Questions of Travel Read online

  Brother Ignatius said, “Always rushing to get on, Mendis.”

  The shock of the collision caused the emotions of the afternoon to swarm up in Ravi. His thoughts flashed in all directions. Dabrera hissed, They’re a filthy lot. But why was Brother Ignatius on foot, where was his bicycle? Confusion and embarrassment mingled in Ravi and filled him with rage.

  Mrs. Anrado’s guesthouse stood halfway down the lane. A group of foreigners came strolling out of the darkness, young people in bright, loose clothes, one girl with a temple flower in a wave of yellow hair. She was saying, “I don’t care if it’s Bali and Phuket. I just want to go somewhere cheap and with great food.”

  On a great surge of courage, Ravi turned to Brother Ignatius. “Geography is destiny? You don’t know anything!” If he stopped for a second, he knew he would be lost. He shouted, “People like that—” But he didn’t know how to say what he meant.

  “Pray for them, child. Going here and there, far from home.”

  Now Ravi was close to tears. Again he yelled, “You don’t know anything!” Then he ran away.

  At school it was easy enough to avoid Brother Ignatius. But what furtive purpose had taken him to a lane that led only to hippies and fields? Then anger would rescue Ravi from the swirl of shame and helplessness stirred by the memory, and he would conclude that the reverend brother was just a dirty fool.

  As if by agreement, Dabrera and Ravi greeted each other in class with the flawless civility of mutual mistrust. By the middle of the week, Dabrera had been granted permission to exchange his desk for one on the far side of the room; a note from his mother claimed that the light from the window was weakening his eyes. In any case, there would have been no more afternoons at his house. In the north, Tamil guerrillas slaughtered fifteen Sinhalese soldiers in an ambush. Very soon the retaliations began, and Dabrera was missing when school resumed. His classmates learned that his mother was a Tamil. In Colombo, a mob had set her parents’ house on fire and hacked the old people to death. Dabrera’s mother would no longer let him leave the house. Ravi pictured him, a prisoner in a bedroom with The Police in his ears. When his jailer wasn’t screaming orders, she couldn’t stop crying. Ravi remembered the servant’s frightened face.

  Another awful thing was that Marmite settled down on the veranda, gave a mighty thump of her tail and died. Priya wrapped the old dog in a towel and placed her in her grave. She had once shrouded her dolls in handkerchiefs and buried them in the same spot under the mulberry, then as now rounding on Ravi when he tried to help.

  Eventually, there came the news that the Dabreras had been granted asylum in Norway. Then someone else said Denmark—at any rate, somewhere where they could be certain of being cold.

  Laura, 1980s

  AT THE END OF her first year at art school, Laura looked carefully at all her work. Then she withdrew her enrollment. A few days later, in a video shop, she ran into one of her teachers—a lovely, sexy man!—and told him of her decision. Charlie McKenzie nodded. “Smart girl.” She ended the summer in his bed.

  Self-conscious under his gaze, Laura drew a red quilt over her stomach, her heavy breasts. He went away from her on bare feet and returned with a book. “No need to hide.” Laura inspected the dimpled thighs and pear-shaped torso of Rembrandt’s Hendrickje and was not reassured.

  Charlie was a squat-bodied man with a tiny, hooded penis scarcely larger than Laura’s thumb. But he was imaginative and unhurried. There was a dollop of Maori in his ancestral mix, making him a prize in certain quarters. At parties, Laura Fraser thrilled to the novel sensation of being envied.

  Quite soon, there were other women. But Laura couldn’t learn to share. When she said so, Charlie remained a friend, now and then still meeting her in bed. She was restful, he once remarked. Laura would have wished for a gaudier assessment. By that time she was in her final year of English at university, yearning for irrevocable acts and large, sincere, nineteenth-century fictions.

  On a blustery October morning, Hester sneezed. Six days later she was dead.

  Laura left a message at the law firm where Cameron was a partner. He didn’t return her call. Donald Fraser had remarried the previous year. He and his wife, a brisk anesthetist, were doing something medical and crucial in Boston when Hester died. They sent a wreath. The card read, A great innings! That would be the anesthetist, thought Laura, she was from Melbourne.

