by Helen Harris
‘It’s not that I care a hoot what the neighbours think,’ he told her. ‘You know I couldn’t give a damn. But one has to think of their point of view, of Daddy’s position.’
‘But why – what’s wrong with me?’ Sarah raged. ‘Am I a social embarrassment?’
Ravi twiddled the leaves he had pulled from a scented bush. He shrugged: ‘In a way, you are.’
Sarah turned to him, genuinely intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’
He puffed, as though the effort of explanation were too much for him. ‘People will say all kinds of peculiar things about my parents if they imagine that their eldest son has serious intentions about an English girl.’ He gestured at the quiet side-street where they were walking. ‘It isn’t jet-setting Delhi here, you know.’
Sarah looked at him nastily. ‘I don’t see why that should bother you,’ she retorted bitterly, ‘since you haven’t.’
They were walking close to the river, past the grounds of a big boys’ school. On a patch of bare ground, a group of young boys was kicking a ball around. Their thin bare legs flickered up and down their makeshift playing field and in order to interrupt their argument, Ravi and Sarah stopped to watch them. Playing for their audience, the boys’ movements grew wilder and fiercer. They hurled themselves frenziedly up and down. Sarah and Ravi exchanged looks of amusement and, walking on, continued their argument less acrimoniously.
His mother’s complaint was not the only problem. And while Sarah was naturally hurt by it, she could of course see that she was inconveniencing them. The growing knowledge that she could not stay there oppressed her, but something else had happened which was equally ominous.
Two days before, sitting out on the verandah as usual after dinner, they had received a visit from one of Mr Kaul’s office cronies. As soon as he arrived, Mrs Kaul and the girls had as usual retreated into the house but Sarah had been kept outside – as a diversion, as a curiosity, she said to Ravi bitterly: ‘That’s how they treat me; as an amusing curiosity. It’s fine just so long as I remain an entertaining conversation-piece, someone who will perform their party tricks and drink whisky, but as soon as I want to discard that role and actually take part, then it’s curtains, isn’t it?’
The visitor had questioned Sarah about her impressions of India. He was a ponderous, solemn man, in many ways rather similar to Ravi’s father. He had taken all her answers very seriously, analysed and assessed them. At one point, he asked her if she had been disappointed by India or if it had lived up to her expectations? Sarah, by that time quite irritated at the interrogation, felt a foolish urge to shock the two old men with a forthright answer. ‘Oh, I knew what was in store for me,’ she answered, pretending to roll her eyes. ‘Ravi had prepared me. I mean – he and I have known each other so well for such a long time!’
Ravi laughed nervously. The visitor leaned forward. He patted his fat moustache. ‘Ah, you two have known each other well for a long time?’
‘Of course,’ Ravi answered briskly, ‘Sarah and I were at Oxford together.’
Their visitor sat back with his arms folded and looked quizzically across at Ravi’s father. He raised his eyebrows, which were plump and trim like his moustache, and he smirked. There was an embarrassed silence before Ravi went on, ‘I mean Sarah and I are old buddies. She knew quite a few other chaps from this neck of the woods as well.’
Still the visitor said nothing. He shifted his ponderously ironic gaze from Mr Kaul to Ravi. Then he simply said, ‘Is that so?’
But Mr Kaul had started perceptibly at his friend’s look. He turned to Ravi and Sarah with an expression of bewildered, disgusted alarm.
When the visitor had left, uttering genial platitudes into the night, Mr Kaul stiffly excused himself to Sarah and asked Ravi to come out into the garden with him. For ten minutes the two of them walked up and down the short lawn, arguing in an undertone. Ravi said that his father had been adamant; this whole business had gone on for long enough. His friend’s insinuation had cut him to the quick. It was all very well for Ravi to carry on as he liked away at the university and to give whatever unfortunate misleading impression he chose, but if he and Sarah were going to flaunt their easy-going ways here and bring public embarrassment on himself and Ravi’s mother, then he would have to put an end to it.
‘But, for heaven’s sake,’ Sarah objected, ‘surely they must know? I mean, surely you told them once that I wasn’t just a college friend? Didn’t you?’
