A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  When Ritwik had returned from his scholarship interview and told Aritra the good news, his brother’s face had first fallen and then radiated the purest joy, the joy of watching your prison inmate escape, knowing you’re going to be next through the breach he has made. As children, both of them had been reminded constantly by their mother, ‘Doing well in school is the key to everything. You can have everything you want if you’re good in studies.’ The indoctrination had worked in ways that even she hadn’t dreamed of. Both boys had found it easy to do well academically but Ritwik was not so sure if this had come about because it was the only reward he could have given his miserable parents – their eyes lit up when the school report came in or when one of the boys won a prize; they couldn’t stop beaming and stopping the neighbours in the streets to tell them about their latest achievement – or if he had been beaten into doing well by his mother. Either way, the key, which she had so incessantly talked about, was miraculously in his possession and he hadn’t even known he had had it until he was awarded a scholarship to go and study in England.

  It was only now he realized that she had given him both the key and the freedom to do whatever he wanted with it.

  The rain was viciously lashing the window, driven wild by a high wind. Something shifted and realigned inside Gavin. Ritwik had almost whispered the last few words, ‘Besides, there’s nothing . . . no one, actually, to go back to.’ Yes, Gavin was going to help him but only just: he didn’t want Ritwik to end up as his responsibility. He would introduce him to a few things and a few people and leave him to it. There was no way he was going to become a crutch for this boy who was all set to become a difficult problem. He saw in Ritwik his own early years in London and didn’t want that different creature of the immature past, his own green, stumbling self, inflicted on him now, for growing up always entailed a certain degree of embarrassment, a slight desire to wash one’s hands of recent history. He didn’t want a walking reminder of it in this boy.

  Ritwik couldn’t have imagined what Gavin was about to hand him: an old, frail woman living in London who needed care and someone to stay in the house to keep an eye on her. She was too poor to offer any pay but the accommodation was free and he could get a part-time job for other living expenses. Gavin didn’t explain how he had met the woman but he mumbled something vague and inaudible about friends of friends among the Brazilian community, or maybe distant relations in North London and left it at that. It seemed to Ritwik that Gavin had stayed at this woman’s house, looking after her and working in restaurants, at a time when he needed a toehold in this country but beyond that hypothesis he knew he wasn’t going to get any more information from his friend. Besides, he was so thrilled that Gavin had thrown him a lifeline, and that too, so easily, so quickly, he couldn’t be bothered prying into Gavin’s past; he was sure this old woman was going to shed more light on it.

  When the practicalities – convenient time and dates, packing up stuff, storage, finals, phone calls – were all worked out, Gavin asked him, casually, ‘You do have a permit, a visa to stay on in England, don’t you?’

  Equally casually, Ritwik lied, ‘Oh yes. Yes, I do.’ And then added, for verisimilitude, ‘For another two years.’

  ‘But you don’t have a work permit?’

  ‘No, but it won’t be a problem to find people who’ll hire me on a loose-cash-at-the-end-of-the-day basis, will it?’ He was willing Gavin to say oh yes, no problem at all, London is brimming with such people.

  Instead, he got, ‘Strictly speaking, that’s illegal. If you’re found out, there’ll be trouble’ – he pronounced it ‘trawbble’ – ‘rules about immigrant work and stuff are very strict and complicated.’ When Ritwik looked confused, Gavin added, ‘But there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people working in the black economy. You’ll certainly not lack company.’

  Ritwik couldn’t bring himself to think that far. It was enough for now that he should have found a place to stay, a place for free. That had been shaping up as the most consuming problem in his head and now that it was solved he was going to savour it for a little while before that other big problem – a job – occupied all his thoughts.

  He looks like a boy, Anne Cameron thinks. He can’t be more than a boy, surely. He is so thin he looks like he hasn’t been given a square meal in his life. Dark, gangly, bones everywhere. The first thing she notices about him is the way his sharp collarbones jut out. The Brazilian man – or is he Scottish? She doesn’t remember but if he is, he speaks English funny, like a foreigner – sits making introductions, which have long passed their need or usefulness. She is not listening to them, anyway. She is thinking of the big sparrow she had seen that very morning, trying to balance on the swinging birdfeeder at the end of her long garden. Anne Cameron is convinced that any smaller bird, say a robin or a tit, would have managed just fine. It is the size of the sparrow that is suddenly bothering her. It was, frankly, enormous, the size of a builder’s fist; she hadn’t seen anything like it before.

