Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
But, no; it was beautiful. He’d reread the sonnet, for his preparations for the Renaissance paper, and then, after reacting against it through its earlier associations, read it once again, allowing himself to understand it. The lines had begun to repeat themselves in his head, like a jingle in a commercial. The poet—what was he up to? He’d meant to extol his beloved—not by saying she was as good as a summer’s day, but better! Letting the wooden frame nestle his chin, Ananda daydreamed, studying Tandoor Mahal and its curtains.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
More lovely, more temperate! So the poet was dissing the summer’s day, then, in order to praise his beloved. Yet what apposite terms for this summer, as a season, or in its incarnation as a single day: “lovely,” with its suggestion of innocence and newborn qualities; “temperate,” indicating calm, modesty, and fortuitously echoing “temporal,” with its hint of the short-lived. “Lovely” carried in it the sense of the short-lived too; the loveliness of “lovely” was contingent on it not being eternal. And so the summer’s day was transient in comparison to the poet’s beloved, who’d continue to prosper and grow to “eternal lines” in the effing sonnet. To emphasise this, Shakespeare must diss the English spring and summer in the third and fourth lines again:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
It was the fragility and the undependability of the English summer that Shakespeare was drawing the reader’s attention to—hoping, thereby, that the contrast would aggrandise his lover’s qualities. But, for Ananda, it was summer—by being contingent—that came to brief life on his rediscovery of the poem in London, and not the beloved, immobile and fixed in eternity; because the imagination is drawn—not by sympathy, but some perverse definition of delight—to the fragile, the animated, and the short-lived. In this unlikely manner, the near-imbecilic sonnet had been returning to him in the last four days.
A butterfly had settled on the upper window. It had closed its wings, simulating a leaf, or engendering a geometric angle, perfect as a shadow, but was now wavering and bending to one side—not out of any obedience to the breeze, but according to a whim. Almost nothing—but for this pane with faint blotches of mildew—separated it in its world outside (Warren Street) from the studio flat within, from where Ananda measured it, intrigued. All insects made him apprehensive. Where had this rarity come from? The principal danger of summer, he’d found, were bees. Almost every day one came in without invitation. He had to pretend he was unmoved by its floating, persistent exploration of the room, until, unable to cohabit with it an instant longer, his nerves already on edge, he’d have to, with an almost superhuman effort, quickly push the window up halfway, causing the house to tremble to its foundations, and then rally to chase it out with something appropriate—usually a copy of the Times or the Times Literary Supplement. The comedy and even the undeniable magic of that chase became clear to him the moment the bee had escaped, the room was empty but for him, and—like someone in a storm—he grappled with lowering the window again.
He saw now, suddenly, that the butterfly was gone—the street’s voyager; undertaking short, unsteady bursts of flight past Walia’s flats.
2
Telemachus and Nestor
(and Manny-loss)
Stupidly, he’d set up a meeting with Nestor Davidson for midday. Some resistant part of him would rather have lolled about—masturbating occasionally, perhaps, though his penis was sore; or dipping into the Oxford Companion to Modern British Literature, to spy, once more, on cherished lines and phrases (most of them these days by Edward Thomas), to check if they still existed and possessed the same shock of surprise; or watching, agog, children’s TV—Postman Pat, whose English village of workaday encounters and visits was so much more preferable to the turbulent life of Noddy that Ananda had come to know as a child; then there was the man he’s begun to like even better—Mr. Benn.
These children’s stories were where craft and observation lay; qualities abnegated by the grown-up shows. Ananda loved the way Postman Pat’s van appeared, like a private revelation, muffled yet exact, a speck of red on the hill, moving, disappearing, until it appeared again, closer this time. He was oddly touched by this trickery, the vanishing and reappearance. Mr. Benn vanished too. A cheery man in a black suit and bowler hat, who, each day, escaped life’s tedium by going into a tailor’s shop and slipping into another universe through a mirror in the fitting room. Ananda envied the enclosedness of that fitting room. Where better to lose yourself? There was a naivety and melancholy about Mr. Benn that struck a chord with Ananda, but also reminded him of the sort of unmoored bachelor whom he, despite himself, was drawn to—his uncle, for example. The animation was rudimentary, and, instead of Mr. Benn talking, you had a remarkably reassuring, paternal voice-over—that spoke only to you. Paucity of means and of technology—that was it; that was what brought to these programmes their peculiar but unmissable artistry. Ananda saw that. Art was not only about not saying everything; it was about not being able to say everything. Thus Chaplin’s films—dependent as they were on dance and choreography—were superior to so many instances of the talkies, including Chaplin’s own work, given the talkies had the dubious advantage of speech and storytelling. As things became easier to tell, they became plainer, more transparent, boring even. Art was synonymous with impediment.
