A red car pulls up a few yards in front of him and the passenger door opens. No one gets out. By the time Ritwik arrives next to the passenger door, the driver has lowered his head and is leaning sideways to look at him. He is not thinking, there is a vague feeling somewhere that the driver knows him and is trying to give him a lift. Maybe it is one of the students who lives in his annexe. He gets in, does up the seat belt, slurs out the name of his destination and only then manages to loll his head driverwards to look at him. No, he doesn’t know him, but he is nice-looking, nicely aged, a handsome uncle or maybe even a father who’ll take care of him. There is a benign smile somewhere behind those thin lips, waiting to break out. Only when the car picks up speed does Ritwik notice that the man hasn’t spoken at all, or even asked for directions; in fact, he seems to know where they are headed. Ritwik tries to focus but it is too much of an effort. The motion of the car moving smoothly doesn’t do him any good: he longs to move around so that he can keep the imminent sickness at bay.
The man takes the correct left turn, drives into the college annexe — he sure knows the place — parks and turns off the engine.
When Ritwik speaks, what comes out is a slew of words run together, ‘J’yoowannoo come up?’
The man nods, pockets his keys and follows Ritwik who is already making his way up the stairs, as stealthily and as silently as he can. He doesn’t really need to — there is no one awake at this time. He turns around and puts a finger to his lips, indicating to the man to be quiet. The man nods.
Ritwik tiptoes down his corridor. His is the second room on the left; there are four on either side of the narrow, fluorescent-lit corridor. He opens his door noiselessly — he is surprised he doesn’t fumble with the key and the Yale lock — and steps in. The man follows. There is enough diffused light in the room from the car park outside so he doesn’t bother turning on the light or drawing the curtains. He starts taking his shoes and clothes off. The man does likewise, almost mimicking him: first the shoes and socks, then the jacket, the T-shirt, the trousers. They both leave their underwear on.
Ritwik gets into bed and slips under the duvet. The stranger sits on the edge of the bed and takes him in for a while, his face in the refracted orange glow of the room a chiselled piece of shadows. He too gets under the duvet and stretches himself along the entire length of Ritwik, their bodies touching at every possible point. The man’s body next to him is all silk and warm honey. And then it hits Ritwik.
The wave, which had been building up for such a long time, which he had managed to avoid so far, now suddenly grabs him up and hurls him against an invisible wall. The whole room spins and nausea crashes all over him.
He tries to lie curled up; his head in the crook of his arm, his eyes shut, and wills it to go away. He thinks of distracting things — The Parlement of Foules, the way Dr. Carter’s eyes had misted up while talking about the moment Pericles recognizes Marina, the day Pradip-mama had dropped a small, heavy metal die-cast on Aritra’s head many, many years ago and then run out of the house, fearing Jamaibabu’s wrath. . He is not even willing this random succession of thoughts any more; they are using him as a conduit to flow through, following their own opaque logic. But the room doesn’t stop swinging. He lies like an inert log, good for nothing, while the man tries to rouse him with his hands, his mouth, but nothing works. The nausea is so great that Ritwik doesn’t have the chance or the luxury to feel embarrassed.
He gets up to go to the toilet to be sick, realizes he doesn’t have a thread on him and, anyway, the toilet is too far down the corridor, in the landing outside, so he just lurches out of his room and enters the tiny shower cubicle that two rooms share. He retches at the sink — they are only dry heaves, deep and exhausting — but brings nothing up, only a bit of sour mucus. He decides that if he has a shower he will feel better, so he turns the shower on and lets the hot water sting and lash him while he slowly slides down against the wall to sit on the cubicle floor.
What wakes him up is the cold: the boiler has run out of hot water in the time he has been sleeping under it. He rises, turns it off, shivering from somewhere deep inside him. He steps out, opens the door to his room and there it is, on the floor, as if it has been slid under the door — a white envelope, stark on the dun carpet. Wet and dripping, he picks it up and opens it. Inside, there is a single twenty-pound note. The man has left, god knows after waiting for how long. Ritwik wonders if he tried getting him out of the shower.
He fingers the crisp banknote and a whole new world starts to swim into view like an undiscovered planet caught in its orbit for the first time. So that is how much the man thought he was worth naked but unperforming. And his second thought is — ‘food money for nearly a week’.
He doesn’t know it now but he is going to look back on this as a watershed in his small life.
PART TWO
SIX
When Ritwik got a two-year scholarship to study in the UK, two months after his mother’s sudden death, he knew he was going to leave Calcutta for good. The scholarship was his escape route, the prison door that had been left miraculously ajar. He would walk out of that door and never return. When he flew out of Delhi — strangely enough, on the thirtieth of September, the first anniversary of his father’s death — he knew he wasn’t going abroad only to study but was also leaving behind one life, permanently, in exchange of another one; unknown, but better. This much he knew — it was going to be a better life, as what wouldn’t be, compared with what he had lived for seventeen years in Grange Road?
Ritwik couldn’t manage to explain the whole extent of it to Gavin that Sunday afternoon, first, in Queen’s Lane coffee house, and then, later, in Gavin’s room, when Gavin realized this wasn’t any ordinary casual-friendly visit Ritwik had asked for. But he tried. Haltingly first, sometimes embarrassed, at other times, down-right ashamed, and then in one scrambled shuffledance full of false moves and missteps, he attempted to give Gavin some idea of the terrain he had crossed. There was no order to it, no neatness or linearity, just a piecemeal tearing of the fabric and flinging the bits to Gavin. Let him try and make sense of it, Ritwik thought; where he had not managed well, perhaps someone else, an observer or an outsider, would do better.
At least he started from a kind of beginning: when Gavin asked him what exactly he was escaping from, he said poverty, but what he should have said was the possibility of never escaping.
‘I don’t want to live in squalor any more. I don’t want to go down the way of my father, helpless and exploited, unable to escape. I don’t want to become him. If I return there, they will now attach their suckers on to me. Life out there will just carry on running in the same groove, decade after decade. I want a different life,’ he said to Gavin. How could he explain that he was also trying to escape the wet sticky monsoons; the blood-drying heat of summer, which made him a drugged, ill, slow creature for six months of the year; the insects that came out in giant colonies and multiplied during the rains; the sheer filth and mud of Calcutta streets, which welled in over the edge of his frayed sandals and oozed between his toes; the thirteen hours of power cuts every day; the chronic water shortage; the smell of paraffin and kerosene oil everywhere; the soot on the glass of the hurricane lamps; the random days without meals, all fanning and exacerbating the tensions in the joint family, year after slowfestering year?