A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Zafar doesn’t call or write. Ritwik doesn’t dare to call Saeed and ask for information about him: he doesn’t want Saeed to get the faintest whiff of himself as either a pining or a nosey rent boy. Of one thing he is certain – Zafar has lied to his handyman or has evaded the entire issue. The questions, double-guessings, doubts, all paralyse Ritwik and keep him from getting in touch with Saeed. Then three weeks after his first four hundred pounds, he calls Saeed again.

  ‘My friend,’ says Saeed, ‘you need more money, I give you.’

  In a split second Ritwik decides to say yes because he can use their meeting for news of Zafar. ‘Why don’t we meet at Al-Shami?’

  ‘I too busy now, this week, next week. You meet me this night, Marble Arch tube, I give money, OK?’

  ‘No, wait, Saeed, I just wanted to ask if you had any news of Zafar.’ The question is phrased wrongly and Ritwik regrets his haste.

  There is a pause before Saeed replies, ‘OK, everything OK. You don’t have news of Sheikh?’

  Forced into this strategic ping-pong again, he tries to lob the question back to Saeed. ‘Is he in Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘Saudi Arabia?’ The disbelieving tone is followed by a long pause. ‘No, Sheikh in many countries. He travels now, business travel, lot of business travel. Africa, Sudan, Syria, Paris.’ Another pause. ‘I not know where Sheikh now.’

  Ritwik swallows the flat contradictions and the seamless jumps between all those seemingly irreconcilable points on the map. A new question rears its dark head: is Saeed Zafar’s eyes in London?

  Saeed marks the silence and asks Ritwik, ‘You in trouble, my friend? You need help?’

  Ritwik says, somewhat more sharply than he intended, ‘No, what do you mean by trouble? What sort of trouble?’

  ‘No, my friend, I just ask. Your voice is . . . how you say . . . far, your voice is far, you know?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ll come and pick the money up. What time is good for you?’

  Slightly over three weeks after Saeed gives Ritwik his second installment, Zafar calls him to say he is in London for ten days; would tomorrow evening – late, say around half ten – be good for him, same place, Dorchester, that is, and then he could drive Ritwik to his new house. Ritwik says yes politely, with a slight tinge of formality, even; in this gradual illumination of someone else’s life, the words ‘new house’ hold a little corner of surprise. The question why Zafar chooses to stay in a luxury hotel if he has a house in this country is not asked, of course.

  It is well past midnight when Zafar and Ritwik set out on the drive to Surrey. Zafar tells him the name of the village – Hincksey Green – and promises to take him back to Brixton before three. Ritwik sits in the car, the metallic taste of Zafar’s semen still in his mouth, and feels anxious about Anne, left alone in the house. When asked about what he did while he was away from London – did he see his wife, his children, what about the son whom he had mentioned last time – Zafar brushes the questions aside with a curt and condescending ‘Oh, the usual stuff, boring, don’t bother your pretty little head with it.’

  Ritwik lets the first half an hour of the drive soothe the rage this condescension fires in him. Halfway through it, he asks, in a tone slightly more highly pitched than normal, ‘But, Zafar, you cannot forever evade such questions. It’s not just empty formality. I might be genuinely interested in your life elsewhere. I know practically zilch about it.’

  Zafar gives his irritating, non-committal laugh. ‘That’s even scarier than empty formality.’

  It is meant to be half a joke but the other half goes through Ritwik like a blade. He stares out of the window, watching the deserted, orange-lit suburbs of south London slip by smoothly and fast. He rolls down his window and a rush of cool night air, smelling of petrol fumes, grass and night vegetation, blows in. There are a lot of trees, green spaces and gardens where they drive through. After Peaslake, Ritwik loses interest in keeping track of places; he certainly doesn’t want to keep on asking Zafar where they are. The houses thin out after a while. Ritwik feels Zafar’s hand on his thigh and the tension in the car begins to fade away with his drowsiness. The cool air makes him shiver a bit so he rolls up the window.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s something reductive in associating every Arab man you meet with oil?’

  More than this abrupt fracture of the nearly companionable silence Ritwik is jolted by the meditated and carefully studied quality of the question.

