—
The smell of fenugreek. A sudden hiss: someone had ordered the tandoori platter. There weren’t that many people: weekday lunches were a desultory affair. Diwan-i-Khas was largely uninfiltrated. He took out the cheque, doubled foetally on itself. Smoothed it on the table.
The Sylheti waiters tarried discreetly. Benevolent backup. Walia’s troops, but Ananda’s kin. From the ancestral land he’d never seen.
“Kemon asen?” said the handsome one with the thinning hair in an undertone. Ananda had never forgotten him. He had the steadfastly reassuring air he’d had when, two years ago, Ananda and his parents had entered Diwan-i-Khas for the first time; once his father and mother had divulged over the beginnings of tarka daal and pilau rice that they hailed from Sunamganj and Habiganj respectively — how it had startled this man! — the subject had turned to rentable property. The hostel had become intolerable; its drunkards and merrymakers — international students — were keeping Ananda from practising music. Someone said the hostel was rumoured to be a “pickup joint.” But Ananda hadn’t been able to take advantage of that aspect of the place either. In the course of their uninformed search for alternative accommodation, they’d slipped into Diwan-i-Khas. “Fo-laat?” the waiter had asked, unflappably resourceful, as he poured tap water from a jug. “You want fo-laat?” Ananda was delighted by the neologism. It was deliberate — meant to put them at ease, earn trust in a way that English or standard Bengali couldn’t. So it was when waiters were plying them with mango chutney. “Fikol?” they’d say solicitously, holding the bowl of mango pickle aloft, disorienting, then disarming, them. Yes, they’d have fikol, how could you demur to such a request, which admitted you to the deepest — maybe it was a slightly too deep — familiarity? “Fo-laat?” this man hovering now by the table had said two years ago, and pointed them in the direction of Warren Street. “Our malik Walia — he has lots of fo-laats, ask him.”
To his enquiry now, “Kemon asen?” Ananda said, “Well”—“Bhalo”—standard Bengali; no one, not even his parents, spoke to him in Sylheti, and he wouldn’t presume to reply in it with the rustic “Bhala,” fearing it might sound like a parody of the tongue. When he was little, his parents had instructed him that Sylheti was not a language but a dialect. And when he was seventeen, he’d lighted on an aphorism by Marshall McLuhan: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” His people — if he could call these waiters his people — perhaps didn’t have an army or navy, then? But actually they did, having wrested and carved out their land in 1971. The land that, before 1947, was Ananda’s parents’ and theirs was now solely theirs. Still, could they be entirely happy in it if they were, today, not there, but here, at the tables of Diwan-i-Khas?
From the newsagent’s — two shops to the right of Diwan-i-Khas — he decided to get his near-daily copy of the Times. First he passed Asian Books and Video, with its tranquil but impoverished air, like a duty-free shop in a socialist country. He’d been in there once, wondering if he might uncover some bootlegged Asian porn (he’d never seen any, it was the myth of it that was compelling) in the basement — if there was a basement. Instead he found books on agriculture, philosophy (by Radhakrishnan), religion, and stacked copies of India Abroad; and what looked like smudged, pirated videos of Shaan and Chacha Bhatija. He had wanted to but balked at asking the balding, good-looking, empathetic proprietor, “Do you, by any chance, have Asian porn?” He wasn’t sure at which point the empathy would dry up. But he did often feel the invisible, gravitational pull of racial empathy: that the Indian, Pakistani, black, even the Chinese, could be presumed upon in a way that the white man couldn’t. The outlines of their consciousnesses were fuzzier, less individual, and softer, like their physical features — noses, jaw-lines, bodies. Ananda felt a strange unconscious familiarity among them — in ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t have noticed his countrymen; but he noticed them here, reviewing them not only with recognition, but with accumulated knowledge and an emotion he hadn’t previously been aware of. Indeed, the very urge and temptation not to notice them — not just Indians, but the heterogeneous tribe of the non-Caucasian — to take them for granted, was something he thought of now as quite wonderfuclass="underline" a gift. Before this profound temptation, and due to it, the stubborn conflicts — between Indian and Chinese, Pakistani and Indian — melted and became irrelevant. In contrast, you couldn’t not be aware of a white man. His very clarity and perfection of features made each version of him separate, singular, and quietly nervous-making.
The balding man in white shirt and dandyish striped trousers inside Asian Books and Video didn’t see Ananda; but Ananda glanced at him as he would at an expected landmark, put aside his need to make urgent queries, moved on towards the newsagent’s. At the neighbouring shop, surveying boxes of vegetables and fruit and herbs displayed outside the steps, was shakchunni (so Ananda’s mother called her; they didn’t know her name); also known at different points in time as churel and dain among the neighbours in Walia’s flats. She’d been consigned to the dominion of ghouls because of her ashen appearance (always wrapping her small stick-like figure in a faded printed sari) and her unhelpful personality. No longer did they go to her for yams, coriander, tomatoes, or other produce; but occasionally, when they fell unexpectedly short, they navigated her for Ribena or a carton of milk; then dealt with her eerie supernatural silence at the till. Her husband — in glasses — looked more generically human, and could even have passed for an accountant; he was no less unfriendly, but that could be because he was entrapped and, as a consequence, dour. On the other hand, shakchunni might be wasting away because of this bespectacled husband, whose very motionlessness was energy-sapping. Ananda arrived at the newsagent’s, hawkishly extracted a copy of the Times from the rack outside, climbed up the three steps. The newsagent, Manish, like shakchunni, was Gujarati, but second-generation; “A nation of Gujarati shopkeepers”—the joke was so obvious that, though he suspected he’d invented it, he couldn’t believe it was original; a thousand people must have thought up the same line; no one ever bothered to speak it aloud because it was so silly. His Highness and Excellency Dr. Rev. Sir Idi Amin had supervised the egress of the Gujaratis — mainly Patels; Manish too was Manish Patel — from Uganda thirteen years ago, leading, quite literally, to a change of colour in the English neighbourhoods. And four years before this happened, the Oracle — silver-tongued, Oxford-educated — had predicted strife in England and raved eloquently about the river Tiber foaming with much blood, a pronouncement that had been variously interpreted. “How are you, mate?” said Manish. “Aw-right?” He said this to Ananda each day. Sometimes it was only, “Aw-right?” Today Ananda sensed the words expressed not a social nicety but real concern, as if Manish had a fleeting but shrewd inkling, from the moments they spent with each other, of Ananda’s ever-returning homesickness and the recent departure of his mother. “Fine thanks,” said Ananda, and Manish smiled and nodded quietly; he’d abandoned his faded maroon jumper, but the smile was, as ever, framed by the changeless hirsute growth that was neither beard nor stubble. It was Manish who’d announced to Ananda the death of the grand witch, Indira Gandhi, when he’d come in to get the Times at half past eleven one morning nine months ago; Ananda had overslept and had no idea the world had changed in the small hours. While making his usual pointless arc from Fitzroy Square to Grafton Way, he’d noticed the flag on top of the Indian YMCA at half-mast and was puzzled; looked back twice to check the flag, then put it out of his head till Manish, in his faded maroon jumper, told him with that same look of concern: “Do you know Mrs. Gandhi’s been shot?” “What?” “Yes.” “Is she dead?” “They’re not saying.” That and the next day Ananda wondered if his country would splinter at the news; and would he be stranded in Warren Street if it did? And for how long then would he have to be here? He’d never before doubted his nation and its viability. But it survived and persisted through the violence and through the seasons. Manish, a bit of a divine messenger in disguise, continued to give Ananda the latest cricket scores along with the small change.