Questions of Travel (2 page)
THE SEA TUGGED PATIENTLY
at the land, a child plucking at a sluggish parent. That was the sound behind all other sounds. Ravi’s life ran to its murmur of change.
The town, a pretty backwater, lay on the west coast of Sri Lanka, twenty-three miles from Colombo. The baroque flourish of its colonial churches threw tourists into confusion. They had come prepared for Eastern outlandishness, not third-rate copies of home.
The new airport wasn’t far away. At night, the tilted lights of planes were mobile constellations, multiplying from year to year.
Ravi lived in a lane crammed with life and food. Foreigners sometimes strayed there by mistake. If they noticed the Mendises’ house, they saw a box devoid of charm. But the house was built of bricks plastered over and colorwashed blue. It contained an electric table fan, a head of Nefertiti stamped on black velvet, a three-piece cane lounge suite. The roof held through ravaging rain. In the compound lived a merry brown dog called Marmite, who could sing the chorus from “Cold, Cold Heart.” There was also a tree with mulberries as fat as caterpillars, and a row of violently orange ixoras. The lavatory was indoors and flushed.
He hated girls and sisters. How had Priya come by a copy of the
Jacaranda School Atlas
? She made a great show of studying its pages. When Ravi came to stand at her elbow, she spread her hands and leaned forward, calling, “Mummy, Mummy!
Aiyya
is breathing on my book.”
On the veranda, their mother was singing to the baby:
John, John, the gray goose is gone.
In a classroom that resembled a stable, with a half wall and a wooden gate, Anglican nuns had taught Carmel to sing. Her husband could play the guitar, and there was the radio, of course, but music in that house meant singing. The older children sang
Why can’t my goose
and
Christmas is coming, The goose is getting fat.
Geese, like God, were taken on trust and for the same reason: they must exist somewhere, there were so many songs about them. Carmel broke off to nibble Varunika’s tiny nose. Then it was
Five golden rings, Four calling birds…
She had sung it to each of her children, standing them up on her knee.
The baby was beneath Ravi’s attention. But he was only ten months older than Priya. The two fought or played with ferocious concentration. In cramped rooms, they exercised childhood’s talent for finding secret places.
There were games with the neighbors’ children. Brandishing a stick to signify authority,
Kang kang buuru!
chanted the leader.
Chin chin noru!
came the chorus. “Will you do what I say?” “Yes!” “Run, run, run and bring me…” When it was Ravi’s turn, he would request objects that struck him as magical: a square white stone, a green feather. But Priya set daring tasks, ordering her subjects to pluck a mango from a tall tree, or to pull the tail of the chained monkey who performed for tourists, his face savage and full of sorrow.
Long after a shower was installed in the house, the children went on making a game of well baths, each icy bucketful eliciting screams of joyful fear. The bathroom and lavatory, the last rooms in the house to be built, were not completed until Ravi was almost four. Perhaps a memory of this work, an odor of damp cement, a sense of walls rising, his parents’ preoccupation with the shaping of domestic space, ran under a game the boy devised when he was older. Accompanied by Priya, he would roam the town looking at houses. When he hissed, “Here!” the children would stand and stare. Priya liked to speculate about the people who lived in the house: she assigned names and ages to the children, she sought Ravi’s opinion on whether their mother was stern or smiling, she dithered over the dishes they preferred. Ravi bore her babyish chatter in silence and contempt. He cared nothing for the lives enclosed within a set of walls and was excited only by the character of
the house itself.
A circular porch lent this one a jovial air, a double row of openwork bricks rendered another spiteful, while a third,
an upstairs house
situated deep in a treed garden, exuded a sinister charm. Ravi’s imagination worked to penetrate the enigma of each dwelling: the brilliance and dark within, the disposition of rooms, the dusty places where dead flies collected.
This game, at once deeply satisfying to both children and the source of bitter quarrels, continued throughout the long Christmas holidays one year.
