They turned back to the station. The woman in the black top still hadn’t found a man; she’d forgotten them, and hovered before the main entrance, purposeful and preoccupied.
“Let’s go,” said Ananda.
“Yes, we can walk to Euston—to Ambala Sweets,” said his uncle.
“To Ambala Sweets now?”
“Yes, to get a few things. Their samosas are tremendous.”
But Ananda wasn’t passionate about samosas. As for sweets—he hadn’t inherited the overpowering sweet tooth gene from his uncle or his mother. In fact, Indian sweets in England invariably disappointed him—they had a vital ingredient missing: it might well be the ghee that lacked flavour. He knew what lay behind the plan. His uncle was gearing up to visit Warren Street—and he couldn’t return (every visit to the studio flat, given it was occupied by family, by Ananda and sometimes Khuku, was for his uncle a homecoming) except bearing gifts. Even when he was a young man (Khuku had told Ananda), he was repeatedly, almost inadvertently, generous, and never came back to Sylhet from a trip without a sari. She used to be touched by this to the core because apparently there was no one else in the family aware that she’d become a young woman. That’s why, now, in London—in spite of the fights they had—she’d forget his idiotic insults with infuriating rapidity.
The reason he came loaded with gifts was complicated. When Ananda came to London with his parents in 1983 to start at university, his uncle was in his “I’m a no-good vagabond; Satish is the managing director” mode; so, whenever they ate out in the first two weeks of term, there would be Radhesh, tagging along as he did in the fifties, when he was impecunious and a satellite of the two. Freeloading daily into the small reserves of pounds sterling Ananda’s father had kept aside for his son’s upkeep. Unable to confront her brother, Khuku had confided in Basanta, a family friend who lived in Pinner. “What do we do with Dada?” Basanta breached the confidence and had a word with Radhesh. So Radhesh reached Warren Street that evening fuming, carrying two bags of groceries. “You think I want your company?” he’d said to his shocked audience. “I don’t need you at all! I visit you because you need my company.”
With some firefighting, that episode needed no further mentioning. But his uncle mostly visited carrying something. Usually stuff he’d long wanted to eat and hadn’t had a chance to and would once he was hungry. Or even a packet of chicken liver he’d encourage Khuku to cook at once. Or, in her absence, samosas. Too many of them.
—
They went down the Euston Road—one of those stretches that was made for neither man nor animal, just the passing car. If there had been a spell of rain, it would have felt doubly inhospitable, but even on a summer’s day that showed no sign of ending the road wasn’t welcoming.
“Spare change please.”
Norman Tebbit’s father: never did he presumably beg. He got on his bike and scoured the town for work. Luckily he didn’t lose the bike, like the man in the Italian movie. This young man now, absorbing the sunshine, had thrown his words out on an off-chance. He wasn’t terribly interested in the response. His uncle stopped, saying: “One minute.” He turned, and, with slow strides, wove back. Stooping, he gave the man something. Shuffling back unhurriedly, he rejoined Ananda.
“How much?”
“Sorry?”
“How much did you give?” asked Ananda, as to a delinquent who erred recurrently.
“Oh nothing.” He ducked his head slightly. “A pound.”
Ananda shook his head in resignation.
Yet his uncle looked put out; annoyed, even.
“He didn’t say anything. Not even a Thank You. There was a time when beggars said God bless.”
So that’s what it was! Too bad. But hadn’t Jesus said (for his uncle admired and even identified with him; he’d once revealed to Ananda, at once tongue-in-cheek and completely without irony, “I am Jesus Christ”)—hadn’t he said, “When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you”? When Ananda had read this, he’d thought of his uncle—how he hungered deeply for his virtues to be recognised, and how too he led a life indifferent to approbation. Ananda had also been impressed by Jesus’s clarity. Christ was more than a populist preacher of love. That was clear from the retort: “Render unto Caesar”—or was it Thatcher—“the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
But wasn’t his uncle human and shrewd, and wouldn’t his left hand be entitled to a degree of awareness of what the right hand was up to? Wasn’t it expected—especially in one so solitary—that he might be often assigning value to his own actions? Who knows—maybe it wasn’t enough for him for God alone to know of his small acts of empathy.
