by Helen Harris
Ravi said, ‘I wish I could come with you.’
Sarah answered, ‘No you don’t, Ravi. It’s too late to pretend now.’
When they came back to the house, it was already lunch-time. Mrs Kaul was setting dishes on the table. At first she pretended not to notice them come in.
‘Sarah’s going to Varanasi tomorrow afternoon,’ Ravi announced unnecessarily loudly. ‘She wants to see the big sights before she leaves India.’
His mother nodded primly, merely acknowledging that she had taken in this piece of information, but still she did not look up at them.
They ate the meal in near silence. Neither Mr Kaul nor Asha was there and naturally Sarah did not dare to ask where they were. She hardly ate anything and, for once, Mrs Kaul did not try to push more food on her. She sighed gustily at intervals through the meal and once or twice pressed her fingers to her suffering temples.
In the afternoon, Ravi and Sarah went out for a walk, walking well apart and not holding hands. They went automatically in the opposite direction from the night before, to the ruined Residency in its neo-classical park. There they sat under a tree and, in the end, were surprised by how little they had to say to each other.
‘God, I’ll be glad to get out of this place,’ Ravi said.
His family had never felt at home in Lucknow and, in bad times, they always remembered it. They had come there unwillingly, uprooted by the imperious demands of Mr Kaul’s Government job. They had come determined to resent the stuffy provincial city, a far cry from Delhi where they had been so at home. And they doggedly resented it, even as children, outnumbered at school by cocky indigenous classmates. Only, in time, involuntary associations had grown up and all of them found themselves occasionally, despite themselves, feeling affectionate towards Lucknow. Eventually they even settled there and knew that when Mr Kaul retired, they would not have the motivation or the energy anymore to return to Delhi. But when things went wrong for them, they still remembered that they had never wanted to come there and they blamed Lucknow for their misfortunes.
Around them a few families strolled through the Residency compound, surveying the smashed arches and columns with a contrived, educational interest.
‘When do you think you’ll be able to get away?’ Sarah asked conversationally.
Ravi shrugged hopelessly. ‘God knows. I suppose I might hear soon if I’ve got that job in Delhi. If not, I shall have to go back and start looking again.’ He hesitated. ‘Let me know when you intend to get back there, won’t you? I’ll try to come up then so that I can see you off.’
Sarah didn’t answer.
‘You’re really going to go trekking off on your own?’ Ravi asked her. ‘Promise me you’ll take care.’
Sarah rounded on him. ‘I don’t know why you’re keeping up this pretence!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s the point?’
They sat a little longer without speaking. Then, finding the silence between them harder to bear sitting still, they got up and started to walk back to the house. Ravi made one or two further attempts to talk on the way, but nothing came of them and by the time they got back to the house, they were both on the verge of tears.
That night Sarah wanted to miss the family dinner. But she realised that staying in her room would only make things worse, if that were possible. She walked into a hostile silence in the dining room and her ‘Hello’ sounded fragile and tinny. Only Mr Kaul replied severely, ‘Good evening, Sarah,’ and Ravi said in an artificially cheery voice, ‘Have you finished packing yet?’
She sat down in her usual place on Mr Kaul’s right, opposite Ravi, and looked down at her plate. Still none of them said anything and a ripple ran around the table – of revulsion, Sarah thought. She wanted to run away at once, to escape from that solidly united censure. Asha passed her the potato curry and-she insultingly took a ridiculously tiny helping of it so that they should all see what she thought of them. After all, what, for God’s sake, had she done wrong? She did the same with everything else which Asha silently passed her, until Mr Kaul announced stiffly, ‘You’ll need more than that for your journey, Sarah.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said sullenly.
‘I think none of us are,’ Mr Kaul replied reprovingly, ‘but we are still managing to eat.’
Sarah looked around at the family and the family looked back at her. It was not really true that they were managing to eat: Mrs Kaul certainly hadn’t taken a mouthful and only Ravi was miserably putting food into his mouth for lack of anything better to do. Asha sat huddled and silent; she had a fiercely stony expression as she stared down at her place, but whether she was triumphant or appalled at the disaster she had brought about, Sarah could not tell.
