The train passed Mornington Crescent without stopping. He caught a much-prized glimpse of the platform. Camden Town and Chalk Farm were dispatched easily; less than five minutes after Mornington Crescent, the train slowed down for Belsize Park. The old Gujarati in the jacket had nodded off; the woman—Ananda saw them both through the window when he got off, hurtling forth—was in a wakeful slumber, eyes deep and fixed. Gone. He went up the stairs, then past the semi-circular hatch (through which the platform from which he’d just risen was visible), with its onrush of air each time a train approached or after it departed—invisible gust, by which you knew a journey’s aftermath or closeness. His uncle and he had strolled past the hatch a hundred times in their lackadaisical way: they never hurried for the trains, not even upon being warned by that warm breeze.
Through the collapsible doors on to the spherical cage, the lift. More than anything—escalator or staircase—this antique piece of ironwork was his connection to what was subterranean here. From the depths he emerged to view Haverstock Hill in the summer. At the exit, instead of weighing the zebra crossing, he turned right, passing the florist’s adjoining the station, where someone behind the glass was harvesting bouquets for customers, choosing, bending, and embracing the flowers. The row of restaurants in the shade on Ananda’s right-hand side appeared to regard him from an imperceptible incline. Weaving in and out of the shadows of trees planted at intervals, he crossed to the Hampstead Town Hall. Its ten steps rising to a sturdy black door, its facade of brick, red stone, and white borders, were inextricably related in his mind to the Pujas. Was it still a town hall? Or something else? The Pujas had moved to King’s Cross. Yet each time he saw the building his memory summoned up two crowded occasions when he, his uncle, and his parents had come here for the festival, his uncle dawdling shyly, half-reluctant to encounter other Bengalis. They’d approached the space—thick with merrymakers—before the majestic staircases on either side, glimpsed, on the first floor, the goddess, noted the festoons of marigold, descended with the crowd to receive khichudi. The English ignored the festivities; as Forster had said, they’d never had gods, only goblins and fairies. They wouldn’t know what it meant to have gods watching over you; they didn’t know what to do with them. So, on the whole, they steered clear of the autumnal droves of women in saris, the men in suits, or flaunting dhutis. He turned left, down the bollarded slope of Belsize Avenue.
—
The sun fell on the opposite side of the road. He walked past the Scandinavian-type apartments as well as the spacious opening into Belsize Village; crossing as if on cue to the other side, continuing a few seconds up the road, he noted the tile that said BELSIZE PARK NW3. The houses on the right paraded themselves one after the other, the front door up a flight of steps—they were like actresses on a stage, ageless, full frontal for the audience. They had their trinkets—columns, pediments, fluted whorls. The basement was on ground level; the main house occupied a proscenium. Number 23—which was coming up—had a green door; number 24 was maroon. On the border of 23—separating the steps from what could be used as a parking space—was a very low wall, a platform you could even sit on. Through the sunlit space by it, Ananda advanced to his uncle’s room at the back. There were two empty milk bottles on the ground, and a garbage bin, the plastic liner making a narrow lip under the lid. And his uncle’s windows—fortified, for some reason, with bags from Budgens. He wasn’t sure if his uncle ever carried a briefcase. Even when they’d twice had a rendezvous at Moorgate Station, when his uncle still worked in the “city,” Ananda hadn’t seen him with one. Maybe briefcases were overrated by office-goers, and his uncle had shown that it was possible to live without them. His sole accessory as a peripatetic man was the Budgens bag. He also carried one—maybe to guarantee he’d never be short—folded in the pocket of his mac or jacket. Even when walking about with minuscule cargo, his closed fist would have penetrated the loop of the bag into the mac pocket, with it swinging idly from his wrist as he walked. He probably didn’t believe in throwing the bags away just in case he ran out in the future, which is why he stuffed them against the windows. Ananda rapped on one of the sealed panes. A cat—white with patches of carpet brown—which had come to pry among the bottles, and was loping away from Ananda, turned to look. Its tail was raised like a mast. It padded off to the garden at the back; “garden” was too generous a name. It—the sunlit lot—was green, overgrown, and generally empty. For all his uncle’s rhapsodising about nature and the wilds, his bestial love of the tiger and forests, Ananda had never seen him so much as glance at the “garden.” Maybe it wasn’t wild enough. It was unkempt, though. To underline his sharp raps on the pane, he pressed the buzzer for “Nandy.” He needn’t have. His uncle was nothing if not alert. An instant after Ananda had put thumb to buzzer, he heard the door being unlatched—almost anticipatorily. His uncle was wearing a maroon dressing gown. “Hello Pupu,” he said, glad, but without surprise, as you would to someone who was overdue.