  ‘I don’t meet Arab men,’ he answers, as indirectional and evasive as Zafar.

  ‘But it was one of the first things you asked me, did I have anything to do with oil,’ Zafar insists.

  ‘Well . . . you said . . . you said you were from Saudi Arabia and . . . and . . .’

  ‘And so, with charming stereotyping impulses, you thought, ah, Saudi Arabia, therefore, oil.’

  ‘Well, you’re not wrong. I was being a bit . . . insular,’ Ritwik says, very sheepish now.

  Zafar returns his hand to his thigh and gives it a squeeze. ‘My father made his fortune in oil. But it’s not going to last forever.’

  ‘What, the oil or the fortune?’

  ‘Neither. Do you know anything about Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘No, apart from . . .’ he stops, trying to phrase sentences that won’t smack of camels, oil or harems.

  Zafar rushes in. ‘Apart from thinking that everyone in that country is afloat on a fortune of oil.’

  Ritwik tries to protest but Zafar gives a short, joyless laugh and continues. ‘Do you know who runs the country? Do you know what the oil revenue is used for? Who gets that money? Who owns the oilfields? How oil multinationals are run?’

  ‘No, Zafar, of course, I don’t know. But why don’t you take me through these things? I’ll be glad to be enlightened.’ Ritwik immediately regrets the last sentence: it could so easily be read as acid-soaked.

  ‘OK, little by little.’ There is no sign that Zafar has taken it as sarcasm but he clams up for a while.

  ‘It’s a one-resource economy. How long will that last you think?’ Zafar has started talking again but Ritwik gets the impression that he is thinking aloud. ‘In the next twenty or thirty years, that country is going to need nearly half a trillion dollars, yes, trillion, to upgrade oil pipelines, refineries, transport, the whole bloody infrastructure to keep the oil industry and its economy running. It’s living in a bubble. Oil money is an illusion.’

  ‘Where’s the money going to come from?’

  Zafar doesn’t answer. Ritwik looks out of the window again and watches the fast glide of trees and houses and road signs. He is baffled by Zafar’s sudden outburst. He takes a left turn at a sign and the roads become narrower. They drive past open country with sudden battalions of brooding Lombardy poplars and hedges huddled in the dark. Zafar seems to know where he is going: he takes more turns, each taking them down a narrower road. Suddenly in front of them, skulking in the dark, is a huge house, a mansion made of darkness, hiding cunningly and willing itself to remain undiscovered. There is a long crunching of gravel under the tyres as the massed shadow moves closer and closer until Ritwik can make out a façade broken up by unlit windows, scores of them, and cornices, a doorway, chimneys, bussoirs. They get out of the car and Zafar leads the way to the front door. He takes out a giant bunch of keys and fumbles around, the keys clinking and jingling, till he finds the right one. They enter and Zafar turns on a light switch.

  The sudden light hurts Ritwik’s eyes. They are in a huge hallway. The floor is wooden, with exquisite Persian and Afghani rugs on them. There is a mirror, in its heavy and intricate golden frame, reflecting them. There is wooden furniture everywhere – a slim table with curved and ornate legs, a heavy cabinet, two beautiful chairs with red silk upholstery; to Ritwik’s untrained eyes, they all look very expensive and classy. These are the objects for which words such as nonsuch chest, davenport, card table with floral marquetry, veneered cabinet are used, Ritwik thinks; if only he could unite name with thing.

>   ‘What do you think? Come, come along, I’ll show you the rest. Are you interested in antique furniture at all? It’s something of an obsession with me,’ Zafar says, moving ahead.

  Ritwik is too struck by the sheer magnitude and opulence of the house and its heavy English furnishings and objects to respond. He follows Zafar to an enormous room that borders on the vulgar in its excess – cabinets and a huge chest of drawers against the walls, tables and stands, a gateleg dining table so huge that the twelve identical chairs around it look distantly placed from each other. The light from the two crystal chandeliers will not allow any dishonesty, any evasion. Zafar keeps up a running commentary, most of which doesn’t reach Ritwik, apart from words and phrases here and there.

