The loneliest of occupations was taking armloads of dirty clothing, stuffing them in a traveller’s shoulder bag, and walking with it to the laundry room across the road. My main ambition was to diminish each moment, to hold as much as possible in as little space, to do things with the least depletion to time and effort. I disliked portioning out the load, for instance; I crammed in more than the bag could contain, and when, finally, I could not zip it, I would push against the clothes with all my weight, repeatedly and brutally, till they had been perfectly packed in.
Or I sat in my room with Lawrence’s Complete Poems on my lap, looking at a page on which the long Laurentian lines spilled and overflowed from one verse to the other. I hated libraries, where human beings hunched strangely over their books, behaving like birds who were not eating, but studying, their prey, in a silence where the only things that whispered were the leaves of the books. Who were these people; what did they do at night; what peculiarly displaced lust drove them to fill in order-forms and push them confidentially towards a woman, and have a conveyor belt with a cargo of books turn endlessly in the basement for their benefit? I stayed safely in my room and tried to make sense of the beauty of ‘Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark,/darkening the day-time’, or ‘Have you built your ship of death, O have you?’, or ‘the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith/with its store of food and little cooking pans’, or, especially, ‘You tell me I am wrong./Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?’, while the sound of someone making coffee entered my reading, and a portrait of Lawrence, gaunt, red-bearded, stared at me like a demon and kept me company.
I rented a television set for a few months, and became acquainted with Postman Pat and Blue Peter, and my afternoons were shaped by a soothing jumble of quiz-shows, word-games, and Fifteen to One. Though poor in general knowledge, at guessing synonyms, and at making sense of the teasing, child-like nuisance of letters in an anagram, my mind, for a while, joyously deluded itself that it was in a state of agile and athletic excitement, and loved nothing more than being vanquished, in the end, by a retired widow from Dorset or a stuttering unemployed electrician from Leicester, sweet and harmless-looking people who had nevertheless used their empty hours to squeeze from themselves a razor-sharp competence in these matters.
There were times when I escaped to London, and as people fell asleep on the coach, their heads nodding and chiming in unison, I had occasion to think of my parents speaking to each other in Sylheti, or the sensation of standing on a veranda on a hot day. Scenes flashed past; and they flashed past when I returned in the evening, when I would see miles of suburbia on the edge of the motorway, house after house with a fragile, liminal television aerial on the roof, beneath a sky from which birds and clouds fast disappeared. It seemed that if extraterrestrial intelligence had a message for earth, it would be here, among these nondescript houses, at this moment, as it darkened outside and a family gathered around a television, that they would send it, to be recognized and deciphered by, of course, a boy in shorts with dreams in his head.