by Helen Harris
Sunil jeered, ‘What rot!’ but his expression betrayed him and he stayed sitting there in silence, following the presents and souvenirs going into the suitcases like a hungry child watching someone else eat dinner. Sarah began to resent his presence, for he distracted Ravi who kept swapping joky repartee with him and reminiscing about their treatment at the hands of Delhi customs men. The last straw, she felt, was when Sunil produced a shoddily wrapped parcel from his shoulder bag and asked Ravi to take it to his brother in Delhi.
‘Honestly!’ Sarah wanted to exclaim, ‘hasn’t he got enough?’
But Ravi took it without a word and tenderly found a place for it near the top of his larger suitcase, to Sarah’s fury moving to a less favourable position four paperback books she had bought him as a leaving present. She did not even give Sunil a look. This afternoon of all times, she thought, surely she had a right to have Ravi to herself? But it seemed that Sunil might stay all evening. In the end, towards six o’clock, when already she saw their plan for a lavish evening shelved in favour of a threesome in an Indian restaurant, he tapped the spot where his watch would have been if he had been in the habit of wearing one, and announced with mock solemnity, ‘The hour draws nigh.’
Ravi stopped tidying and straightened up. ‘You’ve got to push off, then?’ he said, to Sarah’s indignation. Suddenly she sensed that both of them had wanted to put off this separation, for different reasons, and that silently Ravi had been willing Sunil to stay there. She sensed it like a betrayal as they stood for a moment facing each other, looking deep into each other’s eyes. As if they were the parting lovers, she had to look away tactfully as they embraced and she cried breezily, ‘See you around, Sunil,’ when he turned to her and said, ‘Goodbye, Sarah.’
‘That’s right,’ Ravi added, as though the idea had only just occurred to him. ‘You two must keep each other company.’
And although Sarah had felt nothing but dislike for Sunil a minute earlier, merely to take revenge on Ravi she agreed flirtatiously: ‘Well now, Sunil, that’s an idea, isn’t it?’
They dressed up and went to a smart restaurant in the West End. Since they had no money to speak of, this felt more lavish than it was. Sarah wore her Indian dress and the little silver necklace which Ravi had brought back for her from India the summer before. Ravi combed his hair and put on a clean shirt. To begin with, they had to be artificially cheerful and pretend to have nothing but celebration on their minds. But quite soon they found they were genuinely cheerful because the evening was, whatever else, a welcome change. They came under the influence of their festive clothes and by the time they were sitting opposite each other in a little, dark red Italian restaurant, the scraping waiters and cockaded napkins were sufficient to make them quite jolly. And there was, of course, an additional reason to seem unconcerned, because it had always been part of their policy to scoff at solemnity.
They made a great business of choosing their dishes. ‘Because,’ Sarah said giggling, ‘we’ll remember what we had here for ages.’ And Ravi imperiously ordered quite an expensive bottle of wine.
They had already drunk two glasses each by the time their starters arrived. Ravi poured their third glasses and joked, ‘OK, come on, let’s drown our sorrows.’
Across the table, they held hands and fed each other forkfuls of avocado and fish paté. By the middle of the main course, they could talk about the next day and still be cheerful.
‘You know, you really transformed my whole time in England,’ Ravi said grandly as he rolled up his pasta with a flourish.
Sarah giggled. ‘Gee, thanks!’
Ravi smiled. ‘I’m serious. Before I met you, I was actually quite wretched here. I felt totally alone and ostracised in a cold, hostile environment.’
‘A “before and after” commercial,’ Sarah joked. ‘Depressed? Unloved? Miss Livingstone can change your life. Take her twice a day; once before breakfast and once last thing at night.’
‘Wow, give me a break,’ Ravi protested and together they laughed and laughed.
‘In India,’ Sarah said, ‘will we have to be awfully prim? I mean, not smooch or hug each other in the street?’
‘Oh, awfully,’ Ravi said teasingly. He reached across the table and playfully laid his fingers on her lips. ‘Never, never, never smooch in the street!’
