Gravel Heart(22)

The newness and the strangeness did not last but nor did they completely go away, and despite the chores and the labours I took on, I could not disguise from myself that I had no interest in what I was studying. I thought I could study without being interested but I had not anticipated the anxieties of living in an alien and hostile city without the company of other students like myself or the nagging persistence of my mother. I had not understood the difficulty of speaking in the company of strangers. Uncle Amir kept me under surveillance but he was busy and often tired and too easily satisfied with my garbled accounts of my progress. At some point during or after dinner he would ask for a report on my day, and seemed to take as much pleasure as I did in every small victory. If we were on our own, he would make a joke about girls at college and whether I had managed to get a phone number out of one of them. I could just imagine the frowns and the glares if I said yes. Is that what you have come here to do, spend your time doing filthy things with English girls?

I did not tell him that so many of the books he saw me carrying around were novels I had borrowed from the college library, not instructive texts on accountancy and management. It was in that library that I had run into Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad and John Dos Passos for the first time, and there was a deep pleasure in the unhurried way I was able to read them and have them lead me to others I knew nothing about.

Sometimes Uncle Amir had to go out in the evenings to attend a diplomatic event, and then he came home and showered and changed into formal clothes, whistling and teasing his children as he looked forward to the function. He looked glamorous in his dinner jacket and bow tie, like a ballad singer on a Saturday Night special on TV. He was so very pleased with himself that I imagined him able to walk into a room and just not see anybody without even trying, having eyes only for himself. Auntie Asha went with him sometimes, but she did not look forward to these events as he did. He had no time to keep an eye on me at such times, so altogether it was not too difficult to evade his scrutiny. Also in the first year I did well, which would have reassured him, but when I returned after the first summer vacation my college life went to pieces. Somehow or other I was able to disguise this decline for several months, and in moments of optimism I was even able to reassure myself that dedicated cramming in the later stages was sure to rescue the situation.

*

I was frequently at home alone with Auntie Asha and the children. If she needed me downstairs she called for me to amuse the children or to help in the kitchen. It pleased her when I asked questions about cooking. Unlike my mother, Auntie Asha was a painstaking cook, trying new recipes that she had read about or meals that they had eaten when they were out, and I sometimes stood in the kitchen watching and listening as she went about her work. My mother, on the other hand, hardly ever varied her menu, and cooked the same meals week after week, only changing her routine if there was a shortage. The sameness was sometimes wearying.

Auntie Asha had her favourite subjects, which were mostly herself or the children. She talked to me about her youth, about the boarding school in Suffolk – the best time of her life – about her vacations in Dublin and Paris, and, when she was in the mood, about how in love Amir and she were in those days. She spoke about her father, who was no longer in the government and whom I had never met but had seen often on TV. She mentioned her brother Hakim whom I had never met either and whom I loathed with calm detachment. He is practically your step-father, she said, and I did my best not to react. She talked about Uncle Amir and my mother, approaching and retreating, hiding something, the stories varying as she circled events and narrated them in their best light. Oh once we almost got into trouble, she said, but she collected herself and said no more and I wondered what it was she was struggling with and whether it was to do with me. Sometimes she paused in what she was saying and looked at me wonderingly, and then I tried hard to look as harmless as possible and for a while I played the fool. I learnt to ask questions, not wanting to know too much, not caring if the same story was told again and again, flattering her when I was required to and slowly I gathered together tantalising fragments of a story that still did not come into focus.

I did not think she always told me the truth, and was convinced from her tone at times that she was lying. I did not know if there was any reason to lie or if she was doing it out of habit. I thought she trusted me because I was obedient and spent so much time with the children, the royal infants as I thought of them, whose glittering futures in glamorous professions were already assured if their parents had anything to do with it.

The last traces of the awe I once felt for Uncle Amir were gone, and I had learnt to beware his compulsion to dictate and control, and to escape the suffocating family life he required me to be part of. He probably knew he had lost me. It is impossible to disguise such treachery. I was now quite familiar and secure in London streets and did things with friends at the weekend, mostly playing a football game or going to central London for the afternoon or else West to nowhere in particular, or sitting tight in my room reading or listening to music. I was missing most of my classes and had exhausted my dutiful labour at the material and now only felt resentful and inadequate as I struggled to learn things I had no interest in. When I was scheduled for my most unbearable classes, I found a secluded corner in the college library and buried my head in novels. At some point I knew I was adrift and I understood that what I was doing would take me years to put right but I could not do anything about it. I hid this knowledge from everyone including myself. I ignored the pathetic teenager inside me who was sinking into paralysis. When Uncle Amir questioned me, I lied. I rarely attended classes and no longer completed assignments, and in the end the teachers stopped bothering me.