There were no lights on in either Mandy’s flat or the Patels’. Ananda’s own second-floor windows reflected the sun. Eyes lowered, the neighbours hanging, in a manner of speaking, over his head, Ananda unlocked the door. The morning’s clutter had shrunk. They went up, making an extroverted thumping sound. As Ananda attained the first-floor landing, Mandy’s door opened and shut again. Maybe she’d wanted to pounce on him about his morning practice and changed her mind. Hold on—she wasn’t home. Only the budgies, stoic and immobile. His uncle was humming away in his train—soft, deep voice.

—

Once inside, he went to a window and lifted it further up. The oncoming night was festive and menacing. But it was a moot point whether Tandoor Mahal—the fairy lights around its menu glowing—would get customers. It had to. It was Friday. The inside of the flat was in shadow. When he pressed the switch, cushions sprang out of the dark.

“Pupu.” His uncle dangled the Budgens bag. “Keep these in the kitchen.”

“You sure you won’t take them home?” asked Ananda hopefully.

“O no no no!” his uncle said, entirely resolved. “I’d never eat them.” Yes, he would finish them, probably single-handed, but only in company; here. Ananda could imagine him dithering over a laddoo in 24 Belsize Park. Laddoos were not, ordinarily, consumed in solitude.

“Keep the bag,” added his uncle.

“You won’t need it?”

“O, these bags!” He shrugged, as if it possessed no value. “I have hundreds.” A treasure trove.

—

In the kitchen, he noticed the smell of his mother’s cooking. The kitchen was still but for the fridge’s neutral throbbing. A secret place.

Returning to the room, he saw his uncle crouching over last year’s books on shelves Ananda and his mother had brought home from Habitat—books whose alienness he’d had to understand and tame and which he was now liberated from. His uncle was examining Piers Plowman.

“I haven’t heard of this Langland,” he said. “The English poets we knew of were Milton and Shelley…Shelley was the greatest Romantic kobi, wasn’t he?” Solemnly he intoned: “ ‘Let pity clip thy wings before you go.’ ”

“Langland is from much further back.”

“Yes, this doesn’t even read like what you and I would take to be English,” said his uncle, frowning and scrutinising the page. “Too intellectual. Maybe a bit above my head…” he said with sly self-deprecation.

“Langland wasn’t an intellectual, Rangamama,” said Ananda, bristling. “At least, I don’t think so. To tell you the truth, very little’s known about him.”

His uncle lowered himself on to a chair by the dining table. He still hadn’t taken off his pinstripe jacket.

“What are you reading? I hope you have a decent horror novel at hand?”

“Yes, it’s not bad,” replied his uncle casually, placing his right leg on the left knee. “Also, I’m rereading Debojan. Wonderful book! Have you heard of it?” How could Ananda have not? It was a sacred text to his uncle; every other conversation was punctuated by a reference to it. “It’s by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. You know Bibhutibhushan, of course?” About Bengali literature, his uncle presumed a scandalous ignorance on Ananda’s part. Ananda was from a breed on a new planet, impossibly removed from the world that had formed his own parents. That old Bengal that his uncle had left behind, and which was gone forever…Ananda in fact knew Bibhutibhushan, who’d written Pather Panchali—an unprepossessing man, but a great cherisher and noticer of the everyday, the mundane; he’d had no clue earlier that there was another side to him, which was drawn to the transmigratory.

“What’s the book about?” said Ananda, though he’d had pretty intricate accounts before from his uncle.

His uncle was happy to take up the theme again.

“It’s highly interesting,” he said, with the air of an anthropologist. “For instance, he describes the astral plane.”

“What’s that exactly?”

“It’s a plane much like the one we live on, but where you experience things more intensely. Even a beautiful summer’s day like today would be so much more vivid on the astral plane.”

“I see.” Ananda weighed the remark, and tried to conceive how this day’s beauty might increase. “In what way?”

“Things…tremble on the astral plane.”

He vibrated one hand, like a man who’d been administered a jolt of electricity.

“It’s mainly about life after death,” he said, moving on rapidly, unrestrainably. “The soul journeying through the stars and the cosmos. All sorts of extraordinary things happen on that journey! At a certain point, it can hear the screaming of the souls of various animals that have been slaughtered for our consumption.”

