“Did he describe the man at the station?” asked Freda. But the neighbor was absentminded or frightened or both. When Carmel called on him, primed with questions dictated by Freda, he claimed not to remember anything more. His wife assured Carmel that it was all a dream, saying that her husband hadn’t traveled by train in years.
The dreams that came to Ravi during this time were often of his father. Once they were in a car together. They had overshot their destination, even though his father drove, as he had done everything, without haste. They had to go back, Ravi insisted. The rooms in his parents’ house were involved, as well as a roadside stall where small precious figurines made of green glass were sold, and these were sites it was important to recover. Like all the dreams about his father, it was deeply satisfying. Ravi emerged from it soothed and refreshed.
But sometimes there was the policeman with pale eyes. In these dreams, which were brief and had the force of nightmares, Ravi might be in a garden with the man or seated near him on a bus. Everything was calm and ordinary and frightening. There was a dream in which Ravi noticed that although his companion’s shoes had been polished to a high gloss, he wore no socks. That was particularly horrible.
A letter was delivered to Carmel. She forwarded it to Freda, who passed it on. The typed note inside stated that a man of around thirty, smartly presented, had been asking about Ravi on the university campus. He had let it be known that the police had a fresh lead regarding the murders and were keen to talk to Ravi. The note was unsigned, but the typewriter pointed to Frog-Face.
Freda rang the officer in charge of the investigation. She had heard a rumor, she said, that new information regarding the murder of one of her colleagues had come to light. The detective assured her that she had been misled. He was polite and regretful, and inquired casually after Ravi. She had no idea what had become of him after he had left her flat, said Freda. She was unable to resist adding, “Isn’t looking after him what you’re paid to do?”
She was jubilant. “You see? They’re looking for you in all the wrong places.” But then she decided that it would be more prudent if Ravi didn’t spend all his time in Colombo. So he began to join tours that took him away for a night or two. He saw famous places: an elephant sanctuary, fabulous ruins, the precipice at World’s End. He told everyone who asked that he worked in customer relations in Phoenix, where he had lived for the past nine years. He took photo after photo; a metronomic clicking marked his way. Taking, taking, always taking. He told Malini, “Do you know what I’ve just realized? A camera hides a face, does away with the need for conversation, gives you something to do with your hands. Maybe tourists always have something to fear.” He used up the first roll of film, threw it away, didn’t bother to buy another. The Frenchman’s Minolta Memory Maker clung to Ravi’s neck and nuzzled his breastbone: a hard little child.
On a tea estate, a girl removed her hat and shook out hair like a sheet of copper foil. She asked, “So have you seen many changes?” The upcountry morning had been misty; a cardigan dangled from her waist. Its neat emerald pattern replicated the rows of tea on the flank of the hill. Her voice grew serious. “You must have been so homesick. This has got to be the most beautiful place on earth.”
Early on in his travels, Ravi had grasped that the most effective way to avoid questions was to ask them. Most people offered conversation only as a preamble to talking about themselves. The girl replied, “Oh, everywhere. I’ve been here twelve days. I’ve seen everything.” Her skin was so white it was green.
Sightseeing took place in a time out of time: greased, touching nothing as it passed. Scenes, succeeding each other swiftly, bore Ravi away on their surface like a corpse. His schedule was full, but nothing was required of him. That was the point of a holiday. Coaches carried him past dagobas, sandbagged gun emplacements, stilt fishermen, soldiers alone and in knots. In the old days, Ravi would have avoided the eyes of soldiers. Now, safe behind tinted glass, he looked into their faces. Many seemed nervous and most were young.
There was an endless flow of pedestrians beside the road, women carrying bags or a baby, boys with their hands swinging free. Ravi thought, That’s how poor people get around. As a student, he had thought nothing of walking for an hour or two to see a film or a girl. Now the patience of these slow journeys, their human pace, seemed remarkable. He realized, Tourists see invisible things.
Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved.
He attended a program of Kandyan dance held in the ballroom of a famous hotel. Applauding with his hands raised, he smiled at the woman in the adjoining seat. She drew her shawl closer against the air-conditioning and murmured, “I don’t know why I agreed to this. These tourist shows always seem so contrived, don’t you find?” Her husband, a bear in linen trousers, leaned across. “Astrid and I are into authentic local culture. Any idea where we’d go for that?” After reflection, Ravi gave them the RealLanka URL.
In a white-faced mansion, now a hotel set in landscaped jungle, the bathroom was as dim and marbled as a tomb. Ravi ran a tap into a veined bath. He even opened one of the scented lotions provided and poured a little into his palm. But when night fell, he remained unwashed. A reddish rash went on spreading in the creases behind his knees.
They were on the Kandy road in heavy traffic, the minibus laboring up a series of hairpin bends. Somewhere along this stretch of highway, dozens of students suspected of involvement in the first insurgency had been brought at night, stood at the side of the precipitous road and shot. During the endless evenings imposed by curfews, every aspect of this tale had been polished to a high sheen. Ravi had been very young at the time, but the story had persisted, passed around in conversation like an object in a game that went on for years. It was said that instead of disappearing into the ravine, some of the corpses caught on bushes and rotted. The stench was reported to be foul.
