‘Always rules for everything. Every world its own rules, rules in Libya, rules in England, rules in football, rules here we eat,’ Saeed continued. There was a fierce concentration in the frown lines on his forehead and in his eyes, a stubborn determination to articulate properly, but Riwik had already lost him. What was all this talk of rules? He hoped it was going to become clear in time.
‘You understand?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he lied.
‘Your world there are rules, my world there are rules. The two sometimes different. The world of workers in Willesden, all the immigrants, also rules there. Many rules where you go. You see them OK? If you see them, you OK. If you not see, problems, you unhappy.’
Was this an ominous, circuitous warning that Ritwik could never leave the world he had had a brief glimpse of, that he had to do whatever Saeed asked of him? There didn’t seem to be any other signs that this was a threat, apart from the indeterminacies of Saeed’s truncated words, but they could equally stand for a kind of consolatory explanation for what Saeed took to be his unhappiness at the shadowy world of refugee workers, Ritwik thought.
Suddenly Saeed leaned forward and caught hold of Ritwik’s hand and with his other hand reached for his shoulder across the table and held him there. The food arrived and Saeed let go.
There were stainless steel plates of two kinds of paste with swirls of olive oil and sprinklings of herb, a basket heaped with large, warm segments of flatbread, an oblong parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper, which Saeed indicated to be put down in front of Ritwik, another plate of a herb-dense salad flecked with grains, koftes. Ritwik asked Saeed to name everything for him; Saeed obliged: houmous, moutabbal, sujuk wrapped in flatbread and then toasted, tabbouleh.
For a while the spread pushed away Saeed’s enigmatic words and his unexpected gesture to the back of Ritwik’s mind. He bit into his sandwich and the hot, spicy juices from the Lebanese sausages ran down his fingers and the back of his hand. He closed his eyes in a moment of pure bliss: the whole world was circumscribed inside his mouth.
Saeed interrupted with, ‘You like?’
Ritwik nodded weakly. There was so much pride, he thought, on Saeed’s face: he was like a little child showing off his achievements to a parent. Why had he touched him like that? Was it a gesture of camaraderie? Of assurance? Or just an appeal that Ritwik should try and understand him even though his words were not the most perfect carriers of his sense?
What was the sense?
‘You do different work for me?’ Saeed asked while shovelling food into his mouth. There was no daintiness about his eating, no acknowledgement of the effete etiquette that governs polite eating together, only a functional, self-enclosed approach to his food, almost animal in its own and immediate needs.
‘What work?’
Saeed seemed to be too busy eating to have heard so Ritwik repeated the question.
‘You speak English. You talk to people I make work. Woman. Some woman work for me. There is more woman want work. You be between us, you talk, you deal, OK? You my. .’ — he flailed around for a word — ‘my. .’ He clenched his fists in frustration.
‘Go-between? Liaison officer?’ Ritwik offered helpfully. He almost smiled.
Saeed’s face lit up. ‘Yes, yes, how you say it?’
‘Go-between?’
‘Yes, yes, go-between.’ Saeed repeated the words a few times, savouring their newness, their power to give him access, however tiny, into a different world. ‘You be my go-between?’
‘Between you and who?’ Ritwik asked, miming out the three parties with his hand.
‘Many woman. Kurdish, Serbian, Czech. They come to London, look for work, make money, lot of money. You take 5 per cent, 7, maybe 10, OK?’
Ritwik got it but he wanted him to say the words, spell out the trade, right here in the restaurant, in front of the busy waiters and the small throng of eaters. He toyed with some leftover flatbread and moutabbal, ate another forkful of tabbouleh, sipped his pineapple juice and kept his eyes resolutely on the water rings and spattered food on the fauxchrome table top.
‘It is OK for you?’ Saeed repeated, reaching for his crumpled packet of cigarettes and lighting up.
‘Can I think about it for some time?’ To fill out the silence Ritwik padded out his evasion, ‘It’s not every day that I get offered a job, so let me have a think and I promise I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.’ He spoke very fast in the hope that Saeed was deceived by his fluency into thinking that he was not putting him off.
It worked. Saeed nodded for a while — Ritwik detected a glimmer of respect, or awe, in his eyes, or maybe that was what he wanted to see — and said, ‘OK. You touch me by Mr Haq, OK?’
‘No, get in touch, not touch.’
‘What you say?’ Saeed’s face had a puzzled look on it.
Ritwik reached out and touched Saeed on his arm, exaggeratedly. ‘This is touch.’ Then he mimed a phone call and added, ‘And this, getting in touch.’
A broad smile cleared away the confusion. ‘OK, OK, I see, touch, getting touch.’ He chuckled, then added, ‘This English, very difficult, very difficult to me.’ He laughed again, moved his hand across the table, clutched Ritwik’s hand in his fist and said, ‘You teach me English, OK?’
Ritwik didn’t know if he was in earnest, so he smiled, once again taken aback by the ease with which Saeed touched him in public. Saeed repeated the question, lifting Ritwik’s hand off the table and holding it in the air, a gesture of commitment about to be made.
‘Yes, yes,’ Ritwik stammered, ‘if you want.’
‘Good. OK. We go then.’ With a final squeeze he let go of Ritwik’s hand. He signalled to a waiter for the bill that he didn’t bother looking at when it arrived. He pulled out a twenty-pound note from a fat wallet, extricated some loose change from another pocket, weighed down the paper note with the coins neatly and got up. His eye caught someone and he went over, all bonhomie and smiles, to an extremely fat man seated behind a table next to the kitchen door, a pile of paper and a calculator in front of him. The men embraced and, for the entire duration of their conversation, they held each other’s hands in a clasp. They embraced again before Saeed made his way out. He put his hand on Ritwik’s shoulder once they were out on Edgware Road, as men in India do, or men elsewhere, not here, but Saeed seemed oblivious to this. The stalled and swelling traffic on Edgware Road sometimes moved, a few inches at a time, like a lethargic snake.
On fruit-picking days in the summer, Ritwik and Anne saw each other at what Ritwik used to consider ‘duty hours’, such as bathtimes, or the time allotted to cleaning and changing her, explaining painstakingly what was in the fridge and in the kitchen. He left yellow Post-It notes around the place so that Anne wouldn’t forget where the bread was, where her calcium tablets were, or the fact that she had to switch off the burner after the soup had been heated — the house became a paper trail from a treasure hunt. After a few days into it Ritwik realized that Anne, or any other person for that matter, would have a hard time reading, assimilating and remembering all the notes and then acting according to them, so he put up a big note next to Anne’s bed reminding her to look at all the notes, very soon saw the absurdity of the whole thing and, bar a couple, took most of them down.
One evening Anne drifted into the kitchen and said, ‘Looky here, there is no need to feel guilty that you are away most of the time, so stop leaving these ridiculous notes everywhere. They are no substitute for your presence. I have a hard time remembering to look at them in the first place. If I don’t remember to eat then I shall hardly remember to first locate and then look at a note saying what I should have for lunch.’