Authors: Neel Mukherjee
T
hey talk of burnt bridges. Sometimes it is a choice, at other times, enforced, but more often than not the fall of the die takes in both. There
are documents, stamps, official insignia, computer-held records, databases, monitors of exits and entries, date stamps, place stamps, ports of entry, records, papers, hard disks, officers,
institutions, regulations, limitations, hedge after hedge, wall after wall, moat after moat regulating movements in and out, out and in. Life is calibrated in signs, the swift impress of inked
rubber and metal on paper, the brief clatter of keys, a few hits of the return key, information stored in chips. That is all. There are no events, only records. To give all this the slip is to drop
out of official, recorded life, of validated life. It is to move from life to existence. On the 21
st
of December, Ritwik Ghosh will do exactly that: he will silently let his leave to
remain in England expire and become a virtual prisoner in this new land. He will not have access to banking, medical care, foreign travel, proper jobs, the welfare state, benefits, nothing. Not
even an address, which can be used by other people to write to him, in case the post office people are alerted to his name. The vast grid of the impeccably ordered and arranged first-world modern
democratic state will no longer hold him. He will become a shadow behind that grid, a creature with a past but no future, only a teased out mirage of a present. A ghost in limbo. Imprisoned forever
but with infinite freedom.
And all for a better, a new life.
The die lands on crossroads. What determines things? The shift in wind direction? The fall of a russet leaf? An ordering of air atoms that makes the die fall that face up and not another?
There are no answers except for that fall of a die, the unshaping of clouds, the head turned around at crossroads, a door ajar, another closed. Choice and chance.
If he is asked, he will reply, ‘I didn’t want to go back to India because it is too hot out there. I would like to live in a cooler land.’
Choice.
What makes a presence illegal just because another set of keys haven’t been touched, another sheaf of papers marked and moved around?
Three weeks after Ritwik’s conversation with Mr Haq, Saeed Latif rolled up outside Mrs Cameron’s door at three in the morning and sounded his car horn – dash
dash dot dot dash style – just as Shahid Haq had said he would. Ritwik had lain awake most of the night because he didn’t want to miss the signal. That would have meant ringing the
doorbell and waking up Anne who, for all he knew, was wide awake anyway, god knows, that woman seemed to survive on no more than three hours a night.
The car shocked him. He didn’t know what he was expecting, perhaps a dirty, scraped, dented, secondhand one, but certainly not this long, beige obscenity, a tired Freudian joke suddenly
come alive and purring outside his front door. The low-slung Mercedes had a left-hand drive and a swish leather and wood interior. It was either very new or Saaed Latif spent a lot of time everyday
lavishing love and care on his machine. He opened the passenger door for Ritwik and asked, ‘You like car?’
Famous first words.
Saeed Latif could have been any age from twenty to thirty-five, had very pale skin, and was probably Middle Eastern in origin but Ritwik wasn’t very good at placing people. In fact, it was
only recently that he had started thinking about where people came from originally because everyone in London seemed to have arrived from somewhere else.
‘Yes, I do. It looks very splendid,’ Ritwik half-lied, getting into the soft and yielding passenger seat, which hugged his bottom so eagerly.
‘I like, too. Come, we go.’
Before the car started rolling, Ritwik took in Saeed briefly. He wore a shiny blue Umbro top, a thick golden chain around his neck, the links heavy and gleaming even in the halogen-lit night of
south London streets, a similar bracelet around his right wrist, and rings, chunky molars of metal, on practically every finger of both his hands: he could have been a magpie’s secret dumping
ground. The impression was confirmed when Saeed smiled and showed a brief gleam of gold in the region behind his canines.
New to London, Ritwik was eager to figure out how the gargantuan beast was pieced together in its parts by looking out of the window and have Saeed give an intermittent commentary on the
different areas of London through which they would be passing. That thought was killed quite early on when, driving down Effra Road, Ritwik noticed the road sign, turned to Saeed and said,
‘Look, Effra Road. Do you think the river Effra flowed through this area once?’ Saeed briefly turned his head towards Ritwik, then carried on driving, not bothering to reply. His
silence seemed to have drawn some conclusions. Ritwik regretted saying such an incongruous thing but couldn’t shake off thoughts of Walter Raleigh sailing the river four hundred years ago
down this very road, who knows, which now ended with the jostle and tumble of McDonald’s, Ritzy cinema, Pizza Hut and Barclays.
