Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

Ananda put the Collected Poems where it had been, half leaning, half standing. He walked over to the Crime/Horror section, where his uncle stood with his back to him, fussily poring over some pages as if they contained a legal correspondence. To see him doing anything silently was exemplary; he spoke incessantly, so that silence changed him, like those aliens he’d sometimes describe — those who are near us, deceptively normal.

“Which one?” Ananda asked, and his uncle blinked, smiling with genial remoteness.

It was Skeleton Crew —the new collection by Stephen King.

“Any good?” Ananda asked the question academically, without seriousness.

“It is good,” said his uncle. “His stories are usually engrossing — about uncanny occurrences that change people’s lives.” Approbation for a writer was unexpected, except where Tagore was concerned — out of tune with his personality.

The taste for Stephen King had evolved quite recently though, and swiftly. Ananda was still getting accustomed to it — to the unrelenting onward stride, after more than a decade defined by the Pan Book of Horror Stories .

“Maybe I should buy it,” said his uncle, narrowing his eyes. “I’ve gone through all the books in the library.” By “all” he meant horror, the supernatural, life after death — that queasy, uneasy addendum to literature; even so, it was unlikely he could have actually exhausted the lot. “One of the staff said they’re closing the library next year,” he added. Ananda was a bit taken aback. He’d never seen this library — never needed to — but hadn’t thought it would just vanish. He read about such developments in the papers only with the faintest attention, events on the hazy outskirts of the endless, ugly debate about the National Health Service. Opera house closures. Local authorities. Public money. What would his uncle do now?

“Should I get it?” he said with agonised self-absorption. The question wasn’t meant for Ananda; he was asking it of himself, aloud.

Ananda, eavesdropping, volunteered: “If you need it, take it.” Horror, murder, like poetry, were addictions; they were meant to numb and enchant simultaneously — to insidiously engender the desire they satisfied. It depended on how much you could get by with — or without — in a day.

“I have one I’m midway through,” said his uncle, visibly doing some mental arithmetic. “It should last me three — no, maybe four — days.” He was looking for reassurance about his chances of survival.

“Then you’ll be fine,” said Ananda, trying desperately to extricate Skeleton Crew from his uncle’s grip. “You’re in no desperate rush to get it.”

They were pointed to the city. Not the City , where his uncle used to work. No, towards London. Of course, King’s Cross was on the very verge of the capital-see City; but it was its utter opposite. No money seemed to reach it.

—

They had, in October, embarked on the 168 from Belsize Park, reaching Euston — from there, his uncle holding forth, walked till they were in York Way. Here, they woke to sunlit industrial blankness. This was neither Belsize Park nor Oxford Street. What then? They hit upon a notion — they were in “Dickens’s London.” “You can feel it’s still there,” Ananda observed tersely.

—

They now came to the abattoir-like entrance of Belsize Park tube station. The rush of souls was swelling, given it was Friday. But there were still fewer people going in the direction they were compared to the first lot of homecomers. The revellers headed for Leicester Square and Oxford Circus would increase in an hour.

Ananda plunged his hand into his pocket to take out the travel card valid till midnight. His uncle carried, in a flap in his wallet, his pensioner’s travel pass, which gave him infinite freedom to avail himself of both spheres of London public transport — underworld and overground.

The shorn head on the pass was strangely futuristic.

“Never get your photo taken in a booth,” said his uncle. “You’ll look darker than you really are. It’s because the booth cameras are adjusted to make white skin look normal.”

On descending, they were greeted by “Morden via King’s Cross 5 mins”: a relief. On the tube, his uncle pointed out, “Pupu — we could have seen a film.” But they had — last week. Ananda’s mother had flown away, and they, returning from Heathrow to a London that seemed dream-like, had gone to the cinema. In the Leicester Square Odeon, their bodies clenching with each explosion and blow, they watched A View to a Kill . It was an irony that they both adored Sean Connery but had never watched him in a cinema in unison. The first Bond film they’d seen together — also Ananda’s first Bond movie ever — was a Roger Moore, Live and Let Die . They’d caught it in Swiss Cottage in 1973. Last week, witnessing again with concern Roger Moore get into all sorts of scrapes but surviving them to brush the dust off his jacket and straighten his tie, Ananda’s uncle had leaned towards him and murmured: “Pupu, what would we do in such a situation? We’d be hopeless!” Despite Ananda’s uncle setting up a somewhat presumptuous equivalence between them, it was true. They weren’t designed for action. Actually, neither was good with even ordinary mechanical things. Ananda was sure this was why his uncle shunned the debit card. The most complex operation Ananda himself had completed was changing a light bulb (in his studio flat, but also for Mandy). Ananda wasn’t sure if his uncle’s ineptitude had anything to do with Saturn. “Shani”—Saturn—“rules my life,” his uncle had told him, to account for the lack of momentum in his professional career. Ananda had read that people governed by Saturn were, besides being ditherers, great fumblers.

King’s Cross was a paradoxical place at 6 p.m.: swarming with commuters, and lonely. Ignoring the rush, a bunch of people seemed to stand outside the station just waiting, smoking, kissing, or staring at the Pentonville Road.

“What are we doing here?” asked Ananda, raising his eyebrows.

“But it was very interesting when we came last!”

That was in the autumn, when the Durga Pujas were exiled from Hampstead to the Camden Town Hall — which was just out of sight of King’s Cross Station. Harrumphing Bengalis with their slow-footed wives had suddenly appeared. They too — Ananda’s mother, his uncle, he — had come, having heard of the move. They’d crossed at the traffic lights, not certain where, in the by-lanes, the venue was. His mother wasn’t capable of long walks. It was Saptami, which, despite its meaning—“the seventh day”—was the start of festivities.

—

“Hello love, how are you?” A tall ungainly woman in a top revealing round white shoulders had been passing up and down, preoccupied, a cigarette in her cupped palm. Suddenly friendly with his uncle. Who seemed neither interested nor harried; he whispered to Ananda in that candid baritone: “Be careful, there are many of them here.” Ananda felt affronted she hadn’t addressed him. She’d looked through Ananda. What made his uncle worthy of the approach? He wondered what the rate was.

Difficult, this evening (it was getting on to half past six) to feel that Puja magic or, for that matter, the atmosphere of “Dickens’s London.” Turning into York Way, they found it hard to proceed. The pavement was thick with office workers waiting for buses.

They turned back to the station. The woman in the black top still hadn’t found a man; she’d forgotten them, and hovered before the main entrance, purposeful and preoccupied.