by Katy Gardner
“Coral’s here! I’ve got to find her!”
Still he stared at me blankly. Why was he being so obtuse?
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t matter . . . look, just wait for me in Thailand . . .”
“What do you mean: ‘Wait for me in Thailand?’ ” His voice was ominously low. I looked quickly away from his face. I was yearning to be moving now, to be reaching the end of my story.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, I can’t say . . .”
“Esther, for God’s sake . . .”
I took a step away from him.
“Steve,” I hissed. “I have to do this!”
“No you don’t. You’ve just got yourself into a state, that’s all . . .”
“It’s not all!” I shook my head impatiently at him. “How can you say that? You don’t have any idea how I feel!”
He frowned. “That’s funny. I thought that was the whole point.”
At the time I did not understand what he meant. Turning sharply away, I peered across the road. Nearly all of the other passengers had boarded the coaches now. In a minute or so one of the airline officials was going to notice we were missing.
“Look, Steve,” I pleaded, “I don’t have time to discuss this properly. I just have to find Coral.”
There was a long pause. Steve blinked sullenly up at me.
“I’m warning you, Esther,” he said slowly. “This is the last time you’re going to do this to me. I can’t take your histrionics any longer. You’ve got to move on, otherwise I . . .”
But I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence, for although it sounds cruel and hard, I’d turned away from him. It was a split-second decision, but I was convinced it was right. Even if it meant leaving Steve adrift, it seemed like I had no choice. I had perhaps sixty seconds left before they started counting the seats filled on the bus.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed.
Then, not glancing back, I darted across the road where a line of black-and-yellow taxis waited. Behind me I could hear Steve shout “Esther!” but he was too late, for I’d already slammed the door behind me and told the driver to pull away.
26
IT was not until the taxi had joined the motorway that I dared sit up straight and look out of the window. Glancing over my shoulder to reassure myself that no one was following me, I stared blankly at the flat brown landscape, trying to calm down. The cab was traveling through the scrub of the North Indian plains, just as Gemma and I had done that first magical night in India, but it was morning rather than late at night and the road was filled with juggernauts that rumbled endlessly past, their horns blaring. A line of camels plodded elegantly along at the side of the road, their haunches swaying. I glanced at them for a moment before looking away.
I stared down at my shaking hands. I could not believe where I was or what had just happened. Any minute now, I kept thinking, I would jolt awake and find myself on the plane, Steve’s arm securely around me. But as I clenched and unclenched my fingers I could feel my nails digging into my skin and the sticky heat of my palms, and knew it was real. Somehow—for whatever reason—I’d ended up in India, and now I was halfway to Delhi, Steve was no longer at my side, and lying on my lap was a shoddily printed red pamphlet which seemed about to propel me into something momentous.
I gazed at the pamphlet once more. On the front, under a crude depiction of Shiva, were the words: “Sai Baba Ashram: your path to enlightenment.” On the bottom right-hand corner someone had handwritten an address: “House number 2, Kulu Road, Manali, Himachal Pradesh.” Inside was a lot of guff about spirituality and “God-power,” exactly the kind of crap Coral would have been into. She was there all right, I suddenly thought. If I really wanted to find her, it would not be hard.
We had reached the traffic lights and the ostentatious mosque which had reminded me of an over-iced cake all those years ago. I looked quickly away, unable to bear the memories. I didn’t have the courage to do this, I suddenly thought. Searching for Coral and the truth about Gemma was the kind of thing the old Esther would have done, but she was different from me. She acted without thinking; she was brave and brassy and foolhardy whilst I, in contrast, had shriveled into something weak and bitter and incapable of action. Who was I fooling? I should tell the driver to turn the taxi around and return to the airport. I would wait for Steve there and when he reappeared I’d somehow make it up with him, just like I always did. Then we would go to Thailand, have a holiday, and I’d forget everything, just like he said I should.