—
But no Mr. Benn today! He must see Mr. Davidson instead. (He couldn’t persuade himself to call him “Nestor”—though all students addressed their teachers by their first names—not just because of the oddity of the name, but his prissy sense of formality, his Hindu—he was no practising Hindu—distaste of contact: the Mr. and Ms. So and So he used was not only a mode of deference, but a mawkish reassurance: “I won’t be presumptuous. We’ll keep our distance.”) It had to be Mr. because Nestor Davidson was neither Dr.—he had a BA from London University—nor Professor: he was, in fact, a Reader. So the Mr., democratic, anonymous, and somehow, in its two humdrum syllables, quintessentially English, had to suffice. It would do.
—
His first two years—at university and out of it—had been painful. Firstly, there was the civilisation itself, with its language—a language only secondarily his—its zebra crossings, where cars slowed down and waited, pulsating, its assortment of tea bags and cheese and pickle sandwiches, its dry, clipped way of speaking. He felt terribly excluded. Or chose to be excluded; it gave his drift and insignificance meaning in his own eyes. The students in the college—they filled him with nervousness and distrust because of their pink complexions and blue eyes, their easy taking for granted of each other: an American accent, overheard, for some reason brought him momentary lightness. In this way, he’d curtailed his visits to the college till, by the middle of the first year, he wasn’t attending a single lecture. He only appeared for his tutorials. During one of these, his tutor, a beautiful young woman called Hilary Burton, broached the subject of his meagre interface with college life: “Mrs. Bailey, the Anglo-Saxon tutor, says you’ve stopped going to her seminar.” It was the first sign that his irregularities—the liberties he’d taken in a smooth, self-governing institution that had no knowledge of him—had been noted. “I told her you haven’t been well; that you’ve been getting migraines,” said Dr. Burton, appraising his collar, eyes downcast, neutral but sympathetic. “I know what they’re like”—lowering her soft voice to a minuscule register—“I get them too.” He was vulnerable to headaches (he must have mentioned this to her some time) as he was plagued by hyperacidity. The two could be linked in an ecological chain. Migraines arose from, among other things, lack of sleep; hyperacidity on some nights destroyed rest; and Migraleve—which he kept at only a marginally less accessible spot than Double Action Rennie—could, if he wasn’t mindful, create hyperacidity. At least a few of his ailments were siblings, and now and then they chose to unite
against him. Still, the consequence of Dr. Burton’s words—a complaint relayed, but shared like a confidence—was that Ananda went to the remaining four of Mrs. Bailey’s seminars, before giving up on Anglo-Saxon when it became a non-compulsory option in the second year. And so he was introduced to this primitive tongue, which had letters—like the malformed p—that had no equivalent or peer in modern English, a tongue used by proselytisers and, after the Norman Conquest, by servants. It had a claustrophobic air—not just of an island-language, but of a further retreat from the world. How remote it was from the worldly, aerated domains of Sanskrit, Persian, and Greek! It was hidden. Yet there was more to it than translated passages from the Bible (one or the other of the parables of the New Testament that were the seminar’s staple) which concluded inevitably with a gruff threat: that those who didn’t adhere to God’s ways would be “cast into the outer darkness with much gnashing of teeth.” No, there was more to the study of Anglo-Saxon than this scary outer darkness and the dull acoustics of teeth-gnashing: such as “The Dream of the Rood,” with its flaring cross, burning through time, and its warrior-Christ, more a hero than a blonde prophet. Poring over these texts gave to Ananda his first inkling that medieval England was different from what he’d glimpsed of it in movies: that the Christians here used to be stranger than any conjecture of them suggested. And, despite it being so long, the language ugly and resistant, the words heaped like debris, he was gripped by “The Battle of Maldon,” and even asked Mrs. Bailey, “Is Byrhtnoth, then, a Christian martyr or tragic hero?”—a mouthful, that name—and the pretty girl whose name he still didn’t know (he was so deprived of sex—disabled through shyness and race-consciousness—so lonely!) glanced up at him with a flicker of curiosity, and Mrs. Bailey said, “That’s an interesting question.” That, then, was the crowning glory of his first year—barely noticed by anyone but Mrs. Bailey and (possibly) the pretty girl.
