A Life Apart (28 page)

‘Christopher was born there. Son of an army bigwig, Lieutenant-General or something. His mother was a very unconventional woman. Must have had a lot of steel in her to have broken all the
rules in that society. Ran a school for Indian girls. Unimaginable at that time, really. Loved India. Passed it on to her son. You know what they say, India rages like a hectic in your blood’
– the way he started and looked up sharply, the allusion could have been a jet of ice-cold water between his eyes– ‘you have to go back. It does something to you, to your senses,
your blood, Christopher used to say. So he went back. Joined the civil service and went back to his first love.’

Ritwik was speechless. He let this torrent of information seep in slowly, then asked, ‘What happened then? Did you meet him in England? And his mother?’

Long pause.

‘Could you keep an eye on the fat sparrow and see Ugo doesn’t go near it?’ There, the curtains had come down again.

‘It will be difficult to do that.’

And then, like the curl of a whip lashing out, ‘You don’t have a mother, do you?’

Nothing will wrongfoot him, nothing will make him pause. ‘No.’ Brief, like the truth.

‘So he’s going mad and making all sorts of wild accusations about his mother. Go on then, why did you stop?’

He says,

His voice was a straight, grey road, monotonous and vistaless. He read the words without managing to get to the meanings behind them. When he lifted up his burning face next, at the sound of a
gentle purr, Anne’s head was twitching on the pillow, gently pumelled by unknown dreams. He sat there for a while, waiting for the rhythm of her snoring to calm him down, and then turned the
light off. Ugo had come in unheard and was rubbing himself against him, purring so loudly that Ritwik was half-convinced he had some pulmonary illness. He picked the cat up and gently left the
room. Ugo could come and curl up on his duvet while his fingers gently kneaded the creature’s thick orange pelt.

He turns off his bedside lamp: the sky outside has lightened enough. Another twenty minutes of snoozing, then he will have to go about his morning duties – tea and
biscuits for Anne, cleaning out the chamber pot, washing her. As he is about to drift off, there is a shuffling outside his door. Seconds later, Anne walks in – she never knocks – and
asks, ‘What does “enseamed” mean?’ She gives the word three syllables.

Ritwik flails about in his head for a bit, then remembers exactly what she is referring to. He says, ‘Greasy. Drenched in animal fat and, by extension, disgusting things exuded from the
body.’ He toys with the idea of saying something more about Hamlet’s obsession with his mother having sex but decides there is no need.

She appears not to take notice of what he has said. ‘Come into my room, I want to show you something. Come. Don’t make any noise.’ She beckons with her right hand, like a witch
trying to lure a child into her cottage.

Anne leads him to the window looking out into the garden. ‘Look at the horse chestnut tree. Somewhere in the middle. Do you see what I see?’

Ritwik has spent a lot of hours in the summer disciplining the garden – weeding, uprooting, cutting down and even burning the more recalcitrant unwanteds, mowing the grass down to a
stubble with the lawnmower borrowed from Mr Haq. It doesn’t look good – it is still not a garden – but it isn’t a contained bit of jungle any more. The three trees –
the ceanothus, the lime tree and the horse chestnut – look grand and imposing in the bare space. Right now, the tops of the two big trees are beginning to get tipped with the morning.

In the wet, pewtery light, it takes Ritwik a few seconds to find the exact area that has drawn her interest but when he does, he wonders how he could have missed it. Sitting on the middle
branches are a pair of improbable birds, each no bigger than a small pigeon but with red breast and stomach and a regally curving swoop of lustrous green fantail, long, elegant and utterly out of
this world, Ritwik thinks. They couldn’t be real. And then he notices the small sparrowy head of one of them move jerkily. As if in response, its companion shifts clunkily sideways on the
branch.

Anne is speaking and when he manages to listen to her equally improbable words, he doesn’t know which amazes him more, what she is saying or the presence of these magical birds.
‘Quetzals, I think. Though I may be wrong, my eyesight isn’t exactly perfect. Trogonidae. The genus name is
Pharomachrus
. Found only in the mountain forests of southern Mexico
and Panama.’

Ritwik is rooted to the ground, unblinking in his gaze. He wants to let the images of the birds sink into the deeper lairs of his head and hold them there forever because he knows they are going
to disappear soon, very soon, but this sudden discovery of the ornithologist in Anne distracts him. He is ashamed to discover his unquestioned assumption that an eighty-six-year-old should have no
interests, should remember nothing from the heydays of her life, but should be content only to count the last hours off in infirmity, dependence and mindlessness.

