Afternoon Raag Read Online Free PDF

clothes to wear, forcing me to buy new ones. What brought us together, among other things, was a common love for the English language. Each night, till midnight, he would recount with delight new idioms and words he had picked up during the day, and from these words he would become inseparable for about a week, using them in every context, just as a child who has been given a gift of new shoes spends aeuphoric period wearing them everywhere. After lunch, we would sometimes watch black and white British films from the fifties on Channel Four, and Sharma would tell me how charming he found the rhythms and accents of Old English. He was a glum reader and connoisseur of dictionaries, an admirer of the
Collins’
and a baleful critic of the
OED,
and he had a special but clear-eyed insight into their limitations.

8
    I n Oxford, I would walk almost everywhere, because I had an inexplicable pride that prevented me from using buses. There were two kinds of local buses, the red double-decker and the small toy-like white and blue bus. When the double-deckers passed by, they looked grand and somehow inaccessible, while the white buses seemed warm and busy, with the people sitting in them clearly visible through the large windows. But sitting inside a bus was a different experience, unrelated to what one might have surmised from the outside. Once, I took a double-decker to Cowley Road. It was like entering another life, right from ascending the wide berth of the foot-board at the entrance,clutching with great immediacy the pole-vaulter’s pole that rose there from the floor, ignoring the stealthy staircase that crept primitively upward, to make one’s way shyly inside, braving the curious but not unwelcoming glances of other people. As the scene changed from the civic architecture of High Street to the grey brick houses and Indian restaurants on Cowley Road, bodies circulated gently and continually inside, as people got in and got out; it was strangely but peacefully crowded, and one had to cling economically to a loop of leather or a horizontal rod travelling over one’s head, and sway containedly from the top of one’s head to the base of one’s feet, and privately regain one’s balance, as the bus went on its stately but mildly drunken, intemperate course. Another time, I took a less dramatic journey on a white bus to Summertown. Everything about it was small and detailed, from the coin handed for my fare to the driver, the neat black seats, the roof lowering over my head. Behind me sat a group of chattering boys and girls, and their impudent London accent filled the bus. Only a little way away from me sat the Indian bus driverin his blue uniform, but for some reason I thought of him as ‘Asian’, and he became for me mysterious and unclassifiable. At each stop, he greeted kindly old ladies in a hearty English manner, ‘Hullo, dear! It’s lovely day, innit?’ and later bid them inimitable farewells, ‘Have a nice day, dear!’, but the way he was more English than the English was very Indian, and there was something surprising about his utterances.
    Cowley Road was on the other side, East Oxford. Long ago I had accompanied Sharma, in hope of seeing an erotic Japanese film,
In the Realm of the Senses
, to the Penultimate Picture Palace. After the roundabout, three roads ran parallel to each other—St Clement’s, Cowley Road, and Iffley Road. Full of spirit, we took the Cowley Road to the Picture Palace, but found, alas, that there were no tickets. The road was lined with Bangladeshi shops, and energetic little Muslim boys wearing skull-caps played on the pavement; they did not look foreign, but very provincial and East London. After darkness fell, the shops remained lighted and open, and old Pakistani gentlemen in overcoats,holding crumpled carrier-bags in their hands, had a chance to meet each other inside and converse in idiomatic Punjabi. Politics was discussed; the