The Romantics

by Mishra, Pankaj

  From this chaos, Catherine emerged without warning. I had been searching for her in the crowd flowing down the overbridge stairs, but she crossed on another overbridge, and the moment I had been anticipating since I left my house, the moment of her arrival on the platform, felt oddly flat.

  She was dressed a little too elaborately for the occasion: looped silver earrings, long flared black ankle-length skirt and sparkling white cambric blouse. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and wound in a coiled mass above her head, revealing a long stretch of pale delicate neck. Men turned to stare at her; women considered her with faint hostility from the corners of their eyes.

  The train was to arrive at the same platform on which Anand had made his dispirited goodbyes as we left for Mussoorie. The thought must have struck Catherine, for her first words to me were: ‘Anand is jealous of you, of my friendship with you. He said he was worried that I might fall in love with you when we went to Mussoorie. He suffered a lot when we were away . . . He did nothing all day. He could do nothing. He didn’t even practise; he just lay in bed and smoked a lot of cigarettes.’

  I was taken aback and could not say anything. I remembered well Anand’s run-down appearance as we arrived from Kalpi and found him in the house. But I wasn’t expecting to hear about Anand at this time. It broke into my mood; it briefly cooled the emotion that had been working up inside me on the rickshaw ride to the station, the pangs of grief that I had felt over and above my anxiety regarding my father.

  Some of my optimism about the future had already begun to leak away; it seemed more and more a consoling lie, and the sadness I now felt came as much from the fact of leaving Benares, and with it, Catherine, as from the undeniable truth of our separation, its unknown length, the uncertainties we were both travelling to in different ways.

  I knew that no matter what happened to Anand, I was going back to the same old uncertain life. Anand was the lucky man, moving on to a new life, with its own assurances and securities and even luxuries; I couldn’t think of him as a sufferer.

  We stood there for some time in a dull, estranging silence.

  It was Catherine who finally spoke. ‘I am sorry to see you leave,’ she began slowly, her voice low. ‘Everything happened so fast between us. There was no time to think. But you must promise this . . .’

  The last sentence was drowned out in yet another droning announcement from the loudspeaker. I asked her to repeat it. She did, with a sudden fit of shyness. She appeared to have prepared the words for the occasion; she hadn’t expected to be interrupted.

  Her eyes were turned away from my face and fixed on the ground as she spoke again: ‘You must promise me that you will never regret anything. No matter how painful it is for you . . .’

  She jerked her head up to look at me. I saw her eyes were wet; her lips quivered as she repeated, ‘Will you promise me this?’

  I said, my voice hoarse, ‘Yes, I promise.’

  ‘What do you promise?’ She was now gazing at me with a ghost of a forced smile hovering over her face.

  I was about to reply and then just nodded. It was hard for me to join her mock-cheerful banter.

  A tremor of excitement suddenly moved across the crowd: the train was approaching and when it came, the engine softly blowing at the banks of dust arrayed on the platform, the passing faces at the windows were weary but expectant.

  Fighting our way through noisy, agitated crowds, we went straight to the air-conditioned coaches. A strong smell of phenol filled my empty compartment. We had just finished storing my bags under the seats when Catherine was in my arms, sobbing softly in the way I had seen her all through the long journey from Kalpi to Benares.

  But the moment was brief this time. We could stay like that only for a few seconds, Catherine’s head resting on my chest, before the world began to trickle in.

  The sliding door to the compartment was yanked back open once, twice; curious gazes rested on us and were then withdrawn.

  The third time, a uniformed colonel came in, his batman tottering under a heavy iron trunk. His family followed: first, his plump, bespectacled wife, and then their teenage, sullenly pretty daughter, who was holding a sheaf of Archie comics.

  Their presence and voices shrank the compartment; new perfume and deodorant smells filled the air. An awkward silence grew between Catherine and me. We waited for them to leave the compartment.