—
Past Euston Station they were, without much forewarning, at the sweet shop entrance; inside, a bunch of Indians flocked at the counter, abiding by no queue. The room held a strong suggestion of kesar.
On the tray in Rangamama’s line of vision, flanked by neat diamond-shaped stacks of barfi on the left and some member of the great gulab jamun family on the right, and above another tray on the lower tier of pallid attempts at Bombay halwa, were exorbitant saffron-coloured laddoos. Motichur ladoo, a label said. My ass, thought Ananda. From Wembley, most likely.
“Pupu, look at those magnificent laddoos! Durdanto!”
Ananda had an inkling of doom that these were now destined to come his way, to be added to his kitchen paraphernalia.
“Should we get some of these?”
Since they were, in theory, intended for him, Ananda felt free to half-heartedly fend them off. “Don’t. They’re fakes. They’ll be nothing like the original.” It was the tragedy of London—to eat Indian food outside of the “curry” and to constantly discover the unfamiliar in the familiar: dosas that looked like but didn’t taste like dosas, bhelpuri that resembled bhelpuri but was something else. Not that he cared for the mythology of the laddoo. He had no idea why they were distributed jubilantly at North Indian celebrations. They were more a metaphor, a conceit, rather than a viable sweet. Their prestige had no explanation.
“Pupu he, I think you’re wrong—I think we should try them. We have gulab jamun all the time.” He wanted them. He’d probably never tasted a real laddoo in his life. After all, he’d never been to Delhi or Lucknow—he’d come to London straight after his youth in Shillong. He looked on with contained longing as six were arranged in a box: over-rich, oily orbs, flecked with pistachio. From his jacket pocket he took out an exactly folded Budgens bag and slipped the box in. He slid the bag across a wrist. Hand gloved in his right-hand pocket, the bag swinging imperceptibly, they made for Warren Street.
Ananda’s mind went back to the woman circling around King’s Cross. How many “jobs” did she do in a day? Where? Or maybe his uncle was wrong—maybe she wasn’t that kind of a woman. He’d once seen someone like her in front of Warren Street tube station: tall, with an overlarge body being shown off via a shoulderless top and mini skirt. Dressed like that in November. Ananda had noted her confused and visible air of incongruousness and expectancy; he’d glanced again, and (in the course of the second look) her unique calling had dawned on him. Instantly he’d thought, I could be wrong. She might be waiting for a friend. Anyway, he’d found neither her nor, today, the King’s Cross woman interesting. He’d have to make a major effort of the imagination to want them. Moreover, he suspected that they might, by now, loathe sex. The brisk businesslike indifference that followed soon after the initial flirtatiousness of the two women in Bombay had swamped any confidence he might have had in the performance. Besides, he was terrified of this cruelly misnamed virus. It was largely exclusive to heroin-injectors and homosexuals, but “largely” was the operative word. It had placed the King’s Cross woman and her ilk forever out of bounds.
His uncle said AIDS was a myth. Western scaremongering. “These kinds of diseases have been aro
und forever. I saw people dying in Sylhet—of sexual deviancy. They’ve put a fancy name to it.”
Ananda had wondered about his uncle’s abstinence. He’d considered the matter of his sexuality. In fact, at seventeen, Ananda had even put the question to himself: Could I be a homosexual? He’d been worried—he didn’t feel the sort of aggressive sexual desire towards girls he liked that he thought was appropriate. For two months, when he was seventeen, he’d tortured himself. Just as Sylvia Plath had confessed, “I’ve begun to think like a Jew, feel like a Jew,” he’d worked himself up to a state where he’d begun to feel and think like a gay person. But he found he could cope with this new identity. In the abortive business with the cousin, he’d invoked celebrated allies from history who’d purportedly fallen in love with theirs—Gautama Buddha, Atul Prasad, Satyajit Ray. And, in his agonised period, he summoned names to prove that creative people had to be gay: Ginsberg, Proust, Shakespeare. Then it occurred to him that he’d never wanted to kiss a man. The thought had no appeal at all. Soon, the notion that had gripped him melted, like a fever that had run its course. He went to the two prostitutes in order to confirm his sexuality. The matter was more or less settled.
It was settled where his uncle was concerned too. Ananda had looked for homoerotic inclinations, and found none. Could he be impotent? Ananda had said bluntly: “Do you have wet dreams? You know what I mean?” His uncle had said, unflappable: “I’m quite normal, you know.”
