A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Who you with?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘You want hit again?’

  ‘No,’ Ritwik cries out, ‘no, I don’t . . .’ The man cuts him short by clamping his iron hand on his mouth.

  ‘Don’t make one noise.’ The hand seems to churn his jaws. He lifts it and wipes off Ritwik’s saliva on his jacket with disgust.

  The man turns to his partner, breaks into their own language again, then returns his attention on Ritwik. ‘Who your boss?’

  Ritwik doesn’t understand, yet again, and foolishly answers, ‘I don’t have a boss.’

  This time the other man takes out something from his pocket and hands it to the interrogator. It looks like a small glass flask. Ritwik’s mind is whirling.

  ‘You take business from here. You tell who your boss. This is not your boss streets. This not his ground. You don’t come here again. You see this?’ he asks pointing to the glass bulb.

  Ritwik nods. Slowly, clarity is dawning, but it is so scary he wants to remain in ignorance.

  ‘This acid. You come here again, we burn your face.’ There is no trace of anger or any other emotion in his voice, not even violence.

  ‘You understand?’ he repeats.

  Ritwk nods again, vigorously. The pimp lets go of him and has another brief conversation with his friend. They give him one last look and move away. Suddenly, the interrogator wheels around and throws the glass bulb against the wall on which Ritwik is still leaning. He starts and jumps a few feet away, in a saving miracle of reflex action, as the glass explodes with a sharp noise, followed by the smoking hiss of the acid splattering and eating into the wall.

  He runs blindly, along alleys, lanes, past houses, dark buildings, empty stretches of wasteland, the backs of railway sheds and only stops when he almost collides with a car moving towards him. The car brakes to a halt and Ritwik, winded and breathless, stops for a second, enough time for him to recognize the dark blue Bentley. Zafar gets out of the car – he has seen and recognized Ritwik a while before Ritwik has him – and looks incredulously at him. Without asking any questions, he says, ‘Get in. Now.’

  Ritwik cannot have asked for a greater salvation. He obeys meekly, straps himself in and shuts his eyes to taste the sweet relief flooding him.

  He doesn’t know how many minutes or hours elapse before he opens his eyes to the question, ‘Why were you running? Are you in trouble?’

  Ritwik answers disjointedly, ‘This pimp beat me up. They threatened me with an acid bulb. My stomach hurts, it hurts if I breathe in or out. The acid, the acid, they threw it, it missed me by a couple of inches. Some sort of turf war between competing pimps. The crossfire, I think I got caught in it. I don’t know . . .’ he stops and starts again.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ he falters, trying but failing to start at some fixed point.

  ‘You’re in some sort of shock. Come back with me. A drink will do you good.’ The words are sensible, even caring, but the tone seems to be hooded, unreadable.

  Ritwik surrenders to the indifferent care of a stranger and shuts his eyes again. Zafar is silent throughout the drive to Park Lane and, he senses, oddly tense with the weight of unsaid things.

  Zafar pushes him into his suite. Ritwik almost stumbles, then steadies himself and turns around in surprise at the unexpectedness of the gesture. Zafar’s face is a roiling mask of rage.

  ‘Why did you go there again?’

  It takes some time for the question to sink in.

  ‘You didn’t get enough money for one night from me? You want more?’ Zafar continues, now pacing up and down the dark burgundy carpet of the living room. ‘You want more? All right, here’s more,’ he says, taking off his watch and flinging it across the room to a stupefied Ritwik, who dodges and cowers to avoid getting hit by the heavy metal. It hits the wall, makes a dent in the impeccable wallpaper and sinks with a cushioned thud on the carpet.

  Zafar takes off his belt and holds it like a whip in his hand. An image of his mother flashes through Ritwik’s mind just for a split second before he cries, ‘No, Zafar, no, please, no, not that.’

  ‘Answer me, why did you go there again? Did I not ask you never to do what you do? Did I not repeatedly say, don’t go back to King’s Cross?’

  Ritwik is so taken aback by this fiction, by the delusional questions, he can only answer simply, ‘No, you never did.’

