Odysseus Abroad (4 page)

He stirred the milk in the mug, till, turning from clear but dark to pale brown and neutrally uniform, the water had become tea-like, the spoon negotiating the vortex it had set in motion by constantly evading, and sometimes colliding into, the submerged leviathan tea bag. Then he'd retrieved it from the pool on to his spoon, at once swollen and unresistant, dead but still smoking, an incredibly ugly thing. Unable to look at it, he tossed it into the bin.

His uncle was renowned as a world-conqueror. He'd heard the story time and time again, not least from his uncle. But the story would have no charge, no electricity, if those world-conquering qualities had never been in question. And it was that element of doubt and failure that was, as a result, highlighted in the recountings.

In fact, back home in India, even those who benefited from his uncle's monthly or quarterly handouts, and hadn't seen him in decades, recalled him with a smile in a mildly uncomplimentary way—thinking of the boy, with all his oddities, in Sylhet, and the young man in Shillong, where, just after Independence and Partition, he'd become a used-car salesman despite all his brilliance in school.

By then, 1955, Ananda's father was in London, pursuing without focus his Chartered Accountancy qualifications, while his best friend sold cars in Shillong. Then the friend became his brother-in-law. For Uma travelled across the seas—in an aircraft—and joined Ananda's father Satish (to whom she'd been betrothed
before he left Calcutta). This journey—counting the interminable waiting on Uma's part, the six years of not knowing whether or not it would happen, making her a kind of paragon of and authority on waiting—had been so long in the preparation that when it took place other things quickly followed: the wedding on a sunny August day in London, where Uma (or, to everyone, Khuku) was married to Satish in the presence of her younger brother Benoy, who was en route to Germany to train as an engineer. The priest was an exceptionally fair-skinned Punjabi whose Sanskrit sounded intimidatingly convincing and who was in London to study medicine. Most of this Ananda knew several times over (one doesn't go to the epic—Brecht had putatively said—to learn the story, but for the pleasure of hearing it again), from his mother's joyous repetition of the details, and her persistent weaving and shuttling of the mundane loom of memory. The fair-skinned priest, however, was a new element in the tale; he'd only heard about him two months ago.

So hardly any detail in that narrative could surprise Ananda any more, and yet—as was the case two months ago—he was often surprised. The things he hadn't known his mother let slip by accident—for example, the fact that it had been a blazing summer that year in England. He knew, of course, the date of the wedding, and annually, in Bombay, there was an anniversary party when friends came home for dinner—8th August!—“What will you give me on 8th August?”—said she to his father, half-jokingly but with an innocent doggedness a few days prior to the event. And, though Ananda knew that they'd been married in England, he inevitably thought, by default, of 8th August in relationship to Bombay, and only recently did he see and imagine it more clearly—that, for them, the day's history was forever located
here
. Realisation had come a few weeks ago, when his mother was still visiting him. The two of
them had left Warren Street behind and were walking past Euston Square, when she pointed to the building of the Hindu Association where they were married, and said, “Strange, I remember it being much bigger!” Ananda glanced at the landmark. “Such a bright, dazzling day!” she said. “And it went on like that after I'd arrived, on and on, the darkness never seeming to come. People told me when I left Shillong, Be prepared for the rain, don't be disheartened by the gloom. That first summer, I had no idea what they meant!”

It took her a year, she said to Ananda, to get his father on the rails again. He'd been adrift, distracted after his articleship by politics, poring over M. N. Roy, the “radical humanist,” going to listen to Rajani Palme Dutt speak at the Majlis, having cups of tea with Bengali Marxists, either not writing his exams or casually failing them when he did. She brought him in line. She, a mere matriculate in the third division, who'd never been to college, cast among women who'd either learnt dance and music at Santiniketan or were from Calcutta—she saw her husband's future lay in her hands. And so her arrival into London was primarily to salvage and rescue. Ananda knew well she had these capacities. His mother, with whom he only quarrelled as a child, resenting her disciplinarian rages, her angry, too-large, flashing eyes, he'd begun to see—since he was sixteen—carried irreducible strength. At five foot one and a half inches, at once a diminutive, round-nosed busybody and the closest he'd known to the goddesses of myth. Wasn't he, in his recent doting upon her, being fanciful? Of course he was—he knew that.

