A Life Apart (10 page)

As if in some backhand acknowledgement of this, Ritwik asks him to play that Brazilian song he loves, the one about sexual success. Gavin obliges, laughingly. As the song comes on, Ritwik asks
him to translate, although he knows the lines, in Gavin’s translation, by heart. He likes to watch Gavin laugh affectionately with his countrymen, or even at their stereotyping.

‘What use do I have of money, friends, fame,’ Gavin laughs and translates, ‘if I do not have sexual success?’

They practically roll around laughing. Ritwik loves the sound of those Brazilian words:
Para quê que eu quero grana, Para quê que eu quero fama sem sucesso sexual
. He likes
the rhythm and the cockstrutting masculinity of the song as well. It would be considered ironic here but he is certain it’s dead serious in Brazil.

‘My country is mad,’ says Gavin. But there is no doubt, either in his mind or in Ritwik’s, that he loves Brazil, loves it with the indulgent love of a parent for a slightly
wayward but basically good child. He belongs to some militant Maoist group in São Paulo and wants to go back there to join in grassroots activism before the next general election. He is
convinced they will win and the thought of imminent election fills him with excitement: he raises his arms and says things like ‘Long live the Revolution’ and wears Castro and Che
Guevara T-shirts. He is a great acolyte of Trotsky and he designed an exhibition poster for the Ruskin School’s annual degree show – a reproduction of his lithograph of Trotsky in his
open grave. It borders on the abstract; the various shades of grey and black just about give the impression of an awkwardly curledup figure – like some sleeping Pompeiian – lying on the
ground, with a stick, or something of that sort, beside it. Gavin explains it’s the ice pick, which was driven into his head by the assassin employed by Stalin to hound him out, even in
furthest Mexico. Apparently, he died saying, ‘Stalin did it.’ Ritwik asks him for a copy of the poster and Blu Tacks it to his wall.

Gavin is a clever art student. He makes things which have such a novelty value for Ritwik that he likes them instantly and thinks they’re the Next Great Thing. This is not difficult, for
Ritwik’s knowledge of twentieth-century art stretches up to Matisse and Picasso, Rothko at a pinch. It is centred exclusively on paintings as well; other forms of representation to him are
jarringly modern. But there is this one nifty thing that Gavin does with empty plastic bottles which extends Ritwik’s horizons in a silent way. He puts photocopies of photographs of people
inside empty plastic or glass bottles, along with bits of rubber band, cloth, miscellaneous found objects, and then covers up the mouth of the bottles with cloth and string. He extends this
principle to boxes and tins with windows cut out in them, shoeboxes with slits that make them look like barred windows. The effect is one of not only looking in, but also of these objects inside
– puppets, statues, photographs – looking out from their confinement on to the free viewer.

Gavin makes one for him with an empty 330 ml bottle of Evian and a picture of a woman’s face. He later explains that the woman is one of many whose sons went missing while Pinochet was in
power. Ritwik keeps it on his mantelpiece, secretly hoping that one day he can sell it for a huge sum when Gavin becomes a big name. He is confident Gavin is going to become a big name, like the
ones Gavin himself thinks are great – Paula Rego, Andrzes Klimowski, and a few others whose names Ritwik doesn’t remember. He hasn’t heard of any of them, his idea of a
contemporary big name is the only name he knows of in the art scene – David Hockney. He doesn’t know anything about Hockney, he has just picked up the name from Jonti, another art
student to whom Gavin introduced him some months ago. Jonti and Ritwik get on well and sometimes the three of them get stoned in Jonti’s room where he talks about David Bowie and Hockney and
charges them £2 at the end of the evening for sharing his dope with them. Gavin always says, ‘God, the English really are a nation of shopkeepers,’ when he comes out of
Jonti’s room.

