A Life Apart
Page 17
Sarah links her arm with his and says, ‘Well, we’re both a bit buggered then, aren’t we?’ She lets out a clear peal of laughter and then adds, ‘So you’ve decided to do Milton then? God, you are crazy. Shall we go and do some work in the library and then meet later for tea? We can compare notes on who’s the bigger bastard – Milton or Johnson.’
He feels so light walking to the library he is almost certain that had she not been there, physically linked to him, he might have blown away like a balloon.
In a few months’ time, finals loom like hulking shapes which scare and threaten a child when the lights are turned out. Most of the people he knows withdraw into frenzied revision. Everyone psyches each other out, and there is more than a whiff of tension, fear and rivalry in the air. Jenny Hellman, in the corridor upstairs, sticks unbendingly to her fourteen-hour a day revision schedule – she times her visits to the toilet with a stop watch, adds it all up, then adds that much extra time to the end of her fourteen-hour day. Jo Milne, her neighbour, has all her chemistry formulae, in extra large letters, glued to the ceiling so she can see them first thing every morning; she has grown up with the belief that what you learn in the early hours of waking sticks longest in the mind. She doesn’t bother drawing the curtains shut at night so that she can see her formulae in the morning light, first thing when she wakes up. In the college house across the car park, Paul Dunn and Matt Fellowes have discovered this little nugget and it fuels their masturbatory fantasies, which, in the run-up to finals, are a bit more fevered and frequent than usual. Others have taken more austere decisions. Ritwik never fails to be surprised by the sheer tenacity and longevity of the myth of the debilitating orgasm. Students he is intimate with have confided that they have either stopped having sex or given up jerking off, as if the increasing volume of semen in their testicles will directly nourish their brains when they’re faced with the question, ‘How far are Milton’s early works predictive of his later?’ Jenny’s given up penetrative sex; this from the woman who has had sex in every possible corner of the college – the laundry room, the showers in Staverton Road, the tennis court, the Master’s garden, the chapel, the library. There seems to be a secular Lent everywhere.
And then there is the steady rise of illnesses Ritwik’s never heard of – glandular fever and ME, chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI. God, these are the very people who take a dozen jabs before they go to India and carry a whole pharmacy with them! At least you get nothing more serious than diarrhoea or worms out there but here you get incurable, unheard of things such as BSE and CFS and ME, the acronyms themselves trying to hide the dreaded nature of the new-fangled confections.
Anti-depressants is the buzzword, stigmatizing in some circles, highly desirable and trendy in others. Mark Pawson decides to opt out of doing finals for the third time in his long stay in college because he can’t face it; he is on a record dose. Richard Keene throws himself off a cliff in Torquay, has to be heli-lifted and taken to hospital. Word has it that he is dealing very badly with trying to wean himself off Prozac and the added stress of finals has just pushed him over the edge. The whole college is spooked by it until it is discovered that the helicopter rescue was a creative addition and the only damage Richard seemed to have done was to break his leg when he fell off a boulder while drunk, listening to Nirvana on his personal stereo. The stereo, however, was shattered to bits.
A whole town going self-consciously, safely mad because it was expected of it.
Gavin is very busy. Ritwik has hardly seen him this term. He leaves notes outside Gavin’s door; a few days later he finds one Gavin has BluTacked on to his. It says how he has been working until two in the morning at the studio and returning there at eight in the morning: the final lap in putting together the degree show is consuming him. But they could meet for a quick tea in his rooms next Sunday afternoon? Yes, writes Ritwik, and sticks the note under the door. He feels both eagerness and apprehension about Sunday – he needs to ask Gavin a few things but he doesn’t hope for many answers. Gavin will probably divert it to being facetious and clever-clever.
