That, and books. Not in any superstitious way that was the general air in his uncles’ house, where he had to pick up books, paper, pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners – anything remotely connected to the world of study – and touch them to his forehead and chest, in the quick gesture of prayer, if he touched them accidentally with his feet. Books and related objects were sacred to Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and to bring feet anywhere near them was a mark of grave disrespect and would bring down a curse from her: she would never bless the offender with the gift of learning. Ritwik did all these things out of fear and, later, out of habit, but his father taught him a different sanctity of books.
It started when he was six. His father bought him a slim, big book, so thin it could be used for swatting mosquitoes with the sound and motion of a slap, a slipper book, as it was called. The title of the book was Maya of Mohenjo-daro and it told the story of Maya, also six, who lived in the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro and accompanied her father one morning to the Great Bath and from there to the Great Granary via the paved and clean streets of the town, which were laid out in such a way that the winds cleaned them every day. At the end of the day, both father and daughter made their way back home after he had bought her an orange woollen ball the colour of the setting sun. Happy, Maya returned home and was ready to go to bed when she noticed that her ball was like the sun, now sinking below the horizon in a blaze of orange and red fire.
Ritwik read it over and over again, and asked his father scores of questions: ‘Where is Mohenjo-daro?’, ‘What is an ancient city?’, ‘How old is ancient?’, ‘What is civilization?’, ‘Can I have a fluffy orange ball the colour of the sun?’ This last was, of course, the main thrust. In a book almost wholly illustrated in sepia and other shades of brown, the orange ball stood out like a lamp in the environing dark, almost ready to jump out of Maya’s dark hands into his. Every time he turned back to the page in which the bright ball first appeared it would seem to Ritwik that an added luminosity had stolen into his room. He stared and stared at the ball as his father told him about things he barely understood – Harappa, Indus Valley, ancient civilizations. In the book, Maya and her father were always smiling serenely. He didn’t know it was a strange longing that he felt each time he opened it.
Whenever a book was demanded by Ritwik, it arrived. His father went and ordered it in ‘Study’, the tiny bookshop in Jadavpur Central Market, paid in advance, and the book appeared, wrapped in crisp brown paper, in a week or two. Baba, I’d like to join the school quiz team I need General Knowledge books the four volumes of the Bournvita Quiz Book. Or, Baba, volumes five to seven of the Bournvita Book are out now can I have them soon. This was at a time when the landlord, Khokababu, visited the house weekly to demand the back payments on arrears and his father pretended to be too ill to go to work so that Khokababu could extend the deadline on sympathetic grounds. The household subsisted on rice and boiled potatoes for an entire week but there was no stinting with Ritwik’s books, no complaints about how expensive they were. His mother said, ‘You’re spoilt, you know. Before the words fall from your lips, your father goes out and does your bidding.’ He never understood whether she said this with disapproval or pride.
The Bournvita books were hardbound, the size of coffee-table books, with gold lettering on the spines. He guarded them with his life while his uncles looked at them with silent recrimination. On one occasion he heard Pratim saying to his mother, ‘All this talk of no money, no money, no money, rents unpaid, electricity bills unpaid, we’re constantly under fire from Jamaibabu, where’s all the money for these swish books coming from?’ Ritwik promptly hid them and only took them out when his uncles were out and when he was sure he could hide from the prying eyes of Dida.
And then one day the Collins Concise Encyclopaedia arrived, stout, big and substantial, in its bright red dust jacket, twelve hundred-odd pages of close, compact type on thin, tissue-like paper. It had black and white pictures as well: the bearded Louis Pasteur and Johannes Brahms; a severe yet benign Marie Curie; Keats reading an octavo volume with one hand on his forehead; a Chardin still-life with a vase of flowers; winged seeds that are dispersed by the wind; Byron in Greek headgear. It cost forty rupees and he had gone out with his father to get it from ‘Study’. He had beamed all the way there and back while his father cautioned him, ‘Don’t let anyone find out, especially Dida and your uncles. Keep it in a safe place, it costs a lot of money. . .’ Ritwik plunged into it like a fish released from captivity into the waters again.
