Questions of Travel Read online

  SHE CLIMBED INTO AN autorickshaw outside the bus station in Pondicherry and gave the driver the name of the guesthouse she had chosen.

  “Oh yes, madam. Number eleven.”

  Thinking he had misunderstood, Laura repeated the name.

  “Yes, madam,” he said over his shoulder. “Number eleven, Lonely Planet.”

  Laura consulted the map in the travelers’ bible. The guesthouse was the eleventh item in the key.

  In a gloomy coffeehouse in Thanjavur, she ordered prudently milkless tea. Courting couples had sought refuge in the adjoining booths, where they nestled with decorum.

  A waiter making passes at Laura’s table with a filthy rag inquired where madam was from. When she told him, “Dean Jones,” he murmured.

  Laura had arrived in India not knowing this deity and had quickly been enlightened. “David Boon,” she replied.

  “Merv Hughes.”

  “Allan Border.” And politely added, “Kapil Dev.”

  “Kapil Dev!” he repeated, eyes aglow.

  The ritual satisfied, he asked how long she was staying in Thanjavur.

  She was leaving the next day, said Laura. “I’m going on to Madurai. And to Kanyakumari after that.”

  “Then Kovalam and Trivandrum,” he supplied. “And backwater boat trip and Alleppey and Cochin.”

  “But how do you know?” cried Laura. She had spent pleasurable hours putting together her itinerary from guidebooks and maps.

  He was equally astonished. “All the tourists are going there, madam.”

  On an afternoon in spring, she rested against fallen marble near a Moghul tomb. There were birds, stretches of grass, the names of God carved between chipped tiles of celestial blue. Families were picnicking under trees, while a group of young people photographed one another beside fragments of masonry, or climbed a flight of steps that ended in air. Then they, too, settled down to eat.

  Laura had come to this place some miles outside Delhi in the company of two young men, students encountered at the Red Fort. What was irritating was that she could find no reference to the tomb in her guidebook, although this one was the superior kind devoted to culture and art. The omission might mean that she had arrived, at last, at one of tourism’s blank spaces. But how annoying not to have any information about the ruins. Again she checked the index. Her new friends were no help. One said that the tomb housed the bones of a prince, while the other insisted that they were those of a saint. Was the prince worshipped as a saint? wondered Laura. The boys neither accepted nor rejected her hypothesis. Aziz had a famous picture of Che Guevara on his T-shirt, Sanjay a photo of Michael Jackson. To tell the truth, they were both hungry, for the journey to the tomb on a scooter borrowed from Sanjay’s uncle had been a lengthy one, and they gazed with longing at the picnickers around them. Each felt obscurely that Laura, a Westerner and a female, should have provided their party with food; each recognized, too, that this was unreasonable. On the grass, the group of young people laughed and pinched one another’s arms. The scent of pakoras teased.

  Aziz began to recite snatches of Urdu poetry. A translation followed: exalted stuff, nightingales and tears. Laura boiled the lament down to a preoccupation of her own, India’s smells and sights, the spiced food, the languorous air having worked on her like light, rousing touches. She remembered the sexy temple carvings of the south. She had loitered, inspecting them through dark glasses.

  In India, the single men she met backpacking conformed to one of two types. There were those, frequently unbathed, who were blissful with prayer or other addictions. Only the other day, a dhoti-clad boy, scabbed and with shaven head, had waylaid Laura to announce his dissatisfaction with the natives. “You heard them lads going on about the cricket on the telly? All lovely-jubbly and jolly fine shot. Pretending like they’re English, innit?” Then he told Laura that she could have sex with him. When she declined the opportunity, he produced his trump: “I do Tantric. Goes on, innit?” Laura’s infinite letter to Charlie wondered if it would be a kindness to explain that the prospect of it going on only lowered his meager chances.

  For the second kind of man, visiting the subcontinent was a strenuous sport played with set jaw against touts, germs, rip-offs, beggars, officials, in the end an all-India game, which he would one day recall, point by triumphant point, in the tranquillity of suburban conversation. Laura was unable to summon the effort such men required; nor did they appear to care overmuch for her. Tanned, several pounds lighter and hung with silver from the markets of Yogyakarta, she remained large and quite plain.

