Over the next month, Ritwik worked for Saeed in the hope that he would bump into Dusan somewhere. Sometimes, he worked stretches of ten days at a go, at other times there were three to four consecutive days when he returned to Ganymede Road after an hour or two of futile waiting in Willesden. There was more fruit-picking and promise of more by a farmer, or his friend, called Jack, in the autumn, in his apple and pear orchards in Kent.
There was the odd bit of packing fruit and vegetables in a giant warehouse off the M25. He met Kurdish and Turkish men and women there and first heard the term ‘refugee’, whispered, hot with stigma, almost unspeakable. It fell from the lips of the supervisor in charge of their packing unit as he was doing one of his inspection rounds. A baby, bound to its mother’s chest, was making an unbearable noise: Ritwik thought it was wailing because it was hungry but there was no stopping it and in the high-roofed cavern of the warehouse the acoustics seemed to conspire with the crying to make it more high-pitched, more insistent. The supervisor was doing his rounds and Ritwik understood that if the woman took time off to feed her baby, she would have the time clocked by the man and deducted from her wages. From all of twenty pounds for a nine-hour day. There was no altercation or even irritated sounds of ‘shhhh’ and ‘tssk’ from either the supervisor or the other workers but the air had been heavy with tension; there had been a greater concentration in putting lettuce in cling film. As the supervisor passed by Ritwik, he clearly heard him mutter, ‘Bloody fucking refugees and their fucking children’, then looked at Ritwik, rolled his eyes upward in a gesture that was meant to draw them together in their mutual irritation at this screaming, and said, ‘Why can’t they leave them at home? This god-awful racket.’ Ritwik had lowered his eyes. The appropriate reply — ‘Where should she leave it? At a crèche?’ — came too late, as the man’s back was receding down the far end, towards the double doors.
In any case, he wouldn’t have had the job any more if he had answered back. There were all sorts of talk and gossip in this warehouse — how the workers couldn’t be absent even for a day, how all the time they spent in there was costed down to the last second, including visits to the toilet, how lunch breaks fell outside the number of hours at work, how talking amongst each other was discouraged. Nearly every day some of them had a few pence deducted from the cash they queued for at seven o’clock on some excuse or the other. Ritwik wondered if there was a CCTV, keeping watch on them, hidden away in strategic corners, or if the management just took it for granted that the workers would be either too intimidated or too lacking in English to protest.
As soon as they emerged outside, everyone would lope off to his specific destination, mostly on his own, but a few in groups of two or three, which made Ritwik think they were either related or they lived in the same neighbourhood. It didn’t take him very long to discover that most of these groupings were made along ethnic lines: the Polish men clumped together, the few Kurdish women stayed close to each other because they were returning to the same council estate or bedsit.
Then one evening Ritwik noticed Mehmet, a young Kurdish man, sitting on the ground outside with his back to the warehouse wall, sobbing his guts out, surrounded by four or five other men, presumably all Kurdish. Ritwik edged closer to the group, eaten up by curiosity. Something had happened to Mehmet’s sister, but what exactly it was, no one would say. Perhaps they didn’t have enough English between them to articulate it. Or it could have been they didn’t trust this outsider at all, this thin, young boy who looked starved but could speak fluently in English, so what was he doing here among them when he could so easily have got a better job anywhere else?
Mehmet stopped coming to work. Ritwik worked himself up for three days to ask one of his Kurdish friends, as he was leaving after being paid, what had happened to him. All he got initially was a hooded look of mistrust; some shutter seemed to have come down, leaving Ritwik outside. Two men joined them and spoke rapidly in their tongue. One of them tried to speak to Ritwik but after a few stray words — ‘sister’, ‘police’, ‘beg’ — all flung out without joins and syntax, he gave up in frustration. What on earth had happened? Had Mehmet’s sister been caught begging on the Tube and arrested by the police? Did the police then discover she was staying in the country illegally and deport her with her entire family? Other lurid scenarios played themselves in Ritwik’s mind: was she a prostitute who was caught by the police in a raid? What was the begging all about? Was she begging the police to let her go? It was still light outside but the traffic whirling around them in the highways and flyovers had become denser and all the vehicles had switched on their head and tail lights. The sound was that of a steadily churning sea.
VIII
Miss Gilby has taken her seat along with the rest of the andarmahal in the balcony of the first floor. The dark green blinds are still drawn but the slats have been opened so that the women can see what is happening in the courtyard below. Bimala, her two sisters-in-law and Miss Gilby are all perched on moraas — cane pouffes with leather seats — while the andarmahal cook and the new maid stand behind a pillar in a corner. Bimala has procured a pair of opera glasses, which she passes to Miss Gilby and her sisters-in-law regularly so that they too can hone in on a face or a head in the crowd below.
For there is nothing short of a milling crowd gathered in the courtyard this morning, all waiting to hear the swadeshi leader Sandip Banerjea address them and direct the next phase of the movement. There are men from the village, men who have come all the way from Calcutta, men from surrounding districts, a large number of swadeshi activists — nearly all of them young students, hardly more than seventeen or eighteen years old — in their customary orange garb that makes them stand out like a bright flash in the dark sky. Mr Banerjea was supposed to have started at ten; he is more than twenty minutes late and although punctuality is something which the Bengali man can never be accused of, Miss Gilby cannot help feeling that the swadeshi leader had an actor’s cunning sense of timing: he was whetting the appetite of the crowd by making it wait for him.
When he does appear, borne on a wooden board held on the shoulders of four young disciples — Miss Gilby cannot shake off that mildly objectionable word — her feelings appear to be confirmed in an irrational and unverifiable way. Loud cries of bande mataram go up, especially from the energetic orange youths, all flashing eyes and revolutionary ardour. The neatly bearded and fashionably attired Mr Banerjea soaks them up with the benign and effortless public smile that comes so naturally to gifted actors and politicians; after a few moments he signals with his right hand — it is a cross between a holy man’s gesture of blessing and a signal for the crowd to allay their enthusiasm for a little while. When the crowd has gone so silent that one can hear a reed moving in water, he begins his oration.
Miss Gilby understands only the first sentence — ‘The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, has divided Bengal’ — and the rest is just a few lucid words here and there in an opaque sea: swadeshi, obviously, appears a lot, and atmasakti, self-reliance, too, along with ‘boycott’ and ‘English’. But a considerable amount of the sense can be inferred from the tone of his voice, its modulations, the gestures, the blazing-bright eyes, the confidence in his own consummate performance, the timbre and fluidity of his baritone: the man is such a skilled orator, thinks Miss Gilby, that he could easily, at the end of his speech — during which every mouth in the crowd remains half-open, every face rapt — have commanded his audience to do anything, anything, and they would have willingly rushed out and done it. Bimala forgets to pass on the lorgnette after his first few sentences, even naw jaa slips off her moraa a couple of times, so keen is her eagerness to get as close to the speaker as her confinement in the andarmahal will allow.