They were out of breath, going up the slope. The Town Hall was coming up on the right, the petrol pump on the left. “The new souls?” asked Ananda. “Oh, they’re all around us,” said his uncle. “There’s a great impatience to be born.” Ananda felt a rustling, a single-minded urgency in the air. Dappled. “The new souls are competing to be born and experience sensuous pleasures—bars, sex, cars, big homes. They want all that—soon.”
—
They reached the top, the head of the T, and turned left. They had, as yet, no plan. They appeared to be heading for Hampstead. It was hard to know who was following whose lead; neither wanted to consciously take the upper hand, although Ananda’s uncle came up with impromptu suggestions: “Let’s cross, there’s more shade on the other side,” and “Don’t step on that, be careful. The English let their dogs defecate anywhere.” His uncle muttered imprecatory caveats if they approached a dog’s stool. They went past the Trust House Forte hotel, and across the zebra crossing before a posh pub and the new KFC, coming to the church whose name they didn’t know. Here they slowed down, catching their breath, but also in deference to the building. They couldn’t recall having ever spotted activity around it. They presumed (without saying this aloud) it must be abandoned. In spite of the rest of the road being sunlit, the green around the church had a stubble of shadow darkening it, as if there were a cloud hanging over it. It was a ghostly edifice. “It is possible to see the badger here,” said his uncle, waving grandiosely, though Ananda wasn’t sure what he meant by “here.” “Really?” He was mildly curious and a bit disbelieving—he had no idea what a badger looked like. But his uncle claimed to be a great observer of flora and fauna, hoarding their names and characteristics. “Yes, there are all kinds of animals around,” he said, as (again, without consciously deciding to) they descended the path on the right—down which hunched tramps could be seen advancing—to the Royal Free Hospital. “Like foxes. I saw a fox here once.” As they emerged into Pond Street, there was a widening, and, in response, his uncle, glancing at a pub as if it were a royal residence, said: “You run into all kinds of actors and politicians here. I bumped into Glenda Jackson a few years ago. She smiled at me.” He was a snob, secretly proud to belong to these parts; so that, when people asked him where he lived, he admitted (Ananda had overheard him) modestly, reluctantly: “Hampstead.” The successful man of the world. Director at Philipp Bros, a man with a family and a grand home. Hampstead indeed!
—
They sat down at last at the base of the hill, in a homely-looking tea shop. Ananda’s uncle tapped his sneakers. “These are very comfortable. No matter how much you walk, your feet will never hurt in these.” They were grey and ugly. He eyed Ananda’s brown leather shoes. “You should change those,” he advised. “You’ll be much happier.” Picking up the menu, he protested: “No rum baba!” Then read: “Strudel, merring, fruit tart—dhur, the English have become too fancy of late.” There was a new internationalism afoot in London, and he bristled against it. “You don’t get treacle tart any more,” he said contemptuously. “There are only a few pubs in London where you can get treacle tart.” His baritone was filling up the space by the window where they sat. A woman two tables away glanced swiftly back. After reflecting further on the fact that there seemed to be a recent recoil in the nation from extremities of sweetness, they ordered tea and a muffin. Ananda, by now, realised that his uncle was going to make no enquiry about how he was or what frame of mind he was in (despite knowing his nephew was unremittingly, even tediously, unhappy in Warren Street). He wasn’t going to ask after his parents either.
So Ananda said anyway: “Those people upstairs are always making a racket. They start at midnight. Telling them not to hasn’t worked.” He stared at the cubes of sugar. “Today’s Friday, they’ll be up later than usual.”
His uncle wasn’t listening. Instead, he said to Ananda: “Pupu, have you heard this song?”
Bhalobeshe jadi shukho nahi
Tabe keno eto bhalobasha?
If loving gives no happiness
Why do we love so much?
