Odysseus Abroad (9 page)

“Getting a First's quite tough, isn't it?”

He had no academic ambitions. He wanted to do well—his marks at school had, when they'd peaked, been mediocre—mainly in order to continue in England and devote himself to his quest, of becoming a world-famous poet. It was a matter of strategising; Mr. Davidson's looking askance at his poems hadn't dampened him. The encouraging verdict on the tutorial essays had emboldened Ananda, and made him begin to dream.

“Yes, but it can be done,” said Mr. Davidson with a set look, as if he were experiencing his student's resolve vicariously.

In 1984–85, there had been three Firsts in English, the sort of drought that was by no means atypical. Ananda had gazed at the shrunken list of names hovering above the usual spillage of 2:1's and 2:2's on the noticeboard; there was just a single third—a case of frightening, sad uniqueness. Each year, he knew, the Firsts were a meagre precipitation falling from high and coming to a stop no
sooner than it started. The sciences were a fraction more generous; in the hallway of the Engineering Building, Ananda had seen five Firsts on the noticeboard—four of them, admittedly, Chinese.

“But what do you think my chances are?”

He could be child-like with his tutor. Mr. Davidson stared hard at Ananda, as if divining his fortune from his face.

“I think you have a first-class literary sensibility,” said Mr. Davidson. “But you haven't read enough to get a First.” A sudden small burst of sparrow-chatter.

“You've read far more poetry than you have prose. I'd say you've read a great
deal
of poetry.” He made it sound like Ananda had crossed a line that demarcated acceptable behaviour. “But your reading of the novel needs enlarging.”

It was useless to deny this. Ananda loved reading poems. He avoided novels. It was a tacit—not a premeditated—avoidance. He had a restive attention span; his mind drifted when reading long books. The only novels he'd read with true gusto were those trashy thrillers he'd consumed at school. These days he read poems like thrillers. He even took them to the bathroom. Poems of a certain duration, even obscure ones, like Geoffrey Hill's “To the (Supposed) Patron,” he finished in the duration of a single crap. He then reread it, suspended over the submerged stool. He'd emerge from the bathroom in a strange mood, physically unburdened and spiritually, mentally, elevated. Of “serious” novels, he'd only finished
All Quiet on the Western Front
,
A Farewell to Arms
, and the later, almost comical tragedies of Thomas Hardy, in which things went relentlessly wrong, as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Of course—being ambitious—he'd tried his hand at
Ulysses
when he was eighteen, and reached its finale without comprehending it—taking pleasure in hardly any of its features except the giant S, the first alphabet in the book. The S had undoubtedly vibrated with energy, but the book
was a physical burden. He'd put it in the luggage three years ago on a trip to America with his parents, intending to examine it on his travels. A customs man at JFK had asked them to open the suitcases (in case they were smuggling in Indian fruits or sweets, perhaps). “
Ulysses
!” the large bespectacled disbelieving customs man had said. “Are you a student?” Ananda had nodded, though he was in the equivalent of high school. “
I
wouldn't read
Ulysses
unless I was a student!” said the customs man, shutting the suitcase after his glimpse into the tantalising freemasonry of studenthood. A potentially incendiary book then—on the verge of being, but not quite, contraband. And near-unreadable. Ananda had secretly rejoiced at it being discovered in his bag on his entry into America.

“Moll Flanders,”
said Nestor Davidson. “That's the first of six novels I'd recommend you read.”

Ananda prised out a biro and his chequebook from his trouser pocket and guiltily scribbled the title on the back—in the hasty egress from Warren Street, he'd forgotten his notebook at home.

Moll Flanders
! Had he read the Classics Illustrated version? Or was that
Silas Marner
? His spirits sank. So unadulteratedly and classically English!

“And I think you may as well read
Journal of the Plague Year
too—it's
very
interesting.” Ananda inscribed the numeral 2 and added the name in his tiny handwriting to the chequebook's uneven surface. He had a premonition of dullness. Walls of prose.

“Gulliver's Travels.”
What! Was Mr. Davidson sending him back to school as a punishment?
This
he'd definitely encountered in Classics Illustrated, where the comedy of scale had been shrewdly exploited by the artist: the stranded, long-haired body in knickerbockers pinned to the earth—every inch of him—by minute
threads. Beautifully drawn. Ananda's mother used to lovingly call him “Lilliput” when he was a toddler. In Bengali, the word had become a noun referring not to the place but to its people. Must he now go back to this implausible giant?

