A Life Apart (21 page)

There is a sudden great influx of men at all hours, but especially during the evenings, in the ground floor offices and study. There are important meetings, some lasting
till very late at night; Miss Gilby can hear the murmur of departing voices and, sometimes, their coaches and traps, well after midnight. There are lots of heated, passionate exchanges, many of
them in English, but she hasn’t been able to pick out a telling word or phrase to gather the specific nature of these debates. Bimala tells Miss Gilby that it would be better if the lessons
were held in a different place, in Miss Gilby’s own study, or even in Bimala’s room in the
andarmahal
; the piano classes are best left to times when there are no visitors. When
Miss Gilby asks who these numerous visitors are, Bimala grows vague and then confesses that they are all involved in business with her husband. Miss Gilby suspects that Bimala either doesn’t
know the whole truth – for her answer has the ring of incompleteness to it – or she is hiding something from her. Miss Gilby doesn’t press her on this matter any further.

The men who attend these meetings all seem to Miss Gilby to belong to the
babu
class – English-educated, wealthy, perhaps even holding government positions. They are attired in
dhoti
and shawls, some carry canes. And where is the gentle Mr Roy Chowdhury in all this? She hasn’t seen him properly for over a week, and when she has (only briefly in passing
– they have exchanged polite greetings), the time hasn’t been right for her to ask him about the sudden spate of late night meetings conducted in his offices. And on those brief
occasions, he has had a troubled, preoccupied expression on his face, or has she just imagined it?

Afternoon Teas in the English style, complete with cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sponge, plum cake, scones, lead naturally to Bimala’s wish to make Miss Gilby a true lover and
connoisseuse of Bengali food. If truth be told, this has been Miss Gilby’s secret wish for a long time, not so much the emphasis on the food and kitchen aspects as on the unobvious corners of
another country that don’t reveal themselves unless one is taken by the hand and shown them by someone who lives and moves there with the ease of one born into them. Besides, the lessons with
Bimala have fallen so imperceptibly into such a natural pattern of reciprocity, the two women teaching each other things about their own cultures in such a beautiful and harmonious exchange, that
it would be inaccurate to call Miss Gilby tutor any longer. She started off as one but then shed that role to occupy more fully the other, companionate one. Could she have asked for any more? How
fortunate she was that the very thing she desired, this immersion into the intimate India, which hardly any one of her countrymen knew or showed an interest in knowing, how serendipitous that such
designs should be revealed to her. Maybe she will write a novel, a thinly disguised account of her days in this obscure corner of Bengal, and show her countrymen a true picture of this vast
country, which they governed but didn’t understand.

So today’s morning lesson on Floral Arrangement – not a lesson, really, but just a pleasant way for the two women to while away their time, gossiping about Bimala’s
jaa
s, the servants, Mr Roy Chowdhury’s MA years in Calcutta, Miss Gilby’s Club in Calcutta, Violet Cameron’s school, that infamous weekend at the Maharajah of
Mysore’s palace, while the flowers lie around as neglected decoration – has been cancelled in favour of a trip to the kitchen.

Miss Gilby has never actually cooked anything in a kitchen before: orders were given to servants and they carried them out. In India, this is one thing she has played by the rules. In the
morning, she summoned the cook, planned out the day’s menu, went into the pantry, measured out everything that was needed – if this duty was left to the servants, they stole from you
without batting an eyelid – reiterated the orders and instructions and left everything to the cooks and servants. Bimala, too, worked along similar lines: the cook came to her in the morning,
she specified what was to be prepared; another servant went to the market and bought fish, meat, groceries; she issued orders – informed the cook that the fish was going to be cooked in a
mustard sauce, that Mr Roy Chowdhury felt like lobster, that it was the season for pancakes – and the cook did her bidding. Only occasionally, as a special treat to her husband or a guest,
would she do the cooking herself.

This visit to a kitchen, and a true Bengali kitchen, not one in an Anglo-Indian household run by a
memsahib
and staffed by Indian servants, is going to be a novel experience for Miss
Gilby. She is not sure her heart is wholly in this business but it is Bimala’s wish and she is, all said and done, curious to know how a native woman runs her household and her servants. Do
the servants pull the wool over her eyes as well? Do they steal? Are they recalcitrant at times? Miss Gilby is eager to pick up any useful tips that might, in the future, enable her to get more
value from her servants, more peace of mind with them.

