"Don’t worry," he shouted. "You’ll do first class first." But his tone of terror undid the reassurance of the words.
"Throw the coconut!" he shrieked.
Jemubhai looked at his father, a barely educated man venturing where he should not be, and the love in Jemubhai’s heart mingled with pity, the pity with shame. His father felt his own hand rise and cover his mouth: he had failed his son.
The ship moved, the water split and spilled, flying fish exploded silver above the unravelment, Tom Collinses were passed around, and the party atmosphere reached a crescendo. The crowd on the shore became flotsam churning at the tide’s hem: scallops and starbursts, petticoat ruffles, rubbishy wrappings and saliva flecks, fish tails and tears… Soon it vanished in the haze.
Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn’t throw the coconut and he didn’t cry. Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn’t adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.
They sailed past the Colaba Lighthouse and out into the Indian Ocean until there was only the span of the sea whichever way he turned.
He was silly to be upset by Sai’s arrival, to allow it to trigger this revisita-tion of his past. No doubt the trunks had jogged his memory.
Miss S. Mistry, St. Augustine’s Convent.
Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver.
But he continued to remember: when he located his cabin, he found he had a cabinmate who had grown up in Calcutta composing Latin sonnets in Catullan hendecasyllables, which he had inscribed into a gilded volume and brought along with him. The cabinmate’s nose twitched at Jemu’s lump of pickle wrapped in a bundle of puris; onions, green chilies, and salt in a twist of newspaper; a banana that in the course of the journey had been slain by heat. No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana, but it had been packed just in case. In case of What? Jemu shouted silently to his mother.
In case he was hungry along the way or it was a while before meals could be properly prepared or he lacked the courage to go to the dining salon on the ship, given that he couldn’t eat with knife and fork -
He was furious that his mother had considered the possibility of his humiliation and thereby, he thought, precipitated it. In her attempt to cancel out one humiliation she had only succeeded in adding another.
Jemu picked up the package, fled to the deck, and threw it overboard. Didn’t his mother think of the inappropriateness of her gesture? Undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love – the monsters of the ocean could have what she had so bravely packed getting up in that predawn mush.
The smell of dying bananas retreated, oh, but now that just left the stink of fear and loneliness perfectly exposed.
In his cabin bunk at night, the sea made indecent licking sounds about the ship’s edge. He thought of how he had half undressed and hurriedly re-dressed his wife, of how he had only glimpsed her expression, just bits and pieces of it in the slipping of the pallu over her head. However in memory of the closeness of female flesh, his penis reached up in the dark and waved about, a simple blind sea creature but refusing to be refused. He found his own organ odd: insistent but cowardly; pleading but pompous.
They berthed at Liverpool and the band played "Land of Hope and Glory." His cabinmate, in Donegal tweeds, hailed a porter to help with his luggage – a white person to pick up a brown person’s bags! Jemubhai carried his own bags, stumbled onto a train, and on his way to Cambridge, found himself shocked as they progressed through fields by the enormous difference between the (boxy) English and the (loopy) Indian cow.
He continued to be amazed by the sights that greeted him. The England in which he searched for a room to rent was formed of tiny gray houses in gray streets, stuck together and down as if on a glue trap. It took him by surprise because he’d expected only grandness, hadn’t realized that here, too, people could be poor and live unaesthetic lives. While he was unimpressed, though, so too were the people who answered his knock, when they opened their doors to his face: "Just let," "All full," or even a curtain lifted and quickly dropped, a stillness as if all the inhabitants had, in that instant, died. He visited twenty-two homes before he arrived at the doorstep of Mrs. Rice on Thornton Road. She didn’t want him either, but she needed the money and her house was so situated – on the other side of the train station from the university – she was concerned she wouldn’t be able to find a lodger at all.
Twice a day she put out a tray at the foot of the stairs – boiled egg, bread, butter, jam, milk. After a spate of nights lying awake listening to the borborygmus of his half-empty stomach, thinking tearfully of his family in Piphit who thought him as worthy of a hot dinner as the queen of England, Jemubhai worked up the courage to ask for a proper evening meal. "We don’t eat much of a supper ourselves, James," she said, "too heavy on the stomach for Father." She always called her husband Father and she had taken to calling Jemubhai James. But that evening, he found on his plate steaming baked beans on toast.
"Thank you. Absolutely delicious," he said as Mr. Rice sat looking steadily out of the window.
Later, he marveled at this act of courage, since he was soon to lose it all.
He had registered at Fitzwilliam with the help of an essay he penned for the entrance examination, "Similarities and Differences between the French and Russian Revolutions." Fitzwilliam was a bit of a joke in those days, more a tutoring place than a college, but he began immediately to study, because it was the only skill he could carry from one country to another. He worked twelve hours at a stretch, late into the night, and in thus withdrawing, he failed to make a courageous gesture outward at a crucial moment and found, instead, that his pusillanimity and his loneliness had found fertile soil. He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.
But shadows, after all, create their own unease, and despite his attempts to hide, he merely emphasized something that unsettled others. For entire days nobody spoke to him at all, his throat jammed with words unuttered, his heart and mind turned into blunt aching things, and elderly ladies, even the hapless – blue-haired, spotted, faces like collapsing pumpkins – moved over when he sat next to them in the bus, so he knew that whatever they had, they were secure in their conviction that it wasn’t even remotely as bad as what he had. The young and beautiful were no kinder; girls held their noses and giggled, "Phew, he stinks of curry!"
Thus Jemubhai’s mind had begun to warp; he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar. He forgot how to laugh, could barely manage to lift his lips in a smile, and if he ever did, he held his hand over his mouth, because he couldn’t bear anyone to see his gums, his teeth. They seemed too private. In fact, he could barely let any of himself peep out of his clothes for fear of giving offence. He began to wash obsessively, concerned he would be accused of smelling, and each morning he scrubbed off the thick milky scent of sleep, the barnyard smell that wreathed him when he woke and impregnated the fabric of his pajamas. To the end of his life, he would never be seen without socks and shoes and would prefer shadow to light, faded days to sunny, for he was suspicious that sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly.