Odysseus Abroad (13 page)

Ananda went into the kitchenette to look for a clean glass. The two on the shelf had no smudges. He turned the kitchen tap, filled one, drank.

The gas cooker was unlit. The moment the temperature fell, two hobs would burn with low flames and have faintly simmering saucepans of water on them. The vapour was meant to counter dryness. The electric rods in the other room, which became incandescent and orange in the winter, made his uncle's skin dry anyway. On the left ankle, he'd scratched a vertical gash into the skin. Even now there was a saucepan on a hob with a low still pool of water in
it, its sides whitened by evaporation. Also a frying pan half full of liver, in which the sauce had congealed richly.

Plonking the glass into the sink, Ananda returned to the table and saw the
Times
, which he'd bought less than an hour ago and as good as forgotten. He picked it up and turned it round, and was gripped by SHAHNAWAZ BHUTTO SHOT. Tragic family. Enemies of India; Zulfikar had been to the same school as he, but decades before. The school was proud of the fact; the Principal, peering at them over assembly: “Who knows? One of you might be a future Prime Minister,” while they fidgeted. Or maybe “proud” wasn't the word, given the war in 1971. But who, in death, can be classed as friend or enemy?
I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Let us sleep now
. Was Shahnawaz with his father today? Ananda put down the paper and went for the
Sun
—astonished this time by the starved figure of Rock Hudson, smiling. This unspeakable affliction, coming out of nowhere! The gods' retribution for human happiness. He was mortified, when he turned to page three and paused over the girl's gleaming nipples, trying to feel some desire. The breasts sloped down meekly; the face was audacious and common—the sort you'd have glanced at twice in Sainsbury's and maybe made eye-contact with. This sense of possibility excited him—it was less a visual than a brazen verbal statement, more bold and shameless than anything the photograph actually contained: he was appeased she wasn't model-like, but so living, contemporary, and English—truly “your girl of the day.” Shahnawaz Bhutto and Rock Hudson dissolved into a retrospective glimmer; empathy deserted him; his cock stirred. His uncle returned; he swiftly returned the
Sun
to the table.

“Pupu
he
,” said Rangamama. “I'm ready when you are!” Ever the gent. Apparently he'd been miserable when he'd arrived in 1957, tearful, and wanted to run back to Shillong. “Can I have the
rabbit?” he'd said to the man taking orders in a tea shop. The man had contemptuously cast a plate of thinly sliced cheese toast before him and said, “
There's
your rabbit!” Rare-bit. Ray-bit. He was over all that now, not quite integrated but perhaps as assimilated as he could be in any milieu. Actually, he was much happier than Ananda had seen him even two years ago. The early retirement had freed him utterly. He poked at the knot of his tie and considered the face in the shaving mirror—eyes narrowed, cheeks sucked in. He had the thinnest moustache above his upper lip, which he must have cultivated as an addition when he was a youthful dandy; lips that veered towards the thin, but were a bit fuller than Ananda's mother's; a prominent nose. He didn't have fat cheeks, but some nervous anorexic impulse made him suck them in when he regarded himself, since his ideal, when it came to the ur-male, was Humphrey Bogart: urbane, dissipated. Each time he turned to the mirror he made a face like Bogart did when Lauren Bacall had just lied to him, or when he'd heard a funny sound: on high alert; undeceived.

Tearing himself away from his image, he said, “I had ten glasses of water this morning. Flushes the system. You should try it.” A challenge. Ananda nodded vaguely.

Glancing at the broadsheet folded on the table, he wrinkled his nose: “I never read the ‘intellectual' papers—
Times
;
Guardian
. I prefer the
Sun
.” A put-down—aimed vaguely, but unmistakable. The inference was: he was too good for the
Times
. Either dirt or the heavens for him: nothing in between. Ordinary mortals, belabouring their thoughts and emotions (the word “intellectual” was a euphemism) read the
Guardian
—solitary, stratospheric wayfarers who made their own road couldn't be bothered.

Ignoring him, and still seated though his uncle was ready to go, Ananda said, as if reminding a schoolboy of his botched-up homework: “What's that in the kitchen? You've been cooking?”

