by Alison Moore
She asks if my father ever talks about his trip to India.
I didn’t know he had been.
‘We went together,’ she explains. ‘We worked on the same magazine. I was a features writer.’ My father is a photographer. She takes my hand and tours me around her living room, showing off her colourful tapestries and carved wooden boxes and statues.
I ask her about the elephant man on her mantelpiece.
‘That’s Ganesha,’ she says, ‘remover of obstacles and patron of learning. His father, Shiva, was commanded to cut the head off the first thing he saw, which unfortunately was his own son. But then he saved Ganesha’s life by replacing his lost head with an elephant’s.’
I am appalled by this image of a father who listens to the voices compelling him to do such heinous things, and the bodged repair which maybe he hopes nobody will notice. Head? What head?
‘Would you like to try some Indian tea?’ she asks. She boils up milk with herbs and spices, and we drink the chai from small, hot glasses.
The train journey from Bombay to Surat takes about six hours. I sit on a hard bench, writing notes. Beside me is an Indian man who reads over my shoulder and stops me every now and again to correct my spelling of the names of the places we pass through. Beside him sits his mother who peels small oranges and includes me when she shares out the segments. Later, the son moves to the opposite bench to let his mother lie down, and she lies with her head on her shawl at the far end and her bare feet resting on my thigh.
John sits on another bench trying to explain to some men what he does for a living, with his very little Hindi and their very little English. He gestures taking photographs, and then gets out a copy of the magazine and shows them pictures of male models with his name beneath them. They pretend to misunderstand him, shaking their heads in refusal to believe that he is the man in the photograph.
The train rattles on for hours through the smells and sounds of many different stations, many different villages. When we stop, traders board with baskets of fruit and bread and pots of hot chai; and beggars with limbs as thin and knotty as their sticks; and a leper, who is beaten away by the policemen.
When my legs and backside become stiff and begin to ache, I stand up, placing the woman’s bare feet gently down on the bench. She tuts loudly. I inch through the standing passengers, all men, to the open doorway, and stand there cooling in the rush of fresh air. At each station, the breeze wilts and a rank smell leaks through the toilet door into the carriage, burning my nostrils.
I return to the bench where the woman is peeling more oranges. She holds a piece out to me, the juice dripping down her long, thin fingers and onto my white trousers.
When my father phones, I say to him, ‘Kemcho. Tamaru naam su che?’
‘I’m coming to pick you up,’ he says, and puts the phone down.
Again, in the car, I try this Gujarati greeting, these phrases my Aunty Frances has taught me: Hello. What is your name? Maru naam Jenny che. He doesn’t respond. From the back seat, I watch his eyes in the rear-view mirror, flicking back and forth and from side to side, from the road ahead to the road behind, to me, and away again. His eyes are brown with a sliver of amber; his lids are heavy; he looks sad even when he smiles. I don’t have his eyes; mine are blue like my mother’s and Aunty Frances’s. I ask, ‘Did mum ever go?’
‘Where?’
‘To India.’
‘No.’ He switches on the radio. The subject is closed.
I dream that night of Ganesha, who stands before me with his elephant’s head bearing down on his skinny body, its weight too great for his legs, which look like they might buckle. He plants his bare feet wide to keep his balance and fixes me with his elephant eyes, which are brown, with a chink of amber; the lids are heavy and make him look sad. And Shiva is begging Ganesha not to tell anybody what he has done.
We are in India for a couple of weeks to produce an article on a wedding in a village in Gujarat, a bus-ride north of Surat.
The bride’s name is Pritti. We capture her first in her daily routine before the wedding preparations start. Down by the river at dawn, John takes the photographs and I conduct an interview, while Pritti washes clothes, beating shirts so hard against the rocks that the buttons break off. She makes chappatis, rolling them and putting them out to dry on mats in the early sun, where they become pock-marked with the footprints of tiny birds which run through the dust and over the chappatis. Her brothers and sisters want to practise their English on us, but they only know how to ask our names, so conversations sound like Rumpelstiltskin riddles. In the evenings, we return to our guest house, where we eat and sleep to the sound of the cicadas, the helicopter beetles and the call to prayer.
The guest house is a family business managed by a middle-aged couple and their unmarried daughter, Sangita. Monkeys sit on the roof, watching our comings and goings. John and I have a bedroom each, and every morning Sangita brings us chai.
She tells John that it is not proper for him to visit the bride at home on the eve of her wedding. We agree that I will go alone to document the wedding party preparations, while John goes off to take contextual pictures, landscapes, whatever takes his eye. I eat with the bride and her family, and return to the guest house late. John is not in his room. I fall asleep, and by the time I wake the next morning, John is already out and about.
I return to Pritti’s house. Everybody is busy dressing and decorating the bride. One of her sisters paints my hands with cold dots of henna paste, making concentric circles on each palm, and a flower in the middle, painting bangles around my wrists and rings around my fingers.