But he had preferences. Today, on the tube, he’d leaned towards Ananda when a mildly plump West Indian woman—unmindful, maybe tired—got on at Camden Town and sat opposite them, and said with an evil smile: “Pupu, I’m feeling some lust for her.” Ananda speculated anxiously if she’d heard. But the hum was in the foreground.
A narrow range preoccupied his uncle on the menu of desire: black and working women. Granted, his love for Gilberta had been more devotion rather than Eros—heartfelt and unsullied (which is why it had brought him pain). But, as a rule, sexual desire and romantic longing were, for his uncle, incompatible with each other. It was one of the reasons, he’d implied, he hadn’t married. He’d gone out with refined Bengali women and Englishwomen, but they were only good for attentive walks and conversations about poetry and life. On the other hand, maidservants: they were funny and down-to-earth.
6
Ithaca
There were no lights on in either Mandy’s flat or the Patels’. Ananda’s own second-floor windows reflected the sun. Eyes lowered, the neighbours hanging, in a manner of speaking, over his head, Ananda unlocked the door. The morning’s clutter had shrunk. They went up, making an extroverted thumping sound. As Ananda attained the first-floor landing, Mandy’s door opened and shut again. Maybe she’d wanted to pounce on him about his morning practice and changed her mind. Hold on—she wasn’t home. Only the budgies, stoic and immobile. His uncle was humming away in his train—soft, deep voice.
—
Once inside, he went to a window and lifted it further up. The oncoming night was festive and menacing. But it was a moot point whether Tandoor Mahal—the fairy lights around its menu glowing—would get customers. It had to. It was Friday. The inside of the flat was in shadow. When he pressed the switch, cushions sprang out of the dark.
“Pupu.” His uncle dangled the Budgens bag. “Keep these in the kitchen.”
“You sure you won’t take them home?” asked Ananda hopefully.
“O no no no!” his uncle said, entirely resolved. “I’d never eat them.” Yes, he would finish them, probably single-handed, but only in company; here. Ananda could imagine him dithering over a laddoo in 24 Belsize Park. Laddoos were not, ordinarily, consumed in solitude.
“Keep the bag,” added his uncle.
“You won’t need it?”
“O, these bags!” He shrugged, as if it possessed no value. “I have hundreds.” A treasure trove.
—
In the kitchen, he noticed the smell of his mother’s cooking. The kitchen was still but for the fridge’s neutral throbbing. A secret place.
Returning to the room, he saw his uncle crouching over last year’s books on shelves Ananda and his mother had brought home from Habitat—books whose alienness he’d had to understand and tame and which he was now liberated from. His uncle was examining Piers Plowman.
“I haven’t heard of this Langland,” he said. “The English poets we knew of were Milton and Shelley…Shelley was the greatest Romantic kobi, wasn’t he?” Solemnly he intoned: “ ‘Let pity clip thy wings before you go.’ ”
“Langland is from much further back.”
“Yes, this doesn’t even read like what you and I would take to be English,” said his uncle, frowning and scrutinising the page. “Too intellectual. Maybe a bit above my head…” he said with sly self-deprecation.
“Langland wasn’t an intellectual, Rangamama,” said Ananda, bristling. “At least, I don’t think so. To tell you the truth, very little’s known about him.”
His uncle lowered himself on to a chair by the dining table. He still hadn’t taken off his pinstripe jacket.
“What are you reading? I hope you have a decent horror novel at hand?”
“Yes, it’s not bad,” replied his uncle casually, placing his right leg on the left knee. “Also, I’m rereading Debojan. Wonderful book! Have you heard of it?” How could Ananda have not? It was a sacred text to his uncle; every other conversation was punctuated by a reference to it. “It’s by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. You know Bibhutibhushan, of course?” About Bengali literature, his uncle presumed a scandalous ignorance on Ananda’s part. Ananda was from a breed on a new planet, impossibly removed from the world that had formed his own parents. That old Bengal that his uncle had left behind, and which was gone forever…Ananda in fact knew Bibhutibhushan, who’d written Pather Panchali—an unprepossessing man, but a great cherisher and noticer of the everyday, the mundane; he’d had no clue earlier that there was another side to him, which was drawn to the transmigratory.
