Odysseus Abroad (5 page)

Ananda had never seen or heard her budgies; it was the first he'd become aware of the birds. He'd never seen the inside of her flat except once, when she'd knocked on his door and nonchalantly asked him to help her change a light bulb. There was an erotic charge running beneath the way they chafed and got on each other's nerves—or was he imagining it? It had seemed, as she spectated upon him climbing a chair and reaching for the ceiling (again, in his pyjamas), that she was capable of dealing with the light bulb herself. But he was very proper and a little cowardly too—he barely glanced at her after he'd fixed the bulb and made for the door. Another time he did glance at her, when she'd kept her door ajar and, half stepping out of the bathroom, partly wet but in her bra and panties, shouted over the doorbell: “Can you see who it is, please? I think there's a package for me.” And he'd noticed the diaphanous curve of the brassiere, and how palely luminous her stomach was, and also the faintest smile on her lips, because she'd noticed him noticing.

She'd had her revenge for their constant tit for tat once the payphone incident occurred—that night when the Patels and Cynthia's incongruously studious-looking brother Rahul had dislodged the BT coin box from the landing between the first and second floors and taken it to the attic, breathing heavily with exertion and laughter. Ananda had heard it all—it must have been past 1 a.m.—the rushed activity, the transitory out-of-place jingling; but he didn't know what to think of it. Next morning, he saw the discoloured blank space where the coin box was. Walia arrived, hovered around Mandy's door, and questioned her about what happened. Ananda, dully listening from upstairs, heard her say: “I think it was Ananda.” He was overcome: less disturbed than wounded—and, most importantly, made intensely and doubly to feel a foreigner. Every fibre of his being said, “What am I doing here? This is not my home,” though no words formed in his head. He heard Walia dismiss the accusation in a bland matter-of-fact way: “No, no, it wouldn't be
him
, it must be the
boys upstairs.” And Ananda felt the sense of vindication that only an eavesdropper and exile might feel, that a man he hardly knew, Walia, should still know him well enough to have made up his mind about him. When he related this conversation to his uncle later, he saw him pass, in a wave, through the same emotions, from disbelief to shock to a kind of scandalised but grateful relief. “Well, at least he has enough up there to know you'd never do something like that,” he muttered. Ananda was surprised that his uncle had this faith in him—he'd never let on earlier (Ananda knew his uncle cared for him, but he had no idea what he
thought
of him), probably because they were frequently bickering over the subject of relatives or literature, and also because what most interested his uncle was himself.

Shall I compare thee

Shall I compare thee to

Although the lines were incomplete, they kept ending on a question mark. He felt his inner voice rising docilely at the end. Confronting the day in Warren Street with the mug of tea in one hand, a breeze beneath the now one-quarter-raised window flicking his weightless kurta ends, he reflected again—as he had only recently—on the beauty and particularity of the word “summer.” It wasn't a word that had previously interested him. In India, it was a dead word, spoken almost without reference to its meaning, and all its mutations and locations—“summery,” “a midsummer night's dream”—were ready clichés that locked up experience. What summer itself was in India, or in its different regions, was still untapped, unaddressed in this colonial language. Only after coming to England had he discovered the beauty of the word. On reading the poem itself in Bombay in his school textbook, he'd decided it was stupid; silly, even. And
who, in India, would compare someone to a summer's day—except to insult the addressee? A near-imbecilic line.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

But, no; it was beautiful. He'd reread the sonnet, for his preparations for the Renaissance paper, and then, after reacting against it through its earlier associations, read it once again, allowing himself to understand it. The lines had begun to repeat themselves in his head, like a jingle in a commercial. The poet—what was he up to? He'd meant to extol his beloved—not by saying she was as good as a summer's day, but better! Letting the wooden frame nestle his chin, Ananda daydreamed, studying Tandoor Mahal and its curtains.

Thou art more lovely and more temperate
.

