Odysseus Abroad (19 page)

“Which one?” Ananda asked, and his uncle blinked, smiling with genial remoteness.

It was
Skeleton Crew
—the new collection by Stephen King.

“Any good?” Ananda asked the question academically, without seriousness.

“It
is
good,” said his uncle. “His stories are usually engrossing—about uncanny occurrences that change people's lives.” Approbation for a writer was unexpected, except where Tagore was concerned—out of tune with his personality.

The taste for Stephen King had evolved quite recently though, and swiftly. Ananda was still getting accustomed to it—to the unrelenting onward stride, after more than a decade defined by the
Pan Book of Horror Stories
.

“Maybe I should buy it,” said his uncle, narrowing his eyes. “I've gone through all the books in the library.” By “all” he meant horror, the supernatural, life after death—that queasy, uneasy addendum to literature; even so, it was unlikely he could have actually exhausted the lot. “One of the staff said they're closing the library next year,” he added. Ananda was a bit taken aback. He'd never seen this library—never needed to—but hadn't thought it would just vanish. He read about such developments in the papers only with the faintest attention, events on the hazy outskirts of the endless, ugly debate about the National Health Service. Opera house closures. Local authorities. Public money. What would his uncle do now?

“Should I get it?” he said with agonised self-absorption. The question wasn't meant for Ananda; he was asking it of himself, aloud.

Ananda, eavesdropping, volunteered: “If you need it, take it.” Horror, murder, like poetry, were addictions; they were meant to numb and enchant simultaneously—to insidiously engender the desire they satisfied. It depended on how much you could get by with—or without—in a day.

“I have one I'm midway through,” said his uncle, visibly doing some mental arithmetic. “It should last me three—no, maybe four—days.” He was looking for reassurance about his chances of survival.

“Then you'll be fine,” said Ananda, trying desperately to extricate
Skeleton Crew
from his uncle's grip. “You're in no desperate rush to get it.”

They were pointed to the city. Not the
City
, where his uncle used to work. No, towards London. Of course, King's Cross was on the very verge of the capital-see City; but it was its utter opposite. No money seemed to reach it.

They had, in October, embarked on the 168 from Belsize Park, reaching Euston—from there, his uncle holding forth, walked till they were in York Way. Here, they woke to sunlit industrial blankness. This was neither Belsize Park nor Oxford Street. What then? They hit upon a notion—they were in “Dickens's London.” “You can feel it's still there,” Ananda observed tersely.

They now came to the abattoir-like entrance of Belsize Park tube station. The rush of souls was swelling, given it was Friday. But there were still fewer people going in the direction they were compared
to the first lot of homecomers. The revellers headed for Leicester Square and Oxford Circus would increase in an hour.

Ananda plunged his hand into his pocket to take out the travel card valid till midnight. His uncle carried, in a flap in his wallet, his pensioner's travel pass, which gave him infinite freedom to avail himself of both spheres of London public transport—underworld and overground.

The shorn head on the pass was strangely futuristic.

“Never get your photo taken in a booth,” said his uncle. “You'll look darker than you really are. It's because the booth cameras are adjusted to make white skin look normal.”

On descending, they were greeted by “Morden via King's Cross 5 mins”: a relief. On the tube, his uncle pointed out, “Pupu—we could have seen a film.” But they had—last week. Ananda's mother had flown away, and they, returning from Heathrow to a London that seemed dream-like, had gone to the cinema. In the Leicester Square Odeon, their bodies clenching with each explosion and blow, they watched
A View to a Kill
. It was an irony that they both adored Sean Connery but had never watched him in a cinema in unison. The first Bond film they'd seen together—also Ananda's first Bond movie ever—was a Roger Moore,
Live and Let Die
. They'd caught it in Swiss Cottage in 1973. Last week, witnessing again with concern Roger Moore get into all sorts of scrapes but surviving them to brush the dust off his jacket and straighten his tie, Ananda's uncle had leaned towards him and murmured: “Pupu, what would
we
do in such a situation? We'd be hopeless!” Despite Ananda's uncle setting up a somewhat presumptuous equivalence between them, it was true. They weren't designed for action. Actually, neither was good with even ordinary mechanical things. Ananda was sure this was why his uncle shunned the debit card. The most complex operation Ananda himself had completed was changing a light
bulb (in his studio flat, but also for Mandy). Ananda wasn't sure if his uncle's ineptitude had anything to do with Saturn. “Shani”—Saturn—“rules my life,” his uncle had told him, to account for the lack of momentum in his professional career. Ananda had read that people governed by Saturn were, besides being ditherers, great fumblers.

