A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  Bimala’s first appearance after Miss Gilby’s meeting with Mr Roy Chowdhury was startling. She had red, swollen eyes, she wore austere clothes – monotone cotton sari, an unremarkable shade of blue, white cotton blouse – she had no bangles on her wrists, no jewellery in sight anywhere, even the vermillion mark in the parting of her hair looked dull. The spartan air must have had to do with Bimala’s more active endorsement of swadeshi, thought Miss Gilby; she had at last abandoned all items of foreign-manufactured luxury or ostentation.

  Miss Gilby’s interest in Bimala’s book of birds has mounted to an obsession now. With Bimala listless, uncooperative, sometimes passively truculent, it is that part of the afternoon when they go through the books on Indian birds (although Bimala only dutifully so, for she doesn’t seem to share her English friend’s burning interest in birds anymore) that Miss Gilby looks forward to most. Indeed, two mornings ago, her first thought, after she had woken up, had been not of Bimala, or the new song they were learning, but the delight of ‘Birds of the Ganges Estuary Mudflats and Mangroves’ and ‘Birds of the North Eastern Hill Ranges’ awaiting her in the book she had so surprisingly discovered in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s study next door.

  This morning Bimala has been set a composition exercise – one page on the goddesses of Bengal, something that Miss Gilby thinks might inspire a spark in the jaded Bimala. Her head bent down on her book, Bimala passively fulfils what has been asked of her, occasionally asking the odd question on translation – ‘What is this?’ she asks, drawing an instrument that the goddess Durga holds in one of her ten hands and for which there is no translation in English except for the awkward and wholly unrepresentative ‘spinning discus’.

  Seeing that dark head bent over paper, that slender hand forming the foreign letters slowly, much as a child does when it is learning to write, Miss Gilby feels a tightening in her chest. So pressing and sharp is the feeling that ignoring hundreds of years of refinement and social norms and rules, rules, rules, she moves over to Bimala, sits beside her, touches her shoulder and asks that enquiring, surprised face, ‘Bimala, if there is anything wrong, you know you can talk to me, don’t you?’

  Bimala bursts into tears while Miss Gilby leaves her hand on the woman’s sobbing, heaving shoulder. Hot tears drop like candle wax on to the paper she has been writing on. With a rare clarity, Miss Gilby notes one smudging drop on the inverted word ‘learning’ and another poised between ‘lion’ and ‘demon’, about to spread out on either side and start disfiguring both.

  Late that evening, a perplexed Miss Gilby, hearing the ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ murmur of collected voices, looks out of her balcony to see scores of men gathered outside the front gate of the house. She at once guesses, rightly, that they are villagers demanding an audience with Mr Roy Chowdhury. She is both curious and concerned, but it wouldn’t do to look at these men from her vantage point two floors above them. Nor would it be right to try and find out what is happening by going downstairs. In any case, if she were to ‘accidentally’ eavesdrop, she would understand very little of the proceedings. She would have to stay in her quarters and be alert to the sounds and movements, or go down to find Bimala, possibly in the andarmahal. After half an hour of such deliberation, she picks up the book on birds she had found in Mr Roy Chowdhury’s study and prepares herself to go downstairs with it, on the fragile pretext of returning it to the collection.

  By the time she reaches the long verandah off which lie the meeting room, Mr Roy Chowdhury’s study, the drawing room and the offices, the sound of voices has grown so loud – sometimes a single voice, at other times, many voices together, all talking at the same time, and occasionally, a veritable cacophony, with what seems like the entire gathering shouting – that there is no doubt this is an altercation, not just a heated debate or the deplorable Indian habit of talking loudly. Miss Gilby takes fright and turns around to mount the staircase up to the second floor but someone emerges from the meeting room and, in hasty confusion and the desire not to be caught loitering in a place where it could easily and naturally be thought she has no business to be, she does a double take and hurriedly crosses the courtyard, her heart thumping with guilt and relief at having avoided shameful exposure by the skin of her teeth. She reaches the verandah parallel to the one in which she was so nearly caught out. The rooms off this one are all dark, except one, which has such feeble candlelight emanating from it that one would have to let one’s eyes become dark-adapted before realizing that the room was a significantly lighter shade of the thick darkness everywhere. Miss Gilby decides to rush past that room and quickly take the stairs from the other direction.

