
3.
On his way back from the shop and the church Mehran often saw ugly things: blocks of stone that seemed to serve no purpose, piles of withered leaves and mulch, blue bags from which the rotting stench of garbage overflowed. He took photographs of those, too, remembering the young man who once accused him of seeing only beauty in living things, of worshipping nature, of seeking reconciliation in human relationships. But the world can be brutal, he said in response, people tear each other apart, why dwell on ugliness in my photographs? The young man, who was stranded in his Sindhi village, published a story about a settlement in which all the old were wiped out by the arrival of a man from the city. And yet he had a habit of exclaiming: Kuchh nahin hoga (nothing will happen) when things looked bad, and Sab theek ho jayega (everything will be alright) when bad things did happen. He’d responded that way when he heard Mehran had cancer. But things do happen, Mehran texted back, and they don’t often turn out right in the end. I’m prepared for that, but I’m not going to mourn a future that’s not to be.
Kuchh nahin hoga. Sab theek ho jayega.
Mehran had come to loathe those phrases. And to dread them.
4.
He’d woken up that morning at first light remembering a phrase his mother often repeated: Ye suffer from yourselves…
He knew she attributed it to the Buddha, but where had she found it? She was no longer there for him to ask. The syntax was archaic and very English, almost biblical. He googled and found the verse. From The Light of Asia, by Edwin Arnold. He couldn’t remember who had given him the book length poem about the Buddha’s life, or if he’d found it for himself: was it in Indore, where his uncle might have bought it for him, or Karachi, where he grew up and where he’d read the book?
But do we really suffer from ourselves, he thought? Or is hell made for us by other people, as Sartre wrote? Envy, malice, greed: don’t they affect us even when we feel we are strong? He remembered the bearded white-robed faqir, rattling with bells and green beads and chanting incomprehensible verses, who’d come to their door in Karachi one morning. His sister had given the man alms but he’d asked for twelve rupees. She’d run away to call the old cook to deal with him. But she heard him curse her as she ran: Khana kharab! He said her heart would be a grave and wished misfortune on their household for seven years. And she’d got a temperature that night and lain in bed for several days. Had she brought illness on herself, was it pure chance, or had the beggar’s presence induced it? What sort of holy man would utter curses?
His old friend Rafey died in Karachi a few nights ago; he was only 60. When he’d heard Mehran had cancer he’d said: but you can’t go before me! Rafey, with the fine shield of glass he wore to protect him from the world, who had been his loyal friend for 27 years, but never quite intimate – Rafey had suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, and gone through a painful divorce after the death of his father in the two years before he died. The pandemic and enforced isolation had shredded his nerves: yet he’d kept on writing and recording videos. When they’d met in Lahore two months before, or spoken on the phone after lockdown began, neither of them imagined that they’d never meet again.
Oh Rafey, I couldn’t have saved you. I couldn’t even try.
Mehran spent a night and a day grieving. Then, as he’d so often done, he had turned his face to silent occupations: rereading Kalidas, whose poems full of flowers and birds and trees had filled his eyes with images when he was a young boy – he’d been given a book of Kalidas’s plays and poems by his uncle in Indore.
He turned to The Light of Asia; he’d easily found it online and downloaded it in his e-reader. He sat down to read the poem.
Ye suffer from yourselves
None else compels,
None other holds you that you live or die,
And whirl upon the wheel,
And hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its nave
of nothingness.
Reading on, Mehran found a story about a wounded swan the young Siddhartha saved, cured and then allowed to go free. It had stayed in his mind for most of his life until he retold it in one of his own stories, without remembering where he had first come upon it. As always when he read the Buddha’s words, he pondered: If we push over a sturdy rock and it cracks, is it the fault of the rock? If we contaminate a pond with piss or the sea with a city’s load of shit, are we to blame the pond or the sea for poisoning us? Did I set myself up for every act of omission or commission that made me bleed within? Oh Siddhartha, Gautama, Buddha: you might have taught me about the depths of compassion and loneliness, but you never could give me an answer about the wheel, the spokes of agony and the tire of tears which I knew but never embraced, in the fifty years and more I have meditated on your words. Compulsion to suffer can come from the acts of others.
But Papa Sartre, if ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’, heaven, too, can be handed to you in a glass by the love of others. And by the love you give to them.
5.
