by Helen Harris
‘It was such a crude way of putting it.’
‘What did I say? Underneath, you would really like me to be demure and know my place.’
‘Sarah, this is totally ridiculous. I don’t want you to touch my feet in respect – or to wait to eat until I’ve eaten for that matter, either.’
‘No? Why not? Is it because you don’t view me in the same way as Indian women? Is it because I’m not pure enough to be put on a par with them?’
‘Sarah, what has got into you? What you’re saying is preposterous. I’m not a barbarian, you know. My God! All I asked you to do was carry one extra bag to the laundry. Is that really so demeaning? Listen, I just want you to be you, all right?’
‘And do your washing? And not use bad language?’
‘Oh Sarah, stop it! Forget the wretched washing! Forget it! This is so silly. One bag of dirty laundry!’
‘It’s not just one bag of dirty laundry, it’s a whole issue. You just won’t admit that you would view me completely differently if I was Indian.’
‘If you were Indian? Is that it? Sarah, don’t you realise that if you were Indian, probably none of this could ever have happened? We would never have got into this situation in the first place.’
‘Because you would have considered me too unattainable to lay a finger on me? Out of bounds? But English girls come into a separate category, don’t they?’
‘Shut up!’
‘I will. I’m going – and I’m leaving you your bloody dirty washing because it’s my pillow-case and I’m taking it anyway. There!’
‘Well, you’ve certainly done your best to be “crude and unladylike”, I’ll give you that.’
‘Bully for you.’
‘Oh, you’re so silly!’
‘And you’re such a cheat!’
*
They probably argued more often then because of the pressure of work. January and February were dreary months, unrelievedly drab and cold. The prospect of Finals swelled from a grey blotch to a sooty mushroom cloud beyond which the rest of the world was hidden. Ravi and Sarah shut themselves away in their small universe of timetables and revision. They blocked up Sarah’s draughty windows with Ravi’s socks stuffed with newspaper so as to make her turret room easier to work in. In a way, the exams actually helped them because they were a legitimate reason for shutting out the rest of the world. For a short while, they could barricade themselves inside their doomed fortress and let nobody in.
At Easter they went on a short holiday together – five days in Cornwall in a borrowed cottage. It had been Sarah’s idea; the cottage belonged to one of her parents’ friends. But everyone agreed that a quick break from revision was quite essential. So Ravi left his desk too, where anxiety was gradually glueing him, and together they went down to a windy little bungalow above the sea where, for the first time ever, they really were quite alone.
The ocean tossed at the bottom of the cliff and sand found its way into the cottage, even with all the doors and windows shut. When it rained, the wind flung solid sheets of water at the windows and the whole ocean disappeared. They could have been anywhere in their draughty pastel-pink house and it was cold.
There were hardly any tourists as yet in the village to which they walked to buy eggs and milk and sliced white bread. They struck up quite a friendship with the cheery fat Cornishwoman whose shop sold little else. She took a fancy to them and asked Ravi where he came from and, on Easter Saturday, gave them each a free chocolate cream egg. They walked back to the cottage with their green nylon net clanking with tins and, in the evenings, Sarah cooked amusing combinations of tinned luncheon meat and tinned spaghetti and tinned rice pudding and tinned peaches. After supper, they sat in the borrowed living-room and read by the poor light of two pink-shaded standard lamps.
One evening, they were sitting there with the fake log gas fire on and sipping at surreptitious glasses of ‘borrowed’ brandy. A wet squall was making the ocean thud outside. They were both reading: Ravi a new interpretation of England’s economic decline (‘half work’), and Sarah a gorgeously lowbrow bestseller which she had found on the bookshelves. Suddenly, she looked up and said, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’
‘We’ll both get starred Firsts,’ Ravi answered.
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘No. Afterwards. I mean, what’s going to happen to us after Finals?’
Ravi looked up from his book. ‘What’s suddenly made you bring that up?’