Anne breaks the rapt silence. ‘They are never found in these parts of the world. What are they doing here?’

She has put her finger on the other nodule of unease in Ritwik. These are not British birds. Of course, he doesn’t
know
, but creatures such as these don’t perch on trees in
south London gardens, that’s for sure. Call it a prejudice but
England
cannot harbour these birds.

‘You know, they were sacred to the Mayas and the Incas. I think it was first described for Europeans by Francisco Hernández in the 1570s.’

Ritwik is so amazed by this sustained focus, even narrative, that he turns around to face her. ‘How do you know all these things?’ There is astonishment in his voice; it comes out
hoarse and unsteady.

‘Oh, it’s one of those things I was interested in. I wanted to become an ornithologist but in those days women didn’t go to universities. So I kept reading, collecting books,
pictures . . . I even started an album of Indian birds of the foothills of the Himalayas. The Garhwal region.’

The world is unfolding in tiny furls of amazement for Ritwik. It is not the sight of the bird that has made him speechless, it is this hidden maze in Anne, this gradual illumination of the
penumbral spaces he didn’t know had existed.

‘I met this quite remarkable woman out there. Ruth Fairweather, her name was. She had embarked on this ambitious project of compiling a comprehensive account of Indian birds, region by
region. Much like your Audobon in the United States. I learnt so much from her,’ she continues.

‘I wanted my son to become an ornithologist. He did.’ Pause. ‘Richard loved birds.’ A longer pause. ‘Ruth loved him, treated him as her own son. She taught him how
to look, how to listen, how to hold the pen and brush and pencil to draw birds.’

Ritwik’s mind is jammed with cogs whirring away and turning, turning unceasingly. When the right clicks happen, and one cog locks into the groove of another, he holds back all reaction,
even to the new knowledge of Anne’s son, an ornithologist, having killed himself in the room where he is staying at the moment.

Anne is silent for the longest time this morning. Ritwik senses that a door has been shut. He will have to wait until it opens of its own accord. He turns around and looks out of the window
again. He is not surprised to see the quetzals gone. Has he dreamed the whole thing? The morning is brightening but the lower reaches of the trees are still in a mothy gloom; it is only the top
branches that hold today’s light.

The Haq house was a teeming, heaving slice of the subcontinent, filtered through first world glitz and polish, in a south London street. The throws on the sofas were Indian, a
couple of chairs, a low wooden table, a hookah centrepiece on it, the red curtains with mirrorwork, the three framed mirrors with gold Urdu lettering on them, presumably passages from the Koran,
all reeked of a home the Haqs had left behind and studiously tried to recreate in a foreign country. The predominant effect was of density: cupola-like curves instead of straight lines, intricate
and busy craftwork,
zari
, mirror, colour. The wallpaper, an electric pink, was picked over with golden stars and the gold was repeated in the picture rail, which ran the length of three
walls.

Two girls, noses running, had come downstairs and were now standing at the doorway to take in the stranger who had just entered their house. They had chubby cheeks, wore nearly identical
salwar-kameez, and looked very similar. Ritwik guessed one was about five and the other, six. He smiled at them and said ‘Hello.’ One of them, the one who looked slightly older, turned
her face away and ran upstairs, barely able to contain her shy smile. The younger one stood staring at him. Mrs Haq – or so he assumed – chided her in Urdu, ‘Now, say
“hello”. Don’t be rude.’

The girl ignored this with perfect insouciance and continued staring. The older girl now reappeared, peeped into the room, and said, ‘Ma, can you please turn on the CD player again?’
Perfect South London English, down to the splayed out vowels in ‘again.’

Mrs Haq replied in Urdu. ‘No, not now. Look, we have a guest. We’ll talk to him now.’ She turned to Ritwik and ushered him into the living room. The English she spoke was
heavily accented. ‘Sit down, sit down.’ She made a moue of mock-exasperation and added, ‘There’s not a moment’s rest from these children. Mr Haq’s helping Saleem
with his homework. He’ll come soon.’

