A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Miss Gilby descends the stairs and decides to take matters in hand. The envelope is held securely between her fingers.

  ONE

  Ritwik raises the lower sash of the window and leans out, almost to his waist, letting the English rain fall on him on a darkening afternoon. His tiny room is on the top floor of a house on the corner of two cobbled streets. One of them is called Logic Lane; something out of Pope, he had thought on his first day in England, dragging his two heavy suitcases over random cobbles designed to defeat any movement on them except the one for which they were initially made. They ream through the thin soles of his Indian shoes. Walking on them is like wearing acupressure sandals, which have textured soles made of hundreds of raised points, except that these raised points are little mounds, and uneven, on top of that.

  The room is so small he can hardly move around. It has what he will later come to call a celibacy bed, a row of white shelves against one wall, a desk and a chair, an armchair, a window with fluorescent peach curtains, a wardrobe and an upright wooden box with a glass front. The box contains a coil of thick rope and the glass has a sign, which says, ‘FIRE ESCAPE’.

  For a long time he thinks, not wholly frivolously, that it is quite radical of his college to provide its depressed and clinically on-the-edge students with the means of escape from it all, till Gavin one day points out that you are meant to swing it out of the window and clamber down, stupid, Tarzan or Indian fakir style, take your pick, when everything is blazing to the ground.

  Even the rain, so typical and so patly conforming to a stereotype of England the non-English assiduously propagate, begins to irritate him with its in-between status. It is neither the obliterating deluge of the Calcutta monsoon, nor the obliging short bursts of a life-giving natural force after an arid summer. All those clichés about the English climate trotted out by his friends, their parents, and anybody who knew someone who knew someone who had visited England, had only bored him. He had been prepared to deal with this skewed vision of the perfectly rainy land; after all, he had lived with rain for the four months of monsoon every year, for twenty-two years. After that, the English rain could only be a gentle variation in a minor key.

  But nothing had prepared him for this. It is variation, all right, but muffled. For most of the time, it is not the actual physical thing, the element of water, which he experiences, but the intent to rain, a sort of pervasive threat in the dead gunmetal skies. He doesn’t understand how it is possible, this excess of wetness without downpour. It is in England he first encounters the infinite nuances of drizzle: soft spitting, a spattering of directionless spray blown by the wind here and there, sometimes a thinning out of even that insubstantial spume till there is nothing but wet jewels in the hair. At times, the stronger drizzle eventually gathers enough critical mass to reach down to his scalp and trickle coldly down. That is an unpleasant moment.

  Then there are the changing dramas of the different darkenings of the sky, each one with its own subtle warning of imminent rain. The rain mostly never falls and when it does, the end precipitation is never commensurate with the fear contained in the threat of the changeable clouds. It is all very disappointing, and ultimately irritating, this long play of umbrous forms and shades between the potential and its fitful realization. Part of his impatience lies in the fact that he begins to appreciate this miniature drama of deferral.

  As for the rain with which he had grown up, it was less rain than some primal frustration vented on little mortals. From June to September, everyone who lived under the vengeful path of the monsoons understood what rainfall must have been like in prehistoric times. The relentless sheets of water were unleashed unforgivingly. There was zero visibility in this all-erasing elemental fury – you couldn’t see beyond the edge of your helpless umbrella – but there was also the euphoria of end and destruction to it.

  Ritwik had dissented stubbornly from all notions of the idealised monsoon, which school textbooks and the general culture propagated – all dancing farmers, overabundant fields, frolicking peacocks – for he had lived an infernal one of floods and water-logging on a miserable scale. Every monsoon, Calcutta became, intermittently, a city that stepped deeper and further into those capricious waters that swallowed towns and villages inch by inexorable inch. The open drains on the sides of the streets invariably overflowed and houses were left looking at their reflections in the muddy brown stream which their streets had become.

  As children, both Ritwik and Aritra had played with the idea that this was what Venice must be like – waterways connecting houses – but without the excitement of hopping on a boat from your doorbank to get from point A to B. That was so typical of living in Calcutta, this festering mediocrity: there was neither the cruel extreme of the floods which ravaged neighbouring Bangladesh and made refugees of two million people every year, nor the transforming romance of a Venice-like watercity. In the absence of either, both brothers had sat with their legs dangling out of the railings of the verandah and floated flimsy paper boats, made from the lined paper of their school exercise books, in the stream between the roads and the open drains that formed the margins of the streets in this part of south Calcutta.

