Afternoon Raag (11 page)

As a child, I used to come here with my parents for my holidays; but this time, returning from England, my parents were waiting for me outside the arrival area, my father and mother standing in the light, while passengers, pursued by those exuberant, sparrow-like local boys, passed before them, negotiating trolleys. Was it my imagination, or had some of Calcutta's black vapour darkened their complexions a shade? They looked as if they had been exposed to the sun, and seemed smaller as they stood there. But when I asked them, they said it might be because they had woken early in the morning; and here they were to receive me.

The drive homeward goes past a village scene, with huts, plantains, lakes, and malnourished but energetic children. Then, without hiatus, the city begins with a great drum-roll of traffic and one is in the midst of a marketplace of houses, tailors' and butchers' shops, billboards, and tramlines,
bargaining for movement, haggling to go forward. Nothing has changed for the last twenty years. The Bengalis are like Irish families, except that they are small in height and the men have no access to drink, but the city is a mixture of officiousness and circumlocution that makes one despair. The air is awash with Marx and Trotsky; the airport, to which no international flight but Aeroflot and the Bangladesh Biman has been coming for years, is no gateway to fresh influences from abroad, but an interesting, if puzzling, building: and in Calcutta, nothing has happened after Marxism and modernism. In tea-shops and on street corners, Bengali men, as ever, indulge in ‘adda', a word that means both a pointless, pleasurable exchange of opinions and information, and the place or rendezvous in which it is conducted; if it were possible to say, for instance, of a certain kind of languorous conversation in England, ‘I'm having a pub,' its quality might be approximately communicated in English.

And on the roads, one's neighbours are still Ambassadors, created by the Birlas from odds and
ends—the body of a Morris Oxford and a tractor's engine—outnumbering by far any other car. Ours still has its old Bombay numberplate. On the Ambassador one finds perhaps the only doors that have to be slammed shut, with the maximum of force, without any intention of venting ill-temper, but as a perennial good-humoured habit as one gets in and gets out. Families that own them have had them for twenty years, half the duration of independence, in which time they have been repaired, repainted, sent to garages, reupholstered, and, when the owner is in straitened circumstances, left exposed to the elements. Every few years, the Birlas produce a new model at their factory, Mark III, Mark IV, which exactly replicates the previous one; for the Ambassador has remained faithful to the ideal that was perfected in the secure, organic era of the ‘protected market', and, in its shape, still retains that philosophical look, that aura of being cut-off from the ‘real' world: squat, conservative, and spacious.

Cruising downtown in it, one risks the bother of paying a tax to the municipal corporation if one
parks it. The tax is collected by men who, sweating from running from car to car in the sun, slip a ticket under the wiper when you are away, and reappear punctually to collect the fee when you are back. Loafers and layabouts as described in the stories of Parashuram and Bibhutibhusan Bandhopadhaya, often charging you without giving you a ticket, they have taken up this job as human parking meters because they haven't found any other. The trouble they cause is brief, like a mosquito's sting, and subsides when one drives away.

When I arrived here in the summer, it was from an Oxford that had just gone through its annual dress-rehearsal and theatre of the exams. That was when Shehnaz finally put to use the notes she had made diligently over two years, when, after retching at her basin from nervousness, she would wear her black gown and set out early mornings through narrow cobbled lanes towards the Examination Schools, followed, and led, by other characters similarly dressed, some stepping out of the perfectly ordinary houses along the sides of the road. It was at this time that I began to realize that we were
here in Oxford less as individuals than as students, attempting, in a touchingly innocent way, to complete a course and obtain a degree that would not only please us, but our parents, whoever and wherever they were. We were children sent here who, for a period of time till the exams began, behaved and felt like adults. Once the exams were finished the childhood was over, the childhood of which even Shehnaz, Mandira, and I—the affection we felt for each other at our intersection of each other's life, and the loneliness of being in Oxford—were part.