—
He entered and turned to the half-ajar door on the left. His uncle shuffled behind him, gentlemanly, slow. The looped sash of the dressing gown came undone, revealing, underneath, the slight frame in the dark maroon pyjama suit.
“You’re nowhere near ready,” said Ananda, taking on a patrician, indulgent air. “It’ll be four soon. When are we going out?”
“Darao he,” said his uncle, in his mock-literary way. Switching to English: “I haven’t finished yet!” A look of annoyance on his face. “Wait, sit down, let me get you something.”
Ananda looked around him. The centre table, or dining table, or maybe the work table—whatever it was—had chairs on two sides, one bearing a pile of books on shipping law. Noticing Ananda’s beady stare, his uncle made to remove this low stack, at which Ananda pulled out the other chair and said, “That’s fine, that’s fine, I’ll sit here.”
He lowered himself, distrustful of the surface. He patted and slapped it. The smallish table was covered neatly with pages from newspapers in lieu of a tablecloth. There were more books on it: a familiar, creased pile of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, a half-open novel by Stephen King, a copy of the Sun that seemed to have been recently consulted, a shaving mirror. Ananda looked away. The bed was right next to him, against the wall, not properly made but not wholly neglected either, the tucked blanket that would have been pulled down slightly at night pulled up again, the sheet and pillow still bearing his uncle’s impress.
Ananda could see him. He was rummaging in the kitchenette. The bedsit was divided in two: this room was three quarters of it, then came the kitchenette through a doorway with no door.
He returned brandishing a can. “Coke?” he asked. “I’m all right,” said Ananda: he wasn’t going to drink Coke in the afternoon—it seemed like a scandalous thing to do. Ananda knew his uncle had stocked up on Coke to appease Ananda’s mother—from stirrings of guilt, because he so often insulted her—ever since he’d realised that she liked the drink. “Are you sure?” he asked, drawing out the word “sure” like a melancholy Bengali syllable. Ananda kept shaking his head. “Would you like a Jaffa cake then? Ba Mr. Kipling-er almond slice?” He’d become very hospitable—not overnight, but inexorably. He had a very personal notion of hospitality, though. Having long fended for himself with only a degree of success, he threatened to rain a small range of confectionary on Ananda. This was linked to his own taste rather than his guest’s (the Coke was an exception)—since he had a sweet tooth, it largely comprised cakes.
—
“Guess what I had for breakfast,” said his uncle. Although Ananda knew the answer, and knew his uncle knew he knew the answer—as he asked the question of his nephew each time they met up and the answer was the same—he pretended courteously not to know, because he knew his uncle wanted to tell him again. Epic theatre. The point being not to learn a new story, but to hear it, with recognition, recited for the umpteenth time. So with audiences of epic sagas, who’d been told the tale ad absurdum, kn
ew the lines by heart, and delighted at being told again.
“Coffee with a bit of cream and eleven spoons of sugar, and a quarter of a toast with half a spoon of honey.” He looked distant and amused—his hunger had been exacerbated by his inadvertent mention of the Jaffa cakes. “I haven’t eaten anything since then. I’m burning with hunger!” He seemed pleased at his feat. Pleased, because his diet followed some theory of life—to do with subsistence, staying fit and lean (he worried uninterruptedly about how he looked), and with maximising pleasure when he ate in the evening. Even then, prolonging and deferring pleasure would take precedence over killing hunger; he’d chew with infuriating slowness, holding himself in check and wading into a tantalisingly dilatory frame of time. If Ananda were eating with him, he’d be distracted from his own meal by the strangely frustrating sight of his uncle chewing. All things by dinner were universally appetising (“I could eat a horse!” he’d say in restaurants or when he came to have dinner at Warren Street), and he’d scoff at Ananda’s likes and dislikes in food as finicky. He lived life by a code of punishments and rewards, withholding from himself till he was on the edge, the subsequent act of auto-kindness then feeling like a miracle. Even his living conditions had no relation to his means, but was a deliberate act of deprivation, conditions from which he’d probably release himself one day on a whim.
