Odysseus Abroad (12 page)

He entered and turned to the half-ajar door on the left. His uncle shuffled behind him, gentlemanly, slow. The looped sash of the dressing gown came undone, revealing, underneath, the slight frame in the dark maroon pyjama suit.

“You're nowhere near ready,” said Ananda, taking on a patrician, indulgent air. “It'll be four soon. When are we going
out
?”

“Darao he,”
said his uncle, in his mock-literary way. Switching to English: “I haven't
finished
yet!” A look of annoyance on his face. “Wait, sit down, let me get you something.”

Ananda looked around him. The centre table, or dining table, or maybe the work table—whatever it was—had chairs on two sides, one bearing a pile of books on shipping law. Noticing Ananda's beady stare, his uncle made to remove this low stack, at which Ananda pulled out the other chair and said, “That's fine, that's fine, I'll sit here.”

He lowered himself, distrustful of the surface. He patted and slapped it. The smallish table was covered neatly with pages from newspapers in lieu of a tablecloth. There were more books on it: a familiar, creased pile of the
Pan Book of Horror Stories
, a half-open novel by Stephen King, a copy of the
Sun
that seemed to have been recently consulted, a shaving mirror. Ananda looked away. The bed was right next to him, against the wall, not properly made but not
wholly neglected either, the tucked blanket that would have been pulled down slightly at night pulled up again, the sheet and pillow still bearing his uncle's impress.

Ananda could see him. He was rummaging in the kitchenette. The bedsit was divided in two: this room was three quarters of it, then came the kitchenette through a doorway with no door.

He returned brandishing a can. “Coke?” he asked. “I'm all right,” said Ananda: he wasn't going to drink Coke in the afternoon—it seemed like a scandalous thing to do. Ananda knew his uncle had stocked up on Coke to appease Ananda's mother—from stirrings of guilt, because he so often insulted her—ever since he'd realised that she liked the drink. “Are you
sure
?” he asked, drawing out the word “sure” like a melancholy Bengali syllable. Ananda kept shaking his head. “Would you like a Jaffa cake then?
Ba
Mr. Kipling-
er
almond slice?” He'd become very hospitable—not overnight, but inexorably. He had a very personal notion of hospitality, though. Having long fended for himself with only a degree of success, he threatened to rain a small range of confectionary on Ananda. This was linked to his own taste rather than his guest's (the Coke was an exception)—since he had a sweet tooth, it largely comprised cakes.

“Guess what I had for breakfast,” said his uncle. Although Ananda knew the answer, and knew his uncle knew he knew the answer—as he asked the question of his nephew each time they met up and the answer was the same—he pretended courteously not to know, because he knew his uncle wanted to tell him again.
Epic theatre
. The point being not to learn a new story, but to hear it, with recognition, recited for the umpteenth time. So with audiences of epic sagas, who'd been told the tale ad absurdum, knew the lines by heart, and delighted at being told again.

“Coffee with a bit of cream and eleven spoons of sugar, and a quarter of a toast with half a spoon of honey.” He looked distant and amused—his hunger had been exacerbated by his inadvertent mention of the Jaffa cakes. “I haven't eaten anything since then. I'm burning with hunger!” He seemed pleased at his feat. Pleased, because his diet followed some theory of life—to do with subsistence, staying fit and lean (he worried uninterruptedly about how he looked), and with maximising pleasure when he ate in the evening. Even then, prolonging and deferring pleasure would take precedence over killing hunger; he'd chew with infuriating slowness, holding himself in check and wading into a tantalisingly dilatory frame of time. If Ananda were eating with him, he'd be distracted from his own meal by the strangely frustrating sight of his uncle chewing. All things by dinner were universally appetising (“I could eat a horse!” he'd say in restaurants or when he came to have dinner at Warren Street), and he'd scoff at Ananda's likes and dislikes in food as finicky. He lived life by a code of punishments and rewards, withholding from himself till he was on the edge, the subsequent act of auto-kindness then feeling like a miracle. Even his living conditions had no relation to his means, but was a deliberate act of deprivation, conditions from which he'd probably release himself one day on a whim.