A student fills the closet and shelves in his room with provisions that seem numerous when they are visible, but actually can be stuffed into one, at the most two suitcases. The student takes the coach to Heathrow; leaves by air; his books are packed in a crate and shipped after him, to travel out of the country upon the old sea-routes. The student's departure is deceptively fast, while his books' is slower, more weighted and material, and will reach his country only three months later. A few things are left behind in boxes in the college storeroom,
or with friends, as if there were hope of returning in the future.

That summer in Calcutta, I sat and wrote a letter to America, to Shehnaz, and never posted it. Petty details and grievances, and a contradictory feeling of closeness, came to me as I was writing the letter. I took it with me to the General Post Office, a huge building on whose steps, all day, people ascend and descend dramatically, like the diminutive, busy men in the first black and white films. Inside, the Bengali male, dark, not more than five feet and five inches tall, hair carefully parted at the side, can be seen among pots of glue, or queueing up at one of the many windows where an employee sits portioning stamps, or having his letters weighed at a counter, and stamped with an archaic object that looks like a pestle. By evening, however, there is hardly anyone left, and the main room looks large and peaceful in the glow of fluorescent lights; a few employees working overtime sit behind counters, looking as porters on a provincial railway-station do after a train has left, the sense of departure, of a world beyond this one, having disappeared into the
ordinariness of another evening and night. I had my letter weighed and stamped, and then decided not to send it. The thin, bespectacled clerk, in whose frail hand the ancient stamp looked so heavy and powerful, said irritably, ‘You mean you want it back?' He explained to me the rules governing such procedures; he became, temporarily, the voice of the General Post Office; but I only saw before me a middle-aged Bengali whom, I felt vaguely, I already knew from a previous encounter. The more he sensed my frustration, the more he protracted his lecture on a higher logic that transcended personal ideas of reasonableness; and when he handed me the letter, he had me take it out of the envelope, which he tore thoroughly with his own hands.

T
he two of them have been sleeping on the single bed, he against the wall, and she, lying on her back, next to him. Once, unable to bear her cramped position any more, she slipped off the bed on to the ground, her pillow with her. That was early in the morning. Now it is light. She gets up before him; she rummages among the shelves. She finds a jar of biscuits, and begins to eat them. When she peers through a crack in the curtains, she sees a hedge, and, barely visible above it, pinnacles and rooftops, the dreaming spires. Soon, outside the window, because it is summer, there will be visitors, a goose and a gander, one with pale brown feathers and the other with dark, translucent colours. Like
the first tourists to discover a town, they explore the lawn together, though each, doggedly, keeps its distance from the other, maintaining a tangential, somewhat covert, relationship with the other's self-absorption, like the English couple, Henry and his wife, who are always separated by a few paces during their humdrum walks in
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.
The days belong to these two, with their fussy, academic interests; they do not seem to be in the first flush of love, but in a period of retirement, discovering earthly wonders; and when a window is half opened, they quack acknowledgingly, rather than gratefully, at the thrower of crumbs, but never trouble themselves to look straight at a human face.

She wears her fluffy slippers, quietly opens the door, and goes to the bathroom so as not to disturb him; she solemnly washes her face, brushes her teeth, and combs her hair for almost a minute with her head bent sideways, as if thinking or remembering. Outside, she can hear other students making their first disconnected movements, the tentative noises, like those of a musical instrument being tuned, gradually accumulating and amplifying into
a larger significance. She had never thought that she would give so much of herself to that boy still sleeping inside. He makes her angry, now that she loves his college and friends more than her own, and her heart is heavy with the distance she will have to travel. They were friends at first, they took walks, and then he wanted something more—and had she, too, wanted it?—and she found it more and more difficult to say no, to make him unhappy. And when he was unhappy … She makes herself a cup of coffee, and takes it back to the room. She will have to go now, she says, but she will be back in the afternoon to help him pack. I'll go and start my own packing now, she says. She wears her trousers and shirt, which are lying on the chair in the shadow, and picks up her things.

