by Mark Sampson
At any rate, our more-than-friendly chat wrapped up and I walked away, realizing only later that I hadn’t even told her my name.
That would have been the end of it, except I ran into her a week later in the catacombs of Turf Tavern. I was on my way to the bar and she was just coming in with some girlfriends, and we practically walked into each other.
“Well hello there, Prince Edward Island!” she said. This time, she was wearing blue jeans and a buckskin jacket, her black hair loose and spilling over her shoulders.
“Oh, hey,” I smiled, and we passed each other like ships, and she leaned in to whisper to her friends as they moved into the pub, and some of them giggled.
I got a fresh pint and returned to my table, stacked with undergrad papers I should have been marking. Rani’s table was on the other side of the room, and I grew envious of the animated conversation she and her friends were having. I thought about inviting myself to join them, but before I could, she got up and crossed the floor to join me, sitting herself in the chair across from mine without asking.
“You know, I realized,” she began, her eyes sparkling in the pub’s dimness, “that I didn’t even catch your name at the Oxford Union the other night.”
“Um, Sharpe,” I fambled. “Philip.”
“Sharpe Philip?” She smirked. “Are you sharp, Philip?”
“About certain things,” I replied.
“Anyway, sorry I prattled on so much.” She shrugged modestly. “It was kind of a big night for me.”
“No need to apologize. You did very well. I’m sure you’ll make a great British prime minister someday.”
She roared with laughter. “Um, no.” She leaned in then as if to convey a secret. “I’m not interested in running for office. I want to go into journalism, ultimately. But I figured some public speaking experience would help me as a broadcaster.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you’re obviously a student,” she said, nodding at the stack of essays on my table. “Not a tourist visiting from PEI?”
“Yeah, no. I’m reading philosophy at Balliol for my D.Phil.,” I said. “Specializing in Kant.”
“Oh God, really?” She grinned. “And here I thought you were cool. How can you love Kant? He’s such a bore!”
“He’s not a bore.”
“Oh, but he is. Can you point to a single translation of Kant that isn’t unbearably dense?”
So we had at it for a while (a sure sign of our mutual attraction — we were making fun of each other right away), and I was impressed by the breadth of her knowledge, the way she could quote snippets of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals at me. I also noticed how the Indian portion of her accent would crowd out the English portion when she got her back up about something. All the while, her hands were flashing in front of my face as she talked, and I once again noticed the glittery assemblage of rings on her fingers. Single? Not single? Help me out here.
“Look, I’m delivering a paper on Kant at the end of the month,” I said. “It’ll be in the Middle Common Room at Holywell Manor. You should come. Let me prove to you that he’s as relevant today as he’s ever been.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Come on. It’s a symposium — totally open to the public. There’ll be lots of people; there’ll be food.”
She did this dainty little cringe of uncertainty.
“Oh, come on,” I pressed. “It’ll be fun. You could bring your … husband?”
“I don’t have a husband,” she said.
“You could bring your boyfriend.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You could bring whatever guy friend from undergrad you still string along with an occasional night of snogging.”
She was about to make an angry face but then said, “Oh, Steven — yeah, he’d probably come.”
My heart sank. “Great. Bring Steven. We’ll have a grand old time.” And I gave her all the details.
“Well, Sharpe Philip, I should get back to my friends.”
“Okay,” I replied.
She got up, reluctantly crossed the pub floor, and eased her heart-shaped derrière back into her chair. One of her girlfriends, who’d been observing us the whole time, leaned in and said, loud enough for me to hear, “I think that guy fancies you.” And I disappeared back into my marking.
Okay. Let’s cut to the symposium. There I was, well-dressed and ready to roll, exchanging pleasantries with the crowd, my brain jiffy-popping with all the points my talk would cover and the performative qualities with which I would deliver them. Still, I found myself staring at the doors, wondering if Rani would actually show up. Holywell Manor’s Middle Common Room, all rugs on hardwood and plush leather couches, was teeming with fellow grad students and their professorial advisors, as well as alumni and other fans of Balliol. The event organizers had pulled off an opulent spread of food on a drape-covered table near the back — a gigot of lamb, an assortment of cheeses and caviars, crackers to serve them on, oysters on the half shell, and little displays of small, decorative mangoes. I was just navigating a wedge of Wensleydale into my mouth when Rani and her date arrived, having wound their way through Holywell Manor to find this room. She spotted me and they came right over.
“This is quite an event, Sharpe,” she said. “Are you nervous?”
“I don’t get nervous,” I replied. She smiled, and then introduced me to her friend.
As I suspected, this Steven character was a bit of a sad sack. Balding guy with glasses and a beard, ratty tweed coat over collared plaid shirt, a pen displayed prominently in his breast pocket. He seemed somewhat out of place in this room, but Rani informed me that he was in fact an aspiring novelist. Steven confirmed this, saying, Yep, he had been rising at 4:30 daily since the age of sixteen to write a thousand words, rain or shine. He had yet to publish anything, of course. One thing was quickly evident: he was madly in love with Rani, but like any lapdog, grateful for whatever scraps of affection she threw his way.