  But, their luggage stored after loud, urgent exhortations to the batman, they settled themselves in a row, the colonel, wife, and daughter, on the seat before us, and shot appraising glances at Catherine as she wiped her tears, and then at me.

  Catherine at last said, her voice strangely choked, ‘You must write. I’ll wait for your letters,’ and before she could even finish her sentence she burst into fresh tears.

  The colonel and his family stared even harder.

  Finally, it was Catherine who suggested, in a whisper, ‘We must go out. It’s really awful, the way they are staring.’

  We had been out in the corridor for barely a second when the warning whistle blew. Catherine groped in her skirt pocket for something and brought out a cream-coloured envelope. ‘This is for you,’ she said, and leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  She seemed more composed now. ‘You are a treasure trove,’ she said. It was what she had told me in Kalpi. ‘We’ll write to each other and then one day we’ll meet. Soon,’ she said, and then added with extra emphasis, ‘Very soon.’

  I felt tears welling up inside me. The train lurched forward; Catherine hurried to the open door of the coach, her skirt swishing, and stepped down agilely on to the platform.

  I stood stunned for an instant, clutching the envelope, and then dashed towards the door, almost colliding with a mystified coach attendant coming in with a bundle of towels and sheets.

  As I leaned out of the open door, I saw her standing behind a magazine stall, her hand raised in a still wave. I waved back with one hand, holding on to the cold steel door rail with the other.

  The train lurched a few more times and then began to slide quickly off the platform. As it picked up speed, large sackcloth bundles lying at the end of the platform blocked my sight of Catherine. When the view cleared after some agonizing seconds she was walking away, with that brisk steady gait of hers, receding serenely into the background confusion of spinning fans, bundles, men, magazine and food stalls, and I thought, as I had so many times before, of the rest of the journey that took her away from me – up the footbridge to the exit and a waiting rickshaw, through the streets and alleys I had just passed, past the sadhu with the matted hair, up the staircase with the Rama-Sita mural – the short journey that took her to the faraway place where her real life existed.

  7

  IT WAS RAINING in Pondicherry when I arrived, and it continued to rain with brief interruptions for the few weeks I was there.

  After all my anxiety about him, it turned out that my father had had a minor stroke. And in the time that elapsed since the telegram had been sent to me his condition had improved dramatically. He had been discharged from the hospital; he was home now, attended by a full-time nurse and Deepa, the woman who had sent the telegram to me, and who I discovered had become my father’s constant companion.

  I came to know all this from Deepa herself in the very first moment of my arrival late in the evening from Benares, after nearly twenty-four hours of continuous travel. She was a middle-aged woman with a bob of grey hair and a severe expression in her sharp-features. She smiled easily, though, and then an appealing shyness would emerge. Her first words to me were: ‘Your father is sleeping. You can see him tomorrow. He is all right. There is no cause for worry. He hasn’t been well looked after, that’s all.’

  I wondered if she was alluding to my mother, and her decision to leave my father and live in Benares. But I didn’t ask her to elaborate. I was too exhausted, and eager to get to the hotel where my father had arranged for me to stay.

  Deepa told me that the hotel was run by
the Aurobindo ashram, and after I arrived, scampering through the rain, at a big whitewashed building at one end of the sea-facing promenade, my weary senses could register only the middle-aged ashram inmates in khaki shorts and white cotton saris who staffed the reception; and the garlanded portraits of Sri Aurobindo and his French companion, the Mother, that hung in my austerely furnished room.

  I dropped straight away into sleep after checking in, and when I awoke many hours later, it was to a world of pure emptiness. The sea from my window was a broad sparkling band of silver foil – blinding after a long spell in my curtained room – which, later that afternoon, as dark clouds gathered, shaded into restless grey. The rain, when it came, briefly pockmarked the sea and then obliterated all sight in a steamy white mist. The long asphalt promenade was deserted now; but on some humid, rainless afternoons that followed, I would see a couple of toy sellers, their bright red and yellow balloons straining upwards against the silently heaving sea.