I am expecting to see John at the wedding, but he is not there. I take some pictures on my own camera and wait for him to arrive, but he doesn’t come. He misses the wedding and the day of celebration which follows it. I collect a roll of thirty-six snaps with people’s heads and feet chopped off or with my thumb half over the lens. I forget the flash in a dim room or face the sun, which scorches out the image. My record of the occasion is skewed and blurry.
When I finally catch up with John, he makes a few lame excuses. He says we can tell the magazine that I or he took the pictures while he was ill.
As it happens, John is not ill at all, not once. It is me who goes down with terrible diarrhoea and vomiting the day after the celebrations. I stay at home feeling wretched, sleeping and sweating and washing, watching my orange henna patterns fade.
John goes out every morning to get bottles of water and Thums Up! cola for me before going to work. Each evening I ask him for the day’s stories; whether there are interviews I need to do to accompany his pictures; whether he has written down all the subjects’ names. In response, he is vague; he says he has photographed nothing worthwhile that day but will go out again the next day.
On the third day of my illness I am feeling a little better and a little bored. In the afternoon, I get up and go to John’s room. He is still out, but while I wait for him to return, I sit down to look at the Polaroids spread out on his bed. I am expecting to see pictures of the village and its surroundings, the market and the shrines, the main road and its traffic. I am surprised and puzzled to find myself looking at dozens of pictures of Sangita down by the river, stained orange by the sunrise.
When I talk about going to India, Dad says, ‘Bloody Frances.’ He says I am too young, and that I don’t have the money. This is true when I am fourteen with a paper-round, but not when I am eighteen and working, with Aunty Frances topping up my fund for my nineteenth birthday. ‘Bloody Frances,’ he says. He thought I had forgotten all about it, that I had left India behind. Still he tries to put me off, to find reasons for me not to go. ‘You’ll get ill,’ he says. ‘Frances was very ill when she was there.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘she told me. But you weren’t.’
He looks startled.
There are more than a hundred photographs of Sangita
altogether. Beneath the stack of pictures of her looking fresh and shy in the morning sunshine there is another collection. In these, her sari is a little dishevelled, her hair is a little tousled, her face is a little flushed, and her smile is a little secret.
I confront John when he comes home. He is embarrassed and defensive.
‘How could you?’ I ask. ‘What about Linda? Does Sangita know you’re married?’
‘Yes, she knows,’ he says.
‘And what are you planning on doing? What are you going to tell Linda?’
‘Linda doesn’t need to know,’ he says.
I turn away.
On the day we leave, while we are waiting to catch the bus back to Surat, I see Sangita running through the village in an orange sari, scattering the dust and the chickens. She catches up with us and holds John’s hands and face and tells him he must stay.
I stand at a distance, turned away, angry with both of them. John makes excuses and promises, all the while squinting into the distance, looking for the bus, which eventually comes. As it pulls away we stare back at Sangita who stands horribly alone, shrinking in the dust, becoming a puddle of orange in the distance as we travel away along the bumpy road.
Neither of us tells Linda, although she notices that he does not like to talk about India, and perhaps she notices how I have cooled towards my brother-in-law. She suggests to me that his illness was a particularly bad experience for him.
‘Poor John,’ I say.
She says she hopes that he wasn’t too difficult a patient.
‘Not at all,’ I say.
In the monsoon season, the river swells and stays fat for months, lurking at the edge of the village, watched and monitored and speculated about, and then it shrinks again, leaving behind puddles and the debris of the flood.
I pack long skirts, loose trousers, long-sleeved tops, a hat, sunscreen, mosquito repellent, malaria tablets. I have my ticket, visa, money, and an address.
I travel in December, when England’s winter is wet and grey, and India’s is orange. I make the journey Frances has described to me, flying at dawn into Bombay. The roads are already swollen with traffic – black and yellow taxis and auto-rickshaws weaving between lorries and bicycles and camels with carts. The air is thick with the honking of horns and the ringing of bells, and nonchalant cows potter across four rough lanes of traffic, playing lazy chicken.
I catch a train to Surat, breaking up my journey with tea and fruit, and in Surat I catch a bus, a boneshaker which deposits me on a dusty roadside at the end of the afternoon.
Approaching the village is like approaching Neverland or Oz, a place which only exists in stories. There is the river which will flood in the summer. And there is the guest house with grey monkeys loitering on the roof as if they were no more exotic than pigeons.
The girl at the desk is on the phone. I wait. She is about my age, I think. Behind her, a door opens into a back room, where a middle-aged woman sits in front of a glassless window, with the shutters wide open and the early evening sunlight dancing around her. Her eyes are closed. The girl behind the desk puts down the phone. She lifts her head, raising her heavy eyelids and looking at me with eyes which are dark brown with a sliver of amber.
‘What is your name?’ she asks, searching for my answer in her ledger.
In the back room, the melting sun drips warm orange puddles into the dozing woman’s lap, and the folds of her sari ripple as she stirs.
It Has Happened Before
Eleanor, thinks Roger, is in love with the postman. Roger lunches regularly at Eleanor’s house and sees how she watches her driveway through the kitchen window, distracted from their conversation, alert to the approach of this striking young man who comes with the mail in the early afternoon, ensuring that when he does come, she is near the front door.
Or, there is somebody else in her life, from whom she anticipates love letters, gifts; someone she’s hiding from Roger. Except that nothing ever comes for her. She receives nothing but junk.
The postman is at least ten years younger than her. If Eleanor is in love with the postman, she is making a fool of herself, thinks Roger, who is older than her.
It has happened before. Roger’s own mother had a fling with the milkman. And Rosemary down the road was recently discovered, by her husband Victor, fucking the gardener on the kitchen floor. Victor walked out after that, late one night or early one morning – Rosemary woke up and found him gone. Victor took almost nothing, but he did take his wallet, so he is probably holed up in a hotel somewhere, punishing her.
Roger used to work a late shift in a factory out of town, getting home in the early hours and sleeping until noon. He is retired now but still sleeps late.
Rising much later today than he meant to, and full of bad dreams, somewhat shaken, he opens his curtains and peers across the road to see if Eleanor is in her kitchen having lunch. If she hasn’t already eaten, she might like to join him.
Eleanor, though, is not in her kitchen. She is standing on the pavement outside her house, crying in front of the postman, holding on to his sleeve, begging him; and he, the postman, touching Eleanor’s arm, nods.
Roger turns away from the window and goes downstairs. He puts his coat on over his pyjamas and swaps his slippers for shoes. Leaving the house, he finds Eleanor already gone, the postman too. At the end of his driveway, Roger stops, looking up and down the street, but no one is there.
He crosses the road to Eleanor’s house and knocks on her door but she doesn’t answer. He looks through her windows but doesn’t see her. Returning to his house, he telephones, letting it ring, but she doesn’t pick up. He watches her house for a while, an hour. He doesn’t think she’s there. He thinks about her crying and the postman touching her.
It occurs to Roger that he knows where the postman lives. He has driven past the postman’s house many times, heading out to the factory.
He misses working. He has plans, involving Eleanor or Europe, but he has so far just been sleeping his mornings away. He plays the lottery every week, hoping for a jackpot. It happens – why shouldn’t it happen to him?
He had planned, before sleeping so late, to make lunch for Eleanor today, for her birthday. He has bought flowers; they are waiting in water.
The postman’s house stands alone at the edge of town. It is just about the last thing you see as you leave. He has seen the postman sitting on his front doorstep wearing a string vest and shorts, or just shorts, drinking beer.
Roger puts on proper trousers, and a jumper under his coat – it is midwinter; it is frosty out there. Getting into his car, he drives to the outskirts.
What does he expect to find? Eleanor, in the postman’s bed? He found the milkman in his mother’s.
He would like to find letters and parcels, undelivered mail piled high, kids’ birthday cards ripped open for the cash. Then the postman would be sacked; he would be sent away.
Or knickers. A collection of knickers from the local women’s washing lines. Someone has been stealing ladies underwear as it hangs drying.
He has no idea what he might find.
Roger drives slowly past the postman’s house and parks down a track before walking back. There is no car in the postman’s driveway. There is a garage whose door is shut. Roger doesn’t know whether the postman has a car or just a bike. He crouches in the bushes at the side of the house. At least he doesn’t need to worry about being seen by neighbours. He waits, watching. He has a view of both the front door and the side door but no one goes in and no one leaves. He notes that the curtains in the upstairs windows are closed.
He takes out his cigarettes. He has tried to give up – Eleanor doesn’t like him smoking – but withdrawal gives him the shakes.
When he gets too cold and stiff, when the light starts to go, when he can no longer bear the smell of the shrubs, the jabbing of sharp branches, when he runs
out of cigarettes, he stands. He is, he has decided, going in.
He is lucky, he thinks: the side door is not locked. Roger lets himself in, closing the door quietly behind him. He walks through the dim kitchen, through the buzzing of electricity, into the hallway. He looks at the shoe rack and the coat pegs, seeing nothing of Eleanor’s, only men’s things.
He steps onto the stairs, the bottom step, which creaks, and Roger wonders whether there is anyone in the upstairs rooms to hear. He wants to turn back now. He doesn’t want to know, he tells himself, but he keeps on moving, climbing up the gloomy stairs to the landing. He has no idea what he is going to find.
There are three doors. A bathroom, he supposes, and a bedroom or two, perhaps a bedroom and a spare room, the room in which the postman keeps the hoarded mail and the stolen knickers.
He reaches for the nearest doorknob and pauses, steeling himself.
When he turns it, opening the door, he finds a bedroom in darkness. He can discern, though, someone naked, facedown on the bed. Crossing to the window, he draws aside the curtain, but all daylight has gone now. He feels for the light switch, turning on spotlights trained on the bed, finding Victor, Rosemary’s Victor, on a waterproof sheet.
Roger gets close to Victor’s face, which is turned towards him, his cheek against the heavy-duty plastic. When Victor tries to speak, Roger sees how dry his lips are. He has the mouth of a man who is dying in the desert. And then Victor’s eyes swivel towards the door, and Roger looks too and sees the postman in the doorway, his uniform off, a beer bottle in his hand.