“Eleven spoons!” said Ananda, disapproving—this was what he dutifully exclaimed each time. Yet he did rise to the bait, there was a genuine reprisal of surprise at his uncle’s—his entire maternal clan’s—consumption of sugar (his grandmother had died of diabetes; his aunt had it; one of his cousins had developed the juvenile variety and took daily self-administered shots of insulin). Rangamama had no sign of the disease. He looked pleased at Ananda’s veiled reprimand. “And now he’ll say,” thought Ananda, “ ‘I hardly slept last night.’ ” Still, he felt a twinge of pity. His mother had chronic insomnia. He’d often discovered her hovering near the dining table at three in the morning. She emerged to nibble at biscuits. Ananda had it: or he wouldn’t have run into his mother. He glanced at the bed. It seemed well-used, frequently inhabited. Beneath it were bottles from which he averted his gaze. They brought a urinous presence to the room, mingled sweetly with aftershave. The bottles made unnecessary that trip at two in the morning to the shared loo in the hallway. Although Ananda heated his flat to tropical levels, he knew the resistance you felt at night, in the chill, to emptying your bladder—the pressure on the sphincter muscle deepened by the very chill—he knew what it was like to coerce yourself to liberate your body from the warm cell of the tucked-in blanket, climb off the bed, drown briefly in the cold, totter to the hallway. There were few more solitary odysseys. Better to do it in a bottle. “I slept badly last night,” grumbled Rangamama.
But he looked well-rested. “When will you be done?” nagged Ananda. His uncle had unbuttoned his shirt, draped it over a chair. He began to dab his arm with a small wet towel. “Haven’t had your bath?” “Bath!” His uncle, as he swept his thin arms and shoulders, demurred to the question. “No,” he admitted. “I had a bath last in April.” It sounded dreadful; but Ananda—when he thought of it calmly, and despite the evidence to the contrary—concluded his uncle wasn’t unclean. Each day he cleaned himself piecemeal, like a cat, pouring water over his head just two or three times annually. Maybe this was a modulation on the native mode of hygiene which he’d internalised after moving to London in 1957, when having a bath used to be a seasonal, fleeting occurrence, like the full moon or daffodils. A troublesome occurrence, according to his mother, recounting the years spent in 24 Belsize Park, in the bedsit upstairs, with his father; how others would leave sooty tidemarks in the tub which you had to implore them to wipe away before you went in. Still, the wallowing in soapy water, in which your dirt particles settled and swam, had created in Ananda’s mother a taste for the warm languor of the bath, and she’d return to it occasionally in Bombay, where middle-class people still possessed ornamental bathtubs though they preferred the straightforward drenching of the shower. His uncle’s ongoing abstinence from bathing might be put down to his general laziness, his slowness, which made the smallest things he did elements in a gigantic journey, or to his unrelenting adoption of the identity of a “black Englishman.”