—
Ananda and Hilary Burton didn’t get on. This was established early, though there was a show of encouraging cordiality on Dr. Burton’s side. Ananda wasn’t decided if he wanted to have sex with Dr. Burton, though at times he thought he did, but not at the cost of his dignity as a young man of letters (that’s how he conceived of himself)—and he wasn’t sure if she wanted to have sex with him, though there were times he thought she did, despite (or maybe impelled by) their unspoken animosity. The problem should have been clear, but it wasn’t, at least to Ananda: that Dr. Burton was a feminist, and a rather sophisticated advocate of French feminist critical theory; and that she saw Ananda as an unreconstructed Romantic, thin but glowing with universal ideals and an unforgiving discontent with all he deemed unworthy of “literature.” Ananda, typical of his gender, took “literature” as a given, a sacred fact. Imagine his confusion when he had to write his first tutorial essay on Troilus and Criseyde, and discovered that the word “poet,” as he understood it, was quite inappropriate to Chaucer. Nevertheless, he decided he’d ignore this, and gave a positive spin to his piece, pretending Chaucer was a Romantic poet. At the tutorial, Dr. Burton, trying to hide her exasperation, brandishing his essay, said: “You write very eloquently, Mr. Sen”—it took three meetings for her to graduate coquettishly to his first name; she’d even asked whether she was pronouncing the simple monosyllabic surname accurately—“and what I like is that—unlike my other students—you’ve taken the poem for what it fundamentally is: a love story!” How could he not? He was a passionate apologist for love. He was like a virginal Victorian girl: love and sex existed in separate compartments. He would argue and argue that year and the next for love in the jaded circles of the English department—the Vision of Eros, which, as Auden had said, was near-impossible to champion. For to speak of love was like “talking about ghosts”—“most people had heard of them, but very few people knew one.” He sensed that Hilary Burton’s encouragement was a backhanded compliment. A connoisseur of literary insincerity, she herself was being completely insincere: and wanted him to know it. Last time, she’d suggested that Troilus and Criseyde was not so much a poem as a forerunner of the novel, exemplifying not the poem’s “truth” but the novel’s “light and shade.” This observation was symptomatic of a general call to arms within the department, and he first became aware of it in Dr. Burton’s room; that the student needed to be educated about how the idea that literature was a repository of emotion and spontaneity was only a relatively recent Romantic fiction, no more than two centuries old, that most students had been schooled, without being aware of it, in this Romantic notion, and now required to be disabused, that there were swathes of writing before Romanticism that demonstrated that literature was not truthful and spontaneous, but deceptive and constructed. This project within the corridors and rooms of the department—a crusade, as Ananda viewed it—was one of the causes of his misery. How could this version of things account for the palliative effect Edward Thomas had on him daily, or for lines that “moved” him in poems he didn’t entirely understand?
