Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Priya had said that she would be arriving early the next day to prepare milk rice for breakfast. But when she came, she disappeared into their mother’s bedroom and came out a few minutes later wearing a faded cloth tied above her breasts. To Ravi she said, “Aiyya, come.”

  The well in the courtyard still supplied the kitchen with water. Priya lowered the bucket and drew it up carefully, refusing her brother’s help. Then she upended it over his head.

  Ravi was wearing a T-shirt over his sarong. Priya said, “Why don’t you take your T-shirt off?” Busying himself with the bucket, Ravi turned deaf. As he let out the rope, he launched into one of their mother’s old songs: “John, John, the gray goose is gone, And the fox is on the town-o.” The marks of the whip were still fresh on his back. The fox’s den had a bathroom where everything Ravi could possibly need was waiting when the fox had finished playing with him. There was always a clean towel and antiseptic and lotions that soothed. One had a name like a beautiful, mysterious heroine: Aloe Vera. The first time, cautiously twisting to look over his shoulder, Ravi had inspected his back in the mirror. Then he had addressed his frightened face: “They’re only a fox’s tracks.”

  Brother and sister sang, “He didn’t mind the quack, quack, quack, And the legs all dangling down-o.” Priya broke off to exclaim, “What a thing to sing to children!” Her eyes were complacent; with pregnancy, she had drawn close to Carmel, whose advice on grave maternal subjects Priya systematically sought and rejected, saying, “Nowadays, it’s all different.”

  Ravi and she took turns at throwing water on each other. Priya produced a fresh cake of soap, a new bottle of shampoo. While they anointed themselves with these luxuries, Priya told her brother that Aloysius de Mel, now a widower, had returned at Christmas, along with his oldest daughter and a Canadian son-in-law. “But when you meet him, he’s Chinese.” All the de Mels had been back at one time or another, she said, except Roshi. “That one has a child and no husband. Uncle let the cat out of the bag. No wonder she’s ashamed to show her face.”

  As Priya spoke, she was remembering Roshi’s big, greedy teeth shining with spit. How pleasingly life distributed its punishments sometimes! A little grunt of approval escaped her. It encompassed her bare arms, which had rounded beautifully in pregnancy, and the diamond speck on her finger. There would be another ring for her, a ruby, if the child was a boy.

  She told Ravi something the de Mel girl had said. When the family emigrated, Aloysius had carried with him a plastic bag containing a handful of his native soil. In Vancouver there was trouble at Customs, and the bag was confiscated. It had become one of the ridiculous stories that the de Mels specialized in turning out, recounted with rowdy glee. But as they dried themselves, Priya and Ravi confessed to amazement: what a gesture, foolish and splendid, for the old tortoise!

  While breakfast was being prepared, Ravi ran a caressing hand over the sideboard on the back veranda. All the drawers were now stuck. But when he squatted before a door and tugged, it opened. Something yellow lay inside the cupboard: Hiran’s toy viewfinder, mislaid on a visit to his grandmother’s house.

  Freda drove him to the airport. The last thing she said was, “She was so brave.”

  At the barrier that separated them, Ravi didn’t look back. On receiving his boarding pass, he had entered a new country. Its citizens were all around him, the young with their surfboards and backpacks, the rich with their matching luggage, the swarming poor, who as usual outnumbered every other group, as ubiquitous as their duct-taped cardboard boxes, mysterious bundles and suitcases peeling at the corners.

  Ravi’s hard gray case had accompanied his parents on their honeymoon; his mother had insisted on giving it to him. When he asked if she was sure she didn’t need it, Carmel had said, “Where will I go now, child? Only into hospital.” Ravi didn’t want the old suitcase. It was heavy and impractical with silver locks that snapped. When he opened it, he found a pocket formed by ruched blue satin and a card from his mother emblazoned with Bon Voyage in raised, flowing script. The card had yellowed along the fold, as if it had lain too long in sunlight, but it was imported and must have once been expensive. Above his mother’s message to him were printed verses:

  Kiss the Blarney Stone for me

  And if you get the chance,

  Give my dearest love—Oui, oui!

  To the President of France.