Meanwhile, Ritwik tries to bone up on all the names in this new world to which Gavin has introduced him. He remembers, with a hot flush of embarrassment, how he had made friends with Gavin by
talking nervously about Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini and Ghirlandaio after overhearing at a meal in hall that he was an art student, as though all it took to lure art students into
friendship was a name or two from his gallery of childhood obsessions. He had culled the names, as a boy of ten, from the
Collins Concise Encyclopaedia
, his first peek into the greater world
outside the horizons of his life in Grange Road; it was a book that became a shield, the talisman against his life at home, the very first stumbling, halting steps to his escape. He had doggedly
chased those names and their works, hunted them down in bad, grainy reproductions on the brittle pages of out of print, cheap imprints in decrepit, poorly stocked libraries in Calcutta; to utter
those names aloud, to hear his own voice articulate them, felt like sacrilege, a breaking of an unimaginable taboo. Gavin, however, knew them and had got excited about having someone to talk to
about the various hand gestures of Mary in the Annunciation. Ritwik had been so grateful that he had had to swallow the several lumps in his throat and rapidly blink his smarting eyes as Gavin had
talked to him about Michael Baxandall. Six months into his friendship with Gavin hasn’t eroded that gratitude. Here, where the past seems more foreign, more unknown to almost everyone, Gavin
is a little oasis in a desert of amnesia. He is convinced this is so because Gavin is Brazilian and engages with Europe in a way only outsiders can do.

He envies Gavin his familiarity with the contours of the world he studies but, above all, he envies Gavin his easy acceptance of Maoism, his left-wing activism. He goes to meetings of the
Socialist Workers’ Party and raises his arm in that characteristic way of his while uttering a joyous ‘Yea’ when Ritwik tells him how, when the Communists came to power in Bengal
in 1979, they changed the names of all Calcutta streets that honoured British viceroys, governor generals and rulers to names of Communist leaders. Curzon Street, Bentinck Street, Ripon Street were
ditched and in their stead there were Lenin Sarani, Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. The sole exception was Theatre Road; it was renamed Shakespeare Sarani because the British Council was on it.

Gavin thinks this wholesale renaming is important. Ritwik tells him how people in Calcutta still keep calling the roads by the names of their erstwhile British overlords; he has never heard
anyone use the name Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. Rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, ordinary people, all stuck to Harrington Street and Dalhousie Square.

‘But, Gavin, it’s all very well to say “People this”, “People that”, but nothing, absolutely fucking NOTHING works in that state,’ Ritwik occasionally
splutters.

‘You can’t have Revolution overnight,’ Gavin says. Ritwik can hear the upper-case ‘R’ in his voice. ‘Besides, while you were having a Communist Revolution in
Bengal, they elected Thatcher here,’ he adds with distaste.

Ritwik knows Thatcher is Bad but does not exactly know why. He asks tentatively, ‘Is it because of the poll tax?’ He has heard that term mentioned before with disgust and anger.

‘I was living in London at the time of the poll tax riots. I tell you, I come from Brazil, and I’ve never seen police brutality on that level anywhere, anywhere before. It was
shocking.’

Ritwik’s images of Thatcher are from recycled newsreel on the neighbours’ television during the week-long mourning after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. He tells Gavin about this.
‘You know, when Indira Gandhi was killed, we had nothing on national television for days on end, except films about her. Documentaries, news footage, films, homage, the works.’ He
slides over the fact that they had all crowded around the television set next door, in Tipshu’s house: he is too ashamed to admit they didn’t own a television. ‘On one of these
newsreels they showed Thatcher and Indira Gandhi chatting, laughing, you know, getting on really well. They always seemed to be together. One of my uncles said, “Look, two women at the top,
they’re friends. It must be so lonely for them. I suppose it’s their mutual loneliness that has made them bond. They both understand how difficult it is.” At that time, that
thought really struck me, this alliance of powerful solitaries. You know, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” sort of thing.’

The library is like a sombre chapel, a dark redbrick edifice with gothicky spires and a huge heavy door, which not only looks but also feels like the door to a castle, all
enormous wood and metal; he has to push against it with his entire body to get it to open. He likes working here: it is cosy, warm and unintimidating, not at all like the central library where you
have to wait for more than six hours for the ordered books to arrive and when you go up to the members of staff after the scheduled wait, they sometimes tell you things like, ‘Sorry we
couldn’t find it, it’s missing, and we have no idea when it will turn up.’ Or, ‘The book fell off the trolley and its spine was crushed under the wheels; it’s gone to
the binders, it’ll be six months before we get it back.’

