“Getting a First’s quite tough, isn’t it?”
He had no academic ambitions. He wanted to do well — his marks at school had, when they’d peaked, been mediocre — mainly in order to continue in England and devote himself to his quest, of becoming a world-famous poet. It was a matter of strategising; Mr. Davidson’s looking askance at his poems hadn’t dampened him. The encouraging verdict on the tutorial essays had emboldened Ananda, and made him begin to dream.
“Yes, but it can be done,” said Mr. Davidson with a set look, as if he were experiencing his student’s resolve vicariously.
In 1984–85, there had been three Firsts in English, the sort of drought that was by no means atypical. Ananda had gazed at the shrunken list of names hovering above the usual spillage of 2:1’s and 2:2’s on the noticeboard; there was just a single third — a case of frightening, sad uniqueness. Each year, he knew, the Firsts were a meagre precipitation falling from high and coming to a stop no sooner than it started. The sciences were a fraction more generous; in the hallway of the Engineering Building, Ananda had seen five Firsts on the noticeboard — four of them, admittedly, Chinese.
“But what do you think my chances are?”
He could be child-like with his tutor. Mr. Davidson stared hard at Ananda, as if divining his fortune from his face.
“I think you have a first-class literary sensibility,” said Mr. Davidson. “But you haven’t read enough to get a First.” A sudden small burst of sparrow-chatter.
“You’ve read far more poetry than you have prose. I’d say you’ve read a great deal of poetry.” He made it sound like Ananda had crossed a line that demarcated acceptable behaviour. “But your reading of the novel needs enlarging.”
It was useless to deny this. Ananda loved reading poems. He avoided novels. It was a tacit — not a premeditated — avoidance. He had a restive attention span; his mind drifted when reading long books. The only novels he’d read with true gusto were those trashy thrillers he’d consumed at school. These days he read poems like thrillers. He even took them to the bathroom. Poems of a certain duration, even obscure ones, like Geoffrey Hill’s “To the (Supposed) Patron,” he finished in the duration of a single crap. He then reread it, suspended over the submerged stool. He’d emerge from the bathroom in a strange mood, physically unburdened and spiritually, mentally, elevated. Of “serious” novels, he’d only finished All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and the later, almost comical tragedies of Thomas Hardy, in which things went relentlessly wrong, as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Of course — being ambitious — he’d tried his hand at Ulysses when he was eighteen, and reached its finale without comprehending it — taking pleasure in hardly any of its features except the giant S, the first alphabet in the book. The S had undoubtedly vibrated with energy, but the book was a physical burden. He’d put it in the luggage three years ago on a trip to America with his parents, intending to examine it on his travels. A customs man at JFK had asked them to open the suitcases (in case they were smuggling in Indian fruits or sweets, perhaps). “Ulysses!” the large bespectacled disbelieving customs man had said. “Are you a student?” Ananda had nodded, though he was in the equivalent of high school. “I wouldn’t read Ulysses unless I was a student!” said the customs man, shutting the suitcase after his glimpse into the tantalising freemasonry of studenthood. A potentially incendiary book then — on the verge of being, but not quite, contraband. And near-unreadable. Ananda had secretly rejoiced at it being discovered in his bag on his entry into America.
—
“Moll Flanders,” said Nestor Davidson. “That’s the first of six novels I’d recommend you read.”
Ananda prised out a biro and his chequebook from his trouser pocket and guiltily scribbled the title on the back — in the hasty egress from Warren Street, he’d forgotten his notebook at home.
Moll Flanders! Had he read the Classics Illustrated version? Or was that Silas Marner? His spirits sank. So unadulteratedly and classically English!
“And I think you may as well read Journal of the Plague Year too — it’s very interesting.” Ananda inscribed the numeral 2 and added the name in his tiny handwriting to the chequebook’s uneven surface. He had a premonition of dullness. Walls of prose.
“Gulliver’s Travels.” What! Was Mr. Davidson sending him back to school as a punishment? This he’d definitely encountered in Classics Illustrated, where the comedy of scale had been shrewdly exploited by the artist: the stranded, long-haired body in knickerbockers pinned to the earth — every inch of him — by minute threads. Beautifully drawn. Ananda’s mother used to lovingly call him “Lilliput” when he was a toddler. In Bengali, the word had become a noun referring not to the place but to its people. Must he now go back to this implausible giant?
Reading his mind, Mr. Davidson remarked: “Swift is the best satirist in the English language, a bit extreme and mad (look up ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits’)”—Ananda paused; then rushed to notate the quotation—“but worth your while I think. I’d add Jane Eyre to the list.”
Another children’s book! Classic literature was what he’d encountered long ago mostly in the form of a comic book or movie; it belonged to a boy’s bygone ephemera. He’d grown up; he belonged to the present; modernist difficulty was his bread and butter. He wanted no more of “stories.” The Emmas and Fannys and Rochesters — they were of a closed English household where he’d never been welcome or at home.
“It’s a remarkable novel,” said Mr. Davidson, narrowing his eyes. The First no longer concerned him; he was trying to make Ananda look over his shoulder and notice the dim light shining in the nineteenth century.
“Sons and Lovers,” he said with finality. At last, a novel that didn’t originate in antiquity! Bursting with sex too, from what Ananda had heard.
“That’s enough reading. I’d be very curious to know your thoughts once you’ve finished.”
He was going to see his uncle. But he must get something to eat. Senate House was nearby. He decided he wouldn’t. The busy dining hall on the top floor — it was far too English. The English were a strange lot: even if they didn’t acknowledge your existence, they made you feel on display. How did they manage to do that? Their books advocated the virtues of observation — but they didn’t look at you directly. If you sat opposite an English person, you may as well not be there — that was English politeness, or the rules of the culture. It wasn’t obliviousness. They did practise the art of looking in secret; on the tube, in the silence of human contiguity, Ananda’s eyes had more than once alighted accidentally on the reflection of a co-passenger, and found he was being studied. The eyes had immediately slid away, but he’d been startled that his existence had aroused curiosity. His uncle, with his misshapen racial superiority, often warned him against making eye-contact with skinheads and even punks: “Would you look an animal in the eye? No. Because it thinks it’s a challenge.”
He saw his uncle once or twice a week. They got on each other’s nerves, but had grown fond of the frisson. He was Ananda’s sole friend in London — and Ananda his. “Friend” was right; because his uncle was capable of being neither uncle, nor father, nor brother. He mainly needed a person to have a conversation with — specifically, for someone to be present, listening and nodding, as he talked. When his sister and brother-in-law had returned to India in 1961, the deprivation of such a person in his life had, slowly, changed him. As his basic requirement was an avid companion, he didn’t get married, because the distractions of sex and administering a family would leave less time to talk about himself. Deprivation had already turned him — when Ananda visited London in 1973 with his parents — into a hermit in a dressing-gown. The rug and furniture in the first-floor bedsit was covered with a fur-like lining. The pans in the kitchenette sink hadn’t been treated to a washing liquid for years. He was cheery to outward purposes, his sideburns signifying the mood of the time, a shipping company high-flyer. When he came to see them in their hotel room on their next visit in 1979, he was bitter. For some reason, he was furious with Ananda’s parents. He’d emptied the round coconut naroo that Ananda’s mother had brought for him from home into the wastepaper basket. They placated him somehow, for the hurt they’d unknowingly caused. Because the person who congenitally seeks companionship — rather than seeking out, say, positions of influence or power — is also, often, a compulsive quarreller. There are hardly any terminal severances in his life, as he can’t afford them. His relationships might be defined by discord, but they’re also permanent.