Reading his mind, Mr. Davidson remarked: “Swift is the best satirist in the English language, a
bit
extreme and mad (look up ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits')”—Ananda paused; then rushed to notate the quotation—“but worth your while I think. I'd add
Jane Eyre
to the list.”

Another children's book! Classic literature was what he'd encountered long ago mostly in the form of a comic book or movie; it belonged to a boy's bygone ephemera. He'd grown up; he belonged to the present; modernist difficulty was his bread and butter. He wanted no more of “stories.” The Emmas and Fannys and Rochesters—they were of a closed English household where he'd never been welcome or at home.

“It's a remarkable novel,” said Mr. Davidson, narrowing his eyes. The First no longer concerned him; he was trying to make Ananda look over his shoulder and notice the dim light shining in the nineteenth century.

“Sons and Lovers,”
he said with finality. At last, a novel that didn't originate in antiquity! Bursting with sex too, from what Ananda had heard.

“That's enough reading. I'd be
very
curious to know your thoughts once you've finished.”

He was going to see his uncle. But he must get something to eat. Senate House was nearby. He decided he wouldn't. The busy dining hall on the top floor—it was far too English. The English were a strange lot: even if they didn't acknowledge your existence, they made you feel on display. How did they manage to do that? Their books advocated the virtues of observation—but they didn't look at you directly. If you sat opposite an English person, you may as well not be there—that was English politeness, or the rules of the culture. It wasn't obliviousness. They did practise the art of looking in secret; on the tube, in the silence of human contiguity, Ananda's eyes had more than once alighted accidentally on the reflection of a co-passenger, and found he was being studied. The eyes had immediately slid away, but he'd been startled that his existence had aroused curiosity. His uncle, with his misshapen racial superiority, often warned him against making eye-contact with skinheads and even punks: “Would you look an animal in the eye? No. Because it thinks it's a challenge.”

He saw his uncle once or twice a week. They got on each other's nerves, but had grown fond of the frisson. He was Ananda's sole friend in London—and Ananda his. “Friend” was right; because his uncle was capable of being neither uncle, nor father, nor brother. He mainly needed a person to have a conversation with—specifically, for someone to be present, listening and nodding, as he talked. When his sister and brother-in-law had returned to India in 1961, the deprivation of such a person in his life had, slowly, changed him. As his basic requirement was an avid companion, he didn't get married, because the distractions of sex and administering a family would leave less time to talk about himself. Deprivation had already turned him—when Ananda visited London in 1973 with his parents—into a hermit in a dressing-gown. The rug and furniture in the first-floor bedsit was covered with a fur-like lining. The pans in the kitchenette sink hadn't been treated to a washing liquid for years. He was cheery to outward purposes, his sideburns signifying the mood of the time, a shipping company high-flyer. When he came to see them in their hotel room on their next visit in 1979, he was bitter. For some reason, he was furious with Ananda's parents. He'd emptied the round coconut
naroo
that Ananda's mother had brought for him from home into the wastepaper basket. They placated him somehow, for the hurt they'd unknowingly caused. Because the person who congenitally seeks companionship—rather than seeking out, say, positions of influence or power—is also, often, a compulsive quarreller. There are hardly any terminal severances in his life, as he can't afford them. His relationships might be defined by discord, but they're also permanent.

Circling back to Warren Street, so he could pay Walia the rent, Ananda crossed at the traffic lights. He still wasn't out of Bloomsbury.
Discovering the college was in the heart of Bloomsbury had once compensated an iota (no more) for his misery in London, and for the fact that he wasn't in Oxford or Cambridge. The entrance exams he'd have had to take for Oxbridge—given his aversion to being quizzed and assessed—decided it for him; and the fact that he'd need to write a Latin paper for Cambridge had made up his mind. But he might still have wavered if his uncle hadn't casually said he'd put him up. Staying with him seemed like a feasible idea at the time. Another reason to be in London. How the two would have fitted into the bedsit was never put to the test. Part of the lore about his uncle had to do with how he'd taken in Bontu, an older cousin of Ananda's, when he was a poor research student at the School of Tropical Medicine. Many were Bontuda's stories about his uncle's and his odd-couple existence—till Bontu got his doctorate and escaped. Maybe some kind of wisdom made his uncle retract his original offer to Ananda. By then Ananda was already aimed for London. He didn't change direction. When he realised at last that he was almost daily in Bloomsbury, he couldn't find it. Whenever he came to college, he thought he'd encounter it without having to actively search for it. The sixties stone building of the Bloomsbury Cinema and the bed and breakfasts with black doors on the outer reaches of Gower Street didn't add up to the place.

