—
Khuku and her husband had lived as a couple in Belsize Park for two years; now, there was a third. Radhesh didn’t live or sleep in their pockets; but almost. They’d arranged for him to live in the bedsit opposite. (After Ananda’s parents’ departure, Radhesh moved to their bedsit, and, in a few years, Shah rented his.) Ananda’s mother ensured the friends focussed on exams while she handled the universe. Back from work at the naval department, she sometimes made bhaja mooger daal, roasting the pulses, lastly pouring in the oil, which had just popped with cardamom and cinnamon bark. The aroma was an announcement that Radhesh must cross the hallway and join them for dinner. She and her husband introduced Radhesh to herring, which she cooked in a gravy of mashed green chillies as a substitute for ilish. It was no ilish; it had hooped bones and none of the quills embedded in the Bengali fish. Its taste was less dark. Yet eating herring was a minor celebration, a return to the habits of home, and they made smacking noises as they sorted the bones with their fingers.
—
In both Belsize Park and Belsize Village there was a contingent of Bengali men and women. They’d come for medicine, accountancy, surgery, librarianship, and law. The scents Khuku released into the building often transfixed them. They were also intrigued by the regime and discipline she’d imposed on her husband and brother. For these people, Belsize Village and Park were at once a crowded bhadralok village and an island: from which return was desirable but not imminent. It was as if nothing mattered—not even exams—before the urgency of gossip, food, and each other’s aspirations. They were audible to one another on Belsize Avenue through half-open windows. Khuku had heard of them when she was in Shillong; a childhood friend of hers had grandly shared a letter written by her husband, already entrenched in Belsize Park and appearing for certified accountancy exams: “I am eagerly awaiting your arrival. There are a few things you need to know about this country. You will not find it necessary to say ‘Thank you’ here. ‘Q’ is sufficient.” Neither Khuku nor her husband nor Radhesh wanted to associate closely with this assortment of types—to be stuck on an island punctuated by convulsions of rote-learning and dominated, between 1955 and 1961, by a mixture of restiveness and forgetfulness. By the time Ananda visited the area in 1973, the island had largely vanished. Belsize Village remained—and his uncle.
—
They were three. But who was the third? Was Radhesh Ananda’s father’s best friend, or had that role been appropriated by Ananda’s mother? Khuku and Radhesh themselves had been exceptionally close in Shillong—in those two years after Partition, when the family had been transplanted to that hill station (its weather a preparation for, and a lesson in, English weather), they were inseparable and went for long walks up and down the hills around the lake—mistaken by some, to Khuku’s amusement, for “girlfriend” and “boyfriend.” Oh, this hopeless older brother, incapable of finding a partner or getting married, hanging out with his sister, making her, implausibly, his Penelope! Then (in his own narrative and account) hinting to his best friend that he marry her. The question re-presented itself in Belsize Park: was she his, or his? Ananda’s father was nonchalant, tolerant; but his uncle demanded absolute fealty. The answer was unarguable, and only an idiot like him would take so long to figure it out: he, Radhesh, was the third—both to his friend and to his sister. He was alone, despite the illusion of togetherness. He never really forgave her her desertion. Even now, when she reappeared in London on her custodial forays into Ananda’s life, his uncle could be incredibly rude—hurtful—towards her. She was his—but her fidelities were variously dispersed, towards her husband, other members of the family, and towards Ananda of course. In that regard and in others, Ananda and his uncle must be rivals.
The first of the Chartered Shipbrokers exams came and went. Radhesh didn’t take them. He hadn’t studied enough. He was fundamentally superstitious; not only in ordinary ways, but in believing that certain procedures needed to be followed to the letter before success could be ensured. In his case, the ritual was absolute immersion in preparations. He’d once passed through a utopian phase in school, when he decided that anything less than perfect preparedness was useless. This was a consequence of running into his science teacher on the street prior to his Chemistry exam, when he’d enquired politely: “Sir, how do I ensure that I’ll do well?” The teacher said, “You should know every word in your Chemistry textbook” and went on his way. So Radhesh set about familiarising himself with each word. He never appeared for the Chemistry exam.
