A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  The question of returning to London had assumed such huge proportions in Ritwik’s mind that he hadn’t even taken in most of the instructions. But he hadn’t dared to speak out.

  Just half an hour into picking strawberries – larger berries in one basket, smaller ones in another – Ritwik had realized why the farmers didn’t do it themselves. You had to either squat or bend, moving like a crab, awkward and hobbling; the first applied unbearable tension on the thighs, the second broke your back. After the first hour, both Ritwik and Dusan had tried crawling on their knees and moving on fours. By the time it was ten o’clock, they had worked out that the optimal thing to do was a combination of all these movements, each sustained until it became unbearable, then switching to another one. The sun was becoming fierce, Ritwik had forgotten to get a bottle of water, and his body was being tested in positions and configurations it wasn’t used to. He hadn’t wanted to think what the aches would be like after a night of sleep.

  Where am I going to sleep? In London? How will I get there? In the shed here? What’s going to happen to Anne?

  Before midday, Ritwik felt as if he would never walk straight again, his back hunched, the stoop taking its own time to relax and let him ease, very slowly and painfully, up into erect position again. Dusan, either made of more resilient stuff, or used to such work, had doggedly carried on, needing fewer rests and fewer stretches of the body to its natural and original postures.

  When the dehydration headache kicked in, first a slow contracting behind the eyes and then the drilling at the temples and at the back of the head, Ritwik decided that finding water couldn’t be put off any longer. They walked to the shed only to be disappointed. Dusan explained to him, in broken English, that there was bound to be a source of water somewhere nearby otherwise how would they water their crop? Ritwik accompanied Dusan, the Albanian boy following some arcane and invisible track understood only by him but he led them, after a meandering walk for about three-quarters of an hour, to a lead pipe sticking out of the ground with a tap at its mouth and a huge hose of green plastic coiled near it. They drank, mouths to the tap, as if there were no tomorrow.

  As the day wore on, Ritwik realized that Dusan’s English was not as minimal as he had first taken it to be. Perhaps it was nervousness that had inhibited him, perhaps the company of strangers, but he told Ritwik that he had read English in his school for three years, a school in a small, small village next to a town called Bogovino near the foothills of the Sar mountains, on the border of Macedonia with Kosovo. Dusan spelt out, like a child learning his first alphabet and getting the vowels jumbled with each other, the names of the town and the mountain, and then inscribed them on the earth with a hardy point of a piece of straw. When Ritwik asked him what had brought him to London, with a shrug his English disappeared once again. Different variations on the question, from several angles, only brought shrugs, silence, apparent incomprehension and a subsequent immersion in work.

  The other thing Ritwik noticed about Dusan was that he never smiled. Not that there was much to smile about when your body was contorted impossibly, like a whimsically bent metal clothes hanger, and the sun got more and more ruthless, but normal people smiled when they introduced themselves to each other, or said ‘thank you’, or did any of those unthinking little acts of civil courtesy or politeness. No trace of those in Dusan; he wasn’t rude or anything, but it felt to Ritwik that there were vast dark clouds moving inside him all the time, darkening his eyes. For all he knew, he had never learnt to smile at all.

  In the numerous silences that marked their fruit-picking, Ritwik battled with discomfort bordering on pain, hunger, headache, curiosity, anxiety and, the biggest of them all, boredom. Who would have thought that ten to twelve hours in a field of strawberries would become so viscous after the first two that they refused to budge? He filled up the vast spaces between his intermittent conversation with Dusan thinking about the ways in which Miss Gilby was getting knottier by the day, opaque and locked in her world, a world that often refused him entry. Every time he thought or wrote of Miss Gilby now, the face of Anne occupied his mind, ludicrously so because his Miss Gilby was stuck at what, forty-five? Fifty? Fifty-five even?

