Odysseus Abroad (17 page)

“There's sure to be trouble tonight. They sleep late on Fridays.”

“It's one of the ways you can tell an alien from a human being. People who live among us, look like us, but come from elsewhere,” said his uncle. “Aliens sleep when ordinary people wake—they
wake when others sleep. If you observe this oddity in someone's habit, you should keep in mind that they may not be from here.”

This did fit in with the Patels' and even Mandy's sleep patterns. When his uncle expounded these theories, he didn't always let on about his sources. They might be something he'd taken note of years ago in Sylhet; or from his reserves of the
Pan Book of Horror Stories
; or from a piece of research about the supernatural and the afterlife—which his family had been interested in since he was a child.

They'd tried out the planchette in Sylhet—a kind of seance. The pencil went crazy, wrote by itself, impelled by a spirit. This pencil gave one- or two-word bulletins; cryptic declarations. Most of the message was lost, as with a wireless which, despite you rolling the knobs or shifting its position, couldn't capture the signal. The technology connecting the here to the hereafter was still imperfect. Perhaps it was the early death of the father, in 1926, which had left the family rudderless, that led them—especially Radhesh's older brothers and older sister—to take up this pursuit. Or maybe it also involved a genuine curiosity about the migration of souls. They'd made contact with an English schoolteacher, dead of typhoid, who'd spelt out the nonsensical remark,
Met him Sykes hoses
. However, they were mostly able to find one who gave them news of the spiritual progress of people they'd known—celebrated as well as local and familial figures. Ananda's uncle had told him the seventh stage was the highest a soul could ascend to. “Amalesh Tripathi, a businessman and philanthropist in Sylhet, was in the
second
stage—despite all his charitable work,” said his uncle. There was a glimmer of satisfaction in his eye. “Wonder why.” Proudly he'd told Ananda: “Our father was in the fourth stage. Very good”—as of a favourite bright child who'd, as expected, shone at an exam. Finally, the big news, in a quiet, vindicated tone: “Tagore was in the sixth stage.” They would
have been told this by a spirit in the 1940s, no doubt (Tagore had died in 1941), in Shillong, where the family moved prior to Partition, still rudderless.

“I sleep poorly myself,” pointed out Ananda as they awaited the bill. “Could it mean I'm from another planet?”

“Whatever you do,” said his uncle firmly, “don't drink milk before you go to bed because people have told you that it's a cure for insomnia. You'll feel bloated. We had an aunt who had a fixation about milk—as a result my growing up and even my youth was a purgatory. I gave up milk a few years after coming to London. Since then my life has been a life of freedom.”

A moment later, staring out of the window, distracted, he said,
“Pupu, mone chhata pore achhe.”
Ananda hadn't ever heard anyone else use this expression. It was something you'd expect an old village woman to say. Literally, it meant, “There's a covering of moss on my heart.” He was vaguely sad—why, on this bright day, it was hard to tell. He never owned up to homesickness—though he'd lived in 24 Belsize Park for twenty-six years now. He said he was happy; his only cause of distress his rejection of the directorship. When Ananda complained of missing home, he showed little sympathy. Yet, sometimes during a walk, or in the middle of a walk, he'd say:
“Mone chhata pore achhe.”

“Why, what's the matter?” Did his mother leaving last week have anything to do with it? “Ma was asking after you yesterday.”

“Tell her not to spend your father's money on long-distance calls. She lives on some other plane, your mother. Thinks she's Queen Elizabeth!” Still resentful she wasn't hanging around for him. Khuku, the sidekick; envying her her posh married life in Bombay. And maybe missing her?

Ananda bristled. Yet he held back from leaping into the fray. On one of his mother's recent visits, when she'd come to London to allay Ananda's restiveness, Rangamama had attacked her physically, rudely yanking her hair when she'd dared to defend the older brother in Shillong whom Ananda's uncle was sounding off about for repeatedly demanding money from him. Instinctively, Ananda had shoved him, and, to his surprise, sent him reeling, realising how lightly built his uncle was, a wisp of a man.

