A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  When the speech is over, there is a long moment of silence, in which the radiance and intensity of the blaze the crowd has been exposed to are registered and assimilated, before it breaks into applause, yet more fervid shouts of bande mataram, a general clambering and stampede to reach out and touch the speaker who has now acquired in almost everyone’s minds the status of a demigod. The orange boys appear delirious and possessed as they move around the crowd, fists balled, arms raised, shouting their mantra. The flock of pigeons, which had settled peacefully along the edges of the roof, perhaps also mesmerized like the humans gathered below, have their spell broken and flutter up in a group. Their departure too sounds like clapping hands. Miss Gilby turns sideways to find all the women in the balcony dabbing at their eyes with the aanchol of their saris.

  Bimala seems distracted and restless but Miss Gilby does not rule out the possibility that she may be attributing to her charge her own feelings of a sudden and inexplicable diffusion of focus and concentration. Bimala makes three mistakes in the very first two bars of ‘Roaming in the gloaming’, an unusual thing because she knows the piece so well. She ignores the metronome, too, resulting in Miss Gilby having to stop singing and remind her, indulgently the first few times, and then rather sharply, that her innovative tempi are doing no favours either to the piano or to the spirit of the tune. Bimala sulks for a while and tries to concentrate but it seems that they might have to write off music lessons for the day.

  Miss Gilby tries a different tack. ‘Why don’t we leave music for another day, Bimala, when you’ve practised some more?’

  Bimala jumps at the bait. ‘Yes, Miss Gilby. Can I sew for a bit and we can talk and practise Conversation?’

  ‘All right, then. What are you embroidering?’ Miss Gilby hopes this form of subtle and covert correction has the right effect on Bimala.

  Bimala picks up her embroidery: it is a very large piece of blinding white cloth, with the area to be worked on picked out and stretched like the skin of a drum by the frame, showing the beginnings of Bengali letters in blue.

  ‘Banglaar pakhi,’ Miss Gilby reads, much to the visible delight of Bimala. ‘The birds of Bengal.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Bimala nods excitedly and unravels more of the cloth lying in folds and soft heaps on the sofa, trailing on the floor. ‘I make a bedspread with the different birds of Bengal all over it. Yes?’

  Only two birds have been embroidered on to that pristine field of white but they are creatures that could set a cat stalking. Miss Gilby’s heart leaps when she sees them – a sparrow in shades of brown and ash and fawn, its eye a dark bead, its legs the colour of dun, dried leaves, and a kingfisher in its blue blaze, the beak a miracle of poised coral red. They are a rapture of finger and thread and needle: who would have thought such a miracle to be possible from those ordinary objects of commonplace life?

  Bimala notes Miss Gilby’s pleasure and admiration in her sharp intake of breath. ‘You like this?’ she asks, somewhat redundantly.

  ‘Yes, very, very much. It’s so . . .’ she searches for a word, ‘so . . . lifelike, so real. Did you have a model to work from, a picture or a drawing or something of the kind?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I get it now.’ She puts down the spilling cloth, frees herself from its clinging folds and runs out of the room. In a few minutes, she is back, bearing a giant book, which she passes to Miss Gilby.

  The Birds of the North-Eastern and East Gangetic Plain by a Ruth A. Fairweather. 1902. Published in London. The brief note about the author says that after twenty years in Bengal, Orissa and the foothills of the north-eastern arm of the mighty Himalayan range, she is now a resident of Almora where she is at work on a companion volume on North Indian birds. The name doesn’t ring a bell but there aren’t very many Englishwomen in this vast country who have scientific interests and write about Indian birds; surely someone Miss Gilby knows must know her.

  As she turns the pages, Miss Gilby cannot make up her mind whether Ruth Fairweather is an artist first and then a scientist, or the other way around. Page after page of luminous plumage, limpid, waterdark eyes; the birds look ready to fly out in a flash of colour and escape from their papery imprisonment to the green and gold outside where they truly belong. Miss Gilby is so hypnotized that she doesn’t know how much time has elapsed before she turns her attention on to Bimala who seems to be lost in a daydream.