  ‘. . . couldn’t really have guessed it was a sparrow if I hadn’t tiptoed closer and watched it for a while.’

  The Brazilian man has stopped speaking. The starved boy has looked up sharply at her. The Brazilian man – for the life of her, she can’t remember his name – asks politely, ‘Pardon?’ And to think that he used to live here for, for . . . oh many months . . .

  ‘Many months, didn’t you?’

  ‘Pardon?’ he says again.

  ‘You lived here for how long? Many months, wasn’t it?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, nearly a year,’ he says.

  Nicholas, that’s it, that’s his name.

  ‘Nicholas,’ she fairly shouts.

  ‘Pardon?’ Again.

  ‘Your name’s Nicholas.’

  ‘No, Gavin.’

  Gavin? She doesn’t recall anyone called Gavin staying with her. In fact, she doesn’t know anyone of that name. She furrows her brows for a moment but the name doesn’t click or light up. Most of them don’t nowadays.

  ‘You were saying something about a sparrow?’ he asks hesitantly.

  But she has already seen the two men exchange knowing glances. She is not going to tell them. She is going to punish them for thinking she is scatty by depriving them of the morning’s marvel, the fat sparrow. She doesn’t care very much at this moment that she has been speaking her thoughts aloud again.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she says with cold firmness. That conversation is now closed.

  ‘What did you say your name is, again?’ She looks at the thin boy.

  He says something that sounds suspiciously like nitwit.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up, I’m getting a bit deaf.’

  ‘Ritwik. R-I-T-W-I-K,’ he says.

  She takes a few moments to visualize the spelling and then repeats his funny name. ‘Ritwik. Ritwik. What a . . . an . . . unusual name,’ she says. ‘What colourful names you have. Do you know, the woman who lives down the road, I think she’s from your country or thereabouts, she once told me that all their names mean something, like . . . like . . . Lord of Fire or . . . Direction, or something. I’m sure she said direction, someone in her family has a name which means direction. You know, north or south, that sort. I can’t remember the names, and they’re all so difficult, anyway. Do you know the Indian word for direction?’

  The boy struggles for a while and then says, ‘No, I can’t think of one particular word. There are so many languages in the country, so many different words for one thing, that . . . that I can’t give you one right answer.’

  ‘But you are from India, aren’t you, not from Pakistan or Bangladesh?’ she asks.

  He looks up sharply again. ‘Yes, that’s absolutely correct,’ he says.

  Nicholas is quiet, sitting with something approaching a smile on his face. He would so like to interrupt but she is not going to let him: he is in disgrace at the moment for being naughty about her miraculous sparrow.

  ‘You know, you’ – she moves
and lifts her head towards the dark boy – ‘you’ll have to keep reminding me of your name. I’ll get it slowly, but you’ll have to help me. I’m not very good with names, I’m getting on in years . . .’ Her voice stops abruptly.

  The boy remains quiet.

  ‘If you tell me what your name means, perhaps I shall be able to remember it,’ she says.

  ‘It means a priest who officiates at a fire sacrifice,’ he answers solemnly. He is embarrassed as well, as if he has said it many times before, with a predictable range of effects, none of them the one he wanted. Nicholas rolls his eyes heavenwards and thinks she hasn’t seen him do it.

  ‘Ooooh, how grand, how grand, a priest at fireworks. What fun. Do you have religious fireworks in India? You shall have to tell me all about it.’ She has been trying to get out of her battered armchair ever since she decided to punish the impudent Nicholas but hasn’t managed so far. She hopes that if she keeps on talking she can distract them from her failed attempts. And then, halfway through some boring old conversation about laundry and bedpan-cleaning and locking all the doors and not letting the cat out, she will rise like an elegant bird, all grace and brilliant plumage, and flit out in one seamless curve, out of the door, up the stairs, glide glide, swoop balletically into the bathroom and only after she has sat on the toilet will she let her bladder go . . .

