The Lives of R.T. Bannergee

I first heard the story of R.T. Bannergee from a friend’s girlfriend while sitting in their loft across the river from the still smoking wreckage of the World Trade Centers in the late fall of 2001. Jaya began to tell me the tale of her great uncle that first night when Joe, her boyfriend at the time, brought me home after finding me dazed on a subway platform in Union Square. I had just suffered the third in a series of panic attacks after getting stuck on the downtown number 6 train earlier that afternoon, and when Joe found me I was standing in the middle of the platform, trying to catch my breath and waiting for the crowd massing around the stairs to thin out. Since the attacks earlier that fall, I had rarely ridden the train, preferring instead the hour long walk from the lower east side to the Metropolitan Museum where I was working. That afternoon however, I had been tired and, after hesitating for only a second at 76th street, decided to brave the subway. The train however had been unusually packed, and shortly after mid-town, I found myself wedged in the middle of the car, between a construction worker whose dark, tired face was half-obscured by a white surgical mask, and small Japanese woman who looked around with wide eyes, working her jaw in tight circles as she did so. Watching the woman, I began to feel the panic rising inside of me; as I worked to take a breath, my left leg began to twitch just above the knee, and I started to hum lightly. I imagined anthrax sifting through the air vents, like thin snow on a too cold day. The faces of the passengers all seemed set in stone, resolutely ignoring me. A young woman stared up briefly from the seat directly in front of me, meeting my eyes. When I tried to smile at her, she quickly looked away, opening a New York Post between us.
The bombing of Kabul had began earlier that week, and the headline on the paper breathlessly described a group of Special Forces who had ridden on horseback to a mountain range just behind the city. It felt to me like that the rest of the country was in the midst of this near orgasm of patriotism, celebrating galloping heroes and newly opened shopping malls, while those of us in the City, with the exception perhaps of the editorial board of the Post, were left with dull ache and the smoldering wreckage of the towers. Often, while standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change, I would close my eyes tightly together and try to imagine it had never happened—not through denial but because the whole thing was too big to handle, and—in some way—too boring. I simply wanted things to be the same as they had been over the summer. Sometimes I could convince myself for longer than a changing light and, for the better part of a day, could forget the towers crumbling, and in those moments—in those points of clarity—I could focus on my job and read and write, and even get bored or laugh or sit quietly for a moment. Inevitably though, like a wall of heat bursting from an open oven, I would remember the attacks, remember the immense impossibility of those two twinned monoliths slowly disintegrating elegantly into a soft powder which lapped later at my window sill like sand. Sometimes, the reminder would come in an overheard burst of 1010 WINS echoing from a passing car, or at other times, it would arrive in a sudden glance as I hit Broadway on my way home, and I would become aware again, in an instant, of the twin absences downtown, twin abscesses loudly missing in the night sky.
When the train finally pulled into Union Square I lurched off, drenched in a hot sweat that had slowly spread up from the small of my back, drenching my t-shirt. I felt sick and stood still for several minutes on the platform waiting for the crush of people to ease slightly. When they finally cleared, I noticed Joe standing beside me. I wasn’t sure how long he had been there, but he looked concerned. Though I’d known him for years, I’d never known him well.
“You look like you could use a drink, man” he said gently, holding up in his other hand a bottle of wine. “I never travel anywhere without one,” he joked.
I had been anti-social for so long that I initially, out of habit, tried to find figure a way out of spending time with him. But then, feeling exhausted with the afternoon, I quietly assented.
He suggested we go back to his apartment in Williamsburg where his new girlfriend was waiting for him, and I, being in no shape to argue, quietly assented. On the way there, I listened silently while he told me about Jaya. He told me he’d met her while he was working a temp job over the summer and that she was staying with him while she looked for place. They hadn’t been together long but it was clear he was in love with her. She put up with his drinking he said, which was always a plus.
On the way to his loft on the Southside we stopped in at a bar and had a bottle of beer each, as well as a shot of whiskey. Outside, people were streaming home after work and the last rays of sunlight slanted across the street, tinting everything in a washed out rose-yellow brilliance.