  As she passes the room, something, perhaps just natural human curiosity, or the bare hint of a sound, not so much heard as sensed, causes her to turn her head. What she sees roots her to the ground and makes her hair stand on end. In that dim firelight, more dark than light, with giant shadows flickeringly eager to devour the little of the room that is in the dirty yellow tallow light, Bimala and Mr Banerjea, the swadeshi revolutionary, are entwined in an amorous embrace, their mouths joined together in a communion of unspeakable passion.

  TEN

  Boarded up windows invariably remind Ritwik of gouged out eyes. A large number of houses in the back streets around King’s Cross look as if they have been forcibly blinded, with cheap plywood squares nailed into where windows once were. Abandoned buildings with broken windows; bold, swirling graffiti, mostly unintelligible, sometimes pure, riding form; detritus-blown streets: newspapers, empty cartons, kebab wrappings and takeaway boxes; train sheds with more graffiti in places one would have thought unreachable – in a different country, with different building materials, this would have been called a slum. This is a dead appendage of the urban monster, awaiting amputation or, as they call it here, regeneration. Every building and warehouse along these streets seems to have conspired with the other to induce instant depression and exude an unnameable threat. This is their only resounding achievement. Under the dull, gunmetal London sky, Crinan Street, Delhi Street, Randell’s Road, Bingfield Street, Goods Way, Camley Street, Earlsferry Way, all make suicide seem sensible, natural, even desirable.

  At night, the drama changes. The dark hides the cracking plaster, the details of the decrepitude, and the emphasis moves from desolation to fear. These are the streets that everyone has learned to call ‘soulless’, ‘dangerous’, ‘crime hotspot’, but no word approaches the shadowy menace always out of the field of vision, always imminent, but never realized. Add to that the impoverishment, this interminable locked-in dance with squalor, and the mixture explodes in little tingles in the skin’s pores as you walk down these streets.

  Of course, like most of the others who hover here, those who do not hurriedly walk down, Ritwik has learnt to live with the fear, at times finding it somewhat erotic, a conditioned reflex from his cottaging nights. The creatures here dart in and out of shadows. They are creatures of fishnet stockings, high heels, cigarette smoke, impossibly short skirts, the careless glitter and dazzle of sequins and tawdry shiny stuff – fake zari, he thinks – and garishly applied lipstick, eye make up, concealer. Or so he imagines, because he has never actually come close enough to see their Otto Dix faces and their harlequin make up, except for split second glimpses of mouths, which look like bleeding gashes in the unforgiving light of the intermittent sodium vapour lamps that cast more gloom in a pool right at their bases than light around them.

  The stretch off York Way on which Ritwik usually walks is called the ‘Meat Mile’. Not that it has got them hanging off hooks, but if one is minded that way, there is plenty available, provided a police car is not cruising by at irregular intervals, or another crackdown on kerb-crawling not taking place. The main thing is knowledge, adherence to codes that to the untrained eye might be invisible. A certain type of aimlessness thrown into one’s gait, being seen on the same alley or lane more than once, a few glances sideways and backwards – Ritwik knows all of these with practised ease. It’s what they
say about swimming, that you never forget it, that it’s muscle memory; these codes are written into his veins and arteries. He can read a customer, either his kind or the more numerous and more frequent other type, from the sound their shoes make on the pavement, from the shadows they cast on the occasionally syringe- and ampoule-strewn streets.

  And then there is the other fear, the fear that he is a freak here, the break from the norm expected in the ‘Meat Mile’. Two weeks ago he had heard a fat woman, all skimpy shawl and enormous breasts almost totally exposed except for a precariously tied piece of glittering cloth on her nipples, spit out the words ‘Fucking queer’, her gobbet of spit landing with a loud ‘splat’ near her, before disappearing into the darkness that is always stalking one here.