A SUMMER CAME WHEN,
having twirled up the seat to adjust its height, Laura would photograph herself in the booth at Central Station. There were weeks when all her pocket money, changed into twenty-cent coins, disappeared that way. The result was always the same: a gloomy adolescent skulking under a bush of hair.
One day she pulled back the pleated curtain and emerged from the booth to see Cameron. Her brother had his back to her and was using one of the payphones, listening with one palm on the tiled wall. His head drew all the light in that dim place. The receiver, pressed to it, had the black potential of a gun.
Laura dodged back into the booth. Why had Cameron left his office to use a public phone? When she heard the whirr that signaled the delivery of her photos, she peered out. He had vanished.
The way home lay past gardens that were gatherings of green decay. Rain might fall, caressing and warm, hardly different from the thick, damp heat that preceded it. Now and then a cloudburst encouraged delirium. Timetables and commuters were thrown into chaos, traffic lights blacked out, the broken bodies of umbrellas littered the streets. Sydney quite forgot that it was Western and efficient. It squinted over its brown back at Africa, at India; an old, old memory of wholeness stirred.
After the storm, pavements showed a heightened brilliance of blossom. Here and there, a stone face wore a cockroach veil.
When there was a scorcher, afternoon tightened around the streets in a blinding bandage. On the nature strips, the nerve had gone from the grass. But in the park the light was necklaces and pendants looping through trees. Laura lifted an arm from the elbow like an Ancient Egyptian; admiring her pretty hands, with their pointed fingers, her thoughts were bright and dark as leaves. Half-naked children were to be seen darting through a shimmer. Laura would have liked to join them beside the fountain, but an elf shouted, “What’s Vince gunna do for a face when the camel wants its bum back?” and Laura recognized that she was no longer a child. She walked on, badly frightened. She had just realized—which is to say,
felt
—that she was going to die. The elf, too, was doomed, along with Vince and all that shrieking crew. The broad-faced European woman stealing municipal begonias would die, and those two snooty girls flicking their flat hair at each other. All the teachers at school and everyone in Fleetwood Mac. No one on earth would be spared. The galloping gaucho, the indigo Tuareg on his dune: inside each, the skeleton smiled. The dead strolled through the suburbs, through the city, their numbers uncountable and always on the rise. How could anyone, knowing this, select the correct concourse at Central, or deal with the yellow fat on a chop while not disdaining the multitudes that starved? The gravel slurred under Laura’s shoe, the planet groaned as it turned. Behind her, screams revived and fell like sirens.
Her brothers, paid to apply the rack and the screw, Hamish in finance, Cameron in commercial law, rented a flat in Rushcutters Bay. Donald Fraser, the medical director of a hospital, often dined out. So Laura and Hester watched TV with plates on their laps. There were evenings when they sat on and on, homework and washing-up neglected. By the time the sound of a car could be heard in the drive, it was a point of honor not to move. It was not that Donald criticized
Dallas
or fish fingers. But he stood there, jingling his keys, before retreating to his room.
Wielding his electric toothbrush in the en suite, Donald Fraser was reliving the moment when he had looked in on his daughter and his aunt. One was a glazed wooden goat, the other…he rinsed and spat, traversed by pity for the female morsel he had engendered. His daughter’s eyes were coins of a lowly bronze denomination. Crossing a room, she caused him to fear that she would collide with the furniture. He couldn’t conceive of the absence of beauty in a woman as anything other than a misfortune and had no doubt that he was responsible for Laura’s affliction. Long before her birth, mirrors had presented him with lips as coarsely suggestive as a double entendre. He pressed a hand towel to them. Yet they excited women. For context is all. It was a mouth that would constitute an invitation on an attractive girl; on his poor child, it was an obscenity from which her father flinched.
She was the repository of all that was massive and defective in Donald’s lineage. He had escaped the worst of it. Even so, as he peered over the towel, he fell far short of his own ideal. Beautiful young women—
stunners
—were therefore necessary to him. His wife had been one. Her radiant fairness had passed to the boys, adulterated by the Fraser motif of thickly turned limb. But it was the girl who had suffered the full force of the paternal theme.
The runt had copped the brunt.
