Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

Central, Piccadilly—existed as rumour, in narratives he had little interest in.
    —
    Not that he had to go to Belsize Park to see his uncle. They also appointed other locations. They decided this on the phone. Neither had a phone—but this didn’t deter them from calling each other. After the Patels had prised out the coin box, the payphone had become a relic without function and Ananda had to have recourse to a booth on the opposite side of Warren Street, near Tandoor Mahal. From there he called Bombay, speaking to his mother, her clear childish voice reaching him after a delay, like a benediction. When he needed to talk to his uncle, he called the neighbour, Abbas. “One sacund, please,” Abbas said—Punjabis from Pakistan had perfect manners—and sometimes Ananda heard him knock vigorously and proclaim: “Nandy—Nandy!
Tumhara nephew hain
.” Some expected shambling; then the baritone—“Pupu!” (Ananda’s ignominious pet name.)
“Kemon achho he?”
His uncle addressed him in a lisping way—like Ananda was an overgrown child who requiredspecial handling. He usually sounded amused talking to Ananda—and surprised. He was capable of bickering with Ananda. But they might concur that Marble Arch or Oxford Street was the best meeting place, and experience a bit of satisfaction. This decision shaped the next few hours. What they did then—even if it was the same as what they did every day—would be an accomplice to their future convergence. By the time they hung up, both of them—but particularly Ananda—were fulminating; because his uncle would have complained again about a remark Ananda’s father or mother had made, or something Ananda himself had said, and also offered a long, uncalled-for justification for an opinion
he’d
expressed last week. To this, Ananda had to reply with “Okay, okay, fine”—his role being to soothe and bring closure—while secreting his third 10 p coin into the slot; when the warning beeps went off again, he’d say, “I’m running out of change, Rangamama, we’ll talk this afternoon”—giving them, before they were cut off, just enough time to rescue a semblance of good humour, his uncle his feeling of anticipation, and say provisional farewells.
    —
    The tube to Edgware was near-empty. It was that time of day. The suited yuppies would begin to enter the parted doors in a couple of hours, till there was no room to stand. But, given his daytime schedule, Ananda hardly knew rush hour. Tube-travel was spacious; he often found himself headed somewhere in the company of stragglers. “Company” was the wrong word, because they didn’t know each other. And the chances of them seeing each other again were few, if not nil. This fact underlined—without emphasis—the short journey, given the paucity of passengers. During rush hour, the passengers jostled and threatened to merge. Now, the five or six others marooned on seats brought home to Ananda the contingency oftheir nearness—without the thought surfacing with finality.
He
was off to see his uncle;
they
weren’t. If another person or two alighted at Belsize Park, it would be intriguing to see how long their journeys coincided; eventually, the others would fall away, and Ananda’s path to the basement bedsit would be his own. There was a beautiful tall girl in a black dress on the far side, who looked absorbed in everything but where she was. She denied the tube entirely. Her eyes altered direction every few seconds as she raced, very still, with some unfolding preoccupation. A Gujarati couple got on at Euston, at once mercantile and spiritual—old; managing to make their progress a pilgrimage and an enterprise. They didn’t speak; they were receiving and absorbing the train’s motion—but he knew by some unspecified rule of recognition that they were from Gujarat: their arrival here had been presaged by the Oracle, moving him to his “rivers of blood” grandiloquence. The man wore a black jacket and grey