Afternoon Raag

Amit Chaudhuri

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780746289
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Described as a ‘felicitous prose poem’, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man who is studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail. Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a perfect miniature of a novel about arrivals and departures, new worlds and old homes.

1

Each year, in Oxford, new students come and old ones disappear; after a while, one knows the streets and by-lanes, all of which lead to each other, by heart; in the north, no one goes beyond Summertown, and the road leading to London goes out via Headington. On the first day of Michaelmas, men and women in black gowns walk to matriculation ceremonies, and at the end of the year they wear these gowns again, unhappily, to take exams; then, after the exams, the town is nearly empty, and the days, because of that peculiar English enchantment called Summer Time, last one hour longer; and Oxford, in the evening, resembles what an English town must have looked like in wartime, the small shops open but unfrequented, an endangered, dolorous, but perfectly vivid peace in the lanes, as the eye is both surprised by, and takes pleasure in, a couple linked arm in arm, or a young man conversing with a woman on a polished doorstep, and then the early goodbyes. It is like what I imagine a wartime township to have been, because all the young people, with their whistling, their pavement to pavement chatter, their beer-breathed, elbow-nudging polemics, are suddenly gone, leaving the persistent habits of an old way of life, the opening and shutting of shops, intact, a quiet, empty bastion of civilization and citizenry. It is because of its smallness, repetition, and the evanescence of its populace, that Oxford is dreamlike.

From the window of my room I could see a library and a faculty building, and a path, curving slightly, that led to a college. Students, dressed in the oddest of clothes, in secretive overcoats, in long and black primitive skirts, men with earrings, women wearing gypsy ornaments, would gather each morning for lectures, or pass in and out of doors recklessly with books clutched to their bosoms, or sit on the steps in abandonment, as if they had forgotten their appointments. The path, which is flanked by hedges that turn bright red in the autumn, I could see far into; at one point, it ran over a canal, so that I sensed water there. This intuition of water came to me again when I was visiting Worcester College; it was an unhappy day, because I was still vacillating between Mandira and Shehnaz, falling asleep by one woman at night and spending the day with the other, but I had, for a forced, lucid period of time, come here to attend a seminar on Lawrence. On entering the first quad, I saw that the light—it was evening—behind the wall at the end of the garden was different; as if the sun had set there, so that I imagined a seashore and a horizon. Later, I learnt that there was a lake there.

Dr Mason’s room was simple, with two sofas, adjacent to each other, and a study table, next to which there was a chair on which he sat. It was a well-lighted and warm room, but its colours were cool—furniture browns and wallpaper purples and magnolias and greys, the colours that create, in afternoon light or evening shadow, the abidingness of an English interior. Three undergraduates, myself, and two other graduate students, sat on the sofa, while another undergraduate, bearded and with spectacles, placed himself on the window-sill and never said a word, but listened to the others’ words, seeming to weigh them, and it was his silence that I deciphered for agreement or disapproval. Dr Mason was a polite, even kind, man, a very big man, not very old, facing us in his armchair. Some students had open copies of The White Peacock in their hands, and as we talked of Lawrence, extolled him, applauded him, and most invigoratingly of all, corrected him, it seemed both strange and natural to hear our own voices. The mind focused itself upon the sphere of the room and the table lamp, and then dilated vaguely and darkly into a consciousness of Lawrence-country, and then focused upon the room again, and this dilation and constriction went on for a long time, like breathing. An hour later, we got up to leave. There was laughter, and a relaxed certainty with which we let each other go, almost released each other, into the night. How unique student life is, with its different rooms, its temporary enclosures and crystallizations, its awareness and memory of furniture and windows and spaces.

2

Early in the morning, light would frame the curtains of my window, although at times there was only a dull whiteness. When I parted the curtains, I would look out into the curving road to the next college, the closed doors of the library, and the pavements. The wind would make a piece of paper move, and, touching the window, I would sense the cold outside. As I am used to the sound of crows in the morning, this absence of noise would fill me with a melancholy which was difficult to get rid of because it seemed to have no immediate cause. It was only when I saw students, with their odd, comical gait, and their touchingly disguised sleepiness, walking down that road, growing, little by little, in number as the morning wore on, that I would feel an at-homeness and pleasure in their rhythm. It was around this time that Shehnaz too would set out from her college and come down the same road, indistinguishable from the other students, but with her own thoughtful gait, a backward-lookingness, happy in a simple way in having this opportunity to walk to her library in Broad Street, and devote a fresh day to copying out notes, stopping at my room for half an hour on her way there.