Ananda nodded—as if he could almost hear the dreadful din himself.

“Do you know,” said his uncle, untying his shoelaces, “that when a man dies he often doesn’t know what’s happened? It’s described in Debojan. A man suddenly falls dead on the street, say, or is hit by a car. The body’s taken away in an ambulance. But the soul doesn’t realise what’s going on. So the man gets up, goes home as usual.” Painfully, he wrested a sneaker off. “Everything’s as it was. A while later, he notices his wife and children are weeping. He thinks: What’s wrong? He goes to them. But they continue to mourn; they don’t seem to notice him. It’s at that point that an already dead person might come to him and break the news—and guide him to the other world. He’d be reluctant to go, of course; he might have a daughter to marry, a debt to pay. It’s hard to pull away.”

Both sneakers had come off.

“Who would this already-dead person be?” asked Ananda—witnessing, in his head, the disconsolate progression of events.

“Oh it could be anyone. But someone who knows the dead person. Maybe a friend. Or it might be a relation.”

Ananda was soothed by this. He’d never much cared for the conception of the afterlife. Even misery in Warren Street was more congenial to him than any possible idea of paradise. But the thought of being reunited with a known figure who’d keep you company, after your death, on your journey to the hereafter spoke to everything in him that, ever since he could recall, was groping its way through this world.

“Would you be scared if you saw such a—saw someone of that kind?”

“Of course I would!” said his uncle, histrionically enlarging his eyeballs. He scratched his ankle, making a rasping sound. “I don’t want to see a ghost!”

“If it were someone you knew?”

“Even if it were my mother, my dear friend,” he said, absolving himself of being the type that rejoiced upon seeing a phantom. “I would be—I’d be terrified!”

“Mm,” said Ananda. He switched on the TV and was greeted by a gale of uproarious laughter. Terry and June were in bed, confabulating.

“I had a dream once,” said his uncle, oblivious to the mirth, which had as suddenly subsided. “You know that when our father died, we three younger ones—Dukhu, your ma Khuku, and I—were reigned over by the three older siblings who had forceful personalities: Chhorda, Sejda, and Didi. Our mother protected and looked over us all, but she had no real influence over us. Mejda was too dreamy. It was these three who controlled us: the committee.” He pursed his lips at the memory of their authority. “Then Sejda—who sang Tagore songs more beautifully than anyone else I’ve heard—died at the age of thirty.” He looked at Ananda; Ananda looked back at him, experiencing a sorrow that was distant, yet curiously personal. Ananda had never seen this uncle; he remained forever youthful in these stories; forever in Sylhet in undivided British India. “We were all completely shattered. Others cried; I grew very quiet. We knew he had a bad heart, but he was so versatile—he baked wonderful cakes, and played the harmonium magnificently (no one taught him, don’t know how he picked it up)—that we never expected it to happen.” Further merriment: Terry had emerged awkwardly from bed and was wearing his trousers. “Two days later, I had a dream. Sejda had just got back home with a group of English officers he was friendly with. He was sitting in the drawing room—they were talking and laughing loudly. Then Chhorda called me aside and said, ‘Doesn’t he know he can’t do that? Why is he sitting over there? Go and tell him he’s dead!’ ” Rangamama sighed. “He gave me that chore—to go and break the news.”

Chhorda, the brother for whom he sent a monthly cheque to Shillong.

“You should read the book,” he said semi-urgently, as if it wasn’t too late. “Can you read Bengali?”

“A little,” Ananda confessed.

“It’s known everywhere. In China they call it Deb-chan.” He spat out the syllables. “Deb-chan!” he said again, almost making an authentic Chinese sound.

“Rangamama!”

His uncle looked up.

“What are you doing?”

He’d drawn blood. He’d rolled down one sock, and, while endorsing Bibhutibhushan’s tale, was mauling an itch.

“Sorry.” A bit sheepish. “These feet get no air.”

He brushed off the dead skin. “Do you have the Betnovate C?” he asked, with the incisiveness of a connoisseur.

Ananda’s mother had carried two tubes with her for her brother and his longstanding complaint and left them at Warren Street.

Ananda groped among objects on the top shelf of the cupboard adjoining the bed.

