The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  “I thought I might go back,” he says. “Just for a couple of weeks. You could come if you want. You and the girls.”

  “Really, Henry.”

  “No. I didn’t think so.”

  When they return home the house is dark and quiet. The children have not stirred, both sleeping with their arms tossed up over their heads. Charlotte stands at the entrance to their room and leans against the doorframe. Henry comes up behind her, kisses her neck, and pulls the door gently closed. Then he leads her back to the bedroom, feeling for her skin beneath her heavy jumper. They make love in the dark. Afterwards Henry rolls Charlotte onto her stomach and kisses her back. She has a dark birthmark high on the outside edge of her thigh, roughly a hand’s length down from the curve of her bottom. Its color is something between aubergine and chocolate. Henry can feel it under his palm—a thick, smooth coin of skin. He runs his fingers down the warm meat of her leg, then puts his tongue to the mark. His fingers stray into her pubic hair, then away, down the inside edge of her other leg. He touches her from behind, then slips inside her once more.

  Thunder wakes her late in the night. She dreams she is hearing fireworks, until the weather moves overhead and the crack of the storm makes the house shake. It passes slowly—the thunder, then the rain. “Henry,” she whispers. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” he says, rolling towards her. He puts his hand out, trying to find her face in the dark. His palm opens against her nose, his fingers stroking her forehead and coming down towards her mouth. He feels her lips move beneath his hand.

  “You should go,” she whispers. “If you want to, you should.”

  PART THREE

  Homecomings

  1965–1966

  Henry leaves two days later. He kisses the girls good night and slips out once they are sleeping. Charlotte helps him with his bags, then watches from the veranda as the taxi drives away, the taillights disappearing in the trees. That night she sleeps with the children and in the morning meets Carol, and the group of them walk down to the river. At the water’s edge a giant gum has turned gray and lost its leaves. “What happened to it?” asks Lucie.

  “It has grown old,” Charlotte replies.

  “What is old?”

  Charlotte thinks for a moment, then says, “Days and days and days.”

  Lucie stands watching the tree, then stumbles up to it and touches its smooth trunk, quickly, as though it were scalding hot, then a second time, slowly. “I’m stroking it,” she says. “I’m stroking the tree.”

  They arrive home to find a dead worm curled up on the garden path, its body baked hard by the sun. “What is dead?” Lucie asks. Several answers flash through Charlotte’s mind but they are all inadequate. Instead she cheats, distracting her child with the blooming flowers, the torrent of red geraniums over the side of the hanging basket—Let’s pick some for the table. But the next day Lucie finds the worm curled in the same place. Is the worm still dead? Yes, the worm is still dead. The sun is out and the grass is shining with the remains of night rain. Lucie crouches down to touch the wet grass beside the worm. “Who makes the rain?” she asks.

  * * *

  Henry flies into Delhi late at night and takes a taxi, the city dense with sirens and horns and headlights. The car plaits its way through the streets, tailgating a motorbike, buzzing up to race a truck, then overtaking a bus from the inside lane. Henry grips the cloth of his trousers with his sweaty hands. Further ahead an amber traffic light turns red. The driver pushes his foot to the brake and the car skids to a stop. A beggar comes up and puts his hand to the window just as the lights change again and the car takes off, roaring across three lanes of oncoming traffic to make the exit. Horns. Lights. One horn: hurry up. Two horns: I’m passing.

  Henry sits in the back and gazes out the window. He paid for the airfare with the money from the trust fund his father left him. He didn’t tell Charlotte about the fare. He said his mother was covering the costs, but he knew she didn’t have any money to give and now feels his guts twist up with the lie. There’s not much left of his father’s money, he reasons, not enough to make a difference to them now. It paid for Charlotte’s new shoes before they sailed out, and for the new bikes they’d bought on ­arrival. They were going to save the rest to put towards ­schooling, be sensible. Or he could have been kinder and given it to her, helped her go home. And now he is here. Of all places. Along the roadside is everything his mother wanted him to forget: the men sleeping on benches and on the ground and on the footpaths; the man defecating by the bridge—not squatting but just standing with knees a little bent, the shit falling out; the stone-and-cloth shacks by the highway and the thin mangy dogs; a truck piled full of corpses, the pale soles of their dark feet sticking out through wooden railings.

