A Life Apart (6 page)

‘No, not really, but it’s not unusual.’

‘It’s very unusual to my ears,’ he smiled.

‘It means “he who officiates at a fire sacrifice”,’ the words tumbled out, heavy and anachronistic in the faultless green of the rain-washed main quad, before he could
stop himself.

‘Wow.’ This time the wonder was real. ‘Do all Indian names have a meaning?’

‘Yes, they do.’ They had entered the main hall now where some of them were beginning to disperse. Someone came up to Pete and he started talking to her before Ritwik had a chance to
tell him that his name meant rock.

He went up to Sarah, the confident, friendly girl with glasses and radiating rings of brown, springy, corkscrew curls. ‘Is it necessary to know German then?’

She frowned, then laughed and said, ‘German? Good god, no! Why do you think it’s necessary to know German?’

‘I thought you were all joking in German. You see, I don’t know the language at all . . . Declan’s German, isn’t he?’

It took a few seconds for the pieces to fall into place. She cracked up, laughing, ‘No, no, you’ve got it wrong, he’s from Liverpool, that’s his accent . . . Dec’s
not German . . . oh, that’s so funny, wait till the others hear of it.’ She continued laughing. He joined her, weakly and uncertainly at first, then got swept up in it. Maybe he found
it funny as well.

The days are loads, bearing him down. The cold has given him an intractable case of dandruff, but for the first time in his life he has money to go into the shops and buy
things for himself, superficial and silly things, things that deal with problems such as dandruff. He has heard of the Body Shop; Jhimli had got her delicious lip balms from that place on one of
her numerous trips abroad with her dance company. He can now buy those improbable objects that fill him with wonder: is it even possible to have ginger root anti-dandruff shampoo, a
banana
conditioner? How can you get butter from mango? He buys stackloads of different types of products. They give him a sense of control over his life: yes, he’s finally grown up, he can choose
his own luxury items. He can pay for them himself. They’re going to do him good.

But the embers of hyperacidity behind his breastbone, sometimes up in his throat, won’t be extinguished; at times they flare up into something more unmanageable (he has a supply of Pepto
Bismol at hand) but most of the time it’s just a slow burn inside him. He’s convinced it’s caused by eating dinner at six o’clock in the evening. Back home, dinner, when it
was at all available, was between half-past ten and half-past eleven at night.

After that absurdly early dinner, he lopes back to his cell and reads in the yellow spill of light, gets up sometimes and paces around, thinking of Christ the knight jousting at a tournament and
ending up bleeding. Or of Hunger plaguing poor farmers and helpless little men and women battling with the cold and their masters’ stubborn land. That acid sting surges and falls, surges and
falls. When he’s bored and lonely, he looks at the little row of his Body Shop objects, fingers them lovingly, sometimes uncaps a bottle or two and has a sniff. The thought of using some of
those things the next day makes him feel all right again. He owns these products. They are bought with his scholarship money and they belong to him. They will protect his face from the legion
knives of the February wind, keep his armpits fragrant, free his tangled locks of dandruff. He can have a new body in England, even be a new person. Maybe.

The clock tower chimes out the notes for half past the hour. It’s a melody he knows by heart; he knows he has to wait for another incomplete installment before the full
tune is rung out at the hour. Unfailingly, every fifteen minutes, this escalating teasing of three-note and four-note unfulfillment. It drives him mad, this knowing what’s going to come
– so trite and mechanical, so unchanging – but having it deferred. The giant horse chestnut tree outside, across the cobbles, is losing its edges and becoming an amorphous looming
shadow. Someone has recently told him the blossom of the horse chestnut is called ‘candle’. Candles of horse chestnut, he savours the phrase in his head.

He turns around to walk towards the light switch. His mother is sitting in the armchair near the door.

There is a barely whispered presence in this threshold time of the gathering dark. In a thought-swift instant he understands the expression about hairs standing on end – fear tastes like
this; it is the opening of the pores of your face, inside your ears, behind your head.

Don’t come back like this you’re gone you belong elsewhere not here I cannot live on this hinge you’ve just shown me it’s one or the other now or then elsetime
elseplace but please please please not me not ever.