‘Mr Haq say I take care of you, OK?’ Saeed said after a longish silence during which Ritwik studiously looked out, willing Saeed to say at least the names of the areas he was driving
him through, but no such luck. After the blankness, which followed the misjudged statement about Effra river, he didn’t dare ask Saeed the simple question, ‘What’s this place
called?’ Anyway, what did he expect, a history and psychogeography of the various layers of London?
‘What Mr Haq say, we do, OK? He say I look after you, give you best job, not construction site job.’
Ritwik didn’t have a clue where he was being taken. Mr Haq had reassured him that he was going to be in safe hands. Saeed was a trusted old hand at helping him out with things, both a
troubleshooter and a facilitator, Ritwik wasn’t to worry at all, after all, he, Shahid Haq, was like his elder brother, wasn’t he? And he needed a job, didn’t he, an underground
job where they didn’t ask questions, didn’t ask for numbers or bank accounts or other official things, just gave you cash in hand at the end of the day and that was it. Ritwik was
looking for that kind of thing because the official type would be difficult to find immediately, he could start doing this over the summer and then Shahid Haq would try and find something else for
him, was that OK for now?
Ritwik had nodded to everything Mr Haq had said, although what the ‘this’ he would be doing over summer was never explained clearly, except for wispy comments about helping out in a
friend’s farm in Hertfordshire. Ritwik didn’t object to fruit-picking, did he? No, of course not, fruit-picking, how wonderful, how how . . . rustic, how pastoral. It was typical of
Ritwik to think first of Virgil’s
Georgics
at that point rather than hard details of location, hours of work, pay, duration of employment. If he noticed how consummately Mr Haq had
read his situation – the unrevealed, messy business of black employment, lack of permits and illegal stay – he didn’t raise the issues with Mr Haq; images of bee-loud glades and
nectarines and curious peaches reaching themselves into his hands were too much in the foreground to worry about insoluble and irreversible problems. Well, irreversible in a few months’
time.
At last Ritwik gathered enough courage to ask, ‘Do you know the name of this area we’re driving through?’ when they crossed a bridge beside which stood a huge abandoned brick
building on the further bank, to their right, with white columns at the four corners, resembling an upturned table. The river was dark and oily, the bridge on their immediate left festooned with
lights. For a very brief moment, if he kept his head turned left, it looked like a deserted toy town. But only for a moment. If he turned his head to the right, it shifted to an industrial
wasteland where shadows stalked the dark outlines of buildings, all spooky warehouses and silent wharves.
Saeed shrugged. Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t understand the question, or he couldn’t be bothered to make small talk. The dark blue night was fading to a lighter shade
around them almost imperceptibly: Ritwik could see inside the car more clearly now. That, and smell Saeed’s fetid breath.
‘Where are you from?’ Ritwik asked. This was going to be his final attempt.
‘London.’
‘You mean, originally?’
Silence. ‘London. East London.’
Ritwik knew he was lying. He dropped the matter and concentrated on the view smoothly slipping past. Row after row of detached white houses, grand and elegant. There was a big walled garden
along the entire stretch of the road.
‘Buckin Ham Palace,’ Saeed said.
‘That? On the right?’
Once again, no answer: conversation was going to happen strictly on Saeed’s terms.
Suddenly there was a spacious roundabout, with monuments and victory arches, a hint of a large expanse of green, which soon broadened out to what Ritwik considered the countryside, yet along the
other side of the green-bisected road, there was a series of swish, ritzy hotels, Hilton, Park, Dorchester.
‘Rich place. Is called Park Lane. Rich people and rich foreigners here,’ Saeed said, being surprisingly chatty.
‘Is that Hyde Park?’ Ritwik asked.
Saeed nodded, driving past another arch and into a long road. Instantly, the scenery changed, like a swift, rumbling movement of theatre backdrop ushering in a new time, a new place. The shops,
cafés, restaurants, juice bars, grocery stores, takeaways were almost without exception Arabic – Lebanese, Egyptian, Middle Eastern.
‘Edgware Road,’ Saeed said, laconic as always, but there seemed to be a trace of light somewhere in his tone, almost a joy, an ease.