“Calls herself an artist!” he continued, undaunted. He was now taunting her for what he perceived to be her hubris as a singer. All her childhood she'd been enshrined within her family for her singing voice. Ten days ago, she'd excused her inability to understand complex financial arrangements by saying (not without levity) to the world—actually, to the room in Warren Street—that after all she was an “artist.” “Artist!” said his uncle. “She doesn't know what an arse is, let alone art!”

“She
is
an artist,” insisted Ananda. “Her voice is amazing. It's your family's fault—not sending her to Santiniketan—or to college for that matter. Disgraceful!”

“You're right,” conceded his uncle. “That was a bad mistake. The family was completely out of money at the time. But if
I
had been responsible, she'd have finished her education.” Pronounced grandiosely, but with passion. “And Satish married her because of
me
. I extracted that promise from him.”

“And it's because of
her
,” said Ananda, “that you two good-for-nothings are where you are today—one a managing director and the other a would-be director with a giant-size pension. Because she worked in the naval department at Aldwych while you two ate her cooking and sat your exams.”

“Rubbish—that's not true.” A transient malevolent smile passed over his face. Was he toying with him?

“Did you not,” persisted Ananda, “live off her earnings in 24 Belsize Park?”

A swift assessment of evidence. Penitently he replied: “I've never denied it. I've never denied what she did for me. Or that I am what I am because of her.”

“There you are! Thank you!” A piece of paper on a plate, so precarious it might blow away any second. The waitress had vanished almost as soon as she'd placed it on the table.

“Wait, let me get this.” He lifted a restraining palm. From the inside breast pocket he took out, with grace and regret, a carefully tucked-in wad of pound notes. He plucked a five-pound note from the inner whorl and laid it on the plate. Ananda almost felt sorry for him, so immersed he was, so
alone
too, and clearly had been. Ananda was beholden. He couldn't have afforded this tea shop. It was “dear”; the bill had come to three pounds ten. “How much?” he asked. “Nothing,” his uncle said mysteriously, as if he were hiding an embarrassing sexual secret from an innocent—but Ananda had bent forward and read the scrawled figure. The waitress turned up again by magic; “Thank you!”—now she'd borne the plate with the five-pound note aloft. His uncle had given her a dazzling smile, as if she were an angel they'd been lucky to have watch over them. He displayed the gap where his front incisor was until a year ago. Dental work was too costly in Britain. He'd go to India and get it fixed. It was a plan. Till then, he'd brandish the gap.

He'd lost the tooth in an idiotic episode. He was returning late on one of his nocturnal sojourns, via a lonely stretch on Chalk Farm, when he'd had the core of a recently consumed apple flung at him by a skinhead who was sitting on a low wall with two friends. As a rule, his uncle avoided making eye-contact with skinheads, because it was unsettling to look at a visage that had no facial hair. Like looking at a face that was all eye: a giant angry eye. But something
possessed his uncle to go to the one who'd thrown the core and say: “Why did you do that?” It was well past the heyday of skinheads, so this one merely punched him, rather than kill him, as he would have when the National Front was in season. Somewhere in Chalk Farm, a mile and a half from where they were now, his uncle had lost a tooth.

The change, back on the table—a squat pound coin and nine pieces of what could have been silver. “Sorry for the wait! Thank you!” The endless metronome-like swing between apologies and expressions of gratitude. In the song, “In a daily dance / in my consciousness / who dances / ta ta thai thai,” the dancer's arc moved from infinity on the one foot to finitude on the other; from bereavement to laughter. Here, in London, Sorrys and Thank yous covered the day in the same dance, in an ever-repeating back-and-forth.

“How much should we leave her?” Ananda's uncle's face was grim. Tipping was occasion for exaggerated theatre.

“Thirty—maybe forty at most.”

“Should I leave a pound? A pound would look nice. She
has
been friendly.”

“A pound!” Ananda was exasperated by his uncle's indiscriminate sense of justice. What made him moan non-stop about sending cheques to his brother in Shillong, but be so cavalier with his money to a stranger? “You can't possibly leave a pound!”

“She must be quite poor,” substituting the fact that he had no basis for the statement with an annoying look of maternal compassion—as if he were speaking of some down-at-heel cousin or beggar-maid he'd known in his childhood.

