Seems. They have obviously managed to have a long and functional relationship across class boundaries. Clearly, Saeed is no fool if he has managed such a thing with a man who strikes Ritwik as cunning, shady, powerful and disturbing.
‘You still think what I do for Sheikh. Work, I tell you. No worry for you. You don’t think of it.’
Ritwik is surprised at having his mind read. He gives a faint, false smile and asks, ‘Are you saying it’s none of my business?’ He hopes the smile takes the edge off the question.
Saeed plays the same hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ he smiles, ‘not your business, not your business.’ Affable, even friendly, but Ritwik gets the sense that he has just been warned off.
‘How much you want?’
Ah, business again. Ritwik decides to test his limits. ‘How much can I have?’ he asks.
‘Any money. Two hundred, five hundred, you say.’
Ritwik looks steadily at the bright green parsley flecked sparingly with light beige grains of bulgur, the orange oil from the sausages, the broken ball of a falafel, and says, without lifting his eyes, ‘Four hundred now, let’s say. If I need more, I’ll call you.’ He pauses to look up and adds, ‘Not here, please, in the car.’
For some reason he doesn’t go into, Saeed refuses to take him to Ganymede Road and drops him off on Acre Lane, a three-minute drive away from where Ritwik lives. Ritwik reads this too as a sign and tries to keep his voice bleached of any interest when he asks Saeed, ‘Does Zafar know Mr Haq?’
Saeed looks out of the window, spits, counts out four hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes and hands the wad to Ritwik. His jaw muscle throbs under his pale skin. He bares his teeth in what is meant to be a smile, says something under his breath in Arabic then leans sideways to open the door and says, ‘Goodbye’, once in English and again in Arabic.
Ritwik gets out and walks the quarter hour to Ganymede Road, the dirty wad in his pocket an unsightly square bulge chafing and burning his skin. Everyone in the teeming crossroads of Brixton seems to be staring at him. A young, bespectacled man, wearing a white shirt too small for him, stands in the concrete garden in front of the Ritzy cinema and shouts, ‘The Lord said, Come unto me and I shall give you everlasting life. Friends, Jesus has given me a peace I have never known before. Jesus has saved me. Jesus has shown me love above all.’ He clutches a small Bible in his hand and paces an invisible perimeter of about twenty square feet. His eyes are fixed in the middle distance. He repeats the words over and over again, unchanging in tone and delivery. By the time Ritwik leaves the voice behind, he is ready to scream.
There is a message next to the phone in the living room one day: ‘Gavin called’. When he asks Anne if Gavin had left a number, she says no. There is no way he can get in touch with him. But he has figured out a way to send letters to Aritra. He writes to his brother and asks him to address his envelopes to Anne Cameron, without any mention of his name anywhere in case the immigration people trace him back to Ganymede Road and throw him out of the country. Of course, he doesn’t mention the reason for this subterfuge to Aritra and fobs him off with a lie about bureaucracy and quirky rules of the British postal system.
Zafar doesn’t call or write. Ritwik doesn’t dare to call Saeed and ask for information about him: he doesn’t want Saeed to get the faintest whiff of himself as either a pining or a nosey rent boy. Of one thing he is certain — Zafar has lied to his handyman or has evaded the entire issue. The questions, double-guessings, doubts, all paralyse Ritwik and keep him from getting in touch with Saeed. Then three weeks after his first four hundred pounds, he calls Saeed again.
‘My friend,’ says Saeed, ‘you need more money, I give you.’
In a split second Ritwik decides to say yes because he can use their meeting for news of Zafar. ‘Why don’t we meet at Al-Shami?’
‘I too busy now, this week, next week. You meet me this night, Marble Arch tube, I give money, OK?’
‘No, wait, Saeed, I just wanted to ask if you had any news of Zafar.’ The question is phrased wrongly and Ritwik regrets his haste.
There is a pause before Saeed replies, ‘OK, everything OK. You don’t have news of Sheikh?’
Forced into this strategic ping-pong again, he tries to lob the question back to Saeed. ‘Is he in Saudi Arabia?’
‘Saudi Arabia?’ The disbelieving tone is followed by a long pause. ‘No, Sheikh in many countries. He travels now, business travel, lot of business travel. Africa, Sudan, Syria, Paris.’ Another pause. ‘I not know where Sheikh now.’
Ritwik swallows the flat contradictions and the seamless jumps between all those seemingly irreconcilable points on the map. A new question rears its dark head: is Saeed Zafar’s eyes in London?
Saeed marks the silence and asks Ritwik, ‘You in trouble, my friend? You need help?’
Ritwik says, somewhat more sharply than he intended, ‘No, what do you mean by trouble? What sort of trouble?’
‘No, my friend, I just ask. Your voice is. . how you say. . far, your voice is far, you know?’
‘I’m fine. I’ll come and pick the money up. What time is good for you?’
Slightly over three weeks after Saeed gives Ritwik his second installment, Zafar calls him to say he is in London for ten days; would tomorrow evening — late, say around half ten — be good for him, same place, Dorchester, that is, and then he could drive Ritwik to his new house. Ritwik says yes politely, with a slight tinge of formality, even; in this gradual illumination of someone else’s life, the words ‘new house’ hold a little corner of surprise. The question why Zafar chooses to stay in a luxury hotel if he has a house in this country is not asked, of course.
It is well past midnight when Zafar and Ritwik set out on the drive to Surrey. Zafar tells him the name of the village — Hincksey Green — and promises to take him back to Brixton before three. Ritwik sits in the car, the metallic taste of Zafar’s semen still in his mouth, and feels anxious about Anne, left alone in the house. When asked about what he did while he was away from London — did he see his wife, his children, what about the son whom he had mentioned last time — Zafar brushes the questions aside with a curt and condescending ‘Oh, the usual stuff, boring, don’t bother your pretty little head with it.’
Ritwik lets the first half an hour of the drive soothe the rage this condescension fires in him. Halfway through it, he asks, in a tone slightly more highly pitched than normal, ‘But, Zafar, you cannot forever evade such questions. It’s not just empty formality. I might be genuinely interested in your life elsewhere. I know practically zilch about it.’
Zafar gives his irritating, non-committal laugh. ‘That’s even scarier than empty formality.’
It is meant to be half a joke but the other half goes through Ritwik like a blade. He stares out of the window, watching the deserted, orange-lit suburbs of south London slip by smoothly and fast. He rolls down his window and a rush of cool night air, smelling of petrol fumes, grass and night vegetation, blows in. There are a lot of trees, green spaces and gardens where they drive through. After Peaslake, Ritwik loses interest in keeping track of places; he certainly doesn’t want to keep on asking Zafar where they are. The houses thin out after a while. Ritwik feels Zafar’s hand on his thigh and the tension in the car begins to fade away with his drowsiness. The cool air makes him shiver a bit so he rolls up the window.
‘Don’t you think there’s something reductive in associating every Arab man you meet with oil?’
More than this abrupt fracture of the nearly companionable silence Ritwik is jolted by the meditated and carefully studied quality of the question.