Stepping outside, into the clear June day, she inhales the air and hugs herself, and, with quick steps, crosses the road confidently, missing two oncoming cars on either side. She feels relieved, as if Oxford were new to her; as if nothing had happened, and she had not known him, or any of the other people. It takes two years of rainy days,
of human contact, to feel this moment of freshness. This is what it should have been like in the beginning, not the newcomer's worries and desires, lived from moment to moment, the reckless craving for companionship and communication. She smiles and nods at the working men in overalls and the scouts coming in; she is happiest acknowledging people she has come to know by sight. She begins to run towards her own college, as the path curves, and students like herself come out in twos and threes from the gate, quite blind to her, and others go past singly and swiftly on bicycles. She is still running down that path lined with bicycles, where flowers have blossomed on the hedges, and the canal flows on the other side. A group of American academics wearing suits, who are here to attend a conference, emerge, unled, in an excited, bustling train from the doorway like schoolchildren who have lost sight of their teacher. She is coming back to her college in the morning, with its comforting hivelike rooms with large windows, in which students have woken up and parted their curtains, and their study-table, books, and table lamp are visible. She
must say goodbye to her scout before she forgets, and to the boy who sits in at the porter's lodge in the evening, who once used to bravely dye his hair different colours; she must give them her address. Then, if she has time, she will walk down to the Bodleian to see if that book she had ordered before her exams has arrived; she still feels tempted, as if it were the treasured vestige of a discarded habit, to take a look at it. Will that leave her enough time to meet her tutor in North Oxford before lunch—that man whose ordinary, trustworthy name appears beneath the complicated and obscure titles of certain books she will put into her bag tonight, who used to write god-like but compassionate notes in an awesome hieroglyphic on the margins of her essays—and then come back in time to help him with his packing for the summer? The thought wearies her. The thought of parting, of never meeting again, of having to repeat to each other that they will see each other in December, of knowing that he will start again; Oxford wearies her. Just to study here, and go to the library, and walk up the stairs and come down again to have a sandwich
at lunchtime; she could do that for ever. But it is never as simple as that. If she could choose, what would she choose? She is going back home to her parents and her wonderful, wisecracking sister, she will never mention it to them, and then she will get married. If she is married, she would like to have a baby in a year, it is something she has thought of, in a vague but intense way, for a long time. She will begin another life.

T
he first day I arrived in Oxford, it was raining the fine, persistent, baby-like drizzle in which no one gets wet. Propelled and navigated by my suitcases, I found myself before a window in a centuries-old building which was now run, in a mood of chicanery and make-believe, as a fully operational shelter for scores of bright-spirited graduates in sweaters and jeans. I travelled then to my room in the modern annexe across the road, but returned each day, for food and letters, to that fairy-tale site, with its series of rooftops like witches' hats, which would disappear in a mist in January, its irregular flagstones outside the steps that had iron rings like knockers upon them (as if they
opened onto secret underground entrances), and its mysterious employees who had ranks that set them apart as members of an ancient English sect ‘porter', ‘steward', ‘scout'. On my second day, I got a glimpse of Sharma in the dining room in the basement, dressed up like a provincial colonial, walking stiffly in a black suit I was never to see later, wearing it with that exact degree of painfulness that people do in the sweltering tropics, managing to look hot in it even in a cold country. His hair still possessed that neat and combed look imparted to it by an Indian barber, and he wore black-framed spectacles and a pencil-thin moustache, all of which constituted the cargo of his former life that he would lose accidentally, at one stroke, in a matter of weeks. But at that time, with a stern expression on his face, he resembled, with complete accuracy, the discomfited man facing the camera in his old passport photograph.

That was my second day. Even then, Shehnaz and Mandira were waiting to happen to me, for the rain and lack of sunlight had already entered me, from which I would create, inevitably, wisps of fantasy and desire that would later become flesh
and bones and blood capable of breaking the heart, becoming one's own, and then, after a year, again changing into rain and grey light.