Bimala stops attending lessons altogether. Miss Gilby doesn’t write to Mr Roy Chowdhury again: the man is too burdened with graver matters to have the leisure to discuss his wilful and secretive wife’s little obstinacies with her tutor. She waits for this sudden rain of madness to let up but deep down inside something tells her that she is not for long in the Roy Chowdhury family. Something, some connection, thin as a strand from a spider’s web, has been severed and there is no repairing it. The music has become subtly discordant.
ELEVEN
Saeed patters his stubby fingers on the faux-chrome top of the table to an invisible tune inside his head. It goes maniacally fast sometimes; at other times it reduces to the slow tapping of his index finger once every few seconds. Indeed, there is something manic about Saeed this morning; he has made the journey from Ganymede Road to Al-Shami, his favourite restaurant on Edgware Road, in fourteen minutes flat, zipping through the empty stretches and jumping most of the traffic lights on the way. He had kept drumming his fingers on his steering wheel, had fiddled with his rings and bracelets, and had spewed out an unstoppable stream of words at Ritwik during that quarter of an hour. The only noteworthy thing Ritwik managed to extricate from it was the fact that Saeed kept calling Zafar ‘Sheikh bin Hashm’ and, when asked by Ritwik if he was really a sheikh, he had replied, ‘Yes, sheikh, sheikh, important person, VIP, very rich, lots money’, with an accompanying gesture of rubbing the tips of his forefinger and thumb to emphasize the undeniable fact of Zafar’s immense wealth. All this left Ritwik confused about whether Zafar was really a sheikh; Saeed could have been using the term loosely, in the way Italians call everyone ‘dottore’, regardless of their profession or level of higher education.
Now, Saeed sits smoking, waiting for the food to be brought to the table. The whole thing may be in Ritwik’s imagination, but Saeed seems to be respectful of him, almost ingratiating in his holding open of doors, letting him enter first, asking him questions about his well-being, asking for permission to smoke, his over-solicitous concern about seat belts, restaurant tables, the food ordered. He assumes it to be the cachet that being friends with Zafar gives him. Ritwik is first baffled, then embarrassed; he finds it difficult to make eye contact with someone who has so unsubtly appointed him, Ritwik, his overlord.
‘I speak with Sheikh. He tells me I give money, any money you ask. I have money with me. You want?’ he says through a cloud of blue smoke soured by his breath.
Ritwik leans back, slightly alarmed at the possibility of Saeed unrolling and handing him soiled banknotes in such a public place. He says hastily, ‘No, no, not now, it can wait wait until later.’
Saeed gives him another look of respectful reappraisal, as if he is seeing the real Ritwik for the first time.
‘You work for Sheikh.’
Ritwik decides to treat this as a statement, not a question, so he doesn’t answer.
‘I work for him many years. Ten, maybe, maybe twelve.’
‘What do you do for him?’
‘I am. . how you say last time. . going middle? No?’
‘Going middle?’ Ritwik asks, puzzled.
Saeed makes a gesture with two hands placed at two opposite sides of the table and then removes one hand to do a walking figure with two fingers while repeating, ‘Going middle, heh? Going middle.’
The penny drops. ‘Ah, go-between.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Saeed nods like a happy child. ‘Go-between, I forget, go between. I go-between for Sheikh.’
‘But between what?’
Saeed takes some time to understand the question so Ritwik mimes his gesture and asks him to name the points on the table between which the to and fro of the go-between happens.
Saeed hesitates before answering. When he does, haltingly, Ritwik immediately understands that he is either lying or evading. ‘People. Big people. Business, lot money. Business clients.’ He repeats the word ‘clients’ several times as if it were a new word he has only recently acquired.
Ritwik wields his newfound power, if it is that at all, and pushes ahead with the questioning. ‘What business?’
Saeed gives him an intensely quizzical look. At that moment the waiter arrives with the first of their dishes. Ritwik watches Saeed’s dogged determination to please and flatter slow down over the sharing out of food — this time, Saeed heaps Ritwik’s plate before serving himself — as he tries to work out the nature of the connection between Zafar and Ritwik, but the blip is thankfully short. Whatever he has deduced, it seems to be in Ritwik’s favour for he reverts to his enervating solicitude.
‘You eat. You too thin. Eat all this food.’
‘I’ll certainly try,’ says Ritwik, smiling. ‘I love this food, you know that.’
Saeed takes this as a personal compliment and preens. Ritwik seizes the opportunity. ‘So, you never said, what business is it that you do with Zafar?’
Saeed takes a long time to spear his kebab, put a piece into his mouth, follow it with a forkful of buttery rice and another of salad, and then a morsel of vinegared chilli, chew it, swallow and address the question.
‘You know. Business. Money. You do same for Sheikh.’
Once again, Ritwik cannot determine if this is query or statement; each has a radically different meaning from the other. His mind is thick with questions: does Saeed know the nature of his contact with Zafar or does he think that he is another of Zafar’s business clients? Surely, given how Saeed has helped him in the recent past, he cannot think Ritwik to be anything other than an illegal immigrant scrabbling to feed himself one meal a day? Has Saeed ever asked himself, or even Zafar, for what services Ritwik is being given a blank cheque? What did Saeed and Zafar talk about? And, noisiest of them all, what work did Saeed do for Zafar? Did he look after Zafar’s money in London? Was he just a low-level handyman for his interests here? What interests?
The air in the restaurant is dense and swooning with smoke. There are blue swirls of it everywhere, barely moving. Ritwik concentrates fiercely on eating and hopes Saeed will not demand a response. The waiter comes with more food and moves plates and bowls around on their table to make space for the new arrivals. He and Saeed talk for a while in Arabic, the waiter laughs, looks at Ritwik, says something to Saeed and leaves for the kitchen.
‘What were you saying to each other?’ Ritwik asks.
‘He say you eat like little bird,’ Saeed replies, smiling, and shows the size of the bird with his hand: it could be a sparrow in the nest of his palm.
The asymmetry of any relationship between Saeed and Zafar strikes Ritwik for the first time: what was a poshly spoken, educated, filthy rich sheikh doing with a criminal who had a line in a mild version of people trafficking and wanted to break out into more serious aspects of it? The chasm that separates the two men seems vast, unbridgeable.