The servants have been warned weeks in advance of a visit by a
memsahib
to their domain. Bimala has asked them not to giggle, stare, or worry that the kitchen is going to be polluted
by the presence of a Christian. When Bimala and Miss Gilby enter the kitchen, the three women working inside immediately pull up their
aanchol
and cover their heads: the movement is so fast
and instinctive, it could be almost involuntary. They turn away, refusing to look, and stare at the stone floor, crushed by shyness. Bimala gives out orders in such rapid Bengali that Miss Gilby is
left searching for an isolated word or two whose meaning she might understand and thereby make some sense of what she has said.

Bimala turns to Miss Gilby. ‘We will make something special. A Bengali special food. You will see?’

‘Yes, of course, but what is it?’

‘You will see,’ Bimala repeats mysteriously. One of the women goes to a corner of the kitchen and carries a bucket to the centre. She pulls out a giant fish from it. It is still
thrashing, overpowering the woman in whose hands it cannot be contained. It slips out of her small hands and lands on the stone floor with a wet thud, flailing around in that dry, alien world,
starved of its own element. An excited chatter breaks out among the servants while Bimala, excited too, moves away a few feet from the beating fish and asks for someone to get hold of it. Two of
the servants come forward – one grasps the head, the other the tail – gabbling away constantly. The captured fish still convulses, struggling to get free. Bimala says to Miss Gilby,
‘This is
rui
, a favourite Bengali fish.’

The third servant gets out a
bonti
, an enormous sharp curved blade, like a broad, flattened question mark, attached to a wooden stand at right angles, and sets it down on the floor.
Bimala shouts out something; everybody is talking all at once, very loudly. The servant with the
bonti
grabs hold of the fish with difficulty – Bimala, standing well away from the
centre, shouts again, ‘Carefully, carefully’ – while another servant fetches her some ash with which she smears her hand while letting go of the fish momentarily, then catches it
firmly by its head and neck, leaving the torso and the tail to lash about vigorously all over again. Holding the
bonti
down with her right foot and the fish with both hands she sets its head
against the blade and with rapid sawing motions severs it from the rest of the body. A loud cheer goes up, there is blood on her hands and on the floor, Bimala says, ‘The head is for you,
Miss Gilby. It is our special dish.’ She turns around just in time to catch Miss Gilby falling in a faint.

H
e bumps into Sarah two days later in the main quad. They are both on their way to the library and stand around awkwardly for the brief pause of a
couple of pulse beats and say ‘hello’ to each other as if they have been set up by mutual friends at a party, both primed beforehand that they are going to be introduced to a potential
date. Then Sarah’s social sparkle gleams in into this unease; she starts talking, easily first, and then it builds up to a scatterfire, an excess of things and words that try to keep
something at bay with their dense shield.

‘. . . and there are times I think is it really worth it, this whole business of being made to hang on, and then he smiles at me in that way he has and my knees turn to jelly . .
.’

Ritwik has been so nervous about this encounter with Sarah that all he has looked for is a telling sign of their new knowledge but she is not going to give him any. Why, he wonders. Principle?
The rule of confidentiality and anonymity? He hasn’t paid the slightest attention to what she has been saying and suddenly it dawns on him that she is confiding in him about her long-standing
problems with Richard, her commitment-phobic boyfriend who has been stringing her along for nearly two years now. The whole college seemed to know about it; Sarah’s closest friends thought
she should end it immediately.

‘. . . sometimes aye, sometimes nay, I’m so confused, but Ritwik, you mustn’t think he’s bad or anything, it’s just that I’m his first important relationship
and these are all teething problems, they’ll settle down soonish, but sometimes I doubt whether he’s in love with me as much as I’m with him. And he’s so clever . .
.’

This gives Ritwik a hook. He grabs it. ‘What does he work on?’

‘He’s doing a DPhil on Wittgenstein. He’s very bright. He’s now thinking of applying to the US for post-doctoral stuff and I can’t help feeling that he’s just
trying to escape from me, you know, avoiding doing the dirty deed of dumping me and letting it happen the “long-distance relationship petering out” sort of way. God, it makes me so
angry sometimes, this cowardice . . .’

Ritwik cuts in, ‘Sarah, you might be misreading or misinterpreting. I don’t know Richard, so obviously I can’t say anything useful, and you know your situation best, but have
you thought that some people might be like that – noncommittal, hedging their bets all the time, leaving all doors open. It doesn’t mean they love any less.’

He is talking drivel now, platitudes of received wisdom, but it is the only way he can staunch Sarah’s flow. This flood of words, standing in the middle of the main quad, is the only way
they both have of acknowledging their knowledge. He is grateful to her for this torrent and now that he has launched himself into it as well, he knows there could have been no better way.

She smiles at his psychobabble, or it could have been a smile of complicity, receiving him into her strategy; from that moment on it becomes what it should have been from the very beginning
– an effortless conversation between two friends.

‘But Ritwik, what am
I
to do?’ she wails.

‘You have to make up your mind firmly about what you want, whether you want a man who’ll give you all that’s conventionally associated with being in love, whatever that means,
or someone with whom you’re able to negotiate something different.’ He gags internally at this shopworn counsellor-talk.
Where did I get all this into my head?

‘Yes, I know all that’ – she waves an impatient arm in dismissal – ‘but, but what if I’m not
happy
with negotiating? Why do we
need
to
negotiate? Why can’t we fall into an easy love rather than have this business of having to
negotiate
?’

Ritwik can tell she is getting more and more despondent by the minute; her face is flushed and warm now. He wants to scoop her up in his arms and tell her it is going to be all right, tell her
she can lean on him always, but the moment passes.

‘Oh, Ritwik, why are all the nice, caring, sensitive
and
good-looking men gay?’ she cries out.

They look at each other with something approaching horror and, in that instant, far more than knowledge passes between them; it is understanding, even deep empathy, for Ritwik realizes that
Sarah has been telling him about Richard as a reciprocal confiding. This is her way of making them fall together as equals again and she offers him the best she can – not damage, not abuse,
but the impossibility of happiness in love. He swallows a few times to rid his throat of lumps then wills himself to spin off the conversation to a superficial chit-chat about the attraction of
unattainable things.

‘Ah, you see, it’s what you can’t have,’ he says. ‘Why do you think nearly all gay men fancy straight boys?’ There, he has done it.

Sarah links her arm with his and says, ‘Well, we’re both a bit buggered then, aren’t we?’ She lets out a clear peal of laughter and then adds, ‘So you’ve
decided to do Milton then? God, you
are
crazy. Shall we go and do some work in the library and then meet later for tea? We can compare notes on who’s the bigger bastard – Milton
or Johnson.’

He feels so light walking to the library he is almost certain that had she not been there, physically linked to him, he might have blown away like a balloon.

In a few months’ time, finals loom like hulking shapes which scare and threaten a child when the lights are turned out. Most of the people he knows withdraw into frenzied
revision. Everyone psyches each other out, and there is more than a whiff of tension, fear and rivalry in the air. Jenny Hellman, in the corridor upstairs, sticks unbendingly to her fourteen-hour a
day revision schedule – she times her visits to the toilet with a stop watch, adds it all up, then adds that much extra time to the end of her fourteen-hour day. Jo Milne, her neighbour, has
all her chemistry formulae, in extra large letters, glued to the ceiling so she can see them first thing every morning; she has grown up with the belief that what you learn in the early hours of
waking sticks longest in the mind. She doesn’t bother drawing the curtains shut at night so that she can see her formulae in the morning light, first thing when she wakes up. In the college
house across the car park, Paul Dunn and Matt Fellowes have discovered this little nugget and it fuels their masturbatory fantasies, which, in the run-up to finals, are a bit more fevered and
frequent than usual. Others have taken more austere decisions. Ritwik never fails to be surprised by the sheer tenacity and longevity of the myth of the debilitating orgasm. Students he is intimate
with have confided that they have either stopped having sex or given up jerking off, as if the increasing volume of semen in their testicles will directly nourish their brains when they’re
faced with the question, ‘How far are Milton’s early works predictive of his later?’ Jenny’s given up penetrative sex; this from the woman who has had sex in every possible
corner of the college – the laundry room, the showers in Staverton Road, the tennis court, the Master’s garden, the chapel, the library. There seems to be a secular Lent everywhere.