‘It’s not sudden, I’ve thought about it a lot. But being here, together, all normal and relaxed and knowing it can’t last …’
‘Let’s enjoy now.’
‘That’s easy to say. I would enjoy it a lot more if I didn’t know it was going to end so soon.’
‘Well, we can’t stay here forever, can we?’
‘I don’t mean here, Ravi. I don’t mean this grotty little house and our pink double bed. I mean everything; don’t you realise that in less than four months’ time we’ll have left university? What are we going to do then?’
‘I’ve thought about that too,’ Ravi said, ‘and I don’t know.’
‘You’ll go back to India, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, and what about me?’
Suddenly Ravi felt trapped in the little pink living-room, felt it had all been planned – that he had been lured down to Cornwall on purpose, shut up in this remote cottage where he had loved Sarah more than ever before, and now she was rounding on him and demanding payment. She had arranged it all.
Instead of the pity and guilt he had started to feel, he was suddenly unexpectedly angry; he had been tricked. He answered her more callously than he had intended to: ‘You said you might try for a job in publishing.’
He saw her flinch and, quickly, he tried to moderate his harshness. ‘I mean, until we work something out.’
‘What?’ Sarah said shrilly. ‘What can we work out? If you’re going back to India and I’m supposed to stay here, what exactly can we work out? Be pen-friends?’
‘I shan’t go immediately,’ Ravi said. ‘I won’t hop on a plane the day Finals finish and vanish for ever, you know. I shall still be around for a while afterwards.’
‘Oh, big deal!’ Sarah said. ‘I can look forward to two weeks helping you to pack.’
‘Sarah,’ Ravi said slowly, almost as if he were afraid to let the words out, ‘what did you expect when all of this began?’
‘I didn’t expect anything,’ Sarah said hotly. ‘I didn’t think my maharajah would sweep me off to his glamorous Eastern palace, if that’s what you mean. But I suppose I didn’t think I’d be dumped at the end like this, either.’
‘Dumped?’ Ravi said indignantly. ‘Dumped? Who’s talking about dumping? I didn’t pick you up, Sarah, and I’m not going to let you drop. I thought you were an independent adult human being. Stop talking as if you were a passive package. If you’re in a situation that you don’t like now, isn’t it fifty per cent your own choice?’
For a moment Sarah, who was lying on the level of Ravi’s feet, stared at them as though she hated them. Then she looked up into his face and answered, ‘My own choice is to come to India too.’
Ravi was stunned by the threat. It had never once occurred to him that Sarah could produce it. He stared at her, astounded. A moment ago he had been justly accusing her of not being far-sighted enough. But in fact she had arrived by her own route at the hurdle which he had acknowledged all along as insurmountable, and here she was prepared to jump it. He gaped. ‘What?’
‘Why’s that so shocking?’ Sarah said. ‘Wouldn’t you like it if I came?’
‘You can’t come to India.’
‘Why ever not? Other people have.’
‘Sarah, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You … you don’t know what India’s like. You couldn’t behave or do anything there the way we do here.’
‘Don’t you want us to go on?’
‘Of course I do. But—’
�
�Then let me come to India … Marry me.’
If she had hit him instead, attacked him with great violence, he would not have been as shocked. The thought which had lain behind everything – behind those summer letters, behind his uneasy insomnia in her parents’ guest room, behind their argument about the pillow-case, the thought which had gone to and fro between them as they said different things, behind the sunny Indian dress and then the sari, the thought she had no right to fling into the open – now lay between them.
‘Sarah!’
‘All right, all right. I wish I hadn’t said it—’
‘Oh, Sarah, don’t cry!’ And then he did exactly what he had least imagined he would do. He got out of his chair and crouched down beside her, taking her carefully into his arms, prepared for her to hit out and repel him.
‘Oh, Sarah
She said nothing, but she did not push him away.
‘That was such a brave thing to say.’
‘I take it back, I take it back!’
‘No, Sarah, don’t cry. What you said was tremendous. Sarah, I love you.’