“Liver,” said his uncle, happy to share his recipes: “Cooked with butter and onions and chilli powder—and in its own blood.”

Ananda made a face.

“That sounds…” He didn't need a word.

“I never wash the blood away. Arrey baba,
that's
where the strength lies.” Nothing he did was merely sloppy, though his home, his bed, his knick-knacks might make you think otherwise; everything was a product of painful strategy. One of his ambitions was to have a healthy and worryingly long life. (“I'm going to be a hundred—at least,” he'd said to Ananda, making the young man anxious at the prospect of his uncle being around for another forty years: for some reason, though he'd deny this, he took his uncle's remarks with immense seriousness.) The ambition seemed curiously at odds with his other one—of never to be born again—though there was no actual link between the two. You might want to live inordinately long; you might also wish to never experience life again. (“I couldn't stand it a second time,” he'd confessed to Ananda with an intake of breath. The word
abar
—“again”—was full of terror. “A horrifying thought.”)

The injunction about cooking liver fell on deaf ears. Ananda stayed with his uncle's statements a few moments at a time; engaging with them led to long-drawn-out quarrels.

“Give me a minute,” Ananda said, getting up. “I'd better go to the loo too.”

“For big job or small?”

Ananda didn't give him the satisfaction of an instant reply.

“Small.” He closed the door to the bedsit behind him.

He was more like his uncle than he cared to know.
Naranang matulakrama
, his mother had said mysteriously when he was quite young:
“Man's made in his maternal uncle's mould.” Ananda's father too had pointed out resemblances, mildly surprised, as when
a memory not only returns to you but is reincarnated uncannily. There were few likenesses between uncle and nephew except the slight slouch while walking; Ananda looked more like his father. But part of the DNA had been reproduced invisibly. Elements of the repetition made Ananda's parents smile conspiratorially, given the gifts Radhesh had had; but also fret, since he'd taken his peculiarities too far. The intensity of those peculiarities had hopefully been diluted in their son. Still, he had to pee before he went out—it was like the physical equivalent of a confession before dying: meant to make the journey lighter. In the hallway, entering the loo, he saw the door to Shah's room ajar. A pigsty. Made his uncle's room look tidy.

A cigarette butt! In the pool inside the commode. He knew his uncle had thrown it there. Rangamama had cut down on his smoking, but he must have one on the toilet seat. A habit acquired in Sylhet, where the bathroom—according to him—was a purgatory, the cigarette the only means at hand of negating it. Ananda flushed, a god unleashing the elements; there was a storm within, culminating in a vortex. What's this? The damn thing had survived! There it was, motionless, barely mindful of the deluge that had just covered it. As the cistern filled, he aimed his stream of urine at it and simultaneously flushed again, so that it was assaulted on both sides. The world slowly returned to what it was. What! Still there, ever-resurfacing, plucky, bothersome! He zipped his trousers. Let his uncle and Shah and the other neighbour (whoever he was; there was a third tenant in the basement) deal with it.

Voices. He opened the door and found Shah, tall, wearing his tweedy green jacket, addressing his uncle.

“Why you are not taking him back?” he asked the moment
he saw Ananda. “Take him to India. I told your mother the same thing!”

Shah was not his real name—it was Abbas. A Pakistani who owned a shady pharmacy in Kilburn (his uncle wasn't sure if it existed), and boasted he knew Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, and various leading lights of the Tory party. “You want to meet Vice Chancellor?” he'd said when Ananda had murmured something about his college. “I will arrange it.” Not “can,” but “will”; as good as a threat. He was not only his uncle's neighbour, he was his principal “contact”—his uncle's chief access to the British State. If, notionally, his uncle got into trouble with the government, Abbas would “take care” of the problem. Till then, Abbas's mettle as a fixer in the higher echelons didn't need testing. Ananda had warned his uncle that it was Abbas who might get in trouble with the government soon, and his uncle might be summoned. “Be careful,” he said. “Shah” was the name that his uncle had conferred on Abbas as he was a dead ringer for the Shah of Iran. They referred to him in private as only “Shah”—not even “the Shah.” Abbas had no idea. Take away the warm, clanging Punjabi accent and put him in a white jacket with epaulettes and a cross-section of medals, and he could pass for the disgraced monarch. Or put the Shah in a tweedy jacket and you'd have Abbas. His uncle and he had been neighbours for fifteen years. On Ananda's first evening in London in 1973, when he and his parents had walked from the bed and breakfast under sodium vapour lights to an Indian restaurant on Haverstock Hill, his uncle had informed them, as they sat at a table in front of a huge picture of the Taj Mahal, “Shah will be joining us, he lives in 24 Belsize Park,” adding by way of explanation, “he looks exactly like the Shah of Persia.” In fact, he
could
have been the Shah (he'd joined them shortly, sidling his way into their company, his massive aquiline nose hovering in Ananda's line of vision all evening) in hiding
in London, incognito in a first-floor bedsit in Belsize Park, except the Shah wasn't then in exile, but lording it over Iran with the help of SAVAK. And he might be the Shah now, except he couldn't be—the Shah had died a homeless and kingdomless man in Egypt five years ago. So this person
had
to be Abbas, living in what Ananda had noticed was a pigsty.

