A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Bimala here was telling me,’ she continues, ‘that in the true spirit of swadeshi we should be reading only Bengali books and translating from them as part of our language exercises rather than reading English-language books. I was just on the point of mentioning to her whether asking you to adjudicate would be a fair move. And you walked in, as if you had read our thoughts.’ Miss Gilby smiles, but there is a hint of reserve somewhere behind the thin mouth.

  The information gently inflects his question to Bimala. ‘Bimala, is this true?’

  This is the first time Miss Gilby has heard him use a language other than his mother tongue in conversation with his wife. Bimala remains tongue-tied and her gaze is steadfastly fixed on to the floor, whether out of the novelty of having to speak to her husband in English or out of the incipient conflict implied in the situation,Miss Gilby cannot ascertain with any degree of sureness.

  Mr Roy Chowdhury speaks again, ‘Well, Bimala, I’m sure Miss Gilby thinks it is a good idea but will you abandon playing the piano, or singing your favourite English songs as well?’

  Before Bimalahas a chance to answer, Mr Roy Chowdhury turns to Miss Gilby andadds, ‘Did you know, Miss Gilby, our Bimala has become a veritable revolutionary.Swadeshi, swadeshi, swadeshi: she doesn’t seem to think of anything else. Even while humming English songs, or asking her darzee to design a new blouse from a Dickins and Jones catalogue, she thinks and speaks of swadeshi.’ His voice cracks with good-natured and affectionate laughter.Miss Gilby and Bimala, too, follow suit after a few seconds’ hesitation.

  ‘So I’ve said to her, by all means, do as much swadeshi as you feel like, but you might have a few problems making your lessons with Miss Gilby follow such lines, not unless you give up your French perfumes, too.’

  Bimala pretends mock anger and accuses her husband of exposing her little failures in front of Miss Gilby, but it is all a joke, all playacting, and the little cloud that threatened to settle overhead passes swiftly.

  ‘Now, Miss Gilby, I do not know whether Bimala has already mentioned this to you but I wanted to let you know that my friend, Sandip – a childhood friend, we go back a long way – will be coming to stay here with us for a while. I was wondering if we could talk about it when you have some time to spare?’

  ‘But of course, Mr Roy Chowdhury. What about teatime this afternoon? Bimala can sing one of her lovely Bengali songs, while I accompany her on the piano. What do you say, Bimala?’

  Bimala nods enthusiastically. Mr Roy Chowdhury is so surprised at Miss Gilby’s sure, swift ease with the Bengali world that he remains speechless for a few moments.

  18th OCTOBER 1905

  Despite the earnest protests of millions of people, the Government has gone through with its insidious and deplorable partition of Bengal on the 16th of October. In anticipation of large-scale rioting and disorderly protests, an unprecedented number of policemen were deployed on the streets of Calcutta but it gives us great satisfaction to report that the infamous day passed peacefully in the city and hundreds of other towns and villages all over undivided Bengal. The people turned this most egregious of political offences into a day of brotherhood and friendship by tying rakhison to the wrist of their brothers and fellow men. And it was not only on to each others’ arms that the Hindus and Mohammedans, united in love and common destiny, tied rakhis, but also on to the arms of bemused policemen andsoldiers, thus showing that the Bengali race will not be provoked or broken by the divisive policies of Lord Curzon.We will turn all actions against us to our advantage, our silent and peaceful resistance will be our biggest victory. This was the day when Lord Curzon went down in the annals of history forever but not for the reasons he understands: for this was the day when the clock started ticking for the English Government in India and the man who set it ticking was Lord Curzon.

  Throughout the city shops were closed, businesses shut, schools, colleges, transport, everything on strike. Every single Bengali had taken to the streets, now a sea of heads,from early in the morning until 9 p.m. It was a show of unity and harmony, of peace and love, of strong determination. In the following days, we shall be reporting to you the spread of swadeshi throughout undivided Bengal.

  The Bengalee, Calcutta.

