He got up at around nine o’clock with the usual feeling of dread. He threw off the duvet. Still unused to being vertical, he pounded the pillow and the sheet to ensure he’d dislodged strands of hair as well as the micro-organisms that subsisted on such surfaces but were invisible to the naked eye. He straightened the duvet, tugging at it till it was symmetrical on each side. He smoothed the sheet, patting it but skimming the starchy bit—a shiny patch of dried semen, already quite old—on the right flank of where he’d lain.
The anger inside him hadn’t gone—from the aftermath of the concert. He’d watched it six days ago on TV: Africa, London, and Philadelphia conjoined by satellite. He switched it off after three quarters of an hour. By the time the Boomtown Rats came on, and the sea of dancing people in Wembley Stadium was being intercut with Ethiopian children with innocent eyes and bulbous heads, a phrase had arisen in his consciousness: “Dance of death.” Didn’t the exulting crowds in Wembley and in Philadelphia see their heroes’ and their own complicity in the famine? But surely this line of thought was absurd, maybe malicious, and to interpret in such terms an event of messianic goodwill, meant to bring joy and food to Ethiopia, nothing but perverse? So what if it brings a bit of joy to Londoners as well? Is that what you’re resenting? He’d discussed it with Mark while having lunch in the Students Union Building; and Mark, in the incredibly tolerant way of one who’s brushed aside death (he was a cancer survivor; his lower left leg was amputated), and who saw his friend’s madness for what it was, said with self-deprecating reasonableness: “I think any kind of effort that brings relief to Africa is all right.” “Can one make an aesthetic objection, though, however awful that might sound?” Ananda had insisted. “Can an aesthetic objection go beyond what might seem morally right? That all those people cheering and dancing in Wembley Stadium, all of them thinking that by dancing to the music they were doing those starving children a good turn—that it made it quite wrong and macabre somehow, especially when you saw the faces of the children?” Mark smiled a smile of understanding—and of one who knew death’s proximity. As for Ananda: his own position on this matter underlined to him his isolation from the world—from London, for that matter.
That feeling had come to him at other times, when he’d seen the necessity for certain actions and yet couldn’t participate in them—including the great march that took place a couple of years ago soon after he’d arrived here as a student. He remembered his first awkward hour in the college—joining the other first years for the freshers’ get-together in the Common Room on the second floor of Foster Court, ascending the stairs under a painting by Whistler, and ending up informing a bespectacled girl with a Princess Di haircut that the Sanskrit prem meant both carnal desire and love, that there was no separation between the two in “Indian culture.” The girl had smiled distantly. Only a week or two after his arrival, the news of the imminent cruise missiles had gathered force, leading finally to the march. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want the world to blow up (as it seemed it any day would), but he couldn’t spend too much time thinking of the shadow of death hanging over mankind. Yet he didn’t quite admit this to himself. It was his uncle, who’d come to see him the next day in Warren Street, who’d said, while watching the Hyde Park–bound procession on TV with Monsignor Kent in the foreground (a touch of revolutionary glamour it gave to this man, the word “Monsignor”):
“They’re not getting to the root cause. They’re concerned about the symptom.”
This was uttered in the droopy-eyed, amused way in which he spoke aphorisms containing a blindingly obvious truth ignored by everybody.
“Symptom?” said Ananda, challenging his uncle, but part of him chiming in.
“The nuclear bomb’s only a symptom,” repeated his uncle, almost contemptuous. “Getting rid of it won’t solve anything. Arrey baba, they have to look at the root cause.”
He pottered about for three or four minutes, making wasted journeys in the room, before parting the curtains and lifting the window a crack. In crumpled white kurta and pyjamas, he looked out on the street and on Tandoor Mahal opposite, unconcerned about being noticed by passers-by below. It was striking how, with the window even marginally open—heavy wooden windows he had to heave up or claw down, and which he was unused to (they made him fear for his fingers)—sounds swam into the studio flat, making him feel paradoxically at home. His mind was elsewhere. He was aware that the house itself was very quiet. The only time there was a sound was when he walked about, and a floorboard groaned at the footfall.
