A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  If the cottaging business started off as an unsought adventure and surprised Ritwik by its very existence and possibilities, now, seventeen months down the line, it is a habit. An addiction even. He braves the bonecutter of the February wind to get to St Giles. No intensity of rain lashing across Catte Street and Broad Street in slanting spears can deter him. In fact, these extremes of weather he constructs as challenges – let’s see who’s hunting tonight – knowing well that he might be the only one, waiting for hour after sleepless hour, listening to the rain and wind, and hoping and waiting for a kind of ashen deliverance.

  He gets impatient on summer evenings because the light stays till so late, the darkening blue of the sky never quite reaching the perfect black he thinks is necessary for going out on the prowl. It is a last vestige of some inhibition, this reluctance to go cruising with the residue of daylight stubbornly lingering in the air. He is sure in time it will go although he doesn’t know whether that is going to be a good or a bad thing.

  He has started questioning himself about why he feels this urge to sit or stand in his cubicle for sometimes three to four hours on wet, icy evenings even when there is no action going on nor any reasonable chance of it. There are more pressing things that need his attention: Miss Gilby has only just made her first appearance at Nikhilesh and Bimala’s, Prometheus Unbound remains untouched. All those areas in which he thought he had imposed some order and method – books, essays, Miss Gilby – are beginning to escape control. All because, he thinks in a moment of trying to find one monolithic enemy, of that addiction to the adrenaline rush as he steps down the wet stairs into the underworld of St Giles, his heart a slow percussive fist, opening closing, opening closing. There is no denying it is a thrill. And he is hooked to it in the same way a big cat is after its first taste of saltblood. No amount of getting used to it, as he is by now (one of the other regulars calls him ‘our Indian chair’, he’s so much a fixture now in this place), no amount of it totally removes the slight loosening of the sphincter, the vague, peripheral urge to shit, as he makes his way into the toilets. Adrenaline, he notes every time; fight, flight, or fright.

  The elements of danger and fear were at the forefront before. Will he get caught by the police? Will anyone who knows him see him in there or going down the stairs? What are the chances of picking up a psycho? What about AIDS? They have all moved back to the shadows, some more, some less. He is now so inured to any sense of danger that if it is there, it is as some complex spicing, present only in the bass notes, resistant to isolation and pinning down.

  A particular incident in the toilets one day, at around two in the morning, sticks in his mind. No one there except Ritwik, who had been hanging around, utterly bored yet free and in his element, and another man: short, chubby, small shifty eyes, his skin the colour of bacon fat, tiny scratches on his nose and face, the kind one would see in an infant who has been scratching itself. The man hadn’t betrayed any interest in Ritwik at all but it was getting late and all they were going to get that night was each other. So, reluctantly, Ritwik had been making the moves, his mind not really on it, just to tease, just to see if the man was interested. Either way, he probably wouldn’t go through with it, he would just tease a bit and leave. The man had suddenly taken down his trousers, flicked out his penis and said, ‘If you don’t suck my cock, I’ll beat you up.’ Ritwik had thought how easy it would have been to spit at him and run out of the toilet to the safety of the open public streets above. Instead, though, he had kneeled down and sucked him with greed and had even got the stranger to jerk him off. In the post-ejaculation illusion of rapprochement, Ritwik, a few steps already on his way out while the man was washing his hands, hadn’t been able to resist shouting out, ‘I have a bigger cock than yours.’ Cheap, but it was going to hit home, he was that sort of man. He had shouted back at a hastily retreating Ritwik, ‘That’s coz you’re fuckin’ black, that’s why.’

  It’s different tonight. He had had to leave the bar, it was getting too smoky and close in there. In his room, his work had outstared him into defeat. So he’s been left with no choice but trace his invariable tracks to the cottage. Or so he tries to reason with himself. 328665, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. That information won’t leave him alone.

