Odysseus Abroad

by Amit Chaudhuri

  The balding man in white shirt and dandyish striped trousers inside Asian Books and Video didn’t see Ananda; but Ananda glanced at him as he would at an expected landmark, put aside his need to make urgent queries, moved on towards the newsagent’s. At the neighbouring shop, surveying boxes of vegetables and fruit and herbs displayed outside the steps, was shakchunni (so Ananda’s mother called her; they didn’t know her name); also known at different points in time as churel and dain among the neighbours in Walia’s flats. She’d been consigned to the dominion of ghouls because of her ashen appearance (always wrapping her small stick-like figure in a faded printed sari) and her unhelpful personality. No longer did they go to her for yams, coriander, tomatoes, or other produce; but occasionally, when they fell unexpectedly short, they navigated her for Ribena or a carton of milk; then dealt with her eerie supernatural silence at the till. Her husband—in glasses—looked more generically human, and could even have passed for an accountant; he was no less unfriendly, but that could be because he was entrapped and, as a consequence, dour. On the other hand, shakchunni might be wasting away because of this bespectacled husband, whose very motionlessness was energy-sapping. Ananda arrived at the newsagent’s, hawkishly extracted a copy of the Times from the rack outside, climbed up the three steps. The newsagent, Manish, like shakchunni, was Gujarati, but second-generation; “A nation of Gujarati shopkeepers”—the joke was so obvious that, though he suspected he’d invented it, he couldn’t believe it was original; a thousand people must have thought up the same line; no one ever bothered to speak it aloud because it was so silly. His Highness and Excellency Dr. Rev. Sir Idi Amin had supervised the egress of the Gujaratis—mainly Patels; Manish too was Manish Patel—from Uganda thirteen years ago, leading, quite literally, to a change of colour in the English neighbourhoods. And four years before this happened, the Oracle—silver-tongued, Oxford-educated—had predicted strife in England and raved eloquently about the river Tiber foaming with much blood, a pronouncement that had been variously interpreted. “How are you, mate?” said Manish. “Aw-right?” He said this to Ananda each day. Sometimes it was only, “Aw-right?” Today Ananda sensed the words expressed not a social nicety but real concern, as if Manish had a fleeting but shrewd inkling, from the moments they spent with each other, of Ananda’s ever-returning homesickness and the recent departure of his mother. “Fine thanks,” said Ananda, and Manish smiled and nodded quietly; he’d abandoned his faded maroon jumper, but the smile was, as ever, framed by the changeless hirsute growth that was neither beard nor stubble. It was Manish who’d announced to Ananda the death of the grand witch, Indira Gandhi, when he’d come in to get the Times at half past eleven one morning nine months ago; Ananda had overslept and had no idea the world had changed in the small hours. While making his usual pointless arc from Fitzroy Square to Grafton Way, he’d noticed the flag on top of the Indian YMCA at half-mast and was puzzled; looked back twice to check the flag, then put it out of his head till Manish, in his faded maroon jumper, told him with that same look of concern: “Do you know Mrs. Gandhi’s been shot?” “What?” “Yes.” “Is she dead?” “They’re not saying.” That and the next day Ananda wondered if his country would splinter at the news; and would he be stranded in Warren Street if it did? And for how long then would he have to be here? He’d never before doubted his nation and its viability. But it survived and persisted through the violence and through the seasons. Manish, a bit of a divine messenger in disguise, continued to give Ananda the latest cricket scores along with the small change.

  Surya. Helios. Phaeton’s dad.

  The interiors of English houses weren’t built to cope with uninterrupted, heat-inducing sunshine. But odd how it conferred beauty, even on these very streets—Warren, and Whitfield, Grafton Way, even illuminating Charlotte Street, which otherwise seemed permanently to be in the shade. It wasn’t as if the sun was just the ruler of the universe that he, Walia, and even the Patels lived in; he was its creator—not only in sending out the ray of light that penetrated the seed and stirred the shoot. The sun wove maya—the fabric of the visible world. Some Hindus said that maya was dream, or illusion; but there was nothing else to speak of—the visible world was all there was. It was his work. Daily the enchantment recurred—except in England, not daily; there were weeks and months of anaemic reality, when the sun was reluctant, and Tottenham Court Road was an industrial version of itself. On such days, the lights of the night were more uplifting—the lamps, the lit shop windows on Oxford Street, the neon advertising—than the light of day, and you prayed for the day’s end so you might seek out areas alive with artificial glitter. But today—like yesterday—the sun was out, and living as well as inert things verified his handiwork: shakchunni, the cabbages in the crate outside her shop, the newspaper rack—all were complicit in this work-in-progress: the day.

