When I turned I saw that she had changed more than any of us. She’d put on weight, though was still statuesque enough to carry it. Her blonde hair had turned a dark brown. Her face was lined. Her clothing was much more modest than those outfits she’d worn in Los Angeles. She was dressed simply in matching cotton pants and a long shirt. I gave her a full-bodied hug and as I held her felt one of those great waves of love I used to feel for her before the irritation, inevitably, set in. Then you stepped forward and gave me a kiss.
‘She’s five. Very grown-up, aren’t you darling?’ Anna looked proud.
‘Yes,’ you said. The first word I ever heard you say. ‘I’m a grown-up.’
‘Here, let us get your bags,’ Anna waved her hand and two men who had been hovering were finally allowed to pick up our luggage. They strode towards the car park and we followed them through the crowd.
‘Is Ian coming?’ I asked.
I’d met Ian once, before he and Anna had headed overseas together. A boy—he was at least ten years younger than Anna—that she first met in Paris. He’d been introduced to me as some friend of William Burroughs. I was beyond surprised when I’d received a letter from Calcutta, a bit over a year before:
You will probably think it very strange that I am married to a man like Ian, but you know darling, just because Ian has boyfriends doesn’t mean we don’t like to fuck. It is very nice. Very sweet. Of course the main reason to marry is to travel together and to reassure his family. He says they don’t like the fact he is a homo. But I want you to know that actually, we love each other very much. We were married in a small Anglican church close to our hotel. In the early morning light the church was pretty and its stone edges were soft because moss and rain have eaten them away. The English reverend thought Ian was very nicely dressed. I wore a bright red sari that I got into a tangle. Ana-Sofia looked like some glorious Christmas beetle in her blue-green shimmery silk and she held a bouquet of marigolds.
‘No,’ Anna laughed. ‘But I got a telegram a few weeks ago. Dear wife am in love with Pakistan stop and a young man stop details to follow. Then, of course, no more details. But maybe another friend of mine will be meeting us in Ceylon. An old boyfriend, from Paris. Well, actually, from Rome. That is where he lives.’ Anna suddenly looked so anxious at the thought of seeing this man that she could not look me in the eye. She changed the subject. ‘You are very hot. I don’t think I explained well enough how hot you would be here. But back at our guest house I have got some lighter clothes for you.’
It took over an hour in a very sweaty taxi to get to our guest house. ‘You must tell me all about your acid tests, darling,’ Anna said to me. ‘Is that what they were called? Was it groovy? Were you turned on? I keep meeting travellers who say they have been turned on, and now are dropping out.’ Anna said the words ‘groovy’ and ‘turned on’ like she’d used English words when I first met her, when every word she spoke was foreign to her and words were new things that she was trying out. ‘And how is San Francisco? You are so lucky to live there.’
Anna fired questions at me so fast that it occurred to me she was nervous. Of course she often disappeared on me for years at a time, but she needed me to be the sensible friend, the one she could rely on. When she’d tracked me down to the commune where Marilyn and I lived in the Haight to ask us to join her for a holiday, she’d sounded shocked that my life had changed so.
I told her what it had been like to go to an acid test in Watts. The Grateful Dead playing and us all drinking Kool-Aid from trash cans in the centre of the room. The Watts riots had only been five months beforehand so we all felt pretty edgy going down to South Central—though when I think about it now, I assume all the guys from down there thought all us white kids running around half-naked and stoned was the most ridiculous thing they’d ever seen.
I was one of the oldest people there but that meant the clarity I felt after taking acid was all the more beautiful to me. My former life, one that seemed to me full of failures—of judgment, of bravery, of spirit—fell away from me. I watched people dance and then begin to break off into colours, drifting off like smoke, before merging at a higher level. I found myself at six a.m. talking to a plainclothes cop who was even more out of it than me. ‘Listen,’ he said, to me, to anyone else who’d listen, ‘I’ve got more Awareness, more…Awareness, in my little fingernail…My Awareness is so superior to yours…’ Then he passed out. Soon after that I walked out into a beautiful autumn morning. Everything was bright and clear. A couple of weeks later I followed some of my new friends to San Francisco and began to work as a cook preparing food with the Diggers, food that they gave out in the Panhandle everyday. Miriam went berserk. She even threatened to take Marilyn from me, though of course she never would.