“Eleven spoons!” said Ananda, disapproving—this was what he dutifully exclaimed each time. Yet he
did
rise to the bait, there was a genuine reprisal of surprise at his uncle's—his entire maternal clan's—consumption of sugar (his grandmother had died of diabetes; his aunt had it; one of his cousins had developed the juvenile variety and took daily self-administered shots of insulin). Rangamama had no sign of the disease. He looked pleased at Ananda's veiled reprimand. “And now he'll say,” thought Ananda, “ ‘I hardly slept last night.' ” Still, he felt a twinge of pity. His mother had
chronic insomnia. He'd often discovered her hovering near the dining table at three in the morning. She emerged to nibble at biscuits. Ananda had it: or he wouldn't have run into his mother. He glanced at the bed. It seemed well-used, frequently inhabited. Beneath it were bottles from which he averted his gaze. They brought a urinous presence to the room, mingled sweetly with aftershave. The bottles made unnecessary that trip at two in the morning to the shared loo in the hallway. Although Ananda heated his flat to tropical levels, he knew the resistance you felt at night, in the chill, to emptying your bladder—the pressure on the sphincter muscle deepened by the very chill—he knew what it was like to coerce yourself to liberate your body from the warm cell of the tucked-in blanket, climb off the bed, drown briefly in the cold, totter to the hallway. There were few more solitary odysseys. Better to do it in a bottle. “I slept badly last night,” grumbled Rangamama.

But he looked well-rested. “When will you be done?” nagged Ananda. His uncle had unbuttoned his shirt, draped it over a chair. He began to dab his arm with a small wet towel. “Haven't had your bath?” “Bath!” His uncle, as he swept his thin arms and shoulders, demurred to the question. “No,” he admitted. “I had a bath last in April.” It sounded dreadful; but Ananda—when he thought of it calmly, and despite the evidence to the contrary—concluded his uncle wasn't unclean. Each day he cleaned himself piecemeal, like a cat, pouring water over his head just two or three times annually. Maybe this was a modulation on the native mode of hygiene which he'd internalised after moving to London in 1957, when having a bath used to be a seasonal, fleeting occurrence, like the full moon or daffodils. A troublesome occurrence, according to his mother, recounting the years spent in 24 Belsize Park, in the bedsit upstairs, with his father; how others would leave sooty tidemarks in the tub which you had to implore them to wipe away before you
went in. Still, the wallowing in soapy water, in which your dirt particles settled and swam, had created in Ananda's mother a taste for the warm languor of the bath, and she'd return to it occasionally in Bombay, where middle-class people still possessed ornamental bathtubs though they preferred the straightforward drenching of the shower. His uncle's ongoing abstinence from bathing might be put down to his general laziness, his slowness, which made the smallest things he did elements in a gigantic journey, or to his unrelenting adoption of the identity of a “black Englishman.”

“The main reason I could never have become a director at Philipp Brothers,” he said, “was because I spent too much time in the toilet.” This was
one
of the impediments to his taking up directorship. There were others. “The toilet holds up your day. You use a lot of time.” The fact that he hadn't become a director haunted him; and now it haunted Ananda, since his uncle reminded him of the fact whenever he visited. What had first set off this tireless confession of regret was the news, from three years ago, that Ananda's father, Satish, had become Managing Director of the company he worked in. Ananda's uncle and Satish used to be inseparable in Sylhet; best friends; classmates. Both bright sparks, but Ananda's uncle, it was conceded (by Satish in particular), gifted, maybe a “genius” (a judgement that Ananda's uncle graciously concurred with). News came of Ananda's father's ascendancy. Ananda's uncle responded with joy. Three days later, he began to explain—and he hadn't stopped—how Anderson, the chief at Philipp Bros, had invited him to take up an “executive directorship” a year ago, which he'd turned down. “Executive director—a post with a directorship's prestige, but few of the responsibilities. But I said I wouldn't do it…What an idiot! I thought it meant I'd be travelling constantly, now to Frankfurt, now to Paris, São Paulo or Madrid. That's all I wanted once—to travel, travel, travel: the high life! By the time
Anderson asked me, the job had no charm any more. Idiot!” He was buttoning his shirt. In the winter, he'd wear the three-piece suit over the pyjamas—they kept him warm and were preferable to long johns. Now he made, again, his usual exculpatory statement: “I couldn't have done it anyway. I can't start work without going to the toilet.
Not
evacuating your bowels—and drinking milk—may lead to you breaking wind at any time…” Ananda ruminated on this, one of his uncle's many diagnoses to do with navigating your path through a day; was reassured that he abhorred milk. “In the office, I seldom went to the toilet to do the big job, in case someone outside the cubicle heard me breaking wind.” He made a face to indicate that that would have been a calamity. Then narrowed his eyes, conceding he was over-sensitive. But he was also hinting at the stubbornness of the powers-that-be, that rule our lives and the universe. The gods. Aeolus. Wind. Had disrupted his progress. No point harping about it—he'd been made redundant after all. Or asked to take voluntary retirement if you preferred. All this business about directorship was, as they say, History: a record of events that can be resurrected only in the telling. “Excuse me, Pupu,” he said.

