What of the epics, which they made such a fuss over? He’d gone to a lecture on the Aeneid one Monday morning, and puzzled over the lecturer’s caressing pronunciation—e-nee-yud; but he—the lecturer—had droned on about the “founding myth of the nation,” and Ananda, in the back row, began to turn the pages of the Observer stealthily (two students glanced at him, smiling). What to make of these epics in comparison to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the latter (he was now convinced) equal to all of Shakespeare and more?—they were like a Thames to the Ganges, a stream beside a river with no noticeable horizon; minor. Homer he’d studied with similar scepticism, noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without volition, like a traffic light, every few pages of the Iliad, and, with greater fascination—salivating, even, because he was often hungry—how the soldiers feasted on pork “singed in its own fat” at regular intervals. The Odyssey he hadn’t bothered to read.
Still, he’d read enough of and around the Greeks to know that the gods were undependable, and put their powers to use in idiosyncratic ways. In this, they were superficially like the many-headed, many-armed Hindu deities; except that, with the Hindu gods, you felt the capriciousness of their actions was linked to the transformative play of creation, lila. In comparison, the Greek gods were merely dim-witted and vengeful. They hibernated; they woke up; they became conscious of a problem; they either attended to it or forgot to. There was no telling which human being they’d help out or do their utmost to destroy—guided by some personal like or grudge that had no rational explanation, or, what was quite common, in order to redress a slight received aeons ago.
Ananda first met Dr. Burton on Gower Street. She was wearing a bright orange dress with large yellow circles which came to below her knees, and was tapping the pavement with a cane. He knew it was her. It was the first time that the person he wanted someone to be turned out to be whom he thought it was. “Mr. Sen!” she exclaimed, taking particular pleasure in the sound of his voice, as if it were a disembodied stream. “We have a meeting at ten, don’t we?” It was drizzling very lightly, despite the sun, and instinctively, opportunely, he took her under his umbrella. “Can you help me?” she asked. “I have a problem with my vision today.” He placed his arm on her shoulder, not daring to keep it there for more than a few seconds at a time, but feeling an unbelievable closeness that she too seemed to have surrendered to, almost patting her back as he steered her forward. From Gower Street they entered through a heavy glass door on the left and were in a long bleak corridor, from where—he escorting her, but she guiding him, as she knew the way—they ended up (he couldn’t remember how) in another building, and at last in her spacious room on the first floor, where the medievalists, Chaucerians, and linguistics professors had their offices.
Their romance remained buried beneath their different personalities; his still unformed, but with many of its traits already visible. She never found out if he had a sense of humour; and he could only deduce she had one from the poster on her door, showing a languorous Mrs. Thatcher being carried masterfully by Ronald Reagan in his arms. Her kindness, like her cane, he knew only from her curious exhibitions of empathy, such as the birdhouse she kept on her sill for transient but recurrent sparrows. He couldn’t crack, through her, what Englishness was; and, for her, the prickly mystery of being Indian clearly remained permanently unsolved. Sex stayed in the air, like an absurdity; once, when he asked her if he could write a tutorial essay on a topic different from what she’d suggested, she’d parted her legs, both swift and interminably slow—she was in a shortish skirt; he’d had to turn his eyes away—before crossing them again, and said, smiling faintly, “Do what you like. I believe in the pleasure principle.” He was unhappy about her tutelage—he was generally unhappy at the time—but masturbated thinking about her, twice.
In the second academic year (which had ended a month ago), he no longer saw her—which was a relief. He wanted to forget her, at least for now. She had taken ill; his second-year tutor told him one day that her visits had grown irregular. How had the subject come up—of Hilary Burton? Maybe from a recounting to the second-year tutor of his state of mind in the first year. Another day, the tutor announced—again, an association of anecdotes and harmless gossip led unexpectedly to her—that Dr. Burton had entered a coma. She was alive. Her brain wasn’t. She was too young. Ananda couldn’t believe it.
His second-year tutor, Richard Bertram, he was happier with. By some train of thought, Richard—maybe his surname—made Ananda think of P. G. Wodehouse, and this at once put him at ease. Richard, with his general cheeriness, and his mild astonishment each time Ananda came for a tutorial—“Hel-lo there, Ananda!”—didn’t belie this impression. He was very tall, which added to his air of being a large schoolboy who was destined to thrive in an educational institution. You could see him sometimes in the corridor, negotiating his bicycle by the handle, his trousers fastened with bicycle clips round his ankles, urgent and unselfconscious, confirming he had no natural habitat but college.