Ananda’s father speculated about whether he’d repeat those tactics in London. But he did write his Part One the next time he had an opportunity; he passed, without distinguishing himself. He was troubled; his ambitions were aimed much higher. He’d crammed shipping law like a fanatic for six months.
Radhesh thought it over and changed strategy. Clearly, identity was key. Chartered Shipbroking was well known for being a white man’s domain. They wouldn’t let just anyone in, especially to the pucca upper strata. The Fellowship was fiercely competed over by men from Harrow and Rugby. Radhesh considered his surname—Nandy Majumdar. A double-barrelled kayastha title of (he liked to boast to Ananda) kulin ancestry. Majumdar. The examiners doubtless thought he was African. Majumdar, Majoomba—it was the same to them. They couldn’t let an African in: as simple as that. He re-enrolled, lopping off Majumdar. (“From ‘mauja daar,’ ” another wastrel relative had bragged to Ananda, “ ‘owner of several villages.’ ”) He became the universal, non-committal “Nandy.”
He stood First in Part Two—“in the world,” Ananda was often reminded, as examinees were scattered globally and throughout the Commonwealth. In Belsize Park and Belsize Village, his uncle was celebrated for his metamorphosis to world-conqueror.
—
And what happened then? What changed from when Ananda’s parents left him in his triumph?
Ananda remembered his first expedition to Belsize Park from the bed and breakfast on Haverstock Hill in 1973. They’d arrived the previous night; they were woken up by a buzzer summoning them to breakfast. They sat at a large table with a man in thick glasses and a black suit who buttered, back and forth, four slices of toast, breathing hard. His mother’s sari shone like an exotic plumage. Then—once the disciplinarian silence of breakfast was lifted—they were liberated, and were out on Haverstock Hill, crossing the road and marching down Belsize Avenue. When they reached the house his parents had left twelve years before, his father, instead of going up the steps to press the buzzer, cried in the sunlit space to the first-floor window: “Radhesh?” The heavy window creaked onerously as it was lifted; his uncle peered out. “Open the door!” The three went up the steps and united on the porch, as if posing for a family photograph. Radhesh, lurking inside in his dressing gown, opened the door a few seconds later. Through it they passed into the dark stairwell, and up the wide stairs on which the electric light shone a minute at a time. The house closed upon Ananda in a years-old smell of dust and curry. In Rangamama’s bedsit, nothing had been polished or dusted for a few years at least. Things had multiplied: pots, cups, pans; greeting cards. Telephone numbers, including country codes (Ananda’s father’s among them), were inscribed in a large clear hand above the mantelpiece. (That bedsit had pink wallpaper.) A pile of the Pan Book of Horror Stories occupied the rug near the bed. Dust had settled in an ashen nuclear winter on the table and chairs, and formed serpentine moustaches on the sides of walls. Ananda’s uncle held forth, the perfect host. The bed was unmade; he hadn’t smoothed the sheet or pulled up the blanket. Ananda’s father instructed his wife and Ananda to step through the windowsill on to the half-octagon of the parapet. With barely room to sit, they looked out at the breadth of Belsize Avenue, talking, Ananda glancing now and then over his shoulder. His uncle, standing in his maroon dressing gown, was declaiming, releasing statements pent up for years. His father, dressed in a suit as if for a business appointment, had covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He was beati
ng surfaces with a duster, leading to black storms within. When the storms subsided, the two returned from the sunshine into the room.
Over the three weeks of their stay, his parents used the bedsit as a watering hole, though it was more hole now than watering hole. Between the guest house with its unfriendly breakfasts and the comforts of the Trust House Forte Hotel (to which they moved after ten days), with electric kettle and tea bags, this was a place to come back to. Late one morning, Ananda and Khuku arrived at the house to find a semi-familiar smell wafting down the stairs. His uncle was cooking; when they walked in, he lowered the flame and let the gravy simmer. He’d produced a light, turmeric-and-spice-based curry of marrow and shrimps. Ananda had never had this vegetable before, but was won over by the curry’s delicacy, the fortuitous neighbourliness in it of shrimp and marrow. It was served from one of those suspect saucepans. His mother resumed cooking too—dressed in a red printed sari, serving up coder jhaal. Thick white rectangles of cod in a gravy of chilli powder, with a spattering of turmeric, slivers of onion and fingernail shavings of garlic, and specks of kalonji that she’d brought from India. Amassed in a small frying pan.
