Red Earth and Pouring Rain (81 page)

“Do you know how I imagine it?” she said, eyes still closed. “Big sky. Green, everything green. Blue water and women in gold
saris walking slowly. Everything slow. Birds in the trees, parrots. An elephant in the distance, waving its trunk. Unbelievable
sunsets.”

“Don’t imagine too much,” I said.

“Oh, shut up, spoilsport,” she said. Then she slept with a smile on her face, and her breath was warm on my skin. But later,
in Bombay, when we were waiting in a long underground corridor to go through immigration, she began to look unhappy. I noticed
this and looked around, and there were long lines of people waiting, everyone tired from the trip, but smiling a little, patient.

‘Relax,’ I said, rubbing her arm. She nodded. Then we went through the check, and descended into the swirling crowd around
the luggage, and then again we went through the line at customs. Outside, it was still dark, but there was the ever-present
gang of boys who wanted to carry our things, and I shooed them off and we got into a taxi. I had no idea what we were going
to do, I wasn’t ready to go home to my parents yet, and so I gave the driver the name of a hotel in Colaba.

When we stopped at a red light I turned to Amanda again, and she was looking out of the window with a kind of dazed expression
on her face. The birds were exploding out of the trees with their usual dawn clamor, and so I leaned close to her and said,
‘This is Bombay. It’s not all like this.’ I meant the long line of slums, the cardboard shacks that stretched away from the
road.

Amanda turned to me, and she shook her head a little before she spoke. ‘No. You know, there are no straight lines anywhere.’

I looked around, and I had never noticed it before, but there were really no straight lines. By the time we got to Haji Ali,
I had made up my mind, and I said to the driver, ‘Bhai, take us to Victoria Terminus instead.’ The streets were already crowded,
and I could tell, looking at her face, that Bombay was too much, and I remembered after summer holidays, back at Mayo, the
Bombay fellows would always talk about
Matheran. ‘Amanda,’ I said decisively. ‘We’ll go to Matheran. It’s a hill station. It’s beautiful.’

So we caught a train that swept us up the Ghats, and then a little miniature train, a mountain version, that took us up a
dizzying hill to Matheran. The clouds were dark and low above the wooded hill-tops, there were the long ridges, the familiar
motion of the train made me happy, I could smell the rain in the air, and I couldn’t stop smiling, the other people in the
compartment stared frankly at us and me and my face, and I finally announced, ‘Just came back to India after years.’ So then
of course they wanted to know about my father and mother, what I had studied, where, did I have a job yet, and the trip passed
in the conversation, and the children, there were many of them bumping our knees, fascinated by Amanda’s hair.

In Matheran we found the Rugby Hotel, which was a dozen cottages scattered over a knoll, around a large garden. It was raining
by the time we got to our room, which had two enormous, canopied beds, and a heavy, teak-lined mirror in the dressing room.
I liked it instantly, and I liked it even more when a waiter brought me hot toast, marmalade and tea, so that I could sit
out on the porch in a cane chair and watch the rain, scalding my tongue and feeling the water splash on the soles of my feet.
Amanda emerged from the room drying her hair with a towel. A man had brought a bucket of hot water to the door at the back
of the bathroom, and I had to explain to her that you mixed the hot water with the cold water from the tap, and she had exclaimed,
Wow.

Now she said: ‘Everything’s damp.’ She held out the towel.

’It’s almost the monsoon, you know’ She didn’t seem satisfied with that, but she sat next to me and we had our tea, and after
that I sat there and watched it rain till darkness, the trees bending with the wind, the slope of the mountain beyond, and
I felt lazy and content. We had dinner in a long, dark dining room filled with round tables, chandeliers above and paintings
of English landscapes on the wall. The food, though, was Gujarati, spicy and hot and delicious, and I ate thankfully. The
only other people in the room were a small family, parents whom I recognized as army across the room and their two teenage
daughters. The Colonel —that’s what he was —introduced himself as Amanda and I walked towards the door after we had finished.
He was from a Poona
cavalry regiment, and he had a magnificient grey handle-bar moustache, pointed and upturned at the ends. His wife had a long,
elegant nose, a short bob, and pale shoulders wrapped in a pink sari. The two daughters —Tina and Nita, thirteen and fourteen
—were pretty in black T-shirts, and they smiled delightedly when I introduced Amanda. ‘This is my girlfriend, Amanda,’ I said,
and they thought it was delicious, I could see the romance novels in their eyes, but after I had turned away I felt the Colonel’s
raised eyebrow on my back. I didn’t care, outside the air was cool, and I had eaten well, and I was pleasantly tired.

In the room I pulled the sheets up to my nose and looked at the canopy of the bed, and I had a feeling of well-being, cosiness
I suppose it was, with the wind picking up outside and the shutters creaking and rattling. When Amanda got into bed she screwed
up her nose, and I didn’t know what it was until I asked: I had smelt the slight damp mustiness of the sheets, and after she
told me about it I could see that it might be unpleasant, but to me it was a smell of childhood, of rain and the ground suddenly
turning green, holidays when the streets flooded, at one time in the year it was just there. ‘Sorry’ I said, though, and I
touched her cheek, but then I was asleep, deep in the softness of the bed and the sound of the shower on the roof.

When I awoke I felt Amanda shifting restlessly beside me, turning from side to side. The hands on my watch said nine but it
was still dark.

‘Hey’ I said, nuzzling into her back. ‘Did you sleep all right?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it the noise? The shutters? Or the sheets?’

‘No, it’s this place.’

‘The place?’

‘It’s just, I don’t know, so gloomy. All those clouds pressing down. And this stuff in here. It looks like it’s been here
forever.’

I looked around. The bed was pretty old, and you could see where they had filled in a crack in the canopy.

‘Well, a century or maybe two,’ I said. ‘But it works, more or less.’

She shook her head, then looked intently at me. ‘This sounds crazy. Do you think there are ghosts here?’

‘Did you hear something?’

‘No. I just feel it. It’s like just the density of this place. I feel them
right here.’ She pointed to the middle of her chest. I knew what she meant. There was something in the place, about the sighing
of the wind between the cottages, the age of the bricks, there were memories waiting behind every door. I had felt it in the
dining room, holding an old fork in my hand, and I felt it in the dressing room, looking in the mirror, I mean it wasn’t hard
to imagine some Englishman doing the same a hundred years ago.

‘Do you feel it too?’ Amanda said.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You’re not crazy. They’re probably here, all over the place. Dozens of ghosts. But it makes the place more
homey, don’t you think? It’s kind of a nice feeling.’ I was serious, but she burst out laughing, put her hands over her face
and collapsed into my chest. We held each other, and it was the first time we had laughed together since the plane had landed.
‘Come on now. It’s just this rain. It’ll clear up and the sun will come out and everything will look better. Let’s eat something.’
She nodded, and I kissed her, but she still looked tired and wan.

The bearer brought us tea, and I told him to put it on the porch, and then I ran through a slight drizzle to the Colonel’s
cottage next door to borrow his newspaper. He was wearing a tweed jacket and an ascot, and we were just exchanging good mornings
when I heard a loud scream from behind me. I turned and ran back to the cottage, and the Colonel followed, and when we came
up the steps Amanda was standing in the doorway, backing away from a large red monkey, which was sitting on the table, its
tail curled over the teapot, eating a piece of toast.

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ said the Colonel. We both gestured and shooed at the monkey, and he watched us impassively, taking
quick little bites from his toast. I picked up a chair and stepped forward, and then, very slowly, he turned and hopped onto
the railing, then down to the ground, where a dozen others of his family waited. ‘Rascals, rascals. You have to watch out
for these chaps. When the rain lets up they come out in full force. They’ll steal your food if you look away for a second.
But really nothing to be frightened of. You’ll get used to them.’ He smiled at Amanda, and she nodded, and then he thumped
me on the back and marched off to his house. ‘Watch the flanks,’ he called back to me.

I waved to him, and I growled at the monkeys, who watched us for a while and finally moved away, but it was a long time before
I could get Amanda to eat anything. It was a shock for her, I guess. The day passed
slowly, and again I sat on the porch and watched the rain, but Amanda was restless, and so in the evening, when the showers
paused, I proposed a walk. We strolled along a muddy path between dense patches of trees, and we walked past cottages with
names like ‘Mount Prospect’ and ‘Clearview,’ most of them boarded up. The path curled around the ridge, and we could see the
clouds far below, drifting against the mountain, but there were too many mosquitoes to stop and look, they droned in thick
clouds around our faces and hands as soon as we paused. So we walked on, and when we came around a corner, and there was a
family of monkeys scattered across the path, Amanda pulled back at my hand.

