by Anuradha Roy
At Buleleng the water was shallow and the ship dropped anchor a long way away from the shore. We had to climb down the ship by a ladder and get into a boat which carried us and our muddle of luggage, including the sarod WS has brought back with him. He walked off to hunt for a car, which was supposed to be waiting for us, to drive us to Gianyar. It costs 26 guilders to rent a car for the day—new and exciting to think in guilders and not rupees! It would take us all day to reach, he said, it was almost forty miles away, over hills & volcanoes, down on the southern side of the island. The household would be waiting for us, he said. The cook must have roasted pig and duck to celebrate.
The most wonderful thing was that WS rented a car from the same woman who supplied the cars for Rabi Babu’s entourage on my last trip! I had so wanted to meet her again, and I did. She is a woman called Queen Fatima—she is such a character, she had made a great impression on me the last time—a billowy creature with a loud voice & teeth absolutely black with chewing tobacco & cigarettes. The story about her is that she had been one of the queens of southern Bali & when the Dutch came to conquer it, her husband the king & all his wives decided to kill themselves. Queen F did not want to die, so she ran away—all the way over hills & mountains, to the north. Here she changed her religion & became a Muslim. Some say it’s nonsense & she was no queen, she was a concubine. Whatever it is, I like her. I remember how she was terribly friendly & bade Rabi Babu “Selamat Jalan” again & again when we were leaving. After a while, a bit tired of her effusions, he had said in his dry way, “The lady is the kind of woman who has a past that is not yet wholly past.” He & his friends found her rather forward, which irked me even then & I was reminded of it when I sat with her a few hours ago—she’s not forward, she’s forceful. She is sure of herself & lives by her own means—runs her own taxi service & her own shop & orders her staff around & bosses over her daughters & spits her tobacco juice as far into the corner as any man—I suppose these things mark her out as forward.
I felt a great sense of freedom when I sat in her shop. Her enormous bulk poured out from every side of her chair & she grilled me via WS’s translations with great inquisitiveness (somehow I didn’t find it offensive)—who was I, what did I think I was doing etc. To her, I had no trouble saying I had left my husband! (There, I have written it too. For the first time.) In the end she said, “When you have to leave your family & home it is not easy & nobody does it without a thought. If you have come so far, you are here to stay.”
She wasn’t sentimental or profound, quite the opposite, sucking on her teeth, prying them with a pin for some bit of stuck meat while she spoke to me, but when I was leaving, she pressed a mother-of-pearl necklace & a little Buddha into my hands & said that if I needed a friend I had one & not to hesitate, etc etc. Then she said something to WS, which was possibly lewd (somehow, it felt like that from the way she smacked her lips & gargled with laughter), she slapped his shoulders & also Beryl’s (B loved her too) & the “Selamat Jalan” came in the booming voice I know from years ago.
And finally—here I am! Settled in a small bamboo & stone hut in W’s Tjampuhan. It is a part of his estate. It’s as WS described it when he came—a series of small bamboo huts with thatch roofs, each one with a verandah & above a fast-moving river that runs down a deep gorge far, far below & in the gorge are trees so tall their tops are level with our houses.
Life is quiet & pleasant here. Every morning you find someone on the steps of the verandah—they sit & wait until WS comes out & talks to them. They smoke something that smells sweetly, of cloves. WS might chat for a while, then go back in to nap or read, come out again when he wants to be with them & they just keep sitting there. They are villagers from nearby & at times from far away & they might stay for hours—very peaceably, smoking, chewing a paan-like thing just as at home & spitting out red juice also just as they do at home, blackened-teeth from it, just as Banno’s teeth were. (How my father-in-law hated her red spittle.) Some of the men come to show WS their paintings or sculpture, some just to share news.
There are two managers who run this place & a small group of foreigners too, all orbiting around WS. They gossip & squabble & there are undercurrents I can sense but not analyze—but everyone is at work or at play & somehow much gets done. A famous American anthropologist is here: Margaret Mead. Rather a stodgy, humorless person who talks in long words & once she starts a sentence you know it will be nothing short of a paragraph. I want to run when I see her approach. It’s like NC launching into a discourse on the economics of colonialism—all of it used to fly straight past my ears or above my head. M. Mead dislikes Beryl & calls her a sharp-tongued witch behind her back. Beryl does not say anything offensive, but I can tell the dislike is mutual. There is an American musician called Colin McPhee & his wife, Jane Belo—she’s very pretty & WS adores her.
Beryl & WS quarrel a lot these days, though it is not ill-natured fighting. He is amused by her but loses patience & she can be annoying, acts the little girl, jumps around with over-enthusiasm. He says it takes a long time for him to teach her to see & understand things. I can be of some help when they are going over their notes about India, but none at all when they discuss the dance here, which I understand only from a dim distance. I go with Beryl to watch the Balinese dances, but it has fallen away from me—my absorption in dance, the way I became charged lightning if I was watching a performance. The dazzling costumes, the formal precision, the beauty of the dancers . . . and yet after a while I find my thoughts are far away, or I am interested in drawing them rather than understanding. So I stay on the fringes while Beryl complains that WS is too lighthearted & too lazy. (What must she think of me?) She says everything takes twice the time because he does too many different things & rushes around Bali once to give a concert, the next few days to help out a film crew, or just to collect old musical instruments.
