by Helen Harris
By the way, there was no need to get into such a state over what I said about not writing to me. All that I meant was that I hoped you weren’t keeping me a shameful secret and I’m quite sure now that you’re not. You know, misunderstandings occasionally creep in over four thousand miles.
I love you in any case.
Sarah
*
16 September, Lucknow
Dear Sarah,
Just a quick note to say please don’t be angry with me, but I will not be flying back until October 5th. There has been a last-minute change of plan and I will now be staying on in Delhi at my uncle’s house for an extra few days before I leave. I didn’t want to do this, but it seems there is no way out of it. It’s a complicated story, but I’ll explain everything when I get back. Less than a month to go now in any case! I can hardly wait …
All my love, Ravi
*
In the morning on the verandah, with the koels calling in the coral pink cool, Ravi drank his tea and thought about flying back to England with mixed feelings. Part of him couldn’t wait to be gone, away from his family and the female relatives and the fuss. But part of him convulsed in a cowardly longing to cling on to this family cosiness, the way he had clung tightly to his mother as a child when he was frightened of falling into the murky depths of the latrine.
*
Sarah met him at the airport, at seven o’clock on a raw October morning. She had travelled out to Heathrow jubilant on the Underground. Ravi came out of the Arrivals door, smaller than she remembered him and cluttered by the crowd around him. After she had run to him and hugged him, there was first a problem to solve over a missing bag and then other luggage and transport to sort out. It was only when they were actually on the Underground again, going back to the house in the white crescent where Ravi had agreed to stay for two days, that they both realised that the bond between them had lasted and, disregarding the stiff passengers, clutched each other in exultant triumph.
Ravi had a funny little brown string tied around his wrist, which Sarah noticed as she held his hand.
‘What’s this?’
He tucked it under his cuff, dismissed it. ‘Shakun put it on.’
‘Your little sister Shakun? Why?’
‘Oh, it’s for a safe journey. It’s nothing.’
‘Well, you’ve arrived safely. You can take it off now.’
‘No, no. It’s a good luck thing; you keep it on until it wears through.’
They giggled and kissed.
Later in the day Sarah noticed the string again, when Ravi was asleep in her parents’ guest room, exhausted by his journey. His arm was hanging down over the edge of the bed and the little brown string – firmly knotted, she now saw – sat smugly around his wrist. It looked to her like an ownership label and she had a jealous urge to snip it off.
The two days at her parents’ house, much dreaded and debated, went easily. Ravi had never wanted to come there before, out of nervous embarrassment she thought. But the visit was quite a success. Her mother and father were elaborately polite to him, her younger brother simply ignored him and Ravi, well used to tuning his behaviour to please people like Sarah’s parents, was almost effortlessly charming and appreciative. He looked at Mr Livingstone’s photographs of India and shook his head in wonder, repeating, ‘Oh my, oh my!’ He ate amply of the studiously spicy dinners which Mrs Livingstone had prepared. He was deferential and attentive.
But at night, in the little guest room which Mrs Livingstone had given him, Ravi looked out at the street-lamp through the flowered curtains and felt odd and ill-at-ease – a little like a trespasser in the soft lumpy bed, as if he had been let into the house through mistaken identity and given a prodigal’s welcome. He had never wanted to come before because it would have seemed to put a stamp of public acknowledgement on the seriousness of their bond. Now, he regretted that he had succumbed to Sarah’s pressure. Until Mr and Mrs Livingstone had gone to bed and Sarah came creeping giggling across the landing to him, he seemed to have no business being there and when she tiptoed back in the morning, he felt doubly strange. He was glad when the agreed two days were over and left for Oxford at the first possible opportunity.
*
‘God, I missed you so much in the summer, I thought I would die!’
‘I missed you too.’
‘Did you? Did you really?’
‘Of course I did. I used to go out into the gardens at night and howl at the moon.’
‘Oh Ravi, why aren’t you ever serious? Honestly!’
