A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Suddenly all the pieces fall into place. It must be because he has been trying to work out subconsciously for some time the characteristic odour of the house. The smell seems familiar to Ritwik but he can’t quite pin it down; it is somewhere just outside the edge of his mind, refusing to come in. Initially he thinks it is just the sour and musty smell of unaired old age and its attendant detritus, maybe even stuff rotting in the kitchen bin or something similar. And then ammonia, piss, cat, wet patch, I can wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help, no use crying over spilt piss all fall together in a pattern.

  There is no one in the room now so he doesn’t have to check his tears. Once again, they are not so much for this woman who has nearly arrived at the end of her days as for an imagined future his mother didn’t reach. It is not a future he wanted for his mother but he thinks this is probably how she would have ended her days had she been alive. And yet again, a decision has already been made for him: he is going to stay on in 37 Ganymede Road and look after Anne Cameron. He will clean up the place, he decides valiantly. He might not manage to make everything unfade, but he will certainly deal with the dust, dirt, stench and urine-sodden carpets on a war-footing.

  One final thing about the haven he has left behind.

  He had Heroin Eyes in the toilet cubicle one night. It was a brief, edgy coming together, he remembers now with a dry mouth and a tautness in his gut, an encounter slippery with saliva, semen and fears. He was so grateful for it that the next time he met him there, weeks later, he was bold enough to whisper, ‘Do you want to come back to mine?’

  Gently, gently, don’t rush it, he’s a twitchy butterfly, anything sudden will make him flit. But the desire overwhelmed the caution.

  Heroin Eyes hesitated; through the crack of that pause, Ritwik pushed in, ‘It’s safer than here.’ There was a desperation in him that made him play on the other man’s fears so unscrupulously.

  ‘OK, then. I’ll leave first. You follow me out to my car.’ Everything in hot muffled whispers.

  Ritwik followed him outside, his chest in a tight knot; he would either come back to his room or run away like he did the first time. There was no telling which one it would be. He was going to have to play it very carefully.

  They got into the car, a clapped out white Renault, which made a clattering racket as it moved along, and Ritwik gave him directions. His name was Matthew – he wouldn’t give his surname – and he seemed uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy that sharing an ordinary, unsexual space with a cottaging pickup had brought between them. It was somehow a more revealing and skinless interaction to negotiate.

  Ritwik tried to make the odd reassuring comment – ‘Don’t worry, my neighbours are all fast asleep at this time’, ‘I very much have my own privacy’ – but they petered out in the shallows of his own unconviction. Matthew, meanwhile, drove steadily, giving away nothing except a pheromonal charge of his deep discomfort. Ritwik didn’t dare look at him sideways or in the rear view mirror in case he upset the fragile balance that had brought this beautiful stranger his way. He had been chosen: that fact alone caused an unpleasantly effervescent cocktail of euphoria and anxiety inside him. He had to keep a firm lid on the bubbles of helpless, nervous giggles trying to rise to the surface.

  Once past the parking lot and the staircase, in which Matthew behaved like a jittery cat, things seemed to ease out a bit. Matthew even smiled as Ritwik drew the curtains first and then turned on the bedside lamp, twisting it to face the wall so they had only a dim, diffused refraction in which to love.

  He was too tall to fit into the bed, which was also too narrow; both of them kept bumping their knees and elbows on the wall against which the bed was pushed as they moved and changed positions. They tried to make as little noise as possible and spoke in whispers, afraid that they were going to wake someone up in the adjacent rooms. At the end of it, Ritwik hoped Matthew had got out of himself and felt a little bit of what he had felt.

  Afterwards, Ritwik didn’t dare ask him to stay because he was afraid his raw need for this lanky stranger would become so transparent if he spoke out the words; he would surely take fright and scuttle off. Instead, he arranged the single duvet over both of them as best as he could, draped himself around Matthew and nestled his head in the hollow of his shoulder blade and collarbone.

  ‘So what do you read?’ Ritwik asked after a while.

