Funerals happen quickly in the tropics, but murder investigations inevitably force delays. I was at the Golden house every day after the news broke and it seemed that the calamity had stopped time. Nothing and nobody seemed to move except in the room where Ms. Blather and Ms. Fuss were making arrangements for the return of the bodies and even their office seemed to be draped in a cloth of silence. Petya had come home to be near his father, but was mostly closeted with the Australian therapist in the room of blue light. D Golden spent most days in the house too, lost in a corner dressed in black with Riya holding his hand. Nobody spoke. Outside the house, for a moment, the story roared. Frankie Sottovoce was everywhere mourning the death of his star sculptor. The dead woman’s family, tall and graceful, carrying themselves as nobly as royal sentinels, stood behind Sottovoce on television in dry-eyed sorrow. Nero Golden did not appear in public but it was plain to those of us inside the house that something had broken in him, that the message he had received was not one from which he would easily recover. On the other side of the world also there was both noise and silence. There were policemen and autopsies and journalists and all the siren sounds that follow a violent death but those who had known the family before its departure for New York remained invisible, no word from any of them, as if the silence had fallen over the Goldens’ lost world too, like a shroud. The unidentified woman who had greeted Apu in the hotel lobby with cries of “Groucho!”—she was not to be seen. The other women he had spoken of, his three former loves, the circling exes, did not appear to mourn him. It seemed that the city had turned its back on the departed, both the expatriates and the deceased. If Mr. Brown and his associates were arrested we did not hear of it. The news fell out of the headlines. Groucho was dead. Life went on.
The two dragon ladies at the Golden house, as expected, proved more than equal to the task of bringing the bodies home speedily once they had been released by the Mumbai authorities. A reputable firm, cumbersomely named IFSPFP—International Funeral Shipping Program Funeral Providers—was engaged and quickly made all the correct preparations for transportation, including sealer caskets and USA-approved shipping containers. They did the paperwork, acquiring certified English translations of the death certificates and written authorization from the local authorities to remove the bodies, and found an early shipping window so that Apu and Ubah could return to New York City as promptly as possible. On the tarmac of JFK a sad parting occurred. Frankie Sottovoce and the Somali artist’s family took possession of Ubah’s body and carried it away to be buried according to their practice. Apu came back to Macdougal Street.
It was a strange and broken farewell. The sealer casket was not opened. The body had not been embalmed and so state law did not permit open-casket viewing. When Nero refused to permit any form of religious ceremony to be carried out and specified cremation rather than burial, the IFSPFP funeral director bowed his head and suggested he leave the family for an hour and then return. Later he would bring back the cremains. Or he would dispose of them if that was what was preferred. “No,” Nero said. “Bring him back.” The funeral director inclined his head once more. “If I may,” he said softly. “There is no law in this state that says where you may keep or scatter ashes. You may keep them in a crypt, niche, grave, or in a container at home, as you think best. If you choose to scatter them, do so as you please, but refrain from placing them where they are obvious to others. Cremation renders ashes harmless, so there is no public health risk involved. Scattering on private land requires the landowner’s consent, and it is wise to check local ordinance zoning if you wish to scatter on public lands. If you wish to scatter off the coast or out of New York Harbor you need to bear in mind Environmental Protection Agency regulations regarding burial at sea—”
“Stop,” said Nero Golden. “Stop at once, and go away immediately.”
During the hour that followed no word was spoken. Vasilisa took the child Vespasian upstairs and the rest of us stood or sat in the company of the casket, each of us alone with our own thoughts. During this awful hour I realized that Apu in death had finally persuaded me of something which I had resisted through our friendship: that the human ineffable invariably coexisted with the properly knowable, and that there were mysteries in men which explanations could not explain. No matter how I tried I could not understand the ease with which he, of all the Goldens, had agreed to shed his Indian skin and head west from his city to the Village. The old man had enough dark doings in his past, and Petya had enough real and present damage, and Dionysus enough secret longings for his future, to explain their choices, but Apu had been deeply involved in the life of his hometown, loving and being loved, and heartbreak seemed an insufficient explanation for his willingness to go. The voice of reason in me proposed that of all Nero’s sons he had seen most clearly into his father’s shadows and had been scared by what he saw there, and maybe that was a part of the truth. Maybe what he said, about being raised in the old ways, so that his father’s decision was simply the law which had to be followed, had something to do with it also. But another voice, the voice he had instilled in me and which I had resisted, now conjured up a different scene, in which he sat, cross-legged perhaps and meditating on the wide marble terrace of the old family house on the hill, his eyes closed, looking inward or wherever he looked for guidance, and heard another voice, not the voice that was murmuring to me, or maybe it was the same voice, or maybe it was his own voice or a voice he made up, or maybe, as he would put it, he tapped into the thing he always believed was there, the universe-sound, the wisdom of all that there was, the voice he trusted; and that voice said Go. And so, like Joan of Arc, like Saint John the Divine, like the “Apu Golden” he invented, on whom his old self’s ghosts came calling in New York—like the mystic he was, listening to his voices, or on impulse as we skeptics might say, he went.
The mystical experience existed. I understood that. When my rational self reasserted itself it would say, yes, agreed, but it was an interior experience, not an exterior one; subjective, not objective. If I had stood beside Apu in his Union Square studio I would not have seen his ghosts. If I had knelt beside him on that Walkeshwar terrace seven and a half years ago the Force would not have spoken to me. Not everyone can become a Jedi knight. Many Australians say they can, that’s true. And Apu, perhaps, learned how to trust and use what he once called the spirit level. But no, no, not I.