  *

  I saw my father the evening after I arrived. He looked frailer than when I had first noticed his advancing age, years ago at the ashram in Benares where my mother died, and where he disclosed to me his intention of retiring to Pondicherry.

  But a strange peace had settled on his lined face underneath the shock of thick grey hair. The life of the ashram suited him; he surprisingly said as much to me – he who had never talked about anything except the most practical matters.

  I saw him every day for dinner at the communal dining room run by the ashram. He was invariably escorted by Deepa, leaning on her shoulder in an intimate way that I found slightly embarrassing. We didn’t discuss his illness after the first time I asked him about it. He said he had been in a bad way, but he was much better now. It was a symptom of old age, he said, and his tone indicated that he didn’t want to talk more about his infirmities.

  He was curious about my time in Benares. But I could tell him little. I told him about the house I had lived in; I told him about my visits to the library. To speak of Miss West or Catherine would have meant drawing upon a store of ease and frankness that had never existed in our relationship, and to my relief the subject of Benares soon dropped out of sight. Instead, each evening he punctiliously asked me about my activities during the day.

  I replied as best I could. There wasn’t much to report. The rain and the heat kept me indoors for most of the day, in bed, unwilling to stir from under the fan. To walk for just a few minutes away from my room was enough to bring rivulets of sweat coursing down my body. The hotel was empty except for a few ageing Germans, whom I saw each evening contorted in yoga postures on the smooth green lawn of the landscaped garden below, and the restaurant was closed. For lunch I had to go to a nearby café for South Indian food, where restless flies collided head-on with the window panes and drowsy waiters sat slumped below furiously revolving fans.

  Then, each afternoon at three o’clock I would venture out of my room after a failed attempt at a siesta. I would walk through the blazing forecourt to the reception where a stern-faced woman sitting behind a long, glass-topped desk would inform me every day in the same measured, gravelly tone that there were no letters for me.

  But there must be! I would remonstrate to myself as I walked back to my room, past the forecourt and up three flights of stairs, and threw myself on my bed, picking up again from the side table the card Catherine had slipped into my hands at Benares railway station.

  All three sides of the card were scribbled over with her tiny curly handwriting, the shape of each letter familiar to me by now. It said:

  Dear Samar,

  Perhaps this card will only make you more emotional, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to keep the line of communication still alive for a few moments, even after we have parted. I tell myself ‘detachment is the key’ and then even a few more minutes of unbroken attention mean so much to me! It has been such a joy first to see our proximity grow and then open up entire new fields of understanding, of affection and of ourselves as we are. I don’t express myself very precisely – English is only my second language as you know – but it is in itself such an impalpable feeling, this sense of communication with each other. It is such a relief to know that you have seen me naked, dejected and in moments of despair, because thanks to this I am not afraid now to tell you anything; there is just no need at all to pretend. What a freedom you have given me, a great gift indeed. I promise my next letters will be more factual and consequential, but I just wanted to say how much you mean to me. Such a friendship is a benediction, one of the things for which you feel worthy of living. And to think of the part I have played in your once secure life – what a mystery love is! Indeed, it will be exciting to tell each other the manifold meaning it shall acquire for both of us. For me, you have already been something of an earthquake, compelling me to rethink my relationship with Anand. How can I thank you if only for this. Let’s promise each other that this friendship will continue to be a source of help for one another, so that I can enrich you and you can, out of your loneliness, enlarge and protect our solitudes.

  I’ll write again soon and send you an address once we have one.

