A Life Apart (12 page)

Mrs Cameron exclaims, ‘Oh, look, a feather.’ There’s a childish delight in her voice. She moves her head forward and lets out a puff of breath from lips protruding in an O;
the breath catches the swaying, falling feather and it swerves towards Miss Gilby. But before it can reach Miss Gilby’s blowing range, it loses momentum and starts gravitating downwards
again. Miss Gilby gets up, goes down on her knees and before the feather can reach the chairs, she blows on it very hard.

‘Quick, Violet, quick, blow it up to the level of the table. Go on, lie down and blow it up, up,’ she squeals with urgency.

Mrs Cameron does exactly that – she crouches very low on the floor and, with her neck pointed upward, blows up, moving her head like a cat that has seen a flying insect or bird above
it. She tries several bursts to get the feather right in the current.

‘You’ve got it, you’ve got it,’ Miss Gilby shouts and raises herself up to meet the ascending feather.

‘Maud, Maud, try and raise it higher so we can do it standing up. No, higher, higher,’ Mrs Cameron shouts.

The two women shuffle and parry in an odd, staccato dance while the feather, which gets tossed between them, never seems to lose its light grace.

P
aper covers stone. Stone breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper cuts him, has always done. Not just those occasional cuts when he is
impatiently opening the rare envelope in his pigeon-hole, no, not those. It cuts him into new shapes, new forms, until there is no he anymore, but a cipher, a shadow, dependent on other things for
his very existence. Sometimes while papers and their resident words slip and slide into him, drowning him under so that he can’t take so much life in its burning bright rush inside him, he
casually looks up to catch the face of someone in the window opposite his desk. For the space of something not calibrated in human time, only registered by the sudden sway of his heart towards his
throat, he does not recognize that the unmoored face looking back at him is his own. He is goosepimpled by his own presence, or a deferred version of himself, as if he is not really there. He
chances upon Edmund Spenser’s dedicatory epistle to Lady Carey: ‘Therefore I have determined to give my selfe wholy to you, as quite abandoned from my selfe . . .’ His eyes stop
at
quite abandoned from my selfe
. Yes, this is it; he has found confirmation in another page, in other words, of what happens to him. But there is no he left when he reads. So who is it that
looks at him from the impressionable glass? Words for him are like the sporing rust on metal – they eat away at him until there is only an unidentifiable husk. He has become nothing.

These presences and shadows scare him sometimes. He has taken to sitting with his back firmly pressed to the corner where two walls meet at right angles. He has become like a cat: at least two
sides are covered and nothing can startle him from behind. Whatever encounter there is in store for him will be face to face; he’s prepared for it, ready to look it in the eye.

Look her in the eye if she comes back again.

So far, she hasn’t come back while he has been in his room, but occasionally, when he returns at night, turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open and, leaning forward, quickly
switches on the light with an outstretched arm while still standing outside, he knows she has been in the room. No, nothing has been moved or hidden, nothing has been disturbed. There is no trace,
no evidence, only a gathering together of the air into its normal Brownian motion after it has been sliced through and agitated by a recent presence. It is like water restored to calm after the
ripples generated by a lost stone have died out but the water still remembers. The air in his room sometimes has that quality of remembrance. That’s all. And he’s afraid of that memory
of air.

He doesn’t dare tell anyone about it; he knows they’re going to be polite, commiserating, maybe just embarrassed, averting his eye. He certainly doesn’t want
to confide in Gavin. Lately, he has been getting on Ritwik’s nerves. When he’s alone with Gavin, the deprecatory humour directed at him, the ribbing, they’re quite all right; he
takes them in his stride as part of Gavin’s affection for him. He even enjoys, up to a point, Gavin’s feigned exasperation with him, his attitude of
what are we going to do with a
__________ like you?
The blank term changes: sometimes it’s
rustic peasant, at other times phony, charlatan, unsophisticated yokel, embarrassment
; it all depends on his mood, but
it’s all done in the spirit of fun and friendship.

Maybe.

