Choice, page 15
‘Emily. Dear.’
The words arrested her shaking. She was flooded with shame; for what, she couldn’t have said. Where had the possession come from?
Later, she went online to track down the tea estate. The correct name was Varugaram, now part of Veritea, an umbrella company constituted of half a dozen plantations, all in the Nilgiri Hills in South India. The head office was in a town called Coimbatore. They had a decent enough website: lush pictures of low green hills, slopes green with dense rows of tea bushes; the usual corporate branding and marketing language, all performatively labour-centred and green consciousness vision values community yadda yadda, to describe the company, its mission, and its products; even pictures of past and present CEOs and the present CEO’s email; a contact tab. Emily didn’t know why she was expecting something shabby and unprofessional. What she wasn’t expecting was the lethally effective dispersal of Western bullshit, like spores of some malign fungus, to the other side of the world and finding welcome soil there. There was a little history thrown in too: its first chairman was a British man, Sir Reginald Hartley, who founded the company, then named after the one estate it owned, Varugaram, in 1898. The page said: ‘He dabbled in many an industry – cotton mills, coffee plantations, tea, coffee curing, motor works, and tyre retreading. It wasn’t only industry that interested Sir Hartley; he was a man with a commendable sense of social responsibility. As early as the 1800s he had set up a couple of schools, taken on the chairmanship of the city council of Coimbatore, and was soon conferred the title “Kaiser-e-Hind”. And in 1960, this company passed into the hands of Mr Balasubramanian.’ Passed into. An entire history of oppression, resistance, bloodshed, independence elided over in a phrasal verb that made it sound as easy and natural as the flow of water. And such a large gap between British founder and first Indian CEO, an erasure of the period into which Emily’s grandfather fitted.
There was a tab called ‘CSR’ and its short drop-down menu included health care, children’s home, and education. Education. She read the short sections on each and had a mild plummeting feeling: the school was set up in the late 1970s, an orphanage in 1986. The dates were all wrong – her grandparents had left India very shortly after Independence in 1947. So, either her mother had misremembered some detail, or something had been lost in the transmission of anecdotes. The school page, for example, said that it had been set up in 1979 for children of the plantation workers and managers. The medium of instruction had been Tamil, but in 1986 it had affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education and switched to becoming an English-language school, now serving not only the children of all the estates that formed Veritea, but also those from ‘surrounding villages’.
The only way she could find out more was if she wrote to them and they bothered to reply. She composed a brief note to the CEO (surely an account monitored, if at all, by a secretary?), then spent half the night worrying about whether she had got the tone right, whether the CEO, if he ever saw it, wouldn’t think that this was phishing, or that a person claiming to be a descendant of their English founder was getting in touch to assert some kind of legal or financial claim. Every twenty minutes she got up to tweak, rewrite, add, subtract, copy-and-paste; her mind couldn’t move on to anything else. If only she could get hold of something . . . anything from their colonial lives would do.