‘So, actually, I have been. Turned on, I mean. Are you laughing at me?’
Anna took my hand and said earnestly, ‘Oh no, darling. Whatever you are into, it is cool with me. I have been checking all kinds of things out too.’
‘What have you been checking out?’
‘I am…’ her announcement was drowned by the sound of horns as we sat in some traffic jam so that she had to repeat herself: ‘I am a Buddhist now.’
‘Like Suzuki-roshi?’
‘That is Zen. My dharma friends are Tibetan. I have been living with some Tibetan lamas.’
‘I thought you were living with Ian? ‘
‘For a while, yes. But as I have told you he left.’ That shrug. ‘Instead of a husband I have a guru now.’
The heat took my breath away. So did the dramatic twists and turns of Anna’s life.
We pulled up outside our guest house, somewhere near Lodi Gardens. There was a man loitering under a mango tree near the entrance of the guest house. He was wearing a traditional Indian top with embroidery around the neck and drawstring pants, but his crew cut and square jaw made his disguise less than convincing.
‘He was there this morning,’ Anna said. ‘I think he is some CIA creep following me.’ I thought she was being paranoid but later that day when we were bundled into two rickshaws to do some sightseeing, he was there again. This time he was in a car.
‘To Chandni Chowk,’ Anna directed the old man pulling her rickshaw. She turned to Marilyn and me. ‘We are going to have a bit of an adventure, I think. Chandni Chowk is in the middle of Old Delhi. Its streets are too narrow for a car to follow us. Let’s see how Mr Secret Agent deals with that.’ Sure enough the man with the crew cut tried to follow us, but was, to our delight, held up by a bullock cart. We disappeared into the maze of streets and finally alighted at a market entrance. You and Anna wandered from stall to busy stall while Marilyn and I walked anxiously behind. You seemed at home there but for us—well, nothing, not one second of our lives in Los Angeles had prepared us for Old Delhi. We stopped at a sweet stall and bought some sugary milky sticky balls called gulab jaman. Soon all our faces were streaked with syrup and sugar and coconut and Marilyn’s spirits finally lifted.
I became so overwhelmed by the crowds that I thought I might faint. Anna took pity on me and suggested we go in search of a cafe and some soft drinks. As she strode ahead of me I saw that she moved differently. She was more languid. ‘Your walk has changed,’ I said.
Anna turned and smiled. ‘It’s the heat,’ she said. But it wasn’t just that.
A wailing sprung up. I started and Marilyn looked alarmed. ‘What’s that?’
‘We are near Jama Masjid,’ Anna said. ‘For Muslims Friday is the holy day. This is the Friday afternoon prayer service.’ I didn’t want to admit that I had no idea what a Muslim was. ‘Ian and I had an apartment in Kashmir near a mosque for a while,’ Anna went on. ‘I find the sound very beautiful.’ And she was right. It was.
Mr Crew Cut was outside our guest house again the next morning and that was when Anna walked up to his car and knocked on the window. The young man looked startled.
‘Since you want to know what we’re doing, why don’t you just drive us all around today?�
�� Anna asked.
‘Ma’am,’ he stammered. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘Come on, darling, take us to Connaught Circus. That way you’ll know for sure that I am buying plane tickets to get me out of this crazy country.’
‘The name is Chase, ma’am,’ he said, apparently fearful she might keep calling him darling. Then, not knowing what else to do, he let the four of us climb into his Ambassador and took off. As he drove down Janpath, Chase turned to her. ‘Is it true what they say, ma’am? That you’re Russian?’
‘What, you think I am like some spy out of James Bond? Perhaps I am Ursula Andress?’ At which point Chase glanced up into his rear vision mirror, because the idea wasn’t entirely implausible. Anna went on: ‘I’m an American now, if I am anything at all. The CIA is ridiculous.’
‘You’ve got to understand, ma’am, that if you add up the Russians and the Chinese, that’s a lot of commies. And of course there’s the fact—if you forgive me, ma’am—that you’ve almost killed a man.’