  “Where have you come from?” the driver asks.

  For a moment Henry can’t remember the right answer. “Australia,” he replies, looking up. The driver is silent. They’ve not got far to travel and Henry is glad for it.

  The driver punches the horn as he speeds past a rickshaw, then eyes Henry in the rear-vision mirror as if doubting what Henry said. “And where are you going?”

  The power is out when he arrives at his lodgings. Everything is dark. The attendant lights a lantern and walks him around the side of the house towards his room. It all looks very different from how he remembers it, when the guesthouse was their ­family home. The attendant places Henry’s suitcase at the foot of the bed. Would this have been his mother’s room? He is jet-lagged and his sense of the house is confused. Which way had the attendant brought him? By the fish pond, he guesses, close to the front gate, which would mean he is in one of the outer rooms and that the room where his mother once slept would be through the adjoining wall. Of course no one knows who he is now. After his sister died his father stayed on in Calcutta, while Henry and his mother moved here, to be with his mother’s family. It was a fine new house then, built by his mother’s father, with rooms for everyone and a wide green garden glittering with orange-and-blue dragonflies. Everyone hoped that his mother would recover here; she would be well cared for and would not have to look out every single day over the places where her daughter had played. But it never happened, and soon enough Henry was packed off to school in the hills. By 1947, when India became independent, Henry was already in England and the house was sold to a wealthy developer who turned the building into a guesthouse. The family had dispersed.

  Henry switches on the fan to disguise the sound of traffic. Mosquitoes bump against the high ceiling, then swoop down towards his arms. He knows that his is an accidental return, an accidental journey—like all his journeys, he thinks, created by the rough chances of the time. Charlotte must understand this. She must forgive him this. The ideas have not come of their own accord. It has always been someone else who suggested it, some ­other set of circumstances that made it possible. His geography has been determined by forces outside himself: the war, India’s push towards independence, Australia’s own fear of invasion. They shouldn’t have taken him—they did not really want him. Neither England nor Australia, nor India for that matter. He could see it in the glare of the taxi driver’s eye: he is too fair, but not fair enough; his English is good, but a little clipped, something you see as well as hear, something that makes him seem, just for a moment, like one of them—the way his lower jaw moves out when he speaks, pushing his chin forwards and bending his bottom lip down away from his teeth. He wonders what it would be like to belong somewhere and never doubt it. To not be constantly pestered by the knowledge of your own foreignness. He knows that his mother felt this herself, and sent him off to England in the hope that he might avoid this same experience, that he might come to feel himself part of a country, a rightful member of a place. But family has a way of passing down its fate. How he ­envies Charlotte her feelings for England, her sense of kinship.

  * * *

  He takes his breakfast early,
while the sun is low behind the trees. His bags sit by his feet and the lanky black-and-white dog sniffs them over while Henry butters his toast. Two elderly ladies sit at the far end of the table, each picking at a basket of stuff in her lap. He thinks it some kind of intricate needlework at first, then realizes that the two are slowly working their morning pills out of their packets and lining them up next to their plates piled with rice and vegetables. Beside him sit an older man and a younger woman. The man is touching sixty perhaps, the woman thirty-five. But he can never tell with women, something that always amuses Charlotte. “How old do you think she is?” she’d ask, meaning the woman at the grocery store, or a lady at a party, or the librarian, or the woman with six whining children.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, go on, have a guess.”

  “No, really, I don’t know.”