Where had it all gone, Emily continued to fret through the sleepless blue-grey hours, because there must have been something: people leave traces, they accumulate, they have memories that are material, the concept of ‘memorabilia’ attesting to that very materiality, they have things. Where did they go? Got rid of in a clear-out, donated to charity shops, binned, set on fire? What happened to them? She could not settle. She found other bitter fruits to gnaw at and unearthed a few lines of solace – the rare gleams on the Internet that could take one by surprise – while looking aimlessly for new poetry, here they were: ‘About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say, / And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those / mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride / turn rough.’ What had led her to these unexpected depths? Typing in ‘poem’ and ‘memory’? Algorithm moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform etc. And wonder it was that filled her, at the poet’s sinuous enjambed stream, a silver curve through the dense and forever-changing forest, like the Wood of Error in Book I, of an individual’s history of emotions. Flick, flick, changing the inner and outer weathers like a magician shuffling cards. Then that final flick, almost an apology, an admission, an irreducible residue in the crucible of a relationship. In the lightness that insomnia brought on, the feeling that not only she but everything around her, the whole embodied world, would begin to levitate any minute seemed now to be dented and bent by a new gravity, as if a black hole had materialized in her universe. Why should he text or call her, she tried to reason; it was ridiculous to have even allowed that thought to flit through her head. He was afraid, watching her every move, like a prey watches its predator, or a sapper regards a bomb that he’s defusing. To run with the simile, shouldn’t she be doing the defusing by calling him? The feeling of levitation, again. They didn’t say it was a side effect of concussion, did they? At half-past three in the morning, she started to put on makeup, just as a way of reminding herself that she could still do invisible makeup, the kind that had given her boyfriend in university such a shock when he had seen her face the first morning after, when all of it had been scrubbed off rigorously. Oh god, what had he said, something like, ‘You look like a different person’, poor lamb, and she had asked, ‘Better or worse?’, and he had made his indelible mistake, something that had set a foundational pattern to their relationship as long as it had subsisted. Now, trying to dust her face with the brush, she feared that she would make herself look like a painted monkey, a circus clown, if she strayed even slightly beyond the boundaries of her minimalist cleanse-tone-moisturize-SPF routine. ‘To be born woman is to know – / Although they do not talk of it at school – / That we must labour to be beautiful.’ She wanted to drop the little wand of Touche Éclat and punch the air – she hadn’t forgotten it all or, as she was now beginning to reckon, sacrificed it all to admin and committees and league-table fuckwittery. When had she first read that poem? Must have been for mods in her first year. Then, sure as death, the basso continuo of guilt-laced anxiety: all this time rushing past her that she would never get back and the work, undone, mounting mounting mounting. Halfway through wiping her face raw with micellar water, she went to her study and looked at her email tab. She had been aware for a while that her life was in the prison of acronyms but had not accorded it due weight and salience; the bars now closed around her. The majority of communications was from DLTC (Department Learning & Teaching Committee), SEOC (Student Experience & Outcome Committee), CQAC (Curriculum Quality Assurance Committee), TeLSOC (Teaching, Learning & Student Outcomes Committee), TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment), TESEP (Teaching Excellence & Student Engagement Plan). The neoliberal university was not about knowledge and its flow. Those who talked about the marketplace of ideas actually meant only the first half of the phrase, the only one that mattered to them. In the ideal university, she would be contemplating how unprepared she was for the graduate seminar on Wednesday and the ‘Forms: Pastoral, Romance, Epic’ lecture on Friday, thinking about how any time-management scheme that she drew up now would have to prioritize finishing the two articles-in-progress (one on Lodowick Bryskett, a ‘revise and resubmit’ from ELR, and another, yet to be sent out on submission, on a textual matter in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia) and a chapter, vaguely titled ‘The Pastoral, Interrupted: Spenser, Guarini, Milton’, that she had been thrilled to be asked to contribute to a festschrift for her late thesis supervisor. How profoundly the interest in these matters had run out, like water escaping in a rush after the plug in the sink was removed; a mighty gurgle, a brief vortex, then nothing but a wet residue. This compulsively irritating habit of life to assert itself as more interesting than, say, literary-ideological agendas under the surface of an early modern writer’s reading of the classics. She could hear one of her bolshier students posturing, ‘Like, yeah, whatever.’ The intellectual is no match for the lived, for the process of living. Model versus mess – what chance did the former ever have? Weren’t they all fools to think so and to persist nevertheless like blind donkeys? And which self-respecting woman – person! – called a man, who was almost a stranger, at four o’clock in the morning? What would he think of her? What kind of signals would she be sending? But in the vivarium of regrettable ideas that this hinge between the night and the morning was, she had one that she hoped would salvage something: resisting the pull of a somewhat inappropriate text that was beginning to take over her, she instead sent an email to Rohan.
