Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

He 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.

And then there is the steady rise of illnesses Ritwik’s never heard of — glandular fever and ME, chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI. God, these are the very people who take a dozen jabs before they go to India and carry a whole pharmacy with them! At least you get nothing more serious than diarrhoea or worms out there but here you get incurable, unheard of things such as BSE and CFS and ME, the acronyms themselves trying to hide the dreaded nature of the new-fangled confections.

Anti-depressants is the buzzword, stigmatizing in some circles, highly desirable and trendy in others. Mark Pawson decides to opt out of doing finals for the third time in his long stay in college because he can’t face it; he is on a record dose. Richard Keene throws himself off a cliff in Torquay, has to be heli-lifted and taken to hospital. Word has it that he is dealing very badly with trying to wean himself off Prozac and the added stress of finals has just pushed him over the edge. The whole college is spooked by it until it is discovered that the helicopter rescue was a creative addition and the only damage Richard seemed to have done was to break his leg when he fell off a boulder while drunk, listening to Nirvana on his personal stereo. The stereo, however, was shattered to bits.