She was, essentially, a lonely person searching for the right company, a wise little girl in a woman’s body, dressed in black trousers, a blue top and a coat, and black sneakers. Her hair was long and striking and untidy; solemnly, she carried a file full of papers under her arm, and a clumsy, oversized bag whose significance was that there was a tiny packet of Marlboro Lights in it. She had been married once, very briefly, and then divorced; later, she had an involvement in Oxford which came to nothing. It was towards the end of this involvement that I first met her, through a friend, and then we would exchange nods when we passed each other by on the bicycle-lined pavement of a street which led to a pub and a junction. Students, drolly crossing the street, or lavishly arguing, filled out the spaces in the street and the time between one meeting and the other upon this repeated route, so that the street, with its daily, inconsequential academic excitement and drama, has become indissoluble from the inner life of our early meetings, and Oxford, its climate and architecture, seems not so much a setting as a part of the heart of our friendship.

By the time she would get up to leave, the rest of the building would have woken up and be moving about. Noises were transmitted through walls and doors; a radio; a knowing, crowded murmur in the kitchen; footsteps in the corridor; the main door shutting; the firm but almost non-physical sound of footsteps on the gravel; there were many lives in the building made transiently one by sound. I had a feeling of being surrounded, as on a ship or a train, by personal routines and habits that would not be known again, that had their natural place in some larger, more fixed habitat, and the morning noise had about it, therefore, the concentratedness, the temporariness, and the pathos of the noise of shared travel. It was at this time, after the sun had risen, and lives, without apparent reason, once more began excitedly, when there was shouting upstairs, windows opening, last-minute preparations, and a joy akin to that felt by passengers approaching a port, that Shehnaz would get up to leave, listening, with one ear, to the voices of other students, smiling at what they were saying. Everything they said she found worth listening to, especially if she had had a happy morning with me; she had an uncanny sensitivity to the presence of people in small spaces, in corridors, in doorways, as others have to landscapes, or to places. Being there in that corridor at that moment, as students sheepishly came out of rooms and vanished into the kitchen or the toilet, was a real experience for her.

Sharma lived in another room in the same building. Sometimes, in the morning, he would come down in his shorts to have coffee with me. Banging on the door in a forthright manner, he would enter, and if I happened to be midway through practising a raag, he would sit quietly on a chair and nod and shake his head in vigorous appreciation as I sang. The irrepressible bodily meaning of the words ‘to be moved’, which we have come to associate with mental and aesthetic response, was apparent when one looked at him listening to music. Sometimes he would keep rhythm to the song, arbitrary temporal divisions that he slapped and pounded on the table, and when I had finished he would still be doing this, as if he could no longer stop. Later, he would walk around the room possessively, tapping the keys of my typewriter and reading aloud all the titles of the books on my shelf in order to make himself more conversant with the English language.

Once or twice, it happened that I had gone outside, leaving my door open, and then returned and closed it, thinking I was alone. But Sharma, in the meanwhile, had come and hidden himself in the clothes-closet, from which, at a given moment, he emerged explosively. Towards the beginning of our friendship, he had told me very seriously that I was to help him improve his English. He was writing a thesis on Indian philosophy, but he longed to be a stylist. I would, thus, recommend to him a book whose language had given me pleasure, and he would read aloud passages from Mandelstam or Updike or Lawrence to me, either in the morning or at midnight, times at which I was sleepy, he reading sonorous lines in a loud and unstoppable voice, interrupting himself only to demand comments from me that were both fair and encouraging. His English had a strong, pure North Indian accent, so that he pronounced ‘joy’ a little bit like the French ‘joie’, and ‘toilet’ like ‘twilit’. Yet this accent, I soon learnt, was never to be silenced completely; it was himself, and however he trained himself to imitate the sounds of English speech, ‘toilet’, when he pronounced it, would always have the faint but unmistakable and intimate and fortunate hint of ‘twilit’. His sentence constructions were curious, with missing articles and mixed-up pronouns, but he compensated for these with an excess of ‘Thank yous’ and ‘Sorrys’, two expressions gratuitous in Indian languages, and therefore, no doubt, of great and triumphant cultural importance to him. His reading practice in the mornings, executed with the single-mindedness of a child practising scales by thumping the keys, remains for me one of the most relaxing memories of Oxford; me lying on the bed and patiently listening, a time of rootedness and plenitude, even of equable solitude, for with Sharma one is always alone, listening to him. Mandelstam, read by Sharma, took on a different, unsuspected life, odd, cubist, harmlessly egotistical, and atmospheric.

