“Bombay alu?” asked the waiter in return.
“Please,” said Ananda. Be done with it.
“Would you like naan bread or pilau rice?”
“Pilau rice,” replied Ananda gravely — it was the inevitable choice. Driven by obscure racial characteristics handed down over millennia, Bengalis might flirt with bread but succumb, at the end of the day, to rice.
After issuing a cheery “Thank you!” about to race off like a man whose real job was about to begin, the waiter checked himself: “Would you like some poppadums?” Ananda and his uncle contemplated each other; Ananda was no great fan of the poppadum, but it was graceless to admit this. “Not really, don’t think so.”
The waiter hurried away. In the meanwhile, trolleys of food had been navigated towards the boisterous table nearby.
“Wonder if it’s a birthday party?” said Ananda, glancing at the multiple vessels of curry and the effervescent grilled platters. “Quite a banquet. I wish they wouldn’t make such a racket!”
“Oh they’re all right!” His uncle made it a point to be magnanimous when Ananda was carping. In retaliation, Ananda plotted to be equable or indifferent when his uncle carped, but forgot each time to execute the plan. “They’re just living it up a bit!” Living it up! Clichés that his uncle plucked from the air according to his mood.
“I can’t stand the English — especially when they’re being sociable,” whispered Ananda.
Two small men were holding pans above blonde and brownhaired heads that almost came up to their shoulders.
“Oh they’re human too!” his uncle said with some conviction. “And,” here he very sadly expressed a historical truth that he knew might wind Ananda up, “they do belong to what used to be the ‘master race.’ ” At other times, when it suited him, he’d argue otherwise, saying that Europeans, with their blue eyes that were discomfited by the sun and their rapacious history, were suspiciously “different.” “By the way, English women can be very kind — much kinder than Bengali women.”
“They may be kind,” said Ananda. Neither Hilary Burton nor the Anglo-Saxon teacher had struck him as particularly kind. He’d sensed a sweetness in one or two of the girls in college he’d never had the time or will to talk to — mooning as he fruitlessly was over his cousin. “But for some reason the English emanate unpleasantness in groups. You see a bunch of Englishmen talking loudly on the tube and you feel uncomfortable — even threatened. If it’s some loud Italians, you don’t really notice them.”
“That’s to do with drink,” said his uncle. “There’s an unwritten law in this land that you can’t criticise drinking. All the propaganda — the surgeon-general’s health warning etcetera — is about smoking.” He spoke bitterly. When Ananda first met him, he’d smoke serially, with little self-consciousness or sense of apology. Then, despite his defiance of the dark anti-smoking conspiracy, the “propaganda” must have got to him, because he’d defected to Silk Cut, which was low-tar. His smoking was petering out. Today, despite the stub floating in the toilet in Belsize Park, Ananda hadn’t actually seen him smoke a cigarette. “They keep saying smoking kills you. It’s a lie. What they won’t say is that drinking is far more lethal than smoking — and it changes the personality too.”
In response, a cheer went up at the big table. His uncle, distracted by the mood, clapped his hands in glee. Someone glanced back for a second.
“What are you doing?” asked Ananda.
“Just joining in,” said his uncle. “Everyone’s feeling jolly.”
Ananda shook his head in reproach at this disloyalty.
“It’s certainly not Christmas,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s birthday either — or they’d have been singing by now.”
In fact, they were soon quieter, making a hubbub as they ate.
The waiter appeared with a plate of poppadums. Poppadum after poppadum had floated down, settling on top of each other, making a low tower. “On the house!” he said.
Ananda felt an onrush of emotion. “Thank you!” He was tempted to communicate — to share their common ancestry. But he held back. Maybe the waiter had guessed, or had some half-formed inkling? He was no fool.
“My birthday,” his uncle snapped a bit of the poppadum off (the conversation had to veer round at some point to the enduring theme: himself), “falls on a particularly unlucky day.”
“Thirteenth June?” Ananda recalled it well. Last month, his mother had stood before the cooker and, over an hour, reduced a pan of milk to produce rice payesh for her “dada”—a delicate thing, almost unbearably sweet, such as both she and his uncle preferred. But he’d orchestrated a terrible quarrel on the phone — punishing her for her old and recent transgressions, including the mistake she’d made in confiding in Basanta in Pinner, and possibly for even having the temerity to marry Satish at all. Those deeds couldn’t be undone. But it was his birthday. She’d transferred some of the payesh to a bowl, covered it with a saucer, tied the whole makeshift arrangement with a cloth, and, to Ananda’s chagrin, carried it via the tube and road to Belsize Park. “He’s a vagabond,” she’d soothed Ananda. “You can’t take his rages seriously.”
“Not just 13th June!” said his uncle in a pained hypochondriac’s tone. “Friday the 13th. My birthday. The unluckiest day of the year.” A shout was released from the other table as someone made a little speech.
“What’s wrong with thirteen?” asked Ananda. “Baba always says thirteen is his lucky number. You know his roll number was thirteen when he appeared for his Chartered Accountancy exams. And he passed!”
His father: a foil to his wife and his best friend. Tranquil and moored.
“Your father!” His uncle shook his head fondly.
Coming out of nowhere, the waiter shouted: “Tarka daal!” What joy! The evening’s climax! Nothing — not even the eating — could match the festive instant of the order materialising. “One pilau rice!” Retrieving more from the trolley, he continued: “One jhalfrezi! One Bombay alu!” A pause. “All right?”
“My goodness, this is fit for a king!”
“Khub bhalo,” said Ananda. “Dhanyabad.”
The waiter seemed not to hear the Bengali words — he stood beside the table, congenial and undecided.
“Apnar naam?” asked Ananda.
“Iqbal,” said the man, a bit guarded.
“Wonderful name! A very famous poet — Iqbal!” said his uncle. He then emptied half the platter of the pilau rice on to his plate — red, white, and yellow grains, perfumed with cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom, a few possibly stiffened by the microwave’s heat. “Pupu, have some!” He must be starving — Ananda had heard his stomach bubbling — but he was serving himself with considerable discipline. He wouldn’t start until he’d cajoled Ananda into having an inaugural mouthful.
“Some jhalfrezi?” Iqbal said. He’d picked up a serving dish with alacrity.
“We Bengalis,” said his uncle in standard Calcutta Bangla, “eat course by course — I have no idea why. I like mixing things up. Pupu, what are you doing, have some Bombay alu!”
In prelapsarian undivided Bengal, as his uncle had once revealed wryly to Ananda, the Bengali Hindus were called “Bengalis,” the Bengali Muslims just “Muslims.”