A Life Apart (37 page)

She clears her voice and asks, ‘But surely it’s in the interests of the two races to stay united?’

‘One would have thought so’ – that dry smile again, hardly visible in the gathering dark inside – ‘but it’s been considered before. The troublemakers
– troublemakers according to our English rulers, that is – in Bengal are the Hindus. They were solidly opposed to the partition, still are, they are also the better educated, the more
eloquent. In short, they are the noisy opponents with a political voice. There is no such equivalent in the Muslim community.’

Miss Gilby interrupts, ‘So if Bengal was divided along Hindu-Muslim lines then the opposition could be fragmented and therefore weakened?’

‘ “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways.”Famous words,’he says wryly. There is another long pause. ‘Well, the plan seems
to be working. Despite isolated shows of Hindu-Muslim unity in rallies and gatherings here and there, the truth is quite different. The Muslims have always been poorer, their interests always
neglected, their education overlooked, their voices ignored. It’s not surprising they don’t think very highly of the Hindus who are their landlords, or bureaucrats or government
servants. So if a separate province is promised them where Mohammedan interests would be strongly represented, if not predominant, how can we blame them for falling for it?’

‘But I still don’t understand how this relates directly to your village.’

‘You see, because the Hindus of Bengal have been traditionally the political voice of the region, for obvious reasons of class and education and opportunities, the Muslims think
swadeshi
is another Hindu conspiracy and therefore they look on it with great suspicion. They are not wholly wrong.’

Mr Roy Chowdhury moves in his chair to get more comfortable. The last light of the sun, amber dark, catches his glasses and makes them into bright, blind mirrors. ‘If it’s a
choice between the Hindu
babu
, who has traditionally been known to be indifferent to Mussulman interests, and the English governor, who dangles the idea of a predominantly Mohammedan
province, I too would choose the chance for a change. My villagers now see these Hindu boys, clad in orange, going around the place, calling for boycott of English goods that provide these poor
Muslims a livelihood. Is it that extraordinary they should think this whole
swadeshi
business as another Hindu ploy to keep them poor and downtrodden?’

This is the first time Miss Gilby has heard anger tint his voice; it is a cold, reasoned fury, disciplined and measured, like the rest of the man.

‘Sandip’s boys are getting a bit carried away in their enthusiasm. It is pointless asking Sandip to rein them in because he clearly believes in what his activists are doing. There
is talk of forcible seizure of English goods and burning them, even talk of burning down shops and houses of those who stock or sell English goods. This is terrorism, not revolution. I cannot stand
by and see this happen.’ His voice nearly breaks.

Miss Gilby is appalled. ‘But, Mr Roy Chowdhury, to appear divisive myself for a moment, this is your house, you are letting him use it as a base for his activities.’

‘And that seems to be the reason why my tenants, my villagers, with whom my forefathers and my family have had cordial relations for the best part of two hundred years, now appear to
think that I am behind all this. They think that without my sanction these Hindu nationalist boys wouldn’t have dared go so far. ’

The encroaching dusk collects in pools in the room; Miss Gilby can hardly see him put his head in his hands. The mosquitoes have started arriving in whining droves, circling above their heads
in little vicious columns.

Miss Gilby continues her train of thought, ‘You can surely ask him to leave?’

There is another silence, a long, weighted one. There is a catch in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s voice when he answers, ‘I cannot do that. I cannot.’ The words are barely a whisper.
For some reason, the servants have forgotten to bring lights into this room. It is so dark now that to anyone who entered the room it would be impossible to tell if it was inhabited at all. Miss
Gilby wishes she could have seen his face, his eyes, to read more, to understand more, because she cannot ask him why and because she has a sharp hunch that there is more going on than is revealed
to her.

Bimala starts attending lessons again and this is exactly what their morning meetings have now become – duty-bound, obligatory lessons. When Miss Gilby had first
arrived at ‘Dighi Bari’ years ago, it was like that – a tutor-student meeting – for the first few months but that had changed subtly, giving way to a much more intimate and
informal meeting of two friends who lived under the same roof. The lessons had become subsidiary, the company of each other, the principal. Sometimes there were no lessons at all for long
stretches, just gossiping, looking at books, exchanging recipes, games in the garden. All that has suddenly reverted to the dry, strictured atmosphere of the classroom now, a chore, not spontaneous
pleasure.