  ‘The chairs are all Louis Quatorze . . . I had the rugs shipped to England . . . the only bit of the house that’s fully furnished . . . Queen Anne, by the way . . . it’s almost ready . . . Grace Carpenter in the village . . . you look a bit gobsmacked, if you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll soon start catching flies.’ It is the laugh on which this ends that makes Ritwik pay attention to what he is saying. He shuts his mouth and says, ‘This . . . this is amazing. How many rooms does it have?’

  ‘Twelve bedrooms, on three floors. There are reception rooms, drawing rooms, morning rooms, smoking rooms, a billiard room. I think if you add the bathrooms, kitchens, breakfast rooms, and all that sort of thing, maybe forty?’ Ritwik can hear the pride of ownership in his voice.

  ‘But what are you going to do with . . . with this palace?’ He cannot keep the incredulity out of his naive voice. ‘You’re not planning to live here, are you? It looks like a stately home, something English Heritage looks after. Do you really own it?’

  ‘Yes, I do. As of last year. Do you want to have a quick tour around the other floors?’

  ‘Zafar, you must be joking, you cannot own this thing. It’s like saying you own Audley End or something. You cannot buy this sort of thing, can you?’

  ‘Of course, you can. You can buy anything you want.’

  Ritwik thinks he catches a moment of truth, a brief flash of the inner, real Zafar, in this last statement and, for some intangible reason, it makes him feel both small and sad. He shakes it off and asks again, ‘But will you live here? In all of it? You could . . . you could house ten, a dozen families here.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to buy something in this country, do it up, maybe have a place here when the family wants to travel.’ His voice becomes hooded again. ‘Besides, I work with important clients. It would be nice to have a place to entertain them, you know, have meetings, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Does it have a garden?’

  ‘A huge one. And an orchard. But it’s too dark to see them now. There’s even a gardener.’

  Ritwik feels dispersed in this new world; in a strange way, it makes him feel dishonest, besmirched.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asks, feeling leached of interest and energy, as if it had all flown out to create the unremitting shower of attention the house so imperiously demanded.

  ‘It’s about half one. Time to go?’

  ‘Oh my god, it’s very late,’ says Ritwik, a bit too promptly. ‘Zafar, I would love to see the rest of the house but I must leave now.’

  ‘All right then, let me turn the lights off.’

  ‘I’m a bit paranoid about leaving Anne on her own. I keep thinking I’ll go back home one day and find her lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs or in the bathroom. She’s very, very old and frail. I’ve also recently discovered that she’s a little gin fiend.’ Ritwik keeps on this patter. ‘You’ll bring me here in the daytime one day, won’t you? I’d love to see the garden and the orchard and the whole house in the daylight.’

  ‘Yes, some time.’

  ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never seen you in the daylight.’

  ‘I might be a vampire, beware,’ Zafar says, making a lunge for his neck with bared teeth. Ritwik starts laughing and holds him away. In an instant, Zafar envelops him in his arms, lifts him off the ground, carries him to the room with the chandeliers and sets him down on the table on his back. He kicks out of his way a couple of chairs, unbuttons his fly, rubs himself against the seat of Ritwik’s jeans while he lies, knees up, on the table, then lifts him up again and pushes him down to his knees on to the floor. It is over in an instant, before Ritwik has even had a chance to tumesce. Saliva and semen drip off his chin on to the floor; he cannot banish the thought of the stain it will leave on the expensive wooden floor. He stands up, reaches into his pocket, pulls out some crumpled and frayed tissues, bends down and rubs the bit of the floor where he thinks the drops might have fallen: his dark-adapted eyes cannot make out anything much in this room.

  They leave the house and begin the drive in total silence. There is no traffic and the redbrick houses behind their privet hedges and shielding trees all look abandoned. Even the streetlights add to the spectral effect.

  ‘Do you want to live in that house?’

  Ritwik isn’t expecting a question like that; he turns his head sideways, in a flash, to look at Zafar. Zafar’s eyes are steadily fixed on the road unrolling in front of him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You could live there. If you wanted to, that is,’ he says in an utterly detached tone, as if he were reading regulation 4.2 of the Highway Code.