  The toilets are fairly busy tonight. Just entering it gives him a temporary reprieve from 328665 328665 328665. His cubicle is occupied. He waits for the occupant to leave and then practically pounces on the door, lets himself in and locks it. He’ll have a tough time keeping this for himself tonight, there are other loiterers like him who want to use it as a base too. There’s no option but to stay put in here until the trade thins out a bit. Unlike other evenings, tonight he is not buzzing with the need for action, rushing in and out of the cubicle to check out new arrivals, heading for the viewcrack at the sound of shuffling feet. Tonight he stands with his back against one of the walls and realizes after what seems like a considerable while that he has read all the graffiti many times over without any of it sinking in.

  Maybe he can will himself to shut the door that has opened inside him. The unsettling thing is that he did not know the door was there in the first place. No, he has to resist this tug. If he can only force himself to concentrate on the traffic around him, he’ll be better; nothing like the tired old game leading to orgasm for a snack of oblivion.

  He leaves his cubicle and someone standing at the pissoir neatly moves back and steps in, bolting the door fast. Bastard. He’ll have to hang around in the open now. He feels exposed and it’s not a natural feeling for him, not in this world. Then someone comes out of one of the other cubicles and Ritwik automatically, along with everyone else, looks at him. Very tall and very thin, his exposed collarbones like ridges enclosing two shallow bowls on either side of his neck. I bet if he takes his trousers off, his hipbones will be jut out like promontories in a map: that is Ritwik’s first thought. He marks it with unconscious prescience, for he won’t have either the clarity or the luxury to focus on his thoughts about this stranger again. There are dark shadows under his eyes, as if he hasn’t slept in a long time. Heroin addicts have such leaking darkness around their eyes, that devoured, consuming look, Ritwik thinks.

  They look at each other. Ritwik turns away and moves to the urinal, looking back at him once, making sure there is a lot of space between him and the next person standing and pretending to piss. The stranger doesn’t accept the offer, instead he goes and positions himself at the pissoir on the other side of the mirrors. Ritwik’s chest has a plumetting feeling inside it. He leans back to look at him and catches him doing the same.

  Who dares, wins.

  Ritwik zips up, walks over and stands beside him at the other urinal. Heroin Eyes is resolutely looking down, refusing to catch his eye, but he isn’t moving away either. Ritwik has become brazen – he is straining to get a glimpse of his cock, willing the man to catch a second of the crackle of electricity that he suddenly seems to have developed around him.

  It doesn’t work: the stranger buttons up and starts making his way up to street level. Ritwik is unable to let this one go. Almost immediately, he too moves away and follows him outside. The man takes the steps three at a time, bounds up and with enormous strides crosses over to Martyrs’ Memorial.

  The man looks over his shoulder: Ritwik has nearly broken into a run now. The stranger quickens his pace, crosses Cornmarket Street diagonally and almost runs into the vaulted Friars’ Entry, between Debenhams and the Randolph Hotel, just behind the bus stops. Ritwik pursues, running now, desperate, heavy with the knowledge that he has scared him off, is scaring him off right now, by stalking him out in the streets, but he can’t stop himself. He runs into the passage too and watches a tall, lanky figure lope away hurriedly, through the uneven patchwork of light and shadows thrown out by huddled buildings, a fair distance from him.

  He gives up. His heart is an eel, describing its endless Möbiusstrip dance, over and over again. There is no point going dow
n to the loos now; he is suddenly tired and uninterested. He walks slowly back down Broad Street; a keen wind is whipping up little local whirlpools of dried leaves beside a phone booth. Almost without thinking, he walks into the booth, picks up the phone, and the index finger of his right hand – not he, not the entire person – punches in the freephone number: 328665. As soon as the phone starts to ring at the other end, he slams his receiver down on its metal cradle.

  He breathes in and out for a couple of minutes, aware of each inhalation and exhalation, then redials the number . . . This time he lets the phone ring. At the fourth ring, a voice answers, ‘NSPCC Helpline. How can I help?’

  The voice is so familiar he can see the bridge of fading freckles under her eyes and over her nose if he shuts his eyes. He can’t answer.

  ‘Hello? Can I help?’ Her voice gentle, ever so kind and gentle.

  ‘No.’ The word rushes out before he has had a chance to string together other words into a sentence.

  ‘Do you have anything to say?’ she asks, slightly coaxing now, but still kind.

