Chapter Sixty-Seven
Now that the murder investigation was as good as forgot, Gangakanta spent most of his time locked away in his room, meditating. At the moment Enid lay in her lovers’ arms, and Glen lay on the floor, Gangakanta sat cross-legged, eyes closed, pores admitting the ineffable. At the height of his disembodiment, the memory of his one, unrealised, attempt at love revisited him:
He grew up happily enough, on a family farm in India, until it was razed, along with all those in the district, by the civilising British occupiers, as punishment against a reputed band of insurrectionists (among whom his family was definitely not to be counted). What little chance there had been to earn money was now unravelled, so he was forced, as a young man, to move to London, where he hoped to send back some wages for the care of his aged parents. In that noisy, filthy, debauched metropolis, he never had the time or money for love, even if the very notion of love hadn’t felt so out of place there. He despised London, he despised city life, and felt distinctly untethered to time in its unhalting rush into modernity. There was only that one person, that one time, that one unsnatched chance. . .
The pain of the memory whisked him back to his hotel room before he’d even dwelt on it. He sought to compose himself. He contemplated another day in his back-float through being; another half-hearted attempt to exist outside the impulses and temptations of his flesh, and arrive at a rational-based meaning in life, with which to replace the emotional one he’d forsworn; when a passionate, gut-hacking love, which would wrench him out of his rationality for good, was all he’d secretly prayed for all along.