These presences and shadows scare him sometimes. He has taken to sitting with his back firmly pressed to the corner where two walls meet at right angles. He has become like a cat: at least two sides are covered and nothing can startle him from behind. Whatever encounter there is in store for him will be face to face; he’s prepared for it, ready to look it in the eye.
Look her in the eye if she comes back again.
So far, she hasn’t come back while he has been in his room, but occasionally, when he returns at night, turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open and, leaning forward, quickly switches on the light with an outstretched arm while still standing outside, he knows she has been in the room. No, nothing has been moved or hidden, nothing has been disturbed. There is no trace, no evidence, only a gathering together of the air into its normal Brownian motion after it has been sliced through and agitated by a recent presence. It is like water restored to calm after the ripples generated by a lost stone have died out but the water still remembers. The air in his room sometimes has that quality of remembrance. That’s all. And he’s afraid of that memory of air.
He doesn’t dare tell anyone about it; he knows they’re going to be polite, commiserating, maybe just embarrassed, averting his eye. He certainly doesn’t want to confide in Gavin. Lately, he has been getting on Ritwik’s nerves. When he’s alone with Gavin, the deprecatory humour directed at him, the ribbing, they’re quite all right; he takes them in his stride as part of Gavin’s affection for him. He even enjoys, up to a point, Gavin’s feigned exasperation with him, his attitude of what are we going to do with a __________ like you? The blank term changes: sometimes it’s rustic peasant, at other times phony, charlatan, unsophisticated yokel, embarrassment; it all depends on his mood, but it’s all done in the spirit of fun and friendship.
Maybe.
In public, this takes on a sharper edge. Then, it seems Gavin is intent on pulling him down. Ritwik becomes some sort of a clownfreak for whom Gavin has to apologize even at the same time as he’s expected to perform for others. It is quite relentless; Gavin doesn’t seem capable of any other mode with him in public. Sometimes it’s funny, this you must treat Ritwik with indulgence, he’s a third-world peasant disclaimer from Gavin. At other times, the sheer unchangingness of it grates on him. Maybe he reads too much into all this because he is touchy and feels insulted. It could all be ironic, all the time, in which case it would be very trendy and in.
So telling Gavin, even ironically, is out of the question. Besides, what could he say? Oh, Gavin, by the way, my mother keeps appearing in my room. This hash is really wicked, it steals up on you slowly. What were you saying about ‘index’ and ‘icon’? He doesn’t want to dent Gavin’s soi disant role of educator and civilizer. It’s a role that has taught Ritwik to smoothe over the jagged edges of his own behaviour, to learn to observe, ape and conform.
Gavin is full of contradictions in this way; for all his radical lefty politics, he occasionally jolts Ritwik with a type of old-guard parochialism, such as his firm belief in good breeding. On the back of some conversation about women — they are never very far from Gavin’s mind — he once said he didn’t see why people objected to arranged marriages: at least one could make sure then the girl came from a good family. This is a vital thing in Gavin’s book: he sets a high premium on manners, decorum, social niceties, impeccably behaved children. And he’s very aware of class. There is this girl he fancies, Miriam; she reads English and plays the cello. He tells Ritwik, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have Miriam play the cello naked?’
Ritwik says, ‘You know, there’s a Buñuel film where a woman plays some Brahms at the piano, nude.’
Gavin’s mind is on other things. ‘That well-bred personality all thrown to the winds. . the cello between her legs. . oooff, I can’t bear to think about it,’ he rhapsodizes, then adds, ‘It would make her poshness piccante, you know, the contrast between good behaviour and. . and. . shocking, well, shocking. . WHORISHNESS.’ He pounces upon the word.
‘How do you know she’s well-bred and all that stuff?’
‘Oh, I know friends of hers. She went to a posh school in posh North London.’
Ritwik is a bit daunted, although this doesn’t last very long for he finds out, in a few months, that Gavin’s use of the word ‘posh’ is a bit loose, that Miriam went to what they call a bog-standard comprehensive, that she does not come from a posh (even by Gavin’s definition) bit of north London. But then, he thinks, there are two types of people. The first, his type, is the myopic, narrow sort: they take people exactly as they come — curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc. No more, no less. There is no other meaning behind these appearances and facts. They mean to him: curly hair, glasses, crushed velvet trousers from a Marie Curie shop, plays the clarinet, hasn’t heard of Alain Resnais, etc etc.
The second type, to which Gavin belongs, is endowed with a shrewd socio-historical perceptiveness. They meet people and extrapolate a whole complex context from their parents’ marital status, parents’ jobs, area of residence, school attended, etc etc. By themselves those elements are nothing but indices to further extrapolation. So Gavin tells him how Highgate and Mitcham lead to further, different meanings. By itself Highgate, or Mitcham, signifies nothing. It’s like a game in which corridors open to further niches and passages that might then lead to rooms. Or might not. Perhaps one day he is going to understand England and its people well enough to have that breadth of vision. He certainly means to.
His fellow-students in the group, or at least a couple of them, are helpful to him. Not in any egregious or patronizing way; they assume that cultures don’t translate neatly or dovetail into each other with a satisfying click, so they mostly leave him alone, or ask him questions to satisfy some minor curiosities. In the early days, when he was just beginning to settle in and get introduced to some of the students in college, a standard question was So is it very different then? Are you adjusting well? Is it a big shock? His equally anodyne answers were vague mutterings about No, not all that much, you know, we grew up reading Enid Blyton and, later, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, or, Well, Calcutta is still such a colonial outpost…
An important question now seems to be, ‘How is it you read English Literature in India and came here to do more of it?’ He surprises them by revealing that English Literature, as an academic discipline, was first taught in India, not in England; English administrators and policy-makers thought that the study of English Literature would have an ennobling and civilizing effect on the natives. They are thrown a bit, even a little embarrassed by this.