He'd gone. To do the small job. A voyage out with Pupu was a thing of joy, and he didn't want it spoilt by an urge to pee coming over him. Once it did, he'd be seized by it. So now he was in the loo, wringing himself dry. It took minutes. And patience.

It was notable that heroes in Europe had no bodily functions as such—or encumbering relatives. Neither Hercules nor James Bond for that matter interrupted their antics and missions because they had to visit the toilet. When morning came, they didn't bother to brush their teeth; they jumped out of bed in pursuit. For Bond, saving the world took precedence over everything. The furthest he went towards his hygiene was shaving, an exhibition of his pheromonic powers which was rudely cut short (depending on context) by a deadly insect, a treacherous consort, or a Soviet spy. So, even this one recorded act of his humble daily toilette was made tantalising by being never completed, and Bond was seen, again and again, brusquely wiping off what remained of the lather with a towel. This detail both unsettled and inspired Ananda and his uncle; they,
namby-pamby Indians, would have assiduously washed the lather off their face before drying their cheeks. Bond had no time for niceties. Nor did he have an aunt or father calling him on the phone in the midst of his fights, or demanding to know where he'd gone in the last seven days. It was a peculiarity of Western culture: this immersion in individuality, and the pretence that haemorrhoids or family didn't undermine or subvert the frame of action—it was what made its myths so free-floating and fabulous. And this transcendence was what shaped the colonial project:
they
simply wouldn't have conquered the world if they'd paused to brush their teeth or vanished to do the “big job.” The latter, Ananda was pretty sure, was the reason there was no Bengali Empire.

Although his uncle had embarked on his great journeys in the forties and fifties—Sylhet to Shillong, Shillong to London, and from being a school matriculate working as a part-time used-car salesman in Shillong to a full-fledged Chartered Shipbroker who ended up as a senior manager at Philipp Bros—in spite of this, the grand journey he focussed on daily was an internal one. Not psychological, not inner; internal. To do with encouraging the food he'd taken the previous day to make its proper, unfettered way through oesophagus, alimentary canal, intestines, and colon to its final and complete escape, helped along by violent tides of water. For, in the morning (Ananda knew), his uncle, after his breakfast of syrupy coffee and half a spoon of honey and a quarter of toast, would drink ten glasses of water to cleanse his organs and send the waste within on a burst of energy to its bigger journey. “He's going to come back now and boast about the water he drank today,” thought Ananda.

Next to the doorway to the kitchenette was a splendid calendar of Kali.

Ananda didn't bother to check if it was out of date. Things were often displayed in his uncle's room after they'd served their function. For instance, the bedsit upstairs, which the landlord had now acquired for a two-bedroom conversion, where Ananda's parents used to live in the fifties, and which his uncle had inherited after they'd vacated it in 1961, to return to India. Ananda's first visit to 24 Belsize Park in 1973 also saw his entry into his uncle's former first-floor abode—for some reason, his memory would sometimes tell him it was Christmas. But it was August; he had vivid recollections of the summer; consecutive days of sunlight. Why Christmas? He now knew: the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, and especially the cards hung sideways from a cord strung across the room, with pictures of snowmen, holly, Madonna and child, their bright fins pointing downwards. Not just last Christmas's cards, but earlier ones too—that August, Ananda found them in their assigned places, as if they'd just arrived. They were never removed, only added to.