We moved closer to the food and they began to help themselves. “This spread is a bit ostentatious,” I said. “I’m still getting used to all the wealth in here and all the poverty …” and I motioned to the windows, “out there.”
“Oh, I know,” Rani said, taking up an oyster shell. “It’s one of the first things you notice when you come to Oxford.” She gracefully poured the slimy meat down her throat, and her eyes flared at the flavour. “Mmm. Salty.”
Steven, meanwhile, seemed utterly baffled by the caviar. He held a small cracker in his hand but couldn’t figure out how to get some of the fish eggs onto it, despite there being a tiny serving spoon right there. “Yep, my parents are working class,” he said. “They’ve never been to an event like this.”
“That’s sort of what my talk is about tonight,” I said. “Using a Kantian framework, I’m arguing that globalization will only worsen, not improve, the class divisions already prevalent in Western society.”
“Really?” Rani asked. Her whole face lit up. “Because I’ve often said that about India’s caste system.” She gave me one of her up-and-downs. “Wow, Sharpe, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have made fun of you the other night at Turf.”
Having abandoned his efforts at the caviar, Steven now took up one of the small decorative mangoes. I watched as he looked around the table and then reached for a cheese knife. He used its dull blade, as best he could, to pierce the mango’s skin. He returned to us just as he began peeling back the fruit’s flesh. “Kantian? Kant, right? Philosopher guy?”
“Um, yeah,” I replied, staring at his hands. I turned back to Rani. “Anyway, I don’t want to scoop my thunder, but yes, that’s what I’ll be talking about.”
“Interesting,” Steven said. He proceeded then to not so much eat the mango as make love to it with his face. He went on like that until Rani touched his arm,
and then he stopped.
The event organizer came by. “Okay, Philip, we’re ready to start. Are you still okay with going second?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and she hurried off. I turned to Rani. “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.”
I was about to ask the same of Steven, but he had turned back to the table, another cracker in hand, and was now trying to resolve his caviar dilemma. Droplets of mango juice shone in his beard.
“You’ll want to use the spoon, champ,” I said to him.
“Ah, brilliant,” he replied.
Soon the proceedings began. I was sandwiched between a guy talking about Spinoza and a young woman talking about Lacan, and we each had twenty minutes to deliver our papers. I don’t want to brag, but I pretty much owned the night. The other presentations were competent but a touch dreary. Mine was a zesty concatenation of contemporary economic trends and Kantian wisdom, which I delivered with humour and charisma when it was my turn at the podium. During the Q&A, I was funny and charming and on point, and left everyone in the room feeling as you should after one of these events — enriched.
There was much milling afterward. Steven had buttonholed some minor novelist he’d discovered in the crowd, and was sharing his theory on narrative beginnings with the poor, withered bloke. “By the end of the first page, readers should really know your two main characters,” he was saying. “They really should know what kind of novel it’s going to be, right from the start.” Rani used this opportunity to slink over to me. As Steven droned on, her unibrow did another of its little two-steps.
“He’s quite a guy,” I said to her.
“He’s just a friend.” And then repeated it, as if to herself. “He’s just a friend.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, Sharpe, you were amazing. Now I really feel bad for mocking you the other night. Seriously. You’ve converted me on Kant. If that’s going to be the focus of your scholarship, you’re going to have a long, successful career ahead of you.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She looked at the floor for a bit, then back up. “So.” And here did one of her shy, girly cringes. “Are you interested in having an Indian sometime?”
I blinked at her, then smiled. “What, is that some sort of subcontinental come-on?”
“What? No!” She burst out laughing. “Oh God, Sharpe, you really are a babe in the woods. No, I meant going for a curry, you moron.”
“Oh, right,” I said, excited. “Yes. Curry. Absolutely. Let’s do it. Curry. Right. Yes.”
So I had my first Indian with Rani. And then I had my first Indian, with Rani.
The next year and a half passed in a series of moments between us that remain scorched in my memory. What do I remember? In the parlance of 2015: a bunch of random shit. I remember her excitement when she learned I lived on Walton Street in Jericho, and she took me to the local club there where the U.K.’s “shoegaze” music scene — bands like Slowdive and Ride and a nascent version of Radiohead — was already in full flower. Rani loved shoegaze music, those trancelike guitar riffs and ethereal lyrics, and one of my sharpest memories involved her dancing around my room in Jericho to Lush’s “Sweetness and Light” in nothing but her panties. I recall being deathly afraid for her whenever I knew she was out on her bicycle navigating Oxford’s narrow, medieval streets. (And she did do a faceplant on the cobblestones, once, after some asshole townie cut her off.) I remember taking her punting at Christ Church Meadow — that most leisurely of Oxford activities, the ruralness just sort of creeping up on you — and nearly capsizing us into the River Cherwell. I remember us gathering with friends for pub-crawls that lasted ten hours. (Steven would sometimes come, sitting with his pint and looking like the sensitive novelist he was, perhaps thinking about all the sex with Rani he wasn’t having.) And I remember she and I would stagger back to my place afterwards to fuck and then watch episodes of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, thinking, So this is what the Cambridge set gets up to. I remember describing Rani to my father on one of my rare calls home to PEI, and how excited Little Frankie got for me. “And here I thought you were scared of girls,” he quipped. I recall she took me for my first brunch, said I should order a Bloody Mary. When I asked the waiter what the base spirit was and he told me vodka, I made a face. “Well, I could swap in Irish whiskey, but then it would be a Bloody Joseph.” So he did, and BY GOD I was in love! And I remember meeting up with Rani in the Bodleian’s lunchroom — which was basically just a steam tunnel that reeked of mildew — and we’d share stories about whatever intellectual discovery we had made since we last saw each other, which was sometimes the previous day, and sometimes whole weeks.