  ‘Don’t lie,’ he shouts and drops the belt.

  ‘Zafar, you’re mistaken. Look, calm down, please. You never mentioned anything about it last time. This is what I do for a living.’ Ritwik seizes the momentary silence from Zafar to press ahead with a barrage of information. ‘I’m an illegal immigrant in this country, I have no working papers, no permit to stay, to work. That’s what pays for my food and clothes.’

  ‘Do you work for anyone?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he says firmly.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘What do you mean am I sure?’ Ritwik lets his anger leach out into his voice. ‘You mean if your hard-earned pennies are going to someone else? No, let me assure you, they’re not. I stuff them in a little box at home. I can’t have a bank account, obviously. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you come along with me and see where and how I live?’ There is acid in his words now.

  Zafar looks away and goes over to the bar. He pours out two drinks and brings one to Ritwik.

  ‘Try downing it in one go.’ His voice is distantly caring again, as if nothing has happened to ruffle the placidity of general life.

  Ritwik sits and stares at the oily swirl of the ice and whisky in the heavy tumbler. He has never had to articulate his position of no exit to anyone before and now that he has somehow let it slip out in a moment of weakness, of defence, even, it becomes enormous and all-consuming, the sound of it so deafening that there is nothing else but this roaring by which he is defined, against which every other note in his little life is sounded. The room shrinks to the size of a grain of sand within which his whole body is compacted.

  Ritwik lies on the bed and finishes the last bit of his hot, sweet milk that Zafar has ordered from the invisible people downstairs. He briefly imagines himself with a milk moustache, licks his upper lip and subsides in the soft sea of linen and silk. He is so tempted to close his eyes and give in to sleep right here but the thought of Anne alone in Ganymede Road nags at him. Zafar has once again had his brief and imperative pleasure from Ritwik before rolling off him and disappearing into the living room with a thrown away, ‘I have to finish some work before tomorrow morning. Urgent stuff. Why don’t you have a nap here and then I can drive you back later.’

  Ritwik can hear the shuffling of papers, the snap of opening and closing of briefcases, a low-voiced telephone call, as he dozes desultorily and wonders whether he can ever ask Zafar if his, Ritwik’s, pleasure is not important to him at all. Even in his blurred world of half-sleep he keeps trying to remind himself that this is business, not an ordinary pick-up; questions of his pleasure here are irrelevant, even presumptuous.

  He chooses not to think about Zafar’s naked display of proprietoriness an hour or so ago. Like all things that dredge the murky depths inside his head, he lets it sink down; he knows its disturbing demands on his attention will resurface later. While he is musing on such imponderables, Zafar pokes his head through the bedroom door and says, ‘I’m going to have a shower. Why don’t you get dressed if you’re feeling better and I can take you home?’

  As soon as Zafar is gone, Ritwik gets out of bed and walks into the living room. Zafar’s papers lie strewn on the polished dark walnut table. There is a laptop with a winking light amidst the pen, the slimline leather briefcase, the papers and folders, and a couple of video cassettes. The briefcase is open and lazily, uncuriously, Ritwik glances inside. There are four passports. The desire to know Zafar’s surname is immediate. He picks one up – it is a Jordanian one – and opens it. Zafar abu Bakr al-Aziz bin Hashm. Born 1947, Amman. The photograph shows a cruelly handsome man
in his twenties. It is only when he looks at the other passports that Ritwik is woken out of his passive and blunt curiosity. The remaining three are all issued by different countries – Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. In each, the date of birth, the name, the photograph and the place of birth are different.

  Something unknown begins a slow ticking inside his head. Initially, he identifies it as a vague and intangible envy for someone who has not one, but four travel documents and, therefore, such freedom of travel as four nationalities might allow: Ritwik correlates number of passports to ease of entering and leaving borders. But it doesn’t explain a more smoky unease building up in little wisps and grains inside him. He takes a perfunctory glance at the spill of papers everywhere. A fat and battered filofax lies open, but before he has had time to have a quick, furtive browse , some sixth sense in him registers that the sound of the shower has stopped and urges him to move away. He tiptoes into the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed and starts putting his clothes on.

