Odysseus Abroad Read Online Free PDF Page A

being fanciful? Of course he was—he knew that.
    —
    Even when she’d arrived here in 1955, unable to speak perfect English, noticeably little, it became clear she was a force and thatshe 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 commemorationsand 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