Another Country (16 page)

There were four shack restaurants.

‘How about this one?' he asked.

‘Sure,' she said.

‘Is that okay?'

‘They all look the same.' Each shack had plastic tables and chairs in the sand, a smaller covered section, and menus written in coloured chalk on blackboards.

‘Hello,' Mike said to the man who came forward smiling.

He'd been here for a beer, he said; he hadn't eaten. He ordered a beer and she a fresh lime soda. They discussed which fish was fresh; Leela silently worried about the cost.

Mike poured out his Kingfisher and drank from it contentedly. He rested the glass on the paper tablecloth. He was on holiday, she thought with envy. So was she, but she kept feeling she must come up with a better pretext.

‘Are you looking forward to the elephants?' she asked.

He laughed. ‘To be honest, it's just great to get away, get some warm weather. My parents –' his face took on a serious, protective expression when he spoke of them ‘– have been through a horrible time. Really horrible. Chemotherapy –'

‘That makes you feel crap, doesn't it?' she asked. His anxiety made her anxious.

He waved his hand. ‘It's horrible. But it's over. My mum's better. At least for now. It's good to enjoy something. And it's their anniversary.'

‘How long have they been married?'

‘Thirty years. They got married young. Had me. That was it.' He hesitated. ‘Are you seeing anyone?'

‘No. I just split up with someone. Are you?'

He hesitated again. She wondered at her own surprise.

‘I have been seeing someone for a bit. Not that long. I – I think I'm onto a good thing, though.' He looked at her, and his face went through a conflict: question, avidity, then its extinguishing.

‘Oh, that's great. What's her name?' She was no longer surprised.

‘Sarah,' he said reluctantly.

‘What does she do?'

‘She works in a school.'

‘Oh, nice. Does she live near you?'

He paused, and waved a hand. ‘It hasn't been that long. But I think – I think I'm onto a good thing.' He sounded dogged, as though arguing with himself.

Leela nodded to show consent. The food arrived: kingfish cooked with butter and lemon, and chips on the side. The fish was very good.

‘This is how I like it – simple,' Mike said. Leela, who had inwardly rolled her eyes at the thought of no chilli or anything, ate and agreed it was good.

‘Are you sure you don't want a beer?'

‘No, thanks.' To save money and out of an exaggerated sense of responsibility to herself, travelling alone, she didn't drink during the trip.

‘Do you want another of those?' He pointed at her lime soda. She smiled and shook her head.

‘So tell me about you,' he said, his eyes quick.

‘Well, I was seeing someone, I was with someone for about three and a half years. In London. But I split up with him, then I was seeing someone else for a bit, now I'm single.' She fiddled with her napkin.

He watched her, eyes unquiet. ‘What happened with the – with your boyfriend?'

She exhaled. ‘It just went on too long. Maybe we weren't suited. Or maybe that's just what people say when they split up.'

He nodded. ‘So you stopped fancying him?'

‘Not that, even. He wouldn't commit, and I got really angry about it until finally I couldn't get angry any more.' She shrugged.

Mike nodded, attentive. ‘And then what happened?' His long fingers plied his knife and fork.

‘Then I met someone else.'

‘Oh.'

Leela stopped eating so that she could better talk. ‘Not like that. I didn't do anything till I'd split up with Richard. It just made me realise – if I'd still been in love with him, or believed things could work out I would never have liked someone else. When I did, I realised that was it. It'd been dragging on for too long. He couldn't make up his mind. Basically I thought, it's not that hard to know if you want to commit to someone. You pretty much know immediately, as far as I can tell.' Absent-mindedly, she ate a chip that had gone cold. Behind them, the sea did quiet, night-time things; the tide was going out.

‘What happened with the other guy?'

She shrugged. ‘He was a bit older. I don't know, I just didn't really get it. Then afterwards I felt stupid. He kind of made me feel stupid. When you're ten years older, you just know more stuff about life. I didn't get that, but now I do. I wouldn't let it happen again, I'd be more in control,' she said. She clutched at her empty lemonade glass. ‘I'd never just go along with stuff. I've got it now. It's like you're always learning things, but never the things you need to know to stop making the same mistake in a new way.'

‘It sounds like you've done a lot of thinking,' Mike said.

She felt ashamed; she had begun to tell the story in a deliberate way, but lost awareness. It had pulled her along, and she had begun to shed details, accumulate speed like a cartoon snowball.

She shrugged. ‘I dunno.'

‘We must keep in touch,' he said. ‘I don't want this to be one of those things where you meet someone really great on holiday and have a chat and that's it.'

