A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Ritwik didn’t go back to King’s Cross for nearly a month.

  The car is so ludicrously classy that it brings out the skeletal girls – underdressed children, really, all gangly arms and bones and the shadow of night under their eyes – the fat ladies and the lost, indeterminate ones in between, one by one, like victims of famine emerging from bushes and rocks and clumps of scrub. Something in the way these creatures appear, as if from nowhere, and take their positions along the pavement with such premeditated casualness at the smell of possible business, brings to his mind pictures of starving people weakly emerging from behind a crag until what was barren ground becomes magically populated with the remnants of human beings. This could be business, although he assumes, from the car and its obviously unseasoned driver (who else would cruise these streets so brazenly, and in such a car, if not someone utterly unfamiliar with the area?), it is probably not going to be for him.

  So he decides to get out of the competition by making his way through to another, darker sidestreet. The car moves in his general direction. Ritwik takes a right and then a left. He succeeds in shaking off the car only to find, a minute later, that it is directly in front, moving slowly towards him. He turns 180 degrees and reenters the street he emerged from minutes ago. The car follows him into All Saints Street. By now, there is no doubt the driver is tailing him. His heart lifts – money, at last – at the same time as there is the old, familiar grip in his bowels.

  He stands against a postbox, staring insolently at the car. It moves past him – it is too dark to make out the person inside – takes a right turn at the end of the street and disappears.

  Everything inside him deflates.

  He moves in the opposite direction, towards York Way. He toys with the idea of going to Central Station and picking up the sad leftovers at closing time.

  And then the car is right ahead of him. He pretends he hasn’t seen it and walks past it. The passenger door opens, the driver bends down, cranes his neck and gestures with his hand for Ritwik to climb in.

  The man is probably of Middle Eastern origin, Ritwik takes a guess as he belts up. Late thirties to mid forties, spreading middle, moustache, salt and pepper hair, and the twilight of a stereotypical Arab handsomeness dying with a final flourish. His first words, in his flawless English accent, are impossibly absurd, ‘What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?’

  Ritwik, incredulous, looks at him to figure out whether this is self-conscious parody. There are no clues to read. His laugh, which would have been open had he been able to ascertain the nature of the chat-up line, is slightly guarded and nervous. He says, ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘Well . . .’ he shrugs.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to take me some place?’ This time, the man’s eyes are smiling.

  Ritwik is thrown by the question. He stammers out, ‘I . . . I live some distance away, and . . . and . . . it’s not really . . . suitable.’

  ‘Then we can go back to mine. Is that all right?’

  Ritwik nods. This is going all wrong, certainly not according to the interactions he has been used to or expecting. Since when did clients ask him his opinion? Since when did they behave like polite and gentle pick-ups in a somewhat fast-tracked dating scene? As the car – a Bentley, he learns later – negotiates its way south through Gray’s Inn Road, he regrets having said yes to the stranger’s offer of taking him back to his place. The familiar fears and misgivings of getting into a stranger’s car darken his thoughts again. At least in the back streets of King’s Cross, he is on his own territory, more or less. But now . . .

  ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  Ritwik notes the archaism; presumably, the man was brought up in a former colony, like he was, on staples such as Enid Blyton, P.G. Wodehouse and Jennings, Biggles and Billy Bunter.

  Before he can reply, the man throws him again by extending his left hand sideways to him. ‘Zafar. Nice to meet you.’

  Ritwik shakes his hand and adds his name.

  ‘Say that again?’

  ‘Rit-wik.’ It hasn’t occurred to him to use something concocted, something easier, less unfamiliar.

  The next few predictable questions are avoided by a tricky traffic move. Once past that, Zafar says, ‘I’m taking you to my hotel.’

  ‘Oh. Which one?’

  ‘The Dorchester. Do you know it?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ It sounds as if he should know it, that single word thrown so nonchalantly. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Park Lane.’ Pause. ‘Do you live in London?’

  ‘Yes. In Brixton.’

  ‘Ahh.’ It could have meant anything.