It was lovely here in Rome in spring but the wind and heat are taking over, Fabia wrote on WhatsApp, sending pictures of flowers from her garden. When you are up for it do come and sit in my garden or Mummy’s. When this lockdown is finally over. You seem to be surrounded by flowers on your walks. But are you wearing your mask when you go to the shops?
24 June MEHRAN 10.04
Yes, I find flowers in other people’s gardens. During lockdown I have become a garden spy.
FABIA 10.08
Brilliant title for a story. You ‘see’ the flowers. I shall wait for it.
MEHRAN 10.13
I’m planning to write it, yes.
***
Two
Dejeuner sur l’herbe
1.
Mehran’s piece on Elizabeth Chou was incomplete: he’d been given until June 30 to complete it, and the deadline was looming. June had gone by in a haze of phone calls, messages, writing a short fiction which was also grossly overdue. And – finally – he had started to slip away from isolation to meet people, on the broad pavements just beyond his home to begin with, and later in a park by a lake, a few minutes’ walk away in the other direction. Elizabeth’s books had piled up on the floor beside him. He’d read one, put it down, pick up another. As always, he’d be dazzled by her penetrative intelligence, baffled by some of her provocative views, and always annoyed by the fact that he hadn’t – couldn’t – include personal details of their friendship in the piece. Instead, he’d written a piece just before Rafey died about how human contact, virtual or real, had become more important to him than books during the first three months of lockdown. But was that really true, or was he only echoing the voices of others? Was it a premonition of mortality, foreshadowed by the suicide of a young Bollywood actor, which had induced almost pathological grief among some of his acquaintances, that actually made him abandon his books to spend hours consoling others?
He was sitting in a hospital room, waiting for a blood test, when he received a text from a young man he’d mentored in the past, demanding help for a very long application and then a reference for a scholarship in the US, all within two working days.
Mehran had just been informed that if the new treatment they’d assigned to him – no chemo, no radiotherapy for you during the pandemic, it’s too dangerous, the MRI you had last week confirms that the cancer has metastatised to your ribs and your pelvis, it’ll have to be pills for you, it’s a risk but one you ought to take blahblahblah – he had a life expectancy of about two years and up to five if he was really lucky. In February they’d given him ten years. He hadn’t believed that: he’d known for a while he was slowly dying, but still today’s cold diagnosis shocked him.
The connection on his phone in the crowded room, with masked people sitting two or three seats apart, was weak. He wanted to ignore the message but there were two more: hey? Are you there? Why aren’t you replying? My future life depends on this reference. Can’t you help me just this one more time?
I’m sorry – he responded, thinking of the treatment and the unfinished article. I’m busy for the next week. And it’ll take another week for me to get round to doing any of this. You’d best ask someone else if you’re in a hurry.
The green light beside his name on the board flashed, summoning him to Room 5. He switched off his phone, which was only on because he knew his sisters were waiting for news and texting him every few mins because he’d insisted on coming alone.
The nurse scolded him for not drinking enough water and jabbed him about three times in each arm before getting the blood she wanted. He told her he had no idea he was going to have to give blood this morning: he’d only had one a week ago. With bandages on both arms, he reeled out into thin sunlight and lit a cigarette. He walked past a bed of sunflowers but didn’t have the energy to take his phone out of his pocket to take pictures. His nephew had wanted to meet him outside the hospital but he’d forgotten to text him. He’d come by taxi; he decided to go home by bus.
On the ride home, he switched on his phone. A message from the young man who’d asked for help flashed up at him:
ego selfish inhuman you think you’re great but you’re not a friend to me nor a mentor any longer I’m done with you rid of you before you rid yourself…
His head was spinning. He couldn’t make the sentences cohere. The phone pinged. He deleted the old message, slipped down his mask, and checked new ones. A beloved friend from Dubai who knew he was going to hospital today and didn’t like to be beleaguered with questions. She’d sent a video of a woman shouting from a balcony:
I just want you to know that I miss you and I love you. I just can’t wait for this shit show to be over so that I can touch people, be with people, and have the best life ever….
2.
Lausanne. December.
Elizabeth walked into the room at dawn. He raised his head and rubbed his eyes.
Your small clothes, she said.
I’m sorry?
Socks. Underpants. I’m doing a handwash.
But Elizabeth, you can’t wash my…
I’m a doctor. And you’re a little bit like my son.
