A Life Apart (19 page)

Ritwik could only feel the rectangles of burn the ruler imprinted on his skin. He noticed that where the thin edge of the ruler had caught one of his knuckles the skin had split in a tiny red
gash. Only a tiny one. And there was the torrent of her words, some shouted, some hissed with the spitting anger of an attacking snake, which kept up the continuous bass line to the slap of wood
against skin: ‘No God MADE God MADE how many times do you need to be told that if you’re asked a question containing the word “did” the answer is in the simple past tense so
MADE MADE MADE not “make” will you ever make that mistake will you will you say MADE say God MADE.’

‘God made, God made,’ Ritwik obediently sobbed.

‘Stop crying. Stop crying now,’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t want a single sound to escape your lips. I’ll throttle you if I hear another sob. Is that clear?’

Ritwik choked and nodded. He was aware of the open wooden shutters of the adjacent house and the squares of fluorescent light visible through their own open windows. He sensed there were people
standing near those windows, listening to everything that was going on here. He knew that his mother was aware of the neighbours soaking up the details of this little exemplary drama as well. The
theatre inside her head broke into a tumultous applause.

There was an indeterminate gap between the Moral Science and the spelling test. Bidisha strode off to the kitchen after this corrective act, warning her silently crying son, ‘I’m
going to the kitchen to cook some rice. I want all the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane” mastered by the time I’m done. Otherwise, what you’ve just had is going to
seem like a picnic compared with what’s coming.’

Ritwik had reached the plateau stage of terror. It was only its first installment that rattled and jarred him; after that, it was the physical pain that took front seat while the fear
diminished. If there was to be more after a while, he was more or less prepared for it. He took a pencil and started underlining the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane”:
witty
,
receive
,
humorous
,
kitchen
,
shoo
. . . The words drew him in and his voice slowly faded until he was reading the whole story silently.

Her appearance at the door took him by surprise; she had come to conclude unfinished business.

‘Why can’t I hear your voice? Why? Didn’t I tell you I wanted to hear every word? Didn’t I?’

She advanced on him with huge strides, shouting, ‘I can’t hear you. Who’s taken your tongue?’ In the space of an eyelash-flicker she was upon him.

Then she did something she’d never done to him before: she picked him up by his shirt collar, lifted him clean off the floor and flung him, as one would a rag doll or a bag of rubbish, to
one corner of the room. She had just extended her repertoire; the audience was on its feet, throwing coins and flowers. The applause was deafening.

Ritwik hit the low bed and the big metal trunk and landed on the little square of space made by the two walls, one edge of the trunk and one side of the bed. She rushed to him, dragged him out
of the space and then threw him, again, in the opposite direction. This time he skidded on his school books lying on the floor and fell with his face down, his nose, teeth and tongue somehow
hitting the concrete floor, with its patchwork of mismatching loud tiles, all at the same time. It put an end to his scared whimpering, the pain was too much for that. He let out a wail and some
torn words, unintelligible, ineffectual, which were like bellows to her fire. While he lay curled on the floor trying instictively to reduce the surface area of contact, she kicked and punched him
in between straightening him out so that she could have greater access to his body.

No one in the house intervened to save him. It was necessary disciplining, the rod that taught and educated. Without this just measure of pain, how would a child ever learn to be diligent about
his studies? It was an unspoken law of the Bengali household that whatever a mother meted out to her children, it was right and motivated by unconditional love. It couldn’t be questioned:
everything worked for the greater good of the child.

It was the sight of blood on Ritwik’s face that made her stop, or the sense that he was nearly choking, able only to inhale or to exhale but not both, one following the other. Perhaps it
was because she had welled herself out empty for the moment. She left the room to go to the kitchen, only returning when the sobbing had given way to an exhausted panting of snot, tears and some
blood. There was a very faint air of the truce behind her commands, ever so slightly gentle now – ‘Stop crying. Get up, go to the bathroom and wash your face with cold water. I will
give you your dinner after that, all right? Go, get up now.’