  Ritwik is getting more and more nervous with every passing minute. This interim conversation between first sight and business is a great dampener: the rules of this game do not include superficial familiarity.

  Zafar seems to be intimate with London streets and traffic. As the car gently glides into Park Lane, Ritwik realizes with a sharp intake of breath which part of the world he is in.

  ‘Wait, stop. Look, I think it’s a bad idea to go to the Dorchester.’

  ‘Why?’ Zafar knits his brows.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m not dressed for . . . for such a place. I think they’ll stop me at the entrance. That’s going to be embarrassing.’

  ‘You’re going as my guest. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’ His voice and answers are calm, reassuring and supremely confident.

  It has been decided for him, not so much by Zafar’s authority as by the accumulated nudge the car, the hotel, Zafar’s clothes, all give to Ritwik’s greed: he could probably get away by asking for an unthought of sum from this man.

  Zafar leaves his car to be valet-parked and gently ushers him into the lobby of the Dorchester, bowed to by doormen in regalia. Ritwik feels so out of place that he registers this opulence – the crimson carpet, the light fittings, the floral arrangements, the depersonalized friendliness and judiciously measured fawning of the staff, the gleam and polish of perfect maintenance – only as something that shines by in the margins of his field of vision.

  ‘Do you want a drink in the bar?’ Zafar asks him solicitously.

  ‘No . . . no . . . I’m fine. Thanks.’ He feels intimidated and tyrannized by the interior and his knees wobble slightly as Zafar leads him to the lift.

  He has a whole suite to himself: the John James Audubon suite on the sixth floor. The bird prints comfort him somewhat but not enough for him to feel that he wouldn’t soil anything he touched or sat on. He tries very hard to concentrate on Virginian partridge, Louisiana tanager and scarlet tanager, black-bellied darter and a remarkably amusing solitary trumpeter swan, craning its neck backwards and contemplating an insect very close to its parted beak: the swan itself looks tickled by the proximity of this silly insect.

  ‘A drink now?’ Zafar has moved to the bar.

  ‘No, thanks. Do the windows on the other end look out on to Park Lane?’

  ‘Yes. Do you want to have a look?’

  ‘Yes, please’.

  Zafar draws the curtains. Hyde Park stretches outside like a landscaped parkland in an eighteenth-century print. The traffic below moves by in complete silence. Zafar stands beside him, taking in the sweep, tinkling the ice cubes in his tumbler of whisky.

  Ritwik decides to make the first move. He bends down to untie his shoelaces. The business of unmentioned money is bothering him intensely: what if Zafar thinks this is just a casual pick-up and sends him away unpaid? Did he have any inkling in the first place?

  ‘Take your clothes off, everything, and then walk up and down. I want to see you.’ It is clearly a command from someone at ease with issuing them yet, at the same time as it is impossible not to recognize it as such and act accordingly, it lacks both urgency and firmness. Ritwik does as told.

  ‘Come into the bedroom.’

  Ritwik follows. Zafar sits down on the four-poster bed and takes his shoes, socks and
trousers off.

  ‘What about the rest?’ Ritwik asks. ‘I want to see all of you as well.’

  ‘Come here.’

  Ritwik joins him in bed. Zafar pushes him down and pinches his nipples really hard. He winces in pain and tries to push the man’s hand away. His breath is hot on his face. Onions, overlaid with whisky. And then before he can move or touch Zafar, the man rises on his knees and pushes his crotch on to Ritwik’s head propped up on the oversize pillows. He does what is expected; in less than ten seconds Zafar comes in a bloom of hot, salty liquid in his mouth, rolls off him and subsides on the softly billowing mattress, his hairy legs splayed, his arms akimbo. Ritwik discreetly takes a tissue from the bedside table and silently spits into it, hoping Zafar doesn’t notice.

  He lies staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, worrying about his next move. Zafar solves it by saying, ‘Stay for a bit. I’ll drive you home.’

  Ritwik instantly relaxes. He turns on his side to face Zafar and tentatively puts an arm and a leg around him. He pushes Ritwik’s head on to his chest – the shirt is silk, he notices – and runs his fingers through his curls.

