its brainwashing duties long completed but still reflexively cleansing the occupants of original thought.
The bench he usually rested on had been vandalized in the night. He stood before it, surveying the efforts of the mental giant who had spray-painted a swastika and racist slogans across the seat.
‘If only I could go home,’ he muttered to himself as he read the misspelt words. ‘If only I could.’
He tested the paint with one cautious fingertip, and finding it dry, eased himself down, feeling a stab of satisfaction as his buttocks pressed into the swastika. He wondered briefly if the youth had been aware of the symbol’s Indian origins. He smiled at the irony and took out a cigarette.
Against the background noise from the motorway he could hear the car alarms starting to go off around the district, each one welcoming its owner with the faithfulness of a dog, bleating an answering toot as a keyring was fired at it. Soon their drivers would be sitting in traffic jams and feeling the tension knot in the solar plexus at the prospect of being late for work.
The old man sat back and drew on his cigarette, glad to be out of it all, yet unable to resist the slightest twinge of regret that his own participation in the conduct of life was at an end. He had never become used to retirement, another one of the many exiles. Had his wife still been alive there might have been some solace in the spread of empty hours that extended from dawn to dusk. But she was dead – yet one more exile that he mentally ticked off on the tally he kept.
A growing roar overhead heralded the approach of the first morning flight into Heathrow. Moments later the fat silver fuselage broke through the low, swirling clouds like a bloated fly, sinking down to settle on a new-found corpse. The old man smiled grimly. He had seen plenty of those in his time. Too many. But that was all such a long time ago. He wondered sometimes if it had been a dream. Nightmare might be a better description.
He watched the plane disappear behind a prim row of houses, its great belly touching down out of sight on the soaking runway. The day had begun pretty much like every other since he had arrived in Britain. Perhaps later on he would go to the temple near his home in Southall, but he never knew whether or not he would actually go inside until he was mounting the steps and walking through the tinsel-adorned entrance hall. More often than not he simply passed by, unable to drum up the courage to face his conscience. He didn’t believe in the gods any more. That had died a long time ago, but the temple had proved to be a place of brutally frank reflection and of late he found he preferred the cinema.
When he had finished the cigarette he contemplated smoking another but decided instead to heed his doctor’s warning and cut down. By evening he would have finished the packet which had been new when he had got out of bed, unable to sleep, to dress and set off on his walk.
So how would he spend the day? He could go and visit any one of the restaurants, but then his son-in-law would think he was interfering and by midday his daughter would be on the phone, whining at him to give them space. They were so bloody sensitive, the younger generation. They had no concept of respect. All they thought about was themselves and their own selfish fulfilment. Self-sacrifice was an unknown land, and the notion that age had a certain wisdom to offer was as alien as the other planets.
If not the restaurants, what then? He was beginning to regret handing over the management of his little empire to his son-in-law. But he had to admit that the lad had improved their efficiency more than he would have thought possible. He was always spouting the jargon gleaned from the MBA course he had attended after university. ‘Total quality management’, ‘customer care’ – stuff like that. In the old man’s day it had been enough simply to be the best in the neighbourhood, to crush the opposition by fair means or foul and fill the resulting power vacuum. Now it was all graphs and figures. There didn’t seem to be any room for intuition.
He pushed himself off the bench and set off for home. As he walked the drizzle began to harden into rain and he cursed himself for not taking his umbrella. He was a creature of habit and always liked to return by a roundabout route past the cinema, but as he felt the sting of cold water lash against his cheeks he decided to go back the way he had come, taking the shorter path through the park. ‘Park’ was a grand description for a miserable patch of grass, largely trampled to mud at this time of year. From the far side a narrow path crept between the side of an old Victorian terraced house and a row of fenced-off garages, beyond which a single road cut in front of his own house. He glanced at his watch, trying to shield the glass from the rain. It would take him at least fifteen minutes, enough time to get thoroughly soaked. Perhaps he would go back to bed once he got home. That would solve the problem of what to do with himself. But no. That way lay a quick death. He would take to his bed only when he knew his end was near, and not before.
He approached a row of shops. Built in the early 1960s, they exuded all the charm and grace of an empty cornflakes packet. White wooden boards coated the upper floor and the lettering identifying each of the shops was in stark black plastic, the occasional letter missing. There was a launderette, a newsagent who served also as confectioner and postmaster, a greengrocer, a hairdresser and a chemist, every one of them Indian. It was extraordinary, the old man reflected. If their noble ancestors could see them now and witness what they had become, making their living in such an unpleasant foreign land. They had forsaken the wide, sweeping continent of their forebears, the ancient land of gods and sagas, of princes, fables and legends, to retreat to a dank, miserable corner of the globe that had been civilized for barely a millennium.
The newsagent was winding up his metal blinds and squinted suspiciously at the old man in the gloom.
‘You should keep your spectacles on,’ the old man called across. ‘One day you’ll be robbed.’
The newsagent grinned with relief as he recognised the old man’s voice. ‘You’re up early, Mr Sanji.’
‘As ever, as ever,’ the old man said with a dismissive wave of the hand.
‘You should get some sleeping pills from Dr Gupta.’
‘Why hasten matters? We’ll all be sleeping soon enough, and for as long as any man could wish.’
The newsagent shook his head in bemusement. ‘You are always joking, Mr Sanji. Always joking.’ He went inside and reappeared seconds later with a paper. ‘Do you want to take this with you?’ he asked. ‘You know what that delivery boy is like. Quite, quite useless. Always late, always idling.’
The old man nodded appreciatively and accepted the paper, glancing briefly at the headlines and then folding it away inside his coat out of the rain. ‘Thank you. I expect it’s all bad news anyway.’
Chuckling to himself, the newsagent wagged a finger at him and went inside. A moment later there was the flicker of neon and the inside of the shop was illuminated in the garish whiteness. The old man walked on.
By the time he reached the edge of the park the rain had become too heavy for him to ignore it. For a moment he toyed with the idea of pressing on and accepting the inevitable drenching, but his daughter would scream with horror at the sight of him and then fuss for the rest of the day. His son-in-law would likewise protest, but more from a sense of good manners. In his heart, the old man knew, his son-in-law would be wishing upon him a speedy death by pneumonia. There was no love lost between them. Politeness concealed their mutual hatred.
The entrance porch to an old church provided partial shelter from the rain. The old man squeezed up against the shuttered door and turned up his collar, but the rain slanted in, soaking the toes of his shoes. He turned them in like a pigeon but the water still found them, feasting on the cheap leather until he felt it penetrating to his socks. Strangely, the cold moistness between his toes reminded him of walking barefoot
