Questions of Travel (5 page)
LAURA HAD READ WIDELY
to ready herself for adventure: travelers’ tales, histories, guidebooks. They warned of pickpockets, rabid dogs, unboiled water, children’s eyes in which the incautious might drown. But no one mentioned the sheer tedium of being a tourist. Dreaming of travel, Laura had pictured a swift slideshow of scenes. But oh, the long, blank hours that linked! They were spent waiting for buses, trains, ferries, flights, waiting to cash traveler’s checks, waiting for the museum to open, waiting to make a booking or a call. Once, Laura waited to buy stamps while the clerks read her postcards with frank interest, passing them from hand to hand. It was like being trapped in a particularly irritating Zen koan:
In order to advance, the traveler must stay still.
She came to savor the brief minutes at the end of every journey when travel was over but arrival remained prospective. The bus bumped into the station, the plane slipped into its bay. People rose, straightened their clothes, looked around for their belongings. Their involvement with each other held but was already infiltrated by change. Soon they would scatter, individual and purposeful as seeds.
In Bali, the plane door opened and there was the smell of the tropics, a moist coupling of fragrance and stench. Laura crossed the tarmac, stunned by a marvel: This is Asia and I am in it.
Dusk brought jet lag and large, velvety black butterflies. One startled her by having a face. Then she saw that it was a bat.
She couldn’t wait to write to Charlie, to describe and enthuse.
There were Australian voices in the street, bars that advertised Foster’s, surfers with eyes like blue fish.
It was nothing like home.
A man staying in the same losmen in Ubud addressed Laura at breakfast. He had been spending his holidays in Bali since 1971, he announced. “Of course it’s not the same these days. Legian was a fishing village. Have you seen it now?”
Hairy and resolute as a character from Tolkien, he moved without invitation to Laura’s table. His name was Darrell; he was
in concrete in Alice,
he said. It was easy to picture him on a municipal plinth scanning the spinifex for wear and tear—but that was quite wrong, the beard marked him plainly as a garden gnome. The gnome squeezed lime juice over the sunset flesh of a papaw, saying, “This place used to be paradise. It’s ruined now.”
For the next twenty minutes, he spoke, in statements indistinguishable from accusations, of the forested acres felled since he had first come to the island, the multiplication of hotels, the destruction of reefs, the corruption of values, the poisoning of water and air.
What was totally infuriating was that not everything he said could be dismissed.
Laura had just finished a postcard to Charlie. There was a little cartoon of herself overflowing a flowery sarong, recumbent under a palm tree.
Miss you, heaps of love.
Dull lies were all that came as soon as she held a pen. That didn’t matter because the real letter, a long one, was being composed in Laura’s head. Among other things, it told Charlie about the affection the Balinese lavished on the very young.
We’d call it spoiling a child. When did we decide that love was a curdling agent?
Darrell was saying, “Take Kuta. You’ve been there, of course.”
There was no denying it.
“Rip-offs and tacky nightclubs and pissed footballers everywhere you turn. Burgers and
bananasheks
on the menus. The whole place shut down by ten when I was first here. You could hear a pin drop. Even Ubud’s not the same these days.” He inventoried changes, all of them for the worse.
Near the entrance to the losmen, a bowl held the daily offering of flowers and cooked rice. The more distant view was of terraced fields. Laura’s eyes followed a frieze of men and women laboring in the mud, watched by the sun’s ancient face. Her letter continued:
A factory might save them from breaking their backs. But this gnome I know would have something to say about pollution. Anyway, who’d want to take a photo of a factory?
Darrell leaned in. “First time?” It was less a question than a diagnosis. When she confirmed it, he brightened. “No worries. Reality’ll soon set in.”
Reality/concrete: they were the same, Laura realized, something gray that spread and trapped.
A waterfall in a forest was mourning its lost life as a cloud. Under the lament, a whisper reached Laura:
What are you doing here?
She shook her head and raised her camera. But the question remained.