‘Of course I implied you were,’ Ravi answered, ‘but you’ve seen for yourself what they’re like. I could hardly spell things out, could I?’
‘But you told them who I am? I mean, they do at least know I’m your girl-friend, don’t they?’
Ravi looked at her teasingly. ‘I told them what was necessary,’ he said, ‘not specifics.’
They were still sitting in the garden talking about it, so late that everyone else must have gone to bed. And, in the dark, Ravi reached out his hand and flicked her nearer nipple playfully. ‘Not specifics.’
Sarah pushed him away. ‘Oh, you’re just horrible,’ she shrilled, ‘and anyway, why shouldn’t I tell people that we’re not just college friends? It’s the truth.’
And then, to top it all, there had been that unfortunate incident with Asha. Sarah had not thought much of it at the time and hadn’t even mentioned it to Ravi, hoping that Asha – only a very naïve sixteen-year-old – would not know what to make of it and would dismiss it. But later she was sure that Asha had understood perfectly well what she had seen and had reported it to her mother. It must have been that which in the end precipitated the crisis.
What had happened was this: Sarah had been sitting on her bed that morning, taking her contraceptive pill from its cellophane card and thinking ruefully how unnecessary it was, since it was already nearly a month since she and Ravi had managed to have such privacy, when she realised that Asha was standing in the open doorway watching her. Instinctively, she pushed the card under the sheets and gave Asha a guilty smile. ‘Stomach pills,’ she said brightly, tapping her stomach as though Asha were slow on the uptake.
‘Oh dear,’ said Asha. ‘Are you feeling bad again? Should I tell Mummy?’
‘No, no,’ Sarah said. ‘No, I shall be fine. These are quite good pills actually.’ She laughed awkwardly. ‘Really, Asha, it’s nothing.’
Asha shook her head. ‘Are you sure? You mustn’t fall ill again.’
‘I won’t,’ Sarah assured her. ‘This time I’ve nipped it in the bud.’ And even as she said that, she had been cockily pleased with her little joke.
For a moment Asha stayed in the doorway, silently accusing, then she came in to collect the sandals she had come for. As she turned to go, Sarah called, ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone, Asha. I don’t want them to worry.’
All in all, by the time the storm broke it had been brewing for several days.
It was quite late and already completely dark when Ravi and Sarah set off to their favourite destination. They liked to walk to the grounds of a nineteenth-century mausoleum near the river called Shah Najaf. It was an ornate, fancy building, but in the dark it became something more ancient, simpler. The first time they went there together in the evening, the caretaker had switched on the lights inside to show them a collection of murky memorabilia. He had given them an eager explanation of his showpieces in Hindi (‘He’s talking utter rubbish,’ Ravi whispered), but Sarah had found the shadowy rooms under the collection of multi-coloured chandeliers and lamps wonderfully atmospheric. From then on, they just walked in the garden and usually sat down in a secluded corner to talk and make amends. It was not a popular courting place, Ravi knew, and there was no reason why anyone should have come snooping after them.
They sprawled in their corner and discussed their predicament. It had reached a stage where they were temporarily reunited by the imminence of defeat. The weeks of bickering and frustration had worn them out. Suddenly it seemed they had no more hostility, only bitterness and the admi
ssion of failure.
After a while they grew calmer and, talking over what remained to them, they grew more affectionate towards each other.
Because he felt sorry for her and, in his heart, perhaps also a little guilty, Ravi stroked Sarah’s hair. She had brought so many extra problems down on him. They were not major problems, certainly, but in his low state of irritable depression they had exasperated him. Rickshaw drivers charged him a higher fare at the sight of Sarah; he couldn’t be a local. People stared in shops and restaurants and made quite audible speculative remarks about the two of them, as though somehow like Sarah he couldn’t understand. When she had put her arms around his neck one previous evening in these gardens, he had seen her as a stone – a living stone, slung round his neck and dragging him down into a muddy pond of entanglements and compromises in which he would inevitably drown. Perhaps that was the reason why in the end, he had simply stopped sticking up for Sarah when his family criticised her and why, when his mother had asked him when he thought Sarah might leave, he had answered resolutely, ‘Soon.’
