A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Meanwhile, Ritwik tries to bone up on all the names in this new world to which Gavin has introduced him. He remembers, with a hot flush of embarrassment, how he had made friends with Gavin by talking nervously about Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini and Ghirlandaio after overhearing at a meal in hall that he was an art student, as though all it took to lure art students into friendship was a name or two from his gallery of childhood obsessions. He had culled the names, as a boy of ten, from the Collins Concise Encyclopaedia, his first peek into the greater world outside the horizons of his life in Grange Road; it was a book that became a shield, the talisman against his life at home, the very first stumbling, halting steps to his escape. He had doggedly chased those names and their works, hunted them down in bad, grainy reproductions on the brittle pages of out of print, cheap imprints in decrepit, poorly stocked libraries in Calcutta; to utter those names aloud, to hear his own voice articulate them, felt like sacrilege, a breaking of an unimaginable taboo. Gavin, however, knew them and had got excited about having someone to talk to about the various hand gestures of Mary in the Annunciation. Ritwik had been so grateful that he had had to swallow the several lumps in his throat and rapidly blink his smarting eyes as Gavin had talked to him about Michael Baxandall. Six months into his friendship with Gavin hasn’t eroded that gratitude. Here, where the past seems more foreign, more unknown to almost everyone, Gavin is a little oasis in a desert of amnesia. He is convinced this is so because Gavin is Brazilian and engages with Europe in a way only outsiders can do.

  He envies Gavin his familiarity with the contours of the world he studies but, above all, he envies Gavin his easy acceptance of Maoism, his left-wing activism. He goes to meetings of the Socialist Workers’ Party and raises his arm in that characteristic way of his while uttering a joyous ‘Yea’ when Ritwik tells him how, when the Communists came to power in Bengal in 1979, they changed the names of all Calcutta streets that honoured British viceroys, governor generals and rulers to names of Communist leaders. Curzon Street, Bentinck Street, Ripon Street were ditched and in their stead there were Lenin Sarani, Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. The sole exception was Theatre Road; it was renamed Shakespeare Sarani because the British Council was on it.

  Gavin thinks this wholesale renaming is important. Ritwik tells him how people in Calcutta still keep calling the roads by the names of their erstwhile British overlords; he has never heard anyone use the name Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. Rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, ordinary people, all stuck to Harrington Street and Dalhousie Square.

  ‘But, Gavin, it’s all very well to say “People this”, “People that”, but nothing, absolutely fucking NOTHING works in that state,’ Ritwik occasionally splutters.

  ‘You can’t have Revolution overnight,’ Gavin says. Ritwik can hear the upper-case ‘R’ in his voice. ‘Besides, while you were having a Communist Revolution in Bengal, they elected Thatcher here,’ he adds with distaste.

  Ritwik knows Thatcher is Bad but does not exactly know why. He asks tentatively, ‘Is it because of the poll tax?’ He has heard that term mentioned before with disgust and anger.

  ‘I was living in London at the time of the poll tax riots. I tell you, I come from Brazil, and I’ve never seen police brutality on that level anywhere, anywhere before. It was shocking.’

  Ritwik’s images of Thatcher are from recycled newsreel on the neighbours’ television during the week-long mourning after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. He tells Gavin about this. ‘You know, when Indira Gandhi was killed, we had nothing on national television for days on end, except films about her. Documentaries, news footage, films, homage, the works.’ He slides over the fact that they had all crowded around the television set next door, in Tipshu’s house: he is too ashamed to admit they didn’t own a television. ‘On one of these newsreels they showed Thatcher and Indira Gandhi chatting, laughing, you know, getting on really well. They always seemed to be together. One of my uncles said, “Look, two women at the top, they’re friends. It must be so lonely for them. I suppose it’s their mutual loneliness that has made them bond. They both understand how difficult it is.” At that time, that thought really struck me, this alliance of powerful solitaries. You know, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” sort of thing.’

