But wasn’t his uncle human and shrewd, and wouldn’t his left hand be entitled to a degree of awareness of what the right hand was up to? Wasn’t it expected — especially in one so solitary — that he might be often assigning value to his own actions? Who knows — maybe it wasn’t enough for him for God alone to know of his small acts of empathy.
—
Past Euston Station they were, without much forewarning, at the sweet shop entrance; inside, a bunch of Indians flocked at the counter, abiding by no queue. The room held a strong suggestion of kesar.
On the tray in Rangamama’s line of vision, flanked by neat diamond-shaped stacks of barfi on the left and some member of the great gulab jamun family on the right, and above another tray on the lower tier of pallid attempts at Bombay halwa, were exorbitant saffron-coloured laddoos. Motichur ladoo, a label said. My ass, thought Ananda. From Wembley, most likely.
“Pupu, look at those magnificent laddoos! Durdanto!”
Ananda had an inkling of doom that these were now destined to come his way, to be added to his kitchen paraphernalia.
“Should we get some of these?”
Since they were, in theory, intended for him, Ananda felt free to half-heartedly fend them off. “Don’t. They’re fakes. They’ll be nothing like the original.” It was the tragedy of London — to eat Indian food outside of the “curry” and to constantly discover the unfamiliar in the familiar: dosas that looked like but didn’t taste like dosas, bhelpuri that resembled bhelpuri but was something else. Not that he cared for the mythology of the laddoo. He had no idea why they were distributed jubilantly at North Indian celebrations. They were more a metaphor, a conceit, rather than a viable sweet. Their prestige had no explanation.
“Pupu he, I think you’re wrong — I think we should try them. We have gulab jamun all the time.” He wanted them. He’d probably never tasted a real laddoo in his life. After all, he’d never been to Delhi or Lucknow — he’d come to London straight after his youth in Shillong. He looked on with contained longing as six were arranged in a box: over-rich, oily orbs, flecked with pistachio. From his jacket pocket he took out an exactly folded Budgens bag and slipped the box in. He slid the bag across a wrist. Hand gloved in his right-hand pocket, the bag swinging imperceptibly, they made for Warren Street.
Ananda’s mind went back to the woman circling around King’s Cross. How many “jobs” did she do in a day? Where? Or maybe his uncle was wrong — maybe she wasn’t that kind of a woman. He’d once seen someone like her in front of Warren Street tube station: tall, with an overlarge body being shown off via a shoulderless top and mini skirt. Dressed like that in November. Ananda had noted her confused and visible air of incongruousness and expectancy; he’d glanced again, and (in the course of the second look) her unique calling had dawned on him. Instantly he’d thought, I could be wrong. She might be waiting for a friend. Anyway, he’d found neither her nor, today, the King’s Cross woman interesting. He’d have to make a major effort of the imagination to want them. Moreover, he suspected that they might, by now, loathe sex. The brisk businesslike indifference that followed soon after the initial flirtatiousness of the two women in Bombay had swamped any confidence he might have had in the performance. Besides, he was terrified of this cruelly misnamed virus. It was largely exclusive to heroin-injectors and homosexuals, but “largely” was the operative word. It had placed the King’s Cross woman and her ilk forever out of bounds.
His uncle said AIDS was a myth. Western scaremongering. “These kinds of diseases have been around forever. I saw people dying in Sylhet — of sexual deviancy. They’ve put a fancy name to it.”
Ananda had wondered about his uncle’s abstinence. He’d considered the matter of his sexuality. In fact, at seventeen, Ananda had even put the question to himself: Could I be a homosexual? He’d been worried — he didn’t feel the sort of aggressive sexual desire towards girls he liked that he thought was appropriate. For two months, when he was seventeen, he’d tortured himself. Just as Sylvia Plath had confessed, “I’ve begun to think like a Jew, feel like a Jew,” he’d worked himself up to a state where he’d begun to feel and think like a gay person. But he found he could cope with this new identity. In the abortive business with the cousin, he’d invoked celebrated allies from history who’d purportedly fallen in love with theirs — Gautama Buddha, Atul Prasad, Satyajit Ray. And, in his agonised period, he summoned names to prove that creative people had to be gay: Ginsberg, Proust, Shakespeare. Then it occurred to him that he’d never wanted to kiss a man. The thought had no appeal at all. Soon, the notion that had gripped him melted, like a fever that had run its course. He went to the two prostitutes in order to confirm his sexuality. The matter was more or less settled.
It was settled where his uncle was concerned too. Ananda had looked for homoerotic inclinations, and found none. Could he be impotent? Ananda had said bluntly: “Do you have wet dreams? You know what I mean?” His uncle had said, unflappable: “I’m quite normal, you know.”
But he had preferences. Today, on the tube, he’d leaned towards Ananda when a mildly plump West Indian woman — unmindful, maybe tired — got on at Camden Town and sat opposite them, and said with an evil smile: “Pupu, I’m feeling some lust for her.” Ananda speculated anxiously if she’d heard. But the hum was in the foreground.
A narrow range preoccupied his uncle on the menu of desire: black and working women. Granted, his love for Gilberta had been more devotion rather than Eros — heartfelt and unsullied (which is why it had brought him pain). But, as a rule, sexual desire and romantic longing were, for his uncle, incompatible with each other. It was one of the reasons, he’d implied, he hadn’t married. He’d gone out with refined Bengali women and Englishwomen, but they were only good for attentive walks and conversations about poetry and life. On the other hand, maidservants: they were funny and down-to-earth.
6 Ithaca
There were no lights on in either Mandy’s flat or the Patels’. Ananda’s own second-floor windows reflected the sun. Eyes lowered, the neighbours hanging, in a manner of speaking, over his head, Ananda unlocked the door. The morning’s clutter had shrunk. They went up, making an extroverted thumping sound. As Ananda attained the first-floor landing, Mandy’s door opened and shut again. Maybe she’d wanted to pounce on him about his morning practice and changed her mind. Hold on — she wasn’t home. Only the budgies, stoic and immobile. His uncle was humming away in his train — soft, deep voice.
—
Once inside, he went to a window and lifted it further up. The oncoming night was festive and menacing. But it was a moot point whether Tandoor Mahal — the fairy lights around its menu glowing — would get customers. It had to. It was Friday. The inside of the flat was in shadow. When he pressed the switch, cushions sprang out of the dark.
“Pupu.” His uncle dangled the Budgens bag. “Keep these in the kitchen.”
“You sure you won’t take them home?” asked Ananda hopefully.
“O no no no!” his uncle said, entirely resolved. “I’d never eat them.” Yes, he would finish them, probably single-handed, but only in company; here. Ananda could imagine him dithering over a laddoo in 24 Belsize Park. Laddoos were not, ordinarily, consumed in solitude.