The Roys

We’ve rented a flat in Ghosh Buildings, Albert Road,

And the Roys live across the street. Mr. Roy,

General Merchant, dresses in white

Drill trousers, long-sleeved cotton shirts,

And looks like a friendly duck.

His three sons are in school with me. The eldest,

Ganesh, has a gleaming forehead,

A shelled-egg complexion, a small

Equilateral mouth. He belongs to a mystical

Group of philatelists. Together with Shaporjee,

The tallow-white Parsi next door, and Roger Dutt,

The school’s aromatic geography teacher, he goes up

In an air balloon and, on the leeward

Side of a Stanley Gibbons catalogue, comes down

Near a turret in Helvetia or Magyar,

Stamp-sized snowflake-like countries

Whose names dissolve like jujubes on my tongue.

We play French cricket, seven tiles, I spy, and Injun.

Our tomahawks are butter-knives, our crow

Feathers are real, and riding out from behind

Plaza Talkies we ambush the cowboys of Civil Lines.

Ganesh does not join our games. The future,

He seems to say, is not a doodle on the back

Of an envelope but a scarp to be climbed

Alone. He attends a WUS^* meeting in Stockholm

And opens a restaurant in the heart of town.

I go there in early youth for Jamaican coffee,

In early middle age to use its toilet.

From behind the counter he extends his hand.

“How’s the English Department?” he asks. “How’s

Rajamani? Is Mishra a professor now? Is that true?

What are things coming to.” As I listen to him

My piss travels down the left trouser leg

Into my sock, and then my restless son drags me

Towards a shoe store and buys his first pair of

Naughty Boys. Seen from the road,

Mr. Roy’s shop is a P&O boat anchored in midstream.

Inside, it’s an abandoned coal pit. A film

Of darkness wraps the merchandise; a section of the far

Wall conceals the mouth of a cave, leading

To an underground spring; the air, dry and silvery

At the entrance, is moist and sea-green, furry

To the touch; the display cases, embedded

In the floor, are stuffed with a galleon’s treasure;

Finned toffees peer at customers through glass jars.

Every afternoon Mr. Roy goes home for his

Siesta and his second son, Ramesh, still wearing

A crumpled school uniform, takes over the town’s

Flagship. At three p.m. the roads melt, becoming

Impassable, as cloth-backed chiks

Protect shop-fronts against heatstroke.

For the next two hours the sun, stationed above

A traffic island, lays siege to the town, and the only

Movement is of leaves falling so slowly

That midway through their descent their colours

Change. The two waxen shop-assistants

Melt in their sticks, Ramesh sits beside

The cash box with an open sesame

Look in his eye, and I have the place

All to myself. Looking around,

I can make out, in the small light coming in

From outside, bottles of ketchup, flying cigarillos,

Death-feigning penknives, tooth powders, inexpensive

Dragon china dinner sets, sapphire-blue packets

Of detergent, wooden trays holding skeins

Of thread, jade-coloured boxes of hosiery, rolled-gold

Trinkets, mouth-watering dark-tan shoe polish, creams,

And hula hoops. Driven by two ceiling fans,

The freighter moves. Land drops from sight.

Though the binoculars are trained on the earth’s dip,

The eye is monopolized by after-images of land:

I hold a negative against the light,

And now I’m received into the negative I’m holding.

At five p.m. the spell is broken. The sun

Calls it a day and goes down, Mr. Roy comes

To clear away the jungle that has grown around his shop,

And I slip away with a packet of razor blades.

Where stealing’s easy, hiding stolen goods is tough.

A pink stamp issued on Queen Elizabeth’s coronation

Cannot be traced to a cigarette tin buried among

Clothes, but what do I do with a whole album

That has the owner’s name rubber stamped

All over it? To six-year-old Suresh I give lessons

In the pleasures of thieving.

For each first-day cover he brings, I press

My View-Master against his face

And let him look through it once. Then one day, while

Having lunch, I see a policeman framed in the door.

The food in my mouth hardens into a lump

Of plaster of Paris. Afterwards, I lose my voice

And so does everyone around me. Believe me when I say

That nothing’s more sad than a tropical evening,

When auctioneers buy dead advocates’ libraries

And there’s all the time in the world and nowhere to go.

Their cousin, Anil, takes out his autograph book.

“Just in case,” he says, “you become famous.”

He has said this to every boy in school.

“Do you think,” he asks, “I can get Peeks’s

Grandfather’s autograph?” Peeks’s grandfather is a retired

Chief justice and gets his pension in sterling.

Anil takes a hard look at a marble

In the hollow of his palm

But can’t make out if it’s an oblong. His sister,

The same age as us but more hairy,

To whom strange things happen, sits

On the veranda, absorbed in our game.

Through broken tiles in the roof

Sunbeams let themselves down and she screams

Before they strike her. She turns

Into a black beetle and crawls on my skin. Charlie Hyde,

Nicknamed Bony Arse, is the only other person

To so affect me. We go our separate ways and sometimes

We cross Albert Road together or meet outside

A chemist’s. Anil has a tabletop head, a broad forehead,

And bulging brown eyes. He sets himself up

As a dealer in office equipment

And then as a distributor for Number Ten cigarettes.

He fails at both jobs and is given shock therapy.

*World University Service.