A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  The hands that open the report are not his, they are guided by someone else, someone at once inside and outside him.

  Entry through glabella, entry wound consistent with contact wound. Shattering of the crista galli, the collection of the frontal sinuses. Grazing of the corpus callosum. Slower trajectory through the lateral ventricle, which is entirely shattered, along with similar damage to the posterior ramus of the lateral sulciss. Grazes edge of the parieto-occipital lobe, just missing the occipital lobe, exiting through the occipital bone, two centimetres above the superior nuchal line.

  Ritwik forces his eyes from this to the doctor’s illegible signature, its very scrawl a feeble attempt to restore normality, but foredoomed and drowned by the preceding jargon, at once emotionless and violent. His head is a carillon of one question – why, why, why – increased in amplitude by the belief that never in his or Anne’s lifetime will he be able to bring himself to ask her about her son’s suicide.

  A loose leaf of paper has fallen out from the single fold of the post mortem report. He opens it: a crabbed, ungenerous hand, faded blue ink. It is the last page of a letter: my view that neither any good nor any remedy can come of what you suggest. I am sorry if I appear to be somewhat inflexible, but our griefs are different. While not wishing for one moment to detract from your great loss – and what can be greater than the death of a son – I would like you to understand that I too have lost someone, and my loss is made more painful by the fact that I have to carry it around secretly like a mark of shame, hiding it from public view, from any acknowledgement of it to even those nearest to me. Your laudable move to sanction my relationship with your son – and perhaps there is something of an attempt to lighten your irredeemable loss by sharing it with someone similarly afflicted – comes too late. Let us mourn, individually, each to his or her own self. What could not be in life, cannot be in the absence of the one who could have bound us. I wish you forbearance, strength (but you have those already) and send you my prayers.

  Yours sorrowfully, James.

  P.S.: I am attaching a photograph of Richard and me in Maine two autumns ago. Richard wished you to have it one day.

  There is no photograph. Ritwik upends the whole box, shakes out everything on to the floor, goes through every fold and sleeve of paper, but he cannot find it. He feels so hollow and shaky inside that he holds on to the edge of the table before slumping on to the bed. He watches, unmoving, the night lightening to a grey dawn outside his window. He doesn’t turn off his bedside lamp.

  Next morning he discovers that the tiles on the side of the bath have come loose. As he kneels down to examine the damage more closely to see if he can manage a temporary repair, they fall onto the floor, exposing the dark cavern under the bath and half a dozen bottles of Safeway gin nestling in there. He debates whether to confront Anne with this or simply hide them away silently somewhere out of her reach and decides on the latter; she is so brilliant at evading, stonewalling and plain not listening that the first approach would get him nowhere. What baffles him most is how she has been smuggling it in. Mrs Haq? No, she would never do such a thing. Mr Haq? Equally unlikely. Did Anne herself go out of the house to get it? Impossible. The nearest Safeway is in Balham and Anne doesn’t have a car.

  He gives up in despair; he can forgive her anything. He paces the garden for a while with his hands on his hips. As he slips his hands into his back pockets, he comes across a folded piece of paper. He takes it out and opens it. On it, in green ink, are an 081 London phone number and the name of Zafar’s contact. He cannot believe the name written on it in Zafar’s hand so, to have his fears confirmed, he rushes in immediately and calls the number. No one picks up the phone and there is no machine. He tries every twenty minutes, nervous, impatient, puzzled. Seven hours later, at around five in the afternoon, the phone is answered. The voice and accent are unmistakable: they are Saeed Latif’s.

  X.

  Fires have started in the village of Nawabgunj. Little armies of saffron-clad youths, some of them hardly out of their teens, are rushing around the village like the lawless winds, seizing foreign goods wherever they are stocked – cloth from Manchester, salt from Liverpool, stainless steel implements and utensils from Sheffield, sugar from Leicester – dragging them out into the open, pouring kerosene over them and torching them into bonfires. Their zeal is incandescent, the air above the conflagrations redolent with the ardour of their mother goddess mantra, bande mataram. No door can remain shut to them, no English goods, however tiny, hidden from their righteous rage. The handful of Muslim traders who have resisted have had their houses set on fire too. Some of them have fled the village, others have voluntarily surrendered their secret stockpiles of tainted English goods to avoid greater dangers.