Upstairs, they’d sleep till midday or later. He knew when they were awake because of the sporadic bangs and thuds that announced movement. It was as if the person who first woke up didn’t just get on their feet, but stamped on the floor. The noise they made wasn’t intentional—it was incidental. It wasn’t directed against others because it bore no awareness of others. It was pure physical expression, made by those whose heads didn’t carry too many thoughts—at least, not when they woke and became mobile again.
He hadn’t slept well. This was the norm; partly, it was the recurrent hyperacidity, which had him prop up two pillows against the wall—that made it difficult to sleep too—and, cursing, reach in the dark for the slim packs of Double Action Rennie he kept at his bedside. The taste of the tablets—with associations of chalk powder and spearmint—stayed with him slightly longer than their palliative effects.
But mainly it was the neighbours. They hardly slept till 3 or 4 a.m. There were three people upstairs, but also, often, a fourth. Vivek Patel, who wore pleated trousers and was lavish with aftershave; he wore accessories too—chains around the wrist, fancy belts etcetera. He had a lisp—or not a lisp, really, but a soft way of saying his t’s that was both limpid and menacing. His girlfriend Cynthia stayed in the same room. She was Bengali, but from a family of Christian converts. Cynthia Roy. She was pretty and a little cheap-looking, with her bright red lipstick and simper and the thick outline of kohl, and with her sheep-like devotion to Vivek. Cynthia was a new kind of woman—a social aspirant, like her boyfriend—that Ananda couldn’t really fathom, especially the mix of characteristics: newfangled but unintellectual, independent but content to be Vivek’s follower. Anyway, Ananda barely existed for her. Someone had said she liked “tough men.” Vivek wasn’t taller than five feet seven or eight, but he was probably tough—because he was broad. In spite of his chains and aftershave, he had a swift, abstracted hammerhead air. Ananda had overheard him say “Fuck off, fuck off” to Walia, the landlord, after the payphone incident—uttering the admonishment in his calm musical manner (“Fukko, fukko”) to which Walia clearly had no answer. Walia had nevertheless reclaimed the payphone coin box and carried it downstairs and out of 16 Warren Street. But in all other ways he was toothless before Vivek Patel because Vivek’s father, an East African businessman, was an old contact of Walia’s. Patel Senior lived in Tanzania. From there, he’d sent forth two sons, Vivek and Shashank (who stayed in the single room next to his older brother), to study at the American Management School in London. Shashank looked like Vivek in a narrow mirror: he was slightly taller, paler, and a bit nicer. He spoke with the same lisp—which could have been a hallmark of Tanzanian Gujaratis. On his lips, it sounded guileless and reassuring. He’d told Ananda in the solemn way of one gripped and won over by a fiction that the American Management School offered genuine American degrees. This was the first time they’d discussed education and pretended to be high-minded students of a similar kind—to have different aims that somehow nobly overlapped and converged in this location, despite the signals to the contrary. No wonder they don’t have to study. Besides, who comes to London to do management?
The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called “rap.” It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words—words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like. So it seemed from his prejudiced overhearings. But down here he couldn’t hear the words—only the beat and the bass note. It wasn’t loud, but it was profound, and had a way of sinking through the ceiling into his body below. Each time it started, his TV was still on, and he’d allow himself to think, “It’s OK, it’s not so bad really, I don’t know why I let it bother me. I can ignore it.” This gave him great reassurance for a few minutes. But the very faintness of the pulse, and the way it caused the remotest of tremors—so remote he might be imagining it—was threatening.
