“But what do you think my chances are?”
He could be child-like with his tutor. Mr. Davidson stared hard at Ananda, as if divining his fortune from his face.
“I think you have a first-class literary sensibility,” said Mr. Davidson. “But you haven’t read enough to get a First.” A sudden small burst of sparrow-chatter.
“You’ve read far more poetry than you have prose. I’d say you’ve read a great deal of poetry.” He made it sound like Ananda had crossed a line that demarcated acceptable behaviour. “But your reading of the novel needs enlarging.”
It was useless to deny this. Ananda loved reading poems. He avoided novels. It was a tacit—not a premeditated—avoidance. He had a restive attention span; his mind drifted when reading long books. The only novels he’d read with true gusto were those trashy thrillers he’d consumed at school. These days he read poems like thrillers. He even took them to the bathroom. Poems of a certain duration, even obscure ones, like Geoffrey Hill’s “To the (Supposed) Patron,” he finished in the duration of a single crap. He then reread it, suspended over the submerged stool. He’d emerge from the bathroom in a strange mood, physically unburdened and spiritually, mentally, elevated. Of “serious” novels, he’d only finished All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and the later, almost comical tragedies of Thomas Hardy, in which things went relentlessly wrong, as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Of course—being ambitious—he’d tried his hand at Ulysses when he was eighteen, and reached its finale without comprehending it—taking pleasure in hardly any of its features except the giant S, the first alphabet in the book. The S had undoubtedly vibrated with energy, but the book was a physical burden. He’d put it in the luggage three years ago on a trip to America with his parents, intending to examine it on his travels. A customs man at JFK had asked them to open the suitcases (in case they were smuggling in Indian fruits or sweets, perhaps). “Ulysses!” the large bespectacled disbelieving customs man had said. “Are you a student?” Ananda had nodded, though he was in the equivalent of high school. “I wouldn’t read Ulysses unless I was a student!” said the customs man, shutting the suitcase after his glimpse into the tantalising freemasonry of studenthood. A potentially incendiary book then—on the verge of being, but not quite, contraband. And near-unreadable. Ananda had secretly rejoiced at it being discovered in his bag on his entry into America.
—
“Moll Flanders,” said Nestor Davidson. “That’s the first of six novels I’d recommend you read.”
Ananda prised out a biro and his chequebook from his trouser pocket and guiltily scribbled the title on the back—in the hasty egress from Warren Street, he’d forgotten his notebook at home.
Moll Flanders! Had he read the Classics Illustrated version? Or was that Silas Marner? His spirits sank. So unadulteratedly and classically English!
“And I think you may as well read Journal of the Plague Year too—it’s very interesting.” Ananda inscribed the numeral 2 and added the name in his tiny handwriting to the chequebook’s uneven surface. He had a premonition of dullness. Walls of prose.
“Gulliver’s Travels.” What! Was Mr. Davidson sending him back to school as a punishment? This he’d definitely encountered in Classics Illustrated, where the comedy of scale had been shrewdly exploited by the artist: the stranded, long-haired body in knickerbockers pinned to the earth—every inch of him—by minute threads. Beautifully drawn. Ananda’s mother used to lovingly call him “Lilliput” when he was a toddler. In Bengali, the word had become a noun referring not to the place but to its people. Must he now go back to this implausible giant?
Reading his mind, Mr. Davidson remarked: “Swift is the best satirist in the English language, a bit extreme and mad (look up ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits’)”—Ananda paused; then rushed to notate the quotation—“but worth your while I think. I’d add Jane Eyre to the list.”
Another children’s book! Classic literature was what he’d encountered long ago mostly in the form of a comic book or movie; it belonged to a boy’s bygone ephemera. He’d grown up; he belonged to the present; modernist difficulty was his bread and butter. He wanted no more of “stories.” The Emmas and Fannys and Rochesters—they were of a closed English household where he’d never been welcome or at home.
“It’s a remarkable novel,” said Mr. Davidson, narrowing his eyes. The First no longer concerned him; he was trying to make Ananda look over his shoulder and notice the dim light shining in the nineteenth century.
“Sons and Lovers,” he said with finality. At last, a novel that didn’t originate in antiquity! Bursting with sex too, from what Ananda had heard.
“That’s enough reading. I’d be very curious to know your thoughts once you’ve finished.”
