Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Yet discontent continued to fester. There were the usual complaints about smoking—but that was a trifle. The ease and rapidity of electronic communication ensured that the suspicion of fraudulence couldn’t be contained. However vigilantly RealLanka eradicated all taint of pamper from its programs, the rumor gained strength. Emails circulated. It was inconceivable that people really lived in such conditions, all the time, 24/7. It was all spectacle and show. The student’s death was a gimmick, the funeral rigged, with actors hired to impersonate monks. There was an experience beyond RealLanka’s offerings, something neither cosseted nor exposed, something exotic yet persuasive, for which its clients yearned. Vaguely defined, it was keenly missed. There was wild interactive chat about malpractice. Bookings fell away.

  Nimal wrote that he no longer cared for a career in IT. As for picking up his abandoned thesis, he couldn’t imagine returning to academic life. Fortunately, he had come into a small inheritance. He returned to the south, where he had been raised, and went into partnership with his brother. They set up an Internet cafe near a beach where tourism flourished. Now Nimal asked for nothing more than to smoke ganja and marry a foreigner who would take him abroad. The Russians were pitiless but Germans abounded. Even their elderly were technologically proficient. He had nurtured great hopes of a retired principal from Bonn. But she got an email telling her that her cat had disappeared, and Nimal’s campaign was cut short.

  Every week, without fail, Ravi received an aerogram from his mother. The thin blue sheet was covered with anxiety and advice. But once Carmel had momentous news: Freda had visited her. Freda had worn a denim skirt and was accompanied by her fiancé, a very nice fair boy. They were touring the island for the last time because Freda was going back to England. The fair boy ate two wafer biscuits, but Freda left her tea untouched. There had been no ginger beer in the house, and this failure of hospitality haunted Carmel; also, she had come to the door in slippers. Her visitors brought flowers, velvety white orchids from a shop. The fair boy admired a photo of Priya’s baby. Freda said that she hoped Ravi was well and to please give him her love. Carmel’s disapproval showed in the detail of the tea not drunk, as well as this: They’re planning to marry in a registry office.

  Ravi responded, as he did to all his mother’s letters, with informative evasions. I am well. It is cool but sunny. There is no news about my application. My room is very comfortable. Yesterday I visited the harbor. He had perfected the style on school compositions: My Holidays, My Family. A teacher learned much and nothing that mattered. When his father died, Ravi had written: My Christmas was quiet because my cousins didn’t come from Galle. I had two pieces of chicken and they will keep my box of hankies for another occasion.

  Scrolling down through an email one day, he found a second message from Priya. It was more or less identical to the one above but included the information that the baby’s nose was flattish—Priya pinched up the bridge every day. She must have decided that babies were a tactless subject, and copied her email in order to censor it. But then she had forgotten to delete the original. It brought her sharply into focus, the care with which she typically blundered.

  Varunika wrote: Do you remember when you fell from the mango tree and broke your wrist? It was just after Priya cut her chin open when she fell off someone’s bike. I was so frightened, thinking it was my turn next and wondering what was going to happen. All these years I’ve had this idea, at the back of my mind, that a horrible accident was waiting for me. Last week, a dentist replaced that tooth I chipped when I fell down those steps at school. I looked in his mirror and realized I’ve been expecting a disaster that happened when I was nine.

  Night after night, Hiran cried, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Rain was pounding the sleep-out roof when Ravi woke from the latest dream. The thought of what was under the bed grew unbearable. He pulled it out, put it into a plastic bag and wrapped the package in newspaper. It was only a short dash to the shed and worth the soaking.

  Rain obliged Fair Play to suspend her midnight sorties in favor of Ravi’s pillow. Reared on raw drumsticks, apples and grass, she gave off a reek as strong as freshly turned earth and as sweet. Her eyes were open as Ravi settled in beside her, but she didn’t stir. Humans were a noisy species, given to the production of clamor—like Sit! like No! like this keening—none of it any concern of hers.

