Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

Long after the rain stopped there would remain the flushing sounds of overflowing drains, the burble of tiny rivulets busily furrowing the pliant earth and, finally, the steady plop-plop of water sloping down the tarpaulin roof into a rusty Ovaltine tin.

The sun was quick to reappear and soon dried everything. Red dust swirled through the bars of sun below giant ancient banyan trees, and naked bronze-bodied children frolicked noisily in shaded ponds as we returned each sunset to Pondicherry.

As we neared the city, the traffic growing thicker all the time, the clouds on the horizon gloriously crimson and pink, a familiar disquiet would gnaw at me.

Once when the reception woman bluntly shook her head, Priya, who was standing next to me, said, ‘Why does that woman always shake her head when she sees you, and why do you suddenly turn so grim and silent?’

She was alert to my moods now; she had started questioning me about my own life. Her questions were bold and intrusive; they could exasperate me, but I could also sense, and was moved by, the simple curiosity that I thought lay behind them.

I told her nothing on that occasion. I said I hadn’t ever noticed the woman shaking her head at me; I denied being ‘grim and silent’.

I lay awake until late that night, suddenly full of self-recrimination and trying to work up a new resolve.

PRIYA WAS SITTING BEHIND ME on the moped, on our way to Mahabalipuram — the last of our excursions together — when I said that I was leaving the next day. I told her I was planning to travel around the country for a few weeks before heading off to Dharamshala to take up my job there.

She didn’t say anything, but I felt her arm wrapped around my abdomen suddenly slacken. She was sullen and withdrawn and dishevelled, her hair tousled after the long windy ride, as I parked the moped and walked down the sandy paths with her to the shore temples.

All through the morning I had known a familiar heaviness of heart: the special feeling before departure, which in this case was mixed up with the ever-present anxiety of not having heard from Catherine, and a sense of the unresolved things I would be travelling with.

I was expecting a day of small quiet distractions at the shore temples. But it was not to be: loudspeakers blaring Tamil film music followed us from temple to temple. Guides holding plastic-sheathed certificates and speaking pidgin Hindi lurked behind every sculpted column. Noisy school tour groups thronged the forecourts, and tourist coaches disgorged squinting Europeans in straw hats who were immediately set upon by a small army of half-naked beggars lying in wait outside temple gates.

After an hour of this, Priya said she was bored. She asked me if she could go for a swim, and when I agreed, the undercurrent of delight that always lay in her voice seemed to return. As we trudged through wildernesses of thick burning sand, she pointed and laughed at the corpulent Russian tourists slumped beneath faded beach umbrellas, the fleshy folds around their torsos glossy with suntan oil; she bantered with the ragged coconut vendors and drug pushers and masseurs that pursued us for a while before giving up.

She finally found a secluded place in a clump of coconut trees, and reappeared in a white swimsuit that set off the swarthy complexion of her thin arms and legs. She dropped her kurta and jeans by my side and then, in a sudden burst of energy, sprinted away, a tangle of brown limbs. She waded and splashed through a timid wavelet and then, with a squeal of girlish delight, dived headlong into a nascent breaker, only to emerge a few seconds later, shaking her head from side to side, wiping away wet sticky hair from her face.

She swam farther out than my half-shut eyes could see in the silver-blue blinding glare. A couple of coconut vendors came over, lingered a few feet away and shot hopeful glances at me. After them there came a long procession of young boys in dhotis, with caste marks on their foreheads, supervised by a short, stocky man in a silk lungi, their cautious steps leaving a trail of footprints on the wet sand. I had seen them filing out of their bus at the temples; they looked incongruous here.

After the boys went back, the beach remained empty. I occasionally saw Priya’s bobbing head in the far distance. From time to time a small breeze blew in from the sea, and when it did, the serrated shadow of a coconut leaf swayed over the unread open page of the book I held in my hand. The sun climbed higher in the hot white sky.

At some point I noticed Priya coming back. She was dripping with water; grains of sand stuck to the soles of her feet. There was a wan shy smile on her face as she collapsed on her stomach beside me.

We lay there silently for some time, the trees behind us swaying and crackling in the breeze, the surf hissing up the gentle slope to the beach and abruptly shimmying back, unveiling a glittering mirror of watery sand.

I had become so used to the silence that it startled me to hear Priya speak.

‘What were you thinking about?’ she said.

I turned to look at her face freckled with tiny drops of water, and she repeated her question, abruptly flicking back curly strips of wet hair from her face. ‘What were you thinking about when I was swimming?’

I quickly lied. ‘Nothing, nothing important,’ I said.

What were you thinking about? From Priya, it was now a recurring question, and it irritated me with the offhand way it unravelled the complicated web of thoughts within my mind.

I could tell her nothing: it would have shocked her to glimpse even a hint of the thoughts and memories set so far away from this flat bright seascape: the white glowing peaks straining defiantly against a star-spangled sky and the damp chill of the room in the rest house at Kalpi, the swaying shadows, the sound of falling water outside, the desultory intimate talk, the long melancholy silences during which I had suddenly realized that Catherine was watching me, an expression of tender expectancy playing around her soft moody eyes and enigmatically smiling mouth.

I had been thinking about all that again, and in a much more complicated way. I was hoping, as I always did, to coax out more meaning from remembered moods and gestures. At the same time, I could not avoid a creeping sense of exhaustion. In recent days, these forced memories had come to have some of the monotony and boredom of a too frequently observed routine, and I was often surprised, while in the midst of them, by a great urge to break away, to read, to travel, to engross myself in the great world, in an endeavour so exalted and consuming that I would forget about everything else, most of all my own welfare and happiness.

I would have found it impossible to explain any of this to Priya; and, as always, I told her nothing.

*

It was close to dusk when we returned to Pondicherry. There were a few strolling families and ice-cream vendors on the promenade. At the bandstand, ageing policemen wearing French-style red helmets played ‘Halcyon Days’ to a small indifferent audience of Hindu pilgrims. Invisible behind the bright sodium lamps, the sea heaved and broke on the rocks.

At the hotel, Priya went off to buy some incense sticks from a nearby store. I went straight to my room; I no longer stopped at the reception.

Later that evening, I was in my room, packing for the next day’s journey, when Priya came in through the open door, freshly bathed and bearing a whiff of talcum powder.

I thought she had come for a walk on the promenade, and I didn’t look up from the crammed suitcase I was pressing down in an attempt to lock it.

I struggled with the suitcase for some time, half expecting her to help me. I looked up when the two ends of the lock finally met in a click. She was sitting in the only chair provided in the room, facing the sea, but with her hands over her face, her thin shoulders jerking spasmodically with ever deeper sobs.