Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

Is this love? Is this love? I kept asking myself, more insistently than in the recent past, when I witnessed it only from a distance, and the part of me that was made uneasy by the unreal quality of it all — listening to Catherine’s words of love for me, which referred to someone other than the person she saw before her — was soon overwhelmed by the part that embraced eagerly the possibility that Catherine had seen things in me I hadn’t, the part that wished to surrender to the mood of the moment, to the new intense emotion it released within me — the emotion which was also a suddenly acute awareness of the great yearning that had lain suppressed within me for a long time.

I wanted the moment to go on for ever; I wished never to let go of its intensity, and the morning, when it came, felt like an unwelcome intrusion.

*

I had stayed awake for a while after Catherine drifted into sleep, her head resting on my shoulder, the shadows from the candle still swaying across the walls and ceiling of the room. I felt restless and exuberant; strange wild thoughts criss-crossed my mind and then faded out of sight. At some point after the candle burned itself out and the room plunged into darkness, I too fell asleep.

I woke up, and the first wakeful moment was suffused with the thrilling memory of the previous night’s events, before being almost immediately assailed by panic.

Catherine was gone. A mess of bedclothes and wrinkled sheets were piled where she had lain the previous night. Where was she?

Then I heard the noise of the tap and the din of water falling into a steel bucket. She was in the bathroom, and between registering this rather too plain fact and the panic of finding her absent from my side, I felt the memories of the night recede.

The room itself looked ordinary, stripped of drama, in the bright glare filtered through the dirty green curtains. Random sunbeams fell on discarded backpacks, untidy bundles of clothes and shoes; there was something monotonous about the even noise of the river.

The tap in the bathroom was turned off. I heard the quick, squelchy sounds made by her flip-flops and then, after a short mysterious spell of silence, the flush toilet with the rusty chain roared and gurgled.

The door opened, and Catherine appeared wrapped in a black towel, her hair wet and glossy, tiny beads of water on her bare shoulders, which were bunched up against the cold. She didn’t turn to look at where I lay, half-propped on my elbow. With short mincing steps, she went up to where her backpack rested against the wall, rummaged for a brief moment through it, brought out first a white T-shirt, then her underclothes, and holding them in a bundle she turned, as I knew she would, towards the bed, where her jeans lay on the floor.

She noticed my gaze. She walked towards me, a small reluctant smile on her face. I smelled the sandalwood soap she had used on her face as she leaned down to plant a quick kiss on my forehead. She withdrew abruptly and untied the towel around her.

Naked, her breasts shaking slightly, she dressed herself, and I, still supine on the bed, couldn’t help but watch: first the underclothes, and then the T-shirt and jeans and the woollen jumper. All this — elastic straps slapped into place, hooks and buttons fastened, zippers zipped — was accomplished with a practised ease and a matter-of-factness that left me oddly flustered, and the exchange of tenderness that I half hoped for as she came into the room began to feel inappropriate.

She bent her torso to one side and began to dry her thick mop of hair.

She said, between the sneezing sounds the towel made, ‘I see. . Indian women. . doing this. . in Benares. . They do. . it really. . well.’

So composed and remote she already seemed, so different from the tender and high-spirited person I had held in my arms. It was peculiarly painful to hear her mention Benares — the larger world that the last few hours of our intimacy had managed to keep at bay and to which we were now going back.

Every time Catherine hit her hair with the towel, a fine spray of water rose from her head and briefly passed through the golden sunbeams crossing the room.

I suddenly remembered something. ‘There is a woman who lives right next to my house in Assi,’ I said. ‘I can never see her face but I hear her drying her hair every morning.’

She didn’t respond. When she stopped and straightened up, her expression was solemn. She was panting slightly; loose strands of hair fell over her eyes.

She said, her voice neutral and low, ‘We must not let Anand know what happened last night. He would not be able to deal with it. It would crush him, and I can’t let that happen. I feel responsible for him. I love him too, you know.’

My thoughts had been far away from Anand; this emphatic reminder of her connection with him — after that already painful reference to Benares — couldn’t have come at a more vulnerable moment. She saw the puzzled hurt on my face. She leaned down to embrace me. I smelled the sandalwood soap; the wet cold hair against my skin made me shiver.

Then, as it was too uncomfortable to hold me while standing, she slipped into bed next to me and held me tight against her.

She repeated her endearments of last night, her conviction of a lifelong friendship. Soon, we were babbling in the childlike way we had discovered, without, it seemed, any effort on our part. Then, a few fervent kisses later, we were re-enacting the rituals I had learned the previous night.

It was done with only a bit more competence on my part. Catherine joked about it and then, seeing me slightly put out, burst into laughter.

‘You men are all the same,’ she said, laughing, her teeth large and white, dimples on her cheeks. ‘You all worry about these things.’

The thought came to me, with a pang of jealousy, of the men she had spoken of last night, the men who had not worked out for her.

*

But the moment passed; I was eager to fall in with her cheerful mood.

Catherine mimicked the chokidar’s gait as we packed up our things; she spoke excitedly of the journey back through the mountains. As we walked away from the rest-house, weighed down by our backpacks, Catherine stopped abruptly and turned back.

‘One last look,’ she said in a cheerful voice. The sentimental gesture surprised me at first; but it was gratifying to notice her sombre face and sad eyes when she turned towards me.

Later, while waiting for the bus to Hardwar, we sat out on the rock by the river, eyes half-shut against the blinding reflection from the water. So new the world seemed, and everything of value in it present in this moment, when neither the discontentments of the past nor the desires for the future existed, everything touched by the pure happiness I felt — the snowy peaks, glorious in the sun, the rushing river, the rope bridge, the grassy hillsides spangled with dew, the whitewashed temple and the ochre pennant fluttering from the very top of the oak tree.

The sadhu from last night performed his morning rituals a few metres away, a picture of grace as he stood facing the sun, pouring water from a glittering brass jug, his long hair wet, his muscular torso gleaming with oil.

How remote and neutral he appeared to me now, so easily blended into the brilliant morning scene, all the complex of melancholy feelings he had brought on last night defused and almost unrememberable.

He nodded at us as he left. I suddenly noticed Catherine watching him unseeingly, her face a mass of quick conflicting emotions, and she broke down as soon as he had disappeared from sight.

She felt oppressed by the confusion of her life, she said between sobs that shook her entire body, the confusion and the uncertainty. And it was getting worse: there was her attachment to Anand, with all its attendant responsibilities, and now there was a new one, to me, and it had come with its own complications. Instead of detachment, she was getting more and more involved with other people.