Bimala’s first appearance after Miss Gilby’s meeting with Mr Roy Chowdhury was startling. She had red, swollen eyes, she wore austere clothes – monotone cotton sari, an
unremarkable shade of blue, white cotton blouse – she had no bangles on her wrists, no jewellery in sight anywhere, even the vermillion mark in the parting of her hair looked dull. The
spartan air must have had to do with Bimala’s more active endorsement of
swadeshi
, thought Miss Gilby; she had at last abandoned all items of foreign-manufactured luxury or
ostentation.

Miss Gilby’s interest in Bimala’s book of birds has mounted to an obsession now. With Bimala listless, uncooperative, sometimes passively truculent, it is that part of the
afternoon when they go through the books on Indian birds (although Bimala only dutifully so, for she doesn’t seem to share her English friend’s burning interest in birds anymore) that
Miss Gilby looks forward to most. Indeed, two mornings ago, her first thought, after she had woken up, had been not of Bimala, or the new song they were learning, but the delight of ‘Birds of
the Ganges Estuary Mudflats and Mangroves’ and ‘Birds of the North Eastern Hill Ranges’ awaiting her in the book she had so surprisingly discovered in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s
study next door.

This morning Bimala has been set a composition exercise – one page on the goddesses of Bengal, something that Miss Gilby thinks might inspire a spark in the jaded Bimala. Her head bent
down on her book, Bimala passively fulfils what has been asked of her, occasionally asking the odd question on translation – ‘What is this?’ she asks, drawing an instrument that
the goddess Durga holds in one of her ten hands and for which there is no translation in English except for the awkward and wholly unrepresentative ‘spinning discus’.

Seeing that dark head bent over paper, that slender hand forming the foreign letters slowly, much as a child does when it is learning to write, Miss Gilby feels a tightening in her chest. So
pressing and sharp is the feeling that ignoring hundreds of years of refinement and social norms and rules, rules, rules, she moves over to Bimala, sits beside her, touches her shoulder and asks
that enquiring, surprised face, ‘Bimala, if there is anything wrong, you know you can talk to me, don’t you?’

Bimala bursts into tears while Miss Gilby leaves her hand on the woman’s sobbing, heaving shoulder. Hot tears drop like candle wax on to the paper she has been writing on. With a rare
clarity, Miss Gilby notes one smudging drop on the inverted word ‘learning’ and another poised between ‘lion’ and ‘demon’, about to spread out on either side and
start disfiguring both.

Late that evening, a perplexed Miss Gilby, hearing the ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ murmur of collected voices, looks out of her balcony to see scores of men gathered
outside the front gate of the house. She at once guesses, rightly, that they are villagers demanding an audience with Mr Roy Chowdhury. She is both curious and concerned, but it wouldn’t do
to look at these men from her vantage point two floors above them. Nor would it be right to try and find out what is happening by going downstairs. In any case, if she were to
‘accidentally’ eavesdrop, she would understand very little of the proceedings. She would have to stay in her quarters and be alert to the sounds and movements, or go down to find
Bimala, possibly in the
andarmahal
. After half an hour of such deliberation, she picks up the book on birds she had found in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s study and prepares herself to go
downstairs with it, on the fragile pretext of returning it to the collection.

By the time she reaches the long verandah off which lie the meeting room, Mr Roy Chowdhury’s study, the drawing room and the offices, the sound of voices has grown so loud –
sometimes a single voice, at other times, many voices together, all talking at the same time, and occasionally, a veritable cacophony, with what seems like the entire gathering shouting –
that there is no doubt this is an altercation, not just a heated debate or the deplorable Indian habit of talking loudly. Miss Gilby takes fright and turns around to mount the staircase up to the
second floor but someone emerges from the meeting room and, in hasty confusion and the desire not to be caught loitering in a place where it could easily and naturally be thought she has no
business to be, she does a double take and hurriedly crosses the courtyard, her heart thumping with guilt and relief at having avoided shameful exposure by the skin of her teeth. She reaches the
verandah parallel to the one in which she was so nearly caught out. The rooms off this one are all dark, except one, which has such feeble candlelight emanating from it that one would have to let
one’s eyes become dark-adapted before realizing that the room was a significantly lighter shade of the thick darkness everywhere. Miss Gilby decides to rush past that room and quickly take
the stairs from the other direction.

