Miss Gilby involuntarily adds, ‘Spoke, Bimala, spoke. He spoke last week; it’s in the past.’
Bimala lowers her gaze, smiles embarrassedly, and corrects herself. ‘Yes, sorry, spoke, spoke, he spoke.’
‘Anything else, apart from the nation as mother goddess?’
Bimala doesn’t answer the question. Instead, she expounds similar themes to her tutor. ‘You know bande mataram? We say bande mataram? Yes? It means “We pray to you, mother goddess”. Bengal is mother to us. It was written by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. He is great writer.’
Miss Gilby at last understands the rallying cry of swadeshi leaders and activists. ‘How wonderful. I didn’t know that. It is Sanskrit, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Bimala nods.
Their effortless and easy interactions now seem to be developing intercalations of uncomfortable pauses and silences. There is one of those now, which Bimala breaks by asking, ‘Do you want to learn names of Bengali birds and you teach me English birds?’
‘That is a very good idea’, says Miss Gilby with something approaching relief.
And then one day, very soon after their Conversation Session spent talking of birds, both British and Bengali, Bimala stops attending lessons.
NINE
He had saved nearly two hundred pounds, all in loose cash and coins, in the Kashmiri wooden box, which he had found in one of the shelves in his room when he had first moved into Anne’s house. It had gorgeously drawn peacocks and herons on it but the colours had lost their sheen and turned matte and the patina of dust had proved much more stubborn than he had expected when he tried to brush and, eventually, to scrub it off. Could it have been a relic from Anne’s final days in India, nearly sixty years ago? He must remember to ask her about the box. One hundred and ninety-two pounds, eighty-six pence, he counted out. More than a month’s subsistence money, maybe two, if he was very careful. And then he would have to start all over again.
He met Saeed one dawn on Chichele Road. Of the increasing queues and groups of peoples, Ritwik could now identify about half a dozen nationalities. He walked up to Saeed and said, ‘Can I have a few words with you? After you’ve seen off your people?’, looking briefly in the direction of the few people gathered loosely around him.
‘You don’t work? We find work for you today.’
‘No, no, I’d like to take today off.’
‘You speak to Mr Haq?’
‘No, I haven’t seen him for a long time.’ He hadn’t been to visit the Haq family ever since Saeed had picked him up from outside 37 Ganymede Road. There had been no need; besides, he wouldn’t have been able to look Mr Haq in the eye or talk to his wife and children as if the last two months hadn’t happened.
‘You wait here. I take you back. OK?’
Ritwik nodded. For the next ninety minutes, he was audience to the drama he had been an actor in not so very long ago: floating groups of people, all trying to edge their way into a better life, get the briefest of toeholds on this dizzying escarpment of what they considered a better world, by becoming ghosts and shadows, the unseen and non-existent workers behind most things which made this ravenous, insatiable monster of a city live and breathe and keep consuming. If he had believed in a loony strain of religion, which asserted that the world was supported by invisible spirits and angels holding everything together in a vast safety net, here was its real objective correlative. He winced at the indelible term, product of such a different world altogether. There was fur in his mouth and Chichele Road had never looked so squalid and seedy as he realized quietly that work was never equal, never levelling; instead, work created the greatest tyrannies.
Saeed saw off his charges, two by two, then stood around for a while, smoking one Benson & Hedges after another, waiting to see if anyone else would need his services. Then he walked back to Ritwik who was sitting on the edge of a pavement. ‘I take you back now?’
‘Yes, please, if it’s not too much trouble. I can always take the Tube but I wanted to ask you a few things.’
His car was parked, as always, in the genteel redbrick terraces of Heber Road. It was not till they were nearing Kilburn Park that Ritwik spoke. He knew Saeed wouldn’t until he broke the silence. ‘Saeed, I want to take a break for a while.’
Saeed was concentrating on negotiating an intersection off Maida Vale: it was morning rush hour and buses and cars appeared to fill up the streets.
‘I mean, just stop working for a few days.’
Saeed nodded. He kept darting surreptitious glances at Ritwik in the rear view mirror.
‘I was wondering if I could come back to you later if I needed more work.’
‘You go away from London?’
‘No, no, nothing of the sort.’ Then, after a few seconds’ beat, a sliver of the truth came out. ‘I’ve never done this sort of work before and I feel very tired most of the time, you know, physically tired. I just want to rest for a week or so.’ He wondered if he sounded convincing enough, for the beginnings of the truth had imperceptibly shaded into a white lie.
There was no immediate response from Saeed. Just before going under Marylebone flyover, he asked, ‘You hungry? You eat something?’
Not knowing whether it was a question or a statement, Ritwik hesitated for too long but Saeed had already decided for him. ‘We eat something here, OK?’
They went to Al-Shami, a cross between a café and a restaurant, teeming, even at this hour, with Lebanese men and a sprinkling of tourists. There was Khaled playing loudly on their music system but two juicers were going full time, making a great deal of noise and trying to drown out the warm bustle of voices, the usual clatter from the kitchen and the eaters, even the music. The strip lighting, however, made Ritwik feel down, as it invariably did, reminding him of those dingy, shadow-cornered rooms in Grange Road. The air was heavy with unfamiliar smells that made him salivate.
Saeed was clearly in charge here: he led them to a table beside a chunky square column with mirrors, went up to someone he evidently knew and had a brief chat while Ritwik seated himself and looked around. He returned to the table, sat down and asked Ritwik, ‘All right?’
Ritwik nodded.
‘We get good food here. I order.’ He signalled for a waiter, brushed away his offer of two giant menu cards and broke out into rapid-fire Arabic with him. Ritwik obviously wasn’t going to be consulted about the food, but he didn’t really mind; it was clear that Saeed knew what was good so the decisions were best left to him. The incomprehensible conversation featured a few waves of Saeed’s hand in the direction of Ritwik, probably telling the waiter what he thought should be got for him. As the waiter left, Saeed pulled out his packet of cigarettes from the back pocket of his jeans and started smoking.
‘You eat at home?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course I do,’ Ritwik answered, trying to weave a casual laugh in there but failing.
‘You look ill. Weak. Nobody take you for heavy job. They think you too weak.’
‘No, no, honestly, I eat lots. It’s my. . my metabolism I suppose.’ He didn’t want the conversation going down this road at all.
There was a lapse as Saeed smoked and looked for words in a language so evidently foreign to him while Ritwik couldn’t think of anything but the imminent arrival of food.
‘There are rules, OK?’ Saeed suddenly announced, leaning forward, as the waiter brought to the table two large tumblers of pineapple and mango juice, one foaming at the top. They had been freshly squeezed, realized Ritwik, as he took his first sip from the pineapple, and hadn’t come out of a carton of concentrate. For a moment he thought Saeed was talking about rules governing the eating of this food because that non sequitur had coincided so perfectly with the arrival of the juice.