It was not his fault, of course, that Sarah had insisted on bringing this trouble on herself, but now that she had done so the least he could do was to get her out of it. He looked at her, wretchedly playing with a strand of her yellow hair and repeating, ‘It just seems so pathetic to leave now when I’ve hardly seen anything of India.’ Even though there were tears trickling down her face, it was still nice to be lying there beside her on the grass with the background of night birds and crickets. He tried to comfort her, ‘No crickets in the college gardens, eh?’ he joked.
And Sarah sniffed. ‘No, I don’t know how I shall put up with England now. What will I do?’
Ravi tried to hide his relief, but his heart soared; openly, Sarah was at last admitting that this thing was over.
He took her fretful hand away from her hair. ‘You’ll go back home,’ he said gently, ‘and you’ll live happily ever after.’
Sarah rolled onto her back and spoke sourly to the sky. ‘I haven’t got much option, have I?’
They were very close to each other. They had nothing else to take comfort in. And once Ravi had begun to fondle Sarah, a perverse desire to shock and commit public sacrilege made him go further, to get his own back on the place which had made him carry out this betrayal.
It was delicious lying together in their corner, hidden by the dark shapes of the bushes. The night was protectively full of other squeaks and rustles and they were sure that no one could possibly have seen them, for around them the gardens were impenetrably black.
Things were still all right that night, because it was very late by the time they got back to the house and everyone was in bed. On the way, Ravi worried that his parents would have noticed their long absence and suspect what they had been up to. ‘You’re like a well-brought-up young lady who’s been led astray,’ Sarah teased him. ‘I’m the man in all this!’ And to show how little she cared, she kissed him extravagantly on the front porch. They went silently to bed in their separate bedrooms. Before she got into bed, Sarah looked up a reproduction which she remembered in a glossy art book she had bought in Delhi; it was one of a series of miniatures, depicting Krishna making love to a milkmaid. They were lying horizontally, apparently floating, under a tree in a nocturnal garden. Krishna’s skin was deep blue and the girl’s an uncanny ivory white. She studied it for a little while, grinning, and then dog-eared a corner of the page as a memento.
When she woke in the morning, Sarah became aware of a noise which she thought at first was a new bird calling in the garden. It was piping and shrill and repetitive and it was only as she woke completely that she realised it was Ravi’s mother crying. She stayed in her room, petrified, convinced that if there was trouble in that house today, then somehow it must be connected with her. She heard Mr Kaul’s booming tones interrupt the crying and she listened for Ravi’s. When they came, they were barely recognisable: shrill and anguished. The shouting rose and Sarah waited for someone to fetch her. She waited for an hour. When at last silence fell, Ravi came to her room. His face was tear-stained and contorted.
‘Ravi! Whatever’s the matter?’
‘God bloody damn it!’
‘What’s happened, Ravi?’
‘Can’t you guess? Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!’
He fell onto her bed and furiously pounded the pillow.
‘Ravi, for heaven’s sake, tell me! What’s going on? I heard your mother—’
Ravi lifted his swollen face from the bedclothes. ‘Isn’t it obvious? We were followed last night. Someone saw us at Shah Najaf.’
For a moment Sarah was so aghast that she could not respond. Then the dreadful, obvious explanation occurred to her and, even though she already knew what his answer would be, she asked, ‘Who?’
Ravi groaned. ‘Asha.’
She deserved everything – that was her second thought. Whatever catastrophe, whatever nightmare now descended on her, she had asked for it. She had not understood anything; she had viewed Ravi’s family as a comic cameo and Asha as a sweet little stereotype who would never alarmingly come to life. She had not credited her with normal perceptions, normal reactions, because after all this wasn’t England. Whatever retribution the days ahead had in store for her, she deserved it all.
When she did not respond, Ravi went on, ‘I just can’t understand it. For the life of me, I can’t see what could have made her do such a disgusting thing. There’s no sense in it; it’s just not like her.’ He thrust his fists into the bedclothes, but drew them out as if he did not know who he wanted to hit. ‘She must have suspected something,’ he said, ‘but it’s so coldly calculating. What can have made her want to do it?’
