Odysseus Abroad Read Online Free PDF

irresistibly—it was more in response to his anxiety than to the noise that she’d done this—and gone up the flight of stairs. He followed her in sheepish excitement, remonstrating “Ma! Ma!” unable to pullher back, till they were in the attic’s half-lit converted kitchen, a den in which Vivek Patel and Cynthia and Cynthia’s brother Rahul and Shashank were pouring wine into glasses, talking, laughing loudly. Khuku had ambushed them; they were taken by surprise. Though Vivek attempted to refute her in his labile, lisping way, and Cynthia giggled, and Rahul, most disconcertingly of the four, exuded a silent, myopic rage, his mother stood in the eye of Walia’s converted kitchen and lectured them. Her message, implicitly—but also forthright, without prevarication—was that her son was doing a “real” degree (unlike them) at a “real” university, he’d embarked on a difficult voyage, his father was paying through his nose, and she—the timeless Indian mother that she was (and more)—would brook no partying as the hour approached midnight. They defiantly invoked the equivalent of their constitutional rights, but in the end they let her be, as if she was mad. Maybe the Patels had become a bit more self-aware about their stomping; only they couldn’t
help
making a racket.
    —
    She had gone. Eight days ago. Ascended swiftly into the air. Like a bird. Taken that proud national aircraft Air India: nodded to the Maharajah. She was back home with his father.
    —
    Unwashed, evacuated, clothed in the night’s kurta and pyjamas, he sat on the rug to sing. He was an exile in his home. He frequently expected complaints. He knew the ragas he sang were hopelessly alien to Mandy’s ear (she too slept till midday) and foreign even to the boys upstairs. Not one of them (certainly not Ananda) ever saw the sun rise; though maybe the Patels sometimes went to bed when it was just coming up. Now Ananda made a clarion call to theday with the raga Bhairav (though it was already nine thirty). He hardly let a morning pass without practising—he was a singer in his own solitude, he was his own audience and his notes needed to sound perfect to himself. Without practising his voice would falter. He sat cross-legged on the rug—all rugs in London houses were the same—with the tanpura on his lap: it was no bigger than a ukelele, made by a septuagenarian, Ambalal Sitari. The old man received visitors in a room in Breach Candy—Ananda’s music teacher had taken him there and cajoled the old man to part with the portable tanpura: “He will be in London soon, and he is dedicated: he practises every day—in fact, I have to tell him not to practise so much!” The strings didn’t speak; they had a flat sound, however much Ananda manipulated the threads at the lower end—the tanpura wouldn’t drone, and was barely audible even in the studio flat’s deep quiet, but he kept worrying it, nestling the instrument. Ambalal Sitari’s experiment hadn’t come off. The wood, which should have become a living thing, remained, stubbornly, wood; the strings were muted.
    —
    He sang: he’d trained himself to be thick-skinned. It was a quarter to ten—it was
their
problem if they went to bed late, then slept slothfully into the hours when people were at work. They
couldn’t
expect midnight-stillness at this time. He sang delicately; singing was his mode, in his student’s life of subterfuge and anonymity (he hardly ever went to lectures and only a handful of professors knew him), of being battle-ready, in constant preparedness. It was a battle—this struggle to master Bhairav—almost without a cause or end. Twenty minutes into the exposition, there was a stirring above. The movement of a beast: a first random thump then silence, then—making Ananda uneasy—another thump. It was the alienness of the melodythat intruded on their drunken sleep. “Karma Chameleon” would have just lulled them, late in the morning, to sounder