A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  She has put her finger on the other nodule of unease in Ritwik. These are not British birds. Of course, he doesn’t know, but creatures such as these don’t perch on trees in south London gardens, that’s for sure. Call it a prejudice but England cannot harbour these birds.

  ‘You know, they were sacred to the Mayas and the Incas. I think it was first described for Europeans by Francisco Hernández in the 1570s.’

  Ritwik is so amazed by this sustained focus, even narrative, that he turns around to face her. ‘How do you know all these things?’ There is astonishment in his voice; it comes out hoarse and unsteady.

  ‘Oh, it’s one of those things I was interested in. I wanted to become an ornithologist but in those days women didn’t go to universities. So I kept reading, collecting books, pictures . . . I even started an album of Indian birds of the foothills of the Himalayas. The Garhwal region.’

  The world is unfolding in tiny furls of amazement for Ritwik. It is not the sight of the bird that has made him speechless, it is this hidden maze in Anne, this gradual illumination of the penumbral spaces he didn’t know had existed.

  ‘I met this quite remarkable woman out there. Ruth Fairweather, her name was. She had embarked on this ambitious project of compiling a comprehensive account of Indian birds, region by region. Much like your Audobon in the United States. I learnt so much from her,’ she continues.

  ‘I wanted my son to become an ornithologist. He did.’ Pause. ‘Richard loved birds.’ A longer pause. ‘Ruth loved him, treated him as her own son. She taught him how to look, how to listen, how to hold the pen and brush and pencil to draw birds.’

  Ritwik’s mind is jammed with cogs whirring away and turning, turning unceasingly. When the right clicks happen, and one cog locks into the groove of another, he holds back all reaction, even to the new knowledge of Anne’s son, an ornithologist, having killed himself in the room where he is staying at the moment.

  Anne is silent for the longest time this morning. Ritwik senses that a door has been shut. He will have to wait until it opens of its own accord. He turns around and looks out of the window again. He is not surprised to see the quetzals gone. Has he dreamed the whole thing? The morning is brightening but the lower reaches of the trees are still in a mothy gloom; it is only the top branches that hold today’s light.

  The Haq house was a teeming, heaving slice of the subcontinent, filtered through first world glitz and polish, in a south London street. The throws on the sofas were Indian, a couple of chairs, a low wooden table, a hookah centrepiece on it, the red curtains with mirrorwork, the three framed mirrors with gold Urdu lettering on them, presumably passages from the Koran, all reeked of a home the Haqs had left behind and studiously tried to recreate in a foreign country. The predominant effect was of density: cupola-like curves instead of straight lines, intricate and busy craftwork, zari, mirror, colour. The wallpaper, an electric pink, was picked over with golden stars and the gold was repeated in the picture rail, which ran the length of three walls.

  Two girls, noses running, had come downstairs and were now standing at the doorway to take in the stranger who had just entered their house. They had chubby cheeks, wore nearly identical salwar-kameez, and looked very similar. Ritwik guessed one was about five and the other, six. He smiled at them and said ‘Hello.’ One of them, the one who looked slightly older, turned her face away and ran upstairs, barely able to contain her shy smile. The younger one stood staring at him. Mrs Haq – or so he assumed – chided her in Urdu, ‘Now, say “hello”. Don’t be rude.’

  The girl ignored this with perfect insouciance and continued staring. The older girl now reappeared, peeped into the room, and said, ‘Ma, can you please turn on the CD player again?’ Perfect South London English, down to the splayed out vowels in ‘again.’

  Mrs Haq replied in Urdu. ‘No, not now. Look, we have a guest. We’ll talk to him now.’ She turned to Ritwik and ushered him into the living room. The English she spoke was heavily accented. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ She made a moue of mock-exasperation and added, ‘There’s not a moment’s rest from these children. Mr Haq’s helping Saleem with his homework. He’ll come soon.’

