A Life Apart (34 page)

And there had been no Dusan either. When Ritwik had asked Saeed, he had answered that he had no idea where the boy was, what his name was, where he came from. Like everyone out here, he was part
of a floating population, here today, gone tomorrow, looking for better work, more pay. It was possible that he had found some place else, somewhere less temporary and less short-term than fugitive
tasks like fruit-picking. Or, Ritwik thought, his uncles had found him something more stable in a construction job, leaving Ritwik with all those questions he had never asked about Dusan’s
father and why he had had to leave Macedonia – was there violence? Was his village burnt down as the
dalit
s’ were in India? Did he watch members of his family killed? –
never had time to ask him about his country and if many people escaped or only a few. In the end, it came down to Ritwik’s own ignorance of the world, of his willed innocence about what was
happening in it: he couldn’t look beyond the boundaries of his own shadow.

Over the next month, Ritwik worked for Saeed in the hope that he would bump into Dusan somewhere. Sometimes, he worked stretches of ten days at a go, at other times there were three to four
consecutive days when he returned to Ganymede Road after an hour or two of futile waiting in Willesden. There was more fruit-picking and promise of more by a farmer, or his friend, called Jack, in
the autumn, in his apple and pear orchards in Kent.

There was the odd bit of packing fruit and vegetables in a giant warehouse off the M25. He met Kurdish and Turkish men and women there and first heard the term ‘refugee’, whispered,
hot with stigma, almost unspeakable. It fell from the lips of the supervisor in charge of their packing unit as he was doing one of his inspection rounds. A baby, bound to its mother’s chest,
was making an unbearable noise: Ritwik thought it was wailing because it was hungry but there was no stopping it and in the high-roofed cavern of the warehouse the acoustics seemed to conspire with
the crying to make it more high-pitched, more insistent. The supervisor was doing his rounds and Ritwik understood that if the woman took time off to feed her baby, she would have the time clocked
by the man and deducted from her wages. From all of twenty pounds for a nine-hour day. There was no altercation or even irritated sounds of ‘shhhh’ and ‘tssk’ from either
the supervisor or the other workers but the air had been heavy with tension; there had been a greater concentration in putting lettuce in cling film. As the supervisor passed by Ritwik, he clearly
heard him mutter, ‘Bloody fucking refugees and their fucking children’, then looked at Ritwik, rolled his eyes upward in a gesture that was meant to draw them together in their mutual
irritation at this screaming, and said, ‘Why can’t they leave them at home? This god-awful racket.’ Ritwik had lowered his eyes. The appropriate reply – ‘Where should
she leave it? At a crèche?’ – came too late, as the man’s back was receding down the far end, towards the double doors.

In any case, he wouldn’t have had the job any more if he had answered back. There were all sorts of talk and gossip in this warehouse – how the workers couldn’t be absent even
for a day, how all the time they spent in there was costed down to the last second, including visits to the toilet, how lunch breaks fell outside the number of hours at work, how talking amongst
each other was discouraged. Nearly every day some of them had a few pence deducted from the cash they queued for at seven o’clock on some excuse or the other. Ritwik wondered if there was a
CCTV, keeping watch on them, hidden away in strategic corners, or if the management just took it for granted that the workers would be either too intimidated or too lacking in English to
protest.

As soon as they emerged outside, everyone would lope off to his specific destination, mostly on his own, but a few in groups of two or three, which made Ritwik think they were either related or
they lived in the same neighbourhood. It didn’t take him very long to discover that most of these groupings were made along ethnic lines: the Polish men clumped together, the few Kurdish
women stayed close to each other because they were returning to the same council estate or bedsit.

Then one evening Ritwik noticed Mehmet, a young Kurdish man, sitting on the ground outside with his back to the warehouse wall, sobbing his guts out, surrounded by four or five other men,
presumably all Kurdish. Ritwik edged closer to the group, eaten up by curiosity. Something had happened to Mehmet’s sister, but what exactly it was, no one would say. Perhaps they
didn’t have enough English between them to articulate it. Or it could have been they didn’t trust this outsider at all, this thin, young boy who looked starved but could speak fluently
in English, so what was he doing here among them when he could so easily have got a better job anywhere else?