She blamed it on Darrell. How dare he assume that she was a green girl? Stuffed into the back of a bemo, with something alive and unhappy fastened up in wicker and wedged into her ribs, Laura added to her phantom letter. It noted that ugliness, typically attributed to the modern by
orientalizing foreigners,
was present equally in age-old elements. It cited the toddler with ulcerated sores along his legs, the man bowed with exhaustion between the shafts of a laden cart, the fly-wreathed filth by the wayside, the savage, stick-figure dogs. Nor did it neglect what progress had brought: the ominous flutter of discarded plastic bags, the traffic-choked road designed for the passage of beasts, the pink-kneed Dutchman across from Laura whose T-shirt, suitably illustrated, bore the legend
Bali—Land of Tits.
She alighted at her destination bone-rattled, filmed with dust, refreshed.
What she couldn’t know was that Darrell was only a pre-figuration. Across the world, the world-weary were waiting. Time after time, Laura would learn that she had missed the moment; to be a tourist was always to arrive too late. Paradise was lost: prosperity had intervened, or politics. The earthquake had finished off Naples. Giuliani had wrecked New York. Immigrants ruined wherever they squatted. France—well, France had always been blighted by the necessary evil of the French. But if only Laura had seen Bangkok before the smog/Hong Kong before the Chinese/Switzerland before the Alps/the planet before the Flood.
A girl called Corinne befriended Laura. They stood before a famous temple where tour buses exhaled. A sign declared in multiple tongues that menstruating women were not welcome. That morning, the girls had risen before dawn and been jolted on a bus for three hours. Corinne, who stepped lightly and stood perfectly straight, placed her hands on her hips. “Fucking priests. The same shit everywhere.” In Montreal, Corinne had been educated by Ursulines; she owed them her spine and her contempt. She traveled with only a child’s brown suitcase and was dressed always in creaseless white. Her cotton dress, bound with a temple sash, was a patch of light moving through dim, sacred interiors, along stairs, pausing to examine stonework. In the noon haze of a courtyard, she seemed to float. Laura, heaving along behind, wondered uneasily when and where she might change her tampon. Corinne appeared on a high brick outcrop, balanced on one leg, her joined palms raised. A volcano, not extinct, was propped above the temple. Laura pictured the punitive spurt, people fleeing and dogs, the lava nipping her guilty heels.
Mica glittered on a black beach where a gnome clad in a breastplate of fur placed himself in her way. Stupid Laura Fraser forgot the quiver of scorn she had prepared. Instead of letting fly with,
Do you imagine you’re not a tourist?
and
Hasn’t anyone ever told you that describing a complex culture as paradise is deeply patronizing?,
she gushed, “Isn’t this the most beautiful place? Aren’t we lucky to be here?”
Out of dull dreams, she opened her eyes and found that she was wide awake. Above the paddies, a cloudy crystal ball. Outside her window, one of her countrymen throwing up. A drum sounded somewhere, faint and insistent. How many Balinese would visit Australia to spend up on bargains and vomit in the streets?
What are you doing here?
Now she knew that the whisper had nothing to do with Darrell. It merely pursued everyone who left home.
Her guidebook had guided:
Stay in family-run losmens. Your money goes directly to locals, not to the multinationals who own the big hotels.
So Laura stayed with Balinese families and talked to their children in Useful Vocabulary. Corinne, who had studied anthropology, spoke of the benefits of cross-cultural encounters. “In the measure one learns from the Balinese people, our Western egotism erodes. Have you remarked their faces? So full of joy!” Then she asked how much Laura was paying for her room. Laura named the sum—a few Australian dollars. Corinne was dismayed. “But it is bourgeois to pay what they ask! That I can tell you without error. To respect their culture, you must not give more than half.”
On Laura’s last evening on the island, Wayan, the owner of the losmen, inserted a tape of gamelan music into a cassette recorder and placed lanterns around the yard. His barefoot daughters began dancing, costumed in sarongs tucked up under their arms. Nimble as fish, their hands darted and curved. The smallest child wearied of the performance, broke off midstep and went away; she reappeared from the shadows later to pick up the dance. On a woven mat beside Laura and Corinne, the children’s grandmother had nodded off. When the tape came to an end, only the two visitors applauded.
