I put my arm around Ira and move closer to her as Rudi stands in an empty room, curtains fluttering in the deathly quiet breeze. Rudi now discovers that he in fact barely knew Trudi at all in spite of their long marriage. He learns from his daughter’s girlfriend that Trudi sacrificed her whole life for him and that her secret passions were Japan and the Japanese Butoh dance, performed in white body make-up with slow movements. And so it is that Rudi goes to Tokyo.
He visits his son who lives there, but he too wishes his father to go away. Rudi decides to make himself scarce by frequenting a park full of cherry blossoms. Here he sees a young Japanese girl who dances Butoh every day. He and the girl, Yu, soon get along because she too has recently lost a loved one, her mother, and they are able to understand each other’s feelings. Trudi had often talked about wanting to see Mount Fuji. With that in mind, Rudi persuades his new friend to travel with him.
Mount Fuji is said to be so shy that it constantly hides behind clouds, so the two put up in a hotel room beside a lake as they wait for the weather to improve. Meanwhile, Rudi’s delicate health starts to deteriorate. It is as if I know what is going to happen next. The mountain eludes Rudi day after day as his condition worsens. Then one night he wakes up in a fever, and as he stands outside the hotel door, the mighty Mount Fuji greets him in the bright moonshine. He wears his dead wife’s clothes, puts on the Butoh make-up and starts to imitate the slow movements of the dance. Trudi then appears to him, and hand in hand they unite to create a dance before the sublime mountain. The next morning, Yu finds Rudi dead by the lake and all his savings left for her in his luggage.
I see the final scenes through a screen of tears and start crying as the film ends. Ira clearly did not expect I would react this way. She keeps asking what happened and I only repeat, ‘It was so beautiful,’ because in the vulnerability of the moment I don’t know what else to say. I want to tell her that I’ve been thinking our lives are diverging, that I’ve been feeling sad about us drifting apart. And I want to tell her I’ve just realized we have this one mighty thing still left in common. But, put into words, I know it will only sound awkward.
*
I wake up the next morning feeling dead tired already in anticipation of the long drive ahead. Today we go to Lachung in North Sikkim. I know it is only about a hundred kilometres from Gangtok, but I also know that distances can be deceptive in the mountains. I remember the journey from ten years ago as a long one on undoubtedly some of the worst roads I have ever travelled on. I am up for it. I’m oddly excited by the thought of the drive. But I fear for Ira. After two good days, I think today’s journey will wear her out. Worse still, I’m afraid it will really test her motion sickness. But the bookings have been done and paid for—in fact, Sharmila’s contact person who confirms our excursion tells me on the phone that we are lucky we are actually able to go to Lachung as the roads were shut for two days because of a landslide and have opened just early this morning—and so we pack our bags and head to the stand from where we will be taking our shared taxi.
When we get there, we identify our ten-seater Sumo and see that others have already occupied the front and middle seats. It is a big Bengali family of six, including two children, and my heart sinks. There’s no hope that the plump middle-aged uncle sitting in the front seat with his little girl will agree to switch with me and Ira. In the back are a couple, newly married, I think. And while they seem pleasant and eager to make small talk, the guy is several inches taller than me. Ira looks at me uneasily with the same thought that I have: the drive is going to be not only long but also cramped and uncomfortable. She quickly pops an Avomine.
At first I feel like I might just settle into the unsettling rhythm of the bouncy back seat. The tall guy and I quickly and silently work out an arrangement of our legs that will allow both of us to sit facing each other with the least discomfort. Our wives are falling asleep on our shoulders—holding on to, I smile as I think of it, a new gym-trained arm in my case. I close my eyes and invite sleep. But the seats are too uncomfortable for me to doze off and my bum soon becomes numb.
We halt often, sleepily step out, stretch our legs, have a cup of tea or a bag of chips, and then we resume what starts to feel like an interminable journey. The drive on the cumbersome seats and the scraggly, winding road gets worse through the day. By the time the light fades, it’s killing me to remain seated. It is pitch-dark all around. I peer long and hard into this deepening gloom but fail to tell which side the mountains are on and which side the valley. Ira is up by now, but the desperation in our eyes as we stare at the road slithering endlessly ahead of us in the glare of the Sumo’s headlights is so intense that we stay mum. I restrain myself from asking our driver, Bikram, how long it will be before we reach our stop for the night, because I know it’s a question that annoys his kind. But I can’t help but notice that we’ve been on the road for a little more than ten hours and there is no hint of civilization around.
The farther into oblivion we drive, the harder it becomes not to get restless. Eventually, the Bengali family succumbs. The woman by the window in the middle seat starts making clucking sounds. ‘Are we close to Lachung?’ she says softly to her husband in Bengali.
‘Go to sleep. We will reach when we reach,’ he says cockily in English from the comfort of his front seat.
The woman next to the one by the window—the two are sisters, I’ve had enough time to deduce that—tells the girls not to be upset. ‘We will arrive soon,’ she reassures them though they have not asked and have so far been rather patient and brave. It is when she tries to console them needlessly that they become whiny and start demanding good food and a warm bed.
