A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Gimlets or pegs of whisky and soda on the lawns, a spot of tennis very early in the morning, even swimming sometimes, the endless rounds of gossip and talking about the intransigence of servants: it was amusing how she who had suffered all these obligatory things should now feel herself poised on the brink of missing them, trying to fit them in in her final days so that they were fixed in some future memory.

  One advantage Mrs Cameron certainly had over the outraged little Anglo-Indians was the quality of her dinner parties. Here, she was nonpareil, an unqualified social success. And here, too, she broke all the rules. She tore up the Warrant of Precedence and seated guests wherever her fancy or mood took her. At one such party in the early days of her stay in Calcutta, she had seated an army officer in the wrong place, at which the incensed guest had informed her that he was a full colonel; she had chirpily replied, ‘Are you really? Well, I do so hope that when dinner is over you will be fuller still.’

  Miss Gilby had found in the older woman a soulmate, a mentor who exposed in her the nervous steel to do things about which she would either have thought twice before or, having done it, would have felt lonely in the isolation that committing such a deed would have almost certainly brought her.

  Suddenly Miss Gilby feels a pang of sorrow for her impending separation from Violet Cameron. Mrs Cameron is a little surprised at Miss Gilby’s insistence on strolling in the Eden Gardens or walking down the Strand as the bands played, two or sometimes three times a week, even during the wet, squally afternoons. Could it possibly be because Miss Gilby is trying to hold on to her company in these last few days left to her? Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris, but could not the same be said of happy people in the joy they took of each other? They will write to each other regularly and, yes, this communication is going to take a lot longer than the scores of chits circulated around the community and carried by the servants to and fro, and it will not have the immediacy and urgency of a chit written half an hour before its delivery to the addressee by a hot-footed servant, but it will have to do.

  During one of their dinners – informal, just the two of them, but neither of them forgets to dress up – Mrs Cameron asks, ‘So do you have any idea what this woman Bimala is like?’

  Miss Gilby says, ‘No, what I know of her is what I have gleaned from her husband’s letters. He is very well educated: a recent MA from Calcutta University.’

  ‘But Maud, she’s not one of those girl brides, is she?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so. She can’t be any older than twenty or so but she is no girl. Or at least that’s not the impression I get from his letters.’

  There is a pause for a few minutes as the servants remove the empty plates of consommé and bring in the curried prawns.

  ‘Are you not somewhat anxious about living with an Indian family?’ Mrs Cameron asks.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Miss Gilby replies, ‘yes, I am, a little.’

  ‘Will they have an untouchable European put in a separate wing of the house, give you servants who will not be allowed to touch or do any work for the other members of the household, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh, Violet, I’ve thought and thought about these practical arrangements and even mentioned one or two of them to Mr Roy Chowdhury. It appears they are a very progressive family. He has two widowed sisters-in-law who live with them and I’m assuming they observe strict religious rules or whatever the norms and mores are in these cases, but I’ve been asking around about rules and etiquette in Hindu families. One thing I’m sure of is that he doesn’t have much truck with the caste system.’

  There is another clearing of plates before the leg of mutton is brought to the table. Miss Gilby asks, ‘Are you going to carry on with the school?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Maud, of course. It will be difficult without you. God knows, you’ve been such a great help and I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. Miss Hailey – you know her, don’t you, Grant Hailey’s sister – is showing an interest but she is the timid sort and one harsh word from her brother, or, indeed, anyone, would be enough to make her cower into subservience.’

  ‘You know, Violet, don’t you, I really wish I could stay on but . . .’ she says, an askance glance picking up the burden of the unsaid.

  ‘No, Maud, you must go where your heart takes you. And if you don’t manage to get into all these families and familiarize yourself with their running, get to know their women, your book is going to be a little thin. Have you started it yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, not yet, but I’m hoping to begin once I’ve settled in in Nawabgunj. I’m so glad you understand, Violet. Mr Roy Chowdhury says he’s very interested in your school. If you need any help from him – talking to people, funds, anything – you just have to ask. He seems to be a very enlightened young man.’

  ‘You are lucky. You could have got yourself into a family that locked the women away in dark rooms and allowed them to do nothing but play with dolls and gossip and bear children.’

  ‘In that case, I don’t think I would have been asked for in the first place.’

  Mrs Cameron gives orders for the table to be cleared. They have both had somewhat more than their usual amount of claret. Lightheaded, they move to the drawing room. It has started raining again and there are all sorts of flying insects making a beeline for the candles in the room; something drifts down, too slow to be an insect. Miss Gilby realizes it’s a feather from somewhere, maybe a wet bird outside, or a pillow. She blows on it and instead of falling down it changes its course and gets wafted in the direction of Mrs Cameron.

  Mrs Cameron exclaims, ‘Oh, look, a feather.’ There’s a childish delight in her voice. She moves her head forward and lets out a puff of breath from lips protruding in an O; the breath catches the swaying, falling feather and it swerves towards Miss Gilby. But before it can reach Miss Gilby’s blowing range, it loses momentum and starts gravitating downwards again. Miss Gilby gets up, goes down on her knees and before the feather can reach the chairs, she blows on it very hard.

