Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

He sees a familiar car, a blue Bentley, in the held-up convoy before the heavy police presence disperses the protesters. But perhaps he imagines this flash of blue to accompany the words of the events coordinator of CAAT whose impassioned face appears on the screen and speaks out a new knowledge for him. ‘. . supply arms to the most detestable and repressive regimes in the world, arms that are used to crush democracy, kill people, extinguish their voices. If you look at some of the countries which have been invited to this fair, you’ll be outraged. What are Burma, North Korea, Iraq, Sierra Leone doing here, countries with military juntas and ruthless dictatorships as governments, countries with a proven record of repression and torture? Some of the delegates here are brokers and fences: theoretically and officially we sell this to, say, Pakistan, or India, but where do they then end up? There are private buyers here, among the so-called delegates. This is just a legitimization of illegal arms dealing and it’s being done in broad daylight, with the full knowledge, indeed, approval of the government. We are campaigning to reconcile a foreign policy with . .’

He moves to the cooker and watches the peas agitated in the furious boil of the stock. A few seconds of staring into that roil and he is hypnotized by their movement.

He doesn’t even know he is going to go out of the house until he steps out of the front door. The sky is the dark blue of an English summer night. Unerringly, he walks towards Brixton tube station. It is like sleepwalking, the motives and outcomes equally cloudy, the acts themselves unpredictable, zigzag. An old serpent inside him has begun to stir, awaking from a long, long sleep. He hasn’t felt this hollowing out of his bowels, this insistent clenching and unclenching of his sphincter, since his cottaging years in university.

In the train, he keeps his eyes fixed on the ads over the opposite seats and the route of the Victoria Line, a blue, straight trajectory of sans serif letters from Brixton to Walthamstow Central. Despite a number of empty seats, a man stands holding the blue supporting rod in front of the doors and teeters precariously on the balls of his feet. He can barely keep his eyes open. At this hour, the carriages are littered with trampled newspaper pages, empty Lucozade bottles, McDonald’s boxes, crumpled brown paper packets that had held chips, entire newspapers folded and left at the windows above the backrest of the seats. Only one headline is visible: BRITAIN TOPS ASYLUM SEEKER INTAKE IN EUROPE. Daily Mail.

By the time he gets off at King’s Cross, the sky is still blue enough for the twin tower blocks of the Bemerton Estate to be silhouetted against it like two menacing gods presiding over their demesne of misrule and detritus. Once within the maze of alleyways, streets and culs-de-sac, the noise of traffic and human life on the bordering main roads fades away, leaving only an echo corridor of receding footsteps, the revving of an occasional car, the awkward shuffle of bodies disappearing into the dark, sometimes even the hissy whispers of haggling customers. Everything seems furtive and has the quality of noises off. Even the sound of trains entering the depot to the west, into sidings, has a faraway quality to it, something heard in a different, fairytale land, before a child’s eyes close over with sleep.

His insides are fizzing fireworks of fear; it runs, thick and sluggish, in his feet, his calf muscles, his knocking chest, turning them heavy and light at the same time. Where does this end and hunger begin? Initially, he stays on streets from where running out onto York Way or Caledonian Road would be a short sprint, but the slowly diffusing smoke of the drug inside him obliges with its addictive hits only when he strays into the darker, more remote areas of the maze. The thought of those pimps with the acid bulb explodes in a delicious crackle-and-flash of fear in him. Tonight he will go with anyone and not ask for any money. Tonight it is faceless pleasure he is after.

He walks towards the stretch of water between Camley Street and Goods Way. It is the only way he can live with his fear, exorcizing it in the very place he was pinned down and threatened with the potent, disfiguring hiss of acid. He hasn’t been in these desolate streets for well over six months; surely, the men who assaulted him have forgotten his very existence by now. Small change, that is what he was to them.

He hears footsteps in the next street and instinctively moves into the darker shadow of what appears to be a doorway to an abandoned warehouse. There are no streetlights here, only what meagre illumination reaches from the halogen lights of the Bemerton Estate; one could hardly count the change in one’s hand in it. Two men appear at the end of the street. On instinct, Ritwik flattens himself against the door. One man could be a possibility, two men, almost always trouble: first rule of streetwalking. A few minutes later, he peeps: they are gone. He steps out and moves towards the end where he had seen the men. He moves fast because this area is slightly better lit than where he had hidden.

As if from nowhere, there are two men standing there. Skinny, young, pinched pale faces. One of them is smoking. Ritwik bends his head, concentrates on the road, and increases his pace. He can feel their eyes boring into his back, hears some whispering and then the punch of ‘Paki cunt’, not hurled at him, not yet, but just a casual conversational moment that exceeds and spills over the whispers. Whatever is invisible in the semi-darkness, colour obviously is not one of them. He tries not to panic, not to run, not to register any reaction, and keeps walking at the same pace. Thank god they are not those Albanian pimps at least, he thinks.

The men smell his fear, read his forced nonchalance easily, and gradually step up their abuse.

‘Paki scum, hey you, Paki scum.’ Tentative, even hushed, like a singer trying out his voice in a new venue, testing the acoustics.

‘Fuck off to your slum you Paki bastard you Paki cunt fuck off.’ Louder, bolder.

Ritwik arrives at a crossroads. If he takes a right and runs, runs very fast, he might be able to make it to one of the arteries feeding into the Caledonian Road. But the lane is so dark that he is scared to step in there. He hears running footsteps behind him. He wheels around: the men are within spitting distance. He has no choice; he makes his first mistake by turning into the street nearest him, thinking it will offer him a temporary sanctuary, the cover of darkness, or throw the men off the scent. Fear clouds his thoughts, and when he hears running behind him again, he blindly turns left, right, left, any turning that appears in front of him, desperate to lose himself and confuse the men. There are no niches and corners in the street he finds himself in, panting furiously, although it is darker than Camley Street. He has lost all orientation now. He is so scared that even the slow clang-and-rattle of a train in the background doesn’t give him back his bearings. He is deaf to it; his ears are now wholly given to catching the sound of pursuit.

He hears a low whistle, a short hollering, the sound of more running feet, another whistle, and then, chillingly, the sound of running swells. There are five men now, at least five that he can see, entering his street, summoned like dogs by some ultrasonic signal unheard by the human ear, by the scent of prey. He huddles against a wall, wishing himself invisible. If he could only walk a few feet and slither under the hedge in front of him, he would feel safer but he is certain any movement will give him away.

‘Find the fucking wog. You two run over to that end, we’ll wait here for him. Let’s see where that scum can hide.’ The words are so loud that it seems to Ritwik all perspective, all distance, has been warped and shortened to pack this street and the five men into a little closed chamber. He finds himself shaking all over. He decides to risk it to the hedge — invisibility will save him — and in stepping out of the shadows he makes his second and final mistake.