Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  No, I can’t say I felt anything like that. Racism, you mean? I was a callow youth, baba. When were you there last? You gave a talk at Sidney Sussex College? How delightful! You must have gone to St John’s Street?

  *

  You hate Cambridge, Amit? Extraordinary. I’d forgotten you’d lived there. You say it’s perfect for a two-day visit? I loved it – narrow streets widening into the quads at Trinity and King’s. The revelation of grandeur. Trinity depresses you? My word. No, there were no malls or shopping centres in our day. I’m sure you’re right about the redneck taxi drivers. Bill Gates is pouring money into the place, is he? I had no idea the region was so deprived. My word.

  *

  We’ll see you at six on Friday, then, baba? Thank you. Thank you. That would be lovely. Thank you. The both of you. Your wife is lovely. Such hidden depths. She spoke so eloquently about the nineteenth century – I was utterly disarmed. Really.

  I want to hear more from her. About Dinesh Chandra. Pyarechand. Michael. We are so illiterate.

  *

  We are your social life here? Ha ha ha. That’s too funny. We’re very lucky to have you in this wretched city, baba. I’m nothing – as you know. Tuchho manush.

  There’ll be two others on Friday. I must forewarn you. Mitra and Dutta. Related to me on my mother’s side. Well-intentioned characters. I call them ‘the detectives’. They look and sound like detectives. You’ll see. I mean they rather ostentatiously try to look like everyone else. Difficult to remember later. Observe them at leisure. They will not know you. They do not read.

  *

  What is it you like least about being in Calcutta? You once said it isn’t the traffic jams or fumes you find difficult – it’s the pettiness. That’s right – you came back because you were missing the traffic jams! Ha ha ha ha! This city’s the place to return to if you’re afflicted by that kind of homesickness.

  *

  Baba, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Could you possibly come next Friday? The cook’s gone off suddenly. To his village. Says his older brother’s ill. He does it every month. Drives us mad. No, we can’t get a new cook. He’s been with us for thirty years. We have to put up and shut up.

  *

  I’m so glad, baba. Delighted you like Uma’s sandwiches this time. We were thinking of introducing a variation. She thought you’d like something more traditional – shingara! Then she changed her mind. You’re right, you can have shingara anywhere. Yes, they are unique. She experiments. Adds a bit of yoghurt, I think, to the mayonnaise and cucumber.

  *

  Do you know, we hardly knew there was a famine? I was ten years old. I’d see them on my way to school. Emaciated wandering figures. Too tired to walk sometimes. They’d come to the gates with their bowls and say Phan de ma! Our lives went on as usual, baba. Yes.

  *

  Buddhadev babu! I don’t know what to say about him. Very Bengali. Proud of his potted plants. Jyoti babu was Bengali too – but imperious. A bar at law and all that. Buddhadev babu – a fan of Lorca … I don’t know. I don’t know. They say the state will take a new turn under him. Do you think so? Do you think he’s capable? Wants to bring in foreign investment. Can he? I know he’s a good translator.

  Yes, he came to tea on Wednesday. With his wife. Sweet, simple woman. Chatty.

  *

  I’m not a communist, baba. Yes, we did have a few Naxalites over in the Sixties. An education. The way they saw the world. Very exciting, their passion for total revolution. The blood rushes to the head, the adrenaline … I was a closet Naxal for a while. I’m very susceptible, baba. I love life. I want every person, ugly or handsome, stupid or bright, to live life to the full. The Naxals wanted that too. Then they got carried away.

  I was much more mobile then …

  *

  Yes, the cook’s OK, baba. He doesn’t do a lot. He spends half the day in his room. Don’t know what he does. I suspect he’s a bit of a maniac for khaini. He and Gobinda come to the sitting room when there’s a cricket match on; Uma lets them take charge of the TV.

  Mostly the cook is at a loose end, baba. Because Uma will order dinner from Calcutta Club. Suruchi is splendid for Bengali food – just simple fare with unpronounceable names: you know, chhachda and rui machher kalia.