—
He was kind to Ananda, but was of a different species altogether—a Renaissance scholar. Like Hilary Burton, he was a product of Oxford, and this meant he was like one who’d assiduously made his way back to reality from a dream. The fact that the Renaissance was Richard’s intellectual domain meant there was—despite their bonhomie—an unspoken gulf between tutor and student, which was palpable to Ananda alone, and of which Richard was blissfully unmindful. Ananda viewed Richard with gratitude and friendship, but also anthropologically: as an English academic of a particular ilk and type. The reason was this—Ananda couldn’t seriously engage (whatever pretence he made) with someone whose interests were anterior to 1800. The nineteenth century was a subconscious cut-off date; behind it lay an incredible array of armadas, knaves, kings, people on horseback; Philip Sydney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Even in the nineteenth century, it was only Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and select bits of Shelley and Keats that he felt a loyalty towards, for their wonder at the actual universe; the deliberately histrionic (Byron and Browning) he avoided, even if he was intermittently susceptible to their gifts; the Victorians, too, whatever their persuasion—Tennyson, Clough, Housman—he’d cross the street in order not to have to meet them. Richard didn’t suspect at all how prone to irrational literary biases Ananda was: he was too self-absorbed and congenitally trustful to be suspicious. For Ananda—though he may not have articulated it to himself plainly, and despite its horrible wars and conflicts (and maybe not entirely unconnected to them)—the twentieth century was the most magnificent period ever. At once tragic and playful, so incredible and unparalleled, yet so familiar that you might not notice it! It was either taken for granted, because it was merely the present, or praised for the wrong reasons, because it represented progress; it was easy not to really think about it. Did Richard think of it—since, after all, he was of it, and in it? Twentieth-century literature! With its narrow subject, modern man—strange creature! With his retinue of habits, like getting on to buses, secreting the bus ticket in his pocket, or going to the dentist…However modern man might turn into Tiresias or a giant insect, he was, in many ways, more akin to Richard and Ananda than Ananda and Richard—given one’s investment in the sixteenth century and the other’s in T. S. Eliot; given one was English and the other Indian—were to each other.
—
When there were around five weeks left for the end of spring term, Richard suddenly departed because of his mother’s illness. She was dying by herself in Primrose Hill, worsening through the winter, unrevived by spring—English mothers had it tough in times of distress, as did their children. Dr. Bertram had written Ananda a beautiful letter of apology—beautiful for its handwriting, sweepingly inscribed in black ink—saying how sorry he was to abandon him and that he could sense Ananda would “burgeon and grow” next year. It was now that Nestor Davidson stepped in, to take the last few tutorials. Ananda already knew of “Mr. Davidson,” and had glimpsed him
, a man of medium height, or on the lower side of medium, or at the upper end of short, what remained of his straight black hair combed across his head and never falling on the widening forehead, glasses with a conventional, thickish frame on his face, his mouth often set—but not in an English way—in silent determination, and the nose, slightly large and veined and ravaged, possessing an independent identity, and implying alcohol. He was a well-known novelist—but not well-known enough for Ananda to have heard of him before he came to this college. Ananda was apprehensive when Davidson was assigned as his temporary tutor—the set mouth, the determined look, the nose, made him wonder about his temper.
In fact, it became evident very early that Mr. Davidson and Ananda found the same kinds of things funny. Mr. Davidson (unlike Ananda’s first two tutors) was not shy of calling people “idiots,” and their laughter at randomly chosen human beings was essential to their common enjoyment of life as they sat down to tutorials. Midway through the tutorial, they broke to have tea, and biscuits from a large oval tin. Mr. Davidson didn’t consume that much alcohol, so the nose had no explanation. On the shelves on the left—on which the sun fell directly—were books by Isherwood, Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), Babel, Pound, Auden, Eliot, Bruno Schulz, Emily Dickinson, D. H. Lawrence, Singer, Olive Schreiner, and what were presumably his novels, An Outing in the Summer, Boer Diamonds, Intransigents, with his very own name (yes, that’s what it was)—Ananda glanced at it twice without giving himself away—descending the spine. Any place where you have a collection of books must be considered a second home, and when a man unobtrusively collects books he once wrote it hints at the fact he’s maybe not inwardly settled. Mr. Davidson was from South Africa; this accounted for the accent, which had had Ananda puzzling privately. He had come to London in the early sixties. Here he’d met the woman he only ever called “Sal,” and to whom he was married. In the college library, Ananda had stealthily read the first chapter of Nestor Davidson’s memoir, Time Regained, and, in the silence that he seldom entered or visited (he’d only been to the library one other time), he was struck by the vividness with which the arrival was described, the first encounter with King’s Cross Station, a journey made with a friend to look for digs at Highgate, the discovery as a bewildered loiterer of the backstreets of Victoria. Could one hold even London in wonder and affection? He himself was so at odds with London. As he held the book before him, he thought in a flash of his parents, who also spoke of their first bleak years in this crushing city with a kind of love.