He was going to see his uncle. But he must get something to eat. Senate House was nearby. He decided he wouldn’t. The busy dining hall on the top floor—it was far too English. The English were a strange lot: even if they didn’t acknowledge your existence, they made you feel on display. How did they manage to do that? Their books advocated the virtues of observation—but they didn’t look at you directly. If you sat opposite an English person, you may as well not be there—that was English politeness, or the rules of the culture. It wasn’t obliviousness. They did practise the art of looking in secret; on the tube, in the silence of human contiguity, Ananda’s eyes had more than once alighted accidentally on the reflection of a co-passenger, and found he was being studied. The eyes had immediately slid away, but he’d been startled that his existence had aroused curiosity. His uncle, with his misshapen racial superiority, often warned him against making eye-contact with skinheads and even punks: “Would you look an animal in the eye? No. Because it thinks it’s a challenge.”
He saw his uncle once or twice a week. They got on each other’s nerves, but had grown fond of the frisson. He was Ananda’s sole friend in London—and Ananda his. “Friend” was right; because his uncle was capable of being neither uncle, nor father, nor brother. He mainly needed a person to have a conversation with—specifically, for someone to be present, listening and nodding, as he talked. When his sister and brother-in-law had returned to India in 1961, the deprivation of such a person in his life had, slowly, changed him. As his basic requirement was an avid companion, he didn’t get married, because the distractions of sex and administering a family would leave less time to talk about himself. Deprivation had already turned him—when Ananda visited London in 1973 with his parents—into a hermit in a dressing-gown. The rug and furniture in the first-floor bedsit was covered with a fur-like lining. The pans in the kitchenette sink hadn’t been treated to a washing liquid for years. He was cheery to outward purposes, his sideburns signifying the mood of the time, a shipping company high-flyer. When he came to see them in their hotel room on their next visit in 1979, he was bitter. For some reason, he was furious with Ananda’s parents. He’d emptied the round coconut naroo that Ananda’s mother had brought for him from home into the wastepaper basket. They placated him somehow, for the hurt they’d unknowingly caused. Because the person who congenitally seeks companionship—rather than seeking out, say, positions of influence or power—is also, often, a compulsive quarreller. There are hardly any terminal severances in his life, as he can’t afford them. His relationships might be defined by discord, but they’re also permanent.
—
Circling back to Warren Street, so he could pay Walia the rent, Ananda crossed at the traffic lights. He still wasn’t out of Bloomsbury. Discovering the college was in the heart of Bloomsbury had once compensated an iota (no more) for his misery in London, and for the fact that he wasn’t in Oxford or Cambridge. The entrance exams he’d have had to take for Oxbridge—given his aversion to being quizzed and assessed—decided it for him; and the fact that he’d need to write a Latin paper for Cambridge had made up his mind. But he might still have wavered if his uncle hadn’t casually said he’d put him up. Staying with him seemed like a feasible idea at the time. Anot
her reason to be in London. How the two would have fitted into the bedsit was never put to the test. Part of the lore about his uncle had to do with how he’d taken in Bontu, an older cousin of Ananda’s, when he was a poor research student at the School of Tropical Medicine. Many were Bontuda’s stories about his uncle’s and his odd-couple existence—till Bontu got his doctorate and escaped. Maybe some kind of wisdom made his uncle retract his original offer to Ananda. By then Ananda was already aimed for London. He didn’t change direction. When he realised at last that he was almost daily in Bloomsbury, he couldn’t find it. Whenever he came to college, he thought he’d encounter it without having to actively search for it. The sixties stone building of the Bloomsbury Cinema and the bed and breakfasts with black doors on the outer reaches of Gower Street didn’t add up to the place.
—
Nestor Davidson’s rebuttal—his misreading—of his poems was sinking in. He pondered over the remark, “I’m sure you’re not as bloodthirsty as this makes you appear,” as he walked towards Charlotte Street, feeling faintly hungry. He was unassailable. The words didn’t hurt; they weren’t meant to. They were a detail in a small chapter in a larger story whose shape still wasn’t clear; but Ananda sensed that glory, in the end, would be his. Walia: he’d promised he’d give him the cheque this afternoon. The Natwest chequebook was curled double in his pocket, less a financial accessory than an extension of himself.