  Thank you ever so much for sending over the chhana patal, baba. Very grateful. Uma says it’s ‘out of this world’. Her exact words. Chhana, and patal. Never the twain could meet, I would have thought. But it works perfectly. We were in a daze of chhana patal all afternoon.

  *

  It’s very quiet. Cholbe na, cholbe na! Jyoti babu’s legacy. He’d grumble to me about it. ‘The cadres are out of hand and we have to keep them happy.’ I don’t even know what they’re objecting to. Do you?

  You’d think it makes no difference to me. I don’t go out. But I abhor a deathly calm, baba – the grinding down of activity. Quite unlike the quiet of Sundays. Or the quiet of my childhood. So much more tentative and slower it was then. But bandh days! I feel the life ebbing from me.

  *

  You said the other day that you came back because you couldn’t take the silence. Was it 1999?

  Not the discrimination or the damp. It was the quiet you couldn’t bear. Is that true? Too funny, baba! You missed noise?

  Ah, the background hum. I see. I never thought of it that way. I prized the silence in Cambridge – never felt gloomy. I think we’re educated in that way – we put a high price on silence, on privacy. Maybe we don’t even realise we don’t want to be alone. Impossible to be alone here, isn’t it, baba? One is always part of some bloody thing. All these people inviting themselves over for tea.

  How do you write, baba? Can you compose sentences with people around you? It’s true, the French did write in cafes. You knew someone who did? Kolatkar? No, don’t know him, baba. Extraordinary!

  *

  Hello.

  Sorry, yes, it’s me, baba.

  Sorry. Yes. No, I don’t have a sore throat. I’m well, thank you. I just change my voice a little when I pick up the phone. Quite right.

  A long story, baba. I’ll tell you another time. Stupid litigation. It’ll bore you.

  My great-aunt, baba. Don’t know what possessed her – a recherché religious impulse. Penitence for that husband of hers. Left the house to a religious organisation. Ananda Seva Kendra. This house. The document has no legality, baba. But they use it to harass us. Ananda Seva Kendra. You’d think they’d have better things to do, the scoundrels – social work; singing bhajans to Hari. I mean, we could do with some social work. My pension is absurd, you’d laugh if I told you. I have sold two of my mother’s earrings – thank God for her!

  The Ananda Seva Kendra should do some seva for me.

  Forgive me, baba. I’ve become very careful when I pick up the phone. You’ll hear a different voice now and again. Yes, a croak, Ha ha. Meant to confuse them.

  *

  Hello.

  Amit!

  Forgive me.

  Yes, of course you should come. We’re dying to see you. Don’t say another word. Thursday? Can you? I’d like you to meet Jacqueline. She’s here. Remember I told you? Her grandfather’s buried in Park Street or Park Circus.

  *

  You’re going on Monday? That is soon. But Thursday should be possible, baba, shouldn’t it?

  Two weeks? We’ll still be here when you’re back, I promise. Ha ha ha.

  You’re sad, baba? Extraordinary! What I would do to go! London in the spring!

  Oh, to escape the heat …

  Yes, the mangoes will have arrived when you return.

  What makes you sad?

  Does it happen each time? The alienation you mention? Everything you love feeling alien when you go? Because you get into a funk each time, don’t you?

  You’ll be back in two weeks, baba … True. True. The heart can’t distinguish between two weeks and two years. Neither can the head, really. Sometimes I feel that it was last month that I went to t
he club.

  I have a shameless request, baba. I’m sorry. Can you bring me some Wensleydale? Only if it’s no trouble. Promise me you won’t try if it’s a problem.

  SUSIE BOYT

  PEOPLE WERE SO FUNNY

  WHEN SHE RAN it through her mind there were three things lately that had made her stop and shake her head sharply and wonder if there wasn’t something going on. Not a syndrome or anything, nothing with an actual name, it was just some small stirrings, not from every corner either, not yet, not thick and fast, but a gathering of little facts, facts or rather episodes with opinions attached to them which appeared to be speeding up and might just need her attention.