He suddenly has an urgent need to piss, but it seems he has grown gnarled, hugging roots into the regulation carpet. How can he bring himself to cross the few feet, past that armchair which is
charged with her imagined trace, to the toilet outside? Only by this and by this only:

He must have been six or seven at the time, so it was quite natural to have thought it was a great idea to stick the rubbery gob of chewing gum in his mouth in the hair of Tipshu, the small girl
next door. Tipshu didn’t notice until much later. They had to cut off some of her lovely, glossy hair as she brought the house down, howling and crying. Her mother came around for the
inevitable complaint, serious words about improper bringing up of children, insufficient discipline that let naughtiness such as this run unchecked.

Ritwik’s mother was out, tutoring children in a couple of houses in the neighbourhood; this was her way of supplementing her husband’s apology of an income. Dida, his grandmother,
already at the door eavesdropping on the loud confusion next door, received the complaint much in the way a hungry dog receives leftovers. Ritwik was warned, darkly, ‘Wait till Ma’s
back. You’re in for a bad time.’

There was a sudden manic animation that lit up Dida’s eyes like embers from within. She sat in the balcony, keeping a sharp eye out for her daughter, jittery with excitement. No sooner had
she spied her at the far end of Grange Road than she limped to the door: she could barely wait for the knock before she opened it and the rush of tales spilled out before his mother had even had a
chance to sit down and drink a cooling glass of water, ‘You won’t believe what Ritwik’s done, he stuck a dozen Chiclets in Tipshu’s hair, they’ve had to shave all her
hair off. Her mother came to complain to you, she is absolutely livid with rage, shaking with anger, said what kind of discipline is this . . .’

The first kick caught him unawares; it happened in the instant of a blink and sent him nearly flying to the niche where the mortar and pestle stood. While losing his balance and skidding across
the floor Ritwik caught, in the peripheries of his field of vision, the blur of his mother pulling a belt from the nylon line on which his father’s clothes hung, shabby and limp. He lay on
the floor, a foetal quiver of fear, as the first lash from the leather belt cleanly cut a menacing crack through the compact air and landed on him with the sting of fire. The fiery flowers bloomed
rapidly across his legs his thighs his back his scalp, now all one clarifying tingle of pain, and his hairs took life in rising to attention to this rain of weals. Maybe he was sobbing maybe crying
please spare me spare me I’ll never do it again never again never stop
but this was not just any rain of fire, it was a deluge, which didn’t know when to stop, until she put an
end to it and instead started kicking his head his stomach his chest then stood on him with her fierce weight of fury. He felt choked and air air was all he wanted to breathe in, air in, not this
hollow of nothing of craving to inhale; then there is only dark, only a saving obliterating blackness.

When he wakes up, it takes him a span of viscous, murky time to realize he is in a bed next door, in Tipshu’s house. And the story he pieces together to comfort himself goes something like
this: the commotion must have brought the next-door neighbours rushing in, Tipshu’s mother had carried the unconscious Ritwik away to their flat, called a doctor or given him water to revive
him, then put him to bed, letting the heave of his residual sobbing subside to a calm, but he doesn’t actually know if it went like that. All he knows is that they can’t put him in a
plaster cast for cracked ribs; he has to sit, or lie, and wait it out, still as a forgotten stone in a corner, erased, absent.

He lets the liquid heat of his piss comfort him in its trickle down the inside of his legs and, when his saturated jeans cannot take it any more, watches it leak through
pathetically in weak, stuttering drops on to the carpet. He is pissing, shaking and sobbing beside his desk, his room now completely in the grip of the dark. He feels he can never stop this
trembling as he makes his way out, fumbling, to the bathroom. It is only much later that he notices how walking past that armchair is no longer a problem, no longer a consuming terror.