The next morning, when the last strap on her backpack was fastened, Laura looked around her room. Quite soon, it would be swept clean. Someone else, pillowed on fresh linen, would dream in her bed. The clouds would still press on the hilltops, the children’s voices would sound like rain. But the quilted green view would keep no trace of her gaze. The life of the place would flow on as if it had never known Laura Fraser. She dismissed the thought—it was plainly nonsense.
When she had settled her bill, Laura followed Wayan into the family’s living quarters for farewells. A patch of color sang in the dimness there. It was a cardboard box, decorated with purple and yellow tulips, that had once held Kleenex. Laura had thrown it away the previous day. Now it displayed its pretty pattern on a shelf.
Laura made a to-do of getting out her notebook and speaking to the children. In a flurry of shame, she wrote down their names and the family’s address. Corinne appeared, yawning in a white cotton nightie. She had already explained that she wouldn’t be staying in touch: “To travel is to say goodbye.”
The rest of the day, vexatious with fumes and delays, barely registered with Laura. She was light-headed with schemes: she would write to every guidebook and tourist office recommending the losmen, she would pay for the education of the youngest girl. She would send the family…something marvelous and transforming, a new motorbike or an electric jug. She had taken photos of everyone: she would post them copies, for a start.
But in India, Laura’s canisters of film disappeared from her pack while it was strapped to the roof of a bus. Months later, in London, the losmen children rose from an address in her notebook; it wasn’t too late, she could still send them little gifts. While hesitating over what to buy, she decided to enclose a letter, explaining the absence of photos, describing her adventures. So much had receded that loomed large when she was staying with the family: the old lady’s cataracts, Wayan’s plans for expanding the business, the children’s progress at school. The letter would inquire about all these things. She embarked on it at once and covered three pages with barely a pause. Then came a knock at her door or some other distraction. Laura had every intention of finishing the letter, buying the presents, posting the package. But she never did.
SHE CLIMBED INTO AN
autorickshaw outside the bus station in Pondicherry and gave the driver the name of the guesthouse she had chosen.
“Oh yes, madam. Number eleven.”
Thinking he had misunderstood, Laura repeated the name.
“Yes, madam,” he said over his shoulder. “Number eleven, Lonely Planet.”
Laura consulted the map in the travelers’ bible. The guesthouse was the eleventh item in the key.
In a gloomy coffeehouse in Thanjavur, she ordered prudently milkless tea. Courting couples had sought refuge in the adjoining booths, where they nestled with decorum.
A waiter making passes at Laura’s table with a filthy rag inquired where madam was from. When she told him, “Dean Jones,” he murmured.
Laura had arrived in India not knowing this deity and had quickly been enlightened. “David Boon,” she replied.
“Merv Hughes.”
“Allan Border.” And politely added, “Kapil Dev.”
“Kapil Dev!” he repeated, eyes aglow.
The ritual satisfied, he asked how long she was staying in Thanjavur.
She was leaving the next day, said Laura. “I’m going on to Madurai. And to Kanyakumari after that.”
“Then Kovalam and Trivandrum,” he supplied. “And backwater boat trip and Alleppey and Cochin.”
“But how do you know?” cried Laura. She had spent pleasurable hours putting together her itinerary from guidebooks and maps.
He was equally astonished. “All the tourists are going there, madam.”
On an afternoon in spring, she rested against fallen marble near a Moghul tomb. There were birds, stretches of grass, the names of God carved between chipped tiles of celestial blue. Families were picnicking under trees, while a group of young people photographed one another beside fragments of masonry, or climbed a flight of steps that ended in air. Then they, too, settled down to eat.
