Questions of Travel (20 page)
AT NIGHT, STRINGS OF
lights twisted through the trees in the hotel garden; Ravi knew that a man stood pressed behind each trunk. Fear came to find him like steps approaching the bend in a corridor. He rose from a table, leaving a meal half eaten, a head waiter hurrying forward. He was certain there were watchers: on a bench in a marble lobby, in a deckchair on the far side of a lawn.
One of the dreamlike aspects of this time would become apparent only long after it was over. Then it was the weddings that fanned out to command the retrospective screen. Ravi would turn a corner or step out of a lift and find himself caught up among confident, bare-armed bridesmaids. On dates deemed auspicious, the wedding parties followed each other in swift succession. Restrained in formal clothes from the cruder expressions of hostility, men hit each other on the back. Mothers searched their handbags for something vital, a lipstick or a warning. Lobbies filled up with boys in miniature bow ties; rose, lilac, tender blue flower girls gathered in bouquets. Ravi looked on from terrace or restaurant. Tourists lay like offerings beside the pool.
The black square rose and widened without warning. Then the convulsions clutched. Ravi would begin counting:
One, two, three
…The struggle against memory exacted its revenge. Having placed food in his mouth, Ravi might realize that he didn’t know what to do next. He would sit on and on at the table with his mouth full. Removed from time, he watched it pass. Sometimes leaving a room posed a riddle. How did anyone contrive to move through a door or escape from a chair?
He turned his head and saw Malini. She was descending a polished staircase. By the time Ravi reached her, she was a fat woman in checked trousers. For the first time, he registered:
They are gone.
Who can say where the dead live? Certainly not here. Time was a magician, it always had something improbable up its sleeve and the show lasted an eternity. But two had been dropped from its routine forever.
Ravi took a three-wheeler to a craft shop, where he bought Freda a handloom tablecloth. It was handsomely striped in cinnamon and red. Paying for it, he was struck by the notion that even the banknotes she had given him were cleaner and crisper than any he had previously handled. They seemed valueless, notes from a children’s game. He gave them away in handfuls, until the afternoon when he saw a man come out of the relaxation center in his hotel. An ayurvedic masseur followed. “Sir! Sir!” When the man turned, the masseur joined his palms and brought them to his chest, murmuring, “Sir, tip, sir?”
The man spared him a look as blank as it was blue. “A
tip?
” There was a pause, exquisitely prolonged to allow hope its full deployment. Then, “No tip. I’ve only got plastic.” He patted the place where tradition locates the heart.
Thereafter Ravi tipped sparingly—he was less conspicuous that way. Mirrors showed him a soft-fleshed stranger with a familiar face. His appetite had revived; in fact he was ravenous. He ate doughnuts for the first time and gorged himself on protein, returning to buffets for second and even third helpings of prawns, beef, chicken cooked in cream.
At some point, he started to breathe well, his ribs opening sideways and folding without haste. No one spied on him over a newspaper or waited in the shadow of a colonial clock. Even the country’s leaders, cut off at the neck and preserved behind glass, looked no worse than smug. Evil was a real thing. Ravi had seen it—it had looked like a vase. What flourished here was as harmless and false as the piano player’s smile. A bride floated past in her sari, upside down in the gleaming floorboards. The sky darkened, as if something enormous had spread its wings. But only tourists came running in from the rain.
Every few days, Freda would pick Ravi up in the evening. Flicking her eyes at her rearview mirror, doubling back on their tracks, now and then pulling over to the side of the road, she would drive him to his next destination. Journeys that might have been accomplished in fifteen minutes stretched to fill an hour. This expansion of time, too, was dreamlike, with a dream’s spellbound stagnation. As they approached whichever hotel she had chosen, Freda would call ahead; if a room wasn’t available, she would drive to the next place she had in mind. She was forbearing and humorous on these occasions, as if playing her part in an entertainment organized by children. Ravi decided that she relished the intrigue. He wasn’t wholly immune to it himself.
Ravi Mendis, Tourist
played only to select audiences. Registering required ID, so the desk clerks always knew that Ravi was a local. But he had refused television interviews, and most picture editors had succumbed to a dramatic image that showed a man slumped forward with his hands over his face. No one appeared to connect that ill-fated figure with the one advancing across a lobby in Reeboks and American jeans. In any case, when Freda produced one of her three credit cards at reception, every clerk drew the same conclusion as the man at the first hotel.
At checkpoints across the city, Freda’s passport was glanced at, Ravi’s ID card inspected. She would lean across. “My friend’s with me. We’re on our way to my flat.” They would be waved on with obscenities only one of them understood.
Anyone with official connections, or the money to make them, could gain access to the registration data collected by hotels. But what happened was that Carmel Mendis rang Freda. An elderly neighbor of hers had fallen into conversation with a stranger at the train station. They had chatted of this and that, and at one point the stranger mentioned that years ago, at university, he had known a Ravi Mendis who came from here. He wondered aloud what had become of him. The old man replied that he lived near Ravi Mendis’s mother but hadn’t seen her son in a long time. A few days later, turning the conversation over in his mind, he grew uneasy and went in search of Carmel.
“Did he describe the man at the station?” asked Freda. But the neighbor was absentminded or frightened or both. When Carmel called on him, primed with questions dictated by Freda, he claimed not to remember anything more. His wife assured Carmel that it was
all a dream,
saying that her husband hadn’t traveled by train in years.
