Questions of Travel (21 page)

Where exactly had the killings taken place? It was hardly the kind of incident that would attract a memorial plaque. The story floated unanchored; the scene sank back into landscape. It occurred to Ravi that the tale might have been no more than one of those blood-soaked rumors people love to invent. He aimed his camera at the murky panorama anyway. Settling back in his seat, he smiled at the Finn next to him. “View,” he explained. The Finn nodded. But he obviously thought that Ravi had wasted a shot.

With his hands held stiffly at his sides, a small boy ran across a roadside yard. Seeing the minibus, he stopped and waved. Several people waved back. But every bolt in Ravi’s body had come undone.

Malini had become a frequent visitor. If Ravi went up close or gazed too directly, she changed shape. They had long, silent conversations. In a restaurant, she said, “Are you mad? You know you don’t like squid.” Startled, he looked across at her. She was a bald American, eating ice cream with a long-handled spoon.

In a gem-mining town, Ravi came out of a shop where blue moonstones had trickled through his fingers. Malini was waiting: she launched into a rambling account of a strange incident that had taken place when she was a girl. On a visit to Colombo with her parents, they had gone to the cinema. Just before the feature came on, Malini went to the toilet. A woman followed her in; she was one of the ushers. She told Malini that ten minutes into the film, the doors would be barred, and the audience whisked away to a secret destination. There, everyone would be fed and watered and held captive in pleasant, solitary surroundings until they died. Pets were allowed but not radios. Malini smiled—it was a joke! “I’m not playing the fool,” said the usher. “Don’t forget that the man who sold you your tickets was missing an eye. He was the only one who escaped last time. He hid behind the curtain.” Frightened now, Malini asked why the outrage was necessary. It was scientific, she was told, the experiment would be filmed and studied. In order to advance the store of human knowledge, it was vital to ascertain what happened when people were supplied with every comfort but never allowed to hear another voice. But the usher, a lovely person, was on Malini’s side. She stood by the door to the foyer, holding it open with one arm, and urged the girl to run. Malini felt the sun on her face. She was advancing in slow motion. The usher had climbed onto her back and was clinging there like a monkey.

Ravi found the whole story frankly incredible. It almost turned into one of their rows. But policemen began ordering people off the street and herding them behind sandbags. Outriders approached on motorbikes; a cabinet minister was visiting the town. His car flashed past, flanked and followed by more armed escorts. “I must say it’s heartening,” murmured Malini, “that our leaders know how greatly they’re loved.”

Twice a week, Ravi had an appointment in Colombo. After nightfall, he would take a taxi to an outlying area of the city—he was following instructions issued by the Australian diplomat and passed on by the Frenchman. A concrete stair waited in an empty apartment block at the far end of a cul-de-sac. In a flat on the top floor a tap was always dripping; Ravi heard but never saw it. He always climbed each thrice-grooved step slowly, but was terrified only once. That was the first time, when the door to the flat opened and Ravi saw the devil. The devil was a tall, two-legged figure with Hiran’s Mickey Mouse pack for a head.

The Australian seldom spoke and never took off the mask. It continued to frighten Ravi. Fear worked to his advantage: sensing it, the man grew aroused. Everything happened quite quickly after that. The ceiling fan was set to high, but Ravi’s skin was always clammy. Once or twice, when Freda was driving him along a dark road to a new hotel, she said vaguely that she hoped everything was going all right. At no point was the mask ever mentioned—the horror of it. The face Ravi pictured underneath belonged to a fox; that was because red hair curled on the back of the man’s hands. The little knotted whip was a further revelation. When it began to claw, there were so many reasons why Ravi was glad—he was alive, for a start. He was also waiting for someone in authority to say, “Now you have earned the right to go into that room over there. Your wife and son will be so happy to see you.”

