Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

through the colleges of Oxford with whom Mandira was on first-name terms; later, when her life became more solitary, morenocturnal, and was spent more upon the anxieties we created for ourselves, those letters still stayed pinned to the board, no longer representing her other life outside her room, but a forgetfulness, the dates missed, the events long over, but the lecture-lists and invitation cards remaining upon the board as a beguiling and innocent surface.
    In Oxford, the modes of social existence are few but tangible. But the tangibleness of this existence—conversing at parties, studying at libraries, going to lectures—is at the same time dreamlike. Sometimes the occasions seem like images that one has projected from within for one’s own entertainment, until they fade, as they must after a certain hour at night. Night brings darkness, the emptying of the images that made up the day, so that, in the solitary moment before falling asleep, the day, and Oxford, seem to be a dream one is about to remember. At this moment, one knows that one has no existence for others in Oxford, just as others have no existence for oneself, except in their absence. Daylight and waking bring the feeling of having travelled great distances, of arriving, at last, at a place that is nothome, a feeling that cannot be exactly recalled or understood later, but which occurs at the same time each morning, until one gets out of bed, changes into one’s trousers and shirt, and leaves the room. To be someone’s lover, to share someone’s bed, does not help, but only disturbs that fragile configuration of events and meetings, that neutral and desirable intersection of public places and private ambition, that creates the surface of the dream; instead, the moments of solitariness and self-consciousness, such as before sleeping and at waking, begin to recur unexpectedly, interrupting the flow and allocation of time, of schedules, deadlines, and appointments. One begins to get distanced from Oxford; more and more, one sees it as one’s own dream, an illusion or vision composed relentlessly of others, but not shared by anyone else. This is in part an effect of knowing that one’s relationship with one’s lover could have only taken place in Oxford, and has no meaning outside it, and that Oxford itself is a temporal and enchanted territory that has no permanence in one’s life.
    Mandira lived in a college amongundergraduates. The rhythms and inflections, the sounds, were different here from those of graduate life. For one thing, the internationalism of a graduate building was missing; most of the undergraduates were English, and, speaking in accents that belonged to different but neighbouring localities and regions, they formed a kind of family, constantly on the move, opening and closing doors, engaging in interminable exchanges in the corridor, and borrowing each other’s provisions. There was an urgency and panic in much of what they did, writing weekly essays and preparing for examinations, and tension exploded either into laughter, or remained unexpressed as silent resentment. Men and women mixed with each other in large, friendly groups, but there was also a subdued tension between the sexes that came out in their jokes, an undercurrent of signals and hidden priorities that never existed in quite such a way in graduate life. Later, I came to know that many of Mandira’s English girlfriends, whom I would sometimes find in her room drinking tea, speaking a rapid language that I hardly followed,were always falling in and out of love with the men on their floor or their staircase, and a conversation with a female friend was only a stop-gap between two sexual moments of anxiety or pleasure. Heartbreak was usual; for about a month, one would see a certain combination of singles and couples on the staircase, the single people in jeans and the couples often dressed in black formal clothes for guest-night; and