by Tabish Khair
But Mary did not allow the Captain to dwell on such thoughts. She had better things to fill his mind with: things to do with herself. She dropped a handkerchief, and when the Captain did not notice it drop, she pointed it out to him. Meadows gallantly stooped to retrieve the fabric from the bedewed grass.
‘Oh, look’, said Mary.
Captain Meadows looked. There was a ladybird on the handkerchief.
‘It is quite unusual’, began Captain Meadows.
‘Isn’t it beautiful’, Mary interrupted.
There was a slight pause before Captain Meadows could think of the right response. ‘Not as beautiful as you, if I may say so.’ But perhaps it was not the right response.
Mary frowned.
‘Are you comparing me to a bug, Captain?’ she asked with a perfect pout.
She watched him stutter and fumble and realized once again why it was taking her so long to reel him in: this highly eligible man, excellent in so many ways, simply lacked the social ease with which other young men besieged her at parties and balls. But Mary, though exceptionally pretty, was no fool. She was not looking for a beau, not any more; she was looking for a husband. And Captain Meadows had ‘husband’ written all over his pale, blushing face with its long sideburns and washed-out eyes. She relented and laughed.
The Captain looked incredibly relieved.
50
Jenny and Amir could not hold hands in the polite parts of the city. This was new, Qui Hy had told them: when she was young, no one had objected to a coloured woman walking hand in hand with a white man. Perhaps that was so, thought Amir, or perhaps it was simply because in his case, it was the woman who was white. He did know that he could walk with Jenny in the rougher neighbourhoods of the city, in the rookery, for instance. But in the polite parks and streets he had to walk behind her, or some man or the other would take offence on Jenny’s behalf and shove him away with a word or a gesture.
This was less disturbing for Amir, who had long realized that all societies had their untouchables, than for Jenny. She felt obliged to protest on his behalf. On one occasion, it had led to a scuffle. It would have ended badly too, if the two white men who had objected did not speak with such a heavy American accent — this had inspired Jenny to accuse the two of being slavers, thus winning the sympathy of the crowd. Killers of Lovejoy, this isn’t America, a voice from the crowd had shouted. The men had been shoved and booed away by the mob and Jenny and Amir were actually cheered and applauded when they resumed their walk. But now Amir pre-empted the possibility of unpleasantness by keeping a step behind Jenny in the fashionable avenues of London.
Having spent the afternoon at Hyde Park, watching squirrels quarrel with long-tailed tits in the uneasy company of people of the higher classes, they were now walking back to Amir’s half-house. Amir relished these rare trips — for Jenny was always working — to parks or monuments. He was fascinated by the look of rapture with which Jenny pointed out the latest features of the place they visited — this time, it was the monumental entrance at Hyde Park Corner, which Jenny recalled being built when she was a child. But while she could point out all the new features, she was largely ignorant of the history of the parks and palaces. She would listen with a combination of disbelief and fascination when Amir supplied some of the missing history, culled from papers or gossip. This afternoon she had laughingly refused to believe Amir when he told her that the Serpentine was an artificial lake, created only a century ago.
In general, Jenny and Amir did not talk much. On the way back from Hyde Park, they admired the buildings and the dresses: Amir because he was still getting used to this city, Jenny because it was seldom that she had time to look at the houses she passed, the people she served.
As they walked towards the neighbourhood where Amir was renting a place, not very far from Qui Hy’s dhaba, imperceptibly they drew closer to each other. As the streets got darker and dirtier, the houses more dilapidated, the invisible pressure of decorum that had kept them apart dissipated and they realized they were holding hands. Unlike her hair, which was carefully tended and protected even during her most difficult chores, Jenny’s hands were hard and callused. If her hair, when she let it down for Amir, evoked a desire to protect, her hands seemed to proclaim a capacity to survive on their own, unprotected by anyone. It was this that Amir found most fascinating about Jenny: her vulnerability and her toughness.
They walked on together, hand in hand, in the growing darkness of this rough neighbourhood full of dogs and homeless people, of houses with broken shutters, of people with abandoned dreams; they walked on like any other couple down a street that had seen and borne so much that it felt no surprise at the sight of a young Asian man, dressed like a lascar, walking with a slightly older English maid. When the clouds parted and the moon was revealed as almost full, the two lovers felt alone in the slight fog, wrapped in themselves, though the street was still teeming with people, carts and horses, urchins and sellers, porters and burglars, lascars and gypsies, Malays and Moroccans, tinkers and beggars, drunks and prostitutes returning home or, in some cases, going to work.
51
If Amir and Jenny had not been so intent on each other, perhaps they would have noticed the ‘Singing Salesman’, January Monday, on one of the streets they passed on their way back to Amir’s house. They would have known him. He was known by sight to many in London: his name purportedly taken from the month and day when he arrived in London on a ship from Jamaica.
