Odysseus Abroad (22 page)

“We Bengalis,” said his uncle in standard Calcutta Bangla, “eat course by course—I have no idea why.
I
like mixing things up. Pupu, what are you doing, have some Bombay alu!”

In prelapsarian undivided Bengal, as his uncle had once revealed wryly to Ananda, the Bengali Hindus were called “Bengalis,” the Bengali Muslims just “Muslims.”

Iqbal was vaguely nonplussed.

“Are you gentlemen from Calcutta?” he asked politely.

“I'm from India,” said Ananda. “But my parents were from Sylhet. This is my uncle—he was born in Sylhet.”

He lifted up a spoonful: the daal was incredible—a ghee and garlic-infused ambrosia.

Iqbal studied Ananda's uncle, who appeared to be rotating the food in his mouth in dilatory contentment.

“Which part of Sylhet are you from?” He'd switched to Sylheti—always charming to hear: this fluent, rapid, and intimate tongue.

“Habiganja,” replied his uncle serenely, having just swallowed. “We grew up in Sylhet town—in Puran Lane when we were small, then mostly in Lamabajar.” Being a Tagorean, he refused to answer him in the rustic tongue of his childhood, but addressed him in a slightly affected Bengali, trying (as usual) to disguise the East Bengali inflection he'd never be rid of. Gesturing to Ananda, he volunteered grandly: “My sister's son. Can you tell?”

“Habiganja!” said Iqbal, not attending to this last query. “I know Habiganja…and Lamabajar!” He smiled reminiscently.

“Who are they?” asked Ananda, with a conspiratorial tipping
of his head towards the table of fourteen. “Sounds like they're celebrating tonight.”

“Oh them!” said Iqbal. He kept his eyes off the table. “Those kind of people come every Friday night for ‘curry.' ” He used the word fastidiously, as a pejorative. “They drink too much.” He spoke with patrician distaste while dispassionately spectating on Ananda and his uncle eating.

When it came to the tip, Ananda felt duty-bound to curtail his uncle. For his uncle had an incurable tipping problem. The trouble was, his uncle acted in consultation. “Three pounds?” “That's crazy,” said Ananda. With the gulab jamun that was their final excess (his uncle had asked Iqbal to heat his up, and, after masticating the pincushion-like sweet whole, had tippled the syrup from the chalice), the bill had come to ten pounds thirty. “That's almost thirty per cent.” “It's a generous tip.” “I know you're rich,” said Ananda, “but you shouldn't distribute your bounty indiscriminately.” His uncle frowned, paralysed, a wad of notes in his hand. (He didn't deny he was wealthy.) Scrutinising the bill, they found the total smaller than it should have been as Bombay Potato had inexplicably been omitted. They beckoned to the waiter. “There's been a mistake,” said Ananda. The other waved one hand in dismissal of an imaginary trifle. “Bombay Potato is on the house.”

Stomachs heavy, they walked down Whitfield Street. Confronting, in a few minutes, the building on Warren Street, Ananda studied it as if it were a dark castle. No lights on the first, second, and top floors. They stepped in. Almost at once, a rumbling sound. The Patels were hurtling down the stairs. A brief arrest as they saw each
other. Ananda continued up the stairs, but his uncle, hamming it up, said: “Vivek! How are you? And this handsome young man is your brother, isn't he?” As Ananda entered the flat, he heard laughter. The words, “I'm a black Englishman,” seemed to float eerily up the staircase.

By the time his uncle came in, Ananda was cross-legged on the sofa, grinning at
Rising Damp
. He didn't care when the Patels and Mandy would make their entrance again. His spirits were high. Poetry, at this moment, couldn't do the job (not Edward Thomas, not Larkin) that Leonard Rossiter was doing so expertly, exuding an obtuse grandeur.

Standing before him, marginally blocking his view, his uncle said: “Could you change the channel? There's too much laughter on television. People are dying in various parts of the world, but in this culture you have to have something to laugh at.” He narrowed his eyes, awaiting a rebuke for his sermon.

But there were more squeals as Leonard Rossiter, updating the African tenant Don Warrington on English etiquette, stole a glimpse of Frances de la Tour's cleavage.

