Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

—

Nestor Davidson was Jewish: a man fitting in, seamlessly, without any special attempt to do so, but having to fit in nevertheless. Was this what had made Ananda’s and his paths converge — the fact there was room here for them both, Mr. Davidson with his Lithuanian forefathers of whom he knew relatively little, Ananda with his covert Sylheti ancestry? No, that was too fanciful. Maybe it was simply that they both loved “modern” literature. After meeting Mr. Davidson, Ananda, for the first time, had felt there was a point to his being here; that he was moving in the right direction after all.

—

The right direction! But he was late. It was 11:35, it would take him twenty minutes to reach Mr. Davidson’s door. That is, if he picked up momentum and didn’t dawdle on Tottenham Court Road. For his journeys in the neighbourhood hardly ever had a purpose. Today was an exception — but even this was more of an unofficial meeting between a mature writer and an apprentice than a tutorial: term was over, his second academic year was history. He sat on the bed, tied his laces, got up. Alone. No mother to see him off, no stream of meaningless mother-chatter to soften his exit. It was quiet with her not there. One part of him still listened, alert, for the Patels. Nothing. He closed the door behind him, went down the tunnel of stairs, the jaundice-yellow rug lit evenly by yellow light, swinging quickly at the first landing to avert the possibility of an emerging Mandy — more than her intolerance of his singing it was her betrayal that had shaken him — and then, alighting from the last flight of stairs, he was in the ground-floor hallway, the floor covered indiscriminately with the glossy detritus of this morning’s junk mail — somehow attesting to the fact that much of the day had already elapsed while the thicker letters in white or brown envelopes — final reminders to pay gas bills; missives from the home office — lay bunched by an invisible hand, piled neatly, on the central heating radiator on the side. Ananda paused to peer at them before deciding that this mix of the daily precipitation of official communications and a suspiciously non-committal package addressed to Vivek Patel, probably containing a pornographic magazine, had nothing for him. He opened the door and, once he’d passed the little vestibule — where often garbage bags were kept — turned right towards McDonald’s.

—

Here, at McDonald’s — whose burgers were both disappointing and too expensive for him, the big Mac, for its size, a Herculean task to bite into, but strangely nondescript to the palate — was a junction at which you encountered people crossing from Tottenham Court Road into the futuristic anonymity of Euston Road. Others headed through the glass door for (or emerged heavy with) a Big Mac meal, and still others, across the road, milled before Warren Street tube station, either about to disappear inwards, or just coming out, accustoming themselves to the right angle of Warren Street and Tottenham Court Road.

Ananda turned right into the wide busy stretch that went much further than the brain could accommodate; for he had trouble comprehending that this Tottenham Court Road was identical to the one after the traffic lights that would sever New Oxford from Oxford Street —there lay the more salacious stretch, besides of course the obscure guitar shops in by-lanes, and Foyles, civilised sentinel; but also prostitutes so down-at-heel that you flinched and looked away — they becoming, for a split second, focussed on you as you passed by, giving you the privilege of their attention (it was nice to be noticed, however you might deny it, when you were in the crowd), but becoming bored instantaneously and returning to their vigil; in further by-lanes were the remaining XXX cinemas that, under Thatcher, had become pristine with nipples and buttocks and never the vestige of an erection, the LIVE PEEP SHOW! signs, bursting with unfounded optimism, and the weirder notices pinned to doors: MODELS ON THE FIRST FLOOR. In his first year, he’d been a flâneur of these sites, a frequenter of interiors in which no one acknowledged anyone else as they browsed in stops and starts, and even the faint touch of another man’s shoulder could make you flinch; shops that you slipped into through curtains that had been passed through a shredder; he was uneasy, but the shop assistant (if you could call them that: they were probably on parole) was usually friendly, but sly; only once or twice had Ananda received a whiff of racism, a burly man saying “Vindaloo, vindaloo” in an eerie sing-song to himself. Such people were to be ignored and avoided; there are certain demoniacal beings in the universe, his uncle had said, quoting Taranath the tantric, who are dim but incredibly powerful; they can grow a hundred times their size in a second; they have brute strength; they can fly; but they are not intelligent. You won’t be able to beat them in a contest of strength, but you have to hold your nerve when facing them. His uncle’s reason for referring to Taranath the tantric was to take a dig at Western civilisation, its technological marvels, which he dismissed as a brash, superficial form of energy. Ananda found Taranath the tantric’s definition handy for classifying the whole range of skinheads, football fans, and neo-Nazis he must take care not to run into during his Soho wanders.