  But here, where royalty or holiness had rotted, seeking out her company were these two. In a teashop they frequented, it was the boys’ habit to detail their exploits, each one—both virgins, of course—striving to outdo his friend in the number and nature of his conquests. They had gone there as usual after arranging the excursion with Laura, brimful of hope and graphic speculation. Now they stared at this big foreign girl, and one pictured her hair spread on a pillow, and the other ventured no further than loosening it from its combs. What was she thinking of, this huge stranger? She must be mad to have come out here with them! Soon it would be dark. Their stomachs growled.

  Mosquitoes sang. The sun crashed into the plains. They returned to the city as they had come, all three straddling the scooter. Laura, in the middle, leaned into Sanjay’s shoulder blades; her nipples lengthened. On a quiet stretch of road, she slid her hand down from his waist. His response was instantaneous, but he kept heroically to his course. As the lights of roadside stalls approached, he gently but authoritatively disengaged her hold.

  Outside her hostel, Laura thanked them. They waggled their heads—what did Indians mean by that? Assent, forgiveness, denial, rebuke?—and Aziz said, “It has been a most enjoyable outing.” She watched the night drink them up.

  The following morning, when Laura came out into the street, Sanjay was waiting under the sign that advertised Three-Bedded Rooms. In the neutral tone a guide might adopt, he observed, “In India there are many hotels.”

  In the decrepit one to which he led her, she pretty much ripped off his clothes.

  A sneeze might last longer! When she suggested something he might try, he scrambled down from her and into his clothes. “My uncle will be angry if I am late,” he said, backing away from Laura on her rented nylon sheet. “He is a very angry man.”

  But he was there, waiting for her, the next morning. Laura moved to a single room and spent six days longer in Delhi than she had intended.

  Laura, 1980s

  SHE LOOKED AT A bridge, and what she saw wasn’t balustrade and arch but the embodiment of a sonnet. As for the monuments, they were iconic from tea towels. Then came a red-purple tree, magisterial in a park. Laura had never seen another like it and she recognized it at once—copper beeches were always turning up in novels. That was what it meant to be Australian: you came to London for the first time and discovered what you already knew.

  But that was in the first floating, glassy days. Underneath, it was all strange. The trees were large green buildings locked up in squares. And why had they called it Paddington? It was nothing like Paddo in Sydney. That went for Edgeware Road, too. It was equally amazing to find Indian shops run by Indians, unlike at home, where Indians were few, and the same racks of bright, flimsy garments and clumsily carved pantheons were presided over by flowerchildren who had faded on the stem. “Hoxton! Isn’t that a little off-piste?” exclaimed a rotund voice, and Laura knew herself incurably alien. English in the mouths of the English was a dream language, an affair of allusion and code.

  She couldn’t get used to the washing arrangements. No showers! But doing things differently was the point of leaving home. Willingly she scrubbed the tub before and after. Then her landlady, a sweet-faced Christadelphian called Blanche, asked her not to bathe every day. “It uses hot water, you see.”

  It was June. Each blade of grass stood up polished and green.

  Laura came out of the National Gallery.
She told the first friendly face, “I am twenty-five years old.” What she meant was something like, I’ve missed twenty-five years of looking at those pictures. It was a straightforward sentiment, but all she could do, trembling a little, was repeat herself. Passersby saw one of London’s mad, a large girl talking to a lion.

  Blanche’s house was the latest in a succession of rooms Laura had rented in Bermondsey, Stamford Hill, Hackney, the blighted boroughs to which the exchange rate sentenced her. From tower blocks, those modern wrecks worked by the twentieth century’s Unenlightenment, pit bulls and other monsters came and went. Once in a while, at the foot of a thundering flyover or mirror-glass cliff, she would observe a pink-eyed ancient frozen to the spot, as if engaged in a last attempt to drag a remembered map clear of the architectural felony that had obliterated it.