Mehmet stopped coming to work. Ritwik worked himself up for three days to ask one of his Kurdish friends, as he was leaving after being paid, what had happened to him. All he got initially was a
hooded look of mistrust; some shutter seemed to have come down, leaving Ritwik outside. Two men joined them and spoke rapidly in their tongue. One of them tried to speak to Ritwik but after a few
stray words – ‘sister’, ‘police’, ‘beg’ – all flung out without joins and syntax, he gave up in frustration. What on earth
had
happened? Had
Mehmet’s sister been caught begging on the Tube and arrested by the police? Did the police then discover she was staying in the country illegally and deport her with her entire family? Other
lurid scenarios played themselves in Ritwik’s mind: was she a prostitute who was caught by the police in a raid? What was the begging all about? Was she begging the police to let her go? It
was still light outside but the traffic whirling around them in the highways and flyovers had become denser and all the vehicles had switched on their head and tail lights. The sound was that of a
steadily churning sea.

M
iss Gilby has taken her seat along with the rest of the
andarmahal
in the balcony of the first floor. The dark green blinds are still
drawn but the slats have been opened so that the women can see what is happening in the courtyard below. Bimala, her two sisters-in-law and Miss Gilby are all perched on
moraa
s – cane
pouffes with leather seats – while the
andarmahal
cook and the new maid stand behind a pillar in a corner. Bimala has procured a pair of opera glasses, which she passes to Miss Gilby
and her sisters-in-law regularly so that they too can hone in on a face or a head in the crowd below.

For there is nothing short of a milling crowd gathered in the courtyard this morning, all waiting to hear the
swadeshi
leader Sandip Banerjea address them and direct the next phase of
the movement. There are men from the village, men who have come all the way from Calcutta, men from surrounding districts, a large number of
swadeshi
activists – nearly all of them
young students, hardly more than seventeen or eighteen years old – in their customary orange garb that makes them stand out like a bright flash in the dark sky. Mr Banerjea was supposed to
have started at ten; he is more than twenty minutes late and although punctuality is something which the Bengali man can never be accused of, Miss Gilby cannot help feeling that the
swadeshi
leader had an actor’s cunning sense of timing: he was whetting the appetite of the crowd by making it wait for him.

When he does appear, borne on a wooden board held on the shoulders of four young disciples – Miss Gilby cannot shake off that mildly objectionable word – her feelings appear to be
confirmed in an irrational and unverifiable way. Loud cries of
bande mataram
go up, especially from the energetic orange youths, all flashing eyes and revolutionary ardour. The neatly
bearded and fashionably attired Mr Banerjea soaks them up with the benign and effortless public smile that comes so naturally to gifted actors and politicians; after a few moments he signals with
his right hand – it is a cross between a holy man’s gesture of blessing and a signal for the crowd to allay their enthusiasm for a little while. When the crowd has gone so silent that
one can hear a reed moving in water, he begins his oration.

Miss Gilby understands only the first sentence – ‘The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, has divided Bengal’ – and the rest is just a few lucid words here and there in an opaque
sea:
swadeshi
, obviously, appears a lot, and
atmasakti
, self-reliance, too, along with ‘boycott’ and ‘English’. But a considerable amount of the sense can be
inferred from the tone of his voice, its modulations, the gestures, the blazing-bright eyes, the confidence in his own consummate performance, the timbre and fluidity of his baritone: the man is
such a skilled orator, thinks Miss Gilby, that he could easily, at the end of his speech – during which every mouth in the crowd remains half-open, every face rapt – have commanded his
audience to do anything, anything, and they would have willingly rushed out and done it. Bimala forgets to pass on the lorgnette after his first few sentences, even
naw jaa
slips off her
moraa
a couple of times, so keen is her eagerness to get as close to the speaker as her confinement in the
andarmahal
will allow.