—
Down the stretch of Charlotte Street he went—he liked the route, because there was no one else on it, and he felt like he possessed the road—till he came to Grafton Way and turned right. Here was Walia’s kingdom. He had two restaurants here. The one on the corner of Grafton Way and Whitfield Street was fancifully called Diwan-i-Khas, the Regal Court, as in the Red Fort, from where the Mughals centuries ago had reigned. In fact, the environs gave off echoes of Mughal imperial history, and, on Tottenham Court Road, a minute away, was the Red Fort itself, Lal Qila, a better-quality restaurant than Walia’s: its tandoori quail was fabulous, though you had to take care to extricate the deceptively thin bones in the bird’s flesh in case you choked on one. On Whitfield Street was (named after another section of the interminable Red Fort) a second restaurant, Diwan-i-Aam, the Commoners’ Court. Ananda had presumed that this was a rejoinder by a rival to Walia, until he found that the dashing Punjabi owned both restaurants. There was a joke among tenants in the buildings Walia owned on Warren Street that, given the steady advance he was making in capturing properties, he’d become “Lord Walia” before long. The little stretch of Whitfield Street between Grafton Way and Warren Street was not, however, salubrious. On one side lay a vacant lot behind which was a shattered building occupied illegally by people from the Caribbean—whose proximity scandalised the wealthier Indian expatriates in Walia’s flats. On the opposite side was a neutral Bangladeshi grocer’s, and Diwan-i-Aam (through the panes you could see customers submitting to men dressed like Peshawari soldiers), which marginally enlivened the stretch in the evening. But best was the Jamaican music shop adjoining the vacant lot, on your left if you were directly facing Diwan-i-Khas on Grafton Way. Without explanation or warning, it would sometimes vibrate with music of simple, uncomplicated joy, comprising two or three chords and an agile melody.
—
Walia was usually to be found in Diwan-i-Khas, the Regal Court; you rarely spotted him in Diwan-i-Aam. Entering, Ananda at once saw him at a table between the doorway and the bar. He was in his mid-fifties, with an air both youthful and authoritative. His sartorial sensibility had been shaped by the seventies. He wore a pale, silken shirt—its sheen achieved a kind of parity with his silver hair—and left the first two or three buttons unfastened, so that you were provided a glimpse of his largely hairless torso—with the exceptional strand of grey—and the curve where his mildly assertive paunch began. Close friends called him Manny: an affectionate contraction of Maninder. Despite his cheesiness, he stood out; he was handsome, in a Punjabi-aquiline way, his flared nostrils giving the impression of a man who had a temper and an instinct for flamboyance.
Ananda had never been a rent-payer before; Walia was his first landlord. He didn’t know how to take him. Though it was well disguised—maybe even subconscious—he couldn’t banish the feeling that Walia was a subordinate. An intellectual one. What was he but a small-time “Asian” businessman, despite his airs? A man who temporarily had the upper hand. What was “Asian” anyway—an equivocal category, neither British nor Indian, for people who had essentially nowhere to go? The whole notion of Walia’s properties became a bit of a joke then, something he was making up on the hoof. Maybe these prejudices—a set of defences, really, on Ananda’s part, against one who exercised power over him—somehow conveyed themselves to Walia, and explained his stiffness.
“Mr. Walia.”
He looked up from whatever was absorbing him in the ledger, smiled faintly.
“Ha—how are you?”
“Fine, thank you. Uh—I’ve got the rent.”
Not cash in hand. He dipped into the pocket for the chequebook. The rent was two hundred and fifty pounds—a hundred more than before, given the sequestering of the kitchen and the conversion of the second floor into Ananda’s studio flat. Ananda’s mother had had a showdown with Walia in Diwan-i-Khas about the rent and the neighbours. “You can’t charge us because other people behave terribly!” She’d flashed her big angry eyes. That usually worked. “You don’t know who you’re talking to,” she said. How could he? Could he have any conception—this restaurant owner—of their apartment overlooking the sea, or her husband’s exalted position? “You’re nothing,” he’d said, studying the ledger, not so much shying away from eye-contact as not troubling to look at her. “Nothing.” She was. Neither her dominance nor her husband’s extended to here. She could protect Ananda, but mainly with joking camaraderie. Later, she’d mimicked Walia—“You’re nothing, you’re nothing”—and they’d relished the remark. There was no change to the barely affordable rent.