The excitement of the book never wore off; instead it surprised him with its myriad forms. First, there was the excitement of discovering an entry that was familiar to him. It gave him a little shiver of joy to see on the certainty of the printed page little areas of his mind précised into three or four close-knit lines. He looked up Tagore, Rabindranath; photosynthesis; mycology; Beethoven, Ludwig van; electrocardiogram with the thrill of seeing known things in unfamiliar and new settings, in the prestige of print. It endorsed his knowledge in some kind of way at the same time as it opened up new avenues in a proliferative dance. So gene led to DNA, DNA led to double-helix, from there to Watson and Crick through meiosis and mitosis, cell division to McClintock, Barbara. It was like the picture of nerve dendrons in his biology book, a web of paths and sub-paths, a familiar road suddenly leading him down unknown ones till he ended up himself as a wide-open space from the initial little cluster he had started off as.
At other times it was a different joy of finding out totally unknown things. There was curiosity, bafflement and, once again, that intense chasing dance, the moves of some of which he could not master for a long time. Someone had mentioned Bach in school so he came home and looked it up. There seemed to be a lot of them, and he didn’t know the first names, but he assumed it must be Bach, Johann Sebastian, because he had the maximum number of lines to his name. It led him on separate enquiries: a slowly enclosing one from counterpoint, to canon, to fugue, to suite; the other, a widening dance: Bach, Johann Sebastian; Rameau, Jean-Philippe; Albinoni, Tomasso; Vivaldi, Antonio; Couperin, Louis ... It reminded him of those funny chapters in the Old Testament which went on and on and on about how Shem begat Arphaxad begat Salah begat Eber begat Peleg, theoretically stretching to the here and now, but this one was different: each name, each term was a new world, not a dead proper noun on the page.
There was a lot he didn’t understand. When this happened, he committed the thing to memory or read it over and over again, ten times, fourteen times, repeating counterpoint The term comes from the idea of note-againstnote, or point-against-point, the Latin for which is punctus contra punctum. It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are woven together so that their individual notes harmonize. In this sense Counterpoint is the same as Polyphony, repeating it in his head as a rapid chant, as though manipulating this stubborn thing and chasing its strewn spores across other pages with such white-hot doggedness would suddenly make it give up its resilient secret. When he shut the book at last and looked around him, at the bare whitewashed walls, the cobwebby mosquito nets in the windows, the gathering dust everywhere, he saw them differently, as though the whole world had been newly named. Was this what Brother Matthew meant when he talked about new heaven, new earth?
Outside, another conflict had erupted. Pratim had been hiding for three days because Mr Malvya from across the street had told Ritwik’s mother that he had lent Pratim some money which he said he would return in a week. ‘He wanted about three hundred rupees; he said you haven’t been able to pay the boys’ school fees for over two months now. I didn’t have three hundred with me, I gave him a hundred and seventy-five,’ he said. He had been clearly embarrassed confronting her with their inability to pay for their children’s education. Ritwik’s mother had been furious at this unashamed lie; she didn’t know which was worse – telling Mr Malvya that Pratim had lied or letting him continue to think that it was she who had sent her brother out to beg for some
money. Each was equally humiliating.
As always, it was Dida who had informed Pratim that everyone knew what he had done. So he had lain low for a few days, but it was a small, enclosed world, and as Dida frequently said, ‘The world is round, remember; things have a habit of coming back full circle.’ Pratim too reached the completion of this particular circle a bit too quickly for his comfort and faced the wrath of his sister and Jamaibabu.
