Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

He got up at around nine oclock with the usual feeling of dread. He threw off the duvet. Still unused to being vertical, he pounded the pillow and the sheet to ensure hed dislodged strands of hair as well as the micro-organisms that subsisted on such surfaces but were invisible to the naked eye. He straightened the duvet, tugging at it till it was symmetrical on each side. He smoothed the sheet, patting it but skimming the starchy bit a shiny patch of dried semen, already quite old on the right flank of where hed lain.

The anger inside him hadnt gone from the aftermath of the concert. Hed watched it six days ago on TV: Africa, London, and Philadelphia conjoined by satellite. He switched it off after three quarters of an hour. By the time the Boomtown Rats came on, and the sea of dancing people in Wembley Stadium was being intercut with Ethiopian children with innocent eyes and bulbous heads, a phrase had arisen in his consciousness: Dance of death. Didnt the exulting crowds in Wembley and in Philadelphia see their heroes and their own complicity in the famine? But surely this line of thought was absurd, maybe malicious, and to interpret in such terms an event of messianic goodwill, meant to bring joy and food to Ethiopia, nothing but perverse? So what if it brings a bit of joy to Londoners as well? Is that what youre resenting? Hed discussed it with Mark while having lunch in the Students Union Building; and Mark, in the incredibly tolerant way of one whos brushed aside death (he was a cancer survivor; his lower left leg was amputated), and who saw his friends madness for what it was, said with self-deprecating reasonableness: I think any kind of effort that brings relief to Africa is all right. Can one make an aesthetic objection, though, however awful that might sound? Ananda had insisted. Can an aesthetic objection go beyond what might seem morally right? That all those people cheering and dancing in Wembley Stadium, all of them thinking that by dancing to the music they were doing those starving children a good turn that it made it quite wrong and macabre somehow, especially when you saw the faces of the children? Mark smiled a smile of understanding and of one who knew deaths proximity. As for Ananda: his own position on this matter underlined to him his isolation from the world from London, for that matter.

That feeling had come to him at other times, when hed seen the necessity for certain actions and yet couldnt participate in them including the great march that took place a couple of years ago soon after hed arrived here as a student. He remembered his first awkward hour in the college joining the other first years for the freshers get-together in the Common Room on the second floor of Foster Court, ascending the stairs under a painting by Whistler, and ending up informing a bespectacled girl with a Princess Di haircut that the Sanskrit prem meant both carnal desire and love, that there was no separation between the two in Indian culture. The girl had smiled distantly. Only a week or two after his arrival, the news of the imminent cruise missiles had gathered force, leading finally to the march. He didnt want to die and he didnt want the world to blow up (as it seemed it any day would), but he couldnt spend too much time thinking of the shadow of death hanging over mankind. Yet he didnt quite admit this to himself. It was his uncle, whod come to see him the next day in Warren Street, whod said, while watching the Hyde Park bound procession on TV with Monsignor Kent in the foreground (a touch of revolutionary glamour it gave to this man, the word Monsignor):

Theyre not getting to the root cause. Theyre concerned about the symptom.

This was uttered in the droopy-eyed, amused way in which he spoke aphorisms containing a blindingly obvious truth ignored by everybody.

Symptom? said Ananda, challenging his uncle, but part of him chiming in.

The nuclear bombs only a symptom, repeated his uncle, almost contemptuous. Getting rid of it wont solve anything. Arrey baba, they have to look at the root cause.

He pottered about for three or four minutes, making wasted journeys in the room, before parting the curtains and lifting the window a crack. In crumpled white kurta and pyjamas, he looked out on the street and on Tandoor Mahal opposite, unconcerned about being noticed by passers-by below. It was striking how, with the window even marginally open heavy wooden windows he had to heave up or claw down, and which he was unused to (they made him fear for his fingers) sounds swam into the studio flat, making him feel paradoxically at home. His mind was elsewhere. He was aware that the house itself was very quiet. The only time there was a sound was when he walked about, and a floorboard groaned at the footfall.

Upstairs, theyd sleep till midday or later. He knew when they were awake because of the sporadic bangs and thuds that announced movement. It was as if the person who first woke up didnt just get on their feet, but stamped on the floor. The noise they made wasnt intentional it was incidental. It wasnt directed against others because it bore no awareness of others. It was pure physical expression, made by those whose heads didnt carry too many thoughts at least, not when they woke and became mobile again.

He hadnt slept well. This was the norm; partly, it was the recurrent hyperacidity, which had him prop up two pillows against the wall that made it difficult to sleep too and, cursing, reach in the dark for the slim packs of Double Action Rennie he kept at his bedside. The taste of the tablets with associations of chalk powder and spearmint stayed with him slightly longer than their palliative effects.

But mainly it was the neighbours. They hardly slept till 3 or 4 a.m. There were three people upstairs, but also, often, a fourth. Vivek Patel, who wore pleated trousers and was lavish with aftershave; he wore accessories too chains around the wrist, fancy belts etcetera. He had a lisp or not a lisp, really, but a soft way of saying his ts that was both limpid and menacing. His girlfriend Cynthia stayed in the same room. She was Bengali, but from a family of Christian converts. Cynthia Roy. She was pretty and a little cheap-looking, with her bright red lipstick and simper and the thick outline of kohl, and with her sheep-like devotion to Vivek. Cynthia was a new kind of woman a social aspirant, like her boyfriend that Ananda couldnt really fathom, especially the mix of characteristics: newfangled but unintellectual, independent but content to be Viveks follower. Anyway, Ananda barely existed for her. Someone had said she liked tough men. Vivek wasnt taller than five feet seven or eight, but he was probably tough because he was broad. In spite of his chains and aftershave, he had a swift, abstracted hammerhead air. Ananda had overheard him say Fuck off, fuck off to Walia, the landlord, after the payphone incident uttering the admonishment in his calm musical manner (Fukko, fukko) to which Walia clearly had no answer. Walia had nevertheless reclaimed the payphone coin box and carried it downstairs and out of 16 Warren Street. But in all other ways he was toothless before Vivek Patel because Viveks father, an East African businessman, was an old contact of Walias. Patel Senior lived in Tanzania. From there, hed sent forth two sons, Vivek and Shashank (who stayed in the single room next to his older brother), to study at the American Management School in London. Shashank looked like Vivek in a narrow mirror: he was slightly taller, paler, and a bit nicer. He spoke with the same lisp which could have been a hallmark of Tanzanian Gujaratis. On his lips, it sounded guileless and reassuring. Hed told Ananda in the solemn way of one gripped and won over by a fiction that the American Management School offered genuine American degrees. This was the first time theyd discussed education and pretended to be high-minded students of a similar kind to have different aims that somehow nobly overlapped and converged in this location, despite the signals to the contrary.