Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

How is our very own Bengalee Babu responding to all this? Does he not have any views that he might have communicated to you? I shall have to leave the story of the persistent Daisy Ampthill for another occasion for it is too long to relate now; she grows a menace apace and I fear for my peace of mind and sanity sometimes with her around, always hiding in some piece of shrubbery or behind a tree, waiting to pounce as a tiger on its prey. I shall leave you on tenterhooks. I promise to write with more news from Velloor.

Your loving brother always,

James

The November morning briefly toys with the idea of frost but settles for bruised sunshine instead. If it holds, the afternoon is going to be one of those autumn ones, glassy air blazing with burned gold till the dark comes down like a swooping cat, sudden and swift. In their separate rooms, both Anne Cameron and Ritwik, sleepless and still, think of cats.

It wouldn’t do for Ugo to get that fat sparrow, no, it wouldn’t, but she knows of no way to prevent cats from stalking birds. He would probably come and offer the half-dead bird to her one of these days, purring and wrapping himself around her ankles. No, she couldn’t have that. Ugo himself was one of those offerings, although an unintended one. The Pakistani family five doors down, with three children, one of the kids, what was his name now, Saleem or Osman, one of the boys, certainly, but beyond that she cannot be any more definite, one of the boys had come in with seven kittens one day, spilling out of his arms and shoulders and hands, and dropped them one by one in her front room.

‘You like? Amma says we can’t have them all. You want one? Please.’ The boy, hardly more than six, was pleading.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No. Who would look after it?’ Best not to get attached to creatures, and at such a very late hour in life too.

‘You,’ the boy said, with perfect, unassailable innocence.

‘I’m not very good at looking after things.’ The words hurtled out, as if her faculty of speech itself had become incontinent. What was she doing? Very soon, she’d actually start telling this little boy, with such lovely dark eyes, like a forest lake, about how she could never look after things. People. Richard. Clare. Christopher.

‘Please.’ That word again.

In the end she didn’t know how one had come to be left in her house. But she had got the nice and ingratiating Mr Haq, the boy’s father, to install a cat-flap in the back door leading to the garden. That way, Ugo could go in and out as he wished; that was more than half the problem taken care of. But the boy, was it Osman or Saleem, she doesn’t see any more.

She lies. She saw him once, huddling in a corner of the road with half a dozen other boys, when she made an extremely rare sortie from her front door to the end of the road one day, just to see if she could make it unattended, just to see. The boys had fallen silent when she had emerged from the house. A few foreign words, opaque and derisive, tinged with cruel laughter somewhere, had leaked out from their close cluster. And then, ‘Bag lady.’ More laughter. Of course, they thought she wouldn’t be able to hear.

Maybe it wasn’t Saleem or Osman at all among those boys.

Ritwik is obsessed with Ugo. Never having shared a living space with an animal before, his first instinct was to feel slightly repelled by the whole idea. The cat hair everywhere didn’t help. And he was convinced he would catch some disease off the fat marmalade animal, diphtheria or something equally terrifying. He doesn’t know when that gave way to this rapt adoration, watching Ugo and thinking how he was perfect, pure form. Nothing that he did — the way he moved, yawned, curled himself, stretched out in the slowly moving quadrilaterals of sunshine on the carpet, head-butted Ritwik’s outstretched hand, ran his jawline along the human knuckles — nothing was less than infinite grace.

And then there was the disdain, the utter unimportance of taking anything else except his own wants into account. Pure form, yes, but pure selfishness as well. And why not? Why should animals conform to human ideals or indeed be made to behave in human ways? That is why Ritwik hates dogs, their slavering, adoring excess, tailoring their lives to human expectations and emotions. No such rubbish with cats. They do things on their own terms; you like it, fine, you don’t, you can fuck off. There was a letter in the Guardian a few weeks ago that reminded readers: ‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff.’

He is becoming a staff to Anne. No sooner does he think that than he cringes at the bad pun. Oh, well, anyway, he is a support, there is no denying that. In the beginning, while Gavin had explained his duties to him, it had all seemed neat, contained, a job more than anything else: making sure that Mrs Cameron used her stairlift all the time; keeping the bath dry at all times ; locking and securing all doors and windows because who knows what miscreants might be targeting the house, knowing a brittle, eighty-six-year-old lady lived there with only a part-time help; feeding the cat; changing Mrs Cameron’s sheets; giving her a warm sponge three times a week; chamber-pot duties; cleaning her after she had messed herself; heating her soup; collecting her winter fuel allowance; trips to the Post Office for monthly collection of state pension. . The list grew, like something organic, with a breathing, spreading life of its own, but it was manageable. It could be boxed under the broad title of ‘duty’ and that itself limited it.

What he hadn’t been prepared for was the little ambushes tucked away cunningly between the spaces of these boxes. Like the time Anne walked into his room, without knocking, her powder blue nightdress clinging to her bony form like a helpless sail trying to clutch on to something before it was blown away by the lawless winds. In the kind, low light of his bedside lamp, which he always kept on, he noticed there was a conspiratorial look in her hollow eyes, a gleam that could only have been called naughty. And mingling with her normal doughy odour was something else, something floral and sick. . juniper berries, yes, that was it.

It took him another few seconds to nail down the smell to gin and that too after he had noticed her teetering on the soles of her feet while saying, ‘Boy priest, story time. Story time.’

Almost without thinking, Ritwik looked at the watch on his bedside table. Twenty past two. Did the old bat never sleep? Over the last few months, he had gradually trained himself to be woken up like this, with as little gap as possible between the meshy drag of sleep and awareness, sharp like an instant shard of glass. You couldn’t have the submerging luxury of drowsiness when there could be an eighty-six-year-old lying in a crooked and impossible heap at the bottom of the stairs. But to be woken up by the drunken old bat demanding to be read a story? There were limits. Besides, where the fuck did she get her hands on a bottle of gin?

He swallowed his annoyance. ‘It’s very late. Do you know what time it is?’ It was pointless asking her anything, or having the to and fro of ordinary human interaction through small talk with her. She never answered. In most cases, she probably never even heard the questions from the other side. In the radical innocence of old age, the horizons of her world had become that of an infant’s: very close and devoid of everyone in it except her own self.