B009Y4I4QU EBOK (18 page)

In that first year I had a lot to learn. Grasping Keynesian critiques of monetarism was the relatively easy part. I struggled more with
Life of Brian
, my first Monty Python film. I didn’t get half the jokes. I persuaded myself to like The Clash just because David did, I bought
Combat Rock
. My friends and I
were heady with our recent initiation into left-wing politics, hardly taking time to sleep for discussing the crises of capitalism. To protest against Thatcherite policies of cutting public spending at a time of high unemployment, in the Cambridge Union I sat next to a young man wearing polka-dot trousers and threw eggs at Sir Geoffrey Howe.

I’d been in Cambridge a year when Steve arrived. He’d also came to Girton to read economics.

“Does it rain here often?” This was the first thing Steve said to me. Except he said “rhine,” not rain, and I stared at him thinking,
What?
He was standing behind me in the lunch queue, a tall and skinny eighteen-year-old, with a wooden tray in his hand. He repeated his question in response to my blank look, scarlet-cheeked now. When I figured out what he’d said, I still thought,
What?
I gave some uninterested reply and turned to the curly-haired boy who was with him—Kevin, he told me his name was—hoping for a more inspiring chat. Steve later told me he thought then, you arrogant cow.

Steve and Kevin relied on each other to navigate Cambridge, an untried terrain for these two working-class boys, Steve from East London and Kevin from Basildon in Essex. So at the sherry reception to meet the Mistress of the college, Steve nudged Kevin as he told her, “Me and me friend want to …” but too late, she corrected him and said “You mean, my friend and I.” Kev tried to stop
Steve picking out and eating the leaves from the cup of green tea he’d been served by their economic history professor during a tutorial—“No, mate, you don’t do that, no.” In those days Steve wore a green bomber jacket, Doc Martens boots, and a West Ham football scarf. This look of urban toughness was at once defeated because his grandmother had knitted
STEPHEN
across his scarf, as you would for a five-year-old.

The two of them quickly became the comics in our group. They regaled us with wildly exaggerated impersonations of characters from their local neighborhoods, savoring the knowing that in Cambridge they would not be maimed for this, as they would be back home. So they’d act the thief who stole his neighbor’s TV and displayed it in his own living room—even though the neighbor was a friend who often popped over for a chat (and probably to watch
Crimewatch UK
, who knows). Or “hard men” who strutted the streets saying, “You lookin a’ me or chewin’ a brick?” and were affronted if you looked them in the eye. And those with ambitions to make it big in the world of crime—wannabe bank robbers and bare-knuckle fighters who lived by the code of not “grassing up” friend or foe to the law. This was the first I’d heard of Cockney rhyming slang and learned that
tea leaf was
“thief” and
butcher’s hook
meant “look” and
trouble and strife
was, of course, “wife.”

Every evening Steve and Kevin were drunk, vomit arcing over Trinity Bridge or dripping down shut windows that hadn’t been opened fast enough. I kept my distance. “Her ladyship,” they’d tease me. “Look, she’s miffed, she’s turning her nose up at us.” Two rowdy boys, I thought, not yet fully formed.

So I wasn’t seeking Steve’s interest when each morning I sauntered down the hallway we shared wearing a transparent white kurta and no underwear—I’d only just woken up and was going to the bathroom. But this encouraged him to come to my room with his copy of
The Complete Poems of John Keats
and read from it. That book was stained with black grease, he’d taken it with him on his travels across Europe in his father’s lorry the previous summer. He told me he read Keats’s “Lamia” sitting on a crate in a warehouse in Milan, and not even the din of unloading trucks could distract him from Lamia the serpent transforming herself into a woman, writhing and foaming—“her elfin blood in madness ran.” Now from “Lamia” he read me the lines “Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars” several times over. You
could
be a tad more subtle, I thought.

