Playing Fields in Winter

by Helen Harris

  It stayed fine – in Sarah’s terms, gorgeous. For three or four days the sun shone steadily, the temperature rose and the city was transformed. Sarah persuaded Ravi – reluctant to admit that anything as slight as this should be welcomed so extravagantly – out into the garden, the park. Her pleasure infected him and they fell on to the grass (damp, Ravi warned) and gave in to exuberance. Sarah held up her white arm against Ravi’s, rejoicing, ‘If it stays like this, I’ll start to go brown too!’

  ‘I had forgotten,’ Ravi said wonderingly, ‘how everyone goes crazy here at the first ray of sunshine.’

  And they did go crazy. By the end of the first week of the fine weather, girls were appearing in backless T-shirts, cutaway dresses and gaudy, flowing ethnic skirts. They bicycled through the streets with a beatific look on their pale faces. Then they came out into the college gardens in bikinis, displaying their impossibly white skin to an equally pale sun.

  Ravi watched them with amusement: the white larvae of the winter disporting themselves in the sunshine. He found them funny, but also a little touching; their happiness was so earnest. Physically too, the girls were transformed. Perhaps the sunlight showed up shades of difference which he had not noticed before. He saw dull hair flare into splendid yellow and puddle-brown eyes turn out to be green. All of them went an excited pink. He made fun of them; their sillier excesses were extraordinary, but he also felt a pitying fondness for them all, driven crazy by such a small promise of summer. Blithely, they were utterly unaware of how ridiculous they seemed.

  Sarah started to experience a new source of discontent around this time; she wished that she was not white. There were various incidents which prompted this; Nanda comparing their bodies when Sarah tried on one of her saris for fun, waggling her head and exclaiming, ‘So – oh pale!’; Ravi commenting jokingly again on the pinkness of her nose on a cold day. Being white began to be associated for her with being vulnerable and ridiculous. Her skin could not conceal its flustered reactions to climate, to emotions, to Ravi Kaul. In bright sunshine, she would burn. She was condemned to silly transparent obviousness. The Indians, with their camouflage of opaque skin, were more at ease in the world than she was.

  She had an urge to buy herself some new clothes. Last summer, she had mainly worn a broderie anglaise Edwardian outfit alongside David Whitehead’s cricket whites. But this now seemed quite inappropriate. So she went to a boutique and bought a dress of Indian fabric – thin, violently coloured cotton with small circles of mirror sewn to the skirt. She put it on as a surprise for Ravi when they went together to a party given by Ved Sharma to celebrate the news that his wife Amrita was expecting a baby. To Sarah it seemed a remote and unlikely theme for a party, but it was a festive occasion. All the Indian students she knew were there and Amrita, the star of the evening, served them delicious snacks and smilingly received their compliments. Sarah enjoyed the feeling of privilege which came from participating as a member at someone else’s private ceremony. It made up for the earlier disappointment, when Ravi had reacted almost teasingly to her enthusiastic new dress.

  Most of the parties that summer were different. The garden parties, the strawberries and Pimms parties went on, but Sarah felt she was on the outside of them now and no longer part of the fun. She strained to experience the parties as Ravi must experience them. Often it seemed that Ravi enjoyed them in the end much more than she did, for he could be quite spontaneous whereas she felt obliged to monitor her every move.

  One evening, going down the river in a punt with Ravi, Sunil and Dilip Joshi, she saw David Whitehead and Simon Satchell punt past them. On the one hand, she felt glad and defiant that David should see her sitting happily next to Ravi, but on the other she felt a moment of sneaking embarrassment that David should punt so expertly past them, while Sunil splashed experimentally along.

  *

  ‘Tell me more about your family. You’ve got two sisters, haven’t you?’

  They were lying in bed in Sarah’s room one Sunday morning and summer rain was spattering the window. By keeping the curtains drawn, they could pretend they were somewhere else.

  ‘Yes, and a brother Ramesh.’

  ‘How old are they all?’