  PARTITION DAY PASSES PEACEFULLY

  With Lord Curzon, the infamous architect of the partition of Bengal, hiding in England after having drawn out a ridiculous drama of resignation, the division came into effect from the 16th of October, a day celebrated – for what other word can be used for this day? – by a massive general strike and a public rakhi bandhan ceremony. Every factory, mill, school, college, court, shop, business was closed for the day, a unified cry of protest against an act on which the people it affects most were not consulted. The partition, let us repeat, was done over the heads of the people and in this the Government at Simla showed that peculiar mixture of arrogance, evasiveness and tyranny, which has come to characterize it so singularly.

  But if the Government was afraid, indeed expectant of any violence or disorder that was being predicted, the disciplined Bengalis took the very wind out of their sails by turning the day into one of pride in the unity and brotherhood of all Bengali men, Hindus and Mussulmans, scholar and worker, farmer and lawyer. The streets of Calcutta were thronged with people from all backgrounds, singing Amaar sonar Bangla and Bande mataram, the sky resounding with the sound of proud nationhood.

  We can only thank Lord Curzon, for the act which was meant to divide Bengal, administratively, geographically, racially, has brought us all together as brothers. The strength of the Bengali will has been put to the test and we have come out triumphant. History will have more to show. Simla, take note.

  Amrita BazarPatrika,Calcutta,October18, 1905.

  EIGHT

  They talk of burnt bridges. Sometimes it is a choice, at other times, enforced, but more often than not the fall of the die takes in both. There are documents, stamps, official insignia, computer-held records, databases, monitors of exits and entries, date stamps, place stamps, ports of entry, records, papers, hard disks, officers, institutions, regulations, limitations, hedge after hedge, wall after wall, moat after moat regulating movements in and out, out and in. Life is calibrated in signs, the swift impress of inked rubber and metal on paper, the brief clatter of keys, a few hits of the return key, information stored in chips. That is all. There are no events, only records. To give all this the slip is to drop out of official, recorded life, of validated life. It is to move from life to existence. On the 21st of December, Ritwik Ghosh will do exactly that: he will silently let his leave to remain in England expire and become a virtual prisoner in this new land. He will not have access to banking, medical care, foreign travel, proper jobs, the welfare state, benefits, nothing. Not even an address, which can be used by other people to write to him, in case the post office people are alerted to his name. The vast grid of the impeccably ordered and arranged first-world modern democratic state will no longer hold him. He will become a shadow behind that grid, a creature with a past but no future, only a teased out mirage of a present. A ghost in limbo. Imprisoned forever but with infinite freedom.

  And all for a better, a new life.

  The die lands on crossroads. What determines things? The shift in wind direction? The fall of a russet leaf? An ordering of air atoms that makes the die fall that face up and not another?

  There are no answers except for that fall of a die, the unshaping of clouds, the head turned around at crossroads, a door ajar, another closed. Choice and chance.

  If he is asked, he will reply, ‘I didn’t want to go back to India because it is too hot out there. I would like to live in a cooler land.’

  Choice.

  What makes a presence illegal just because another set of keys haven’t been touched, another sheaf of papers marked and moved around?

  Three weeks after Ritwik’s conversation with Mr Haq, Saeed Latif rolled up outside Mrs Cameron’s door at three in the morning and sounded his car horn – dash da
sh dot dot dash style – just as Shahid Haq had said he would. Ritwik had lain awake most of the night because he didn’t want to miss the signal. That would have meant ringing the doorbell and waking up Anne who, for all he knew, was wide awake anyway, god knows, that woman seemed to survive on no more than three hours a night.

  The car shocked him. He didn’t know what he was expecting, perhaps a dirty, scraped, dented, secondhand one, but certainly not this long, beige obscenity, a tired Freudian joke suddenly come alive and purring outside his front door. The low-slung Mercedes had a left-hand drive and a swish leather and wood interior. It was either very new or Saaed Latif spent a lot of time everyday lavishing love and care on his machine. He opened the passenger door for Ritwik and asked, ‘You like car?’

  Famous first words.

  Saeed Latif could have been any age from twenty to thirty-five, had very pale skin, and was probably Middle Eastern in origin but Ritwik wasn’t very good at placing people. In fact, it was only recently that he had started thinking about where people came from originally because everyone in London seemed to have arrived from somewhere else.