  The 168 on the way to the hospital on Friday was struggling, making rude shuddering noises and sudden ill-tempered hypochondriac jolts. A man got on, rough in his appearance, his skin had too much texture, cross-hatched with scars, almost darned-looking. He was not exactly unsympathetic but undeniably he was falling to bits and flakes of him were settling on the plaid bus-cloth, on the bald and shiny shoulders of his jacket, on his shoes and he was – and there was no nice way of saying it – he was stinky. And he did that thing that people always do with a bus that is completely empty, he came and installed himself next to her. He spread his thighs so she had to make herself small. To have a stranger’s leg rubbing against you in ancient suit trousers with stains dark and pale and loose skin and bits of crusted god knows what adhering to the folds in his face, on a windy Tuesday morning, when you were wearing a new pair of tights in a dark blue shade named ‘admiral’, well she was not sure she was equal to it.

  ‘Hey,’ he said with an extravagant smile. He had gone in his way all-out.

  ‘Oh hello,’ she answered unsteadily. That was her mistake.

  ‘Nice day,’ he said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ and then because she felt a bit sorry for him in his sorry state, ‘the light’s beautiful and the sky’s such a lovely colour this morning.’

  ‘Blue,’ he said flatly.

  It could not be denied.

  ‘You know something?’ He turned to her with an air of concern a bit too suddenly. His lips were dangerously close to her collarbone. She felt the sourness of his breaths. ‘You’re not bad looking, for your age, you should get yourself some decent clothes, make-up, do something with your hair. You dress like my grandma. What you scared of? Can’t be that old.’

  She was two weeks shy of thirty-one.

  She switched off, willed him to go away, disintegrate, explode. She closed her eyes. It was something akin to vertigo that she felt. It was true that when she bought clothes the last few times, she had leafed through various catalogues thinking that might look inoffensive and efficient on the ward. Striped and checked things, cheering, muted end of cheering, not tactless, not banal. Her mother used to have a dress shop. She liked elegance, or rather she liked neatness which was really the absence of things. She liked her daughter ‘put-together’, everything in order, shipshape, house-proud. Even as a child Beth had been dressed like a forty-year-old woman: brass buttons, white collars, inverted-pleat skirts, ready at the drop of a hat for deck quoits on a luxury liner, or presenting a posy of violets to the Queen …

  She came out of the lift on the 13th floor, the sleeves of her blue and white dress rolled and ready, her nursey white trainers squelching the new-mown-grass-look lino. She approached the bed where her mother lay sleeping under a green cellular blanket. A television suspended from the ceiling on a dark metal arm was playing softly. She crept into the chair next to her mother’s bed. It was a hospital drama that was on TV, the surgeon, an old-school, chalk-striped, bow-tied gent was ill himself and trying to hide it from his colleagues who were beginning to pick up on his irrational behaviour. Beth took some fruit out of her bag, arranging it silently in the small basket on the tray table at the foot of the bed. Her mother could not eat solid food but she liked to have some fruit close to her. Like a pet, she said. A bit of life going on. Today she had black cherries and thin-skinned yellow grapes and there were two clean pin-tucked cotton lawn nightdresses, neatly folded.

  A new woman was being brought to the bed that was diagonally opposite; a pair of nurses stood by as she unpacked her washbag and her handbag into the locker which slid a little, giddy on its wheels. She was helped into bed by a lanky son or grandson. She undid her pearls, gave them to him for safekeeping, which seemed daring. She asked if he had eaten and when he nodded, said he had had a baked potato, she closed her eyes.

  Oh no! A couple of feet to the right of her mother’s bed she spied some blood on the floor, five dark flower-shaped patches. God! She fetched a few wetted tissues from the toilets, sank discreetly to her knees, rubbing at the marks until they were gone. The jagged outline of the blood took much longer to get rid of than the middle portion. She thought of her mother’s lipstick adhering to the edges of her mouth after the saturated colour on the fleshy part had disappeared. She washed her hands thoroughly, spritzed them with hand sanitiser. Last month a small blonde girl wearing an orange hoody that said LA County Jail had come up on to the ward to visit and kept referring to the bottle of blue spray attached to the end of the bed as ham appetiser …