King's Cross was a paradoxical place at 6 p.m.: swarming with commuters, and lonely. Ignoring the rush, a bunch of people seemed to stand outside the station just waiting, smoking, kissing, or staring at the Pentonville Road.

“What are we doing here?” asked Ananda, raising his eyebrows.

“But it was very interesting when we came last!”

That was in the autumn, when the Durga Pujas were exiled from Hampstead to the Camden Town Hall—which was just out of sight of King's Cross Station. Harrumphing Bengalis with their slow-footed wives had suddenly appeared. They too—Ananda's mother, his uncle, he—had come, having heard of the move. They'd crossed at the traffic lights, not certain where, in the by-lanes, the venue was. His mother wasn't capable of long walks. It was Saptami, which, despite its meaning—“the seventh day”—was the start of festivities.

“Hello love, how are you?” A tall ungainly woman in a top revealing round white shoulders had been passing up and down, preoccupied, a cigarette in her cupped palm. Suddenly friendly with his uncle. Who seemed neither interested nor harried; he whispered to Ananda in that candid baritone: “Be careful, there are many of them here.” Ananda felt affronted she hadn't addressed him. She'd looked through Ananda. What made his uncle worthy of the approach? He wondered what the rate was.

Difficult, this evening (it was getting on to half past six) to feel that Puja magic or, for that matter, the atmosphere of “Dickens's London.” Turning into York Way, they found it hard to proceed. The pavement was thick with office workers waiting for buses.

They turned back to the station. The woman in the black top still hadn't found a man; she'd forgotten them, and hovered before the main entrance, purposeful and preoccupied.

“Let's go,” said Ananda.

“Yes, we can walk to Euston—to Ambala Sweets,” said his uncle.

“To Ambala Sweets now?”

“Yes, to get a few things. Their samosas are tremendous.”

But Ananda wasn't passionate about samosas. As for sweets—he hadn't inherited the overpowering sweet tooth gene from his uncle or his mother. In fact, Indian sweets in England invariably disappointed him—they had a vital ingredient missing: it might well be the ghee that lacked flavour. He knew what lay behind the plan. His uncle was gearing up to visit Warren Street—and he couldn't return (every visit to the studio flat, given it was occupied by family, by Ananda and sometimes Khuku, was for his uncle a homecoming) except bearing gifts. Even when he was a young man (Khuku had told Ananda), he was repeatedly, almost inadvertently, generous, and never came back to Sylhet from a trip without a sari. She
used to be touched by this to the core because apparently there was no one else in the family aware that she'd become a young woman. That's why, now, in London—in spite of the fights they had—she'd forget his idiotic insults with infuriating rapidity.

The reason he came loaded with gifts was complicated. When Ananda came to London with his parents in 1983 to start at university, his uncle was in his “I'm a no-good vagabond; Satish is the managing director” mode; so, whenever they ate out in the first two weeks of term,
there
would be Radhesh, tagging along as he did in the fifties, when he was impecunious and a satellite of the two. Freeloading daily into the small reserves of pounds sterling Ananda's father had kept aside for his son's upkeep. Unable to confront her brother, Khuku had confided in Basanta, a family friend who lived in Pinner. “What do we do with Dada?” Basanta breached the confidence and had a word with Radhesh. So Radhesh reached Warren Street that evening fuming, carrying two bags of groceries. “You think
I
want your company?” he'd said to his shocked audience. “I don't need you at all! I visit you because
you
need
my
company.”

