Odysseus Abroad (6 page)

Ananda and Hilary Burton didn't get on. This was established early, though there was a show of encouraging cordiality on Dr. Burton's side. Ananda wasn't decided if he wanted to have sex with Dr. Burton, though at times he thought he did, but not at the cost of his dignity as a young man of letters (that's how he conceived of himself)—and he wasn't sure if she wanted to have sex with him, though there were times he thought she did, despite (or maybe impelled by) their unspoken animosity. The problem should have been clear, but it wasn't, at least to Ananda: that Dr. Burton was a feminist, and a rather sophisticated advocate of French feminist critical theory; and that she saw Ananda as an unreconstructed Romantic, thin but glowing with universal ideals and an unforgiving discontent with all he deemed unworthy of “literature.” Ananda, typical of his gender, took “literature” as a given, a sacred fact. Imagine his confusion when he had to write his first tutorial essay on
Troilus and Criseyde
, and discovered that the word “poet,” as he understood it, was quite inappropriate to Chaucer. Nevertheless, he decided he'd ignore this, and gave a positive spin to his piece, pretending Chaucer was a Romantic poet. At the tutorial, Dr. Burton, trying to hide her exasperation, brandishing his essay, said: “You write very eloquently, Mr. Sen”—it took three meetings for her to graduate coquettishly to his first name; she'd even asked whether she was pronouncing the simple monosyllabic surname accurately—“and what I like is that—unlike my other students—you've taken the poem for what it fundamentally
is
: a
love
story!”
How could he not? He was a passionate apologist for love. He was like a virginal Victorian girl: love and sex existed in separate compartments. He would argue and argue that year and the next for love in the jaded circles of the English department—the Vision of Eros, which, as Auden had said, was near-impossible to champion. For to speak of love was like “talking about ghosts”—“most people had heard of them, but very few people knew one.” He sensed that Hilary Burton's encouragement was a backhanded compliment. A connoisseur of literary insincerity, she herself was being completely insincere: and wanted him to know it. Last time, she'd suggested that
Troilus and Criseyde
was not so much a poem as a forerunner of the novel, exemplifying not the poem's “truth” but the novel's “light and shade.” This observation was symptomatic of a general call to arms within the department, and he first became aware of it in Dr. Burton's room; that the student needed to be educated about how the idea that literature was a repository of emotion and spontaneity was only a relatively recent Romantic fiction, no more than two centuries old, that most students had been schooled, without being aware of it, in this Romantic notion, and now required to be disabused, that there were swathes of writing before Romanticism that demonstrated that literature was not truthful and spontaneous, but deceptive and constructed. This project within the corridors and rooms of the department—a crusade, as Ananda viewed it—was one of the causes of his misery. How could this version of things account for the palliative effect Edward Thomas had on him daily, or for lines that “moved” him in poems he didn't entirely understand?

