All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  Or maybe there is something wrong with me—home, husband & children are the world for women, they say. Why weren’t they enough for me? That woman was always up to no good, Dinu’s mother will declare in her theatrical way. Gayatri Flighty Rozario. Was her husband beating her up? Did he make her swab the floors and wash the clothes? Did he drink, did he have a lover? Did she have to tend to his aching legs every night?

  NC did none of these things. Q.E.D.

  There was a bird trapped inside me beating its wings. I had to tear my chest open & let it free. It makes me bleed, it hurts beyond words. There are so many things I cannot say still, even to you.

  I thought I had found the best solution, I would run away with my son. It was not to be. Why was he late the one day I begged him to be on time? I still don’t know. Is he all right? I’ll be back for Myshkin within a year, I’ve sworn. Please, dearest Lis, keep an eye on him, give him treats & cakes, all the things his father thinks of as spoiling a child. Inspect his ears now & then to see they are not grimy: he hates them being cleaned. And he lets nobody else cut his nails but me. Will you cut them for him—to think of those grimy little nails growing longer & longer! He will agree if you dangle a treat afterwards.

  Sometimes people are separated for a while. It can’t be helped, but it’s only for a time & if I didn’t know this to be true I could not remain away from Myshkin another day. I refuse to be miserable, I won’t be sick again or have headaches, this is adventure, not abandonment. I want to eat life, grab everything new & taste it. WS was gazing out of the window yesterday—we were passing a stand of coconut trees, some villages, a child near the train tracks waved at us—& he said it was like a fairy tale—all of life, the world—& he would never work for the future, only live in the here & now. I know exactly what he means. B says WS is gruff & cutting & brutal to people he doesn’t like—tells them uncomfortable truths to drive them away. She told me of a violinist he was particularly sarcastic about—a puny, well-meaning youth—yet WS complained that the man incessantly took photographs & somehow managed to “insinuate” himself into each one. And in just the same way, he said, when they were playing the Kreutzer Sonata together, the man “struck poses” on the violin that obscured “the view of Beethoven.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but WS can be cruelly scathing.

  Still, he appears to like both Beryl & me & so far we are a harmonious group. We talk about dance and painting and travels. We make up stories about the passengers who come & go. We don’t fight & argue for every little thing. It feels new—to talk this way. I feel as if my brain is waking up again. I’ll work at last. Properly. In a new way, really work so that I am painting with concentration & intensity. The springs are rusty, the thoughts & images don’t come, they circle around, but I can’t reach them, they float away. I will make them stand still.

  With much love,

  Gay

  July 14th 1937

  Lis, dearest,

  Madras is unbearable, the sweat drops off our eyelashes & foreheads. This letter paper is damp with sweat, the blurs in the ink you see are made by sweat. If you can imagine the heat having a damp stink, that’s how it is here. If I had not been able to reach you through that trunk call today and found out the news, I’d have given this up & come back home. (What home? Where?) Poor Myshkin, how he must have fretted at being late that day—he is such a fretter! I could not have told him why I needed him to come back on time, I was sure he’d let it out. I am so very relieved that you’ve reassured him & he knows all will be well.

  We sail to Ceylon in a week or ten days after B has seen some Bharatnatyam. There is a new dancer here called Kanta Devi whom she is fascinated by. I think she is half in love. Is that possible? Why not? Kanta Devi is so athletic & tall & striking, she could be a man. Beryl never takes her eyes off her when they are in the same room. It’s quite funny.

  Yesterday we went for a walk on the Marina. It is a beautiful promenade on the beach. A storm was building up & the waves were already high. I was frightened to think of being in the sea in a ship, lurching about on such waves. I was sad & longing for Myshkin, longing for home, longing even for Banno & Dinu & Brijen—in some strange way, I am missing the very place where I felt a prisoner. At times I feel such an outsider with W & B, Lis, I wonder if I made a mistake. I know I’ll be an outsider for good now wherever I am. When that thought came to me yesterday it made me go still for a moment. As if everything had stopped around me & I had too.

