He’d gone. To do the small job. A voyage out with Pupu was a thing of joy, and he didn’t want it spoilt by an urge to pee coming over him. Once it did, he’d be seized by it. So now he was in the loo, wringing himself dry. It took minutes. And patience.
It was notable that heroes in Europe had no bodily functions as such — or encumbering relatives. Neither Hercules nor James Bond for that matter interrupted their antics and missions because they had to visit the toilet. When morning came, they didn’t bother to brush their teeth; they jumped out of bed in pursuit. For Bond, saving the world took precedence over everything. The furthest he went towards his hygiene was shaving, an exhibition of his pheromonic powers which was rudely cut short (depending on context) by a deadly insect, a treacherous consort, or a Soviet spy. So, even this one recorded act of his humble daily toilette was made tantalising by being never completed, and Bond was seen, again and again, brusquely wiping off what remained of the lather with a towel. This detail both unsettled and inspired Ananda and his uncle; they, namby-pamby Indians, would have assiduously washed the lather off their face before drying their cheeks. Bond had no time for niceties. Nor did he have an aunt or father calling him on the phone in the midst of his fights, or demanding to know where he’d gone in the last seven days. It was a peculiarity of Western culture: this immersion in individuality, and the pretence that haemorrhoids or family didn’t undermine or subvert the frame of action — it was what made its myths so free-floating and fabulous. And this transcendence was what shaped the colonial project: they simply wouldn’t have conquered the world if they’d paused to brush their teeth or vanished to do the “big job.” The latter, Ananda was pretty sure, was the reason there was no Bengali Empire.
—
Although his uncle had embarked on his great journeys in the forties and fifties — Sylhet to Shillong, Shillong to London, and from being a school matriculate working as a part-time used-car salesman in Shillong to a full-fledged Chartered Shipbroker who ended up as a senior manager at Philipp Bros — in spite of this, the grand journey he focussed on daily was an internal one. Not psychological, not inner; internal. To do with encouraging the food he’d taken the previous day to make its proper, unfettered way through oesophagus, alimentary canal, intestines, and colon to its final and complete escape, helped along by violent tides of water. For, in the morning (Ananda knew), his uncle, after his breakfast of syrupy coffee and half a spoon of honey and a quarter of toast, would drink ten glasses of water to cleanse his organs and send the waste within on a burst of energy to its bigger journey. “He’s going to come back now and boast about the water he drank today,” thought Ananda.
—
Next to the doorway to the kitchenette was a splendid calendar of Kali.
Ananda didn’t bother to check if it was out of date. Things were often displayed in his uncle’s room after they’d served their function. For instance, the bedsit upstairs, which the landlord had now acquired for a two-bedroom conversion, where Ananda’s parents used to live in the fifties, and which his uncle had inherited after they’d vacated it in 1961, to return to India. Ananda’s first visit to 24 Belsize Park in 1973 also saw his entry into his uncle’s former first-floor abode — for some reason, his memory would sometimes tell him it was Christmas. But it was August; he had vivid recollections of the summer; consecutive days of sunlight. Why Christmas? He now knew: the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, and especially the cards hung sideways from a cord strung across the room, with pictures of snowmen, holly, Madonna and child, their bright fins pointing downwards. Not just last Christmas’s cards, but earlier ones too — that August, Ananda found them in their assigned places, as if they’d just arrived. They were never removed, only added to.
—
Ananda went into the kitchenette to look for a clean glass. The two on the shelf had no smudges. He turned the kitchen tap, filled one, drank.
The gas cooker was unlit. The moment the temperature fell, two hobs would burn with low flames and have faintly simmering saucepans of water on them. The vapour was meant to counter dryness. The electric rods in the other room, which became incandescent and orange in the winter, made his uncle’s skin dry anyway. On the left ankle, he’d scratched a vertical gash into the skin. Even now there was a saucepan on a hob with a low still pool of water in it, its sides whitened by evaporation. Also a frying pan half full of liver, in which the sauce had congealed richly.
Plonking the glass into the sink, Ananda returned to the table and saw the Times, which he’d bought less than an hour ago and as good as forgotten. He picked it up and turned it round, and was gripped by SHAHNAWAZ BHUTTO SHOT. Tragic family. Enemies of India; Zulfikar had been to the same school as he, but decades before. The school was proud of the fact; the Principal, peering at them over assembly: “Who knows? One of you might be a future Prime Minister,” while they fidgeted. Or maybe “proud” wasn’t the word, given the war in 1971. But who, in death, can be classed as friend or enemy? I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Let us sleep now. Was Shahnawaz with his father today? Ananda put down the paper and went for the Sun—astonished this time by the starved figure of Rock Hudson, smiling. This unspeakable affliction, coming out of nowhere! The gods’ retribution for human happiness. He was mortified, when he turned to page three and paused over the girl’s gleaming nipples, trying to feel some desire. The breasts sloped down meekly; the face was audacious and common — the sort you’d have glanced at twice in Sainsbury’s and maybe made eye-contact with. This sense of possibility excited him — it was less a visual than a brazen verbal statement, more bold and shameless than anything the photograph actually contained: he was appeased she wasn’t model-like, but so living, contemporary, and English — truly “your girl of the day.” Shahnawaz Bhutto and Rock Hudson dissolved into a retrospective glimmer; empathy deserted him; his cock stirred. His uncle returned; he swiftly returned the Sun to the table.
“Pupu he,” said Rangamama. “I’m ready when you are!” Ever the gent. Apparently he’d been miserable when he’d arrived in 1957, tearful, and wanted to run back to Shillong. “Can I have the rabbit?” he’d said to the man taking orders in a tea shop. The man had contemptuously cast a plate of thinly sliced cheese toast before him and said, “There’s your rabbit!” Rare-bit. Ray-bit. He was over all that now, not quite integrated but perhaps as assimilated as he could be in any milieu. Actually, he was much happier than Ananda had seen him even two years ago. The early retirement had freed him utterly. He poked at the knot of his tie and considered the face in the shaving mirror — eyes narrowed, cheeks sucked in. He had the thinnest moustache above his upper lip, which he must have cultivated as an addition when he was a youthful dandy; lips that veered towards the thin, but were a bit fuller than Ananda’s mother’s; a prominent nose. He didn’t have fat cheeks, but some nervous anorexic impulse made him suck them in when he regarded himself, since his ideal, when it came to the ur-male, was Humphrey Bogart: urbane, dissipated. Each time he turned to the mirror he made a face like Bogart did when Lauren Bacall had just lied to him, or when he’d heard a funny sound: on high alert; undeceived.