‘It could be the name of a gay porn film,’ Gavin sniggers. They both giggle for a while.
As the dope kicks in, Ritwik invariably wonders whether he really fancies Gavin or whether it’s just his generalized hunger for white men. Anyway, Gavin is as straight as they come with a line in Tamil and Sri Lankan women. When he is single, as he is now, he looks at Pakistani and Indian women and goes, ‘Oh, sheees, look at her, just look at her.’ And if the woman is with another guy, especially one who he thinks is English, he always adds, ‘What a bloody waste.’ Gavin tries to live up to the cliché of the sexually rampant Latino man. With his balding head, goatee and white skin — his mother is from Brazil but his late father was Scottish — he doesn’t quite fulfill the image of the dusky South American stud.
As if in some backhand acknowledgement of this, Ritwik asks him to play that Brazilian song he loves, the one about sexual success. Gavin obliges, laughingly. As the song comes on, Ritwik asks him to translate, although he knows the lines, in Gavin’s translation, by heart. He likes to watch Gavin laugh affectionately with his countrymen, or even at their stereotyping.
‘What use do I have of money, friends, fame,’ Gavin laughs and translates, ‘if I do not have sexual success?’
They practically roll around laughing. Ritwik loves the sound of those Brazilian words: Para quê que eu quero grana, Para quê que eu quero fama sem sucesso sexual. He likes the rhythm and the cockstrutting masculinity of the song as well. It would be considered ironic here but he is certain it’s dead serious in Brazil.
‘My country is mad,’ says Gavin. But there is no doubt, either in his mind or in Ritwik’s, that he loves Brazil, loves it with the indulgent love of a parent for a slightly wayward but basically good child. He belongs to some militant Maoist group in São Paulo and wants to go back there to join in grassroots activism before the next general election. He is convinced they will win and the thought of imminent election fills him with excitement: he raises his arms and says things like ‘Long live the Revolution’ and wears Castro and Che Guevara T-shirts. He is a great acolyte of Trotsky and he designed an exhibition poster for the Ruskin School’s annual degree show — a reproduction of his lithograph of Trotsky in his open grave. It borders on the abstract; the various shades of grey and black just about give the impression of an awkwardly curledup figure — like some sleeping Pompeiian — lying on the ground, with a stick, or something of that sort, beside it. Gavin explains it’s the ice pick, which was driven into his head by the assassin employed by Stalin to hound him out, even in furthest Mexico. Apparently, he died saying, ‘Stalin did it.’ Ritwik asks him for a copy of the poster and Blu Tacks it to his wall.
Gavin is a clever art student. He makes things which have such a novelty value for Ritwik that he likes them instantly and thinks they’re the Next Great Thing. This is not difficult, for Ritwik’s knowledge of twentieth-century art stretches up to Matisse and Picasso, Rothko at a pinch. It is centred exclusively on paintings as well; other forms of representation to him are jarringly modern. But there is this one nifty thing that Gavin does with empty plastic bottles which extends Ritwik’s horizons in a silent way. He puts photocopies of photographs of people inside empty plastic or glass bottles, along with bits of rubber band, cloth, miscellaneous found objects, and then covers up the mouth of the bottles with cloth and string. He extends this principle to boxes and tins with windows cut out in them, shoeboxes with slits that make them look like barred windows. The effect is one of not only looking in, but also of these objects inside — puppets, statues, photographs — looking out from their confinement on to the free viewer.
Gavin makes one for him with an empty 330 ml bottle of Evian and a picture of a woman’s face. He later explains that the woman is one of many whose sons went missing while Pinochet was in power. Ritwik keeps it on his mantelpiece, secretly hoping that one day he can sell it for a huge sum when Gavin becomes a big name. He is confident Gavin is going to become a big name, like the ones Gavin himself thinks are great — Paula Rego, Andrzes Klimowski, and a few others whose names Ritwik doesn’t remember. He hasn’t heard of any of them, his idea of a contemporary big name is the only name he knows of in the art scene — David Hockney. He doesn’t know anything about Hockney, he has just picked up the name from Jonti, another art student to whom Gavin introduced him some months ago. Jonti and Ritwik get on well and sometimes the three of them get stoned in Jonti’s room where he talks about David Bowie and Hockney and charges them £2 at the end of the evening for sharing his dope with them. Gavin always says, ‘God, the English really are a nation of shopkeepers,’ when he comes out of Jonti’s room.
Meanwhile, Ritwik tries to bone up on all the names in this new world to which Gavin has introduced him. He remembers, with a hot flush of embarrassment, how he had made friends with Gavin by talking nervously about Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini and Ghirlandaio after overhearing at a meal in hall that he was an art student, as though all it took to lure art students into friendship was a name or two from his gallery of childhood obsessions. He had culled the names, as a boy of ten, from the Collins Concise Encyclopaedia, his first peek into the greater world outside the horizons of his life in Grange Road; it was a book that became a shield, the talisman against his life at home, the very first stumbling, halting steps to his escape. He had doggedly chased those names and their works, hunted them down in bad, grainy reproductions on the brittle pages of out of print, cheap imprints in decrepit, poorly stocked libraries in Calcutta; to utter those names aloud, to hear his own voice articulate them, felt like sacrilege, a breaking of an unimaginable taboo. Gavin, however, knew them and had got excited about having someone to talk to about the various hand gestures of Mary in the Annunciation. Ritwik had been so grateful that he had had to swallow the several lumps in his throat and rapidly blink his smarting eyes as Gavin had talked to him about Michael Baxandall. Six months into his friendship with Gavin hasn’t eroded that gratitude. Here, where the past seems more foreign, more unknown to almost everyone, Gavin is a little oasis in a desert of amnesia. He is convinced this is so because Gavin is Brazilian and engages with Europe in a way only outsiders can do.
He envies Gavin his familiarity with the contours of the world he studies but, above all, he envies Gavin his easy acceptance of Maoism, his left-wing activism. He goes to meetings of the Socialist Workers’ Party and raises his arm in that characteristic way of his while uttering a joyous ‘Yea’ when Ritwik tells him how, when the Communists came to power in Bengal in 1979, they changed the names of all Calcutta streets that honoured British viceroys, governor generals and rulers to names of Communist leaders. Curzon Street, Bentinck Street, Ripon Street were ditched and in their stead there were Lenin Sarani, Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. The sole exception was Theatre Road; it was renamed Shakespeare Sarani because the British Council was on it.
Gavin thinks this wholesale renaming is important. Ritwik tells him how people in Calcutta still keep calling the roads by the names of their erstwhile British overlords; he has never heard anyone use the name Ho-Chi-Minh Sarani. Rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, ordinary people, all stuck to Harrington Street and Dalhousie Square.
‘But, Gavin, it’s all very well to say “People this”, “People that”, but nothing, absolutely fucking NOTHING works in that state,’ Ritwik occasionally splutters.
‘You can’t have Revolution overnight,’ Gavin says. Ritwik can hear the upper-case ‘R’ in his voice. ‘Besides, while you were having a Communist Revolution in Bengal, they elected Thatcher here,’ he adds with distaste.