by Anuradha Roy
All around are things I want to paint! There are not enough days in my life to paint all the pictures I have in my head. The painters here make exquisitely detailed scenes of village life and although I did that one long painting of the same kind, I could never paint another like that, my mind doesn’t work that way. They have an elegance & artistry that is from another time. I remember Rabi Babu pointed out how the ordinary village people here are artistic about their homes, furniture, doorways. He thought that because they have enough food they can paint & make beautiful things out of nothing. I don’t agree. Is prosperity the only barrier against ugliness & squalor? The rich parts of our country are not beautiful as the most ordinary villages are here. Every courtyard is serene & enchanting, pink & blue lotus grow in still pools. Wherever you turn your gaze there is a stone frog or stone dog below a champa tree showering it with flowers. There is no sloppiness of the wretched, shabby kind we have at home. In every village there is dance & theater. Music fills the nights. Elaborate, gorgeous costumes & jewelry at the dances. Flowers in their hair, ornate headdresses. The men wear flowers in their turbans or tuck one at their ears. Many of the women are exquisitely beautiful & have a direct, unafraid gaze that I love.
Rabi Babu’s friend Suniti Babu said the men & women were as if they came off the walls of Ajanta & Ellora—& he was right. (Suniti Babu was fascinated by Balinese women. He noticed their clothes, their hair, their gait, he even noticed how they had their mouths a bit open at all times so that they have an expression of permanent wistfulness . . . It makes me smile now—how closely he must have been examining them, that old Bengali scholar! Indian men! If lechery is not their primary characteristic I don’t know what is—though not for a moment was Suniti Babu lecherous, he was attentive.)
Suniti Babu pointed out then what I know to be true now—that Java & Bali are magical, exotic, fairy lands to the Europeans who come here. But for us from India, it is not so. It is only another version of the East. Suniti Babu would keep reminding us that patterns of dress, rituals, homes, temples were similar in a huge swath right from the northwest frontier of India to Bengal to the Malabar & Indochine, Java & Bali. He used to point to examples from archaeological finds, from statues in Indian temples. He knew a great deal—so many languages & history—that he could see & hear rhythms across civilizations that I simply could not, certainly not then, at sixteen. At that time I listened, but did not understand too much. Now I find myself thinking back to the things he said, more & more.
All along the roads here are statues & temples. I have not seen a single beggar. The children don’t seem to cry & the mothers don’t scream at them as we in India do. Not many women in villages of the remote south of Bali cover their chests. In the north because of the Dutch & Christianity, they have become prudish. It was astonishing for me at first to see how normal it was to be bare-breasted here—after a while it seems the most natural thing. It used to be the same in the Malabar & in Bengal long ago as well—women wore no blouses. Well, I am relieved to have been born late!
Before you ask: no, I haven’t taken to their style of (un)dress!!! I still wear my normal sari & blouse & petticoat, haven’t had the nerve to wear one of your beautiful dresses yet—though I do wonder where to get new saris when I need them. I could just cut up meters of cloth. Or I could take up Lokumull’s offer & ask him. I exchange letters with his family occasionally & saw them once more when we went to Surabaya to fetch Beryl. As usual they started frying and cooking the instant they saw me and insisted I eat with them. Lokumull has a grumpy old relative—nobody knows how old—she sits there in the shop all day scolding the boys who work there, but she has a sweet way of nodding off to sleep in the middle of conversation, even her own, & the room goes still while everyone suppresses their laughter. She wakes after a few minutes & notices the mirth & is scornful. “Laugh, laugh while you can,” she says. “The dried fruit lasts longest, the green ones fall from the tree & rot.”
I don’t miss Indians, nor do I seek them out, but I so miss you, Lis. And I ache for my darling Myshkin. I even miss my sharp-tongued, fault-finding old Father-in-Law . . . at this rate I might start missing Arjun and Brijen. Or Bechari Banno. All right, all right, I know you are fond of old Batty Rozario. Sometimes I think that if you were closer in age—oh, so many possible lives! I should never have been married at all. I was never meant to be owned, I needed to be free, a vagabond or a gypsy. I’d have done less damage. But they forced me & I was so young. What else would I have done? My mother owned me, she transferred me to NC & then he owned me. Life would have been so different if my father had lived longer.
It is pointless to think such thoughts. Out, sad thought!
And on that note, with much love, yours as ever,
Gay
Feb. 1938
My dearest Lis,
I have had my first letters from my son! Two came together. He doesn’t seem to have got a few of my letters. Maddening. But I feel grateful NC is kind about this—he lets him have my letters and answer them. How adorably he writes, with rubbed-out black bits where I can see the spelling mistakes he is trying to hide from me & all his news of Rikki & Dinu & his Dada. He asks me what time next week he should go to the station so that he can come to me: oh, that broke my heart! Will you explain to him please, so that he understands—& you mustn’t crush his hopes, just make him understand that it will take a little time. You’ll need to be a trapeze artist to do that.