  —

  The English outside the Grafton Arms had taken off their shirts; expanses of pink with ruddy blotches, swigging down lager. If only they’d had more sun! This is what they’d have been like—semi-naked, sedentary, congregated in pairs or threes. They wouldn’t have needed Empire—because their souls would have been full.

  Alas, that’s not the way history had turned out. The weather was what it was; Empire had happened; Ananda was here. Sometimes, in November, when the day shrank and grew damp, Ananda daydreamed about what it would have been like if India had been colonised by the Caribbean. He’d have been at a Caribbean university, in shirtsleeves the whole year. The thought consoled him as he made his way to Malet Street.

  But that wasn’t how history turned out!—which is why he was in Warren Street rather than St. Kitts or St. Lucia. That’s why the people from St. Kitts and St. Lucia were here too—the little shop on the corner of Whitfield Street, with its euphoric spells of music.

  Thank goodness for immigrants! They—tired West Indian women steering prams before them, Caribbean workmen at building sites, wrestling with each other during their breaks like teetering boys, Paki gentlemen in worn black suits, the sudden swarms of dark-skinned children following in the wake of a schoolteacher, even the industrious, practical, seldom-smiling Chinese—they brought some sunshine to a place starved of light. The Gujarati and Pakistani shopkeepers kept the day from sputtering out: their shops open till after nine, well after the natives had retired. Sundays were a graveyard but for the Alis, Patels, Shahs, who (with Thatcher’s collusion) were always open for business.

  His hunger had passed, but then been revived by the static of the tandoori platter. He was suddenly ravenous. Near Goodge Street there was an American Style Fried Chicken which, till recently, he was too ingenuous to realise was not Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was McDonald’s of course—for which, he’d heard, oxen were compressed and flattened (like one of those cars pounded to a flat metallic shape in a scrapyard) to a neat patty—eyeballs and all. This horrible diminution surely offended some primordial law? Would someone pay one day?

  At the Greek takeaway on Charlotte Street he paused to look at a rotating rump of meat, from which a man scraped shavings at intervals. Also, impaled on skewers were small chunks of—beef or mutton? A small flood of saliva filled his mouth. Could these be progeny of the food mentioned adoringly in the Iliad? Food was usually more appetising in books, and Homer’s descriptions had galvanised Ananda’s gastric juices—just as, when he was a boy, reading, in Enid Blyton, of picnics flowing with scones, milk, sandwiches, and jam used to fill him with a powerful longing. That surfeit was missing from the life he’d come to know in London, although, if you could afford it, you could eat halibut in a restaurant, or rainbow trout in butter and almonds. The days of rationing—which he’d learnt of from his uncle—were long over. He went in, shyly ordered a skewer of lamb from the moustached Greek. The rump on the spindle had an unpleasant smell. Chewing a dead, resistant piece, he fantasised he was partaking of the food Homer had written of—then rejected the fantasy. It was odd how quickly the meat became cold and lumpy: masticated chunk
s settled in his stomach, allaying the restive juices. He wondered if the food at the takeaway was below par, or whether Homer had overrated the soldiers’ repasts.

  3

  Eumaeus

  Usually, he descended two levels at Warren Street for the journey, riding escalator after escalator, ignoring the sign saying Victoria Line, reaching deeper into the earth for the Northern. Today he was near Goodge Street. He took the lift down and just missed the train when he reached the platform. There would be another one in two minutes, going to Edgware.

