Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  The rain began to fall again that night.

  ‘Matteo,’ Sophie said, ‘what are we doing here, Matteo?’

  The policeman they had called to see to the dead child had offered them a space to sleep on the veranda of the police station, now locked and dark at the edge of the field. Sophie could not sleep or even lie down. She sat with her arms around her knees looking at the rain that dripped off the roof and splashed onto the edge of the veranda. The fair seemed to have been quenched by the rain, washed away by it, leaving no sign.

  Matteo lay with his limbs spread out, wanting only to sleep. Why would she not lie down quietly and let him sleep? He groaned, ‘What do you want, Sophie?’

  ‘I want to know why we are here.’

  ‘I told you – to find India, to understand India, and the mystery that is at the heart of India.’

  ‘I have found it. At its heart is a dead child. A dead child, Matteo!’

  ‘Don’t shout, Sophie, I can hear,’ he hissed. ‘And why is it the dead child? Why not the temple? Or the people climbing up the hill, singing when they reach their god? Why not their journey, our journey?’

  ‘Because at the end of that journey is a dead child,’ she repeated.

  Matteo covered his ears with his hands. ‘Don’t people die elsewhere?’ he cried. ‘Haven’t children ever died in your own country?’

  ‘Then why,’ she breathed, lowering her knees and coming closer to him, ‘couldn’t we stay in our own country? To die there?’

  ‘I told you, because here it is possible to understand the mystery. Over there it is not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Over there people don’t even know there is a mystery. No one thinks about it. Here they do. There are people – great sages – to guide you. I need such a person.’

  ‘And I?’ she put her hand to her chest. ‘Don’t I need you? Don’t you need me?’

  He gave a groan. Now he had to sit up. He had to put his arm around her. He had to give in. Sighing, he promised to take her to Goa after the rains were over. To help her to go to sleep, he gave her a cigarette, one of a bundle he had been given by a sadhu he had run into at the fair. He lit it for her and while she smoked, sat breathing in its deep, pervasive aroma. Sometimes he held out his hand to take it from her so he could smoke too. Instead of sleeping, or talking, they sat on the veranda, looking out into the dark and the rain, while they smoked.

  Perhaps that was why the last clear memory Sophie retained of that early time in India was of the woman squatting on the ground with her head in her hands, looking away from the dead child on a square of her sari on the ground, and of herself and Matteo smoking on the veranda while it rained in the dark.

  After that all her memories became blurred, she could not make sense of what they had done, what had happened to them, where or when or how. The diary she had tried to write fell apart and disappeared without anyone noticing. The pilgrimage through India became suffused with the rich and aromatic haze of marijuana; it clung to her and became her clothing. It penetrated her and became her being.

  Goa. She saw very little of Matteo there, or very little that she remembered. He vanished, or receded, like Pierre Eduard, and she found herself with Marc, with Gustave and Francis. The sand was warm as a bed, they burrowed into it like puppies, and slept. The sea caught them up, tossed them up on glassy green waves, then flung them back on shore. On their knees, they scrambled out, drenched, as far as the dry sand, and lay stretched out there, laughing. All night the palm tree leaves glistened and shivered, and Marc, who had a guitar, played the sad laments of fado that he had learnt from a Goan musician in a bar. Once someone hurled a bottle at him and cut a gash into his temple. He had sunk to the ground, holding the wound and crying, ‘You have killed music. You have killed poetry. Call the police, call the police.’ Sophie held her sarong to the cut, letting his blood soak into the patterned cloth. Then she walked into the sea and washed it clean.

  Sometimes she cried herself. When her head throbbed and she was so giddy that she could not walk as far as the bushes for privacy, and seemed to be lying in a spreading pool of her own excrement, she cried quite shamefully. Peggy appeared and said, ‘Come along now, there’s a good girl,’ and lifted her head so she could drink coconut water which was said to be a cure for diarrhoea.

  Peggy disappeared, having found a buyer for the van in which she had driven to India through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, so she could buy an airline ticket and fly home for Christmas.