‘This is hardly a position for being serious, is it? Naked in your bedchamber at … two a.m.?’
‘No, but I want to be serious. We’ve got so incredibly much to talk about.’
‘I didn’t come all the way over here tonight to be serious, Sarah; through all that wind and rain and kamikaze cyclists—’
‘Sometime we have to be serious.’
‘Sure, sure, but not tonight, OK?’
‘Oh Ravi, that’s just the easy way out.’
‘Speak for yourself, Miss Livingstone! OK? Agreed? It’s a deal?’
‘It’s a – a deal. Oh, Ravi!’
‘Good, so not tonight.’
*
In the third year, they both had new rooms. Sarah chose a room in a turret because it had no neighbours; it looked in two directions from ill-fitting windows, over the red buildings of the college and out along the suburban street. A small architectural frivolity at the end of an institutional wing, Ravi called it her ‘ivory tower’. It was a good choice because it was so isolated that no night porter ever came to check on her or discovered Ravi’s almost constant presence in her room. But it was cold, so cold that Ravi began to catch his germs again. Almost as soon as they got back he fell ill, smitten by the contrast between Lucknow and an English October, and Sarah had to nurse him. She loved nursing him, a quite unexpected pleasure for she had always thought she was hopeless with invalids. But Ravi, weak and dependent on his back, was more within her grasp than ever before and, for the first time, she felt she possessed him entirely. His illness began as an ordinary cold but progressed alarmingly into a combination of bronchitis and ’flu. He lay in bed in his room, wheezing and sweating while Sarah fussed around him with hot lemon drinks and blankets. Ravi luxuriated in this nursing and Dev and Sunil, only recently returned from their protective families, looked on enviously at this female care.
Certain things had always seemed to Sarah to sum up the stigma of being English and one of them was having a cold. Ravi said, ‘When I arrived here, I thought sniffing was the national language. I didn’t know how much information could be conveyed by mucus.’ And in a gorgeous, hideous imitation, he had snorted his way through a whole spectrum of English emotions: prudishness, arrogance, insularity, disdain. Sarah had giggled, but when she caught a cold herself she remembered the jibe and kept away from Ravi. The accompanying ugliness was bad enough and she did not want to be ridiculed for her classically English complaint.
But Ravi’s cold was far more dramatic, life-threatening. The college nurse, called in when his temperature rose, was unsympathetic. ‘Too many people in here, for a start,’ she said, eying Sarah, Sunil and Dev grimly. ‘The first thing you need is a good night’s rest.’ They did not call her in again. The starchy phrase ‘a good night’s rest’ became a private catch-phrase, which one of them would sometimes murmur smugly after sex.
It was November. Sarah rode through the fog on her bicycle and one afternoon was hit by a delivery van which materialised out of the grey mist. Stricken, Ravi rushed to fetch her from the Casualty department of the hospital. They mourned over her five stitches and an enormous but amusingly located bruise. Ravi was secretly rather impressed that Sarah did not cry at all; she was even tougher than he had thought. She vaunted her injuries afterwards like battle scars and told the story of the accident all over again to an admiring audience. She also seemed to have no idea how horrid her wounds looked. Ravi watched her sleep that nigh
t and was touched with pity for her poor arms, stretched repugnantly black and battered on the much-laundered sheets.
On Guy Fawkes’ night, there was a party given in Ravi’s college. At first, Sarah was secretly amused to see how excited Ravi and his friends were over fireworks. She thought it was endearingly uninhibited, their usual exuberant selves. But she found out that they were actually celebrating their own childhood memories, far removed from ‘Penny for the Guy’. The bright flames in the dark reminded them of Diwali, the festival of lights, when in India the houses are decorated with tiny oil-lamps. Their exuberance had nothing to do with the boyish fun of bangers; they were miles away. Sarah suddenly felt left out of their evening, for she had no idea any more what the party was about. Ravi wrote her a message in the dark with a sparkler, but she couldn’t follow it. ‘I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ she said snappily. Sunil filched some Roman candles from the communal store and took them away for a private display afterwards. He, Dev and Ravi stood and watched them burn in utter silence. That night, Simon Satchell was badly burnt while fooling around with a Catherine wheel.
