by Amitav Ghosh
But instead she walked into the middle of the dance floor, flung her arms dramatically outwards, like a diver on a high board, and cried: All right folks – let’s dance with Ol’ Blue Eyes – let’s dance with a stranger tonight.
Yes, gasped Ila, that’s it. Let’s dance, that’ll cheer us up.
Come on, she said, tugging at my hand. Get up, let’s dance.
But I was clumsy and self-conscious on my feet at the best of times. And when I looked at the empty expanse of the dance floor, at plump Miss Jennifer swaying in the middle, and the hungry eyes of the businessmen staring at her, I knew that I would never be able to step on to that floor.
No, I said, shaking my head. I couldn’t, not here.
She turned away disappointedly. Robi? she said. Wouldn’t you like to dance?
I can’t dance, he said, raising his head to look at her. And even if I could, I wouldn’t in a place like this. I think you should sit down, for you’re not going to dance either.
At first she was merely surprised.
I’m not going to dance? she said. Why not?
Because I won’t let you, said Robi evenly.
You won’t let me? she said. The muscles of her face went slowly rigid.
You won’t let me? she said. Why, who do you think you are?
Robi folded his arms across his chest. It doesn’t matter who I am, he said. I won’t let you.
She turned to look at me now, her lips going thin and bloodless. Does he think, she asked me, that I’m one of his college freshers or something? Does he think because he’s got a lot of muscles he can stop me? Does he think I’m scared of a college bully? Well, let’s see him stop me.
She kicked her chair back and rose to her feet.
I put out my hand and tugged at her skirt. Ila, please don’t, I said. You don’t know him. Please sit down and let’s go home.
She gave my hand a stinging slap. I’m going to find out, she said. Let’s see what he does to stop me.
I jumped to my feet and stood in front of her. Ila, please, I said. What are you going to do?
She pushed me aside. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, she said. I’m going to go over to those two businessmen over there, and I’m going to ask the thin one to dance with me.
She turned on her heel and walked away.
Pivoting in his chair, Robi watched her walk up to the two businessmen. We saw her smiling at them, then she bent her head gracefully to talk to the thinner of the two, and he started to his feet. We watched as his face creased into a smile and then clouded over with a leering, greedy suspicion. Then she smiled again, and he, nodding eagerly, stepped out to take her hand.
I heard the scrape of Robi’s chair and stepped sideways to stop him. He elbowed me away and reached them with three long strides. He caught hold of the neck of Ila’s blouse with one hand and wrenched her away from the businessman. Then he opened the palm of his hand and planted it squarely in the middle of the man’s chest. Arching his shoulder back, he swivelled, suddenly, with so much force that the man staggered back for a good five feet or so, taking his chair with him.
The singer dropped her microphone and the band froze into a silvery tableau under the spotlight. There was a moment of complete silence. Then, like a reel of film coming unstuck, everyone sprang to life, and a crowd of waiters surrounded us.
The only person who was perfectly calm was Robi. He held his hands open in front of him and said, in a quiet, mild voice: Don’t touch me. We’ll pay and we’ll leave right now, but don’t touch me.
He took out his wallet and handed one of the waiters a fifty-rupee note. Then he put his arm around Ila and led us out. The waiters followed us all the way to the pavement.
Ila did not say a word until we had walked as far as the museum. At the corner she stopped and leant against the wrought-iron railings.
Have you gone mad? she said to Robi, spitting the words through her teeth. What did you think you were doing?
Look, Robi said. It’s over now, let’s just forget it.
We won’t forget it, she said; she was screaming now, but with her voice very low, in that way women have. We will not forget it. Just tell me: what did you think you were doing?
Listen, Ila, Robi said, shaking his head. You shouldn’t have done what you did. You ought to know that; girls don’t behave like that here.
What the fuck do you mean? she spat at him. What do you mean ‘girls’? I’ll do what I bloody well want, when I want and where.
No you won’t, he said. Not if I’m around. Girls don’t behave like that here.
Why not? she screamed. Why fucking well not?
You can do what you like in England, he said. But here there are certain things you cannot do. That’s our culture; that’s how we live.
She stared at him, wide-eyed, speechless. Then she spun around to face me. Do you see now? she cried. She bit her lip fiercely and the tears came pouring out of her brimming eyes.
I put my arms around her and pulled her towards me. She rubbed her face into my kurta, sobbing, saying over and over again: Do you see now? Do you understand? – and I, uncomprehending, repeated after her: See what? Understand what? while trying to stop the flow of her tears with the back of my hand.
Then she pushed me away and waved at a taxi. It stopped, and she darted into it, rolled down the window, and shouted: Do you see now why I’ve chosen to live in London? Do you see? It’s only because I want to be free.
Free of what? I said.
Free of you! she shouted back. Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you.
The taxi started moving and I began to run along with it.
You can never be free of me, I shouted through the open window. If I were to die tomorrow you would not be free of me. You cannot be free of me because I am within you … just as you are within me.
Then the taxi picked up speed and disappeared along Chowringhee.
So that was what I told my grandmother as she lay in her sickbed, glaring at me; I told her that Ila lived in London only because she wanted to be free.
