A Life Apart (42 page)

‘I speak with Sheikh. He tells me I give money, any money you ask. I have money with me. You want?’ he says through a cloud of blue smoke soured by his breath.

Ritwik leans back, slightly alarmed at the possibility of Saeed unrolling and handing him soiled banknotes in such a public place. He says hastily, ‘No, no, not now, it can wait wait until
later.’

Saeed gives him another look of respectful reappraisal, as if he is seeing the real Ritwik for the first time.

‘You work for Sheikh.’

Ritwik decides to treat this as a statement, not a question, so he doesn’t answer.

‘I work for him many years. Ten, maybe, maybe twelve.’

‘What do you do for him?’

‘I am . . . how you say last time . . . going middle? No?’

‘Going middle?’ Ritwik asks, puzzled.

Saeed makes a gesture with two hands placed at two opposite sides of the table and then removes one hand to do a walking figure with two fingers while repeating, ‘Going middle, heh? Going
middle.’

The penny drops. ‘Ah, go-between.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Saeed nods like a happy child. ‘Go-between, I forget, go between. I go-between for Sheikh.’

‘But between what?’

Saeed takes some time to understand the question so Ritwik mimes his gesture and asks him to name the points on the table between which the to and fro of the go-between happens.

Saeed hesitates before answering. When he does, haltingly, Ritwik immediately understands that he is either lying or evading. ‘People. Big people. Business, lot money. Business
clients.’ He repeats the word ‘clients’ several times as if it were a new word he has only recently acquired.

Ritwik wields his newfound power, if it is that at all, and pushes ahead with the questioning. ‘What business?’

Saeed gives him an intensely quizzical look. At that moment the waiter arrives with the first of their dishes. Ritwik watches Saeed’s dogged determination to please and flatter slow down
over the sharing out of food – this time, Saeed heaps Ritwik’s plate before serving himself – as he tries to work out the nature of the connection between Zafar and Ritwik, but
the blip is thankfully short. Whatever he has deduced, it seems to be in Ritwik’s favour for he reverts to his enervating solicitude.

‘You eat. You too thin. Eat all this food.’

‘I’ll certainly try,’ says Ritwik, smiling. ‘I love this food, you know that.’

Saeed takes this as a personal compliment and preens. Ritwik seizes the opportunity. ‘So, you never said, what business is it that you do with Zafar?’

Saeed takes a long time to spear his kebab, put a piece into his mouth, follow it with a forkful of buttery rice and another of salad, and then a morsel of vinegared chilli, chew it, swallow and
address the question.

‘You know. Business. Money. You do same for Sheikh.’

Once again, Ritwik cannot determine if this is query or statement; each has a radically different meaning from the other. His mind is thick with questions: does Saeed know the nature of his
contact with Zafar or does he think that he is another of Zafar’s business clients? Surely, given how Saeed has helped him in the recent past, he cannot think Ritwik to be anything other than
an illegal immigrant scrabbling to feed himself one meal a day? Has Saeed ever asked himself, or even Zafar, for what services Ritwik is being given a blank cheque? What did Saeed and Zafar talk
about? And, noisiest of them all, what work did Saeed do for Zafar? Did he look after Zafar’s money in London? Was he just a low-level handyman for his interests here?
What
interests?

The air in the restaurant is dense and swooning with smoke. There are blue swirls of it everywhere, barely moving. Ritwik concentrates fiercely on eating and hopes Saeed will not demand a
response. The waiter comes with more food and moves plates and bowls around on their table to make space for the new arrivals. He and Saeed talk for a while in Arabic, the waiter laughs, looks at
Ritwik, says something to Saeed and leaves for the kitchen.

‘What were you saying to each other?’ Ritwik asks.

‘He say you eat like little bird,’ Saeed replies, smiling, and shows the size of the bird with his hand: it could be a sparrow in the nest of his palm.

The asymmetry of any relationship between Saeed and Zafar strikes Ritwik for the first time: what was a poshly spoken, educated, filthy rich sheikh doing with a criminal who had a line in a mild
version of people trafficking and wanted to break out into more serious aspects of it? The chasm that separates the two men seems vast, unbridgeable.

Seems. They have obviously managed to have a long and functional relationship across class boundaries. Clearly, Saeed is no fool if he has managed such a thing with a man who strikes Ritwik as
cunning, shady, powerful and disturbing.