Sarah couldn’t tell him, of course. How could she admit – after everything else that she had done wrong there, all the mistakes she had made – that she had done that too? So she just stood, stricken in the middle of the room and, after a minute or two, asked, ‘What’s going to happen?’
‘You’ll have to leave,’ Ravi said without moving.
Of course, she knew that. She could not sleep another night in that house, which she had turned upside down. She could not go on sitting with the family at table in the ghastly silence, which now filled the house. But where could she go?
She looked down at Ravi, defeated on the bed. He offered no solution, no comfort. He was sprawled across it, overwhelmed by his own misfortune. But then, she did not feel that sorry for him either.
‘Where to?’ she asked.
Ravi made an impatient little movement as though that, for heaven’s sake, were the least of his worries. ‘I’ll get you a train ticket.’
‘I’m not going back to Delhi.’
Her decision surprised her. ‘I’m not just going to be packed off home like a naughty school girl. I’ve hardly seen anything yet.’
‘Haven’t you seen enough?’ Ravi asked and Sarah was suddenly enraged that at that frightful moment, he could be so sarcastic.
‘No, I’ll go to Benares.’ (Their train from Delhi had been eventually bound for Benares. Reading its destination on the station board, she had imagined going there with Ravi.)
‘Varanasi?’ Ravi said.
‘Yes,’ said Sarah, ‘I’ll go to Varanasi. Why should I miss that too?’
Ravi shook his head. ‘Are you sure? On your own? You could go back and stay with Birendra for a bit.’
That decided her. ‘No, I don’t want to stay with Birendra. I want to go to Varanasi. I can cope. I shall go and spend a few days in Varanasi and then … then maybe I’ll go to Khajuraho and have a look at those temples.’
Ravi looked amazed. For a moment, he seemed about to argue with her, to try and persuade her for her own good not to go. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s your decision.’
And losing any remnant of control she had kept, Sarah shrieked, ‘Yes, it is!’
Wildly she tugged her suitcase out from under the bed, roughly pushed aside Ravi’s dangling ankle and started
to fling her belongings into it, with tears running down her face.
*
Of course, afterwards she still had to face his parents. She couldn’t get a train ticket just like that, she couldn’t evaporate. They were both grimly correct to her, as though it cost them dear even to look at her. When she finally dared emerge from her bedroom, (‘Look, I don’t care,’ she had said to Ravi, ‘I’ve just got to get some tea,’) the house had at first seemed deserted. Waiting for a howl of fury, she had made her way as far as the kitchen corridor and gingerly coughed. One of the servants, Ila, shot out of the kitchen and gestured wildly at her not to come in. Sarah thought sadly, ‘She thinks I’ll pollute it.’ She said, ‘Chai,’ tea, one of the first Hindi words she had ever learnt, and turned back to her room. As she turned, she caught sight of Shakuntala gaping at her from the other end of the kitchen corridor, but Shakun at once scurried away.
Ila brought them both tea, her face bunched and sorrowful. Sarah remembered long ago Ravi telling her that Ila had wept when he went away to England. She wondered what thoughts were running through Ila’s mind now as she contemplated the end result of that foolish journey. Ravi got up off the bed and washed his face. They drank their tea and discussed what they should do next; Sarah’s hysterically half-packed suitcase lay unavoidably at their feet.
They went to the railway station to fix up her ticket and on the way, Ravi said again, ‘You know, you don’t have to go haring off into the blue. You’re quite sure you don’t want to go back to Delhi? You could always stay at the YWCA.’
But Sarah answered, ‘Sure. Why should I miss Varanasi on top of everything else?’
Ravi looked doubtful. ‘It’s a tricky old city.’
Sarah shrugged. ‘It’s hardly been a bed of roses here.’ Because she had been thinking, in the meantime, that this was her last chance. If she turned her back on India now and fled home to safety, then she would never really have come face to face with her adventure. Naturally she was scared stiff, but that fear in its way was exciting. While at first she had been reluctant to turn to mosques and temples for lack of Ravi, her surrogate interest had turned to a real one. She found that immersing herself in that brilliance gave her an almost comparable thrill. And anyway, if anything went wrong, then her fate would be a punishment for Ravi.