It remains in no doubt to Miss Gilby why this man is one of the leaders of the
swadeshi
movement: he certainly appears to have been born to such things. He seems to be whipping them up
into a fervour of
swadeshi
activity, spreading his message of the boycott of English goods, carrying everyone into the vortex of protest against the unjust division of Bengal. Mr Banerjea is
a creature of fire and wind, working together in a dance of fury; for an unsettling moment she sees a childhood illustration of the prophet Elijah in his chariot of fire. Miss Gilby feels like a
traitor, sitting and listening to him, but she would be hard-pressed to answer which party she felt she was betraying.

When the speech is over, there is a long moment of silence, in which the radiance and intensity of the blaze the crowd has been exposed to are registered and assimilated, before it breaks
into applause, yet more fervid shouts of
bande mataram
, a general clambering and stampede to reach out and touch the speaker who has now acquired in almost everyone’s minds the status
of a demigod. The orange boys appear delirious and possessed as they move around the crowd, fists balled, arms raised, shouting their mantra. The flock of pigeons, which had settled peacefully
along the edges of the roof, perhaps also mesmerized like the humans gathered below, have their spell broken and flutter up in a group. Their departure too sounds like clapping hands. Miss Gilby
turns sideways to find all the women in the balcony dabbing at their eyes with the
aanchol
of their
sari
s.

Bimala seems distracted and restless but Miss Gilby does not rule out the possibility that she may be attributing to her charge her own feelings of a sudden and inexplicable
diffusion of focus and concentration. Bimala makes three mistakes in the very first two bars of ‘Roaming in the gloaming’, an unusual thing because she knows the piece so well. She
ignores the metronome, too, resulting in Miss Gilby having to stop singing and remind her, indulgently the first few times, and then rather sharply, that her innovative tempi are doing no favours
either to the piano or to the spirit of the tune. Bimala sulks for a while and tries to concentrate but it seems that they might have to write off music lessons for the day.

Miss Gilby tries a different tack. ‘Why don’t we leave music for another day, Bimala, when you’ve practised some more?’

Bimala jumps at the bait. ‘Yes, Miss Gilby. Can I sew for a bit and we can talk and practise Conversation?’

‘All right, then. What are you embroidering?’ Miss Gilby hopes this form of subtle and covert correction has the right effect on Bimala.

Bimala picks up her embroidery: it is a very large piece of blinding white cloth, with the area to be worked on picked out and stretched like the skin of a drum by the frame, showing the
beginnings of Bengali letters in blue.

‘
Banglaar pakhi
,’ Miss Gilby reads, much to the visible delight of Bimala. ‘The birds of Bengal.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Bimala nods excitedly and unravels more of the cloth lying in folds and soft heaps on the sofa, trailing on the floor. ‘I make a bedspread with the different
birds of Bengal all over it. Yes?’

Only two birds have been embroidered on to that pristine field of white but they are creatures that could set a cat stalking. Miss Gilby’s heart leaps when she sees them – a
sparrow in shades of brown and ash and fawn, its eye a dark bead, its legs the colour of dun, dried leaves, and a kingfisher in its blue blaze, the beak a miracle of poised coral red. They are a
rapture of finger and thread and needle: who would have thought such a miracle to be possible from those ordinary objects of commonplace life?

Bimala notes Miss Gilby’s pleasure and admiration in her sharp intake of breath. ‘You like this?’ she asks, somewhat redundantly.

‘Yes, very, very much. It’s so . . .’ she searches for a word, ‘so . . . lifelike, so real. Did you have a model to work from, a picture or a drawing or something of
the kind?’

‘Yes, yes, I get it now.’ She puts down the spilling cloth, frees herself from its clinging folds and runs out of the room. In a few minutes, she is back, bearing a giant book,
which she passes to Miss Gilby.

The Birds of the North-Eastern and East Gangetic Plain
by a Ruth A. Fairweather. 1902. Published in London. The brief note about the author says that after twenty years in Bengal,
Orissa and the foothills of the north-eastern arm of the mighty Himalayan range, she is now a resident of Almora where she is at work on a companion volume on North Indian birds. The name
doesn’t ring a bell but there aren’t very many Englishwomen in this vast country who have scientific interests and write about Indian birds; surely someone Miss Gilby knows must know
her.