On a murky grey March mid-morning, the sky like a lid about to press down on the petty business of humans scurrying about, Emily and Rohan met outside Stockwell Tube station. Embarrassment helped them get quickly out of the way all the difficult things, apologies, gracious acceptance, articulating that the contretemps was behind them and forgotten, by not going through them at all. Bits and pieces of these things could be alluded to in the interstices of their conversation and the essential work would be done. Emily had set it up in such a way that she would come across as needing his help – the email had explicitly said that – and Rohan, adept at that same code, would instantly understand it as her way of saying sorry.
‘So, this is what I have in mind,’ she said. ‘I need to feel out this area for some research.’ She was certain that he could detect the lie, and her voice, she thought, sounded different, but she consoled herself with the thought that they both knew they were playing a game and had to abide by rules that had a different truth-value.
‘What research? I didn’t know you had leaped from the early modern to the contemporary,’ he said. With that, she knew that he knew. Everything could proceed without any glitches.
‘Well . . .’ she feigned shyness, ‘I’m, I’m trying my hand at something more, how should I put it, more creative, and for a while, I didn’t tell you because it’s, it’s so new and you’d be sceptical about it, rightly, of course, it goes without saying, but for a while my mind has been gravitating towards fiction, and I thought that perhaps I should, I could, give it a whirl . . .’ She amazed herself. Where lay the wellspring from which this flowed with such ease, such guile? Her mother? Why did she think that? It had its own momentum, own pleasures, she found, as she let it blossom more fully: ‘Besides, I felt awkward and shy about telling you, of all people, a feted writer . . .’
‘Feted-schmeted.’ Emily knew that this was no false modesty: Rohan genuinely wore his two Booker short-listings lightly; ‘Nothing to wear,’ he would have said, ‘hundreds of second- and third-rate writers get on that carousel and are quickly forgotten.’
‘So, what exactly are you, we, looking for?’ he asked, looking on his phone for a route to chart.
‘Um, I don’t know . . .’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? A particular street or set of streets, landmarks, shopfronts . . . I mean, what do you want?’
‘Just a general feel of the place. I think.’
‘General feel. Ah. Yes, of course. But what is the story about? Wait, I know, sorry, scratch that, terrible question to ask anyone. Let me rephrase that. If you feel like saying anything more about this . . . project, you have a keen listener standing next to you.’
Admiration took her breath away and silenced her for a while; two certainly could play at this game. The world around them insisted on attention, if only for the sake of her performance, which hid an ulterior truth that only she knew, or could eventually feel her way towards. Rohan planned out a circular route, with a number of small detours into the interior of the circle. Seven years in London had familiarized her with the discrete-villages model of the city but had not made her a Londoner; there was still the novelty of the unvisited areas, a sort of mild shock of the new. On Stockwell Road, a long stretch of council estates and tower blocks, with sodden earth in front and in the lots. A small public garden that looked municipal to the last blade of struggling grass and an enormous straggly clump of Saint-John’s-wort. Even accounting for winter, this was a place still and stultified with the lack of colour. The grey-white and grey-red of the building fronts, the grey of the wet roads and pavements, the grey of an empty park, with its abandoned play area, the wet grey of mud and the grey of concrete, the mud-brown of the wet bark chips in a bare garden, all aggregated to a non-colour, so that when they came to a stylish second-hand furniture store, Loved Again, the orange mid-century leather recliners in the display window had the effect of blood in a crime scene. There followed a small string of delis, cafés, and restaurants.
They walked past a skate park, with its diminutive hills, valleys, and canyons, every available inch profuse with graffiti, and suddenly, like a radical scene change, unmistakable Caribbean Brixton arrived. They turned back and started exploring the side roads off Stockwell Road. Stockwell Park Road and Stockwell Park Crescent, with their Victorian detached houses and semi-detached terraces, gave off the odour of money, of long ownership: doors with lead-bordered coloured stained glass, a shiny imitation of a Victorian coach lamp in brass positioned above it; gardens in the front letting you know that their bigger versions lay at the back; a house with two huge tree palms standing sentry in the stone courtyard on either side of the short flight of stairs leading to the front door. Her walking pace picked up past these homes, slowing down again when the scene changed to council houses on Lansdowne Way and South Lambeth Road.