When we got to Joe’s apartment under the Williamsburg Bridge, I was already a little drunk, feeling the burn of the whiskey in a pleasantly uncomfortable way in my chest. Jaya was sitting at a large round wooden table in the center of the space. She was sewing what looked to be a large quilt, intricately using a needle to detail a pattern in brilliant orange thread on the white cloth. She smiled up at his from her seat, allowing Joe to kiss her cheek while she looked out from his embrace and winked at me.
“You’ve been out drinking already,” she said. “And here I am your seamstress waiting for you to come home.” She laughed and gestured to the pool of cloth layered around her. From beneath the fabric her two feet, small and brown, stuck out, and around her shoulders a thin gray shawl was loosely wrapped. Joe fetched two glasses from a rack by the sink and opened the bottle of wine. His loft was large and dark, cool already now that the sun had begun to set. A wall of windows looked out on the now dark river and Manhattan rose beyond, the lights of her buildings pale against the thinning light of the evening sky.
After sitting down, Joe seemed to fall into a morose silence, and so I drank my wine silently, watching the two of them. After awhile, Jay looked up from her sewing and began to tell me the story of her great uncle R.T. Bannergee. She related it to me as though she had been waiting for someone to tell it to, as though she had rehearsed. She began shyly but then continued more forcefully. At one point, Joe got up to open another botle of wine, and when he returned silently gave her a cup of tea.

My family, as Jaya began, was once wealthy and highly regarded in Bengal society, though now her father ran a motel in South Jersey and her mother bided her days in the back kitchen, gently filling the rooms of the motel with the smells of fish curries and rose-water scented ladoos. Bannergee’s family had been the last of this wealthy line, last of the aristocrats who had hobnobbed with the English before the first partition of Bengal had destroyed even the unequal vestiges of social equality between the two classes. His father had run a tea estate in Assam, securing a small fortune for the family, and along with tea, had dedicated his life to studies of Tennyson and Blake and was famous for holding forth at the Anglo-Indian club, in a formal, though clipped English accent, on the merits of English poetry over the backwardness of Indian verse. Bannergee’s mother, following her husband’s cue of cultural self loathing, held tea parties in their garden residence just off the Maidan of Calcutta, entertaining the bored and stifled English wives of colonial functionaries, ignoring their spiteful class comments directed in her direction, their titters at her provincialism. After the partition, Jaya explained, the English and the Indians had stopped socializing completely, each retreating, except in the rarest circumstances, to their own clubs, and the Bannergee family, like so many other Indian clans at that time, faded into obscurity.
Bannergee himself had, like many wealthy Indians of that time, been packed off to England at age twelve for a proper public schooling at Cheltenham followed by a stint at Oxford. Seeing him off at the dock with a suitcase full of starched collars and jars of lime pickle from his mother, his father admonished him to learn from the English, but “not so much, yaar, that you don’t come home.” From all accounts he had spent nearly ten years there, first as a homesick child, and then as young man, learning to perfect the gin and tonic, and becoming a great bowler. In time he became captain of the cricket team, and he entertained his mates by chasing char women and expounding on subjects he knew very little about and chose not to learn about either. After graduating with doubtful honours, he spent another year in the south of France learning now to drink wine and gamble his rapidly diminishing funds, before regretfully boarding a steamer to return to Calcutta in the year 1897.
Returning home with little more than a letter of introduction to TD Williams[tk:], the then secretary of the Asiatic Society, Bannergee found the tight confines of his family home and the rigid strictures of Victorian colonial society more than he could bear. Besides the provincialism, there had been a drought in the north, and his fathers position, along with the family fortune, were in precarious positions. Declaring himself to be a writer and philosopher and having absolutely no interest in continuing the “tyrannical oppression of wage earner over the peasant” he eschewed the invitations of his peers to the club and took refuge instead in the high ceiling and dingy coffee shops off College Street. There he read Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Spending his days there, he smoked a bitter local variation of Gauloise, and drank endless cups of milky tea from chipped chinaware. Joined by other young men similarly alienated from family and society, they formed the Young Bengalis Writers Group, in the spirit of Tagore. Gathering at the large round tables that dotted the cavernous coffee shop, the group drew attention with their loud and cynical talk, and especially their constant mimicking of the ignorant accents of the turbaned waiters.