  Ritwik’s first impression was of a woman who seemed very much in control of her household. She chattered on, ‘It’s good to know there’s someone looking after Mrs Cameron. We’ve always been worried about her. She’s so old. She should be living with her children and grandchildren. Why does she live alone? I always ask her, Mrs Cameron, you must live with family, that is what they are for, to take care of you in your old age, but she says nothing, just smiles. You tell me, would this have happened in Pakistan or India? The English like to live alone. Only their own self, that is what they think about all the time. Not mother, not father, but just own self.’

  Someone had managed to switch on the CD player upstairs without the help of Mrs Haq. The garish Hindi film song, all overblown strings and a superfluous flute, flooded down. Every word of the shrill female voice was audible: A ring on my finger, a serpent in the ring. Mrs Haq ran upstairs. There was the sound of a rapid stream of Urdu and English, a brief wail, a thud and then the abrupt end of the song. When Mrs Haq came down to the living room again, the younger of the two girls was with her. She had put on a headband and some glass bangles. She stayed nestled against her mother but couldn’t take her eyes off Ritwik. Mrs Haq started saying something about her children when Mr Haq, bluff, portly and garrulous, walked in. The girl immediately switched allegiances and jumped on her father, who scooped her up, all the time keeping up his bonhomie talk.

  ‘Ah, so you’re new boy, heh heh heh, we are curious about you. We find out as soon as you come here, someone from our part of the world is here to look after Mrs Cameron. You’re from Pakistan, no?’

  Ritwik hesitated before he said, ‘Well, very close. India.’ He didn’t know why that question made him so defensive.

  There was a brief blink before he launched into his camaraderie again. ‘India. India. Well. We’re neighbours. Practically the same country, no? Before they divided us, we were same, all together, Hindu Muslim living as brothers.’ He got more and more animated during the course of his benign politics. ‘Yes, we live in harmony. We live here in harmony if we can’t live there. We are still brothers.’ He extended his hand to Ritwik. As Ritwik shook it, Mr Haq chuckled and said, ‘And you are young enough to be my little brother, no? Heh heh heh.’

  In the course of the next hour, in between glasses of tangy and sweet nimbu-paani brought in at regular intervals by Mrs Haq, who had disappeared into the innards of the house on the arrival of her husband, perhaps on kitchen duty, Ritwik was given a filleted history of the Haq family. Mr Haq’s father came to England in the early 60s, as part of a wave of subcontinent immigrants England was opening its doors to at the time, partly to salve its colonial guilt, partly to fill its depleting labour market for the jobs the natives wouldn’t touch. His father had been a young boy when the partition of 1947 had unrooted the poor cobbler family in Aligarh. It had taken them two years to reach Pakistan, the new Muslim homeland, along with millions of other Muslim families who had made the journey to a new home, new hopes, to the company of equals in faith. But everything had turned sour in the new country. Yes, true, there was no danger of their village getting torched by Hindus on the rampage, but Sindh and Baluchistan were arid dustbowls, Karachi a collection of ragged slums. There were no jobs, no food, just swarms of refugees trying to build homes. When Mr Haq’s father was invited by a distant uncle to help him out in his grocery store in Leicester, the family had pinned all hopes on the twenty-one-year-old and borrowed money to put the young man aboard a ship and send him off to a country full of possibilities. He left his wife and their year-old son behind in his village and sailed away.

  The young man had done well. By the time he was twenty-seven, he was managing the original store in Leicester, while his uncle had opened two others. Business was good, the Asian community in Leicester was booming and the demand for goo
ds from home was on a dizzyingly upward curve. Mr Haq’s father and his uncle rode it. And compared with the price they paid for the goods brought over from Pakistan, even a 100 per cent mark-up meant that the things they imported and sold in their shops were nearly three times cheaper than native English goods. A child could realize that the pound-rupee exchange rate worked heavily in their favour but it required a certain amount of business nous to exploit that to their full advantage. The young man learnt, hands on, the meaning of profit; Zulfikar Haq became a partner with his uncle. The first time he went back, in 1967, his son Shahid was seven years old. He distributed gifts among the family – razor blades, soaps, plastic toys for the children, shirts, a watch for his ageing father, all from England, to show that he had made it and his family wouldn’t want for anything any more – and returned to England after three months, promising he would come back every year. He didn’t manage to go back every year; the booming business made it more like every three, but he regularly sent money orders and drafts back home. Once again, the rupee-pound exchange kept him a winner.

