Odysseus Abroad (16 page)

“Do you know what she did once?” he'd said to Ananda during one of their several discussions about Gilberta, a faint look of horror on his face.

“What?”

“I could see her in front of the bathroom standing with mop and bucket (I was the one person at work, everyone had gone). I wasn't sure if she knew I was there. Next moment, she knelt in front of the bucket as if to wipe something, and—looking straight at me—gestured with her hand towards the place down there”—his own hand hovered fleetingly above his crotch: he was still a bit scandalised—as though an epiphany had turned out to be its opposite.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. What could happen? I pretended not to see. She finished and left.”

Ananda had then taken the opportunity to bring to light a question that had troubled him, though why he thought his uncle would know the answer wasn't clear—for some reason, he believed his uncle carried within him some intractable wisdom distilled by his asociability: so he'd put to him—“What's important to women—love or sex?”

“Sex,” his uncle had said, taking no special pleasure in the reply, just acknowledging a fact.

Both, heads bowed, had allowed a moment to pass as Ananda absorbed the impact of the news. For such plain-speaking, Ananda knew (from his background reading on
The Waste Land
) that Tiresias, who'd experienced what it meant to be both man and woman (“old man with wrinkled dugs”), had been struck blind by the vindictive Hera.

In his first year in London, Ananda had had to hear about Gilberta repeatedly. His uncle wasn't over her. He spoke at length, now praising her, now offering his summations and suspicions, weighing her gestures and the inadvertent eye-contact between them, the banter she engaged in with Paul Middleton. Much had passed over his heart. Ananda marvelled, and quietly fulminated, that his uncle should make so much out of so little. For his uncle and Gilberta hardly knew each other outside their inane day-to-day encounters. To her, he was another man in the office. Mr. Nandy. Or maybe she didn't know his name. Why then was he moaning (to use the very English term his uncle used to put down Ananda with when he spoke plaintively of home)? Then again, how necessary was contact? Dante had met Beatrice twice. Not met—maybe just
seen
. A total of fifteen minutes…And what about Meera bai, who'd dumped her husband, the king, for her “lord” and lover, the flute-playing Krishna? What of those songs and poems coming out of—not contact, let alone consummation, but wish-fulfilment and fantasy? Was it some sort of pathetic fallacy, to presume that lives were animated by love when they were actually quickened by the imagination? How many people were there today who loved quietly without hope of consummation: to whom conventional sexual fulfilment was unimportant? You might not be aware of them, but
they probably wrote the love poems. (Larkin sprang to mind: curmudgeonly bachelor.)

Ananda wondered if his uncle was still susceptible to Gilberta. Why was he humming the maudlin tune?

“Really?” His uncle was stung at the implication that he'd been singing it too frequently. Ananda resented that his uncle often tried to subtly undermine him (dismissive as he was of modernism and slyly sceptical of Ananda's mission as a poet), but his uncle probably felt the same way about Ananda—that his nephew deflated him at crucial moments. He persisted: “But what do you think of the song?”—for Tagore's reputation, on all fronts, must be jealously overseen.

“Maybe not quite my cup of tea,” said Ananda.

On cue, the waitress came with a pot of tea and cups and saucers on a tray, as well as the muffin his uncle had insisted on ordering for Ananda. “Here we are,” she said (she was middle-class and cheerily aloof), “Thank you!” A stream of Thank yous followed—dutiful, upbeat, insincere, grateful—each time something was unloaded off the tray.

Both of them—but his uncle in particular—were feeling a bit out of place. It was clear that his uncle wished they were in one of those self-service tea shops. The sort with rum baba and trays on top of each other. His uncle didn't know how to whisper, and he said in Bengali: “There are places I know where you can get a cup of tea and an excellent cheesecake for half the price.”

Did he not feel a sense of belonging any more in this area? Though his uncle used to despise his bhadralok contemporaries in Belsize Park, they'd at least
been
there, earlier, to despise and avoid. They were long vanished, to Stoke Newington or Pinner. Those people, fifteen years in the London boroughs, had grown-up
children now, who—because their parents had saved on heating and electricity—had gone to the best private schools and were presently either at university or starting to look for jobs. Only his uncle had stayed on, in “Hampstead,” rejecting the suburbs and the married life and family that inevitably accompanied them—the Shah his interlocutor. Ananda sensed his uncle's grumbling ennui as he poured tea into the cup. From the pane on Ananda's right, they gazed at where the hill leading to the Heath descended and made a trough with the bottom of Pond Street, and, lit by the sun, displayed a junction with a zebra crossing and a bus stop.

“Pupu,” said his uncle, “have the muffin.” His tone bordered on hectoring. “It's very good,” he claimed, without having tasted it. “We mustn't waste it.” That was the reason for the advocacy: it was an expensive muffin. Ananda resisted the urge to say,
I never wanted it
, and replied, “You have it.” Because he knew this was why his uncle had ordered it—he was hungry. He hadn't had anything after all that sugar at breakfast. (Here, he'd only put four cubes in his cup and stirred it slowly.) His uncle said,
“Tumi khao.”
“No, I won't, really—you go ahead,” said Ananda. His uncle regarded the muffin with dislike (for being undemocratically overpriced). Then he picked it up and took a huge mouthful, his eyelids drooping, his throat rippling, as he swallowed—till he could breathe again, and utter the verdict: “Very good…” His whole body was curiously relaxed.

“Keats used to live here,” said his uncle.

Foxes, Glenda Jackson—and Keats. Hampstead. Rangamama too, in a manner of speaking. But was Belsize Park truly Hampstead?

“Mukherjee used to say to me—‘
Moshai
, have you seen Keats's house?' I was never interested in Keats's house.” Confessed to matter-of-factly, as he devoured the muffin. Still, he mentioned Keats no doubt because his nephew was “reading” English literature; although his equivocations and qualifications about this were a reminder coming from sideways about whether or not English literature was a subject worth studying. But Keats was useful to establishing the brilliance of this address—its ineffable pedigree. Mukherjee must be a bit of an English lit aficionado. A bachelor, and for two years Ananda's uncle's other neighbour in the basement. Ananda had never seen him. Yet he was always speaking to his uncle, this man, about facets of English culture.

“Hm,” said Ananda. His uncle always provided such a steady
stream of opinion that he seldom felt like voicing his own: but he harboured views on everything.

Oddly, he wasn't touched by Keats. The poetry, that is. Maybe because he'd had to study “Ode to a Nightingale” in school, and, precocious and ignorant, glutted himself on the young poet's over-rich vocabulary, on mouthfuls of phrases such as “blushful Hippocrene.” Already a poet in his own eyes, Ananda, at fifteen, had judged Keats by the standards of his own subjectivity, and found him a little—bland. Keats was too perfect. Ananda had never recovered from that first encounter—poet to poet, young adult to young man. He looked semi-sensitively around him through the glass pane, to guess at where Keats might have been or still be. He'd written of summer only in passing, in the short-breathed “Grasshopper and the Cricket.” Outside, the day was golden. Busy. The Odeon might have disappeared, but cars were going up all the time past the Royal Free Hospital. Ananda was unreceptive to the poetry—but he was moved by the man. He could see him, almost. Good-looking, terribly short. Possibly because of the early privations and illnesses. He did not grow. He did not grow old in a number of ways. A man-boy.

Ananda was in England because of Keats. He'd begun reading the letters around the time he was applying to colleges in London. He was won over: it was the first time he'd felt a writer's nearness, his heartbeat. When he was offered a place (in the college where he was now a student), they'd asked him to write a short account of his reading. He'd typed out a page and a half, of which the last quarter was devoted entirely to Keats's letters. Richard Bertram had told Ananda that he had it on good authority that it was this piece of writing—which they'd wanted from him in lieu of an interview—that had secured his admission. So Ananda was beholden to the twenty-six-year-old.

In that little document he'd sent to the college, he hadn't mentioned how affected he'd been by Keats's love for Fanny Brawne. A desire unfulfilled. At some point, it had dawned on Keats that he'd never marry Fanny because he was dangerously ill. An insoluble conundrum—how to make a future with a person when you knew you were going to die? Ananda himself had experienced a prohibited love: for a cousin. When he was twenty, he was warned never to see her again. This was among the reasons for London being a place of exile. And why he must prove to himself that he'd have a future—as a poet—without her.