Yes, that was the other thing. Rani and I never talked about job descriptions, whether I was her “boyfriend” and she was my “girlfriend.” Between our academic obligations and the transience of Oxford life itself, such labels seemed twee. We were both addicted to working — especially her. She took a job with an Oxfordshire radio station before she even completed her thesis, gaining experience she hoped would help land her dream job as a producer at BBC Radio in London. She would pull these afternoon shifts at the station and then return to Merton to work on her thesis until the dawn hours. I always marvelled at what a night owl Rani was, the way she could just stay up until morning — even after we’d been out drinking — and work and work and work. I myself was an early riser, and so it often felt that our schedules never synchronized, that our tryst would fizzle out because we were both so immersed in our respective ambitions.
There may have also been, I should say, other men in her life. Steven certainly loomed on the periphery, and there were vague intimations of a male “friend” in London, and of familial commitments back in India. Rani also had certain hang-ups about sex. There were times when she and I were vigorously intimate with one another, but other times when she might stop us at the beginning of something — or even in the middle of something — and just leave, just flee my Jericho flat without explanation. I was hurt, but tried to be understanding about it — as much as any twenty-six-year-old male can be — and simply waited for her to return to me. Which she would. We’d reunite, and be ravenous for one another. Once, while deeply inebriated, she let slip that she “loved” me, but then promptly took it back, apologizing as if it were a gaffe. I thought: Don’t apologize. I kind of love you, too, Ms. Sumita. I mean, what are we even doing here? Are we going to be together long term, do you think? But I never raised these questions, and she never volunteered to answer them. At best, she would just leap into my arms after not seeing me for a while, kiss me like I was the only man on the planet worth kissing. Cling to me like I was some raft keeping her afloat on a dark, dark sea.
By the end of 1992, OUP was showing interest in publishing my dissertation, and I was showing interest in finishing the fucking thing and moving on to something else. I admitted to Rani that, while I did love my time at Balliol, I would always be disappointed that I hadn’t been (due to not having earned my undergraduate degree at Oxford) eligible to attend All Souls College instead. All Souls, which didn’t even admit undergraduate students, was known back then for its infamous “one-word exam.” During this exam, fellowship applicants would be given a single word — usually something basic, like tree or water or fundamental — and had to write about it for three hours, creating a cogent thesis and including whole quotes and citations — from memory — taken out of their specialty area. The exams were marked pass/fail, and very few applicants succeeded in getting a fellowship. I was convinced I could pull it off, and would frequently gripe to Rani about my lack of opportunity to do so. This complaining came to a head one dreary afternoon when we were hanging out in my place near the end of Michaelmas term that year. She and I had just wrapped up a feisty, post-coital debate about whether Gutenberg had really invented movable type in the 1400s, or whether it had been invented in China several centuries earlier. Somehow we g
ot back onto the topic of All Souls. “I could write that exam,” I grumbled. “I could totally fucking write that exam.”
“Oh God, Sharpe, I’m tired of your whingeing. Here.” She climbed out of bed to fetch a pad of canary paper and a pen off my desk, and tossed them to me. “Put your brain where your mouth is. I’ll give you one word and for the next three hours you will write me an essay about it.”
“Fine,” I said, resting the pad on my knees. “Fuck you. I’ll do it. Citations and all. What’s my word?”
Her eyes rolled up to her unibrow as she thought about it, and then she looked at me. “Movable,” she said.
“Movable. Great. Let’s do this thing.”
She picked her watch up off my nightstand. “You’ve got three hours,” she said, glancing at it. “Go.”
And so I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Rani occupied herself with reading and listening to her Discman, but I barely noticed her once I got into the zone. And what a zone it was — anyone who writes essays will know what I mean, the way you can just vanish into your argument, and how all the points and sentences just fit and work together and sing. It was sort of magical, what happened then, the trancelike state I achieved.
After three hours, Rani came over and kissed me behind the ear. “Time’s up,” she said. I finished off one last sentence, then tossed the pen out of my cramped and aching hand. I gathered up the stack of pages that had accumulated beside me on the bed and passed them to her. She curled up and began reading, and I went to the bathroom and to stretch my legs. When I came back, I could see she was engrossed. After a bit, she looked up at me.