‘You still think what I do for Sheikh. Work, I tell you. No worry for you. You don’t think of it.’

Ritwik is surprised at having his mind read. He gives a faint, false smile and asks, ‘Are you saying it’s none of my business?’ He hopes the smile takes the edge off the
question.

Saeed plays the same hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ he smiles, ‘not your business, not your business.’ Affable, even friendly, but Ritwik gets the sense that he has just been warned
off.

‘How much you want?’

Ah, business again. Ritwik decides to test his limits. ‘How much can I have?’ he asks.

‘Any money. Two hundred, five hundred, you say.’

Ritwik looks steadily at the bright green parsley flecked sparingly with light beige grains of bulgur, the orange oil from the sausages, the broken ball of a falafel, and says, without lifting
his eyes, ‘Four hundred now, let’s say. If I need more, I’ll call you.’ He pauses to look up and adds, ‘Not here, please, in the car.’

For some reason he doesn’t go into, Saeed refuses to take him to Ganymede Road and drops him off on Acre Lane, a three-minute drive away from where Ritwik lives. Ritwik reads this too as a
sign and tries to keep his voice bleached of any interest when he asks Saeed, ‘Does Zafar know Mr Haq?’

Saeed looks out of the window, spits, counts out four hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes and hands the wad to Ritwik. His jaw muscle throbs under his pale skin. He bares his teeth in what is
meant to be a smile, says something under his breath in Arabic then leans sideways to open the door and says, ‘Goodbye’, once in English and again in Arabic.

Ritwik gets out and walks the quarter hour to Ganymede Road, the dirty wad in his pocket an unsightly square bulge chafing and burning his skin. Everyone in the teeming crossroads of Brixton
seems to be staring at him. A young, bespectacled man, wearing a white shirt too small for him, stands in the concrete garden in front of the Ritzy cinema and shouts, ‘The Lord said, Come
unto me and I shall give you everlasting life. Friends, Jesus has given me a peace I have never known before. Jesus has saved me. Jesus has shown me love above all.’ He clutches a small Bible
in his hand and paces an invisible perimeter of about twenty square feet. His eyes are fixed in the middle distance. He repeats the words over and over again, unchanging in tone and delivery. By
the time Ritwik leaves the voice behind, he is ready to scream.

There is a message next to the phone in the living room one day: ‘Gavin called’. When he asks Anne if Gavin had left a number, she says no. There is no way he can
get in touch with him. But he has figured out a way to send letters to Aritra. He writes to his brother and asks him to address his envelopes to Anne Cameron, without any mention of his name
anywhere in case the immigration people trace him back to Ganymede Road and throw him out of the country. Of course, he doesn’t mention the reason for this subterfuge to Aritra and fobs him
off with a lie about bureaucracy and quirky rules of the British postal system.

Zafar doesn’t call or write. Ritwik doesn’t dare to call Saeed and ask for information about him: he doesn’t want Saeed to get the faintest whiff of himself as either a pining
or a nosey rent boy. Of one thing he is certain – Zafar has lied to his handyman or has evaded the entire issue. The questions, double-guessings, doubts, all paralyse Ritwik and keep him from
getting in touch with Saeed. Then three weeks after his first four hundred pounds, he calls Saeed again.

‘My friend,’ says Saeed, ‘you need more money, I give you.’

In a split second Ritwik decides to say yes because he can use their meeting for news of Zafar. ‘Why don’t we meet at Al-Shami?’

‘I too busy now, this week, next week. You meet me this night, Marble Arch tube, I give money, OK?’

‘No, wait, Saeed, I just wanted to ask if you had any news of Zafar.’ The question is phrased wrongly and Ritwik regrets his haste.

There is a pause before Saeed replies, ‘OK, everything OK. You don’t have news of Sheikh?’

Forced into this strategic ping-pong again, he tries to lob the question back to Saeed. ‘Is he in Saudi Arabia?’

‘Saudi Arabia?’ The disbelieving tone is followed by a long pause. ‘No, Sheikh in many countries. He travels now, business travel, lot of business travel. Africa, Sudan, Syria,
Paris.’ Another pause. ‘I not know where Sheikh now.’

Ritwik swallows the flat contradictions and the seamless jumps between all those seemingly irreconcilable points on the map. A new question rears its dark head: is Saeed Zafar’s eyes in
London?

Saeed marks the silence and asks Ritwik, ‘You in trouble, my friend? You need help?’