  Beth wanted to say something amazing to her mother, something inspiring, the opposite of despair. ‘You know there is a whole world out there or at least half a world in any case on the other side of the wall, you can see it from the landing by the lifts, through the picture windows and I’m not saying it’s entirely composed of roses and starched tablecloths, or string quartets in hotel foyers and raspberry mousse cake on pistachio-coloured scalloped plates three times a day, but some of it is really something. Look at the yellow toy train pulling out of Euston Station! Look at that flock of seagulls, in an arrow formation, so carefree and deluxe! It’s a world that is worth getting well for. Sometimes it is, anyway. Now and then. Dark blue mornings, green afternoons … You’ve got to believe it. Sort of got to. If you can. The moon even can be unbelievably beautiful, last night it was, and really slight, scant almost, just a tiny curved beam but it gave out so much light.’

  There could be romance to their convalescence. That was what she wanted to convey. Beyond grief and mourning and the humiliations of age and poor health there were quite a few golden things to be unearthed. They could make up their minds to go after pleasure together, hail it like a taxi, grab it by the lapels. They could sit in chairs in the garden between the flowering currant and the sweet pea cages and remember things late into the evening. In a wheelchair at Manchester Square they could laugh, not unkindly, in the face of The Laughing Cavalier. Sleeping Beauty, they could save up for at Christmas, with Russian ballerinas; watch the rose-coloured dancers unfurl their limbs against the deep forest. You could not force people to decline in such a way, but you could open the doors to it, usher the best things on to the stage.

  They had each other …

  But in her dreams where it was often possible to say such things, to mount an argument for maximum life, her mother would raise her arms above her head and whisper weakly, ‘Please don’t shoot.’

  Once when she was returning from a quick coffee with a school friend, her bus paused opposite the hospital and from the top deck she made out her mother lurking on the shallow hospital steps with a clutch of other smoking women, some of whom were attached by white wires to mobile drips. Her mother, unaccompanied by such a device, sucking on her cigarette, looked so forlorn. Her quilted satin dressing gown, salmon-coloured, farmed salmon, came over as fancy dress in its pavement setting, a seaside landlady from a hundred years ago. That night when Beth lay awake in bed with some bread and butter strips, she googled ‘mobile drip stands’ on her phone. The deluxe version had four hooks to hold containers and a five-bar base with castors making it stable and very easy to manoeuvre. It was actually quite handsome. Seventy-nine pounds did seem reasonable.

  Her mother was still sleeping softly, the murmurs from the hospital series faint and soothing. Beth opened her book and, just as she began
to read, the second thing, the thing that made her wonder, happened. A nurse approached, a new one she had not seen before. Beth rose and smiled across the patient. ‘Thank you so much for all you’re doing for us,’ she said.

  ‘Your sister’s good as gold.’ The nurse smiled too.

  ‘Thank you so so much!’ Beth said. She felt a bolt of pride spread about her.

  Then – ‘My –? Oh.’

  The third thing was nothing new, just something not quite right she remembered freshly from two years earlier. It had taken her a while to work it out.

  The night her father lay dying her mother swore.

  She was getting that feeling you got before you started a heavy cold, she told the nurse, she told Dr Clarkson, who had been their doctor since before Beth was born.

  ‘Oh dear,’ her mother said. ‘This is the last straw.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ the doctor muttered tonelessly.

  ‘Could you take my temperature please?’ she asked. Dr Clarkson rinsed the thermometer in the sink in the adjoining bathroom, wiped it on a hand towel, but he did nothing more.

  They were all in the bedroom at her parents’. It was the eleventh hour, the twelfth. Her mother was providing a running commentary of her symptoms, listing them on her fingers: the hot and cold feeling travelling up and down her spine, the beginnings of a headache, the salt and pepper sensation in her eyes.

  They were at the stage with her father when you listen for the breaths, counting the gaps between them as they slow. His poor dry face, his frail body, were right at the edge of what they could endure. The air was hot, the atmosphere stiff. The radio was playing quietly, a drama about a cricket match, something like that, in a country village. Stumps, scones … Beth turned the dial round slowly until all the sound went out. The silence felt valuable.

  It is about to happen, she thought.

  ‘What would you advise me to do, doctor?’ her mother was saying, fingers clasped to her pulse. She compared the heaviness in her legs to cold treacle.