He was briefly given reign of Belsize Village. At home, his mother never let him out of sight without a servant, but now she sent him forth on an errand: to buy a carton of milk and some salt. The village was really a square lined with shops and restaurants (including an Indian one called Beer and Curry), which, in Ananda’s mind’s eye, swelled, as he turned left from Belsize Avenue, like the letter omega, Ω, with Belsize Avenue forming the baselines. The shop was at the upper end of the horseshoe.
Once inside, the chocolate mousse in the freezer caught his fancy. He took it home along with the salt and milk. In the bedsit, Ananda, in his impatience, prised open the lid holding the container upside down, letting its contents fall intact on to the rug—which was, despite Ananda’s father’s efforts, dark with dust. The dessert was irretrievable.
—
Given this bedsit was where Ananda’s parents had lived prior to his birth, the room had the air of belonging to a story. The fact that he’d heard the story several times didn’t make the bedsit better-known to him. For it was very real, and difficult to make your way around in without colliding into something. Also, the neglect it had absorbed in the twelve years since his parents had gone to India gave it a touch of the unexpectedness associated with the mamar baadi, the “maternal uncle’s house,” a place traditionally lacking in restrictions for the nephew.
By the time of that holiday in 1973, Ananda’s uncle’s world-conquering glory had dimmed; he was bored of it too. Radhesh had proved he was capable of great conventional professional success; but it looked like he wasn’t interested in great conventional professional success. What he was interested in was company and family: as if responding to this in a corrective way, he lived alone and in the proximity of people who until recently were strangers. On the first floor, he had two neighbours: Abbas, and Pinku Chaudhury, a phlegmatic East Bengali who worked for British Rail and who possessed an idiot box. Radhesh made infrequent visits to Pinku Chaudhury’s bedsit to watch wildlife programmes, to admire, over an hour, the tiger’s stride and gathering pace, and to bemoan the gazelle’s spry but fatal ingenuousness. As if in reciprocity, Pinku Chaudhury’s cat habitually invaded Radhesh’s bedsit, pushing its way in through the heavy door, which was often kept ajar, and jumping on to the armchair: an indolent feline with a thick brandy-cream coat and a lingering air of entitlement. He was called Vodka, and Ananda would find him politely prowling the bedsit that summer. He saw him again in 1979, but not after. When Council work began on the first floor, Pinku Chaudhury moved to Chalk Farm. Only Shah and Ananda’s uncle relocated to new rooms in the basement.
—
Rangamama would encourage Ananda to sing as they went for walks that August. He’d contribute snatches in his baritone. Cliff Richard was on his uncle’s mind—“He has a lovely voice,” he said, and, appropriately for the season, sang the opening lines of “Summer Holiday” as all four of them proceeded on the pavement. Satish had bought his son Best of the Bee Gees, with its mustard-yellow cover and figures in Mount Rushmore–like array. Ananda already knew “Holiday,” and he approximated Robin Gibb’s plaintive, melodious, nasal cry. His uncle answered with “Bachelor Boy,” humming, “Happy to be a bachelor boy until my dying day,” without Ananda sensing the irony that made his uncle’s voice float unsteadily before going silent. Nor did he get the irony when his uncle ebulliently urged him to do a repeat of “I’m going to marry in the morning, ding dong the bells will chime” as they walked up Belsize Avenue to Haverstock Hill—Ananda’s falsetto standing in for the scoundrel Dolittle’s guttural announcement.
—
That was the happiest he’d seen his uncle—though Rangamama had told Ananda that he’d never known happiness unmixed with disappointment. By then Rangamama was already developing his most abiding obsession—the nature of the afterlife; how and why souls come to the world, and what they do when they leave. Its main sign were the several volumes he had of the Pan Book of Horror Stories series. The tales in these books underlined the fact that life played savage tricks on you, that there were people out there who were suffering for no reason, and others whose sole function was to make people suffer. This, according to the Pan Book of Horror Stories, was what existence was, before the blank panacea of death came, and it was a world view that was then—and even today—imbibed nightly by Ananda’s uncle in his bed.