  Miss Gilby gives a slight cough. ‘They’re extraordinary,’ she manages to say at last.

  ‘My husband gives it . . . no, no . . . gave, gave it to me, no?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘He knows I like birds very much. So I sew this for him,’ Bimala says, and giggles nervously, not sure whether that homophonic assonance was quite correct or not.

  ‘That is very nice of you. You are a wonderful artist yourself.’

  Bimala smiles shyly and starts picking up her embroidery. Miss Gilby tries to get her to talk more; she asks Bimala, ‘Why don’t you tell me what the fiery Mr Banerjea’s speech last week was all about?’

  A hectic flush races up Bimala’s face and reaches her hairline. She drops her embroidery and makes a great show of picking it up, then gets down on to the floor to look for a lost needle. As the search progresses, a touch excessive and theatrical, Miss Gilby infers from the sudden blush that Mr Banerjea and Bimala, against all prevailing custom and social rules, have been introduced to each other by Mr Roy Chowdhury; the revolutionary must be the first man she has met apart from her husband and she hasn’t quite got over the novelty, the sheer transgressiveness of the situation.

  When the little charade is over and Bimala settles down again, having failed to find the missing needle but otherwise composed as before, Miss Gilby repeats her question. ‘I could not follow a lot of Mr Banerjea’s speech in the courtyard. I thought he was speaking a very chaste and purified Bengali. What was he saying? I could gather it was about swadeshi but not very much more.’

  Bimala looks straight at Miss Gilby, holds her gaze and says, with utmost seriousness, even awe, ‘He speaks about Bengal as the mother goddess.’

  Miss Gilby involuntarily adds, ‘Spoke, Bimala, spoke. He spoke last week; it’s in the past.’

  Bimala lowers her gaze, smiles embarrassedly, and corrects herself. ‘Yes, sorry, spoke, spoke, he spoke.’

  ‘Anything else, apart from the nation as mother goddess?’

  Bimala doesn’t answer the question. Instead, she expounds similar themes to her tutor. ‘You know bande mataram? We say bande mataram? Yes? It means “We pray to you, mother goddess”. Bengal is mother to us. It was written by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. He is great writer.’

  Miss Gilby at last understands the rallying cry of swadeshi leaders and activists. ‘How wonderful. I didn’t know that. It is Sanskrit, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Bimala nods.

  Their effortless and easy interactions now seem to be developing intercalations of uncomfortable pauses and silences. There is one of those now, which Bimala breaks by asking, ‘Do you want to learn names of Bengali birds and you teach me English birds?’

  ‘That is a very good idea’, says Miss Gilby with something approaching relief.

  And then one day, very soon after their Conversation Session spent talking of birds, both British and Bengali, Bimala stops attending lessons.

  NINE

  He had saved nearly two hundred pounds, all in loose cash and coins, in the Kashmiri wooden box, which he had found in one of the shelves in his room when he had first moved into Anne’s house. It had gorgeously drawn peacocks and herons on it but the colours had lost their sheen and turned matte and the patina of dust had proved much more stubborn than he had expected when he tried to brush and, eventually, to scrub it off. Could it have been a relic from Anne’s final days in India, nearly sixty years ago? He must remember to ask her about the box. One hundred and ninety-two pounds, eighty-six pence, he counted out. More than a month’s subsistence money, maybe two, if he was very careful. And then
he would have to start all over again.

  He met Saeed one dawn on Chichele Road. Of the increasing queues and groups of peoples, Ritwik could now identify about half a dozen nationalities. He walked up to Saeed and said, ‘Can I have a few words with you? After you’ve seen off your people?’, looking briefly in the direction of the few people gathered loosely around him.

  ‘You don’t work? We find work for you today.’

  ‘No, no, I’d like to take today off.’

  ‘You speak to Mr Haq?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him for a long time.’ He hadn’t been to visit the Haq family ever since Saeed had picked him up from outside 37 Ganymede Road. There had been no need; besides, he wouldn’t have been able to look Mr Haq in the eye or talk to his wife and children as if the last two months hadn’t happened.

  ‘You wait here. I take you back. OK?’