The apartment block had only recently been completed. Shades had yet to be fitted to the lights in the lobby, and the smell of paint loitered in the stairwell. The smell was quite strong but Ravi only noticed it on the way up. It seemed to mount with the stair.

When he had climbed to the top twenty-four times, his passport was returned. It contained a visa for Australia, valid for a stay of three months. Freda bought his ticket the next day.

Laura, 2000

WATCHING FOOTAGE OF THE
Sydney Olympics, Laura saw Australians gathered around a giant public screen spontaneously boo their prime minister as his rat-smile menaced a victorious swimmer.

She went to her laptop and Googled
london sydney one way.

Ravi, 2000

CARMEL MENDIS HAD WORKED
her bunions into high-heeled shoes. Powdered and lipsticked like a wedding guest, she stood with her knees apart and slightly bent. Her shimmering pink dress was creased across the hips. She had grown stouter, which gave the impression that she had sunk into her shoulders. As soon as Ravi saw her there, waiting on the platform, he knew he could never go away.

Priya had married and now lived near the Dabreras’ old place. Her husband was a well-to-do man, a widower of almost sixty with two grown sons. He was also an inch shorter than his wife. When she thought of working at the hotel, and how it had seemed as if that life would go on forever, Priya counted her blessings. She was expecting a child, she was mistress of a house with four bedrooms, her stepsons were placid men with nondescript wives. But sometimes she couldn’t suppress a pang for the stilettos she would never wear again.

Ravi’s gaze kept returning to his sister’s stomach. In the last month of Malini’s pregnancy, he had been in the habit of whispering to her navel, “Hurry up! Amazing things are going on out here.”

A string-hopper feast was waiting at Priya’s house, where the cushions had been set on their points in Ravi’s honor. Over the meal, Carmel lamented the absence of her youngest child. For the past two years, Varunika had been working as a pediatric nurse in a German hospital in Tanzania. Ravi was shown photographs: Varunika in uniform with a small African child attached to each hand, or wearing jeans in a group on a lawn bordered with flowering shrubs. How neat and self-possessed she looked. Ravi remembered her way of holding herself aloof from his titanic quarrels with Priya when they were all children. But there had never been anything controlled about her smile.

He remarked that she looked happy. Carmel tightened her lips and tucked the photos away. Her son seemed to have forgotten—they all seemed to have forgotten—that the following day was Varunika’s birthday. Recalling the protracted labor that had preceded the birth, Carmel thought, This time twenty-seven years ago I was in agony! The baby had turned and slipped and wedged its head sideways across the passage above her groin. But her children didn’t care about any of that. And now the bird-boned infant they had wrenched from her was walking about in Africa, and sending home money and presents. “Africa used to be where poor people live, isn’t it?” wondered Carmel aloud. “My God, what if she goes and marries one?” she cried.

Ravi could tell that Priya was ashamed of her husband, who picked his teeth without covering his mouth. Lal Fonseka never ran out of platitudes, which he produced with the weighty deliberation of one proffering pearls. Ravi learned that the Tigers were
in for one helluva shock
if they thought the government was going to give in to them; and that
things were bound to get worse before they got better.
Then Lal scratched his scalp and examined his nails. Not for the first time, Ravi reflected on what he owed this amiable dimwit. Leaving his mother and Priya would have been impossible if not for Lal.

Priya was thinking that it was just like Ravi and Varunika to come and go as they pleased, leaving her responsible for their mother—did Ravi even know that Carmel had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure? Then the reason he was going away came to Priya with force, and she spread her hand over her stomach and went into the kitchen to visit the welter of her emotions on the cook.

Ravi went for a last walk along the beach that evening. On the way home, he encountered the familiar odor of frying fish. He felt…not joyful, for that was a house locked and barred against him, but in possession of himself and at one with his surroundings—a brief, bright plenitude of being. His childhood, a lost country, had offered friendliness, frog song, the grit of pipeclay on his fingers from freshly whitened tennis shoes.