The cottaging rages like a hectic in Ritwik’s blood. It is a habit, an addiction, and he is powerless to break out of its grip. But he hasn’t even tried. The pangs of guilt – I waste so much time down there, I could use it for revision, for plain sleeping, or cracking Vindication of the Rights of Women – are always mollified, suppressed, or dismissed. So far no one has justified the long waits. Ritwik is beginning to realize that this is the way it is going to be, that no one will come along to save him, but he has the clinical gambler’s dopamine-addicted brain, hooked to the tyranny of uncertain and random rewards.
On nights when the sound of footfalls becomes few and far between, sometimes dwindling to nothing for hours, he sits there and thinks of his mother and the lost innocence of the word ‘abuse’. The English he has grown up with in India is slightly different from England English; there is a touch of a phase-lag somewhere – they do not superimpose on each other perfectly. ‘Abuse’ for Ritwik has always meant the hurling of loud, angry, possibly filthy words at someone else – you can call someone a motherfucking bastard and that would be abuse. But to have it upgraded like this, in the casual snap of two fingers, to his entire childhood, to his relationship with a mother who is not there anymore to answer questions or even to listen to him – no, that can’t be right. And surely this has happened, more or less, to every child in India? He feels a sudden rush of irritation for this business of other cultures, other countries, renaming and recategorizing things, using their own yardsticks, for other people, as if their definitions were universal. But this fades away as swiftly as it has arrived with the question, ‘What if they’re right?’ The momentousness of the answer is always kept at bay by that classic reasoning: it happens to other people, not to me. He hasn’t got his head fully around the cognitive shift ‘abuse’ has undergone.
At other times he just sits away the hours in his cubicle thinking, ‘What would you think if you saw me now? This, this stench of urine and disinfectant and cock, this is what I am, not what you wanted me to be.’ And he punishes her more by staying on another extra hour when he knows there won’t be anyone else visiting the public toilets that night.
It could be any night, it is any night, because they are all the same, they all wind down the same way, but not this one. Four pints of Guinness in the college bar, followed by two pipes of hash in Chris Elwes’s room, have left Ritwik clouded and dizzy. He can’t sit still or lie down for more than a few seconds because everything starts becoming gently, dancingly unstuck and unfixed. The only hope is to keep walking. So he walks down a deserted Banbury Road, northwards, to his dorm on Staverton Road. At this time there are no cars, no people, no bicycles, just a long, well-lit stretch of road with trees on either side dropping blossom intermittently on to the tarmac. The traffic and pelican-crossing lights are desolate; they blink and change for no one at all to the rhythm of some soulless programme they are wired to.
A red car pulls up a few yards in front of him and the passenger door opens. No one gets out. By the time Ritwik arrives next to the passenger door, the driver has lowered his head and is leaning sideways to look at him. He is not thinking, there is a vague feeling somewhere that the driver knows him and is trying to give him a lift. Maybe it is one of the students who lives in his annexe. He gets in, does up the seat belt, slurs out the name of his destination and only then manages to loll his head driverwards to look at him. No, he doesn’t know him, but he is nice-looking, nicely aged, a handsome uncle or maybe even a father who’ll take care of him. There is a benign smile somewhere behind those thin lips, waiting to break out. Only when the car picks up speed does Ritwik notice that the man hasn’t spoken at all, or even asked for directions; in fact, he seems to know where they are headed. Ritwik tries to focus but it is too much of an effort. The motion of the car moving smoothly doesn’t do him any good: he longs to move around so that he can keep the imminent sickness at bay.
When Ritwik speaks, what comes out is a slew of words run together, ‘J’yoowannoo come up?’
The man nods, pockets his keys and follows Ritwik who is already making his way up the stairs, as stealthily and as silently as he can. He doesn’t really need to – there is no one awake at this time. He turns around and puts a finger to his lips, indicating to the man to be quiet. The man nods.
Ritwik tiptoes down his corridor. His is the second room on the left; there are four on either side of the narrow, fluorescent-lit corridor. He opens his door noiselessly – he is surprised he doesn’t fumble with the key and the Yale lock – and steps in. The man follows. There is enough diffused light in the room from the car park outside so he doesn’t bother turning on the light or drawing the curtains. He starts taking his shoes and clothes off. The man does likewise, almost mimicking him: first the shoes and socks, then the jacket, the T-shirt, the trousers. They both leave their underwear on.
