A Life Apart (41 page)

Ritwik is overwhelmed by this casual generosity and feels belittled by the stubborn suspicion about Zafar’s motives that will not let go of him. Too many questions are muddying this, too
many bad films and stereotypes and myths are in the way. He nods, unable to say anything that will not appear flimsy and hackneyed.

Outside Ritwik’s house, Zafar turns off the engine.

‘Is there any way I can get in touch with you?’ asks Ritwik.

‘Why?’ The question is as instantaneous as Zafar’s regret for letting it slip out. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I just wanted to . . .’

‘No, that’s all right. Thank you so much for your generosity.’ The whipcrack of Zafar’s question has turned on all the harsh lights; even the brief illusion of soft focus
images is now gone irreversibly.

‘You know my address, you have my phone number,’ Ritwik continues, ‘you can contact me when you’re in London next.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that. And . . .’ Zafar hesitates.

‘What?’

‘Don’t go to King’s Cross again. That’s our deal, all right? And don’t for once think I won’t find out if you do it. I have eyes everywhere in
London.’

Ritwik finds the image much more startling than the naked threat. Once again, he wonders what Zafar does for a living that gives him such wealth, such a smooth acceptance of the role of
imperious master. He doesn’t respond immediately to this. When he speaks, his words are of a doormat’s.

‘How long will it be then before I see you again?’ He hates himself for being such a pushover, he finds his own voice whiney and needy.

‘Soon,’ says Zafar, evasive again.

Ritwik reaches for the door handle. Zafar leans forward, touches his hand and says, ‘You give me your word, don’t you, you are not going to go with other men?’

Ritwik isn’t sure the unidiomatic nature of Zafar’s words is real or imagined inside his prejudiced head. He nods and even manages a smile as Zafar holds his face and says something
in Arabic again.

‘You never said what it means.’

‘I will, one day,’ he whispers.

The rest of the night is sleepless for Ritwik. He writes for a bit, for company, nearing the end of Miss Gilby’s story. At other times, he lies in bed and stares at the
objects in the room with a fixed gaze, hoping it will induce first a meditative trance and then sleep. No such luck as he discovers that the hoop of the small lock on the metal trunk stowed away
under the table doesn’t go through the clasp of the bolt. Which means the trunk is not locked but just gives the impression of being so. He leaps out of bed and starts ferreting, unsure of
what he is going to find.

Bills, some dating back forty years, house deeds, vehicle registration forms, leasehold papers, brittle yellow pieces of paper, foxed and aged, letters, bank statements, a bundle tied with faded
blue silk, a post mortem report from Southwark Coroner’s Court for Richard Christopher Cameron, died May 26, 1966, by his own hand, a single gunshot wound to his forehead.

The hands that open the report are not his, they are guided by someone else, someone at once inside and outside him.

Entry through glabella, entry wound consistent with contact wound. Shattering of the crista galli, the collection of the frontal sinuses. Grazing of the corpus callosum. Slower trajectory
through the lateral ventricle, which is entirely shattered, along with similar damage to the posterior ramus of the lateral sulciss. Grazes edge of the parieto-occipital lobe, just missing the
occipital lobe, exiting through the occipital bone, two centimetres above the superior nuchal line.

Ritwik forces his eyes from this to the doctor’s illegible signature, its very scrawl a feeble attempt to restore normality, but foredoomed and drowned by the preceding jargon, at once
emotionless and violent. His head is a carillon of one question – why, why, why – increased in amplitude by the belief that never in his or Anne’s lifetime will he be able to
bring himself to ask her about her son’s suicide.