The dreams that came to Ravi during this time were often of his father. Once they were in a car together. They had overshot their destination, even though his father drove, as he had done everything, without haste. They had to go back, Ravi insisted. The rooms in his parents’ house were involved, as well as a roadside stall where small precious figurines made of green glass were sold, and these were sites it was important to recover. Like all the dreams about his father, it was deeply satisfying. Ravi emerged from it soothed and refreshed.
But sometimes there was the policeman with pale eyes. In these dreams, which were brief and had the force of nightmares, Ravi might be in a garden with the man or seated near him on a bus. Everything was calm and ordinary and frightening. There was a dream in which Ravi noticed that although his companion’s shoes had been polished to a high gloss, he wore no socks. That was particularly horrible.
A letter was delivered to Carmel. She forwarded it to Freda, who passed it on. The typed note inside stated that a man of around thirty,
smartly presented,
had been asking about Ravi on the university campus. He had let it be known that the police had a fresh lead regarding the murders and were keen to talk to Ravi. The note was unsigned, but the typewriter pointed to Frog-Face.
Freda rang the officer in charge of the investigation. She had heard a rumor, she said, that new information regarding the murder of one of her colleagues had come to light. The detective assured her that she had been misled. He was polite and regretful, and inquired casually after Ravi. She had no idea what had become of him after he had left her flat, said Freda. She was unable to resist adding, “Isn’t looking after him what you’re paid to do?”
She was jubilant. “You see? They’re looking for you in all the wrong places.” But then she decided that it would be more prudent if Ravi didn’t spend all his time in Colombo. So he began to join tours that took him away for a night or two. He saw famous places: an elephant sanctuary, fabulous ruins, the precipice at World’s End. He told everyone who asked that he worked in customer relations in Phoenix, where he had lived for the past nine years. He took photo after photo; a metronomic clicking marked his way.
Taking, taking, always taking.
He told Malini, “Do you know what I’ve just realized? A camera hides a face, does away with the need for conversation, gives you something to do with your hands. Maybe tourists always have something to fear.” He used up the first roll of film, threw it away, didn’t bother to buy another. The Frenchman’s Minolta Memory Maker clung to Ravi’s neck and nuzzled his breastbone: a hard little child.
On a tea estate, a girl removed her hat and shook out hair like a sheet of copper foil. She asked, “So have you seen many changes?” The upcountry morning had been misty; a cardigan dangled from her waist. Its neat emerald pattern replicated the rows of tea on the flank of the hill. Her voice grew serious. “You must have been so homesick. This has got to be the most beautiful place on earth.”
Early on in his travels, Ravi had grasped that the most effective way to avoid questions was to ask them. Most people offered conversation only as a preamble to talking about themselves. The girl replied, “Oh, everywhere. I’ve been here twelve days. I’ve seen everything.” Her skin was so white it was green.
Sightseeing took place in a time out of time: greased, touching nothing as it passed. Scenes, succeeding each other swiftly, bore Ravi away on their surface like a corpse. His schedule was full, but nothing was required of him.
That was the point of a holiday.
Coaches carried him past dagobas, sandbagged gun emplacements, stilt fishermen, soldiers alone and in knots. In the old days, Ravi would have avoided the eyes of soldiers. Now, safe behind tinted glass, he looked into their faces. Many seemed nervous and most were young.
There was an endless flow of pedestrians beside the road, women carrying bags or a baby, boys with their hands swinging free. Ravi thought, That’s how poor people get around. As a student, he had thought nothing of walking for an hour or two to see a film or a girl. Now the patience of these slow journeys, their human pace, seemed remarkable. He realized, Tourists see invisible things.
Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved.
He attended a program of Kandyan dance held in the ballroom of a famous hotel. Applauding with his hands raised, he smiled at the woman in the adjoining seat. She drew her shawl closer against the air-conditioning and murmured, “I don’t know why I agreed to this. These tourist shows always seem so contrived, don’t you find?” Her husband, a bear in linen trousers, leaned across. “Astrid and I are into authentic local culture. Any idea where we’d go for that?” After reflection, Ravi gave them the RealLanka URL.
In a white-faced mansion, now a hotel set in landscaped jungle, the bathroom was as dim and marbled as a tomb. Ravi ran a tap into a veined bath. He even opened one of the scented lotions provided and poured a little into his palm. But when night fell, he remained unwashed. A reddish rash went on spreading in the creases behind his knees.
They were on the Kandy road in heavy traffic, the minibus laboring up a series of hairpin bends. Somewhere along this stretch of highway, dozens of students suspected of involvement in the first insurgency had been brought at night, stood at the side of the precipitous road and shot. During the endless evenings imposed by curfews, every aspect of this tale had been polished to a high sheen. Ravi had been very young at the time, but the story had persisted, passed around in conversation like an object in a game that went on for years. It was said that instead of disappearing into the ravine, some of the corpses caught on bushes and rotted. The stench was reported to be foul.
These things—the bodies crumpling backwards in the dark, the reek—entered the child Ravi’s repertoire of horror, where they occupied a vivid niche. His thoughts would glide almost pleasurably towards the scene. He re-enacted it with his sister’s dolls, kidnapping all three, lining them up on the edge of the veranda, hitting them with a stick so that they tumbled into the dirt, repeating the routine until Priya saw what was going on.
When Ravi peered through the window of the bus, pillowy clouds had smothered the sun. The old story still trembled and glowed in his thoughts, now twinkling surface, now mysterious depth. He saw a few stalls selling plantains and pineapples, and a tiered arrangement of cooking pots. A sleek mongrel stood on three legs, clawing his belly. The minibus inched forward, and the far side of the valley, dingily lush, was revealed.