But I did not move. The taxi sped on, entering a wide boulevard of large, luxurious villas, the city center growing ever closer. I glanced down at my watch, a habit I had picked up from work, where each minute past seemed a small achievement. It was getting on for nine. Steve would be at the hotel now, thinking God knows what. He would inevitably be angry and hurt and when I saw him again I’d be apologetic and repentant, willing him to understand, knowing that he never really could.
That was it. He would never understand, and until I’d proved to him that I was not simply hysterical, there was no going back: not to him, not to London, not even to myself. I glanced out of the window, noticing that we were passing the high-walled compounds of what looked like the British High Commission. I stared at the Union Jack fluttering from the roof and the guards lounging by the heavy metaled gates. Whatever happened, I realized, I could not return to the life I’d been living, to that stifled malaise where increasingly all I wanted was to be left alone, for events to wash over me, as painlessly and as unobtrusively as possible. Ever since I had lost Gemma, I’d been sleepwalking. I looked down again at the pamphlet, then folded it decisively, tucking it into my bag. Finally, I was about to wake up.
THE taxi dropped me outside the British Airways office on Connaught Place. I gave the driver a ten-pound note and climbed out of the car, gazing across the radial road as I struggled to get my bearings. Like the airport, everything had changed. I was clearly nowhere near the hostel where Gemma and I had stayed five years earlier; rather than the restaurants and small travel agents I recalled, the shops behind me were grand affairs, dealing in gold jewelry, expensive books, and posh silk saris. The Circus seemed smarter and cleaner than I remembered, too, the traffic moving past in an orderly stream, the as yet unopened shopfronts gleaming. It was true that in the doorways and alleys leading off the wide sidewalks there were sleeping bodies, their heads covered by thin blankets, but there were no more beggars here than in Central London.
In the center of the road, where the traffic paused at lights, a handful of kids were attempting to sell flowers to the waiting cars. I watched them for a while, remembering the children at Old Delhi Station and how I’d so primly reprimanded Gemma for giving them money. I must have been insufferable, I thought grimly: an unbearable mixture of know-it-all arrogance and naïveté. Why on earth had I presumed to understand so much about India after just one day in the place? Even worse, what right did I have to impose my narrow, ill-informed views on poor Gem?
In an attempt to halt the inevitable flow of thoughts, I turned back to the British Airways doors, noticing for the first time that two backpackers were waiting in front of it. They must have been there a while, for they were sitting on the ground, the girl—whose dirty dreadlocks obscured her face—apparently asleep and the boy buried in a book. They were a couple, I saw with a pang of unfamiliar loneliness, for the girl’s feet were nestled into the lap of her boyfriend, his ringed fingers absentmindedly kneading her toes. As I approached he roused and put down his book, looking up at me with a smile. His eyebrow was pierced and he had a quasi tribal tattoo on his lip.
“It opens at ten,” he said, in the perfectly enunciated tones of an English public schoolboy. “We thought it was nine so we’ve got another bloody hour to wait.”
I cleared my throat. It seemed a very long time since I’d a normal conversation.
“Going home?” I said hoarsely.
�
�No way. On to Hanoi.”
“How long have you been here?”
He shrugged. “A month or so. We were going to spend the whole winter in Goa, but it was totally ruined, you know? Like, there’s all these package tourists and people coming from India just to see, you know, white women’s tits and the police everywhere . . .” he trailed off. “How about you?”
“Just off the plane.”
For a brief, imperceptible moment, he raised his eyebrows, his eyes flicking quickly over my crumpled T-shirt and the tracksuit bottoms I had planned to swap for a sarong once we reached Bangkok.
“Yah?”
I smiled at him again, this time more perfunctorily. “Yeah.”
“And you’ve had enough already?” He jerked his chin questioningly at the British Airways logo behind his back.
“No, no, it’s not that. I just wondered if you knew where I could change some money.”
“Well, there’s a cash machine next to the Air India office, if you’ve got a credit card or whatever . . .”
“A cash machine?!”
“Sure. This isn’t Outer Mongolia, you know.” He smiled condescendingly, his status as the more experienced traveler now fully established.
