Questions of Travel (8 page)
In her last week in Lisbon, shaken from her siesta by the rumble of a tram, Laura wondered if she had lived here long ago. For an entire afternoon, she considered staying for the rest of time. She imagined meals, routines, the room she would have, its curtains, the elderly neighbor who carried his Pomeranian up the stairs when the little dog grew frail. But then she realized that the whole continent was breathing down her neck. Where was there to go but out to sea? Along the green Tagus, where she walked in the evening, the ghosts of caravels canvassed the failing day. Laura consulted the special offers of travel agents and totted up sums on the last page of her notebook; briefly, she shared the lust of conquistadors for a new world.
But the considerations that had spurred them on reined her in: gold, questions of territory. Laura’s money was running out. Her mother, born through no fault of her own in Cornwall, had bestowed on her daughter the right to live and work in the United Kingdom. The Americas, north and south, told a different story.
Somewhat out of breath, Laura arrived at the summit of an icing-white tower. There she farewelled the city while vulgarly consuming a custard tart. When she dusted her hands of crumbs, it produced a flutter of sparrows. Far below, the Atlantic approached, slow as a slattern, to smear its gray rags along the shore.
WITH A PLASTIC BAG
held over his head, he ran through sheets of rain. The wind was at his back. Here and there in the darkness, light streamed from a lamp. Trees bending at the waist gave the impression that the whole campus was fleeing at his approach.
He was in luck. The bus had been held up by a group of female students clambering aboard. Ravi squeezed in beside a girl in a damp blue dress. He had noticed her on campus, distributing leaflets about violence against women. She was in her final year of history, she said. Her complexion, the same dark gold as the uptilted eyes, was lightly pocked.
The bus lurched, throwing them together, and she spoke to Ravi about fate. She told him that her name was Malini, adding that it meant
a maker of garlands.
Her mother had chosen it because the horoscope cast at her daughter’s birth had seen flowers in the child’s destiny. Then it had warned that she would grow up as bright as a boy.
Malini de Zilva was not exactly a pretty girl, but there was a magnetic quality to her pull. In the days that followed, she blossomed in Ravi’s mind: golden-skinned, her head lightly balanced on its stalk.
Quite soon, they were married. Six months later, Hiran was born, the day after his mother turned twenty-four.
LAURA WAS MAKING FRIENDS,
the London phone numbers in her notebook were mounting. Piece by piece, she was assembling a city of her own. She joined a library and found a pool where she could swim. Good coffee, sold even in the airport in Sydney, even in malls in far, far suburbs of brick veneer, continued elusive in London. But Laura acquired a favorite cinema, a GP she could trust. She walked and walked, or rode a borrowed bicycle. She listened and inspected. Kilburn. Twickenham. She could place them now, and not only on a map. She knew what they
meant.
Strangeness still sprang. The English voices came through a door as she climbed to a party. Laura froze in pretty sandals on the landing. How happy they sounded and inhuman, gathered in a room like that.
An unpromising alley behind Paddington yielded a genius called Sharon, who preserved the luxuriance of Laura’s hair while laying into it with blades. The result was sinuous and faintly sinister. Her lips, colored a violent ruby, were a declaration. Men noticed it. Somewhere along the way she had learned to dress, shedding her jeans and shapeless tops for styles that flattered and draped. There was now a queenliness to her volume. The bloom that would have begun to wilt in Sydney was ancestrally suited to England’s damp cold. She was firm-fleshed, the flesh rose-flushed and fine-grained.
Like all her friends, Laura Fraser had spent the eighties in black to express her nonconformity. Now she found herself starved of color. Oxfam yielded a shirt in mulberry and plum. The following week there was a kameez: eau-de-nil cotton paisley-printed in emerald and pink.
A girl who was going home to Brisbane passed on a slate-blue coat. Laura wore it on a weekend jaunt to Paris, where she bought a cheap, perfectly cut dress in a satisfying French blue.
It wasn’t a fairy-tale transformation. But there were those who saw the large white girl with pointed fingers and thought of a fairytale character, a goose perhaps or a duck. She looked motherly, capable of malice, sacrificial.
