Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

The sudden light hurts Ritwik’s eyes. They are in a huge hallway. The floor is wooden, with exquisite Persian and Afghani rugs on them. There is a mirror, in its heavy and intricate golden frame, reflecting them. There is wooden furniture everywhere — a slim table with curved and ornate legs, a heavy cabinet, two beautiful chairs with red silk upholstery; to Ritwik’s untrained eyes, they all look very expensive and classy. These are the objects for which words such as nonsuch chest, davenport, card table with floral marquetry, veneered cabinet are used, Ritwik thinks; if only he could unite name with thing.

‘What do you think? Come, come along, I’ll show you the rest. Are you interested in antique furniture at all? It’s something of an obsession with me,’ Zafar says, moving ahead.

Ritwik is too struck by the sheer magnitude and opulence of the house and its heavy English furnishings and objects to respond. He follows Zafar to an enormous room that borders on the vulgar in its excess — cabinets and a huge chest of drawers against the walls, tables and stands, a gateleg dining table so huge that the twelve identical chairs around it look distantly placed from each other. The light from the two crystal chandeliers will not allow any dishonesty, any evasion. Zafar keeps up a running commentary, most of which doesn’t reach Ritwik, apart from words and phrases here and there.

‘The chairs are all Louis Quatorze. . I had the rugs shipped to England. . the only bit of the house that’s fully furnished. . Queen Anne, by the way. . it’s almost ready. . Grace Carpenter in the village. . you look a bit gobsmacked, if you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll soon start catching flies.’ It is the laugh on which this ends that makes Ritwik pay attention to what he is saying. He shuts his mouth and says, ‘This. . this is amazing. How many rooms does it have?’

‘Twelve bedrooms, on three floors. There are reception rooms, drawing rooms, morning rooms, smoking rooms, a billiard room. I think if you add the bathrooms, kitchens, breakfast rooms, and all that sort of thing, maybe forty?’ Ritwik can hear the pride of ownership in his voice.

‘But what are you going to do with. . with this palace?’ He cannot keep the incredulity out of his naive voice. ‘You’re not planning to live here, are you? It looks like a stately home, something English Heritage looks after. Do you really own it?’

‘Yes, I do. As of last year. Do you want to have a quick tour around the other floors?’

‘Zafar, you must be joking, you cannot own this thing. It’s like saying you own Audley End or something. You cannot buy this sort of thing, can you?’

‘Of course, you can. You can buy anything you want.’

Ritwik thinks he catches a moment of truth, a brief flash of the inner, real Zafar, in this last statement and, for some intangible reason, it makes him feel both small and sad. He shakes it off and asks again, ‘But will you live here? In all of it? You could. . you could house ten, a dozen families here.’

‘Well, I wanted to buy something in this country, do it up, maybe have a place here when the family wants to travel.’ His voice becomes hooded again. ‘Besides, I work with important clients. It would be nice to have a place to entertain them, you know, have meetings, that sort of thing.’

‘Does it have a garden?’

‘A huge one. And an orchard. But it’s too dark to see them now. There’s even a gardener.’

Ritwik feels dispersed in this new world; in a strange way, it makes him feel dishonest, besmirched.

‘What time is it?’ he asks, feeling leached of interest and energy, as if it had all flown out to create the unremitting shower of attention the house so imperiously demanded.

‘It’s about half one. Time to go?’

‘Oh my god, it’s very late,’ says Ritwik, a bit too promptly. ‘Zafar, I would love to see the rest of the house but I must leave now.’

‘All right then, let me turn the lights off.’

‘I’m a bit paranoid about leaving Anne on her own. I keep thinking I’ll go back home one day and find her lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs or in the bathroom. She’s very, very old and frail. I’ve also recently discovered that she’s a little gin fiend.’ Ritwik keeps on this patter. ‘You’ll bring me here in the daytime one day, won’t you? I’d love to see the garden and the orchard and the whole house in the daylight.’

‘Yes, some time.’

‘Come to think of it, I’ve never seen you in the daylight.’

‘I might be a vampire, beware,’ Zafar says, making a lunge for his neck with bared teeth. Ritwik starts laughing and holds him away. In an instant, Zafar envelops him in his arms, lifts him off the ground, carries him to the room with the chandeliers and sets him down on the table on his back. He kicks out of his way a couple of chairs, unbuttons his fly, rubs himself against the seat of Ritwik’s jeans while he lies, knees up, on the table, then lifts him up again and pushes him down to his knees on to the floor. It is over in an instant, before Ritwik has even had a chance to tumesce. Saliva and semen drip off his chin on to the floor; he cannot banish the thought of the stain it will leave on the expensive wooden floor. He stands up, reaches into his pocket, pulls out some crumpled and frayed tissues, bends down and rubs the bit of the floor where he thinks the drops might have fallen: his dark-adapted eyes cannot make out anything much in this room.

They leave the house and begin the drive in total silence. There is no traffic and the redbrick houses behind their privet hedges and shielding trees all look abandoned. Even the streetlights add to the spectral effect.

‘Do you want to live in that house?’

Ritwik isn’t expecting a question like that; he turns his head sideways, in a flash, to look at Zafar. Zafar’s eyes are steadily fixed on the road unrolling in front of him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You could live there. If you wanted to, that is,’ he says in an utterly detached tone, as if he were reading regulation 4.2 of the Highway Code.

‘I can’t leave Anne on her own.’

A brief pause. Then, ‘It’s not as if she’s going to live for very long, is she?’

‘Zafar!’ Ritwik shouts. It’s a reflex action he immediately regrets and tries to turn into mock-admonishment, not with great success.

‘You had no compunction leaving her alone when you were working fields or factory warehouses.’

He starts disputing this — ‘That’s not true at all, I always returned home at night but. .’ — when, halfway through, there is a brief, illuminating flicker of light. It doesn’t come in a blinding flash; only a slow, unsurprising discovery of how much Saeed has told Zafar about him that makes him nod his head with a calm realization, yes, they know this.

Zafar is too shrewd to miss the sudden, midway halt. He laughs and says, ‘I’m just suggesting you might want to stay there, say, when I’m around in the country. But, of course, there’s your old lady to think of.’

He lets Zafar understand he has taken his words at face value by remaining quiet. But the game is too far advanced for him to let be. ‘Which bit of Africa were you in?’ he asks, looking out of the window.

‘Sudan, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire,’ comes the answer, prompt and pat, throwing Ritwik completely: Zafar will certainly not give him the satisfaction of letting him hear the clicks inside his head.

More silence and the slipstream of trees, hedges, houses in its silent flow. Then another move in the game: Zafar asks, with as much disinterest as his voice can muster, ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Nothing, just wondering.’

They are now well inside suburban London. ‘Saeed’s given you money, I expect.’