  This was a kind of default route. He’d known hardly any other since that first visit in 1973. Belsize Park was inevitable; he and his parents went no further north—Golders Green was unexplored; Hampstead he only ever went to on foot with his uncle. And his uncle made that journey slightly melodramatic, staring portentously at Ananda—when was he ever serious?—and saying, “The Devil lives in the North.” “The North? I thought the Devil lives in Hell,” said Ananda, recalling, at once, his favourite line attributed to Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. “The North,” insisted his uncle, “is beloved of the Devil. They say the further North you go, the greater the chances of running into him.” The map opposite the platform depicted one straight line splitting into two, High Barnet dangling from the left, Edgware from the right—and Mill Hill East, not far above High Barnet, appearing to hang from a hair. The picture was imprinted in Ananda’s mind as the essence of an expedition. Not because he lived in Belsize Park, but because he repeatedly went there. In the train, the map of the Northern Line was drawn sideways, becoming a bracelet in two parts, united and linked together at Euston.

  The bracelet’s outer border—trains bound for High Barnet or going via King’s Cross—were irrelevant, no, inimical, to him. Stops like King’s Cross, Moorgate, and Angel had to be avoided, despite being on the Northern Line; head for them, and you were lost for half an hour. Other lines—Metropolitan, Central, Piccadilly—existed as rumour, in narratives he had little interest in.

  —

  Not that he had to go to Belsize Park to see his uncle. They also appointed other locations. They decided this on the phone. Neither had a phone—but this didn’t deter them from calling each other. After the Patels had prised out the coin box, the payphone had become a relic without function and Ananda had to have recourse to a booth on the opposite side of Warren Street, near Tandoor Mahal. From there he called Bombay, speaking to his mother, her clear childish voice reaching him after a delay, like a benediction. When he needed to talk to his uncle, he called the neighbour, Abbas. “One sacund, please,” Abbas said—Punjabis from Pakistan had perfect manners—and sometimes Ananda heard him knock vigorously and proclaim: “Nandy—Nandy! Tumhara nephew hain.” Some expected shambling; then the baritone—“Pupu!” (Ananda’s ignominious pet name.) “Kemon achho he?” His uncle addressed him in a lisping way—like Ananda was an overgrown child who required special handling. He usually sounded amused talking to Ananda—and surprised. He was capable of bickering with Ananda. But they might concur that Marble Arch or Oxford Street was the best meeting place, and experience a bit of satisfaction. This decision shaped the next few hours. What they did then—even if it was the same as what they did every day—would be an accomplice to their future convergence. By the time they hung up, both of them—but particularly Ananda—were fulminating; because his uncle would have complained again about a remark Ananda’s father or mother had made, or something Ananda himself had said, and also offered a long, uncalled-for justification for an opinion he’d expressed last week. To this, Ananda had to reply with “Okay, okay, fine”—his role being to soothe and bring closure—while secreting his third 10 p coin into the slot; when the warning beeps went off again, he’d say, “I’m running out of change, Rangamama, we’ll talk this afternoon”—giving them, before they were cut off, just enough time to rescue a semblance of good humour, his uncle his feeling of anticipation, and say provisional farewells.

  —

  The tube to Edgware was near-empty. It was that time of day. The suited yuppies would begin to enter the parted doors in a couple of hours, till there was no room to stand. But, given his daytime schedule, Ananda hardly knew rush hour. Tube-travel was spacious; he often found himself headed somewhere in the company of stragglers. “Company” was the wrong word, because they didn’t know each other. And the chances of them seeing each other again were few, if not nil. This fact underlined—without emphasis—the short journey, given the paucity of passengers. During rush hour, the passengers jostled and threatened to merge. Now, the five or six others marooned on seats brought home to Ananda the contingency of their nearness—without the thought surfacing with finality. He was off to see his uncle; they weren’t. If another person or two alighted at Belsize Park, it would be intriguing to see how long their journeys coincided; eventually, the others would fall away, and Ananda’s path to the basement bedsit would be his own. There was a beautiful tall girl in a black dress on the far side, who looked absorbed in everything but where she was. She denied the tube entirely. Her eyes altered direction every few seconds as she raced, very still, with some unfolding preoccupation. A Gujarati couple got on at Euston, at once mercantile and spiritual—old; managing to make their progress a pilgrimage and an enterprise. They didn’t speak; they were receiving and absorbing the train’s motion—but he knew by some unspecified rule of recognition that they were from Gujarat: their arrival here had been presaged by the Oracle, moving him to his “rivers of blood” grandiloquence. The man wore a black jacket and grey trousers, the woman a pale white cotton sari; both had keds on. They were subtly wizened—Gujaratis tended to wizen gracefully, as if in preparation for withdrawal. Yet they were a worldly lot; you could sense that in the couple’s wordless determination. Ananda envied this fearlessness; he wouldn’t have had the gumption to go around in a faded sari and keds in London. Despite his pretences, he cared about what he looked like.