  Zafar enters the room and asks him, ‘You feeling better?’

  ‘Yes, much, thanks.’

  Zafar ruffles his hair in a surprise gesture of affection before starting to dress. ‘Let me put some clothes on and we’ll be on our way.’

  In the car, he is unusually friendly, asking Ritwik questions about his family, his origins, his education, how he came to England, questions which Ritwik tries to evade, some successfully, others not. Zafar even puts his hand on Ritwik’s thigh a couple of times and leaves it there. He decides to frame a careful question.

  ‘So, Zafar, you never told me what you did for a living.’

  A long silence during which it seems Zafar is trying to make up his mind whether to give an honest answer. At last he says, ‘I work for some departments of the British government.’

  ‘What does that mean? You’re a spy?’

  Zafar laughs. ‘You’ve been reading too much Le Carré.’

  ‘What then?’ Ritwik persists.

  ‘Oh, I’m a sort of business broker. I get international clients for British-manufactured stuff.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘You know what happened to the cat who was curious?’ Zafar asks, laughing, but there is no hiding the deterring emphasis behind the words.

  ‘Yes, I do, but you also know what brought it back, don’t you?’ Ritwik adds, with feigned innocence.

  Zafar doesn’t reply. After a while, while they are on Vauxhall Bridge Road, he tries again.

  ‘So when are you going back to your country?’

  ‘In a few days.’ He has become laconic again.

  Ritwik decides to hold his tongue; Zafar is unreadable and besides, what does it matter to him what the man does for a living?

  As the traffic starts moving, Zafar seems released into another short burst of affability. ‘You know, maybe you shouldn’t go there again.’

  Silence.

  ‘In fact, I’m asking you not to go there. If it’s money you’re worried about, I can see to that, it’s no problem.’

  Ritwik’s senses prick up, like a cat’s ears, but he remains quiet in the fear that any word might break this delicate spell of generosity and make Zafar retract everything.

  ‘I can settle something on you. I come to London quite often and when I’m here, you can see me. What do you think?’

  Settle. What a strange word. Dust settles, memories settle, agitated liquids settle, but money for exclusive access to bad sex? Does that settle too?

  ‘You must be joking.’ Ritwik cannot believe what he is hearing.

  ‘You can be my friend, only mine.’ Once again, Ritwik is thrown by the slippage in such an innocuous word.

  ‘Why are you doing this? You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘Do you mean, you don’t know me? Is that what is bothering you?’

  Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul . . .

  ‘Trust me. I just want to make your life a bit easier.’

  ‘But why? I don’t understand it at all,’ Ritwik fairly shouts.

  ‘Let’s call it a whim. Or maybe it’s because I would like your company when I come to London. Which is often. I would like to have someone to spend some time with, talk to, you know, when I’m here.’ The words are tentative and feel as if they are being spun out unrehearsed.

  Ritwik is a whirl of flattered ego and utter bafflement. A Bengali proverb, much used by his mother, comes to his mind but inexactly, something along the lines of not pushing away a smiling god.

  They are nearing Brixton, so Ritwik starts giving Zafar directions. Once outside number 37 Ganymede Road, Ritwik asks him to stop.

  ‘This is where I live. With a very old woman. I’ll tell you about her some day. Her entire family died – her husband, her son, her daughter, too, I suspect. All at different times in her life.’

  Zafar makes a noise of regret with his teeth and tongue. ‘You’ll come to my hotel tomorrow?’ he asks.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I can come and pick you up from here. Say eight o’clock. We can go and have dinner somewhere.’

  ‘All right. See you tomorrow.’

  Zafar smiles – this is the first time Ritwik has seen him smile gratuitously and it makes him look like a child who has just received a cuddle – and cups Ritwik’s face in his palm, gives it a light squeeze and says something in Arabic.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to find out. All right, then. Till tomorrow.’

  Ritwik gets out of the car, bends down, gives a wave and lets himself into the house with a very gently tripping heart.

