Class after class went through his lectures and discussions. Young people who had graduated several years ago could stop him on the street, still with an embarrassing amount of respect, and tell him how much they appreciated his teachings. Sometimes he was moved to tears by their kindness.
Through these young people, he even gained a place in the world of their parents. He became known throughout the area and was received with goodwill in the small shops in his neighbourhood.
He was a volunteer teacher not only for the sake of the children. He did it as much for himself. Something of the skills he had gained in his old life could be drawn upon in the planning of the lessons and in the actual instruction. He always tried to encourage discussion in his classroom, inviting the students to articulate a point and to use their imagination. He was not always successful in this. Even in this sense, he recognised situations from political life in Uppsala.
Perhaps he also taught in order to assuage his bad conscience. He had chosen not to delve deeper into this, just acknowledge that he was privileged. He had chosen a simple life. Planting trees and bushes placed him far down on the social scale. He observed almost daily the surprise of the more well-to-do Indians who came to Lal Bagh. They would stare unabashedly at the white man who was dressed like a Dalit or Untouchable, bare feet in rough sandals, dirty, with calloused hands, engaged in highly unusual behaviour: He was doing the dirty work, the heavy, manual, poorly paid labour. This was somewhat of a shock to the middle-class population. They took him for a fool, a failure, who perhaps had come to India to seek God but had found a spade. They pointed, they laughed at him, and thereby felt themselves somewhat elevated.
Some of them spoke to him and found to their astonishment a well-versed man who spoke good English, frequently even better than themselves, and who explained his position with a smile – how he had freely taken on the work of gardening because he wanted to make a contribution – but who painstakingly avoided mentioning anything about his background. Sometimes it sparked respect; there was something Ghandian about the gaunt man that was appealing to a faithful Hindu. But mostly it brought him ridicule.
These threads, the contact with Lester and his family, his contributions as volunteer teacher, and his work in the botanical garden, constituted the safety net of Sven-Arne Persson, former county commissioner. The net that transformed the officially deceased county commissioner into a living being.
Now all this was threatened. An unlikely encounter had brought two Uppsala citizens together.
Suddenly it occurred to him that this might not be a coincidence at all. Was there a possibility that Jan Svensk had in some way been informed of his whereabouts? Had he been sent out from Sweden for this purpose? What was his profession? Could he actually be a police officer? Sven-Arne had no idea. If he was, he was the right person to send to Bangalore as a spy, old neighbours that they were. If this was the case, then there was every likelihood he was working with the Indian police, and then the situation was even more precarious.
Sven-Arne tapped the driver’s shoulder and gave him a different address.
‘Yes, sir,’ he answered, with a nod of his head, and made a daring U-turn that caused the rickshaw to lurch and the drivers of surrounding vehicles to throw themselves on their horns.
He turned onto Regency Road and drove north, passing Brigade Street and taking a left onto MG Road.
Sven-Arne Persson leant back in the rickshaw but observed everyone who drove up alongside them and he scrutinised the pavements as if he were a newcomer to the city.
Somewhere in the crowd was Jan Svensk.
Hotel Ajantha was located at the end of a side street on MG Road. He had never been to the hotel before but knew that its clientele consisted of Indians from the lower middle class as well as the occasional European on a tight budget. His chances of encountering Jan Svensk here were minimal.
A man was snoozing on a couch in the dingy reception area, but he woke up when Sven-Arne walked in. The man blinked at him but made no attempt to get up. Sven-Arne greeted him in English and asked if there was a room for the night.
The man got up reluctantly and walked over to the front desk, opened the ledger, and pointed at a row without saying a word, then turned and pointed to a posterboard that stated the cost of the room was 990 rupees per night. That was more than he spent on food for a week.
‘Okay,’ he said, and wrote down a name that he made up that instant: Lester Young.
‘Passport number,’ the receptionist said, unselfconsciously scratching himself in the crotch.
Sven-Arne wrote down eight numbers without hesitation and said he was Australian.
‘One night, pay now.’
Room 101 was spartan: a bed, a chair, a rickety table with a television set. That was all. Sven-Arne lay down on the bed. He stared at the blades of the fan and noticed the grey layer of dust that had sprouted like a fungus over the base attached to the ceiling. Somewhere a telephone rang and someone hollered ‘Hello.’ Muted voices floated through the open ventilation to the courtyard, steps on the stone patio and a man’s hoarse laughter. There was a life out there, a contextual web that had been torn from him in the blink of an eye.
Images of his former native land came and went over the next few hours as he lay on the bed, incapable of getting to his feet, much less undressing and crawling in between the sheets. It was images of his past that he was fishing up out of his inner depths. He rarely or never read about Sweden in the Indian newspapers and was completely cut off from the great, decisive political events. Sometimes he accidentally came across a news item on Sweden, often about sports or amusing writings on climate or other rarities that had to do with the country’s exotic placement on the globe. It could be some ice hotel in the north, or now most recently a storm that had struck the southern parts and apparently taken out forests. Of course he had read about the killing of the foreign minister. He had met her during her time in SSU and recalled an enthusiastic young woman, and he remembered thinking she would either be broken or go very far. Now she was dead.
About the small world, about Uppsala county politics, his old friends and acquaintances, who had married, had children, or died during his twelve years abroad, he knew nothing.
From time to time he experienced a burning anxiety, a longing to meet someone from the past who could tell him. This happened especially in the beginning of his stay in Bangalore, but now and then this gnawing desire to get the information that created connections returned.
Out of nowhere he had the thought that Jan Svensk was perhaps the person who had been dispatched by an unseen hand as a messenger from his former life. Perhaps he had messages such as… well, what? What kind of information could seriously mean anything? What was there to gladden the expatriate, to add anything to his life? What did he need? Wouldn’t the knowledge of births and deaths, about neighbours’ and local politicians’ lives, simply knock him off-kilter, perhaps risk his entire existence?
He did not need this knowledge! But sometimes he wondered if his wife was still alive, and if so, how she was doing. Had she taken up with someone new?
Sven-Arne suddenly stood up, walked over and turned on the television, found the remote control, and started to cruise through the channels.
He sank down on the bed and stared unseeing at a film. A woman ran up a gentle slope, paused at a tree, melodramatically surveyed a valley, and then started a languishing song. Sven-Arne gathered that she had run away from her husband and was now looking for the man she had loved from early youth. Always the same story, he thought, convinced that she or her beloved would die before the film came to an end.