“You take him back, please!” insisted Shah strenuously. “He is living here for
too
lahng. Someone will look after him better there—no?”

“Tu isskoo kyu pagal karta re,”
his uncle admonished his friend, appearing displeased. He lapsed into Hindi sometimes when speaking with Shah. For no good reason: to become, briefly, a man of the people. Also, playing the fool? One should never discount that.

Shah was making a big demonstration of his eagerness to let go of Rangamama: underlining the fact that he didn't own him. For he sensed that Ananda's mother viewed him with reserve and suspicion. He was a small, unending drain on Rangamama's funds. They knew this from Rangamama's grumblings. Of course, he also pointed out that Shah was a benefactor and help, in offering to not only shop for the groceries but insisting he do so: “Why you are going to Budgens Nandy—I know where there are best prices for courgette and garlic and
alu. Woh tum mujhpe chhod do
.” And then he'd procure garlic, alu, unsalted butter, and a cauliflower for six pounds, pointing out: “Very good cauliflower—you will not see so good every day.” Ananda's uncle didn't have the gumption to quiz Shah about his bookkeeping, and obediently agreed about the voluptuousness of the cauliflower. But his discontent festered. Last month, he'd parted with two hundred pounds in small payments and change to his neighbour (his own bookkeeping was laborious, impeccable, if futile), a figure that agitated Ananda's mother, since it was more than what he sent many of his relatives in Silchar and
Shillong. Yet, despite his moaning, he resisted alterations to the arrangement. He valued Abbas. Also, doling out money was, today, his one way of reminding himself and others of his special status—that he was unattached; living in a bedsit more or less for the rent he'd paid in 1961 (eighteen pounds); and the recipient of a huge pension of twenty-four thousand pounds that increased each year and was also index-linked (as he'd informed Ananda) to inflation. This was not including the early retirement lump sum he'd been gifted on saying goodbye to Philipp Bros. So, though he had no property to his name, no car, you could almost claim he was—rich. Except to the few who knew him (Shah was one who'd have known, his uncle must have boasted about the salary and pension to him often), it would have been impossible to know he'd had professional success—not because that was his intention, but given the kind of person he was—so that, once, when he was weaving his way in his black mac down Belsize Avenue (he'd narrated this with disbelieving delight: it spoke to him to the core), a kindly lady had startled him by giving him a pound.

Before Ananda's father sailed to London in 1949 to become a Chartered Accountant, he'd proposed to his best friend's sister, using him as a via media. There were two schools of thought about how this came about. Rangamama had claimed to Ananda that he was having a conversation one day with Ananda's father about Khuku: “She's twenty-three years old, and there's still no sign of a bridegroom.” Their father had died when they were little; the family wasn't well off. Ananda's father had looked thoughtful and said: “Don't worry, Radhesh.” The proposal followed. According to this account, the marriage was a result of Ananda's uncle's intervention, his willingness, even, to set aside his dignity. The other version
of events came from Ananda's mother, who told him that, soon after their wedding in London, his father had said to her: “It was after I heard you sing
Ore grihabashi
that I decided.” “But that was long ago!” “That was when I knew…a person who sang the way you did had to be a good person.”