  WS spoke to me for a long, gentle time as we walked. He told me how he had to live alone in the Urals after he was imprisoned by the Russians when they were at war with the Germans. The rest of his family had already left their home in Russia & gone back to Germany, he happened to be the one in the wrong place at the wrong time—at just 22. But he had his dog with him & had somehow got himself a piano in the wilds of Russia—typical of WS! After all, he even managed to find a piano in Muntazir, of all places. He made friends with the nomads, he learned their language & went off to the mountains with their herds of goats. He says he felt a slowing down, a settling into the rhythms of the seasons that has never left him since. The future is always elusive he told me, you have to be a chameleon & adapt to your present & live it as if it were a celebration. Can you imagine, he read books & learned enough Arabic & Persian in the wilds of the Urals to translate Arabian Nights? He said he had wanted to learn Hindi & Sanskrit also, but was released too soon, in merely three years. Beryl said she would arrange to send W back to Russia to finish his education when the next war broke out—WS was sure to be in the wrong place again & be imprisoned again.

  WS told us how it had been when he set off for unknown Java. He did not feel at home in Germany after coming back from Russia. He was surrounded by Germans who hung on to Hitler’s every word. Can one exist in that way? Once you have been out of Germany, he said, you notice how terrible it is to live there, what a terrible country it is & what ghastly people inhabit it, so dry & without feeling. How unhappy it must be to feel an alien in your own country, I thought. He was afraid he would become like them, he said—to come by a sense of belonging there, he would have had to surrender his whole being, somehow have to sell himself, he said. He could not do that, so even when it meant leaving his friends, family, he preferred to go away & try to find himself a new home.

  And Lis, I felt he was so right. (Not that I am saying NC was Hitler! Oh no.) There are times I have been afraid I will lose all that is myself. I felt myself turning into the person NC wanted me to be, just for a few moments’ peace, how easy to please people. How easy not to cause unpleasantness. My mother always said, Whatever you do, Gayatri, don’t cause any unpleasantness. As though pleasantness is life’s single goal.

  It makes me laugh to think of your face when you read this. Fat chance, you will say & blow a big puff of your smoke into my face. Oh, I wish we were talking together in your living room, instead of me writing pages & pages in the half-dark inside a mosquito net in this airless heat.

  All of the things WS told me as we walked past the boiling sea, tasting salt with every breath—they made me feel calmer somehow. A vendor came with peanuts & we bought some. We drank cold soda from those thick bottles with marble stoppers. In the end I felt stronger. I felt as if these big changes in life are like waves that take time to build up, starting miles out at sea & we only see them at the end when they come crashing onto the sand. We can’t see where they began, or where they will end, we can’t see what caused them to build up in the first place.

  Please write to me: you know the address! Please make sure I have a stack of letters waiting! Give me all the news, about yourself, Myshkin, Arjun, Brijen: everyone. So that I feel I am with you all. Half of me is there still, I am a torn-up fragment.

  I will write again from the ship, I know it is possible to send letters from ports, I remember my father spending all his time on board ships to Java & Bali writing letters. This trip brings back the one with him so clearly. It seemed short at that time—I wa
s excited & young, didn’t want the journey to end. I had never expected the ship from Madras to Singapore to be so massive. This time I am prepared! Five hundred or more people, French, Vietnamese, Tamilians, Mauritians, all to live on that ship together for so many days. I remember they had four cooks for just the Indian travelers and believe it or not, one of the cooks slaughtered and skinned a goat on the deck a few feet away from the other cooks grinding spices on huge stones and peeling mountains of onion and garlic while the French soldiers stood around asking for snacks.

  My father pointed out that the lack of a common language did not stop man from finding a common humanity, the natural urge is to live harmoniously, he said. And Suniti Babu, who was with us, said the happy camaraderie on the S.S. Amboise filled him with a special kind of self-loathing about the cannibalistic hatreds at home.

  The days had gone by blissfully . . . the ten days from Singapore to Batavia passed as if in a few minutes. And then two days more to Surabaya & another two to Buleleng. How very, very long we traveled & not a moment’s misery. Uncomplicated joy. My father was like that, he made everything wonderful: interesting, meaningful, amusing. If only he had been alive! Everything broke into pieces the day he died.

