‘It is OK for you?’ Saeed repeated, reaching for his crumpled packet of cigarettes and lighting up.
‘Can I think about it for some time?’ To fill out the silence Ritwik padded out his evasion, ‘It’s not every day that I get offered a job, so let me have a think and I promise I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.’ He spoke very fast in the hope that Saeed was deceived by his fluency into thinking that he was not putting him off.
It worked. Saeed nodded for a while – Ritwik detected a glimmer of respect, or awe, in his eyes, or maybe that was what he wanted to see – and said, ‘OK. You touch me by Mr Haq, OK?’
‘No, get in touch, not touch.’
‘What you say?’ Saeed’s face had a puzzled look on it.
Ritwik reached out and touched Saeed on his arm, exaggeratedly. ‘This is touch.’ Then he mimed a phone call and added, ‘And this, getting in touch.’
A broad smile cleared away the confusion. ‘OK, OK, I see, touch, getting touch.’ He chuckled, then added, ‘This English, very difficult, very difficult to me.’ He laughed again, moved his hand across the table, clutched Ritwik’s hand in his fist and said, ‘You teach me English, OK?’
Ritwik didn’t know if he was in earnest, so he smiled, once again taken aback by the ease with which Saeed touched him in public. Saeed repeated the question, lifting Ritwik’s hand off the table and holding it in the air, a gesture of commitment about to be made.
‘Yes, yes,’ Ritwik stammered, ‘if you want.’
‘Good. OK. We go then.’ With a final squeeze he let go of Ritwik’s hand. He signalled to a waiter for the bill that he didn’t bother looking at when it arrived. He pulled out a twenty-pound note from a fat wallet, extricated some loose change from another pocket, weighed down the paper note with the coins neatly and got up. His eye caught someone and he went over, all bonhomie and smiles, to an extremely fat man seated behind a table next to the kitchen door, a pile of paper and a calculator in front of him. The men embraced and, for the entire duration of their conversation, they held each other’s hands in a clasp. They embraced again before Saeed made his way out. He put his hand on Ritwik’s shoulder once they were out on Edgware Road, as men in India do, or men elsewhere, not here, but Saeed seemed oblivious to this. The stalled and swelling traffic on Edgware Road sometimes moved, a few inches at a time, like a lethargic snake.
On fruit-picking days in the summer, Ritwik and Anne saw each other at what Ritwik used to consider ‘duty hours’, such as bathtimes, or the time allotted to cleaning and changing her, explaining painstakingly what was in the fridge and in the kitchen. He left yellow Post-It notes around the place so that Anne wouldn’t forget where the bread was, where her calcium tablets were, or the fact that she had to switch off the burner after the soup had been heated – the house became a paper trail from a treasure hunt. After a few days into it Ritwik realized that Anne, or any other person for that matter, would have a hard time reading, assimilating and remembering all the notes and then acting according to them, so he put up a big note next to Anne’s bed reminding her to look at all the notes, very soon saw the absurdity of the whole thing and, bar a couple, took most of them down.
One evening Anne drifted into the kitchen and said, ‘Looky here, there is no need to feel guilty that you are away most of the time, so stop leaving these ridiculous notes everywhere. They are no substitute for your presence. I have a hard time remembering to look at them in the first place. If I don’t remember to eat then I shall hardly remember to first locate and then look at a note saying what I should have for lunch.’
The logic was so impeccable that it threw Ritwik off wondering if there had been an implicit recrimination in her words. He sat at the kitchen table, held his head in his hands and bleated, ‘What else can I do?’
‘For a start, you could stop walking around as if you’d been buggered by the entire squadron of the Queen’s Horse Guards and their horses.’
‘I wish, Anne, I wish. And you should wash your mouth out with carbolic. Look at you, at your age, using language that would make a sailor blush,’ he said, in between sobs of laughter.
Anne couldn’t stop giggling. Ritwik never disclosed what it was that was making simple, unquestioned things such as sitting down, bending, turning around, climbing up or down the stairs so painful and stiff, as if he had just been put together by a hamfisted joiner. And anyway, he thought, it was just lack of regular physical exercise; he would be fine after a week or so.