Emily Williams gave another party to which she invited Sarah and Ravi, and Sunil and Dev as well. At the party, Sunil made a pass at Emily which Sarah and Ravi watched with incredulous amusement.
‘We’ve started a trend,’ Sarah said happily to Ravi, as they went to bed afterwards.
But Ravi did not reply; oddly, Sunil’s behaviour repelled him, although he could not have said exactly why. He had found the sight of his friend fondling Emily Williams in the dark of the party peculiarly unpleasant. He felt somehow implicated in the murky scene and did not want to dwell on it, so he pretended to be exhausted and already half-asleep.
Perhaps there had been the occasional difficulty, dwarfed by memory: meeting David Whitehead at a small lunch party. But Ravi had coped well, had come out of it better, in fact, than David who had appeared gauche and churlish. Sarah had felt disconcerted afterwards, wondering how she could possibly have been fond of David. That seemed a different incarnation now: rugger shirts and crumpets, vicars and tarts parties, playing games with a blond schoolboy hero. Ravi had been most diplomatic afterwards, had made no comment until Sarah pressed him. Perhaps there had been the occasional argument too – not many, but the chance eruption of some unimportant grievance; the issue of the pillow-case, the unexplained air-letter, the beautiful sari lent by Nanda which Ravi had refused point-blank to let Sarah wear to a party. And there had been Christmas.
Everyone became slightly frenetic in the build-up to Christmas and Sarah, whether she wanted it or not, found herself caught up in the excitement too. Only Ravi it seemed to her, stayed aloof, wouldn’t be inane and jolly, wouldn’t join in. And funnily, it had never occurred to Sarah that she might have to give up Christmas. Before, she had condemned it unthinkingly, never imagining an English winter without it. Now she berated Ravi at first for being a killjoy and told him he was middle-aged before his time. It was only when he eventually got annoyed with her and snapped, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, run along and enjoy your Christmas,’ that the truth hit her. Then she was devastated by her chauvinism. How could she have been so stupid? She dropped Christmas like a scalding dish, studiously avoiding all the parties and carols but underneath bearing Ravi a grudging resentment for depriving her of them. For his part, Ravi did not like to see Sarah going to such lengths to please him. It was almost as embarrassing as her sari-wearing or her eating with her fingers. He hated to be responsible for her happiness and persuaded her to go to some of the lesser Christmas festivities.
Together, they went to a vegetarian Christmas dinner given by a girl in Sarah’s ‘Modern Novel’ class. The girl, Rowena Archer, had collected everyone she could think of to whom Christmas was alien and, declaring it an alternative festival, sat them down to an ersatz Christmas feast. There were four Jewish students who clearly found the whole thing obscurely insulting, two timid Malaysian Chinese girls who simply giggled helplessly at yet another instance of bizarre English behaviour, and Ravi and Sarah, taken aback by this heavy-handed philanthropy. Rowena’s boy-friend, a well-meaning left-wing theology student, tried to engage each of them in turn about their own cultural background and repeatedly failed to see that he was being snubbed. It was an unhappy compromise. At the end of the meal, Rowena served a carrot-based Christmas pudding – ‘Beef-suet-free’, she beamed at Ravi – and in trying to flambé it, set her oven glove alight. Afterwards Sarah and Ravi made fun of the dinner, but that time their laughter rang a little hollow, for it had made them feel momentarily exiled to a no-man’s land where no one was at home.
Both he and Sarah boycotted their colleges’ Christmas dinners and went instead to the Shah Jehan. The waiters had put up holly around the flock wallpaper and a gaudy banner on the door wishing all their customers a ‘Merry Xmas’. ‘To deter them from smashing the windows,’ Ravi said bitterly. By then, Sarah felt confident enough not to suffer a pang of national guilt and gloomily agree, but answered impatiently, ‘God, you’re cynical.’