Even when she'd arrived here in 1955, unable to speak perfect English, noticeably little, it became clear she was a force and that
she could command respect—maybe even intimidate. Implausibly, she got a job at the Naval Advisory Department in the Indian High Commission at Aldwych. At the interview, she made it a point to answer the questions her husband had coached her to expect, though those questions weren't asked. She settled into employment, which involved an irregular sending out of memos to and receiving them from various commanders of the Indian navy. The High Commission had been seized by a “reorganisation,” and the result was that, in six months, at the end of the reorganisation—a word whose significance she grasped slightly, but whose melee she was happy to be part of—she was drawing a handsome salary of fifty-eight pounds a month, enough to look after Satish's needs and hers, and give him time to devote himself entirely to the shrine of accountancy.

She sat at her desk in India House, comfortably negligent of office friendships, openly disdainful of the gossip between the Indian women near her, Mrs. Sinha and Mrs. Hussein, forensically perplexed by the conversations Englishwomen had (“So she said…and I said…and then she said…”). She mimicked and relived these “He saids” and “She saids” for her husband. Going to the cinema, they agreed that the English, unlike the melodramatic Indians, were natural actors; but they also noted that this race behaved and spoke in normal circumstances like they were in a film, with a peculiar self-consciousness, as if their gestures and words were being recorded. There didn't appear to be a complete separation between fantasy and social life for the English. Dr. Krishnan, the departmental head, had discovered what an exceptional singer she was, and was willing to overlook her eccentric uninvolvement in office life. “She is an artist, and she is an asset,” he said, meaning it was okay for her to not fit in. He encouraged her to sing at the India Office's public functions—on numerous commemorations
and national days. Not everyone liked this. Miss Watkins, her immediate superior, resented her privileges and chafed at her. Then, one morning, when she'd commanded her: “Uma, bring me that file!” Khuku had lost her calm—as she did periodically—and tossed it towards Miss Watkins's table, saying, “
There's
your file!” (Ananda, hearing this episode recounted, thought how his mother loved to throw things when she was angry. The servants knew it. Her husband knew it.) This was followed by an instant of scandalised undecidedness. Yet Miss Watkins didn't retaliate. In the next few months, she was unflinchingly civil to Khuku. When Dr. Krishnan died suddenly of a heart attack, Khuku was transferred to the consular department on South Audley Street.

Khuku's propensity to battle was innate to her. Besides possessing an inexplicable tendency to be joyous—she could never be sad or angry for long—she'd had an inexplicable conviction from childhood that she was destined for great contentment. She'd never believed she'd live forever either in Sylhet or Shillong; and, with or without the transfer, neither Aldwych nor South Audley Street could hold her. This was part of the hope she conveyed to Ananda: that nothing, including Warren Street, was long-term. Her readiness for battle she had even today. When trouble presented itself, she had to confront it with her oppositional littleness.

When the Patels had moved into the rooms upstairs, Ananda's mother was visiting, and staying with him in the studio flat. After two or three nights, it dawned on them that the Patels would be noisy. Noise invaded the flat from different directions—from below (Mandy's radio) and above. Ananda began to obsess over the Patels' movements. At 11:30 p.m., he found his mother had slipped out irresistibly—it was more in response to his anxiety than to the noise that she'd done this—and gone up the flight of stairs. He followed her in sheepish excitement, remonstrating “Ma! Ma!” unable to pull
her back, till they were in the attic's half-lit converted kitchen, a den in which Vivek Patel and Cynthia and Cynthia's brother Rahul and Shashank were pouring wine into glasses, talking, laughing loudly. Khuku had ambushed them; they were taken by surprise. Though Vivek attempted to refute her in his labile, lisping way, and Cynthia giggled, and Rahul, most disconcertingly of the four, exuded a silent, myopic rage, his mother stood in the eye of Walia's converted kitchen and lectured them. Her message, implicitly—but also forthright, without prevarication—was that her son was doing a “real” degree (unlike them) at a “real” university, he'd embarked on a difficult voyage, his father was paying through his nose, and she—the timeless Indian mother that she was (and more)—would brook no partying as the hour approached midnight. They defiantly invoked the equivalent of their constitutional rights, but in the end they let her be, as if she was mad. Maybe the Patels had become a bit more self-aware about their stomping; only they couldn't
help
making a racket.

