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“The brightest students do medieval studies!” said Hilary Burton. “Oh, you mustn’t go to the moderns!” Towards the end of the previous academic year, he’d let it slip that, by the time he was a finalist, he wanted to take only nineteenth- and twentieth-century options; to be unshackled of the study of the past. The past is a foreign country; but another country’s past is twice-foreign. Was she hinting that she thought he was bright? Now that he was at a crossroads in life’s journey, already a traveller, was she confusing him by pointing out a route he didn’t intend to take? Brightest students! Was she inveigling him with disingenuous noises? By this time, her health — which had been appalling beneath her beautiful exterior and her gay fauvist dresses — had worsened, and she couldn’t see properly; so that when she stared at his collar while speaking, it was neither shyness nor flirtatiousness which made her do so, but simply the fact that she had a hazy sense now of where his face was. She’d been diagnosed with a problem in the brain — he had no idea what it was — a year ago. He wasn’t sure how much of the illness was real, how much a product of her imagination.
Medieval England didn’t attract him; not Gawain, not Piers Plowman. He felt he’d like Greek tragedy, but kept putting off the “intellectual background” classes where he could familiarise himself with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Besides, he was becoming suspicious of tragedy. He put this down to the rediscovery of his Indian past, his recent realisation that there was no tragedy in Sanskrit literature. Sanskrit theatre, with its tranquil curtain calls, where thief, courtesan, soldier, king, could smilingly take a bow, their conflicts resolved—that was a welcome antidote to the Western universe, with its privileging of dark over light. He was a proponent of joy! This, despite being drawn to Philip Larkin. He was plainly prejudiced against the West. Then what was he doing in the West, in the English department? He was clearly not at home; he was lost. He’d always presumed that Sophocles rhymed with “monocles.” Until, standing before a noticeboard announcing lectures, his mispronunciation was gently overlooked by a fellow student, an English boy, who repeated the name, rhyming it with Pericles. Ananda was embarrassed.
What of the epics, which they made such a fuss over? He’d gone to a lecture on the Aeneid one Monday morning, and puzzled over the lecturer’s caressing pronunciation—e-nee-yud; but he — the lecturer — had droned on about the “founding myth of the nation,” and Ananda, in the back row, began to turn the pages of the Observer stealthily (two students glanced at him, smiling). What to make of these epics in comparison to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the latter (he was now convinced) equal to all of Shakespeare and more? — they were like a Thames to the Ganges, a stream beside a river with no noticeable horizon; minor. Homer he’d studied with similar scepticism, noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without volition, like a traffic light, every few pages of the Iliad, and, with greater fascination — salivating, even, because he was often hungry — how the soldiers feasted on pork “singed in its own fat” at regular intervals. The Odyssey he hadn’t bothered to read.
Still, he’d read enough of and around the Greeks to know that the gods were undependable, and put their powers to use in idiosyncratic ways. In this, they were superficially like the many-headed, many-armed Hindu deities; except that, with the Hindu gods, you felt the capriciousness of their actions was linked to the transformative play of creation, lila. In comparison, the Greek gods were merely dim-witted and vengeful. They hibernated; they woke up; they became conscious of a problem; they either attended to it or forgot to. There was no telling which human being they’d help out or do their utmost to destroy — guided by some personal like or grudge that had no rational explanation, or, what was quite common, in order to redress a slight received aeons ago.
Ananda first met Dr. Burton on Gower Street. She was wearing a bright orange dress with large yellow circles which came to below her knees, and was tapping the pavement with a cane. He knew it was her. It was the first time that the person he wanted someone to be turned out to be whom he thought it was. “Mr. Sen!” she exclaimed, taking particular pleasure in the sound of his voice, as if it were a disembodied stream. “We have a meeting at ten, don’t we?” It was drizzling very lightly, despite the sun, and instinctively, opportunely, he took her under his umbrella. “Can you help me?” she asked. “I have a problem with my vision today.” He placed his arm on her shoulder, not daring to keep it there for more than a few seconds at a time, but feeling an unbelievable closeness that she too seemed to have surrendered to, almost patting her back as he steered her forward. From Gower Street they entered through a heavy glass door on the left and were in a long bleak corridor, from where — he escorting her, but she guiding him, as she knew the way — they ended up (he couldn’t remember how) in another building, and at last in her spacious room on the first floor, where the medievalists, Chaucerians, and linguistics professors had their offices.
Their romance remained buried beneath their different personalities; his still unformed, but with many of its traits already visible. She never found out if he had a sense of humour; and he could only deduce she had one from the poster on her door, showing a languorous Mrs. Thatcher being carried masterfully by Ronald Reagan in his arms. Her kindness, like her cane, he knew only from her curious exhibitions of empathy, such as the birdhouse she kept on her sill for transient but recurrent sparrows. He couldn’t crack, through her, what Englishness was; and, for her, the prickly mystery of being Indian clearly remained permanently unsolved. Sex stayed in the air, like an absurdity; once, when he asked her if he could write a tutorial essay on a topic different from what she’d suggested, she’d parted her legs, both swift and interminably slow — she was in a shortish skirt; he’d had to turn his eyes away — before crossing them again, and said, smiling faintly, “Do what you like. I believe in the pleasure principle.” He was unhappy about her tutelage — he was generally unhappy at the time — but masturbated thinking about her, twice.
In the second academic year (which had ended a month ago), he no longer saw her — which was a relief. He wanted to forget her, at least for now. She had taken ill; his second-year tutor told him one day that her visits had grown irregular. How had the subject come up — of Hilary Burton? Maybe from a recounting to the second-year tutor of his state of mind in the first year. Another day, the tutor announced — again, an association of anecdotes and harmless gossip led unexpectedly to her — that Dr. Burton had entered a coma. She was alive. Her brain wasn’t. She was too young. Ananda couldn’t believe it.