“
Thank
you sir!” said the waitress when she spotted her reward,
a bit shocked. She probably felt she'd taken advantage of this poor demented man, clearly unfamiliar with English currency.

He ducked his head. “It was a jolly good tea, you know!” he lied.

They emerged from the hut-like space. These rural log-cabins were expensive; the tea shops with modern furniture and fittings were common: the paradox of Hampstead. Except there were no common tea shops here.

Well?”

“What?”

“Bus or tube?”

A dilemma on the pavement before the tea shop. They contemplated the bus stop at South End Green. Not because they intended to go somewhere—but simply because, as his uncle had once said, “You can see more from a bus.” A couple of months ago, he, his uncle, and his mother had got on to a bus destined to travel in an exploratory circle and bring them back to where they'd begun, the South End Green terminus. It had been a week of frayed nerves; Ananda was struggling with
Paradise Lost
and Milton justifying the ways of God to men as, above him, the Patels erupted without warning into movement and rap music. But the bus ride had lifted them, literally (since they decided to sit on the upper deck). They'd floated—if not over London, then over its streets, encountering, at eye-level, a succession of treetops and half-open first-storey windows. When Ananda had remarked, taking
in the illuminated residential vistas, “I'll need to get back to the Milton essay tonight—exams start in three weeks,” his uncle, with a scandalised gasp (from the horror of past exams taken and half-remembered), said, “You're lucky to be calm. When there's work before me, I can never take pleasure in things till it's out of the way.” Of course, his uncle had no work before him—he'd presumably need to invent some to feel again the true sensation of pleasure.

Now they could cross and board the stationary 517, or walk past Keats's house and, near the Heath, take the A11.

“No let's go to Belsize Park.” The final decision, when he chose to exercise it, was Ananda's.

“Take the tube?”

“Yes—to King's Cross.”

Why to a stop as uninviting as King's Cross wasn't clear. Yet his uncle nodded, as if he'd been given counsel full of wisdom.

They went back up Pond Street, skirting the Royal Free Hospital.

“Sing that one Pupu:
se din dujane dulechhinu boney
”—one of Rabi Thakur's commonest ditties, common but lovely.

“Not now.”

Ananda was humming a raga: Purvi. His uncle couldn't abide classical music. Not only because of its demonstrative virtuosity, which he regarded with contempt. (Anything outside his ken was beneath him. He bowed to no superior form or authority.) But also the sacred context of classical music embarrassed him. Being a Tagorean, he saw the universe in a bright humanist radiance. Any mention in songs of Hari, Radha, or Ram made him flinch. That's what the Brahmo antecedents of modern Bengal had done—turned the Bengali into a solitary voyager, with no religion and nothing but a raiment of poems, Tagore songs, and—instead of deities—novelists and poets.

Ananda stubbornly sang Purvi going up to Haverstock Hill. A car crept up on a zebra crossing. No one blew the horn here. Ananda preferred to practise twice a day. On some days he gave his voice a holiday. He managed this routine because of his peculiar relationship with the university. His tutors, certainly Mr. Davidson, had given him a cautious berth—lecturers barely noticed him and his absences. Since he'd forgone a second spell of practice today, he felt a pang of remorse. Saraswati, whom he looked up to, might notice. Nubile, private, plucking on the veena—from her remote domain reigning over the arts.

“Pupu—
se din dujane
!”

Finally Ananda surrendered.

That day when we together

Were suspended in the forest

On a swing that was threaded with flowers
.

They were in front of the church; the neighbouring school was closed, or there would have been children rushing past. Ananda hesitated to sing in Warren Street for fear of being overheard. In the streets, he felt less constrained. His uncle, his eyes closed in emotion and pain, was so absorbed he didn't notice people walking by. He might be indifferent to Ananda's future as a modernist poet and only cursorily concerned with his progress as a student—but he adored the way he sang Tagore. If he'd had his way (in a utopia, his uncle would have been an autocrat), he'd have had Ananda give up writing and every loyalty to classical music, and only perform Tagore songs. So it was just as well his word wasn't law.