In public, this takes on a sharper edge. Then, it seems Gavin is intent on pulling him down. Ritwik becomes some sort of a clownfreak for whom Gavin has to apologize even at the same time as
he’s expected to perform for others. It is quite relentless; Gavin doesn’t seem capable of any other mode with him in public. Sometimes it’s funny, this
you must treat Ritwik
with indulgence, he’s a third-world peasant
disclaimer from Gavin. At other times, the sheer unchangingness of it grates on him. Maybe he reads too much into all this because he is touchy
and feels insulted. It could all be ironic, all the time, in which case it would be very trendy and in.

So telling Gavin, even ironically, is out of the question. Besides, what could he say?
Oh, Gavin, by the way, my mother keeps appearing in my room. This hash is really wicked, it steals up on
you slowly. What were you saying about ‘index’ and ‘icon’? He doesn’t want to dent Gavin’s soi disant
role of educator and civilizer. It’s a role that
has taught Ritwik to smoothe over the jagged edges of his own behaviour, to learn to observe, ape and conform.

Gavin is full of contradictions in this way; for all his radical lefty politics, he occasionally jolts Ritwik with a type of old-guard parochialism, such as his firm belief in good breeding. On
the back of some conversation about women – they are never very far from Gavin’s mind – he once said he didn’t see why people objected to arranged marriages: at least one
could make sure then the girl came from a good family. This is a vital thing in Gavin’s book: he sets a high premium on manners, decorum, social niceties, impeccably behaved children. And
he’s very aware of class. There is this girl he fancies, Miriam; she reads English and plays the cello. He tells Ritwik, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have Miriam play the cello
naked?’

Ritwik says, ‘You know, there’s a Buñuel film where a woman plays some Brahms at the piano, nude.’

Gavin’s mind is on other things. ‘That well-bred personality all thrown to the winds . . . the cello between her legs . . . oooff, I can’t bear to think about it,’ he
rhapsodizes, then adds, ‘It would make her poshness
piccante
, you know, the contrast between good behaviour and . . . and . . . shocking, well, shocking . . . WHORISHNESS.’ He
pounces upon the word.

‘How do you know she’s well-bred and all that stuff?’

‘Oh, I know friends of hers. She went to a posh school in posh North London.’

Ritwik is a bit daunted, although this doesn’t last very long for he finds out, in a few months, that Gavin’s use of the word ‘posh’ is a bit loose, that Miriam went to
what they call a bog-standard comprehensive, that she does not come from a posh (even by Gavin’s definition) bit of north London. But then, he thinks, there are two types of people. The
first, his type, is the myopic, narrow sort: they take people exactly as they come – curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t
heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc. No more, no less. There is no other meaning behind these appearances and facts. They mean to him: curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie
shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc.

The second type, to which Gavin belongs, is endowed with a shrewd socio-historical perceptiveness. They meet people and extrapolate a whole complex context from their parents’ marital
status, parents’ jobs, area of residence, school attended, etc etc. By themselves those elements are nothing but indices to further extrapolation. So Gavin tells him how Highgate and Mitcham
lead to further, different meanings. By itself Highgate, or Mitcham, signifies nothing. It’s like a game in which corridors open to further niches and passages that might then lead to rooms.
Or might not. Perhaps one day he is going to understand England and its people well enough to have that breadth of vision. He certainly means to.

His fellow-students in the group, or at least a couple of them, are helpful to him. Not in any egregious or patronizing way; they assume that cultures don’t translate neatly or dovetail
into each other with a satisfying click, so they mostly leave him alone, or ask him questions to satisfy some minor curiosities. In the early days, when he was just beginning to settle in and get
introduced to some of the students in college, a standard question was
So is it very different then? Are you adjusting well? Is it a big shock?
His equally anodyne answers were vague
mutterings about
No, not all that much, you know, we grew up reading Enid Blyton and, later, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, or, Well, Calcutta is still such a colonial outpost
...

An important question now seems to be, ‘How is it you read English Literature in
India
and came here to do more of it?’ He surprises them by revealing that English Literature,
as an academic discipline, was first taught in India, not in England; English administrators and policy-makers thought that the study of English Literature would have an ennobling and civilizing
effect on the natives. They are thrown a bit, even a little embarrassed by this.

