—
Not that he had to go to Belsize Park to see his uncle. They also appointed other locations. They decided this on the phone. Neither had a phone — but this didn’t deter them from calling each other. After the Patels had prised out the coin box, the payphone had become a relic without function and Ananda had to have recourse to a booth on the opposite side of Warren Street, near Tandoor Mahal. From there he called Bombay, speaking to his mother, her clear childish voice reaching him after a delay, like a benediction. When he needed to talk to his uncle, he called the neighbour, Abbas. “One sacund, please,” Abbas said — Punjabis from Pakistan had perfect manners — and sometimes Ananda heard him knock vigorously and proclaim: “Nandy — Nandy! Tumhara nephew hain.” Some expected shambling; then the baritone—“Pupu!” (Ananda’s ignominious pet name.) “Kemon achho he?” His uncle addressed him in a lisping way — like Ananda was an overgrown child who required special handling. He usually sounded amused talking to Ananda — and surprised. He was capable of bickering with Ananda. But they might concur that Marble Arch or Oxford Street was the best meeting place, and experience a bit of satisfaction. This decision shaped the next few hours. What they did then — even if it was the same as what they did every day — would be an accomplice to their future convergence. By the time they hung up, both of them — but particularly Ananda — were fulminating; because his uncle would have complained again about a remark Ananda’s father or mother had made, or something Ananda himself had said, and also offered a long, uncalled-for justification for an opinion he’d expressed last week. To this, Ananda had to reply with “Okay, okay, fine”—his role being to soothe and bring closure — while secreting his third 10 p coin into the slot; when the warning beeps went off again, he’d say, “I’m running out of change, Rangamama, we’ll talk this afternoon”—giving them, before they were cut off, just enough time to rescue a semblance of good humour, his uncle his feeling of anticipation, and say provisional farewells.
—
The tube to Edgware was near-empty. It was that time of day. The suited yuppies would begin to enter the parted doors in a couple of hours, till there was no room to stand. But, given his daytime schedule, Ananda hardly knew rush hour. Tube-travel was spacious; he often found himself headed somewhere in the company of stragglers. “Company” was the wrong word, because they didn’t know each other. And the chances of them seeing each other again were few, if not nil. This fact underlined — without emphasis — the short journey, given the paucity of passengers. During rush hour, the passengers jostled and threatened to merge. Now, the five or six others marooned on seats brought home to Ananda the contingency of their nearness — without the thought surfacing with finality. He was off to see his uncle; they weren’t. If another person or two alighted at Belsize Park, it would be intriguing to see how long their journeys coincided; eventually, the others would fall away, and Ananda’s path to the basement bedsit would be his own. There was a beautiful tall girl in a black dress on the far side, who looked absorbed in everything but where she was. She denied the tube entirely. Her eyes altered direction every few seconds as she raced, very still, with some unfolding preoccupation. A Gujarati couple got on at Euston, at once mercantile and spiritual — old; managing to make their progress a pilgrimage and an enterprise. They didn’t speak; they were receiving and absorbing the train’s motion — but he knew by some unspecified rule of recognition that they were from Gujarat: their arrival here had been presaged by the Oracle, moving him to his “rivers of blood” grandiloquence. The man wore a black jacket and grey trousers, the woman a pale white cotton sari; both had keds on. They were subtly wizened — Gujaratis tended to wizen gracefully, as if in preparation for withdrawal. Yet they were a worldly lot; you could sense that in the couple’s wordless determination. Ananda envied this fearlessness; he wouldn’t have had the gumption to go around in a faded sari and keds in London. Despite his pretences, he cared about what he looked like.
—
“Asians” is what the couple would be called here. Ananda didn’t see himself as “Asian.” He was keen to militate against the category, though his militancy must, naturally, remain incommunicable to the people it was intended for. He was Indian. He’d go back home some day — the deferred promise defined him. When he’d visited London in the summers of 1973 and 1979, he’d seen “Asians” for the first time — a family in Belsize Park in particular, whom his parents knew from their time here before they’d returned. The nice Bengali bhadralok lady had a boy who was Ananda’s age — eleven. He had casual long hair which fell repeatedly on his eyebrows, and he spoke exactly as a London boy would, unobtrusively dispensing with many of his t’s. He was, actually, English. Speaking the language in that way translated his features, his facial muscles, into the idiom of this city’s culture. They’d run into each other during subsequent explorations in the neighbourhood that summer, but never talked again. Ananda was convinced that this was an Indian boy who belonged more to Belsize Park than to India; he was enveloped by a curious shyness when he saw him in the distance, and tried to avoid him.
The “rivers of blood” speech was still quite fresh that year, and he remembered his uncle — in flared trousers, sideburns tapering down from the thinning scalp — refer to it with an impish smile. In less nice neighbourhoods, the National Front left parcels of shit on the doorsteps of Indians and Pakis. Indians had then only just emerged into this new identity—“Asian”—from having not long ago been “black.” In fact, his uncle still called himself “black”—having maybe boasted of his Bengali antecedents one moment ago (“Tagore turned Bengali into one of the seven richest literatures in the world,” he’d say, citing an English scholar, not bothering to tell him what the other six literatures were). In the time of colonisation even Tagore — a veritable bearded Zeus atop Olympus — had playfully called himself “black.” It was the convenient catch-all en masse term for those not from Europe. The Greeks, responsible for European civilisation, only barely escaped the misnomer by virtue of being lightly tanned. However, Ananda had sensed the Greeks were visible to the naked English eye from a mile off. The gradations of colour between white and black were infinite in London; you didn’t need the seven colours of the rainbow here — these two were heterogeneous enough to suffice.
His uncle hadn’t completely eschewed the word — in fact, was fairly comfortable with it — as, over time, with most of his hair gone, and given his round nose, he was beginning to look Jamaican. He’d been mistaken for a Jamaican by strangers a few times. This both amused and troubled him. “Don’t think that Africans and West Indians all look similar,” he told Ananda. “If you study them carefully, you’ll notice Ethiopians are very good-looking.” He had an agenda for race. “Ethiopian,” he’d say under his breath when a handsome dark-skinned man walked by. Partly he continued using the word because he’d come to England when “black” and “white” were the only two camps in the country. Partly it was to distance himself from the Bengali bhadralok, who, with their pusillanimous ambitions (to become GPs or at the very least clerks in the railways), their small semi-detached houses in East London and their children in Westminster and Harrow, he saw as the very antithesis of himself — solitary, without roots, without family or clear future. “I’m a black Englishman,” he’d say proudly to fresh acquaintances. He always wore a tailored three-piece suit with a maroon silk tie neatly ensconcing his collar, and a matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. The matter of colour was a joke to him, Ananda suspected — just as it was to the Africans. He’d recount a conversation he’d once had with a bunch of émigrés in 1957, his first year in London, when they were telling each other where they’d come from. One said, smiling, apologetic, “I…I am from the ‘dark continent.’ ” Western civilisation was all vanity, his uncle said to Ananda. The Africans led lives of continual irony.