A creeper—was it antigonum?—was offering up big green hearts and tiny pink ones to the barbed-wire fence. Ravi recalled the frustration of living here, how it had seemed as if nothing would ever change. But the possibility of happiness had beckoned and sustained him then. Now all that was
the past.

He had reached the place where the banyan tree continued its assault on the asphalt. The vegetable violence of the tree was both more horrible than Ravi remembered and disturbed him less. Standing in its shade, Malini had once licked ice cream from her wrist. She had been talking about her schoolgirl fascination with detective novels. Over the course of a year, she had read all her father’s Agatha Christies and Ngaio Marshes, secreting herself away with their moldering pages. She was severe in her condemnation of any failure to comply with the conventions, requiring genuine and sufficient clues, subtlety in the matter of red herrings and a plausible solution. Once, unable to bear the suspense, she had turned to the end to learn the name of the murderer. She still felt bad about it, she confessed. At the recollection, a flash opened behind Ravi’s eyes: it was iridescent, persuasive, mad. It insisted that if only Malini had told that story to her abductor, Hiran and she would have been spared. To die was to be transformed into an object—but even as the thought came to Ravi, it was overtaken by the memory of his son’s corpse. Damaged and icy, it had remained a person: agonizing because, laid out in a mortuary, it still seemed to hold wishes, sorrow, fear. Conversely, what Ravi had seen on the TV set in the rooming house was neither person nor thing. It was a no-thing. Why hadn’t Malini told the man in the sunglasses about flicking ahead to find out whodunit? That small transgression was so irreducibly human. Surely even he would have understood that?

Ravi had intended to observe everything carefully on his way home, according these familiar sights the gravity of
the last time.
But enmeshed in his thoughts, he allowed his feet to carry him forward mechanically and noticed almost nothing that he passed.

Priya had said that she would be arriving early the next day to prepare milk rice for breakfast. But when she came, she disappeared into their mother’s bedroom and came out a few minutes later wearing a faded cloth tied above her breasts. To Ravi she said, “
Aiyya,
come.”

The well in the courtyard still supplied the kitchen with water. Priya lowered the bucket and drew it up carefully, refusing her brother’s help. Then she upended it over his head.

Ravi was wearing a T-shirt over his sarong. Priya said, “Why don’t you take your T-shirt off?” Busying himself with the bucket, Ravi turned deaf. As he let out the rope, he launched into one of their mother’s old songs:
“John, John, the gray goose is gone, And the fox is on the town-o.”
The marks of the whip were still fresh on his back. The fox’s den had a bathroom where everything Ravi could possibly need was waiting when the fox had finished playing with him. There was always a clean towel and antiseptic and lotions that soothed. One had a name like a beautiful, mysterious heroine: Aloe Vera. The first time, cautiously twisting to look over his shoulder, Ravi had inspected his back in the mirror. Then he had addressed his frightened face: “They’re only a fox’s tracks.”

Brother and sister sang,
“He didn’t mind the quack, quack, quack, And the legs all dangling down-o.”
Priya broke off to exclaim, “What a thing to sing to children!” Her eyes were complacent; with pregnancy, she had drawn close to Carmel, whose advice on grave maternal subjects Priya systematically sought and rejected, saying, “Nowadays, it’s all different.”

Ravi and she took turns at throwing water on each other. Priya produced a fresh cake of soap, a new bottle of shampoo. While they anointed themselves with these luxuries, Priya told her brother that Aloysius de Mel, now a widower, had returned at Christmas, along with his oldest daughter and a Canadian son-in-law. “But when you meet him, he’s Chinese.” All the de Mels had been back at one time or another, she said, except Roshi. “That one has a child and no husband. Uncle let the cat out of the bag. No wonder she’s ashamed to show her face.”