Dr. Burton was a medievalist. She was an expert on
Pearl
and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. The one reason that Ananda didn't
dismiss Dr. Burton's preoccupations out of hand was because he'd read somewhere that Ted Hughes had been nourished by these strange consonantal poems—whose language was as harsh as the English winter. The recent English poets Ananda had read a great deal of: Larkin, Gunn, Hughes, Causley, Tomlinson. One of the reasons he'd gravitated towards this college—making the voyage out from Bombay, where the college had no separate meaning for him, unlike Oxford or Cambridge—was because Stephen Spender was here. When he applied for a place, he knew Spender had retired—only just—and, even today, this was a cause of heartbreak. Not so long ago, Spender hovered in these corridors, near these portals, until, coinciding with Ananda's advent, he had withdrawn completely into late-night television shows, radio talks, and journal-publishing. If only Spender had frequented these corridors now, Ananda wouldn't have been so unhappy. It was not so much his poems Ananda cared about—although he loved Hughes's and Larkin's work, Spender's poetry hadn't made an impression—as the appearance (slightly stooped; tweed-jacketed; with a blue-eyed angelic face, like David Gower's) and the persona he'd encountered in
World within World
: sensitive, with a youth of mildly adventurous left-wing predilections, but a firm believer in poetry's sacrosanct qualities (“I think continually of those who are great”). If only Spender had survived in the college to Ananda's arrival, he would have recognised in him a kindred soul, a person moved invisibly by the poetic. Ananda would have hesitantly shown his poems to Spender, who, in his excitement, would have got them published, just as Spender's friend Auden had once tremblingly, in astonishment, discovered the nineteen-year-old Dom Moraes's poetry on a visit to Bombay, and been instrumental in its publication. That collection, as everyone knew, was the one book by an Indian to win the Hawthornden Prize, its author the youngest to have received
that accolade. If Ananda had won the Hawthornden, he wouldn't have been as young as Moraes, but young enough. Instead, he'd come to the college just a little too late. He recalled that Spender, in his memoir, had mentioned a teacher in his school, St. Paul's, who'd said to him, “You're unhappy in school, but you are going to be very happy at university.” Ananda had almost taken heart from this, because he too was miserable in school; but, unlike the youthful Stephen, he found he was very unhappy in university too. He didn't mind. A part of him knew that he'd one day be happy. That state of being was firmly—and securely—reserved for full adulthood, when he'd probably be married and famous; just as, when he was a child, he'd concluded it was reserved for his late teens. To Hilary Burton, he hardly ever mentioned the contemporary poets. The only recent writer that
she
seemed halfway enthusiastic about was a woman called Julia Kristeva. “This is a
wonderful
book!” she'd said deeply, huskily, imparting a sensual emphasis to “wonderful,” as she lifted, from her populous, fusty bookshelf, a gleaming tome with a blue cover,
Desire in Language
. Again, sex seemed to be introduced into the frame of the tutorial, and he wasn't sure if she was making a pass.

“The brightest students do medieval studies!” said Hilary Burton. “Oh, you mustn't go to the moderns!” Towards the end of the previous academic year, he'd let it slip that, by the time he was a finalist, he wanted to take only nineteenth- and twentieth-century options; to be unshackled of the study of the past. The past is a foreign country; but another country's past is twice-foreign. Was she hinting that she thought he was bright? Now that he was at a crossroads in life's journey, already a traveller, was she confusing him by pointing out a route he didn't intend to take? Brightest students! Was she inveigling
him with disingenuous noises? By this time, her health—which had been appalling beneath her beautiful exterior and her gay fauvist dresses—had worsened, and she couldn't see properly; so that when she stared at his collar while speaking, it was neither shyness nor flirtatiousness which made her do so, but simply the fact that she had a hazy sense now of where his face was. She'd been diagnosed with a problem in the brain—he had no idea what it was—a year ago. He wasn't sure how much of the illness was real, how much a product of her imagination.

Medieval England didn't attract him; not Gawain, not
Piers Plowman
. He felt he'd like Greek tragedy, but kept putting off the “intellectual background” classes where he could familiarise himself with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Besides, he was becoming suspicious of tragedy. He put this down to the rediscovery of his Indian past, his recent realisation that there was no tragedy in Sanskrit literature. Sanskrit theatre, with its tranquil curtain calls, where thief, courtesan, soldier, king, could smilingly take a bow, their conflicts resolved
—that
was a welcome antidote to the Western universe, with its privileging of dark over light. He was a proponent of joy! This, despite being drawn to Philip Larkin. He was plainly prejudiced against the West. Then what was he doing
in
the West, in the English department? He was clearly not at home; he was lost. He'd always presumed that Sophocles rhymed with “monocles.” Until, standing before a noticeboard announcing lectures, his mispronunciation was gently overlooked by a fellow student, an English boy, who repeated the name, rhyming it with Pericles. Ananda was embarrassed.

What of the epics, which they made such a fuss over? He'd gone to a lecture on the
Aeneid
one Monday morning, and puzzled over the lecturer's caressing pronunciation—
e-nee-yud
; but he—the lecturer—had droned on about the “founding myth of the nation,”
and Ananda, in the back row, began to turn the pages of the
Observer
stealthily (two students glanced at him, smiling). What to make of these epics in comparison to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the latter (he was now convinced) equal to all of Shakespeare and more?—they were like a Thames to the Ganges, a stream beside a river with no noticeable horizon; minor. Homer he'd studied with similar scepticism, noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without volition, like a traffic light, every few pages of the
Iliad
, and, with greater fascination—salivating, even, because he was often hungry—how the soldiers feasted on pork “singed in its own fat” at regular intervals. The
Odyssey
he hadn't bothered to read.