Throughout the meal, very little was said. The atmosphere was painful and everyone got up and scattered as soon as possible when it was over.
Ravi and Sarah went out into the garden. Ravi said to her, ‘That was “The Last Supper”,’ and Sarah giggled sadly. It was their last joke.
*
Of course it was awful that, in the end, Sarah had to leave so suddenly, so sordidly. There was something horrid, Ravi thought, about the way his parents wanted her packed out of the house straight away, as if she carried some shameful germ. They had been beside themselves at the revelation – quite naïvely, he considered, for surely they must have had some inkling of his relations with Sarah? But he knew it was not the revelation in itself which upset them, so much as its implications: if a child like Asha had found them out, then who else might not have done? Ravi knew that, in his father’s mind, a circle of his office colleagues stood around them at Shah Najaf, looking on in outrage and scandal as his son disgraced himself. There was A. B. Habibulla, their pompous visitor of the other night, puffing and pontificating; there was ‘Nonesuch’ Nair and there was Major Mehrotra, the father of the charming and sweet-natured girl whom Mr Kaul had still hoped that Ravi would one day marry.
Now that the truth was out, even if so far it had been kept a family secret, what was there to stop other people finding out in any case? The family might keep its mouth shut and expel Sarah like a serpent from its bosom, but once such a superlative piece of scandal became public it would be impossible to suppress it. In a gossipy provincial place like Lucknow, even the ceiling lizards told tales.
In the end, he was genuinely upset to see Sarah go. With her departure the last link with his university days was being severed and he knew that for years to come he would still sometimes miss her. He was sorry that she had decided to go off, so innocent and ill-equipped on her touring. But his life would be, oh so much easier when she had gone.
Even as he watched her pack, even as he took her to the railway station, he could not ignore the treacherous little voice which whispered under his sorrow, telling him that although today might be terrible, ahead of him at last his destiny was clear.
*
In the morning, after a virtually sleepless night, Sarah put the last few things into her suitcase. The art book with the dog-eared page she pushed down to the bottom, because she was afraid that later on the sight of it might make her cry. She forced down some breakfast and managed to reply quite calmly when Mr Kaul said goodbye to her before leaving for his office. Asha and Shakun had avoided her, skittering off to school as soon as she was up. Mrs Kaul had one of the servants prepare her a picnic for the journey and Ila brought it to her wordlessly as she closed her suitcase. Sarah felt as though her very presence were unhealthy.
Her train left at two o’clock, so she and Ravi set off to the station soon after one. Asha and Shakun were out and only Mrs Kaul stood stiffly on the verandah and watched them go, her face a composition of distrust as if she suspected that Sarah might still spirit Ravi away and he would never come back.
They did not say very much, even on the way to the station. What was there to say in the face of such an irredeemable mess?
Ravi said, ‘Make sure you put your handbag under your head if you go to sleep on the train.’ And, ‘Don’t m
iss going to Sarnath from Varanasi, will you? It’s supposed to be really interesting.’
Sarah said, ‘I get down at the Cantonment Station, don’t I?’
‘Look, you’re sure the rickshaw men in Varanasi will know where this hotel of yours is?’
They went in silence past the school where they had watched the boys playing football. Nearer the station, they just talked about platforms and tickets. Everything was very rushed once they got there and, in the end, they did not even say goodbye to each other properly because that very morning a letter had arrived to say that Ravi had got the job in the social survey outfit in Delhi after all. So they just agreed that when Sarah’s adventure was over, she would get in touch with him there.
*
Varanasi Station was no worse than any other station she had been to and the hotel, which Ravi had given her the name of, was no worse than any other hotel. There were plenty of foreign tourists there, which reassured her until she remembered that really she ought to be disappointed.
She went down to the Ganges to watch the sun rise on her first morning and saw a sight which made her forget for a good two hours that she no longer had a reason to be there.