As Priya spoke, she was remembering Roshi’s big, greedy teeth shining with spit. How pleasingly life distributed its punishments sometimes! A little grunt of approval escaped her. It encompassed her bare arms, which had rounded beautifully in pregnancy, and the diamond speck on her finger. There would be another ring for her, a ruby, if the child was a boy.

She told Ravi something the de Mel girl had said. When the family emigrated, Aloysius had carried with him a plastic bag containing a handful of his native soil. In Vancouver there was trouble at Customs, and the bag was confiscated. It had become one of the ridiculous stories that the de Mels specialized in turning out, recounted with rowdy glee. But as they dried themselves, Priya and Ravi confessed to amazement: what a gesture, foolish and splendid, for the old tortoise!

While breakfast was being prepared, Ravi ran a caressing hand over the sideboard on the back veranda. All the drawers were now stuck. But when he squatted before a door and tugged, it opened. Something yellow lay inside the cupboard: Hiran’s toy viewfinder, mislaid on a visit to his grandmother’s house.

Freda drove him to the airport. The last thing she said was, “She was so brave.”

At the barrier that separated them, Ravi didn’t look back. On receiving his boarding pass, he had entered a new country. Its citizens were all around him, the young with their surfboards and backpacks, the rich with their matching luggage, the swarming poor, who as usual outnumbered every other group, as ubiquitous as their duct-taped cardboard boxes, mysterious bundles and suitcases peeling at the corners.

Ravi’s hard gray case had accompanied his parents on their honeymoon; his mother had insisted on giving it to him. When he asked if she was sure she didn’t need it, Carmel had said, “Where will I go now, child? Only into hospital.” Ravi didn’t want the old suitcase. It was heavy and impractical with silver locks that snapped. When he opened it, he found a pocket formed by ruched blue satin and a card from his mother emblazoned with
Bon Voyage
in raised, flowing script. The card had yellowed along the fold, as if it had lain too long in sunlight, but it was imported and must have once been expensive. Above his mother’s message to him were printed verses:

Freda’s last present to Ravi was a dossier. She had kept multiple copies of everything: newspaper reports, signed statements, notes of telephone conversations, the terrible little sketches, the anonymous letter from Frog-Face. There was also a long, formal statement from Freda testifying to Malini’s activism and everything that had happened since the murders. At her insistence, Ravi had lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. His pen had wavered above the simplest questions on the form: was he Rev., Mr. or Mrs.? Freda instructed, “Put ‘Criminal Investigation Department, Sri Lanka Police Force’ where it asks who you’re complaining about.” Ravi wrote down everything she said. There was a copy of the form in the folder Freda handed him, and an acknowledgment of receipt.

While waiting for his flight to be called, Ravi went to the lavatory. There he took Freda’s phone from his pack. On arriving at the airport, he had made a great show of patting his pockets before announcing that he couldn’t find his passport. When Freda and he had searched the floor of the car and the seats, she suggested, in desperation, that it might have ended up in the boot and went to check. At once, Ravi removed the mobile from her bag. Then he called out that he had discovered his passport safe at the bottom of his pack after all. In the toilet, he dropped her phone into the bowl, flushed, and left the cubicle, picturing her distress when she discovered her loss.

A stylized electronic map appeared from time to time on the screen at the front of the cabin. In Thailand, a green word shone beside a green dot:
Kanchanaburi.
Ravi was awake, then asleep, then awake, and a green chant came out of the past to find him.
Kang kang buuru! Chin chin noru! Run, run, run…

Somewhere between Singapore and Sydney, he woke and sat up straight. The cabin was in darkness. Ravi looked out of the window: the plane was suspended in an enormous night. He had just seen that
everything Malini did was for her father.
Freda Hobson had never come into it, after all. It was like passing a house after dark at the moment when the door opens and carves out a corridor of light. The beam showed two coffins and a drunkard. Malini was lounging across the aisle, and Ravi turned to her in fury: “Do you think he was worth it?” But her seat was occupied by a stranger, a man masked as if for execution and strapped into place.