  A long kiss,

  Catherine

  *

  I had read the letter for the first time on the train to Madras, Benares sliding past the window. I had read it in a hurried disconnected way, jumping from middle to end and back, and I had raised my wet eyes to meet the unblinking stares of the colonel and his family. I had read it several times since then, waiting for the bus to Pondicherry at Madras bus station, in the jolting bus to Pondicherry, in the taxi to my dark, curtained room at the hotel, and the growing exhilaration I felt then had tinged everything on my journey – the night light in its rattling cage as well as the colonel’s daughter reading her Archie comics on the train to Madras; the pinpoints of yellow light in the dark night outside the window; the bright paddy fields and coastal mountains in the morning; the bustle of Madras bus station; the muddy country road through dense coconut groves to Pondicherry; the schoolchildren in neat uniforms at village stops – with the kind of all-suffusing private joy that could redeem even the grimy interiors and surly waiters of the South Indian café where I usually had lunch.

  In recent days, I had come to read the letter more carefully, pausing over each word and sentence, turning them over, examining them for deeper sentiment and larger implications. I paused longest at the last sentence: I’ll write again soon and send you an address once we have one.

  Such promise lay in those words, and it was why I felt so keenly the stab of disappointment every afternoon. I had gone to the local post office and inquired about the time it took for letters between France and Pondicherry. By my calculations, Catherine would have written by now, but the days slipped past and no letter came. She was supposed to have left for France six days after my own departure from Benares; I had more than once imagined her – Anand always absent from these mental pictures that came to me from films and books – at the airport in Delhi, where I had been once as a child, the brightly lit chaos of the terminal pressing on her from all sides, counters with Closed signs over them, empty telephone booths, shabbily dressed tourists squatting on luggage trolleys, forlorn bales of merchandise and anxious-looking Sikhs travelling to a better life in the West. I imagined the take-off into darkness, the brisk solicitude of remote, self-possessed air hostesses, the long stupor of stopovers and duty-free shops and then the arrival next morning in another world. I wondered if her parents came to the airport to meet her. What were her thoughts during the moment of arrival? What kind of house did she spend her first night in? Why hadn’t she written?

  I imagined her letter as answering all these questions. I imagined it full of memories of our time together, of the kind of heartening messages I had found in the letter she had handed me in Benares, the few handwritten words on paper that had possessed such power as to cancel out the days of disquieting doubts and gloom I knew in Benares after my return from Kalpi. I no longer th
ought of those days, and the separation from Catherine felt less painful when I set it against the hopes for the future I now had, a future in which a quick and lasting reunion seemed a possibility.

  There was no doubt in my mind that something of great significance had occurred in my life, and I was filled with a sense of wonder again at how the vague longings and expectations of childhood and adolescence had crystallized into a clear, sharp feeling for someone who was a stranger to me in so many ways, a foreigner I wouldn’t ever have known had I not gone to Benares. I had a growing conviction that I had all along been marked in some mysterious way, that after the dull, pointless years of drift, the long years of childhood and adolescence, the time during which I had increasingly felt myself homeless and unprotected and lost, I had been predestined for the moment when I met Catherine – the encounter in which some of the richness of life and the world were revealed to me.

  I felt blessed and fortunate, and the desire to share this private certainty often came over me. But whom could I have shared it with? No one I knew could have followed me in my new life. Nevertheless, the desire to give it some public form made me start a letter. I had already written to Miss West, describing my days in Pondicherry and returning her the money I had borrowed for the rail ticket. I now began a letter to Catherine.

  I wrote with some awkwardness; the peculiar vocabulary of intimacy that Catherine possessed so naturally and employed so fluently felt heavy in my hands. I wrote several drafts and threw away all of them. In the end I decided to wait for her own letter before writing about more personal things, and instead described Pondicherry’s French colonial connections at some length.

  I also wrote about my father. She had been curious about him, and my own curiosity about him – which had not been aroused before when all I knew was the world he had brought me into, where he was an aloof, reticent parent – was provoked by his proximity to Deepa, who was rarely away from him. He turned to her very often for advice and support; he listened with great care to everything she said, his slightly droopy eyes alert and apprehensive. I remembered him as an aloof and self-contained father and husband. The softness in his manner when Deepa was around was odd and disconcerting.