“Last time I was here it took virtually a whole day to cash a traveler’s check.”
He shrugged. “Well, I guess times move on.”
“What about getting trains?”
“You should check out the railway office on the other side. It’s all been changed.” He sniffed and picked up his book, his interest in me fading.
“Thanks, then. Good luck with Hanoi.”
“No worries. Catch you later.”
TO my amazement he was right. I withdrew one hundred pounds’ worth of rupees from the cash machine and waited in line for no more than five minutes in the swish, air-conditioned first-class railway reservations office on the north side of Connaught Place. If I wanted to go to Manali, I was told, I should take the overnight train to Chandigarh, then catch a single-gauge train into the hills to Simla. Flying was out of the question, as the planes were booked for weeks. In under an hour I was standing back on the sidewalk, a train ticket dated for that evening tucked into my passport.
I stood inertly by the road, watching the traffic. Perhaps it was the delayed effect of shock or that I hadn’t slept or eaten properly for so long, but my thoughts kept zooming in and out of focus as if, just like all those years ago in the forest, I was stoned. I kept trying to galvanize myself into action. There were preparations to make, I told myself: I should buy some clothes, a toothbrush, and some provisions for the train. But when I turned toward Janpath, I felt suddenly giddy, the light blotting out alarmingly at the edge of my sight. Staggering back to the arcade of shops which arched behind me, I leaned my hands on my knees, fixing my eyes to the sidewalk in an effort not to faint.
It was different, yet completely the same, that was what knocked me off balance. There was the same hot sweet smell of jasmine and latrines; the same fuming rush of Ambassador cars and scooters and Tata trucks; the same street stalls with their paan leaves and sweet tobacco, their one paisa bidis and cheap reproduction prints. Yet everything was transformed, for the person that I’d been before had disappeared. When I’d walked toward the railway reservations office I had marched straight past the hostel where Gemma and I had stayed, not noticing it at first and only spinning around and gawping at the neon sign a few seconds later. For a moment I tried to picture Gemma walking up the steps, her pristine rucksack on her back, so ignorant of what lay ahead. But her ghost had vanished; all I could see was a small group of travelers smoking and chatting on the steps. Back then I would have aspired to be included in their group, to have joined their conversation and proved my credentials for authentic backpacking travel. But now I felt only a tetchy alienation. They had no idea what things were really like, I thought dismissively; they pretended to be so street-savvy; but just as I’d once been, they were innocents abroad. After all, who cared if they could travel around on some First World “budget” that still exceeded the annual incomes of most of the world’s inhabitants? What did it prove, beyond their unwillingness to put anything into the places which they passed through so superficially?
I stood up, looking back across the bustling road. The whole backpacker scene was utterly irrelevant; the only thing that mattered now was that I find Coral. And that was what I was going to do. I had allowed five long years to pass as I sank into a mire of guilt and depression, but now I had been sent a sign. Of course I was scared: of what I would learn and the people who might try to stop me, but anything was better than not knowing. Folding my arms tightly across my chest I started walking in the direction of the Underground Market.
27
WITHOUT requesting it, I had been booked into the ladies only compartment in the first-class carriage. As I heard the guard’s whistle and the train lurched forward I saw to my relief that the berths opposite remained unfilled. Swinging my feet off the bunk I swayed across the compartment and pulled the metal window blinds down with a clatter. It was already dark outside, but I did not want to see the passing lights. I wanted to be cocooned in my bunk, gently rocked by the train into senseless sleep until it was morning and I had traveled so far north that I was in another country altogether and my memories of me and Gemma were hundreds of miles behind.