  But, no, she is doing it now on her sofa, the hot, comforting trickle, the gathering wetness under and around her like a leaking amniotic sac; she hopes the men will not notice, or at least not until later, not until she has sat on her piss long enough for it to be absorbed by her skirt and the armchair cover and the thick cushions, but, oh dear, it has somehow managed to be rebellious and trickle over the edge and fall drop by drop at first and then in a halting dribble on to the carpet. She waits for a few seconds, debating whether she should draw attention to it and then has no choice but to ask that Nicholas over there to help her; at least he knows the ropes and where things are. No use fretting over spilt milk. Or spilt piss. She cackles out, ‘Spilt piss, ho ho ho ho, no use crying over spilt piss.’

  The priest boy doesn’t seem to react to her words. He stands up, along with Nicholas, when she at last manages to do so herself. Nicholas comes forward to hold her hand and support her brittle steps, crooning, ‘It doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all. Now let us go upstairs gently, one step at a time, one step, one step.’

  She feels irritated at being treated like an invalid; after all, she has only pissed herself, not fallen down the stairs and broken her hip or her neck or anything silly like that. She says, a shade too brusquely, ‘I know, I know. You know, I can climb the stairs on my own and wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help,’ while clinging to his arm. She stresses the ‘your’ spite-fully as she strings out these lies. No use scaring off that pretty priest boy at the first meeting; he’ll find out what’s what soon enough. She is going to tell Nicholas that the boy can stay and have him explain things to him.

  In her state, the only illusion she can hold on to is that she is letting the boy stay out of generosity, not necessity. As she and Nicholas shuffle out she marks that Nicholas doesn’t turn around to give the boy another significant look.

  Almost the first thing Ritwik notices about Anne Cameron’s house is the decrepit state of its interior, as if everything in the house, all the objects and furniture and fittings are sliding, along with their owner, through old age to the final and inevitable stopping and shutting down.

  Almost.

  Because the first thing that strikes him is Anne Cameron’s age, the imprint it has left on her fragile and crumpling face. The furrows of the skin on her face remind him of the folds of clothes and the way they hang in neat, realistic undulations on old statues of the Buddha from Gandhara that he had read about and seen pictures of in history lessons in school so many years ago. He has never seen skin that reminds him of drapery, never seen anyone look so old. When he touches her hand, it is like a weightless claw sheathed in a loose, papery integument; he could have been touching a bird with light, hollow bones. But her blue eyes are clear and bright, with an occasional tendency to go rheumy. It is Ritwik’s belief already that they don’t miss a thing even when her mind is ballooning far above her immediate physical surroundings. She is so senile that she can’t get Gavin’s name straight but Ritwik has this uncomfortable feeling that she marks every single significant look Gavin gives him throughout the time they are in the living room with her while her mind is doing opaque leaps and arabesques about fat sparrows and being impervious to what he is called.

  Ritwik doesn’t know London at all. This is his first visit to the city so he takes Gavin’s word for everything but only provisionally; he knows he will revise the co-ordinates Gavin has given him with time. But that bit about Brixton being a different country strikes him, at first glance, as not wholly untrue. Nothing could be more different from the England where he has spent the last two years. That was a beautiful, pale, homogeneous thing out of every second book written in English, the age of its migrant population stuck eternally in the very early twenties, a white white white town. Compared with this clash and colour, it was Life-Lite; this is life with all the dampeners thrown to the four winds. This is populated by another people, mostly Caribbeans, Gavin tells him, with a smattering of African diaspora here and there. He also helpfully adds that it is the crime, drugs, mugging, stabbing and race-riot capital of England: it was the scene of the most shocking, most brutal race-riots in the country a mere ten years ago. From the way Gavin says it, Ritwik can’t figure out whether this gives the place extra street-cred or lots of negative points.