  Ritwik stopped going for about a week or so. During that time, he stayed up sleepless, worried nights, imagining attacks, assault and other unthinkables. Besides, there was the big question of market, supply and demand. Would anyone in his right mind go shopping for clothes at a grocery market? Where was the financial sense – and let there be no mistake, this is all and only about money, about the need to buy food and clothes, not about the more elusive search during his student years in public toilets – in walking the streets here of all places? He would have been better off walking Hampstead Heath or taking out an ad in Boyz or Thud.

  Then, by that very logic, he decided in favour of the ‘Meat Mile’: surely, the only clothes shop in a grocery market would thrive and prosper. Monopoly, no competition, that sort of thing. As if in annoyance at its unintelligent dilution, bad economics later took its revenge. Ritwik hadn’t done well so far: three clients in three weeks. Sixty pounds in total. The money in the Kashmiri wooden box was dwindling; if things didn’t pick up, he was going to have to rethink everything.

  The first was a dismal blow-job, his back against a dark wall on Gifford Street, his knees on wet grit, the man looking constantly over his shoulders and at one point even saying, ‘Hurry the fuck up, will you?’, as if his tardy tumescence was all Ritwik’s fault. An occasional train or two rumbled past behind him somewhere, shaking the wall. Ritwik had pushed his head back at the first signs of the man’s approaching orgasm and asked for the twenty pounds then. He had reasoned that if this infuriated the man, there was little he could do except zip up and walk away. It was only because they were out in the open that Ritwik didn’t feel threatened by any potential violence. It was fortunate the man had complied for it could so easily have taken another direction.

  Then there was Frank, the man who looked like an insect with his fragile and overgrown head, wet mouth, and beady, non-human eyes, which reminded Ritwik of beetles; he couldn’t shake off thoughts of Gregor Samsa. Frank who had wept afterwards in his car parked on Boadicea Street, with its lights off and reeking of poppers, because his wife had left him for his business partner after twenty years of an impeccable marriage: he had come home and found them in bed together.

  Ritwik felt bad taking the forty pounds from him and had tried to cover up both his hesitancy and shame by sniffing, coughing, rubbing the edges of his nostrils and saying, ‘God, those poppers were powerful, I think I may have burnt my nose. I’m going to have an awful headache soon,’ and then, ‘Thank you,’ to the rustle of crisp notes. Ritwik hadn’t known what to do, watching a grown-up man cry so helplessly with his trousers and boxer shorts still around his knees. He had asked an insensitive question – ‘Did you love her?’ – and then practically kicked himself for letting those words out when Frank had looked him in the eye and said simply, ‘Yes.’

  Frank had asked for his number and, in relief and delight at the hope that at least one customer was possibly going to become a regular and save him that much trouble, Ritwik had given it him and added, ‘Call me anytime you want to meet up.’

  But nothing had prepared him for the encounter with the builder-type man who called himself Greg and carried a big carrier bag in the boot of his white Ford Mondeo. He had stopped the car in a very ill-lit back street, got out and retrieved the bag from the boot. Ritwik had been so scared he had had trouble articulating the words, ‘What’s in that bag?’ Greg had asked him to strip completely naked and when Ritwik had refused he had said tersely, ‘Don’t think you’re going to make any money like this.’ The menace in his voice thickened the stale air in the car.

  ‘OK, but tell me first what’s in the bag.’

  He brought out stilettos, a black nylon bra, transparent black panties and then gripped Ritwik’s hand. ‘I want you to take all your clothes off, put these on and walk outside.’

  ‘Walk outside? In the street?’ Ritwik’s eyes opened wide at the sheer audacity of the request.

  ‘Yeah.’ As if this were the most natural request in the world.

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘You want the money or not?’

  ‘Not at this risk.’

  ‘All right then, get out of the car,’ he said, starting the car to life.

  ‘Wait, what if I do it in the car?’ He had no idea why he was bargaining with this man.

  Greg appeared to think for a few seconds. ‘OK, but you’ll have to move from the front to the back seat.’

