Questions of Travel Read online

  One afternoon he arrived early, before the final bell had sounded. He lingered near the gate, smoking a cigarette to pass the time. A man dressed in white, who was chatting to the security guard, spotted Ravi and crossed the road. It was Sirisena, the school servant. At interval, boys tipped him to fetch paper cones of boiled gram and other treats from the little shops at the junction.

  He began at once to remind Ravi of this service, saying, “So many times I brought buns and achcharu for master.” His head jerked, as if dodging a blow.

  Ravi resigned himself to the inevitable. The coins seemed to melt into Sirisena’s hand. But his eyes, veined and mournful, went to the pocket of Ravi’s shirt.

  Shaking a cigarette from the pack, Ravi asked after Brother Ignatius.

  “He’s gone away.” The cigarette, too, having vanished with greased efficiency, Sirisena informed Ravi that the reverend brother had left the school from one day to the next and gone to work in a refugee camp in the east.

  “When was this?”

  “Two, three years now.” A bold, contemptuous look came over the servant’s face, and he spoke of a woman in the camp. Only he didn’t say “woman.” As he came out with the obscenity, his head twitched again. Ravi could remember mimicking the tic, staggering around the playground with his head tucked into his shoulder, tongue lolling. Boys had held on to each other, weak with laughter. What amazed him now was the chalk-white cleanliness of the servant’s sarong and shirt. By what daily miracle of labor and resolve did this man emerge immaculate from his slum?

  The bell announced the end of school. It obscured Sirisena’s next remark. But a phrase reached Ravi: “Tamil dog.”

  Between Carmel and her daughter-in-law trouble simmered and seethed. The girl had her own notions about everything and a father who drank. Worse still, she wasn’t a Catholic. She wasn’t even a Buddhist, declaring as if it were something to be proud of that she was not interested in religion. Her father had studied abroad when he was young, and Malini had been raised in unorthodox ways. One of the outrages of which Carmel suspected her was birth control.

  The blue house bulged with people and discontent. Varunika was boarding with a relative in Colombo, where she had recently completed her training as a nurse. But Priya, who now worked on reception at one of the beachside hotels, was living at home. With the arrival of her brother’s family, she had been obliged to exchange her room for the one Ravi had occupied as a boy. Intended for storage, it had no door but only a curtain. Priya worked shifts, and her sleep was often disturbed: the baby screamed, people came and went from the house making no effort to lower their voices.

  For several years now, Carmel had been running a hairdressing salon in the front room. She was always up and down past Priya’s curtain, fetching or discarding basins of water. Priya lay in bed, staring at the nail in the wall from which her work sari was suspended, folded over a hanger. There was not enough space for an almirah. And just think how much she contributed to the household expenses!

  The Mendises had always spoken English at home. Now Ravi snapped at his mother in Sinhalese, saying that none of her objections to his marriage mattered. Carmel’s blood boiled. “Think of your father!” she cried, and raised her chin at the framed photograph, entwined with nylon roses, in which her husband stood only three colleagues away from a deputy cabinet minister. Her grandson lay on his mat, and his eyes traveled all about as if to swallow the room.

  A wealthy relative of Ravi’s father lived in the town, one of those connections by marriage that are roundabout yet persuasive. This man, a D. S. Basnayake, had once been prominent in local politics. Retired now, he was writing a history of the municipality in which he and his ancestors figured decisively. Being rich, he wished to be modern, and had bought himself a computer with no idea how to use it.

  Carmel learned this when she called on the Basnayakes, as she did three times a year. Her feelings towards the old couple were complicated. Although prosperous, they were Buddhists, therefore damned. And there was a sharper spur to her pity. A few years earlier, the Basnayakes’ son, a senior government official, had suddenly started denouncing ministerial corruption and so on. His mother had confided that he was the target of a sorcery which had curdled his brain. Whatever the case, he was arrested and jailed. The charges against him, wholly spurious, were dropped after long months, and he came out of prison. A week later he killed himself, leaving no explanation.

  Day and night, a light shone below his photo. It showed the dead man at the height of his power and good fortune, but the eyes were already moths stuck in wax. Under the influence of this ominous image, Carmel offered up Ravi at once. “He knows everything about these machines. Spare parts, everything.” The old lady stuck out her lips and looked at her husband. It occurred to Carmel that the couple might not wish to be exposed to sons. “My daughter-in-law can help you also,” she said quickly. “A very clever girl, varsity trained.”

  So Malini now spent six mornings a week with the Basnayakes. Ravi guided her for the first few hours, but with the help of the notes he had made for the reverend brothers, she was soon transferring the old man’s papers on to his computer. She had a low opinion of his work: “Boasts and statistics.” When Ravi asked whether history was ever anything else, she laughed. What frustrated her was this: Mr. Basnayake appeared to think that word-processing was a kind of magic that would automatically transform his disjointed jottings into a coherent chronicle. Instead of working to impose order on his chaotic material, he could think only of the glorious day when it would be published. Who would launch the book—a local dignitary or an eminent historian? Where would the party take place? What food would be served at it? The guest list alone would require weeks of forethought, diplomacy and ruthlessness. Malini started to relate all this scornfully, but soon began to laugh and had to hold a pillow over her face in order not to wake the baby. One of the things that charmed Ravi about her was her willingness to be amused. But she hated, as she loved, without humor.