Ritwik’s first impression was of a woman who seemed very much in control of her household. She chattered on, ‘It’s good to know there’s someone looking after Mrs Cameron.
We’ve always been worried about her. She’s so old. She should be living with her children and grandchildren. Why does she live alone? I always ask her, Mrs Cameron, you must live with
family, that is what they are for, to take care of you in your old age, but she says nothing, just smiles. You tell me, would this have happened in Pakistan or India? The English like to live
alone. Only their own self, that is what they think about all the time. Not mother, not father, but just own self.’

Someone had managed to switch on the CD player upstairs without the help of Mrs Haq. The garish Hindi film song, all overblown strings and a superfluous flute, flooded down. Every word of the
shrill female voice was audible:
A ring on my finger, a serpent in the ring
. Mrs Haq ran upstairs. There was the sound of a rapid stream of Urdu and English, a brief wail, a thud and then
the abrupt end of the song. When Mrs Haq came down to the living room again, the younger of the two girls was with her. She had put on a headband and some glass bangles. She stayed nestled against
her mother but couldn’t take her eyes off Ritwik. Mrs Haq started saying something about her children when Mr Haq, bluff, portly and garrulous, walked in. The girl immediately switched
allegiances and jumped on her father, who scooped her up, all the time keeping up his bonhomie talk.

‘Ah, so you’re new boy, heh heh heh, we are curious about you. We find out as soon as you come here, someone from our part of the world is here to look after Mrs Cameron.
You’re from Pakistan, no?’

Ritwik hesitated before he said, ‘Well, very close. India.’ He didn’t know why that question made him so defensive.

There was a brief blink before he launched into his camaraderie again. ‘India. India. Well. We’re neighbours. Practically the same country, no? Before they divided us, we were same,
all together, Hindu Muslim living as brothers.’ He got more and more animated during the course of his benign politics. ‘Yes, we live in harmony. We live here in harmony if we
can’t live there. We are still brothers.’ He extended his hand to Ritwik. As Ritwik shook it, Mr Haq chuckled and said, ‘And you are young enough to be my little brother, no? Heh
heh heh.’

In the course of the next hour, in between glasses of tangy and sweet
nimbu-paani
brought in at regular intervals by Mrs Haq, who had disappeared into the innards of the house on the
arrival of her husband, perhaps on kitchen duty, Ritwik was given a filleted history of the Haq family. Mr Haq’s father came to England in the early 60s, as part of a wave of subcontinent
immigrants England was opening its doors to at the time, partly to salve its colonial guilt, partly to fill its depleting labour market for the jobs the natives wouldn’t touch. His father had
been a young boy when the partition of 1947 had unrooted the poor cobbler family in Aligarh. It had taken them two years to reach Pakistan, the new Muslim homeland, along with millions of other
Muslim families who had made the journey to a new home, new hopes, to the company of equals in faith. But everything had turned sour in the new country. Yes, true, there was no danger of their
village getting torched by Hindus on the rampage, but Sindh and Baluchistan were arid dustbowls, Karachi a collection of ragged slums. There were no jobs, no food, just swarms of refugees trying to
build homes. When Mr Haq’s father was invited by a distant uncle to help him out in his grocery store in Leicester, the family had pinned all hopes on the twenty-one-year-old and borrowed
money to put the young man aboard a ship and send him off to a country full of possibilities. He left his wife and their year-old son behind in his village and sailed away.

The young man had done well. By the time he was twenty-seven, he was managing the original store in Leicester, while his uncle had opened two others. Business was good, the Asian community in
Leicester was booming and the demand for goods from home was on a dizzyingly upward curve. Mr Haq’s father and his uncle rode it. And compared with the price they paid for the goods brought
over from Pakistan, even a 100 per cent mark-up meant that the things they imported and sold in their shops were nearly three times cheaper than native English goods. A child could realize that the
pound-rupee exchange rate worked heavily in their favour but it required a certain amount of business nous to exploit that to their full advantage. The young man learnt, hands on, the meaning of
profit; Zulfikar Haq became a partner with his uncle. The first time he went back, in 1967, his son Shahid was seven years old. He distributed gifts among the family – razor blades, soaps,
plastic toys for the children, shirts, a watch for his ageing father, all from England, to show that he had made it and his family wouldn’t want for anything any more – and returned to
England after three months, promising he would come back every year. He didn’t manage to go back every year; the booming business made it more like every three, but he regularly sent money
orders and drafts back home. Once again, the rupee-pound exchange kept him a winner.