‘We won’t be able to show our faces to our neighbours any more,’ Ritwik’s mother shouted. ‘The shame, the shame!’ Pratim decided to keep quiet and ride it out; all this was so much bluster and wind, it would blow over soon. After all, everyone knew he couldn’t repay the money and, because he had used the boys’ school fees as an excuse, Jamaibabu was going to be shamed into paying it back to save his face, never mind what the truth was. Besides, he didn’t care. It was embarrassing for them, not for him; he was going to keep himself in the shadows for a few more weeks and everything would be buried under the weight of a new crisis.
Ritwik listened to the shouting outside with horror. His mother had begun crying, deep, wretched sobs of frustration and anger. There was going to be more of this when his father returned home. She would have to tell him; another round of recriminations, bitterness, tension would ensue. That heave and slow rattle behind his ribs was starting again. He didn’t want to hear any more, he just wanted the draining thudding inside to stop, stop now. He squeezed his eyes shut, tight tight tight, till there were exploding colours inside his eyeballs, and let his voice articulate the words he had memorized from the page in front of him, to drown out the squabble: sonata form: . . . regular sonata form movement falls into 3 main sections: 1. EXPOSITION (usually containing two subjects, the first subject is in tonic key, the second subject . . .
‘What have you done with the money? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH IT?’
in dominant; there may be further subjects), often repeated and giving way to 2. DEVELOPMENT (here the material from the Exposition . . .
‘. . . gambling or drinking? How low can you sink? Did you think about the boys when you did it? Did you? I try so hard to raise . . .’
This time with effort coiled up into a ball: 3. RECAPITULATION (in which the essential feature is the return of the second subject but now in the home key or the tonic, and the repetition of Exposition material, though often with modification). The Recapitulation has a coda, which helps provide a proper feeling of finality. Some composers, including Beethoven, extend this coda into what, to all intents and purposes, is a second Development section. The principle behind sonata form is key relationships.
Everything fell away. He was left just with a rustling page and the accumulative music of repeated words.
The space between the shit-brown door and the hinge offers him a strip of view, just a thin, long line of fluorescent-lit space. He has to keep one eye shut, though, and one side of his face pressed to the cold metal of the door. If he shifts between the right eye and the left, the view from the crack changes in a parallactic dance. Right left, right left, right left. They don’t add up to a seamless whole, there is either an overlap or a gap, he can’t understand which.
Luckily, he doesn’t have to stand in this position all the time, neck twisted, eyes strained. Because the toilets are underground, he can hear heavy footsteps descending; only then does he get up from the toilet seat and move to his spyline swiftly to catch the man entering the toilets while he passes through that narrow ribbon of vision for a fleeting second. He’s cautious and doesn’t want to lose the man during that split second so he rushes to the door as soon as he hears footsteps running down.
There are two staircases leading down to the two wide pissoirs, all brushed aluminium and falling jets of water, separated by a long length of mirrors with four washbasins and an open space off which four cubicles open on either side. The cubicle Ritwik occupies, his favourite one, is an anomaly that disturbs this elegant symmetry; it is placed diagonally behind the two small cubicles which open out from one side of the short wide corridor leading to the mirrors and sinks. There is no corresponding cubicle on the other side. If he draws a straight line through the middle of the sinks and corridor, each half of the St. Giles public toilets almost becomes a mirror image of the other. Almost, because his cubicle, the biggest one, breaks this symmetry: it is like a stray, careless note in a perfect fugue.
But he likes it best because it offers him a view of who’s coming in, who’s going out, without having to get out of the toilet and do all the ridiculous things to signal he was really using the loo – flush, wait two seconds, open the door noisily, get out, head straight for the sinks, wash hands for a long time, shake hands, go to the dryers and spend another five minutes there, pressing the ‘on’ button each time it stops, once, twice, three times, as if he is really drying his hands.
The hot air dispensers are a stale joke, a cliché: everyone in the trade knows that if the button is pressed more than two times the last thing that is happening is hand-drying. Yet it is allowed, almost lovingly indulged, its loud, whirry drone providing a reassuring matrix of meaning to the game. It is so transparent a guise that it is not a guise any more but a tattered, old, understood code. Ritwik loves it; the sound sends a little surge of camaraderie coursing through him: he knows he is in the company of familiar strangers.