  All over India, in those years, ragged white mendicants in loose pyjamas and bandanas milled around ashrams and sadhus and yogis to the mirth and disbelief of Indians who composed a song for them and sang it everywhere, over loudspeakers, in markets and streets, on trains and buses:

  ‘Take a puff, take a puff,

  Feel yourself disappear.

  Hare Krishna, hare Rama,

  Hare Krishna, hare Rama.’

  In places like Goa they formed whole communities by themselves and scarcely ventured beyond them. By day they milled around the open markets that they set up on the sands under the coconut palms where they picked over each other’s rucksacks, mirror-embroidered Rajasthani blouses, turquoise and coral jewellery from Tibet, incense sticks from Pondicherry, and the less visible contraband of drugs that had to be concealed from the vigilant Goan police. By night they gathered in bars where the feni was cheap, and drank till they needed to sleep and crawled away to their huts along the beach or the houses they rented in the villages to share between them.

  Everyone had a story to tell. Stories swarmed, stories multiplied and proliferated. Sophie was uncertain which story belonged to whom: they droned in her ears like flies or mosquitoes and she listened, smiling, in the haze of smoke in which she lived as in a net.

  Henri had just returned from the great fair on the banks of the river in Allahabad, the Kumbh Mela that all of them aspired to visit. ‘Oh, it was fantastique!’ he cried, quite aware of his enhanced status. ‘Mer-veill-eux! All day roaming in the sands, having darshan of the saints who had come, and hearing the discourses of the great sadhus – not from books, not from lecture notes, but from memory, from inspiration! Everyone dressed in the sacred colours. And the singing, all of us singing together. Eating together, spending our days in that holy atmosphere, fan-tas-tique!’

  Andrea, sitting and plaiting Shula’s hair into tiny braids entwined with coloured threads, told them, ‘I went to a mela, too – not the Kumbh; this was in the South, on some other river, I have forgotten which one. There were hundreds, millions of people there too. Not one latrine in sight, of course. I got up in the dark and went down to the river bank before anyone else got there, being a modest sort of person, as you know. And I was sitting there when it started to get light – the way it does before the sun actually rises – and what do you think?’ she giggled. ‘Right next to me, all around me, everywhere, on every square foot of the river bank, there were people squatting with their water pots, to get things done before daylight! And when the sun came up, there we all were in the river together, washing our bottoms. Oh, yes, fantastique!’ she mocked, flipping the tight little braids about in her hands expertly.

  Henri glowered at her, then continued as if she had not interrupted. ‘It was the sadhus I met at the Kumbh who were truly amazing. One brought with him his pet lioness. It is true! En-tire-ly harmless – he had fed her on rice and milk since she was a cub. He had even taught her to growl the sacred syllable: Aum!’

  Gustave said that was not so impressive as what he had seen in a forest through which he had travelled, and where he had come across a yogi who meditated in the most remote and dangerous region. ‘Tigers prowled around there but he paid them no attention – and he had no weapon, of course, with which to defend himself. One day he was deep in meditation when a tiger came right up to him to take a sniff at this strange human being and see if he was for eating. The yogi didn’t even open his eyes. And the tiger just went away, left him unhurt.’

/>   Shula, her head all covered with stiff, whip-like braids now, sat crosslegged and warned, ‘But you have to be careful, too. I knew this woman who came to India to learn these powers, you know. They told her if she travelled to a cave in the Himalayas and sat there and meditated day and night without sleep for five days, she would gain these psychic powers she wanted. She did that – she travelled to it, she went into the cave and stayed there, alone, for five days and nights. It was full of snakes and scorpions but she stayed there, man! Then she came out and walked down to the village to get a taxi to the city. As they were driving along, she suddenly said, “Stop!” She made the taxi driver stop and got out on the roadside. One second later the taxi exploded – boom! Like that. So she had a sign, see, of the powers she had got in the cave. And she was very happy. When she got to the city, she checked into a hotel for the night. She was flying home next day. But when the manager came to call her the next morning in time to get to the airport, what do you think? She was lying there, dead. At the autopsy, they found the main artery to the heart had been severed, and one portion of the heart was entirely missing.’