  Bring me back a Pyramid

  Or else a Spanish comb.

  And don’t forget that I’m all set

  To welcome you back home.

  Freda’s last present to Ravi was a dossier. She had kept multiple copies of everything: newspaper reports, signed statements, notes of telephone conversations, the terrible little sketches, the anonymous letter from Frog-Face. There was also a long, formal statement from Freda testifying to Malini’s activism and everything that had happened since the murders. At her insistence, Ravi had lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. His pen had wavered above the simplest questions on the form: was he Rev., Mr. or Mrs.? Freda instructed, “Put ‘Criminal Investigation Department, Sri Lanka Police Force’ where it asks who you’re complaining about.” Ravi wrote down everything she said. There was a copy of the form in the folder Freda handed him, and an acknowledgment of receipt.

  While waiting for his flight to be called, Ravi went to the lavatory. There he took Freda’s phone from his pack. On arriving at the airport, he had made a great show of patting his pockets before announcing that he couldn’t find his passport. When Freda and he had searched the floor of the car and the seats, she suggested, in desperation, that it might have ended up in the boot and went to check. At once, Ravi removed the mobile from her bag. Then he called out that he had discovered his passport safe at the bottom of his pack after all. In the toilet, he dropped her phone into the bowl, flushed, and left the cubicle, picturing her distress when she discovered her loss.

  A stylized electronic map appeared from time to time on the screen at the front of the cabin. In Thailand, a green word shone beside a green dot: Kanchanaburi. Ravi was awake, then asleep, then awake, and a green chant came out of the past to find him. Kang kang buuru! Chin chin noru! Run, run, run…

  Somewhere between Singapore and Sydney, he woke and sat up straight. The cabin was in darkness. Ravi looked out of the window: the plane was suspended in an enormous night. He had just seen that everything Malini did was for her father. Freda Hobson had never come into it, after all. It was like passing a house after dark at the moment when the door opens and carves out a corridor of light. The beam showed two coffins and a drunkard. Malini was lounging across the aisle, and Ravi turned to her in fury: “Do you think he was worth it?” But her seat was occupied by a stranger, a man masked as if for execution and strapped into place.

  II

  To work and suffer is to be at home.

  All else is scenery…

  Adrienne Rich,

  “The Tourist and the Town”

  Laura, 2000

  SHE HAD TIMED HER return with care. With the seatbelt sign lit up, she craned to see the loose purple canopies among the right-angled turquoise of backyard pools.

  In the taxi, Laura couldn’t keep from remarking on the trees. “Can’t say I look forward to the jacarandas, love,” returned the driver. “That’s when me melanomas start to itch.”

  Six months later, what still struck Laura were the hats, the babies in sunglasses, the Factor 30 sunscreen, the little kids at the beach in neck-to-knee cossies. The familiar summer scents of frangipani and barbecued lamb persisted. Pineapples, ripening in bowls, still overwhelmed at dusk. But parks no longer held the remembered reek of coconut tanning lotion. The planet’s ills came home in six words: Australians were afraid of the sun.

  Laura spent her first month in Sydney at her father’s house. Her anesthetizing stepmother had warned that workmen were attacking the dining room, that Donald Fraser, although retired, had never been busier with consultancies, that her mother, on an extended visit f
rom Melbourne, was occupying Laura’s old bedroom, that there would be no one home at Christmas, which they were all spending with her sister in Portsea, that she couldn’t answer for the Rottweiler around strangers, and that Laura was welcome, of course.

  Ravi, 2000–2001

  THE FIRST TIME RAVI stood on a headland above the Pacific, a jogger cried, “Geddout the fucken way, mate!” The command reached Ravi obscured by wind, the pounding of feet, the slap of waves. It had contained the word “mate” but had sounded hostile. While he was trying to work this out, he was elbowed in the chest by a man speeding past on the narrow track. The word Aspire, embroidered in gold, bounced on green satin buttocks. An old woman going the other way said, “That was a very rude man.” She walked on, swinging her arms.