He could cope with it while the lights were on; he could see it in perspective (how do you see a sound?) as one among other things. When he switched off the bedside lamp, the faraway boom became ominous. Its presence was absolute, interior, and continuous, erasing other noises. In a darkness outlined by the perpetual yellow light coming in through the curtains, he waited for sleep. But more than sleep, he waited for the next sound. That vigil subsumed questions that came to him intermittently, and which lacked the immediacy of When will they turn down the music?—questions like, What am I doing in London? And what’ll I do once I’m back in India? What do I do if I don’t get a First; will a 2:1 suffice? Of course I won’t get a First—no one does. When will the Poetry Review send me a reply? I’ve read the stuff they publish—chatty verses are the norm—and they should be struck (at least some lonely editor tired of sifting through dry, knowing poems by English poets) by my anguish and music. Such thoughts occurred to him during the day but were now set aside in the interests of following—in addition to the bass beat—the movements upstairs. These were abrupt and powerful, as they were when the Patels first woke up at midday, and separated by typical longeurs of silence—and immobility. The gaps were excruciating, because it was then that Ananda concentrated hardest, avidly trying to decide if activity had ended for the night. By now the music would be so faint that he’d have to strain to hear the dull electronic heartbeat. But strain is what he wanted to do; to devote, eyes shut, his whole imagination to this exercise.
It was odd. He hadn’t realised till he moved to this flat that floorboards could be so porous; and that this perviousness was an established feature of English coexistence. “But we were colonised by them,” he thought. “How is it that our cities are so different? How come I’m so little prepared for here?” He briefly sought but couldn’t find a connection between London and Bombay—except, of course, the red double-decker buses and postboxes. It made him ill at ease—over and above having to swallow the insult of having been ruled by this nation! A nation now in turmoil, with Arthur Scargill browbeating television anchors, and the indomitable grocer’s daughter unleashing policemen on horses on the miners. Ananda himself was barely aware that it was all over, that the red-faced Scargill’s time was up, and that his refrain, “At the end of the day,” had caught up with him sooner than you’d have guessed two years ago. Ananda was disengaged from Indian politics but dilettantishly addicted to British politicians—the debates; the mock outrage; the amazing menu of accents; the warmth of Tony Benn’s s’s and his inexorable fireside eloquence; the way he cradled his pipe; the wiry trade union leaders, blown into the void by Mrs. Thatcher’s booming, unbudging rebuttals. It was a great spectacle, British politics—–and the actual participants and the obligatory ways in which they expressed disagreement (“That is the most ridiculous tosh I’ve ever heard”; “Excuse me, but I belong to a family that’s been working class for generations”) was even more entertaining than the moist nonsense that their Spitting Image counterparts regularly sputtered.
Class! He’d hardly been aware of it before coming to England—which was not so much an indication that it didn’t exist in India as of the fact that the privileged were hardly conscious of it, as they were barely conscious of history—because they didn’t dream they were inhabiting it, so much did they take it for granted. History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book. Living in London, he was becoming steadily conscious of it, and not only of race, which was often uppermost in his mind. Who had spoken of the “conscience of my race”? He couldn’t remember. It sounded like a bogus formulation—probably some British orator, some old fart, maybe Winston Churchill. Then again, maybe not. Could it be a poet? Poets said the oddest things—odd for poets, that is. He’d discovered that the words he’d ascribed to some populist sloganeer and even, unconsciously, to Marx actually belonged to “A Defence of Poetry”; there, Shelley had proclaimed: “The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.” How astute of Shelley to have noticed; and to have made that throwaway observation well before Marx made his advent into London! Marx had come here in 1846, and Shelley’s “Defence” was published in 1840, belatedly, nineteen years after it was composed; had the bearded one noticed it, picked it up, investigated—did Marx read poetry? Did he like poets? Certainly, it appeared to Ananda that, in England now, the rich had suddenly become richer—but he could be wrong; he was no good at economics; his sights were set on the Olympian, the Parnassian: especially getting published in Poetry Review. He had a notion that the poor were becoming poorer, though he didn’t connect this with the pit closures. His uncle had been made redundant. Serves him right. Poor man. But, if you thought about it, there was money about and people were celebrating it, the pubs in central London near his studio flat looked less despondent and ruffianly, they’d become smarter, even the curry as a consequence of this new financial self-confidence was in ascendancy, not the old spicy beef curry and rice he’d tasted first when he’d visited London as a child, nor even the homemade Indian food that left smells in hallways which white-skinned neighbours complained of, but a smart new acceptable curry, integer of the city’s recent commercial success and boom. Even before he’d journeyed to England this time, to start out as a student, he’d heard that money was flowing in from North Sea Oil. Lucky bastards. Lucky for Thatcher—like a gift to her from Poseidon, or whoever the appropriate god was (he was poor in Greek mythology). Poseidon had also given her a hand at the Falklands, a war the British should have lost if only because they were British—he was angry about that. Lucky island, with more than its fair share of windfalls, rewards, and fortune. In his own land, all three million square kilometres of it, they’d dug and drilled but couldn’t find a single vein of oil there, nor in the oceans surrounding its deceptively plump finger-like promontory from which Sri Lanka seemed to trickle off like a drop of water. This happy breed of men, this little world. This precious stone set in the silver sea. They were doing all right.
He didn’t feel prosperous. That’s because he wasn’t. His father was going bankrupt paying for this studio flat—and for his tuition fees, which (since he was an Indian) were a few thousand pounds while domestic students paid nothing. Thatcher was responsible; but he bore her no personal ill-will—he was willing to overlook some of her shortcomings for being so integral to the great British show. When he marvelled at her emphatic delivery, sitting in front of the TV, it was her performance he was concerned with and not her words—nor did he connect her directly with the murderous fees his father was paying.
Carrying more than 500 dollars when you were abroad violated FERA regulations; so his father had devised the following method around them. Ananda’s uncle disbursed monthly largesse among relatives living in Shillong and Calcutta—mainly in Shillong, with straggly families displaced during Partition—the principal sum going to an older brother. This made Radhesh (his uncle) feel kingly, and succumb to the tribulations of being a king on whom many were dependent. He could never forget the irony that the family—including this older brother—had dealt with him in his childhood largely with remonstrances, seen him as a bit of a loafer, and that he, buoyed up by the British pound (even though he’d recently been made redundant), was now helping them. “The reason I didn’t marry,” he claimed in one of his monologues, “was because I”—he patted his frail chest lightly—“wanted to be there for my family.” That’s not entirely true. You are, and always have been, afraid of women. Now Ananda’s father made all those payments to those remote towns in the hills; the equivalent amount was transferred monthly from Ananda’s uncle’s National Westminster account to Ananda’s. In this manner, FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulations Act) was subverted but not exactly flouted, and Ananda’s low-key, apparently purposeless education was made possible. It was an arrangement that both satisfied and exacerbated his uncle. His aristocratic urge to preside and dispense—trapped within his slight five-foot-eight-inch frame—was appeased, but his precious need for privacy (he was a bachelor, after all) was compromised.
Because of the paucity of money at any given time (though Ananda didn’t consciously think himself poor; he’d been born into comfort, and, since affluence is a state of mind, he possessed a primal sense of being well-off), Ananda had to ration his recurrent expenditure on lunch, dinner, books, and pornographic magazines. The last comprised all he knew at this moment of coitus. They were a let-down. He anyway suffered from a suspicion that the women were only pretending to enjoy sex, and this consciousness was a wedge between him and his own enjoyment. He required pornography to be a communal joy, shared equally between photographer, participant, and masturbator. But his suspicion was reinforced by Thatcher’s repression of the hardcore. The men’s penises, if you glimpsed them, were limp. There was hardly anything more innately biological and morosely unsightly than a limp penis. Meanwhile, the women’s mouths were open as they lay back in their artificial rapture. Nevertheless, he pursued his climax doggedly and came on the bedsheet.