With admirable self-control, Ananda, eyes on the small lit screen, said: “It's hilarious, Rangamama. You may enjoy it.”

His uncle looked pained and at sea.

“But I prefer tragedy to comedy, Pupu.”

By “tragedy” his uncle meant B-grade action movies—that is, a narrative with dead bodies. Comedy alienated him because he neither followed jokes nor had the patience to stay with them till the punchline. He was terribly inattentive. His consciousness was too fluid to have a grasp on a story from start to end. How he'd shone at exams was a mystery. In action films, too, he had no time for
plot and was placated as long as periodic killings occurred. The last action film he'd fully comprehended and cogitated on was probably
High Noon
. Given the story wasn't the point, he could plunge into an adventure at any juncture—even midway through a movie. The occasional calamity kept him quiet.

“Or you could check if they're showing wildlife! We could be missing the tiger, Pupu!”

This was a recurrent addiction—to gawp awestruck the great beasts in Africa, while they lolled, napped, sunned themselves, blinked at distant cameras, then pursued and devoured the lesser and stupider animals.

“There are no wildlife programmes at this hour,” Ananda assured him. “Sit down.”

Reluctantly—as if he'd rather walk a few more miles—he descended on the sofa. He began to loosen his shoelaces. Let those ankles breathe. Reaching impatiently for the remote control—he was hopeless with devices, but now had the measure of this one—he pushed both himself and Ananda into a vortex of channel-changing. Finally, calming down, he laid the remote control on the sofa, and said:

“I've eaten too much.”

Tamely, in accidental concord, they'd come back to laughter and
Rising Damp
.

“Do you want a laddoo?” Ananda was under pressure to dispense with six uneaten ones.

His uncle gave him an eloquent stare.

“Are you mad? Do you want me to die tonight?”

Though lazy and recumbent for now, he'd be off to Belsize Park in twenty minutes. What an idiotic plan Ananda had had once—that they'd
share
that bedsit. Not because it was too small. But you couldn't share
any
space with him: to live with his uncle would be
to go mad. Or at least to be changed; or sidetracked permanently, indubitably, from a traditional idea of coexistence. No wonder God, in his mercy, had withheld a spouse from him.

“In fact, I'm going to put on weight as a result of that
slap-up meal
,” he complained. “Anyway, my cheeks have always been too fat and my face too round.” Ananda glanced quickly away from Frances de la Tour to confirm that his uncle was describing the person he knew. While it may not have met Rangamama's standards of consumptive narrowness, the face wasn't round at all; the cheeks weren't full. Yet the baritone had a way of casting a spell which meant almost everything his uncle uttered sounded true and reasonable. Half the time you argued with him not to dispute him but to fend off becoming an accomplice to his vision. “Also, my nose becomes larger when I eat too much.” Just as Ananda prepared to debate the canonical European preference for starved, phalange-like noses, his uncle observed: “You know that a large nose is a sign of virility.”

“Is it?” Given that Ananda had grown up in the world essentially in the proximity of a mother who talked unstoppably, he was quite capable of following
Rising Damp
and engaging in a dialogue with his uncle simultaneously. As they slipped into a commercial break, he let himself relax and consider these questions. The nose and virility: he speculated on the kind of equation being made here. It was vaguely obvious. But what reliable knowledge would a virgin have of virility? Intriguingly, experience didn't seem to matter so much when it came to Ananda's uncle. He always sounded more experienced than he could possibly be. As if he had recourse to some other source of information outside reading, education, and life.

“Oh very much so. You know that Christ had a big nose?”

Not that Christ was particularly celebrated for his virility. Still,
Ananda found this an arresting piece of information. He hadn't known that there were actual likenesses available—which could have attested to the feature. The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.

“If you think Christ looked the way they show him in films,” said his uncle, gazing straight at Ananda, as if he'd caught him out indulging in exactly such an irresponsible misconception, “you'd be wrong. Christ wasn't European: he was from the Middle East. It is said that he had a large prominent nose. The way you see him today is Western propaganda.”