—
Dr. Burton was a medievalist. She was an expert on Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The one reason that Ananda didn’t dismiss Dr. Burton’s preoccupations out of hand was because he’d read somewhere that Ted Hughes had been nourished by these strange consonantal poems—whose language was as harsh as the English winter. The recent English poets Ananda had read a great deal of: Larkin, Gunn, Hughes, Causley, Tomlinson. One of the reasons he’d gravitated towards this college—making the voyage out from Bombay, where the college had no separate meaning for him, unlike Oxford or Cambridge—was because Stephen Spender was here. When he applied for a place, he knew Spender had retired—only just—and, even today, this was a cause of heartbreak. Not so long ago, Spender hovered in these corridors, near these portals, until, coinciding with Ananda’s advent, he had withdrawn completely into late-night television shows, radio talks, and journal-publishing. If only Spender had frequented these corridors now, Ananda wouldn’t have been so unhappy. It was not so much his poems Ananda cared about—although he loved Hughes’s and Larkin’s work, Spender’s poetry hadn’t made an impression—as the appearance (slightly stooped; tweed-jacketed; with a blue-eyed angelic face, like David Gower’s) and the persona he’d encountered in World within World: sensitive, with a youth of mildly adventurous left-wing predilections, but a firm believer in poetry’s sacrosanct qualities (“I think continually of those who are great”). If only Spender had survived in the college to Ananda’s arrival, he would have recognised in him a kindred soul, a person moved invisibly by the poetic. Ananda would have hesitantly shown his poems to Spender, who, in his excitement, would have got them published, just as Spender’s friend Auden had once tremblingly, in astonishment, discovered the nineteen-year-old Dom Moraes’s poetry on a visit to Bombay, and been instrumental in its publication. That collection, as everyone knew, was the one book by an Indian to win the Hawthornden Prize, its author the youngest to have received that accolade. If Ananda had won the Hawthornden, he wouldn’t have been as young as Moraes, but young enough. Instead, he’d come to the college just a little too late. He recalled that Spender, in his memoir, had mentioned a teacher in his school, St. Paul’s, who’d said to him, “You’re unhappy in school, but you are going to be very happy at university.” Ananda had almost taken heart from this, because he too was miserable in school; but, unlike the youthful Stephen, he found he was very unhappy in university too. He didn’t mind. A part of him knew that he’d one day be happy. That state of being was firmly—and securely—reserved for full adulthood, when he’d probably be married and famous; just as, when he was a child, he’d concluded it was reserved for his late teens. To Hilary Burton, he hardly ever mentioned the contemporary poets. The only recent writer that she seemed halfway enthusiastic about was a woman called Julia Kristeva. “This is a wonderful book!” she’d said deeply, huskily, imparting a sensual emphasis to “wonderful,” as she lifted, from her populous, fusty bookshelf, a gleaming tome with a blue cover, Desire in La
nguage. Again, sex seemed to be introduced into the frame of the tutorial, and he wasn’t sure if she was making a pass.
—
“The brightest students do medieval studies!” said Hilary Burton. “Oh, you mustn’t go to the moderns!” Towards the end of the previous academic year, he’d let it slip that, by the time he was a finalist, he wanted to take only nineteenth- and twentieth-century options; to be unshackled of the study of the past. The past is a foreign country; but another country’s past is twice-foreign. Was she hinting that she thought he was bright? Now that he was at a crossroads in life’s journey, already a traveller, was she confusing him by pointing out a route he didn’t intend to take? Brightest students! Was she inveigling him with disingenuous noises? By this time, her health—which had been appalling beneath her beautiful exterior and her gay fauvist dresses—had worsened, and she couldn’t see properly; so that when she stared at his collar while speaking, it was neither shyness nor flirtatiousness which made her do so, but simply the fact that she had a hazy sense now of where his face was. She’d been diagnosed with a problem in the brain—he had no idea what it was—a year ago. He wasn’t sure how much of the illness was real, how much a product of her imagination.
Medieval England didn’t attract him; not Gawain, not Piers Plowman. He felt he’d like Greek tragedy, but kept putting off the “intellectual background” classes where he could familiarise himself with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Besides, he was becoming suspicious of tragedy. He put this down to the rediscovery of his Indian past, his recent realisation that there was no tragedy in Sanskrit literature. Sanskrit theatre, with its tranquil curtain calls, where thief, courtesan, soldier, king, could smilingly take a bow, their conflicts resolved—that was a welcome antidote to the Western universe, with its privileging of dark over light. He was a proponent of joy! This, despite being drawn to Philip Larkin. He was plainly prejudiced against the West. Then what was he doing in the West, in the English department? He was clearly not at home; he was lost. He’d always presumed that Sophocles rhymed with “monocles.” Until, standing before a noticeboard announcing lectures, his mispronunciation was gently overlooked by a fellow student, an English boy, who repeated the name, rhyming it with Pericles. Ananda was embarrassed.
Odysseus Abroad Page 4