Ritwik says, somewhat more sharply than he intended, ‘No, what do you mean by trouble? What sort of trouble?’

‘No, my friend, I just ask. Your voice is . . . how you say . . . far, your voice is far, you know?’

‘I’m fine. I’ll come and pick the money up. What time is good for you?’

Slightly over three weeks after Saeed gives Ritwik his second installment, Zafar calls him to say he is in London for ten days; would tomorrow evening – late, say around
half ten – be good for him, same place, Dorchester, that is, and then he could drive Ritwik to his new house. Ritwik says yes politely, with a slight tinge of formality, even; in this gradual
illumination of someone else’s life, the words ‘new house’ hold a little corner of surprise. The question why Zafar chooses to stay in a luxury hotel if he has a house in this
country is not asked, of course.

It is well past midnight when Zafar and Ritwik set out on the drive to Surrey. Zafar tells him the name of the village – Hincksey Green – and promises to take him back to Brixton
before three. Ritwik sits in the car, the metallic taste of Zafar’s semen still in his mouth, and feels anxious about Anne, left alone in the house. When asked about what he did while he was
away from London – did he see his wife, his children, what about the son whom he had mentioned last time – Zafar brushes the questions aside with a curt and condescending ‘Oh, the
usual stuff, boring, don’t bother your pretty little head with it.’

Ritwik lets the first half an hour of the drive soothe the rage this condescension fires in him. Halfway through it, he asks, in a tone slightly more highly pitched than normal, ‘But,
Zafar, you cannot forever evade such questions. It’s not just empty formality. I might be genuinely interested in your life elsewhere. I know practically zilch about it.’

Zafar gives his irritating, non-committal laugh. ‘That’s even scarier than empty formality.’

It is meant to be half a joke but the other half goes through Ritwik like a blade. He stares out of the window, watching the deserted, orange-lit suburbs of south London slip by smoothly and
fast. He rolls down his window and a rush of cool night air, smelling of petrol fumes, grass and night vegetation, blows in. There are a lot of trees, green spaces and gardens where they drive
through. After Peaslake, Ritwik loses interest in keeping track of places; he certainly doesn’t want to keep on asking Zafar where they are. The houses thin out after a while. Ritwik feels
Zafar’s hand on his thigh and the tension in the car begins to fade away with his drowsiness. The cool air makes him shiver a bit so he rolls up the window.

‘Don’t you think there’s something reductive in associating every Arab man you meet with oil?’

More than this abrupt fracture of the nearly companionable silence Ritwik is jolted by the meditated and carefully studied quality of the question.

‘I don’t meet Arab men,’ he answers, as indirectional and evasive as Zafar.

‘But it was one of the first things you asked me, did I have anything to do with oil,’ Zafar insists.

‘Well . . . you said . . . you said you were from Saudi Arabia and . . . and . . .’

‘And so, with charming stereotyping impulses, you thought, ah, Saudi Arabia, therefore, oil.’

‘Well, you’re not wrong. I was being a bit . . . insular,’ Ritwik says, very sheepish now.

Zafar returns his hand to his thigh and gives it a squeeze. ‘My father made his fortune in oil. But it’s not going to last forever.’

‘What, the oil or the fortune?’

‘Neither. Do you know anything about Saudi Arabia?’

‘No, apart from . . .’ he stops, trying to phrase sentences that won’t smack of camels, oil or harems.

Zafar rushes in. ‘Apart from thinking that everyone in that country is afloat on a fortune of oil.’

Ritwik tries to protest but Zafar gives a short, joyless laugh and continues. ‘Do you know who runs the country? Do you know what the oil revenue is used for? Who gets that money? Who owns
the oilfields? How oil multinationals are run?’

‘No, Zafar, of course, I don’t know. But why don’t you take me through these things? I’ll be glad to be enlightened.’ Ritwik immediately regrets the last sentence:
it could so easily be read as acid-soaked.

‘OK, little by little.’ There is no sign that Zafar has taken it as sarcasm but he clams up for a while.

‘It’s a one-resource economy. How long will that last you think?’ Zafar has started talking again but Ritwik gets the impression that he is thinking aloud. ‘In the next
twenty or thirty years, that country is going to need nearly half a trillion dollars, yes, trillion, to upgrade oil pipelines, refineries, transport, the whole bloody infrastructure to keep the oil
industry and its economy running. It’s living in a bubble. Oil money is an illusion.’