He leaned back on the sofa, unarguable, his nose radiating a new power, looking like he was in no hurry to leave. The next moment he got up.

“Small job,” he clarified.

He shuffled off to the neighbouring bathroom.

A thunderclap. The Patels. Or was it Mandy? Back earlier than expected. Ananda steeled himself. Another bang—below him. Mandy. You had to feel for her, actually. Solitary homecomings. From Paul Hogan draining a can of lager in the outbacks—such were the images (caricatures of epic voyages) that flashed before you as the day drew to a close—Ananda looked behind him at Warren Street, the pale torches of the sodium vapour lamps that would keep him company through the troubled sleep to come.

Tandoor Mahal: bright and desolate. A lone jacketless man before it. Was it Mr. Alam?

His uncle returned to him with the fretful air of one who'd not only been pissing but deeply pondering.

“When Annada Shankar Ray came to Europe in 1931,” he said,
“he predicted a time would come when
everybody
will be famous. Well-known people will rise as thick and fast as bubbles in the air.”

Ananda wondered whether this might be some kind of comment—a parting shot before his uncle made his way back—on the futility of Ananda's unspoken but undeniable ambition. That Ananda, through no real fault of his own, had simply been born too late, when becoming a successful poet didn't actually
mean
that much: not because success was less desirable now, but because
everyone
had a right to it today. This might explain the disbelieving feeling he had when he watched
This Is Your Life
or Cilla Black or
Stars in Their Eyes
.

“Shudrer yuga,”
said his uncle, as if pronouncing a verdict, tucking in his shirt very slowly. “The final epoch, according to Vivekananda. The age of the shudra.”

Terrible word: doomed menial, untouchable. Fixed in servitude for eternity. Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra. The lowest of the low. His uncle had assumed each of these incarnations in the course of a single life: philosopher, warrior, merchant, beggar. Surely it wasn't the actual shudra he was speaking of? For was the shudra anywhere near finding dignity and freedom? It seemed not. Then in what way the age of the shudra? Unless it was some allegory he meant…Of course—
then
it made sense, as an insane cosmogony. The caste system could serve as a metaphor for the epochs succeeding each other since the dawn of time. Ananda was momentarily happy to go along with the scheme. The first age, of Brahman, was (decided Ananda proudly) India's—the Brahman not being the pusillanimous priest with the sacred thread, but the spiritual man, who could have any provenance whatsoever, emerge from any caste: the sage and renunciate. The second age, of the Kshatriya, the warriors and aristocrats, was Rome's. The king and the notion of Empire was then supreme. It was the aristocrat who fostered and
nurtured value and beauty and the arts. When the aristocracy went to seed the third age came into being, of the Vaishya—the merchant. You
had
to grant that epoch to the English: the ascendancy and rule of the shopkeeper, the burgher, who might possess an Empire but whose outlook was essentially humdrum, middle-level, and suburban. (Amazing how the allegory fell into place.) Finally, the last age: the shudra's—in which the man on the street was illusorily empowered. (For power invariably deceives those it passes on to.) It was a toss-up whether—if you subscribed to the metaphor—the epoch belonged to Russia or America. It would seem America. For this would be the epoch nominally of the common man, but really of capitalism and popular culture. Everyone would be famous. And after this final phase (Ananda hoped it would take another century to truly arrive)—what?

“Pupu.”

Ananda looked up.

“It's after eleven…I'd better head off before the tube closes.”

Yet another outing! Could he be sprightly, setting out now for Belsize Park? At least it was warm. Better than those chill nights on which he'd dutifully make his way homeward from his nephew. Ananda nodded, briefly and fiercely hating the peace and quiet that came at the end of everything. Mandy was very still, as if she were in hiding. Yet be grateful for the peace before the Patels are back again—and for this indecisive lull before his uncle declaims on a detail he'd forgotten about in his rush to depart. He was loitering: clearly not about to say goodbye just yet.
Never say, “I'm leaving.” Always, “I'll be seeing you.”
“ 
‘Jachhi' bolte nei
, Pupu, but
‘aschhi.' ”

“So—do I see you on Monday then?” enquired Ananda of the hovering figure.