Then there was the business of avoiding the bloated, floating carcasses of dogs and cows, the used sanitary towels, adrift, sometimes wrapping themselves around the legs with a bloody will of their own, the daily rubbish of human living which elsewhere got thrown in bins and taken away in garbage trucks but which in Calcutta sat around on almost every street corner, accumulated into largish hillocks, rotted, and then got partially dispersed by the rain in the streets. Eggshells, vegetable matter, food scrapings, bread, fruit peel, paper, rags, bits and pieces of cloth, hair balls, dead rats, rancid food, floor sweepings, congealing vomit, a turd or two, blister packs, bottles, jars, plastic bags, containers. And disease, DISEASE, DISEASE … even thinking about it sent that familiar shudder down his spine.
On rainy days like this, nostalgia wraps around him like an insidious fog; it is everywhere, but while inside it, he can hardly tell how enveloped he is in it. Nostalgia, and something else. He won’t name it, he won’t even think about it because if he lets go for even a few seconds, the grey, sour rain outside will bend him to its own form. This rain, in a different land, slightly over a year after his parents’ deaths, can read him. He won’t think about them lest the rain reads him again, as it has done for the past two months, and reduces him to its sad, transparent cipher.
It was within his first week of arrival he met another student in the long queue in the buttery during lunchtime: very tall, eyes so blue they were like an electric zap, and hair so golden and curly it looked like an improbable wig. He had a foolish smile that seemed plastered indelibly on to his face and a clockwork sideways nodding of the head. He was like some overgrown animate toy from Enid Blyton, the innocence in his face enhanced by the jerky, toy-like movements.
The queue was a chance to meet people, make friends, introduce himself; he must seize this moment, not wander around, lonely and lost, in the narrow wet streets; here was the opportunity for a new social life, grab it grab it grab it. So he smiled back at the blond toy’s general smile, ‘Hi, I’m Ritwik.’
‘Hello, I’m Robert. Hello. Hello.’ Nodding, nodding, like it was a nervous tic. ‘Have you just arrived?’
‘Yes, last week.’ Keep talking, say something, say something about the weather, ask him what he reads. ‘It’s so cold here.’ He had read somewhere that clichés are clichés because they are universally accepted truths, tried and tested generation after generation.
‘Do you think so? It’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Where are you from?’
The smile found a focus now. ‘I’m from a place called High Wycombe. Do you know it?’
Ritwik lied, ‘Yes, yes, I do.’
Robert was surprised, ‘Really? Where are you from then?’
‘India.’
Robert’s smile now carried hints of wonder; he answered in clipped, short bursts, ‘Wow. Nice. Great. I love India.’
It was Ritwik’s turn to be surprised now. ‘Really? Have you been?’
Once again, that foolishness. ‘No. No. I haven’t. But my mother has.’
Ritwik pursued this one. ‘So why do you love India?’
‘It’s so exotic, isn’t it? And wild, do you know what I mean? And all that mysticism and stuff, it’s spiritual, like, isn’t it?’
Ritwik flashed his smile-of-finality. He wanted to say, ‘Yes, you’re right. We have naked fakirs, white elephants and striped tigers on the streets of Delhi,’ but held back the words. Perhaps this beautiful boy, his head a furious golden halo in the cold light of the buttery, was trying to make friends as well. Ritwik moved on to something brown and absurd-looking, a sort of stylised representation of a perfectly formed turd contained in its own brown, rectangular casing, with an absurd name: ‘toad in the hole’.
The first meeting with his tutor and his group had induced a similar feeling of distance, as if he were watching himself trying to learn the rules of a new game. Dr Elizabeth Carter was ageless, had blue eyes with the incisiveness of a laser beam, and spoke in a kind of breathless and hushed undertone. She was the only person whose words he understood. Her introduction set his ears aflame: ‘This is Ritwik Ghosh (she pronounced it ‘gosh’, the absence of the usual exclamation mark after the word only making it sound worse) who’s come from Calcutta to do the BA.’ He tried to appear relaxed, knowing, in control. His group consisted of ten others who had been together for a year and were all friends. They gabbled away amongst each other, and with Dr Carter, who they all called ‘Liz’ or ‘Lizzie’. He could never bring himself to use her first name, but ‘Ma’am’ sounded so horribly gauche in the face of the easy familiarity the others had with her. He couldn’t understand a word of what they said.
They murmured polite hellos, thrown somewhere across the room vaguely in his direction, but he didn’t feel any of those reached him. They had all been handed glasses of a cloying drink, sherry, which increased the heaviness in his legs. Suddenly he realized he had this panicky vacuum somewhere in his lower stomach, a hollow that pressed his insides intermittently: he did not understand simple English as spoken by true-blood English people. Occasionally, a soothing wisp of Dr Carter’s sentences reached him — ‘. . about it, it gets better with practice. .’, ‘. . the Midlands dialect in which Langland wrote could pose. .’ and then it would be lost in the fizz and crackle of other Englishes.
But surely that guy, Declan Whelan, with glasses and wispy red curls fast disappearing, did not speak English. His voice and words were a sinuous curve of dip and soar; that could not be English, he did not understand one single word of it. God, they must be so clever, they all understand German, they’re all laughing at his jokes, falling apart laughing, he thought. He felt small and stupid and, all of a sudden, very lonely and lost, as the small rain tapped on the panes of the little oriel windows and everyone sat around in the low-ceilinged room with walls covered in books, jabbering away, excited and nervous about their Chaucer and Hildegard von Bingen and Julian of Norwich and he, with that small cold glass of pale liquid gold in his hands, wondered how he would go about making friends with these people.
The meeting ended with Dr Carter issuing out reading lists, a set of essay topics, instructions on little college exams during the first week of term, and invitations to her house for tea. As they clambered down the narrow and noisy wooden stairs, winding down and down, the tall one who was called Pete came up to him and shook his hand, ‘Hi, I’m Pete. I didn’t quite catch your name’.
‘It’s Ritwik, R-I-T-W-I-K.’
Pete gave a polite wow and repeated his name a few times. ‘Ritwik, Ritwik. Is that a common name from where you come?’
‘No, not really, but it’s not unusual.’
‘It’s very unusual to my ears,’ he smiled.
‘It means “he who officiates at a fire sacrifice”,’ the words tumbled out, heavy and anachronistic in the faultless green of the rain-washed main quad, before he could stop himself.
‘Wow.’ This time the wonder was real. ‘Do all Indian names have a meaning?’
‘Yes, they do.’ They had entered the main hall now where some of them were beginning to disperse. Someone came up to Pete and he started talking to her before Ritwik had a chance to tell him that his name meant rock.
He went up to Sarah, the confident, friendly girl with glasses and radiating rings of brown, springy, corkscrew curls. ‘Is it necessary to know German then?’
She frowned, then laughed and said, ‘German? Good god, no! Why do you think it’s necessary to know German?’