All of a sudden Dida appeared at the door and whispered, ‘So, enjoyed the fun, did you? How did it feel?’ From where did the leaking excitement in her voice come? Which bit of it
appeared as ‘fun’ to her? She seemed to be keeping herself on a leash, a little girl trying very hard not to be giddy. Ritwik was convinced that had she, or could she have, let herself
go, she would have broken into handstands and cartwheels there and then on the floor.

He whimpered away to the bathroom, washed his face, blew his nose and returned to his books. His eyes scanned the underlined words in “The Cook and the Crane”. He did not feel any
fear. He noted the cunning twists in the spelling of some English words – ‘humour’ had two U’s but ‘humorous’ omitted the second ‘u’ of
‘humour’ and added an ‘—ous’; ‘receive’, he must remember, had an ‘e’ before ‘i’ and not the other way around. When his mother came
back from the kitchen and gave him the spelling test, he got all the words correct. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was somewhat disappointed.

If the cottaging business started off as an unsought adventure and surprised Ritwik by its very existence and possibilities, now, seventeen months down the line, it is a habit.
An addiction even. He braves the bonecutter of the February wind to get to St Giles. No intensity of rain lashing across Catte Street and Broad Street in slanting spears can deter him. In fact,
these extremes of weather he constructs as challenges –
let’s see who’s hunting tonight
– knowing well that he might be the only one, waiting for hour after sleepless
hour, listening to the rain and wind, and hoping and waiting for a kind of ashen deliverance.

He gets impatient on summer evenings because the light stays till so late, the darkening blue of the sky never quite reaching the perfect black he thinks is necessary for going out on the prowl.
It is a last vestige of some inhibition, this reluctance to go cruising with the residue of daylight stubbornly lingering in the air. He is sure in time it will go although he doesn’t know
whether that is going to be a good or a bad thing.

He has started questioning himself about why he feels this urge to sit or stand in his cubicle for sometimes three to four hours on wet, icy evenings even when there is no action going on nor
any reasonable chance of it. There are more pressing things that need his attention: Miss Gilby has only just made her first appearance at Nikhilesh and Bimala’s,
Prometheus Unbound
remains untouched. All those areas in which he thought he had imposed some order and method – books, essays, Miss Gilby – are beginning to escape control. All because, he thinks in a
moment of trying to find one monolithic enemy, of that addiction to the adrenaline rush as he steps down the wet stairs into the underworld of St Giles, his heart a slow percussive fist, opening
closing, opening closing. There is no denying it is a thrill. And he is hooked to it in the same way a big cat is after its first taste of saltblood. No amount of getting used to it, as he is by
now (one of the other regulars calls him ‘our Indian chair’, he’s so much a fixture now in this place), no amount of it totally removes the slight loosening of the sphincter, the
vague, peripheral urge to shit, as he makes his way into the toilets. Adrenaline, he notes every time; fight, flight, or fright.

The elements of danger and fear were at the forefront before. Will he get caught by the police? Will anyone who knows him see him in there or going down the stairs? What are the chances of
picking up a psycho? What about AIDS? They have all moved back to the shadows, some more, some less. He is now so inured to any sense of danger that if it is there, it is as some complex spicing,
present only in the bass notes, resistant to isolation and pinning down.

A particular incident in the toilets one day, at around two in the morning, sticks in his mind. No one there except Ritwik, who had been hanging around, utterly bored yet free and in his
element, and another man: short, chubby, small shifty eyes, his skin the colour of bacon fat, tiny scratches on his nose and face, the kind one would see in an infant who has been scratching
itself. The man hadn’t betrayed any interest in Ritwik at all but it was getting late and all they were going to get that night was each other. So, reluctantly, Ritwik had been making the
moves, his mind not really on it, just to tease, just to see if the man was interested. Either way, he probably wouldn’t go through with it, he would just tease a bit and leave. The man had
suddenly taken down his trousers, flicked out his penis and said, ‘If you don’t suck my cock, I’ll beat you up.’ Ritwik had thought how easy it would have been to spit at
him and run out of the toilet to the safety of the open public streets above. Instead, though, he had kneeled down and sucked him with greed and had even got the stranger to jerk him off. In the
post-ejaculation illusion of rapprochement, Ritwik, a few steps already on his way out while the man was washing his hands, hadn’t been able to resist shouting out, ‘I have a bigger
cock than yours.’ Cheap, but it was going to hit home, he was that sort of man. He had shouted back at a hastily retreating Ritwik, ‘That’s coz you’re fuckin’ black,
that’s why.’