With some firefighting, that episode needed no further mentioning. But his uncle mostly visited carrying something. Usually stuff he'd long wanted to eat and hadn't had a chance to and would once he was hungry. Or even a packet of chicken liver he'd encourage Khuku to cook at once. Or, in her absence, samosas. Too many of them.

They went down the Euston Road—one of those stretches that was made for neither man nor animal, just the passing car. If there had been a spell of rain, it would have felt doubly inhospitable, but even on a summer's day that showed no sign of ending the road wasn't welcoming.

“Spare change please.”

Norman Tebbit's father: never did he presumably beg. He got on his bike and scoured the town for work. Luckily he didn't lose the bike, like the man in the Italian movie. This young man now, absorbing the sunshine, had thrown his words out on an off-chance. He wasn't terribly interested in the response. His uncle stopped, saying: “One minute.” He turned, and, with slow strides, wove back. Stooping, he gave the man something. Shuffling back unhurriedly, he rejoined Ananda.

“How much?”

“Sorry?”

“How much did you give?” asked Ananda, as to a delinquent who erred recurrently.

“Oh nothing.” He ducked his head slightly. “A pound.”

Ananda shook his head in resignation.

Yet his uncle looked put out; annoyed, even.

“He didn't say anything. Not even a Thank You. There was a time when beggars said God bless.”

So that's what it was! Too bad. But hadn't Jesus said (for his uncle admired and even identified with him; he'd once revealed to Ananda, at once tongue-in-cheek and completely without irony, “I am Jesus Christ”)—hadn't he said, “When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you”? When Ananda had read this, he'd thought of his uncle—how he hungered deeply for his virtues to be recognised, and how too he led a life indifferent to approbation. Ananda had also been impressed by Jesus's clarity. Christ was more than a populist preacher of love. That was clear from the retort: “Render unto Caesar”—or was it Thatcher—“the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.”

But wasn't his uncle human and shrewd, and wouldn't his left hand be entitled to a degree of awareness of what the right hand was up to? Wasn't it expected—especially in one so solitary—that he might be often assigning value to his own actions? Who knows—maybe it wasn't enough for him for God alone to know of his small acts of empathy.

Past Euston Station they were, without much forewarning, at the sweet shop entrance; inside, a bunch of Indians flocked at the counter, abiding by no queue. The room held a strong suggestion of
kesar
.

On the tray in Rangamama's line of vision, flanked by neat diamond-shaped stacks of barfi on the left and some member of the great gulab jamun family on the right, and above another tray on the lower tier of pallid attempts at Bombay halwa, were exorbitant saffron-coloured laddoos. Motichur ladoo, a label said. My ass, thought Ananda. From Wembley, most likely.

“Pupu, look at those magnificent laddoos!
Durdanto
!”

Ananda had an inkling of doom that these were now destined to come his way, to be added to his kitchen paraphernalia.

“Should we get some of these?”

Since they were, in theory, intended for him, Ananda felt free to half-heartedly fend them off. “Don't. They're fakes. They'll be nothing like the original.” It was the tragedy of London—to eat Indian food outside of the “curry” and to constantly discover the unfamiliar in the familiar: dosas that looked like but didn't taste like dosas, bhelpuri that resembled bhelpuri but was something else. Not that he cared for the mythology of the laddoo. He had no idea why they were distributed jubilantly at North Indian celebrations. They were
more a metaphor, a conceit, rather than a viable sweet. Their prestige had no explanation.

“Pupu
he
, I think you're wrong—I think we should try them. We have gulab jamun all the time.” He wanted them. He'd probably never tasted a real laddoo in his life. After all, he'd never been to Delhi or Lucknow—he'd come to London straight after his youth in Shillong. He looked on with contained longing as six were arranged in a box: over-rich, oily orbs, flecked with pistachio. From his jacket pocket he took out an exactly folded Budgens bag and slipped the box in. He slid the bag across a wrist. Hand gloved in his right-hand pocket, the bag swinging imperceptibly, they made for Warren Street.