  In the next ten years, Zulfikar Haq and his uncle cracked export licences, cheap sourcing from Pakistan, ship and land delivery, local transport, warehouse logistics, networks of traders from India and Pakistan and, above all, the unarticulated need of an immigrant community to create a little home on foreign soil. They set up the first cash and carry shop in East London in 1970, the year Zulfikar’s uncle died, three months after the inauguration of ‘Manzil Cash and Carry: For Best Products and Cheapest Value’, leaving him in charge of everything. Zulfikar moved to London, delegating the little empire of shops in Leicester and Birmingham, now all his, to a loosely knit assortment of relatives and friends, and travelled to Pakistan to bring back Shahid, now thirteen, to England. He had made it here so he was now going to bring his family over from Pakistan – his wife, whom he had seen only four times since they got married, his three children, Shahid, Salma and Nilufer – and have them ensconced permanently in the good life.

  Sitting on his sofa and sipping his wife’s lemonade, Shahid Haq told this rags-to-riches story with evident pride, even with a gentle urge to Ritwik that he should learn from this example and do something worthwhile with his life. Or maybe Ritwik imagined that.

  ‘I work for my father. Father says school and university, all useless. Look at him. He didn’t have much learning but he was successful’ – Ritwik noted the ‘was’ and wondered if the entrepreneur father was no longer alive but Mr Haq’s tenses were not conservative – ‘He brought me over to help him in business and then, one day, inshallah, take over from him when he gets old. That is what sons are for, to take care of their parents.’

  Ritwik did some quick arithmetic: Mr Haq would be in his early to mid-thirties now, although he looked a good ten years older with his greying hair and the paunch overhanging his belt. Zulfikar Haq would be about fifty-five.

  ‘Where is your father now?’ Ritwik asked abruptly.

  ‘They go back to Pakistan, my parents. They build big house in Lahore. They go back because they say they want to die in their homeland. The house has become quiet since they left. They want to be with their grandchildren but I tell them, we go back every year to visit them, so they know we’re well with Allah’s blessing.’

  Then Mr Haq, with a sudden narrative pirouette, launched into talk about his business: the chain of cash and carry stores, twelve in total, almost all of them delegated to a team of store managers, all of them Pakistani, trained hands-on in the job; how he had sold off the string of cornershops and larger Asian stores in the Midlands to other businessmen and begun to dedicate himself totally to his London ventures; how with increasing profits and enormous growth of the business, the responsibilities, the workload, the nitty-gritty of management, everything had become staggeringly, dauntingly large.

  It wasn’t really a hook, but Ritwik decided to use it as one; now or never. ‘It seems the business has grown too vast for you to run it all yourself. You must need a considerable amount of paid help in the less important aspect of things. Don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, we need people to stock, shelve, do the accounts, sell, deal with transport, all that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Would it be possible for you to give me a part-time job in one of your shops? Nothing fancy or high-powered, just a few hours a day, three or four days a week.’

  Shahid Haq looked both triumphant, as if a minor suspicion he had harboured for some time had been confirmed, and slightly embarrassed, because he would have to wheel out the tired, old excuses again to turn down this young man, excuses which would doubtless ring false in his ears.

  ‘We try to hire people from families we know, you see, other Pakistani families who are in England.’ His words came out halting, with pauses and a breath of a stutter, as if he were making it up as he went along.

  Ritwik found this so excruciating that he decided to put Mr Haq out of his misery. ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. I was just asking.’

  It was Mr Haq’s turn to do the empty politenesses now. ‘No, no, I’ll see what I can do. You see my problem with our Pakistani brothers . . .’

  ‘That’s absolutely all right. Of course, I see your obligations. Please don’t think about it again, Mr Haq.’

  ‘Do you have a work permit in the UK? A National Insurance number?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ Something flitted across the dark pupils of Shahid Haq. Ritwik briefly entertained the idea of telling him the whole truth but didn’t dare. He lied, ‘I’m on a student visa.’