It’s different tonight. He had had to leave the bar, it was getting too smoky and close in there. In his room, his work had outstared him into defeat. So he’s been left with no
choice but trace his invariable tracks to the cottage. Or so he tries to reason with himself.
328665, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m.
That information won’t
leave him alone.

The toilets are fairly busy tonight. Just entering it gives him a temporary reprieve from
328665 328665 328665
. His cubicle is occupied. He waits for the occupant to leave and then
practically pounces on the door, lets himself in and locks it. He’ll have a tough time keeping this for himself tonight, there are other loiterers like him who want to use it as a base too.
There’s no option but to stay put in here until the trade thins out a bit. Unlike other evenings, tonight he is not buzzing with the need for action, rushing in and out of the cubicle to
check out new arrivals, heading for the viewcrack at the sound of shuffling feet. Tonight he stands with his back against one of the walls and realizes after what seems like a considerable while
that he has read all the graffiti many times over without any of it sinking in.

Maybe he can will himself to shut the door that has opened inside him. The unsettling thing is that he did not know the door was there in the first place. No, he has to resist this tug. If he
can only force himself to concentrate on the traffic around him, he’ll be better; nothing like the tired old game leading to orgasm for a snack of oblivion.

He leaves his cubicle and someone standing at the pissoir neatly moves back and steps in, bolting the door fast.
Bastard
. He’ll have to hang around in the open now. He feels exposed
and it’s not a natural feeling for him, not in this world. Then someone comes out of one of the other cubicles and Ritwik automatically, along with everyone else, looks at him. Very tall and
very thin, his exposed collarbones like ridges enclosing two shallow bowls on either side of his neck.
I bet if he takes his trousers off, his hipbones will be jut out like promontories in a
map
: that is Ritwik’s first thought. He marks it with unconscious prescience, for he won’t have either the clarity or the luxury to focus on his thoughts about this stranger again.
There are dark shadows under his eyes, as if he hasn’t slept in a long time. Heroin addicts have such leaking darkness around their eyes, that devoured, consuming look, Ritwik thinks.

They look at each other. Ritwik turns away and moves to the urinal, looking back at him once, making sure there is a lot of space between him and the next person standing and pretending to piss.
The stranger doesn’t accept the offer, instead he goes and positions himself at the pissoir on the other side of the mirrors. Ritwik’s chest has a plumetting feeling inside it. He leans
back to look at him and catches him doing the same.

Who dares, wins
.

Ritwik zips up, walks over and stands beside him at the other urinal. Heroin Eyes is resolutely looking down, refusing to catch his eye, but he isn’t moving away either. Ritwik has become
brazen – he is straining to get a glimpse of his cock, willing the man to catch a second of the crackle of electricity that he suddenly seems to have developed around him.

It doesn’t work: the stranger buttons up and starts making his way up to street level. Ritwik is unable to let this one go. Almost immediately, he too moves away and follows him outside.
The man takes the steps three at a time, bounds up and with enormous strides crosses over to Martyrs’ Memorial.

The man looks over his shoulder: Ritwik has nearly broken into a run now. The stranger quickens his pace, crosses Cornmarket Street diagonally and almost runs into the vaulted Friars’
Entry, between Debenhams and the Randolph Hotel, just behind the bus stops. Ritwik pursues, running now, desperate, heavy with the knowledge that he has scared him off, is scaring him off right
now, by stalking him out in the streets, but he can’t stop himself. He runs into the passage too and watches a tall, lanky figure lope away hurriedly, through the uneven patchwork of light
and shadows thrown out by huddled buildings, a fair distance from him.