  With Charlie’s help, Laura packed up her great-aunt’s flat. A chest of drawers yielded a photograph album with matte black pages. Two sepia children posed in buttoned boots: Hester and Ruth said an inscription in an upright hand. The album couldn’t be given to the Salvos or thrown into a bin, but how many photos could Laura keep? The day passed in decisions that were betrayals. Charlie, returning to the room with a mug of instant in each hand, found Laura stricken. She had come upon a toffee tin containing every birthday card she had given Hester: “I missed 1984.” Charlie tried to console her, but like most people, Laura dispensed self-reproach in inverse proportion to the damage done.

  Hester’s ancient transistor still lay beside her bed. A death notice, a funeral: these were formal, they had a shape. But what was to be done with the spreading sadness of a radio in a perforated leather case? Laura slipped the strap over her wrist and held the trannie to her ear. On winter afternoons Hester had sat like that, listening to the footy. She had spent two years in Ballarat as a girl and retained a lifelong fervor for Australian Rules. When the enemy had a free kick, she would cross her fingers and hiss maledictions. The twins had imitated and mocked, chanting, “Chewie on your boot! Chewie on your boot!” if ever they found Hester in a tricky maneuver such as the separation of whites from yolks.

  One last relic pierced afresh: it was a charcoal portrait of Hester. Laura was responsible—how she hated it now. The drawing was as exact as a coffin: all that had escaped was everything vital. “It’s so lifelike!” Hester had exclaimed. But the lifelike is not life.

  At her bridge club, Hester had flexed an old talent at discreet intervals; a blue bankbook revealed a surprising sum. She had left her father’s gold watch to a man in London with fourteen letters in his name; everything else went to Laura. The anesthetist would report, eventually, that her husband considered the will insulting.

  And so, like a heroine, Laura came into an inheritance. There was only one thing to do. She set out to see the world.

  Laura, 1980s

  LAURA HAD READ WIDELY to ready herself for adventure: travelers’ tales, histories, guidebooks. They warned of pickpockets, rabid dogs, unboiled water, children’s eyes in which the incautious might drown. But no one mentioned the sheer tedium of being a tourist. Dreaming of travel, Laura had pictured a swift slideshow of scenes. But oh, the long, blank hours that linked! They were spent waiting for buses, trains, ferries, flights, waiting to cash traveler’s checks, waiting for the museum to open, waiting to make a booking or a call. Once, Laura waited to buy stamps while the clerks read her postcards with frank interest, passing them from hand to hand. It was like being trapped in a particularly irritating Zen koan: In order to advance, the traveler must stay still.

  She came to savor the brief minutes at the end of every journey when travel was over but arrival remained prospective. The bus bumped into the station, the plane slipped into its bay. People rose, straightened their clothes, looked around for their belongings. Their involvement with each other held but was already infiltrated by change. Soon they would scatter, individual and purposeful as seeds.

  In Bali, the plane door opened and there was the smell of the tropics, a moist coupling of fragrance and stench. Laura crossed the tarmac, stunned by a marvel: This is Asia and I am in it.

  Dusk brought jet lag and large, velvety black butterflies. One startled her by having a face. Then she saw that it was a bat.

  She couldn’t wait to write to Charlie, to describe and enthuse.

  There were Australian voices in the street, bars that advertised Foster’s, surfers with eyes like blue fish.<
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  It was nothing like home.

  A man staying in the same losmen in Ubud addressed Laura at breakfast. He had been spending his holidays in Bali since 1971, he announced. “Of course it’s not the same these days. Legian was a fishing village. Have you seen it now?”

  Hairy and resolute as a character from Tolkien, he moved without invitation to Laura’s table. His name was Darrell; he was in concrete in Alice, he said. It was easy to picture him on a municipal plinth scanning the spinifex for wear and tear—but that was quite wrong, the beard marked him plainly as a garden gnome. The gnome squeezed lime juice over the sunset flesh of a papaw, saying, “This place used to be paradise. It’s ruined now.”

  For the next twenty minutes, he spoke, in statements indistinguishable from accusations, of the forested acres felled since he had first come to the island, the multiplication of hotels, the destruction of reefs, the corruption of values, the poisoning of water and air.

  What was totally infuriating was that not everything he said could be dismissed.

  Laura had just finished a postcard to Charlie. There was a little cartoon of herself overflowing a flowery sarong, recumbent under a palm tree. Miss you, heaps of love. Dull lies were all that came as soon as she held a pen. That didn’t matter because the real letter, a long one, was being composed in Laura’s head. Among other things, it told Charlie about the affection the Balinese lavished on the very young. We’d call it spoiling a child. When did we decide that love was a curdling agent?

  Darrell was saying, “Take Kuta. You’ve been there, of course.”

  There was no denying it.

  “Rip-offs and tacky nightclubs and pissed footballers everywhere you turn. Burgers and bananasheks on the menus. The whole place shut down by ten when I was first here. You could hear a pin drop. Even Ubud’s not the same these days.” He inventoried changes, all of them for the worse.

  Near the entrance to the losmen, a bowl held the daily offering of flowers and cooked rice. The more distant view was of terraced fields. Laura’s eyes followed a frieze of men and women laboring in the mud, watched by the sun’s ancient face. Her letter continued: A factory might save them from breaking their backs. But this gnome I know would have something to say about pollution. Anyway, who’d want to take a photo of a factory?

  Darrell leaned in. “First time?” It was less a question than a diagnosis. When she confirmed it, he brightened. “No worries. Reality’ll soon set in.”

  Reality/concrete: they were the same, Laura realized, something gray that spread and trapped.

  A waterfall in a forest was mourning its lost life as a cloud. Under the lament, a whisper reached Laura: What are you doing here? She shook her head and raised her camera. But the question remained.

  She blamed it on Darrell. How dare he assume that she was a green girl? Stuffed into the back of a bemo, with something alive and unhappy fastened up in wicker and wedged into her ribs, Laura added to her phantom letter. It noted that ugliness, typically attributed to the modern by orientalizing foreigners, was present equally in age-old elements. It cited the toddler with ulcerated sores along his legs, the man bowed with exhaustion between the shafts of a laden cart, the fly-wreathed filth by the wayside, the savage, stick-figure dogs. Nor did it neglect what progress had brought: the ominous flutter of discarded plastic bags, the traffic-choked road designed for the passage of beasts, the pink-kneed Dutchman across from Laura whose T-shirt, suitably illustrated, bore the legend Bali—Land of Tits. She alighted at her destination bone-rattled, filmed with dust, refreshed.

  What she couldn’t know was that Darrell was only a pre-figuration. Across the world, the world-weary were waiting. Time after time, Laura would learn that she had missed the moment; to be a tourist was always to arrive too late. Paradise was lost: prosperity had intervened, or politics. The earthquake had finished off Naples. Giuliani had wrecked New York. Immigrants ruined wherever they squatted. France—well, France had always been blighted by the necessary evil of the French. But if only Laura had seen Bangkok before the smog/Hong Kong before the Chinese/Switzerland before the Alps/the planet before the Flood.

  A girl called Corinne befriended Laura. They stood before a famous temple where tour buses exhaled. A sign declared in multiple tongues that menstruating women were not welcome. That morning, the girls had risen before dawn and been jolted on a bus for three hours. Corinne, who stepped lightly and stood perfectly straight, placed her hands on her hips. “Fucking priests. The same shit everywhere.” In Montreal, Corinne had been educated by Ursulines; she owed them her spine and her contempt. She traveled with only a child’s brown suitcase and was dressed always in creaseless white. Her cotton dress, bound with a temple sash, was a patch of light moving through dim, sacred interiors, along stairs, pausing to examine stonework. In the noon haze of a courtyard, she seemed to float. Laura, heaving along behind, wondered uneasily when and where she might change her tampon. Corinne appeared on a high brick outcrop, balanced on one leg, her joined palms raised. A volcano, not extinct, was propped above the temple. Laura pictured the punitive spurt, people fleeing and dogs, the lava nipping her guilty heels.