There was a sound like a thunderclap. Then a drumbeat of footsteps that gathered and grew till there was a bustling transit right past Ananda’s flat. After two or three seconds, there was emphatic footfall upstairs.

“Here,” said Ananda, handing over a small green tube.

His uncle squeezed and abstractedly daubed the cream on the raw, pink spot. Ananda couldn’t bear to look.

“Aren’t you hungry?” asked his uncle, massaging the ankle. “I could eat a horse!”

—

“Why don’t we eat at the Indian YMCA? Their meals are superb…”

So that’s why they were heading for Fitzroy Square! Ananda was resistant to the large breast of chicken in the red YMCA curry, along with sides of daal and vegetables (stubs of beans and carrots) and the heap of white rice. He wanted pilau rice. And maybe the reliable quick fixes, lamb bhuna or chicken tikka masala.

“No, Rangamama. Not the YMCA.”

“Why not?” Genuine disbelief at this jettisoning. “The chicken curry is mouth-watering!”

Not egregious, maybe, but certainly not “mouth-watering.” And Ananda didn’t take to the canteen ethos, irrepressible men in tight suits and wives in salwar kameez congregated in solidarity in tables of six. Oh, he’d forgotten the ice cream: gratifying bonus. Non-veg was just two pounds fifty a head.

“No,” he said.

Fitzroy Square: the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Redolent this time of year. Again, Ananda thought of his mother, her omniscient chatter, her crusades. His uncle and he felt incomplete without her. Why did he miss her? Was it what Sunjay (finalist at LSE, staying upstairs before the Patels came along) had said: “The reason you want your mother here is because she cooks you nice meals.” How far he’d been from the truth! “Of course not,” he’d replied at once, but had been unable to explain what her proximity denoted—because it was a recent, and astonishing, discovery for him too. He hadn’t been aware of his mother as a separate being when he was a child.

The moon was up, but a deeper layer of the sky—under its skin—glowed with the remnants of sunshine. You could hear shouting in the distance. It was best to be careful of revellers. All week, they’d have been set a punitive regime. They’d have curbed every impulse and desire. The shouts now were shouts of freedom. Drink enabled them to find their true voices. Tonight and tomorrow evening they’d wander about, seized by celebrations, hectoring you when they didn’t recognise you. Wisest to pretend you hadn’t noticed, and give them a long rope to hang themselves with.

“What about here?”

Ali’s Curry House.

They’d come full circle, almost. The corner of Whitfield and Grafton streets: on their right, Diwan-i-Khas, and, on the left, just by the Jamaican record shop (dark now), Ali’s. A venerable Pakistani gentleman in a traditional long jacket was pottering about behind troughs filled (hard to guess from when) with a morass of saag gosht, a dead pool of chicken curry, daal, and a bank of pilau rice by another basin discreetly crowded with florets of gobi.

“I’m not eating that.”

“Why? It looks marvellous!”

“The last occasion I ate their food—it was with you—I got a stomach upset.”

Mr. Ali—if that’s who the patient diminutive man was—smiled affectionately from within while presiding over the troughs.

“Well,” said his uncle, “the English say that Indian food is useful for a good purging.”

If you were reconciled to the curry being a laxative, you could even view it as a variety of health food. Ananda didn’t want to dwell on the merits of this argument. They walked a bit further up.

Finally, they relented and entered the restaurant almost next to Walia’s, the Gurkha Tandoori. Why it was so called they were uninterested in—nevertheless, the name (and the red wallpaper in the hallway) set up expectations of proud and outdated martial codes.

The restaurant was secreted away in the basement. The moment they’d descended, a waiter greeted them with a “Table for two?” in a Sylheti accent. Careless with the “b,” pushing table close to te-vul. Ananda felt he was near home. Not home in Bombay: his parents didn’t speak Sylheti in that large-hearted peasant way; their accent was slightly gentrified. Not Warren Street of course. Not Sylhet, either—he’d never been there and didn’t particularly regret it. Maybe some notion of Sylhet imparted to him inadvertently by his parents and relations—as an emblem of the perennially recognisable…And the perennially comic. Sylhet, and Sylheti, made everybody in his family laugh with joy.

