Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

When Ramy complained that the food in hall was so bad that he was visibly dropping weight (this was true; the Univ kitchens, when they weren’t serving the same rotation of tough boiled meat, unsalted roast vegetables, and indistinguishable pottages, put out inexplicable and inedible dishes with names like ‘India Pickle’, ‘Turtle Dressed the West India Way’, and something called ‘China Chilo’, very little of which was halal), they stole into the kitchen and cobbled a dish out of chickpeas, potatoes, and an assortment of spices Ramy had scrounged together from Oxford’s markets. The result was a lumpy scarlet stew so spicy that they all felt like they’d been punched in the nose. Ramy refused to accept defeat; instead, he argued, this was further proof of his grand thesis that there was something fundamentally wrong with the British, since if they’d been able to get their hands on real turmeric and mustard seeds then the dish would have tasted much better.

‘There are Indian restaurants in London,’ Letty objected. ‘You can get curries with rice in Piccadilly—’

‘Only if you want bland mash,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘Finish your chickpeas.’

Letty, sniffling miserably, refused to take another bite. Robin and Victoire stoically kept shovelling spoonfuls into their mouths. Ramy told them they were all cowards – in Calcutta, he claimed, infants could eat ghost peppers without batting an eye. But even he had trouble finishing the fiery-red mass on his plate.

Robin didn’t realize what he had, what he’d been searching for and had finally obtained, until one night halfway through the term when they were all in Victoire’s rooms. Hers were improbably the largest of any of their quarters because none of the other boarders wanted to share with her, which meant not only did she have a bedroom all to herself but also the bathroom and the spacious sitting room where they’d taken to congregating to finish their coursework after the Bodleian closed at nine. That night they were playing cards, not studying, because Professor Craft was in London for a conference, which meant they had the evening off. But the cards were soon forgotten because an intense stench of ripe pears suddenly pervaded the room and none of them could figure out what it was, because they hadn’t been eating pears, and because Victoire swore she didn’t have any stashed away in her room.

Then Victoire was rolling on the ground, both laughing and shrieking because Letty kept screaming, ‘Where is the pear? Where is it, Victoire? Where is the pear?’ Ramy made a joke about the Spanish Inquisition, so Letty, playing along, ordered Victoire to turn out all her coat pockets to prove none of them concealed the core. Victoire obeyed but turned up nothing, which sent them into further shrieks of hysterics. And Robin sat at the table, watching them, smiling as he waited for the card game to resume until he realized that it wouldn’t because they were all laughing too much and, besides, Ramy’s cards were splayed across the floor face-up, so continuing was pointless. Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.

A family.

He felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did.

He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellion; he could not acquire Griffin’s hatred of this place.

Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now. Babel, his friends, and Oxford – they had unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again. The world felt less dark.

He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?

He was not ready to commit fully to Hermes. But by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.

Later, it would amaze Robin that it never seriously crossed his mind to tell any of them about the Hermes Society. After all, by the end of Michaelmas term, he had come to trust them with his life; he had no doubt that if he fell into the frozen Isis, any one of them would have dived in to save him. Yet Griffin and the Hermes Society belonged to bad dreams and shadows; his cohort was sun and warmth and laughter, and he could not imagine bringing those worlds together.