“Rangamama!”
His uncle looked up.
“What are you doing?”
He’d drawn blood. He’d rolled down one sock, and, while endorsing Bibhutibhushan’s tale, was mauling an itch.
“Sorry.” A bit sheepish. “These feet get no air.”
He brushed off the dead skin. “Do you have the Betnovate C?” he asked, with the incisiveness of a connoisseur.
Ananda’s mother had carried two tubes with her for her brother and his longstanding complaint and left them at Warren Street.
Ananda groped among objects on the top shelf of the cupboard adjoining the bed.
There was a sound like a thunderclap. Then a drumbeat of footsteps that gathered and grew till there was a bustling transit right past Ananda’s flat. After two or three seconds, there was emphatic footfall upstairs.
“Here,” said Ananda, handing over a small green tube.
His uncle squeezed and abstractedly daubed the cream on the raw, pink spot. Ananda couldn’t bear to look.
“Aren’t you hungry?” asked his uncle, massaging the ankle. “I could eat a horse!”
—
“Why don’t we eat at the Indian YMCA? Their meals are superb…”
So that’s why they were heading for Fitzroy Square! Ananda was resistant to the large breast of chicken in the red YMCA curry, along with sides of daal and vegetables (stubs of beans and carrots) and the heap of white rice. He wanted pilau rice. And maybe the reliable quick fixes, lamb bhuna or chicken tikka masala.
“No, Rangamama. Not the YMCA.”
“Why not?” Genuine disbelief at this jettisoning. “The chicken curry is mouth-watering!”
Not egregious, maybe, but certainly not “mouth-watering.” And Ananda didn’t take to the canteen ethos, irrepressible men in tight suits and wives in salwar kameez congregated in solidarity in tables of six. Oh, he’d forgotten the ice cream: gratifying bonus. Non-veg was just two pounds fifty a head.
“No,” he said.
Fitzroy Square: the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Redolent this time of year. Again, Ananda thought of his mother, her omniscient chatter, her crusades. His uncle and he felt incomplete without her. Why did he miss her? Was it what Sunjay (finalist at LSE, staying upstairs before the Patels came along) had said: “The reason you want your mother here is because she cooks you nice meals.” How far he’d been from the truth! “Of course not,” he’d replied at once, but had been unable to explain what her proximity denoted — because it was a recent, and astonishing, discovery for him too. He hadn’t been aware of his mother as a separate being when he was a child.
The moon was up, but a deeper layer of the sky — under its skin — glowed with the remnants of sunshine. You could hear shouting in the distance. It was best to be careful of revellers. All week, they’d have been set a punitive regime. They’d have curbed every impulse and desire. The shouts now were shouts of freedom. Drink enabled them to find their true voices. Tonight and tomorrow evening they’d wander about, seized by celebrations, hectoring you when they didn’t recognise you. Wisest to pretend you hadn’t noticed, and give them a long rope to hang themselves with.
“What about here?”
Ali’s Curry House.
They’d come full circle, almost. The corner of Whitfield and Grafton streets: on their right, Diwan-i-Khas, and, on the left, just by the Jamaican record shop (dark now), Ali’s. A venerable Pakistani gentleman in a traditional long jacket was pottering about behind troughs filled (hard to guess from when) with a morass of saag gosht, a dead pool of chicken curry, daal, and a bank of pilau rice by another basin discreetly crowded with florets of gobi.
“I’m not eating that.”
“Why? It looks marvellous!”
“The last occasion I ate their food — it was with you — I got a stomach upset.”
Mr. Ali — if that’s who the patient diminutive man was — smiled affectionately from within while presiding over the troughs.
“Well,” said his uncle, “the English say that Indian food is useful for a good purging.”
If you were reconciled to the curry being a laxative, you could even view it as a variety of health food. Ananda didn’t want to dwell on the merits of this argument. They walked a bit further up.
Finally, they relented and entered the restaurant almost next to Walia’s, the Gurkha Tandoori. Why it was so called they were uninterested in — nevertheless, the name (and the red wallpaper in the hallway) set up expectations of proud and outdated martial codes.
The restaurant was secreted away in the basement. The moment they’d descended, a waiter greeted them with a “Table for two?” in a Sylheti accent. Careless with the “b,” pushing table close to te-vul. Ananda felt he was near home. Not home in Bombay: his parents didn’t speak Sylheti in that large-hearted peasant way; their accent was slightly gentrified. Not Warren Street of course. Not Sylhet, either — he’d never been there and didn’t particularly regret it. Maybe some notion of Sylhet imparted to him inadvertently by his parents and relations — as an emblem of the perennially recognisable…And the perennially comic. Sylhet, and Sylheti, made everybody in his family laugh with joy.
“Yes, please,” said Ananda sombrely.
The waiter said, “Follow me, please!” and promptly commandeered the way.
He seated them not too far from a table of thirteen or fourteen people. A vocal, exultant group. Someone would make a remark, another add their bit, and laughter would spread from one end of the table to the other. A few, by turns convulsed by gaiety and introspective, bit into poppadums; some jabbed shards of poppadum into mango chutney. They are so happy, thought Ananda. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s their country after all. What they do and how they behave is law. Then: But are they happy? Sometimes their laughter’s like an assault on the surroundings. It’s a form of aggression. His uncle was examining the menu with a faux pedantic air. It was more a performance of menu-reading — he’d leave the actual ordering to Ananda. Ha ha ha ha ha. They do like a weekly Indian meal, don’t they?
“Sir.”
The dapper waiter.
“Would you like to order?” Now embracing the cockney style. Oh-dah. Chameleon.
“Uh yes, thank you.” Ananda turned to his uncle. “What do you think?”
“Oh let the young man here do the honours. Right?” said his uncle to the Sylheti. “The young should lead the way!”
The waiter chortled.
“Chicken jhalfrezi?” said Ananda, letting the question hang.
“Jhalfrezi!” said his uncle, with the exaggerated enthusiasm of one who has no clue what his interlocutor’s proposing. It was the same principle — over-compensation — that fuelled righteous indignation. “Mouth-watering!” He’d involuntarily checked the price, and was much enlivened that it wasn’t one of the expensive dishes.
“Would you like it hot or less hot?” the waiter asked. “It is very hot.” An oft-repeated caveat that he clearly relished. He sent forth a surreptitious glance, briefly on tenterhooks for their reply.
“Hot is fine,” said Ananda in a casual-grand way. The waiter nodded, and made a note.
“Daal?” Ananda said. Sooner or later you had to pronounce this word — you could not evade it.
“One tarka daal?” chimed in the waiter, pencil poised, accustomed to being two steps ahead of everyone. He barked the words like a command.
“Oh daal is a must, innit!” agreed Rangamama. He imported colloquialisms in company whenever he became intolerably expansive. Then, realising he was being a nuisance, but admitting to his ineluctable love of the potato, he said, needing the green signal from his nephew, “Pupu, can’t we have potatoes? What is life without potatoes?” Ananda had never been able to figure out his uncle’s supplication to the potato; but there was nothing insincere about the light in his eye. “Bombay potato?” his uncle said.