  ‘Oh, goodness! Ramesh is nearly nineteen, Asha’s fifteen and Shakuntala’s thirteen, I think.’

  ‘Do you get on quite well with all of them?’

  ‘Yes, actually I do. I mean, it’s a bit difficult with Asha and Shakun; they’re a lot younger and I was always away from home so much when they were growing up. I think they look on me as much as an uncle as a brother, you know; a distant figure returning from afar and bringing gifts.’

  ‘Do they look up to you?’

  ‘Well, yes, if you put it like that, I suppose they do. They’re awfully sweet and fight to look after me when I come home.’

  ‘Huh, no wonder you’re so spoilt! Do you have people waiting on you hand and foot?’

  ‘Naturally. We live like maharajahs, you know.’

  ‘No, don’t make fun of me. I mean, do you have servants?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three? Is that all? I imagined lots. Are they faithful family retainers? Or sort of short-term, like au pair girls?’

  ‘No, they’ve been with us for years. Ila cried when I came to England.’

  ‘Ah, how touching; the young master leaving the family home. It’s like a Victorian novel.’

  ‘But Sarah, she was really sad. You don’t understand how strong those ties are there. It’s nothing like you imagine.’

  ‘Well, I certainly can’t imagine any of our au pair girls shedding bitter tears if I was going off to India. Tell me about your brother. What’s he like?’

  ‘Ramesh is a good sort. He’s very serious, though, not like me at all. He takes everything terribly seriously and always weighs up all the pros and cons before he acts. He should have been the eldest; I think he considers me a bit of a tearaway. We’re very different, but he’s a great chap.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Oh, he’s still at college in Delhi, the same college I went to actually, trying to live down his big brother’s terrible reputation.’

  ‘Did you have a terrible reputation?’

  ‘Oh, not really, I was just very argumentative. I wouldn’t accept all the rules and regulations without a fuss. We were a group, actually, about ten of us, and we started a kind of reform movement in the college. A lot of the students there had a terrible bureaucratic mentality; they were just interested in sitting on their backsides and getting a piece of paper at the end to show that they had done it. They only studied within the strict limits of what was laid down in the curriculum; they weren’t interested in branching out, leaving the beaten track, beaten to death, and – gracious! – possibly discovering something! And most of our teachers were just as bad. They kept to the narrow path of their textbooks, never looking up, never looking out, teaching in a vacuum, never incorporating a scrap of contemporary comment into their classes. So the group of us devised a new method of non-violent protest; it was intended to draw those imbeciles’ attention to what was going on around them in the country, to the fact that you can’t teach all subjects in a vacuum, that sometimes you have to take day-to-day events into account. We used to smuggle a radio into the classroom and turn it on suddenly full volume for the news, disrupt all that dead rote learning with the clamour of outside reality. That was the idea. We kept it on just long enough for the first headlines – usually that wasn’t long enough for the lecturer to pinpoint exactly who was responsible – and then we’d snap it off. Everyone knew who it was, but we took it in turns to hide the radio so they could never put the blame on just one of us. And it shook them. It was such a prestigious place, you see. We were supposed to be grateful to be there and concentrate on our books, not actually agitate for improvements. Once one of the history lecturers – he was the worst offender – did something particularly blatant: there had been a decree in Parliament the very day before his class, w
hich had direct relevance to the subject he was talking about – and he ignored it. He talked for a whole hour – skirting round the issues, nimbly dodging every possible reference to the decree and never once suggesting that the topic had anything to do with our lives. Even some of the duller students saw what he was up to. That night, we cut all the pages dealing with the decree out of the newspapers and went and stuck them over the windows of his college room – he was a widower, you see, he lived in the college and supplemented his salary with disciplinary duties – so that in the morning when he opened the curtains, he couldn’t see out because all the headlines about the decree were glued fast to the pane.’

  ‘I wonder if I would have liked you if I’d met you then.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, you sound so cocky and arrogant. I mean, I don’t think I’d like you if you were like that here.’