  Five wooden birdhouses hang from the branches of the neem tree that shades the breakfast table. The day is still but the little wooden houses swing gently on their ropes as lorikeets and squirrels wrestle for seed. Henry glances again at the woman and man sitting next to him. At first he assumed them to be strangers. They do not seem to notice one another’s presence; they are sitting across from each other but have turned away so that they are facing in opposite directions. The man has taken an early swim in the green pool and now sits at the table in his bathers, staring into the hazy distance of the garden. The woman sits angled slightly to the left as if to signal to the man that she is not open to conversation, her head buried in the newspaper. For a long time they do not speak, then the man says something without turning towards her—Henry doesn’t catch what it is—and the woman replies, just as briefly, without looking up from her reading. They are not strangers then, Henry thinks. Strangers look one another in the eye when they speak. They might be father and daughter were it not for the difference in appearance: the man thin and gingery, the woman round and dark. Perhaps they are a couple? Old couples ask questions and give answers, all without noticing the person they are talking to. But she looks too young for them to be married, and they are too unenthusiastic—too uninterested in each other—to be traveling as friends or lovers. They could be siblings, Henry thinks, if not for their age. Siblings and old couples can be quite similar, really, both cool with years of residual irritations and rivalries. But perhaps he has the woman’s age wrong and they are husband and wife after all? Do he and Charlotte look like that? Will they soon? How sad it must sometimes feel, but happy too, he imagines, and peaceful, the accumulation of years a kind of comfort in itself. He pictures his own parents plowing on through the decades, breakfasting on the veranda every morning. They were always very calm. He never asked if they were happy. Now he realizes that of course they were not. Henry stands and goes in search of more tea; there was a man about just a moment ago, carrying a silver pot.

  Later, once he’s finished his breakfast, he calls for the porter, who takes his bags and stacks them in the boot of the white Ambassador. Henry climbs into the backseat, and as the driver closes the door the cuff of his blue shirt slips back from his wrist, revealing a single red prayer string. Henry has seen men with inches of wishes tied to their wrists, and now this. Such frugality. If he made only one wish, what would it be?

  * * *

  At half past seven the train pulls out of Delhi station. His seat is by the window, and although he tries not to look he can’t help it. He sees it all: the miles and miles of slums, the dwellings made of scraps of sacking and plastic or cardboard, the roofs pinned down by bricks, the pigs and children digging in the pyramids of rubbish, the women washing in greenish water or cooking over damp fires fueled with refuse, the rags of clothes hanging on decaying brick walls, the buffalo and goats wandering through the mud and slime. No one else in the carriage is looking. They have seen it too many times and for too long to bother noticing it anymore. Henry has forgotten these things. He must have seen these sights as a child, seen them without judgment or understanding; he would simply have seen children and animals, women washing.

  Henry leans his head back and closes his eyes. When he opens them again the train is speeding through rice paddies spotted with small grass huts. The flat plains of green stretch out in every direction. Rain begins to fall, spattering the windows. Soon the green of the rice fields gives way to trees—thin, silver-limbed eucalypts.

  The train starts to climb and the eucalypts are replaced by acacia, then conifer and deodar. The bright green of the hillside is ­colored with pink hibiscus and waves of yellow lantana. Fog collects below as the train moves higher and higher, vine-covered branches leaning out over the deep valley that is soon sunk in cloud. Monkeys perch in the forks of the trees, watching as the train passes, then they run across the vines and jump down, out of sight. They are so much bigger than he remembers—these creatures as fat and tall as dogs.

  Opposite Henry sit a husband and wife, fast asleep, their toes turned inwards. The woman’s chin collapses on her chest, the man’s cheek presses against the window. Henry slides his own window open and breathes in the high, cool air. It smells of diesel and freshly wet earth. The air is cold and dark beneath the trees and they speed now through tunnel after tunnel, black tunnels glistening with water, yet when they emerge the train still seems to move beneath the earth, with high slopes of wet grass and moss-covered rocks rising up beside the carriages. Henry presses his face to the gap of the window and looks up—the spires of conifers tower straight above the train, their uppermost branches lost in the bright fog, their lower ones black with water, the railway tracks running along beneath their roots.

