Odysseus Abroad (10 page)

“Mr. Walia.”

He looked up from whatever was absorbing him in the ledger, smiled faintly.

“Ha—how are you?”

“Fine, thank you. Uh—I've got the rent.”

Not cash in hand. He dipped into the pocket for the chequebook. The rent was two hundred and fifty pounds—a hundred more than before, given the sequestering of the kitchen and the conversion of the second floor into Ananda's studio flat. Ananda's mother had had a showdown with Walia in Diwan-i-Khas about the rent and the neighbours. “You can't charge us because other people behave terribly!” She'd flashed her big angry eyes. That usually worked. “You don't know who you're talking to,” she said. How could he? Could he have any conception—this restaurant owner—of their apartment overlooking the sea, or her husband's exalted position? “You're nothing,” he'd said, studying the ledger, not so much shying away from eye-contact as not troubling to look at her. “Nothing.” She was. Neither her dominance nor her husband's extended to here. She could protect Ananda, but mainly with joking camaraderie. Later, she'd mimicked Walia—“You're nothing, you're nothing”—and they'd relished the remark. There was no change to the barely affordable rent.

The smell of fenugreek. A sudden hiss: someone had ordered the tandoori platter. There weren't that many people: weekday lunches
were a desultory affair. Diwan-i-Khas was largely uninfiltrated. He took out the cheque, doubled foetally on itself. Smoothed it on the table.

The Sylheti waiters tarried discreetly. Benevolent backup. Walia's troops, but Ananda's kin. From the ancestral land he'd never seen.

“Kemon asen?”
said the handsome one with the thinning hair in an undertone. Ananda had never forgotten him. He had the steadfastly reassuring air he'd had when, two years ago, Ananda and his parents had entered Diwan-i-Khas for the first time; once his father and mother had divulged over the beginnings of tarka daal and pilau rice that they hailed from Sunamganj and Habiganj respectively—how it had startled this man!—the subject had turned to rentable property. The hostel had become intolerable; its drunkards and merrymakers—international students—were keeping Ananda from practising music. Someone said the hostel was rumoured to be a “pickup joint.” But Ananda hadn't been able to take advantage of that aspect of the place either. In the course of their uninformed search for alternative accommodation, they'd slipped into Diwan-i-Khas. “Fo-laat?” the waiter had asked, unflappably resourceful, as he poured tap water from a jug. “You want fo-laat?” Ananda was delighted by the neologism. It was deliberate—meant to put them at ease, earn trust in a way that English or standard Bengali couldn't. So it was when waiters were plying them with mango chutney. “Fikol?” they'd say solicitously, holding the bowl of mango pickle aloft, disorienting, then disarming, them. Yes, they'd have fikol, how could you demur to such a request, which admitted you to the deepest—maybe it was a slightly too deep—familiarity? “Fo-laat?” this man hovering now by the table had said two years ago, and pointed them in the direction of Warren Street. “Our malik Walia—he has lots of fo-laats, ask him.”

To his enquiry now, “Kemon asen?” Ananda said, “Well”—“Bhalo”—standard Bengali; no one, not even his parents, spoke to him in Sylheti, and he wouldn't presume to reply in it with the rustic “Bhala,” fearing it might sound like a parody of the tongue. When he was little, his parents had instructed him that Sylheti was not a language but a dialect. And when he was seventeen, he'd lighted on an aphorism by Marshall McLuhan: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” His people—if he could call these waiters
his
people—perhaps didn't have an army or navy, then? But actually they did, having wrested and carved out their land in 1971. The land that, before 1947, was Ananda's parents' and theirs was now solely theirs. Still, could they be entirely happy in it if they were, today, not there, but here, at the tables of Diwan-i-Khas?