Then she did repel him, pushed him with an almighty shove which knocked him to his seat.
‘No, you don’t. If you did really, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’
‘Sarah, you don’t understand. Everything’s totally different in India—’
‘You’re always telling me that! You’re always telling me I don’t understand, I can’t understand. India’s different. Well, why have you got to keep your life in two separate compartments? Why can’t you let me come and find out for myself?’
‘Because it would probably be the end of you.’
‘It will be the end of me if you just go off to India and I have to stay behind here with nothing. I won’t be able to take it.’
‘But, Sarah, this is your home, you belong here. You’ve got all your family and your friends, everything you know. One can’t just drop all that one fine day for an adventure. And India – Sarah, you in India, you in India as my girl-friend, as my … my wife, is like imagining some outlandish flower trying to survive in the English winter. You’d droop, you’d grow sour and reproachful. It couldn’t ever possibly work, Sarah, not in a million years.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You must, Sarah, you must. If you came to India, imagining we could set up house just like we have here, you’d have the most terrible shock.’
‘I don’t see why we can’t try.’
‘As a holiday, for a jaunt, that would be one thing, but to come out imagining you were going to make a go of it!’
‘People do.’
‘Not you, Sarah. Not me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Can’t you see? Here we’re left to our own devices. We can live in this little toy world we’ve made up for ourselves. Everything’s on our side. But there, everything would conspire against us; we’d have nothing.’
‘We’d have us, we’d have us!’
‘Sarah, my darling, that isn’t going to be enough for ever. Look, stop crying, please. Come for a holiday, by all means, come sightseeing if you must, take a look, but don’t kid yourself. Really, I know what I’m talking about.’
‘Have you known that all along?’
‘Known what?’
‘That we hadn’t got a future? That this was short-term only?’
‘Sarah, I didn’t look so far ahead. I wasn’t thinking when we were walking round the playing fields that time, “Right, I’ll fall in love with this girl for two years”.’
He was pleased to see her giggle forlornly through her tears. He pressed his advantage. ‘I thought the great thing about us was that we weren’t part of the predictable order of things, we didn’t fit into a conventional ready-made pattern. You liked that too, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. But now—’
‘Now?’
‘Now, I want to go on to the next stage and you’re not prepared to. You don’t dare.’
‘I don’t dare? Sarah, you always talk as though this were some sort of game we were playing. It’s not a question of “daring”. I know what would happen if you came to India and I don’t want that to happen to us. If we have to part, I would like us to part with pleasant memories of all the good times we’ve had here, not with acrimony and misery.’
‘And I’ll only ever have known half of you. I want to see what you’re hiding.’
‘What I’m hiding?’
‘Yes, you’ve always kept your Indian life a secret from me.’
‘I’ve got a harem of nautch girls—’
‘Oh, shut up. Be serious. We’ve always been lopsided. You know where I come from and my past and my parents, but I haven’t got a clue about you.’
‘Well, come and see what there is then. Come out and take a look, if you want to. Just don’t imagine that you’re coming for good, that’s all.’
‘All right, I will. I’ll get a job after Finals and save the air fare and I’ll come out in the autumn. For a visit.’
‘I’ll look forward to it. Is there any more of that brandy?’
*
After that exchange, how was it possible for them to go back to Oxford the way they did and carry on as before? How was it possible for Sarah still to fall asleep beside Ravi with one hand left across his stomach to make sure that in the morning he would still be there? And for Ravi to lie back after they had made love, still crowing triumphantly: ‘One all!’?
