Another Country (23 page)

A few evenings later, alone at the hostel, she tried to sort through the various pieces of information and impressions in her mind. Shalini's face, slightly sharp, waiting, and her words, which seemed innocuous and yet which Leela couldn't quite understand; then Vikram, who wanted to see her every day, to talk on the phone when he got home from dropping her off, who was always slightly early when she had to meet him; then her increasing sense of disorientation. She had lost direction, and was moving away from everything that was familiar. There were too many things to get in order. When she tried, they slid around, and would not stay. Sitting on her bed, trying to think, for she was sure that if she could think about it with concentration and calm, it would all make sense, she missed dinner. She undressed, got into bed, and fell deeply asleep. In the night she woke, hungry and tired, and didn't manage to get up to drink water; the cooler was two floors away.

She dreamt of Richard. She was standing naked in front of his closet with him before they got ready. He knew about Vikram; he was saying to her, ‘It won't work out. You're not over me yet.'

Her heart flipped in terror, as though she would be found out. He opened the closet and from the top shelf took a bowler hat.

‘See?' he said.

She wore the hat, then tried to hide it in her room, but it kept falling out of the cupboard or sliding out from under the bed. Vikram was there. His face was disappointed.

‘It's not my fault!' she cried.

In the morning she had a fever. She asked the bai not to clean, and slept till the afternoon. She couldn't see Vikram, and he called and became more worried. The next afternoon he came to pick her up. She had packed a few clothes; he was taking her to his house.

When in the hostel, sweating into her sheet, she had worried about nothing, simply following each exhausting stage of the fever: dreaming she was walking down a long, dilapidated corridor to look for someone, with someone else chasing her; when she arrived the person she was looking for wasn't there, and she left again. Her only fear was of the hostel rule that when residents became unwell they must be taken to their local guardian's home. Leela's LG was a cousin of her mother, elderly, living in Bandra; she didn't relish the idea of phoning her.

‘But what about your mother?' she said to Vikram in the taxi. The outside world was bright, there was too much of it. She felt weaker, though she had been in bed for just two nights and a day.

‘Well, you know her. Of course she didn't want you to stay alone while you were ill.'

She was too tired to resist, and beginning to feel lonely from the inevitability of the fever. She worried about dying, or suffering a relapse of the jaundice; inside, she had a sense that she must not damage herself. In the future, no matter how bad things appeared now, there would be things she must do.

Vikram took her to the spare room, where the blinds were already drawn, the air conditioner on.

‘Can you turn the AC off?' she asked.

She got into bed, under a thick blanket lined with a sheet.

‘Let me get some limbu paani. Gopal!'

‘I don't want,' said Leela, and fell back into the long, slow funnel of her fever.

In the hours that appeared afterwards, Vikram was her friend. She would wake and find herself, wondering, in the spare room which came to imprint itself in her mind as one of the spaces where she had existed. Vikram would often be there too, reading in a chair near the bed or typing on his laptop. He came to lie in bed with her, and put his arms around her, his face in her hair. ‘I love you, Leela,' he said.

They hadn't yet had sex. Between Leela's lunch of soup and an afternoon nap, they did. It was over soon. Feeling feverish, she held him and lay in his arms. The afternoon continued to unfold. She thought of the servant going out to shop and coming home to start the cooking, an endless routine of tasks after making lunch and cleaning in the morning. Her grandparents had also had a live-in servant, but Gopal was required to wear a white uniform. He called Vikram's mother madam, rather than memsahib; Leela supposed this was considered more modern or westernised or something.

Lying in bed with her that afternoon, Vikram told her about his childhood. At eight, when his parents' marriage was breaking down, he had been sent to boarding school near Panchgani. He'd known something was going on, but not what; he had been so lonely and miserable that he hadn't been able to focus on what was happening at home. His father had been having an affair with a married woman, a family friend; it had looked serious. In the end, he stayed, but five years later he died of a heart attack.

‘Mummy had a really difficult time,' he said. Leela, facing away from him, made sympathetic noises. She began to understand some of the other woman's rage.

‘Has she been interested in anyone else since then?'

Vikram's hand tightened on her hip; he swallowed. ‘I think there was something with a friend of ours, who's divorced, when I was in England. I think. But I think she ended it.'