  Ravi, 2001

  AT BANKSIA GARDENS AGED Care Facility, with his hair in a hygiene cap, Ravi scrubbed surfaces, put crockery away, stacked a dishwasher, matched meals to trays. Red was diabetics, blue meant pureed, gray was everyone else. Working as a kitchen hand required just enough concentration to keep him from thinking. Old Mrs. Katzoulis, across the road from Hazel, had arranged it all. Her great-granddaughter, playing in the street with older children, had fallen, grazed her knee, howled. Mrs. Katzoulis reached the gate just as Ravi, who happened to be passing, crouched before the child and set her upright. At once the little girl shouted, “I hate that man.” She said “hate” because fear was an emotion she couldn’t yet name. Mrs. Katzoulis could tell because she knew what it was to be frightened of dark skin. That was why she made Ravi sit on her best chair—not one of Hazel’s—and placed cakes that oozed honey before him. Of the two hundred and nine English words she knew, many pertained to rheumatoid arthritis. But when her granddaughter, the manager at Banksia Gardens, collected her children that evening, Mrs. Katzoulis told her that Ravi was looking for work.

  One of his tasks was to write up the daily menu on the whiteboard in the dining room. The fare struck Ravi as sumptuous. A choice of dishes was always offered: between, say, Sausages & Mash and Shepherd’s Pie at lunch, Chicken Vol-au-Vents and Welsh Rarebit for dinner. There were sandwiches for residents who preferred a light meal, as well as soups, salads, desserts. Friday brought fish; Sunday was a roast.

  Mandy, the busty RN, joined Ravi in the brick-paved courtyard where he liked to take his tea break on sunny days. “God, the smell in this place! Mince and disinfectant. Gets me every time I walk in.” She eyed Ravi over her cup. “Must be awful for someone with your ethnicity. How do you stand it?”

  Ravi smiled cautiously.

  “But what I mean to say is, you’re better off here than back there, aren’t you?” Then she laughed, which was alarming. “See that over there? That container-type thing with the broom in it? My first day here, right, I read the label on it and I’m thinking, ‘That’s not a very good name for a paint color, I wouldn’t want my walls painted Gravy.’ And it’s like a full two minutes before it clicks that it’s not an empty paint tin, it’s what it says. The gravy comes in twenty-liter cans here. That’s what they’re serving up on the meatloaf. Isn’t that gross?”

  From Mandy, Ravi learned that what he called a shoe flower was known to Australians as a hibiscus. Tiny birds with bright blue breasts were investigating the blossoms on a tree. Things were as calm as an egg out in the courtyard. Old women and George, the only male resident, came out to stand in the sun, frozen to their walkers and slowly thawing. Ravi contemplated the mysteries of this new climate. Cold air came in a great flood from the west. But he was warmer, that winter, than he would be in those that followed, though that had nothing to do with the way the courtyard trapped the sun. People who have spent their lives in tropical places carry the memory of warmth in their bodies. It sustains them for a while, despite their cheap nylon jackets, because they are unable to believe in winter. Later a fatal stretch of the imagination takes in the cold. Uselessly, they discover fleece, padded parkas, scarves.

  A landline had been installed in the sleep-out as soon as Ravi could afford it. Then he had bought a laptop and a modem; three months interest-free, but he was still paying them off at Bing Lee.

  He went straight to the website that Nimal and he had designed; it had scarcely altered, only the list of academic staff having changed. Ravi was unprepared for the effect of the site, the intensity with which it conjured the sensation of concrete against his bones, the particular itch of
mosquito bites, the maddening power cuts. More dangerously, it brought back Malini. He saw her hands, the short fingers flashing over a keyboard. There was the lively weave of her hair.

  The contrast between his old site and the rest of the web could hardly have been greater. So much had changed, was brighter, speedier, there were images everywhere. It was the reign of Google. Ravi discovered weblogs. He discovered RSS feeds. Everything, it seemed, was for sale online. A link in a page of text was no longer signaled by a clumsy underscore but by a change in the color of the font. The web had grown from usefulness into beauty. It was as complex and various as a world. What was in Ravi’s mind was the waterfront at Circular Quay, its kaleidoscopic gathering of shipping, idlers, commerce, performers, its dazzling mutations and flow. The web was like that, a city of strangers and connections: people with different needs were drawn to it from far and wide. It thrilled with potential, magic, risk. Ravi’s mouse clicked and clicked as if keeping time—but that was an illusion. Time spent online disappeared with the smooth efficiency of Ctrl-A + Delete. There was so much on the web that beguiled and blinked.