  ‘Quick, Violet, quick, blow it up to the level of the table. Go on, lie down and blow it up, up,’ she squeals with urgency.

  Mrs Cameron does exactly that – she crouches very low on the floor and, with her neck pointed upward, blows up, moving her head like a cat that has seen a flying insect or bird above it. She tries several bursts to get the feather right in the current.

  ‘You’ve got it, you’ve got it,’ Miss Gilby shouts and raises herself up to meet the ascending feather.

  ‘Maud, Maud, try and raise it higher so we can do it standing up. No, higher, higher,’ Mrs Cameron shouts.

  The two women shuffle and parry in an odd, staccato dance while the feather, which gets tossed between them, never seems to lose its light grace.

  THREE

  Paper covers stone. Stone breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper cuts him, has always done. Not just those occasional cuts when he is impatiently opening the rare envelope in his pigeon-hole, no, not those. It cuts him into new shapes, new forms, until there is no he anymore, but a cipher, a shadow, dependent on other things for his very existence. Sometimes while papers and their resident words slip and slide into him, drowning him under so that he can’t take so much life in its burning bright rush inside him, he casually looks up to catch the face of someone in the window opposite his desk. For the space of something not calibrated in human time, only registered by the sudden sway of his heart towards his throat, he does not recognize that the unmoored face looking back at him is his own. He is goosepimpled by his own presence, or a deferred version of himself, as if he is not really there. He chances upon Edmund Spenser’s dedicatory epistle to Lady Carey: ‘Therefore I have determined to give my selfe wholy to you, as quite abandoned from my selfe . . .’ His eyes stop at quite abandoned from my selfe. Yes, this is it; he has found confirmation in another page, in other words, of what happens to him. But there is no he left when he reads. So who is it that looks at him from the impr
essionable glass? Words for him are like the sporing rust on metal – they eat away at him until there is only an unidentifiable husk. He has become nothing.

  These presences and shadows scare him sometimes. He has taken to sitting with his back firmly pressed to the corner where two walls meet at right angles. He has become like a cat: at least two sides are covered and nothing can startle him from behind. Whatever encounter there is in store for him will be face to face; he’s prepared for it, ready to look it in the eye.

  Look her in the eye if she comes back again.

  So far, she hasn’t come back while he has been in his room, but occasionally, when he returns at night, turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open and, leaning forward, quickly switches on the light with an outstretched arm while still standing outside, he knows she has been in the room. No, nothing has been moved or hidden, nothing has been disturbed. There is no trace, no evidence, only a gathering together of the air into its normal Brownian motion after it has been sliced through and agitated by a recent presence. It is like water restored to calm after the ripples generated by a lost stone have died out but the water still remembers. The air in his room sometimes has that quality of remembrance. That’s all. And he’s afraid of that memory of air.

  He doesn’t dare tell anyone about it; he knows they’re going to be polite, commiserating, maybe just embarrassed, averting his eye. He certainly doesn’t want to confide in Gavin. Lately, he has been getting on Ritwik’s nerves. When he’s alone with Gavin, the deprecatory humour directed at him, the ribbing, they’re quite all right; he takes them in his stride as part of Gavin’s affection for him. He even enjoys, up to a point, Gavin’s feigned exasperation with him, his attitude of what are we going to do with a __________ like you? The blank term changes: sometimes it’s rustic peasant, at other times phony, charlatan, unsophisticated yokel, embarrassment; it all depends on his mood, but it’s all done in the spirit of fun and friendship.

  Maybe.

  In public, this takes on a sharper edge. Then, it seems Gavin is intent on pulling him down. Ritwik becomes some sort of a clownfreak for whom Gavin has to apologize even at the same time as he’s expected to perform for others. It is quite relentless; Gavin doesn’t seem capable of any other mode with him in public. Sometimes it’s funny, this you must treat Ritwik with indulgence, he’s a third-world peasant disclaimer from Gavin. At other times, the sheer unchangingness of it grates on him. Maybe he reads too much into all this because he is touchy and feels insulted. It could all be ironic, all the time, in which case it would be very trendy and in.

  So telling Gavin, even ironically, is out of the question. Besides, what could he say? Oh, Gavin, by the way, my mother keeps appearing in my room. This hash is really wicked, it steals up on you slowly. What were you saying about ‘index’ and ‘icon’? He doesn’t want to dent Gavin’s soi disant role of educator and civilizer. It’s a role that has taught Ritwik to smoothe over the jagged edges of his own behaviour, to learn to observe, ape and conform.

  Gavin is full of contradictions in this way; for all his radical lefty politics, he occasionally jolts Ritwik with a type of old-guard parochialism, such as his firm belief in good breeding. On the back of some conversation about women – they are never very far from Gavin’s mind – he once said he didn’t see why people objected to arranged marriages: at least one could make sure then the girl came from a good family. This is a vital thing in Gavin’s book: he sets a high premium on manners, decorum, social niceties, impeccably behaved children. And he’s very aware of class. There is this girl he fancies, Miriam; she reads English and plays the cello. He tells Ritwik, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have Miriam play the cello naked?’

