Amit Chaudhuri: Odysseus Abroad

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He didn’t feel prosperous. That’s because he wasn’t. His father was going bankrupt paying for this studio flat — and for his tuition fees, which (since he was an Indian) were a few thousand pounds while domestic students paid nothing. Thatcher was responsible; but he bore her no personal ill-will — he was willing to overlook some of her shortcomings for being so integral to the great British show. When he marvelled at her emphatic delivery, sitting in front of the TV, it was her performance he was concerned with and not her words — nor did he connect her directly with the murderous fees his father was paying.

Carrying more than 500 dollars when you were abroad violated FERA regulations; so his father had devised the following method around them. Ananda’s uncle disbursed monthly largesse among relatives living in Shillong and Calcutta — mainly in Shillong, with straggly families displaced during Partition — the principal sum going to an older brother. This made Radhesh (his uncle) feel kingly, and succumb to the tribulations of being a king on whom many were dependent. He could never forget the irony that the family — including this older brother — had dealt with him in his childhood largely with remonstrances, seen him as a bit of a loafer, and that he, buoyed up by the British pound (even though he’d recently been made redundant), was now helping them. “The reason I didn’t marry,” he claimed in one of his monologues, “was because I ”—he patted his frail chest lightly—“wanted to be there for my family.” That’s not entirely true. You are, and always have been, afraid of women . Now Ananda’s father made all those payments to those remote towns in the hills; the equivalent amount was transferred monthly from Ananda’s uncle’s National Westminster account to Ananda’s. In this manner, FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulations Act) was subverted but not exactly flouted, and Ananda’s low-key, apparently purposeless education was made possible. It was an arrangement that both satisfied and exacerbated his uncle. His aristocratic urge to preside and dispense — trapped within his slight five-foot-eight-inch frame — was appeased, but his precious need for privacy (he was a bachelor, after all) was compromised.

Because of the paucity of money at any given time (though Ananda didn’t consciously think himself poor; he’d been born into comfort, and, since affluence is a state of mind, he possessed a primal sense of being well-off), Ananda had to ration his recurrent expenditure on lunch, dinner, books, and pornographic magazines. The last comprised all he knew at this moment of coitus. They were a let-down. He anyway suffered from a suspicion that the women were only pretending to enjoy sex, and this consciousness was a wedge between him and his own enjoyment. He required pornography to be a communal joy, shared equally between photographer, participant, and masturbator. But his suspicion was reinforced by Thatcher’s repression of the hardcore. The men’s penises, if you glimpsed them, were limp. There was hardly anything more innately biological and morosely unsightly than a limp penis. Meanwhile, the women’s mouths were open as they lay back in their artificial rapture. Nevertheless, he pursued his climax doggedly and came on the bedsheet.

Last night, he’d brought home the first of his two customary Chinese dinner options — mixed fried rice and Singapore noodles — from the restaurant on Euston Road. The other side of that road was so still and dark (notwithstanding the sabre-like hiss of passing cars) that it might have been the sea out there for all he knew. By day, an unfriendly glass-fronted building reflected the rays of the English sun; neighbouring it was a post office. Whenever he was in the Chinese restaurant for his fried rice or Singapore noodles in the evening, it was as if these were a figment of his imaginings — until he’d seen them both the next day when he crossed the road to Euston Square. The restaurant last night had been almost empty, and the staff were as distant as ever and didn’t let on that they were familiar by now with him and his order (both the Singapore rice noodles and the fried rice were one pound fifty) and with his timorous aloneness. They hardly made any attempt at conversation; presumably because their vocabulary was so austerely functional. England and its tongue refused to rub off on the staff of London’s Chinese restaurants, Ananda had noticed; they continued to be defined by a dour but virginal Chineseness. Their taciturn nature was a kind of solace. Thus, silence characterised the time of waiting during which a man rushed ingredients into a wok, producing a hiss and a piercing galvanising aroma that Ananda relished as he ate in solitude, watching Question Time.

The small amount of money in his wallet meant he had to choose from an exceptionally narrow range of orders; but he didn’t mind, because he mostly lacked appetite. The walk from Warren Street to the unexpected moonscape of Euston Road and back again, by when the Patels were stirring in expectation of the night, was so full of loneliness that it couldn’t even be softened by self-pity. During the day, he sometimes forgot lunchtime, delaying eating since it was a boring duty, as sleeping and occasionally waking were. What exactly should I do today? It’s going to be my final year ; the hunger came and then passed, it had disappeared even from his memory, he saw it was an entirely dispensable thing he could cast aside with impunity if he ignored its birth pangs, and at half past three he bit into a green apple. For this reason, he’d grown — to his own abetting approval — very thin (poets were seldom plump) and more and more reliant upon Double Action Rennie, the acidity habitually returning to him at night-time with its stabbing pain. Still, none of these compared, in their undermining, of the stripping of his identity itself. None of the things that defined him — that he was a modern Bengali and Indian, with a cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature; that he wrote in English, and had spoken it much of his life; that he used to be served lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack as a child; that in his early teenage years he’d subsisted on a diet of Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner; that he’d developed a taste for corduroys over jeans recently — almost none of this counted for anything in London, since everyone here spoke English, ate sandwiches, wore jeans or corduroys. In this way, his identity had been taken away from him; and he’d become conscious, in England, of class. Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures — it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent — class was too.

—

A sunny day! Again! One end of his white kurta fluttered in the mild breeze that was coming through the crack he’d created by pushing up the window. Almost directly opposite was Tandoor Mahal, with its unprepossessing plastic sign. Its day had begun too, though its real day would start at half past twelve, when the board on the door would be flipped on its back to say Open. He looked at it. Sunlit, like all else in the world. Lace curtains drawn, cheap red curtains tied on the sides with a sash, the menu card showing.

Traffic into the restaurant began before it opened; the owner’s two daughters, the older one in her teens, quite pretty but a bit bent, wearing jeans, the younger brother, who must be nine or ten — they’d either linger on the pavement or walk (the older one leading) towards the underground. At random moments of their choosing, the family went in and out of the restaurant, as if it were an annexe to their house: they lived next door. The children didn’t know Ananda; but he knew their father, the round-faced man with big expressive eyes — like Vivekananda’s, but sans the penetrating quality — that contained love and life in their gaze; hope, too, since it was possible that business might suddenly pick up. As behoves an owner, he was at all hours of the day in a suit, except he forgot his jacket half the time and so it was the white shirt and grey trousers you mainly saw him in. The principal traffic into the restaurant, it had become clear, comprised the family — though Ananda had never seen the wife — stepping out of the house next door and stepping into Tandoor Mahal. There were very few customers who were tempted to enter the door from Warren Street; there had to be a few who walked in through the Euston Road entrance.