Those nights, with sleep coming down on him heavy and seductive, the very sight of the sheaf of papers containing Miss Gilby’s unfinished story set him afloat on a deep ocean of exhaustion. How would he ever find the time or the energy to finish it? On those nights he told Anne, in installments, the story of Duo-rani, the wicked queen who, wanting to divert the king’s attention from his favourite wife, Suo-rani, pretended to be ill with an incurable bone disease by putting light, hollow twigs of birch and willow and broom under her mattress so that when she tossed and turned it seemed that her very bones were snapping loudly into bits and pieces. Anne lay awake, her thoughts inhabiting god knew what world; Ritwik was certain at times that Anne’s attention couldn’t be farther from the story he had spliced from his childhood folk tales on to the current aches in his lower back, thighs and legs.
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the story one night, kept quiet for a few minutes, then said, ‘I leave all these notes because I don’t want to come back one evening and find you lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs just because you forgot to take the stair lift or misplaced your stick.’
He wasn’t really hoping for an answer – it was spoken more to himself, as a kind of summing up, rather than addressed to the drifting woman – so he was surprised when she whispered, ‘Yes.’
And then the cold jolt of being read with such ease again: ‘What story is it that you keep scribbling down all the time?’
‘How do you know it’s a story? It could be letters, or anything,’ he said, too tired to ask her if she has been going through his stuff.
She didn’t reply. After a while, she said, ‘You could read that out to me, couldn’t you?’
Why not? ‘Do you know who she is?’
‘What do you mean who she is? Isn’t she the heroine of your story?’
‘Yes, she is, but she exists elsewhere. She is a very minor figure, appearing for all of four or five paragraphs in an early chapter in a Tagore novel, Ghare Bairey. Did you know that? Then Satyajit Ray made it into a film in the early eighties and, in keeping with the book, she was a fleeting, walk-on figure there too.’
‘No. But you could still read it out to me, what do you think?’ Adamant and tenacious as always.
‘Yes, yes, I could. Do you want me to start from the very beginning or read the latest installment?’
‘Whichever is easier.’
So Ritwik reads to Anne the chapter in which the great ferment outside enters, in an unsuspectingly malevolent form, the home of Nikhilesh and Bimala:
IX.
First, she doesn’t show up one morning. Miss Gilby waits, unworried, not even registering the delay for half an hour because their arrangements are so informal and fluid; after all, one doesn’t need appointments and rule books and enslavement to the hands of the clock among members of the family. But after an hour has passed, without any sign of Bimala, she decides to send Lalloo to look for her. Lalloo comes back and says Bimala is not in the andarmahal. Miss Gilby leaves a brief note for her saying that if she needs her, she will be in her study upstairs. Bimala doesn’t call that day.
The next morning, Bimala is on time. She says, ‘Miss Gilby, I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I have important things to do in the andarmahal. I couldn’t leave.’
Miss Gilby says, ‘That’s all right. Shall we start by practising scales this morning?’
Next week, she is absent again, once more without any advance warning or subsequent explanation. Miss Gilby’s note gets ignored. This
time she asks Bimala the reason for her absence because none seems to be forthcoming on her part, not even an apology.
Bimala replies, ‘Naw jaa is not well. I look after her all day.’ She refuses to meet Miss Gilby’s eyes when she says this.
The next day Miss Gilby asks after naw jaa. Bimala says, ‘Naw jaa? Naw jaa?’ before awareness strikes and she stammers out, ‘Yes, yes, she’s well.’
That week Bimala is listless and restless in turns, if such an apparently paradoxical condition can be imagined. But there is also something else, a hint of insolence, a defiance somewhere struggling to manifest itself but too weak to come into being. She makes flagrant grammatical errors and when Miss Gilby corrects her, she doesn’t incorporate them into her next sentence, instead repeats her mistake stubbornly. She expresses a desire to read only Bengali books and sing Bengali songs. Her vocal accompaniment gets more and more careless to the extent that Miss Gilby wonders if Bimala is deliberately doing all this for some unknown reason.