  The library is like a sombre chapel, a dark redbrick edifice with gothicky spires and a huge heavy door, which not only looks but also feels like the door to a castle, all enormous wood and metal; he has to push against it with his entire body to get it to open. He likes working here: it is cosy, warm and unintimidating, not at all like the central library where you have to wait for more than six hours for the ordered books to arrive and when you go up to the members of staff after the scheduled wait, they sometimes tell you things like, ‘Sorry we couldn’t find it, it’s missing, and we have no idea when it will turn up.’ Or, ‘The book fell off the trolley and its spine was crushed under the wheels; it’s gone to the binders, it’ll be six months before we get it back.’

  But here, he can see the books on their shelves, go up to them, pull them out, browse, let his attention wander to other books far removed from his subject. At the table next to his, the historian with round glasses, red hair and the area around his nose and eyes marked by a populous colony of freckles has left a pile of books on Indian history lying around. Instantly curious, Ritwik reaches out for a volume with an incredible title: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenāna by a Fanny Parkes, an Englishwoman who travelled around in India in the 1820s and 30s. Ritwik tries to dampen the excitement at this serendipitous find as he flicks through the pages: entire sections on a visit to a former Queen of Gwalior at a camp in Fatehpur, a chapter on a visit to a Mulka Humanee Begum married to a Colonel James Gardner . . . Here it is, an outsider, a foreigner, being let in and recording her experiences; he adds the book to his own tottering pile.

  He can touch and smell the books in this library, make a precarious tower of a dozen or so of them on his desk and feel secure behind that wall. He can even borrow them and take them back to his room, arrange them according to size on his small desk or his bookshelves and feel the satisfaction of order and method, order and method.

  He reads as if his life depends on this reckless rush of words entering him in a torrent; words of different tongues, of other times and alien places all now gone, words which force their own spaces inside him so they can rush in to fill them up.

  He reads about a mother who stands under a tree and tells passers-by to look at her for there is no sorrow greater than hers: her son has been nailed through to a tree. He reads of how this son came to her, to be conceived, as still as the April dew that falls on grass and flowers. On another page, the son enters her as the all-comprehending light through a stained-glass window. Another one about a helpless mother crying and watching her son die in a welter of blood and thorns and nail.

  He reads about people who are so sleepless with love-longing they have gone mad and driven themselves to the forests where they meet others complaining about their despair in love. There is always someone standing under a thorn tree, singing as they languish in love’s prison. And he wonders at Jankin, the naughty church officiant who, instead of chanting Kyrie eleison, breaks out cunningly into Kyrie Alison, hoping the girl in the congregation is going to show him some mercy.

  The strong undertow of his thoughts have pulled him so far away to the pitiful mother that he has trouble making his way back to the shallows again. The poems don’t tell him how she survives.

  III.

  The days pass in anticipation and apprehension. Most of her possessions are packed in large trunks and boxes. Mahesh will see off the first consignment to Sealdah station tomorrow morning. She is taking her first class carriage in a week’s time, on the Eastern Bengal Railway, from Sealdah to Kooshtea. Mr Roy Chowdhury will receive her there himself and arrange for transportation from Kooshtea to Nawabgunj, in all probability in
his motor car, but he has written that the rivers are in spate this season, the tracks are either all flooded or swamped with mud, where wheels will invariably get rutted, so Miss Gilby is really not looking forward to that particular leg of her long journey.

  These days she spends mostly saying goodbye to people and things. Yesterday, she had farewell tea with her Bengali teacher, the old Sheikh Maqsood Ali, in his overcrowded, dark house, crammed with objects, in Collutolla Street. It had been impossible to read the expression in those nearly blind eyes behind their shield of lenses so thick that they looked magnified like an owl’s. Ali-miyan had refused to take back the books which he had lent her in the beginning – ‘Keep them, Miss Gilby, keep them, consider them a humble gift from teacher to student, something which I hope will remind you of our lessons together’ – books of the Bengali alphabet, elementary reading, sentence construction and writing by an eminent Bengali gentleman, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar; Ali-miyan had never stopped singing the praises of that ‘great man’. Despite the initial difficulties with such a strange script, Miss Gilby had made not inconsiderable progress: she could read that bizarre and unpleasant moral tale of a boy who had his ear cut off as punishment for being a liar almost without any halting or help from Ali-miyan. He had been pleased; for Miss Gilby, his joy had been a welcome change from the almost constant state of his surprise at the rare occurrence of a memsahib making the effort to learn an Indian language. Even after three years he still couldn’t believe he had an English lady as one of his private pupils and one who came to his house to take her lessons. It was rare, it was unconventional, it was daring, and Ali-miyan had both savoured and feared it.