Not a dream, but a memory of nearly thirty years ago: like a scene from a film, vivid. He wasn’t asleep, just lying back on the sofa, exhausted after writing about Elizabeth and her books since morning. He was in that space where clock time ceases to exist.
Where are my dead, he thought? Sister, mother, companion, all gone, within a few months…Are they ever far away from me? Is the distance that we feel from those we can’t meet – because of lockdown or other separations – only easier to bear because we imagine we’ll see them again, some day, and we know the dead are gone for ever? His memories wouldn’t go into his article. Elizabeth in her Lausanne flat, sitting at her typewriter, running her fingers through her strong grey hair, passing on each page to him to read as she completed it. Calling for a can of strong lager at 11, which she drank in a porcelain mug. Cooking millet couscous and lambchops for him in her Swiss kitchen. Eating hot Szechuan peppers as if they were pine nuts. Elizabeth in London, sitting in a Marylebone pub, lighting a cigarette which she held between her thumb and finger and laughing at a joke she’d made, signing a book for him with ‘all love to my dearest friend, more than friend’. . Elizabeth, who had written in one of her novels: ‘Don’t ask me to cultivate a cautious heart, a fenced-in backyard for myself alone’. The unknown Elizabeth, losing her memory when she vanished from his life ten years before she died, gone now for eight years. He’d always thought he’d see her again.
Elizabeth, enfante terrible and then grande dame of pan-Asian literature, who said she wanted to leave this life with the wind in her sleeve, without the burden of a single breath left to shed. She died neglected, but not forgotten.
He went back to the laptop.
3.
Sunday. Sophia had walked all the way from her house and was waiting for him on a bench in the park with a flask of coffee and a bag of snacks. It was the third time she had left home since March to see him; the first time was at the end of May, when she’d come by car and they sat for an hour in the courtyard of his block of flats – they hadn’t met since early March. Now lockdown had eased up this weekend, though only slightly. You could buy coffee to take away. Cafes and restaurants were still closed, but promising to reopen with outdoor seating the following week.
Sophia had spent much of her time writing a novel, which was now with her agent.
I’ve brought you some more masks, she said, handing them to him. He fitted one over his nose.
They walked around the park which was full of roses: white, yellow, pink, red. People were picnicking on the grass, young people had brought their children out to play, they were tumbling over each other and bruising their shins and knees.
Two young women were sitting on the grass in summer dresses with an open champagne bottle, and an embroidered tablecloth between them.
Look at those two, Mehran said. They’re distancing. Two meters apart.
It’s like an impressionist painting, Sophia said. Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
They sat down on a bench at the very edge of the lake, the flask and the bag of snacks she’d brought creating the required distance between them. Sophia slipped off her mask.
Have you been sleeping?
Well, the birds start singing so early. Like coloratura sopranos singing that aria from Lakme. Beautiful. But 3.50 am is early, I wish they’d begin later…larks, I think.
Those are robins, I’d say, Sophia replies. They’re back. My garden’s full of them.
How’s your article about the Chinese writer coming along?
I finished it today. But it’s always hard to let go of such things. I’ll have another look tonight and send it off tomorrow.
By the way, Sophia said. I’ve started work on my book about elephants. My India research is done. But I won’t be able to travel to Burma or Thailand as I planned. Do you know that most of the books I’ve read about elephants are written by women? And I’m born on a Wednesday, which is an elephant day. What day of the week were you born, by the way?
Friday’s child, he replied.
Loving and giving – Sophia smiled. And there are times I think that lovers and givers like you have to look after themselves. You don’t; you tend to the needs of others and ignore your own.
But I have you, he said. And Mimi and others phone regularly. And there’s Sama who phones me from Karachi, and Mani who messages from his village in Punjab…some friendships are flourishing, while others freeze.
Are you writing about your mother’s death? It’s been more than 40 days….
No, Mehran said. I can’t. Not yet.
Sophia, who’d written a series of beautiful elegies for her mother some years before, was silent. Her blue-green gaze spanned the water, took on its colour.
The leaves over the lake had turned to melted gold. A swan was swimming right up to the edge of the lake. He took out his phone, made a brief video of leaves and swan, then took a few photographs of Sophia unmasked.
Next time we’ll have drinks in my garden, Sophia said.
Go on, smile, Mehran said. I want another photo of you smiling in the sun.
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash