Gavin could very easily have replied, ‘Get a grip’ or ‘Welcome to Real Life’, or something equally cutting. And he would perhaps have been justified.
If Gavin was convinced, he didn’t show it. He had heard the disjointed, stuttering stories in total silence. For once, he had resisted making comments or ironical facial expressions.
‘Is it also. . also a. .,’ Gavin hesitated, ‘is it a matter of your sexuality as well that you don’t want to go back? I can’t imagine gays having a ball in India.’
Ritwik looked up. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, it’s partly that. I can be free here. No, you’re right, the opportunity to be myself here is something I value immensely.’
A long silence during which Ritwik fretted at the blatantly unconvincing segue into self-help-book talk.
‘Look, Gavin, one runs away from a country because of war, famine, torture, repressive regimes, all that sort of thing. Those are very serious things. But isn’t someone justified in turning one’s back on unhappiness, just turning away from the end of a road?
I’d like the opportunity to start again, in a new place, with new people. Is that so unthinkable?
‘Everyone aspires to a better life, why can’t I? I’ve got a chance now. . if only. . if only you’d show me an opening. . you’ve lived in this country for many years, you came here as a student but you worked and studied and managed to stay on. I’m just asking you to help me go down that way.’ He halted. There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘Besides, there’s nothing. . no one, actually, to go back to.’
The betrayal was ashy, bitter in his mouth as the image of his brother’s innocent face, brimming with the yearning to flee too, stabbed him. But he had to lie now, lie to live; besides, he could console himself with the last letter from Aritra, in which he had written of his imminent departure for Delhi to start his MA. He, too, would escape to his new life, Ritwik thought, trying to console himself, willing himself to believe that Aritra would be fine, would be able to look after himself. He had no choice except to believe in that. What Ritwik had purposefully hidden from Gavin was the sense of freedom into which his parents’ death had released him.
His parents had ensured that the brothers got a good education partly in the hope that when the boys grew up they would save their parents from the miserable lives in which they had got mired. Ritwik and Aritra were their one-way escape tickets, their pension fund, their rescue team. They had pinned all their hopes on the boys, counting out their days, waiting, waiting, waiting for the final move out of the hell of Grange Road.
But both boys had been released from that enormous burden of responsibility: from every day being weighed down by the expectation to perform, by the accumulated weight of the sacrifices their parents had made every day. Of course, these had never been made explicit but the silence of martyrdom, an eloquent dumb show of clenched jaws and haggard faces, had become deafening and solid.
The boys had been brought up like pack horses, blinkered to see nothing else but the path straight ahead; suddenly their masters and drivers were gone. The slow grind of the knowledge that they were investments or life-insurance policies disappeared one day, burnt by the same flames that consumed their mother. In its place was a freedom so vast and so dark it was as if they had been catapulted into deep space. No one to look after in their old age, no responsibilities, no waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the ill health of frail parents or the money to pay for their proliferating illnesses, no rope at their neck; their lives were their own at last, no one could lay any claim on them.
When Ritwik had returned from his scholarship interview and told Aritra the good news, his brother’s face had first fallen and then radiated the purest joy, the joy of watching your prison inmate escape, knowing you’re going to be next through the breach he has made. As children, both of them had been reminded constantly by their mother, ‘Doing well in school is the key to everything. You can have everything you want if you’re good in studies.’ The indoctrination had worked in ways that even she hadn’t dreamed of. Both boys had found it easy to do well academically but Ritwik was not so sure if this had come about because it was the only reward he could have given his miserable parents — their eyes lit up when the school report came in or when one of the boys won a prize; they couldn’t stop beaming and stopping the neighbours in the streets to tell them about their latest achievement — or if he had been beaten into doing well by his mother. Either way, the key, which she had so incessantly talked about, was miraculously in his possession and he hadn’t even known he had had it until he was awarded a scholarship to go and study in England.
It was only now he realized that she had given him both the key and the freedom to do whatever he wanted with it.
The rain was viciously lashing the window, driven wild by a high wind. Something shifted and realigned inside Gavin. Ritwik had almost whispered the last few words, ‘Besides, there’s nothing. . no one, actually, to go back to.’ Yes, Gavin was going to help him but only just: he didn’t want Ritwik to end up as his responsibility. He would introduce him to a few things and a few people and leave him to it. There was no way he was going to become a crutch for this boy who was all set to become a difficult problem. He saw in Ritwik his own early years in London and didn’t want that different creature of the immature past, his own green, stumbling self, inflicted on him now, for growing up always entailed a certain degree of embarrassment, a slight desire to wash one’s hands of recent history. He didn’t want a walking reminder of it in this boy.
Ritwik couldn’t have imagined what Gavin was about to hand him: an old, frail woman living in London who needed care and someone to stay in the house to keep an eye on her. She was too poor to offer any pay but the accommodation was free and he could get a part-time job for other living expenses. Gavin didn’t explain how he had met the woman but he mumbled something vague and inaudible about friends of friends among the Brazilian community, or maybe distant relations in North London and left it at that. It seemed to Ritwik that Gavin had stayed at this woman’s house, looking after her and working in restaurants, at a time when he needed a toehold in this country but beyond that hypothesis he knew he wasn’t going to get any more information from his friend. Besides, he was so thrilled that Gavin had thrown him a lifeline, and that too, so easily, so quickly, he couldn’t be bothered prying into Gavin’s past; he was sure this old woman was going to shed more light on it.
When the practicalities — convenient time and dates, packing up stuff, storage, finals, phone calls — were all worked out, Gavin asked him, casually, ‘You do have a permit, a visa to stay on in England, don’t you?’
Equally casually, Ritwik lied, ‘Oh yes. Yes, I do.’ And then added, for verisimilitude, ‘For another two years.’
‘But you don’t have a work permit?’
‘No, but it won’t be a problem to find people who’ll hire me on a loose-cash-at-the-end-of-the-day basis, will it?’ He was willing Gavin to say oh yes, no problem at all, London is brimming with such people.
Instead, he got, ‘Strictly speaking, that’s illegal. If you’re found out, there’ll be trouble’ — he pronounced it ‘trawbble’ — ‘rules about immigrant work and stuff are very strict and complicated.’ When Ritwik looked confused, Gavin added, ‘But there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people working in the black economy. You’ll certainly not lack company.’