  That was the winter when Hazel Costigan first felt old. It was nothing specific: a recognition rather than a particular limit or a new kind of ache. In dreams she was always a bride with long yellow hair. But when she opened her teledex, she saw a line drawn through yet another name. Towards dawn, when Hazel rose to make a cup of tea, she would find herself looking for Ravi’s light. Like unhappy countries, the sleep-out was a place from which people couldn’t wait to get away. Built of boards, it was drafty in winter, hellish in the heat. There were the drawbacks of the external shower, the outside dunny. When Ravi found work, Hazel had expected that he, too, would leave. She sipped her tea, standing at the sunroom window, going over the roll call of the sleep-out’s inhabitants. The teledex, the sleep-out: it was becoming a tic, this preoccupation with vanished names. Ravi had sought her out one evening after dinner, remaining on the step in his diffident way. Hazel thought, Here we go. Fair Play interposed herself between them, standing over Ravi’s shoes with her back arched to remind him of his inferior status. He interrupted himself to pick her up, and compounded atrocities by tugging her ears. He was insisting that he pay more rent. “It’s not right to take mean advantage of you.” Mean advantage was one of Carmel’s phrases; Ravi was pleased to have found a use for it. Hazel almost laughed, but saw that he was in earnest. They settled on a sum. He paid fortnightly in cash. She passed it on to a charity that worked with asylum-seekers.

  On the web, JenniCam was still going, although access to the site was no longer free. But the coffee pot site at Cambridge was defunct. The last grayscale picture of the empty pot looked so shabby and defenseless that Ravi moved away at once. However, a few days later, he returned to the site and bookmarked it.

  A large envelope came in the mail. It contained a padded one with English stamps, addressed to Ravi care of Angie Segal; he recognized Freda Hobson’s hand. Inside the second envelope, a small white cardboard box held a squishy rectangle wrapped in silver paper. Ravi didn’t have to open it to know what it contained. Remember me by the river, remember me on the lake…She had remembered him on her wedding day and sent him a piece of her cake.

  Ravi, 2001

  THE THOUGHT OF HIM, ALONE in Australia, ate away at Damo. He wondered if Ravi might like to do a bit of sightseeing?

  They would set off early on Sunday in Damo’s car. Ravi inspected Australia through glass: a Pink Panther waving outside a discount-furniture showroom, a horse standing under a blanket, biscuity cliffs. One showery morning, Damo announced, “Today we’re going over the bridge.” They approached the landmark through a sci-fi landscape of expressways and glass towers: it was futuristic, Damo said. Then he said, “Why does the future look like Melbourne?” He referred to the Harbor Bridge as “the coat hanger.” That made sense to Ravi: you could hang your dreams on it. Damo’s voice had turned disparaging and proud. It was the tricky Australian voice. It was Hazel saying, It’s a great Australian invention. Ravi remembered that Can I help you? meant Go away! He remembered that mate could hold a threat.

  At Palm Beach, where Damo and Ravi took off their socks and shoes, the sand was damp and pink. A fresh shower sent them to a restaurant where Damo ordered tea. It was too early for lunch, and the only other customers were a group of girls at a table on the edge of the veranda. The rain, slanting in, brought them to their feet. “I’m getting wet!” they told each other, amazed that anything in the world might do them harm. Their limbs and hair were solid and golden, and they wore, in spite of the weather, tiny dresses that seemed to float. While they clutched their purses, two waiters gathered up their cups and resettled them at a different table, whereupon the rain ceased. Damo and Ravi went on to Pittwater. The sun came out, went in, came out, while they took a ferry between green islands. Weekenders, returning to the city, carried musical instruments, pillows, babies. One man had a turquoise macaw in a cage. The girls appeared on a white wharf, their bright hair dense as clouds. One moved away from her companions, and the wind grabbed her skirt. She tried to hold it fast between her knees.