More
lovely,
more
temperate! So the poet was dissing the summer's day, then, in order to praise his beloved. Yet what apposite terms for this summer, as a season, or in its incarnation as a single day: “lovely,” with its suggestion of innocence and newborn qualities; “temperate,” indicating calm, modesty, and fortuitously echoing “temporal,” with its hint of the short-lived. “Lovely” carried in it the sense of the short-lived too; the loveliness of “lovely” was contingent on it not being eternal. And so the summer's day was transient in comparison to the poet's beloved, who'd continue to prosper and grow to “eternal lines” in the effing sonnet. To emphasise this, Shakespeare must diss the English spring and summer in the third and fourth lines again:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date
.

It was the fragility and the undependability of the English summer that Shakespeare was drawing the reader's attention to—hoping, thereby, that the contrast would aggrandise his lover's qualities. But, for Ananda, it was summer—by being contingent—that came to brief life on his rediscovery of the poem in London, and not the beloved, immobile and fixed in eternity; because the imagination is drawn—not by sympathy, but some perverse definition of delight—to the fragile, the animated, and the short-lived. In this unlikely manner, the near-imbecilic sonnet had been returning to him in the last four days.

A butterfly had settled on the upper window. It had closed its wings, simulating a leaf, or engendering a geometric angle, perfect as a shadow, but was now wavering and bending to one side—not out of any obedience to the breeze, but according to a whim. Almost nothing—but for this pane with faint blotches of mildew—separated it in its world outside (Warren Street) from the studio flat within, from where Ananda measured it, intrigued. All insects made him apprehensive. Where had this rarity come from? The principal danger of summer, he'd found, were bees. Almost every day one came in without invitation. He had to pretend he was unmoved by its floating, persistent exploration of the room, until, unable to cohabit with it an instant longer, his nerves already on edge, he'd have to, with an almost superhuman effort, quickly push the window up halfway, causing the house to tremble to its foundations, and then rally to chase it out with something appropriate—usually a copy of the
Times
or the
Times Literary Supplement
. The comedy and even the undeniable magic of that chase became clear
to him the moment the bee had escaped, the room was empty but for him, and—like someone in a storm—he grappled with lowering the window again.

He saw now, suddenly, that the butterfly was gone—the street's voyager; undertaking short, unsteady bursts of flight past Walia's flats.

Stupidly, he'd set up a meeting with Nestor Davidson for midday. Some resistant part of him would rather have lolled about—masturbating occasionally, perhaps, though his penis was sore; or dipping into the
Oxford Companion to Modern British Literature
, to spy, once more, on cherished lines and phrases (most of them these days by Edward Thomas), to check if they still existed and possessed the same shock of surprise; or watching, agog, children's TV—
Postman Pat
, whose English village of workaday encounters and visits was so much more preferable to the turbulent life of Noddy that Ananda had come to know as a child; then there was the man he's begun to like even better—Mr. Benn.

These children's stories were where craft and observation lay; qualities abnegated by the grown-up shows. Ananda loved the way Postman Pat's van appeared, like a private revelation, muffled yet exact, a speck of red on the hill, moving, disappearing, until it appeared again, closer this time. He was oddly touched by this trickery, the vanishing and reappearance. Mr. Benn vanished too. A
cheery man in a black suit and bowler hat, who, each day, escaped life's tedium by going into a tailor's shop and slipping into another universe through a mirror in the fitting room. Ananda envied the enclosedness of that fitting room. Where better to lose yourself? There was a naivety and melancholy about Mr. Benn that struck a chord with Ananda, but also reminded him of the sort of unmoored bachelor whom he, despite himself, was drawn to—his uncle, for example. The animation was rudimentary, and, instead of Mr. Benn talking, you had a remarkably reassuring, paternal voice-over—that spoke only to
you
. Paucity of means and of technology
—that
was it; that was what brought to these programmes their peculiar but unmissable artistry. Ananda saw that. Art was not only about not saying everything; it was about not being
able
to say everything. Thus Chaplin's films—dependent as they were on dance and choreography—were superior to so many instances of the talkies, including Chaplin's own work, given the talkies had the dubious advantage of speech and storytelling. As things became easier to tell, they became plainer, more transparent, boring even. Art was synonymous with impediment.

But no Mr. Benn today! He must see Mr. Davidson instead. (He couldn't persuade himself to call him “Nestor”—though all students addressed their teachers by their first names—not just because of the oddity of the name, but his prissy sense of formality, his Hindu—he was no practising Hindu—distaste of contact: the Mr. and Ms. So and So he used was not only a mode of deference, but a mawkish reassurance: “I won't be presumptuous. We'll keep our distance.”) It had to be Mr. because Nestor Davidson was neither Dr.—he had a BA from London University—nor Professor: he was, in fact, a Reader. So the Mr., democratic, anonymous, and
somehow, in its two humdrum syllables, quintessentially English, had to suffice. It would do.

His first two years—at university and out of it—had been painful. Firstly, there was the civilisation itself, with its language—a language only secondarily his—its zebra crossings, where cars slowed down and waited, pulsating, its assortment of tea bags and cheese and pickle sandwiches, its dry, clipped way of speaking. He felt terribly excluded. Or chose to be excluded; it gave his drift and insignificance meaning in his own eyes. The students in the college—they filled him with nervousness and distrust because of their pink complexions and blue eyes, their easy taking for granted of each other: an American accent, overheard, for some reason brought him momentary lightness. In this way, he'd curtailed his visits to the college till, by the middle of the first year, he wasn't attending a single lecture. He only appeared for his tutorials. During one of these, his tutor, a beautiful young woman called Hilary Burton, broached the subject of his meagre interface with college life: “Mrs. Bailey, the Anglo-Saxon tutor, says you've stopped going to her seminar.” It was the first sign that his irregularities—the liberties he'd taken in a smooth, self-governing institution that had no knowledge of him—had been noted. “I told her you haven't been well; that you've been getting migraines,” said Dr. Burton, appraising his collar, eyes downcast, neutral but sympathetic. “I know what they're like”—lowering her soft voice to a minuscule register—“I get them too.” He was vulnerable to headaches (he must have mentioned this to her some time) as he was plagued by hyperacidity. The two could be linked in an ecological chain. Migraines arose from, among other things, lack of sleep; hyperacidity on some nights destroyed rest; and Migraleve—which he kept at only a marginally less accessible
spot than Double Action Rennie—could, if he wasn't mindful, create hyperacidity. At least a few of his ailments were siblings, and now and then they chose to unite against him. Still, the consequence of Dr. Burton's words—a complaint relayed, but shared like a confidence—was that Ananda went to the remaining four of Mrs. Bailey's seminars, before giving up on Anglo-Saxon when it became a non-compulsory option in the second year. And so he was introduced to this primitive tongue, which had letters—like the malformed p—that had no equivalent or peer in modern English, a tongue used by proselytisers and, after the Norman Conquest, by servants. It had a claustrophobic air—not just of an island-language, but of a further retreat from the world. How remote it was from the worldly, aerated domains of Sanskrit, Persian, and Greek! It was hidden. Yet there was more to it than translated passages from the Bible (one or the other of the parables of the New Testament that were the seminar's staple) which concluded inevitably with a gruff threat: that those who didn't adhere to God's ways would be “cast into the outer darkness with much gnashing of teeth.” No, there was more to the study of Anglo-Saxon than this scary outer darkness and the dull acoustics of teeth-gnashing: such as “The Dream of the Rood,” with its flaring cross, burning through time, and its warrior-Christ, more a hero than a blonde prophet. Poring over these texts gave to Ananda his first inkling that medieval England was different from what he'd glimpsed of it in movies: that the Christians here used to be stranger than any conjecture of them suggested. And, despite it being so long, the language ugly and resistant, the words heaped like debris, he was gripped by “The Battle of Maldon,” and even asked Mrs. Bailey, “Is Byrhtnoth, then, a Christian martyr or tragic hero?”—a mouthful, that name—and the pretty girl whose name he still didn't know (he was so deprived of sex—disabled through shyness and race-consciousness—so
lonely!) glanced up at him with a flicker of curiosity, and Mrs. Bailey said, “That's an interesting question.” That, then, was the crowning glory of his first year—barely noticed by anyone but Mrs. Bailey and (possibly) the pretty girl.