“Yes, please,” said Ananda sombrely.

The waiter said, “Follow me, please!” and promptly commandeered the way.

He seated them not too far from a table of thirteen or fourteen people. A vocal, exultant group. Someone would make a remark, another add their bit, and laughter would spread from one end of the table to the other. A few, by turns convulsed by gaiety and introspective, bit into poppadums; some jabbed shards of poppadum into mango chutney. They are so happy, thought Ananda. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s their country after all. What they do and how they behave is law. Then: But are they happy? Sometimes their laughter’s like an assault on the surroundings. It’s a form of aggression. His uncle was examining the menu with a faux pedantic air. It was more a performance of menu-reading—he’d leave the actual ordering to Ananda. Ha ha ha ha ha. They do like a weekly Indian meal, don’t they?

“Sir.”

The dapper waiter.

“Would you like to order?” Now embracing the cockney style. Oh-dah. Chameleon.

“Uh yes, thank you.” Ananda turned to his uncle. “What do you think?”

“Oh let the young man here do the honours. Right?” said his uncle to the Sylheti. “The young should lead the way!”

The waiter chortled.

“Chicken jhalfrezi?” said Ananda, letting the question hang.

“Jhalfrezi!” said his uncle, with the exaggerated enthusiasm of one who has no clue what his interlocutor’s proposing. It was the same principle—over-compensation—that fuelled righteous indignation. “Mouth-watering!” He’d involuntarily checked the price, and was much enlivened that it wasn’t one of the expensive dishes.

“Would you like it hot or less hot?” the waiter asked. “It is very hot.” An oft-repeated caveat that he clearly relished. He sent forth a surreptitious glance, briefly on tenterhooks for their reply.

“Hot is fine,” said Ananda in a casual-grand way. The waiter nodded, and made a note.

“Daal?” Ananda said. Sooner or later you had to pronounce this word—you could not evade it.

“One tarka daal?” chimed in the waiter, pencil poised, accustomed to being two steps ahead of everyone. He barked the words like a command.

“Oh daal is a must, innit!” agreed Rangamama. He imported colloquialisms in company whenever he became intolerably expansive. Then, realising he was being a nuisance, but admitting to his ineluctable love of the potato, he said, needing the green signal from his nephew, “Pupu, can’t we have potatoes? What is life without potatoes?” Ananda had never been able to figure out his uncle’s supplication to the potato; but there was nothing insincere about the light in his eye. “Bombay potato?” his uncle said.

“Bombay alu?” asked the waiter in return.

“Please,” said Ananda. Be done with it.

“Would you like naan bread or pilau rice?”

“Pilau rice,” replied Ananda gravely—it was the inevitable choice. Driven by obscure racial characteristics handed down over millennia, Bengalis might flirt with bread but succumb, at the end of the day, to rice.

After issuing a cheery “Thank you!” about to race off like a man whose real job was about to begin, the waiter checked himself: “Would you like some poppadums?” Ananda and his uncle contemplated each other; Ananda was no great fan of the poppadum, but it was graceless to admit this. “Not really, don’t think so.”

The waiter hurried away. In the meanwhile, trolleys of food had been navigated towards the boisterous table nearby.

“Wonder if it’s a birthday party?” said Ananda, glancing at the multiple vessels of curry and the effervescent grilled platters. “Quite a banquet. I wish they wouldn’t make such a racket!”

“Oh they’re all right!” His uncle made it a point to be magnanimous when Ananda was carping. In retaliation, Ananda plotted to be equable or indifferent when his uncle carped, but forgot each time to execute the plan. “They’re just living it up a bit!” Living it up! Clichés that his uncle plucked from the air according to his mood.

“I can’t stand the English—especially when they’re being sociable,” whispered Ananda.

Two small men were holding pans above blonde and brownhaired heads that almost came up to their shoulders.

“Oh they’re human too!” his uncle said with some conviction. “And,” here he very sadly expressed a historical truth that he knew might wind Ananda up, “they do belong to what used to be the ‘master race.’ ” At other times, when it suited him, he’d argue otherwise, saying that Europeans, with their blue eyes that were discomfited by the sun and their rapacious history, were suspiciously “different.” “By the way, English women can be very kind—much kinder than Bengali women.”