The following week, Bimala doesn’t appear for two consecutive days. This time Miss Gilby doesn’t leave a note for her; she waits for Bimala to contact her. When Bimala eventually knocks on her study door, after two days, she tries to pretend as if there has been no hiatus in their daily lessons. Miss Gilby patiently enquires if anything is wrong. Bimala, once again refusing to make eye contact, says something about helping out with swadeshi business.
Three days after this, when Bimala doesn’t turn up for three consecutive days, Miss Gilby decides that enough is enough; she has no option but to write to Mr Roy Chowdhury about the predicament.
Mr Roy Chowdhury has such prominent dark circles under his eyes that Miss Gilby is moved to asking after his health even before the formalities of greeting have been completed.
‘I’m afraid I’ve not been sleeping very well. I have a number of things weighing on my mind, but, Miss Gilby, I’m so sorry to hear of Bimala’s . . . what should I say . . . truancy . . . except I had no idea of it . . . you must excuse me, please . . .’ He gives up before he can complete the sentence.
‘I’m sure it is something very minor, something unimportant, which she feels she cannot tell me. I’m not even very certain that something’s bothering her,’ Miss Gilby tries to reassure.
‘She seems well to me, if a bit fired up about swadeshi. I expect she’s told you all about it. She seems quite obsessed with it, doesn’t talk about much else.’
‘Oh, yes, that must be it,’ Miss Gilby says, unconvinced. ‘She has appeared to be somewhat careless and distracted of late. Her mind is elsewhere. I was wondering if there is anything in particular which she feels she could tell you but not me.’
‘I can’t think of anything at the moment. I’ve always thought that if something was on her mind, she would be far more likely to tell you about it. If it is not a language problem, that is.’
‘Ah, that might be it.’
‘And . . . and . . .’ he hesitates, uncharacteristically dithering and insecure, ‘I’ve been so inattentive, and absent . . . the situation in the village worsens daily . . .’
‘What situation?’
He appears to think for a long time before answering, weighing up his words, ordering his thoughts before summarizing an immensely complicated issue.
‘How do I even begin to tell you about it? You know that my childhood friend Sandip, Mr Banerjea, is staying here with us. He’s using ‘Dighi Bari’ as his centre for swadeshi activities in the neighbouring villages and districts. As you may have noticed, he’s a charismatic man, it’s difficult, no, impossible, to say no to him. What he wants, he usually gets. He arrived with hardly more than a dozen activists, mostly students. Now it seems that every young man in eastern Bengal is part of his movement.’
Miss Gilby looks up sharply at the use of ‘his’. ‘His movement? I thought swadeshi was something to which every Bengali had dedicated his life.’
Mr Roy Chowdhury gives a wan smile. ‘If only, Miss Gilby, if only.’
‘Are you saying that it is not as unanimous as it appears to be?’
There is a long silence, so long that Miss Gilby is about to rephrase and repeat her question but before she has had a chance to do that, Mr Roy Chowdhury says, ‘Do you know that all my tenants are Muslims, that the villages here, most of the villages in what is now East Bengal, are comprised of a Muslim majority?’
‘Well, I hadn’t thought about it but now that you mention it, yes . . .’
‘You have been reading the papers, following the whole crisis with this partition for some years, haven’t you? It won’t come as a surprise to you then if I tell you that one of the biggest motives behind the division of Bengal was to drive a wedge between the Hindu population and the Muslims.’
Miss Gilby involuntarily straightens her back and moves forward to the edge of her chair. It sounds familiar, she has come across this somewhere other than in the newspapers, but she cannot quite put her finger on it at this particular moment. Outside, the luminous winter afternoon is dying in a final blaze of pink and gold.
‘The infamous “divide and rule” policy?’ Miss Gilby asks lamely for want of anything more substantial to say.
‘Yes, basically it is that. When Lord Curzon was on his short tour of Bengal nearly three years back, he gave a speech in Dacca which declared that the partition – still more than two and a half years into the future – would invest the Muslims in eastern Bengal with a unity they had not enjoyed since the days of the Mughal rulers. It was a carefully calculated speech, designed to shore up Muslim support for the division of Bengal.’
She clears her voice and asks, ‘But surely it’s in the interests of the two races to stay united?’