All this Jaya told to me in her quiet voice, sipping tea while Joe and I slowly got drunk. The sky outside had faded to black, the spotlights at ground zero lighting up the haze of smoke over lower Manhattan. In the distance a siren sounded over the hum of traffic from the bridge above us, and beyond that I could hear the rattle of the approaching J train. We hadn’t turned on any lights yet and I could just see the two of them in the dark, the outline of their heads framed by the orange glare of a streetlight. I wanted to hear more about Bannergeebut Jaya had grown silent, and I was afraid I would betray my drunkenness if I spoke. Joe too was quiet. We sat there a long time in the stillness of the dark, enjoying each other’s proximity and quiet drunkenness. Eventually though I rose, and slurring my goodbyes, lurched towards the door. I hugged Joe tightly and wanted to hug Jaya, but her shy reticence held me back, and I meekly shook her hand and left.
I walked over the bridge towards my apartment on Stanton street, savouring the first breaths of winter. The city seemed so still then after the attacks, as though people were speaking, and driving at a whisper. Down on the river a barge moved uptown, led by the flashing blue light of its police escort, and another J train thrummed under my feet. Even that seemed to whisper its passing existence.

The next morning I woke late, feeling somewhat chagrined at my throbbing head. After a year of solid drinking following my divorce, I had not been drinking all summer, and the wine sat in my stomach like thick, sour stew. I could feel the hangover in my cheekbones, as well as in my fingertips as I gripped the cold sink. I stared at my face for long time in the mirror, leaning forward over the sink and trying to squint the headache away. After a while, I took a quick shower, and left the apartment to get something to eat.
Moving back to Manhattan from Brooklyn after my divorce, I decided to sublet an apartment from an old friend and in the process fallen in love the City again. It was just what I needed, I felt, to get working on a new novel. (This turned out to be a little premature and I had been stuck for nearly that same amount of keeping myself busy until my recent job writing reviews and reading copy to pay the rent.)
Though my apartment was small, compromising just two tiny rooms with the bathtub in the kitchen and a floor which leaned downtown precipitously, I found Manhattan to be worth it. After four years in Brooklyn, I’d wearied of the commute into the city, and I felt reborn living in the center of the world again.
Throughout that previous spring and summer, I had even been writing again, taking notes for a novel I’d planned for several years, as well as working for an old professor doing research for him on the changing faces of the Buddha throughout history, and across Asia. It had turned out to be a massive project, one in which the professor had become increasingly less interested, while I could think of nothing more enthralling. I had been nearly six months in his employ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with little guidance on what exactly it was I should be researching. Roaming from the Sackler wing of Asian Art to the library and back again, I had spent countless days (sometimes dozing, sometimes wide awake) in front of the simple carved figures. I sat transfixed at their delicate visages and gentle smiles, which seemed to fill the room with light. I took great pleasure in observing what effect the statues had on families and children, most of whom it seemed had wandered into the wing by accident, and were looking for a way out. Unlike the renaissance galleries, where the poisoned sarcasm of the external world still couldn’t be tamed by the silent art, there were parts of the Asian wing that cooled families tempers and left them a little bit in awe, if only for a minute.