He began to spend more time at Philipp Bros than at home. He did other people’s work: specifically that of two juniors in his department, Paul Middleton and Freddy Gamble. His heart went out to Freddy Gamble, a timorous man, thin as his tie, who failed miserably at what he did, was newly married, and on the verge of losing his job. When Ananda and his parents saw Radhesh in 1979, Freddy Gamble was on his lips, like a backward but beloved child. In those years, Ananda’s uncle returned to Belsize Park well after midnight. It was during these depressed and solitary journeys that he gradually became aware of ghosts and spirits. Once, stepping into the lift at 3 a.m. after hours of work, he felt a draught within. But where could the draught come from? He knew from his reading that a momentary drop in temperature meant a spirit was near. When it happened another night, he asked an employee in the building about it. He learned from him that there had been a death in the building on the fourth floor, seven years ago. At 2 a.m. one night, making his way back from the office (he’d walked from Moorgate to Swiss Cottage), he noticed, climbing the incline between Finchley Road and Belsize Avenue, a man approaching from the distance. Which sane person would be out at this hour? As the strange man came closer, Radhesh, terrified, said: “Would you like a light?” “Believe you me,” said his uncle to Ananda, “that man was not alive. His face was a death-mask. He had no idea of my existence. And do you know what happened next?” Ananda knew it well, since his uncle repeated the story every week, but his uncle wasn’t waiting for his response. “I walked a bit further, thinking, Thank you, dear God, I live to see another day!—when (I was curious) I glanced over my shoulder. Do you know what I saw? The man had stopped and was looking straight at me. Yes, I should have run (though what use is flight from such a being?) but was paralysed and couldn’t move. The man began to make large strides towards me. I watched him, agog. Certain death, I thought…When he was face to face with me he turned sharply to his right and stared at a rusty stain on the wall. He stood like that for half a minute and then very decisively pressed his handkerchief against the stain. Then he turned around as if it were no longer of any interest to him and went back in the direction he was earlier headed.” “Finchley Road?” “Finchley Road—or maybe Swiss Cottage.” It was a terribly boring ghost story, made enervating by repeated rhapsodic recitations and also the fact that there was no proven ghost in it. But for his uncle it was his one episode involving what he took to be a given: the posthumous and the undead. The man was dead, the man was dead, the man was dea
d. It had happened, it had happened, it had happened—once. For Ananda, the tale embodied his uncle’s final years at Philipp Bros: a time alternating between self-inflicted assignments undertaken on behalf of Freddy Gamble and Paul Middleton, and late-night or early-morning visions and homecomings. He was imprisoned by his job, and these three—Middleton, Gamble, and his uncle—were reduced to a kind of insentience: achieving not very much over six years, only his uncle aware how time was passing to no end. Then Mrs. Thatcher took charge, the economy improved, and all three were made redundant. For his uncle, at least, the spell was lifted, and he was himself again.
4
Uncle and Nephew
Having shaken off Shah, they emerged from the left-hand passage of 24 Belsize Park. It was 4:20 p.m. Through the chestnut trees fell shadow-spots. “Shah is an old soul,” observed Ananda’s uncle as they progressed to the rise towards Haverstock Hill. “Old and tired.” “Old soul?” said Ananda. “Yes, born into the world again and again and again. Most Indians and Pakistanis are ‘old souls.’ They’ve been born so many times that they’re tired, they’ve returned to reality so often they take it for granted. If you ask Shah, ‘I gave you ten pounds yesterday for some cigarettes—what happened to the change?’ he’ll look astonished, and say, Arrey Nandy, I gave it back to you in the afternoon, because he thinks he did. He’s been around for a very, very long time. Small inaccuracies escape him, and minor discrepancies don’t matter. Similarly, if you ask an Indian on the street, ‘Bhai, which way to Camden Town?’ he’ll give you directions even if he’s never heard of Camden Town. Old soul. Tired from having come back repeatedly. No longer mindful of detail, just living out, yet again, the duties and obligations.”
Odysseus Abroad Page 11