Travelers

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Lee Travels

  Asha had suffered all night. Although of course everyone has to die, and they are doing it every day and one gets used to it, the idea of a young girl—a young foreign girl—with all of life still before her being destroyed in this way pierced her deeply. She couldn’t sleep and even her pills didn’t work; in the end she had to send Bulbul to Gopi’s room and at last, toward the early hours of the morning, she managed to fall asleep in his arms.

  After all that, naturally the next day she was too exhausted to be able to get up. She remained in bed and Bulbul propped her up with pillows. The gold curtains remained drawn for a long time, keeping the room in dusk, but when she felt stronger, she asked Bulbul to open them. She had a wide sweeping view from her bedroom, which was the principal room in the house and had been the one occupied by her father and his cabaret artist friend. She could look out over the dead garden and, beyond that, across the whole wide landscape lying broiling in the sun, up to the wooded hills from where the tigers sometimes roared. Asha lay for a long time staring out although nothing moved out there except the birds of prey circling around and around in the dun-colored sky.

  After some hours she became aware of a procession of vehicles moving from the direction of the town toward The Retreat. When they came nearer, she identified them as a jeep followed by several lorries. They came nearer and nearer and finally stopped at some distance away from the garden. Bob was the first person to jump off the jeep. He moved around in his quick decisive way, accompanied by a man in a solar hat. The lorries began to be unloaded, raising clouds of dust. Most of them carried materials and machinery, but one was filled with laborers and their families, who jumped down and scattered over the ground and soon made everything look quite lively. Asha watched all this calmly for a while, continuing to think her thoughts, and then she called Bulbul to draw the curtains shut again.

  Lee, coming in to visit her, felt quite at home. It seemed to her that she had spent a lot of time with Asha in Asha’s bedroom. The bedrooms were in different places, but the general sense of luxurious disorder was always the same. This particular room was more luxurious than the others, for Asha’s father had spent a lot of money on it. One wall was taken up entirely by a tapestry which gleamed with golden threads. Asha, lying in the center of the bed, also seemed somehow to be golden-tinted, but no doubt that was an illusion brought about by the curtains and walls and their reflection from within several mirrors.

  “I’m ill,” Asha said. “I couldn’t sleep all night. I keep thinking about that poor sweet girl. And her poor parents. What will they say when they get the news? Oh, poor people.”

  “Miss Charlotte sent a telegram.”

  “I loved the way Miss Charlotte said the Christian prayers. It made me feel—yes, really, all religions are the same, don’t you think so, Lee? Darling, please don’t open the curtains, the glare is hurting my eyes and I have such a headache, it’s from not sleeping.”

  “There’s Bob out there.”

  He was kneeling on the ground looking at something being measured. The man in the solar hat was kneeling beside him, explaining to him from a blueprint. The laborers and their families were beginning to make themselves at home. The children ran around playing games, and some of the women had started cooking fires and others were feeding their babies.

  “Shut it, darling. Please.”

  Lee did so and turned back into the room. She was restless and moved about, picking things up and putting them down again rather irritably. She ignored Asha’s request to come and sit beside her on the bed. Asha looked at her with concern. “Are you all right? You look pale. Naturally, it’s the strain. How terrible, terrible it has been for you. Oh, dreadful. For all of us.” Asha shut her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “Promise me you will take rest and care. . . . Have you written to your parents? How happy they will be. Of course I shall miss you, we shall all miss you, but really I’m glad.”

  Lee said, “Why?”

  “It’s for the best, Lee darling.”

  Lee looked at the tapestry on the wall. It showed pink and white girls dancing hand in hand on a lawn illumined by sunlight. A couple was dallying. There were also a dog and a huntsman and, in the distance, a deer.

  Lee said, “Evie’s on the train now. I think she’s got as far as Kotah.”

  “It must be very, very hot there at this time of the day.”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “I think it’s wonderful the way you girls go here and there.” Asha leaned back against her pillows. It drained her to think of the hardships voluntarily endured by these girls. She asked, “Isn’t she returning home too?”

  “No, why should she. She’s got what she came for. So why should she.”