She had gone. Eight days ago. Ascended swiftly into the air. Like a bird. Taken that proud national aircraft Air India: nodded to the Maharajah. She was back home with his father.

Unwashed, evacuated, clothed in the night's kurta and pyjamas, he sat on the rug to sing. He was an exile in his home. He frequently expected complaints. He knew the ragas he sang were hopelessly alien to Mandy's ear (she too slept till midday) and foreign even to the boys upstairs. Not one of them (certainly not Ananda) ever saw the sun rise; though maybe the Patels sometimes went to bed when it was just coming up. Now Ananda made a clarion call to the
day with the raga Bhairav (though it was already nine thirty). He hardly let a morning pass without practising—he was a singer in his own solitude, he was his own audience and his notes needed to sound perfect to himself. Without practising his voice would falter. He sat cross-legged on the rug—all rugs in London houses were the same—with the tanpura on his lap: it was no bigger than a ukelele, made by a septuagenarian, Ambalal Sitari. The old man received visitors in a room in Breach Candy—Ananda's music teacher had taken him there and cajoled the old man to part with the portable tanpura: “He will be in London soon, and he is dedicated: he practises every day—in fact, I have to tell him not to practise so much!” The strings didn't speak; they had a flat sound, however much Ananda manipulated the threads at the lower end—the tanpura wouldn't drone, and was barely audible even in the studio flat's deep quiet, but he kept worrying it, nestling the instrument. Ambalal Sitari's experiment hadn't come off. The wood, which should have become a living thing, remained, stubbornly, wood; the strings were muted.

He sang: he'd trained himself to be thick-skinned. It was a quarter to ten—it was
their
problem if they went to bed late, then slept slothfully into the hours when people were at work. They
couldn't
expect midnight-stillness at this time. He sang delicately; singing was his mode, in his student's life of subterfuge and anonymity (he hardly ever went to lectures and only a handful of professors knew him), of being battle-ready, in constant preparedness. It was a battle—this struggle to master Bhairav—almost without a cause or end. Twenty minutes into the exposition, there was a stirring above. The movement of a beast: a first random thump then silence, then—making Ananda uneasy—another thump. It was the alienness of the melody
that intruded on their drunken sleep. “Karma Chameleon” would have just lulled them, late in the morning, to sounder sleep.

No, Mandy was definitely up. She'd just cleared her throat; a female throat-clearing, melodious—but threatening. He and Mandy had a sort of duet going—of noises, of complaints. The first time was soon after he'd moved into the flat; term had begun, his parents were still staying with him before they flew back. It was early October, warm, and the window was three or four inches open, allowing in footfall, snatches of song, a shout from near the tube. Then there was an intrusion of another kind, of atmospheric noise as he lay back, head on the plump pillow. A hubbub with a wash of background music, as if he were, without warning, in the centre of a metropolis, roaming in the town square. He must have dreamed this, sound and image mixing with one another as he dozed off. But no, on second thought, he was awake and conscious of floating above the crowded hubbub. Ah, a party! In the flat downstairs! He couldn't believe he was privy to this bonhomie. He asked his mother, unconvinced he wasn't dreaming: “Can you hear it?”

After midnight, not bothering to change out of his pyjamas, he went down, knocked on Mandy's door, and—sensing fleetingly the figures in the background—told her he couldn't sleep.

Mandy was in her twenties. Sometimes she looked older, as if she might be in her early thirties. She kept uncertain hours. She'd come home at three in the morning, shut the door with a bang, turn on cheery music. She told him that she did her aerobic exercises at that hour. She'd shared this information when he'd pointed out to her indignantly: “Mandy—what about you?—must you, must you play
that music at half past three or four in the morning?” His question was meant to counter hers: “Must you sing in the morning? It drives me crazy! It's like Chinese torture.” “I
have
to practise at half past nine,” he'd said. “Besides, it's well after the day has begun.” “I know, but I come home very late—I work at a bar twice a week.” “I'm sorry, Mandy,” he'd said, attempting to shrug. “I do have to practise.” On some days, she worked as a temp—probably a receptionist. She went out in the morning with the music playing all day—low, but continual, inoffensive, except that it was bubblegum pop. He queried her about why it was necessary for the music to play in an empty flat, and she told him it wasn't empty; the music was for her budgies, so they wouldn't be frightened or alone.