  ‘Even your hair is like my son’s,’ he says.

  Determined not to let the words throw him, he asks in a high, bright voice, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you had a son. How old is he?’

  ‘Your age, or slightly younger. Seventeen.’

  Ritwik leaves Zafar’s illusion about his age unpricked. ‘Only one son?’

  ‘No, three daughters. All younger.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Riyadh. Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘Is that where you’re from?’

  ‘Yes. But I spent many years in this country.’

  ‘I can tell from your English. Were you educated here?’

  ‘Partly. But tell me, where are you from?’

  ‘India.’

  ‘Ahhh. I was thinking Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, those areas.’ Pause. ‘So you’re . . . . . . Hindi?’

  Ritwik doesn’t correct the mistake. ‘Nothing, actually.’ He quickly fires off another question in order to avoid becoming the focus. ‘Are you an oil man?’

  ‘What do you mean, oil man?’

  ‘Well, you’re from Saudi Arabia’ – and you appear to be loaded – ‘so I thought you had something to do with oil.’

  Zafar gives a dry laugh.

  Ritwik is well into this familiarity game now. ‘Just tell me if you come from one of the Saudi oil families.’

  He can feel Zafar smiling. ‘You’re asking the wrong questions. But, to use your terms, no, I don’t come from an “oil family”, but yes, I have some dealings with that industry.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Oh, just bits and bobs. Nothing very much.’

  ‘I would very much like to do the nothing very much that pays for such a lifestyle.’

  Zafar laughs briefly again. Ritwik starts playing with himself and Zafar; he doesn’t want a single spare second in which to think of the easy link this man has made involving his teenage son. This time the sex is slightly more prolonged but Zafar remains resolutely locked in his own, limited needs. The taking type, rather than the giving, Ritwik thinks as he concentrates on timing and almost botches it up. He can’t push away from his head deep-etched prejudices about the unenlightened sexual habits and attitudes of the Arab male. Zafar plays into this conveniently.

  The issue of money has now become enormous: because he has not mentioned it right at the outset, he doesn’t know how to broach the subject now and is consumed by thinking of moves and countermoves that would bring it up not too egregiously or offensively. He tries to play for more time. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’ll have a shower, then I need to get going.’

  Zafar doesn’t reply. Ritwik looks at him and catches him on the verge of dozing off. He touches the man’s face and says, ‘Do you want to come and have a shower with me?’

  The shower is an exercise in awkwardness and unsynchronized movements. Ritwik steps out of the black marble bath a few minutes before Zafar, who leans against the tiles and shuts his eyes with pleasure. Or exhaustion. As he dries himself with a red towel big enough to wrap all of himself in several times over, he tries not to look at Zafar’s extraordinarily hirsute body, his growing paunch, and his dangling testicles, which look like used teabags.

  Then he notices a thin line of blood stretching along one side of his glans and cries out, ‘Oh my god, blood.’

  Zafar turns off the taps and steps out onto the bathmat. He asks, ‘Really? Where?’, peering down, the fear just beginning to form, when Ritwik realizes it is just a stray red thread from his towel.

  ‘No, it’s all right, it’s just a piece of thread,’ he says, grinning in relief, and holds it up for Zafar to see.

  ‘Are you sure?’ His face still bears traces of the dissolving fear.

  ‘Yes, take a look.’

  Instead of looking at the thread, Zafar inspects his cock, turning it around in order to leave no doubts hanging. He dries himself in silence then disappears into one of the rooms in the suite, presumably to dress. Ritwik has the sense of some unnamed reverie being broken. When Zafar emerges, in a silk dressing gown, it is obvious that he is not going to drive Ritwik home. Before he can ask, Zafar says, ‘Why don’t I call a taxi for you?’ He reaches into a pocket and adds, ‘Here, here’s some money for the taxi.’ He hands Ritwik four crisp fifty-pound notes. ‘Keep the rest.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he says lamely.

  Zafar waves his hand dismissively. ‘It’s nothing. Let me call the people downstairs and let them know you’ll be down now.’