“They may be kind,” said Ananda. Neither Hilary Burton nor the Anglo-Saxon teacher had struck him as particularly kind. He’d sensed a sweetness in one or two of the girls in college he’d never had the time or will to talk to—mooning as he fruitlessly was over his cousin. “But for some reason the English emanate unpleasantness in groups. You see a bunch of Englishmen talking loudly on the tube and you feel uncomfortable—even threatened. If it’s some loud Italians, you don’t really notice them.”

“That’s to do with drink,” said his uncle. “There’s an unwritten law in this land that you can’t criticise drinking. All the propaganda—the surgeon-general’s health warning etcetera—is about smoking.” He spoke bitterly. When Ananda first met him, he’d smoke serially, with little self-consciousness or sense of apology. Then, despite his defiance of the dark anti-smoking conspiracy, the “propaganda” must have got to him, because he’d defected to Silk Cut, which was low-tar. His smoking was petering out. Today, despite the stub floating in the toilet in Belsize Park, Ananda hadn’t actually seen him smoke a cigarette. “They keep saying smoking kills you. It’s a lie. What they won’t say is that drinking is far more lethal than smoking—and it changes the personality too.”

In response, a cheer went up at the big table. His uncle, distracted by the mood, clapped his hands in glee. Someone glanced back for a second.

“What are you doing?” asked Ananda.

“Just joining in,” said his uncle. “Everyone’s feeling jolly.”

Ananda shook his head in reproach at this disloyalty.

“It’s certainly not Christmas,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s birthday either—or they’d have been singing by now.”

In fact, they were soon quieter, making a hubbub as they ate.

The waiter appeared with a plate of poppadums. Poppadum after poppadum had floated down, settling on top of each other, making a low tower. “On the house!” he said.

Ananda felt an onrush of emotion. “Thank you!” He was tempted to communicate—to share their common ancestry. But he held back. Maybe the waiter had guessed, or had some half-formed inkling? He was no fool.

“My birthday,” his uncle snapped a bit of the poppadum off (the conversation had to veer round at some point to the enduring theme: himself), “falls on a particularly unlucky day.”

“Thirteenth June?” Ananda recalled it well. Last month, his mother had stood before the cooker and, over an hour, reduced a pan of milk to produce rice payesh for her “dada”—a delicate thing, almost unbearably sweet, such as both she and his uncle preferred. But he’d orchestrated a terrible quarrel on the phone—punishing her for her old and recent transgressions, including the mistake she’d made in confiding in Basanta in Pinner, and possibly for even having the temerity to marry Satish at all. Those deeds couldn’t be undone. But it was his birthday. She’d transferred some of the payesh to a bowl, covered it with a saucer, tied the whole makeshift arrangement with a cloth, and, to Ananda’s chagrin, carried it via the tube and road to Belsize Park. “He’s a vagabond,” she’d soothed Ananda. “You can’t take his rages seriously.”

“Not just 13th June!” said his uncle in a pained hypochondriac’s tone. “Friday the 13th. My birthday. The unluckiest day of the year.” A shout was released from the other table as someone made a little speech.

“What’s wrong with thirteen?” asked Ananda. “Baba always says thirteen is his lucky number. You know his roll number was thirteen when he appeared for his Chartered Accountancy exams. And he passed!”

His father: a foil to his wife and his best friend. Tranquil and moored.

“Your father!” His uncle shook his head fondly.

Coming out of nowhere, the waiter shouted: “Tarka daal!” What joy! The evening’s climax! Nothing—not even the eating—could match the festive instant of the order materialising. “One pilau rice!” Retrieving more from the trolley, he continued: “One jhalfrezi! One Bombay alu!” A pause. “All right?”

“My goodness, this is fit for a king!”

“Khub bhalo,” said Ananda. “Dhanyabad.”

The waiter seemed not to hear the Bengali words—he stood beside the table, congenial and undecided.

“Apnar naam?” asked Ananda.

“Iqbal,” said the man, a bit guarded.