From the newsagent's—two shops to the right of Diwan-i-Khas—he decided to get his near-daily copy of the
Times
. First he passed Asian Books and Video, with its tranquil but impoverished air, like a duty-free shop in a socialist country. He'd been in there once, wondering if he might uncover some bootlegged Asian porn (he'd never seen any, it was the myth of it that was compelling) in the basement—if there was a basement. Instead he found books on agriculture, philosophy (by Radhakrishnan), religion, and stacked copies of
India Abroad
; and what looked like smudged, pirated videos of
Shaan
and
Chacha Bhatija
. He had wanted to but balked at asking the balding, good-looking, empathetic proprietor, “Do you, by any chance, have Asian porn?” He wasn't sure at which point the empathy would dry up. But he did often feel the invisible, gravitational pull of racial empathy: that the Indian, Pakistani, black, even the Chinese, could be presumed upon in a way that the white man couldn't. The outlines of their consciousnesses were fuzzier, less individual, and softer, like their physical features—noses, jaw-lines,
bodies. Ananda felt a strange unconscious familiarity among them—in ordinary circumstances, he wouldn't have noticed his countrymen; but he noticed them here, reviewing them not only with recognition, but with accumulated knowledge and an emotion he hadn't previously been aware of. Indeed, the very urge and temptation not to notice them—not just Indians, but the heterogeneous tribe of the non-Caucasian—to take them for granted, was something he thought of now as quite wonderful: a gift. Before this profound temptation, and due to it, the stubborn conflicts—between Indian and Chinese, Pakistani and Indian—melted and became irrelevant. In contrast, you couldn't not be aware of a white man. His very clarity and perfection of features made each version of him separate, singular, and quietly nervous-making.

The balding man in white shirt and dandyish striped trousers inside Asian Books and Video didn't see Ananda; but Ananda glanced at him as he would at an expected landmark, put aside his need to make urgent queries, moved on towards the newsagent's. At the neighbouring shop, surveying boxes of vegetables and fruit and herbs displayed outside the steps, was shakchunni (so Ananda's mother called her; they didn't know her name); also known at different points in time as
churel
and
dain
among the neighbours in Walia's flats. She'd been consigned to the dominion of ghouls because of her ashen appearance (always wrapping her small stick-like figure in a faded printed sari) and her unhelpful personality. No longer did they go to her for yams, coriander, tomatoes, or other produce; but occasionally, when they fell unexpectedly short, they navigated her for Ribena or a carton of milk; then dealt with her eerie supernatural silence at the till. Her husband—in glasses—looked more generically human, and could even have passed for an accountant; he was no less unfriendly, but that could be because he was entrapped and, as a consequence, dour. On the other hand,
shakchunni might be wasting away because of this bespectacled husband, whose very motionlessness was energy-sapping. Ananda arrived at the newsagent's, hawkishly extracted a copy of the
Times
from the rack outside, climbed up the three steps. The newsagent, Manish, like shakchunni, was Gujarati, but second-generation; “A nation of Gujarati shopkeepers”—the joke was so obvious that, though he suspected he'd invented it, he couldn't believe it was original; a thousand people must have thought up the same line; no one ever bothered to speak it aloud because it was so silly. His Highness and Excellency Dr. Rev. Sir Idi Amin had supervised the egress of the Gujaratis—mainly Patels; Manish too was Manish Patel—from Uganda thirteen years ago, leading, quite literally, to a change of colour in the English neighbourhoods. And four years before this happened, the Oracle—silver-tongued, Oxford-educated—had predicted strife in England and raved eloquently about the river Tiber foaming with much blood, a pronouncement that had been variously interpreted. “How are you, mate?” said Manish. “Aw-right?” He said this to Ananda each day. Sometimes it was only, “Aw-right?” Today Ananda sensed the words expressed not a social nicety but real concern, as if Manish had a fleeting but shrewd inkling, from the moments they spent with each other, of Ananda's ever-returning homesickness and the recent departure of his mother. “Fine thanks,” said Ananda, and Manish smiled and nodded quietly; he'd abandoned his faded maroon jumper, but the smile was, as ever, framed by the changeless hirsute growth that was neither beard nor stubble. It was Manish who'd announced to Ananda the death of the grand witch, Indira Gandhi, when he'd come in to get the
Times
at half past eleven one morning nine months ago; Ananda had overslept and had no idea the world had changed in the small hours. While making his usual pointless arc from Fitzroy Square to Grafton Way, he'd noticed the flag on top of the Indian YMCA
at half-mast and was puzzled; looked back twice to check the flag, then put it out of his head till Manish, in his faded maroon jumper, told him with that same look of concern: “Do you know Mrs. Gandhi's been shot?” “What?” “Yes.” “Is she dead?” “They're not saying.” That and the next day Ananda wondered if his country would splinter at the news; and would he be stranded in Warren Street if it did? And for how long then would he have to be here? He'd never before doubted his nation and its viability. But it survived and persisted through the violence and through the seasons. Manish, a bit of a divine messenger in disguise, continued to give Ananda the latest cricket scores along with the small change.