The bug of unease spreads quickly. ‘You could think of only this place?’ the newly married woman diagonally opposite me curses her husband, the tall guy. I become fidgety, knowing that this is a question Ira must be trying really hard to stop herself from asking me.
Ten hours on the road become eleven and yet the end is nowhere in sight. Every turn the car takes feels like it just might be the last for the day. Every tiny light in the distance seems to hold out the possibility of emanating from our hotel. I am able to hold back the question no more and finally ask Bikram how much more time we’ll take to reach Lachung. He says half an hour, and I sigh and groan and Ira has to shush me, but it turns out that Bikram was only messing with me, because we arrive at the hotel just seconds after I pose the question. He laughs as we all tumble out of the Sumo and look up mesmerized at the velvety star-spangled sky.
The hotel is not so much a hotel as a dimly lit row of rooms at the bottom of a few steps that lead down from the main road. But at least it has beds, warm blankets, hot running water and steaming rice, dal and sabzi. We wolf down the food and enter our bed without changing our clothes. There is a river flowing somewhere not far from our room. I can’t see it from the window but I can hear it. And listening to the loud whistle of wind circling between two nearby mountains, I drift off to sleep.
*
We wake up at six, and when we load ourselves into our Sumo, it feels as if there was no intervening night between yesterday’s time on the road and now. My body and brain are still craving rest. Ira too has overnight got dark circles under her eyes. And, by all accounts, today is going to be worse than yesterday. We are going twenty-five kilometres further north to the Yumthang Valley, from where we will retrace our tracks, have lunch at the same hotel where we stayed and then proceed downhill all the way back to Gangtok. It means yesterday’s journey plus fifty kilometres on a road that is way worse than anything we have experienced so far.
Over the next two hours we realize just how far from the idea of a road a road actually can be. As day breaks, the sun lights up the desolate terrain we are in. We are slowly rolling over what is just a pathway of flattened rocks. The sight depresses me. I look sideways at Ira staring out the window.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper to her so the tall guy and his wife can’t hear.
‘For
what?’ she turns to me and says softly.
‘For this holiday. You must really hate me.’
She smiles. ‘Your choice of destination could have been better, yes. But I don’t mind the time we are in. It’ll be over soon and then we’ll be sad for it.’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘We’ve been on the road for so long and gotten nowhere. I feel bad you are here for just four months and we are wasting so much precious time.’
‘And what would you rather have done with it?’
‘I don’t know. Something more productive than being on the road endlessly.’
Ira doesn’t say anything for a while. The Sumo is silent. I look out at the road ahead through the front windshield. ‘You know, that’s what my thesis is going to be about next year,’ Ira says to me unexpectedly.
I turn around, surprised, not just because I had thought she had dozed back off but also because it doesn’t make sense. ‘Your thesis? About what? Being on this road endlessly? Or this holiday?’
‘No, stupid. The idea of productivity.’
‘You need to explain.’
‘I am going to look at artworks which question the necessity of being productive in order to present us with new ways of defining our existence.’
‘Slow down, Sebastian. That’s a hell of a lot of intelligent words and I don’t get them.’
‘I want to look at how,’ she says patiently, ‘when one chooses to be unproductive, one is actually asserting the innate freedom we are born with.’
‘I think if I choose to be unproductive, I am asserting Maran’s freedom to pack me off without severance pay.’
‘That’s what I want to write about.’
‘What? About Maran and me?’
‘Don’t you see? Our existence is defined by our ability to be productive. We think of work as a requirement to survive, to be good citizens. But isn’t it funny that those who engage in the most difficult labour and are therefore most productive are often the ones to be denied freedom and rights? On the other hand, unproductivity or idleness is the supreme liberty that man can hope for.’
‘Are you telling me all this because you don’t want to take up a job after you pass out?’
She ignores me. ‘It is when you are unproductive that you can actually contemplate yourself and your capacity to act—to be productive in a way that is a true expression of your inner self. Think about it. The best creative works are products of what the rest of the world sees as long stretches of unproductive time. In the same sense, travelling is an unproductive activity but it lets you get in touch with your inner self. So is love.’
I am more serious now. ‘How so?’ I ask.
‘Isn’t it? What productive good, in the sense of the word we know, has ever come out of love? When teenagers fall in love and spend hours talking on the phone, their parents tell them to study instead. Because they feel love is a waste of time. What I want to talk about is how this wasting of time makes possible truly intimate relationships because intimacy is what is thwarted in a high-performance work culture. Intimacy is not about being together and having the same interests.’ It’s like she is answering all the questions I’ve been struggling with for a long time. ‘Why else would we anguish about failing to find each other? Time needs to be wasted intimately. That is when you …’
‘… find love,’ I complete the sentence, taking even myself by surprise. It is my turn to fall silent now. ‘So when you look at it that way,’ I say after a few minutes, ‘this, right here—this time we are in—is not precious time wasted that could have been better spent in another way. This unproductive time is in fact productive in a truer sense as it is wasted in the interest of intimacy.’
I put it crudely but Ira does not disapprove. It makes sense now. This is why she has not, ever since she returned from New York, spoken about our fights. We are both looking at the four months we have together as some sort of trial period. But while I see it as a period in which I hope to rediscover points of convergence, she wants to know if finally, after all these years, I will learn to waste time with her intimately.
I look outside. Bikram is manoeuvring the Sumo over great inclines and through small gaps between boulders. And then, unexpectedly, I see cars parked along the pathway. We stop and disembark, and I see that the pathway too has ended abruptly.
‘This is Zero Point,’ Bikram declares, ‘in Yumthang. This is where the road into North Sikkim ends. That mountain you see over there is in China.’ It is not a point I had been to ten years ago.
Standing here in the midst of tourists in the cup of nature’s palm, I can only gawp speechlessly at the white mountains that rise high above me on all sides and the tiny stream that flows by. After the long ordeal I expect Ira to be tired. But she laughs and walks off across the stream to play in the snow, beckoning me to join her. I see it for what it is. It is an invitation to waste time intimately—the closest she will come to saying that in spite of all that has happened over the past few months, she loves me still.
I order Maggi and coffee at one of the stalls. The sun is out and it’s a bright morning with a cool breeze. The valley is vast and for miles there are only tall snow-covered mountains. The air buzzes with the voices of tourists, yet it feels tranquil. In that rarefied silence, I think of all that has happened in my life since Ira moved to New York nine months ago. I think of those who came into my life, held out the promise of new beginnings and left too soon. And then I think of the girl I had met on the first day of college all those years ago, who, despite the distance between us, ironically was the one who never left.
I stare at Ira walking away for a long time before joining her to play in the snow. It has been more than a week since we left Delhi, five days since we left Kolkata and four since we reached Sikkim. After a whole day’s relentless journey I am now at the northern-most point in this part of the country. It has been a long, long journey into a space so remote that the inessential falls away and only the essential survives. And now I know what that is.
Ira.
15
Anniversary
This is it then. The last day of our vacation.
I usually tend to be melancholic at the end of a holiday. Not so much because the few days of relaxation, good food and pretty places to see are over. Nor so much at the thought of going back to work the next day. What makes me sad is to think I won’t be able to hear my own thoughts once I return to the old mind-numbing routine.
Travel, as Ira said, lets us get in touch with our inner selves and gives us the pause to pursue what really matters. Sikkim too has been an amazing journey of self-discovery and for that I am grateful. But I am not sad the holiday is at an end. I am relieved we will at last return to Delhi, where monsoon hasn’t arrived yet and whose heat and aridity I will welcome after the last four days here.
*
The rain started as a drizzle on our way back from Lachung, turning into a heavy downpour by the time we stopped for tea a while later. There we got news of a landslide at a spot we had left behind only ten minutes earlier, and of the cars which would be stuck on the road for the night. So we were fortunate in this matter and Bikram was a star. But Ira and I were not so lucky in another: the rain claimed our backpack on the carrier, leaving all our clothes soggy as mud.
Through the next day we sat in bed back in our Gangtok room staring at the dense fog, the continuing downpour and our clothes spread out on the floor to dry. When the rain let up for a short while we managed to make a quick dash to the market to buy some new clothes, but it resumed almost as soon as we were back. I called up Sharmila to ask if we could cancel Pelling, our last destination in Sikkim which was another day’s journey by shared taxi from Gangtok, and instead go to Darjeeling before our flight to Delhi. But she said that the bookings were non-refundable and Darjeeling was anyway as bad as anywhere in Sikkim.
And so we are in Pelling now. We arrived late in the evening the day before and spent yesterday walking down the single winding road that makes up this quie
t village. I held an umbrella over our heads—our other one was taken by the Gangtok wind—and Ira pulled it towards her whenever it veered unknowingly away.
There isn’t much to do in Pelling but at least it isn’t polluted or noisy like Gangtok. The guy at the reception tells me the village is so secluded that there are no shared taxis out of here. In a few hours, after a long and mostly memorable holiday, we will head back to the plains in a private car and from there fly off to Delhi. But for now I am here, it is five o’clock in the morning, I am awake as I lie in bed next to Ira and I watch her sleep.
*
Funnily, I think of Momo as I look at her. Maybe because he too has this calm, set expression when he sleeps that is reassuring. As if to say all is well with the world. Maybe he gets it from his foster mother who got him home and made sure he lived through the first few weeks of his life after we found him abandoned. I think of something Ira had said to me one day after she had moved to New York—that our children will grow up in a house with cats and dogs or any other animal they want. And suddenly it strikes me as odd. Because Ira was never fond of animals.
I have always loved animals since as far back as I can remember but Ira was different. It was most evident when she visited me and Yusuf when we lived together. She would look up recipes online and make us preparations of fish that would keep her in the kitchen for hours. And then she would get mad when she would see me siphoning off a few pieces to the cats waiting in the veranda. She would curse the cats when I let them in and they ran around the house, climbed curtains and scared her by jumping on her face while she slept at night. She was no fonder of dogs and would fearfully stay behind me as I fed the strays in JNU whenever I visited. Which is why I remember the story of how Momo came into our lives and how Ira came to love animals as odd.
The Story of a Long-Distance Marriage Page 12