‘You know him?' She turned to him.

He nodded.

‘They didn't want to get married or anything?'

‘I don't know. I don't know if she'd marry again. Or maybe he didn't want to.'

‘How did you know they were seeing each other?'

‘I still don't know for sure. His daughter said something to me. And once or twice, when I was here in the holidays I thought I heard his voice early in the morning, when I was sleeping, but Mummy said no one had come home.'

In the evening, when Leela was half asleep, she dreamt of a Christmas at Amy's, the electric blankets Amy's mother had put into their beds so that the sheets were warm when they came back from town at night … How hot she was. She sweated and turned. But it wasn't she who'd taken part in these things, she knew that, and she was bewildered at the wealth of happenings that were attached to the surface of her experience. She woke to find a young man, bearded, grave, sitting at the side of the bed. She was definitely supposed to know him; for a minute she couldn't remember his name. Vikas, she thought. No.

His face lit up, and she was embarrassed. ‘I came to bring you something. Do you want to get up for dinner?'

She sat up. ‘No. No. I might have a bath.' She began to shiver. ‘Or tomorrow.'

‘Do you want some soup? Juice? Mummy's asking. She said you should eat.'

Something in Leela recoiled.

‘Nothing?'

A sense came to her, more than an image, of the quiet corridor to her bedroom at her parents' flat, and birds singing outside in the afternoon.

‘I want to go home,' she said, and to her surprise heard in her voice a sound of crying.

Chapter 30

She padded down the corridor, unheeding, towards the dining table. Her father, from one of the cane chairs: ‘You remember you had to call Vikram back?'

Leela slowed down, forgot what she had wanted in the kitchen, came out holding a glass of water. ‘I'll call him,' she said.

She went back to her room. She was about to have a bath, she was in the state of being about to have a bath, she was sitting on the armchair and listening to birds outside: babblers. They sounded like Donald Ducks quacking at each other, cartoonish, comically disoriented.

She looked at the slim book on her bed, picked it up, read a few lines. She put it down, and stretched out her legs. She would have a bath, perhaps even do a few sun salutations, some stretches. She would meditate. She imagined herself doing so. The sun meanwhile came in from the balcony door and left a hot strip on the tiles. She put her foot in it, and the skin became more alive. She closed her eyes, and remembered yesterday and the journey back from Bombay.

‘We should just get married, you know,' Vikram had said. He'd smiled at her. They had been in the taxi, driving her back, and about to pull into a service station so that the driver could have tea and a cigarette, and Leela go to the bathroom.

‘Huh?' She had been pleased he was willing to say it, but warier than she had expected to be.

‘I could marry you tomorrow, you know. I don't have any doubts.'

‘I could marry you tomorrow, too,' she'd said. They'd discussed it earlier, in the days of their friendship: the need to reach a certain phase in one's life, to become a householder, to enter the world and leave behind the selfish days of youth. To establish oneself, to decide things, so that everything else, life, could take place. She'd agreed that it was what she needed, stability. She went shakily off to the bathroom and peed squatting in the Indian-style loo. She watched and smelt her own pee, pee-smelling, come out and go down into the not-overly-clean ceramic basin. At the sink, she washed her hands with someone else's leftover paper soap; she never remembered to carry it. The toilets smelt of phenyl. Outside, the service station smelt of petrol and frying and men's piss and cigarettes and tea. All these things were real. She tried to imagine her future life as another real thing among them, Vikram her husband, waiting for her in the car, in the sun outside.

She didn't call him back; in the afternoon he had to call again. For the whole of that week and half of the next she didn't go to work. She called Joan to say she had a stomach bug, which was vague but serious enough to be indisputable. When she did go back to Bombay, determined as a ghost returning to the scene of the crime, she handed in a note at the hostel saying that she was leaving, and giving a month's notice per the terms of her contract. She handed a similar letter, typed, to Joan, saying she had valued her time at the charity and thanking Joan for her kindness. Sathya was not in the office. His mother was dying of a late-discovered cancer that had metastised.

‘I didn't know,' Leela said.

‘I thought y'all were such good friends, I'm surprised he didn't tell you,' Joan said.

