A Life Apart (7 page)

He drives down some dark side streets, pulls the car at the end of one and turns off the engine. The street is badly lit and there are some infrequent yellow squares of light where the curtains
haven’t been drawn in the houses along each side. It seems completely deserted as well. Ritwik doesn’t feel comfortable here. ‘It’s not really safe, is it? A police car
could drive in here.’

‘It should be OK.’

Ritwik insists, ‘Could we go somewhere else? Not a residential street.’

The man turns the ignition again. This time they drive through darker and darker roads till they reach a place where streets end and it becomes a slightly bumpy ride over crunchy pebbles and
gravel. That gives out as well and they’re soon in the wider dark of open space. The countryside, maybe. It’s impossible to make out shapes or contours but it’s better to leave
the lights out, he supposes. He lets his eyes adapt to the outer darkness; through the windscreen he cannot so much see as sense a treeless plain with the dull mirror of a stretch of water. The
darker hulks take on edges and become caravans. Or maybe they are big trucks. It’s so quiet the slight chink-clink of the chain and keys still dangling in the ignition switch seems capable of
bringing people running from all sides.

In seconds, Ritwik has established that the man is of the type who tries to kiss and stroke and be affectionate first before getting down to business. He averts his face as the man brings his
mouth closer to his. In case it appears as too overt a rejection, he puts his arms around his neck and pulls him into a hug. There, no chance of a kiss now.

They pull their trousers down to their ankles. Ritwik’s rigid cock springs out, slapping his stomach, while the man’s tumescing one just lolls. He bends down sideways, takes
Ritwik’s cock in his mouth and starts sucking him off with such full-throated ease that had it been at all possible Ritwik would have been taken inside his mouth up to his entire hip.
It’s cramped and uncomfortable and being sucked from that odd angle, rather than from the front, with the man’s bobbing head between his thighs, does not quite make it to his A-list of
Top Ten Oral Sex Moments. There is also a subdued whiff of curing leather somewhere; he hopes it’s not from the man’s body or his mouth. He is jerking himself off as he keeps sucking.
As Ritwik whispers, ‘I’m going to come soon,’ he lets go of his cock, leaving him to finish off, while he starts to moan, ‘Oh, yeah . . . oh yeah . . . come on then, come,
come, shoot your load . . .’ the movement of his hand becoming more and more furious. There seems to be a restless animal in his devouring eyes. Ritwik finds his exaggerated porn-speak so
ridiculous that he has to make an effort to subdue the laughter bubbling up from inside, it’s in his throat now, it has to be pushed down down, no he can’t let it come out, can’t
come out as he comes all over himself, the little opal pools pearlescent on his dark skin even in the darkness inside and around. He watches with detachment the man bringing himself off, whispering
more of those absurdities while eyeing his semen hungrily. Ritwik makes sure he doesn’t come anywhere near his jeans or his legs.

As if the release of orgasm has freed his attention on to other things, Ritwik suddenly notices the deeper darkening inside the car and wheels his head in panic. The windows are opaque, they are
no longer clear glass between inside and outside. There are bodies and faces outside, looking in. His heart thuds in his throat in slow motion; he has no idea how many seconds or minutes elapse
before they both realize the shapes outside are not humans.

‘Horses,’ the man says.

‘What?’ Ritwik’s voice is a blur.

‘Horses. The trucks you see, they carry horses. They’ve stopped here for the night and let them out on to the meadow. They’ll carry on tomorrow morning.’

It takes some time for this to sink in. The animals on all sides are peering in, their noses and muzzle so close that he strains to catch another shade of the dark in a horse’s eye looking
in through the passenger window. Their snuffling breath has condensed here and there and trickles down as threads of water. The last residue of panic still courses around in him somewhere. He looks
ahead, out of the windscreen, and there, in the clotted blackness outside, notices a shuffling dance of firelight, as if a dozen will o’ the wisps have suddenly erupted from nowhere. His mind
isn’t quite working, he can’t understand these suspended points of fireflicker swimming about. The man almost senses his confusion. He lets out a little laugh, ‘See, they’ve
come out of their trailers now to take them in. They’re looking for the horses.’