  Every monsoon it was brought home to him how little people were, wading laboriously through waist-deep waters, their roads sunk, their houses leaking, suspended between the dull unforgiving sky and their land which was only fugitively land. What happened to the slums along Park Circus Maidan, in the back streets of Golpark and Rajabazaar, those makeshift tents of plastic and rotting blankets secured from the wind by a strategically placed brick or two? Where did those people go with their blue plastic sheets, their bundles of tatters and rags, and a couple of tin pans?

  The flooding at the major intersection at Gariahat was so bad that for the monsoon months two or three buses and a few cars, all stalled and damaged temporarily by the water level, would become fixtures on the road, sticking out like dead relics from a lost underwater civilization slowly surfacing. The water frequently reached up to the waist, all traffic stopped, and people were trapped in offices, schools, homes, shops. Ritwik and some other friends often returned from school walking part of the way, and wading through the rest, satchels held on their heads.

  There was anarchic joy in this disruption of normal life as the boys, all headed more or less the same way, giggled, waded and pushed the waters with one arm outstretched for balance and the other holding their satchels firmly on their heads. They swayed like flimsy reeds every time a rare passing bus or lorry generated what seemed like a huge wave in its wake and threatened to knock them off their already wobbling position, half under half above the water. More laughter as someone inevitably lost balance. Sometimes amused warnings, ‘Careful, don’t step into a ditch’, for no one knew what potholes and trenches lurked under the murky waters.

  Those trenches were what made Calcutta a place that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and been transposed east. The road from Gariahat straight through to Jadavpur was relatively safe as far as these underwater holes were concerned but it was a different story in central and north Calcutta, in Kalighat, the area around the Maidan, the Monument, Chowringhee and practically all the stretch of the old, decrepit northern part of the city. Work on the metro, an unending labour, had meant large areas of dug-up roads. The trenches were deep; anyone could break his bones if he accidentally fell down one. He had never seen anyone working in them and once the holes appeared, they tended to stay, uncovered, unmarked by danger or roadworks signs, in one seamless connection between traffic, roads, pedestrians, and remain there for years. When sporadic activity on laying down or repairing telephone cables was added to this, the city became a nightmare of ditches and trenches, an eviscerated hell.

  Then there was the business of avoiding the bloated, floating carcasses of dogs and cows, the used sanitary towels, adrift, sometimes wrapping themselves around the legs with a bloody will of their own, the daily rubbish of human living which elsewhere got thrown in bins and tak
en away in garbage trucks but which in Calcutta sat around on almost every street corner, accumulated into largish hillocks, rotted, and then got partially dispersed by the rain in the streets. Eggshells, vegetable matter, food scrapings, bread, fruit peel, paper, rags, bits and pieces of cloth, hair balls, dead rats, rancid food, floor sweepings, congealing vomit, a turd or two, blister packs, bottles, jars, plastic bags, containers. And disease, DISEASE, DISEASE … even thinking about it sent that familiar shudder down his spine.

  On rainy days like this, nostalgia wraps around him like an insidious fog; it is everywhere, but while inside it, he can hardly tell how enveloped he is in it. Nostalgia, and something else. He won’t name it, he won’t even think about it because if he lets go for even a few seconds, the grey, sour rain outside will bend him to its own form. This rain, in a different land, slightly over a year after his parents’ deaths, can read him. He won’t think about them lest the rain reads him again, as it has done for the past two months, and reduces him to its sad, transparent cipher.

  It was within his first week of arrival he met another student in the long queue in the buttery during lunchtime: very tall, eyes so blue they were like an electric zap, and hair so golden and curly it looked like an improbable wig. He had a foolish smile that seemed plastered indelibly on to his face and a clockwork sideways nodding of the head. He was like some overgrown animate toy from Enid Blyton, the innocence in his face enhanced by the jerky, toy-like movements.