  She said that the Basnayakes’ house was a morgue. At the rear were vast, treed grounds where no one walked. Chained dogs barked there. As for the Basnayakes, when they visited their daughter in Cleveland once a year, they insisted that their cook accompany them—even though she spent the flight terrified, with an airline blanket over her head—because the old man wouldn’t touch American food. The old woman, having nothing better to do, interrupted Malini constantly with her grieving, repetitive stories. Once, when Malini picked up a bottle of pills for her as a favor, she frowned at the receipt and openly counted the change.

  Cows grazed on the Basnayakes’ front lawn. They owed their existence to the old people, who followed the pious tradition of buying a beast destined for the abattoir so that it might live out its natural life. Each year, on their dead son’s birthday, the herd increased.

  Ravi noticed that for all her grumbling, Malini set out each day readily enough. Her wages soothed the Mendis household, antipathies and grudges submerged under the inflow of cash.

  Laura, 1990s

  SHE WAS LEADING AN improvised, peripatetic, rather hectic life. There was the illusion of flight and the safety of tether. Days passed like a sequence of swiftly dealt cards. She was happy, she would have said.

  But there is always time for the worry-worm to tunnel through, especially around 3 a.m. On a futon in Clapham, Laura thought, I’m growing old. Her days were so various that she hadn’t seen them piling up. She had always pictured a life shaped by books or art hovering there, in the distance. But now her thirtieth birthday was no longer unimaginable. She couldn’t go on waitressing forever. The brilliance of Doc Martens notwithstanding, her calves ached.

  Not for the first time, she considered going home. There were days when she could have wept for the blue fern-leaf of that harbor. But Charlie’s last letter had introduced a girl called Fee. She made surrealist—or possibly socialist: his scrunched writing!—sculptures from dirty crockery. With Charlie she would have no shortage of raw
material, thought Laura, uncharacteristically sour. He had noted, in a marginal scrawl, that their child would be born in May.

  There came the memory—slipping in like a blade—of the Balinese family to whom she had never written. Laura told herself that they would have long forgotten her. This failed to cauterize because it missed the wound: namely, that she was unable to forget them.

  At length, the late-night swirl of remorse, indecision and creeping, unfocused fear drove her to the bottle of valerian. Waiting for it to take effect, I need to do something about a career, she thought.

  The community center was offering an evening course in word-processing for beginners. Fluorescently illuminated, Laura clutched a mouse and tried to keep her green cursor from sliding off the screen.

  She was the youngest person in the room. Everyone else my age already knows how to do this, realized Laura. She heard the whoosh of the technological future as it rushed past.

  But the course progressed and so did she. Soon she was cutting and pasting text, copying documents, experimenting with formats, getting the hang of keyboard shortcuts. She recalled typing classes at school. All that fiddling with Tipp-Ex and ribbons! Here words ran across her screen or were removed with the same untrammeled ease.

  The classes were held in a red-brick school. Laura’s seat was by the window. She looked out into the night and was rewarded by the reflected sight of fifteen humans contained in a big lighted box and mesmerized by small ones.

  The white-haired man at the adjoining work station looked her way just then. Their glances appeared to meet in the window, although his was doubly veiled by glass. Laura risked a smile that wasn’t returned.

  During the break halfway through the class, she noticed him looking at a jam jar that held a quarter-inch of damp, stained sugar into which other people had been sticking their spoons. Laura said, “Hang on.” She grabbed an unopened packet from the shelf in the kitchenette.

  He was already scraping the brownish contents of the jar into his polystyrene cup. “This is ample.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  He held out the box of Liptons. Laura wanted Nescafé but didn’t wish to seem rude.

  Sipping brown water, they stood a little apart.

  She had seen his daughter, a girl of barely twenty, accompanied by a small boy, greet him after class. All three wore coats that seemed too large yet inadequate against merciless March.

  On an impulse Laura told him her name, adding, “I’m from Australia.”

  He considered this. Then asked if she knew the Nullarbor.

  “Not really. I’m from Sydney.”

  He remained silent, which muddled her into asking if he’d been to Australia.

  He had not. He added, “I would like to see the Nullarbor.”

  Why?

  His rather elegant hand traced an arc: oh, you know. “There is nothing like it in my country.”

  So then she could ask where that was without fear of sounding racist.

  “Sri Lanka.”

  “Oh!” cried Laura. “I really, really wanted to go there when I was in India. But there was a lot of unrest. People said it wasn’t safe. This was a few years back?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Have things settled down since? Politics, I mean.” She could hear her hateful, bright chatter but was powerless to strangle it.

  He appeared to reflect. Then he shrugged. He had drunk his tea but went on holding his cup in both hands, as though it might still yield warmth.

  How long had he been in England?

  “Two months. Before, we were in Germany for six, seven months. Stuttgart.”

  She kept her eyes from his heartbreaking maroon jumper with the too-long sleeves. “Winter must have been a shock.”

  People were leaving the kitchen. He held out his hand for her cup and binned it along with his. He said, “It is the winter in people’s hearts that is hard to bear.”

  The girl and her son were waiting when the class ended. At the sight of his grandfather, a smile splashed all over the child’s face.

  It was not that the Sri Lankan man avoided her, exactly. But he never chose the monitor next to hers, and during their tea break he visited the lavatory, or stood at the window with his maroon back to the room.

  Arriving for her last-but-one class, Laura saw a thin, bespectacled figure herding his flock between walls of institutional beige. The girl’s black plait, hanging down over her collar to her hips, was the thickness of Laura’s not inconsiderable wrist.

  Mother and child turned into a room where—Laura glanced at the sign taped to the door—Beginners English was conducted. A teacher was already writing on a whiteboard. Laura smiled at the old man as she caught up with him, expecting no more in return. But he quickened his step to walk beside her to their classroom around the corner.

  They were the first to arrive. She asked, as they unwound scarves, if his daughter was enjoying her classes.

  He replied indirectly, saying that the Catholic aid agency responsible for bringing the family to Europe was paying for English lessons. As he already spoke the language, he had elected to study word-processing instead.

  “And your grandson, how’s he finding it?” Laura was struck by a thought. “Are there other children in that class? I thought it was all adults.”

  He replied that the boy was learning English at school. “He goes with his mother to her classes but sits quietly and draws.” He said, “That is a child who loves to draw.”

  “I used to be like that,” confided Laura.

  When he next spoke, he said, “She is my wife. The boy is her son.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  For a while, each contemplated her manifest lie. Laura Fraser was pretty shocked, in her puritan young soul, by the disparity in age.

  He had pushed up the sleeves of his jumper. Below blue flannel cuffs, his wrist bones were white-tufted. She pictured them roving the girl’s sweet flesh.

  But he was more than a match for her brutality. “Soldiers came to my wife’s village when she was twelve. One of them fathered the boy.”

  The following week, at the end of their final class, Laura went up to the child. He had taken an instinctive half-step behind his mother at the approach of this large stranger. But huge black eyes peered when Laura said, “I’ve brought you a present.”

  She had taken some trouble with the parcel, wrapping it first in midnight-blue tissue scattered with glitter and stars. The whole was finished with clear cellophane and done up with silver string.

  The child looked up at his mother, then accepted the celestial object with both hands.

  There were flat golden flowers in the girl’s lobes. Her tiny face, adorned with luxuriant sideburns, was so dark that the scarlet bindi on her forehead stood out like a jewel. Beaming, she recited, “Thank-you-we-are-nice-to-meet-you-please-don’t-trouble.”

  The child was transfixed by a rainbow in a tin.

  “Goodbye,” said Laura. “And all the very best.”

  At the bend in the passage, she glanced back at them. All three—the man, the girl and her son—stood watching her. Laura bowed her head.

  Ravi, 1990s

  HIS SON’S EARS APPEARED remarkable to Ravi: so perfectly curled!

  Malini was pushing her face into the baby’s neck. Ravi heard, “Who did a lovely big fart? Such a stinky fart! Who did a big fart?”

  With his fingernail, he drew a heart transfixed with an arrow on his wife’s leg. Every morning, Malini dotted her shins with Nivea from a blue tin and rubbed in the precious moisturizer. But parallel white tracks still appeared whenever she scratched her legs.

  Husband and wife went for walks together and talked about everything. Sometimes they would buy a sweepstake ticket from one of the small boys who roamed the streets selling hope. But their great treat was to buy ice-cream cones, which they would eat strolling around the cricket ground or along the beach. Sooner or later, their route would take them past a giant banyan tree. It stood in a patch of waste
ground by the side of the road, but was encroaching on the asphalt; the edge of the road had cracked and tilted up. Ravi had always disliked the banyan. It drank light through its roots, and its dark armpits spread. But Malini liked to linger there, in the tree’s deep shade.

  Long afterwards, when Ravi tried to picture happiness, it was those evenings that came. Folded into them were older memories: his feet planted next to his father’s in damp yellow sand, or the smell of candle wax as he puffed his cheeks over an iced cake. All the happy moments were connected, like bright rooms opening on to one another. Yet the young couple’s conversation, as they planned how they would live, was often grave.

  There was the question of whether they should try to emigrate. The insurgency had ended, but the war for and against a Tamil homeland dragged on. There were assassinations, retaliations, disappearances, suicide bombers; the killing had been going on for years. One night, a little further down the coast, the incoming tide had brought what seemed to be a collection of colossal turds. The sun, creeping up on the array, revealed bodies from which the heads and limbs had been removed.

  Ravi was the kind of person whose heart contracted at the sight of a frog-shape mashed into the road. But dailiness normalizes everything, even slaughter. And Ravi was young—what he feared wasn’t extinction but exclusion. He was haunted by the sense that he was witnessing the birth of a new world. A digital revolution was gathering speed. He ached to be part of it. Soon it would transform the way everyone lived, he told Malini; its power, located everywhere and nowhere, would exceed armies. He used a word that had become fashionable: global.

  Malini said, “Who’ll be left if we all emigrate? Only idiots and brutes.”