Since my fainting fit by the side of the road I’d spent the entire day focusing on the immediate tasks of acquiring a set of warm clothes for the mountains, eating a vegeburger in an ice-cream bar on Connaught Place, and finding a taxi to take me to the station. Yet despite my efforts to keep calm I had found the emotional effort of trying to forget where I was exhausting. Gemma’s ghost may have disappeared from the steps of the hostel in Connaught Place, yet my own twenty-three-year-old shadow had trailed around with me all day: a foolish, arrogant slip of a thing who thought she knew it all and who only slipped away when I stood in front of the mirror in the ice-cream place and looked directly into my nearly twenty-nine-year-old face. Esther Waring, the grown-up: with my prematurely lined eyes and too-thin face, who now knew nothing at all.
Locking the compartment, I climbed back onto my bunk, pulling the insubstantial railway blanket around my shoulders and closing my eyes. I had not slept properly for over thirty-six hours and now sleep came quickly and thickly, muffling my thoughts and then blotting them out. I pictured the shops at Heathrow, so many light-years ago, and the rattle of the train turned into the drone of aircraft engines. I was flying now, in a plane without a roof, the planet stretched blue and white and green beneath me. Steve was there, too, his hand on my knee, his breath warm and comforting in my ear.
“Don’t worry, Essie,” he kept saying. “It’s just the engines, nothing to worry about at all.”
Then suddenly there was a bang, followed quickly by another, just below my head. I sat bolt upright, my heart hammering. From somewhere across the compartment there had been a sharp rap.
“Who is it?”
There it was again, the sound of a fist bashing on the door. Swallowing hard, I called out: “Hello?”
But there was no reply, just the shake and rattle of the train. Swinging my legs off the bunk I tiptoed across the dusty floor, opening the door an inch and peering out. No one was there, just the long empty stretch of the corridor.
Slamming the door hard, I bolted it as securely as I could and leaned against it, my eyes closed tight, my chest pounding. It was nothing, I was telling myself; just a guard, checking that the doors were properly locked. There was no need to be alarmed.
I double-checked the lock, then swayed unsteadily across the compartment to the window and pulled up the blinds. Beyond the tracks the quiet night fields were illuminated by a full moon, the sky crammed with stars. I sat down, hugging my shoulders for comfort. I was too wired now for sleep, and there were no little yellow eggs to help me on my way, but it didn’t matter. Soon—before the next day was over—I would reach the mountains.
; OUTSIDE Chandigarh the train finally stopped, and gathering up my few belongings I climbed wearily out. In the chilly half light of six A.M., I was cold. The other passengers had wrapped Kashmiri shawls around their shoulders and were stamping their feet at the morning chill; some wore gloves and scarves. Blowing on my hands for warmth, I wandered up and down the platform, regretting the Punjabi kameez and light trousers I’d bought for three hundred rupees in Delhi. I had badly misjudged the situation, I realized. If I was too cold now I would freeze further north. I was numbingly tired, too; as I waited for the Simla train my eyelids kept fluttering shut and my legs were wobbling precariously. I was, after all, still in British time, and had been on the edge of sleep when the train had stopped.
After about five minutes a narrow gauge train shunted onto the opposite platform and showing my ticket to the guard I was directed to a carriage at the front. This time I was not alone. As I settled into my seat the door opened and a porter loaded with bags and cases staggered into the carriage. After a moment he was followed by a safari-suited man and three little boys in descending order of size. These were dressed identically in gray shorts, knitted jumpers, and sandals, as if on their way to prep school. Finally a woman in a rustling stiff silk sari and elaborately embroidered wrap appeared, her face hidden by a large pair of sunglasses. When the bags were finally arranged on the luggage racks, with the children sitting in a neat row and the woman organized with her handbag and tiffin tins, the man kissed each child on the cheek, nodded at his wife, and jumped dashingly off the train, just as it moved forward.
The platform jolted slowly past. Perched on the wooden bench next to their mother, the children stared at me in silent awe. I looked down at my feet, not wishing to meet their eager, innocent gaze. By now it would have been two A.M. in Britain, and I could feel sleep closing around me, a heavy, all-obliterating unconsciousness. As the train began to gather speed I leaned my head on my bag and closed my eyes. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the children giggling and feel warm sunlight falling on my face, but it already felt far away. I was being rocked to sleep like a baby.
