by Helen Harris
She went to the college library, like a coward, so that if Ravi called she would not be in. But forgotten objects, like notebooks, kept bringing her back to her room just in case he did. She got no work done and by the late afternoon was utterly wretched, undecided, had no idea what she felt about Ravi at all. The surroundings she had fled back to now repelled her. At one point she even thought of rushing out to Ravi, flinging herself on him and asking for forgiveness all the same. Then the thought of that made her shudder. She was standing miserably at her window, undecided whether or not to turn on the lights, when at six o’clock Ravi knocked and opened the door.
‘Oh God.’
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, of course. Oh God.’
‘Stop saying “Oh God”. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, Ravi, I … sit down, let me make you some coffee.’
‘I don’t want any coffee, thank you. I have come … I would like an explanation, please. I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what happened last night.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Neither do you? Well, who the hell is supposed to know, then?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I did what I did. It – it just happened. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m in a most awful state. If you’ve come round to be tough with me, then you’d better go – I can’t take it.’
‘Tough with you? Tough with you? Don’t you think you were maybe just a little tough with me last night?’
‘I didn’t mean to be. I’m sorry, Ravi. It just all sort of got on top of me suddenly and I had to get out.’
‘What did? What got on top of you?’
Simultaneously, they glimpsed the first possibility of humour in the past anguished hours and both giggled unhappily.
‘Oh Ravi, it’s not what you think. I wasn’t just being a prim little English prude, scared stiff at the prospect of sex. I promise you it wasn’t that.’
‘I didn’t think it was.’
‘Didn’t you? Then why did you think I did it?’
‘I’ve no idea; that’s what I’ve come to find out.’
‘I really don’t know why. I just suddenly felt that I didn’t know where I was any more. I can’t explain it. I thought everything was fine up to then, you know I did.’
‘I thought you did.’
‘I did, I did! But last night I suddenly thought: what’s happening? I mean, what are we doing? It seemed as if we didn’t know each other at all yet and there we were – where are we going? Suddenly, everything seemed peculiar.’
‘Suddenly, everything seemed peculiar.’ Ravi wasn’t mimicking her, but the repetition of her words made Sarah writhe.
‘I know, I know it sounds stupid, but I’m trying to explain what I felt. Can’t you imagine what it’s like for me?’
Because Ravi had the role of the wronged party, he could afford to stay calmer. He sat and listened in injured silence while Sarah thrashed about on the hook of his presence.
‘But why couldn’t you tell me that you were scared?’
‘How? It was you that I was scared of. You … and what you mean …’
‘Me? You felt scared of me?’
‘It’s not that I feel any differently about you or anything. You do believe that, don’t you?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Oh Ravi, you know I don’t. It’s not fair – why should I have to defend myself like this? What have I done wrong?’
In the middle of that turmoil it struck Ravi as strangely delightful that even in love, Sarah should use the vocabulary of the playing fields: ‘It’s not fair.’ And he was distracted by it enough to answer, mimicking her in kind: ‘I’m not sure if you’ve been playing straight with me.’
‘I have!’ Sarah burst out. ‘I have. I just don’t see where it will end.’
She had failed to hear the borrowed vocabulary. It was an accusation she responded to with tears of instinctive outrage.
Ravi wanted to comfort her. He felt like reaching out his hand and patting the upset schoolgirl to console her, to reassure her that the end – wherever it came – would not be devastating, would not destroy her.
Sarah met his hand and held on to it with relief. He forgave her; she had not repelled him. The essential was secure, the rest could be dealt with later. So again they sat beside each other on the carpet, silent for fear of damaging their happiness.
It was far too soon after the crash, too close to the rift for them to talk about it. They did not dare touch it in case it split open again. But they stayed there side by side long after it was completely dark, holding on to each other, depending on each other’s shape and breathing to carry on.
When Ravi had left, promising that they would meet straight after his politics tutorial the next day, Sarah threw herself on to her bed and wept at the release from tension. Then she wept with vast and desperate regret because Ravi was gone.
She knew then that he had won, for in the end it had turned out that he mattered more to her than her own ground. For him, she was prepared to leave safety and dignity behind after all. He would doubtless require huge and unknown sacrifices from her in the future and she would joyfully consent to them. Through her wild crying, she enjoyed one last flurry of false regret; she was actually looking forward to it.
Sarah missed Ravi for most of the night, but she must have slept a little between half-past three and five o’clock because, suddenly she was aware of a bird cheeping in the college garden and the dark beginning to thin out on the other side of the curtains. She stroked her face with one hand, pretending that it was Ravi’s hand, and mouthed the words he had spoken when they kissed for the first time: ‘One all.’ His voice had sounded low and lilting in the dark and his inflection made the words impishly his own. When he looked at her, his eyebrows arched in mocking query over the eyes on which she had nearly turned her back because they were not blue.
In the morning she went to meet him after his politics tutorial. He did not hug her in greeting because Sunil and Rajiv Mehrotra were with him and later, in his room, they were both still cautious and a little ill at ease. In the evening though, they went into college dinner with Sunil and Dev and Sunil entertained them with his inspired imitations of college Fellows feasting at High Table on venison and quail. Ravi and Sarah nearly choked with laughter.