These things—the bodies crumpling backwards in the dark, the reek—entered the child Ravi’s repertoire of horror, where they occupied a vivid niche. His thoughts would glide almost pleasurably towards the scene. He re-enacted it with his sister’s dolls, kidnapping all three, lining them up on the edge of the veranda, hitting them with a stick so that they tumbled into the dirt, repeating the routine until Priya saw what was going on.
When Ravi peered through the window of the bus, pillowy clouds had smothered the sun. The old story still trembled and glowed in his thoughts, now twinkling surface, now mysterious depth. He saw a few stalls selling plantains and pineapples, and a tiered arrangement of cooking pots. A sleek mongrel stood on three legs, clawing his belly. The minibus inched forward, and the far side of the valley, dingily lush, was revealed.
Where exactly had the killings taken place? It was hardly the kind of incident that would attract a memorial plaque. The story floated unanchored; the scene sank back into landscape. It occurred to Ravi that the tale might have been no more than one of those blood-soaked rumors people love to invent. He aimed his camera at the murky panorama anyway. Settling back in his seat, he smiled at the Finn next to him. “View,” he explained. The Finn nodded. But he obviously thought that Ravi had wasted a shot.
With his hands held stiffly at his sides, a small boy ran across a roadside yard. Seeing the minibus, he stopped and waved. Several people waved back. But every bolt in Ravi’s body had come undone.
Malini had become a frequent visitor. If Ravi went up close or gazed too directly, she changed shape. They had long, silent conversations. In a restaurant, she said, “Are you mad? You know you don’t like squid.” Startled, he looked across at her. She was a bald American, eating ice cream with a long-handled spoon.
&nb
sp; In a gem-mining town, Ravi came out of a shop where blue moonstones had trickled through his fingers. Malini was waiting: she launched into a rambling account of a strange incident that had taken place when she was a girl. On a visit to Colombo with her parents, they had gone to the cinema. Just before the feature came on, Malini went to the toilet. A woman followed her in; she was one of the ushers. She told Malini that ten minutes into the film, the doors would be barred, and the audience whisked away to a secret destination. There, everyone would be fed and watered and held captive in pleasant, solitary surroundings until they died. Pets were allowed but not radios. Malini smiled—it was a joke! “I’m not playing the fool,” said the usher. “Don’t forget that the man who sold you your tickets was missing an eye. He was the only one who escaped last time. He hid behind the curtain.” Frightened now, Malini asked why the outrage was necessary. It was scientific, she was told, the experiment would be filmed and studied. In order to advance the store of human knowledge, it was vital to ascertain what happened when people were supplied with every comfort but never allowed to hear another voice. But the usher, a lovely person, was on Malini’s side. She stood by the door to the foyer, holding it open with one arm, and urged the girl to run. Malini felt the sun on her face. She was advancing in slow motion. The usher had climbed onto her back and was clinging there like a monkey.
Ravi found the whole story frankly incredible. It almost turned into one of their rows. But policemen began ordering people off the street and herding them behind sandbags. Outriders approached on motorbikes; a cabinet minister was visiting the town. His car flashed past, flanked and followed by more armed escorts. “I must say it’s heartening,” murmured Malini, “that our leaders know how greatly they’re loved.”
Twice a week, Ravi had an appointment in Colombo. After nightfall, he would take a taxi to an outlying area of the city—he was following instructions issued by the Australian diplomat and passed on by the Frenchman. A concrete stair waited in an empty apartment block at the far end of a cul-de-sac. In a flat on the top floor a tap was always dripping; Ravi heard but never saw it. He always climbed each thrice-grooved step slowly, but was terrified only once. That was the first time, when the door to the flat opened and Ravi saw the devil. The devil was a tall, two-legged figure with Hiran’s Mickey Mouse pack for a head.
The Australian seldom spoke and never took off the mask. It continued to frighten Ravi. Fear worked to his advantage: sensing it, the man grew aroused. Everything happened quite quickly after that. The ceiling fan was set to high, but Ravi’s skin was always clammy. Once or twice, when Freda was driving him along a dark road to a new hotel, she said vaguely that she hoped everything was going all right. At no point was the mask ever mentioned—the horror of it. The face Ravi pictured underneath belonged to a fox; that was because red hair curled on the back of the man’s hands. The little knotted whip was a further revelation. When it began to claw, there were so many reasons why Ravi was glad—he was alive, for a start. He was also waiting for someone in authority to say, “Now you have earned the right to go into that room over there. Your wife and son will be so happy to see you.”
The apartment block had only recently been completed. Shades had yet to be fitted to the lights in the lobby, and the smell of paint loitered in the stairwell. The smell was quite strong but Ravi only noticed it on the way up. It seemed to mount with the stair.
When he had climbed to the top twenty-four times, his passport was returned. It contained a visa for Australia, valid for a stay of three months. Freda bought his ticket the next day.
Laura, 2000
WATCHING FOOTAGE OF THE Sydney Olympics, Laura saw Australians gathered around a giant public screen spontaneously boo their prime minister as his rat-smile menaced a victorious swimmer.