But he had glossy black hair that fell across his forehead and very distinct, slanted dark eyes and a pointy chin. Sweet. So I enjoyed the occasional hours we had together, just the two of us, without Kevin or the rest of our friends. We went for long
walks on a dirt track by fields where the veterinary science department kept deviant-looking bulls with oddly shaped heads. And through St. John’s playing fields at dusk. I was still unaccustomed to how early daylight caved in on English autumn afternoons. We hurried to the tearoom of University Library when the hot scones were served. I was bored with the economics I had to study that year and readily gave up grappling with Sraffa’s theory of value to linger with Steve among the stacks in the North Wing, reading pamphlets on party games in the British colonies or books on East End villains like the Kray twins. Steve told me that not too far from where he lived, in Whitechapel, was the Blind Beggar Pub where the Krays shot someone.

Steve was full of stories about his family and his childhood and about the London he knew. He’d grown up in Manor Park, on the outer edges of East London—“growing up on the Manor,” it was called locally. It was here that Steve played football with his brother, Mark, late into the night under streetlamps. He loitered with his friends outside the sweet factory nearby, imagining the rich pickings inside. They ate tomatoes that grew wild by the sewage works near the Roding River, a trifling tributary of the Thames, and their faces broke into a rash. One day Steve’s father told him that he’d smash his kneecaps if he saw him hanging around too many street corners. Steve knew his dad wouldn’t but was thankful
for the threat. It allowed him to stay in and do his homework when his friends called round, yet again, to go hurl milk bottles against the wall of the social club at the end of their street. “Na, not tonight, mate, me dad’ll kill me.”

His father’s long absences from home due to his job meant that Pam, his mother, raised Steve, his brother, and his two sisters largely on her own. She did so cheerfully and very volubly. When Steve was little, she’d embarrass him no end by bemoaning to everyone at the launderette the fact that his ears stuck out, as the two of them folded the family laundry. Although Pam’s daily life was confined to their East London neighborhood, she had a great curiosity about world affairs and politics. And of all her children, it was Steve who paid attention to her interests. As a teenager, he’d spend long evenings lying on the sofa with his head on his mother’s lap, evaluating for her the French parliamentary system or explaining the Spanish transition to democracy. His mother’s other passion was romance novels—she read one a night—and Steve and his sister Jane would be instructed to buy secondhand paperbacks by the dozen for her from a stall in Green Street Market.

They’d stop by the market on their way to see West Ham play at Upton Park on Saturdays. Since Steve was about seven, Jane, who was five years older, took him to football matches. After the game they’d
visit their grandmother, who lived near the stadium in a flat full of clutter above a Chinese takeaway. She always told Steve he was bright because he took after her sister, who was “the cleverest woman in Rangoon.” In Rangoon, his grandmother’s father was the supervisor of a slaughterhouse, and she spent her days playing tennis or going to garden parties.

His details caught my fancy—so many yarns, tender and funny. My stories of my childhood seemed meager in comparison. I told him about my first trip to the cinema when I was five, to see
My Fair Lady
. My parents had to bring me home halfway because I began howling at the steaming hot bath that was being run for Eliza. We had only cold showers then in Sri Lanka, and I thought she was about to be boiled alive. This upset me more than the stilt walker who came down our street once a week in the afternoons, when my mother was having a nap and I was playing outside.

Despite that early nervous talk about rain, Steve had a self-belief that ran deep, I soon learned. He was unruffled, at ease with himself. When we had exams or essays to write, he had remarkable focus. He worked intently, nimble and efficient in identifying what was important from those absurdly vast reading lists. Always precise, those notes he scribbled with a pencil on revision cards in the hush of the library’s Manuscript Room.

Steve came to Cambridge from a secondary
school that was academically dismal. When they were sixteen, a couple of his peers would spell Hitler as “Itla.” The street outside was lined with police riot vans at the end of the school day. Mobs of students who played truant turned up at the gates to fight others who’d spent the day wrecking classrooms. Apart from our friend Lester, who’d been to that same school, no one went to university, some went to prison. On hearing that Steve was off to Cambridge, one of the veteran delinquents assumed it was just another borstal and said, “Which one’s that then? What’s the grub like there?”