‘And you haven’t?’
‘No, ma’am. But if I had to, for my country, I would.’
‘There are many ways to kill people. You have heard of the Tibetan freedom fighters? Your precious CIA dropped some into Tibet with no back-up. Not even a year ago. Most of them were shot before their parachutes hit the ground.’
‘I don’t see how it’s our fault that the Chinese killed them ma’am, as unfortunate an occurrence as that was.’
‘You can kill people by standing back and doing nothing at all,’ said Anna. ‘It’s not so different to pulling the trigger yourself.’
At that moment you spotted something and started squealing out the window. Chase broke into a broad smile and for a moment, he became human. ‘Your daughter’s real pretty.’
‘For a communist, you mean,’ Anna ribbed him. ‘She’s real pretty for a communist.’
‘I mean no disrespect,’ he said, ‘I just can’t understand why a woman like you would be in a dirty country like this unless she had a, well, a motivation.’
‘I do have a motivation,’ she said. ‘I am looking for truth.’
It was hot, everyone in the car was sweating now, and Chase ran his hand back through his blond hair. ‘Well it sounds like we’re on the same side then,’ he said.
Anna and I rolled our eyes and looked out the window.
Chase drove us around Delhi all week. He joined us for dinner every evening and brought offerings every morning: mangoes, cups of marsala chai. He galloped around the guest house lawn on all fours and you called him your horsey. He did magic tricks: smoke came out of his fingers; coins from behind his ears. You and Marilyn adored him. And, for one brief evening he and I were lovers. By the end of our time together we saw through his self importance to the sweet boy from the mid-west he’d once been. When he drove us to the airport we all hugged him.
‘Thank the American government for me, darling,’ Anna said. ‘They’ve been most hospitable.’ When he drove off you began to cry. You turned to Anna. ‘Daddy?’ you asked.
*
After arriving in Ceylon we rested a few days in Colombo then travelled east, by train and taxi, to Welligama. We were staying in a house off the coast that had been built by some French count, and then bought by a writer friend of Anna’s. It looked like something out of a horror movie, with its turrets and palm trees jutting out at crazy angles. Anna had been told that we could walk over at low tide, no problem, but the sea was rough. She struggled to hold you up, which meant you screamed the entire way until a porter came back for you and lifted you up—one palm under your neck, another under your bottom—and into the air. Marilyn climbed onto another porter’s back. When you were both deposited onto the pier you ran along it and straight through the collapsing archway at the island entrance, only coming to a stop when a mongoose crossed your path.
‘It’s got red eyes!’ you yelled.
When I finally clambered onto the pier, I felt as dishevelled as the house and garden. The house didn’t distinguish between inside and out. Decades of monsoon, sea winds and salty air had eaten it away. Dirty white stucco had fallen off the walls in chunks. Vines and moss—even a feral coconut palm—crossed the boundary between verandah and house and no one seemed inclined to do a thing about it. I had the flashes—where are we, who are these people, it’s not very clean here—that I thought of as a kind of haunting. These thoughts were Miriam’s, not my own. It was to escape her, I reminded herself, that I had become friends with people like Anna, married Col, then, most dramatically of all, moved to San Francisco.
I put on a brave face. ‘This is very cool,’ I said.
‘I am happy you are here, darling,’ Anna hauled herself onto the pier beside me. ‘This will be a very special holiday.’
The south-east monsoon came early, catching us out as we sat down to eat dinner out on the terrace on our very first evening there. Rain lashed us and made you girls squeal. We all shivered for a few minutes before the rain stopped and the humidity began to climb again.
Despite my shock when I’d arrived it didn’t take long for the island to feel like a very special home. Or perhaps I should say a dream of home, because the weather meant that everything felt ever so slightly off kilter. Surreal. The ebb and flow of heat, rain and release was almost sexual. I know you’ll call me a hippy for saying this, but staying on that island was the first time I felt the planet breathe.