But here, he can see the books on their shelves, go up to them, pull them out, browse, let his attention wander to other books far removed from his subject. At the table next to his, the
historian with round glasses, red hair and the area around his nose and eyes marked by a populous colony of freckles has left a pile of books on Indian history lying around. Instantly curious,
Ritwik reaches out for a volume with an incredible title:
Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the
Zenāna
by a Fanny Parkes, an Englishwoman who travelled around in India in the 1820s and 30s. Ritwik tries to dampen the excitement at this serendipitous find as he flicks through the
pages: entire sections on a visit to a former Queen of Gwalior at a camp in Fatehpur, a chapter on a visit to a Mulka Humanee Begum married to a Colonel James Gardner . . . Here it is, an outsider,
a foreigner, being let in and recording her experiences; he adds the book to his own tottering pile.

He can touch and smell the books in this library, make a precarious tower of a dozen or so of them on his desk and feel secure behind that wall. He can even borrow them and take them back to his
room, arrange them according to size on his small desk or his bookshelves and feel the satisfaction of order and method, order and method.

He reads as if his life depends on this reckless rush of words entering him in a torrent; words of different tongues, of other times and alien places all now gone, words which force their own
spaces inside him so they can rush in to fill them up.

He reads about a mother who stands under a tree and tells passers-by to look at her for there is no sorrow greater than hers: her son has been nailed through to a tree. He reads of how this son
came to her, to be conceived, as still as the April dew that falls on grass and flowers. On another page, the son enters her as the all-comprehending light through a stained-glass window. Another
one about a helpless mother crying and watching her son die in a welter of blood and thorns and nail.

He reads about people who are so sleepless with love-longing they have gone mad and driven themselves to the forests where they meet others complaining about their despair in love. There is
always someone standing under a thorn tree, singing as they languish in love’s prison. And he wonders at Jankin, the naughty church officiant who, instead of chanting
Kyrie eleison
,
breaks out cunningly into
Kyrie Alison
, hoping the girl in the congregation is going to show him some mercy.

The strong undertow of his thoughts have pulled him so far away to the pitiful mother that he has trouble making his way back to the shallows again. The poems don’t tell him how she
survives.

T
he days pass in anticipation and apprehension. Most of her possessions are packed in large trunks and boxes. Mahesh will see off the first
consignment to Sealdah station tomorrow morning. She is taking her first class carriage in a week’s time, on the Eastern Bengal Railway, from Sealdah to Kooshtea. Mr Roy Chowdhury will
receive her there himself and arrange for transportation from Kooshtea to Nawabgunj, in all probability in his motor car, but he has written that the rivers are in spate this season, the tracks are
either all flooded or swamped with mud, where wheels will invariably get rutted, so Miss Gilby is really not looking forward to that particular leg of her long journey.

These days she spends mostly saying goodbye to people and things. Yesterday, she had farewell tea with her Bengali teacher, the old Sheikh Maqsood Ali, in his overcrowded, dark house, crammed
with objects, in Collutolla Street. It had been impossible to read the expression in those nearly blind eyes behind their shield of lenses so thick that they looked magnified like an owl’s.
Ali-
miyan
had refused to take back the books which he had lent her in the beginning – ‘Keep them, Miss Gilby, keep them, consider them a humble gift from teacher to student,
something which I hope will remind you of our lessons together’ – books of the Bengali alphabet, elementary reading, sentence construction and writing by an eminent Bengali gentleman,
Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar; Ali-
miyan
had never stopped singing the praises of that ‘great man’. Despite the initial difficulties with such a strange script, Miss Gilby had made
not inconsiderable progress: she could read that bizarre and unpleasant moral tale of a boy who had his ear cut off as punishment for being a liar almost without any halting or help from
Ali-
miyan
. He had been pleased; for Miss Gilby, his joy had been a welcome change from the almost constant state of his surprise at the rare occurrence of a
memsahib
making the effort
to learn an Indian language. Even after three years he still couldn’t believe he had an English lady as one of his private pupils and one who came to his house to take her lessons. It was
rare, it was unconventional, it was daring, and Ali
-miyan
had both savoured and feared it.