A Life Apart (45 page)

‘On one condition,’ he says. ‘You tell me where you got it from.’

‘No. Never reveal one’s sources. Rule one. You should know.’

‘What do you mean, I should know?’

No answer. Ritwik decides to spring his surprise, a pleasant one: he has discovered a stash of mouldy, curling, black-and-white photographs in the loft above his room, hidden away in the
insulating material, while he was attempting to hide the bottles of gin. He had looked at all of them and realized, to his great delight, that they were photographs from Anne’s days in India.
Or perhaps not, because he couldn’t identify Anne in any of the pictures, but it was undeniable that they were all taken in India while it was still under British rule. Maybe they belonged to
someone else and Anne had forgotten all about them. He hopes that it will be a treat for her to rediscover these forgotten images.

He runs upstairs, brings them down and presents them to Anne. ‘Look what I found. I think I’ll agree to your deal if you tell me what they are. Let’s go through each picture.
Are you in any of them?’ Ritwik is so excited, his recent wrongfooting so erased, that he babbles like a hyperactive child.

Anne takes one look at them and sits down on a chair. Ritwik pulls another one beside her and places the photographs between them on the table. He can hardly stop talking as he goes through the
pile, passing them to Anne, one by one.

‘Look, are these in India? What funny clothes. Did Englishwomen only wear these gowns all the time? And hats? God, they’re so elaborate. And umbrellas, they always carry
umbrellas.’

‘Parasols. One needed to. It was a cruel sun out there.’

‘And look, the men all have moustaches.’ Ritwik is very amused. ‘What’s happening here?’

‘That looks like tea on the lawns. I forget where.’

‘And look at all these Indian servants in mufti, waiting on the lords and ladies.’

‘Oh, yes, they were indispensable.’

‘Why is everyone looking at the camera all the time? Anne, where are you? Are these from your days in India? Such a long time ago. Is this Simla, no, Dalhousie?’

Anne picks out a photograph, sepia with age, its edges spotted with a sprinkling of orange fungus. It looks like a tableau of an English family in a garden – a moustached man, sombre and
grave; a lady smiling, her eyes in the shadow cast by her hat; a stiff boy dressed in his Sunday best; and a little girl, an infant really, in a floppy bonnet in the arms of her Indian ayah,
reaching out with her little arms to the grass where she presumably wants to be put down. The ayah has a big, bright smile on her black face. There is a fiercely moustached Indian man in the
background, a strap across his kurta, his turban too big for his head. There is also an Indian couple alongside him, looking startled, staring at the alien camera. They are in a garden washed with
bright sunlight.

Anne points a moving finger at each figure and says, ‘That’s Christopher, here’s Richard, here’s Clare with her ayah, Savitri, that’s Bahadur Singh, and I
don’t remember who the others are.’

‘Where is this?’

Anne is silent. Sensing something, Ritwik looks sideways at her. She has shut her eyes and is trying to get up.

‘Anne?’

‘Savitri drowned Clare in the bath. She was two. It was an accident but Savitri was inconsolable. She killed herself the next week. She loved the children.
Chhota sahib
, Richard
was, and when Clare came,
chhota mem
. Loved them more than her life. It was just as well she took her own, they would have hanged her, anyway. She could have killed for them. Such a fiercely
loyal creature. Something broke inside her after . . . after the incident. Christopher wanted all the Indian servants shot. Ridiculous, really.’

Anne manages to stand up, push her chair back and start walking towards the door. Some of the photographs spill in a fan on to the linoleum-covered floor. Ritwik looks down at them: they have
fallen face down, he can only see their browning backs.

‘You shouldn’t have taken them out,’ Anne mutters, more to the landing outside than to Ritwik, sitting behind her like an immovable rock.

The television continues to babble out its rubbish as Ritwik sits quietly after Anne has left the room, when some stray word or phrase seeps into his consciousness and stirs something. He looks
up at the screen: there is a group of young men and women dressed in carnival costumes and a minor cavalcade of mock tanks and lifesize armoured vehicles made of cardboard joyfully protesting
against something. They are carrying CAAT banners; it takes a while before the running commentary decodes this for him: Campaign Against Arms Trade. They are trying to barricade a convoy of cars
– the vehicles of invitees to the Defence System and Equipment International Exhibition at Lydney in Gloucestershire.