A routine quickly established itself. We got up to watch the moon set and the sun rise but slept away the afternoons. If the monsoon clouds weren’t too thick we watched the sun set as well; a red ball of fire that dropped below the horizon with incredible speed. ‘Does the sun move quicker here?’ Marilyn asked, and while I knew the answer was no, it did seem to me that Marilyn might be right. She told me later that when she went to college and studied ‘Paradise Lost’ it was this tiny island that she thought of.
As often as not it was too hot to think. I had never before understood what bliss not thinking could be. That was when I had glimpses of understanding what it was that Anna had found with her lamas. I asked her to explain to me what had happened to her in Darjeeling but it seemed she was still struggling to make sense of things herself.
‘I just sat,’ she said. ‘For a couple of hours every day and tried not to think about the pain in my back. There is also my lamas. They taught me about things. About how my mind works. They are very…special. It is difficult to explain,’ Anna shrugged her frustration. ‘You must do it yourself to understand. Meditation makes me calm. It makes me happy to not think so much about myself but about others. It is all…we are all…’ Her hands moved through the air as she spoke. She briefly linked her fingers as if to suggest the interconnection of all things, then sat still for a few moments before saying, ‘Maybe it is like this: some mornings when I sit, I glimpse for, perhaps, the smallest part of a second, a deep and calmer space: like sky and ocean both, but more than. Think of dawn here on the island, when the clouds lift and the sea seems endless. South from here there is nothing but ocean until the ice around the South Pole. It is vast. And if you look over the horizon—it is possible, Lama Gyatsho has explained this to me, to see over the curve of the earth, if one practises for long enough; if one trains the mind to see past the self’s limitations—you might watch a single wave surge for thousands of miles before it hits the land.’
A few days later Anna’s ex-lover turned up. Nick. Anna had told me they were over, but it seemed to me that they weren’t. There was something between them that could never be over. Nick was thirty-six, although, like Anna, he looked older. He was a cameraman and she said he’d done a lot of filming outdoors in strong southern Italian light. There were crinkles around his eyes. There were smile lines around his mouth. Sadder, deeper lines cross-hatched his face as well, exaggerating his features. He looked happy one moment, sad the next. Apparently his hair was once a sandy colour, but it had faded to no colour at all. His glasses were round and the r
ims were thin and silver. His eyes were very pale grey. Anna was relaxed and happy with him in a way that she never was with any other man. I asked her several times why it hadn’t worked between them and she always shrugged and said, ‘He’s married,’ as if that explained everything. But it seemed to me that they were so in love he could have left his wife for Anna. I don’t know why that didn’t happen.
Nick and Anna were more interested in each other than eating. Marilyn lived on lady finger bananas. You gnawed on hard boiled eggs. It was left to me to admire the hard work of Raj, Taprobane’s cook. Each morning he would present us with egg hoppers—eggs fried into a basket made of pancake—which we filled with chili, sambal, pickled fish, curried egg, tomato salad and dhal. Lunch, the main meal of the day, was sometimes more than fifteen dishes: two kinds of chicken curry, three kinds of fish, beans, potatoes, eggplants, and coconut and purple-onion salsas, rices and breads.
I found myself thinking more and more about an idea I’d first had when I moved to San Francisco; to open a restaurant. Each day I was in Ceylon the idea grew more vigorous, grew like the vine that had begun to coil up one of the posts of my bed. Finally I made a decision to do something about it and wandered, barefoot, down to the kitchen and asked Raj to tell me how he made one of the side dishes we’d just had for lunch.
‘Did you use beetroot?’
‘Yes,’ Raj looked at his feet.
‘Coconut?’
‘Yes,’ he said, again, indicating that he grated it. In a rush of enthusiasm he said firmly, ‘And onions. And…’ then his nerve failed him, ‘tom-at…’ and his voice trailed off into a whisper. The next day I arrived to find a sign that said DON’T NOT ENTER hanging in the doorway. I went in anyway and asked Raj if there was a problem and he said that it was ‘wrong’ for me to watch him work. I spent a full hour convincing him that teaching someone to cook was a proper job, a job I was prepared to pay him for. He finally agreed, though not before requesting that ‘madam should cover her shoulders’. My casual sarongs and singlet tops had been causing offence.
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