There was one statue, about four and a half feet tall and carved of white jade which seemed to have an instantaneous effect on even the brattiest child. On days when I had had enough of the crowds, when my tired cynicism had gotten the best of me I would sometimes sit myself in the small gallery where the statue stood, alone. The walls were painted a heavy green, like the underside of a sage leaf, and there was a small, low dark wooden bench placed about five feet in front of the statue. I would sit there, biding my time, staring into the Buddha’s cool jade eyes, as though lying in wait. Before long I would hear the whining voices from nearly two galleries away, the parents’ wearied arguing and the child’s incessant wheedling echoing in the nearly always empty corridors. Watching these families from afar, and from the aloof vantage point of solitary research, I often wondered why they came at all; it seemed the only thing the family still shared after an afternoon of cultural exposure was a desire to get to the gift store, and then out of the museum, and back into a world they weren’t intimidated by. Invariably though, they would arrive in that gallery, the child running ahead of the parents, and they would stop. The statue affected them so suddenly that their voices would die in mid sentence, and the child would return silently to the parents, shyly grasping its mother’s hand. Eventually of course, the effect would wear off. Continuing the strangeness of the moment, invariably one of the parents, usually the father would approach the wall and stare at the label, announcing to the family with the gravity born of wisdom and doubt, “Well, this one says it’s from Cambodia,” his heading nodding up and down, as though what the label said and what he knew was somewhat in question, but he was willing this time, this time, to accept it, for the sake of family unity and happiness. This act of selflessness done, the father would lead the family away, ushering them along like a saintly shepherd. I would be left alone in delightful silence once again, awed as ever by what I had seen, and radiant with joy.
I had been returning daily to this statue since the attacks nearly a month before. The museum had been closed for almost a week after 9/11, and in the resulting chaos I had missed my Buddha terribly. Since the re-opening (following Bush’s visit to ground zero and subsequent declaration “to keep America open.”) I had returned to my regular schedule, spending most of every day at the museum, reading and taking refuge in my communion with these figurines. For the first time I felt I understood to some extent the compassion of the Buddha; his lilting smile, soft eyes and different hand positions gave me an almost unmatched feeling of calm in his presence. Like the families I secretly observed, I fell, under his gaze, into a trance almost immediately in his presence, and it was this that I relished and grasped ever tighter in the confused days after the attacks.

Leaving my apartment that morning after first meeting Jaya, I noticed that, though still subdued, the city seemed to be returning to life; the construction workers had returned to the building site across the street from me, and the old hispanic man on the corner, dressed impeccably though with a certain shabby grace was back at his usual spot, taking in the morning sun. I didn’t think to much about the story Jaya had told the night before. Mostly my mind was on the essay I had been researching, and how long such a job could be expected to continue. I had not heard from Professor Cornell in over a week and it was becoming increasingly clear that he had no interest in writing the essay, and in fact was keeping me employed doing the research either through the goodness of his heart or through pity, or as I truly suspected, out of neglect and that he had in fact forgotten entirely that I was working for him. My pay checks came through a bank under his name but his signature was imply a rubber stamp. ( He had once alluded to a rich benefactor and I suspected that over time simply been included in the largess.) Though I had always been unsure why he had hired me, it had been work during a scarce time, and requiring me to check in with him regularly had probably saved my life more than once.
I had first seen Mr. Cornell after several years one autumn day in Washington Square Park. I had just polished off a sixteen ounce tall boy and was sitting in the still warm sun on a bench, my head tilted back and my eyes closed. I was, I suppose you could say, communing with nature, such as it is to be found in lower Manhattan. It must have looked to Cornell however like one his former star students was passed out just past noon on a workday. As I got to know him better, I realized how much of a shock this must have been to him. (He once confessed that he wouldn’t have been able to teach without the fantasy that each of his students was going to go on to great things.) Though he didn’t show his distress at the time, later he told me how upset he had been, and it was this emotion that pushed him to insist that I accompany him to lunch that very day. Chagrined, and comfortable in my own depression, I tried to talk my way out of it, but Cornell would have none of my excuses. He even went so far as to eye the empty can at my feet with an arched eyebrow as though to suggest that there really was nothing else I could possibly be doing that day.
That day we went to a Korean restaurant on tenth street not far from where he found me, a clean but empty place utterly lacking in any sort of ambiance, Korean or otherwise. The tables and chairs were mismatched and sat on yellow cracked tile. Behind the cash register, in the only apparent nod to ethnic integrity visible in the entire restaurant, was a calendar featuring prim Asian girls seated in a flower garden. Beside that was taped a poster describing the administration of CPR in case of emergency.
