Odysseus Abroad (3 page)

Last night, he'd brought home the first of his two customary Chinese dinner options—mixed fried rice and Singapore noodles—from the restaurant on Euston Road. The other side of that road was so still and dark (notwithstanding the sabre-like hiss of passing cars) that it might have been the sea out there for all he knew. By day, an unfriendly glass-fronted building reflected the rays of the English sun; neighbouring it was a post office. Whenever he was in the Chinese restaurant for his fried rice or Singapore noodles in
the evening, it was as if these were a figment of his imaginings—until he'd seen them both the next day when he crossed the road to Euston Square. The restaurant last night had been almost empty, and the staff were as distant as ever and didn't let on that they were familiar by now with him and his order (both the Singapore rice noodles and the fried rice were one pound fifty) and with his timorous aloneness. They hardly made any attempt at conversation; presumably because their vocabulary was so austerely functional. England and its tongue refused to rub off on the staff of London's Chinese restaurants, Ananda had noticed; they continued to be defined by a dour but virginal Chineseness. Their taciturn nature was a kind of solace. Thus, silence characterised the time of waiting during which a man rushed ingredients into a wok, producing a hiss and a piercing galvanising aroma that Ananda relished as he ate in solitude, watching Question Time.

The small amount of money in his wallet meant he had to choose from an exceptionally narrow range of orders; but he didn't mind, because he mostly lacked appetite. The walk from Warren Street to the unexpected moonscape of Euston Road and back again, by when the Patels were stirring in expectation of the night, was so full of loneliness that it couldn't even be softened by self-pity. During the day, he sometimes forgot lunchtime, delaying eating since it was a boring duty, as sleeping and occasionally waking were.
What exactly should I do today? It's going to be my final year
; the hunger came and then passed, it had disappeared even from his memory, he saw it was an entirely dispensable thing he could cast aside with impunity if he ignored its birth pangs, and at half past three he bit into a green apple. For this reason, he'd grown—to his own abetting approval—very thin (poets were seldom plump) and more and more reliant upon Double Action Rennie, the acidity habitually returning to him at night-time with its stabbing pain. Still, none
of these compared, in their undermining, of the stripping of his identity itself. None of the things that defined him—that he was a modern Bengali and Indian, with a cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature; that he wrote in English, and had spoken it much of his life; that he used to be served lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack as a child; that in his early teenage years he'd subsisted on a diet of Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner; that he'd developed a taste for corduroys over jeans recently—almost none of this counted for anything in London, since everyone here spoke English, ate sandwiches, wore jeans or corduroys. In this way, his identity had been taken away from him; and he'd become conscious, in England, of class. Class was what formed you, but didn't travel to other cultures—it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any mother tongue. He'd learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent—class was too.

A sunny day! Again! One end of his white kurta fluttered in the mild breeze that was coming through the crack he'd created by pushing up the window. Almost directly opposite was Tandoor Mahal, with its unprepossessing plastic sign. Its day had begun too, though its real day would start at half past twelve, when the board on the door would be flipped on its back to say Open. He looked at it. Sunlit, like all else in the world. Lace curtains drawn, cheap red curtains tied on the sides with a sash, the menu card showing.

Traffic into the restaurant began before it opened; the owner's two daughters, the older one in her teens, quite pretty but a bit bent, wearing jeans, the younger brother, who must be nine or ten—they'd either linger on the pavement or walk (the older one leading) towards the underground. At random moments of their
choosing, the family went in and out of the restaurant, as if it were an annexe to their house: they lived next door. The children didn't know Ananda; but he knew their father, the round-faced man with big expressive eyes—like Vivekananda's, but sans the penetrating quality—that contained love and life in their gaze; hope, too, since it was possible that business might suddenly pick up. As behoves an owner, he was at all hours of the day in a suit, except he forgot his jacket half the time and so it was the white shirt and grey trousers you mainly saw him in. The principal traffic into the restaurant, it had become clear, comprised the family—though Ananda had never seen the wife—stepping out of the house next door and stepping into Tandoor Mahal. There were very few customers who were tempted to enter the door from Warren Street; there had to be a few who walked in through the Euston Road entrance.

