Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

“The main reason I could never have become a director at Philipp Brothers,” he said, “was because I spent too much time in the toilet.” This was one of the impediments to his taking up directorship. There were others. “The toilet holds up your day. You use a lot of time.” The fact that he hadn’t become a director haunted him; and now it haunted Ananda, since his uncle reminded him of the fact whenever he visited. What had first set off this tireless confession of regret was the news, from three years ago, that Ananda’s father, Satish, had become Managing Director of the company he worked in. Ananda’s uncle and Satish used to be inseparable in Sylhet; best friends; classmates. Both bright sparks, but Ananda’s uncle, it was conceded (by Satish in particular), gifted, maybe a “genius” (a judgement that Ananda’s uncle graciously concurred with). News came of Ananda’s father’s ascendancy. Ananda’s uncle responded with joy. Three days later, he began to explain — and he hadn’t stopped — how Anderson, the chief at Philipp Bros, had invited him to take up an “executive directorship” a year ago, which he’d turned down. “Executive director — a post with a directorship’s prestige, but few of the responsibilities. But I said I wouldn’t do it…What an idiot! I thought it meant I’d be travelling constantly, now to Frankfurt, now to Paris, São Paulo or Madrid. That’s all I wanted once — to travel, travel, travel: the high life! By the time Anderson asked me, the job had no charm any more. Idiot!” He was buttoning his shirt. In the winter, he’d wear the three-piece suit over the pyjamas — they kept him warm and were preferable to long johns. Now he made, again, his usual exculpatory statement: “I couldn’t have done it anyway. I can’t start work without going to the toilet. Not evacuating your bowels — and drinking milk — may lead to you breaking wind at any time…” Ananda ruminated on this, one of his uncle’s many diagnoses to do with navigating your path through a day; was reassured that he abhorred milk. “In the office, I seldom went to the toilet to do the big job, in case someone outside the cubicle heard me breaking wind.” He made a face to indicate that that would have been a calamity. Then narrowed his eyes, conceding he was over-sensitive. But he was also hinting at the stubbornness of the powers-that-be, that rule our lives and the universe. The gods. Aeolus. Wind. Had disrupted his progress. No point harping about it — he’d been made redundant after all. Or asked to take voluntary retirement if you preferred. All this business about directorship was, as they say, History: a record of events that can be resurrected only in the telling. “Excuse me, Pupu,” he said.

He’d gone. To do the small job. A voyage out with Pupu was a thing of joy, and he didn’t want it spoilt by an urge to pee coming over him. Once it did, he’d be seized by it. So now he was in the loo, wringing himself dry. It took minutes. And patience.

It was notable that heroes in Europe had no bodily functions as such — or encumbering relatives. Neither Hercules nor James Bond for that matter interrupted their antics and missions because they had to visit the toilet. When morning came, they didn’t bother to brush their teeth; they jumped out of bed in pursuit. For Bond, saving the world took precedence over everything. The furthest he went towards his hygiene was shaving, an exhibition of his pheromonic powers which was rudely cut short (depending on context) by a deadly insect, a treacherous consort, or a Soviet spy. So, even this one recorded act of his humble daily toilette was made tantalising by being never completed, and Bond was seen, again and again, brusquely wiping off what remained of the lather with a towel. This detail both unsettled and inspired Ananda and his uncle; they, namby-pamby Indians, would have assiduously washed the lather off their face before drying their cheeks. Bond had no time for niceties. Nor did he have an aunt or father calling him on the phone in the midst of his fights, or demanding to know where he’d gone in the last seven days. It was a peculiarity of Western culture: this immersion in individuality, and the pretence that haemorrhoids or family didn’t undermine or subvert the frame of action — it was what made its myths so free-floating and fabulous. And this transcendence was what shaped the colonial project: they simply wouldn’t have conquered the world if they’d paused to brush their teeth or vanished to do the “big job.” The latter, Ananda was pretty sure, was the reason there was no Bengali Empire.