3

Mandira lived in a room in college. She had come to Oxford two years after me, and I first saw her in hall. She spoke English, I noticed, with a slight American accent, talked actively at the table, walked in what is called ‘a brisk manner’, and was surrounded by English friends. She was small and roundish, and a favourite with the porters and stewards, who would wink at her, or put an arm around her, and call her ‘love’ or ‘dear’, as the English do, and not take her very seriously. I did not like her, but, when I was bored, I would go to her room and drink a cup of tea. I gradually got over my tentativeness, and came to realize that a knock on her door would not be unwelcome, for she was always very hospitable in her disorganized way. The first five minutes would be spent in me settling down, after a preamble during which I decided where I should sit, on the armchair in a way that was both tortured and patient, and then open a bantering conversation with her in medias res; all this I took to be courtesy, but it made her uncomfortable, for I remember her as a compound of movement and aimless speed, putting the kettle on the boil, and then running down a flight of stairs to the kitchen for her carton of milk. Shyness made her quick, while I, by contrast, was slow. When she was gone for that minute, I would be alone in her room, with the photographs on the wall, the secret things and cups and clothes in her cupboard, the badly made bed, the washbasin and mirror, the textbooks on the table and the floor, absorbing the materiality of the room and also its cheerful, fleeting makeshiftness, and not knowing what to think. She was not a very tidy person, but her attempt at order and creating the semblance of a household, even the clumsy tear at the spout of the milk-carton, touched me. These undergraduate rooms were larger and more comfortable to look at than the box-like, modern rooms in my building. A light hung from the ceiling, enclosed by a comical, globe-like shade, and at evening it gave a light that was both encompassing and personal. The window opened on to a path to the garden and the hall, and all day, laughter and footsteps could be heard, coming and going, and these sounds too became a part of the room’s presence.

In the morning, I looked forward to the small journey I made across the road, glancing right and left with avid interest for oncoming cars, to see if I had any mail. The pigeon-holes, after the poverty of Sunday, its forced spiritual calm, seemed to overflow humanely with letters on Monday, and even if I had not got any, that small walk did not lose its freshness and buoyancy, and a tiny and acute feeling of hope did not desert me in all my mornings. From about half past nine to ten, there was a hubbub as students stooped or stood on tiptoe to peep into pigeon-holes, and sorted and sifted letters, and the mail-room had an air of optimism, of being in touch with the universe, found nowhere else in Oxford. When there were letters for me—the cheap, blue Indian aerogrammes from my mother—they lay there innocently like gifts from a Santa Claus, they did not seem material at all, but magical, like signs. Then I would miss the special feeling of mornings at home, I would think benignly of my mother’s good health, and how she suffers from nothing but constipation, how for three days she will go without having been to the toilet, with an abstracted look on her face, as if she were hatching an egg. Secretively, she will concoct a mixture of Isab-gol and water, and stir it ferociously before drinking it. Then, one day, like a revelation, it will come, and she will have vanished from human company. My father, a great generalizer, collector of proverbs, shows no concern over her health, displays no bitterness.

The furniture in Mandira’s room—the bed, the study-table, its chair, the cupboard, the bookshelves—was old, enduring. The armchair was solid and stoic, and seemed to cradle the space that existed between its thick arms; one felt protected when one sat in it. As I got to know Mandira better, as we became intimate and then grew increasingly unhappy, the room became her refuge, her dwelling, and when she said, ‘I want to go back to my room’, the words ‘my room’ suggested the small but familiar vacuums that kept close around her, that attended to her and guided her in this faraway country. Because, for a foreigner and a student, the room one wakes and sleeps in becomes one’s first friend, the only thing with which one establishes a relationship that is natural and unthinking, its air and light what one shares with one’s thoughts, its deep, unambiguous space, whether in daytime, or in darkness when the light has been switched off, what gives one back to oneself. The bed and chairs in it had an inscape, a life, which made them particular, and not a general array of objects. That is why, when she spoke of her room, I think what she meant was the sense of not being deserted, of something, if not someone, waiting, of a silent but reliable expectancy.

The room had other rooms next to it and other rooms facing it. Sometimes, I would come up the staircase and enter the corridor to find Mandira leaning out of a half-closed door talking to the American girl who lived opposite, who would be standing by her own door. Even when I was inside the room, they would continue their conversation, and I would sit on the chair and watch Mandira’s back; from there I could listen to the voice of the invisible girl, and to her rising peals of laughter. For ten minutes they would say goodbye to each other, until there came a rounded silence, and Mandira closed the door. What was missing was the background sound of old people and children, of babies and mothers, of families; instead one heard people running up and down the staircase, or visitors approaching and knocking. There was a toilet near the room whose cistern gurgled candidly each time someone flushed it, and a bath to which men in dressing-gowns went solemnly in the evening, and women with towels around their heads, less solemn and with an air of freedom. From the bath everyone returned radiant and clean, and slightly ashamed. As I passed to or from Mandira’s room, I would encounter them but not look at them, for I had learnt that the English do not consider it polite to look at each other, but nevertheless I remember the embarrassment o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27