—

This stretch, on which he made his progress towards the college, was boring. He wasn’t even sure if it was Tottenham Court Road. Not a dirty magazine to be seen. Instead, the Grafton Hotel, with its purple-liveried porter. Boring restaurants — Lal Qila (mildly uppity, with tandoori quail on the menu); Strikes, the raison d’etre of whose name was impossible to second-guess, with black-and-white pictures of striking workers from the twenties (no overt homage being made to Arthur Scargill) and a menu dominated by burgers; and Garfunkel’s (no evident genuflection to Paul and Art), where you had to wait to get a table (raising your expectations, naturally), and which probably served the woodiest French fries in miles. He’d eaten at each one: at Strikes and Garfunkel’s with his mother, when she was tired of cooking and he of saving: they’d let go and, with a disproportionate sense of guilt and liberation, made their way there. Strikes! Garfunkel’s! He’d coerced his uncle twice to treat his mother and him to Lal Qila. He felt no remorse — his uncle was a well-to-do man (though he might have lost his job), without a family or property to his name. Surely he could take them out once a week? So ran the unwritten rule (unchallenged, to date, by his uncle).

—

He turned left at Heal’s. When he’d first moved to Warren Street — still fresh to this terrain — he’d taken the longer route, crossing the road at McDonald’s and, quite alone — there were hardly any pedestrians here — traversed a no-man’s land, passing, each day, a largely unvisited sari emporium, aware that Drummond Street and the Asian grocers and bhelpuri shops weren’t far; walked, walked, in silence, till he reached Euston Square tube station. Here, as he turned sharply right facing the station, the vista of Gower Street and his destiny — of being condemned to being in London, of making this journey to college — presented themselves plainly. The grey buildings on his left were the college’s, and, midway through the walk, you passed the old grand building and entrance — faux renaissance with its white dome, marked by imperial pretensions, befitting of Rome rather than the surrounding London brick and stone. This entrance was out of bounds; the grand building was being salvaged and renovated from before he’d seen it almost two years ago; it was an irrelevance; he simply walked past it, noting its brief dishevelment, before he reached the traffic lights, and turned left. It took him two weeks to realise that he needn’t take that walk, that he could go down Tottenham Court Road till he reached the Goodge Street underground, and turn into the street bordered by Heal’s. This was a better route, less stark and nineteenth-century, less emblematic of the colonial past — what a poor subject he’d have made, even worse than the maladroit he was as a migrant student! — and more consolingly drab and populous. The scattered signs of old and new wealth flanked him on this trip; Heal’s, with its fluttering pennants, was a palace, and he had no reason, now or in the future, to enter it to survey the heavy furniture displayed within. Habitat was next to it, with its perky designs, its transformed shapes and fragile-looking chairs and tables; he and his mother, small and bright in her sari, had roamed here one afternoon, and she’d bought him the dining table — it was on a thirty per cent reduction — that now took up one tenth of his room. Much more sprightly, this route. Gower Street — Tagore! What had Tagore felt about Gower Street? Ananda had heard that Tagore had enrolled in the same college in 1879 to read Law. He’d attended a few lectures — but not on Law, as far as he knew, but by Herbert Spencer. To be anonymous, a nobody, and a subject! This, no doubt, was what had made Ananda shiver slightly when going down Gower Street: the haunting of Empire. Tagore had fled back home, long before taking a degree, in disgrace. Ananda would have fled, too, if he’d come here in 1879; he could barely bring himself to continue in Thatcher’s multiracial capital. His mother’s visits — her company, the constant chatter in the room — had kept him from returning; poor Tagore had had no rescuing angel, no mother-love to protect and entertain him. Nor, for that matter, had he had Ananda’s uncle. Though his uncle couldn’t be trusted. Not only was he seldom sympathetic towards Ananda’s outpourings of homesickness, he claimed he never felt homesick himself. He was lying.