If the place had at least rustled up a decent tandoori chicken, Ananda might have ordered a half chicken and naan sometimes as a takeaway and come back home with it in half a minute rather than rely repeatedly on Chinese mixed fried rice or go to Walia's Diwan-i-Aam for an Indian takeout. He quite liked the scoured and singed flesh of tandoori chicken; his eyes feasted on the red lacquering. But the Tandoor Mahal bird was less than ordinary. He'd gone in there earlier this year with his uncle. By then, the oozing proprietor was somehow aware they were of Sylheti ancestry, and addressed his uncle in that tongue, “Aain, aain,” a dialect his uncle abhorred—almost embracing them in his eagerness. Then, in this familial vein, he'd given them, as fellow Sylhetis, reluctant though they were, a tour of the kitchen in the basement, where the cook's helper, unmotivated and unhurried, was frying poppadum in a pan of frothy, orange oil. It was early evening, they were the only customers, and Ananda's uncle and he were pampered like honoured guests. Sylhetis behaved thus—these people, who'd
single-handedly re-created this menu, this cuisine, and invented these restaurants—they distributed nourishment to the English in general (tandoori tikka masala, tarka daal, vindaloo, poppadums), but to long-sundered kin from their own land (that is, to Hindus) they extended a hand of familiarity and kindness. In their own land, Ananda's uncle and the proprietor Alam's kind had been as strangers are; then they'd contested the referendum, and his uncle, his parents, and their ilk had found themselves outnumbered and had to depart their homes altogether. But here, in these restaurants, that bitterness was forgotten, and the Sylhetis unfailingly gave them—once they discovered his uncle hailed from Bejura in Habiganj district—a chicken jhalfrezi on the house, or unobtrusively omitted the gulab jamun from the bill. Often there'd be an extra mint chocolate on the platter. The old wars were set aside; there was only compassion, transmuted from memory. The Sylhetis were great samaritans—especially to a displaced member of the race who was now without a real home in London; or so Ananda felt, instinctively, in the interiors of these restaurants. Still, the slivers of onion, the popaddum and mango chutney, the chicken tikka that Mr. Alam had served them had—it was undeniable—a stale aftertaste; his uncle and he made the extra effort as they lied to Mr. Alam about the food, but that was their last visit.

He loved light—London had taught him this fact. University had taught him little in comparison; his main education in England was imparted by the day itself, his phases of awkwardness and happiness in its fourteen or fifteen hours, and, as a result, the realisation that he adored light
—and
sound. And by sound it was the street he meant, flowing inside in a shallow current through the crack beneath the raised windowpane.
Not
the muffled bassline that
could be heard from upstairs at midnight, or the Patels' abrupt forays into what must be the kitchen or the bathroom, or even Mandy playing the radio below: he didn't like interiority, or neighbours, they were too close, like the thoughts in his head. Indeed, his uncle had said to him recently when he was complaining again about the Patels: “The noise is in your head. Stop thinking about it.” Yes, that was it: it was thought, self-consciousness, and concentration he hated, because they brought him back to himself, just as the sounds above did; it was his consciousness, himself, he was often keeping a reluctant vigil for. The silence in the studio flat when the window was down, the silence of the library or when he was at home reading, the lecturer's voice in a hall, they all did the same thing too: emphasised the leaden permanence of that proximity—the proximity of this shadowy, indestructible thing, the self. He'd become fully aware of its constant nearness in England. He was married to his consciousness forever and ever. He wanted to escape, to slip away from the “I” surreptitiously, leaving it behind somewhere. And only the street with its sounds and manifold associations, filtering in through the raised window on a summer's day—when but on a summer's day could you raise a pane?—scattered and dispelled his vigil, distracting him.

