Chapter 3: Madan ka Tamasha — Present Day

Balli answered on the second ring, which meant he was either awake or had fallen asleep with the phone on his chest again, a habit that his wife Paramjeet had been trying to break for thirty years with the success rate of a person trying to train a cat to fetch.

"Road trip," I said.

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Where?"

"Goa."

A pause. The pause contained multitudes — specifically, it contained Balli's entire assessment of the situation, which was: Madan is in trouble, Shobha has called, Farhan is going to rescue him because Farhan always rescues him, and I am being invited because someone needs to drive while Farhan stares out the window and broods about his childhood.

"I'll pack a bag," Balli said. "Paramjeet will be thrilled. She's been trying to get me out of the house since I retired. Something about 'constant presence being the enemy of marital harmony.' Her words."

"How is Paramjeet?"

"Magnificent. Terrifying. The usual combination. She's taken up yoga and now she can put her foot behind her head, which she demonstrates at dinner parties with the enthusiasm of a person who has discovered that flexibility is a form of social dominance."

"And you?"

Another pause. This one shorter but heavier. "I'm fine. We'll talk in the car."

He hung up. Balli's "we'll talk in the car" was the equivalent of Shobha's strategic ambiguity — it meant there was something to discuss, but the discussion required the particular intimacy of a moving vehicle, where eye contact was optional and the road provided a convenient third party to absorb the awkward silences.

I spent the rest of the day not packing. This is not the same as procrastinating. Procrastinating implies awareness that you should be doing something and choosing not to. I was genuinely occupied — with feeding the dogs, with watering the plants that Nandini had appointed me guardian of while she was at her Tuesday book club, with staring at the covered canvas in my studio and thinking about Madan.

Madan. Where to begin with Madan.

He was three years younger than me and had been, for approximately three of those years — the first three, when he was a baby and therefore incapable of intentional chaos — a source of uncomplicated joy. After that: complicated joy, if joy was the right word. Madan was the kind of person who made you laugh and made you exhausted in equal measure, the kind of person who walked into a room and rearranged its emotional furniture without asking permission. He was charming — genuinely, dangerously charming, the charm of a person who understood people the way a lockpick understood locks: intuitively, mechanically, with the particular skill of knowing exactly which tumbler to press to open a door that the person hadn't intended to open.

He was also an alcoholic. Had been since his twenties, which meant he'd been an alcoholic for longer than he'd been sober, which meant that the alcoholism was no longer a condition but a personality trait — woven into who Madan was as thoroughly as the charm and the chaos and the particular talent for disappearing at precisely the moment when his presence was most needed.

The disappearances had a pattern. Every three to five years, Madan would reach a level of stability — a job, a flat, sometimes a relationship — that suggested permanence. He would maintain this stability for six to eighteen months, long enough for the family to exhale, long enough for Amma to stop lighting extra diyas at the mandir, long enough for Shobha to stop calling me with updates that were really requests for intervention. And then: gone. A phone call from a relative or a friend or, once, a police officer, reporting that Madan had been seen in a state of advanced disrepair in a city that was not the city where he was supposed to be.

Chennai. Varanasi. Shimla. Jaipur. Rishikesh, that one time when he'd decided that spirituality was the answer and had lasted eleven days at an ashram before the ashram had politely asked him to leave, citing "philosophical differences" that I suspected were actually "drinking in the meditation hall" differences. And now: Goa. The destination that, for a certain type of Indian man in a certain type of crisis, was the default setting — the place where the country's rules loosened enough to permit the particular brand of self-destruction that required beaches, cheap alcohol, and the absence of family observation.

Nandini came over at seven. She brought dinner — rajma-chawal, because she knew it was my comfort food, because she knew that Madan's reappearance required comfort, because Nandini understood the particular nutritional requirements of emotional distress with the precision of a woman who had been feeding people through crises for decades.

"How long will you be gone?" she asked, watching me eat with the satisfying attentiveness of a person who expressed love through food and wanted to see the love consumed.

"Two days, maybe three. Depends on how Madan is. If he's functional, we bring him back. If he's not functional, we find him a place to get functional and then bring him back."

"And if he doesn't want to come back?"

I chewed. The rajma was perfect — the beans soft, the gravy thick with tomato and the particular depth of flavour that came from slow cooking and the right ratio of cumin to red chilli. Nandini's rajma was better than Amma's, a fact that I would carry to my grave without admitting to either woman.

"He never wants to come back. We bring him back anyway."

"That sounds like kidnapping."

"It's family. The distinction is largely theoretical."

She smiled. Nandini's smile was — different from Esha's. Everything about Nandini was different from Esha, which was, I had come to understand, the point. Esha had been a flame — intense, consuming, the kind of love that burned. Nandini was a lamp — warm, steady, the kind of love that illuminated. I had needed the flame at eighteen. I needed the lamp at sixty-one. This was not a downgrade. It was an evolution.

"I worry about you," she said. "Not about Madan — Madan is Madan, he'll survive the way cockroaches survive: through pure biological stubbornness. I worry about what going back does to you. Every time you rescue him, you go somewhere in your head that takes a while to come back from."

"Where do I go?"

"Amritsar. 1984. The version of you that couldn't save everyone." She reached across the table and took my hand. Her hand was warm — the warmth of rajma and concern and the particular temperature of a person whose body ran hot, which she attributed to her metabolism and I attributed to the furnace of competence that burned inside her at all times. "You're not that boy anymore, Farhan. You haven't been that boy for forty years."

"Sometimes I am."

"Sometimes you are. And that's OK. Just don't stay there."

I drove her to the gate — the garden gate, the three-metre journey between our houses that we navigated with the ceremonial formality of two people who had agreed that separate houses were the architecture of a healthy relationship and who treated the gate as the threshold between togetherness and independence.

"Call me when you find him," she said.

"I will."

"And eat properly. Not just chai and samosas."

"Balli will be there. Balli doesn't allow nutritional negligence."

"Balli is dealing with his own thing right now. You might need to be the responsible one for once."

"His own thing?"

She looked at me. The look said: you should know this already. The look said: he hasn't told you yet but he should have and when he does, be kind. The look said a dozen things that words would have been too blunt to convey, and then she kissed my cheek and went home.

I stood at the gate. The Pune evening was warm — March, the pre-monsoon heat building, the air carrying the particular heaviness that preceded the city's transformation from pleasant to punishing. The dogs were asleep in the garden — Sheroo on his back, Bholu curled around Choti, the three of them arranged in the particular geometry of comfort that dogs achieved without discussion or negotiation.

In the morning, I would drive to Goa with my best friend to retrieve my broken brother from whatever beach shack had become his latest temporary headquarters. I would navigate the particular minefield of Madan's charm and Madan's damage and the decades of family history that made every conversation with him a negotiation between love and exasperation.

But tonight: the dogs, the warm air, the rajma settling in my stomach, and the knowledge that Nandini was three metres away, reading her book, drinking her chamomile tea, being exactly where she was and exactly who she was, which was the person I loved in the particular way that sixty-one-year-old love expressed itself — not with fireworks but with the quiet confidence that tomorrow would contain the same warmth as today.

I went inside. Set my alarm. Did not pack, because packing could happen at five in the morning with the particular efficiency of a man who had learned that preparation was overrated and adaptability was everything.

The canvas waited under its cloth. Madan waited in Goa. And the morning would come regardless.