  ‘Yes, I do. It looks very splendid,’ Ritwik half-lied, getting into the soft and yielding passenger seat, which hugged his bottom so eagerly.

  ‘I like, too. Come, we go.’

  Before the car started rolling, Ritwik took in Saeed briefly. He wore a shiny blue Umbro top, a thick golden chain around his neck, the links heavy and gleaming even in the halogen-lit night of south London streets, a similar bracelet around his right wrist, and rings, chunky molars of metal, on practically every finger of both his hands: he could have been a magpie’s secret dumping ground. The impression was confirmed when Saeed smiled and showed a brief gleam of gold in the region behind his canines.

  New to London, Ritwik was eager to figure out how the gargantuan beast was pieced together in its parts by looking out of the window and have Saeed give an intermittent commentary on the different areas of London through which they would be passing. That thought was killed quite early on when, driving down Effra Road, Ritwik noticed the road sign, turned to Saeed and said, ‘Look, Effra Road. Do you think the river Effra flowed through this area once?’ Saeed briefly turned his head towards Ritwik, then carried on driving, not bothering to reply. His silence seemed to have drawn some conclusions. Ritwik regretted saying such an incongruous thing but couldn’t shake off thoughts of Walter Raleigh sailing the river four hundred years ago down this very road, who knows, which now ended with the jostle and tumble of McDonald’s, Ritzy cinema, Pizza Hut and Barclays.

  ‘Mr Haq say I take care of you, OK?’ Saeed said after a longish silence during which Ritwik studiously looked out, willing Saeed to say at least the names of the areas he was driving him through, but no such luck. After the blankness, which followed the misjudged statement about Effra river, he didn’t dare ask Saeed the simple question, ‘What’s this place called?’ Anyway, what did he expect, a history and psychogeography of the various layers of London?

  ‘What Mr Haq say, we do, OK? He say I look after you, give you best job, not construction site job.’

  Ritwik didn’t have a clue where he was being taken. Mr Haq had reassured him that he was going to be in safe hands. Saeed was a trusted old hand at helping him out with things, both a troubleshooter and a facilitator, Ritwik wasn’t to worry at all, after all, he, Shahid Haq, was like his elder brother, wasn’t he? And he needed a job, didn’t he, an underground job where they didn’t ask questions, didn’t ask for numbers or bank accounts or other official things, just gave you cash in hand at the end of the day and that was it. Ritwik was looking for that kind of thing because the official type would be difficult to find immediately, he could start doing this over the summer and then Shahid Haq would try and find something else for him, was that OK for now?

  Ritwik had nodded to everything Mr Haq had said, although what the ‘this’ he would be doing over summer was never explained clearly, except for wispy comments about helping out in a friend’s farm in Hertfordshire. Ritwik didn’t object to fruit-picking, did he? No, of course not, fruit-picking, how wonderful, how how . . . rustic, how pastoral. It was typical of Ritwik to think first of Virgil’s Georgics at that point rather than hard details of location, hours of work, pay, duration of employment. If he noticed how consummately Mr Haq had read his situation – the unrevealed, messy business of black employment, lack of permits and illegal stay – he didn’t raise the issues with Mr Haq; images of bee-loud glades and nectarines and curious peaches reaching themselves into his hands were too much in the foreground to worry about insoluble and irreversible problems. Well, irreversible in a few months’ time.

  At last Ritwik gathered enough courage to ask, ‘Do you know the name of this area we’re driving through?’ when they crossed a bridge beside which stood a huge abandoned brick building on the further bank, to their right, with white columns at the four corners, resembling an upturned table. The river was dark and oily, the bridge on their immediate left festooned with lights. For a very brief moment, if he kept his head turned left, it looked like a deserted toy town. But only for a moment. If he turned his head to the right, it shifted to an industrial wasteland where shadows stalked the dark outlines of buildings, all spooky warehouses and silent wharves.

  Saeed shrugged. Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t understand the question, or he couldn’t be bothered to make small talk. The dark blue night was fading to a lighter shade around them almost imperceptibly: Ritwik could see inside the car more clearly now. That, and smell Saeed’s fetid breath.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Ritwik asked. This was going to be his final attempt.