I am mesmerized by everything I see around me, but I still feel an onlooker. I feel as if I’ll visit for a while and then leave—I cannot think I am here to stay, it cannot be. When will I stop feeling like Cinderella at the ball? Time to go! Time to go! Every now and then I think I must stand up and say my thank-yous and go back home. But where is home? My home is where Myshkin is and you are. Does that mean I will never be at home again? I cannot think of not seeing you again, of course we will. You will come here.
I am somewhat starstruck. There is an old guest book here—so many visitors to this place. I have been going through it & find dozens of names I have only read in magazines before. Charlie Chaplin even! Noël Coward (he is an English playwright) came to visit WS & left him a long poem in the book. I’ll tell you a bit of it:
Oh Walter dear, Oh Walter dear,
Please don’t neglect your painting . . .
Crush down dear Walter if you can
Your passion for the Gamelan
Neglect your love of birds & beasts
Go to far fewer temple feasts
Neglect your overwhelming wish
To gaze for hours at colored fish . . .
And so on. It is so true, even if funny. The one thing WS needs to do—his painting—he is lazy about. He is always short of money but still he turns down work. He tells us he’d much rather sit under a tree & watch the birds & leaves or count the ants on a window ledge than waste life at an easel. This infuriates B at times & at times she finds it amusing, depending on her mood.
I, on the other hand, am already beavering away at painting with a kind of grim determination that ruins my work in the end—it is all stilted, forced, imitative—I feel down in the dumps about it—but I so want to sell & earn enough to bring across Myshkin, quickly. I want it to happen tomorrow! Right away! I would paint houses or buses or signboards if that brought money. I feel a hideous sense of urgency—as if I have only a year or a few months in which to work & earn & bring him & then the magic gate will close. It is all nonsense, of course.
In return for my board & lodging (though it is a paltry return) I help WS with s
ome of the things his cousin Conrad used to do—do you remember the Kosya he talked about? He helped W to transcribe music, to care for his animals & so on. I will be useless with the music. I suppose I will be like an assistant, odd-job girl, animal-minder all in one. How jealous Myshkin would be! I wonder if he will grow up & be a zookeeper as he vows—only he would set all the animals free & tigers would roam the streets of Muntazir.
WS used to have a whole menagerie in Java, but in Bali they believe animals should not be kept captive. So he gave them away to a zoo in Java—except for a few monkeys from whom he refuses to part. He shares his own cottage with the monkeys & the bathroom is full of fruit bats. It is rather unnerving when you don’t expect them. I am used to lizards & cockroaches & spiders, even scorpions—but bats! I don’t go in there anymore. You stay in your world, I tell the bats & monkeys when I pass them, I’ll be in mine & do you no harm.
The trees & plants are so familiar—many I can recognize. Banyan, milkwood, banana, coconut, champa. There is lotus and hibiscus. There are other plants I’ve never seen before. It will take me time to find out about. I’ll draw them. Will you see that Myshkin keeps drawing? He made some nice pictures in his schoolbook this year—he has a gift. I have thought that one of the ways is for me to keep painting little pictures & sending him those in my letters. I’ve been drawing them for Myshkin and sending letters to him, I wonder if he gets them. Or if his father lets him read them. I suppose NC will want him to loathe me. That would be natural.
I wonder every day about what is happening at home—at precise times—my mind runs in a loop—now Myshkin is waking, now NC is coming back from his walk, now I am going into the kitchen to set out the day’s necessities, now I am sitting out in the verandah & Brijen has dashed across to try out a new piece of music, his hair standing on end because he’s been clutching it, now I am thinking about painting but not doing it, now I am scooting out of the gate to visit you—oh! I wish you were round the corner here too so I could run down to you. I have not had any letters from you yet—you have written, haven’t you? I hope they are not getting lost. I hope you are getting these letters from me.
With much love, yours
Gay
November 15th 1937
My dearest Lis
At last a little news from you. It makes me so relieved to know that things are not as bad as they might have been, but Lis, do try to write me longer letters—more news—tell me everything that is happening. You are not a longwinded letter-writer, I am finding out, not as long-winded as I am—but then that takes time, doesn’t it? And loneliness. You have neither of those things. Your days are full & you have a hundred friends & two hundred things to do every day to keep your guesthouse running.
I have started collecting money for my passage & Myshkin’s & I am painting with great determination. WS has promised he will paint a big painting by next year that he will contribute to what he calls the “Bring Home Myshkin Fund.” He keeps saying he will give me money to bring him right now—but there is something stubborn in me, I need to do it on my own. I think I need a little time to settle down before Myshkin comes. There has never been a time in my life when I could set everything aside & forget meal times & sleep times & just work!