  The queue was a chance to meet people, make friends, introduce himself; he must seize this moment, not wander around, lonely and lost, in the narrow wet streets; here was the opportunity for a new social life, grab it grab it grab it. So he smiled back at the blond toy’s general smile, ‘Hi, I’m Ritwik.’

  ‘Hello, I’m Robert. Hello. Hello.’ Nodding, nodding, like it was a nervous tic. ‘Have you just arrived?’

  ‘Yes, last week.’ Keep talking, say something, say something about the weather, ask him what he reads. ‘It’s so cold here.’ He had read somewhere that clichés are clichés because they are universally accepted truths, tried and tested generation after generation.

  ‘Do you think so? It’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  The smile found a focus now. ‘I’m from a place called High Wycombe. Do you know it?’

  Ritwik lied, ‘Yes, yes, I do.’

  Robert was surprised, ‘Really? Where are you from then?’

  ‘India.’

  Robert’s smile now carried hints of wonder; he answered in clipped, short bursts, ‘Wow. Nice. Great. I love India.’

  It was Ritwik’s turn to be surprised now. ‘Really? Have you been?’

  Once again, that foolishness. ‘No. No. I haven’t. But my mother has.’

  Ritwik pursued this one. ‘So why do you love India?’

  ‘It’s so exotic, isn’t it? And wild, do you know what I mean? And all that mysticism and stuff, it’s spiritual, like, isn’t it?’

  Ritwik flashed his smile-of-finality. He wanted to say, ‘Yes, you’re right. We have naked fakirs, white elephants and striped tigers on the streets of Delhi,’ but held back the words. Perhaps this beautiful boy, his head a furious golden halo in the cold light of the buttery, was trying to make friends as well. Ritwik moved on to something brown and absurd-looking, a sort of stylised representation of a perfectly formed turd contained in its own brown, rectangular casing, with an absurd name: ‘toad in the hole’.

  The first meeting with his tutor and his group had induced a similar feeling of distance, as if he were watching himself trying to learn the rules of a new game. Dr Elizabeth Carter was ageless, had blue eyes with the incisiveness of a laser beam, and spoke in a kind of breathless and hushed undertone. She was the only person whose words he understood. Her introduction set his ears aflame: ‘This is Ritwik Ghosh (she pronounced it ‘gosh’, the absence of the usual exclamation mark after the word only making it sound worse) who’s come from Calcutta to do the BA.’ He tried to appear relaxed, knowing, in control. His group consisted of ten others who had been together for a year and were all friends. They gabbled away amongst each other, and with Dr Carter, who they all called ‘Liz’ or ‘Lizzie’. He could never bring himself to use her first name, but ‘Ma’am’ sounded so horribly gauche in the face of the easy familiarity the others had with her. He couldn’t understand a word of what they said.

  They murmured polite hellos, thrown somewhere across the room vaguely in his direction, but he didn’t feel any of those reached him. They had all been handed glasses of a cloying drink, sherry, which increased the heaviness in his legs. Suddenly he realized he had this panicky vacuum somewhere in his lower stomach, a hollow that pressed his insides intermittently: he did not understand simple English as spoken by true-blood English people. Occasionally, a soothing wisp of Dr Carter’s sentences reached him – ‘. . . about it, it gets better with practice . . .’, ‘. . . the Midlands dialect in which Langland wrote could pose . . .’ and then it would be lost in the fizz and crackle of other Englishes.

  But surely that guy, Declan Whelan, with glasses and wispy red curls fast disappearing, did not speak English. His voice and words were a sinuous curve of dip and soar; that could not be English, he did not understand one single word of it. God, they must be so clever, they all understand German, they’re all laughing at his jokes, falling apart laughing, he thought. He felt small and stupid and, all of a sudden, very lonely and lost, as the small rain tapped on the panes of the little oriel windows and everyone sat around in the low-ceilinged room with walls covered in books, jabbering away, excited and nervous about their Chaucer and Hildegard von Bingen and Julian of Norwich and he, with that small cold glass of pale liquid gold in his hands, wondered how he would go about making friends with these people.