“What’s the book about?” said Ananda, though he’d had pretty intricate accounts before from his uncle.
His uncle was happy to take up the theme again.
“It’s highly interesting,” he said, with the air of an anthropologist. “For instance, he describes the astral plane.”
“What’s that exactly?”
“It’s a plane much like the one we live on, but where you experience things more intensely. Even a beautiful summer’s day like today would be so much more vivid on the astral plane.”
“I see.” Ananda weighed the remark, and tried to conceive how this day’s beauty might increase. “In what way?”
“Things…tremble on the astral plane.”
He vibrated one hand, like a man who’d been administered a jolt of electricity.
“It’s mainly about life after death,” he said, moving on rapidly, unrestrainably. “The soul journeying through the stars and the cosmos. All sorts of extraordinary things happen on that journey! At a certain point, it can hear the screaming of the souls of various animals that have been slaughtered for our consumption.”
Ananda nodded—as if he could almost hear the dreadful din himself.
“Do you know,” said his uncle, untying his shoelaces, “that when a man dies he often doesn’t know what’s happened? It’s described in Debojan. A man suddenly falls dead on the street, say, or is hit by a car. The body’s taken away in an ambulance. But the soul doesn’t realise what’s going on. So the man gets up, goes home as usual.” Painfully, he wrested a sneaker off. “Everything’s as it was. A while later, he notices his wife and children are weeping. He thinks: What’s wrong? He goes to them. But they continue to mourn; they don’t seem to notice him. It’s at that point that an already dead person might come to him and break the news—and guide him to the other world. He’d be reluctant to go, of course; he might have a daughter to marry, a debt to pay. It’s hard to pull away.”
Both sneakers had come off.
“Who would this already-dead person be?” asked Ananda—witnessing, in his head, the disconsolate progression of events.
“Oh it could be anyone. But someone who knows the dead person. Maybe a friend. Or it might be a relation.”
Ananda was soothed by this. He’d never much cared for the conception of the afterlife. Even misery in Warren Street was more congenial to him than any possible idea of paradise. But the thought of being reunited with a known figure who’d keep you company, after your death, on your journey to the hereafter spoke to everything in him that, ever since he could recall, was groping its way through this world.
“Would you be scared if you saw such a—saw someone of that kind?”
“Of course I would!” said his uncle, histrionically enlarging his eyeballs. He scratched his ankle, making a rasping sound. “I don’t want to see a ghost!”
“If it were someone you knew?”
“Even if it were my mother, my dear friend,” he said, absolving himself of being the type that rejoiced upon seeing a phantom. “I would be—I’d be terrified!”
“Mm,” said Ananda. He switched on the TV and was greeted by a gale of uproarious laughter. Terry and June were in bed, confabulating.
“I had a dream once,” said his uncle, oblivious to the mirth, which had as suddenly subsided. “You know that when our father died, we three younger ones—Dukhu, your ma Khuku, and I—were reigned over by the three older siblings who had forceful personalities: Chhorda, Sejda, and Didi. Our mother protected and looked over us all, but she had no real influence over us. Mejda was too dreamy. It was these three who controlled us: the committee.” He pursed his lips at the memory of their authority. “Then Sejda—who sang Tagore songs more beautifully than anyone else I’ve heard—died at the age of thirty.” He looked at Ananda; Ananda looked back at him, experiencing a sorrow that was distant, yet curiously personal. Ananda had never seen this uncle; he remained forever youthful in these stories; forever in Sylhet in undivided British India. “We were all completely shattered. Others cried; I grew very quiet. We knew he had a bad heart, but he was so versatile—he baked wonderful cakes, and played the harmonium magnificently (no one taught him, don’t know how he picked it up)—that we never expected it to happen.” Further merriment: Terry had emerged awkwardly from bed and was wearing his trousers. “Two days later, I had a dream. Sejda had just got back home with a group of English officers he was friendly with. He was sitting in the drawing room—they were talking and laughing loudly. Then Chhorda called me aside and said, ‘Doesn’t he know he can’t do that? Why is he sitting over there? Go and tell him he’s dead!’ ” Rangamama sighed. “He gave me that chore—to go and break the news.”
Odysseus Abroad Page 15