He’d begun to hum the lines, one elbow on the table. His eyes were droopy; semi-ecstatic. The woman at the nearby table was pretending not to hear. It was one of Tagore’s limpest compositions. But if he said so, there might be a build-up to a scene. They had several of those over Tagore, or Ananda’s mother, or this or that relation—the scenes had their cathartic uses, but were best averted. His uncle could become warlike about Tagore; so best to be peaceable. If Ananda answered with, “No, I haven’t heard it,” his uncle would say: “What? Your repertoire of songs is rather small.” Instead, Ananda said:
“I have heard it—from you. If you recall, you’ve been singing it each time we’ve met this month.”
Every time. His uncle must be in love. Either from a transient thrill of recognition, smiles exchanged between him and a shop girl, or unrequited devotions. Unrequited was not the appropriate word. For love not to be reciprocated, the object of the emotion must know they’re loved. There was no knowledge here. It was in his uncle’s head—as a tumultuous event. Shortly before he’d retired, his uncle had fallen in love with Gilberta, who used to help her mother with the odd janitorly chore at Philipp Bros. The office janitress was a Portuguese woman called Rosa. Gilberta was a sixteen-year-old: a picture of innocence evidently—when his uncle wasn’t tackling Freddy Gamble and Paul Middleton’s leftover work, he studied her as she scrubbed the floor. He was stricken with melancholy; because he loved her, and believed that—if he’d had the courage, the temerity—she would have loved him.
“Do you know what she did once?” he’d said to Ananda during one of their several discussions about Gilberta, a faint look of horror on his face.
“What?”
“I could see her in front of the bathroom standing with mop and bucket (I was the one person at work, everyone had gone). I wasn’t sure if she knew I was there. Next moment, she knelt in front of the bucket as if to wipe something, and—looking straight at me—gestured with her hand towards the place down there”—his own hand hovered fleetingly above his crotch: he was still a bit scandalised—as though an epiphany had turned out to be its opposite.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. What could happen? I pretended not to see. She finished and left.”
Ananda had then taken the opportunity to bring to light a question that had troubled him, though why he thought his uncle would know the answer wasn’t clear—for some reason, he believed his uncle carried within him some intractable wisdom distilled by his asociability: so he’d put to him—“What’s important to women—love or sex?”
“Sex,” his uncle had said, taking no special pleasure in the reply, just acknowledging a fact.
Both, heads bowed, had allowed a moment to pass as Ananda absorbed the impact of the news. For such plain-speaking, Ananda knew (from his background reading on The Waste Land) that Tiresias, who’d experienced what it meant to be both man and woman (“old man with wrinkled dugs”), had been struck blind by the vindictive Hera.
In his first year in London, Ananda had had to hear about Gilberta repeatedly. His uncle wasn’t over her. He spoke at length, now praising her, now offering his summations and suspicions, weighing her gestures and the inadvertent eye-contact between them, the banter she engaged in with Paul Middleton. Much had passed over his heart. Ananda marvelled, and quietly fulminated, that his uncle should make so much out of so little. For his uncle and Gilberta hardly knew each other outside their inane day-to-day encounters. To her, he was another man in the office. Mr. Nandy. Or maybe she didn’t know his name. Why then was he moaning (to use the very English term his uncle used to put down Ananda with when he spoke plaintively of home)? Then again, how necessary was contact? Dante had met Beatrice twice. Not met—maybe just seen. A total of fifteen minutes…And what about Meera bai, who’d dumped her husband, the king, for her “lord” and lover, the flute-playing Krishna? What of those songs and poe
ms coming out of—not contact, let alone consummation, but wish-fulfilment and fantasy? Was it some sort of pathetic fallacy, to presume that lives were animated by love when they were actually quickened by the imagination? How many people were there today who loved quietly without hope of consummation: to whom conventional sexual fulfilment was unimportant? You might not be aware of them, but they probably wrote the love poems. (Larkin sprang to mind: curmudgeonly bachelor.)
Ananda wondered if his uncle was still susceptible to Gilberta. Why was he humming the maudlin tune?