Surya. Helios. Phaeton's dad.

The interiors of English houses weren't built to cope with uninterrupted, heat-inducing sunshine. But odd how it conferred beauty, even on these very streets—Warren, and Whitfield, Grafton Way, even illuminating Charlotte Street, which otherwise seemed permanently to be in the shade. It wasn't as if the sun was just the ruler of the universe that he, Walia, and even the Patels lived in; he was its creator—not only in sending out the ray of light that penetrated the seed and stirred the shoot. The sun wove maya—the fabric of the visible world. Some Hindus said that maya was dream, or illusion; but there was nothing else to speak of—the visible world was all there was. It was his work. Daily the enchantment recurred—except in England, not daily; there were weeks and months of anaemic reality, when the sun was reluctant, and Tottenham Court Road was an industrial version of itself. On such days, the lights of the night were more uplifting—the lamps, the lit shop
windows on Oxford Street, the neon advertising—than the light of day, and you prayed for the day's end so you might seek out areas alive with artificial glitter. But today—like yesterday—the sun was out, and living as well as inert things verified his handiwork: shakchunni, the cabbages in the crate outside her shop, the newspaper rack—all were complicit in this work-in-progress: the day.

The English outside the Grafton Arms had taken off their shirts; expanses of pink with ruddy blotches, swigging down lager. If only they'd had more sun! This is what they'd have been like—semi-naked, sedentary, congregated in pairs or threes. They wouldn't have needed Empire—because their souls would have been full.

Alas, that's not the way history had turned out. The weather was what it was; Empire had happened; Ananda was here. Sometimes, in November, when the day shrank and grew damp, Ananda daydreamed about what it would have been like if India had been colonised by the Caribbean. He'd have been at a Caribbean university, in shirtsleeves the whole year. The thought consoled him as he made his way to Malet Street.

But that wasn't how history turned out!—which is why he was in Warren Street rather than St. Kitts or St. Lucia. That's why the people from St. Kitts and St. Lucia were here too—the little shop on the corner of Whitfield Street, with its euphoric spells of music.

Thank goodness for immigrants! They—tired West Indian women steering prams before them, Caribbean workmen at building sites, wrestling with each other during their breaks like teetering boys, Paki gentlemen in worn black suits, the sudden swarms of dark-skinned children following in the wake of a schoolteacher,
even the industrious, practical, seldom-smiling Chinese—they brought some sunshine to a place starved of light. The Gujarati and Pakistani shopkeepers kept the day from sputtering out: their shops open till after nine, well after the natives had retired. Sundays were a graveyard but for the Alis, Patels, Shahs, who (with Thatcher's collusion) were always open for business.

His hunger had passed, but then been revived by the static of the tandoori platter. He was suddenly ravenous. Near Goodge Street there was an American Style Fried Chicken which, till recently, he was too ingenuous to realise was
not
Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was McDonald's of course—for which, he'd heard, oxen were compressed and flattened (like one of those cars pounded to a flat metallic shape in a scrapyard) to a neat patty—eyeballs and all. This horrible diminution surely offended some primordial law? Would someone pay one day?

At the Greek takeaway on Charlotte Street he paused to look at a rotating rump of meat, from which a man scraped shavings at intervals. Also, impaled on skewers were small chunks of—beef or mutton? A small flood of saliva filled his mouth. Could these be progeny of the food mentioned adoringly in the
Iliad
? Food was usually more appetising in books, and Homer's descriptions had galvanised Ananda's gastric juices—just as, when he was a boy, reading, in Enid Blyton, of picnics flowing with scones, milk, sandwiches,
and jam used to fill him with a powerful longing. That surfeit was missing from the life he'd come to know in London, although, if you could afford it, you could eat halibut in a restaurant, or rainbow trout in butter and almonds. The days of rationing—which he'd learnt of from his uncle—were long over. He went in, shyly ordered a skewer of lamb from the moustached Greek. The rump on the spindle had an unpleasant smell. Chewing a dead, resistant piece, he fantasised he was partaking of the food Homer had written of—then rejected the fantasy. It was odd how quickly the meat became cold and lumpy: masticated chunks settled in his stomach, allaying the restive juices. He wondered if the food at the takeaway was below par, or whether Homer had overrated the soldiers' repasts.