Over the next month, Leela saw Vikram several times. They met in the park near the hostel, and talked into the evening. Sometimes they sat on a bench that looked onto the shore, where, in the morning, you saw people who lived in the nearby slums shitting, then washing themselves. Sometimes they sat atop an artificial hillock in the centre of the park; when a girl Leela knew by sight from the hostel passed, she would cringe, then think, What does it matter?

Vikram cried. He said he'd never love anyone else. ‘That's it,' he said. ‘I'll be single now. There's no point being with someone else. It wouldn't mean anything.'

‘You'll get married before I do,' Leela said.

Chitra helped her pack her things the day before her mother came to pick her up. ‘Better than going through with an engagement, then calling it off,' she said.

‘Did you think this would happen?' Leela asked. She couldn't bear to think of her failures as signal to all the world but herself.

‘Do you want these newspapers? You can give them to the bai to sell if not.'

‘No.'

‘I wondered if you'd get bored with him,' the other girl admitted.

‘What if it was time to settle down, what if this is the wrong thing to do?'

‘Nothing is irreversible. You could tell him you've changed your mind now, if you wanted.'

Leela stood irresolute. She sat on the end of the bed. She would miss this room, which would not remember her or register any trace of her passage.

‘So you're going back? To UK?'

‘It's not back. This was back. I don't know.'

As the car drove through Bombay – behind VT, then up Tulsi Pipe Road and through Parel, she looked down from the flyovers to the small balconies and windows of chawls, decorated with plants in hanging pots, clothes drying, here and there a man in a vest.

Her mother, wearing sunglasses, talked about the servants at home, about a friend of hers who was unwell, about whether they'd be home in time for lunch. The sun grew higher and hotter. Leela thought of the hostel, of her room, and of the sea at Marine Drive, sparkling, impersonal.

She sent Sathya an email at his non-work address, asking if everything was all right, saying she'd heard about his mother's illness and that she was sorry. Another paragraph began:

She stared at it and pressed the backspace key.

A day later she sent a text: Hope you are okay, so sorry to hear about your mother. Let me know if I can do anything. Leela.

She called a day after that.

‘Ah, Leela.' His voice sounded not only older but further away, as though transmitted by radio from the 1950s.

‘How are you?' She was in her room, on the bed, half cross-legged. She stared with concentration at a cupboard.

‘Not great. Amma died yesterday.' She was relieved he was so matter-of-fact.

‘What happened?'

‘She just – she hadn't been well for some time, we kept going for tests. Suddenly it turned out she had this thing. It started in the breast. Then it was everywhere –' But now he was weeping. It sounded like sniffing and swallowing. ‘She was in a lot of pain at the end, that's the really fucking awful part. Sorry Leela.'

‘Don't say sorry. I'm sorry,' Leela said.

‘Everyone's sorry.'

‘Shall I – do you want me to come for –?'

‘It was this morning. Don't come now. Everyone's here – relatives, friends. People have been very nice, neighbours sending food and stuff. Come in a couple of weeks when it's quieter.'

‘Okay. I'll call you in a few days to find out.'

‘Leela, lots of people are turning up. Let me call you back in some time.'

He rang off. She went into the drawing room. ‘Sathya's mother died.'

‘Your friend from the office?' asked her mother.

‘What happened?' asked her father.

Leela sat down at the table. ‘Cancer. It was sudden. She wasn't well, then all of a sudden she was diagnosed. I didn't even know. Just yesterday. I just spoke to him. I'll go there, but not yet.'

The familiar things of her home – a red melamine bowl on a cupboard near the table, a brass vase that her mother had had the servant polish but which hadn't yet been used, a set of the pills her parents took with their breakfast – looked different, like a stage set. Sathya must be thinking that now, looking at the furniture of his mother's life and imagining clearing it away. It was a fact that a person was there at one time, and your ideas of her were so strong, the attachment and antipathy she inspired, and then she was gone in a final way. The ideas remained in you, what did you do with them? The clutter too. At fourteen, she had helped her mother clear out her grandparents' house: boxes of books, a trunk of letters, saris with rents in them, a hoarded box of Camay soap.

Many of those things had migrated to this apartment with her parents.

She eyed her father now. Mr Ghosh was reading. He looked up and caught his daughter's eye. ‘Terrible,' he said, with genuine sympathy. His glance was again caught by the book.