  At other times, he populated the emptiness with musings on the politics of the country house poem; the georgic versus the pastoral; the famous English countryside, written and talked about so much, extolled, loved, and there he was in the middle of it, unable to construct a broader canvas of ‘Countryside’, stuck in a strawberry field which could only be a tiny detail in the huge picture of the literary construct. Where were the gently rolling green fields, the fields of barley and rye, the hills clothed with forests? And why was it all so close to major roads, so that the sound of traffic, a steady sea-roar, was always its music, not birds or crickets as the books and poems and essays had deceitfully promised? And what was Dusan thinking about? Where was he?

  The next three days gave some sort of an answer to where Dusan went inside his head while his red, sore fingers plucked strawberries, his head bent, his body splayed and hunched at the same time. But only a type of answer and one, Ritwik felt, he himself had much to do with piecing together into a coherent fabric from the disparate shreds and rags Dusan threw at him.

  On the second day, as Ritwik stretched his whole body out on the ground, racked with currents of pain and brittleness and warnings from his lower back and neck, Dusan asked Ritwik who he lived with, whether he had family in England, if he had lived in this country all his life. Ritwik answered with accurate facts, not a word more than he deemed necessary, but they were all true, if not the whole truth. There was silence for a long while as Ritwik tried to gather enough courage to ask him reciprocal questions but he hesitated too long and the moment went.

  That day Ritwik had come prepared with a two-litre bottle of water, two sandwiches – white bread and cheese and tomatoes bought with the previous night’s twenty pounds – and two apples, one for himself, one for Dusan. When he offered his food and water to Dusan, the boy looked at him with a dumb surprise, then took them from Ritwik without a word of thanks but with a touching lowering of the head, as if he were being offered grace by an angel. He also volunteered information about himself, which Ritwik had not dared ask for. He lived in a house with his mother, two sisters, two brothers, three uncles, two aunts and five nephews and nieces. Full house, absolutely crammed, thought Ritwik, reminded of the hell of Grange Road. When Ritwik mentioned that he too had lived in a joint family, although not in one as large as Dusan’s, the boy painstakingly explained to him that they all lived in one room, not one house, one room in a place called Barnet. The men, all of them, went to work, if they could find some. His uncles worked exclusively in construction and building: there was more work in that field than in farming and, anyway, this was seasonal, not really a regular job. They did not have proper papers in this country so it was difficult but between the six of them – Dusan, one of his brothers, the three uncles and one nephew – they managed to survive. Dusan’s mother and her sons and daughters were waiting to go to the United States because she had an uncle in a town there and he was going to arrange for papers and a house, maybe, who knows, even schools for his sisters and himself, because he would like to be a doctor.

  They had waited in England for fourteen months now and, before that, two months in Albania, from which they had had to flee because the police came to their village once, with guns, went knocking on every door and asked everyone to get out and never come back again. And there was no work to be had in Albania, you could die of hunger and thirst and even a dog wouldn’t come and piss in your mouth to wet your throat. So they had taken a ship to Bari and then a bus from Bari to Rome and then things got fuzzy and out-of-focus for Ritwik because Dusan wasn’t very clear about how he and his family had come from Italy to England. There were vague mutterings about relatives in the UK, an Albanian community, promise of work but the narrative ran into the sand. At this point, Dusan stared hard at the ground and went
red-faced and silent. Maybe it was just the sun and the racking pain from fruit-picking. Or maybe Ritwik didn’t pay enough attention, for the sound of his own blood rushing around in his ears blocked out this boy’s story, a story that exposed his own as thin and tinny. His lot, which he had escaped, appeared as luxury compared with Dusan’s. He felt small and ashamed and couldn’t make eye contact with the Albanian boy for the duration of their farm experience. Which was all of three days, because he wasn’t picked up by Tim’s van on the fourth day as he stood on Chichele Lane with loose newspapers and the debris of last night’s kebab wrappers and take-away cartons littering the morning road.