Ritwik gets into bed and slips under the duvet. The stranger sits on the edge of the bed and takes him in for a while, his face in the refracted orange glow of the room a chiselled piece of shadows. He too gets under the duvet and stretches himself along the entire length of Ritwik, their bodies touching at every possible point. The man’s body next to him is all silk and warm honey. And then it hits Ritwik.
The wave, which had been building up for such a long time, which he had managed to avoid so far, now suddenly grabs him up and hurls him against an invisible wall. The whole room spins and nausea crashes all over him.
He tries to lie curled up; his head in the crook of his arm, his eyes shut, and wills it to go away. He thinks of distracting things – The Parlement of Foules, the way Dr. Carter’s eyes had misted up while talking about the moment Pericles recognizes Marina, the day Pradip-mama had dropped a small, heavy metal die-cast on Aritra’s head many, many years ago and then run out of the house, fearing Jamaibabu’s wrath . . . He is not even willing this random succession of thoughts any more; they are using him as a conduit to flow through, following their own opaque logic. But the room doesn’t stop swinging. He lies like an inert log, good for nothing, while the man tries to rouse him with his hands, his mouth, but nothing works. The nausea is so great that Ritwik doesn’t have the chance or the luxury to feel embarrassed.
He gets up to go to the toilet to be sick, realizes he doesn’t have a thread on him and, anyway, the toilet is too far down the corridor, in the landing outside, so he just lurches out of his room and enters the tiny shower cubicle that two rooms share. He retches at the sink – they are only dry heaves, deep and exhausting – but brings nothing up, only a bit of sour mucus. He decides that if he has a shower he will feel better, so he turns the shower on and lets the hot water sting and lash him while he slowly slides down against the wall to sit on the cubicle floor.
What wakes him up is the cold: the boiler has run out of hot water in the time he has been sleeping under it. He rises, turns it off, shivering from somewhere deep inside him. He steps out, opens the door to his room and there it is, on the floor, as if it has been slid under the door – a white envelope, stark on the dun carpet. Wet and dripping, he picks it up and opens it. Inside, there is a single twenty-pound note. The man has left, god knows after waiting for how long. Ritwik wonders if he tried getting him out of the shower.
He fingers the crisp banknote and a whole new world starts to swim into view like an undiscovered planet caught in its orbit for the first time. So that is how much the man thought he was worth naked but unperforming. And his second thought is – ‘food money for nearly a week’.
He doesn’t know it now but he is going to look back on this as a watershed in his small life.
PART TWO
SIX
When Ritwik got a two-year scholarship to study in the UK, two months after his mother’s sudden death, he knew he was going to leave Calcutta for good. The scholarship was his escape route, the prison door that had been left miraculously ajar. He would walk out of that door and never return. When he flew out of Delhi – strangely enough, on the thirtieth of September, the first anniversary of his father’s death – he knew he wasn’t going abroad only to study but was also leaving behind one life, permanently, in exchange of another one; unknown, but better. This much he knew – it was going to be a better life, as what wouldn’t be, compared with what he had lived for seventeen years in Grange Road?
Ritwik couldn’t manage to explain the whole extent of it to Gavin that Sunday afternoon, first, in Queen’s Lane coffee house, and then, later, in Gavin’s room, when Gavin realized this wasn’t any ordinary casual-friendly visit Ritwik had asked for. But he tried. Haltingly first, sometimes embarrassed, at other times, down-right ashamed, and then in one scrambled shuffledance full of false moves and missteps, he attempted to give Gavin some idea of the terrain he had crossed. There was no order to it, no neatness or linearity, just a piecemeal tearing of the fabric and flinging the bits to Gavin. Let him try and make sense of it, Ritwik thought; where he had not managed well, perhaps someone else, an observer or an outsider, would do better.