“Wonderful name! A very famous poet—Iqbal!” said his uncle. He then emptied half the platter of the pilau rice on to his plate—red, white, and yellow grains, perfumed with cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom, a few possibly stiffened by the microwave’s heat. “Pupu, have some!” He must be starving—Ananda had heard his stomach bubbling—but he was serving himself with considerable discipline. He wouldn’t start until he’d cajoled Ananda into having an inaugural mouthful.

“Some jhalfrezi?” Iqbal said. He’d picked up a serving dish with alacrity.

“We Bengalis,” said his uncle in standard Calcutta Bangla, “eat course by course—I have no idea why. I like mixing things up. Pupu, what are you doing, have some Bombay alu!”

In prelapsarian undivided Bengal, as his uncle had once revealed wryly to Ananda, the Bengali Hindus were called “Bengalis,” the Bengali Muslims just “Muslims.”

Iqbal was vaguely nonplussed.

“Are you gentlemen from Calcutta?” he asked politely.

“I’m from India,” said Ananda. “But my parents were from Sylhet. This is my uncle—he was born in Sylhet.”

He lifted up a spoonful: the daal was incredible—a ghee and garlic-infused ambrosia.

Iqbal studied Ananda’s uncle, who appeared to be rotating the food in his mouth in dilatory contentment.

“Which part of Sylhet are you from?” He’d switched to Sylheti—always charming to hear: this fluent, rapid, and intimate tongue.

“Habiganja,” replied his uncle serenely, having just swallowed. “We grew up in Sylhet town—in Puran Lane when we were small, then mostly in Lamabajar.” Being a Tagorean, he refused to answer him in the rustic tongue of his childhood, but addressed him in a slightly affected Bengali, trying (as usual) to disguise the East Bengali inflection he’d never be rid of. Gesturing to Ananda, he volunteered grandly: “My sister’s son. Can you tell?”

“Habiganja!” said Iqbal, not attending to this last query. “I know Habiganja…and Lamabajar!” He smiled reminiscently.

“Who are they?” asked Ananda, with a conspiratorial tipping of his head towards the table of fourteen. “Sounds like they’re celebrating tonight.”

“Oh them!” said Iqbal. He kept his eyes off the table. “Those kind of people come every Friday night for ‘curry.’ ” He used the word fastidiously, as a pejorative. “They drink too much.” He spoke with patrician distaste while dispassionately spectating on Ananda and his uncle eating.

—

When it came to the tip, Ananda felt duty-bound to curtail his uncle. For his uncle had an incurable tipping problem. The trouble was, his uncle acted in consultation. “Three pounds?” “That’s crazy,” said Ananda. With the gulab jamun that was their final excess (his uncle had asked Iqbal to heat his up, and, after masticating the pincushion-like sweet whole, had tippled the syrup from the chalice), the bill had come to ten pounds thirty. “That’s almost thirty per cent.” “It’s a generous tip.” “I know you’re rich,” said Ananda, “but you shouldn’t distribute your bounty indiscriminately.” His uncle frowned, paralysed, a wad of notes in his hand. (He didn’t deny he was wealthy.) Scrutinising the bill, they found the total smaller than it should have been as Bombay Potato had inexplicably been omitted. They beckoned to the waiter. “There’s been a mistake,” said Ananda. The other waved one hand in dismissal of an imaginary trifle. “Bombay Potato is on the house.”

—

Stomachs heavy, they walked down Whitfield Street. Confronting, in a few minutes, the building on Warren Street, Ananda studied it as if it were a dark castle. No lights on the first, second, and top floors. They stepped in. Almost at once, a rumbling sound. The Patels were hurtling down the stairs. A brief arrest as they saw each other. Ananda continued up the stairs, but his uncle, hamming it up, said: “Vivek! How are you? And this handsome young man is your brother, isn’t he?” As Ananda entered the flat, he heard laughter. The words, “I’m a black Englishman,” seemed to float eerily up the staircase.

—

By the time his uncle came in, Ananda was cross-legged on the sofa, grinning at Rising Damp. He didn’t care when the Patels and Mandy would make their entrance again. His spirits were high. Poetry, at this moment, couldn’t do the job (not Edward Thomas, not Larkin) that Leonard Rossiter was doing so expertly, exuding an obtuse grandeur.

