Ink

On a crowded square in an unfamiliar European city, you drown out the calls of an over-the-top man selling Turkish ice-cream with the sound of a man playing the piano. A decade ago, on your first night in highrise city, you’d played the same piano swells on gas-station earphones to blot out the sound of cars whizzing by as you strolled through the city’s arteries and found, by your estimation, a couple hundred cars for every walking human figure. Nobody in this city, you figured, walked for leisure; everyone but you seemed to be getting to point b from point a.

It was on that night that you first felt it: the warm breeze carrying the scent of still-wet ink on musty paper, reminding you of the fountain pen that once sat atop your grandfather’s desk in small-town Tamil Nadu. As the moon scaled highrise city’s sky, you found yourself a thousand miles away, in the thick of a long Indian summer afternoon: coconut palms lining a poorly paved street, a 150cc scooter puttering along sidecar in tow, an ice-cream truck ringing an enthusiastic bell in the distance.

A high C minor chord rings through your earpods as the Turkish man serves up a scoop of pistachio ice-cream to a little girl who’s clapping and jumping. It’s the same piano stab that rang out of your gas-station earphones in highrise city ten years ago as you walked past a bar you later discovered was famous for its ice-cream cocktails. A Jaguar X-something screeched to a halt right next to you, revealing a couple no older than the thirty-somethings you had seen on a green-grey 150cc Chetak on that sultry Indian afternoon decades earlier. In your imagination, it was the moustachioed bureaucrat and his portly wife who stepped out of the Jaguar and walked past you, flinging their keys at the hapless valet. Instead of a black tailored jacket, a black tailored shirt, and black tailored trousers, you pictured an unevenly-chequered mostly-white shirt and navel-hugging slate trousers. Instead of a navy-blue cocktail dress and navy-blue stiletto heels, you pictured a red-and-green sari and brown Batas. Instead of cologne, a hint of lavender, coconut oil and fresh jasmine. The incongruous image faded away into highrise city’s suddenly placid air; behind you, concrete, ahead of you, concrete, a swell in E minor.

A group of Indian tourists streams past you, the sterile café, and the Turkish ice-cream man; bewildered pigeons scatter in flight. Three kilometers from here, stocks plunge for the fifth day in a row, a private equity firm withholds the second tranche of its investment in an unprofitable consumer services business, committing to releasing it if, and only if, the terms of their initial agreement are met within the coming quarter; these terms will necessitate the laying off of a hundred-and-fifty employees, most of whom, statistically, will be expats like you. As the Turkish ice-cream man leaves for a break, five kilometers from here, a columnist is putting the final touches on a piece announcing her nuanced belief that the country is in a recession driven by the central bank’s lethargy in enacting key reforms in its monetary policy stance. Oil futures rise, a seventy-five-year-old economist predicts a greater-than-fifty-percent correction in the Nasdaq; the sixth such prediction he’s made in five years. You rock nervously in your chair.

The scent of blue Pelikan ink wafts into your nostrils. Your grandfather appears in your mind’s eye, he’s wearing a moth-eaten banyan and a freshly starched veshti. He’s sorting through stacks of paper, box files, and binders. A silverfish is scurrying out from underneath his teak cupboard, scampering into whatever dark moist world exists under the rusting almirah beside it. Thatha’s looking for something in the way he’s come to look for things since turning eighty: he's more assiduous than frantic. His hands are trembling; Parkinson’s.

A wave of Chinese tourists walks by, led by a local tour guide waving a yellow flag with the number 6 printed in blue.

Soon after thatha passed, amma revealed to you that he’d always wanted to be a writer. That after most dinners, he’d disappear into the storeroom until bedtime, where he’d set up a makeshift desk adorned with a stack of papers, a pen, and a bottle of ink. There were many rules in that house, amma confided in you, but the biggest one was – no going through appa’s papers. It was the first time you’d seen your mother cry after she’d lost her mother a decade earlier – on your balcony on that muggy and surprisingly still Mumbai night. You imagined thatha then – as you do now in this plaza – surrounded by piles of fraying paper and stained books: Income Tax Act in India 1984, Income Tax Act in India 1979, Guidelines for Auditing Public Sector Undertakings (Second Edition). He’s muttering to himself; in Tamil, he’s asking himself where did it go, where did I keep it?

Although you didn’t stay in highrise city long, you stayed a lot longer than you thought you would at the end of your first walk through its streets. As months turned into years turned into a decade, the scent of ink followed you from home to work to bar to pub, intensifying with each passing year. You fell in love, got married, fell out of love, separated, fell in love again, got a divorce, fell out of love once again. Through it all, a set of algorithms you had built to amplify returns from outsized moves in commodities markets, currency futures, and publicly traded securities had helped you amass a great deal of wealth. You found yourself a member of a thin band of global elites that truly lived in a world without borders, and you made the most of this privilege, selling your time and your algorithms to a European hedge fund Bloomberg had recently described as plucky.

That was six inkless months ago.

Today, for the first time in half a year, that familiar metallic scent has returned, bringing with it a yawning Indian summer, a slovenly Bajaj Chetak, a rusty almirah, and a still-open pen left to dry on a sheaf of browning papers. Thatha, glasses on, is reading through the contents of a box file, smiling, then furrowing his brow, narrowing his eyes, then widening them in shock. You’re turning to leave the storeroom, starved of the attention he usually showers on you. Outside, paati is reminding amma how they’d spent most of her life in a house with a storeroom filled with folders, envelopes, newspapers, all sorts of paper, but no provisions, no grains. You’re sitting by paati’s feet, she’s applying coconut oil to your hair. On the tiny black-and-white television that often stops, but always starts when smacked, the Indian cricket team is playing Australia and winning. Evening’s arrival is being signalled by the bell of an ice-cream truck. Thatha is hurriedly buttoning a chequered shirt, binder under one arm, scampering out of the house so he can get you another yellow-and-red-twisty ice-cream. Amma is saying appa no need enough ice cream to a slammed door. Appa and paati are chuckling. VVS Laxman is raising his bat and taking off his helmet after scoring a double century; the elders are commending his technique and tenacity. Thatha is returning with four ice-creams, one of which is the yellow-and-red-twisty. He’s handing one out to everyone until paati says she’d rather he has the fourth, I don’t want ice-cream before coffee. Amma’s asking, appa where’s the binder? Just some old audit notes, he’s replying with a smile, I don’t have any use for them anymore, so I threw them away.

In the plaza, the Turkish ice-cream man is back, bringing with him the Indian tourists from earlier. The kids among them want to see him twirl the ice-cream stick again. Three kilometers from here, an algorithm you named Mango Pickle enters a trade in the short-term bond market upon hearing news of a predicted collapse in Scandinavian pension funds. The Chairman of the European Central Bank calls for an emergency meeting to decide the appropriate course of action should a European sovereign debt crisis materialise. Thousands of miles away, the Nasdaq plummets pre-market on, according to at least two New York hedge fund managers, fears of a repeat of the 2010s Eurozone crisis. In the plaza, the air turns metallic, the sky, a deep shade of blue.