Still, he'd read enough of and around the Greeks to know that the gods were undependable, and put their powers to use in idiosyncratic ways. In this, they were superficially like the many-headed, many-armed Hindu deities; except that, with the Hindu gods, you felt the capriciousness of their actions was linked to the transformative play of creation,
lila
. In comparison, the Greek gods were merely dim-witted and vengeful. They hibernated; they woke up; they became conscious of a problem; they either attended to it or forgot to. There was no telling which human being they'd help out or do their utmost to destroy—guided by some personal like or grudge that had no rational explanation, or, what was quite common, in order to redress a slight received aeons ago.

Ananda first met Dr. Burton on Gower Street. She was wearing a bright orange dress with large yellow circles which came to below her knees, and was tapping the pavement with a cane. He knew it was her. It was the first time that the person he wanted someone to be turned out to be whom he thought it was. “Mr. Sen!” she exclaimed, taking particular pleasure in the sound of his voice, as if it were a disembodied stream. “We have a meeting at ten, don't we?” It was drizzling very lightly, despite the sun, and instinctively, opportunely, he took her under his umbrella. “Can you help me?” she asked. “I have a problem with my vision today.” He placed his arm on her shoulder, not daring to keep it there for more than a few seconds at a time, but feeling an unbelievable closeness that she too seemed to have surrendered to, almost patting her back as he steered her forward. From Gower Street they entered through a heavy glass door on the left and were in a long bleak corridor, from where—he escorting her, but she guiding him, as she knew the way—they ended up (he couldn't remember how) in another
building, and at last in her spacious room on the first floor, where the medievalists, Chaucerians, and linguistics professors had their offices.

Their romance remained buried beneath their different personalities; his still unformed, but with many of its traits already visible. She never found out if he had a sense of humour; and he could only deduce she had one from the poster on her door, showing a languorous Mrs. Thatcher being carried masterfully by Ronald Reagan in his arms. Her kindness, like her cane, he knew only from her curious exhibitions of empathy, such as the birdhouse she kept on her sill for transient but recurrent sparrows. He couldn't crack, through her, what Englishness was; and, for her, the prickly mystery of being Indian clearly remained permanently unsolved. Sex stayed in the air, like an absurdity; once, when he asked her if he could write a tutorial essay on a topic different from what she'd suggested, she'd parted her legs, both swift and interminably slow—she was in a shortish skirt; he'd had to turn his eyes away—before crossing them again, and said, smiling faintly, “Do what you like. I believe in the pleasure principle.” He was unhappy about her tutelage—he was generally unhappy at the time—but masturbated thinking about her, twice.

In the second academic year (which had ended a month ago), he no longer saw her—which was a relief. He wanted to forget her, at least for now. She had taken ill; his second-year tutor told him one day that her visits had grown irregular. How had the subject come up—of Hilary Burton? Maybe from a recounting to the second-year tutor of his state of mind in the first year. Another day, the tutor announced—again, an association of anecdotes and harmless gossip led unexpectedly to her—that Dr. Burton had entered a coma. She was alive. Her brain wasn't. She was too young. Ananda couldn't believe it.

His second-year tutor, Richard Bertram, he was happier with. By some train of thought, Richard—maybe his surname—made Ananda think of P. G. Wodehouse, and this at once put him at ease. Richard, with his general cheeriness, and his mild astonishment each time Ananda came for a tutorial—“Hel-
lo
there, Ananda!”—didn't belie this impression. He was very tall, which added to his air of being a large schoolboy who was destined to thrive in an educational institution. You could see him sometimes in the corridor, negotiating his bicycle by the handle, his trousers fastened with bicycle clips round his ankles, urgent and unselfconscious, confirming he had no natural habitat but college.