‘Oh God, how will I bear it?’ Sarah pretended to groan and Ravi answered mischievously, ‘Oh well, it won’t be for long, will it?’
‘Where will you be this time tomorrow?’ Sarah asked him as they lingered over their dessert. It was not in fact the next day which began to depress them as the meal came to a close, but more immediately their return to the grubby house. In the plush foreign restaurant, they found they were once more serenely immune to England and regained a playful cosiness they had not managed for a month.
‘Let’s see,’ Ravi said, ‘what time is it? Half-past eleven. That will really be about four in the morning, won’t it? I expect I shall be watching the dawn come up over the Himalayas.’
‘Oh,’ Sarah exclaimed, ‘you lucky thing!’ But she added quickly, ‘Still, not long to wait!’
He had to admire her then, although he might have condemned her foolishness. ‘Good old Sarah,’ he declared. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way!’
When they could prolong their meal no longer, they paid and went out into the night. Ravi put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders and said, ‘Let’s finish up in style. Let’s take a taxi.’ But, infuriatingly, at first no taxi would take them; the address was too far and too disreputable. By the time a surly driver on his way home agreed to take them, their festive mood was spoilt and when they unlocked the door of their room, the suitcases confronted them brutally.
Naturally, they did not sleep. Their love-making was ruined by a sense of its gravity and they would not have a chance to remedy it. At some time after dawn, Ravi fell into a transparent doze and dreamt that he was being disturbed by Sarah crying beside him.
In the morning, tired out and numb, they did the things that they had to do one after another: shut the suitcases, telephoned for a taxi to take them and the heap of luggage to the airport terminal and caught the bus out to the airport. On the bus they hardly spoke, daunted by the lasting significance their words would have. Just once, Sarah tried to joke: ‘Too bad I forgot my passport, I could have come too,’ and as the airport buildings appeared, Ravi squeezed her hand and muttered, ‘Promise me you’ll be OK?’ They coped with the airport as best they could; stood patiently in an excited, mostly Indian queue to check in Ravi’s luggage, paid his excess and sat down bravely in an echoing hall to wait. They were so sure that they would be able to manage it without some sort of messy collapse because they were two such resolute, exceptional people that when finally Ravi’s flight was called, Sarah was completely aghast that he should begin to cry too and vanish through the passport gate, waving back to her with tears running down his face.
*
Beneath his plane wings, Ravi saw England shrink to pitiable proportions. There were miniature houses with red toytown roofs, mini highways busy with toy buses and cars and midget-sized people scurrying about on their tiny errands. At the sight of England reduced to this silly scale, Ravi felt a surge of incredible relief. He sat back in his seat and flexed his leg muscles. He would order an American Martini as soon as the seat-belt signs went off; he deserved it. He would order it imperiously, with a curt command, because he was on his way back to what he had been before. He imagined Sarah down there as one of the midget people, walking jerkily away from the airport, going home and turning in automatically at the gate of her parents’ sugar-lump white house. Thinking of her like that, safely back where she belonged, what he had done did not seem nearly so bad.