—
The smell of fenugreek. A sudden hiss: someone had ordered the tandoori platter. There weren’t that many people: weekday lunches were a desultory affair. Diwan-i-Khas was largely uninfiltrated. He took out the cheque, doubled foetally on itself. Smoothed it on the table.
The Sylheti waiters tarried discreetly. Benevolent backup. Walia’s troops, but Ananda’s kin. From the ancestral land he’d never seen.
“Kemon asen?” said the handsome one with the thinning hair in an undertone. Ananda had never forgotten him. He had the steadfastly reassuring air he’d had when, two years ago, Ananda and his parents had entered Diwan-i-Khas for the first time; once his father and mother had divulged over the beginnings of tarka daal and pilau rice that they hailed from Sunamganj and Habiganj respectively—how it had startled this man!—the subject had turned to rentable property. The hostel had become intolerable; its drunkards and merrymakers—international students—were keeping Ananda from practising music. Someone said the hostel was rumoured to be a “pickup joint.” But Ananda hadn’t been able to take advantage of that aspect of the place either. In the course of their uninformed search for alternative accommodation, they’d slipped into Diwan-i-Khas. “Fo-laat?” the waiter had asked, unflappably resourceful, as he poured tap water from a jug. “You want fo-laat?” Ananda was delighted by the neologism. It was deliberate—meant to put them at ease, earn trust in a way that English or standard Bengali couldn’t. So it was when waiters were plying them with mango chutney. “Fikol?” they’d say solicitously, holding the bowl of mango pickle aloft, disorienting, then disarming, them. Yes, they’d have fikol, how could you demur to such a request, which admitted you to the deepest—maybe it was a slightly too deep—familiarity? “Fo-laat?” this man hovering now by the table had said two years ago, and pointed them in the direction of Warren Street. “Our malik Walia—he has lots of fo-laats, ask him.”
To his enquiry now, “Kemon asen?” Ananda said, “Well”—“Bhalo”—sta
ndard Bengali; no one, not even his parents, spoke to him in Sylheti, and he wouldn’t presume to reply in it with the rustic “Bhala,” fearing it might sound like a parody of the tongue. When he was little, his parents had instructed him that Sylheti was not a language but a dialect. And when he was seventeen, he’d lighted on an aphorism by Marshall McLuhan: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” His people—if he could call these waiters his people—perhaps didn’t have an army or navy, then? But actually they did, having wrested and carved out their land in 1971. The land that, before 1947, was Ananda’s parents’ and theirs was now solely theirs. Still, could they be entirely happy in it if they were, today, not there, but here, at the tables of Diwan-i-Khas?
From the newsagent’s—two shops to the right of Diwan-i-Khas—he decided to get his near-daily copy of the Times. First he passed Asian Books and Video, with its tranquil but impoverished air, like a duty-free shop in a socialist country. He’d been in there once, wondering if he might uncover some bootlegged Asian porn (he’d never seen any, it was the myth of it that was compelling) in the basement—if there was a basement. Instead he found books on agriculture, philosophy (by Radhakrishnan), religion, and stacked copies of India Abroad; and what looked like smudged, pirated videos of Shaan and Chacha Bhatija. He had wanted to but balked at asking the balding, good-looking, empathetic proprietor, “Do you, by any chance, have Asian porn?” He wasn’t sure at which point the empathy would dry up. But he did often feel the invisible, gravitational pull of racial empathy: that the Indian, Pakistani, black, even the Chinese, could be presumed upon in a way that the white man couldn’t. The outlines of their consciousnesses were fuzzier, less individual, and softer, like their physical features—noses, jaw-lines, bodies. Ananda felt a strange unconscious familiarity among them—in ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t have noticed his countrymen; but he noticed them here, reviewing them not only with recognition, but with accumulated knowledge and an emotion he hadn’t previously been aware of. Indeed, the very urge and temptation not to notice them—not just Indians, but the heterogeneous tribe of the non-Caucasian—to take them for granted, was something he thought of now as quite wonderful: a gift. Before this profound temptation, and due to it, the stubborn conflicts—between Indian and Chinese, Pakistani and Indian—melted and became irrelevant. In contrast, you couldn’t not be aware of a white man. His very clarity and perfection of features made each version of him separate, singular, and quietly nervous-making.
Odysseus Abroad Page 7