  But I have promised: I will stop all sad & useless thoughts as soon as I see them crossing the door & coming into my head. Out, I will say to the thought. When we reach Ceylon, I’ll use a passport for the first time since I had one ten years ago. What strings Beryl pulled to use that old dead document to get me a new one double-quick—I shall never know. My passport doesn’t mention a husband at all, it says I am an ayah! Beryl’s used to smuggling people out of countries, she told me airily—she has spirited away so many Jewish dancers from Germany. I am another of her missions of mercy, I suppose.

  With much love, yours ever, Gay.

  July 20th 1937

  My dear Lis,

  I will post this letter & soon we will leave again—for Singapore. What an explorer I feel. B plans to stay on here for several weeks & wishes me to stay with her to watch some kind of Ceylonese dance she is interested in, but I want to go on & reach Bali. I find dance doesn’t interest me so much anymore, I want movement myself, I don’t want to sit and watch someone else move! How to carry on ahead with W without being disloyal to Beryl? She can be commanding & sharp-tongued, sometimes she intimidates me, though not for long. Soon she makes a silly joke & all is well again. Yesterday she went to one of her grand British open-air parties to which I was not invited & Walter didn’t want to go. She came back & reported that the British garden was glorified by the most magnificent banyan tree she had ever seen, a forest of pillars, like a temple. The branches provided such generous shade over the tea table—as well as bird droppings, she said, which fell mostly on her. She reports all of this with such a straight face that it is only a few seconds later that you laugh at the absurdity of it. She kept brushing off imagined bird droppings from her head & shoulders & shaking out her black hair as she talked. Whenever I have my attacks of terror & sadness about leaving home, she says, “My dear Gayatri, the best things in life come by chance. And you can’t tell chance what clothes to wear when it comes.”

  How I wish the old life did not have to be lost for a new one to be found!

  We talked a lot, sitting on the deck of the ship. That is W talked mostly & Beryl did too, while I listened. I am so silent that B says I remind her of her Arthur. Words have to be dragged out of Arthur like wisdom teeth with dental pliers, she says. I was not this way, she knows that, but chooses to forget. My words have dried up this last week with worry & fear & who knows what else.

  I’m going on & on when there are a hundred things I want to ask you, but I know some of those questions are answered in the letters you have written & sent ahead for me. Have you written, dear Lis? I am anxious to know everything although it is a great deal to ask of you when you have much to do—one does not say these things face to face because it sounds so grand & sentimental, but do you know how much I have always admired you for the way you make living alone & fending for yourself appear a constant celebration? This is why people flock to you. This is why your Home Away from Home has such an exuberant atmosphere. B & W were saying so as well: Beryl said you are full of infectious “joie de vivre”—I had to ask her what that meant & she said it meant joy of life. That is so true. She was remarking on how you dress with flamboyance (she called it), paint your fingernails just so & wear everything matching whether you are expecting visitors or not. She said you have a way of laughing without restraint till you’re out of breath & have tears in your eyes. I hope those tears of laughter are the only tears you will ever know.

  With much love, Gay

  30th July, Surabaya.

  My dearest Lis,

  Almost Bali. Surabaya. We have docked at Tanjung Perak. It is a curious thing—it is as if I am back somewhere familiar, as if I was here in my last life. It was not my last life—it was only ten years ago—the moment I stepped onto the jetty a whole rag-tag-bag of memories came tumbling into my head & I was as excited as a girl, skipping around, running here & there, trying to find familiar things. B & WS very tolerant, amused, happy to see me normal again, to walk around with me to take me to places I remembered. People stop WS with big smiles—they seem to know him, he has friends everywhere & they want him to inspect new musical instruments, songbirds in cages, fish in glass bowls. The market has all kinds of shops from Chinese shoemakers to Japanese dentists. Carved wood & printed cloth & animals painted in bright colors. Stone Buddhas & other gods & goddesses. The first thing I searched out was the Armenian photographer’s shop—Kurkdjian, he is called—he was still there, grayer but the same—I bought his postcards again, as I had the time before—the postcards enclosed are from there. I will send some to Myshkin too. WS managed to find a car—but of course—& we drove around from place to place. We had lunch at the Hotel Orange, where I recall the Indians had laid out a big lunch for Rabi Babu & his entourage (which by then included my father & me—on the fringes though we were). After we ate, WS dropped me off at Lokumull’s, a Sindhi merchant who has a shop here—I wanted to go because I remembered that too from the last time—a huge barn of a house with four floors, where the lowest floor is the shop & the rest are rooms for his family, for his workers, for storage. Bombay prints of gods & goddesses on the walls of his puja room & a dog-eared Granth Sahib open next to a copy of the Gita in Dutch! One of his relatives insisted I go up there & pray & so I did, sitting quietly for a few minutes, letting my thoughts roam to Myshkin, to home, to you, thinking how far away I am, how everyone must think me an ogre for what I have done. Strangely, that did not make me feel unhappy in the least. Let people think what they will. I know what I am & I know what I intend to do. I have never been more certain.

