He runs upstairs, brings them down and presents them to Anne. ‘Look what I found. I think I’ll agree to your deal if you tell me what they are. Let’s go through each picture. Are you in any of them?’ Ritwik is so excited, his recent wrongfooting so erased, that he babbles like a hyperactive child.
Anne takes one look at them and sits down on a chair. Ritwik pulls another one beside her and places the photographs between them on the table. He can hardly stop talking as he goes through the pile, passing them to Anne, one by one.
‘Look, are these in India? What funny clothes. Did Englishwomen only wear these gowns all the time? And hats? God, they’re so elaborate. And umbrellas, they always carry umbrellas.’
‘Parasols. One needed to. It was a cruel sun out there.’
‘And look, the men all have moustaches.’ Ritwik is very amused. ‘What’s happening here?’
‘That looks like tea on the lawns. I forget where.’
‘And look at all these Indian servants in mufti, waiting on the lords and ladies.’
‘Oh, yes, they were indispensable.’
‘Why is everyone looking at the camera all the time? Anne, where are you? Are these from your days in India? Such a long time ago. Is this Simla, no, Dalhousie?’
Anne picks out a photograph, sepia with age, its edges spotted with a sprinkling of orange fungus. It looks like a tableau of an English family in a garden — a moustached man, sombre and grave; a lady smiling, her eyes in the shadow cast by her hat; a stiff boy dressed in his Sunday best; and a little girl, an infant really, in a floppy bonnet in the arms of her Indian ayah, reaching out with her little arms to the grass where she presumably wants to be put down. The ayah has a big, bright smile on her black face. There is a fiercely moustached Indian man in the background, a strap across his kurta, his turban too big for his head. There is also an Indian couple alongside him, looking startled, staring at the alien camera. They are in a garden washed with bright sunlight.
Anne points a moving finger at each figure and says, ‘That’s Christopher, here’s Richard, here’s Clare with her ayah, Savitri, that’s Bahadur Singh, and I don’t remember who the others are.’
‘Where is this?’
Anne is silent. Sensing something, Ritwik looks sideways at her. She has shut her eyes and is trying to get up.
‘Anne?’
‘Savitri drowned Clare in the bath. She was two. It was an accident but Savitri was inconsolable. She killed herself the next week. She loved the children. Chhota sahib, Richard was, and when Clare came, chhota mem. Loved them more than her life. It was just as well she took her own, they would have hanged her, anyway. She could have killed for them. Such a fiercely loyal creature. Something broke inside her after. . after the incident. Christopher wanted all the Indian servants shot. Ridiculous, really.’
Anne manages to stand up, push her chair back and start walking towards the door. Some of the photographs spill in a fan on to the linoleum-covered floor. Ritwik looks down at them: they have fallen face down, he can only see their browning backs.
‘You shouldn’t have taken them out,’ Anne mutters, more to the landing outside than to Ritwik, sitting behind her like an immovable rock.
The television continues to babble out its rubbish as Ritwik sits quietly after Anne has left the room, when some stray word or phrase seeps into his consciousness and stirs something. He looks up at the screen: there is a group of young men and women dressed in carnival costumes and a minor cavalcade of mock tanks and lifesize armoured vehicles made of cardboard joyfully protesting against something. They are carrying CAAT banners; it takes a while before the running commentary decodes this for him: Campaign Against Arms Trade. They are trying to barricade a convoy of cars — the vehicles of invitees to the Defence System and Equipment International Exhibition at Lydney in Gloucestershire.
He sees a familiar car, a blue Bentley, in the held-up convoy before the heavy police presence disperses the protesters. But perhaps he imagines this flash of blue to accompany the words of the events coordinator of CAAT whose impassioned face appears on the screen and speaks out a new knowledge for him. ‘. . supply arms to the most detestable and repressive regimes in the world, arms that are used to crush democracy, kill people, extinguish their voices. If you look at some of the countries which have been invited to this fair, you’ll be outraged. What are Burma, North Korea, Iraq, Sierra Leone doing here, countries with military juntas and ruthless dictatorships as governments, countries with a proven record of repression and torture? Some of the delegates here are brokers and fences: theoretically and officially we sell this to, say, Pakistan, or India, but where do they then end up? There are private buyers here, among the so-called delegates. This is just a legitimization of illegal arms dealing and it’s being done in broad daylight, with the full knowledge, indeed, approval of the government. We are campaigning to reconcile a foreign policy with. .’
He moves to the cooker and watches the peas agitated in the furious boil of the stock. A few seconds of staring into that roil and he is hypnotized by their movement.
He doesn’t even know he is going to go out of the house until he steps out of the front door. The sky is the dark blue of an English summer night. Unerringly, he walks towards Brixton tube station. It is like sleepwalking, the motives and outcomes equally cloudy, the acts themselves unpredictable, zigzag. An old serpent inside him has begun to stir, awaking from a long, long sleep. He hasn’t felt this hollowing out of his bowels, this insistent clenching and unclenching of his sphincter, since his cottaging years in university.
In the train, he keeps his eyes fixed on the ads over the opposite seats and the route of the Victoria Line, a blue, straight trajectory of sans serif letters from Brixton to Walthamstow Central. Despite a number of empty seats, a man stands holding the blue supporting rod in front of the doors and teeters precariously on the balls of his feet. He can barely keep his eyes open. At this hour, the carriages are littered with trampled newspaper pages, empty Lucozade bottles, McDonald’s boxes, crumpled brown paper packets that had held chips, entire newspapers folded and left at the windows above the backrest of the seats. Only one headline is visible: BRITAIN TOPS ASYLUM SEEKER INTAKE IN EUROPE. Daily Mail.
By the time he gets off at King’s Cross, the sky is still blue enough for the twin tower blocks of the Bemerton Estate to be silhouetted against it like two menacing gods presiding over their demesne of misrule and detritus. Once within the maze of alleyways, streets and culs-de-sac, the noise of traffic and human life on the bordering main roads fades away, leaving only an echo corridor of receding footsteps, the revving of an occasional car, the awkward shuffle of bodies disappearing into the dark, sometimes even the hissy whispers of haggling customers. Everything seems furtive and has the quality of noises off. Even the sound of trains entering the depot to the west, into sidings, has a faraway quality to it, something heard in a different, fairytale land, before a child’s eyes close over with sleep.