  Miss Gilby has seen for herself the heaps of black ash left in the market square, the aftermath of some burning ceremony. On one occasion, she had even seen the dying embers in one; a little child had picked up stones from nearby and flung them on to the residue of the fire, sending up little flurries of black ash, like insects disturbed, in a shower of red sparks.

  Gossip and rumours arrive at ‘Dighi Bari’ by the hour, spreading like bushfire, accompanied by whispered excitement that can barely be kept in check. Did you know they have set Faizal Mohsen’s warehouse on fire? He was hiding a whole consignment of foreign cloth, planning to pass it off as swadeshi fabric in the market. Unable to go out, the women in the andarmahal gather news from the servants and embellish it with untrammelled freedom. Bimala’s naw jaa has already started packing her boxes and trunks in preparation for moving to Calcutta. Miss Gilby is no longer certain how much of that possible move has been actually discussed in the family and how much of it is in her fervid imagination. But the sight of those fires made Miss Gilby realize that not all was rumour and fabrication.

  Mr Roy Chowdhury holds long, agonized meetings with the elders of the village. He is advised to send his friend, Mr Banerjea, packing. The village grows mutinous against the depredations of these imported youths. The elders advise Mr Roy Chowdhury to placate the Muslim population of the village who are now convinced that it is a Hindu plot to drive them out; they are not going to keep quiet for long and watch these thugs set their lives and living on fire.

  All this Miss Gilby finds out when she accidentally crosses Mr Roy Chowdhury’s path in the morning while he is on his way out and she on her way to the drawing room for the first of the morning lessons. In a hurried exchange of words in the verandah, marked by great anxiety and foreboding, he warns her of the dangers of going riding unaccompanied at such a volatile time: anti-English sentiments are running high and unchecked and she would do well to be extra cautious. She thanks him for his solicitude; more than that she cannot say because she is robbed of her usual amiability by the haunted and gaunt look that has settled like a mantle of darkness on him.

  Then one day the fires outside come inside. On the day the local bank is robbed – it remains in no doubt that swadeshi youths have done this for even revolutions need money; besides, the young men who committed the deed didn’t bother to mask themselves – that same evening, Robin babu, Mr Roy Chowdhury’s accountant, is set on by a mob of rabid men and beaten so severely that had Rakhal Sardar not passed by fortuitously, on his way to fetch water from the well, and heard his piteous groans, the accountant would have bled to his death in the muddy ditch into which he had been pushed. When Robin babu comes to his senses and manages to speak, he cannot say with any certainty who the assailants were. Mr Roy Chowdhury calls his own doctor to look after the poor man. The ramifications of the attack on his innocent accountant have disturbed him no end: were the perpetrators swadeshi youths trying to pass it off as a heinous act committed by the wily and intransigent Muslims, thereby attempting to alienate any sympathy for them, or was it really Muslim anger boiling over and this cowardly deed its first expression? As zamindar of Nawabgunj, any action taken by him without establishing the incontrovertible truth could have serious repercussions.<
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  Bimala stops attending lessons altogether. Miss Gilby doesn’t write to Mr Roy Chowdhury again: the man is too burdened with graver matters to have the leisure to discuss his wilful and secretive wife’s little obstinacies with her tutor. She waits for this sudden rain of madness to let up but deep down inside something tells her that she is not for long in the Roy Chowdhury family. Something, some connection, thin as a strand from a spider’s web, has been severed and there is no repairing it. The music has become subtly discordant.