‘Really, they won’t do anything. Look.’ I touched her shoulder, and walked through the monkeys, they barely moved to give
me way on the path, and then I walked back again through them. ‘See?’

Amanda shook her head. It was getting dark. As we walked, the path widened into a little clearing, and on the edge of the
path, over a cliff, there was a rock, a black rock which curved out into a smooth shining curve, and somebody had put a smear
of red turmeric, many years of it, onto the shape. There were piles of flowers at the foot of the rock, I could smell the
sweetness, and above it a tree sighed as the wind moved through the branches. I felt a stir along my spine, a vague shifting.

‘What is it?’ Amanda asked.

‘A shrine.’

‘To what?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was looking away from it uneasily, away from the red as we lost it in the gathering darkness. So I turned her around and
we went back to the hotel, and again the dinner in the cavernous dining room was delicious. I slept as soon as I was in the
bed, and my sleep was deep and long.

The next morning when I awoke Amanda had her eyes closed, but I couldn’t really tell if she was asleep or not, her eyes moved
under the lids nervously. I crept out of bed and dressed, and went outside and walked the path. The air was brilliantly clear,
and the slope fell away sheerly for thousands of feet to the plain. The horizon was hundreds of miles away, and the freshness
made me walk briskly, enjoying the snap of grass under my feet and the birds curving out of the trees. I found a
stone seat on a promontory, and sat on it to watch the sun rise, the serried gradients illuminated one by one. Below me, a
herdsman took his cattle down the slope. Near the seat there was a rock with a carved legend in it: ‘Louisa’s Point.’ The
rock had cracked straight through the middle, and there was the shoot of a plant growing through it, but the writing was still
clear. I wondered what Louisa had seen from this mountain. I squinted my eyes against the sun; if it was blurred, if it was
veiled, Louisa could have thought it was the Sussex Downs, maybe, the dark line of an English wood, and perhaps for a minute
or two she was at home.

When I got to the hotel the Colonel and his family waved to me from his cottage, and I sat on my porch and waited for the
bearer to bring me my tea. I was drinking it when Amanda came out.

‘Look,’ I said as she sat down. ‘The sun’s out.’

She smiled, and it only made her look more tired and pale.

‘Hey, cheer up.’ I was irritated, and I suppose there was anger in my voice. She flinched and rubbed her chin.

‘But maybe I should go home,’ she said.

‘Home?’ I put down my cup, and at the sound she drew up her legs into the chair and put her arms around her knees.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Her voice was so small that I barely heard her, and she looked so unhappy that my heart turned, and I got up from my chair
and walked behind hers, I squatted and put my arms over hers, my head on her shoulder, and I kissed her cheek, I meant to
say, it’s all right, but looking over her shoulder something strange happened to me, the world tilted on some axis that I
had never known existed, suddenly the trilling voices of the Colonel’s daughters, happily dipping in and out of Hindi and
English and two other languages, suddenly they became a babel, a multiple confusion and harsh, lost in the ceaseless chattering
of the birds, the tinkling of cow-bells tinny and hurtful in the noise, the cottages and their endless memories were heavy
and decaying, the trees were huge and unarranged, they seemed to loom over the mad stupefaction of the garden, the uncontrolled
profusion, the sky was bright and hard with sunlight, I felt nausea, loneliness, my self was a hard little point, a unitary
ball spinning and yawing in a hugeness of dark where there was no beginning, no middle, no end: no meaning. And
through my terror I saw the monkeys watching me, their reddish pelts glowing in the sun, their eyes expressionless.

When I was able to get up, I slowly went back to my chair, sat down and tried to breathe. I felt tears in my eyes, so I had
my face turned away. The Rugby Hotel was itself again, back to the shape that comforted me, and in the valley clouds were
forming, it was going to be another afternoon of rain, I could feel it on my face. I had to swallow again and again before
I could speak, and when I did I had no anger left, only sadness.