We arrive in the afternoon.
This hotel, which I grew to avoid as a teenager, then saw nearly destroyed, holds a key to my memories. It’s like ‘the house of our life’ that Benjamin mentions, with its ‘perverse antiquities’ – but not quite.
I collect three keys. They resemble old-fashioned keys, but the key-like bit is useless. It’s the key ring that has the chip to the door.
There’s an expectation, as you check in, that you might not go back – that you’re about to be subsumed. A man escorts us to the room. These are passages you’ve only guessed at. Briefly passing a balcony, I see the intricate circuit of stairs reaching down from the third floor, where the room is.
I stare at the man’s back as he taps key ring to lock.
There’s a little hall at first, with wardrobe and storage space on the left. The bathroom is on the right.
Then comes the habitable part of the room, the bank of the bed, the table, chairs, and television, the pale windows. The paleness is the sea; as I approach the window, I find the Gateway of India is at my left shoulder. Before me is the promenade, and water.
*
Ramu is a fifteen-minute walk away. I know he’s at a loose end. Waiting for my call. I don’t believe he’s busy. My only concern is whether he’s around – or gone. ‘We’re here,’ I say. ‘Ah, the prince of shaggers! Arrived from Calcutta, the intellectual capital!’ ‘What about you?’ I say. ‘Did I interrupt you while you were at it in the bathroom?’ ‘I’m still doing it,’ he says with that sad tremolo. ‘So when are you coming to the hotel?’ He becomes lugubrious. ‘You tell me. You should spend some time with your family, no?’ ‘No, no, they want to see you!’ For my wife, Ramu’s an inevitability. Or an anecdote from my childhood who’s become inescapable. For my daughter, he’s an atavistic apparition of whose meaning she’s not sure. She first set eyes on him as an infant. I can’t tell if she notices him – or any of us: she’s so busy with her phone. ‘Should I wait in the lobby?’ ‘Yeah, I don’t think they’ll let you up in the lift.’
In twenty minutes, there’s a knock. I don’t know how he managed to evade security. There he is, decently dressed, like a man on his way to the office.
Voices go high with hellos. He threatens my daughter, orders her to relinquish the phone. She grins at his forwardness.
‘What a room!’
The fact that it exists is chastening. We become silent. We’re at once watching and remembering.
‘Look at this window!’ I call him urgently.
‘Why? Is it blood-spattered?’
‘Just check out how old it is.’
I point to the neighbouring room. He ducks his head. The wood has lines where it could be riven, but is held together immovably. I last glimpsed such windows in Venice. Sometimes to look upon the old is not to discover the past: it is to see power.