A loose leaf of paper has fallen out from the single fold of the post mortem report. He opens it: a crabbed, ungenerous hand, faded blue ink. It is the last page of a letter:
my view that
neither any good nor any remedy can come of what you suggest. I am sorry if I appear to be somewhat inflexible, but our griefs are different. While not wishing for one moment to detract from your
great loss – and what can be greater than the death of a son – I would like you to understand that I too have lost someone, and my loss is made more painful by the fact that I have to
carry it around secretly like a mark of shame, hiding it from public view, from any acknowledgement of it to even those nearest to me. Your laudable move to sanction my relationship with your son
– and perhaps there is something of an attempt to lighten your irredeemable loss by sharing it with someone similarly afflicted – comes too late. Let us mourn, individually, each to his
or her own self. What could not be in life, cannot be in the absence of the one who could have bound us. I wish you forbearance, strength (but you have those already) and send you my
prayers.

Yours sorrowfully, James.

P.S.: I am attaching a photograph of Richard and me in Maine two autumns ago. Richard wished you to have it one day.

Next morning he discovers that the tiles on the side of the bath have come loose. As he kneels down to examine the damage more closely to see if he can manage a temporary repair, they fall onto
the floor, exposing the dark cavern under the bath and half a dozen bottles of Safeway gin nestling in there. He debates whether to confront Anne with this or simply hide them away silently
somewhere out of her reach and decides on the latter; she is so brilliant at evading, stonewalling and plain not listening that the first approach would get him nowhere. What baffles him most is
how she has been smuggling it in. Mrs Haq? No, she would never do such a thing. Mr Haq? Equally unlikely. Did Anne herself go out of the house to get it? Impossible. The nearest Safeway is in
Balham and Anne doesn’t have a car.

He gives up in despair; he can forgive her anything. He paces the garden for a while with his hands on his hips. As he slips his hands into his back pockets, he comes across a folded piece of
paper. He takes it out and opens it. On it, in green ink, are an 081 London phone number and the name of Zafar’s contact. He cannot believe the name written on it in Zafar’s hand so, to
have his fears confirmed, he rushes in immediately and calls the number. No one picks up the phone and there is no machine. He tries every twenty minutes, nervous, impatient, puzzled. Seven hours
later, at around five in the afternoon, the phone is answered. The voice and accent are unmistakable: they are Saeed Latif’s.

F
ires have started in the village of Nawabgunj. Little armies of saffron-clad youths, some of them hardly out of their teens, are rushing around
the village like the lawless winds, seizing foreign goods wherever they are stocked – cloth from Manchester, salt from Liverpool, stainless steel implements and utensils from Sheffield, sugar
from Leicester – dragging them out into the open, pouring kerosene over them and torching them into bonfires. Their zeal is incandescent, the air above the conflagrations redolent with the
ardour of their mother goddess mantra,
bande mataram
. No door can remain shut to them, no English goods, however tiny, hidden from their righteous rage. The handful of Muslim traders who
have resisted have had their houses set on fire too. Some of them have fled the village, others have voluntarily surrendered their secret stockpiles of tainted English goods to avoid greater
dangers.

Miss Gilby has seen for herself the heaps of black ash left in the market square, the aftermath of some burning ceremony. On one occasion, she had even seen the dying embers in one; a little
child had picked up stones from nearby and flung them on to the residue of the fire, sending up little flurries of black ash, like insects disturbed, in a shower of red sparks.

Gossip and rumours arrive at ‘Dighi Bari’ by the hour, spreading like bushfire, accompanied by whispered excitement that can barely be kept in check.
Did you know they have set
Faizal Mohsen’s warehouse on fire? He was hiding a whole consignment of foreign cloth, planning to pass it off as
swadeshi
fabric in the market.
Unable to go out, the women in the
andarmahal
gather news from the servants and embellish it with untrammelled freedom. Bimala’s
naw jaa
has already started packing her boxes and trunks in preparation for moving
to Calcutta. Miss Gilby is no longer certain how much of that possible move has been actually discussed in the family and how much of it is in her fervid imagination. But the sight of those fires
made Miss Gilby realize that not all was rumour and fabrication.

Mr Roy Chowdhury holds long, agonized meetings with the elders of the village. He is advised to send his friend, Mr Banerjea, packing. The village grows mutinous against the depredations of
these imported youths. The elders advise Mr Roy Chowdhury to placate the Muslim population of the village who are now convinced that it is a Hindu plot to drive them out; they are not going to keep
quiet for long and watch these thugs set their lives and living on fire.