  —

  “Asians” is what the couple would be called here. Ananda didn’t see himself as “Asian.” He was keen to militate against the category, though his militancy must, naturally, remain incommunicable to the people it was intended for. He was Indian. He’d go back home some day—the deferred promise defined him. When he’d visited London in the summers of 1973 and 1979, he’d seen “Asians” for the first time—a family in Belsize Park in particular, whom his parents knew from their time here before they’d returned. The nice Bengali bhadralok lady had a boy who was Ananda’s age—eleven. He had casual long hair which fell repeatedly on his eyebrows, and he spoke exactly as a London boy would, unobtrusively dispensing with many of his t’s. He was, actually, English. Speaking the language in that way translated his features, his facial muscles, into the idiom of this city’s culture. They’d run into each other during subsequent explorations in the neighbourhood that summer, but never talked again. Ananda was convinced that this was an Indian boy who belonged more to Belsize Park than to India; he was enveloped by a curious shyness when he saw him in the distance, and tried to avoid him.

  The “rivers of blood” speech was still quite fresh that year, and he remembered his uncle—in flared trousers, sideburns tapering down from the thinning scalp—refer to it with an impish smile. In less nice neighbourhoods, the National Front left parcels of shit on the doorsteps of Indians and Pakis. Indians had then only just emerged into this new identity—“Asian”—from having not long ago been “black.” In fact, his uncle still called himself “black”—having maybe boasted of his Bengali antecedents one moment ago (“Tagore turned Bengali into one of the seven richest literatures in the world,” he’d say, citing an English scholar, not bothering to tell him what the other six literatures were). In the time of colonisation even Tagore—a veritable bearded Zeus atop Olympus—had playfully called himself “black.” It was the convenient catch-all en masse term for those not from Europe. The Greeks, responsible for European civilisation, only barely escaped the misnomer by virtue of b
eing lightly tanned. However, Ananda had sensed the Greeks were visible to the naked English eye from a mile off. The gradations of colour between white and black were infinite in London; you didn’t need the seven colours of the rainbow here—these two were heterogeneous enough to suffice.

  His uncle hadn’t completely eschewed the word—in fact, was fairly comfortable with it—as, over time, with most of his hair gone, and given his round nose, he was beginning to look Jamaican. He’d been mistaken for a Jamaican by strangers a few times. This both amused and troubled him. “Don’t think that Africans and West Indians all look similar,” he told Ananda. “If you study them carefully, you’ll notice Ethiopians are very good-looking.” He had an agenda for race. “Ethiopian,” he’d say under his breath when a handsome dark-skinned man walked by. Partly he continued using the word because he’d come to England when “black” and “white” were the only two camps in the country. Partly it was to distance himself from the Bengali bhadralok, who, with their pusillanimous ambitions (to become GPs or at the very least clerks in the railways), their small semi-detached houses in East London and their children in Westminster and Harrow, he saw as the very antithesis of himself—solitary, without roots, without family or clear future. “I’m a black Englishman,” he’d say proudly to fresh acquaintances. He always wore a tailored three-piece suit with a maroon silk tie neatly ensconcing his collar, and a matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. The matter of colour was a joke to him, Ananda suspected—just as it was to the Africans. He’d recount a conversation he’d once had with a bunch of émigrés in 1957, his first year in London, when they were telling each other where they’d come from. One said, smiling, apologetic, “I…I am from the ‘dark continent.’ ” Western civilisation was all vanity, his uncle said to Ananda. The Africans led lives of continual irony.