  ‘London.’

  ‘You mean, originally?’

  Silence. ‘London. East London.’

  Ritwik knew he was lying. He dropped the matter and concentrated on the view smoothly slipping past. Row after row of detached white houses, grand and elegant. There was a big walled garden along the entire stretch of the road.

  ‘Buckin Ham Palace,’ Saeed said.

  ‘That? On the right?’

  Once again, no answer: conversation was going to happen strictly on Saeed’s terms.

  Suddenly there was a spacious roundabout, with monuments and victory arches, a hint of a large expanse of green, which soon broadened out to what Ritwik considered the countryside, yet along the other side of the green-bisected road, there was a series of swish, ritzy hotels, Hilton, Park, Dorchester.

  ‘Rich place. Is called Park Lane. Rich people and rich foreigners here,’ Saeed said, being surprisingly chatty.

  ‘Is that Hyde Park?’ Ritwik asked.

  Saeed nodded, driving past another arch and into a long road. Instantly, the scenery changed, like a swift, rumbling movement of theatre backdrop ushering in a new time, a new place. The shops, cafés, restaurants, juice bars, grocery stores, takeaways were almost without exception Arabic – Lebanese, Egyptian, Middle Eastern.

  ‘Edgware Road,’ Saeed said, laconic as always, but there seemed to be a trace of light somewhere in his tone, almost a joy, an ease.

  ‘You are Muslim?’ Saeed asked as they drove down this stretch of well-heeled garishness, the shop signs too big, the lettering too flash, the sound of new money a whisper too loud. They all aimed for a type of conspicuous affluence and hit it, ever so slightly awry, by being vulgar.

  ‘No.’ Ritwik could guess where this was going.

  ‘What you then? Christian?’

  ‘No, no. Actually, I have no religion.’ He felt slightly ashamed to say this. ‘I was brought up in a Hindu family but I went to a Catholic school.’

  ‘So you Hindi and Christian?’

  ‘No, neither.’

  Saeed absorbed this in silence as Ritwik felt disapproval wrapping around him but this could have been inside his head. He attempted to turn it around by asking Saeed questions instead.

  ‘So you are Muslim then?’

  ‘Yes. I am from Libya. You know?’ It seemed that Edgwa
re Road had liberated Saeed into a new honesty and openness, even a pride, about his origins.

  ‘Yes, I mean no, I know of it, but I’ve never been there. Is it a nice place?’

  ‘Beautiful. My country is beautiful. You go one day?’

  ‘Yes, I would like to.’ Pause. ‘So why did you come to England?’

  Saeed didn’t reply, which was just as well. He shouldn’t have asked that double-edged sword of a question.

  Instead, Saeed said, ‘All this shops, all Arabic. From Iran, Lebanon, Egypt. They all speak my language.’ It seemed that, away from Libya, Saeed had found a corner of wet, vast London, which approximated what he was at ease with.

  ‘They seem to be mostly food places.’

  ‘You eat Arabic food? You like?’ An enthusiasm flared up in Saeed like the brief flash of a match.

  Ritwik, who went partially hungry most days unless Mrs Haq called him over and fed him or sent him little tupperware boxes of kebabs, dal bukhara and bhindi gosht, replied feebly, ‘No, I don’t know Arabic food but I’d love to try some.’ His curiosity and greed for food, especially unknown cuisines, was unbounded and haunting.

  To Ritwik, the conversation had become a parody: here he was with an unknown Libyan man, driving him to an unknown destination, and he was sitting politely and giving quintessentially English answers – ‘Yes, please’, ‘No, but I’d love to’ – non-committal and unrevealing, while the real questions bobbed and swelled inside him, his curiosity still sharp and unsatisfied.

  How did Saeed meet Mr Haq? What sort of work did he do for the older man? Why did Saeed drive such a flash car? What did he do by way of earning money? Why did Ritwik get the impression that whatever Saeed did, it wasn’t wholly conventional or licit? Why did he have an uneasy sense that Saeed’s money wasn’t white, clean or regular?