‘One would have thought so’ – that dry smile again, hardly visible in the gathering dark inside – ‘but it’s been considered before. The troublemakers – troublemakers according to our English rulers, that is – in Bengal are the Hindus. They were solidly opposed to the partition, still are, they are also the better educated, the more eloquent. In short, they are the noisy opponents with a political voice. There is no such equivalent in the Muslim community.’
Miss Gilby interrupts, ‘So if Bengal was divided along Hindu-Muslim lines then the opposition could be fragmented and therefore weakened?’
‘ “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways.”Famous words,’he says wryly. There is another long pause. ‘Well, the plan seems to be working. Despite isolated shows of Hindu-Muslim unity in rallies and gatherings here and there, the truth is quite different. The Muslims have always been poorer, their interests always neglected, their education overlooked, their voices ignored. It’s not surprising they don’t think very highly of the Hindus who are their landlords, or bureaucrats or government servants. So if a separate province is promised them where Mohammedan interests would be strongly represented, if not predominant, how can we blame them for falling for it?’
‘But I still don’t understand how this relates directly to your village.’
‘You see, because the Hindus of Bengal have been traditionally the political voice of the region, for obvious reasons of class and education and opportunities, the Muslims think swadeshi is another Hindu conspiracy and therefore they look on it with great suspicion. They are not wholly wrong.’
Mr Roy Chowdhury moves in his chair to get more comfortable. The last light of the sun, amber dark, catches his glasses and makes them into bright, blind mirrors. ‘If it’s a choice between the Hindu babu, who has traditionally been known to be indifferent to Mussulman interests, and the English governor, who dangles the idea of a predominantly Mohammedan province, I too would choose the chance for a change. My villagers now see these Hindu boys, clad in orange, going around the place, calling for boycott of English goods that provide these poor Muslims a livelihood. Is it that extraordinary they should think this whole swadeshi business as another Hindu ploy to keep them poor and downtrodden?’
This is the first time M
iss Gilby has heard anger tint his voice; it is a cold, reasoned fury, disciplined and measured, like the rest of the man.
‘Sandip’s boys are getting a bit carried away in their enthusiasm. It is pointless asking Sandip to rein them in because he clearly believes in what his activists are doing. There is talk of forcible seizure of English goods and burning them, even talk of burning down shops and houses of those who stock or sell English goods. This is terrorism, not revolution. I cannot stand by and see this happen.’ His voice nearly breaks.
Miss Gilby is appalled. ‘But, Mr Roy Chowdhury, to appear divisive myself for a moment, this is your house, you are letting him use it as a base for his activities.’
‘And that seems to be the reason why my tenants, my villagers, with whom my forefathers and my family have had cordial relations for the best part of two hundred years, now appear to think that I am behind all this. They think that without my sanction these Hindu nationalist boys wouldn’t have dared go so far. ’
The encroaching dusk collects in pools in the room; Miss Gilby can hardly see him put his head in his hands. The mosquitoes have started arriving in whining droves, circling above their heads in little vicious columns.
Miss Gilby continues her train of thought, ‘You can surely ask him to leave?’
There is another silence, a long, weighted one. There is a catch in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s voice when he answers, ‘I cannot do that. I cannot.’ The words are barely a whisper. For some reason, the servants have forgotten to bring lights into this room. It is so dark now that to anyone who entered the room it would be impossible to tell if it was inhabited at all. Miss Gilby wishes she could have seen his face, his eyes, to read more, to understand more, because she cannot ask him why and because she has a sharp hunch that there is more going on than is revealed to her.
Bimala starts attending lessons again and this is exactly what their morning meetings have now become – duty-bound, obligatory lessons. When Miss Gilby had first arrived at ‘Dighi Bari’ years ago, it was like that – a tutor-student meeting – for the first few months but that had changed subtly, giving way to a much more intimate and informal meeting of two friends who lived under the same roof. The lessons had become subsidiary, the company of each other, the principal. Sometimes there were no lessons at all for long stretches, just gossiping, looking at books, exchanging recipes, games in the garden. All that has suddenly reverted to the dry, strictured atmosphere of the classroom now, a chore, not spontaneous pleasure.
A Life Apart Page 28