  This drove others to recount yet more experiences they had had, or had heard of others having, and of still more remarkable people that they had met in ashrams and temples they had visited with all the zeal, Sophie thought, of shoppers in a market. She herself only half-listened, and when one of them began to give a discourse on the philosphy of Sri Aurobindo or to explain the creed of the Bhagavad Gita as expounded by Yogi Paramahansa, she found herself dipping lower into the haze of marijuana: she preferred the comfort of ignorance.

  When she came to and listened once again, she discovered that the admiration and awe they had expressed was somehow weakened: they were talking now of the spectacular diseases they had caught and suffered from in the course of their pilgrimages. Typhoid vied with hepatitis, cholera with eczema – ‘And Alexandra, you remember Alexandra? Well, will you believe it, but she is suspected of having leprosy, and is in a home for lepers. Comes from living with what she called a Buddhist monk. Buddhist monk!’ Their horror escalated into laughter. Still more improbable affairs and romances were brought up – did anyone know what had become of Francesca who had followed a Khampa trader she had met in the market-place in Kalimpong to Tibet and was said to be held prisoner there as a Western spy? Or of Phyllis who claimed she had been raped by a boatman on the lake in Kashmir?

  But how could anyone take that seriously? Phyllis, they all laughed, who believed in her stories? Not really so improbable, Andrea reminded them, and they remembered how she too had been raped, here in Goa, not so far from where they were sitting.

  ‘Ahh,’ beamed Nanette, a mother of three who had left them and her husband after twenty years of cooking them dinners which she finally realised they liked better than they did her, ‘what would my husband and sons say if they could see me sitting here with all you adventurers?’ She smiled rapturously.

  The mention of homes and families made them catch each other’s eyes, smile. They knew what their families could never guess, shared what their families would never know. They passed the marijuana joints around in the warm spirit of camaraderie.

  Yet in the morning Theo was weeping because he had been robbed of the last of his opium and he had no money to buy more till he reached the post office of his next port of call but had no way of getting there, and Andrea accused Nanette of wearing a bandana that belonged to her and managed to scratch her cheek in the attempt to retrieve it. Marc withdrew to the furthest edge of the compound with his guitar and sat there amongst the canna lilies and papaya trees, playing a melancholy tune, then vanished altogether, leaving behind his belongings which the others fell upon and began to distribute amongst themselves.

  When Sophie saw this, she struggled to her feet to snatch back his things and keep them for him but found someone had stolen her shoes. For some reason, this upset her dreadfully. Cursing her erstwhile friends, she ran into the village to escape from them, seeing them now as fiends and monsters who had caught her in a trap from which she had to break free.

  After wandering in the sun and dust without her shoes for what seemed days, Sophie found herself seated at a small wooden table, on a bench, in a tea stall in the bazaar, a bottle of lemonade in front of her. She was trying to drink the lemonade because her mouth felt as if it was filled with hot sand but she could not drink it because she was choking and each time she raised the bottle, she set it down again, vaguely aware of being watched and laughed at by others in the place. She stared down at the tabletop, and at her hands resting on it. How large they were, with blunt fingers, how misshapen and ugly, with twisted purplish veins standing out on the backs, and swollen knobs for wrists. She lifted them to her hair and her hair felt dry, in thick, dirty strands on her shoulders. She stared down at the front of her freckled chest and could not recognise it as hers: the colour was all wrong, and the texture. She plucked at the faded, discoloured cloth of her sarong with her lips pulled downwards in a frown. Then, pushing aside the lemonade bottle so that it fell over and foamed across the tabletop onto the floor, she saw her feet planted on the earthen floor amongst the cigarette butts and bottle tops – her large, filthy feet, the soles cracked, a nail torn off at the toe, the heels rough as pumice stone and blackened around the edges. Could these be her feet? Or had someone replaced hers with another’s? She had to get rid of them, leave them behind and run. She began to shake with horror, struggled to get up and lurched towards the door, then started to stumble away from her feet. The shopkeeper stood in the doorway and yelled at her to pay for the lemonade. She waved her hands to show she had no money. India was full of such creatures then, such dregs of Western society – what was a decent shopkeeper to do? he lamented and the others commiserated with him.

