A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Parasols. One needed to. It was a cruel sun out there.’

  ‘And look, the men all have moustaches.’ Ritwik is very amused. ‘What’s happening here?’

  ‘That looks like tea on the lawns. I forget where.’

  ‘And look at all these Indian servants in mufti, waiting on the lords and ladies.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they were indispensable.’

  ‘Why is everyone looking at the camera all the time? Anne, where are you? Are these from your days in India? Such a long time ago. Is this Simla, no, Dalhousie?’

  Anne picks out a photograph, sepia with age, its edges spotted with a sprinkling of orange fungus. It looks like a tableau of an English family in a garden – a moustached man, sombre and grave; a lady smiling, her eyes in the shadow cast by her hat; a stiff boy dressed in his Sunday best; and a little girl, an infant really, in a floppy bonnet in the arms of her Indian ayah, reaching out with her little arms to the grass where she presumably wants to be put down. The ayah has a big, bright smile on her black face. There is a fiercely moustached Indian man in the background, a strap across his kurta, his turban too big for his head. There is also an Indian couple alongside him, looking startled, staring at the alien camera. They are in a garden washed with bright sunlight.

  Anne points a moving finger at each figure and says, ‘That’s Christopher, here’s Richard, here’s Clare with her ayah, Savitri, that’s Bahadur Singh, and I don’t remember who the others are.’

  ‘Where is this?’

  Anne is silent. Sensing something, Ritwik looks sideways at her. She has shut her eyes and is trying to get up.

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘Savitri drowned Clare in the bath. She was two. It was an accident but Savitri was inconsolable. She killed herself the next week. She loved the children. Chhota sahib, Richard was, and when Clare came, chhota mem. Loved them more than her life. It was just as well she took her own, they would have hanged her, anyway. She could have killed for them. Such a fiercely loyal creature. Something broke inside her after . . . after the incident. Christopher wanted all the Indian servants shot. Ridiculous, really.’

  Anne manages to stand up, push her chair back and start walking towards the door. Some of the photographs spill in a fan on to the linoleum-covered floor. Ritwik looks down at them: they have fallen face down, he can only see their browning backs.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken them out,’ Anne mutters, more to the landing outside than to Ritwik, sitting behind her like an immovable rock.

  The television continues to babble out its rubbish as Ritwik sits quietly after Anne has left the room, when some stray word or phrase seeps into his consciousness and stirs something. He looks up at the screen: there is a group of young men and women dressed in carnival costumes and a minor cavalcade of mock tanks and lifesize armoured vehicles made of cardboard joyfully protesting against something. They are carrying CAAT banners; it takes a while before the running commentary decodes this for him: Campaign Against Arms Trade. They are trying to barricade a convoy of cars – the vehicles of invitees to the Defence System and Equipment International Exhibition at Lydney in Gloucestershire.

  He sees a familiar car, a blue Bentley, in the held-up convoy before the heavy police presence disperses the protesters. But perhaps he imagines this flash of blue to accompany the words of the events coordinator of CAAT whose impassioned face appears on the screen and speaks out a new knowledge for him. ‘. . . supply arms to the most detestable and repressive regimes in the world, arms that are used to crush democracy, kill people, extinguish their voices. If you look at some of the countries which have been invited to this fair, you’ll be outraged. What are Burma, North Korea, Iraq, Sierra Leone doing here, countries with military juntas and ruthless dictatorships as governments, countries with a proven record of repression and torture? Some of the delegates here are brokers and fences: theoretically and officially we sell this to, say, Pakistan, or India, but where do they then end up? There are private buyers here, among the so-called delegates. This is just a legitimization of illegal arms dealing and it’s being done in broad daylight, with the full knowledge, indeed, approval of the government. We are campaigning to reconcile a foreign policy with . . .’

  He moves to the cooker and watches the peas agitated in the furious boil of the stock. A few seconds of staring into that roil and he is hypnotized by their movement.