  ‘I can’t leave Anne on her own.’

  A brief pause. Then, ‘It’s not as if she’s going to live for very long, is she?’

  ‘Zafar!’ Ritwik shouts. It’s a reflex action he immediately regrets and tries to turn into mock-admonishment, not with great success.

  ‘You had no compunction leaving her alone when you were working fields or factory warehouses.’

  He starts disputing this – ‘That’s not true at all, I always returned home at night but . . .’ – when, halfway through, there is a brief, illuminating flicker of light. It doesn’t come in a blinding flash; only a slow, unsurprising discovery of how much Saeed has told Zafar about him that makes him nod his head with a calm realization, yes, they know this.

  Zafar is too shrewd to miss the sudden, midway halt. He laughs and says, ‘I’m just suggesting you might want to stay there, say, when I’m around in the country. But, of course, there’s your old lady to think of.’

  He lets Zafar understand he has taken his words at face value by remaining quiet. But the game is too far advanced for him to let be. ‘Which bit of Africa were you in?’ he asks, looking out of the window.

  ‘Sudan, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire,’ comes the answer, prompt and pat, throwing Ritwik completely: Zafar will certainly not give him the satisfaction of letting him hear the clicks inside his head.

  More silence and the slipstream of trees, hedges, houses in its silent flow. Then another move in the game: Zafar asks, with as much disinterest as his voice can muster, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Nothing, just wondering.’

  They are now well inside suburban London. ‘Saeed’s given you money, I expect.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he has, thank you. He’s very eager to please.’

  ‘You mustn’t attach too much importance to him. I retain him out of old loyalties but he’s really very’ – a ticking pause, one two three four five six – ‘peripheral.’

  Ritwik makes an effort to ignore the last word; he counts twenty backwards and then asks, ‘What old loyalties?’

  Zafar doesn’t bother to respond. Instead, he says, ‘We’re in Streatham already. That was quick, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Thank you for dropping me off.’ The armour had parted, only a tiny bit, for a tiny fraction of time; it has become impenetrable again.

  ‘I’m off to Gloucestershire in a couple of days’ time. For a night, maybe two. I was going to ask you to come with me but I know you can’t.’

  ‘Oh. What’s happening in Gloucestershire?’

  ‘Business stuff, meetings, prospective clients. Work.’

  Only after Ritwik has shut the passeng
er door and Zafar has made a three-point turn to leave Ganymede Road does Ritwik notice the open curtains and the lights blazing in the living room. He lets himself in. Every single light in the house seems to be on.

  ‘Anne, Anne,’ he calls out.

  There is no answer. That is not unusual but something about all these burning lights makes his blood pound hard in his heart, his ears. He runs into the kitchen and notices that the door to the garden is wide open. He rushes out but his pupils take a few seconds to adjust to the dark outside. He sees a pale shape, not even a ghost but the residue of one, under the horse chestnut. He advances with immense strides.

  Anne is standing under the tree, her nightdress clinging to the bones of her frame. She has one hand cupped behind an ear, as if she is trying to focus on some very distant sound, and a finger on her lip asking for total silence. Regardless of the fright he has had, that gesture overwhelms everything else: he doesn’t speak and listens out for what Anne might have heard.

  After several moments of this silence, Anne whispers, ‘Listen.’

  A minute of waiting then the silence of the cold spring night shatters with manic laughter from up high, an eked out cackle and bray that curdles his blood. It is followed by another, then another, and Ritwik realizes with a flash that it is the call of an animal.

  Anne hobbles closer to Ritwik and whispers in his ear, ‘Kookaburras. A pair of them.’

  They stay rooted under the tree, Ritwik suspended in a miracle he neither comprehends nor welcomes. After an eternity, he touches Anne’s arm and steers her towards the house. He doesn’t think they’ll hear the birds again.

  Anne witters on, ‘Dacelo gigas. It’s one of the largest members of the Alcedinae, the kingfisher family. Alcedinae. The family name must be from the story of Alcyone, don’t you think? Do you know the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, how one of them went to sea and was lost, and bereft of her love . . .’