  And there had been no Dusan either. When Ritwik had asked Saeed, he had answered that he had no idea where the boy was, what his name was, where he came from. Like everyone out here, he was part of a floating population, here today, gone tomorrow, looking for better work, more pay. It was possible that he had found some place else, somewhere less temporary and less short-term than fugitive tasks like fruit-picking. Or, Ritwik thought, his uncles had found him something more stable in a construction job, leaving Ritwik with all those questions he had never asked about Dusan’s father and why he had had to leave Macedonia – was there violence? Was his village burnt down as the dalits’ were in India? Did he watch members of his family killed? – never had time to ask him about his country and if many people escaped or only a few. In the end, it came down to Ritwik’s own ignorance of the world, of his willed innocence about what was happening in it: he couldn’t look beyond the boundaries of his own shadow.

  Over the next month, Ritwik worked for Saeed in the hope that he would bump into Dusan somewhere. Sometimes, he worked stretches of ten days at a go, at other times there were three to four consecutive days when he returned to Ganymede Road after an hour or two of futile waiting in Willesden. There was more fruit-picking and promise of more by a farmer, or his friend, called Jack, in the autumn, in his apple and pear orchards in Kent.

  There was the odd bit of packing fruit and vegetables in a giant warehouse off the M25. He met Kurdish and Turkish men and women there and first heard the term ‘refugee’, whispered, hot with stigma, almost unspeakable. It fell from the lips of the supervisor in charge of their packing unit as he was doing one of his inspection rounds. A baby, bound to its mother’s chest, was making an unbearable noise: Ritwik thought it was wailing because it was hungry but there was no stopping it and in the high-roofed cavern of the warehouse the acoustics seemed to conspire with the crying to make it more high-pitched, more insistent. The supervisor was doing his rounds and Ritwik understood that if the woman took time off to feed her baby, she would have the time clocked by the man and deducted from her wages. From all of twenty pounds for a nine-hour day. There was no altercation or even irritated sounds of ‘shhhh’ and ‘tssk’ from either the supervisor or the other workers but the air had been heavy with tension; there had been a greater concentration in putting lettuce in cling film. As the supervisor passed by Ritwik, he clearly heard him mutter, ‘Bloody fucking refugees and their fucking children’, then looked at Ritwik, rolled his eyes upward in a gesture that was meant to draw them together in their mutual irritation at this screaming, and said, ‘Why can’t they leave them at home? This god-awful racket.’ Ritwik had lowered his eyes. The appropriate reply – ‘Where should she leave it? At a crèche?’ – came too late, as the man’s back was receding down the far end, towards the double doors.

  In any case, he wouldn’t have had the job any more if he had answered back. There were all sorts of talk and gossip in this warehouse – how the workers couldn’t be absent even for a day, how all the time they spent in there was costed down to the last second, including visits to the toilet, how lunch breaks fell outside the number of hours at work, how talking amongst each other was discouraged. Nearly every day some of them had a few pence deducted from the cash they queued for at seven o’clock on some excuse or the other. Ritwik wondered if there was a CCTV, keeping watch on them, hidden away in strategic corners, or if the management just took it for granted that the workers would be either too intimidated or too lacking in English to protest.

  As soon as they emerged outside, everyone would lope off to his specific destination, mostly on his own, but a few in groups of two or three, which made Ritwik think they were either related or they lived in the same neighbourhood. It didn’t take him very long to discover that most of these groupings were made along ethnic lines: the Polish men clumped together, the few Kurdish women stayed close to each other because they were returning to the same council estate or bedsit.

  Then one evening Ritwik noticed Mehmet, a young Kurdish man, sitting on the ground outside with his back to the warehouse wall, sobbing his guts out, surrounded by four or five other men, presumably all Kurdish. Ritwik edged closer to the group, eaten up by curiosity. Something had happened to Mehmet’s sister, but what exactly it was, no one would say. Perhaps they didn’t have enough English between them to articulate it. Or it could have been they didn’t trust this outsider at all, this thin, young boy who looked starved but could speak fluently in English, so what was he doing here among them when he could so easily have got a better job anywhere else?