Perhaps because he had already made enough money, at that moment, January was not singing the songs that he wrote on paper and sold to passers-by during the day. They were mostly hymns or ballads celebrating some English victory and hero, particularly Lord Nelson, and many people bought them out of patriotism or altruism, for they could not really take the texts seriously as poetry, though everyone agreed that the man sang handsomely. But then he was black, wasn’t he, and the Negro race was good at singing and dancing, being closer to nature; it was at athletics, sports, literature and science that Negroes showed their inferiority.
So Amir would not have been exceptional in recognizing January Monday, wrapped in his sails and rigging, fashioned with stylish care if only one looked at them with different eyes. He was a fixture in these parts. But January knew Amir too, and perhaps if the two men had seen each other, he would have joined Amir and gone on to Qui Hy’s or some other place. Had he done so, he might have escaped the fate that had been trailing him all evening, in the shape of three men, one of them one-eyed and armed with a cudgel. For January Monday was not only a gifted singer and poet, a man who had stitched himself into a future in an alien land; he was also a man with a deformed, indented skull.
52
Having cultivated a meagre moustache, I left Phansa for the first time. I had finished high school and there were no decent colleges in town. With a few other boys from my class, I went to Patna. We were not the best students, I must say: the best students were accepted by colleges in Delhi or by the various government-run medical and engineering colleges. Those who went to Patna were average students, unable to study science’ in better places and not willing, due to family pressure or career expectations, to study Humanities.
Suddenly, from living in a large compound with sprawling houses — my grandfather’s whitewashed one in the middle, flanked by the slightly smaller houses of his two sons — I had to live in a flat. The flat was only slightly bigger than the library in my grandfather’s house. And I had to share it with three other boys, two of us in each of the two rooms. There was a kitchen with a grilled window, which looked out on the dirt-streaked walls of another building. There was a bathroom with a window covered with wire. The wire had rusted and a hole had been poked into it, for cigarette stubs to be thrown out; they littered the window ledge outside.
I felt constrained. I felt imposed upon, observed. But then I looked around, and all around me there were people living two to a room, four to a room. I had never realized life took so little. This con
strained, corralled space, not my grandfather’s spacious whitewashed house, was (I realized) closer to the common inheritance of humankind. When I try now to imagine Amir Ali, Gunga and his friends in London, I think of such rooms in places like Patna. How fine a thread — the silk of surviving — links them apart.
53
Gunga and his gang were as good as their word. For the third evening in a row, the moment they heard Jenny come in, they rolled up their blankets and, after a short conversation, sheepishly excused themselves, leaving the two-room half-house entirely to the young lovers. Jenny and Amir had no place but the half-house to be intimate in. Jenny was no longer living at her aunt’s house: she could not afford to rent it alone and the landlord had foisted two other young women on her after her aunt’s murder.
Amir used to feel uneasy on such occasions, for all the men — everyone except Gunga, who remained as he had always been, wiry, alert, indefatigable (despite having lost his job) — were showing the effects of being landlocked in a cold place. Karim, despite his tall stories about encounters with English and Irish women, was coughing much of the time and occasionally spat out blood. Even Tuanku, a tough, gnarled little man, was thinner and less ebullient than before. Amir knew that if it had not been for his house, they would have subsisted in some dilapidated room, damp and dark, sharing with others like them. He also knew that when they went out, they had few options regarding shelter: Qui Hy’s dhaba was never open to anyone after midnight, and it was seldom that the gang had money for drinks in dockside pubs.
Sometimes, when Karim felt better, he sold biblical tracts on the streets: he had invested in a pile and he knew some English hymns. Amir had heard him on some of those occasions. He gave the same story to all the kind ladies and gentlemen who interrogated him. ‘I was born in Calcutta and was Mussulman — but I Christian now. I have been in dis countree ten year. I come first as servant to a military officer, Englishman. I lived with him in Scotland six, seven mont. He left Scotland, saying he come back, but he not, and in a mont I hear he dead, and den I come to London. I wish very often return to my countree, where everything sheap, living sheap, rice sheap...’
He would follow this up with a hymn in his melodious voice, maintaining a conscious balance between the crispness of English intonation and the fluidity of Hindustani rhythms, pronouncing and mispronouncing the words in the way he knew he was expected to, and it would almost always charm the gentleman or lady into purchasing a tract. But with his consumption exacerbated by the recent winter cold, it was seldom that Karim had the energy or the voice for this livelihood now. Instead, he tagged along with the rest of his gang of jahaajbhais, pilfering, scavenging, grateful to Amir for providing them with a warm and free shelter. Only Gunga still went to the docks, looking for work on some departing ship.
Jenny had cleaned herself thoroughly for the visit to Amir’s place — her hair still smelt of vinegar and she had put on a fresh, if threadbare, dress. Her only shawl — which she kept as carefully as her hair — was wrapped around her sturdy shoulders, over a plain dress that reached her ankles and had, despite the attentions of a darning needle, obviously seen better days. In the gloom of the sparsely furnished room, she took off her petticoats in a matter-of-fact way that Amir found fascinating: it combined the knowledge of the tawaifs he had known in Patna with the demureness of the girls from his village. He waited and watched as garment after garment was discarded, methodically, and in some cases folded away. Jenny seemed to reveal herself more and more with each gesture: the half smile that belonged to a shy girl, the measured movements of an experienced woman, the hair that cascaded down unreal as a dream, the slender work-hardened muscles of reality that her bare arms exposed... but when she came to the last garments, she bent and blew out the only candle in the room. She would have considered it improper to be seen fully naked. She was a woman used to seeing other women importuning from doorways, half hanging out from windows so that the pedestrian could look down and beyond their breasts; it had left her with a revulsion for any stage-setting.