Work meant waitressing in a pub in Clerkenwell staffed by Australians and New Zealanders. A couple who often lunched there told Laura that they were looking for a house sitter while they visited their daughter in the States. Laura realized that she was tired of Mapledene Road. To reach the kitchen, it was necessary to cross a room in which, at unpredictable but frequent intervals, Blanche’s friends sat cross-legged and chanted under rugs. Laura had never determined whether this rite was Christadelphian or a legacy from the commune in Wales.
Word got around. One thing led to another. “You Australians are so marvelously reliable,” exclaimed yet another householder. Laura was now sufficiently fluent in the native tongue to decode this as
worthy
and
dull.
That was okay. She moved around London, stuccoed terrace to mansion flat to loft conversion, reliably walking dogs, feeding fish, watering plants. When stranded, she was always welcome to the couch in a flat shared by three cheerful girls from Auckland.
When she could, Laura traveled. She went to Antwerp, Istanbul, Vienna, Fes. She went to New York for six days. Manhattan confounded all her expectations, which were of the future, the sensation of
zip,
the latest thing. But the streetscape was old-fashioned and moving, an unforeseen effect of all those modernist grids. There was such innocence in their hymning of a century that had been enchanted, then.
Groups of tourists from the former Eastern bloc had appeared in London. Their jeans bagged at the knees, their hair was big and terrible, gold lurked behind their lips. But what was striking was the reverence they brought to looking. Unlike the polite Americans from the north and the operatic ones from the south, unlike the suave French and the tall Dutch, these visitors were not encountered in department stores or cafes. Too poor to buy most of what was for sale, they haunted monuments, window displays, churches. There were drifts of them in parks. What were they looking for? A fountain in which a sparrow had drowned? A statue of The Leader?
Middle-aged, with thick waists and packed lunches, they brought to mind long, hard winters enlivened only by a really tremendous new variety of turnip and the latest steel production figures—so Laura mocked silently, unnerved by their effect. In fact, these strangers made her think of pilgrims—of journeys that begin in yearning and end in bliss. They were serious, appreciative and archaic: travelers for whom the link between travel and holiness still held. Very soon their numbers increased, and they disappeared into the general motley of London. What one noticed then were the fur-clad Russians. Laura bristled with the native-born at their rudeness in queues.
There was another report from icy Sarajevo on the news. As soon as the visiting British cabinet minister began to talk, Laura muted the sound. She had made a donation to an Oxfam campaign to raise money for women raped in the war. Her sympathy was engaged, her interest limited. The conflict was too tangled, the country too obscure, its heroes elusive, its villains possessed of forbidding names.
She remembered a recent documentary that had featured a political prisoner released after seventeen years in a Moroccan jail. His cell had been so cramped that he would spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair. Listening to him, Laura had felt pity, aversion, guilt. Reports from unhappy places clung like a shadow, now lengthening, now reduced, always there. It invaded the other story, the familiar, enjoyable one, about weekend getaways and splurging in Tower Records and investigating spices under the gently smiling guidance of Madhur Jaffrey.
On TV, the camera panned to demonstrate desolation. UN soldiers stood guard against a backdrop of fresh ruins, one shifting on the spot in his boots. Helmeted, armed, padded against winter and snipers, he had the impersonal air of such men. But his feet, unable to forget they were human, continued to protest.
Laura scarfed up and went out. A dump bin in Stanfords displayed a new guidebook to London. She had heard of the publisher—Ramsay—but in a vague way.
A man and a woman were talking behind the counter. Laura asked what they thought of the book.
“It’s Australian. But good.”
Thus Laura learned that her accent had altered.
As Australianly as possible, she inquired, “Like Lonely Planet?”
“Not to be compared, if you believe the Ramsay rep. Same difference if you ask me.” The man shrugged. “We’ve had good feedback.”
The other bookseller said, “I hated it myself.”
They looked at her.
“It gave me such a shock, reading about beggars in London. I know it’s true. But seeing it printed in a guidebook. I mean, I’ve been to India and Marrakesh, and there used to be those scary gypsy children in Paris, but you never think of it being like that here, do you?” Lilac-shadowed eyes implored in English porcelain. “Then you read something in a book and realize foreigners look at us just like we look at them and…” But the chasm revealed by this crack was too dizzying to explore.