  In the next four days, Zafar takes him out to dinner twice – he doesn’t see Ritwik on the second and third days; he is busy with other, business, things, ‘client dinners’ – and invites him to his suite after dinner. The sex is unchangingly swift and one-sided and Zafar retreats into an aloof and impenetrable world of introspection after each time. It is as if Ritwik starts fading for Zafar during the sex and disappears completely afterwards. It is as unintimate as physical contact gets and is always preceded and followed by a shower, in an attempt, Ritwik supposes, to sluice off ritually not only semen, sweat, the touch of another body – there is no saliva, for Zafar never kisses – but also the bigger intangibles that he perceives to come with this paid sex.

  The ‘settlement’ is not mentioned by him again and Ritwik drives himself neurotic thinking about it all the time and being unable to broach the subject in fear of appearing grasping and greedy. On Zafar’s final night in London, he slips Ritwik a piece of paper with numbers and letters written on it in green ink before they step out of his bird suite to drive to Brixton. Out of a misplaced sense of politeness, he doesn’t read what is written on the paper, he just folds it up and shoves it into the back pocket of his jeans.

  ‘Call this number soon. He’s a friend and looks after some of my stuff here. I’ve spoken to him already and told him you will be in touch, so he’ll be expecting your call. Just give him a ring when you need any money, any time. He’s very reliable. You can either have him give you a lump sum at a given time every month, or you could get in touch with him as and when you require money. Does that suit you?’

  Ritwik is overwhelmed by this casual generosity and feels belittled by the stubborn suspicion about Zafar’s motives that will not let go of him. Too many questions are muddying this, too many bad films and stereotypes and myths are in the way. He nods, unable to say anything that will not appear flimsy and hackneyed.

  Outside Ritwik’s house, Zafar turns off the engine.

  ‘Is there any way I can get in touch with you?’ asks Ritwik.

  ‘Why?’ The question is as instantaneous as Zafar’s regret for letting it slip out. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I just wanted to . . .’

  ‘No, that’s all right. Thank you so much for your generosity.’ The whipcrack of Zafar’s question has turned on all the harsh lights; even the brief illusion of soft focus images is now gone irrever
sibly.

  ‘You know my address, you have my phone number,’ Ritwik continues, ‘you can contact me when you’re in London next.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that. And . . .’ Zafar hesitates.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t go to King’s Cross again. That’s our deal, all right? And don’t for once think I won’t find out if you do it. I have eyes everywhere in London.’

  Ritwik finds the image much more startling than the naked threat. Once again, he wonders what Zafar does for a living that gives him such wealth, such a smooth acceptance of the role of imperious master. He doesn’t respond immediately to this. When he speaks, his words are of a doormat’s.

  ‘How long will it be then before I see you again?’ He hates himself for being such a pushover, he finds his own voice whiney and needy.

  ‘Soon,’ says Zafar, evasive again.

  Ritwik reaches for the door handle. Zafar leans forward, touches his hand and says, ‘You give me your word, don’t you, you are not going to go with other men?’

  Ritwik isn’t sure the unidiomatic nature of Zafar’s words is real or imagined inside his prejudiced head. He nods and even manages a smile as Zafar holds his face and says something in Arabic again.

  ‘You never said what it means.’

  ‘I will, one day,’ he whispers.

  The rest of the night is sleepless for Ritwik. He writes for a bit, for company, nearing the end of Miss Gilby’s story. At other times, he lies in bed and stares at the objects in the room with a fixed gaze, hoping it will induce first a meditative trance and then sleep. No such luck as he discovers that the hoop of the small lock on the metal trunk stowed away under the table doesn’t go through the clasp of the bolt. Which means the trunk is not locked but just gives the impression of being so. He leaps out of bed and starts ferreting, unsure of what he is going to find.

  Bills, some dating back forty years, house deeds, vehicle registration forms, leasehold papers, brittle yellow pieces of paper, foxed and aged, letters, bank statements, a bundle tied with faded blue silk, a post mortem report from Southwark Coroner’s Court for Richard Christopher Cameron, died May 26, 1966, by his own hand, a single gunshot wound to his forehead.