  The people here speak a different English, if English it is at all in the first place, for Ritwik cannot understand a word of the loud conversation, punctuated by effervescent laughter sliding to the outright cackle, that takes place between two enormous women on the seat behind him in the bus. It is the sort of laughter that makes everyone within earshot smile and think nothing can be very wrong with the world, after all; there is the chaotic music of life about it. He suddenly realizes that he is letting out, very slowly, the breath he has held in for two years. Doesn’t the notion of feeling at home have to do, first and foremost, with this uncoiling?

  The illusion takes a knocking as Ritwik and Gavin walk up Ganymede Road, one of a set of nearly identical roads off Brixton Hill: it is a genteel, late nineteenth-century, redbrick-and-stucco terrace, each house exactly the same as the next one, with only the ascending and descending numbers, and the different coloured front doors, to distinguish them from each other. Road after road, with names such as Leander and Endymion, of this bland sameness: step off the clash, mingle and patchwork of Brixton Road and you are in white, middle-class suburbia. But only mostly white and mostly middle class – Asmara Eritrean Restaurant, Miss Nid’s Jamaican Take-Away, Lion of Judah Take Away, The Temple of Truth, a clutch of hairdressers with names such as ‘Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow’, ‘Hair Apparent’ and ‘From Hair to Eternity’, all keep redrawing the contours of this amazing pocket of England. To Ritwik this indicates that there are other such delicious and defiant dissonances scattered all over this country; he will have to keep his ears open for them from now. They were not something he had heard here before, but now they speak to his blood with an intimacy he finds almost embarrassing, as if he has been exposed as unfaithful, disloyal.

  Nothing has prepared Ritwik for 37 Ganymede Road. First of all, it is a detached house in a terrace: it stands out so starkly that Ritwik can’t help reading it as some sort of a coded sign trying to tell him that life in number 37 is not going to resemble the broad flow of other lives around it. It is narrow and tall, like a slice from a thick, round cake. When they step in and walk down the narrow passageway to a landing, there is a staircase leading upstairs and five steps leading down to another landing off which open a living room, set back from the front of the house, and a huge kitchen, beyond which there is a big space that could have been a conser
vatory once but the glass roof is so smeared and dirty now that it is dimmer than the walled rooms. Beyond that, Ritwik can see a long garden, dense with knee-high grass and lush, tangled nettles: it is really a scaled-down forest. He could never have guessed, from the thin outside, that the house would open up like this, room after room, widening from the bottom vertex of a V to its open mouth at the top, much like a wedge.

  And then there is the matter of dust. It lies in a thick patina on all the surfaces, sofa covers, bookshelves, tabletops, armrests, mantelpiece, on all the objects in the house – framed photographs, pictures, the leaves of the spindly weeping fig in the living room, the window frames, bric-à-brac, everywhere. There are dust balls, loosely assembled around hair and fluff and lint, in the corners of the filthy linoleum-covered kitchen floor. Dust is slowly invading and taking over the entire place. It is like being in a first-world version of the flat he left behind in Grange Road for a better life, a place where dirt is slowly edging out humans from their space. Everything here is shabby and fading, as if all the colours of things were slowly abandoning a sinking house. It is a drab, battered, leached affair, with all energy extinguished, a space imploding on itself with neglect and inertia.

  And if Gavin hadn’t told him about the cat, he wouldn’t have known what to make of the orange hairs on the sofa covers and cushions, sometimes lying in loose tufts on the carpet, which can only be described as not neutral, not regulation, not snot-beige, but acoloured. At the same time as his heart sinks to think he will have to live here, he feels so much pity for old Mrs Cameron in this dying house that his eyes prick with tears.

  The last shreds of any doubt Ritwik has about living in this squalor are dispelled when Mrs Cameron pisses in her armchair. He has no idea what has happened and when the old lady gives off her frightful cackle while wittering on about spilt piss, he thinks her mind has gone down another unknowable alleyway. Even when Gavin gets up to support her upstairs, he wonders briefly about the abrupt departure and the sharpish tone of her voice when she tells Gavin she doesn’t need his help; he can’t make any sense of it. He sees the darkish, wet patch at the foot of the armchair but doesn’t notice it.