  Once at the back, Ritwik started taking his clothes off. For a moment he forgot that this was not a sex pickup but a money one, so he asked, ‘Aren’t you going to take your clothes off as well?’

  ‘What for?’ Ritwik had never imagined that so much derision could be packed into those two words.

  The bra and panty were about three to four sizes too big for Ritwik’s body; he couldn’t fasten the bra, which flopped like a loose sail on his chest, while the underwear was kept only in place by Ritwik’s back pressed against the seat.

  ‘Now put the heels on.’ It was an order that had the glint of a knife blade hidden somewhere in the spaces between the words.

  ‘But you can’t see them like this, my feet will be . . .’

  Before Ritwik could finish, he barked out, ‘Do as you’re told. Put them on, lean back and stretch out your legs over the gearbox.’

  The shoes were too big as well. At least, Ritwik just had to put them on, not hobble around in them and possibly break his ankle. As he wriggled and manouevred in the cramped space, he was suddenly seized by an intense curiosity to see himself in a mirror, wearing oversized women’s knickers and bra and wriggling around to stretch out his long, thin legs on to the front seat through the narrow gap between the driver and the passenger seats. But there was no light anywhere and even if there had been, he would hardly have been able to see anything in the sliver of the rearview mirror.

  ‘Turn around.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn around. Lie on your tummy. Go on.’

  Ritwik tried to do as he was ordered but the space was so limited that it was all awkward elbows, knees, shins, metal, leather. Without any warning, Greg got out of the car, moved into the back seat and wrenched Ritwik’s legs from the front to try and bundle him into a recumbent position stretched out over the back seats. Food aid sacks were usually handled like this, Ritwik thought. He let out a yelp as his arm got twisted in the process.

  ‘Shut up.’ There was an altogether different tone – saturated with hate – in Greg’s order now.

  With one seamless movement of his strong arms, he had Ritwik crouching face down and knees bent on the seat. He unzipped his fly, bent down on his knees and attempted to mount Ritwik from behind, all the while trying to clamp his hands over Ritwik’s mouth. Ritwik struggled furiously to free himself and Greg kept hissing, ‘Stay fucking down or I’ll really hurt you.’ Ritwik managed to say, ‘No, no, condoms’, before turning himself on his back, using a split second’s let-up of pressure from the man’s arms. Greg was looming over him, his face twisted with hate and rage. He hit Ritwik twice; the confinement and awkward positions took away some of the impact of the blows but he could taste the salt-metal tang in his mouth immediately. As he lifted his arms to shield himself, his hands hit the glass of the wi
ndow and caught the door lock. In a reflex action of survival, he pressed it and headbutted the door open, pushing his head out of the car.

  The inverted world swung for a few seconds, the dull reddish night sky rimmed around with the tops of buildings. He pushed with his feet and tried to get his shoulders and torso out of the car. Once his hands were out in the open, he half turned on his waist, put his palms on the wet ground, and made an effort to crouch out. In the process, the stiletto heel caught Greg in his groin; with a sharp, loud ‘Fuck, fuck’, he pushed Ritwik out of the car with such force that his whole body fell out, contorted and heaped, arse on gritty road, elbows scraped, the bra hitched up on to his shoulders, and the lacy underwear now loosely tying his ankles.

  All this took place so quickly that it surprises Ritwik now, more than three weeks after the event, that he had had the presence of mind to stand upright, naked except for a bra dangling from his shoulders and a pair of knickers held to his groin with one hand, rush to the front of the car, one stiletto in hand, and shout, ‘I have your registration number. If you don’t throw my clothes out, right now, I’m going to break your windscreen with this shoe.’

  Greg threw out his clothes one by one. Jeans, T-shirt, jumper, no underwear, no socks and only one shoe. Before he had a chance to pick them off the road, Greg moved to the front seat and drove off, his tyres screeching out his rage. What an utter waste of an evening, he had thought; not only did he not get any money, but he actually lost some in the form of a new pair of shoes he would now be forced to buy.