  Ritwik nodded. For the next ninety minutes, he was audience to the drama he had been an actor in not so very long ago: floating groups of people, all trying to edge their way into a better life, get the briefest of toeholds on this dizzying escarpment of what they considered a better world, by becoming ghosts and shadows, the unseen and non-existent workers behind most things which made this ravenous, insatiable monster of a city live and breathe and keep consuming. If he had believed in a loony strain of religion, which asserted that the world was supported by invisible spirits and angels holding everything together in a vast safety net, here was its real objective correlative. He winced at the indelible term, product of such a different world altogether. There was fur in his mouth and Chichele Road had never looked so squalid and seedy as he realized quietly that work was never equal, never levelling; instead, work created the greatest tyrannies.

  Saeed saw off his charges, two by two, then stood around for a while, smoking one Benson & Hedges after another, waiting to see if anyone else would need his services. Then he walked back to Ritwik who was sitting on the edge of a pavement. ‘I take you back now?’

  ‘Yes, please, if it’s not too much trouble. I can always take the Tube but I wanted to ask you a few things.’

  His car was parked, as always, in the genteel redbrick terraces of Heber Road. It was not till they were nearing Kilburn Park that Ritwik spoke. He knew Saeed wouldn’t until he broke the silence. ‘Saeed, I want to take a break for a while.’

  Saeed was concentrating on negotiating an intersection off Maida Vale: it was morning rush hour and buses and cars appeared to fill up the streets.

  ‘I mean, just stop working for a few days.’

  Saeed nodded. He kept darting surreptitious glances at Ritwik in the rear view mirror.

  ‘I was wondering if I could come back to you later if I needed more work.’

  ‘You go away from London?’

  ‘No, no, nothing of the sort.’ Then, after a few seconds’ beat, a sliver of the truth came out. ‘I’ve never done this sort of work before and I feel very tired most of the time, you know, physically tired. I just want to rest for a week or so.’ He wondered if he sounded convincing enough, for the beginnings of the truth had imperceptibly shaded into a white lie.

  There was no immediate response from Saeed. Just before going under Marylebone flyover, he asked, ‘You hungry? You eat something?’

  Not knowing whether it was a question or a statement, Ritwik hesitated for too long but Saeed had already decided for him. ‘We eat something here, OK?’

  They went to Al-Shami, a cross between a café and a restaurant, teeming, even at this hour, with Lebanese men and a sprinkling of tourists. There was Khaled playing loudly on their music system but two juicers were going full time, making a great deal of noise and trying to drown out the warm bustle of voices, the usual clatter from the kitchen and the eaters, even the music. The strip lighting, however, made Ritwik feel down, as it invariably did, reminding him of those dingy, shadow-cornered rooms in Grange Road. The air was heavy with unfamiliar smells that made him salivate.

  Saeed was clearly in charge here: he led them to a table beside a chunky square column with mirrors, went up to someone he evidently knew and had a brief chat while Ritwik seated himself and looked around. He returned to the table, sat down and asked Ritwik, ‘All right?’

  Ritwik nodded.

  ‘We get good food here. I order.’ He signalled for a waiter, brushed away his offer of two giant menu cards and broke out into rapid-fire Arabic with him. Ritwik obviously wasn’t going to be consulted about the food, but he didn’t really mind; it was clear that Saeed knew what was good so the decisions were best left to him. The incomprehensible conversation featured a few waves of Saeed’s hand in the direction of Ritwik, probably telling the waiter what he thought should be got for him. As the waiter left, Saeed pulled out his packet of cigarettes from the back pocket of his jeans and started smoking.

  ‘You eat at home?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ Ritwik answered, trying to weave a casual laugh in there but failing.

  ‘You look ill. Weak. Nobody take you for heavy job. They think you too weak.’

  ‘No, no, honestly, I eat lots. It’s my . . . my metabolism I suppose.’ He didn’t want the conversation going down this road at all.

  There was a lapse as Saeed smoked and looked for words in a language so evidently foreign to him while Ritwik couldn’t think of anything but the imminent arrival of food.