  The meeting ended with Dr Carter issuing out reading lists, a set of essay topics, instructions on little college exams during the first week of term, and invitations to her house for tea. As they clambered down the narrow and noisy wooden stairs, winding down and down, the tall one who was called Pete came up to him and shook his hand, ‘Hi, I’m Pete. I didn’t quite catch your name’.

  ‘It’s Ritwik, R-I-T-W-I-K.’

  Pete gave a polite wow and repeated his name a few times. ‘Ritwik, Ritwik. Is that a common name from where you come?’

  ‘No, not really, but it’s not unusual.’

  ‘It’s very unusual to my ears,’ he smiled.

  ‘It means “he who officiates at a fire sacrifice”,’ the words tumbled out, heavy and anachronistic in the faultless green of the rain-washed main quad, before he could stop himself.

  ‘Wow.’ This time the wonder was real. ‘Do all Indian names have a meaning?’

  ‘Yes, they do.’ They had entered the main hall now where some of them were beginning to disperse. Someone came up to Pete and he started talking to her before Ritwik had a chance to tell him that his name meant rock.

  He went up to Sarah, the confident, friendly girl with glasses and radiating rings of brown, springy, corkscrew curls. ‘Is it necessary to know German then?’

  She frowned, then laughed and said, ‘German? Good god, no! Why do you think it’s necessary to know German?’

  ‘I thought you were all joking in German. You see, I don’t know the language at all . . . Declan’s German, isn’t he?’

  It took a few seconds for the pieces to fall into place. She cracked up, laughing, ‘No, no, you’ve got it wrong, he’s from Liverpool, that’s his accent . . . Dec’s not German . . . oh, that’s so funny, wait till the others hear of it.’ She continued laughing. He joined her, weakly and uncertainly at first, then got swept up in it. Maybe he found it funny as well.

  The days are loads, bearing him down. The cold has given him an intractable case of dandruff, but for the first time in his life he has money to go into the shops and buy things for himself, superficial and silly things, things that deal with problems such as dandruff. He has heard of the Bo
dy Shop; Jhimli had got her delicious lip balms from that place on one of her numerous trips abroad with her dance company. He can now buy those improbable objects that fill him with wonder: is it even possible to have ginger root anti-dandruff shampoo, a banana conditioner? How can you get butter from mango? He buys stackloads of different types of products. They give him a sense of control over his life: yes, he’s finally grown up, he can choose his own luxury items. He can pay for them himself. They’re going to do him good.

  But the embers of hyperacidity behind his breastbone, sometimes up in his throat, won’t be extinguished; at times they flare up into something more unmanageable (he has a supply of Pepto Bismol at hand) but most of the time it’s just a slow burn inside him. He’s convinced it’s caused by eating dinner at six o’clock in the evening. Back home, dinner, when it was at all available, was between half-past ten and half-past eleven at night.

  After that absurdly early dinner, he lopes back to his cell and reads in the yellow spill of light, gets up sometimes and paces around, thinking of Christ the knight jousting at a tournament and ending up bleeding. Or of Hunger plaguing poor farmers and helpless little men and women battling with the cold and their masters’ stubborn land. That acid sting surges and falls, surges and falls. When he’s bored and lonely, he looks at the little row of his Body Shop objects, fingers them lovingly, sometimes uncaps a bottle or two and has a sniff. The thought of using some of those things the next day makes him feel all right again. He owns these products. They are bought with his scholarship money and they belong to him. They will protect his face from the legion knives of the February wind, keep his armpits fragrant, free his tangled locks of dandruff. He can have a new body in England, even be a new person. Maybe.

  The clock tower chimes out the notes for half past the hour. It’s a melody he knows by heart; he knows he has to wait for another incomplete installment before the full tune is rung out at the hour. Unfailingly, every fifteen minutes, this escalating teasing of three-note and four-note unfulfillment. It drives him mad, this knowing what’s going to come – so trite and mechanical, so unchanging – but having it deferred. The giant horse chestnut tree outside, across the cobbles, is losing its edges and becoming an amorphous looming shadow. Someone has recently told him the blossom of the horse chestnut is called ‘candle’. Candles of horse chestnut, he savours the phrase in his head.