How real was Fanny Brawne to Keats? How much had he invented her (as Ananda knew he'd to an extent invented his cousin)? Was a beloved even necessary to experiencing love? Similarly, did you have to experience life to be a writer, or to have a subject at hand? These were two kinds of belief where an “actual” experience seemed beside the point—of believing you were in love; and that you were a writer. Was Keats's short life as a poet essentially one of make-believe? Was he pretending, with a unique faith and intensity, that he was a poet? At least in “Ode to Psyche,” which Ananda liked, Keats had embraced the make-believe of being a priest for a goddess he knew didn't quite exist: “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind.”

“Rabi Thakur was in Hampstead,” his uncle said. The plate that had borne the muffin was spotless. He'd taken care of each crumb—from his continuing hunger, but also out of a moral obligation to do justice to a piece of food he'd spent money on. Less than a minute had passed since Keats was mentioned. Ananda didn't believe his uncle could survive much longer—once a poet's name came up—without talking about Tagore. For him, there was one poet only. He'd said as much. Maybe it was the appearance:
the imposing height; the bearded, Olympian air; the bright disarming eyes. Also the delicacy and sophistication of the language (“He single-handedly changed Bengali”).

And, in keeping with his subtly divine qualities, there was the fact that (as his uncle had explained): “He created not only a great body of work but a generation. I wouldn't have been who I am were it not for Tagore. My father”—he hardly knew his father; he'd died when Radhesh was three in a riding accident, but he'd conjured him up thoroughly—“was a very different man from I. Because he belonged to the world before Tagore.”

Judiciously he added, studying Ananda, the English literature student: “When you use a poet's name as an adjective—say, ‘Wordsworthian' or ‘Keatsian'—you mean the style he's well-known for. But when you say
Rabindrik
you don't just mean something literary, but a way of life, an ethos that shaped a generation. Can you say that of another poet?” End of speech. Leaving Ananda to mull over whether the reign of Rabi Thakur could be countered. Whether it was even important to a poet to “create” a generation.

“What do you think he'd have made of you?”

“Me?”

“Yes—supposing you'd met.”

His uncle had bowed his hairless head and said, without rancour, but passionately on Tagore's behalf: “I don't think he would have been able to stand me.”

Ananda had seen the house. Uncle and nephew had, one day, made a detour from the Heath when they'd gone out walking. One of their pointless rambles. Suddenly, the round blue plaque:
INDIAN POET stayed here in 1912
. A lonely vigil. Not a passer-by in the lane—that wasn't unusual. Beautiful house, protected by a filigree of branches. Did his uncle know that Tagore's time was long gone? It would be too harsh to say out loud. If, as his uncle claimed,
a generation had been minted and fashioned by the bearded one—including his parents and their voluble neighbours in Belsize Park—then to deny him was also to cast them into non-existence. Which, in a sense, was what had happened. Tagore was hardly remembered. And to be a Bengali in London meant being the owner of a Bangladeshi restaurant. What a joke, what a come-down! And if he
was
spoken of, it was with polite incomprehension—or mockery. Or, worse, with wide-eyed incomprehension by some Englishman who wasn't interested in poetry but in “India.” Hilary Burton and Richard Bertram never mentioned him; Nestor Davidson had quizzically enquired after him—“What
do
you think of Tagore?”—as if he were an exotic annual ritual or an ailment. Deep in his heart, his uncle must know.

“Could we have the bill please?” Ananda murmured to the waitress as she passed. The English hadn't been made for serving but for nannying, to remind you punctiliously to cross your t's; most people who served were foreigners—it started with the army of tenacious Sikh women with mops and pails who hovered around you, like a wedding party, when you got into Heathrow. “Of course!” she sang out.

“Pupu,” his uncle warned, “this one's on me.” He had a look, as if anticipating rebellion. It was all show. His uncle would pay—they both knew that. Yet his uncompromising air allowed Ananda to feel the glow of love—an avuncular love that was never not slightly comical (so poorly was Rangamama, despite his reputation for past glory, cut out to be mentor). Ananda thought he'd slip in a word again about apprehensions brewing at the back of his mind: