Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Ravi, 1990s

  MALINI HAD BEEN PROMOTED at the NGO and was working four days a week. That meant training, seminars, meetings which dragged on late. She pointed out that rather than the endless bus ride to and from work every day, it was easier for her to spend the occasional night in Cinnamon Gardens, at Freda’s flat.

  Around this time, Deepti Pieris resigned from the NGO. Freda Hobson had never warmed to her. When a literacy project Deepti was working on ran into difficulties, Freda suggested that she might be happier elsewhere. The breakdown of the project was dispiriting but hardly critical; looking into Freda Hobson’s purple eyes, Deepti saw the unfolding of a plot. On the day she left, she engineered a row in which she accused Malini of conspiring against her with that Tamil bitch. Reporting this, Malini was delighted. “It just proves what she’s like.”

  She had insisted that they go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. Ravi ate tempered noodles and glutinous scarlet flesh. Malini was saying that Deepti couldn’t see a glass door “or the chrome on a car or even the bowl of a spoon” without pausing to admire her reflection. This was prompted by the huge mirror that covered the far wall of the restaurant. Waiters crossed and recrossed in front of it, and the big, animated room, which was lit by bluish white electricity, went back and back forever—Ravi pressed his temples because they ached. Malini was drawing parallel lines on the table with her finger. Frowning at them, she said, “In spite of everything, I feel sorry for Deepti. I can’t help thinking we should have found a way to keep her. In the end, she couldn’t look at anyone, not even the tea boy.”

  The golden points of light had returned to her face that evening. They brought her sharply into view. Ravi realized that he never looked closely at anything. Knowing in advance what he was going to see, he paid it only scant attention; the world and his wife passed in a blur. But she was a woman concocted from spells.

  Hiran now attended a kindergarten; soon he would be starting school. But he still came and went freely from the richly strange land of the very young. A murmured commentary hinted at its marvels and laws. “The postman must come with baby birds. Seven, eight, nine, twenty, a hundred. His hand has a headache. Wish you happy year. All the motorbikes went to live in America. If you don’t eat all your rice, you will get ill and die. Is she coming or not? The sun doesn’t want the whole today. It can’t be helped. There was enough bus.”

  Hiran spent a night with his mother at Freda’s flat. Questioning his son in private, Ravi learned that Freda had the biggest TV in the world. Malini and Hiran had shared Freda’s bed, and Freda had slept in a different room. On Saturday morning they had all gone to a swimming pool before eating chocolate ice cream.

  This furtive interrogation of his son sickened Ravi but was necessary. He was determined to keep his manner playful, his tone light. But Hiran answered in a forced way, feigning laughter and raising his voice, imitating his father’s false ease. Recognizing his own artifice in that truthful little mirror, Ravi was shocked.

  The swirl of frustration, rage and misery he felt was so alien that months passed before he could give it a name. Malini was taking off her blouse, and he noticed that she was wearing a stylish pink and white striped bra that fastened at the front. At once he saw the Englishwoman’s ringed hands easing it into place.

  He lay on his wife, gripping her arms, and asked, “Does Freda like girls?”

  Her eyes widened. But all she said was, “Maybe.” She even placed a heel on his buttocks in encouragement. Her nipples hardened as he watched.

  Malini’s voice came out of an open-fronted shop that sold cigarettes and soft drinks, and floated into the night. A man sat behind the counter on a stool, illuminated like a peepshow, picking his teeth beside a radio on a shelf. Ravi, loitering on a pavement pungent with grilled meat from the Muslim eatery across the way, listened to his wife appeal for help for women and children made homeless by the war. Her voice grew spiky as she denounced the Tigers’ brutalization of child recruits taken at gunpoint from their homes, and the murder of dissenting cadres. Then, without a pause, she listed the reasons why it was imperative to investigate the aerial bombing of Tamil civilians.

  A rat ran lightly along the trapeze of a telephone cable. Ravi heard the bemusement in the interviewer’s voice: “So who are you saying is responsible for this situation? The government or the terrorists?”