At least he started from a kind of beginning: when Gavin asked him what exactly he was escaping from, he said poverty, but what he should have said was the possibility of never escaping.
‘I don’t want to live in squalor any more. I don’t want to go down the way of my father, helpless and exploited, unable to escape. I don’t want to become him. If I return there, they will now attach their suckers on to me. Life out there will just carry on running in the same groove, decade after decade. I want a different life,’ he said to Gavin. How could he explain that he was also trying to escape the wet sticky monsoons; the blood-drying heat of summer, which made him a drugged, ill, slow creature for six months of the year; the insects that came out in giant colonies and multiplied during the rains; the sheer filth and mud of Calcutta streets, which welled in over the edge of his frayed sandals and oozed between his toes; the thirteen hours of power cuts every day; the chronic water shortage; the smell of paraffin and kerosene oil everywhere; the soot on the glass of the hurricane lamps; the random days without meals, all fanning and exacerbating the tensions in the joint family, year after slowfestering year?
Gavin could very easily have replied, ‘Get a grip’ or ‘Welcome to Real Life’, or something equally cutting. And he would perhaps have been justified.
If Gavin was convinced, he didn’t show it. He had heard the disjointed, stuttering stories in total silence. For once, he had resisted making comments or ironical facial expressions.
‘Is it also . . . also a . . . ,’ Gavin hesitated, ‘is it a matter of your sexuality as well that you don’t want to go back? I can’t imagine gays having a ball in India.’
Ritwik looked up. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, it’s partly that. I can be free here. No, you’re right, the opportunity to be myself here is something I value immensely.’
A long silence during which Ritwik fretted at the blatantly unconvincing segue into self-help-book talk.
‘Look, Gavin, one runs away from a country because of war, famine, torture, repressive regimes, all that sort of thing. Those are very serious things. But isn’t someone justified in turning one’s back on unhappiness, just turning away from the end of a road?
I’d like the opportunity to start again, in a new place, with new people. Is that so unthinkable?
‘Everyone aspires to a better life, why can’t I? I’ve got a chance now . . . if only . . . if only you’d show me an opening . . . you’ve lived in this country for many years, you came here as a student but you worked and studied and managed to stay on. I’m just asking you to help me go down that way.’ He halted. There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘Besides, there’s nothing . . . no one, actually, to go back to.’
The betrayal was ashy, bitter in his mouth as the image of his brother’s in
nocent face, brimming with the yearning to flee too, stabbed him. But he had to lie now, lie to live; besides, he could console himself with the last letter from Aritra, in which he had written of his imminent departure for Delhi to start his MA. He, too, would escape to his new life, Ritwik thought, trying to console himself, willing himself to believe that Aritra would be fine, would be able to look after himself. He had no choice except to believe in that. What Ritwik had purposefully hidden from Gavin was the sense of freedom into which his parents’ death had released him.
His parents had ensured that the brothers got a good education partly in the hope that when the boys grew up they would save their parents from the miserable lives in which they had got mired. Ritwik and Aritra were their one-way escape tickets, their pension fund, their rescue team. They had pinned all their hopes on the boys, counting out their days, waiting, waiting, waiting for the final move out of the hell of Grange Road.
But both boys had been released from that enormous burden of responsibility: from every day being weighed down by the expectation to perform, by the accumulated weight of the sacrifices their parents had made every day. Of course, these had never been made explicit but the silence of martyrdom, an eloquent dumb show of clenched jaws and haggard faces, had become deafening and solid.
The boys had been brought up like pack horses, blinkered to see nothing else but the path straight ahead; suddenly their masters and drivers were gone. The slow grind of the knowledge that they were investments or life-insurance policies disappeared one day, burnt by the same flames that consumed their mother. In its place was a freedom so vast and so dark it was as if they had been catapulted into deep space. No one to look after in their old age, no responsibilities, no waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the ill health of frail parents or the money to pay for their proliferating illnesses, no rope at their neck; their lives were their own at last, no one could lay any claim on them.