  ELEVEN

  Saeed patters his stubby fingers on the faux-chrome top of the table to an invisible tune inside his head. It goes maniacally fast sometimes; at other times it reduces to the slow tapping of his index finger once every few seconds. Indeed, there is something manic about Saeed this morning; he has made the journey from Ganymede Road to Al-Shami, his favourite restaurant on Edgware Road, in fourteen minutes flat, zipping through the empty stretches and jumping most of the traffic lights on the way. He had kept drumming his fingers on his steering wheel, had fiddled with his rings and bracelets, and had spewed out an unstoppable stream of words at Ritwik during that quarter of an hour. The only noteworthy thing Ritwik managed to extricate from it was the fact that Saeed kept calling Zafar ‘Sheikh bin Hashm’ and, when asked by Ritwik if he was really a sheikh, he had replied, ‘Yes, sheikh, sheikh, important person, VIP, very rich, lots money’, with an accompanying gesture of rubbing the tips of his forefinger and thumb to emphasize the undeniable fact of Zafar’s immense wealth. All this left Ritwik confused about whether Zafar was really a sheikh; Saeed could have been using the term loosely, in the way Italians call everyone ‘dottore’, regardless of their profession or level of higher education.

  Now, Saeed sits smoking, waiting for the food to be brought to the table. The whole thing may be in Ritwik’s imagination, but Saeed seems to be respectful of him, almost ingratiating in his holding open of doors, letting him enter first, asking him questions about his well-being, asking for permission to smoke, his over-solicitous concern about seat belts, restaurant tables, the food ordered. He assumes it to be the cachet that being friends with Zafar gives him. Ritwik is first baffled, then embarrassed; he finds it difficult to make eye contact with someone who has so unsubtly appointed him, Ritwik, his overlord.

  ‘I speak with Sheikh. He tells me I give money, any money you ask. I have money with me. You want?’ he says through a cloud of blue smoke soured by his breath.

  Ritwik leans back, slightly alarmed at the possibility of Saeed unrolling and handing him soiled banknotes in such a public place. He says hastily, ‘No, no, not now, it can wait wait until later.’

  Saeed gives him another look of respectful reappraisal, as if he is seeing the real Ritwik for the first time.

  ‘You work for Sheikh.’

  Ritwik decides to treat this as a statement, not a question, so he doesn’t answer.

  ‘I work for him many years. Ten, maybe, maybe twelve.’

  ‘What do you do for him?’

  ‘I am . . . how you say last time . . . going middle? No?’

  ‘Going middle?’ Ritwik asks, puzzled.

  Saeed makes a gesture with two hands placed at two opposite sides of the table and then removes one hand to do a walking figure with two fingers while repeating, ‘Going middle, heh? Going middle.’

  The penny drops. ‘Ah, go-between.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Saeed nods like a happy child. ‘Go-between, I forget, go between. I go-between for Sheikh.’

  ‘But between what?’

  Saeed takes some time to understand the question so Ritwik mimes his gesture and asks him to name the points on the table between which the to and fro of the go-between happens.

  Saeed hesitates before answering. When he does, haltingly, Ritwik immediately understands that he is either lying or evading. ‘People. Big people. Business, lot money. Business clients.’ He repeats the word ‘clients’ several times as if it were a new word he has only recently acquired.

  Ritwik wields his newfound power, if it is that at all, and pushes ahead with the questioning. ‘What business?’

  Saeed gives him an intensely quizzical look. At that moment the waiter arrives with the first of their dishes. Ritwik watches Saeed’s dogged determination to please and flatter slow down over the sharing out of food – this time, Saeed heaps Ritwik’s plate before serving himself – as he tries to work out the nature of the connection between Zafar and Ritwik, but the blip is thankfully short. Whatever he has deduced, it seems to be in Ritwik’s favour for he reverts to his enervating solicitude.

  ‘You eat. You too thin. Eat all this food.’

  ‘I’ll certainly try,’ says Ritwik, smiling. ‘I love this food, you know that.’

  Saeed takes this as a personal compliment and preens. Ritwik seizes the opportunity. ‘So, you never said, what business is it that you do with Zafar?’

  Saeed takes a long time to spear his kebab, put a piece into his mouth, follow it with a forkful of buttery rice and another of salad, and then a morsel of vinegared chilli, chew it, swallow and address the question.

  ‘You know. Business. Money. You do same for Sheikh.’

  Once again, Ritwik cannot determine if this is query or statement; each has a radically different meaning from the other. His mind is thick with questions: does Saeed know the nature of his contact with Zafar or does he think that he is another of Zafar’s business clients? Surely, given how Saeed has helped him in the recent past, he cannot think Ritwik to be anything other than an illegal immigrant scrabbling to feed himself one meal a day? Has Saeed ever asked himself, or even Zafar, for what services Ritwik is being given a blank cheque? What did Saeed and Zafar talk about? And, noisiest of them all, what work did Saeed do for Zafar? Did he look after Zafar’s money in London? Was he just a low-level handyman for his interests here? What interests?