The kitchen was finally his domain. He went to the bathroom fearlessly, because there was a door with a Yale lock partitioning upstairs from his level, separating the third and second floors, which had earlier, even four months ago, comprised a single flat. The kitchen had then been shared. Savita, who was studying fine art at St. Martin's, and the stocky mathematician Vishal Arora, who went to the same college Ananda did, were in and out of the kitchen next to the room at all times. That was in his first year. And those were his first days in the flat. His mother was staying with him then. He didn't know what he'd do without his mother. She'd habitually defended him, fought battles on his behalf. From being a strict and astringent parent when he was a child, she'd become a strange and close companion and guardian angel. The first skirmish arose from Vishal's misuse of the kitchen. Vishal's tall, stooping, sari-clad mother would visit him every other day and cook him peas masala and rice. Any peas that fell to the floor of the kitchen Vishal kicked with abstracted scrupulousness towards the landing,
and eventually in the direction of Ananda's room. Ananda and Uma (his mother was named after the goddess) had been puzzled to discover shrunken peas on the carpet. “Where did these come from?” he ruminated, inspecting one wonderingly. Then, another day, Vishal left the fridge door ajar and the freezer began to defrost and water trickled down and invaded the kitchen floor. This—later that afternoon—led to much argumentation and an unseemly exchange of accusations. A thought crystallised in Ananda's head even in the midst of the unpleasantness: “So this is how it is for those who live in slums and chawls in Bombay—this is why you hear them shouting in the middle of the night—but worse, of course.” Ananda's mother told Vishal he must wipe the floor clean. Vishal said, “I never did anything. Tell
him
to clean it up,” gesturing with his head to Ananda. The temerity! You could see the astonishment on his mother's face. Her son, brought up to be a prince, with servants to keep him from lifting a finger or performing an unnecessary chore! Would he have to do Vishal's bidding? Then his uncle turned up, full of a glowering resentment towards his mother (he could never quite forgive her for not being his chattel), and began playing the fool. “Do as he says,” he advised solemnly, while they stood undecided before Vishal and his mother, who was there too, supporting her son in her obdurate ghostly way. “Never go into a confrontation. Follow Gandhi. Turn the other cheek.” Ananda had believed his uncle would weigh in. His mother had told him that his uncle could argue brilliantly and persuasively when he chose. He was shocked by this little piece of theatre. He couldn't fathom the man. Still, he must recoup, gather his wits. He'd turned his back on him—skulking nuisance and turncoat, skulking in his macintosh—and opted precisely for confrontation. He challenged Vishal to a fight. Once he'd issued the challenge, he was propelled forward by its ballast in that narrow landing. “Ananda, Ananda!” his
mother cried in fear. His own belly was unsettled by apprehension. “You want a physical fight?” said Vishal with perplexity and relish. “Yeah, a physical fight—and let me warn you that I know karate.” That seemed to calm Vishal at once. He slowed down. “Hey, why do you want to fight?” he asked. That strategic play was the first small step towards establishing suzerainty over the kitchen. Vishal had moved to new accommodation in two weeks. After about nine months, Ananda's father, visiting from Bombay, prevailed upon Walia to erect that door and cordon the kitchen off and to turn his son's room into a small, self-contained studio. The rent leapt up at once. He was now the flat's sovereign, but had no power over the noises his neighbours made.

The kitchen was filled with light. Behind him, framed by the window, were the chimneys of other houses. Natural light in the kitchen was bleak; it stood doing nothing, illuminating the fridge, last night's plate and fork under the tap. It was sunlight inside a prison.

He boiled water and made tea. From the carton's spout, whose edges were congealing into a frosty moustache, a splash of milk spilled on to the shelf; he quelled his momentary but frequent irritation with the carton, with mankind, and the dim-witted forces that governed the universe, and wiped the surface with a strip of kitchen tissue. Today he'd make that journey again—on the Northern Line. To his uncle's house. “House” in a limited sense: it was a bedsit in the basement. But when Ananda thought of the place, it was of the house itself that he thought, 24 Belsize Park, where his uncle had occupied for twenty-one years the first-floor bedsit; then been moved by the Council down below, when a flat in the basement fell vacant and was converted into two bedsits by the Nigerian
landlord Ananda had never seen, and repairs begun (in his uncle's former home) on the crumbling ceiling. He'd heard that his uncle's monthly rent—eighteen pounds fifty—was more or less static since 1961; it was possible the landlord wanted the whole first floor back to rent out as a single flat.