The train passed Mornington Crescent without stopping. He caught a much-prized glimpse of the platform. Camden Town and Chalk Farm were dispatched easily; less than five minutes after Mornington Crescent, the train slowed down for Belsize Park. The old Gujarati in the jacket had nodded off; the woman — Ananda saw them both through the window when he got off, hurtling forth — was in a wakeful slumber, eyes deep and fixed. Gone. He went up the stairs, then past the semi-circular hatch (through which the platform from which he’d just risen was visible), with its onrush of air each time a train approached or after it departed — invisible gust, by which you knew a journey’s aftermath or closeness. His uncle and he had strolled past the hatch a hundred times in their lackadaisical way: they never hurried for the trains, not even upon being warned by that warm breeze.
Through the collapsible doors on to the spherical cage, the lift. More than anything — escalator or staircase — this antique piece of ironwork was his connection to what was subterranean here. From the depths he emerged to view Haverstock Hill in the summer. At the exit, instead of weighing the zebra crossing, he turned right, passing the florist’s adjoining the station, where someone behind the glass was harvesting bouquets for customers, choosing, bending, and embracing the flowers. The row of restaurants in the shade on Ananda’s right-hand side appeared to regard him from an imperceptible incline. Weaving in and out of the shadows of trees planted at intervals, he crossed to the Hampstead Town Hall. Its ten steps rising to a sturdy black door, its facade of brick, red stone, and white borders, were inextricably related in his mind to the Pujas. Was it still a town hall? Or something else? The Pujas had moved to King’s Cross. Yet each time he saw the building his memory summoned up two crowded occasions when he, his uncle, and his parents had come here for the festival, his uncle dawdling shyly, half-reluctant to encounter other Bengalis. They’d approached the space — thick with merrymakers — before the majestic staircases on either side, glimpsed, on the first floor, the goddess, noted the festoons of marigold, descended with the crowd to receive khichudi. The English ignored the festivities; as Forster had said, they’d never had gods, only goblins and fairies. They wouldn’t know what it meant to have gods watching over you; they didn’t know what to do with them. So, on the whole, they steered clear of the autumnal droves of women in saris, the men in suits, or flaunting dhutis. He turned left, down the bollarded slope of Belsize Avenue.
—
The sun fell on the opposite side of the road. He walked past the Scandinavian-type apartments as well as the spacious opening into Belsize Village; crossing as if on cue to the other side, continuing a few seconds up the road, he noted the tile that said BELSIZE PARK NW3. The houses on the right paraded themselves one after the other, the front door up a flight of steps — they were like actresses on a stage, ageless, full frontal for the audience. They had their trinkets — columns, pediments, fluted whorls. The basement was on ground level; the main house occupied a proscenium. Number 23—which was coming up — had a green door; number 24 was maroon. On the border of 23—separating the steps from what could be used as a parking space — was a very low wall, a platform you could even sit on. Through the sunlit space by it, Ananda advanced to his uncle’s room at the back. There were two empty milk bottles on the ground, and a garbage bin, the plastic liner making a narrow lip under the lid. And his uncle’s windows — fortified, for some reason, with bags from Budgens. He wasn’t sure if his uncle ever carried a briefcase. Even when they’d twice had a rendezvous at Moorgate Station, when his uncle still worked in the “city,” Ananda hadn’t seen him with one. Maybe briefcases were overrated by office-goers, and his uncle had shown that it was possible to live without them. His sole accessory as a peripatetic man was the Budgens bag. He also carried one — maybe to guarantee he’d never be short — folded in the pocket of his mac or jacket. Even when walking about with minuscule cargo, his closed fist would have penetrated the loop of the bag into the mac pocket, with it swinging idly from his wrist as he walked. He probably didn’t believe in throwing the bags away just in case he ran out in the future, which is why he stuffed them against the windows. Ananda rapped on one of the sealed panes. A cat — white with patches of carpet brown — which had come to pry among the bottles, and was loping away from Ananda, turned to look. Its tail was raised like a mast. It padded off to the garden at the back; “garden” was too generous a name. It — the sunlit lot — was green, overgrown, and generally empty. For all his uncle’s rhapsodising about nature and the wilds, his bestial love of the tiger and forests, Ananda had never seen him so much as glance at the “garden.” Maybe it wasn’t wild enough. It was unkempt, though. To underline his sharp raps on the pane, he pressed the buzzer for “Nandy.” He needn’t have. His uncle was nothing if not alert. An instant after Ananda had put thumb to buzzer, he heard the door being unlatched — almost anticipatorily. His uncle was wearing a maroon dressing gown. “Hello Pupu,” he said, glad, but without surprise, as you would to someone who was overdue.
—
He entered and turned to the half-ajar door on the left. His uncle shuffled behind him, gentlemanly, slow. The looped sash of the dressing gown came undone, revealing, underneath, the slight frame in the dark maroon pyjama suit.
“You’re nowhere near ready,” said Ananda, taking on a patrician, indulgent air. “It’ll be four soon. When are we going out?”
“Darao he,” said his uncle, in his mock-literary way. Switching to English: “I haven’t finished yet!” A look of annoyance on his face. “Wait, sit down, let me get you something.”
Ananda looked around him. The centre table, or dining table, or maybe the work table — whatever it was — had chairs on two sides, one bearing a pile of books on shipping law. Noticing Ananda’s beady stare, his uncle made to remove this low stack, at which Ananda pulled out the other chair and said, “That’s fine, that’s fine, I’ll sit here.”
He lowered himself, distrustful of the surface. He patted and slapped it. The smallish table was covered neatly with pages from newspapers in lieu of a tablecloth. There were more books on it: a familiar, creased pile of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, a half-open novel by Stephen King, a copy of the Sun that seemed to have been recently consulted, a shaving mirror. Ananda looked away. The bed was right next to him, against the wall, not properly made but not wholly neglected either, the tucked blanket that would have been pulled down slightly at night pulled up again, the sheet and pillow still bearing his uncle’s impress.
Ananda could see him. He was rummaging in the kitchenette. The bedsit was divided in two: this room was three quarters of it, then came the kitchenette through a doorway with no door.
He returned brandishing a can. “Coke?” he asked. “I’m all right,” said Ananda: he wasn’t going to drink Coke in the afternoon — it seemed like a scandalous thing to do. Ananda knew his uncle had stocked up on Coke to appease Ananda’s mother — from stirrings of guilt, because he so often insulted her — ever since he’d realised that she liked the drink. “Are you sure?” he asked, drawing out the word “sure” like a melancholy Bengali syllable. Ananda kept shaking his head. “Would you like a Jaffa cake then? Ba Mr. Kipling-er almond slice?” He’d become very hospitable — not overnight, but inexorably. He had a very personal notion of hospitality, though. Having long fended for himself with only a degree of success, he threatened to rain a small range of confectionary on Ananda. This was linked to his own taste rather than his guest’s (the Coke was an exception) — since he had a sweet tooth, it largely comprised cakes.