Last night, he’d brought home the first of his two customary Chinese dinner options—mixed fried rice and Singapore noodles—from the restaurant on Euston Road. The other side of that road was so still and dark (notwithstanding the sabre-like hiss of passing cars) that it might have been the sea out there for all he knew. By day, an unfriendly glass-fronted building reflected the rays of the English sun; neighbouring it was a post office. Whenever he was in the Chinese restaurant for his fried rice or Singapore noodles in the evening, it was as if these were a figment of his imaginings—until he’d seen them both the next day when he crossed the road to Euston Square. The restaurant last night had been almost empty, and the staff were as distant as ever and didn’t let on that they were familiar by now with him and his order (both the Singapore rice noodles and the fried rice were one pound fifty) and with his timorous aloneness. They hardly made any attempt at conversation; presumably because their vocabulary was so austerely functional. England and its tongue refused to rub off on the staff of London’s Chinese restaurants, Ananda had noticed; they continued to be defined by a dour but virginal Chineseness. Their taciturn nature was a kind of solace. Thus, silence characterised the time of waiting during which a man rushed ingredients into a wok, producing a hiss and a piercing galvanising aroma that Ananda relished as he ate in solitude, watching Question Time.
The small amount of money in his wallet meant he had to choose from an exceptionally narrow range of orders; but he didn’t mind, because he mostly lacked appetite. The walk from Warren Street to the unexpected moonscape of Euston Road and back again, by when the Patels were stirring in expectation of the night, was so full of loneliness that it couldn’t even be softened by self-pity. During the day, he sometimes forgot lunchtime, delaying eating since it was a boring duty, as sleeping and occasionally waking were. What exactly should I do today? It’s going to be my final year; the hunger came and then passed, it had disappeared even from his memory, he saw it was an entirely dispensable thing he could cast aside with impunity if he ignored its birth pangs, and at half past three he bit into a green apple. For this reason, he’d grown—to his own abetting approval—very thin (poets were seldom plump) and more and more reliant upon Double Action Rennie, the acidity habitually returning to him at night-time with its stabbing pain. Still, none of these compared, in their undermining, of the stripping of his identity itself. None of the things that defined him—that he was a modern Bengali and Indian, with a cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature; that he wrote in English, and had spoken it much of his life; that he used to be served lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack as a child; that in his early teenage years he’d subsisted on a diet of Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner; that he’d developed a taste for corduroys over jeans recently—almost none of this counted for anything in London, since everyone here spoke English, ate sandwiches, wore jeans or corduroys. In this way, his identity had been taken away from him; and he’d become conscious, in England, of class. Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures—it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent—class was too.
A sunny day! Again! One end of his white kurta fluttered in the mild breeze that was coming through the crack he’d created by pushing up the window. Almost directly opposite was Tandoor Mahal, with its unprepossessing plastic sign. Its day had begun too, though its real day would start at half past twelve, when the board on the door would be flipped on its back to say Open. He looked at it. Sunlit, like all else in the world. Lace curtains drawn, cheap red curtains tied on the sides with a sash, the menu card showing.
Traffic into the restaurant began before it opened; the owner’s two daughters, the older one in her teens, quite pretty but a bit bent, wearing jeans, the younger brother, who must be nine or ten—they’d either linger on the pavement or walk (the older one leading) towards the underground. At random moments of their choosing, the family went in and out of the restaurant, as if it were an annexe to their house: they lived next door. The children didn’t know Ananda; but he knew their father, the round-faced man with big expressive eyes—like Vivekananda’s, but sans the penetrating quality—that contained love and life in their gaze; hope, too, since it was possible that business might suddenly pick up. As behoves an owner, he was at all hours of the day in a suit, except he forgot his jacket half the time and so it was the white shirt and grey trousers you mainly saw him in. The principal traffic into the restaurant, it had become clear, comprised the family—though Ananda had never seen the wife—stepping out of the house next door and stepping into Tandoor Mahal. There were very few customers who were tempted to enter the door from Warren Street; there had to be a few who walked in through the Euston Road entrance.