A sense of deflation was building up inside her; was that a contradiction in terms, like this purposive meandering, which could conceivably yield nothing? What was she expecting? There followed another moment of being read as Rohan asked, his eyes focused mercilessly on the road in front, ‘Still not found what you’re looking for?’
No, she hadn’t. The streets were resolutely unyielding in their response to the absurd demands she had made of them – that Salim should come out of a walkway in the Mursell Estate, look for a moment up and down the street, his street, before turning the corner and walking to Rooster’s to pick up several orders of family-sized fried chicken and chips for the new members of the family who had come to visit them . . . yes, that was what she wanted, a sense of the plural, of others, a family, better still, a community, a community of Salim’s own people, seeding a garden they could one day perhaps call their own in this cold, grey corner of a foreign world, or even better, she wanted to see a whole big family, rambunctious children, stately dowagers, patriarchs, sons, wives, Salim, all emerge from a restaurant owned and run by one of their own community, like the one they had passed, Asmara, on Clapham Road, a little earlier in their walk.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Rohan said.
‘Gosh. Never thought I’d hear that expression again. My grandmother used to say that to me. Did yours?’
‘My grandmother wasn’t English, she wouldn’t have known what it meant.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever used that expression in my life. Do you think that’s how these things die, or die out, I suppose – the next generation, while understanding their meaning fully, just stops using them, for whatever reason?’
‘I would guess so. So, you didn’t find anything in Stockwell that would be useful?’
She remembered reading, a long time ago, in a Coetzee story, that it was easier to speak – and hear – unadorned truths in a car journey because the driver and the passenger looked straight ahead, not at each other. Could that not be the case during a walk as well?
‘No, actually, yes, I’m just absorbing, it all helps, local colour and all that.’
‘Local colour. Ah. So it is set in these parts?’
‘You seem to be quite confident about the route. You must know this area well.’
‘I have no idea. I’m just wandering aimlessly, waiting for you to sing out “Here, stop right here, this is exactly what I need!” ’
‘Here, stop right here, this is exactly what I need!’
They stopped in front of Stockwell Tube station, smiled at each other, then took the escalators down. The edge inherent in any game-playing was now blunted; they became easier with each other, but she didn’t come clean.
‘Dinner next week?’ he asked, turning to her, as the train approached Pimlico.
‘Yes, that would be nice. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are good, as you know,’ she said, meaning every word.
Back in her office in Mile End, she began working on a plan that could politely only be called coasting – how to survive the semester doing minimal work without being caught out. As for the cost to her research, which meant other, more serious consequences for the mid- to long-term arc of her academic career, she thought about it distantly, disengagedly, not with the expected rising tide of anxiety, as if they would all happen to someone else. In fact, they would happen to someone else; she knew she would be changed; she was changing, changing utterly.
And then, the English spring, temperamental, refractory, magical. The temperature remained unchanged – in fact, maybe even fell a little – but in one corner the sky dazzled with a blue that was stolen from a Renaissance painter’s palette and in the other it was the slate of rain-washed roofs. The banks of daffodils along the edge of the common outside her living room and bedroom windows raised their kitschy heads, reminding her, inevitably, of some of the worst – and best-loved – lines in English poetry. In the concrete courtyard outside her door, the three cherry trees around the car park and the six-feet-by-six-feet children’s play area with one slide and one pair of swings were going to burst into blossom any minute. A little later, she knew, there would be a large colony of lily of the valley in the house at the top end of Harrowgate Road: someone who lived in that house had taken great care to plant a vast number of bulbs that stopped passers-by at this time of the year. She always took a small detour to walk past it on her way to and from the department in late April and early May.