  The ravages of monetarism were abroad, too: boarded-up shops, purse-snatchers, bulging job centers, bag-children asleep in doorways, cardboard suburbs erected and dismantled with the night.

  Leaving the British Museum, Laura detected a distinctive vowel. Suddenly homesick, she accosted it. Phillip was elderly, forty-six at least. In archetypal tweed, he was a sausage in its skin. He admitted to his provenance but informed Laura at once and superfluously that Wollongong had been a long time ago. But as the day drooped in Finsbury, where she had after some labor drawn an orgasm from him, he spoke dreamily of a really fresh lamington.

  On learning where Laura lived, he said, “You can’t live there. We tried.” He recited, “Scrubber, mugger, junkie, thief. When we heard Toby’s new counting-out rhyme, we knew we had to get clear.”

  He offered this splayed on Toby’s bed, for Toby had been dispatched to boarding school. On a chest of drawers, a silver dog grinned in a silver frame: Toby’s Weimaraner, run over at Easter. So unfortunate, but in the midst of life.

  Exhausted by his exertions, he began to snore.

  Autumn in Sydney was a chameleon season that borrowed from summer and winter. Here, shapeless August ended, and things took on a distinctive edge. There were afternoons of sidelit trees. Laura trod on wet grass, followed a gravel path where chestnuts gleamed. It was necessary to visit the parks, not only for the leaves, but because she needed to escape into calm, expensive districts, away from the shitty smears on the pavements, the litter, the mean-eyed children, the shops selling only ugly or necessary things.

  Hurrying home past Electrical Goods in glum November, she turned her head. A bank of screens was showing men and women astride a wall or clambering across fallen barricades to embrace. At the reporter’s elbow, a boy’s round face stared into the camera. Multiple and diminished, history flashed before Laura’s gaze. She had missed it. She might have been in Berlin, could easily still go: Europe, to a mind that judged on an Australian scale, was an undersized place. But what had all that happiness to do with her? At home, memory thickened all occasions, however news-unworthy. Here, she would never look at a cinema and see the scene of her first kiss, never pass a stand of stiff-winged dark trees that had invaded the dreams of five-year-old Laura. She realized, That’s why ghosts return. She walked on, because the wind was gritty as well as cutting, but the face of the German boy went with her. It showed a peculiar mixture of satisfaction tinged with alarm—it was the face of someone who has just bitten into a hot potato.

  Phillip’s card remained in her purse. From time to time, Laura took it out and looked at it. But she never called the number at University College. Put it down to the silver photograph, and to we. After she left him, he would have answered the phone. Nothing much, he might have said, or one of the other phrases that had reached Laura now and then as she lay in Charlie McKenzie’s bed.

  Before Blanche inherited the house in Hackney, she had lived on a commune in Wales. A magnet fixed one of her poems to the fridge. Once there was a rainbow valley, / Gentle people living free…A photo showed children in multicolored crocheted ponchos standing in mud.

  Christmas was coming. Blanche had spent up big on chickpeas, and Laura was invited to the feast. Phillip’s advice about moving had gone unheeded. Laura might experience a genuine frisson for the corpse discovered, after seven months and the rats had passed, in its council flat; might sincerely curse the vandalized telephone booth or the privatized, non-arriving bus. But where the fear of being trapped forever by these things was lacking, so too was the compulsion to get clear.

  The sun, if it showed itself at all, entered Laura’s room in the late afternoon. It lit up the scratches on the furniture, and the nylon fibers, each ending in a tiny ball, that quivered up from the peach-colored spread. Even along the river or in the stripped parks, the low winter sun was baleful. Suspended in bluish vapors, it showed as round and red as the eye on a surveillance camera. It stayed half an hour, as if that were all it could bear to record of earthly iniquity. If Laura was present when it slid through her window, a headache threatened along her hairline. But as long as the corners of the room remained in shadow, she could almost believe it was a painting: a minor effort by a would-be Sickert, in which wallpaper and wardrobe mirror offered the same creepy green. Was that why people went on leaving home to struggle with luggage and exchange rates? Not for the shot at novelty or adventure, profit or escape, but in the hope that their lives would be lifted into art?