He sees a familiar car, a blue Bentley, in the held-up convoy before the heavy police presence disperses the protesters. But perhaps he imagines this flash of blue to accompany the words of the
events coordinator of CAAT whose impassioned face appears on the screen and speaks out a new knowledge for him. ‘. . .
supply arms to the most detestable and repressive regimes in the
world, arms that are used to crush democracy, kill people, extinguish their voices. If you look at some of the countries which have been invited to this fair, you’ll be outraged. What are
Burma, North Korea, Iraq, Sierra Leone doing here, countries with military juntas and ruthless dictatorships as governments, countries with a proven record of repression and torture? Some of the
delegates here are brokers and fences: theoretically and officially we sell this to, say, Pakistan, or India, but where do they then end up? There are private buyers here, among the so-called
delegates. This is just a legitimization of illegal arms dealing and it’s being done in broad daylight, with the full knowledge, indeed, approval of the government. We are campaigning to
reconcile a foreign policy with
. . .’

He moves to the cooker and watches the peas agitated in the furious boil of the stock. A few seconds of staring into that roil and he is hypnotized by their movement.

He doesn’t even know he is going to go out of the house until he steps out of the front door. The sky is the dark blue of an English summer night. Unerringly, he walks towards Brixton tube
station. It is like sleepwalking, the motives and outcomes equally cloudy, the acts themselves unpredictable, zigzag. An old serpent inside him has begun to stir, awaking from a long, long sleep.
He hasn’t felt this hollowing out of his bowels, this insistent clenching and unclenching of his sphincter, since his cottaging years in university.

In the train, he keeps his eyes fixed on the ads over the opposite seats and the route of the Victoria Line, a blue, straight trajectory of sans serif letters from Brixton to Walthamstow
Central. Despite a number of empty seats, a man stands holding the blue supporting rod in front of the doors and teeters precariously on the balls of his feet. He can barely keep his eyes open. At
this hour, the carriages are littered with trampled newspaper pages, empty Lucozade bottles, McDonald’s boxes, crumpled brown paper packets that had held chips, entire newspapers folded and
left at the windows above the backrest of the seats. Only one headline is visible: BRITAIN TOPS ASYLUM SEEKER INTAKE IN EUROPE.
Daily Mail.

By the time he gets off at King’s Cross, the sky is still blue enough for the twin tower blocks of the Bemerton Estate to be silhouetted against it like two menacing gods presiding over
their demesne of misrule and detritus. Once within the maze of alleyways, streets and culs-de-sac, the noise of traffic and human life on the bordering main roads fades away, leaving only an echo
corridor of receding footsteps, the revving of an occasional car, the awkward shuffle of bodies disappearing into the dark, sometimes even the hissy whispers of haggling customers. Everything seems
furtive and has the quality of noises off. Even the sound of trains entering the depot to the west, into sidings, has a faraway quality to it, something heard in a different, fairytale land, before
a child’s eyes close over with sleep.

His insides are fizzing fireworks of fear; it runs, thick and sluggish, in his feet, his calf muscles, his knocking chest, turning them heavy and light at the same time. Where does this end and
hunger begin? Initially, he stays on streets from where running out onto York Way or Caledonian Road would be a short sprint, but the slowly diffusing smoke of the drug inside him obliges with its
addictive hits only when he strays into the darker, more remote areas of the maze. The thought of those pimps with the acid bulb explodes in a delicious crackle-and-flash of fear in him. Tonight he
will go with anyone and not ask for any money. Tonight it is faceless pleasure he is after.

He walks towards the stretch of water between Camley Street and Goods Way. It is the only way he can live with his fear, exorcizing it in the very place he was pinned down and threatened with
the potent, disfiguring hiss of acid. He hasn’t been in these desolate streets for well over six months; surely, the men who assaulted him have forgotten his very existence by now. Small
change, that is what he was to them.

He hears footsteps in the next street and instinctively moves into the darker shadow of what appears to be a doorway to an abandoned warehouse. There are no streetlights here, only what meagre
illumination reaches from the halogen lights of the Bemerton Estate; one could hardly count the change in one’s hand in it. Two men appear at the end of the street. On instinct, Ritwik
flattens himself against the door. One man could be a possibility, two men, almost always trouble: first rule of streetwalking. A few minutes later, he peeps: they are gone. He steps out and moves
towards the end where he had seen the men. He moves fast because this area is slightly better lit than where he had hidden.