The summer term was pretty wretched. Overshadowed utterly by Finals, the weeks went by in a numb routine. They worked all day, as often as possible together in one or the other’s room, and only broke off to eat dully in the college dining hall. Once a week or so, they allowed themselves the treat of a visit to the Shah Jehan and at night, they made love enjoyably and often. Those were their only recreations. They had to spare a little time for Sunil, who had become alarmingly weird from overwork. He had pored over his philosophy for so long that he could no longer take any of it for granted but felt obliged to question everything. The fixed certainties of his universe were receding into a frightening void. He didn’t sleep at night, but wandered through the city streets debating with an invisible opponent. He ate his dinner at four o’clock in the morning, or not at all, took a bath at six and was found asleep in the library in mid-afternoon. Emily Williams was not coping too well with the pressure either. She found she could only sleep after sex and, in order to overcome her insomnia, embarked on a series of desperate one-night stands which racked her days with panic and remorse. She had also virtually stopped eating and her hair began to fall out. Sarah and Ravi clung to each other and felt relatively safe. In the face of such an awesome trial, they thought of little else.
Two weeks before the exams, Sunil collapsed. He walked into Dev’s room in the middle of the afternoon, announced, ‘Either you get a First or you go mad,’ and fell headlong to the floor. Horrified, Dev tried to revive him with a splashed tooth-mug of water and then ran for the college nurse. She was having tea when Dev rushed in and, he reported, when told what the trouble was she exclaimed, ‘Why do you lot have to make such a song and dance about everything?’ Sunil was taken to the college sick bay. When he came to, he was silent and inert, apparently resentful that he had been revived. Dev and Ravi, defying the nurse, came in to see him in the early evening and were shocked out of their selfishness to see how ill he looked. ‘So you’ve decided to lie back and be waited on, then?’ Ravi joked uneasily, but Sunil stared back at him quite blankly. (‘Why not get a First and go mad?’ Ravi said afterwards to Sarah.) The following day Emily Williams came to visit Sunil, unannounced, with her sparse hair hidden under a dramatic kerchief. From that visit a feverish affair developed, out of the unhealthy atmosphere of the sick bay, which lasted with neurotic intensity until the exams were over.
The last weekend before the exams, Ravi and Sarah took a break as recommended, but they were too keyed up to relax and enjoy it. They went to the Livingstones’ holiday cott
age in Wales; Sarah had long looked forward to taking Ravi there as the consummation of her triumph over her upbringing, but they were both restless and unable to appreciate their pretty surroundings.
‘Gosh, England is so small,’ Ravi said when they arrived at the spruce cottage. ‘Everywhere is someone else’s back garden.’
Sarah said, ‘We’re not in England.’
‘We’ve come all this way,’ Ravi went on, waving around at the narrow valley. ‘Here we are in the middle of nowhere and yet it’s all neatly parcelled up. It’s all someone’s nest. Look around at that landscape,’ he said, ‘it’s all so tidy.’
Sarah shrugged. ‘We could have gone to Brighton if you’d preferred.’
‘And it’s all parcelled up by people like your parents,’ he continued, as they unpacked deep-frozen blackberries and Mrs Livingstone’s quiche from the freezer. ‘Have you noticed that, at their level, everyone in England is connected? They run the country like a jolly board game.’
‘Look, I’ve got the message,’ Sarah said, ‘there’s no need to keep going on about it. Just you wait – when I come out to India, I’m going to get my own back on you!’
For three days they bickered listlessly, and the ultimate triumph which Sarah had looked forward to – making love with Ravi in the Victorian brass double bed – did not take place because he was too tired and wanted to conserve his strength.
*
Ravi’s exams lasted three days longer than Sarah’s, so she had to wait to celebrate until he was through. During those three days she rested, worn out, and began to wonder what would come next. She lay on the college lawn, too tired and triumphant at having survived to summon up much feeling about anything else yet. The sky overhead was a distant blue and she would never have to sit another exam again in her life. The difficulties with Ravi would be resolved. For three days, she gazed up at the sky and waited for Ravi and was content. Counted on the fingers of one idle hand against the grass, the months between the beginning of August, when Ravi would go home, and October when she would fly out to join him, were a tiny span – pitiful, a mere three dots on the lawn. In those three months she would earn her air fare, she would start learning Hindi properly and get ready to turn her back on England. For three days she practised waiting for Ravi and it was so easy, such fun on an Oxford lawn.