  It was warm in Damo’s car, Ravi and he talked or followed their own thoughts, there was usually music, Damo would plan their next outing. What he loved best was bushwalking—the native forests were Damo’s sacred sites. He belonged to a continent where nature so far outstripped anything humans had produced that those in need of something to worship turned to it as a matter of course. The cult produced pilgrims, schisms, prophets, doctrine, blasphemers who dedicated their lives to desecration. Out of a sense of fairness, Damo showed Ravi the Hawkesbury, the south coast, a derelict township where gold had been mined. But they always returned to the national parks, to the signposted tan-bark trails. The bush closed in about them. Damo spoke of acacias, rockwarblers, seasonal blossoms, not as one imparting instruction but because he was moved by these things. Quandong, elaeocarpus, ironbark, howea: the names of the trees were a poem. But the forests were cold and blue. The beaches, couched between headlands and devoid of coconut palms, didn’t correspond at all to Ravi’s notion of a coast. It was in the forests, however, that he felt the planet’s scale.

  He got through bushwalking by looking forward to lunch. Like all the Costigans, Damo thought of food as fuel. He would lead Ravi to an authorized picnic spot, and unzip his pack for thick white bread, hardboiled eggs and slabs of yellow cheese, along with bananas and chocolate. Where there were public barbecues, he produced chops, T-bones, sausages, a container of ketchup. While they ate, the talk often turned to Sri Lanka. Damo asked impersonal questions about cricketers or tea—politics appeared only in ruins that bore witness to the ambitions of kings. Gratefully recalling the guided tours he had taken, Ravi told Damo a great many things, quite a few of them inaccurate, about temple architecture and the habits of leopards.

  One day, they were eating bacon sandwiches beside a lake when a car pulled up. A woman arranged plastic containers on a picnic table, children released from confinement screamed their joy, a man used a breadknife to scrape grease from a grill.

  Damo wondered if the newcomers were Sri Lankan. “Can you tell?”

  The mother was calling to her son, warning him in Sinhalese against eating so many potato chips that he would have no room for lunch. “Indians,” said Ravi. The brilliant pink folds of a sari smothered by a belted cardigan struck him as the saddest thing he had seen in Sydney. The boy, now galloping sideways, was the same size as Hiran.

  The Sunday outings were irregular. Damo might be busy with a school camp, a friend’s wedding, a lingering flu. Sometimes it rained all weekend. There was also a man, very young and rattled about love, who was jealous. Damo had invited him to meet Ravi, to accompany them on their sightseeing, but the man, preferring his intrigues orchestrated by invention, had refused. Ravi missed and didn’t miss the Sunday tourism. The memory of fish and chips, consumed on yellow rocks in La Perouse, made his mouth water. But what he would have rea
lly liked was to return to the cemetery above the Pacific. He had never proposed it, believing that destinations weren’t for him to choose. On the first excursion, he had offered money for petrol, too much and awkwardly, that Damo waved away. He said, “You can cook me a curry sometime,” alarming Ravi, who had no idea how to set about such an undertaking. It loomed in his mind, a pledge as perilous as the eucalypts he had been told were prone to crush the unwary. The fish and chips had been paid for by a walk that went on forever among scrubby coastal bush. It rose just above Ravi’s head, so there was nothing to see. Damo spoke stirringly of a fungus that wasn’t in season. In the 1930s, the area had been a vast makeshift slum of the unemployed who had drifted from the city. No trace remained of the settlement, which had been elaborate, with leaders and rules. Of all this, Ravi would retain the word “Depression.”

  In a cafe in Katoomba, on a leaden mountain afternoon, they ate scones and purple jam. They were making their way back to the car when Damo, glancing into a shop that sold midcentury artifacts, spotted a red ceramic horse. Ravi turned over a tray of oddments while he waited. A box held snapshots, dozens of them, of Chinese couples posed beside shrubs or fountains, always with a background of skyscrapers. The women had beehive hair and tight, shiny dresses. Ravi remembered the flyaway dress on the wharf. Everyone in the photos, too, was young and looked happy, although the colors had faded a little. Damo came out of the shop without the horse. All the way home, the men and women in the snapshots asked Ravi why the people who loved them had permitted their photos to cross an ocean and end up in a box.