If the place had at least rustled up a decent tandoori chicken, Ananda might have ordered a half chicken and naan sometimes as a takeaway and come back home with it in half a minute rather than rely repeatedly on Chinese mixed fried rice or go to Walia’s Diwan-i-Aam for an Indian takeout. He quite liked the scoured and singed flesh of tandoori chicken; his eyes feasted on the red lacquering. But the Tandoor Mahal bird was less than ordinary. He’d gone in there earlier this year with his uncle. By then, the oozing proprietor was somehow aware they were of Sylheti ancestry, and addressed his uncle in that tongue, “Aain, aain,” a dialect his uncle abhorred—almost embracing them in his eagerness. Then, in this familial vein, he’d given them, as fellow Sylhetis, reluctant though they were, a tour of the kitchen in the basement, where the cook’s helper, unmotivated and unhurried, was frying poppadum in a pan of frothy, orange oil. It was early evening, they were the only customers, and Ananda’s uncle and he were pampered like honoured guests. Sylhetis behaved thus—these people, who’d single-handedly re-created this menu, this cuisine, and invented these restaurants—they distributed nourishment to the English in general (tandoori tikka masala, tarka daal, vindaloo, poppadums), but to long-sundered kin from their own land (that is, to Hindus) they extended a hand of familiarity and kindness. In their own land, Ananda’s uncle and the proprietor Alam’s kind had been as strangers are; then they’d contested the referendum, and his uncle, his parents, and their ilk had found themselves outnumbered and had to depart their homes altogether. But here, in these restaurants, that bitterness was forgotten, and the Sylhetis unfailingly gave them—once they discovered his uncle hailed from Bejura in Habiganj district—a chicken jhalfrezi on the house, or unobtrusively omitted the gulab jamun from the bill. Often there’d be an extra mint chocolate on the platter. The old wars were set aside; there was only compassion, transmuted from memory. The Sylhetis were great samaritans—especially to a displaced member of the race who was now without a real home in London; or so Ananda felt, instinctively, in the interiors of these restaurants. Still, the slivers of onion, the popaddum and mango chutney, the chicken tikka that Mr. Alam had served them had—it was undeniable—a stale aftertaste; his uncle and he made the extra effort as they lied to Mr. Alam about the food, but that was their last visit.
He loved light—London had taught him this fact. University had taught him little in comparison; his main education in England was imparted by the day itself, his phases of awkwardness and happiness in its fourteen or fifteen hours, and, as a result, the realisation that he adored light—and sound. And by sound it was the street he meant, flowing inside in a shallow current through the crack beneath the raised windowpane. Not the muffled bassline that could be heard from upstairs at midnight, or the Patels’ abrupt forays into what must be the kitchen or the bathroom, or even Mandy playing the radio below: he didn’t like interiority, or neighbours, they were too close, like the thoughts in his head. Indeed, his uncle had said to him recently when he was complaining again about the Patels: “The noise is in your head. Stop thinking about it.” Yes, that was it: it was thought, self-consciousness, and concentration he hated, because they brought him back to himself, just as the sounds above did; it was his consciousness, himself, he was often keeping a reluctant vigil for. The silence in the studio flat when the window was down, the silence of the library or when he was at home reading, the lecturer’s voice in a hall, they all did the same thing too: emphasised the leaden permanence of that proximity—the proximity of this shadowy, indestructible thing, the self. He’d become fully aware of its constant nearness in England. He was married to his consciousness forever and ever. He wanted to escape, to slip away from the “I” surreptitiously, leaving it behind somewhere. And only the street with its sounds and manifold associations, filtering in through the raised window on a summer’s day—when but on a summer’s day could you raise a pane?—scattered and dispelled his vigil, distracting him.