  Sophie, still attached to the monstrous feet, went stumbling through the dust outside and crying. She was crying for Matteo – where was he? Ought he not to be with her, take care of her? Where was he – Matteo?

  Matteo was seated crosslegged on the bare floor of a room he had rented, the door closed and the shutters lowered. He had done with the travels, the crowds, the pilgrims, the talk, the drink, the smoke, the adventures. He had had them, too, had travelled and searched them out with the others, but neither seen nor experienced what the others did.

  Bathing in a wide river along with other pilgrims on a flight of steps leading down from a temple on the sandbank, he had noticed them standing and pointing at an object swirling in the muddy water, shouting excitedly to each other, ‘Baba-ji! Baba-ji!’ Matteo too climbed out of the water and stood on the steps, shading his eyes with his hand against the glare, trying to see what the others saw. He thought it might be an alligator or giant turtle, but a man flapping his cotton dhoti in the wind to dry it, told him, ‘That is the Baba-ji of the temple. Eighty years old and he can swim from one bank to the other even when the river is in flood. He can dive and stay underwater for one hour, two hours, then suddenly appear sitting on the waves in lotus position, floating like a flower. See, see –’ he threw out his hand and chuckled with pride as if he himself had arranged it all for Matteo to see. Matteo did his best, standing on the steps in his streaming clothes, to see what the others saw. But the sun was strong, the muddy water turbulent, and the dark object rolling over and over in the waves, appearing and disappearing by turns, might have been a log, a dolphin or a turtle. Yet the others standing there on the temple steps by the river cried out, ‘Baba-ji ki jai! Baba-ji ki jai!’

  In another town he visited a yogi who had not slept for twenty-five years. A group of pilgrims returning from the cave where he lived pointed the way to Matteo and he trudged up the dusty track to a scattering of rocks like debris left behind on the red earth. They formed eerie shapes, leaning against each other, worn down by wind and rain. The track wound round them to a cave where the yogi sat, as they had told him, on a deer skin, looking with a bored expression at the flat landscape and the pilgrims struggling across it in lines.
Matteo stared into the face which was heavy-jowled and vacant. Without returning his look, the yogi stretched out his hand to point at the notes and coins scattered on the deer skin by the others who had been to see him. When he did so, Matteo noticed the glint of a gold watch strap on his wrist. Twisting his lips, he turned away: why did the yogi who did not need sleep need a watch to tell him the time?

  In one particularly squalid little town where everyone seemed to him to be diseased or disabled, and more than normally poor, he ran into a sudden pandemonium of excitement and learnt that the police had caught a yogi who walked about naked and refused to clothe himself. They had locked him in the gaol house for the night so he would learn the rules, and the people crowded around the little concrete block in which he was being held. The next morning he was released, and Matteo saw him walk out as he himself stood at a tea stall, drinking a tumbler of tea in the grey morning light, and the yogi was still naked. Now the people who had been laughing and mocking him followed him with devoutness, seeming to salute his defiance and steadfastness. ‘Sky-clad baba, sky-clad baba,’ they called him and walked behind him in a procession through the market-place. All Matteo could see was a gaunt, naked man, his skin scorched black by the sun, and covered with a coating of dust and ash. A poor man ill-fed and undressed, but Matteo failed to see how that made him, amongst all the others who were also ill-fed and barely clad, a saint.

  Returning to the beach, Matteo collected with the others to see a yogi whose face and name appeared on posters printed and displayed all over the town, declaring that he could summon clouds out of the sky and bring rain through his psychic force. Matteo stood on the sand, straining to see a cloud appear over the horizon. When it grew dark and the others cried out in amazement, Matteo alone insisted that it was night that fell, and not rain but spray that dashed against them.

  In disgust, Theo said to him, ‘You’re blind, man, you do not see.’