One cold evening, when his head is badly trying to contain the tumult of words inside it, and with an upper stomach burning slowly, he takes a walk to begin, belatedly, an
acquaintance with other streets, other buildings. He starts off with the certainty that he’s going to lose his way, stray into badlands and have trouble getting back to the haven of his
college. With every step forward he thrills with this little fear. He walks past shops and streets with people bathed in the sick orange glow of sodium vapour lamps till he feels he has wandered
well beyond the High Street. It is on a darker side street off an excessively lit road that he suddenly sees the man looking at him. No,
looking
, the kind that tells him in a flash that he
has been noticed for some time now.

With that sudden emptying squeeze in his stomach and the drowning out of all noise by the percussion of his heart he knows, he knows he’s been followed, he knows this is going to be a
pick-up, that he can walk ahead, turning his head around a couple of times to let the stranger know he knows and that he can carry on following him because he’s interested too; it’s a
little courtship dance, like the eight-patterned flight of bees or the choreographed code of birds.

There is that very familiar dryness in his mouth as he plays out this first movement of the suite with a stranger. It has its unerring, delicious shiver as always, but also an inchoate fear of
the unknown: who knows, this is not Calcutta, this is the country of psychopathic serial killers, of thousands of AIDS-infected people, of twisted criminals the papers write about almost every day.
What if he is one of those? It was only a few days ago he read about how two ten-year-old boys had led a toddler away to a railway siding and battered him to death.

Ritwik absurdly splices together unnamed and imagined horrors with the almost mythical accretions around the names of the Yorkshire Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer. The thought of disease keeps
dipping and circling in his head. He marks how unattractive the man is – short, pale, with small eyes, jowls, and a terrible and impossibly black moustache – and he knows with an almost
pathological sense of sureness that he’s going to have sex with that man.

And here he is now, on another dark street – god knows how far and lost he is – unsure whether he has led or been led by this man. The man nods, there is a twist of a smile on his
weak mouth. ‘Hello,’ he says.

‘Hello,’ Ritwik replies and then, almost out of sheer habit, asks him the very first question people asked each other in Calcutta once they had moved into stage one of the game,
‘Do you have a place we could go to?’ Casual, uninterested, trying very hard not to let the tremor in his knees or the manic thudding of his heart inflect his now slightly phlegmy
voice.

‘No, I don’t.’ Pause. ‘Do you live here?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I do, I’m a student.’ He knows what the next question is going to be.

‘Can’t we go back to yours?’

‘No, no . . . you see, I live in college . . .’ he deliberately lets it tail off.

That man is just too unattractive, not what he wants, but the game has begun; in fact, they’re too far in it. For Ritwik, it wouldn’t do to give up now; he’ll be left with that
uneasy itch which not seeing things through to their end unfailingly gives him. It’s almost a feeling of déjà-vu, almost, this illusion of choice which ultimately reveals its
hand but always too late, this going through with something to its conclusion out of a misplaced purism. It’s a game, there must be closure, must be. The man seems to understand
Ritwik’s constraints about taking him back to his room in college. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. Silence. ‘I have a car, though . . .’ he adds.

This is it, Ritwik thinks, the standard opening gambit of a serial killer; you’re powerless the moment you enter his car. It speeds down anonymous highways as your life flashes past you in
its aura of lurid orange glow from the streetlights, till you reach an abandoned barn or a hillside cottage where no one can hear you scream except the cold stars and the gently nibbling sheep. He
gets into the passenger seat, the fear so indelibly stained with excitement he can’t wash one of the trace of the other.

The car races along what seems too unfamiliar, too far, for a long time. His nervousness mounts, he starts fidgeting, tries to muffle all the edginess out of his voice as he answers all those
unimportant questions, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What are you reading?’ He recognizes the kick in his insides at the less innocuous one, ‘What do you like doing?’
Maybe he is a mutilator-rapist: he won’t kill but bruise and maim, leave him infected with HIV and he’ll have nothing to take to the police, no name, only a description. But
descriptions either become fuzzier with time or lose all their sharpness and certainties under close questioning and the faceless requirements of bureaucratic forms. He must note the number of the
car and commit it to memory, but it could easily be someone else’s car, maybe even a stolen one. He tries to concentrate on the names of streets that slip by in an orange blur. On top of all
this, the man is really really unattractive.