Nestor Davidson's rebuttal—his misreading—of his poems was sinking in. He pondered over the remark, “I'm sure you're not as bloodthirsty as this makes you appear,” as he walked towards Charlotte Street, feeling faintly hungry. He was unassailable. The words didn't hurt; they weren't meant to. They were a detail in a small chapter in a larger story whose shape still wasn't clear; but Ananda sensed that glory, in the end, would be his. Walia: he'd promised
he'd give him the cheque this afternoon. The Natwest chequebook was curled double in his pocket, less a financial accessory than an extension of himself.

Down the stretch of Charlotte Street he went—he liked the route, because there was no one else on it, and he felt like he possessed the road—till he came to Grafton Way and turned right. Here was Walia's kingdom. He had two restaurants here. The one on the corner of Grafton Way and Whitfield Street was fancifully called Diwan-i-Khas, the Regal Court, as in the Red Fort, from where the Mughals centuries ago had reigned. In fact, the environs gave off echoes of Mughal imperial history, and, on Tottenham Court Road, a minute away, was the Red Fort itself, Lal Qila, a better-quality restaurant than Walia's: its tandoori quail was fabulous, though you had to take care to extricate the deceptively thin bones in the bird's flesh in case you choked on one. On Whitfield Street was (named after another section of the interminable Red Fort) a second restaurant, Diwan-i-Aam, the Commoners' Court. Ananda had presumed that this was a rejoinder by a rival to Walia, until he found that the dashing Punjabi owned both restaurants. There was a joke among tenants in the buildings Walia owned on Warren Street that, given the steady advance he was making in capturing properties, he'd become “Lord Walia” before long. The little stretch of Whitfield Street between Grafton Way and Warren Street was not, however, salubrious. On one side lay a vacant lot behind which was a shattered building occupied illegally by people from the Caribbean—whose proximity scandalised the wealthier Indian expatriates in Walia's flats. On the opposite side was a neutral Bangladeshi grocer's, and Diwan-i-Aam (through the panes you could see customers submitting to men dressed like Peshawari soldiers),
which marginally enlivened the stretch in the evening. But best was the Jamaican music shop adjoining the vacant lot, on your left if you were directly facing Diwan-i-Khas on Grafton Way. Without explanation or warning, it would sometimes vibrate with music of simple, uncomplicated joy, comprising two or three chords and an agile melody.

Walia was usually to be found in Diwan-i-Khas, the Regal Court; you rarely spotted him in Diwan-i-Aam. Entering, Ananda at once saw him at a table between the doorway and the bar. He was in his mid-fifties, with an air both youthful and authoritative. His sartorial sensibility had been shaped by the seventies. He wore a pale, silken shirt—its sheen achieved a kind of parity with his silver hair—and left the first two or three buttons unfastened, so that you were provided a glimpse of his largely hairless torso—with the exceptional strand of grey—and the curve where his mildly assertive paunch began. Close friends called him Manny: an affectionate contraction of Maninder. Despite his cheesiness, he stood out; he was handsome, in a Punjabi-aquiline way, his flared nostrils giving the impression of a man who had a temper and an instinct for flamboyance.

Ananda had never been a rent-payer before; Walia was his first landlord. He didn't know how to take him. Though it was well disguised—maybe even subconscious—he couldn't banish the feeling that Walia was a subordinate. An intellectual one. What was he but a small-time “Asian” businessman, despite his airs? A man who temporarily had the upper hand. What was “Asian” anyway—an equivocal category, neither British nor Indian, for people who had essentially nowhere to go? The whole notion of Walia's properties
became a bit of a joke then, something he was making up on the hoof. Maybe these prejudices—a set of defences, really, on Ananda's part, against one who exercised power over him—somehow conveyed themselves to Walia, and explained his stiffness.