  ‘Math.’ The knot had loosened somewhat. There was a new languor about him; they could almost be friends talking.

  ‘Where are you from then?’ Ritwik immediately regretted the question: two consecutive questions after sex could only seem to be an inquisition to an Englishman.

  ‘Blackpool. Do you know it?’ Ritwik could feel his self-deprecating, apologetic smile as he named his hometown, as if it were a private joke he wasn’t supposed to get.

  ‘No, I don’t. Is it nice? Isn’t it near the sea?’

  ‘No, yes, in that order.’

  ‘Why isn’t it nice?’

  ‘Have you ever been to an English seaside town? They are havens of the most unimaginable tack.’

  Ritwik kept quiet, then casually asked another question, hoping Matthew would not latch on to this crude strategy of extracting information by spacing out and strewing the vital questions among the innocent ones. ‘So did you do finals this year?’

  Ritwik expected a stark ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, which would have made his work slightly more laborious but not impossible. Instead, Matthew, who seemed to have no idea what Ritwik was leading to, answered, ‘No, I’ll do schools next year.’

  OK, second year then. I just need to find out his college.

  ‘Are you going home for the long vac?’

  ‘Yes.’ Long pause. ‘I need to. I have a summer job waiting for me.’

  Why isn’t he asking any questions? Why hasn’t he even asked my name? Or what I read? He reached his hand backwards and turned the light off.

  Ritwik wished he had kept a firm bolt on his mouth seconds after the next question came out but the cumulative effect of Matthew’s escape through dark alleyways, his refusal to give out normal information, his wound-up, nervy demeanour, could only have led to this. ‘So you aren’t out, are you?’

  Surprisingly, Matthew appeared to be relaxed about this too. ‘No, I’m not.’ Brief but untense. He added, ‘I did join the Gay Pride march last week though. Along with all of Wadham.’

  Ritwik’s mind did silent whoops of joy; the last piece of the puzzle had been handed to him on a plate. He refused to let Matthew realize this so he persisted with the outing questions. ‘You know, this could be the most supportive town to come out in.’

  ‘Yes. I know. But it’s my parents, you see.’

  ‘But parents almost always come round to their children’s point of view, don’t they? Eventually.’ What do I know about that one?

  ‘Yeah, but my parents are very . . . very . . . what can I say . . . conservative.’

  ‘You might try testing the waters.’

  ‘You don’t know how old-fashioned they are. I was watching telly with them one evening and there was this shot of two blokes kissing – I forget what programme it was – and they freaked, kind of. My mother kept muttering “Disgusting, disgusting”, while my father stood up, spat on the telly and turned it off. Then they just sat there, silent and shaking, with . . . disgust. I suppose.’

  There was nothing to say after this. Ritwik curled himself closer around Matthew. As he drifted off, he lost the restraint not to say, ‘Stay. Please.’

  Matthew remained silent and awake beside him.

  The film of sweat, which joined and divided them where their skins touched, was the only indication to Ritwik how much time had elapsed between falling asleep and Matthew’s swift leap out of bed on to the floor to get hurriedly into his clothes. He didn’t even have time to assimilate this uncoupling before his eyes adjusted to the bending shape of Matthew pulling on his socks. By the time he got the words out, Matthew was at
the door.

  ‘Wait. What’s wrong? Why don’t you stay?’ The words come out paratactic, congealed.

  ‘No, I’ve got to go. Goodnight.’

  And he was out of the door, shutting it closed after him with not so much as a scrape or a creak.

  Somehow the room seemed to amplify the sounds as Ritwik, wide awake now, listened to the front door slam shut, and then the cough of ignition, once, twice, before Matthew’s Renault kicked into its purring life. A narrow beam of car headlights swept flawlessly along the ceiling in a neat, brief arc through a crack where the curtains had not quite joined.

  His heart was an eel again, doing its infinite loops around the same elegant path.

  VI.

  There it is, her name, in the respectful and prominent upper case customarily afforded to the author: VIOLET CAMERON, appended to the essay ‘Some Thoughts on Industrialization in Bengal: A Reply to Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury’. And that juxtaposition is what stops Miss Gilby in her tracks as she is walking along the verandah, idly leafing through this latest issue of the Dawn, dated October 1903. It is no secret that Violet has been a member of the Dawn Society from ’97 or ’98. In fact, Miss Gilby collaborated with her on an essay on the education of Indian girls, which was published in these pages in ’99 along with articles by Annie Besant and by the Irish lady who went under the name of Sister Nivedita, and which went on to have far-reaching effects in the Anglo-Indian community not the least of which was the final excommunication of both Mrs Cameron and Miss Gilby from the society of their ‘own kind’, as James didn’t fail to point out repeatedly. But this coming together, this dialogue conducted at a distance between two people who have never met but have heard so much of each other through her, this sudden discovery of her inadvertent role of (of what? catalyst? channel? conductor?) medium, a role she has been so comprehensively ignorant of, this sends a thrill down her spine. It is as if all the coincidences of her worlds were chiming together in a big, resonant harmony.

  She rushes into her study and takes in the article in one sitting. There are half echoes and muted soundings in Violet’s words: Miss Gilby has herself heard similar ideas from her and has had long discussions with her about self-government and that area forbidden to women – economics. The article appears at once familiar and strange. Violet seems critical of an unthinking and wholesale transplantation of Western industrialism to India, arguing that this will lead to similar problems faced by the West as a consequence of industrial capitalism – the stark division of the wealthy and the poor, class conflict, the gradual erosion of moral values and traditional modes of life and living.

  One has only to cast a passing glance at the reports of the various commissions and blue books, which investigated the state of industrial life in the factories, mines and workshops between 1833 and 1842; or to read the pages of Engels’s ‘State of the Working Classes in England in 1844’ to convince oneself of the truth of the total degradation and suffering of the English working classes brought on by the Industrial Revolution, she has written.

  The implied position of Mr Roy Chowdhury appears to be in favour of economic independence from British rule by a steady process of industrialization, which would then also become a remedy for the growing poverty of India. Miss Gilby’s head swims in the attempt to reconstruct his position from Violet’s essay. She is so fired up with curiosity that she immediately writes a note to him and summons Lalloo to deliver it.

  Dear Mr Roy Chowdhury, Imagine my pleasant surprise when reading the latest copy of the Dawn, which was lying on the table in the drawing room, I discovered my friend Violet – Mrs Violet Cameron – to be the respondent to your article in a previous issue of the same journal. Having now read Violet’s article, but missing yours, I am greatly interested in reading it and conversing with you about such matters. Will you be so kind as to let me have the earlier issues of the journal? I gather you are very busy and occupied with a great many things of late but would Afternoon Tea next Wednesday suit you at all? I await your reply. Yours etc.

  It is during the blotting of the note that understanding dawns on her. Part of the answer has been staring her in the face for some time now and she hasn’t been able to see it. All these meetings, this thronging of ‘Dighi Bari’ with strangers and important-looking men at all hours, these late nights, this air of resolve, conspiracy almost, of action and planning and conference, why, Miss Gilby thinks, this is all towards social and political ends. Economic self-determination, alleviation of the country’s chronic poverty – these were the noble aims they were working towards. Miss Gilby feels caught up in the great arc of political movements and it is not without its slight tinge of fear – what if these men are plotting a Revolution to overthrow the Raj? Where does she stand then?

  She pushes the questions away as figments of her overactive imagination, so prone to creating scenarios of disaster and calamity when there are none in the horizon. She decides to write to Violet and chide her affectionately for not letting her know in advance of this correspondence between herself and Mr Roy Chowdhury in Dawn, but she doesn’t go ahead with it for she has written to her only a week ago, besides, who knows, Violet may have written to her and the post had been delayed unreasonably, as it was so frequently. She will wait to hear from Mr Roy Chowdhury.