  Charlotte wakes to a freezing dawn and opens the curtains. What day is it? Henry has been gone for a long time. It feels like a long time. Has it been four days? Five? He called once from Delhi but she’s heard nothing since, and without his coming and going the days are undifferentiated, full of chores and accidents—spillages, injuries, fits of wild crying.

  She hadn’t realized how much she looked forwards to him returning home in the evenings—how his presence soothes her. She wants, more than anything, just to lean against him now and rest her head on his chest. Since he’s been gone, May has suffered from nightmares, crying out in the dark and then refusing to be left alone; Charlotte spent much of the previous night sleeping on the floor beside May’s bed. Now she is tired and sore. She sets the children up at the kitchen table with paper and colored pencils and goes about preparing breakfast.

  At the edge of the garden, crows gather in the pine tree. They cluster along its branches, wing to wing, and caw. They cry all at once but not in unison, some cries ending as others begin, each bird’s single, repeated caw linked into the next, rising and lowering, lowering and rising, like a volley of sirens wailing through the cold air. Then all of a sudden the sound stops. For several minutes there is just the wind in the trees. The green triangle of the pine stands dark against the bright cloud. Then one bird swoops down off a branch, circles the tree, lands, and caws again. The others join in and the sky around the tree grows rough with sound.

  The children eat buttered toast for breakfast, and later Charlotte bakes scones. The girls want to help. May sits in her highchair while Lucie stands on a stool at the bench and spoons lumps of butter into a measuring cup. White flour falls like fine ash. It covers the floor, the table, the bench. It is in the children’s hair. It is trapped in the fine down covering Charlotte’s arms and scattered over the toes of her shoe. She tugs the fridge open to get the milk and the magnetic letters on the door fall off, into the flour, landing wrong side up. Through the window she can see the hibiscus and hydrangea bushes bowing down under the weight of water. Each day now it rains. Spring should be here. It is time. A breeze comes and mountainous clouds move quickly across the sky. The days are long and strange. Each day she goes down to the river and thinks of Henry. She didn’t like India, when they visited. What she remembers most is eating kulfi and reading Anna Karenina while they ­waited out t
he monsoon rains. She remembers the feel of the book—a heavy, green, cloth-bound copy, the pages warped by damp.

  “I’ll write,” promised Henry the morning he left.

  * * *

  He is a long way away now, on a green mountain in the north. He walks slowly uphill, his feet slipping on the moss. He thinks of Charlotte, imagines her doing what he knows she does: cooking, pushing the pram, drinking tea from the floral Wedgwood cup. Now, as he walks, he phrases and rephrases a letter. I always thought that we. Do you remember. The weather is. He has been writing the letter in his head since he boarded the train at Delhi. That must be more than twelve hours ago now, four or five days since the taxi drove him away from the house in Australia. There were lengthy delays with the train and the change in Kalka. Then the creeping Toy Train up the mountain. He forgot what a long journey it was. He is in Shimla now, finally, and walking towards his mother. A steep road narrows to a steep path. He watches his feet, placing them on the grass or in the mud but not on the slippery wet green stone. He feels he has been climbing for a long time now, first the road, then the path, but when he lifts his head he is surprised to find he is almost there, the tall white building visible up ahead and ­glowing amid the jungle. The house is built into the rock of the hillside, the original owner a marine engineer who ordered another level be constructed every time he came home on leave. It now rises five stories. Long ferns curl around the walls, jasmine clambers over the windows, pine trees and bright vines carpet the hill behind.

  * * *

  “It’s urgent,” he says to the secretary stationed at the entrance, and asks to be shown to his mother’s room. “You wrote to me. I’ve traveled for days.”