  Mehmet stopped coming to work. Ritwik worked himself up for three days to ask one of his Kurdish friends, as he was leaving after being paid, what had happened to him. All he got initially was a hooded look of mistrust; some shutter seemed to have come down, leaving Ritwik outside. Two men joined them and spoke rapidly in their tongue. One of them tried to speak to Ritwik but after a few stray words – ‘sister’, ‘police’, ‘beg’ – all flung out without joins and syntax, he gave up in frustration. What on earth had happened? Had Mehmet’s sister been caught begging on the Tube and arrested by the police? Did the police then discover she was staying in the country illegally and deport her with her entire family? Other lurid scenarios played themselves in Ritwik’s mind: was she a prostitute who was caught by the police in a raid? What was the begging all about? Was she begging the police to let her go? It was still light outside but the traffic whirling around them in the highways and flyovers had become denser and all the vehicles had switched on their head and tail lights. The sound was that of a steadily churning sea.

  VIII.

  Miss Gilby has taken her seat along with the rest of the andarmahal in the balcony of the first floor. The dark green blinds are still drawn but the slats have been opened so that the women can see what is happening in the courtyard below. Bimala, her two sisters-in-law and Miss Gilby are all perched on moraas – cane pouffes with leather seats – while the andarmahal cook and the new maid stand behind a pillar in a corner. Bimala has procured a pair of opera glasses, which she passes to Miss Gilby and her sisters-in-law regularly so that they too can hone in on a face or a head in the crowd below.

  For there is nothing short of a milling crowd gathered in the courtyard this morning, all waiting to hear the swadeshi leader Sandip Banerjea address them and direct the next phase of the movement. There are men from the village, men who have come all the way from Calcutta, men from surrounding districts, a large number of swadeshi activists – nearly all of them young students, hardly more than seventeen or eighteen years old – in their customary orange garb that makes them stand out like a bright flash in the dark sky. Mr Banerjea was supposed to have started at ten; he is more than twenty minutes late and although punctuality is something which the Bengali man can never be accused of, Miss Gilby cannot help feeling that the swadeshi leader had an actor’s cunning sense of timing: he was whetting the appetite of the crowd by making it wait for him.

  When he does appear, borne on a wooden board held on the shoulders of four young disciples – Miss Gilby cannot shake off that mildly objectionable word – her feelings appear to be confirmed in an irrational and unverifiable way. Loud cries of bande mataram go up, especially from the energetic orange youths, all flashing eyes and revolutionary ardour. The neatly bearded and fashionably attired Mr Banerjea soaks
them up with the benign and effortless public smile that comes so naturally to gifted actors and politicians; after a few moments he signals with his right hand – it is a cross between a holy man’s gesture of blessing and a signal for the crowd to allay their enthusiasm for a little while. When the crowd has gone so silent that one can hear a reed moving in water, he begins his oration.

  Miss Gilby understands only the first sentence – ‘The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, has divided Bengal’ – and the rest is just a few lucid words here and there in an opaque sea: swadeshi, obviously, appears a lot, and atmasakti, self-reliance, too, along with ‘boycott’ and ‘English’. But a considerable amount of the sense can be inferred from the tone of his voice, its modulations, the gestures, the blazing-bright eyes, the confidence in his own consummate performance, the timbre and fluidity of his baritone: the man is such a skilled orator, thinks Miss Gilby, that he could easily, at the end of his speech – during which every mouth in the crowd remains half-open, every face rapt – have commanded his audience to do anything, anything, and they would have willingly rushed out and done it. Bimala forgets to pass on the lorgnette after his first few sentences, even naw jaa slips off her moraa a couple of times, so keen is her eagerness to get as close to the speaker as her confinement in the andarmahal will allow.

  It remains in no doubt to Miss Gilby why this man is one of the leaders of the swadeshi movement: he certainly appears to have been born to such things. He seems to be whipping them up into a fervour of swadeshi activity, spreading his message of the boycott of English goods, carrying everyone into the vortex of protest against the unjust division of Bengal. Mr Banerjea is a creature of fire and wind, working together in a dance of fury; for an unsettling moment she sees a childhood illustration of the prophet Elijah in his chariot of fire. Miss Gilby feels like a traitor, sitting and listening to him, but she would be hard-pressed to answer which party she felt she was betraying.