  Mr Roy Chowdhury’s note, in neat, firm copperplate, arrives next morning, with a pile of Dawn back issues going back to 1897. It is brief and warm:

  I shall be delighted to take afternoon tea with you the following Wednesday. I apologize for my negligence and absence – there have been too many things demanding my attention of late and I have been inundated by these pressing duties. If you so desire, we might even go for a ride by the river. Will you kindly let me know? Yours ever, etc.

  Miss Gilby opts for the ride and sends a note with Lalloo who has evidently been instructed to wait for her reply. The rest of the morning, and a large part of the afternoon, is taken up with Dawn. What Miss Gilby assimilates during that time – and it is only a tiny fraction of the surging sea around her – makes her head spin. She reads about English-educated Indians raging about the contrast between the prosperous West and destitute India, about how this is no fate-ordained thing but a deliberate tool of British policy. She learns about the premeditated destruction of Indian handicrafts leading to an overwhelming dependence on agriculture, which in turn has been ruined by an excessive land tax. And then there was the wealth drain in the form of first investment and later home charges, which India was meeting only through a harmful and deceptive export surplus. India had thus been reduced to the status of supplier of raw materials and market for British-manufactured goods.

  Page after page she is taken through the need for industrialization, the promotion of technical education, demands for the government to abolish its anti-Indian tariff policy. She learns of self-help, boycott of British goods, increasing reliance on home-produced things, all of which constitute swadeshi. She uses her burgeoning knowledge of Bengali to translate it as ‘of one’s own country’, ‘native’, ‘indigenous’. She even knows its antonym: bideshi, foreign. She reads Bholanath Chandra’s rallying cry to dethrone ‘King Cotton of Manchester’. It would be no crime for us to take the only but most effectual weapon of moral hostility, left us in our last extremity. Let us make use of this potent weapon by resolving to non-consume the goods of England.

  Amidst the long names of Bengali intellectuals – Satishchandra Mukherji, Jogindranath Chattopadhyay, Motilal Ghosh, Kaliprasanna Dasgupta – she notices the flash and shine of two familiar names, Violet Cameron and Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury, dart through the thicket of words like gleaming fish through dark reeds.

  Miss Gilby feels the oppressive heaviness that comes with such a deep and total immersion in a field hitherto largely unknown to her but with it also comes, paradoxically, a liberating lightness conferred by that very activity, for it has resulted in an intellectual endeavour that initiates the long but ultimately victorious battle with ignorance. From now on
, she will involve herself in the thick and press of this germinating revolution. No sooner has she made up her mind than another, more nebulous, feeling assails her, a feeling for which she fails to find either a name or a phrase. She feels oddly divided, melancholy, as if her loyalties were neatly riven and have been called into question, as if two equal forces were pulling her in contrary directions. The sense of implied betrayal she feels is already enormous.

  At lesson the next day, Bimala and Miss Gilby toil over an English translation of a Rajput story – the one of Queen Padmini, reputed to be so beautiful that when she took her early morning walks in the arbours and waterways of the palace in Chitorgarh lotus buds refused to blossom lest she put their collective splendour to shame. The Bengali is very difficult for Miss Gilby. There are problems with the language – simultaneously both poetic and innocent, intricate and childlike – the metaphors and the idioms that don’t quite translate, but as Bimala, slowly and surely, unfurls the story, shaking it out open from its neat, compact folds into a dazzling fabric sewn with every colour and skill imaginable, Miss Gilby falls under its spell.

  They have reached the point at which Alauddin Khilji, Emperor of Hindustan, hears of the famed beauty of Padmini, hidden away in the proud and unassailable Rajput stronghold of Chitorgarh, a land that has stubbornly resisted the steady Muslim incursion throughout Hindustan, holding up its militant head defiant and high. The Sultan of Delhi marches towards Rajputana with five hundred thousand soldiers, razing and laying to waste everything they pass, intent on reaching Chitorgarh and abducting Padmini by sheer, brute force. As news reaches Chitorgarh that the Muslim army is advancing towards the town, Rana Lakshman Singh orders the seven iron gates of the town to be shut to the invaders.