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purple-liveried porter. Boring restaurants—Lal Qila (mildly uppity, with tandoori quail on the menu); Strikes, the raison d’etre of whose name was impossible to second-guess, with black-and-white pictures of striking workers from the twenties (no overt homage being made to Arthur Scargill) and a menu dominated by burgers; and Garfunkel’s (no evident genuflection to Paul and Art), where you had to wait to get a table (raising your expectations, naturally), and which probably served the woodiest French fries in miles. He’d eaten at each one: at Strikes and Garfunkel’s with his mother, when she was tired of cooking and he of saving: they’d let go and, with a disproportionate sense of guilt and liberation, made their way there. Strikes! Garfunkel’s! He’d coerced his uncle twice to treat his mother and him to Lal Qila. He felt no remorse—his uncle was awell-to-do man (though he might have lost his job), without a family or property to his name. Surely he could take them out once a week? So ran the unwritten rule (unchallenged, to date, by his uncle).
    —
    He turned left at Heal’s. When he’d first moved to Warren Street—still fresh to this terrain—he’d taken the longer route, crossing the road at McDonald’s and, quite alone—there were hardly any pedestrians here—traversed a no-man’s land, passing, each day, a largely unvisited sari emporium, aware that Drummond Street and the Asian grocers and bhelpuri shops weren’t far; walked, walked, in silence, till he reached Euston Square tube station. Here, as he turned sharply right facing the station, the vista of Gower Street and his destiny—of being condemned to being in London, of making this journey to college—presented themselves plainly. The grey buildings on his left were the college’s, and, midway through the walk, you passed the old grand building and entrance—faux renaissance with its white dome, marked by imperial pretensions, befitting of Rome rather than the surrounding London brick and stone. This entrance was out of bounds; the grand building was being salvaged and renovated from before he’d seen it almost two years ago; it was an irrelevance; he simply walked past it, noting its brief dishevelment, before he reached the traffic lights, and turned left. It took him two weeks to realise that he needn’t take that walk, that he could go down Tottenham Court Road till he reached the Goodge Street underground, and turn into the street bordered by Heal’s. This was a better route, less stark and nineteenth-century, less emblematic of the colonial past—what a poor subject he’d have made, even worse than the maladroit he was as a migrant student!—and more consolingly drab and populous. The scattered signs of old and new wealth flanked him on this trip; Heal’s, with its flutteringpennants, was a palace, and he had no reason, now or in the future, to enter it to survey the heavy furniture displayed within. Habitat was next to it, with its perky designs, its transformed shapes and fragile-looking chairs and tables; he and his mother, small and bright in her sari, had roamed here one afternoon, and she’d bought him the dining table—it was on a thirty per cent reduction—that now took up one tenth of his room. Much more sprightly, this route. Gower Street—Tagore! What
had
Tagore felt about Gower Street? Ananda had heard that Tagore had enrolled in the same college in 1879 to read Law. He’d attended a few lectures—but not on Law, as far as he knew, but by Herbert Spencer. To be anonymous, a nobody,
and
a subject! This, no doubt, was what had made Ananda shiver slightly when going down Gower Street: the haunting of Empire. Tagore had fled back home, long before taking a degree, in disgrace. Ananda would have fled, too, if he’d come here in 1879; he could barely bring himself to continue in Thatcher’s multiracial capital. His mother’s visits—her company, the constant chatter in the room—had kept him from