Iqbal was vaguely nonplussed.
“Are you gentlemen from Calcutta?” he asked politely.
“I’m from India,” said Ananda. “But my parents were from Sylhet. This is my uncle — he was born in Sylhet.”
He lifted up a spoonfuclass="underline" the daal was incredible — a ghee and garlic-infused ambrosia.
Iqbal studied Ananda’s uncle, who appeared to be rotating the food in his mouth in dilatory contentment.
“Which part of Sylhet are you from?” He’d switched to Sylheti — always charming to hear: this fluent, rapid, and intimate tongue.
“Habiganja,” replied his uncle serenely, having just swallowed. “We grew up in Sylhet town — in Puran Lane when we were small, then mostly in Lamabajar.” Being a Tagorean, he refused to answer him in the rustic tongue of his childhood, but addressed him in a slightly affected Bengali, trying (as usual) to disguise the East Bengali inflection he’d never be rid of. Gesturing to Ananda, he volunteered grandly: “My sister’s son. Can you tell?”
“Habiganja!” said Iqbal, not attending to this last query. “I know Habiganja…and Lamabajar!” He smiled reminiscently.
“Who are they?” asked Ananda, with a conspiratorial tipping of his head towards the table of fourteen. “Sounds like they’re celebrating tonight.”
“Oh them!” said Iqbal. He kept his eyes off the table. “Those kind of people come every Friday night for ‘curry.’ ” He used the word fastidiously, as a pejorative. “They drink too much.” He spoke with patrician distaste while dispassionately spectating on Ananda and his uncle eating.
—
When it came to the tip, Ananda felt duty-bound to curtail his uncle. For his uncle had an incurable tipping problem. The trouble was, his uncle acted in consultation. “Three pounds?” “That’s crazy,” said Ananda. With the gulab jamun that was their final excess (his uncle had asked Iqbal to heat his up, and, after masticating the pincushion-like sweet whole, had tippled the syrup from the chalice), the bill had come to ten pounds thirty. “That’s almost thirty per cent.” “It’s a generous tip.” “I know you’re rich,” said Ananda, “but you shouldn’t distribute your bounty indiscriminately.” His uncle frowned, paralysed, a wad of notes in his hand. (He didn’t deny he was wealthy.) Scrutinising the bill, they found the total smaller than it should have been as Bombay Potato had inexplicably been omitted. They beckoned to the waiter. “There’s been a mistake,” said Ananda. The other waved one hand in dismissal of an imaginary trifle. “Bombay Potato is on the house.”
—
Stomachs heavy, they walked down Whitfield Street. Confronting, in a few minutes, the building on Warren Street, Ananda studied it as if it were a dark castle. No lights on the first, second, and top floors. They stepped in. Almost at once, a rumbling sound. The Patels were hurtling down the stairs. A brief arrest as they saw each other. Ananda continued up the stairs, but his uncle, hamming it up, said: “Vivek! How are you? And this handsome young man is your brother, isn’t he?” As Ananda entered the flat, he heard laughter. The words, “I’m a black Englishman,” seemed to float eerily up the staircase.
—
By the time his uncle came in, Ananda was cross-legged on the sofa, grinning at Rising Damp. He didn’t care when the Patels and Mandy would make their entrance again. His spirits were high. Poetry, at this moment, couldn’t do the job (not Edward Thomas, not Larkin) that Leonard Rossiter was doing so expertly, exuding an obtuse grandeur.
Standing before him, marginally blocking his view, his uncle said: “Could you change the channel? There’s too much laughter on television. People are dying in various parts of the world, but in this culture you have to have something to laugh at.” He narrowed his eyes, awaiting a rebuke for his sermon.
But there were more squeals as Leonard Rossiter, updating the African tenant Don Warrington on English etiquette, stole a glimpse of Frances de la Tour’s cleavage.
With admirable self-control, Ananda, eyes on the small lit screen, said: “It’s hilarious, Rangamama. You may enjoy it.”
His uncle looked pained and at sea.
“But I prefer tragedy to comedy, Pupu.”
By “tragedy” his uncle meant B-grade action movies — that is, a narrative with dead bodies. Comedy alienated him because he neither followed jokes nor had the patience to stay with them till the punchline. He was terribly inattentive. His consciousness was too fluid to have a grasp on a story from start to end. How he’d shone at exams was a mystery. In action films, too, he had no time for plot and was placated as long as periodic killings occurred. The last action film he’d fully comprehended and cogitated on was probably High Noon. Given the story wasn’t the point, he could plunge into an adventure at any juncture — even midway through a movie. The occasional calamity kept him quiet.
“Or you could check if they’re showing wildlife! We could be missing the tiger, Pupu!”
This was a recurrent addiction — to gawp awestruck the great beasts in Africa, while they lolled, napped, sunned themselves, blinked at distant cameras, then pursued and devoured the lesser and stupider animals.
“There are no wildlife programmes at this hour,” Ananda assured him. “Sit down.”
Reluctantly — as if he’d rather walk a few more miles — he descended on the sofa. He began to loosen his shoelaces. Let those ankles breathe. Reaching impatiently for the remote control — he was hopeless with devices, but now had the measure of this one — he pushed both himself and Ananda into a vortex of channel-changing. Finally, calming down, he laid the remote control on the sofa, and said:
“I’ve eaten too much.”
Tamely, in accidental concord, they’d come back to laughter and Rising Damp.
“Do you want a laddoo?” Ananda was under pressure to dispense with six uneaten ones.
His uncle gave him an eloquent stare.
“Are you mad? Do you want me to die tonight?”
Though lazy and recumbent for now, he’d be off to Belsize Park in twenty minutes. What an idiotic plan Ananda had had once — that they’d share that bedsit. Not because it was too small. But you couldn’t share any space with him: to live with his uncle would be to go mad. Or at least to be changed; or sidetracked permanently, indubitably, from a traditional idea of coexistence. No wonder God, in his mercy, had withheld a spouse from him.
“In fact, I’m going to put on weight as a result of that slap-up meal,” he complained. “Anyway, my cheeks have always been too fat and my face too round.” Ananda glanced quickly away from Frances de la Tour to confirm that his uncle was describing the person he knew. While it may not have met Rangamama’s standards of consumptive narrowness, the face wasn’t round at all; the cheeks weren’t full. Yet the baritone had a way of casting a spell which meant almost everything his uncle uttered sounded true and reasonable. Half the time you argued with him not to dispute him but to fend off becoming an accomplice to his vision. “Also, my nose becomes larger when I eat too much.” Just as Ananda prepared to debate the canonical European preference for starved, phalange-like noses, his uncle observed: “You know that a large nose is a sign of virility.”
“Is it?” Given that Ananda had grown up in the world essentially in the proximity of a mother who talked unstoppably, he was quite capable of following Rising Damp and engaging in a dialogue with his uncle simultaneously. As they slipped into a commercial break, he let himself relax and consider these questions. The nose and virility: he speculated on the kind of equation being made here. It was vaguely obvious. But what reliable knowledge would a virgin have of virility? Intriguingly, experience didn’t seem to matter so much when it came to Ananda’s uncle. He always sounded more experienced than he could possibly be. As if he had recourse to some other source of information outside reading, education, and life.