As if on cue, the silence shivers only a tiny fraction to let a few high up-and-down calls from the searchers escape, then it gathers back again over those truncated shepherds’ notes as if
they’d never been. The shapes outside the car begin to move.

‘We should go,’ the man says.

Ritwik nods, unable to speak, but his fear and tension have disappeared. He feels a sense of release, an achievement almost. The man is trying to be affectionate by putting his arms around him
and trying to kiss him, again, but only manages an awkward parody of it. He is also muttering some fearful slush in his ears while stroking his hair, ‘You’re Hassan, my prince, my
lovely prince Hassan . . .’ Ritwik curls his toes. He starts stroking the man’s face to prepare him for his next move: ‘Could you please drop me off somewhere in town . . .
perhaps where you picked me up?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ says the stranger and then lapses into his fantasy again: ‘You’re an Arab prince, your name is Hassan—’

‘No, I’m not.’ His words cut in like the lash of a whip. The man removes his hand as if he’s been struck. Ritwik regrets instantly, ‘Look, it’s getting late .
. .’

‘Oh, yes, yes.’ He turns on the ignition and cuts out the headlights the second they come on. The revving car is too loud. The horses can’t be seen anymore. The searching
lanterns seem to have disappeared as well.

It’s late when he’s dropped off at the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket Street. It has started drizzling gently; under the sodium vapour lamps it looks like a sad sequin shower
without the celebratory glitter. He feels light, not quite happy, but getting there, getting there. While trying to put on his Thinsulate branded gloves, he notices black stains on his palms. He
tries to figure out what they can be; they come off when he rubs them hard, and when he sniffs his hand, there is a familiar chemical tang he tries to identify . . . shoe-polish, that’s it,
black shoe-wax. He doesn’t know why he instantly thinks that the man had dyed his moustache with it.

He sneaks back into college, almost tip-toeing to his room. He doesn’t want to be seen, or talked to, and then smiles wryly: there’s hardly anyone to notice him or talk to him apart
from Gavin and he knows Gavin is working late at his studio tonight. He feels both lonely and the utter banality of this loneliness at the same time. Maybe he’ll tell himself a story, the
story of that blue-clad Englishwoman from a film so ablaze with reds and russets and oranges and flame that she had stood out like its principle of meaning, holding out the slender hope that she
was going to shore up all the dispersal and disintegration around her. He has no idea why the film,
Ghare Bairey
, has suddenly come unbidden to his mind, a film he had seen nearly ten years
ago in Calcutta, but that fleeting woman, Miss Gilby, who had passed through its frames for all of three minutes, or less, all blue primness and measured politeness, will simply not leave his head.
She was so marginal, her presence so brief, vanishing almost before her story began. What if he told her story, which hadn’t been written down or filmed?

Before he enters his room he goes to the bathroom, scrubs clean his hands, his cock, his mouth and face at the sink. Quietly, very quietly, so that Zoe and Charlotte, in the adjoining rooms,
don’t suspect anything. He enters his room, drowning out any surfacing fear of his mother sitting inside and quickly turns on the light. He sits down and writes.

T
he rains have started early this season. Very soon, the Maidan is going to become a shallow lake, and Free School Street, Eliot Street, all
muddy little streams and rivulets. Miss Gilby knows that the rains are going to bring with them ants, termites, cockroaches, a hundred other unnamed creeping and crawling creatures, and the
incessant croaking of toads and frogs all night long in the puddles and ponds which accumulate everywhere during the monsoon. They talk to each other all night, an amphibian parody of antiphon and
response, and it drills into Miss Gilby’s head with its monotonous regularity. Besides, she hates those ugly creatures. During the entire rainy season, there are scores of them in the front
courtyard, sometimes even at the bottom of the stairs leading to her rooms. She had stepped on one of these inadvertently once. The experience still sends shudders down Miss Gilby’s spine:
first of all, she hadn’t expected the creature to turn upside down, exposing its disgusting smooth white underneath, and then, before she had had time to step off it in horror, she discovered
the resiliently springy texture of the animal, as if it were a large jujube or jelly. She was grateful the toad didn’t go ‘splat’ and explode under her shoe but it disturbed her
no end that no sooner had she moved her foot than it hopped off, springing to life, the weight of Miss Gilby just a minor pressure on its innards of sponge. Ugh!