But I knew I had made a mistake the moment I said it; I should have known that she would have nothing but contempt for a freedom that could be bought for the price of an air ticket. For she too had once wanted to be free; she had dreamt of killing for her freedom.
It’s not freedom she wants, said my grandmother, her bloodshot eyes glowing in the hollows of her withered face. She wants to be left alone to do what she pleases; that’s all that any whore would want. She’ll find it easily enough over there; that’s what those places have to offer. But that is not what it means to be free.
I got up then and went back to my room. Staring out of my window, at the darkness of the lake, I saw Ila’s face again, as I had seen it that night in the taxi, wet with tears, twisted with anger and hatred, and I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound: whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me.
I went to see my grandmother again next morning.
She had a nurse now, and the moment she saw me entering the room she asked the nurse to turn her over so that she would be facing away from me. I addressed a few general remarks to her back but she wouldn’t answer.
The nurse was embarrassed. She said to my grandmother, in her most cheerful voice: Come on now, why don’t you answer his questions? He’s your grandson, after all.
I could not see the expression on my grandmother’s face when she said that, but I could imagine it. She reached for the bedpan that was kept on a low table beside her bed and tried to fling it at the nurse. But she was so weak that she barely managed to tip it on to the floor.
The nurse was shaken: she had only been with my grandmother a couple of days. She had taken her to be a gentle thing.
You should go now, she said to me, the patient is upset.
I slipped quick
ly across the room. But when I opened the door, I heard my grandmother’s voice issuing from the bed. It was her old voice, the strong voice I remembered, not the voice she had developed during her sickness.
Why do you always speak for that whore? she said.
I spun around. Who are you talking about? I said, staring at the back of her head.
That memshaheb whore, she said. Ila. Why do you always defend her? What does she mean to you?
The nurse darted across to wipe the spittle from her mouth and I slipped out of the room.
That evening my grandmother’s condition worsened. We heard her through the walls of our rooms, labouring for her breath, all through the night. When I went to see her next morning she was lying in a tiny exhausted heap on her pillows. As soon as I entered her room she fixed her red-rimmed eyes on me and said: Why don’t you answer me? Tell me: what does that English whore mean to you?
The nurse hurried over before I could say anything and bundled me out of the room.
For a few days after that her condition deteriorated steadily. Arrangements were made for setting up an oxygen tent over her bed. We had a doctor sleeping in the house at night now, as well as a nurse. Sometimes during the day, the nurse would allow us to watch her labouring for her breath inside the oxygen tent. But none of us was allowed to speak to her. The doctors wanted to move her to a hospital but she had enough strength left to tell them that she would rather die at home than in an institution.
Then, slowly, she recovered. The oxygen tent was removed and my mother began to spend a lot of time sitting beside her bed. But neither my father nor I were allowed into the room.
My holidays were almost over now. Since my grandmother’s condition had improved my parents decided that I ought to go back to Delhi: my final year examinations were only three months away and I had hardly studied at all during the holidays. I had prepared myself to stay on, but I was only too glad to take their advice.
The day I was to catch the train, my mother took me into my grandmother’s room to take my leave of her. She was sitting up in bed and she seemed better than she had been in a long time. To my relief she talked quite cheerfully about my college and the forthcoming examinations. I touched her feet when it was time for me to leave, and, as always, she pulled my head to her breast, to bless me. I heard the quiet, familiar murmur of her blessings. Then she lowered her mouth to my ear, so that I could feel the heat of her breath on my face.
Why have you let that whore trap you? she whispered. I know it’s she who’s sent you into the arms of those whores you go to in Delhi. Do you think I don’t know? Did you think I would allow it?
I jerked my head out of her hands. She met my gaze and smiled. I could not believe that this withered, wasted, powerless woman was the same person that I had so much loved and feared.
For two months my parents wrote to me every other day with news of my grandmother. Her condition improved for a while after I left Calcutta. Then, for no reason that doctors could perceive, it became very serious for a week or so. Again she recovered miraculously till she was well enough to read and even write a few letters.
Then for a whole week my parents’ letters stopped. I did not have time to think about anything but Indian history then, so I did not worry, except in passing.
In their next letter my parents wrote that my grandmother had died and that she had been cremated the day after her death. They had decided not to send me a telegram in case I decided to rush off to Calcutta. They didn’t want to disturb me when my examinations were so close.
I wished desperately that day that Robi, who had been gone for almost a year, was still in college. I could think of no one else I wanted to talk to, so I wandered out of the college, down the road to the Maurice Nagar bus stop. An empty 210 came along after a while and I climbed into it. I got a window seat and stared out, watching the parks on Ring Road and the walls of the Red Fort go by. When the bus reached the Central Secretariat, I crossed the road and took another 210 back. At Mall Road I decided to get off and walk. It was already dark then, the roads deserted, the whole university silent under the pall of the examinations.