  The air in the restaurant is dense and swooning with smoke. There are blue swirls of it everywhere, barely moving. Ritwik concentrates fiercely on eating and hopes Saeed will not demand a response. The waiter comes with more food and moves plates and bowls around on their table to make space for the new arrivals. He and Saeed talk for a while in Arabic, the waiter laughs, looks at Ritwik, says something to Saeed and leaves for the kitchen.

  ‘What were you saying to each other?’ Ritwik asks.

  ‘He say you eat like little bird,’ Saeed replies, smiling, and shows the size of the bird with his hand: it could be a sparrow in the nest of his palm.

  The asymmetry of any relationship between Saeed and Zafar strikes Ritwik for the first time: what was a poshly spoken, educated, filthy rich sheikh doing with a criminal who had a line in a mild version of people trafficking and wanted to break out into more serious aspects of it? The chasm that separates the two men seems vast, unbridgeable.

  Seems. They have obviously managed to have a long and functional relationship across class boundaries. Clearly, Saeed is no fool if he has managed such a thing with a man who strikes Ritwik as cunning, shady, powerful and disturbing.

  ‘You still think what I do for Sheikh. Work, I tell you. No worry for you. You don’t think of it.’

  Ritwik is surprised at having his mind read. He gives a faint, false smile and asks, ‘Are you saying it’s none of my business?’ He hopes the smile takes the edge off the question.

  Saeed plays the same hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ he smiles, ‘not your business, not your business.’ Affable, even friendly, but Ritwik gets the sense that he has just been warned off.

  ‘How much you want?’

  Ah, business again. Ritwik decides to test his limits. ‘How much can I have?’ he asks.

  ‘Any money. Two hundred, five hundred, you say.’

  Ritwik looks steadily at the bright green parsley flecked sparingly with light beige grains of bulgur, the orange oil from the sausages, the broken ball of a falafel, and says, without lifting his eyes, ‘Four hundred now, let’s say. If I need more, I’ll call you.’ He pauses to look up
and adds, ‘Not here, please, in the car.’

  For some reason he doesn’t go into, Saeed refuses to take him to Ganymede Road and drops him off on Acre Lane, a three-minute drive away from where Ritwik lives. Ritwik reads this too as a sign and tries to keep his voice bleached of any interest when he asks Saeed, ‘Does Zafar know Mr Haq?’

  Saeed looks out of the window, spits, counts out four hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes and hands the wad to Ritwik. His jaw muscle throbs under his pale skin. He bares his teeth in what is meant to be a smile, says something under his breath in Arabic then leans sideways to open the door and says, ‘Goodbye’, once in English and again in Arabic.

  Ritwik gets out and walks the quarter hour to Ganymede Road, the dirty wad in his pocket an unsightly square bulge chafing and burning his skin. Everyone in the teeming crossroads of Brixton seems to be staring at him. A young, bespectacled man, wearing a white shirt too small for him, stands in the concrete garden in front of the Ritzy cinema and shouts, ‘The Lord said, Come unto me and I shall give you everlasting life. Friends, Jesus has given me a peace I have never known before. Jesus has saved me. Jesus has shown me love above all.’ He clutches a small Bible in his hand and paces an invisible perimeter of about twenty square feet. His eyes are fixed in the middle distance. He repeats the words over and over again, unchanging in tone and delivery. By the time Ritwik leaves the voice behind, he is ready to scream.

  There is a message next to the phone in the living room one day: ‘Gavin called’. When he asks Anne if Gavin had left a number, she says no. There is no way he can get in touch with him. But he has figured out a way to send letters to Aritra. He writes to his brother and asks him to address his envelopes to Anne Cameron, without any mention of his name anywhere in case the immigration people trace him back to Ganymede Road and throw him out of the country. Of course, he doesn’t mention the reason for this subterfuge to Aritra and fobs him off with a lie about bureaucracy and quirky rules of the British postal system.