  “What about her parents and her home?”

  “As if she cared.”

  “And you?”

  Lee did not think this worth answering. She was standing before Asha’s dressing table. It was cluttered with Asha’s usual lotions and scents and some pieces of jewelry taken off and carelessly thrown there. Her husband’s photo in its frame had fallen down and was obscured by a box of paper tissues sitting on top of it.

  “I haven’t seen this before.” Lee picked up another framed photo. This one showed Gopi; it was just a snapshot.

  “Give it here.”

  Asha pressed Gopi’s photograph against her lips, and then against her closed lids and her bosom. She held it there. Lee watched her and felt moved by the expression on her face. Asha’s passion was deep and genuine. It made something stir within Lee; she said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “Then stay.”

  “Margaret would have stayed. My God, she is staying.”

  “The poor, poor girl. Ah.”

  Lee waved that aside. In her present mood, it seemed to her that Margaret was not to be pitied. Margaret had accomplished something; she had gone all the way. Whereas for Lee now there was only the journey back to New Delhi, where, at the American Express, she would find her ticket home waiting for her. The idea revolted her. She felt entirely reluctant to leave. How could she, now? She hadn’t finished yet. She said, in a tone of resentment, “It’s all right for Raymond and Miss Charlotte. They want to go.”

  “You stay here with us. We’ll have a nice time. We’ll enjoy ourselves.” However, even as she spoke, Asha was not quite sincere about the invitation she was extending. The prospect of having Lee in the house with herself and Gopi disturbed her. She knew how the days could be very long, very hot, very idle—and Lee and Gopi were both so young, so healthy, they would not be able to help themselves. She pressed Gopi’s picture closer to her heart, which was now beating in premonition and fear.

  But Lee said, “I don’t think I want to stay just in one place. I want to travel, you know, go around the way I used to. . . .” Her old line about losing herself in order to find herself rose to her lips, but she felt it to be no longer appropriate.

  Asha said, “What about your Swamiji?”

  “What about him?”

  “Don’t you want to go back to him?”

  “No, why should I.”

  But as if Lee could ever be anything but perfectly truthful! That was everything for her—to be truthful, with others, of course, but first of all with herself. She wanted her whole life to be based only on truth found and tested by herself. So now she stood there frowning, searching into herself and determined to pluck up any weeds of falsehood that might have had the temerity to grow there.

  “Of course I want to go back,” she said. “That’s the trouble. I try not to, but I think about it all the time. About going back to him. Being with him again.” Her voice shook but she controlled it at once and said, “No I can’t. I mustn’t.”

  Asha looked with attention into Lee’s face. She thought at last something was changing there. She had always liked Lee’s face, but at the same time she felt it lacked something. Now this lack was being made up with expressions that had not been there before.

&nbs
p; Asha said, “When I was with Banubai I thought a lot about higher things, just like you do. Of course there are higher things, we all know that; if we didn’t know, where would we be better than animals? Yes, there is something higher and we all want to reach it. Only who are we to say which is the right path?”

  Lee pushed the curtain aside and looked out of the window again. She pretended not to be listening but she was. At the same time she was following her own thoughts. She looked past Bob and the laborers and the unloading machinery, toward the town in the distance. The only part of it visible from here was the old fort on its hill, but Lee disregarded it and thought only of the railway station that lay beyond it. She loved this thought: also that of buses, trains, travelers; endless hours of monotonous landscape; heat and dust; unexpected adventures in strange towns. If she went, it would be just like before.

  No! She knew at once: it wouldn’t be like before. True, the journey would be the same and the view out of the window; but now if some place they passed looked attractive—or she heard of some interesting monument, or some fellow passenger invited her to stay—she wouldn’t be able to get off the way she used to and go wherever she was taken. She would have to say, I can’t. Because now she would be traveling in one definite direction and get off at one definite station; and then wait for the bus; and travel in that bus down a long and dusty road; and jump off at what looked like the middle of nowhere and, lugging her bedroll behind her, walk across the fields till she came to a board and some barbed wire. There he would be, sitting under the only tree. “Oh-oh!” he would say. “Just see who has come.”