  He doesn’t even know he is going to go out of the house until he steps out of the front door. The sky is the dark blue of an English summer night. Unerringly, he walks towards Brixton tube station. It is like sleepwalking, the motives and outcomes equally cloudy, the acts themselves unpredictable, zigzag. An old serpent inside him has begun to stir, awaking from a long, long sleep. He hasn’t felt this hollowing out of his bowels, this insistent clenching and unclenching of his sphincter, since his cottaging years in university.

  In the train, he keeps his eyes fixed on the ads over the opposite seats and the route of the Victoria Line, a blue, straight trajectory of sans serif letters from Brixton to Walthamstow Central. Despite a number of empty seats, a man stands holding the blue supporting rod in front of the doors and teeters precariously on the balls of his feet. He can barely keep his eyes open. At this hour, the carriages are littered with trampled newspaper pages, empty Lucozade bottles, McDonald’s boxes, crumpled brown paper packets that had held chips, entire newspapers folded and left at the windows above the backrest of the seats. Only one headline is visible: BRITAIN TOPS ASYLUM SEEKER INTAKE IN EUROPE. Daily Mail.

  By the time he gets off at King’s Cross, the sky is still blue enough for the twin tower blocks of the Bemerton Estate to be silhouetted against it like two menacing gods presiding over their demesne of misrule and detritus. Once within the maze of alleyways, streets and culs-de-sac, the noise of traffic and human life on the bordering main roads fades away, leaving only an echo corridor of receding footsteps, the revving of an occasional car, the awkward shuffle of bodies disappearing into the dark, sometimes even the hissy whispers of haggling customers. Everything seems furtive and has the quality of noises off. Even the sound of trains entering the depot to the west, into sidings, has a faraway quality to it, something heard in a different, fairytale land, before a child’s eyes close over with sleep.

  His insides are fizzing fireworks of fear; it runs, thick and sluggish, in his feet, his calf muscles, his knocking chest, turning them heavy and light at the same time. Where does this end and hunger begin? Initially, he stays on streets from where running out onto York Way or Caledonian Road would be a short sprint, but the slowly diffusing smoke of the drug inside him obliges with its addictive hits only when he strays into the darker, more remote areas of the maze. The thought of those pimps with the acid bulb explodes in a delicious crackle-and-flash of fear in him. Tonight he will go with anyone and not ask for any money. Tonight it is faceless pleasure he is after.

  He walks towards the stretch of water between Camley Street and Goods Way. It is the only way he can live with his fear, exorcizing it in the very place he was pinned down and threatened with the potent, disfiguring hiss of acid. He hasn’t been in these desolate streets for well over six months; surely, the men who assaulted him have forgotten his very existence by now. Small change, that is what he was to them.

  He hears footsteps in the next street and instinctively moves into the darker shadow of what appears to be a doorway to an abandoned warehouse. There are no streetlights here, only what meagre illumination reaches from the halogen lights of the Bemerton Estate; one could hardly count the change in one’s hand in it. Two men appear at the end of the street. On instinct, Ritwik flattens himself against the door. One man could be a possibility, two men, almost always trouble: first rule of streetwalking. A few minutes later, he peeps: they are gone. He steps out and moves towards the end where he had seen the men. He moves fast because this area is slightly better lit than where he had hidden.

  As if from nowhere, there are two men standing there. Skinny
, young, pinched pale faces. One of them is smoking. Ritwik bends his head, concentrates on the road, and increases his pace. He can feel their eyes boring into his back, hears some whispering and then the punch of ‘Paki cunt’, not hurled at him, not yet, but just a casual conversational moment that exceeds and spills over the whispers. Whatever is invisible in the semi-darkness, colour obviously is not one of them. He tries not to panic, not to run, not to register any reaction, and keeps walking at the same pace. Thank god they are not those Albanian pimps at least, he thinks.

  The men smell his fear, read his forced nonchalance easily, and gradually step up their abuse.

  ‘Paki scum, hey you, Paki scum.’ Tentative, even hushed, like a singer trying out his voice in a new venue, testing the acoustics.

  ‘Fuck off to your slum you Paki bastard you Paki cunt fuck off.’ Louder, bolder.