*
Sarah earned her air fare by taking a job as a holiday relief assistant in a shoe shop. It was in Kensington, not far from her parents’ house, and every morning she enjoyed the comic transition from her parents’ leisurely breakfast tabl
e with its freshly ground coffee and high-class marmalade to the stuffy little shop and its sorry employees. There was one other assistant and a would-be dictatorial manager called Mr Patel. Sarah was supposed to be at the shop fifteen minutes before it opened at half-past nine, although after the first week she was often late and then, unless there were a lot of customers, she sat on the fitting stools all day, talking to the other assistant, Julie. After a few days, she would dearly have liked to read, but the book she produced clearly annoyed both Julie and Mr Patel. Reading was not actually forbidden, Mr Patel stated in answer to Sarah’s half-joking query, but it was clearly offensive to her colleagues. So, for two months, she sat and listened to Julie telling her about her boy-friend Kevin and their wedding plans and, in exchange, she told Julie about Ravi. If very well disposed and able to take time off from his endless ledgers and stocktaking, Mr Patel would contribute some humorous anecdote or interrupt their chatter with a little pun. He was not very forthcoming about his own life; he kept it rather primly to himself, like the packed lunch he brought every day and shut away in his private cupboard. Only occasionally odd details emerged, like the distinctive smells which escaped when he ate his lunch in the back office. He and his family shared a house in Ealing with one of his four brother’s families. All four of them worked in the clothing trade – one in hats, two in frocks and saris and Mr Patel himself in shoes. ‘Between us,’ he quipped in one of his happier moods, ‘we make up body.’ He was obsessed by order and even though the little shop could have been managed with far less effort, he worked at it constantly. If there was really nothing else to do, he pored over a Hindi film cartoon magazine. Once, quite unexpectedly, he burst into a soulful high-pitched song which made Julie snort with giggles.
At home in the evenings, Sarah cooked herself experimental dishes from an Indian recipe book and drowsily tried to concentrate on her Hindi primer. The house was otherwise empty because her parents were at the cottage in Wales and her brother away on holiday. Over and over again, she played the records of Hindi songs which Ravi had left her and traipsed rather ridiculously around the house in her sari.
Through August and into September, she worked in the shoe shop, compensating for her boredom by an elaborate calculation in which each hour in the shop represented so many of the four thousand miles between London and Delhi.
In mid-September, when she was due to book her ticket, she got a letter from Ravi asking her to postpone her visit because his grandmother, who lived with them, was seriously ill. She tried to overcome her disappointment and wrote back to him the same day, saying how very sorry she was to hear it and please to give the grandmother her best wishes for a speedy recovery. But at the bottom of the letter she added in capitals, ‘LET ME KNOW AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WHEN I CAN COME.’ She took out her disappointment on her family when they returned and on the irritating employees at the shoe shop.
Ravi took three weeks to reply to her letter. By then she had actually started to worry, to wonder if maybe this excuse would be the first of many similar; if, after her illness, the grandmother would need to convalesce or if she died, heaven forbid, that a visit to the family would be tactless and therefore out of the question. She lay awake at night and thought she saw her imagined future shrivelling to an impossible illusion. She tormented herself and once, in the early hours of the morning, she even wondered if Ravi’s story was true. But by then she had also decided that she was going anyway. Whatever Ravi might write to her, or not write, she was going anyway. One day, in her lunch hour, she went impulsively into a travel agent’s office and made enquiries about booking her flight to Delhi. As she left, it struck her quite forcibly that she was flying off into a void. But she had to go. If only to keep up appearances now, to preserve her dignity in front of her family and friends, she had to go to India. So when at last Ravi did answer and wrote that it was all right, that she could come in a couple of months’ time even though his grandmother had died, she greeted his letter with rapturous relief. The qualifications and caution which detracted from it – everyone in the family was very gloomy, she must not be prepared for an enthusiastic welcome – hardly bothered her at all.
She booked her ticket for the thirtieth of November, then rang all her friends and told them that she was practically on the point of departure. With renewed energy, she flung herself into a round of Indian pastimes. The attempts she had maintained to hang on to some vestiges of Ravi seemed like positive preparations once more.
Getting ready – organising lightweight clothes and travellers’ cheques and vaccinations – prevented her from thinking much about her journey. There really was an awful lot to do; as well as getting all her own stuff prepared, she had to buy a number of items which Ravi had written and asked for as soon as he knew for sure that she was coming and which she was superstitiously conscientious about finding for him. In addition, she wanted to bring an appropriate gift for each member of his family, as he had described them: the serious brother Ramesh, the giggling little sisters Asha and Shakuntala. She had no idea what she ought to bring for his parents, since she could not clearly imagine them; but in the end she settled on cufflinks for his father, (he would surely consider whisky wicked and she had never asked Ravi if he smoked), and a nice Liberty silk headscarf for his mother. Friends of her parents, who had known India long before she was born, deluged her with advice but she rarely listened. Their travellers’ tales of mosquito nets and lethal drinking water seemed comically irrelevant. In fact, she barely thought beyond the miraculous moment when she would walk out of the Arrivals door at Delhi Airport and see Ravi, open-armed and beaming, waiting there for her.