‘Okay.'

‘I mean it,' he said. ‘Let me give you my number. Give me a call when you get back.'

She took out her black-backed notebook and her pen, and he took both from her. She disliked other people writing in her notebook, but watched as he wrote down his name, Mike Gibbons, and his telephone number.

‘Give me your address as well,' she said. ‘I could write to you.'

‘I'm not very good at letters.' He wrote it down anyway. ‘Call me when you're back,' he said. ‘The house number's the best. Leave a message if I'm not there, and I'll call you back for sure.'

He wanted to pay for dinner, but she refused; when they said goodnight, he gave her a hug. After the elephant trip the next day, he and his parents were leaving for a bird sanctuary in the hills. Leela said she would move on in a day or two; she didn't know.

The hug had made her more lonely. The next day, eating her dosa, reading, going to the beach, she was alone in a new way. She sat on the sand, drawing in her sketchbook, and an old woman who was passing stopped to look, then tried to teach her the Malayalam word for ‘cow', indicating the cow Leela was sketching to make her point.

Chapter 21

‘Ah, you went travelling? Where all?'

‘Round the coast, Varkala, Kanyakumari, Madurai. I had the best coffee there, on the street. You know the way they pour it.' She mimed the gesture of two vessels, a yard apart.

The other girl, Chitra, smiled. She was tall and fair, with a soft face. They continued to sit in the dining room, at a corner table under the fluorescent tube lights.

Leela was divided between the pressure to be entertaining and the pleasure of a moment in which someone was listening; this was her first prolonged conversation in the hostel. ‘Lots of temple towns,' she went on.

‘I've been to Kanchipuram and Chidambaram,' Chitra said.

No one else was left in the room. Leela moved congealed daal around her plate. Half a leathery chapati also remained.

‘I didn't go to either,' she said. ‘But I did go to Rameswaram.'

‘Ooh! Was it beautiful?'

‘Really beautiful. The sea was incredibly blue, and calm. It made me nervous. I went on a boat trip, with this family from Indore. The boat guy said the sea is always like that at that time of year. He said in June it's flat, like glass.'

‘Wow,' Chitra said. She smiled, and gathered her pots of ghee and pickle, condiments every hostel girl seemed to own.

‘I went to Dhanushkodi as well. They say you can see Lanka on a clear day – but I didn't.' Her mind became blank and wondering as that day, stepping out of a rickshaw to go down to the beach. The ocean had boomed, dark blue. There had been huge breakers, and what looked like a steep shelf. She had sat on the beach for a while in her swimming costume, and a t-shirt; fishermen had pulled in their boats and thrown out ropes so that their wives could draw in the nets. The men had looked at her and the women had narrowed their eyes, telegraphing that when she began to drown, they wouldn't save her.

After some thought she had put on her trousers again. ‘I didn't swim,' she told the baffled rickshaw driver.

At the end of the land was a salty promontory, fish bones and quartz, a few boats and coir huts. You looked out into space, wind, and ocean.

Chitra got up and went to the fridge to put away her stuff. Each of her bottles was labelled with her name, as per regulations. Leela followed her, already depressed by the moment when they would part for the evening. There were firm unspoken rules about new girls, who were ignored for exactly as long as making friends mattered to them. There was one girl who'd smiled at Leela and introduced herself when she moved into the corridor. But they had never spoken at length, merely exchanged ‘How's it going?' and smiles en route to the communal bathroom, each clutching her plastic bucket.

She and Chitra headed into the foyer.

‘Late finishing today,' remarked Mrs Pawar, one of the hostel wardens. She sat at the desk, self-consciously upright in her bright pink sari and matching, daringly low-backed blouse. Sometimes she even wore sleeveless blouses. She had recently bobbed her hair. It was an improbable crow-black.

Chitra dimpled at her. ‘You know what it's like, ma'am. We were talking.' She drifted over to the pigeonholes to check her mail. Leela headed to the lift. The requirement to address the wardens as ‘ma'am' so horrified her that she avoided talking to them.

‘Leela Ghosh!' Pawar liked to apostrophise using the full name.

Leela turned.

‘Come here.'

Leela approached. She showed her teeth. Pawar took on a reproachful look. She was a kind woman, though she would nag.

‘Lee-la,' said Pawar, at length and querulously.

‘Yes?'

‘“Yes ma'am”,' explained Pawar.

Leela remained silent.

‘Your room is very untidy.'

