Amit Chaudhuri: Odysseus Abroad

Khuku’s propensity to battle was innate to her. Besides possessing an inexplicable tendency to be joyous — she could never be sad or angry for long — she’d had an inexplicable conviction from childhood that she was destined for great contentment. She’d never believed she’d live forever either in Sylhet or Shillong; and, with or without the transfer, neither Aldwych nor South Audley Street could hold her. This was part of the hope she conveyed to Ananda: that nothing, including Warren Street, was long-term. Her readiness for battle she had even today. When trouble presented itself, she had to confront it with her oppositional littleness.

When the Patels had moved into the rooms upstairs, Ananda’s mother was visiting, and staying with him in the studio flat. After two or three nights, it dawned on them that the Patels would be noisy. Noise invaded the flat from different directions — from below (Mandy’s radio) and above. Ananda began to obsess over the Patels’ movements. At 11:30 p.m., he found his mother had slipped out irresistibly — it was more in response to his anxiety than to the noise that she’d done this — and gone up the flight of stairs. He followed her in sheepish excitement, remonstrating “Ma! Ma!” unable to pull her back, till they were in the attic’s half-lit converted kitchen, a den in which Vivek Patel and Cynthia and Cynthia’s brother Rahul and Shashank were pouring wine into glasses, talking, laughing loudly. Khuku had ambushed them; they were taken by surprise. Though Vivek attempted to refute her in his labile, lisping way, and Cynthia giggled, and Rahul, most disconcertingly of the four, exuded a silent, myopic rage, his mother stood in the eye of Walia’s converted kitchen and lectured them. Her message, implicitly — but also forthright, without prevarication — was that her son was doing a “real” degree (unlike them) at a “real” university, he’d embarked on a difficult voyage, his father was paying through his nose, and she — the timeless Indian mother that she was (and more) — would brook no partying as the hour approached midnight. They defiantly invoked the equivalent of their constitutional rights, but in the end they let her be, as if she was mad. Maybe the Patels had become a bit more self-aware about their stomping; only they couldn’t help making a racket.

—

She had gone. Eight days ago. Ascended swiftly into the air. Like a bird. Taken that proud national aircraft Air India: nodded to the Maharajah. She was back home with his father.

—

Unwashed, evacuated, clothed in the night’s kurta and pyjamas, he sat on the rug to sing. He was an exile in his home. He frequently expected complaints. He knew the ragas he sang were hopelessly alien to Mandy’s ear (she too slept till midday) and foreign even to the boys upstairs. Not one of them (certainly not Ananda) ever saw the sun rise; though maybe the Patels sometimes went to bed when it was just coming up. Now Ananda made a clarion call to the day with the raga Bhairav (though it was already nine thirty). He hardly let a morning pass without practising — he was a singer in his own solitude, he was his own audience and his notes needed to sound perfect to himself. Without practising his voice would falter. He sat cross-legged on the rug — all rugs in London houses were the same — with the tanpura on his lap: it was no bigger than a ukelele, made by a septuagenarian, Ambalal Sitari. The old man received visitors in a room in Breach Candy — Ananda’s music teacher had taken him there and cajoled the old man to part with the portable tanpura: “He will be in London soon, and he is dedicated: he practises every day — in fact, I have to tell him not to practise so much!” The strings didn’t speak; they had a flat sound, however much Ananda manipulated the threads at the lower end — the tanpura wouldn’t drone, and was barely audible even in the studio flat’s deep quiet, but he kept worrying it, nestling the instrument. Ambalal Sitari’s experiment hadn’t come off. The wood, which should have become a living thing, remained, stubbornly, wood; the strings were muted.

—

He sang: he’d trained himself to be thick-skinned. It was a quarter to ten — it was their problem if they went to bed late, then slept slothfully into the hours when people were at work. They couldn’t expect midnight-stillness at this time. He sang delicately; singing was his mode, in his student’s life of subterfuge and anonymity (he hardly ever went to lectures and only a handful of professors knew him), of being battle-ready, in constant preparedness. It was a battle — this struggle to master Bhairav — almost without a cause or end. Twenty minutes into the exposition, there was a stirring above. The movement of a beast: a first random thump then silence, then — making Ananda uneasy — another thump. It was the alienness of the melody that intruded on their drunken sleep. “Karma Chameleon” would have just lulled them, late in the morning, to sounder sleep.

—

No, Mandy was definitely up. She’d just cleared her throat; a female throat-clearing, melodious — but threatening. He and Mandy had a sort of duet going — of noises, of complaints. The first time was soon after he’d moved into the flat; term had begun, his parents were still staying with him before they flew back. It was early October, warm, and the window was three or four inches open, allowing in footfall, snatches of song, a shout from near the tube. Then there was an intrusion of another kind, of atmospheric noise as he lay back, head on the plump pillow. A hubbub with a wash of background music, as if he were, without warning, in the centre of a metropolis, roaming in the town square. He must have dreamed this, sound and image mixing with one another as he dozed off. But no, on second thought, he was awake and conscious of floating above the crowded hubbub. Ah, a party! In the flat downstairs! He couldn’t believe he was privy to this bonhomie. He asked his mother, unconvinced he wasn’t dreaming: “Can you hear it?”

After midnight, not bothering to change out of his pyjamas, he went down, knocked on Mandy’s door, and — sensing fleetingly the figures in the background — told her he couldn’t sleep.

—

Mandy was in her twenties. Sometimes she looked older, as if she might be in her early thirties. She kept uncertain hours. She’d come home at three in the morning, shut the door with a bang, turn on cheery music. She told him that she did her aerobic exercises at that hour. She’d shared this information when he’d pointed out to her indignantly: “Mandy — what about you? — must you, must you play that music at half past three or four in the morning?” His question was meant to counter hers: “Must you sing in the morning? It drives me crazy! It’s like Chinese torture.” “I have to practise at half past nine,” he’d said. “Besides, it’s well after the day has begun.” “I know, but I come home very late — I work at a bar twice a week.” “I’m sorry, Mandy,” he’d said, attempting to shrug. “I do have to practise.” On some days, she worked as a temp — probably a receptionist. She went out in the morning with the music playing all day — low, but continual, inoffensive, except that it was bubblegum pop. He queried her about why it was necessary for the music to play in an empty flat, and she told him it wasn’t empty; the music was for her budgies, so they wouldn’t be frightened or alone.

Ananda had never seen or heard her budgies; it was the first he’d become aware of the birds. He’d never seen the inside of her flat except once, when she’d knocked on his door and nonchalantly asked him to help her change a light bulb. There was an erotic charge running beneath the way they chafed and got on each other’s nerves — or was he imagining it? It had seemed, as she spectated upon him climbing a chair and reaching for the ceiling (again, in his pyjamas), that she was capable of dealing with the light bulb herself. But he was very proper and a little cowardly too — he barely glanced at her after he’d fixed the bulb and made for the door. Another time he did glance at her, when she’d kept her door ajar and, half stepping out of the bathroom, partly wet but in her bra and panties, shouted over the doorbell: “Can you see who it is, please? I think there’s a package for me.” And he’d noticed the diaphanous curve of the brassiere, and how palely luminous her stomach was, and also the faintest smile on her lips, because she’d noticed him noticing.