They did not solve the problem straight away, of course. For almost a fortnight they waited, creeping cautiously back to where they had been before. Ravi especially was careful, for fear of setting off another panic; if Sarah had run away again, he would not have gone after her. She became impatient with his caution. Although she knew perfectly well that it was she who had provoked it, now she felt that Ravi was punishing her with his reticence. He tended to keep his hands in his pockets when they walked together and left without hesitation once he had kissed her good night. She wanted to show him that he did not need to be so cautious any more and she felt she ought to reward him for his patience. So in fact it was Sarah who initiated the act which put an end to caution.
It happened in the last week of May. She would remember the day and date for ever afterwards because, when it was over, she thought her life had changed and opened her diary to see the date on which that had occurred.
She had spent the afternoon in Ravi’s room, listening to a lady called Lateh Mangeshkar singing on the stereo and drinking very sweet tea with cinnamon in it. Outside, it was the sort of day which alternated violently between heavy squalls and white unripe sunshine. People coming into the room reported that outside it was April, May, June. A high-pitched hilarity connected to the coming summer was in the air.
For part of the afternoon Ravi was not even there – he had had to go off to some seminar – and Sarah had stayed and waited for him with his friends, finally feeling quite accepted by them and enjoying her position there. Only the girl Nanda occasionally still made her feel uncomfortable: prim and formal with Sarah, either resentful that Sarah had trespassed into her flirtatious mono
poly or obscurely disapproving. Sunil, Dev, Rajiv and Dilip all seemed quite reconciled to her and Sunil gave her one of his small foul cigarettes – a bidi – to try while Ravi was out.
When Ravi came back, pleased with his success at the seminar, Sarah slung her arm around him and crowed, ‘Look, I’ve been picking up filthy habits from your friends!’
Everyone laughed and Sarah stuck the bidi sluttishly in her mouth like a comic charlady. Later, she winced at the memory of what she had said and wondered if anyone had taken the remark badly.
She sat next to Ravi on the floor and pressed the full length of her leg against his. He squeezed her hand hard in return.
Because it was a Saturday night, they all decided to go and eat together at the Shah Jehan. Walking there in a noisy party through the quiet streets, Sarah exulted; she was part of their group now, she was part of them. Once upon a time, a group of Indians larking about in the street would have seemed flamboyant, undisciplined and foreign. Now she was one of them, she thought, and it was the streets which were foreign. She walked hand in hand with Ravi and he exulted too, to see her beaming in the dark.
They seemed to fill the little restaurant and the waiters rushed to and fro, bringing them more and more dishes. A favourite ploy, Sarah noticed, was to slip in extra dishes which no one had ordered, but none of the others seemed to mind. They peered at the new mixtures, consulted and invariably laughingly told the waiters to leave them on the table. Without alcohol, a drunken hilarity spread over them. People shouted and delved experimentally into one another’s plates. They called along their adjoining tables and cracked side-splitting jokes. At the climax of the hilarity, someone proposed a toast to Sarah in tea.
She did not say anything to Ravi when he waved good night to the others afterwards and turned to walk back with her to her college. Something in the way he publicly turned his back on them, put his arm around her and hugged her to him told her that that night marked a change. All the way back, her body felt quite hollow in anticipation. But just in case – just in case she was mistaken – she took Ravi’s hand as they reached the front gates and pulled him to her saying, ‘About time too, Mr Kaul!’
It was cold in her room and she flicked the switch of the electric fire before hugging Ravi. Then they took each other – neither knowing who took first – and enclosed each other in a long embrace. Ravi’s right hand reached inside Sarah’s duffel coat, but Sarah’s hands undid Ravi’s collar. Their mouths met in a warm, slippery, prolonged kiss. Ravi’s hands reached under Sarah’s pullover and Sarah’s hands slid around Ravi’s neck. Their chests met, then their stomachs and they adhered to each other length to length. Their feet got in the way. Standing embracing in the middle of the room, each delved further inside the other’s layers of clothes as they rolled their heads, round and round on the soft pivots of their tongues. They bore against each other and their arms held each other fast. Their hands laid claim to the hollow of another back, to curves they could explore and acquire. Their hands felt for more territory, encountered fastenings.
They stood apart to undress. Silently, tidily, they took off their clothes and laid them on the chairs. Sarah was ready first and hopped quickly into the bed. Ravi, in the centre of the room, turned away slightly to hide his nudity, so that Sarah could watch uninhibitedly as his brown body emerged from his white underwear. Then he came over to the bed and slipped into it at the very edge. Sarah was waiting, rigid with apprehension on the cold sheets. Ravi threw back the sheets suddenly and uncovered their naked bodies. He looked down at Sarah’s, and he said gloatingly, ‘Miss Livingstone, I presume?’