Standing before him, marginally blocking his view, his uncle said: “Could you change the channel? There’s too much laughter on television. People are dying in various parts of the world, but in this culture you have to have something to laugh at.” He narrowed his eyes, awaiting a rebuke for his sermon.

But there were more squeals as Leonard Rossiter, updating the African tenant Don Warrington on English etiquette, stole a glimpse of Frances de la Tour’s cleavage.

With admirable self-control, Ananda, eyes on the small lit screen, said: “It’s hilarious, Rangamama. You may enjoy it.”

His uncle looked pained and at sea.

“But I prefer tragedy to comedy, Pupu.”

By “tragedy” his uncle meant B-grade action movies—that is, a narrative with dead bodies. Comedy alienated him because he neither followed jokes nor had the patience to stay with them till the punchline. He was terribly inattentive. His consciousness was too fluid to have a grasp on a story from start to end. How he’d shone at exams was a mystery. In action films, too, he had no time for plot and was placated as long as periodic killings occurred. The last action film he’d fully comprehended and cogitated on was probably High Noon. Given the story wasn’t the point, he could plunge into an adventure at any juncture—even midway through a movie. The occasional calamity kept him quiet.

“Or you could check if they’re showing wildlife! We could be missing the tiger, Pupu!”

This was a recurrent addiction—to gawp awestruck the great beasts in Africa, while they lolled, napped, sunned themselves, blinked at distant cameras, then pursued and devoured the lesser and stupider animals.

“There are no wildlife programmes at this hour,” Ananda assured him. “Sit down.”

Reluctantly—as if he’d rather walk a few more miles—he descended on the sofa. He began to loosen his shoelaces. Let those ankles breathe. Reaching impatiently for the remote control—he was hopeless with devices, but now had the measure of this one—he pushed both himself and Ananda into a vortex of channel-changing. Finally, calming down, he laid the remote control on the sofa, and said:

“I’ve eaten too much.”

Tamely, in accidental concord, they’d come back to laughter and Rising Damp.

“Do you want a laddoo?” Ananda was under pressure to dispense with six uneaten ones.

His uncle gave him an eloquent stare.

“Are you mad? Do you want me to die tonight?”

Though lazy and recumbent for now, he’d be off to Belsize Park in twenty minutes. What an idiotic plan Ananda had had once—that they’d share that bedsit. Not because it was too small. But you couldn’t share any space with him: to live with his uncle would be to go mad. Or at least to be changed; or sidetracked permanently, indubitably, from a traditional idea of coexistence. No wonder God, in his mercy, had withheld a spouse from him.

“In fact, I’m going to put on weight as a result of that slap-up meal,” he complained. “Anyway, my cheeks have always been too fat and my face too round.” Ananda glanced quickly away from Frances de la Tour to confirm that his uncle was describing the person he knew. While it may not have met Rangamama’s standards of consumptive narrowness, the face wasn’t round at all; the cheeks weren’t full. Yet the baritone had a way of casting a spell which meant almost everything his uncle uttered sounded true and reasonable. Half the time you argued with him not to dispute him but to fend off becoming an accomplice to his vision. “Also, my nose becomes larger when I eat too much.” Just as Ananda prepared to debate the canonical European preference for starved, phalange-like noses, his uncle observed: “You know that a large nose is a sign of virility.”

“Is it?” Given that Ananda had grown up in the world essentially in the proximity of a mother who talked unstoppably, he was quite capable of following Rising Damp and engaging in a dialogue with his uncle simultaneously. As they slipped into a commercial break, he let himself relax and consider these questions. The nose and virility: he speculated on the kind of equation being made here. It was vaguely obvious. But what reliable knowledge would a virgin have of virility? Intriguingly, experience didn’t seem to matter so much when it came to Ananda’s uncle. He always sounded more experienced than he could possibly be. As if he had recourse to some other source of information outside reading, education, and life.

“Oh very much so. You know that Christ had a big nose?”

Not that Christ was particularly celebrated for his virility. Still, Ananda found this an arresting piece of information. He hadn’t known that there were actual likenesses available—which could have attested to the feature. The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.

“If you think Christ looked the way they show him in films,” said his uncle, gazing straight at Ananda, as if he’d caught him out indulging in exactly such an irresponsible misconception, “you’d be wrong. Christ wasn’t European: he was from the Middle East. It is said that he had a large prominent nose. The way you see him today is Western propaganda.”