  ‘There are rules, OK?’ Saeed suddenly announced, leaning forward, as the waiter brought to the table two large tumblers of pineapple and mango juice, one foaming at the top. They had been freshly squeezed, realized Ritwik, as he took his first sip from the pineapple, and hadn’t come out of a carton of concentrate. For a moment he thought Saeed was talking about rules governing the eating of this food because that non sequitur had coincided so perfectly with the arrival of the juice.

  ‘Always rules for everything. Every world its own rules, rules in Libya, rules in England, rules in football, rules here we eat,’ Saeed continued. There was a fierce concentration in the frown lines on his forehead and in his eyes, a stubborn determination to articulate properly, but Riwik had already lost him. What was all this talk of rules? He hoped it was going to become clear in time.

  ‘You understand?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he lied.

  ‘Your world there are rules, my world there are rules. The two sometimes different. The world of workers in Willesden, all the immigrants, also rules there. Many rules where you go. You see them OK? If you see them, you OK. If you not see, problems, you unhappy.’

  Was this an ominous, circuitous warning that Ritwik could never leave the world he had had a brief glimpse of, that he had to do whatever Saeed asked of him? There didn’t seem to be any other signs that this was a threat, apart from the indeterminacies of Saeed’s truncated words, but they could equally stand for a kind of consolatory explanation for what Saeed took to be his unhappiness at the shadowy world of refugee workers, Ritwik thought.

  Suddenly Saeed leaned forward and caught hold of Ritwik’s hand and with his other hand reached for his shoulder across the table and held him there. The food arrived and Saeed let go.

  There were stainless steel plates of two kinds of paste with swirls of olive oil and sprinklings of herb, a basket heaped with large, warm segments of flatbread, an oblong parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper, which Saeed indicated to be put down in front of Ritwik, another plate of a herb-dense salad flecked with grains, koftes. Ritwik asked Saeed to name everything for him; Saeed obliged: houmous, moutabbal, sujuk wrapped in flatbread and then toasted, tabbouleh.

  For a while the spread pushed away Saeed’s enigmatic words and his unexpected gesture to the back of Ritwik’s mind. He bit into his sandwich and the hot, spicy juices from the Lebanese sausages ran down his fingers and the back of his hand. He closed his eyes in a moment of pure bliss: the whole world was circumscribed inside his mouth.

  Saeed interrupted with, ‘You like?’

  Ritwik nodded weakly. There was so much pr
ide, he thought, on Saeed’s face: he was like a little child showing off his achievements to a parent. Why had he touched him like that? Was it a gesture of camaraderie? Of assurance? Or just an appeal that Ritwik should try and understand him even though his words were not the most perfect carriers of his sense?

  What was the sense?

  ‘You do different work for me?’ Saeed asked while shovelling food into his mouth. There was no daintiness about his eating, no acknowledgement of the effete etiquette that governs polite eating together, only a functional, self-enclosed approach to his food, almost animal in its own and immediate needs.

  ‘What work?’

  Saeed seemed to be too busy eating to have heard so Ritwik repeated the question.

  ‘You speak English. You talk to people I make work. Woman. Some woman work for me. There is more woman want work. You be between us, you talk, you deal, OK? You my . . .’ – he flailed around for a word – ‘my . . .’ He clenched his fists in frustration.

  ‘Go-between? Liaison officer?’ Ritwik offered helpfully. He almost smiled.

  Saeed’s face lit up. ‘Yes, yes, how you say it?’

  ‘Go-between?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go-between.’ Saeed repeated the words a few times, savouring their newness, their power to give him access, however tiny, into a different world. ‘You be my go-between?’

  ‘Between you and who?’ Ritwik asked, miming out the three parties with his hand.

  ‘Many woman. Kurdish, Serbian, Czech. They come to London, look for work, make money, lot of money. You take 5 per cent, 7, maybe 10, OK?’

  Ritwik got it but he wanted him to say the words, spell out the trade, right here in the restaurant, in front of the busy waiters and the small throng of eaters. He toyed with some leftover flatbread and moutabbal, ate another forkful of tabbouleh, sipped his pineapple juice and kept his eyes resolutely on the water rings and spattered food on the fauxchrome table top.