The pink disc of the sun moved up over the wide silver river and all along the steps which lined the river bank, people were plunging. They bathed, absorbed in their ritual, and paid no attention to the foreign tourists standing watching them. They held up brass cups of water to the rising sun. As it grew brighter, individual ceremonies emerged from the general washing: a shrunken old woman in widow’s white squatting in the mud, a contorted, emaciated yogi doing exercises on a stone slab, a powerful matron in an infinite sari wading into the water. They were at one with the spreading morning and as the colours entered the crowded ghats and temples, the bathers too grew livelier and more jubilant.
That afternoon Sarah wandered through the chaotically narrow streets of the old city. They were alive with such feverish excitement that it seemed impossible that it could be an ordinary day. Every inch of space was given over to encouraging the excitement – shrines, stalls, garlands, incense. Now and then she would cross a wave of jostling, shrill pilgrims, who plunged past her as though she was invisible. Only their occasional kohl-eyed babies, their great eyes magically increased in size, would stare at her over the hurrying shoulders. In one small alleyway she came face to face with a cow, which butted its way absently past her as though she had no business being there at all. She spent the day in a state of happy shock, marvelling at the weirdness of it all, the adventure she had found for herself. She got lost, had no idea where she was, no idea what was going on. In a moment of whimsical abandon, she even bought herself some incense and a garland. In a busy temple, she met some French tourists from her hotel and, in the evening, she went out to eat with them in a restaurant full of the sweet fumes of dope.
On her second day, she went to the Durga Monkey Temple and the Shiva Temple. Little bells rang around her, informing the gods of the visitors’ presence. She was briefly shocked from her happy trance when a monkey snapped at her ankle. She went back to the old city again as well. She had no idea how long it would last, but, for the moment, she was having a lovely time. In the evening, she went with the French tourists to listen to some devotional music. One of them, a Christ-like blond hippy called Jean-Marc, put his arm around her as the sitar pulsed and tenderly caressed her breasts through her thin muslin kurta. For two or three days, everything worked out fine.
But on the morning of the fourth day, she woke in her stuffy hotel room and realised that she felt dreadfully ill. Below her window, someone was cooking on charcoal and it took her a moment to separate her sickness from the smell. She was suffocating. But when she threw off her sheet and sat up to go and switch the ceiling fan onto a faster setting, the sudden movement made her head spin. She lay back and assessed her condition as the fan croaked round infuriatingly overhead. She must have a fever; obscene little trickles of sweat were rolling down between her legs and her hair, spiky with damp, all seemed to be lying in the wrong direction so that her scalp hurt. Her mouth, foul with the taste of the previous evening’s smoking, was dry and stuck together. She must have caught something. As she lay there, wondering how ill she really was, panic came over her in a cold sweat; she was going to be taken ill here, she was going to be overwhelmed by India. And she whimpered with self-pity; the prospect was just too terrifying for words.
She had to get up. Several times during the next couple of hours she told herself that and found the certainty comforting. At last her thirst forced her out of bed and, shuddering, she washed and dressed and went outside.
She went to Ahmed’s Kola Korner, a small dingy restaurant frequented by foreign tourists where she had taken to having her breakfast. It was already nearly eleven o’clock and most of the customers she knew by sight had gone. The restaurant, which was really just a small hole in the wall of a larger Import-Export company, was empty and quiet. Sarah sat down thankfully. It was dazzlingly bright outside and as she walked down the street, the lurid colours of the little shop-fronts had seemed to hammer at her eyes. She was relieved to reach the dark cavern of Ahmed’s, prop her head on her hands and shut her eyes.
She ordered tea and toast. Ahmed did a lively trade in mock European cooking. The toast came soft and utterly pliable and Sarah sat in front of it for a while, playing with it and feeling sick. Ahmed – at least she imagined he was Ahmed – watched her from his corner. His blank gaze annoyed her. But the tea helped a bit and after two or three cups, she began to think that she might be better. Ahmed came over to offer her some more tea, and they had a stilted little conversation about her health. It did her good to reduce her illness to simple terms: heat, fever, stomach, fatigue. By the end of their conversation she felt quite reassured, convinced that as Ahmed said, it was only an upset. She sat on in the restaurant for a while, idly watching the morning.
Walking back to the hotel, she was suddenly sick in the gutter. Her main concern was that Ahmed should not see her and be offended. But it was hard to vomit inconspicuously because a circle of street children immediately gathered around her, and pointed and commented.
She lay down in her hotel room, telling herself that it had been Ahmed’s unspeakable toast, and dozed for most of the afternoon. But the fear of admitting that she really might be ill forced her to get up and go out again later on. She took a tricycle rickshaw down to the ghats and sat by the river in the pink peace of the dusk, watching the quieter evening people come and go. A little way away from her squatted a young American, his face glazed, his muscular legs contorted in an imitation of an Indian crouch. That time she felt no elation, only a sense of her own redundancy and defeat.
The next morning, she felt worse. She had sweated a lot in the night and her sheets were damp and chilly. Her head was swimming. At first, she even wondered if she had the strength to get up. But staying in bed would have been an unbearable admission of illness. She forced herself to get up and was promptly sick again, except that not having eaten anything much the day before, all that she could do was retch hopelessly over the washbasin, thin viscous liquid. After that, she thought she felt better and dragged herself into her dirty clothes. As soon as she put them on, she began to feel intolerably itchy. She gathered her things to go out with painful care, hoping that the concentration would pull her together – bag, sunglasses, purse, key. She walked out past the staring receptionist with an expression of frozen dignity on her face. She knew she must look a fright.
She walked slowly down to Ahmed’s, fighting against rising waves of nausea. Whereas the day before the gaudy little shop-fronts had seemed blindingly brilliant, today they had receded to an uncertain frieze. The street danced at a great distance from her, on the far side of a shimmering layer of exhaustion peopled by jerkily gesticulating pin-men and women. It surprised her that the children in the bazaar still noticed her and called.
It took her eyes a minute or two to become accustomed to the total blackness i
nside the restaurant, and she groped her way to the same table as the day before. Ahmed was not in his corner and she sat down glumly to wait for him; he seemed to take ages coming. It was chilly and damp in there, she was the only customer and it seemed mournful and eerie. She fidgeted unhappily. Where the hell was Ahmed? This was really a nasty, sinister little hole. Whyever had she come here? As she tried to peer into the back of the restaurant to make out some sign of life, it suddenly struck her that the room was actually getting darker. She blinked and shook her head, her mouth filled with cold saliva and a wave of panic swept over her. She realised that she was about to faint and tried to get up and make for the bright open doorway, but it was too late.
The waiter and his brother retrieved the unconscious English girl from the floor where she had fallen. Acutely embarrassed, they made one or two discreet attempts to revive her with patting and prods and then called the brother’s wife. But when none of their measures had any effect and the wife noticed how hot the girl’s head was, they became frightened and the waiter shouted for a tricycle rickshaw and they took her like a parcel to the hospital.
*
‘Is there any history?’ Two doctors stood out in the corridor of the dilapidated hospital and an immense Indian sun spilt through the windows onto their white coats. From her bed in the large, silent ward, Sarah half heard them discussing her, a trifle dismissively. She was not presenting any of the usual hippy traveller’s symptoms, they said; she had not got hepatitis or dysentery or malaria. Yet she was clearly ill. She lay repugnantly white and bony on the much-laundered sheets and tried to roll her eyeballs inwards away from their probing examination. Her illness dispensed her from her well-brought-up inhibitions and before their hands, she gave way to hysteria and recoil. Their brown and smiling faces bobbed above her and as they examined her, they seemed to make fun of her predicament. She wanted to explain to them that it was not what it seemed; she was not just another piece of European flotsam and jetsam cast up in Benares at the end of a farcical quest for the wisdom of the East. She was there for another, quite admirable reason. But they had waggled their heads in amusement at her protests and gone on examining her. At that point, she gave up and let them see that she was simply utterly sick of India and, not surprisingly, that insulted them.