  Ravi went on his way without waiting to hear her answer. In an auditorium made airless by lawyers and intellectuals, he had recently listened to speeches about the routine use of torture by the security forces. When it was Malini’s turn to speak, “I am against terror,” she began. “The terror of the terrorist and the terror of the state.” She recounted testimonies confided to her by village women with such calm power that Ravi saw a man sitting further along the row wipe his eyes. Freda Hobson sat beside Ravi and applauded with her rings raised in front of her face. One of them was a large blue sapphire; it dropped you to your knees, like her gaze. She was wearing a red-on-blue sari with a red blouse. Malini was in a blue blouse, and her sari was blue-on-red. She ducked away from the microphone, beaming and awkward, and joggled the stand. A schoolgirl was keeping a capital-letter promise: I RESOLVE NOT TO LIVE MY LIFE IN VAIN.

  When he was still living at home, Ravi had once seen a shirtless boy dance on the beach under a string of colored bulbs, watched by a group of spellbound foreign men. In Malini’s escalating activism, he recognized the same shimmer of risky willingness. It was addressed to Freda, he was certain, and his heart twisted. Their saris called to and answered each other. Maybe. Maybe. He thought, When did she last say anything important to me?

  He found himself prey to a lust he had last known in his teens: a vast, hormonal greed. His solution was technological. By now he had the use of a dial-up connection to himself at work. In a chat room, he observed for a while how matters played. Then he wrote: hi, topaz here, 18, i like girls like me, do u want to talk?

  Responses appeared at once. Ravi waited. One of those who replied posted a second message and a third. Soon Aimee and he were in touch every day in their private message window. Aimee was compliant, acquiescing in Ravi’s scenarios. These flowed with ease from his keyboard: all he had to do was transcribe what was going on in the video of his wife and Freda that looped endlessly through his brain.

  Aimee offered elaborations. They were endearing and misspelled. Gradually Ravi tutored her in the sophistication of inference. He might describe nothing more than standing behind her while he fitted a front-fastening bra over her breasts (c-cups just like yours, she had informed him early on), the quasi-clinical portrait repeated, without variation, in a series of messages, until she climaxed or claimed to. About his own finales, there was nothing virtual. He had wired himself into his fantasy: at once witness, participant and impresario. He felt his body’s drift, its effortless assumption and discarding of forms, even as his flesh turned adamant as stone.

  Laura, 1990s

  SHE WAS SHARING A flat in Kentish Town and freelancing for the Wayfarer. Whenever she had an assignment, there was always material that didn’t fit the angle Meera wanted. So Laura would work it up into different stories that she sold elsewhere. She sold photographs, too, and reviewed hotels for a ritzy accommodation guide—that meant free ritzy hotels. When people asked where she lived, she would say London. But she might have replied, just as truthfully, that she lived in hotel rooms and gate lounges, in taxis and planes, on Eurostar and Heathrow Express, on moving walkways and escalators, in shuttles and courtesy buses. She was inert, strapped into place, yet hurtling and fast-forwarded. She could lay claim to two passports and three email addresses, she was between destinations, she was virtual, she was online, she was on the phone. She was a voice on a machine, she was neither here nor there. She swallowed small, extremely green pills against jet lag. Sometimes she thought, Why not just live at Heathrow? A family of robed Africans seemed to be doing just that. Why not sleep stretched out across plastic chairs, eat fast food, while away t
he time between flights by filling in questionnaires about her airport experience? The editor of a newspaper’s travel supplement advised her, “You’re only as good as your content—you’ll keep moving if you’re smart.” Laura Fraser was a late-twentieth-century global person. Geography was beside the point.

  St. Petersburg, Jaipur, Ljubljana. Hill trekking in Thailand, a weekend in an abbey on the Isle of Wight. New York, where Laura realized that her first assessment of the city, shaped by those repetitive modernist grids, had been quite wrong. In Manhattan the contemporary wasn’t architectural but invisible, hidden in towers full of screens, buried in coaxial cables, carried in bytes.

  Hong Kong was a giant cash register where spending was soundtracked by the ringtones of mobile phones. Shanghai, pinned between capitalism and control, was all suspension: elevated expressways that ribboned past the middle levels of impossibly high-rise blocks, a glamour bar that floated in neon night. In Dublin there was Guinness and rain, Laura ate oysters in a pub where a man played a penny whistle and people with red hair spoke to her in soft, light voices—her mind was a caricaturist, fastening on to whatever was distinctive. She wrote well and efficiently, to length and to deadline, of flea markets, amusement parks, rituals, touts. Laura Fraser checked out hipster bars, woke to mist-shrouded hills, she explored the Beijing art scene. She wrote, This is where worlds collide.

  A folder on her laptop held material she couldn’t sell. On an icy Chinese evening her taxi took a wrong turn. A naphtha lamp flared. She saw bedding, cooking pots, the faces of laborers whose lives unfolded under the freeway they were constructing.

  In Singapore, an open-sided truck transporting guest workers to or from a building site kept pace with Laura’s cab. One of the dark-skinned men was asleep on a pile of bricks. The others stood braced against the sides, reaching behind for something solid to hold.

  Hip-hop was blasting from a Bangkok arcade. Near the entrance, a beggar and her child had claimed a square of cracked pavement. In a faded red intel inside T-shirt, the little girl sat facing her mother with her legs stretched out. Laura had a note in her hand, ready to drop into the empty instant-noodle container. But as she drew close, the child spoke, her mother smiled and bent forward, the child laughed. Laura passed on, unwilling to break into that private moment, into the locked circuit of gazes and delight. But afterwards she wasn’t sure whether her reluctance sprang from discretion or a nugget of ungiving in her heart. Later still, she was looking from her hotel window at vertical concrete curtained with light when it occurred to her that perhaps she hadn’t offered money because happiness is not a beggarly attribute. Perhaps her failure wasn’t one of charity but of imagination. Lives predicated on misery are not reduced to it, are humanly shot through with pleasure, with joy. But otherness is readily opaque, and she had been unable to see into it.

  In Munich, a gargantuan helping of a moussaka no Greek would have recognized was placed before her, covered in chips. Laura deployed a cautious fork. A man was moving about the restaurant, peddling long-stemmed roses individually wrapped in cellophane; the mechanical gesture with which he held out a bloom acknowledged that he had no expectation of a sale. He had a neat moustache, light brown skin, gray hair streaked with black cut close to his head. An Iraqi, a Turk? He was, or appeared to be, about Donald Fraser’s age—but the gulf between the two men was as wide as the world. The people eating barely looked at him, signaling their disinclination with a small flip of the hand. In his white shirt and blue suit, the man threaded his way through conversations, the smells of food, the racket of spoons. Waiters looked through him. Laura saw that he was expert at sidestepping them. Also that he was the oldest person in the room.

  A German dining with his wife and sons was also watching the flower seller. His face was a blank pink page, but Laura knew what he was doing because she was doing it herself. They were trying to place themselves in the moment when the man stood at the door, in the wind that was slicing through autumn, preparing to sell what nobody wanted. Was that enough? wondered Laura. Were acts of imagination what people in her position would plead? The metaphor didn’t escape her—its implication that justice would yet be done, her species’ great, vague, consolatory fiction.

  Incidents, scenes, reflections such as these were the et cetera of travel: intractable matter, material that couldn’t be molded into the shapely narratives Laura produced.

  Ravi, 2000

  MALINI DECIDED TO SPEND the weekend with her parents. She would leave work at midday, collect Hiran from school and take a bus into the green monotony of the interior, returning on Sunday night. She liked to arrive unannounced at her parents’—that way her father had no time to hide the empty bottles.

  The Mendises now occupied a large, quiet room tucked away down a passage at the rear of the rooming house. On Saturday afternoon, Ravi was correcting students’ work when his pen ran dry. Looking for a new one, he found a bracelet of blue plastic beads inside a box of odds and ends. How was that possible? They had searched their old room so thoroughly for the trinket. He dusted the bracelet off and placed it prominently on the table, smiling as he anticipated his wife’s delight.