“Really?” His uncle was stung at the implication that he’d been singing it too frequently. Ananda resented that his uncle often tried to subtly undermine him (dismissive as he was of modernism and slyly sceptical of Ananda’s mission as a poet), but his uncle probably felt the same way about Ananda—that his nephew deflated him at crucial moments. He persisted: “But what do you think of the song?”—for Tagore’s reputation, on all fronts, must be jealously overseen.
“Maybe not quite my cup of tea,” said Ananda.
On cue, the waitress came with a pot of tea and cups and saucers on a tray, as well as the muffin his uncle had insisted on ordering for Ananda. “Here we are,” she said (she was middle-class and cheerily aloof), “Thank you!” A stream of Thank yous followed—dutiful, upbeat, insincere, grateful—each time something was unloaded off the tray.
Both of them—but his uncle in particular—were feeling a bit out of place. It was clear that his uncle wished they were in one of those self-service tea shops. The sort with rum baba and trays on top of each other. His uncle didn’t know how to whisper, and he said in Bengali: “There are places I know where you can get a cup of tea and an excellent cheesecake for half the price.”
Did he not feel a sense of belonging any more in this area? Though his uncle used to despise his bhadralok contemporaries in Belsize Park, they’d at least been there, earlier, to despise and avoid. They were long vanished, to Stoke Newington or Pinner. Those people, fifteen years in the London boroughs, had grown-up children now, who—because their parents had saved on heating and electricity—had gone to the best private schools and were presently either at university or starting to look for jobs. Only his uncle had stayed on, in “Hampstead,” rejecting the suburbs and the married life and family that inevitably accompanied them—the Shah his interlocutor. Ananda sensed his uncle’s grumbling ennui as he poured tea into the cup. From the pane on Ananda’s right, they gazed at where the hill leading to the Heath descended and made a trough with the bottom of Pond Street, and, lit by the sun, displayed a junction with a zebra crossing and a bus stop.
“Pupu,” said his uncle, “have the muffin.” His tone bordered on hectoring. “It’s very good,” he claimed, without having tasted it. “We mustn’t waste it.” That was the reason for the advocacy: it was an expensive muffin. Ananda resisted the urge to say, I never wanted it, and replied, “You have it.” Because he knew this was why his uncle had ordered it—he was hungry. He hadn’t had anything after all that sugar at breakfast. (Here, he’d only put four cubes in his cup and stirred it slowly.) His uncle said, “Tumi khao.” “No, I won’t, really—you go ahead,” said Ananda. His uncle regarded the muffin with dislike (for being undemocratically overpriced). Then he picked it up and took a huge mouthful, his eyelids drooping, his throat rippling, as he swallowed—till he could breathe again, and utter the verdict: “Very good…” His whole body was curiously relaxed.
“Keats used to live here,” said his uncle.
Foxes, Glenda Jackson—and Keats. Hampstead. Rangamama too, in a manner of speaking. But was Belsize Park truly Hampstead?
“Mukherjee used to say to me—‘Moshai, have you seen Keats’s house?’ I was never interested in Keats’s house.” Confessed to matter-of-factly, as he devoured the muffin. Still, he mentioned Keats no doubt because his nephew was “reading” English literature; although his equivocations and qualifications about this were a reminder coming from sideways about whether or not English literature was a subject worth studying. But Keats was useful to establishing the brilliance of this address—its ineffable pedigree. Mukherjee must be a bit of an English lit aficionado. A bachelor, and for two years Ananda’s uncle’s other neighbour in the basement. Ananda had never seen him. Yet he was always speaking to his uncle, this man, about facets of English culture.
“Hm,” said Ananda. His uncle always provided such a steady stream of opinion that he seldom felt like voicing his own: but he harboured views on everything.