As she passes the room, something, perhaps just natural human curiosity, or the bare hint of a sound, not so much heard as sensed, causes her to turn her head. What she sees roots her to the
ground and makes her hair stand on end. In that dim firelight, more dark than light, with giant shadows flickeringly eager to devour the little of the room that is in the dirty yellow tallow light,
Bimala and Mr Banerjea, the
swadeshi
revolutionary, are entwined in an amorous embrace, their mouths joined together in a communion of unspeakable passion.

B
oarded up windows invariably remind Ritwik of gouged out eyes. A large number of houses in the back streets around King’s Cross look as if
they have been forcibly blinded, with cheap plywood squares nailed into where windows once were. Abandoned buildings with broken windows; bold, swirling graffiti, mostly unintelligible, sometimes
pure, riding form; detritus-blown streets: newspapers, empty cartons, kebab wrappings and takeaway boxes; train sheds with more graffiti in places one would have thought unreachable – in a
different country, with different building materials, this would have been called a slum. This is a dead appendage of the urban monster, awaiting amputation or, as they call it here, regeneration.
Every building and warehouse along these streets seems to have conspired with the other to induce instant depression and exude an unnameable threat. This is their only resounding achievement. Under
the dull, gunmetal London sky, Crinan Street, Delhi Street, Randell’s Road, Bingfield Street, Goods Way, Camley Street, Earlsferry Way, all make suicide seem sensible, natural, even
desirable.

At night, the drama changes. The dark hides the cracking plaster, the details of the decrepitude, and the emphasis moves from desolation to fear. These are the streets that everyone has learned
to call ‘soulless’, ‘dangerous’, ‘crime hotspot’, but no word approaches the shadowy menace always out of the field of vision, always imminent, but never
realized. Add to that the impoverishment, this interminable locked-in dance with squalor, and the mixture explodes in little tingles in the skin’s pores as you walk down these streets.

Of course, like most of the others who hover here, those who do not hurriedly walk down, Ritwik has learnt to live with the fear, at times finding it somewhat erotic, a conditioned reflex from
his cottaging nights. The creatures here dart in and out of shadows. They are creatures of fishnet stockings, high heels, cigarette smoke, impossibly short skirts, the careless glitter and dazzle
of sequins and tawdry shiny stuff – fake
zari
, he thinks – and garishly applied lipstick, eye make up, concealer. Or so he imagines, because he has never actually come close
enough to
see
their Otto Dix faces and their harlequin make up, except for split second glimpses of mouths, which look like bleeding gashes in the unforgiving light of the intermittent
sodium vapour lamps that cast more gloom in a pool right at their bases than light around them.

The stretch off York Way on which Ritwik usually walks is called the ‘Meat Mile’. Not that it has got them hanging off hooks, but if one is minded that way, there is plenty
available, provided a police car is not cruising by at irregular intervals, or another crackdown on kerb-crawling not taking place. The main thing is knowledge, adherence to codes that to the
untrained eye might be invisible. A certain type of aimlessness thrown into one’s gait, being seen on the same alley or lane more than once, a few glances sideways and backwards –
Ritwik knows all of these with practised ease. It’s what they say about swimming, that you never forget it, that it’s muscle memory; these codes are written into his veins and arteries.
He can read a customer, either his kind or the more numerous and more frequent other type, from the sound their shoes make on the pavement, from the shadows they cast on the occasionally syringe-
and ampoule-strewn streets.

And then there is the other fear, the fear that he is a freak here, the break from the norm expected in the ‘Meat Mile’. Two weeks ago he had heard a fat woman, all skimpy shawl and
enormous breasts almost totally exposed except for a precariously tied piece of glittering cloth on her nipples, spit out the words ‘Fucking queer’, her gobbet of spit landing with a
loud ‘splat’ near her, before disappearing into the darkness that is always stalking one here.