“The main reason I could never have become a director at Philipp Brothers,” he said, “was because I spent too much time in the toilet.” This was one of the impediments to his taking up directorship. There were others. “The toilet holds up your day. You use a lot of time.” The fact that he hadn’t become a director haunted him; and now it haunted Ananda, since his uncle reminded him of the fact whenever he visited. What had first set off this tireless confession of regret was the news, from three years ago, that Ananda’s father, Satish, had become Managing Director of the company he worked in. Ananda’s uncle and Satish used to be inseparable in Sylhet; best friends; classmates. Both bright sparks, but Ananda’s uncle, it was conceded (by Satish in particular), gifted, maybe a “genius” (a judgement that Ananda’s uncle graciously concurred with). News came of Ananda’s father’s ascendancy. Ananda’s uncle responded with joy. Three days later, he began to explain—and he hadn’t stopped—how Anderson, the chief at Philipp Bros, had invited him to take up an “executive directorship” a year ago, which he’d turned down. “Executive director—a post with a directorship’s prestige, but few of the responsibilities. But I said I wouldn’t do it…What an idiot! I thought it meant I’d be travelling constantly, now to Frankfurt, now to Paris, São Paulo or Madrid. That’s all I wanted once—to travel, travel, travel: the high life! By the time Anderson asked me, the job had no charm any more. Idiot!” He was buttoning his shirt. In the winter, he’d wear the three-piece suit over the pyjamas—they kept him warm and were preferable to long johns. Now he made, again, his usual exculpatory statement: “I couldn’t have done it anyway. I can’t start work without going to the toilet. Not evacuating your bowels—and drinking milk—may lead to you breaking wind at any time…” Ananda ruminated on this, one of his uncle’s many diagnoses to do with navigating your path through a day; was reassured that he abhorred milk. “In the office, I seldom went to the toilet to do the big job, in case someone outside the cubicle heard me breaking wind.” He made a face to indicate that that would have been a calamity. Then narrowed his eyes, conceding he was over-sensitive. But he was also hinting at the stubbornness of the powers-that-be, that rule our lives and the universe. The gods. Aeolus. Wind. Had disrupted his progress. No point harping about it—he’d been made redundant after all. Or asked to take voluntary retirement if you preferred. All this business about directorship was, as they say, History: a record of events that can be resurrected only in the telling. “Excuse me, Pupu,” he said.
He’d gone. To do the small job. A voyage out with Pupu was a thing of joy, and he didn’t want it spoilt by an urge to pee coming over him. Once it did, he’d be seized by it. So now he was in the loo, wringing himself dry. It took minutes. And patience.
It was notable that heroes in Europe had no bodily functions as such—or encumbering relatives. Neither Hercules nor James Bond for that matter interrupted their antics and missions because they had to visit the toilet. When morning came, they didn’t bother to brush their teeth; they jumped out of bed in pursuit. For Bond, saving the world took precedence over everything. The furthest he went towards his hygiene was shaving, an exhibition of his pheromonic powers which was rudely cut short (depending on context) by a deadly insect, a treacherous consort, or a Soviet spy. So, even this one recorded act of his humble daily toilette was made tantalising by being never completed, and Bond was seen, again and again, brusquely wiping off what remained of the lather with a towel. This detail both unsettled and inspired Ananda and his uncle; they, namby-pamby Indians, would have assiduously washed the lather off their face before drying their cheeks. Bond had no time for niceties. Nor did he have an aunt or father calling him on the phone in the midst of his figh
ts, or demanding to know where he’d gone in the last seven days. It was a peculiarity of Western culture: this immersion in individuality, and the pretence that haemorrhoids or family didn’t undermine or subvert the frame of action—it was what made its myths so free-floating and fabulous. And this transcendence was what shaped the colonial project: they simply wouldn’t have conquered the world if they’d paused to brush their teeth or vanished to do the “big job.” The latter, Ananda was pretty sure, was the reason there was no Bengali Empire.
—
Although his uncle had embarked on his great journeys in the forties and fifties—Sylhet to Shillong, Shillong to London, and from being a school matriculate working as a part-time used-car salesman in Shillong to a full-fledged Chartered Shipbroker who ended up as a senior manager at Philipp Bros—in spite of this, the grand journey he focussed on daily was an internal one. Not psychological, not inner; internal. To do with encouraging the food he’d taken the previous day to make its proper, unfettered way through oesophagus, alimentary canal, intestines, and colon to its final and complete escape, helped along by violent tides of water. For, in the morning (Ananda knew), his uncle, after his breakfast of syrupy coffee and half a spoon of honey and a quarter of toast, would drink ten glasses of water to cleanse his organs and send the waste within on a burst of energy to its bigger journey. “He’s going to come back now and boast about the water he drank today,” thought Ananda.
Odysseus Abroad Page 9