  Freda’s Sydney contact, an immigration lawyer called Angie Segal, had sent a friend to meet Ravi at the airport. Helen Guest spoke slowly and distinctly as she drove him to her flat. “Angie’s been held up in Port Hedland for three days. Do you understand?” She held up three fingers. “She’s processing asylum-seekers at the detention center there. In western Australia. She can’t afford to turn it down, it’s really well paid.”

  Helen’s face, like her hair, was long and pale. Standing in her kitchen, she asked if Ravi was a vegetarian. Then she said, “That’s a relief. I hate picky eaters.”

  She served him a bowl of spicy, delicious soup. When it was empty, she filled it again. There was bread on the table, butter, red apples on a white plate. Helen addressed Ravi as they ate, feeding him stray facts in clear-cut sentences. “We’re in Clovelly. It’s east of the city. From the front door, it’s a ten-minute walk to the beach. On Wednesday morning, I’ll drop you off at Angie’s office in the city. We were at school together. I’ve left a key beside your bed.”

  When Helen had cleared the bowls away, she sat at the table drawing him a map. Her hair lay against her brown shirt in flat, shining bands. She asked if he was a Tamil. She also said, “Angie’s taking you on pro bono. Do you know what that means?” Ravi realized that she was kind, and that his need to get away from her was acute. Otherwise she might go on telling him things for the rest of the day.

  Her map took him over tarmacked hills. Gardens held shoe flowers and oleander and flowering creepers known to him from home. There were pink blossoms and creamy ones underfoot—Helen had scattered the same scented flowers on her table. Touching one lightly, she said that she hoped they made Ravi feel at home. “They must grow in Sri Lanka?” Ravi nodded: “Temple flowers.” “In Australia,” said Helen, “they’re called frangipani.”

  Everything bore the glaze of strangeness, the fast, baleful traffic, the pavements where the only rubbish was fallen blooms. What he saw on that first Australian afternoon had a bright outline setting it apart from everything that followed. Thirsty boats stood in the streets, each covered with a blue wave that had crisped and been reborn as tarpaulin. A wall bore the large painted hieroglyph <<+#>>, an algebra too far advanced to understand.

  But the energetic smell of the sea was familiar. On the clifftop path, the wind stirred coldly in the roots of Ravi’s hair. It went away, returned and ran over his eyeballs. There was sunshine, and Ravi was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he wouldn’t have said he was warm—logic had come loose, as in dreams. There was the dreaminess, too, of finding himself beside the Pacific. He tried to recall what he knew of it, other than its immensity. Names lifted from a blue page to float in his mind like wreckage: the Mariana Trench, the Bering Strait.

  Presently, he came to a cemetery set, in shallow terraces, on the side of a hill. Ravi went in and, forsaking the path, climbed the grassy tracks between the graves. At the summit, it was one long seaward rush of marble and flowering weeds. What Ravi knew of cemeteries was a composure that might on occasion pass for majesty. The dead lay flat under its weight. Here whited sepulchers set the light bouncing. An air of recklessness prevailed: at any moment these stolid monuments might rise and hurl themselves over the cliff, choosing obliteration over endurance and sham. The Pacific yawned—there was all the time in the world. It shuddered in its blue skin.

  Ravi wandered around, noting the variousness of the memorials, the mausoleums and headstones with their stark or elaborate inscriptions, the mottled or snowy marble, the shining granite, the angels, crosses, photographs, railings, the colored china bouquets. Each element had been chosen, he supposed, to accord with the preferences and personalities of those they enshrined. But what was overwhelming wasn’t individual at all but the common outrage of death.

  Angie Segal had round black eyes like a bird, and a bird’s darting quickness. She looked through Freda’s dossier, asked questions, keyed Ravi’s answers into a laptop. He would come to associate the sound of the keyboard with her voice, that quick clicking chatter. She crossed to a filing cabinet, from which she drew a form. There was a landline on the desk and a mobile beside it. One or the other rang frequently. Angie, too, seemed to vibrate and trill. She asked, “Did you have trouble getting your travel documents?” She looked up from her screen because Ravi didn’t answer at once. He was remembering the smell of paint on a concrete stair.

