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'Symptom?' said Ananda, challenging his uncle, but part of him chiming in.
'The nuclear bomb's only a symptom,' repeated his uncle, almost contemptuous. 'Getting rid of it won't solve anything. Arrey baba, they have to look at the root cause.'
*
He pottered about for three or four minutes, making wasted journeys in the room, before parting the curtains and lifting the window a crack. In crumpled white kurta and pyjamas, he looked out on the street and on Tandoor Mahal opposite, unconcerned about being noticed by passersby below. It was striking how, with the window even marginally open – heavy wooden windows he had to heave up or claw down, and which he was unused to (they made him fear for his fingers) – sounds swam into the studio flat, making him feel paradoxically at home. His mind was elsewhere. He was aware that the house itself was very quiet. The only time there was a sound was when he walked about, and a floorboard groaned at the footfall.
Upstairs, they'd sleep till midday or later. He knew when they were awake because of the sporadic bangs and thuds that announced movement. It was as if the person who first woke up didn't just get on their feet, but stamped on the floor. The noise they made wasn't intentional – it was incidental. It wasn't directed against others because it bore no awareness of others. It was pure physical expression, made by those whose head didn't carry too many thoughts – at least, not when they woke and became mobile again.
*
He hadn't slept well. This was the norm; partly, it was the recurrent hyperacidity, which had him prop up two pillows against the wall – that made it difficult to sleep too – and, cursing, reach in the dark for the slim packs of Double Action Rennie he kept at his bedside. The taste of the tablets – with associations of chalk powder and spearmint – stayed with him slightly longer than their palliative effects.
But mainly it was the neighbours. They hardly slept till 3 or 4 am. There were three people upstairs, but also, often, a fourth. Vivek Patel, who wore pleated trousers and was lavish with aftershave; he wore accessories too – chains around the wrist, fancy belts etcetera. He had a lisp – or not a lisp, really, but a soft way of saying his t's that was both limpid and menacing. His girlfriend Cynthia stayed in the same room. She was Bengali, but from a family of Christian converts. Cynthia Roy. She was pretty and a little cheap-looking, with her bright red lipstick and simper and the thick outline of mascara, and with her sheep-like devotion to Vivek. Cynthia was a new kind of woman – a social aspirant, like her boyfriend – that Ananda couldn't really fathom, especially the mix of characteristics: new-fangled but unintellectual, independent but content to be Vivek's follower. Anyway, Ananda barely existed for her. Someone had said she liked 'tough men'. Vivek wasn't taller than five feet seven or eight, but he was probably tough – because he was broad. In spite of his chains and aftershave, he had a swift abstracted hammerhead air. Ananda had overheard him say 'Fuck off, fuck off' to Walia, the landlord, after the payphone incident – uttering the admonishment in his calm musical manner ('Fukko, fukko') to which Walia clearly had no answer. Walia had nevertheless reclaimed the payphone coinbox and carried it downstairs and out of 16 Warren Street. But in all other ways he was toothless before Vivek Patel because Vivek's father, an East African businessman, was an old contact of Walia's. Patel Senior lived in Tanzania. From there, he'd sent forth two sons, Vivek and Shashank (who stayed in the single room next to his older brother) to study at the American Management School in London. Shashank looked like Vivek in a narrow mirror: he was slightly taller, paler, and a bit nicer. He spoke with the same lisp – which could have been a hallmark of Tanzanian Gujaratis. On his lips, it sounded guileless and reassuring. He'd told Ananda in the solemn way of one gripped and won over by a fiction that the American Management School offered genuine American degrees. This was the first time they'd discussed education and pretended to be high-minded students of a similar kind – to have different aims that somehow nobly overlapped and converged in this location, despite the signals to the contrary. No wonder they don't have to study. Besides, who comes to London to do management?
Excerpted from Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri. Copyright © 2015 by Amit Chaudhuri. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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