She went to her laptop and Googled london sydney one way.
Ravi, 2000
CARMEL MENDIS HAD WORKED her bunions into high-heeled shoes. Powdered and lipsticked like a wedding guest, she stood with her knees apart and slightly bent. Her shimmering pink dress was creased across the hips. She had grown stouter, which gave the impression that she had sunk into her shoulders. As soon as Ravi saw her there, waiting on the platform, he knew he could never go away.
Priya had married and now lived near the Dabreras’ old place. Her husband was a well-to-do man, a widower of almost sixty with two grown sons. He was also an inch shorter than his wife. When she thought of working at the hotel, and how it had seemed as if that life would go on forever, Priya counted her blessings. She was expecting a child, she was mistress of a house with four bedrooms, her stepsons were placid men with nondescript wives. But sometimes she couldn’t suppress a pang for the stilettos she would never wear again.
Ravi’s gaze kept returning to his sister’s stomach. In the last month of Malini’s pregnancy, he had been in the habit of whispering to her navel, “Hurry up! Amazing things are going on out here.”
A string-hopper feast was waiting at Priya’s house, where the cushions had been set on their points in Ravi’s honor. Over the meal, Carmel lamented the absence of her youngest child. For the past two years, Varunika had been working as a pediatric nurse in a German hospital in Tanzania. Ravi was shown photographs: Varunika in uniform with a small African child attached to each hand, or wearing jeans in a group on a lawn bordered with flowering shrubs. How neat and self-possessed she looked. Ravi remembered her way of holding herself aloof from his titanic quarrels with Priya when they were all children. But there had never been anything controlled about her smile.
He remarked that she looked happy. Carmel tightened her lips and tucked the photos away. Her son seemed to have forgotten—they all seemed to have forgotten—that the following day was Varunika’s birthday. Recalling the protracted labor that had preceded the birth, Carmel thought, This time twenty-seven years ago I was in agony! The baby had turned and slipped and wedged its head sideways across the passage above her groin. But her children didn’t care about any of that. And now the bird-boned infant they had wrenched from her was walking about in Africa, and sending home money and presents. “Africa used to be where poor people live, isn’t it?” wondered Carmel aloud. “My God, what if she goes and marries one?” she cried.
Ravi could tell that Priya was ashamed of her husband, who picked his teeth without covering his mouth. Lal Fonseka never ran out of platitudes, which he produced with the weighty deliberation of one proffering pearls. Ravi learned that the Tigers were in for one helluva shock if they thought the government was going to give in to them; and that things were bound to get worse before they got better. Then Lal scratched his scalp and examined his nails. Not for the first time, Ravi reflected on what he owed this amiable dimwit. Leaving his mother and Priya would have been impossible if not for Lal.
Priya was thinking that it was just like Ravi and Varunika to come and go as they pleased, leaving her responsible for their mother—did Ravi even know that Carmel had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure? Then the reason he was going away came to Priya with force, and she spread her hand over her stomach and went into the kitchen to visit the welter of her emotions on the cook.
Ravi went for a last walk along the beach that evening. On the way home, he encountered the familiar odor of frying fish. He felt…not joyful, for that was a house locked and barred against him, but in possession of himself and at one with his surroundings—a brief, bright plenitude of being. His childhood, a lost country, had offered friendliness, frog song, the grit of pipeclay on his fingers from freshly whitened tennis shoes.
A creeper—was it antigonum?—was offering up big green hearts and tiny pink ones to the barbed-wire fence. Ravi recalled the frustration of living here, how it had seemed as if nothing would ever change. But the possibility of happiness had beckoned and sustained him then. Now all that was the past.
He had reached the place where the banyan tree continued its assault on the asphalt. The vegetable violence of the tree was both more horrible than Ravi
remembered and disturbed him less. Standing in its shade, Malini had once licked ice cream from her wrist. She had been talking about her schoolgirl fascination with detective novels. Over the course of a year, she had read all her father’s Agatha Christies and Ngaio Marshes, secreting herself away with their moldering pages. She was severe in her condemnation of any failure to comply with the conventions, requiring genuine and sufficient clues, subtlety in the matter of red herrings and a plausible solution. Once, unable to bear the suspense, she had turned to the end to learn the name of the murderer. She still felt bad about it, she confessed. At the recollection, a flash opened behind Ravi’s eyes: it was iridescent, persuasive, mad. It insisted that if only Malini had told that story to her abductor, Hiran and she would have been spared. To die was to be transformed into an object—but even as the thought came to Ravi, it was overtaken by the memory of his son’s corpse. Damaged and icy, it had remained a person: agonizing because, laid out in a mortuary, it still seemed to hold wishes, sorrow, fear. Conversely, what Ravi had seen on the TV set in the rooming house was neither person nor thing. It was a no-thing. Why hadn’t Malini told the man in the sunglasses about flicking ahead to find out whodunit? That small transgression was so irreducibly human. Surely even he would have understood that?
Ravi had intended to observe everything carefully on his way home, according these familiar sights the gravity of the last time. But enmeshed in his thoughts, he allowed his feet to carry him forward mechanically and noticed almost nothing that he passed.
Questions of Travel Page 19