At her birth, Donald had thought of a piglet he had dissected as a boy. Loving his sons, he showed them no quarter. Laura, whom he didn’t like to touch, raked in money, extravagant presents, indulgence in all things except the failure in which she had played no part.
Donald put the thought of his daughter from him by recalling the image of a succulent oncologist who was driven to adjust her goldilocks if ever they met in the lift. But her smile contained a pink expanse of gum. So he had pretended not to understand when she “accidentally” called his extension. Emboldened before the bathroom mirror by this proof of standards, he dared to let the towel fall.
In the rumpus room, they were eating Tim Tams straight from the packet. An ad break interrupted a Ewing machination—something involving a secret and a lie. It must have been the reason Hester chose that moment to confide that she hadn’t always been the last after a run of boys. A sister had contracted diphtheria in India at the age of three. Pinafored Hester, lingering outside a window, heard her mother say that the child’s throat seemed to be lined with gray velvet. “That was the infected membrane,” said Hester to Laura. “Dr. Norris had ridden through a cyclone to reach us but he was too late. Ruth choked and died.”
Yuk! thought Laura. The unfairness of being saddled with
an old bag
as companion had recently begun to oppress. Thankfully, the Ewings had returned to cavort and divert. Hester went on holding half a Tim Tam. Eventually, she placed it on her saucer and drew a hanky from her sleeve. Laura thought, If you cry, I’ll have to kill you. She waited, sliding her eyes sideways and holding a cushion like a shield. The whole hanky thing was disgusting, too—what was wrong with a Kleenex?
Hester was in the grip of a senseless thought:
Death runs in our family.
For a long time, the space occupied by Ruth had remained visible; the child Hester had to step off a path or choose a different chair. A Ruth-shaped form, something like a mist but less definite, still moved now and then along a passage or across a window. Back teeth together! said Hester to Hester. It was the only salve known to her childhood: offered when a funny bone collided with a cupboard, when a sister died. Over the years that followed, the command lost its power; it survived in the present as a joke. It wasn’t that Hester regretted the shift, exactly. But the saying belonged to a world that was imperfect and solid: how had it grown as light as mockery? She wiped her ringless fingers—carefully, one by one.
ON THAT DAY IN
1779 when Captain Cook died in Kealakekua Bay, an Italian apothecary arrived in Galle on a ship registered in Rotterdam to the Dutch East India Company. One of these men was already famous and the other would die in obscurity, but each had his part in a great global enterprise that ran on greed, curiosity and the human reluctance to stay still.
Ravi’s pedigree reached back through two hundred years to the Italian adventurer; on his mother’s side, which didn’t count. Of his father’s ancestors, however, he knew almost nothing. No tales circulated of them, for they lacked exoticism and hence the glamour from which legends are made.
Mindful of his wife’s European heritage, Suresh Mendis had once brought home a sideboard inset with speckled mirrors and a portrait of Edward VII. It was solidly constructed from teak, but two of its clawed feet had been sawn off and one of its drawers was stuck. Suresh told his wife that he had acquired it from a colleague who was emigrating and had
let it go for next to nothing.
Suspicion fluttered in Carmel, but this was in the first year of their marriage, and they hadn’t yet learned to look on each other’s wishes as flaws.
Propped on bricks, the sideboard was placed on the back veranda to await repair. There it stayed and became, in fact, a useful receptacle for the odds and ends that every household accumulates: a pot of glue, string, receipts, a saucepan without a handle, a cracked dish that might yet serve for the dog’s rice. “Look in the sideboard,” the Mendises would advise each other when they had searched everywhere else for an elusive object.
It was here that Ravi came to stand when his father went into hospital with pains in his stomach and failed to return. The sideboard, ever further advanced in decrepitude, one of its mirrors shattered by a cricket ball, a second monsoon-warped drawer now as unyielding as the first, had nevertheless endured. Ravi was just tall enough to lay his head on the battered board, beside a blurred whitish ring left by a glass. Marmite, believing this stance to signal a new game, trotted up and remained beside him, gently wagging her tail.