‘Where?' said Leela. She had almost no things with her – she had moved in with a suitcase. Her possessions were in the steel cupboard, or on the small shelf. Moreover, she made her bed every day.

‘Your room was inspected by the committee today. Your table is very untidy.'

‘Two books and a piece of paper?'

‘Neat your table. And please,' said Pawar with finality and some distaste, ‘try to be sincere.'

Leela gawped and moved towards the lift, which had just arrived. Chitra held open the doors, then closed the outer, then inner door. The lift stopped playing a piercing rendition of the ‘Für Elise', and jerked upwards.

‘“Be sincere?”' said Leela.

Chitra giggled. ‘Don't worry about it. It's one of her things. “Be sincere.”'

‘She said my room is untidy because there are a couple of books on the desk. What the fuck?'

Chitra nodded. ‘They get anal about things. It's a power trip.'

‘And why was the committee in my room?'

The other girl shrugged. They had arrived at their floor. ‘Don't take it all so seriously.'

‘See you,' said Leela, sad that Chitra hadn't invited her to her room to chat. She moved down the corridor, and let herself into room 703. Her cell was clean and peaceful. She turned on the light and fan, shut the door, listened to the sounds of the corridor – other girls talking – and stretched out on the bed. The small fan turned crankily. The window was open onto the balcony, and the sea breeze came in clear. You could stand there in the daytime, or sit on the slightly dirty tiles, and watch a few inches of ocean shimmer not far away; the view belonged to the millionaires of Cuffe Parade, but the hostel girls had somehow appropriated it.

In the morning she lay blank after waking. The breeze came in, wilful, then went. It was too hot. A patch of sun lay across the floor: the curtains she'd bought a week earlier were slightly too short.

How did I get here? Small matters arose more urgently. The fan, turning fast in the early morning voltage, made her shiver. She pulled the sheet around her. The corridor was quiet. This would be a good time to bathe, before the bathroom became busy.

Crows quarrelled on the balcony, harsh and repetitive. She laughed, got up, went outside. The sun was already hot, almost wet in its intensity. ‘Shut up!'

Two large crows, one a little younger than the other, looked round. They made clockwork noises of reproof and moved further away.

She sat cross-legged and looked down. To her left, the gardens with their large trees, then the sea, then Cuffe Parade's high-rises sparkling in the sun. On the right, the road spread out like a diagram. Buses from the depot swung out of the gate, illustrating how to manoeuvre a parallelogram around a corner.

She closed her eyes. Through the lids, orange.

For a moment there was contentment. Then she thought of a similar moment, in Roger's flat. He had without remark left a cup of coffee on the bedside table next to her, then gone to take a shower. She had half sat in bed, drinking the coffee, her mind nearly empty. From the bathroom she had heard water, Roger's beard trimmer, a snatch of song. She had been liberated in that instant from the world: she might have been said to be taking part in it, yet there was enough room for her to stand back. She hadn't considered whether she was happy, and she had been.

Revisiting the moment didn't bring the same peace. She twitched, thought of Roger – perhaps she should write to him? – and cringed, for he was bound up with her ego and meant pain and humiliation. When she dreamed of him, he appeared with a cruel face.

Inside she convulsed away from the thought. No, I'm strong and capable of … whatever. The tiles were rough under her. Would she miss breakfast, and her cup of weak coffee? That would be annoying – but there was time – but she must get to the bathroom before it became busy. She moved. Her ankle hurt against the floor. And Roger and the … but she would meet someone; something would happen. She was without faith but debilitated by hope.

She would focus on her breathing. In, the lungs were tight, then a pause; then out, slowly, the relief of having breath giving way to the urge to be rid of it. A moment's quiet, then thought started again. She sighed and opened her eyes. Below, another bus pulled into the lane. She scrambled up for her bucket, soap, and towel.

When she went to work, sitting on the top deck of the number 124 towards Worli Aagar, it would strike her, surprising her, that she was somewhere she knew – Colaba, where her aunt and uncle had lived, and the familiar road, on which many of the shops still looked the same. When she saw them, she felt she had known them even during the time she'd forgotten their existence, and the earlier life that had taken place in this small world. She remembered the thwack of thin branches on the bus's upper windows as it trundled down the Causeway past the market and the docks.

As she looked out of the window, her mind, which was always chattering underneath whatever happened, said something about the mornings, and the trip to work, and was shocked. It expected west London, rushing to the tube, privet hedges, red-brick walls, the Metropolitan line, the quiet misery of sodden concrete. She looked out instead on sunshine, banyan trees, and the Causeway, and wondered.