  Ritwik arrives at a crossroads. If he takes a right and runs, runs very fast, he might be able to make it to one of the arteries feeding into the Caledonian Road. But the lane is so dark that he is scared to step in there. He hears running footsteps behind him. He wheels around: the men are within spitting distance. He has no choice; he makes his first mistake by turning into the street nearest him, thinking it will offer him a temporary sanctuary, the cover of darkness, or throw the men off the scent. Fear clouds his thoughts, and when he hears running behind him again, he blindly turns left, right, left, any turning that appears in front of him, desperate to lose himself and confuse the men. There are no niches and corners in the street he finds himself in, panting furiously, although it is darker than Camley Street. He has lost all orientation now. He is so scared that even the slow clang-and-rattle of a train in the background doesn’t give him back his bearings. He is deaf to it; his ears are now wholly given to catching the sound of pursuit.

  He hears a low whistle, a short hollering, the sound of more running feet, another whistle, and then, chillingly, the sound of running swells. There are five men now, at least five that he can see, entering his street, summoned like dogs by some ultrasonic signal unheard by the human ear, by the scent of prey. He huddles against a wall, wishing himself invisible. If he could only walk a few feet and slither under the hedge in front of him, he would feel safer but he is certain any movement will give him away.

  ‘Find the fucking wog. You two run over to that end, we’ll wait here for him. Let’s see where that scum can hide.’ The words are so loud that it seems to Ritwik all perspective, all distance, has been warped and shortened to pack this street and the five men into a little closed chamber. He finds himself shaking all over. He decides to risk it to the hedge – invisibility will save him – and in stepping out of the shadows he makes his second and final mistake.

  He has hardly taken two steps forward, intending to crouch down and roll over the distance that separates him from his hiding place, when someone shouts, ‘There he is. Jim, to your left.’

  In an instant they are on him. Someone trips him up: he breaks his fall using the palms of his hand. He doesn’t feel the skin scraping off them as he manages to save himself falling on his face, only the pure lucidity of his terror, like some clear afternoon light. They kick him while he is lying down, random kicks, aimed nowhere in particular. One catches him in his groin and he doubles up in pain. There is one on his ribs that takes all his breath away; try how hard he may, he cannot breathe anymore. As he chokes, he feels little popping explosions of light, a thousand lights, of dull, unnameable colour, behind his eyes.

  ‘Send the fuckers back send those Paki scum away.’ They are almost chanting it now, like a mantra at a ritual, their words resonating in some deep way to the blows they throw out in such aleoritic concord: a kick, a punch to the face, a sickening sound of cracking and crunching of bone. He tries to shout, but the scream is soundless. He doesn’t know whether he should shout for help or beg for mercy. Just before he loses consciousness, Ritwik is granted not the diorama of his entire life flashing past his eyes in an instant but two unrelated moments of clarity: he is struck with wonder at the sheer rage these men are expressing; where is its wellspring? How can one small human harbour a sea of such anger inside him? Why do they not drown under it? The last light is the awareness of the fact that at some point during the chase or the assault, he had wet his jeans. Then he passes into the warmth of darkness.

  He doesn’t hear the sharp, cold flick of a metal blade emerging from its sheath, cries of ‘No, Dave, no, don’t be so fuckin’ stupid, let’s fuck off quick, no, Dave, no’, doesn’t feel the swift entries and exits of the knife, doesn’t hear the desperate cry of ‘You daft cunt, what the fuck have you done’ repeated over and over, the sound of five sets of running, escaping feet, as his thin blood trickles out on to this dark corner of a back street that will be forever England.

  XIII.

  Miss Gilby sits on the terrace of the bungalow with a blanket drawn over her knees and soaks up the welcome warmth of the midday sun. It is so quiet that she can almost hear the wheeling of the brown eagle – Ruth would immediately reel off its scientific name, habitat, reproductive habits, nesting characteristics if she were to see it – in the middle distance, against the backdrop of the gleaming ranges of the Garhwal, their tops tipped with white snow that turn flame orange in the afternoons and then blue, an unfathomably dark blue, moments before the silent nightfall.