—

Although his uncle had embarked on his great journeys in the forties and fifties — Sylhet to Shillong, Shillong to London, and from being a school matriculate working as a part-time used-car salesman in Shillong to a full-fledged Chartered Shipbroker who ended up as a senior manager at Philipp Bros — in spite of this, the grand journey he focussed on daily was an internal one. Not psychological, not inner; internal. To do with encouraging the food he’d taken the previous day to make its proper, unfettered way through oesophagus, alimentary canal, intestines, and colon to its final and complete escape, helped along by violent tides of water. For, in the morning (Ananda knew), his uncle, after his breakfast of syrupy coffee and half a spoon of honey and a quarter of toast, would drink ten glasses of water to cleanse his organs and send the waste within on a burst of energy to its bigger journey. “He’s going to come back now and boast about the water he drank today,” thought Ananda.

—

Next to the doorway to the kitchenette was a splendid calendar of Kali.

Ananda didn’t bother to check if it was out of date. Things were often displayed in his uncle’s room after they’d served their function. For instance, the bedsit upstairs, which the landlord had now acquired for a two-bedroom conversion, where Ananda’s parents used to live in the fifties, and which his uncle had inherited after they’d vacated it in 1961, to return to India. Ananda’s first visit to 24 Belsize Park in 1973 also saw his entry into his uncle’s former first-floor abode — for some reason, his memory would sometimes tell him it was Christmas. But it was August; he had vivid recollections of the summer; consecutive days of sunlight. Why Christmas? He now knew: the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, and especially the cards hung sideways from a cord strung across the room, with pictures of snowmen, holly, Madonna and child, their bright fins pointing downwards. Not just last Christmas’s cards, but earlier ones too — that August, Ananda found them in their assigned places, as if they’d just arrived. They were never removed, only added to.

—

Ananda went into the kitchenette to look for a clean glass. The two on the shelf had no smudges. He turned the kitchen tap, filled one, drank.

The gas cooker was unlit. The moment the temperature fell, two hobs would burn with low flames and have faintly simmering saucepans of water on them. The vapour was meant to counter dryness. The electric rods in the other room, which became incandescent and orange in the winter, made his uncle’s skin dry anyway. On the left ankle, he’d scratched a vertical gash into the skin. Even now there was a saucepan on a hob with a low still pool of water in it, its sides whitened by evaporation. Also a frying pan half full of liver, in which the sauce had congealed richly.

Plonking the glass into the sink, Ananda returned to the table and saw the Times , which he’d bought less than an hour ago and as good as forgotten. He picked it up and turned it round, and was gripped by SHAHNAWAZ BHUTTO SHOT. Tragic family. Enemies of India; Zulfikar had been to the same school as he, but decades before. The school was proud of the fact; the Principal, peering at them over assembly: “Who knows? One of you might be a future Prime Minister,” while they fidgeted. Or maybe “proud” wasn’t the word, given the war in 1971. But who, in death, can be classed as friend or enemy? I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Let us sleep now . Was Shahnawaz with his father today? Ananda put down the paper and went for the Sun —astonished this time by the starved figure of Rock Hudson, smiling. This unspeakable affliction, coming out of nowhere! The gods’ retribution for human happiness. He was mortified, when he turned to page three and paused over the girl’s gleaming nipples, trying to feel some desire. The breasts sloped down meekly; the face was audacious and common — the sort you’d have glanced at twice in Sainsbury’s and maybe made eye-contact with. This sense of possibility excited him — it was less a visual than a brazen verbal statement, more bold and shameless than anything the photograph actually contained: he was appeased she wasn’t model-like, but so living, contemporary, and English — truly “your girl of the day.” Shahnawaz Bhutto and Rock Hudson dissolved into a retrospective glimmer; empathy deserted him; his cock stirred. His uncle returned; he swiftly returned the Sun to the table.