  ‘No . . . I mean, yes, yes . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  He is shallow-breathing in fairly rapid bursts now. ‘Could you tell me something about about about child abuse?’ Pause. ‘Please.’

  There is nothing in her voice, no sharp intake of breath, no silence left hanging for more than its seemly duration, to tell him that his voice has been recognized and his face mapped on to it. But he knows, in the way the telephone receiver seems to have become sentient in his clammy left hand, or by what he suddenly feels to be a slightly different ordering of the air and signals between the two ends, somewhere deep under the ground, in the souls of the cables.

  Her voice is collected, unswerved by the new knowledge. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

  Pause. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want to report anything?’

  Silence.

  ‘Whatever you say to us is in strictest confidence. If you choose not to identify yourself, that is perfectly all right.’ The professional words ring strained in his ears. Perhaps in hers as well.

  ‘It’s it’s about me.’

  ‘I take it you want to report something about your past?’

  Pause. Then a whispered ‘Yes’.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Yes,’ slightly louder.

  ‘Have you talked to anyone else about it?’

  ‘No, no.’

  There is a long silence during which he imagines their words, broken down into constituent letters and then further into electric signals and sound waves, travelling down cables and coalescing into human words again just before they spill out of the earpiece into her ear. He wishes they would remain atomized forever within the cable and get lost in a little black hole along the line and never reach her.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it now?’ Her voice has become that of a ministering angel’s again.

  His throat is a constricted passage of pure obstruction, blocking his words, choking out sound. He is not aware of little guerillas of words escaping this tyranny of his throat. ‘It’s my mother.’

  Silence from her.

  ‘My mother . . .’ he tries again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My mother used to . . . beat me.’

  ‘What sort of beating was it?’

  Pause. ‘Severe.’ That’ll do, he thinks.

  ‘How old were you at the time?’

  He doesn’t answer the question. He could be talking to himself as the refractory words tumble out: ‘Once when I was six I used some abusive term which I’d picked up from god knows where. You know, nothing very offensive. Roughly translated it would mean “child of a pig”. I suppose it has the same heft as “bastard” here.’ His voice is reasoned, calm, almost reflective. He is telling a story now in which he is a character; as raconteur, he manages far better, for it could be someone else’s story. Indeed, it is someone else’s story.

  He continues, ‘She was making chapatis, you know, flat Indian bread, on a griddle on open coals. She had a pair of tongs and a metal fishslice sort of thing, which she was using to flip the bread over. As soon as she heard the words, she looked at me and asked me to say the words again, as if she hadn’t quite heard them. I gathered that something was wrong, that the words were bad, so I kept quiet. She kept on asking me to repeat them. Then she reached forward and and and . . .’

  The barrier of fiction, without any warning, suddenly gives way. The words become painful pushes against a throat sealing up again. ‘. . . and she hit me on my thigh with the hot iron spatula.’

  Pause. On both sides. He can’t hear her breathing. For all he knows, she might have gently put her receiver down on a table and gone away, while his words leak out into a spartan cell, institutional and characterless, and it is only the room that registers the immediate peeling off of a ninesquare inch area of skin, like the papery bark of an arbutus tree, the slow seconds of silence and awe watching this wonderful ruching and metamorphosis of blemish, then the deferred shock of pain.

  Her voice returns. ‘Hello, hello? Are you still there? Hello?’

  He doesn’t answer; instead, he replaces the receiver, but this time with infinite gentleness, as if he is cradling the head of a newborn, fragile as eggshell, so delicate, so vulnerable to hurt.

  Outside, the wind is making ever more furious eddies and edgeless, formless pillars of rising and falling leaves, all atonal brown. At the lit display window of Blackwells, a shy, uncertain Mary looks down from her home in the shiny open pages of a luxury art book at some unspecified spot near his feet. One palm is outstretched and open, pointing downwards, as if she has just finished doling out some grace. He almost looks around him to see if it is still dispersed in the restless air around him.

  V.