RAVI AND MALINI WERE
living with Carmel Mendis when their son was born. Although Ravi had majored in maths, he had taken extra units in computer science, and his ambitions, as formless and changeable as clouds, now revolved around the new growth area of information technology. But success found its way to graduates with connections. Ravi was unnetworked. His letters to employers turned to pleas and still went unanswered. Having thoughtlessly acquired a wife and child, he couldn’t afford to train as a teacher and was obliged to pick up his old work of coaching school students. He wasn’t the only young man on the beach at sunset, gazing westward as the day drowned.
The beach, like the sea, could turn grubby. Tourism had revived with astonishing swiftness, and it was a town where foreign men came for boys. Strolling languid-hipped where the little waves rushed his ankles, Ravi knew himself the object of appraisal. He swaggered a little under this weight—at night, pushed a fraction deeper into his wife’s greedy mouth.
When his old school received a donation of ten secondhand PCs, Ravi was hired to train a handful of teachers in the rudiments of word-processing. He returned to spaces and smells so instantly familiar that changes, great and small, burst on him like assailants.
In the classroom where the training took place after school, the red water bottle had gone from its niche. Brother Francis had lost his hair and acquired the habit of scratching his head. Part of the Science block roof had collapsed, and the new section of tiling appeared lurid and false. And the great tree had gone, cut down to make way for an auditorium. The grounds now contained only a few shrubs which, chosen to thrive in shade, were being slowly murdered by the sun.
Instructing men who had once known so much more than he did was uncomfortable. Ravi had looked on his teachers, whatever their individual traits, as uniformly wise. Now he realized that their wits were as varied as their faces. He wondered how many seemingly self-evident truths would crumble over the course of his life. What a wasteful process! And when everything else had worn away, would the last vista have any more substance than the painted cardboard it had replaced? Ravi felt weary in anticipation of all the adjustments to come, and sad.
Passing an open door, he saw Brother Ignatius’s map, fully extended, on the wall of an empty classroom. Ravi went in and examined it—the cord that rolled it up or down had disappeared. So even that was different! The map, hanging there limply on view, seemed as unremarkable as a desk or blackboard, robbed of its former flourish.
The sea was a few streets distant from the school. Three windows on the upper floor held wide bands of bright or deep blue. Boys going to and from classes barely noticed this. But some remembered it for the rest of their days.
There were many more lay teachers than in Ravi’s day, more lady teachers, too. But Ravi looked in vain for Brother Ignatius. It would have been easy to inquire after him, but the old authority of the reverend brothers kept Ravi from a question he feared would be personal and rude.
One afternoon he arrived early, before the final bell had sounded. He lingered near the gate, smoking a cigarette to pass the time. A man dressed in white, who was chatting to the security guard, spotted Ravi and crossed the road. It was Sirisena, the school servant. At interval, boys tipped him to fetch paper cones of boiled gram and other treats from the little shops at the junction.
He began at once to remind Ravi of this service, saying, “So many times I brought buns and
achcharu
for master.” His head jerked, as if dodging a blow.
Ravi resigned himself to the inevitable. The coins seemed to melt into Sirisena’s hand. But his eyes, veined and mournful, went to the pocket of Ravi’s shirt.
Shaking a cigarette from the pack, Ravi asked after Brother Ignatius.
“He’s gone away.” The cigarette, too, having vanished with greased efficiency, Sirisena informed Ravi that the reverend brother had left the school from one day to the next and gone to work in a refugee camp in the east.
“When was this?”
“Two, three years now.” A bold, contemptuous look came over the servant’s face, and he spoke of a woman in the camp. Only he didn’t say “woman.” As he came out with the obscenity, his head twitched again. Ravi could remember mimicking the tic, staggering around the playground with his head tucked into his shoulder, tongue lolling. Boys had held on to each other, weak with laughter. What amazed him now was the chalk-white cleanliness of the servant’s sarong and shirt. By what daily miracle of labor and resolve did this man emerge immaculate from his slum?
The bell announced the end of school. It obscured Sirisena’s next remark. But a phrase reached Ravi: “Tamil dog.”
Between Carmel and her daughter-in-law trouble simmered and seethed. The girl had her own notions about everything and a father who drank. Worse still, she wasn’t a Catholic. She wasn’t even a Buddhist, declaring as if it were something to be proud of that she was
not interested in religion.
Her father had studied abroad when he was young, and Malini had been raised in unorthodox ways. One of the outrages of which Carmel suspected her was birth control.