‘You are Muslim?’ Saeed asked as they drove down this stretch of well-heeled garishness, the shop signs too big, the lettering too flash, the sound of new money a whisper too loud.
They all aimed for a type of conspicuous affluence and hit it, ever so slightly awry, by being vulgar.
‘No.’ Ritwik could guess where this was going.
‘What you then? Christian?’
‘No, no. Actually, I have no religion.’ He felt slightly ashamed to say this. ‘I was brought up in a Hindu family but I went to a Catholic school.’
‘So you Hindi and Christian?’
‘No, neither.’
Saeed absorbed this in silence as Ritwik felt disapproval wrapping around him but this could have been inside his head. He attempted to turn it around by asking Saeed questions instead.
‘So you are Muslim then?’
‘Yes. I am from Libya. You know?’ It seemed that Edgware Road had liberated Saeed into a new honesty and openness, even a pride, about his origins.
‘Yes, I mean no, I know
of
it, but I’ve never been there. Is it a nice place?’
‘Beautiful. My country is beautiful. You go one day?’
‘Yes, I would like to.’ Pause. ‘So why did you come to England?’
Saeed didn’t reply, which was just as well. He shouldn’t have asked that double-edged sword of a question.
Instead, Saeed said, ‘All this shops, all Arabic. From Iran, Lebanon, Egypt. They all speak my language.’ It seemed that, away from Libya, Saeed had found a corner of wet, vast
London, which approximated what he was at ease with.
‘They seem to be mostly food places.’
‘You eat Arabic food? You like?’ An enthusiasm flared up in Saeed like the brief flash of a match.
Ritwik, who went partially hungry most days unless Mrs Haq called him over and fed him or sent him little tupperware boxes of kebabs,
dal bukhara and bhindi gosht
, replied feebly,
‘No, I don’t know Arabic food but I’d love to try some.’ His curiosity and greed for food, especially unknown cuisines, was unbounded and haunting.
To Ritwik, the conversation had become a parody: here he was with an unknown Libyan man, driving him to an unknown destination, and he was sitting politely and giving quintessentially English
answers – ‘Yes, please’, ‘No, but I’d love to’ – non-committal and unrevealing, while the real questions bobbed and swelled inside him, his curiosity still
sharp and unsatisfied.
How did Saeed meet Mr Haq? What sort of work did he do for the older man? Why did Saeed drive such a flash car? What
did
he do by way of earning money? Why did Ritwik get the impression
that whatever Saeed did, it wasn’t wholly conventional or licit? Why did he have an uneasy sense that Saeed’s money wasn’t white, clean or regular?
The blue had lightened to the pre-dawn grey, which held the promise of another unbrokenly cloudless and hot day. Outside, the scene had changed radically again. Ritwik was going to discover this
abiding aspect of London: with one corner turned or a side-street stepped into, the whole landscape could change, from Georgian terrace to postwar prefab, tree-lined red brick suburbia to outbreaks
of high-rise council estate rashes with cruel names to their buildings: Ullswater, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. The demarcations were sudden and jagged. Even the immigrant quarters changed, as
Saeed pointed out driving down Finchley Road, ‘The Jewish people live here.’ This was his first voluntary statement, after Buckingham Palace, about an area of London; Ritwik wondered if
the two held equal, not identical, significances in his mind.
‘We come near the place,’ Saeed volunteered. They passed an underground station: Willesden Green. He drove on for a few minutes, turned left on Anson Road and parked his car.
‘We go out.’ Saeed leaned forward and sideways to open the door for Ritwik, a gesture he found touching and old-fashioned. It was nearly light and the dawn was cool; Ritwik was glad
of his thin jumper.
‘We walk there. Not far, five minutes. We don’t take car there.’ Saeed was becoming almost talkative.
They went back to the main road, Chichele Lane. After a few minutes, Ritwik noticed disparate groups of people. It wasn’t as if the journey here had been through utterly deserted streets,
but after their relative emptiness, this seemed positively crowded. Men, mostly, standing in little groups, chatting, smoking, huddled, as if sharing a secret or a shame. A few were standing on
their own. There were even two women, one with a sleeping baby wrapped around her front in folds and folds of cloth, another one, standing with a pale man, both smoking.