They clutched each other. They fell laughing onto each other. And then each began to look seriously at the new body they had acquired. Ravi was opaque and smooth. Sarah felt herself momentarily repugnantly white and bony on the much-laundered sheets. But Ravi explored her. He put one finger to her acutely pink nipples and slid his palm down over her pale stomach. And Sarah, gradually thawing out of her nervous stiffness, reached over to discover him too. Their faces were deadly serious and this went on for a long time.
It was no one’s decision when Ravi moved inside her. He did not offer, she did not invite him. His hand was already long between her legs and all of her appreciating him. He entered her, and in the moment while he felt and found, during the gap between his fingers and himself, they looked into each other’s eyes and grinned.
Then it was nothing like being with David Whitehead, Sarah’s only other lover. It was nothing like being a receptacle, a sack jolted up and down in a series of sore, mechanical jerks for a few perfunctory moments. Now she was an orange, whose segments were separated by feeding fingers. Now she was waiting earth in which a man was planting a tree. Inside her, the trunk of the great tree swelled and its branches stretched out; her body, the branches, her hands, fingers, twigs, leaves in her heart. Now she and the tree were the same substance, the same movement as together they grew and spread. There were all the seasons, fast after one another and at once, buds and thunderstorms, and there were roots tickling her and nothing, everything. She and the tree, she and the tree, she and the tree burst into flames.
In the dark, two people, stranded, thrown up by a typhoon, lay one of top of the other and did not say a word. Hot, sticky and wet, they lay breathless and their lives from beforehand came back to them.
‘Ravi?’
‘Sarah.’
‘Oh, Ravi.’
‘How do you do?’
Later, they talked. Later, they said they loved each other, that they would not let outside things intervene any more and that, from now on, the two of them would be stronger than everything else. They said that they would surely not last out the summer vacation apart. And Sarah foresaw, jokingly, her parents’ reaction when Ravi came to London to visit her. They laughed at themselves, because it seemed typical of the way they were determinedly at odds with everything that when at last they had managed to achieve this triumph, there were only three more weeks of the term left.
*
Ravi went back to his college in the morning. Walking through the faint mist, he felt thrilled and smug and secretive and tired. There was an uncanny absence of friends in his room. He had a shower at the end of the corridor, humming under the hot stream and then, shutting the door of his room on everyone, sat down to work with gusto. In the late afternoon Dev wandered in and, from his evasive manner, it was obvious that he had guessed. He sat down on Ravi’s bed and, for a moment, pretended to look at the books scattered over it. Then he tilted his head at Ravi and at first Ravi raised his chin defiantly but then, succumbing to camaraderie, pretended to put on a show of modesty and sheepishly grinned.
Dev stroked his small moustache with the tip of his index finger. It was the slightly self-conscious gesture of someone too plump who has just eaten a most enjoyable sweet.
*
Clarissa Rich looked down from the library window at the dappled lawn. That silly blonde Sarah Somebody, whom she had lived next to in the first year, came sauntering across it arm-in-arm with her Indian boy-friend. Clarissa’s attention left her Stoics text – which truth to tell was not tremendously stimulating although she was glad, she was glad she had changed to Philosophy – and she stared out intently at the pair of them. They zigzagged across the lawn, going nowhere, clearly quite absorbed in their own contentment. Sarah looked up at the Indian boy, laughing, and he ruffled her hair. Clarissa watched them greedily until they disappeared, frolicking, around the corner of the college boat-house. She could tell by the way they walked what had recently happened between them. She recognised the moment when two people walking together quite publicly became one. She drew herself up stiffly and went back to her reading. But, suddenly, she felt herself engulfed in a wave of despair; oh God, would anything like that ever, ever happen to her?
*
In the exhilaration of their progress, they expected sunshine but for a while it stayed cold. Improbably, auditions began for open-air productions in the colle
ge gardens at the end of term. All the gauzy clothes bought for imaginary summer days hung pathetically inside the musty antique wardrobes. But then on about the seventh of June, something happened; the sky turned blue and from a thin haze, the sun shone out on the city. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the lawn under Sarah’s bedroom window was dotted with girls on rugs, still wearing cardigans but doggedly making the most of the sunshine. Half the windows in that wing had been opened wide and cheerily assorted music could be heard.
Sarah cycled over to Ravi’s college, tilting up her face at the sunlight. Exclaiming, ‘Oh isn’t this gorgeous?’ she raced into Ravi’s room and flung open the window. She stuck her head out into the sunshine again and savoured the light. ‘Mmm!’
‘Isn’t what gorgeous?’ Ravi asked from his desk, watching Sarah’s antics with affectionate amusement.
‘Wake up!’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘It’s summer! Look, come and have a look.’
‘Summer?’ Ravi said, joining her at the window. ‘Where?’
Sarah seized him exuberantly. ‘Don’t be so snobbish, Ravi. It’s wonderful!’
Ravi shook his head disbelievingly. ‘We’ll have to get you to India one day, so that you can see what a proper summer is like,’ he said. He was quite unprepared for the way his comment made Sarah, over-excited as she was, fling her arms around him and cover him with kisses.