  Ruth has gone inside to ask Mohun Singh to rustle up some lunch. She briefly appears at the door and calls out, ‘Maud, there’s a letter for you. I think it’s from your brother. Shall I bring it out to you?’

  Without looking behind her, she answers, ‘If you will be so kind.’ She is intent on watching the gliding arcs the eagle is describing in the clean, thin air. It gives Miss Gilby a vertiginous feeling inside her, as if she were in free fall. Part of that, she thinks, with her characteristic rationality, might be because the terrace of Ruth’s bungalow is poised right on the edge, with nothing between it and the graceful bird but a steep valley of air reaching out over the tops of hills and ranges to the distant might of the Garhwal.

  Later this afternoon, she is going to watch Ruth draw the next three birds for her new book – finch-billed bulbul (Spizixos semitorques, did you know, Maud, some of these are really good songsters?), hoopoe (Upupa epops) and the eared or snow pheasant (Crossoptilon crossoptilon, really too low for it to be here in Almora, how strange, it usually lives in Tibet and northern China, this really is very unusual, I shall have to write off to Mr Elliot immediately). Miss Gilby especially likes the hoopoe, and Ruth tells her quite a charming little story about how these birds had been given crowns by God for sheltering Solomon from the sun but they were killed for these crowns so often that they appealed to Solomon, who in turn prayed to God, and the crown was changed to the crest of feathers we see on their heads now. Miss Gilby is going to help Ruth with the accompanying illustrations of various individual feathers and vegetation, mostly leaves and flowers from the particular birds’ native habitats. They have collected some specimens of flowers and leaves from their rambles in the hills so that she can have them in front of her while practising the sketches. It still gives her an excited shiver of delight to think that she has a hand, however minor or marginal, in helping Ruth Fairweather create her glorious ornithological survey of the Indian Sub-Continent.

  Ruth comes out, gives the letter to Maud, and takes her place in the chair beside her. It is indeed from James and feels quite substantial. She decides to open it now and only skim it, reserving the proper reading for later. Five sheets of close cursive hand. Local gossip, new governor of Madras, North Arcot politics . . . she grazes inattentively . . . shipping taxes, Mysore growing restive, Lady Ampthill’s latest. Then the name ‘Nikhilesh’ on page three makes her halt and retrace her eyes over the relevant area of the paper.

  You might already know this but I thought there would be no harm in repeating that Nikhilesh, your zamindar in Nawabgunj, died in the Hindoo-Mohammedan riots, which erupted in his village very shortly af
ter you left. (Thank the good Lord for that.) Apparently, a stray bullet got him while he was out trying to stop a riot. Must admit to feeling rotten when I found out about it. My first thought was . . .

  Miss Gilby neatly folds the letter and puts it away in a pocket. Ruth asks, ‘Everything all right?’ politely, perhaps because she has noticed the slight tremor of her friend’s hands. Miss Gilby nods and reaches for the binoculars on the little stone table between them. She looks through it and tries to find the brown eagle but it is gone. She can only see the snow-scarred slopes of the distant mountains, brought so close now by the glasses that she could reach out her hand and almost touch them.

  A NOTE ON NAMES

  Bengalis, as indeed most Indians, address each other relationally. An older brother is called dada, while someone who stands in such a relationship to the speaker would be addressed by his first name with the suffix –da. An older sister, similarly, is didi, and someone like an older sister is called by her name with the suffix –di. Mama is maternal uncle, mashi maternal aunt and dida maternal grandmother. Jamai is brother-in-law, jamaibabu, a respectful way of addressing an older brother-in-law, so didi’s husband would be called jamaibabu.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It would not have been possible to write Miss Gilby’s story without Sumit Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (People’s Publishing House: New Delhi, 1973, 2nd imprint, 1994). For those interested in the period and in the particulars of this chapter of colonial history, his still remains the most magisterial account: lucid, exhaustive, and deeply intelligent. I feel privileged to have taken some bearings from his work in writing my own.

  Permission to quote from Cynthia Ozick in the epigraphs from author through David Miller at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permission with reference to copyright material. The publishers apologize if inadvertently any sources remain unacknowledged and will be happy to correct this in any future editions.