Walking along the deserted avenue, I found myself crying, not so much in grief as anger that my parents had not informed me in time, so that I could be there when they cremated her. I climbed up the steep road that led to the monument on the Ridge, and sitting there, on the grass, I found my anger ebbing away. There seemed to be something fitting, after all, in the manner in which I had learnt of my grandmother’s death: she had always been too passionate a person to find a real place in my tidy late-bourgeois world, the world that I had inherited, in which examinations were more important than death.
Two days later a peon brought me a message from the dean of our college. He wanted to see me urgently. I put away my textbooks and hurried off to his offices. He was a small, self-important little man whom nobody liked. But nobody took the trouble to particularly dislike him either: he didn’t seem to warrant it.
He signalled me to a chair when I entered his office. When I had sat down he tapped a sheet of paper that was lying in front of him, on his desk, and said: I’m sorry to disturb you at this time, but there is a very serious matter at hand. Expulsion, if not rustication, is also possible. This is a very serious matter. After all, there is the medical angle to be considered.
Ridiculous though he was, I was alarmed by the tone of his voice: he had the power to destroy whatever chances I had of an academic career.
What exactly is the matter, sir? I said.
We have received information, he said, tapping the sheet of paper again, that you have been visiting prostitutes in houses of ill repute. It says that for your own good you should be expelled forthwith and sent back to Calcutta.
I was so taken aback that for a while I could only stare at him dumbly. Then I managed to say: Who has given you this information, sir?
Your own grandmother, he said, handing me the sheet of paper. You can see for yourself.
The letter was just three lines long. The writing was very shaky, but unmistakably my grandmother’s. It said that she knew I visited whores in Delhi, that she had spoken to me and I had shown no signs of repentance, and that as a schoolteacher herself she thought that my college, if it had any self-respect at all, would see to it that I was sent home.
I was so shaken by the sight of her resurrected hand, reaching out to me after her death, as it had all through my childhood, that it was some time before I could collect myself enough to offer an explanation to the dean. I told him, looking him in the eye, that in all my years in college I had visited no place more disreputable than the Chanakya cinema and the Khyber restaurant at Kashmeri Gate; I said that my grandmother had been very ill indeed when she wrote that letter, and that in her illness her mind had become prey to delusions.
The situation was so fantastic that soon the dean lost faith in the letter and let me go. But he warned me that he would be keeping an eye on me during my last few weeks in college.
When I got up to go, I cast a glance at the letter. She had even written the date in the top right-hand corner, as she always did. Later, thinking back, tallying the dates, I realised that she had written the letter the day before she died.
I have never understood how she learnt of the women I had visited a couple of times, with my friends; nor do I know how she saw that I was in love with Ila so long before I dared to admit it to myself.
At some time late in my first autumn in London, when the trees of the Embankment were already bare, I realised I could no longer hide the truth from myself.
I would find myself wandering through Soho or around Trafalgar Square, and I would pretend to myself that I was walking for the mere pleasure of it, discovering the city. But soon I would find myself walking along the Embankment. I would lean on the parapet and gaze across the dark breadth of the Thames at the concrete hillocks of the South Bank; I would stop to run my hands over the cast-iron lamps, over the pouting lips of the moulded fish, an
d often, to my surprise, I would discover that somewhere at the back of my throat I was softly humming the tune of an old Hindi film song – beqaraar karke hame yun na jaiyen … I don’t know why it was that tune: I hadn’t seen the film, nor ever possessed the record, but it was always that one and no other. It would appear unannounced, for no apparent reason, and though it was always the same tune there were times when it sounded quite different. At times it was a happy, lilting kind of tune, and then, whether it was a wet, cold night or a cool, crisp one, I would find myself marching cheerfully along the deserted Embankment, singing out loud when the cars went roaring past me in packs. I would walk across to the other pavement, take a pencil out of my pocket and hold it beside me so that I could hear it clicking against the railings as I walked, drumming in time with the tune. But there were times when the tune became eerily sombre: I would find myself shying away from the patches of shadow on the pavements, and the dark masses of the tall buildings that lined the Embankment would begin to seem somehow menacing. I would try to keep to the pools of light under the lamps, and I wouldn’t look down at the silky blackness of the Thames; I would lower my head and hurry, with my chin buried in my scarf, not daring to look at the other overcoated figures walking past me. On nights like that I would pray for the tune to go away, to leave me alone. At times I would even think that I had beaten it, that it had gone: I would drop on to a bench and listen hard, to make sure, and then, invariably, I would hear it again, buzzing softly at the back of my throat.
Sooner or later on those evenings I would find myself standing at Lambeth Bridge. I would look across the bridge at the weathered red-brick castellations of the Palace, and in genuine surprise I would say to myself: Why, here I am, at Lambeth Bridge. Since I’ve come this far I may as well walk to Stockwell and visit Ila.
Then I would walk half-way across the bridge, lean on the railing and think of reasons why I should not go on: that it was too far, the rain would get worse before I got there, I had already been there twice that week, Ila wouldn’t be at home anyway … I would carry on this argument with perfect disingenuousness, as though I were merely eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends. All the while the sceptical part of my mind, the part that knew perfectly well why I happened to be on Lambeth Bridge, would be silent: I would not allow myself to listen to it.