—
Nestor Davidson was Jewish: a man fitting in, seamlessly, without any special attempt to do so, but having to fit in nevertheless. Was this what had made Ananda’s and his paths converge—the fact there was room here for them both, Mr. Davidson with his Lithuanian forefathers of whom he knew relatively little, Ananda with his covert Sylheti ancestry? No, that was too fanciful. Maybe it was simply that they both loved “modern” literature. After meeting Mr. Davidson, Ananda, for the first time, had felt there was a point to his being here; that he was moving in the right direction after all.
—
The right direction! But he was late. It was 11:35, it would take him twenty minutes to reach Mr. Davidson’s door. That is, if he picked up momentum and didn’t dawdle on Tottenham Court Road. For his journeys in the neighbourhood hardly ever had a purpose. Today was an exception—but even this was more of an unofficial meeting between a mature writer and an apprentice than a tutorial: term was over, his second academic year was history. He sat on the bed, tied his laces, got up. Alone. No mother to see him off, no stream of meaningless mother-chatter to soften his exit. It was quiet with her not there. One part of him still listened, alert, for the Patels. Nothing. He closed the door behind him, went down the tunnel of stairs, the jaundice-yellow rug lit evenly by yellow light, swinging quickly at the first landing to avert the possibility of an emerging Mandy—more than her intolerance of his singing it was her betrayal that had shaken him—and then, alighting from the last flight of stairs, he was in the ground-floor hallway, the floor covered indiscriminately with the glossy detritus of this morning’s junk mail—somehow attesting to the fact that much of the day had already elapsed while the thicker letters in white or brown envelopes—final reminders to pay gas bills; missives from the home office—lay bunched by an invisible hand, piled neatly, on the central heating radiator on the side. Ananda paused to peer at them before deciding that this mix of the daily precipitation of official communications and a suspiciously non-committal package addressed to Vivek Patel, probably containing a pornographic magazine, had nothing for him. He opened the door and, once he’d passed the little vestibule—where often garbage bags were kept—turned right towards McDonald’s.
—
Here, at McDonald’s—whose burgers were both disappointing and too expensive for him, the big Mac, for its size, a Herculean task to bite into, but strangely nondescript to the palate—was a junction at which you encountered people crossing from Tottenham Court Road into the futuristic anonymity of Euston Road. Others headed through the glass door for (or emerged heavy with) a Big Mac meal, and still others, across the road, milled before Warren Street tube station, either about to disappear inwards, or just coming out, accustoming themselves to the right angle of Warren Street and Tottenham Court Road.
Ananda turned right into the wide busy stretch that went much further than the brain could accommodate; for he had trouble comprehending that this Tottenham Court Road was identical to the one after the traffic lights that would sever New Oxford from Oxford Street—there lay the more salacious stretch, besides of course the obscure guitar shops in by-lanes, and Foyles, civilised sentinel; but also prostitutes so down-at-heel that you flinched and looked away—they becoming, for a split second, focussed on you as you passed by, giving you the privilege of their attention (it was nice to be noticed, however you might deny it, when you were in the crowd), but becoming bored instantaneously and returning to their vigil; in further by-lanes were the remaining XXX cinemas that, under Thatcher, had become pristine with nipples and buttocks and never the vestige of an erection, the LIVE PEEP SHOW! signs, bursting with unfounded optimism, and the weirder notices pinned to doors: MODELS ON THE FIRST FLOOR. In his first year, he’d been a flâneur of these sites, a frequenter of interiors in which no one acknowledged anyone else as they browsed in stops and starts, and even the faint touch of another man’s shoulder could make you flinch; shops that you slipped into through curtains that had been passed through a shredder; he was uneasy, but the shop assistant (if you could call them that: they were probably on parole) was usually friendly, but sly; only once or twice had Ananda received a whiff of racism, a burly man saying “Vindaloo, vindaloo” in an eerie sing-song to himself. Such people were to be ignored and avoided; there are certain demoniacal beings in the universe, his uncle had said, quoting Taranath the tantric, who are dim but incredibly powerful; they can grow a hundred times their size in a second; they have brute strength; they can fly; but they are not intelligent. You won’t be able to beat them in a contest of strength, but you have to hold your nerve when facing them. His uncle’s reason for referring to Taranath the tantric was to take a dig at Western civilisation, its technological marvels, which he dismissed as a brash, superficial form of energy. Ananda found Taranath the tantric’s definition handy for classifying the whole range of skinheads, football fans, and neo-Nazis he must take care not to run into during his Soho wanders.