  For the last three years, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, without fail, come rain, floods or the unbearable sticky heat of summer, Miss Gilby appeared in her private brougham, from Elliott Road to Collutolla Street, for her Bengali lessons. The lessons had to be terminated, regrettably for both parties, when Miss Gilby was invited to tutor Saira-begum: it was an offer she couldn’t refuse because the Nawab of Motibagh was one of her brother’s influential acquaintances and when Miss Gilby had first moved to Calcutta four years ago the Nawab had extended every possible help to her because she was James’s sister. Besides, this was an opportunity Miss Gilby had been looking for all along, this chance to spread the knowledge not only of English but also of a different way of living, the knowledge of a whole new world, to Indian women, to forge a contact with these unheard and dumb creatures, to hear them speak, to hear their lives.

  In the balance of things, her lessons with Ali-miyan, enjoyable and challenging though they were, and her unfolding relationship with her old teacher proved wonderfully that James, and along with him every single servant of the Empire in India and all the Anglo-Indian community, was wrong wrong wrong about the impossibility of a true, trustful friendship between the natives and the Anglos; the lessons had had to be sacrificed but she had made certain that her continuing friendship with Ali-miyan didn’t suffer. To this effect, she had visited him for tea – an institution to which she had slowly converted the all-too-willing teacher by speaking gloriously of the ways in which her people in England practised it daily – every first Sunday of the month during her time with the Motibaghs.

  For her now, there is a valedictory air to everything in this messy city of lanes and by-lanes and road repairs and road building. It tinges her beloved tramcar journeys, which she has taken at least once every week during her time here. She goes down her favourite routes again and again: first, from Sealdah Station through Circular Road, Bowbazaar Street, Dalhousie Square, through Customs House and Strand Road – which, Ali-miyan tells her, was under water until 1823 or so – to Armenian Ghat on the banks of the Ganges. Seated in her first class carriage, she wills herself not to think of James’s words beating themselves out to the titup-titup-titup of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles as houses, temples, churches, people, buildings gently pass by, leaving her desiring the wide open space of the Maidan or the muddy brown water of the river, the sky low over it, and on its broad surface, boats and dinghies, ramshackle things barely held together with bamboos and tattered cloth. She likes the stillness of these boats; they seem to ply the waters in so leisurely a manner that it is difficult to believe they’re going anywhere or transporting people on them. It is the very rhythm of the country, this apparent lack of movement, of any forward motion altogether. Time means an altogether different thing to them.

  In the autumns, during the Durga Puja celebrations, there are steam engines drawing the tramcar carriages on Chowringhee Road, carrying pilgrims from and to the temple in Kalighat. These ghats are something which Miss Gilby had never seen before coming to Calcutta. They had grown on her so much that in the autumns and winters she and Ali-miyan, sometimes with Mrs. Cameron, used to take the air in the early afternoons on the banks of the Hooghly, with Ali-miyan keeping up a running commentary about the history and names of the scores of ghats which dot the stretch of the river.

