—
Even when she’d arrived here in 1955, unable to speak perfect English, noticeably little, it became clear she was a force and that she could command respect — maybe even intimidate. Implausibly, she got a job at the Naval Advisory Department in the Indian High Commission at Aldwych. At the interview, she made it a point to answer the questions her husband had coached her to expect, though those questions weren’t asked. She settled into employment, which involved an irregular sending out of memos to and receiving them from various commanders of the Indian navy. The High Commission had been seized by a “reorganisation,” and the result was that, in six months, at the end of the reorganisation — a word whose significance she grasped slightly, but whose melee she was happy to be part of — she was drawing a handsome salary of fifty-eight pounds a month, enough to look after Satish’s needs and hers, and give him time to devote himself entirely to the shrine of accountancy.
She sat at her desk in India House, comfortably negligent of office friendships, openly disdainful of the gossip between the Indian women near her, Mrs. Sinha and Mrs. Hussein, forensically perplexed by the conversations Englishwomen had (“So she said…and I said…and then she said…”). She mimicked and relived these “He saids” and “She saids” for her husband. Going to the cinema, they agreed that the English, unlike the melodramatic Indians, were natural actors; but they also noted that this race behaved and spoke in normal circumstances like they were in a film, with a peculiar self-consciousness, as if their gestures and words were being recorded. There didn’t appear to be a complete separation between fantasy and social life for the English. Dr. Krishnan, the departmental head, had discovered what an exceptional singer she was, and was willing to overlook her eccentric uninvolvement in office life. “She is an artist, and she is an asset,” he said, meaning it was okay for her to not fit in. He encouraged her to sing at the India Office’s public functions — on numerous commemorations and national days. Not everyone liked this. Miss Watkins, her immediate superior, resented her privileges and chafed at her. Then, one morning, when she’d commanded her: “Uma, bring me that file!” Khuku had lost her calm — as she did periodically — and tossed it towards Miss Watkins’s table, saying, “There’s your file!” (Ananda, hearing this episode recounted, thought how his mother loved to throw things when she was angry. The servants knew it. Her husband knew it.) This was followed by an instant of scandalised undecidedness. Yet Miss Watkins didn’t retaliate. In the next few months, she was unflinchingly civil to Khuku. When Dr. Krishnan died suddenly of a heart attack, Khuku was transferred to the consular department on South Audley Street.
Khuku’s propensity to battle was innate to her. Besides possessing an inexplicable tendency to be joyous — she could never be sad or angry for long — she’d had an inexplicable conviction from childhood that she was destined for great contentment. She’d never believed she’d live forever either in Sylhet or Shillong; and, with or without the transfer, neither Aldwych nor South Audley Street could hold her. This was part of the hope she conveyed to Ananda: that nothing, including Warren Street, was long-term. Her readiness for battle she had even today. When trouble presented itself, she had to confront it with her oppositional littleness.
When the Patels had moved into the rooms upstairs, Ananda’s mother was visiting, and staying with him in the studio flat. After two or three nights, it dawned on them that the Patels would be noisy. Noise invaded the flat from different directions — from below (Mandy’s radio) and above. Ananda began to obsess over the Patels’ movements. At 11:30 p.m., he found his mother had slipped out irresistibly — it was more in response to his anxiety than to the noise that she’d done this — and gone up the flight of stairs. He followed her in sheepish excitement, remonstrating “Ma! Ma!” unable to pull her back, till they were in the attic’s half-lit converted kitchen, a den in which Vivek Patel and Cynthia and Cynthia’s brother Rahul and Shashank were pouring wine into glasses, talking, laughing loudly. Khuku had ambushed them; they were taken by surprise. Though Vivek attempted to refute her in his labile, lisping way, and Cynthia giggled, and Rahul, most disconcertingly of the four, exuded a silent, myopic rage, his mother stood in the eye of Walia’s converted kitchen and lectured them. Her message, implicitly — but also forthright, without prevarication — was that her son was doing a “real” degree (unlike them) at a “real” university, he’d embarked on a difficult voyage, his father was paying through his nose, and she — the timeless Indian mother that she was (and more) — would brook no partying as the hour approached midnight. They defiantly invoked the equivalent of their constitutional rights, but in the end they let her be, as if she was mad. Maybe the Patels had become a bit more self-aware about their stomping; only they couldn’t help making a racket.
—
She had gone. Eight days ago. Ascended swiftly into the air. Like a bird. Taken that proud national aircraft Air India: nodded to the Maharajah. She was back home with his father.
—
Unwashed, evacuated, clothed in the night’s kurta and pyjamas, he sat on the rug to sing. He was an exile in his home. He frequently expected complaints. He knew the ragas he sang were hopelessly alien to Mandy’s ear (she too slept till midday) and foreign even to the boys upstairs. Not one of them (certainly not Ananda) ever saw the sun rise; though maybe the Patels sometimes went to bed when it was just coming up. Now Ananda made a clarion call to the day with the raga Bhairav (though it was already nine thirty). He hardly let a morning pass without practising — he was a singer in his own solitude, he was his own audience and his notes needed to sound perfect to himself. Without practising his voice would falter. He sat cross-legged on the rug — all rugs in London houses were the same — with the tanpura on his lap: it was no bigger than a ukelele, made by a septuagenarian, Ambalal Sitari. The old man received visitors in a room in Breach Candy — Ananda’s music teacher had taken him there and cajoled the old man to part with the portable tanpura: “He will be in London soon, and he is dedicated: he practises every day — in fact, I have to tell him not to practise so much!” The strings didn’t speak; they had a flat sound, however much Ananda manipulated the threads at the lower end — the tanpura wouldn’t drone, and was barely audible even in the studio flat’s deep quiet, but he kept worrying it, nestling the instrument. Ambalal Sitari’s experiment hadn’t come off. The wood, which should have become a living thing, remained, stubbornly, wood; the strings were muted.
—
He sang: he’d trained himself to be thick-skinned. It was a quarter to ten — it was their problem if they went to bed late, then slept slothfully into the hours when people were at work. They couldn’t expect midnight-stillness at this time. He sang delicately; singing was his mode, in his student’s life of subterfuge and anonymity (he hardly ever went to lectures and only a handful of professors knew him), of being battle-ready, in constant preparedness. It was a battle — this struggle to master Bhairav — almost without a cause or end. Twenty minutes into the exposition, there was a stirring above. The movement of a beast: a first random thump then silence, then — making Ananda uneasy — another thump. It was the alienness of the melody that intruded on their drunken sleep. “Karma Chameleon” would have just lulled them, late in the morning, to sounder sleep.