54
The Batterstone mansion was not lighted with gas. It was lighted in the traditional way: with candles and lanterns, torches and fireplaces. Even the library. And it was in the library that Lord Batterstone had taken refuge after dinner this evening, assuming that he was most likely to be left undisturbed in this room of shelves and books. But he was not left alone for long. The young Reginald B. Sangrail — of all people — came sidling in and almost bumped into the armchair in which Lord Batterstone was incumbent. Having refitted his pince-nez and discovered his reclusive host, Mr Sangrail overcame his initial surprise and seated himself in an adjoining chair, attempting to converse.
The host was just as surprised: Mr Reginald B. Sangrail, whose conversation seldom galloped without horses, foxes and hounds to inspire it, was the last person he had expected to encounter in his library. In any library. Had he been more perceptive, he would have read from the blush on Mr Sangrail’s handsome features that he had arranged to encounter someone else — of another age and gender altogether. But not bothering with faces, expert as he was of skulls, the lord asked Mr Sangrail if he, too, was interested in phrenology.
‘Yes, sir, what logic?’ yipped Mr Sangrail, still recovering from his surprise.
‘Phrenology’, repeated Lord Batterstone. He indicated the book he had been looking at, and the shelves in that part of the room — all of them stocked with books on phrenology and related matters.
‘Oh, of course, sir’, replied Mr Sangrail, following his general policy of agreeing with people as much as possible, ‘I am a great admirer of phrenology. It is an intricate science, sir. Just the other day, I was reading that fellow Coombe...’
It was one of Mr Sangrail’s many talents that he picked up references and names in light conversation and quoted them, with much astuteness and deadly effect among females of a certain kind, on singularly appropriate occasions.
‘Combe, sir? Now which book was it, and what did you think of the author?’
Mr Sangrail was going to blurt out an inane eulogy, but he looked at his host’s expression and, being a careful reader of faces, modulated his reply significantly.
‘I cannot claim, sir, that I entirely agreed with the author.’
Lord Batterstone sat up abruptly. For the first time in days, the light of interest flickered in his chimerical yellow-blue-green eyes.
‘You were right not to, sir. The man hardly knows what he is talking about, at least not when it comes to the core issues...’
‘Exactly my feeling, Lord Batterstone, though of course I lack your knowledge of the matter.’
‘So does the world, sir, so does the world’, said Lord Batterstone, feeling a sudden desire to unburden himself to this sympathetic and knowledgeable listener.
Mr Sangrail made soft, obliging noises. Another of his talents was to produce noises so finely modulated that they could be made to carry the burden of any — or no — meaning.
Lord Batterstone grew more expansive. He poured himself and the fine young man some excellent claret.
‘It has been one of my endeavours, sir, to prove that man wrong. And I believe it will not be long — perhaps no longer than two or three years — before I crush his supporters under the weight of evidence, of solid proof, sir.’
Mr Sangrail raised himself to the occasion. ‘I am sure, Lord Batterstone, that your book will be a major contribution to science and society’, he offered encouragingly.
‘Book, sir? I shall not indulge in the vulgar conceit of writing a book. I am compiling something far more extensive and scientific. Haven’t you heard of my Theatre of Phrenological Specimen, sir?’
Mr Sangrail, who had not even dreamt of any such thing, hastened to assure the lord that word of this great monument had been circulating, admiring mouth to awestruck mouth, in the upper-most and most intelligent echelons of society, state and civilization.
‘You see, sir, my European collection is almost complete,
and it proves me right and the Combians wrong. But next summer, perhaps even earlier, I am embarking on a voyage up the Congo which will enable me to expand the collection decisively.’
‘I am sure, sir, a voyage to India will be beneficent...’
‘India? India, sir? I am talking of the Congo in darkest Africa. It is there I hope to be around this time of the year, not here, surrounded by...’
Lord Batterstone waved his hands in a gesture of contempt and dismissal, which Mr Sangrail interpreted as aimed at the books in the room. As he harboured a similar contempt for books and never imagined that anyone could evince contempt for people like him, Mr Sangrail hummed and hawed in sympathy, drained his claret as fast as etiquette permitted, and sauntered off to his next rendezvous.
55
Major Grayper rolled the newspaper into a tube, folded it in half and threw it into the wastebasket. The cheek of the man! And to think that he knew him, knew Meadows, knew half the people in their circle... But then, what else could one expect from a pen-pusher, from a grubby little hack!
Mrs Grayper looked up from her breakfast at this act of unusual violence by her spouse. She glanced at the paper lying in the basket. She looked back at the Major.
