Odysseus Abroad (21 page)

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.