  That night, Ravi was woken by a distant shout. This would turn out to be the night watchman—he executed his duties by muffling his head in a towel and stretching out at the bottom of the stairs. When the police questioned him later, he would say that he had woken at a blow to his ribs; someone had stumbled over him. He heard a car accelerate and realized at the same moment that the street door was open.

  Ravi rose and opened the door of his room, his thoughts still molten. Seeing no one in the passage, he almost went back to bed. But something like instinct directed him along the corridor, towards the lobby; he was still sleepily knotting his sarong around his waist when he arrived. In the grayish dark, he could make out the chairs grouped around the television like guests who had fallen asleep at a party. But there was an unfamiliar bulk on top of the set. The watchman, arriving at the head of the stairs, switched on the light. Ravi blinked, and still couldn’t decipher the object in front of him: a thing half known but unspeakably strange. Then he understood that he was looking at a female torso that had been sawn off halfway down the thighs and above the breasts. The cavity at the top had been enlarged and the amputated limbs crammed inside. The whole arrangement resembled a vase from which outlandish flowers of feet and hands emerged on fleshy stalks.

  He must have moved closer, because just before he fainted he saw his name: RAVI, in white letters scratched on a shin.

  Ravi, 2000

  HE SLEPT AND SLEPT. The shock, said Freda Hobson, the shots her doctor gave him and the pills he had prescribed. Ravi heard her out and yawned.

  On the day of the funeral, he could barely keep awake. Finally released by the police, the bodies lay at Malini’s parents’ house. Mourners came from all over the island. They stood in line for an hour to file past the big coffin and the small one, both closed. Hiran had been found in the street, not far from the rooming house. In the uproar caused by the discovery in the lobby, the small body had gone unnoticed at first. Then a young constable, vomiting out of sight of his colleagues, wondered why the dog lying in the crevice between two buildings hadn’t stirred.

  A crone shrouded in silk rose up and embraced Ravi. Her arms were clammy and hard, and her breath was unfresh. It was like being clasped by something that had risen from a grave. “That girl,” said Mrs. Basnayake. Her spectacles appeared to be leaking. “That wonderful girl.”

  There was a commotion in the middle of the room. Ravi’s father-in-law, drunk of course, had collapsed at the foot of his daughter’s bier.

  On the afternoon of the abductions, witnesses had seen Malini talking to a young man in wraparound sunglasses. Hiran was with her, in his favorite red T-shirt with the yellow smiley face. The stranger was leaning against an ice-blue Mercedes parked around the corner from the bus station. He held a ballpoint pen, which he clicked absently as they talked. The conversation seemed
unhurried, relaxed.

  When the man opened the rear door of the car, Hiran climbed in. His red Mickey Mouse pack, a birthday present from Freda, was strapped to his back. Malini followed her son, and the stranger went around to the driver’s seat. The windows of the car were tinted. But there were those who claimed to have seen another man, waiting in the back.

  The Mercedes was a novel touch. As a rule, a white van was preferred.

  A pale-eyed man in plain clothes was always present when the police interviewed Ravi. He remained in the background but was memorable for the polished gray stones in his face. He spoke only once. That was at the end of the second interview, when he came up very close to Ravi and said, “Don’t you think there are questions it’s better not to ask?” His tone was pleasant and conversational. He said, “You’re lucky. You know they’re dead.”

  Freda Hobson had scooped Ravi up and installed him in her flat. She lived in a district of expensive apartments, and large new houses that filled up their grounds as if they had been dropped into place by a crane. At first Ravi was in no condition to refuse Freda, and later he was glad. The flat was a blank place. He had never been there with anyone he loved.

  What he remembered of those first weeks was brightness and space. Here and there, objects stood out as clearly as if outlined in black. Light moved through him unimpeded: there was a window at either end of the room in which he slept. Or so he thought—later he would be amazed to find that there was only a single long window above the bed.