*
Ravi spent the Christmas vacation in Sheffield again. There had been some brief discussion about his coming to stay at the Livingstones’. But both of them knew that would be impossible – Sarah because of the constraints and her parents and Ravi because it felt too much like a trap. In any case, the Christmas vacation only lasted six weeks and they shortened this by staying up in Oxford until the very day the colleges closed. Sarah saw Ravi go with a fair amount of resignation. It was a parting from which he was guaranteed to return.
*
They both came back to Oxford early, before term began, and continued where they had left off. It was so bitterly cold in Sarah’s room that it became one of their jokes; neither of them could bear to get out of bed in the morning – they had to take it in turns to dart across the room to switch on the fire. The shadow of the final exams first fell across their horizon that term, a worrying grey blotch which obscured what might lie beyond it. Sarah’s attitude was one of erratic panic, Ravi’s a grimmer determination. In a way, perhaps they almost welcomed them, for they hid the less well-defined obstacles which would follow.
They liked to work at different times of day; Ravi slept late and it was sometimes three or four o’clock in the afternoon before he got into his stride. After dinner, he would go back to work and then quite often sit up until two or three in the morning, reviving himself with a wet towel wrapped around his head. Sarah got up at about nine and hurried to the library, only to be lured out by some distraction a few hours later: coffee with a friend, an invitation to lunch. By dinner-time, she usually felt that her day’s work was done. Sometimes they accused each other of being a distraction and once, when Ravi had done badly in a test paper, they had a real argument about it, their first since the pillow-case.
They always seemed to be short of pillow-cases; wherever they slept, they invariably ended up with just one. The spare pillow-case was a humorous bone of contention which travelled back and forth between their rooms. One day, Sarah discovered to her annoyance that Ravi had filled it with his dirty washing and left it by his door in a way which seemed to imply that the washing was her responsibility.
‘What’s this supposed to mean?’
‘Oh, you said you were going to the launderette tonight, remember? I thought, as you were going anyway and you wanted the pillow-case, you wouldn’t mind taking my stuff too. There’s not much.’
‘Oh, Ravi, honestly!’
‘All right, all right, don’t. I didn’t think it was such a great favour to ask.’
‘It’s only the third time! I’m not your maidservant, you know.’
‘Oh Sarah, don’t exaggerate. I never thought you were.’
‘Ah, but you’d never dream of doing mine for me, would you?’
‘Bras and coloured panties would look a bit funny in our laundry room.’
‘Funnier than underpants and men’s shirts in ours?’
‘I thought
you said your laundry room was always overflowing with rugger shirts and size ten socks.’
‘That’s not the point! It’s the principle – why should I go on doing your washing if you’re not prepared to do mine?’
‘OK, don’t do it, don’t do it! But you’ll have to go without the pillow-case then, because I certainly shan’t have time to do any washing for a couple of days yet.’
‘Oh, stuff the pillow-case!’
‘Sarah, I wish you wouldn’t keep saying things like that—’
‘Why not? Is it because it makes me jar with your image of how a woman ought to be, all nice and quiet and subservient?’
‘What on earth are you going on about now?’
‘You don’t like it when I’m crude and unladylike, do you? Deep down, I suppose you still believe in all that crap about women being meek and docile and knowing their place.’
‘Sarah, what rubbish! I don’t think women should be meek and docile.’
‘Oh yes, you do.’
‘No, I don’t. Look, how many times have I told you that the very first reason I liked you was because you were independent, you were precisely the opposite of what I was used to?’
‘Oh yes, that’s fine. It’s great to be independent, so long as I’m still prepared to do your washing and I don’t contradict you in front of your friends.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know perfectly well. Last night, when we were talking about racial prejudice among intellectuals with Sunil and Rajiv Mehrotra and you said you thought most dons were really racists underneath and I said you’d got a racists-under-the-bed complex, you looked daggers at me.’