  ‘All right. Thank you. Bye.’ He brushes against a sudden melancholy: maybe it is just exhaustion. He reaches out his right hand towards Zafar who takes it, gives it a perfunctory, businesslike shake and says, ‘Give me a call. I’m here for the week. Take care. Will you be able to see yourself out? Just take the lift downstairs, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Turn left and then left again.’ The words have something of his handshake in them, too.

  He accompanies Ritwik through the enormous living and dining rooms to the mahogany door. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘was that enough? You can have some more . . .’

  By the time Ritwik has found an embarrassed stammer of ‘No, no, that’s more than enough’, the door has shut behind him.

  That night he lies awake in his narrow bed, with his bedside light off for long periods so he can watch the rare London moonlight slant along the carpet in an elastic parallelogram, thinking of a small boy with unruly curls being flung up in the air by his father and then caught again in his sure arms amidst delighted squealing and laughter.

  Three days later Ritwik is back walking King’s Cross again on a raw evening threatening rain. He has the momentary luxury of telling himself that if he doesn’t get lucky in the next fifteen minutes he will go home; he doesn’t need to work for the next three weeks at least. An emaciated girl with a black eye and scabby lips imperfectly disguised, even in this light, by loud lipstick comes out of the shadows and crosses the street into another set of shadows. He can hear stray words from a murmured bargaining going on between a man in a car and a busty woman leaning and resting her elbows on the window edge, showing her extraordinary cleavage to full effect. They are about ten metres away from him. He decides to take a left turn and walk down to the narrow canal between York Way and Caledonian Road.

  Two men are standing a few metres apart on the street. Something in the way that both of them hold themselves and turn around simultaneously to look at Ritwik sends off alarm signals in his head. Before he has the chance to do an about-turn and seek the safety of a main road, the men are beside him. Fear explodes in a starburst inside him. One of the men touches his arm and pushes him gently towards the towpath. ‘Come with us. Don’t make noise.’

  Foreigners, Ritwik thinks. They are both young and goodlooking in a footballer stud sort of way. They push him against the wall of a sealed-up public lavatory and stand very cl
ose to him. They say something to each other in their language – Albanian, perhaps, Ritwik guesses wildly, not only from the sound but also from their looks – and one of them lights a cigarette. In the brief flare of the yellow light of the lighter they look like textbook criminals.

  The leaner of the two asks him, ‘You come here every day?’

  ‘No. Only very rarely.’ His voice sounds unfamiliar to his own ears.

  ‘What you say?’

  Ritwik speaks slowly, ‘No, I don’t come here every day. Once a week. Maybe less.’

  The smoking man takes something out of his pocket, flicks it open, shuts it and then repeats the motions several times over so that Ritwik is left in no doubt as to what it is. No ordinary clients, he thinks, as his mind races through the worst scenarios – unprotected gang rape, torture, mutilation, death, another statistic found by a dirty canal path in London.

  The speaking man puts his hand around Ritwik’s throat and lifts him clean off the ground while keeping his back against the wall. Halfway through it, his jacket, jumper and T-shirt get hitched up and the exposed brick scrapes the skin off his lower back. He chokes and coughs. The man loosens his hand and lets Ritwik fall. He is still coughing uncontrollably when the man says, ‘You lie. You here every day. We know. We see you.’

  Ritwik protests, ‘No, no . . .’

  A fist pummels into his stomach. He doubles over, choked with pain. After what seems like hours, his eyes focus on the man’s shoes, right next to his face. He feels he can never rise up on his feet again. He lies there, his mind concentrated by the pain, waiting for it to run its course. Even the fear of having more blows inflicted on him is displaced by the pain.

  The man lifts him up on his feet, steadies him against the wall and asks, ‘Who you with?’

  Ritwik cannot answer the question because he doesn’t understand it in the first place. He thinks the blow to his stomach has done some damage to his rational faculties. He tries to lean sideways and retch but the man is holding him straight by the scruff of his neck. After a couple of dry heaves, he hears the question repeated.