All this Miss Gilby finds out when she accidentally crosses Mr Roy Chowdhury’s path in the morning while he is on his way out and she on her way to the drawing room for the first of the
morning lessons. In a hurried exchange of words in the verandah, marked by great anxiety and foreboding, he warns her of the dangers of going riding unaccompanied at such a volatile time:
anti-English sentiments are running high and unchecked and she would do well to be extra cautious. She thanks him for his solicitude; more than that she cannot say because she is robbed of her
usual amiability by the haunted and gaunt look that has settled like a mantle of darkness on him.

Then one day the fires outside come inside. On the day the local bank is robbed – it remains in no doubt that
swadeshi
youths have done this for even revolutions need money;
besides, the young men who committed the deed didn’t bother to mask themselves – that same evening, Robin
babu
, Mr Roy Chowdhury’s accountant, is set on by a mob of rabid
men and beaten so severely that had Rakhal Sardar not passed by fortuitously, on his way to fetch water from the well, and heard his piteous groans, the accountant would have bled to his death in
the muddy ditch into which he had been pushed. When Robin
babu
comes to his senses and manages to speak, he cannot say with any certainty who the assailants were. Mr Roy Chowdhury calls his
own doctor to look after the poor man. The ramifications of the attack on his innocent accountant have disturbed him no end: were the perpetrators
swadeshi
youths trying to pass it off as a
heinous act committed by the wily and intransigent Muslims, thereby attempting to alienate any sympathy for them, or was it really Muslim anger boiling over and this cowardly deed its first
expression? As
zamindar
of Nawabgunj, any action taken by him without establishing the incontrovertible truth could have serious repercussions.

Bimala stops attending lessons altogether. Miss Gilby doesn’t write to Mr Roy Chowdhury again: the man is too burdened with graver matters to have the leisure to discuss his wilful and
secretive wife’s little obstinacies with her tutor. She waits for this sudden rain of madness to let up but deep down inside something tells her that she is not for long in the Roy Chowdhury
family. Something, some connection, thin as a strand from a spider’s web, has been severed and there is no repairing it. The music has become subtly discordant.

S
aeed patters his stubby fingers on the faux-chrome top of the table to an invisible tune inside his head. It goes maniacally fast sometimes; at
other times it reduces to the slow tapping of his index finger once every few seconds. Indeed, there is something manic about Saeed this morning; he has made the journey from Ganymede Road to
Al-Shami, his favourite restaurant on Edgware Road, in fourteen minutes flat, zipping through the empty stretches and jumping most of the traffic lights on the way. He had kept drumming his fingers
on his steering wheel, had fiddled with his rings and bracelets, and had spewed out an unstoppable stream of words at Ritwik during that quarter of an hour. The only noteworthy thing Ritwik managed
to extricate from it was the fact that Saeed kept calling Zafar ‘Sheikh bin Hashm’ and, when asked by Ritwik if he was really a sheikh, he had replied, ‘Yes, sheikh, sheikh,
important person, VIP, very rich, lots money’, with an accompanying gesture of rubbing the tips of his forefinger and thumb to emphasize the undeniable fact of Zafar’s immense wealth.
All this left Ritwik confused about whether Zafar was really a sheikh; Saeed could have been using the term loosely, in the way Italians call everyone ‘dottore’, regardless of their
profession or level of higher education.

Now, Saeed sits smoking, waiting for the food to be brought to the table. The whole thing may be in Ritwik’s imagination, but Saeed seems to be respectful of him, almost ingratiating in
his holding open of doors, letting him enter first, asking him questions about his well-being, asking for permission to smoke, his over-solicitous concern about seat belts, restaurant tables, the
food ordered. He assumes it to be the cachet that being friends with Zafar gives him. Ritwik is first baffled, then embarrassed; he finds it difficult to make eye contact with someone who has so
unsubtly appointed him, Ritwik, his overlord.