Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

It was only now he realized that she had given him both the key and the freedom to do whatever he wanted with it.

The rain was viciously lashing the window, driven wild by a high wind. Something shifted and realigned inside Gavin. Ritwik had almost whispered the last few words, ‘Besides, there’s nothing. . no one, actually, to go back to.’ Yes, Gavin was going to help him but only just: he didn’t want Ritwik to end up as his responsibility. He would introduce him to a few things and a few people and leave him to it. There was no way he was going to become a crutch for this boy who was all set to become a difficult problem. He saw in Ritwik his own early years in London and didn’t want that different creature of the immature past, his own green, stumbling self, inflicted on him now, for growing up always entailed a certain degree of embarrassment, a slight desire to wash one’s hands of recent history. He didn’t want a walking reminder of it in this boy.

Ritwik couldn’t have imagined what Gavin was about to hand him: an old, frail woman living in London who needed care and someone to stay in the house to keep an eye on her. She was too poor to offer any pay but the accommodation was free and he could get a part-time job for other living expenses. Gavin didn’t explain how he had met the woman but he mumbled something vague and inaudible about friends of friends among the Brazilian community, or maybe distant relations in North London and left it at that. It seemed to Ritwik that Gavin had stayed at this woman’s house, looking after her and working in restaurants, at a time when he needed a toehold in this country but beyond that hypothesis he knew he wasn’t going to get any more information from his friend. Besides, he was so thrilled that Gavin had thrown him a lifeline, and that too, so easily, so quickly, he couldn’t be bothered prying into Gavin’s past; he was sure this old woman was going to shed more light on it.

When the practicalities — convenient time and dates, packing up stuff, storage, finals, phone calls — were all worked out, Gavin asked him, casually, ‘You do have a permit, a visa to stay on in England, don’t you?’

Equally casually, Ritwik lied, ‘Oh yes. Yes, I do.’ And then added, for verisimilitude, ‘For another two years.’

‘But you don’t have a work permit?’

‘No, but it won’t be a problem to find people who’ll hire me on a loose-cash-at-the-end-of-the-day basis, will it?’ He was willing Gavin to say oh yes, no problem at all, London is brimming with such people.

Instead, he got, ‘Strictly speaking, that’s illegal. If you’re found out, there’ll be trouble’ — he pronounced it ‘trawbble’ — ‘rules about immigrant work and stuff are very strict and complicated.’ When Ritwik looked confused, Gavin added, ‘But there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people working in the black economy. You’ll certainly not lack company.’

Ritwik couldn’t bring himself to think that far. It was enough for now that he should have found a place to stay, a place for free. That had been shaping up as the most consuming problem in his head and now that it was solved he was going to savour it for a little while before that other big problem — a job — occupied all his thoughts.

He looks like a boy, Anne Cameron thinks. He can’t be more than a boy, surely. He is so thin he looks like he hasn’t been given a square meal in his life. Dark, gangly, bones everywhere. The first thing she notices about him is the way his sharp collarbones jut out. The Brazilian man — or is he Scottish? She doesn’t remember but if he is, he speaks English funny, like a foreigner — sits making introductions, which have long passed their need or usefulness. She is not listening to them, anyway. She is thinking of the big sparrow she had seen that very morning, trying to balance on the swinging birdfeeder at the end of her long garden. Anne Cameron is convinced that any smaller bird, say a robin or a tit, would have managed just fine. It is the size of the sparrow that is suddenly bothering her. It was, frankly, enormous, the size of a builder’s fist; she hadn’t seen anything like it before.

‘. . couldn’t really have guessed it was a sparrow if I hadn’t tiptoed closer and watched it for a while.’

The Brazilian man has stopped speaking. The starved boy has looked up sharply at her. The Brazilian man — for the life of her, she can’t remember his name — asks politely, ‘Pardon?’ And to think that he used to live here for, for. . oh many months. .

‘Many months, didn’t you?’

‘Pardon?’ he says again.

‘You lived here for how long? Many months, wasn’t it?’ she asks.

‘Yes, nearly a year,’ he says.

Nicholas, that’s it, that’s his name.

‘Nicholas,’ she fairly shouts.

‘Pardon?’ Again.

‘Your name’s Nicholas.’

‘No, Gavin.’

Gavin? She doesn’t recall anyone called Gavin staying with her. In fact, she doesn’t know anyone of that name. She furrows her brows for a moment but the name doesn’t click or light up. Most of them don’t nowadays.

‘You were saying something about a sparrow?’ he asks hesitantly.

But she has already seen the two men exchange knowing glances. She is not going to tell them. She is going to punish them for thinking she is scatty by depriving them of the morning’s marvel, the fat sparrow. She doesn’t care very much at this moment that she has been speaking her thoughts aloud again.

‘No, I wasn’t,’ she says with cold firmness. That conversation is now closed.

‘What did you say your name is, again?’ She looks at the thin boy.

He says something that sounds suspiciously like nitwit.

‘You’ll have to speak up, I’m getting a bit deaf.’

‘Ritwik. R-I-T-W-I-K,’ he says.

She takes a few moments to visualize the spelling and then repeats his funny name. ‘Ritwik. Ritwik. What a. . an. . unusual name,’ she says. ‘What colourful names you have. Do you know, the woman who lives down the road, I think she’s from your country or thereabouts, she once told me that all their names mean something, like. . like. . Lord of Fire or. . Direction, or something. I’m sure she said direction, someone in her family has a name which means direction. You know, north or south, that sort. I can’t remember the names, and they’re all so difficult, anyway. Do you know the Indian word for direction?’

The boy struggles for a while and then says, ‘No, I can’t think of one particular word. There are so many languages in the country, so many different words for one thing, that. . that I can’t give you one right answer.’

‘But you are from India, aren’t you, not from Pakistan or Bangladesh?’ she asks.

He looks up sharply again. ‘Yes, that’s absolutely correct,’ he says.

Nicholas is quiet, sitting with something approaching a smile on his face. He would so like to interrupt but she is not going to let him: he is in disgrace at the moment for being naughty about her miraculous sparrow.

‘You know, you’ — she moves and lifts her head towards the dark boy — ‘you’ll have to keep reminding me of your name. I’ll get it slowly, but you’ll have to help me. I’m not very good with names, I’m getting on in years. .’ Her voice stops abruptly.

The boy remains quiet.

‘If you tell me what your name means, perhaps I shall be able to remember it,’ she says.

‘It means a priest who officiates at a fire sacrifice,’ he answers solemnly. He is embarrassed as well, as if he has said it many times before, with a predictable range of effects, none of them the one he wanted. Nicholas rolls his eyes heavenwards and thinks she hasn’t seen him do it.