Professor Cornell was a finicky and precise man. He left me for several minutes to use the restroom just after we sat down, and he got up twice during our meal to wash his hands. He used a new handi-wipe on all three of his returns which he extricated from a soft black briefcase. Though none of his clothes seemed new or particularly up to date, he dressed precisely, though with a mis-matched quality that had always endeared me to him. Like his clothes, his gestures were exaggerated though deliberate. His hands would play in front of his face, hovering just over his food, folding and compacting his ideas, layering the concepts one over the other as though illustrating a difficult baking technique. He was constantly ironic, referring often to ideas I couldn’t quite follow but I did my best to keep up. He was pursuing, he said, a history of the Silk Route, and was specifically interested in Alexander the Great’s influence on eastern culture. He was especially interested in the Gandhara culture, he said, which flourished in the second century b.c. after Alexander’s retreat in a series of military missteps. His Greek emissaries remained behind in what is now Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, cut off entirely from their native culture. He described what came next as the first “world” culture, a trans-national hybrid that was Hellenic in spirit, and Buddhist in religion. Over the next several centuries, the Hellenic principles of democracy and Plato flourished in that part of the world, mixing seamlessly with the Buddhism flowing northward from India. The Greek influenced culture had even radically changed representation in Buddhist art; up until that time, Buddhist figures had been aniconic-that is, showing not the figure of the Buddha himself but symbols of him; a lotus blossom for example, Mr. Cornell said, illustrating a blossom with his hands opening, or an imprint of his feet he said, slapping his palms together, as though touching the Buddha’s soles. Never the actual person, never the seated figure in meditation that we associate with Buddhism today. It was the Greek influence, the rationalism that marked contemporary Hellenic thought, that forged with Buddhism and resulted in direct representation. The statuary of Gandhara, Mr. Cornell explained, notably wore the togas of Greece hanging from both shoulders versus the classic Indian dress that covered only one shoulder. The heads were depicted with the tight curls of Semitic hair while the facial characteristics, in the eyes especially, remained those of North India.
Gandhara culture gave birth to Padmasmbhava who was the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, and reached its zenith with the construction of Bamiyian Buddhas, two vast buddhas carved into a cliff face, one measuring 175 feet and the other 120 feet, colossal figures which could be seen from miles away across a valley that descended from one pass and presaged another. Travellers would note time and again the feeling of seeing them rise out of the mists of the Kunduz river, their golden painted figures reflecting the cold winter light of modern day Afghanistan. Around these buddhas, a great city arose. Built nearly halfway between Palestine, the gateway to the Mediterranean, and China, the culture, Mr. Cornell continued, could be described as the first melting pot. Filled with traders and emissaries travelling back and forth, Gandhara became a central depository of knowledge and gossip. From there messages were exchanged, philosophies debated, loads of silk and spices transferred for gold and salt. Mounds of lapis lazuli from the nearby mines of Ishkashim were argued over by ambassadors from the Vatican [tk:]. People were murdered and married there; Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Persians and then later Muslims practiced in the streets; the alleyways echoing and blending with the chants of different liturgies and the raw, bawdy laughter of businessmen. Temples and churches backed up against mosques in an anarchistic celebration of diversity. As he described this, Mr. Cornell’s eyes sparkled and he would look around the restaurant as though hoping to see the buddhas themselves appear to emphasize his point.