  The morning passed. Angie fed them both sweets from a tin. She would read back what Ravi had said, then press him for more. “Your application will stand or fall on credibility. That’s where details count.” Ravi stared across the street at an identically gray building with slits for eyes. There was so much he could say: an exercise book opened at a capital-letter promise, we fed our son anamalu plantains, she had a blue skirt with orange pockets—Ravi’s brain held nothing but details of the wrong kind, details that proved nothing. Angie Segal shook her head over Frog-Face’s letter. “It’s useless without a signature. You could have typed it yourself.”

  When they took a break, she walked Ravi down the street to a bank. He examined this new currency with interest, the colorful plastic notes, the heavy coins. When he came out, Angie was waiting with two rolls from which there protruded lettuce and flaps of ham. She produced her mobile, called a number, nibbled her knuckles. Sitting across her desk from Ravi, she had said, “Most asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka are young Tamil men. The department understands that. I’m not saying they’re sympathetic, I’m saying their imagination’s limited. A Sinhalese like you, it’s not an everyday scenario.” Then she offered Ravi another mint.

  Now he heard, “Hazel, hi, it’s Angie. Yeah, he’s here. Oh, I forgot—hang on.” She lowered the phone and asked, “Are you okay with dogs?” Then she said, “No worries, he’s good.” She bit herself some more.

  The following day, Angie collected Ravi and his suitcase, and drove them across the city. Her car held a great mess of juice bottles, wrappers, parking tickets, ballpoints, grease-stained paper bags. “Air-con’s bust,” said Angie. “Sorry ’bout that.” When they stopped at a light, she fumbled for a newspaper and fanned herself. “Now it’ll stay muggy for months.” These remarks were mysterious to Ravi, whose notion of weather was inseparable from this dense and vaporous warmth.

  A taxi cut in front of the car. Angie said, “Don’t you love a dickhead?” Ravi didn’t immediately realize that these events were cause and effect. He had been marveling afresh at how little the Australian traffic wove about. Like Helen, Angie drove in a straight line and was at once irritated when someone swerved.

  Halted by the traffic, she said, “Would you believe there’s a Sri Lankan guy at Port Hedland with the same name as you? His wife’s a Tamil. They’ve been in detention a while.” Then she said that Hazel Costigan, to whose house she was driving Ravi, had worked at the DHS. “She used to be in Admin with Mum. Before the cuts.” All this, too, was obscure, but after Helen, Ravi was grateful for talk that didn’t automatically instruct.

  Angie had given Ravi a street directory when they set out and told him to navigate. “I’m Castle Hill born and raised. Wouldn’t have a clue south of Parramatta Road.” Signs often prevented them from turning right at intersections. Angie sighed and tosse
d chocolate-coated peanuts into her mouth. Ravi consulted the map for alternatives, and quite soon they had arrived at the address in Hurlstone Park. At the sound of the gate, a dog began to bark.

  This dog, Fair Play, a beagle-whippet cross passed off by the pet shop as a spaniel, had once belonged to Robbo, Hazel’s second. The puppy was named by his girlfriend, Sooz, for a horse on which Robbo won a shitload of money and for the first year of her life was greatly indulged, dressed in fairy wings at Christmas, encouraged to occupy couches and growl as she pleased. Then Bettany was born, and Fair Play was banished to the shed. Naturally she chewed woodwork, ruined petunias, charged the usurper. Sooz was all for taking her out Dural way and letting her go, but Hazel intervened.

  Fair Play rushed Ravi, barking extravagantly while sizing him up. All that first day, she growled each time he ventured into the yard. That was where she lived, for it was the kind of house where there were always visitors and grandchildren, some with allergies, all of whom Fair Play resented. For Bettany she reserved an implacable hatred, surging forward in ominous silence whenever the lumpish child appeared—which luckily was seldom, for Robbo and his family had moved to the Sunshine Coast, where the birth of a sister had presented Bettany with a fresh set of complexes.

  Hazel Costigan lived in a small house on a big block, the opposite of how they now came. The sleep-out in the yard had seen a parade of occupants, and Fair Play had ruled them all. On Ravi’s first night, she scratched at his door. She kept this up until he opened it, whereupon she sprang onto his bed and curled up. In summer, she preferred to spend the night outdoors, where small lives offered themselves up for extinction. But this was a test.