—
No, Mandy was definitely up. She’d just cleared her throat; a female throat-clearing, melodious — but threatening. He and Mandy had a sort of duet going — of noises, of complaints. The first time was soon after he’d moved into the flat; term had begun, his parents were still staying with him before they flew back. It was early October, warm, and the window was three or four inches open, allowing in footfall, snatches of song, a shout from near the tube. Then there was an intrusion of another kind, of atmospheric noise as he lay back, head on the plump pillow. A hubbub with a wash of background music, as if he were, without warning, in the centre of a metropolis, roaming in the town square. He must have dreamed this, sound and image mixing with one another as he dozed off. But no, on second thought, he was awake and conscious of floating above the crowded hubbub. Ah, a party! In the flat downstairs! He couldn’t believe he was privy to this bonhomie. He asked his mother, unconvinced he wasn’t dreaming: “Can you hear it?”
After midnight, not bothering to change out of his pyjamas, he went down, knocked on Mandy’s door, and — sensing fleetingly the figures in the background — told her he couldn’t sleep.
—
Mandy was in her twenties. Sometimes she looked older, as if she might be in her early thirties. She kept uncertain hours. She’d come home at three in the morning, shut the door with a bang, turn on cheery music. She told him that she did her aerobic exercises at that hour. She’d shared this information when he’d pointed out to her indignantly: “Mandy — what about you? — must you, must you play that music at half past three or four in the morning?” His question was meant to counter hers: “Must you sing in the morning? It drives me crazy! It’s like Chinese torture.” “I have to practise at half past nine,” he’d said. “Besides, it’s well after the day has begun.” “I know, but I come home very late — I work at a bar twice a week.” “I’m sorry, Mandy,” he’d said, attempting to shrug. “I do have to practise.” On some days, she worked as a temp — probably a receptionist. She went out in the morning with the music playing all day — low, but continual, inoffensive, except that it was bubblegum pop. He queried her about why it was necessary for the music to play in an empty flat, and she told him it wasn’t empty; the music was for her budgies, so they wouldn’t be frightened or alone.
Ananda had never seen or heard her budgies; it was the first he’d become aware of the birds. He’d never seen the inside of her flat except once, when she’d knocked on his door and nonchalantly asked him to help her change a light bulb. There was an erotic charge running beneath the way they chafed and got on each other’s nerves — or was he imagining it? It had seemed, as she spectated upon him climbing a chair and reaching for the ceiling (again, in his pyjamas), that she was capable of dealing with the light bulb herself. But he was very proper and a little cowardly too — he barely glanced at her after he’d fixed the bulb and made for the door. Another time he did glance at her, when she’d kept her door ajar and, half stepping out of the bathroom, partly wet but in her bra and panties, shouted over the doorbelclass="underline" “Can you see who it is, please? I think there’s a package for me.” And he’d noticed the diaphanous curve of the brassiere, and how palely luminous her stomach was, and also the faintest smile on her lips, because she’d noticed him noticing.
She’d had her revenge for their constant tit for tat once the payphone incident occurred — that night when the Patels and Cynthia’s incongruously studious-looking brother Rahul had dislodged the BT coin box from the landing between the first and second floors and taken it to the attic, breathing heavily with exertion and laughter. Ananda had heard it all — it must have been past 1 a.m. — the rushed activity, the transitory out-of-place jingling; but he didn’t know what to think of it. Next morning, he saw the discoloured blank space where the coin box was. Walia arrived, hovered around Mandy’s door, and questioned her about what happened. Ananda, dully listening from upstairs, heard her say: “I think it was Ananda.” He was overcome: less disturbed than wounded — and, most importantly, made intensely and doubly to feel a foreigner. Every fibre of his being said, “What am I doing here? This is not my home,” though no words formed in his head. He heard Walia dismiss the accusation in a bland matter-of-fact way: “No, no, it wouldn’t be him, it must be the boys upstairs.” And Ananda felt the sense of vindication that only an eavesdropper and exile might feel, that a man he hardly knew, Walia, should still know him well enough to have made up his mind about him. When he related this conversation to his uncle later, he saw him pass, in a wave, through the same emotions, from disbelief to shock to a kind of scandalised but grateful relief. “Well, at least he has enough up there to know you’d never do something like that,” he muttered. Ananda was surprised that his uncle had this faith in him — he’d never let on earlier (Ananda knew his uncle cared for him, but he had no idea what he thought of him), probably because they were frequently bickering over the subject of relatives or literature, and also because what most interested his uncle was himself.
Shall I compare thee
Shall I compare thee to
Although the lines were incomplete, they kept ending on a question mark. He felt his inner voice rising docilely at the end. Confronting the day in Warren Street with the mug of tea in one hand, a breeze beneath the now one-quarter-raised window flicking his weightless kurta ends, he reflected again — as he had only recently — on the beauty and particularity of the word “summer.” It wasn’t a word that had previously interested him. In India, it was a dead word, spoken almost without reference to its meaning, and all its mutations and locations—“summery,” “a midsummer night’s dream”—were ready clichés that locked up experience. What summer itself was in India, or in its different regions, was still untapped, unaddressed in this colonial language. Only after coming to England had he discovered the beauty of the word. On reading the poem itself in Bombay in his school textbook, he’d decided it was stupid; silly, even. And who, in India, would compare someone to a summer’s day — except to insult the addressee? A near-imbecilic line.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
But, no; it was beautiful. He’d reread the sonnet, for his preparations for the Renaissance paper, and then, after reacting against it through its earlier associations, read it once again, allowing himself to understand it. The lines had begun to repeat themselves in his head, like a jingle in a commercial. The poet — what was he up to? He’d meant to extol his beloved — not by saying she was as good as a summer’s day, but better! Letting the wooden frame nestle his chin, Ananda daydreamed, studying Tandoor Mahal and its curtains.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
More lovely, more temperate! So the poet was dissing the summer’s day, then, in order to praise his beloved. Yet what apposite terms for this summer, as a season, or in its incarnation as a single day: “lovely,” with its suggestion of innocence and newborn qualities; “temperate,” indicating calm, modesty, and fortuitously echoing “temporal,” with its hint of the short-lived. “Lovely” carried in it the sense of the short-lived too; the loveliness of “lovely” was contingent on it not being eternal. And so the summer’s day was transient in comparison to the poet’s beloved, who’d continue to prosper and grow to “eternal lines” in the effing sonnet. To emphasise this, Shakespeare must diss the English spring and summer in the third and fourth lines again: