—
Here, at McDonald’s — whose burgers were both disappointing and too expensive for him, the big Mac, for its size, a Herculean task to bite into, but strangely nondescript to the palate — was a junction at which you encountered people crossing from Tottenham Court Road into the futuristic anonymity of Euston Road. Others headed through the glass door for (or emerged heavy with) a Big Mac meal, and still others, across the road, milled before Warren Street tube station, either about to disappear inwards, or just coming out, accustoming themselves to the right angle of Warren Street and Tottenham Court Road.
Ananda turned right into the wide busy stretch that went much further than the brain could accommodate; for he had trouble comprehending that this Tottenham Court Road was identical to the one after the traffic lights that would sever New Oxford from Oxford Street—there lay the more salacious stretch, besides of course the obscure guitar shops in by-lanes, and Foyles, civilised sentinel; but also prostitutes so down-at-heel that you flinched and looked away — they becoming, for a split second, focussed on you as you passed by, giving you the privilege of their attention (it was nice to be noticed, however you might deny it, when you were in the crowd), but becoming bored instantaneously and returning to their vigil; in further by-lanes were the remaining XXX cinemas that, under Thatcher, had become pristine with nipples and buttocks and never the vestige of an erection, the LIVE PEEP SHOW! signs, bursting with unfounded optimism, and the weirder notices pinned to doors: MODELS ON THE FIRST FLOOR. In his first year, he’d been a flâneur of these sites, a frequenter of interiors in which no one acknowledged anyone else as they browsed in stops and starts, and even the faint touch of another man’s shoulder could make you flinch; shops that you slipped into through curtains that had been passed through a shredder; he was uneasy, but the shop assistant (if you could call them that: they were probably on parole) was usually friendly, but sly; only once or twice had Ananda received a whiff of racism, a burly man saying “Vindaloo, vindaloo” in an eerie sing-song to himself. Such people were to be ignored and avoided; there are certain demoniacal beings in the universe, his uncle had said, quoting Taranath the tantric, who are dim but incredibly powerful; they can grow a hundred times their size in a second; they have brute strength; they can fly; but they are not intelligent. You won’t be able to beat them in a contest of strength, but you have to hold your nerve when facing them. His uncle’s reason for referring to Taranath the tantric was to take a dig at Western civilisation, its technological marvels, which he dismissed as a brash, superficial form of energy. Ananda found Taranath the tantric’s definition handy for classifying the whole range of skinheads, football fans, and neo-Nazis he must take care not to run into during his Soho wanders.
—
This stretch, on which he made his progress towards the college, was boring. He wasn’t even sure if it was Tottenham Court Road. Not a dirty magazine to be seen. Instead, the Grafton Hotel, with its purple-liveried porter. Boring restaurants — Lal Qila (mildly uppity, with tandoori quail on the menu); Strikes, the raison d’etre of whose name was impossible to second-guess, with black-and-white pictures of striking workers from the twenties (no overt homage being made to Arthur Scargill) and a menu dominated by burgers; and Garfunkel’s (no evident genuflection to Paul and Art), where you had to wait to get a table (raising your expectations, naturally), and which probably served the woodiest French fries in miles. He’d eaten at each one: at Strikes and Garfunkel’s with his mother, when she was tired of cooking and he of saving: they’d let go and, with a disproportionate sense of guilt and liberation, made their way there. Strikes! Garfunkel’s! He’d coerced his uncle twice to treat his mother and him to Lal Qila. He felt no remorse — his uncle was a well-to-do man (though he might have lost his job), without a family or property to his name. Surely he could take them out once a week? So ran the unwritten rule (unchallenged, to date, by his uncle).
—
He turned left at Heal’s. When he’d first moved to Warren Street — still fresh to this terrain — he’d taken the longer route, crossing the road at McDonald’s and, quite alone — there were hardly any pedestrians here — traversed a no-man’s land, passing, each day, a largely unvisited sari emporium, aware that Drummond Street and the Asian grocers and bhelpuri shops weren’t far; walked, walked, in silence, till he reached Euston Square tube station. Here, as he turned sharply right facing the station, the vista of Gower Street and his destiny — of being condemned to being in London, of making this journey to college — presented themselves plainly. The grey buildings on his left were the college’s, and, midway through the walk, you passed the old grand building and entrance — faux renaissance with its white dome, marked by imperial pretensions, befitting of Rome rather than the surrounding London brick and stone. This entrance was out of bounds; the grand building was being salvaged and renovated from before he’d seen it almost two years ago; it was an irrelevance; he simply walked past it, noting its brief dishevelment, before he reached the traffic lights, and turned left. It took him two weeks to realise that he needn’t take that walk, that he could go down Tottenham Court Road till he reached the Goodge Street underground, and turn into the street bordered by Heal’s. This was a better route, less stark and nineteenth-century, less emblematic of the colonial past — what a poor subject he’d have made, even worse than the maladroit he was as a migrant student! — and more consolingly drab and populous. The scattered signs of old and new wealth flanked him on this trip; Heal’s, with its fluttering pennants, was a palace, and he had no reason, now or in the future, to enter it to survey the heavy furniture displayed within. Habitat was next to it, with its perky designs, its transformed shapes and fragile-looking chairs and tables; he and his mother, small and bright in her sari, had roamed here one afternoon, and she’d bought him the dining table — it was on a thirty per cent reduction — that now took up one tenth of his room. Much more sprightly, this route. Gower Street — Tagore! What had Tagore felt about Gower Street? Ananda had heard that Tagore had enrolled in the same college in 1879 to read Law. He’d attended a few lectures — but not on Law, as far as he knew, but by Herbert Spencer. To be anonymous, a nobody, and a subject! This, no doubt, was what had made Ananda shiver slightly when going down Gower Street: the haunting of Empire. Tagore had fled back home, long before taking a degree, in disgrace. Ananda would have fled, too, if he’d come here in 1879; he could barely bring himself to continue in Thatcher’s multiracial capital. His mother’s visits — her company, the constant chatter in the room — had kept him from returning; poor Tagore had had no rescuing angel, no mother-love to protect and entertain him. Nor, for that matter, had he had Ananda’s uncle. Though his uncle couldn’t be trusted. Not only was he seldom sympathetic towards Ananda’s outpourings of homesickness, he claimed he never felt homesick himself. He was lying.