He leaned back on the sofa, unarguable, his nose radiating a new power, looking like he was in no hurry to leave. The next moment he got up.

“Small job,” he clarified.

He shuffled off to the neighbouring bathroom.

A thunderclap. The Patels. Or was it Mandy? Back earlier than expected. Ananda steeled himself. Another bang—below him. Mandy. You had to feel for her, actually. Solitary homecomings. From Paul Hogan draining a can of lager in the outbacks—such were the images (caricatures of epic voyages) that flashed before you as the day drew to a close—Ananda looked behind him at Warren Street, the pale torches of the sodium vapour lamps that would keep him company through the troubled sleep to come.

Tandoor Mahal: bright and desolate. A lone jacketless man before it. Was it Mr. Alam?

His uncle returned to him with the fretful air of one who’d not only been pissing but deeply pondering.

“When Annada Shankar Ray came to Europe in 1931,” he said, “he predicted a time would come when everybody will be famous. Well-known people will rise as thick and fast as bubbles in the air.”

Ananda wondered whether this might be some kind of comment—a parting shot before his uncle made his way back—on the futility of Ananda’s unspoken but undeniable ambition. That Ananda, through no real fault of his own, had simply been born too late, when becoming a successful poet didn’t actually mean that much: not because success was less desirable now, but because everyone had a right to it today. This might explain the disbelieving feeling he had when he watched This Is Your Life or Cilla Black or Stars in Their Eyes.

“Shudrer yuga,” said his uncle, as if pronouncing a verdict, tucking in his shirt very slowly. “The final epoch, according to Vivekananda. The age of the shudra.”

Terrible word: doomed menial, untouchable. Fixed in servitude for eternity. Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra. The lowest of the low. His uncle had assumed each of these incarnations in the course of a single life: philosopher, warrior, merchant, beggar. Surely it wasn’t the actual shudra he was speaking of? For was the shudra anywhere near finding dignity and freedom? It seemed not. Then in what way the age of the shudra? Unless it was some allegory he meant…Of course—then it made sense, as an insane cosmogony. The caste system could serve as a metaphor for the epochs succeeding each other since the dawn of time. Ananda was momentarily happy to go along with the scheme. The first age, of Brahman, was (decided Ananda proudly) India’s—the Brahman not being the pusillanimous priest with the sacred thread, but the spiritual man, who could have any provenance whatsoever, emerge from any caste: the sage and renunciate. The second age, of the Kshatriya, the warriors and aristocrats, was Rome’s. The king and the notion of Empire was then supreme. It was the aristocrat who fostered and nurtured value and beauty and the arts. When the aristocracy went to seed the third age came into being, of the Vaishya—the merchant. You had to grant that epoch to the English: the ascendancy and rule of the shopkeeper, the burgher, who might possess an Empire but whose outlook was essentially humdrum, middle-level, and suburban. (Amazing how the allegory fell into place.) Finally, the last age: the shudra’s—in which the man on the street was illusorily empowered. (For power invariably deceives those it passes on to.) It was a toss-up whether—if you subscribed to the metaphor—the epoch belonged to Russia or America. It would seem America. For this would be the epoch nominally of the common man, but really of capitalism and popular culture. Everyone would be famous. And after this final phase (Ananda hoped it would take another century to truly arrive)—what?

“Pupu.”

Ananda looked up.

“It’s after eleven…I’d better head off before the tube closes.”

Yet another outing! Could he be sprightly, setting out now for Belsize Park? At least it was warm. Better than those chill nights on which he’d dutifully make his way homeward from his nephew. Ananda nodded, briefly and fiercely hating the peace and quiet that came at the end of everything. Mandy was very still, as if she were in hiding. Yet be grateful for the peace before the Patels are back again—and for this indecisive lull before his uncle declaims on a detail he’d forgotten about in his rush to depart. He was loitering: clearly not about to say goodbye just yet. Never say, “I’m leaving.” Always, “I’ll be seeing you.” “ ‘Jachhi’ bolte nei, Pupu, but ‘aschhi.’ ”

“So—do I see you on Monday then?” enquired Ananda of the hovering figure.