  Ali-miyan guided the coachman as the brougham made its way from Kashipur in the north to Hastings on the Ganges estuary in the south, pointed out the ghats – steps leading down to the water, sometimes half submerged, made of marble or bricks, at other times docks really, for landing, anchoring and hauling of goods – and reeled off their names and explanations that awed Miss Gilby: ‘Look, Miss Gilby, that’s Ahiritolla Ghat, named so because this was the area where cowherds and milkmen lived’; ‘That’s Nimtolla Ghat, where Hindus cremate their dead’. Miss Gilby had been disturbed much more by this social ritual of people burning their dead on the banks of a river than by the odd practice of people bathing outdoors. She found the funeral practices primitive and didn’t encourage Ali-miyan to elaborate on this, quickly diverting him to give her a prolix history of another ghat, Huzurimal Ghat, or the ones with English names – Jackson sahib’s Ghat, Colvin Ghat, Foreman sahib’s Ghat. Miss Gilby has always found it amazing that the ghats are used for bathing, cremating, as docking and landing points of goods to be transported either inland or on the river. Even though each ghat is given over to only one of these functions, Miss Gilby is still struck by this unusual commingling of cleansing, commerce and ritual as if life, living and death were interchangeable, or all one.

  She keeps repeating to herself that she will return to this city, that the appointment in Nawabgunj is only for a few years, but something deeper and unnameable, both inside and outside her, impels her to traverse the lengths and breadths of Calcutta in her brougham or in tramcars as if she were breathing in her last of the place, etching it solidly in her mind in a way only people who know they are never going to return do.

  There are letters to write – polite‘thank you’ notes, more intimate ones to one or two of her friends here, slightly more formal ones letting acquaintances know of her new address and residence, a more general one to the members of the Anglo-Indian community she knows through Clubs, that sort of thing. These she usually keeps for the mornings. Afternoons are taken up with visiting or, in those rare spare hours, travelling through the city, mostly on her own. It is a little adventure, partly thrilling, partly fearsome, she rations to herself as a treat.

  The evenings are mostly taken up, although reluctantly and with much misgiving, by the Club. This is on the insistence of Mrs Cameron, her only true friend in Calcutta. A widow who had been married to the Lieutenant-Governor of Allahabad, she had moved down east shortly after her husband’s death. Her ten-year-old daughter, Jane, was in London and her younger son, Christopher, at Summerfield. Sending her children, both born in India, to be educated back Home was the only sign of conformity to Raj society she had shown. Fiercely independent and unconventional, she had cocked a snook at Calcutta’s ossified Anglo-Indian society: ignoring the listings in the Warrant of Precedence; setting up schools for the education of Indian women in her own backyard and, in the winter months, in her garden; campaigning for the end of the moorgi khana in Clubs – her sins were so numerous that she was practically
on the verge of ostracism by the unforgiving Anglo-Indian community. But she was one of life’s great irrepressibles, a true free spirit, and Miss Gilby knew that she enjoyed every bit of the controversy attaching to her, down to her outcast status, her lack of invitations to the Governor’s balls or the Viceroy’s Winter Dances: these were things that didn’t matter to her. She laughed at them, laughed at the choreographed dance of folly, which her countrymen indulged in, and held their snobbery in deep contempt. It was she who had recognized a kindred spirit in Miss Gilby and, on her arrival in Calcutta, had tested the newcomer by throwing to the winds the whole mad business of calling cards and appearing on her doorstep to invite Miss Gilby to afternoon tea; Miss Gilby had been utterly delighted. Mrs Cameron had warned her, ‘If you are intelligent, try and hide it if you can: a clever woman is not a very popular item in this jolly place.’

  Miss Gilby and Mrs Cameron had taken on the might of the Club with glee. While most considered that they had lost, the two women knew they had nothing to lose. Besides, they were financially independent and sufficiently high up the ladder for any of the mutterings and whisperings to really bite. Despite a lot of coldshoulders andfrosty behaviourat the Club, theyhadpersisted in socializing there in the evenings when there was nothing to be done – ‘Maud, we cannot stop going to the Club, it will be a victory for them, don’t you see? If they think they can make things difficult for us there, don’t you think we can do exactly the same for them? They are far more uncomfortable with our presence than we are with theirs. We don’t care, they do, that’s our trump card’ – and had even ended up earning a sort of grudging respect.