  ‘Dighi Bari’,

  Nawabgunj,

  Bograh Distt

  Bengal

  October the 28th, 1902

  Dear Violet,

  I read with great regret and dismay of the troubles you are facing in your school. If the Bengali babu is not going to interfere in these petty racial squabbles and take immediate action against the separatist poison that is choking the country and which, I am sad to say, our countrymen are doing nothing to either allay or eradicate, instead strengthening it for their own petty political games, I am afraid, Violet, the only way to keep the school running might be to have Hindoo and Muslim girls attend on alternate days. I know it goes against our most fundamental principle of unity but we are both in agreement that the education of Indian women is of far greater importance than trying to solve their race wars, which we are too small to effect. If the Hindoo-Muslim animosity, which, I am reliably informed (and my readings seem to confirm, too), goes back centuries, deflects us from our true task, then we will have lost our battle in bringing the light of knowledge to Indian women. I only wish I could be there beside you at this hour of your need and help you in any way that you might require, or I, in my limited capability, can provide.

  You ask of my news. I am very well here and derive considerable joy and pleasure from being part of the Roy Chowdhury family. I have already acquainted you with my accidental straying into the andarmahal last year, haven’t I? Well, since that time, I have not only been accompanied and given a ‘Grand Tour’ of the place by both Bimala and Mr Roy Chowdhury, but I am also invited there occasionally to tea and, on two occasions, to lunch. It seems that Mr Roy Chowdhury has talked sense into his widowed sisters-in-law – he treats them as if they were his own blood – and convinced them, with reason and arguments and affection, that having a Christian lady step into their quarters is not going to defile them or turn them into pariahs. I think curiosity, rather than instruction, has ultimately got the better of them.

  Mr Roy Chowdhury has been open and frank about the rituals and observances his sisters-in-law practise, and has told me a considerable part of his, and their, family history. It appears that the older of the two widowed lad
ies, the one whom Bimala calls ‘Naw Jaa’, ‘jaa’ being the Bengali word for husband’s sister-in-law, was married off to Mr Roy Chowdhury’s brother, a good twelve years older than Mr Roy Chowdhury, when she was but a child of nine, the same age as the young Mr Roy Chowdhury himself at the time of this marriage. They grew up together, as two children, first as two friends in a family of adults, then the bond between them growing to that between a brother and a sister. When Mr Roy Chowdhury’s brother, the girl’s husband, died, leaving her a widow at the age of eleven, she had thrown herself into Vaishnavism as succour and consolation – shaving her head, observing extreme dietary laws, such as not eating or drinking after sunset, required by that strain of the Hindoo religion, immersing herself in fasts and prayers and rituals, seemingly in atonement for her sins, which, she was convinced, had caused her husband’s death. The bond between her and Mr Roy Chowdhury had only deepened although he had not succeeded in dissuading her from the more extreme aspects of her new religion. If she derives support or happiness from it, if it makes the burden of her tragedy easier for her, who am I to impose my will, he had said to me once, when I was expressing my reservations about the austerity of life for a woman so much younger than I am. Do you know, Violet, she feeds pigeons every morning, opening the shutters of the andarmahal verandah and throwing out handfuls of grain, in the belief that all those cooing birds are a collective incarnation of the little Lord Krishna?

  The other sister-in-law, married to another of Mr Roy Chowdhury’s brothers, lost her husband after five years. It seems such misfortune dogs the poor women who marry into this family. She, too, is childless. The second brother’s death left Mr Roy Chowdhury as head of family, a role he fulfils with affection, love and a great deal of maturity, with conscientious attention to duty and to every member’s wishes and desires. It cannot be easy for him to sustain the roles of brother (for that is what he is to Bimala’s Naw Jaa), beloved brother-in-law and loving husband, all at once, certainly not when Bimala’s recent presence in the andarmahal has disrupted, I suspect, former stabilities and precedences. I am also of the opinion, and I haven’t mentioned this to anyone, apart from you, Violet, that Mr Roy Chowdhury’s gentle prevailing on the matter of Bimala’s introduction to the outside world, leaving her seclusion behind, has not been looked upon too kindly by the two other women. It must be difficult for Mr Roy Chowdhury to steer a balanced and peaceful path through a household of women.