Oddly, he wasn’t touched by Keats. The poetry, that is. Maybe because he’d had to study “Ode to a Nightingale” in school, and, precocious and ignorant, glutted himself on the young poet’s over-rich vocabulary, on mouthfuls of phrases such as “blushful Hippocrene.” Already a poet in his own eyes, Ananda, at fifteen, had judged Keats by the standards of his own subjectivity, and found him a little—bland. Keats was too perfect. Ananda had never recovered from that first encounter—poet to poet, young adult to young man. He looked semi-sensitively around him through the glass pane, to guess at where Keats might have been or still be. He’d written of summer only in passing, in the short-breathed “Grasshopper and the Cricket.” Outside, the day was golden. Busy. The Odeon might have disappeared, but cars were going up all the time past the Royal Free Hospital. Ananda was unreceptive to the poetry—but he was moved by the man. He could see him, almost. Good-looking, terribly short. Possibly because of the early privations and illnesses. He did not grow. He did not grow old in a number of ways. A man-boy.
Ananda was in England because of Keats. He’d begun reading the letters around the time he was applying to colleges in London. He was won over: it was the first time he’d felt a writer’s nearness, his heartbeat. When he was offered a place (in the college where he was now a student), they’d asked him to write a short account of his reading. He’d typed out a page and a half, of which the last quarter was devoted entirely to Keats’s letters. Richard Bertram had told Ananda that he had it on good authority that it was this piece of writing—which they’d wanted from him in lieu of an interview—that had secured his admission. So Ananda was beholden to the twenty-six-year-old.
In that little document he’d sent to the college, he hadn’t mentioned how affected he’d been by Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne. A desire unfulfilled. At some point, it had dawned on Keats that he’d never marry Fanny because he was dangerously ill. An insoluble conundrum—how to make a future with a person when you knew you were going to die? Ananda himself had experienced a prohibited love: for a cousin. When he was twenty, he was warned never to see her again. This was among the reasons for London being a place of exile. And why he must prove to himself that he’d have a future—as a poet—without her.
How real was Fanny Brawne to Keats? How much had he invented her (as Ananda knew he’d to an extent invented his cousin)? Was a beloved even necessary to experiencing love? Similarly, did you have to experience life to be a writer, or to have a subject at hand? These were two kinds of belief where an “actual” experience seemed beside the point—of believing you were in love; and that you were a writer. Was Keats’s short life as a poet essentially one of make-believe? Was he pretending, with a unique faith and intensity, that he was a poet? At least in “Ode to Psyche,” which Ananda liked, Keats had embraced the make-believe of being a priest for a goddess he knew didn’t quite exist: “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind.”
“Rabi Thakur was in Hampstead,” his uncle said. The plate that had borne the muffin was spotless. He’d taken care of each crumb—from his continuing hunger, but also out of a moral obligation to do justice to a piece of food he’d spent money on. Less than a minute had passed since Keats was mentioned. Ananda didn’t believe his uncle could survive much longer—once a poet’s name came up—without talking about Tagore. For him, there was one poet only. He’d said as much. Maybe it was the appearance: the imposing height; the bearded, Olympian air; the bright di
sarming eyes. Also the delicacy and sophistication of the language (“He single-handedly changed Bengali”).
And, in keeping with his subtly divine qualities, there was the fact that (as his uncle had explained): “He created not only a great body of work but a generation. I wouldn’t have been who I am were it not for Tagore. My father”—he hardly knew his father; he’d died when Radhesh was three in a riding accident, but he’d conjured him up thoroughly—“was a very different man from I. Because he belonged to the world before Tagore.”
Judiciously he added, studying Ananda, the English literature student: “When you use a poet’s name as an adjective—say, ‘Wordsworthian’ or ‘Keatsian’—you mean the style he’s well-known for. But when you say Rabindrik you don’t just mean something literary, but a way of life, an ethos that shaped a generation. Can you say that of another poet?” End of speech. Leaving Ananda to mull over whether the reign of Rabi Thakur could be countered. Whether it was even important to a poet to “create” a generation.
“What do you think he’d have made of you?”
“Me?”
“Yes—supposing you’d met.”
His uncle had bowed his hairless head and said, without rancour, but passionately on Tagore’s behalf: “I don’t think he would have been able to stand me.”
Odysseus Abroad Page 12