The blue house bulged with people and discontent. Varunika was boarding with a relative in Colombo, where she had recently completed her training as a nurse. But Priya, who now worked on reception at one of the beachside hotels, was living at home. With the arrival of her brother’s family, she had been obliged to exchange her room for the one Ravi had occupied as a boy. Intended for storage, it had no door but only a curtain. Priya worked shifts, and her sleep was often disturbed: the baby screamed, people came and went from the house making no effort to lower their voices.
For several years now, Carmel had been running a hairdressing salon in the front room. She was always up and down past Priya’s curtain, fetching or discarding basins of water. Priya lay in bed, staring at the nail in the wall from which her work sari was suspended, folded over a hanger. There was not enough space for an almirah. And just think how much she contributed to the household expenses!
The Mendises had always spoken English at home. Now Ravi snapped at his mother in Sinhalese, saying that none of her objections to his marriage mattered. Carmel’s blood boiled. “Think of your father!” she cried, and raised her chin at the framed photograph, entwined with nylon roses, in which her husband stood only three colleagues away from a deputy cabinet minister. Her grandson lay on his mat, and his eyes traveled all about as if to swallow the room.
A wealthy relative of Ravi’s father lived in the town, one of those connections by marriage that are roundabout yet persuasive. This man, a D. S. Basnayake, had once been prominent in local politics. Retired now, he was writing a history of the municipality in which he and his ancestors figured decisively. Being rich, he wished to be modern, and had bought himself a computer with no idea how to use it.
Carmel learned this when she called on the Basnayakes, as she did three times a year. Her feelings towards the old couple were complicated. Although prosperous, they were Buddhists, therefore damned. And there was a sharper spur to her pity. A few years earlier, the Basnayakes’ son, a senior government official, had suddenly started denouncing ministerial corruption and so on. His mother had confided that he was the target of a sorcery which had curdled his brain. Whatever the case, he was arrested and jailed. The charges against him, wholly spurious, were dropped after long months, and he came out of prison. A week later he killed himself, leaving no explanation.
Day and night, a light shone below his photo. It showed the dead man at the height of his power and good fortune, but the eyes were already moths stuck in wax. Under the influence of this ominous image, Carmel offered up Ravi at once. “He knows everything about these machines. Spare parts, everything.” The old lady stuck out her lips and looked at her husband. It occurred to Carmel that the couple might not wish to be exposed to sons. “My daughter-in-law can help you also,” she said quickly. “A very clever girl, varsity trained.”
So Malini now spent six mornings a week with the Basnayakes. Ravi guided her for the first few hours, but with the help of the notes he had made for the reverend brothers, she was soon transferring the old man’s papers on to his computer. She had a low opinion of his work: “Boasts and statistics.” When Ravi asked whether history was ever anything else, she laughed. What frustrated her was this: Mr. Basnayake appeared to think that word-processing was a kind of magic that would automatically transform his disjointed jottings into a coherent chronicle. Instead of working to impose order on his chaotic material, he could think only of the glorious day when it would be published. Who would launch the book—a local dignitary or an eminent historian? Where would the party take place? What food would be served at it? The guest list alone would require weeks of forethought, diplomacy and ruthlessness. Malini started to relate all this scornfully, but soon began to laugh and had to hold a pillow over her face in order not to wake the baby. One of the things that charmed Ravi about her was her willingness to be amused. But she hated, as she loved, without humor.
She said that the Basnayakes’ house was a morgue. At the rear were vast, treed grounds where no one walked. Chained dogs barked there. As for the Basnayakes, when they visited their daughter in Cleveland once a year, they insisted that their cook accompany them—even though she spent the flight terrified, with an airline blanket over her head—because the old man wouldn’t touch American food. The old woman, having nothing better to do, interrupted Malini constantly with her grieving, repetitive stories. Once, when Malini picked up a bottle of pills for her as a favor, she frowned at the receipt and openly counted the change.
Cows grazed on the Basnayakes’ front lawn. They owed their existence to the old people, who followed the pious tradition of buying a beast destined for the abattoir so that it might live out its natural life. Each year, on their dead son’s birthday, the herd increased.
Ravi noticed that for all her grumbling, Malini set out each day readily enough. Her wages soothed the Mendis household, antipathies and grudges submerged under the inflow of cash.