Declan is more wide-eyed than most at this nugget of information. ‘Does that mean it’s compulsory in schools, like? Are you forced to read English Literature?’ he asks,
incredulous.

‘No, it’s not forced, but it’s a discipline, a subject offered in universities. You can do a degree in it if you want to. Like Engineering or Maths.’

‘It’s a strange thought, isn’t it, thousands of Indians poring over Shakespeare and Keats,’ Declan says. Now that Ritwik has it pointed out to him by an outsider, it
becomes unfamiliar, shifts patterns and configurations, like one of those exercises where he sits in his room and tries to imagine if there could be another him, looking in through a window at
himself. What would that other he see? He often wants to look into his own room, locked and empty, from the outside; the bed, the books, the posters, all silent and waiting, as if they had a secret
life of their own to which he couldn’t be privy, but living on the second floor put paid to that fantasy.

He knows where Declan’s coming from: how can anyone square a Dr. Johnson reader with images of loin-clothclad, emaciated farmers standing next to equally cadaverous cows? Play ‘The
Association Game’ with a white man, say ‘India’, and pat will come the word ‘Poverty’; it’s a coupling branded in the western mind, and who can say it’s
wrong? It’s etched in his mind too.

Sarah, sharp as ever, clothes this in other words, ‘So how do you feel about being a post-colonial subject still studying the imperialists’ literature?’

‘Well . . .’ he shrugs and hedges the question. ‘It’s not quite like that, is it? Or not always.’

The unasked question is
Did you go to an elite expensive school to come this far?
He can almost see the unuttered assumptions buzz and collide like bluebottles against window panes:
rich kid father must be well-connected or influential you know what they say about rich third-world people when they are wealthy they are wealthier than the extremely rich in the first-world
privileged boy to have been bought an education which paved his way here
.

But it’s not quite like that, not at all.

In Ritwik’s mind, there were two types of poverty. One, the unexperienced sub-Saharan type, some sort of a shrine for the western media, with images of devouring eyes;
fly-encrusted lips of children; women and men and offspring reduced to bare, forked animals, a cage of awkward stubborn bones barely sheathed in polished skin. The other was the slow drip drip drip
which did not decimate populations in one fell swoop but hounded you every fraction of your time, got under your skin, into every space in your head and made you a lesser person, an edgy jittery
animal because, you see, it never finished you off but gnawed at you here and there just to remind you it was there and that you were powerless in its half-grip. Gloating and victorious, but
sleazily so, poverty not as Death triumphant in a Bosch nightmare but instead, one of his low, seedy, taunting thieves.

This was the poverty that played cat and mouse with Ritwik. It ruled in his world of worn-out clothes, of ill-fitting school shoes that ate into his toes but lasted forever with the help of his
father’s home repairs, of the tired vegetables sold at cut price when the greengrocers in the daily market were about to pack up and leave for the suburbs, of the hungry delight with which he
waited for the treat of gristly and bony meat once in two months or so. It was everywhere, all the time, so much so that Ritwik either did not remember a time when it was not a daily struggle, or
his memory did not match his father’s nostalgic stories of days of plenty.

When he was four, his parents and their two sons had moved from their rented ground floor flat in Park Circus to his uncles’ in Jadavpur. He had never been able to figure out the reason
for this. In any case, he was too young to remember except for one somewhat unfocused memory of his mother, in one of her moods, shouting at him while dressing him:
You’ll get nothing to
eat but salt and rice at your uncles’ house, we’ll see then how fussy you can be about food
.

Knowledge is a cumulative business, acquired with the slow, unnoticed accretion of information here and there, and when four-year-old Ritwik arrived at his uncles’ home, he had neither the
tools nor the pile-up of evidence to comprehend their instant economically downward move in this act which, for him, was full of fun and excitement. The word for ‘uncles’ house’
in Bengali is, after all, synonymous with boundless liberty and fun. Instead, growing up in Jadavpur became a growing intimacy with the shame of his father’s moving in with his in-laws in
their
home.