Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

“You take him back, please!” insisted Shah strenuously. “He is living here for too lahng. Someone will look after him better there — no?”

“Tu isskoo kyu pagal karta re,” his uncle admonished his friend, appearing displeased. He lapsed into Hindi sometimes when speaking with Shah. For no good reason: to become, briefly, a man of the people. Also, playing the fool? One should never discount that.

Shah was making a big demonstration of his eagerness to let go of Rangamama: underlining the fact that he didn’t own him. For he sensed that Ananda’s mother viewed him with reserve and suspicion. He was a small, unending drain on Rangamama’s funds. They knew this from Rangamama’s grumblings. Of course, he also pointed out that Shah was a benefactor and help, in offering to not only shop for the groceries but insisting he do so: “Why you are going to Budgens Nandy — I know where there are best prices for courgette and garlic and alu. Woh tum mujhpe chhod do .” And then he’d procure garlic, alu, unsalted butter, and a cauliflower for six pounds, pointing out: “Very good cauliflower — you will not see so good every day.” Ananda’s uncle didn’t have the gumption to quiz Shah about his bookkeeping, and obediently agreed about the voluptuousness of the cauliflower. But his discontent festered. Last month, he’d parted with two hundred pounds in small payments and change to his neighbour (his own bookkeeping was laborious, impeccable, if futile), a figure that agitated Ananda’s mother, since it was more than what he sent many of his relatives in Silchar and Shillong. Yet, despite his moaning, he resisted alterations to the arrangement. He valued Abbas. Also, doling out money was, today, his one way of reminding himself and others of his special status — that he was unattached; living in a bedsit more or less for the rent he’d paid in 1961 (eighteen pounds); and the recipient of a huge pension of twenty-four thousand pounds that increased each year and was also index-linked (as he’d informed Ananda) to inflation. This was not including the early retirement lump sum he’d been gifted on saying goodbye to Philipp Bros. So, though he had no property to his name, no car, you could almost claim he was — rich. Except to the few who knew him (Shah was one who’d have known, his uncle must have boasted about the salary and pension to him often), it would have been impossible to know he’d had professional success — not because that was his intention, but given the kind of person he was — so that, once, when he was weaving his way in his black mac down Belsize Avenue (he’d narrated this with disbelieving delight: it spoke to him to the core), a kindly lady had startled him by giving him a pound.

—

Before Ananda’s father sailed to London in 1949 to become a Chartered Accountant, he’d proposed to his best friend’s sister, using him as a via media. There were two schools of thought about how this came about. Rangamama had claimed to Ananda that he was having a conversation one day with Ananda’s father about Khuku: “She’s twenty-three years old, and there’s still no sign of a bridegroom.” Their father had died when they were little; the family wasn’t well off. Ananda’s father had looked thoughtful and said: “Don’t worry, Radhesh.” The proposal followed. According to this account, the marriage was a result of Ananda’s uncle’s intervention, his willingness, even, to set aside his dignity. The other version of events came from Ananda’s mother, who told him that, soon after their wedding in London, his father had said to her: “It was after I heard you sing Ore grihabashi that I decided.” “But that was long ago!” “That was when I knew…a person who sang the way you did had to be a good person.”

Before this, though, there was the six-year wait between proposal and marriage, Shillong and London. Khuku waited. But there seemed no guarantee that Satish would return. By the sixth year, she was close to despair. She sent him a letter, asking him to either release or marry her. She was by now twenty-nine. Satish woke up. He made arrangements for her to fly to London on an antique plane (that is, the plane imagined by Ananda was antique and industrial). One detail she repeated with satisfaction: that, because her family wasn’t well off, she insisted on setting out without the gold jewellery customary to a wedding. They were married.

Soon after the wedding, she and Satish began to plan what to do with Radhesh, a genius but quite mad, who’d done so well at school but sabotaged his matriculation finals and still stood twentieth in Bengal. Early on, Radhesh had revealed a tendency to manufacture his own impediments. After he bounced back from his school debacle and stood First in his Intermediate finals, he grew obsessed with syphilis. He was convinced you could catch it from any surface, and could hardly study because he couldn’t bear to touch the pages of his textbooks in case they carried the bacterium. In his attempts not to get infected, he turned each page by clasping it between his fingernails. Ananda’s father noticed his friend’s adoption of these methods, and the ensuing paralysis in his revision. Radhesh didn’t appear for his finals; he became a used-car salesman. Even today, he was relieved, in spite of everything, never to have caught syphilis. He said so to Ananda, when he implied he was still a virgin — a fact Ananda was aware of, having heard it from his aunt, to whom his uncle had confirmed it in 1965. There had been no developments since then. Syphilis was just one reason for this state of affairs; but an important one. “Imagine,” he’d said to Ananda, “if you’d had sex with someone”—his “you” was general but also pointed, and Ananda felt a personal unease at the pronoun—“and then, every time you felt a burning sensation when you passed urine you wondered — Could I have caught something?” He’d shaken his head in horror as they went up Belsize Lane and Ornan Road in the direction of the Trust House Forte Hotel. “That’s why things are so vivid and black and white to you,” said Ananda, bringing his hunch out into the open. “Because you’ve never had sex. You live in an innocent complete world — it’s possible for you to be idealistic. Once you’ve had sex, the world goes grey.” He spoke this piece of wisdom from having twice had — to his growing sense of self-torture — coitus with prostitutes in rooms in Apollo Bunder. His uncle, puzzling over the insight, bowed his head.

—

“There’s no point him coming here to do Chartered Accountancy,” Ananda’s father had said to his wife. “There are too many people doing Chartered Accountancy. Let me check the situation with aeronautical engineering.” That was an idea planted in Radhesh’s head by a garrulous older cousin in Sylhet. “You’ll be structuring the new aircraft,” the cousin had told him, “both fighter and commercial. It’s an international field, and given it’s peacetime the arsenals for both war and commerce are going to thrive.” “Since I have a head for numbers,” Radhesh had solemnly written from Shillong, “I might stand a chance: calculus and algebra are indispensable here. Queen Mary College, Imperial, Newcastle are places to consider”—the names of institutions known to him from early youth coming to him with facility. But his friend thought Radhesh would prosper more in finance than in designing; he did some research and discovered that Chartered Shipbroking might be the most profitable — albeit a testing — option for the future: a cabal guarded by the near-unleapable hurdles of exams which, however, Ananda’s father believed his perverse but ingenious old friend would be able to penetrate. So he pulled Radhesh from the air, and placed him in, or at, sea.