Steve was always relaxed about the bedlam in his secondary school. It even worked to his advantage, he told me. For he had the undivided attention of his teachers, a rare student they could actually teach, and he thrived. And the troublemakers let him. He had respect for being on the basketball team. It also pleased a few of his white peers that “one of them” was excelling. “That’ll show the Pakis,” they’d say, perceiving that it was mainly Asians who achieved anything academically in that school. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s, when notions of white supremacy were widespread among groups of youth in deprived neighborhoods. The distress he felt about the prejudice and hatred around him, Steve poured into his troubled teenage poems about the corrupt urban soul.

Some Sunday afternoons in Cambridge, the two
of us would go study in a meadow or an orchard, a bottle of Southern Comfort in hand. The English countryside had no allure for me as yet, and I would complain that it was boring, no wild elephants charging at us. Steve declared that, unlike me, he could find charm in any landscape. He described how he’d luxuriate in the glow of early sunlight striking red brick on his council estate as he cycled through its streets every morning delivering newspapers for Patel’s, the newsagents on Romford Road.

We would hitchhike from Cambridge to London a few times a term, the group of us. We’d go to the Reading Room in the British Library and to Highgate Cemetery, out of reverence for Karl Marx. Our friend Seok introduced us to Cantonese roast duck and rice at Kai Kee on Wardour Street. It was on one of these trips that Steve’s great passion for the bronze Sri Lankan statue of the goddess Tara in the British Museum was ignited. Another time, one December afternoon, he made Seok and me walk around his neighborhood for hours looking for the place he buried his Action Man when he was six. It was cold and dull—what was that nonsense he’d told me about radiant red brick?—and I was pouting.

But the next morning when Steve came to my room and sat on my bed, I reached for him. To save him the bother of, yet again, reading Keats. He was very eager, of course, so sweetly intense, but before long he said, “Back in a minute,” and left. I later
learned this pause was so he could sprint to Kevin’s room and bang on his door and brag “I snogged Sonal” and relish his friend’s response. Kev threw him onto the floor. “You lucky bastard, you jammy git.” Had I known then of this silliness over a kiss, I would never have let him in my room again that cold December morning. But he came bounding back. And stayed a good while.

MIAMI
, 2011

I
am not one for telling. So it might be the mojitos that make me confess. I had two with dinner. No, I think, three. The night was clear, and the ocean quiet. Even in the dark I could see pelicans dive.

These are perilous days, my boys’ birthdays. They make me anxious as they approach. In these past six years I’ve spent this time with friends. We traveled to new landscapes, some of them vast and fierce, they echoed my tumult, some diverted me, a little. There was a blizzard on a glacier in Iceland and a storm that rocked our car by a lonely Scottish loch. We got tangled in pondweed swimming in the Berkshires, in Madrid we sought out the bars.

Now this time it’s different. It was Vikram’s birthday two days ago, and again I traveled. But alone. I wanted an unfamiliar vista to help me endure the day, and I was curious—do I dare spend this time on my own? When I came to Miami from New York, I told myself, it’s not far, if I am too
wrecked, I can always come back. Vik would have been fourteen two days ago. Fourteen.

I didn’t at first trust the lightness I felt. It’s just Miami, all this gaiety around me, I am getting carried away, I am being duped into feeling nothing is amiss, I thought. How could I be this comfortable otherwise? Yet my ease didn’t fade. Each day I walked on the beach in the early sun, the wind was wild, and I felt brisk and fresh. I dipped in the ocean, time and again, let the salt sting my arms. There was a downpour last night, and I swam in an empty pool, spring rain cutting my face. I was peaceful in that water, I found a brightness in myself I didn’t think I now possessed.