Laura had come to this place some miles outside Delhi in the company of two young men, students encountered at the Red Fort. What was irritating was that she could find no reference to the tomb in her guidebook, although this one was the superior kind devoted to culture and art. The omission might mean that she had arrived, at last, at one of tourism’s blank spaces. But how annoying not to have any information about the ruins. Again she checked the index. Her new friends were no help. One said that the tomb housed the bones of a prince, while the other insisted that they were those of a saint. Was the prince worshipped as a saint? wondered Laura. The boys neither accepted nor rejected her hypothesis. Aziz had a famous picture of Che Guevara on his T-shirt, Sanjay a photo of Michael Jackson. To tell the truth, they were both hungry, for the journey to the tomb on a scooter borrowed from Sanjay’s uncle had been a lengthy one, and they gazed with longing at the picnickers around them. Each felt obscurely that Laura, a Westerner and a female, should have provided their party with food; each recognized, too, that this was unreasonable. On the grass, the group of young people laughed and pinched one another’s arms. The scent of pakoras teased.
Aziz began to recite snatches of Urdu poetry. A translation followed: exalted stuff, nightingales and tears. Laura boiled the lament down to a preoccupation of her own, India’s smells and sights, the spiced food, the languorous air having worked on her like light, rousing touches. She remembered the sexy temple carvings of the south. She had loitered, inspecting them through dark glasses.
In India, the single men she met backpacking conformed to one of two types. There were those, frequently unbathed, who were blissful with prayer or other addictions. Only the other day, a dhoti-clad boy, scabbed and with shaven head, had waylaid Laura to announce his dissatisfaction with the natives. “You heard them lads going on about the cricket on the telly? All
lovely-jubbly
and
jolly fine shot.
Pretending like they’re English, innit?” Then he told Laura that she could have sex with him. When she declined the opportunity, he produced his trump: “I do Tantric. Goes on, innit?” Laura’s infinite letter to Charlie wondered if it would be a kindness to explain that the prospect of it
going on
only lowered his meager chances.
For the second kind of man, visiting the subcontinent was a strenuous sport played with set jaw against touts, germs, rip-offs, beggars, officials, in the end an all-India game, which he would one day recall, point by triumphant point, in the tranquillity of suburban conversation. Laura was unable to summon the effort such men required; nor did they appear to care overmuch for her. Tanned, several pounds lighter and hung with silver from the markets of Yogyakarta, she remained large and quite plain.
But here, where royalty or holiness had rotted, seeking out her company were these two. In a teashop they frequented, it was the boys’ habit to detail their exploits, each one—both virgins, of course—striving to outdo his friend in the number and nature of his conquests. They had gone there as usual after arranging the excursion with Laura, brimful of hope and graphic speculation. Now they stared at this big foreign girl, and one pictured her hair spread on a pillow, and the other ventured no further than loosening it from its combs. What was she thinking of, this huge stranger? She must be mad to have come out here with them! Soon it would be dark. Their stomachs growled.
Mosquitoes sang. The sun crashed into the plains. They returned to the city as they had come, all three straddling the scooter. Laura, in the middle, leaned into Sanjay’s shoulder blades; her nipples lengthened. On a quiet stretch of road, she slid her hand down from his waist. His response was instantaneous, but he kept heroically to his course. As the lights of roadside stalls approached, he gently but authoritatively disengaged her hold.
Outside her hostel, Laura thanked them. They waggled their heads—what
did
Indians mean by that? Assent, forgiveness, denial, rebuke?—and Aziz said, “It has been a most enjoyable outing.” She watched the night drink them up.
The following morning, when Laura came out into the street, Sanjay was waiting under the sign that advertised
Three-Bedded Rooms.
In the neutral tone a guide might adopt, he observed, “In India there are many hotels.”
In the decrepit one to which he led her, she pretty much ripped off his clothes.
A sneeze might last longer! When she suggested something he might try, he scrambled down from her and into his clothes. “My uncle will be angry if I am late,” he said, backing away from Laura on her rented nylon sheet. “He is a very angry man.”
But he was there, waiting for her, the next morning. Laura moved to a single room and spent six days longer in Delhi than she had intended.