  ‘Like what? I’m exactly the same here as I was over there … I think.’

  ‘You can’t be! You’d never have anything to do with the people who do things like that here.’

  ‘Ah, that’s only the context, Sarah. I’m exactly the same here, but my surroundings are different. Pasting over someone’s window here might be an obnoxious thing to do, but it would be done by drunken rugger types after a party, wouldn’t it, and they’d stick up pictures from girlie mags. That’s the difference, surely, not me?’

  ‘I see what you mean. I think I like you anyway.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Because, actually, I think this place could do with a little of the clamour of outside reality too.’

  *

  ‘Show me where you live on the map. It’s in the North, isn’t it?’

  The blue sliver of an air-letter, used as a bookmark, frequently reminded Sarah of the country she knew nothing about. Even the air-letter paper was different from the smooth blue she was used to; it was rougher and grainy, with incomprehensible Hindi ciphers, and where Ravi opened it impatiently the paper always tore.

  ‘Yes, roughly.’

  ‘Show me on the map.’

  ‘You get the map. I feel too lazy.’

  ‘Here. There – India Plains, plate thirty. Is it on this page?’

  ‘Yes, there. That’s where I live.’

  ‘Lucknow. Is it nice?’

  ‘On the whole, no. The part we live in is lovely though. It used to be called the City of Gardens. Now it’s more like the City of Shacks. But our neighbourhood is still pretty nice.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Tell me about your house.’

  ‘What do you want to know? It’s nothing special.’

  ‘No, but describe it to me. I want to be able to imagine you there during the Long Vac.’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘Well, go on, it’s only fair. You know what my home’s like.’

  ‘Well, it’s in a district a little way away from the centre, quite near the river. The houses are mostly quiet, white bungalow-type places in gardens. Ours is one of those.’

  ‘Is it quite big?’

  ‘No, not really. In fact, you’d probably find it rather small by your standards.’

  ‘But it has a garden?’

  ‘Goodness, you’re really interrogating me.’

  ‘Well, I want to know. I can’t imagine what it’s like there. I mean, you might as well come from the moon for all I know about it.’

  ‘Oh, the moon’s more romantic.’

  *

  ‘I heard from my father this morning.’

  ‘Did you? What did he have to say?’

  ‘Nothing much. He hopes that I’m working hard and making the most of my time here.’

  ‘Well, you are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am. Though not exactly what he had in mind.’

  ‘How would he feel if he knew about us?’

  ‘Oh, he’d be horrified. He’d probably think I was on the road to ruin.’

  ‘Does he write to you often?’

  ‘On the first of the month.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It’s hardly a letter actually, more of a bulletin. I mean, it’s not written because he felt like sitting down and writing to me or because he has anything in particular to communicate; he writes because it’s the first of the month and when I left, he said he would write to me on the first of the month.’

  ‘Good heavens! Do you get on well with him?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I think he sounds rather daunting.’

  ‘He’s not daunting; he’s too predictable to be daunting. He’s just very stuck in his ways and clings on to all the old traditions. He’s petrified of letting go in case he finds himself adrift in a world he can’t cope with.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a civil servant, he works for the State government. What exactly he does, I’ve never been too clear. When I was little, I thought he just drove around in a big car with net curtains, shooing people off the road. Maybe I was right.’

  ‘How about your mother? What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s wonderful, a real darling.’

  ‘Does she write to you a lot?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘More or less than your father?’

  ‘Oh, much less.’

  ‘Why, if she’s so much nicer? Why doesn’t she write to you on the first of the month instead of your father and just let him send you an occasional sermon?’

  ‘My father doesn’t know she writes to me. She’s very shy and secretive about her letters and she gets one of my sisters to post them without Daddy knowing. They’re her little indulgence.’

  ‘But, good heavens, you’re her son. Why shouldn’t she send you letters?’