If Mahesh gets more intransigent this season, Miss Gilby is going to discharge him from his duties. Not a single week passes when she doesn’t have to chide him for carelessness or sheer
forgetfulness. He still hasn’t managed to ask the builder to come and look at the various leaks, one right in the ceiling of the drawing room, which dripped water down on to her floor, inches
away from her Steinway. He had put pails and buckets to catch the drips but mostly in the wrong places so that the damage had already begun. When she had taken him to task for it, he had grovelled
first and then dared to answer back – how was he to know where the leaks were if they didn’t start dripping in the first place. Unconscionable impudence. As if she hadn’t spent
all of last Rainy Season pointing out the leaks to him over and over again.

She will ask him to get the chairs from the verandah, especially her favourite planter’s long sleever, a present from James, in to the drawing room, remove all the cane chairs and
tables, and let down the rattan shades so that the rains don’t flood her verandah every day. And then there will be the fraught business of packing up, storage, removal and
relocation.

Mr Roy Chowdhury had kindly offered to come down to Calcutta in his motorcar and drive her to Nawabgunj, which, of course, will save her a long, bone-rattling journey, for at least part of
the way on a
palkee
. But some of her possessions are going to have to go by train and then by God knows what, in all probability a bullock cart; she is sure most of them are never going to
arrive in one piece, jolted and shaken as they are certainly going to be on the atrocious Indian roads and the mud and
kunkur
tracks. The very thought makes her feel weak so she sits down
and starts making lists. There is great comfort to be derived from lists: they organize life, bring order and method, cut the amorphous business of a messy life into manageable and sizeable
chunks.

She leaves at the end of the month to take up her position in the Roy Chowdhury family. She is excited at the prospect of making friends with an Indian woman who has so far been kept in the
andarmahal
but, thanks to her progressive husband, has been brought out of it and given a new world to move around in. Would she have been excited if she had been in Bimala’s shoes? Or
just plain afraid? Is Bimala enjoying her new freedom, the huge expansion of her world? Mr Roy Chowdhury, in the course of their correspondence, had mentioned that she was literate, and competent
in reading, writing, even arithmetic, but almost wholly in her own language, Bengali. She read voraciously, she even knew some English, which he had started her on but now didn’t find the
time or the regularity that a new student needed. So Miss Gilby wasn’t really inheriting a
tabula rasa
– his term – but a compliant and intelligent student, he hoped,
except that her problem was chronic shyness, indeed, fear at meeting an English lady and having to converse with her, eventually, in English; she was convinced she would not be able to cross the
first hurdle, she would be a tongue-tied and hopeless student, Miss Gilby would give up in despair and leave etc etc.

Miss Gilby knows all these symptoms. They are not just the classic signs of nerves and a sense of inferiority but also so much more. Imagine a woman, kept confined to the
andarmahal
,
socializing only with the other women in the household, rarely coming across men, even her own father, imagine growing up with this great sense of awe and fear of men, nay, this sense of the great
unknown, of the alien race that the male is to her, imagine whiling away an entire girlhood in games and housework and feminine chores till she gets married one day, without any consultation or
involvement, to one of those very creatures she has seldom met in her life, creatures she has only seen during
jaatra
performances in her house through a chink in the curtains or the
tatti
which separates the women’s section of the audience from the men’s, imagine growing up in a society where on those very rare occasions when a woman suddenly comes across a
man other than her husband she draws her veil instantly to cover her face and hastily leaves the room. Imagine all that. Then imagine her being catapulted into the big, wide, open world. It would
be something akin to being thrown into an ocean when all you know is your little enamel bath. Miss Gilby herself would be very nervous in Bimala’s situation. She had seen with her very eyes
Hindu women from wealthy, privileged families taking their annual dip in the holy Ganges by having their entire palanquin, shut and enclosed, lowered into the waters while they remained inside, and
then being carried off back home on the shoulders of the bearers. Because the waters teemed with bathing men, it was an act that managed ingeniously to observe a sacred ritual without endangering
any of the sanctions against women being seen in public.