Two weeks before she left, she had a farewell lunch with Emily Williams. Emily was beside herself with envy at Sarah’s adventure; she had always imagined that she would be exhilarated by the world outside when she left university, but was finding it a disappointment. Because she had no clear idea of her own preferences, she could not decide what path she ought to take. They all seemed plodding and, in contrast, Sarah’s plans appeared superb. They sat over salads and coffee in a wine bar and talked headily about her future. Gradually, it began to seem to Sarah too that her destiny was utterly enviable, that her future was bright and glamorous and assured. She allowed herself to confide her secret misgivings to Emily: Ravi’s reservations, his worrying reluctance, his family. But Emily brushed them aside reassuringly and Sarah left the lunch feeling more confident and excited about her journey than she had at any time since Ravi went home.
His last letter, which she received only days before her departure, reinforced that confidence:
My dearest Sarah,
Only fourteen days to go now – I can hardly wait to hop on the train to Delhi and come to meet you! This place is really intolerably small and stuffy; it is suffocating me with its wretched, petty restraints! My parents’ mentality is frankly even more blinkered than I remembered and their behaviour over your intended visit has been a source of great rage. Let us spend just as little time here as possible and travel together to other places. Just you and I on the move, what a relief that will be!
To confirm, I will meet you off the Air India flight from London arriving at Delhi at 7 am on December 1st. You will recognise me because I will be wearing a broad grin – outsize measurement.
Don’t forget the cassettes and the throat lozenges if you can manage to bring them. Also, the books – please, the books! Come prepared for a magnificent holiday!
All my love, Ravi
*
When she woke up, it was already morning. They were flying through a salmon-pink dawn over a country which looked bleak and inhospitable. Down below were villages in a barren plain, huddled around muddy pools, a village to a puddle, and between them pink fields pathetically divided and subdivided for ever. Involuntarily, Sarah shuddered; life looked awfully precarious down there.
She had not slept well, aware of Ravi approaching through her sleep, but now she beamed at the air hostess who brought her a steaming sc
ented face flannel to wipe her face. Between scraps of almost conscious dreams, she had imagined this morning. She was taut with expectation. The air hostess brought her a plastic tray of breakfast and she ate it with relish, thirty thousand feet above the pink plain. She was surprisingly ravenous with nervous excitement and also suddenly acutely aware that comforts such as butter curls and sterile sausages might be about to vanish.
The ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ sign came on when she had eaten and she had an involuntary shiver of anticipation. Outside, there was now reassuring grass and trees as the plane came down towards a sprawling garden city and then landed with a self-satisfied bounce at Delhi Airport. For a fraction of a second, as she came out on to the aeroplane steps, Sarah wondered if she would be able to stand the brilliant, white-hot sun.
Everyone was so kindly to her at the airport – the fat, moustachioed Sikh at the passport counter, the little affectionate bank clerk, the inquisitive Customs officer. But she barely paid any attention to them, hurrying, jostling, and she was one of the first off her flight to rush out towards the exit where an excited crowd was waiting.
*
Seeing Sarah appear through the International Arrivals gate was like seeing a piece of his past return. He was already nostalgic for that recent past, for he had been back in India just long enough to miss it. The sight of Sarah Livingstone, so unchanged and eager, trotting towards him despite her heavy bag – oh, just as rosy-cheeked and cheerful as he remembered her – caused him a great rush of fond remembrance. And having lain awake for much of the night, worrying how he would react to her and how he would handle the difficult first days of their reunion, he now had no difficulty in seizing her and giving her an enormous hug for all the lost freedoms that she represented.