  Ritwik says, ‘You know, there’s a Buñuel film where a woman plays some Brahms at the piano, nude.’

  Gavin’s mind is on other things. ‘That well-bred personality all thrown to the winds . . . the cello between her legs . . . oooff, I can’t bear to think about it,’ he rhapsodizes, then adds, ‘It would make her poshness piccante, you know, the contrast between good behaviour and . . . and . . . shocking, well, shocking . . . WHORISHNESS.’ He pounces upon the word.

  ‘How do you know she’s well-bred and all that stuff?’

  ‘Oh, I know friends of hers. She went to a posh school in posh North London.’

  Ritwik is a bit daunted, although this doesn’t last very long for he finds out, in a few months, that Gavin’s use of the word ‘posh’ is a bit loose, that Miriam went to what they call a bog-standard comprehensive, that she does not come from a posh (even by Gavin’s definition) bit of north London. But then, he thinks, there are two types of people. The first, his type, is the myopic, narrow sort: they take people exactly as they come – curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc. No more, no less. There is no other meaning behind these appearances and facts. They mean to him: curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc.

  The second type, to which Gavin belongs, is endowed with a shrewd socio-historical perceptiveness. They meet people and extrapolate a whole complex context from their parents’ marital status, parents’ jobs, area of residence, school attended, etc etc. By themselves those elements are nothing but indices to further extrapolation. So Gavin tells him how Highgate and Mitcham lead to further, different meanings. By itself Highgate, or Mitcham, signifies nothing. It’s like a game in which corridors open to further niches and passages that might then lead to rooms. Or might not. Perhaps one day he is going to understand England and its people well enough to have that breadth of vision. He certainly means to.

  His fellow-students in the group, or at least a couple of them, are helpful to him. Not in any egregious or patronizing way; they assume that cultures don’t translate neatly or dovetail into each other with a satisfying click, so they mostly leave him alone, or ask him questions to satisfy some minor curiosities. In the early days, when he was just beginning to settle in and get introduced to some of the students in college, a standard question was So is it very different then? Are you adjusting well? Is it a big shock? His equally anodyne answers were vague mutterings about No, not all that much, you know, we grew up reading Enid Blyton and, later, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, or, Well, Calcutta is still such a colonial outpost ...

  An important question now seems to be, ‘How is it you read English Literature in India and came here to do more of it?’ He surprises them by revealing that English Literature, as an academic discipline, was first taught in India, not in England; English administrators and policy-makers thought that the study of English Literature would have an ennobling and civilizing effect on the natives. They are thrown a bit, even a little embarrassed by this.

  Declan is more wide-eyed than most at this nugget of information. ‘Does that mean it’s compulsory in schools, like? Are you forced to read English Literature?’ he asks, incredulous.

  ‘No, it’s not forced, but it’s a discipline, a subject offered in universities. You can do a degree in it if you want to. Like Engineering or Maths.’

  ‘It’s a strange thought, isn’t it, thousands of Indians poring over Shakespeare and Keats,’ Declan says. Now that Ritwik has it pointed out to him by an outsider, it becomes unfamiliar, shifts patterns and configurations, like one of those exercises where he sits in his room and tries to imagine if there could be another him, looking in through a window at himself. What would that other he see? He often wants to look into his own room, locked and empty, from the outside; the bed, the books, the posters, all silent and waiting, as if they had a secret life of their own to which he couldn’t be privy, but living on the second floor put paid to that fantasy.

  He knows where Declan’s coming from: how can anyone square a Dr. Johnson reader with images of loin-clothclad, emaciated farmers standing next to equally cadaverous cows? Play ‘The Association Game’ with a white man, say �
��India’, and pat will come the word ‘Poverty’; it’s a coupling branded in the western mind, and who can say it’s wrong? It’s etched in his mind too.

  Sarah, sharp as ever, clothes this in other words, ‘So how do you feel about being a post-colonial subject still studying the imperialists’ literature?’

  ‘Well . . .’ he shrugs and hedges the question. ‘It’s not quite like that, is it? Or not always.’

  The unasked question is Did you go to an elite expensive school to come this far? He can almost see the unuttered assumptions buzz and collide like bluebottles against window panes: rich kid father must be well-connected or influential you know what they say about rich third-world people when they are wealthy they are wealthier than the extremely rich in the first-world privileged boy to have been bought an education which paved his way here.

  But it’s not quite like that, not at all.

  In Ritwik’s mind, there were two types of poverty. One, the unexperienced sub-Saharan type, some sort of a shrine for the western media, with images of devouring eyes; fly-encrusted lips of children; women and men and offspring reduced to bare, forked animals, a cage of awkward stubborn bones barely sheathed in polished skin. The other was the slow drip drip drip which did not decimate populations in one fell swoop but hounded you every fraction of your time, got under your skin, into every space in your head and made you a lesser person, an edgy jittery animal because, you see, it never finished you off but gnawed at you here and there just to remind you it was there and that you were powerless in its half-grip. Gloating and victorious, but sleazily so, poverty not as Death triumphant in a Bosch nightmare but instead, one of his low, seedy, taunting thieves.