In the world of the real I had learned hard lessons. Lies can cause tragedies, both on the personal and the national scale. Lies can defeat the truth. But the truth is dangerous too. Not only can the truth teller be vulgar and offensive, as I was in the Golden house that day. Telling the truth can also cost you what you love.
There wasn’t much discussion after I told Suchitra about Vasilisa Golden’s child. She heard me out in silence and then excused herself and went into the bedroom and shut the door. Ten minutes later she reemerged, dry-eyed, in perfect command of her emotions. “I think you should move out, don’t you,” she said. “And you should do it now.” I moved back into my old room at the home of Mr. U Lnu Fnu. As to our working relationship she said she was willing to continue to support my feature film plan, which after so many years was close to being green-lit, but that apart from that we should work separately in future, which was more than fair. Also, and to my surprise and great discomfiture, she immediately launched into a series of brief but apparently passionate love affairs with high-profile men and all of these were extensively shared on social media and knocked me, I admit, for a loop. How deeply could she have cared for me if she could dive so swiftly into the next things? How real had it been? Such thoughts plagued me, though I knew, in my deepest heart, that this was me trying to shift the blame, and the blame could not be shifted, it rested firmly on my shoulders.—So this was not a good time for me but, yes, I got my film The Golden House made, my almost-decade-long obsession-project—in the end a drama, a fully fledged fiction, not a mockumentary, the screenplay completely rewritten since my time at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab—and, yes, the people I needed to like it seemed to like it, and, yes, with the help of an Italian-American producer friend in Los Angeles, North American distribution rights were acquired by Inertia Pictures. There it was in the trades, a release in the theaters and on demand in the first quarter, Variety has learned exclusively, so it had to be true. Pic is Unterlinden’s feature film writer-directorial debut. In a tough time for indie movies this was an outstanding agreement. Strangely, when the good news came through, I felt nothing at all. What was there to feel? It was just work. The main benefit was that I could now afford to rent an apartment of my own.
But to get that apartment would be to lose my access to the Gardens, and the Gardens were where my son played every day, even if it was impossible to approach him. Also, I had become fond of Mr. U Lnu Fnu, who tried in his gentle way to comfort me for my loss of Suchitra’s love. He asked me on what day of the week I had been born, and Suchitra too. I didn’t know, but there were websites now where you could enter the date and be told the day, and so I discovered that it was Sunday (for me) and Wednesday (for her). I told Mr. U Lnu Fnu and at once he clucked his tongue and shook his head. “You see, you see,” he said. “In Myanmar, this is known to be unlucky combination.” Saturday and Thursday, Friday and Monday, Sunday and Wednesday, Wednesday evening and Tuesday: these were the hexed pairings. “Better find someone with complementary day,” he said. “For you, Sunday child, every other day is good. Not Wednesday! Why pick the one day that has jinx? How to guarantee unhappy life!” Oddly, this superstition from across the globe did in fact offer some comfort. But then in those days when I had lost both my lover and my child, I was drowning, and clutching at straws.
Your work goes well when your life’s going terribly. Is that a rule? Loneliness and Heartbreak: these are the names of the gates of Eden?
My story has now gone beyond my film and the divergences are sharp. In the movie, the retired Indian police inspector comes to see the old bastard with murderous intent, and in fact pulls out a gun and shoots him dead, and is then shot dead by the pistol waiting in the pocketbook of the old man’s Russian wife.
In what I have to call real life, Mr. Mastan was dead within twenty-four hours of leaving the house on Macdougal Street, pushed off a subway platform into the path of a train when he was on his way to Penn Station to return to his sister’s home in Philadelphia. The attacker was a thirty-year-old Queens woman of South Asian ethnicity, who was taken into custody almost immediately and charged with second-degree murder. On being detained she said, “That was an old meddler. He interfered in a household matter.” The Times report said this: “The police described her as emotionally disturbed and said that she had made up a story just one month earlier about pushing someone onto the tracks.” That earlier statement had been quickly found to be a lie. This time, however, she had really done it. In spite of her statement, no relationship between her and the dead man could be established, and the investigating officers concluded that none existed. An emotionally disturbed female had pushed a man to his death. No further investigation seemed to be required.
Even that little life of mine had begun to feel less comprehensible by the day. I understood nothing. I had become what I always hoped I might be but without love it was all ashes. I thought every day about reaching out to Suchitra but there she was on Instagram telling the world about new liaisons that were knives in my heart. And my crime, my only son, was right outside my window growing up before my eyes, learning words, developing a character, and I helpless to be a part of it. Vasilisa had made it clear to me that if I came within fifteen feet of him she would go to court and get a restraining order. So I hung back at my Burmese mentor’s window and gazed in misery upon my forbidden flesh and blood as he approached his third birthday. Maybe it would be better for me to leave the Gardens and start a new life somewhere else, Greenpoint, for example, or Madagascar or Sichuan or Nizhny Novgorod or Timbuktu. I dreamed, sometimes, of being flayed, and walking naked and skinless through an unknown city that didn’t give a damn about my dreams. I dreamed of walking up a staircase in a familiar house and realizing suddenly that in the room I was about to enter at the head of the stairs a man was waiting for me with a hangman’s noose and my life was about to end. All this when I was, after more than a decade, an overnight success, and there were lucrative offers to direct hip-hop videos and motor car commercials and episodes of hit sixty-minute television drama series and even a second feature film. None of it made sense. I had lost my bearings and there I was sitting in my tin can whirling in the void.
Can you hear me. Can you hear me. Can you hear me.