  ‘Oh, I see, I see. Let me think about it for some time.’ Then he gave a particularly oleaginous smile, which extended to a grin, and slipped into his man-of-the-world mode. ‘Heh, heh, heh, we have to help each other out, don’t we? In this country, we need to stick to each other and have our own community.’

  Ritwik wasn’t sure if that was a hope held out or a discouraging reminder that he stood outside the community.

  The Hindi film songs had resumed playing upstairs. There was no sign of Mrs Haq. The voice of one girl was briefly heard over the song and then, silence. The younger of the two girls came into the living room; there was a large red bindi in the centre of her forehead, a few more bangles on her thin arms, a dupatta, presumably her mother’s, wrapped many times around her child’s body and a hair clip in the shape of a butterfly, pink, spangled and enormous, poised precariously on her head. She went to her father, not walking, but with the stylized movements of a Hindi film actress in a song-and-dance number, all the while her eyes fixed on Ritwik. There was a loud call – ‘Ameeee-naaa’ – from upstairs and she swiftly hid behind her father. Ameena was going to be in trouble with her mother for dressing up to the nines. Ritwik left the house with a strange, lonely feeling of unbelonging and perhaps, just perhaps, envy.

  VII.

  ‘Dighi Bari’,

  Nawabgunj,

  Bograh Distt.

  Bengal. May 1905

  Dear Violet,

  There is Swadeshi on everyone’s lips, in the food we eat, the clothes we wear – I feel we are breathing it in with the very air. The papers here are full of the impending Partition, the towns and villages resounding with meetings resolving to boycott English goods. The papers call them ‘monster meetings’ and ‘mass meetings’and‘giant rallies’;there are tens of thousands of people gathering everywhere to protest against the division of Bengal which must surely happen soon so why this public furtiveness on the part of Simla I do not understand. My head is full of this accumulating dissatisfaction against the Government, so eloquently expressed, so ubiquitous – meetings in Khulna, Pubna, Rungpoor, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Dinajepoor, Cooch Behar, Presidency College, Eden Hindu Hostel, Ahiritolla. The head reels with the sheer number of these protests – it seems everyone has taken to the streets.

  Is it as hectic and mad in Calcutta as I understand from the papers? Are people congregating everywhere? They say here that the boycott of English goods is beginning to bite in Manchester, in Lanc
ashire; even salt from Liverpool has come under the sway of Swadeshi Boycott. The traders are an odd combination of revolutionary euphoria and apprehensiveness, the Bombay cloth mills I read are gearing themselves up for a steep rise in production, while there is the usual division and debate about the comparative merits and demerits of Manchester dhoti versus the Swadeshi dhoti; it is widely acknowledged that Swadeshi cloth will never be able to rival Manchester products in quality and niceness, while the more patriotic allege loudly that Swadeshi cloth is far more durable than English fabric. The Bengali babu is in a quandary: betrayal and luxury on one hand, righteous patriotism and discomfort on the other. I have, of course, politely expressed my desire to Mr Roy Chowdhury that I shall be more than willing to try out Swadeshi goods if that does not extend to my soap: I shall remain loyal to my Pears forever.

  Mr Roy Chowdhury explains the complicated business of Trade Boycotts and Surplus and other well-nigh incomprehensible things to me: I sit and nod sagely. He is getting more and more pensive by the day; it has been over a year now that I haven’t seen him without furrowed brow. Bimala has announced her decision to forsake all things foreign: needless to say, she’s having great difficulties – her piano, her silk blouses, her combs, her dressing table, her mirror, her perfumes, her knitting needles, everything is ‘foreign’ – but is putting on a brave face and continuing to wear dull, white cotton saris. I hope her new decision doesn’t extend to me or to the English songs on which we’ve been making such wonderful progress.

  Dear Violet, write to let me know all the news from Calcutta: it must see much more than our share of the gathering storm. Will you tell me all about it? I wait with equal parts dread and excitement.

  Ever your loving friend,

  Maud

  Mr Roy Chowdhury comes in during a lesson one day, unannounced and apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry to interrupt your . . .’ he begins, but Miss Gilby interrupts him, ‘Not at all, not at all, please sit down’, before he has had a chance to finish his sentence.