In the middle of the late evening, twice, I’ve run out & stood breathing the dark air & the dense forest around & listening to the gamelan’s gong, so deep it hums in my bones. I stand there feeling the forest enter my body, smelling the scents I don’t know yet. Then the sound dies down & slowly comes back chime by chime. It makes me shiver, their music. It makes me understand how far away I am from everything I used to know. I go back in & I go to bed & wake before it is light & lie still, eyes closed. I can see what I am going to paint so clearly before me.
But certainly, no handouts, none—well, other than the board & lodging—that is somehow not as bad as taking money to bring my son across. (Will Nek let him come or will I have to kidnap him?) I am saving & saving, I spend on nothing. Once M is here, W says he will take him all over the island, “fore & aft” to show him around! Why does WS do so much for me? He’s not close to me in the way he is to Jane (Colin’s wife, I told you about her in an earlier letter) or to the other people here. It must be because of some memory of meeting me as a girl with my father—ten years ago—but what an age ago that seems. The world’s gone through two ice ages between then & now—dinosaurs & mammoths were wiped away—a new world came.
I am painting better. I noticed WS’s visitors stop before a picture I finished the other day and contemplate it for a long, long time. It is a scroll-like picture, about 5 ft long, in which all of Balinese village life is happening down the levels from top to bottom, and I’ve done it somewhat in the style of the local painters. It will find a buyer, WS said, sounding certain, & I was as pleased as a child getting a prize!
WS long ago started a foundation to help local artists: to teach them new ways to paint & to sell their paintings. It is called Pitamaha (after Bhishma from Mahabharata—unexpected to find these Indian traces here, I had almost forgotten them). Most artists are so selfish they don’t want others to succeed & here’s WS who spends his own time & energy & thought trying to make others famous. When art galleries in Berlin & Paris want his paintings to be part of Bali-art shows, he does not send any because he wants the local work to get the attention. Maybe one day he will send one of my paintings! It is thrilling to think of earning from my own work, but I’ll have to work hard & sell many pictures. A guilder here is only a little bit less than a rupee, and the money from home—so much of it from your savings, Lis—will serve me for a while, but not for long.
I envy WS’s gift. It is a lesson to watch him at work—when he does start working he doesn’t stop, for days you don’t see him at all. The other day, when he had run out of money, he locked himself up for a week & painted a picture. He says it’s indecent how he can paint something with no effort at all & sell it for a heap of money. And it did—it sold for enough to buy him a car. The trouble is, though, that the minute he makes any money he spends it—either on himself or on his friends & so he is perpetually short.
It will cost a lot to bring Myshkin. Somehow, on that holiday with my father, it had felt a much shorter distance. I remember one afternoon when our ship had halted in Singapore & Dhiren Babu, Rabi Babu’s friend, was lost in playing the esraj all day—from Bhairavi to Ram Kali & back to Bhairavi the esraj went with its plaintive notes & time melted away—in just the way it does when Brijen sings. (Brijen claimed that every night, when he used to sing on his terrace, it was only so that I would listen to his songs from my bed on my roof and fall asleep to them. Such a mischievous flirt. How is he?)
That trip with my father has been coming back to me with everything I see. I miss him continually these days. How he would have loved to visit me here—he would have come here with me, he would have rejoiced in the painting, the music, the travel—he was always ready for adventure, endlessly thought up new things to do. He said the way to live was to fill your mind & body with pleasurable things so that unpleasant things simply had no room in your life. Which is much as WS thinks & I suppose that is why they got along. One of my life’s great regrets will always be that Myshkin never knew my father—his sense of music, his love for painting, his way with children, his faith that I was something unusual & gifted. What keeps me alive through these months of separation is that this change in my life is as much for Myshkin as for me: once he is here, he won’t be stifled by worthiness anymore, new worlds will open up for him, of art, or animals, of living among people who are different, who value something other than politics.
Anyway, no room for self-pity, none! I am here. I came because I chose to, I will not mope & moan, I will work.
I must tell you: Bali is not at all unlike India & not only because of the Hindu gods here. When we came here with Rabi Babu, the Dutch were afraid he would incite the nationalistic Javanese—to follow in the footsteps of the Indian freedom fighters. They sent Dutch pe
ople with him everywhere, watching him. He might have—he saw many similarities between India & Bali. When he came here to Gianyar he said it was as if an earthquake had destroyed a great old city—India he meant—and it had sunk beneath the ground. In its place had risen up the homes & farms & people of later years, but in many places the past had come back to the top & the two, cobbled together, make up the culture of Bali.
On that journey with my father, I was too young to understand such complicated things—or maybe not too young—after all, it made such an impression on me that I have not forgotten it. All those years ago the place felt both familiar & quite unknown. The villages are very like those I saw in Bengal when I went with my father—the land is green & blue as gemstones & with little houses with two-tiered roofs of thatch. Coconut palms, jackfruit, shining paddy fields, the sound of water everywhere. The stands of bamboo are as tall as big houses & sway gently all together from the base when there is a wind—a creaking sound that goes on and on until you feel drowsy.