  Lokumull sells everything in the world, Japanese silks, mainly, but also every other pretty or ugly thing from all over—what Beryl calls “objets d’art.” You would instantly find a place for one of the Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, or Burmese curios he has. Oh, I wish I could send you something. It is one among a series of shops run by Sindhis & he had looked after Rabi Babu a great deal during the day we spent in Surabaya. He recognized me from that time & asked about my “esteemed father” & shook his bald head sadly when I told him. When he heard of Rozario he was ablaze with excitement, began talking of Karachi & Rai Chand. I knew Rozario’s furniture shops were famous all those years ago, of course, but never imagined I would meet someone in Java of all places, who is familiar with them. This is only because Lokumull is from Karachi & the instant he knew of the connection, he wanted me to meet all his relatives, his wife, his grandchildren—it became a regular Indian gathering with much shouting, laughing, excitement. We were served very sweet, ghee-soaked halwa & sherbet in glasses tinted yellow. In the midst of it all appeared an urbane old gentleman named Badruddin, a Punjabi Muslim with a long beard & a paunch that settled comfily on his thighs. He fitted himself into a chair & held forth on Karachi, Lahore, Que
tta & so on. THOSE DAYS! It was as if my presence gave them an audience for old tales they have nobody new to share with. When we parted there were loud & warm invitations to me to come to them the minute I was tired of Bali—there are very few Indians there, just a few illiterate petty traders, I would have nothing in common with them whatsoever, they assured me. Any time I was longing for home food or new saris, anything at all, I was to remember they were only two nights away by steamer. It made me smile, both their ardour & their conviction that I would pine for home food & home company. I was struck that they didn’t condemn me as a fallen woman—maybe because travel is a normal thing for them. They & their ancestors have always done it & so they do not find it unusual to encounter a woman traveling alone. They think I am here for a holiday & will go back soon. Of course I did not tell them the way I left home.

  Before we sail for the last part of our journey, I will give this letter to be posted. My dear, dear Lis, I am going to be in Bali at last! It is the final stretch. Is it wrong & criminal that I feel nothing but excitement? My pangs of homesickness are gone. Well, gone for the moment, & why (as WS says) look beyond the moment. Everything in life happens for a reason, & good things happen out of bad. Onward!!

  With much love, yours ever,

  Gay

  August 1937, Ubud

  My dearest Lis!

  In the water between Surabaya and Buleleng I thought for a minute—no, for many minutes!—that I would meet my Maker. (He did a bad job with me, didn’t He?) We could see hills on the island of Madura from the steamer and to pass it the steamer had to go through a narrow strait—would it go through safely or would it hit the coast? It seemed far too narrow for us. We stood on the deck watching, half-afraid, half-excited, even WS taut, though with excitement not fear, I suppose. In the event, we went through safely. Ships with billowing sails went past far away, nearer us were boats from which men were throwing out nets to catch fish. So beautiful when I stopped being anxious. In the early evening the moon rose big and orange, like half a setting sun, and the water became deep orange and blue. Slowly the blue darkened to almost black and at night the ship moaned and rocked and the moon hung so low and large in the sky it was close enough to pluck and eat. A hundred colors! My face is soaked in blue and orange. And then at dawn the shadows of hills on the island in the distance and a mysterious fragrance in the air—I cannot describe it, you have to be here to know it.