—
This stretch, on which he made his progress towards the college, was boring. He wasn’t even sure if it was Tottenham Court Road. Not a dirty magazine to be seen. Instead, the Grafton Hotel, with its purple-liveried porter. Boring restaurants—Lal Qila (mildly uppity, with tandoori quail on the menu); Strikes, the raison d’etre of whose name was impossible to second-guess, with black-and-white pictures of striking workers from the twenties (no overt homage being made to Arthur Scargill) and a menu dominated by burgers; and Garfunkel’s (no evident g
enuflection to Paul and Art), where you had to wait to get a table (raising your expectations, naturally), and which probably served the woodiest French fries in miles. He’d eaten at each one: at Strikes and Garfunkel’s with his mother, when she was tired of cooking and he of saving: they’d let go and, with a disproportionate sense of guilt and liberation, made their way there. Strikes! Garfunkel’s! He’d coerced his uncle twice to treat his mother and him to Lal Qila. He felt no remorse—his uncle was a well-to-do man (though he might have lost his job), without a family or property to his name. Surely he could take them out once a week? So ran the unwritten rule (unchallenged, to date, by his uncle).
—
He turned left at Heal’s. When he’d first moved to Warren Street—still fresh to this terrain—he’d taken the longer route, crossing the road at McDonald’s and, quite alone—there were hardly any pedestrians here—traversed a no-man’s land, passing, each day, a largely unvisited sari emporium, aware that Drummond Street and the Asian grocers and bhelpuri shops weren’t far; walked, walked, in silence, till he reached Euston Square tube station. Here, as he turned sharply right facing the station, the vista of Gower Street and his destiny—of being condemned to being in London, of making this journey to college—presented themselves plainly. The grey buildings on his left were the college’s, and, midway through the walk, you passed the old grand building and entrance—faux renaissance with its white dome, marked by imperial pretensions, befitting of Rome rather than the surrounding London brick and stone. This entrance was out of bounds; the grand building was being salvaged and renovated from before he’d seen it almost two years ago; it was an irrelevance; he simply walked past it, noting its brief dishevelment, before he reached the traffic lights, and turned left. It took him two weeks to realise that he needn’t take that walk, that he could go down Tottenham Court Road till he reached the Goodge Street underground, and turn into the street bordered by Heal’s. This was a better route, less stark and nineteenth-century, less emblematic of the colonial past—what a poor subject he’d have made, even worse than the maladroit he was as a migrant student!—and more consolingly drab and populous. The scattered signs of old and new wealth flanked him on this trip; Heal’s, with its fluttering pennants, was a palace, and he had no reason, now or in the future, to enter it to survey the heavy furniture displayed within. Habitat was next to it, with its perky designs, its transformed shapes and fragile-looking chairs and tables; he and his mother, small and bright in her sari, had roamed here one afternoon, and she’d bought him the dining table—it was on a thirty per cent reduction—that now took up one tenth of his room. Much more sprightly, this route. Gower Street—Tagore! What had Tagore felt about Gower Street? Ananda had heard that Tagore had enrolled in the same college in 1879 to read Law. He’d attended a few lectures—but not on Law, as far as he knew, but by Herbert Spencer. To be anonymous, a nobody, and a subject! This, no doubt, was what had made Ananda shiver slightly when going down Gower Street: the haunting of Empire. Tagore had fled back home, long before taking a degree, in disgrace. Ananda would have fled, too, if he’d come here in 1879; he could barely bring himself to continue in Thatcher’s multiracial capital. His mother’s visits—her company, the constant chatter in the room—had kept him from returning; poor Tagore had had no rescuing angel, no mother-love to protect and entertain him. Nor, for that matter, had he had Ananda’s uncle. Though his uncle couldn’t be trusted. Not only was he seldom sympathetic towards Ananda’s outpourings of homesickness, he claimed he never felt homesick himself. He was lying.
Odysseus Abroad Page 5