Mr. Cornell described it with passion and belief, visibly heating up until beads of sweat appeared on his nose. He would pause and chuckle occasionally at the incredulity of his story, stopping only briefly to eat his food or swallow a quick drink of water. I sat completely transfixed by his stories, almost not believing them. Mr. Cornell had always enjoyed the obscure and the esoteric, and the more fantastic interpretation of history or literature, the better. In the classes I had had with him, I remembered him taking great joy in using strange, post modern sounding words. Using one, he would pause, his eyes glinting with pleasure and gaze around the classroom, watching our faces to see if we had recognized the exotic mot just used. Usually we would face him blankly and shortly he would relent, defining the word or concept patiently, though with a slight visible deflation. That afternoon, Mr. Cornell didn’t use any tricks, nor did he need to; I sat transfixed, less by his story (though the story was wonderful) than by his presence, his intellectual ecstasy which stood in stark contrast to my several months of drunken revelry in which of slurred words, yelled over jukeboxes in dark bars, posed as discourse. In the months since my divorce, I had happily taken on the mantle of the angry, drunk writer, debating and shouting down friends about the merits of Delillo or Auden, standing on pin ball machines chanting out Ginsberg’s Howl until being dragged into the streets by bouncers driven mad by my madness. Listening to Mr. Cornell, I saw the emptiness and futility of my angst, the endless cycle of hysteria which was only aging my friends faster than any of us dared admit and doing little to help us in our careers as writers and artists. I felt so honoured to sit in his presence and watch him access different ideas and thoughts with a profound passion which mocked my own drunken one, and it was with a sadness I watched him finish his food and signal for the check. I had been driven into a respectful and shamed silence when he finally asked me what I was working on, and could only stammer out a reply about working on this or that, sounding like the fool I felt next to him. Out on the street he eyed me in the same mischievous way he had eyed my empty beer can several hours before and said he might have a project coming that he could use help with if I wasn’t too busy. I gave him my number and stood with him while he hailed a cab, not wanting to let him go. I didn’t really believe he would call, and as I put him into a cab, I felt regretful I hadn’t been able to offer more substance to the conversation.
After he had left, the taxi heading downtown, I wandered around a bit, walking up fifth avenue against the traffic. The day had turned cold and the light was already fading, turning that husky early blue of approaching winter. At thirteenth street, I took refuge in East West Books, browsing the Buddhism section until I found pictures of the Bamiyan Buddhas. They were indeed extraordinary. Carved out of sandstone and sheltered in massive coves dug out of the dun coloured cliffs, they stood impassive and serene. The larger one had once held his hand up, his vast palm facing outward in a gesture of nobility and peace, but it had long since disappeared. Despite much of the face having sheared away, a contented smile could be seen on his calm face. In earlier times, both buddhas had been covered with a daub of plaster painted bright, garish colours, and finished in gold leaf, but now only faint traces of pigment remained. The coves themselves had been painted as well with great decorations of the lives of a variety of Bodhisattvas on a rich blue background. (The famous lapis lazuli mined nearby, I imagined.) Sadly, of this only a trace was left as well in the form of dilapidated frescoes sagging on the rough walls, a mere echo of its onetime magnificence. The book quoted Hsuan Tsang, a seventh century trader who wrote that, “its golden hues are sparkle on every side, and its precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness.[sic:]” Between the two standing Buddhas, another smaller one sat crosslegged. Surrounding the three and extending to the hills beyond like a vast wasps nest was a network of caves and halls that had once housed the thousands of monks who gathered in the area. The caves had also worked as a sort of hotel for travellers passing through, and I imagined the cliff side filled with silent observations of thousands of aspirants in repose. In the photos, a lone tree exploded in a riot of green against the dusty cliff face, and far beyond purple snow capped mountains stood sharply against the brilliant high altitude sky. I sat and stared at the book for what seemed like hours, allowing New York to fade away and imagined what my new life might look like as a research assistant.
After a week of nervous anticipation, Mr. Cornell called me and offered me a research position, and I had been immersed in the east since that day. At the beginning, he had wanted me to focus solely on the migration patterns of the early herdsmen on whose paths the silk route was originally founded. I had found the work frightfully boring, and resented the herdsmen more and more each day. In time though, Mr. Cornell, often communicating through his assistant, Elizabeth Pebody, had relented, and requested that I focus more on the art produced during he golden age of the Gandhara. Gratefully leaving behind the public library on fifth avenue, I quietly ensconced myself in a corner of the Metropolitan’s library, and spent hours each day going over the books on Gandharan culture. Many unfortunately were written in German, and though I claimed to Ms. Pebody that I was proficient, my evenings were spent struggling with grammar books and trying to divine away through its arcane tongue.