  ‘Oh, my father would insist on reading them if he knew.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Don’t sound so amazed. In India most fathers are tyrants, especially fathers like mine who feel threatened by the big wide world. They like having a little universe in which they can be top dog.’

  ‘But why does she put up with it?’

  ‘She has no option.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But what? Of course it’s shameful, but after all, there are worse things. He’s not an unkind man, he’s not harsh to her, he’s just a petty dictator.’

  ‘But, Ravi, it’s such an intrusion; it’s as though she had no right to her own affairs.’

  ‘Of course. But you know, he’s not unique. Lots of husbands in India are like that, in his generation anyway. He doesn’t see anything wrong in what he’s doing and I’m not sure that she does either.’

  ‘Does he read the rest of the family’s mail as well?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure of it. I get two quite different kinds of letters from my sisters – those written for Daddy’s inspection and those they’ve smuggled out. You can tell the difference straight away.’

  ‘Gosh, I think that’s awful!’

  ‘The close-knit Indian family.’

  ‘It sounds suffocating.’

  ‘I suppose it must to you. It can be, of course. But you don’t know the positive side of it; people aren’t so lonely there.’

  ‘I’d rather be lonely.’

  ‘Would you? Would you really?’

  ‘Yes, I would! I mean, I just can’t imagine my father spying on my mother’s correspondence. Frankly, he couldn’t care less; it wouldn’t even bother him, I don’t think, if she was writing passionate love letters to someone. He wouldn’t even notice.’

  ‘There you are! Is that any better?’

  ‘Yes, it’s infinitely better.’

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Sarah, you don’t know anything about India; you’ve never been there. You know, you can’t judge everything over there by the standards you would here. In a way, you can’t judge anything by the standards you would here.’

  *

  The final weeks of term were wonderful
. As well as garden parties, there were dinners of vegetable curries and lentils, gatherings to share newly arrived Indian sweets or rare records or letters of common interest. Sarah was taken to the shabby little cinema in the outskirts and found herself the only non-Indian in the audience. It was a revelation, showing her that her geography had been self-imposed all along.

  The background stayed the same. One particularly warm evening, David Whitehead saw Sarah and Ravi walking hand in hand on the opposite side of the river. He found the sight oddly satisfying and gloated over their silly, oblivious smiles. If Sarah Livingstone was now going around with that Indian chap, then as far as he was concerned she could be after only one thing – and if that was what she was really like, then she could never have been up to much after all.

  There was still punting and cricket in the park. Sarah and Ravi lay on the grass and made fun of the cricketers. At first, it struck Sarah as funny that Ravi should know the rules of cricket so much better than she did, but he got quite angry with her when she laughed about it. It stayed fine and Sarah wore her Indian dress and open sandals. Ravi wore his light muslin kurtas and later Sarah wore one of them too. The weather was exceptionally warm, almost close. They went to an open-air performance of Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale. In the middle of the play a thunderstorm broke and they giggled at the way the audience stoically brought out umbrellas and plastic macs and no one ran away. After the thunderstorm the weather cleared again and, in the morning, the smell of lukewarm drying grass was nearly intoxicating. It was warm enough for picnics, warm enough for bare arms at night. Bizarrely, incomprehensibly, someone called Verity Claybody tried to kill herself in one of the sunniest weeks.

  But in that similar summer, Sarah was travelling. Apparently stationary amongst the same quadrangles and the same cavorting, she felt her distance from them grow. She could even less wholeheartedly be part of all that, now that she was part of Ravi. A childhood memory of carrying a frog into one of her mother’s polite fund-raising coffee mornings and all the ladies recoiling in squeamish alarm surfaced strangely when she arrived at a certain kind of party together with Ravi. She sensed the same instant of shock, the same social perplexity over what would be the right reaction. And then the swift efforts to crowd around the frog and cry, ‘How sweet, how educational!’ also echoed that earlier memory. Sarah felt she was on the brink of a departure. But it was in fact Ravi’s departure for, on July the first, he would be going back to India for the Long Vacation.