  Mica glittered on a black beach where a gnome clad in a breastplate of fur placed himself in her way. Stupid Laura Fraser forgot the quiver of scorn she had prepared. Instead of letting fly with, Do you imagine you’re not a tourist? and Hasn’t anyone ever told you that describing a complex culture as paradise is deeply patronizing?, she gushed, “Isn’t this the most beautiful place? Aren’t we lucky to be here?”

  Out of dull dreams, she opened her eyes and found that she was wide awake. Above the paddies, a cloudy crystal ball. Outside her window, one of her countrymen throwing up. A drum sounded somewhere, faint and insistent. How many Balinese would visit Australia to spend up on bargains and vomit in the streets? What are you doing here? Now she knew that the whisper had nothing to do with Darrell. It merely pursued everyone who left home.

  Her guidebook had guided: Stay in family-run losmens. Your money goes directly to locals, not to the multinationals who own the big hotels. So Laura stayed with Balinese families and talked to their children in Useful Vocabulary. Corinne, who had studied anthropology, spoke of the benefits of cross-cultural encounters. “In the measure one learns from the Balinese people, our Western egotism erodes. Have you remarked their faces? So full of joy!” Then she asked how much Laura was paying for her room. Laura named the sum—a few Australian dollars. Corinne was dismayed. “But it is bourgeois to pay what they ask! That I can tell you without error. To respect their culture, you must not give more than half.”

  On Laura’s last evening on the island, Wayan, the owner of the losmen, inserted a tape of gamelan music into a cassette recorder and placed lanterns around the yard. His barefoot daughters began dancing, costumed in sarongs tucked up under their arms. Nimble as fish, their hands darted and curved. The smallest child wearied of the performance, broke off midstep and went away; she reappeared from the shadows later to pick up the dance. On a woven mat beside Laura and Corinne, the children’s grandmother had nodded off. When the tape came to an end, only the two visitors applauded.

  The next morning, when the last strap on her backpack was fastened, Laura looked around her room. Quite soon, it would be swept clean. Someone else, pillowed on fresh linen, would dream in her bed. The clouds would still press on the hilltops, the children’s voices would sound like rain. But the quilted green view would keep no trace of her gaze. The life of the place would flow on as if it had never known Laura Fraser. She dismissed the thought—it was plainly nonsense.

  When she had settled her bill, Laura followed Wayan into the family’s living quarters for farewells. A patch of color sang in the dimness there. It was a cardboard box, decorated with purple and yellow tulips, that had once held Kleenex. Laura had thrown it away the previous day. Now it displayed its pretty pattern on a shelf.

  Laura made a to-do of getting out her notebook and speaking to the children. In a flurry of sham
e, she wrote down their names and the family’s address. Corinne appeared, yawning in a white cotton nightie. She had already explained that she wouldn’t be staying in touch: “To travel is to say goodbye.”

  The rest of the day, vexatious with fumes and delays, barely registered with Laura. She was light-headed with schemes: she would write to every guidebook and tourist office recommending the losmen, she would pay for the education of the youngest girl. She would send the family…something marvelous and transforming, a new motorbike or an electric jug. She had taken photos of everyone: she would post them copies, for a start.

  But in India, Laura’s canisters of film disappeared from her pack while it was strapped to the roof of a bus. Months later, in London, the losmen children rose from an address in her notebook; it wasn’t too late, she could still send them little gifts. While hesitating over what to buy, she decided to enclose a letter, explaining the absence of photos, describing her adventures. So much had receded that loomed large when she was staying with the family: the old lady’s cataracts, Wayan’s plans for expanding the business, the children’s progress at school. The letter would inquire about all these things. She embarked on it at once and covered three pages with barely a pause. Then came a knock at her door or some other distraction. Laura had every intention of finishing the letter, buying the presents, posting the package. But she never did.

  Laura, 1980s