The other reasons he prefers this particular cubicle to the others is because it is so roomy. There is space enough for someone to sleep in there comfortably in a sleeping bag. Three people could fit inside without finding it a squish. This aspect is readily exploited as and when the opportunities and inclinations arise.
There is graffiti on the walls, the door, even some on the ceiling. Most of it seems to be written with marker pens, some with pencil or biro, and some etched and scratched on to the paint of the metal door and the one metal wall with sharp objects. There are the usual ones: ‘For cock action call 865974’, ‘Any horny 18–21y old around looking for 9” cock here every Friday and Saturday evening. Show hard at the urinals’, ‘8 in cock, cut, for sucking fucking Sunday afternoon. Genuine. Leave message below with date and time.’
There is one that can only be described as super-efficient: ‘I love to suck young juicy cocks and swallow your creamy spunk. Make date’. And then, below, five columns: name, age, size, date, time. The writer has even taken the trouble of drawing vertical and horizontal lines, so the whole thing looks like a statistical table. There are two entries as well in the columns. The age is always under twenty-one, the size never below seven inches. ‘Genuine’ seems to be a desirable quality: more than half the messages have that word as its final note. Occasionally, they get cleaned or painted away but some are too stubbornly written with invincible ink, they just fade a bit. Soon others appear and before long it is thick with these urgent, hot words again.
Every night he takes some time to read them: they ease him into the swing of things and even get him aroused. His favourite one is:
Batter my arse, three persons at the door
Who but knock, breathe, rub, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
On knees, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
The changes to the sonnet are minimal and not especially clever but seeing it in that context reconfigures it for Ritwik in such a way that there is no other way to look at it any longer but as a feverish request for a trinitarian gang-bang. The metaphors, the desire behind the writing, all seem to fall into place with such ease it is as if he has at last unlocked a room to which he has been denied complete access for a long time. He laughs silently for some time at the aptness of the whole thing. He wonders if in his essay on the metaphysicals he could get away with saying that the seventeenthcentury religious poet loiters with intent in his prayer closet, cruising god. The final three lines – ‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’ – when they come, are exact an
d inevitable. Some marginalia have been added to the sonnet: ‘Doesn’t scan any more you poof wanker’ and ‘Posh turd burglar fuck off to your AIDS.’
This is a true laboratory of the senses: all of them are stretched to their experiential limits – the eye at the door hinge; the ears pricked to catch footsteps entering or exiting, the flush of the cistern, the hissing drum of a jet of urine hitting the metal pissoir, running water and gurgling sink, the slightest movement and shift of feet; the nose acclimatized to the acrid bite of ammonia, disinfectant and sometimes the wafting stench of shit.
The way everything is registered on impeccably tuned keys of sight, sound and smell here, he could easily be a hunter in the wild; either that or a beast of prey, sensing out danger even in the slightest change of wind direction.
There are infinite ways in which this game is played out, all set but all indeterminate at the same time. The unchanging basis for all, however, is the checking out of goods, an unillusioned appraisal. The concept of ‘goods’ varies, of course.
A standard procedure for Ritwik is to stay inside his cubicle if the fleeting slit-view of a man entering the toilets does not appeal. If it does, he still remains locked in; after all, the man could have come in for an innocent piss only. This is either confirmed or negated in the next few minutes by one or more of various signals – not exiting after the standard time taken for a pee, washing hands at the sink for a long time (though this could be any other person in the toilets, but chances are it is the new arrival), that telling handdryer business, entering a cubicle after his piss and locking himself in . . . it is like a problem in logic: if p, then not q, but only after a finite set of conditions, ∑ {a, b, c . . . n}, has been satisfied.
A Life Apart Page 11