As if from nowhere, there are two men standing there. Skinny, young, pinched pale faces. One of them is smoking. Ritwik bends his head, concentrates on the road, and increases his pace. He can
feel their eyes boring into his back, hears some whispering and then the punch of ‘Paki cunt’, not hurled at him, not yet, but just a casual conversational moment that exceeds and
spills over the whispers. Whatever is invisible in the semi-darkness, colour obviously is not one of them. He tries not to panic, not to run, not to register any reaction, and keeps walking at the
same pace. Thank god they are not those Albanian pimps at least, he thinks.

The men smell his fear, read his forced nonchalance easily, and gradually step up their abuse.

‘Paki scum, hey you, Paki scum.’ Tentative, even hushed, like a singer trying out his voice in a new venue, testing the acoustics.

‘Fuck off to your slum you Paki bastard you Paki cunt fuck off.’ Louder, bolder.

Ritwik arrives at a crossroads. If he takes a right and runs, runs very fast, he might be able to make it to one of the arteries feeding into the Caledonian Road. But the lane is so dark that he
is scared to step in there. He hears running footsteps behind him. He wheels around: the men are within spitting distance. He has no choice; he makes his first mistake by turning into the street
nearest him, thinking it will offer him a temporary sanctuary, the cover of darkness, or throw the men off the scent. Fear clouds his thoughts, and when he hears running behind him again, he
blindly turns left, right, left, any turning that appears in front of him, desperate to lose himself and confuse the men. There are no niches and corners in the street he finds himself in, panting
furiously, although it is darker than Camley Street. He has lost all orientation now. He is so scared that even the slow clang-and-rattle of a train in the background doesn’t give him back
his bearings. He is deaf to it; his ears are now wholly given to catching the sound of pursuit.

He hears a low whistle, a short hollering, the sound of more running feet, another whistle, and then, chillingly, the sound of running swells. There are five men now, at least five that he can
see, entering his street, summoned like dogs by some ultrasonic signal unheard by the human ear, by the scent of prey. He huddles against a wall, wishing himself invisible. If he could only walk a
few feet and slither under the hedge in front of him, he would feel safer but he is certain any movement will give him away.

‘Find the fucking wog. You two run over to that end, we’ll wait here for him. Let’s see where that scum can hide.’ The words are so loud that it seems to Ritwik all
perspective, all distance, has been warped and shortened to pack this street and the five men into a little closed chamber. He finds himself shaking all over. He decides to risk it to the hedge
– invisibility will save him – and in stepping out of the shadows he makes his second and final mistake.

He has hardly taken two steps forward, intending to crouch down and roll over the distance that separates him from his hiding place, when someone shouts, ‘There he is. Jim, to your
left.’

In an instant they are on him. Someone trips him up: he breaks his fall using the palms of his hand. He doesn’t feel the skin scraping off them as he manages to save himself falling on his
face, only the pure lucidity of his terror, like some clear afternoon light. They kick him while he is lying down, random kicks, aimed nowhere in particular. One catches him in his groin and he
doubles up in pain. There is one on his ribs that takes all his breath away; try how hard he may, he cannot breathe anymore. As he chokes, he feels little popping explosions of light, a thousand
lights, of dull, unnameable colour, behind his eyes.

‘Send the fuckers back send those Paki scum away.’ They are almost chanting it now, like a mantra at a ritual, their words resonating in some deep way to the blows they throw out in
such aleoritic concord: a kick, a punch to the face, a sickening sound of cracking and crunching of bone. He tries to shout, but the scream is soundless. He doesn’t know whether he should
shout for help or beg for mercy. Just before he loses consciousness, Ritwik is granted not the diorama of his entire life flashing past his eyes in an instant but two unrelated moments of clarity:
he is struck with wonder at the sheer rage these men are expressing; where is its wellspring? How can one small human harbour a sea of such anger inside him? Why do they not drown under it? The
last light is the awareness of the fact that at some point during the chase or the assault, he had wet his jeans. Then he passes into the warmth of darkness.