  The problem was that the mirror always held her, too: untransformed in the foreground of the scene.

  Laura made up her mind to find work when Hester’s money ran out: to dig in, stay. The galleries were full of pictures; when she dared, she was looking at them one by one. Perhaps the point was also to stay away. There was the memory of all those times when she had rushed to question travelers returned from the magic land called overseas. They would assure her that it was great for a while but. A while was elastic and corresponded to the length of time they had been away. Laura learned that Australia was the best place to bring up kids, no question. Everything was so much easier here. It was simply wonderful how away confirmed that home was best. Photographs were produced as evidence that travel had occurred, for the travelers themselves were unchanged. Souvenirs, strategically deployed around the house, proclaimed the sophistication and broadness of outlook that familiarity with foreign cultures conferred. And that was all of overseas that anyone needed.

  Ravi, 1980s

  AT THE FAREWELL PARTY for the de Mels, the young people were sitting out on the veranda. A vein of lightning opened, and sky showed bright and thin—it was the skin of a balloon seen from the inside. Then the power failed. In the commotion, Ravi drew Roshi de Mel around the side of the house and kissed her. She was sixteen and a district swimming champion. He kept a newspaper photograph of her in her swimsuit hidden in his old Bible, among the prayer cards and images of saints.

  By this time, with the de Mels leaving for Canada in a week, there was a sense of crisis to the affair, which had not progressed beyond the play of glances and an exchange of boldly confessional letters.

  The de Mel girls, a quartet of sisters, were all forward and long-limbed. Roshi returned Ravi’s kiss openmouthed and pressed herself against him. Early evening drizzle had left a vegetable scent in the air. Ravi had an impression of ripeness and branching. It was answered by a bloom of light on his lids. He opened his eyes and saw a bodiless head suspended beyond the trees.

  Recently, the Mendises had attended a family wedding near Galle. All those cousins were cheerful and mean. One by one, they had spoken with satisfaction of a lane where each driveway contained a body with a dark circle in the forehead. The day after the ceremony, when the oldest cousin had sobered enough to drive the Mendises back to the station, they chanced on a little procession of soldiers herding a group of insurgents along the road. “Don’t look!” ordered Carmel. One of the prisoners was a girl, not much older than Ravi, wearing a printed cotton dress. She was plain and thick-browed, and her eyes moved sideways as the car passed. She was pushed on.

  When Ravi tried to remember the girl’s face, all he could see was a brown bu
tton. But she was involved in the fear that opened inside him in the de Mels’ garden. The apparition, oddly lit and drawing closer, was entirely suited to the times: unnatural, out of joint. Then he recognized Dudley, a poor relation of the de Mels, a moonstruck idiot with a large, lolling head. He had come trotting up from the rear of the house with a lighted candle held under his chin. Roshi swiveled and, placing her hands on her hips, began to abuse him. Squealing with delight, the idiot brushed past. From the house, a voice called, “Roshi! Roshi! Where are you hiding, darling?” The girl seized Ravi’s hand and crushed it. Then she was gone.

  Candles had been set around the room where everyone was gathered, and a kerosene lamp glowed. Christmas flies delirious with light littered every surface with iridescent wings. They dragged their maimed bodies here and there, then died.

  Aloysius de Mel, Roshi’s father, was saying, “…our bothal karaya’s nephew. Young fellow, twenty years old. The JVP cut his throat after a falling-out, and left the body tied to a lamppost with a notice saying not to touch it. But the father went and cut down his son. In the middle of the funeral, the JVP showed up and killed the whole lot. All the mourners, ten, fifteen people.”

  There were the standard murmurs. But reaction to the tale was muted. In the first place, there was nothing unusual about what had happened to the bottle-man’s relatives. For months, rumor and journalists had been reporting far worse. War and peace, anarchy and government were no longer discrete colors but had run together and changed hue. Besides, the de Mels’ ties to the country had already begun to fray. The gathering felt that it was less than tactful of Aloysius to dwell on woes that no longer touched him.