Odysseus Abroad Read Free

square kilometres of it, they’d dug and drilled but couldn’t find a single vein of oil there, nor in the oceans surrounding its deceptively plump finger-like promontory from which Sri Lanka seemed to trickle off like a drop of water. This happy breed of men, this little world. This precious stone set in the silver sea. They were doing all right.
    —
    He
didn’t feel prosperous. That’s because he wasn’t. His father was going bankrupt paying for this studio flat—and for his tuition fees, which (since he was an Indian) were a few thousand pounds while domestic students paid nothing. Thatcher was responsible; but he bore her no personal ill-will—he was willing to overlook some of her shortcomings for being so integral to the great British show. When he marvelled at her emphatic delivery, sitting in front of the TV, it was her performance he was concerned with and not her words—nor did he connect her directly with the murderous fees his father was paying.
    Carrying more than 500 dollars when you were abroad violated FERA regulations; so his father had devised the following method around them. Ananda’s uncle disbursed monthly largesse among relatives living in Shillong and Calcutta—mainly in Shillong, with straggly families displaced during Partition—the principal sum going to an older brother. This made Radhesh (his uncle) feel kingly, and succumb to the tribulations of being a king on whom many were dependent. He could never forget the irony that the family—including this older brother—had dealt with him in his childhood largely with remonstrances, seen him as a bit of a loafer, and that he, buoyed up by the British pound (even though he’d recently been made redundant), was now helping them. “The reason I didn’t marry,” he claimed in one of his monologues, “was because
I
”—he patted his frail chest lightly—“wanted to be there for my family.”
That’s not entirely true. You are, and always have been, afraid of women
. Now Ananda’s father made all those payments to those remote towns in the hills; the equivalent amount was transferred monthly from Ananda’s uncle’s National Westminster account to Ananda’s. In this manner, FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulations Act) wassubverted but not exactly flouted, and Ananda’s low-key, apparently purposeless education was made possible. It was an arrangement that both satisfied and exacerbated his uncle. His aristocratic urge to preside and dispense—trapped within his slight five-foot-eight-inch frame—was appeased, but his precious need for privacy (he was a bachelor, after all) was compromised.
    Because of the paucity of money at any given time (though Ananda didn’t consciously think himself poor; he’d been born into comfort, and, since affluence is a state of mind, he possessed a primal sense of being well-off), Ananda had to ration his recurrent expenditure on lunch, dinner, books, and pornographic magazines. The last comprised all he knew at this moment of coitus. They were a let-down. He anyway suffered from a suspicion that the women were only pretending to enjoy sex, and this consciousness was a wedge between him and his own enjoyment. He required pornography to be a communal joy, shared equally between photographer, participant, and masturbator. But his suspicion was reinforced by Thatcher’s repression of the hardcore. The men’s penises, if you glimpsed them, were limp. There was hardly anything more innately biological and morosely unsightly than a limp penis. Meanwhile, the women’s mouths were open as they lay back in their artificial rapture. Nevertheless, he pursued his climax doggedly and came on the bedsheet.
    Last night, he’d brought home the first of his two customary Chinese dinner options—mixed fried rice and Singapore noodles—from the restaurant on Euston Road. The other side of that road was so still and dark (notwithstanding the sabre-like hiss of passing cars) that it might have been the sea out there