I am working very, very hard. I am immersed in work, it thrills me & consumes everything I have—I don’t want to spend a minute doing anything else but work. It is as if I have turned a corner of a winding road that seemed to have no end & I have found my way of painting, what appears true & interesting & real. When I am not working, I think of it—continually & intensely—my dreams are drenched in color—there are nights when I close my eyes & can see nothing but topaz, gold, jade, purple, the deepest red, ocher & midnight blue & they are dazzling & brilliant & ever present. The colors of the forest and water here particularly: a million blues, & thousands of greens & the fading away of leaf into vine into weed into a blue-green distance made of hill & rice field.
We travel here & there & I carry my watercolors & a camera WS has lent me, one of his old ones, so that I can use the photographs to paint from later: this was something he advised me to do, he had done it in his early days in Java, he said. Even though it cannot capture the colors it reminds one of the scene, the positions of trees and so on. He told me not to scream and scare the animals when I hear the news . . . that I am to be included in an exhibition in Batavia next month. Can you believe that? I will have to work even harder now!
Last month we went on horseback to Kintamani in a group—it is a remote place which has a volcano surrounded by bare fields of lava, black & strange, sprouting dry straw-like grass & nothing else. The top of the volcano is flat & its sides are bare. The mist that permanently obscures the top gives it a brooding mystery quite unlike other mountains. It is a bleak beauty. Through this we wandered & it was chilly at times & exhilarating. When we were tired we would settle in the shade somewhere & eat and drink. WS has created a wickerwork basket which can be attached to a saddle so that he can carry beer & whisky & gin & port with him on these travels. He takes a childlike glee in offering a choice to his friends posted in remote villages doing survey work. You should see how their mouths fall open—you would have loved it, wouldn’t you? And you’d have remembered to pack lemons to slice & top the glasses with.
We had some dried roast duck, fish, boiled eggs—and a black dog with a curly tail appeared. We threw it scraps of food & it came closer, though it was wary. It was so scrawny, as if it had hardly eaten for days. As we left, it would not take its eyes off us & that was miserable, to see that wire-thin dog lost among the black rock & weeds—the edge of the lonely world. When we’d come down & reached the villages, we saw there was the dog still, following us. To cut a long story short, it has joined the household & WS has named her Indah, which means Beauty,
though she is really anything but that in her present scabby, flea-bitten, miserable state. She has blisters—from not eating enough, I am told. WS aims to set all that right & the first thing that happened when Indah came home was that she was given a bath (she smelled foul) which she hated & ran from, despite the heat! And then she gobbled down fish & a great heap of rice, hardly even stopping to breathe until it was finished. She will learn to live with the monkeys and bats, WS says, with great confidence. Let us see.
W has been tramping all over Bali collecting artifacts for a museum he is curator of. I don’t go on these trips, I stay back & work—how odd it is to call painting “work”! NC always insisted it was a “nice hobby” for women, painting pictures. Everything was permitted as long as it remained trivial. He should see the way I paint now! I’m covered in paint & mud (I am making things with stone & clay too), my face is smeared, my hair is glued together.
Ni Wayan Arini, a woman who does some housework for me, laughs her head off each time she sees me. She’s one of the few Balinese I can talk to, even though her English is broken, she has picked it up playing around as a child with visitors to WS’s home, I think. She pauses with an open mouth & mutters in her own language when she is hunting for a word—then our eyes meet & she shakes her head & grins & gives up. It pleases me no end that the people you pay to help with menial jobs are not servile here in the way our servants are—& our servants are like that because people treat them so badly. It is ingrained in us to be savage and cruel to poor people, as if they were some other life form—neither human nor animal. I have seen Arjun slap across his face the boy who cleans his car when he finds a fingerprint on the windscreen.
Anyway—I was telling you about W’s collecting trips—someone else drives while W keeps his eyes open for things to collect. The car is a bit like Arjun’s Dodge—but is a different one. It is called an Overland Whippet. It’s anything but a whippet, more a lumbering, trundling thing that is piled high with the oddest things from carved doors and musical instruments to kitchen goods when it comes back. Beryl said the other day that it was just an excuse for boys’ days out & beachcombing, this museum. They have a few others helping with descriptions of the things in Dutch & English & then off the things go to the museum—it already has many visitors.
What surprised me here was to see how completely immersed WS is in music—he hears music in everything—there are always scores coming for him in the post. He often talks about the way Brijen used to take him to listen to singers nobody knew about, old maestros tucked away in moldy old tenements—but W could not make much sense of Indian classical music he says. He jokes that like Hinduism, you probably have to be born to it.
When WS is here rather than at his other home in Iseh, I know at once because of the music that spreads over our hillside. I am sure the birds pause to listen, it is so lovely. Colin & W are at the piano together, sometimes W alone, playing something sublime I cannot remember or hum but long to listen to again. W has retuned a piano so that it sounds like the gamelan—the gamelan is not one instrument, it is the orchestra here. I can’t go into long descriptions, but it is made of xylophones & drums & gongs & the sound is a very strange, rhythmic, repetitive one which is somehow mesmerizing. Have I already told you about it? Forgive me if I have!
Colin’s wife Jane Belo is an anthropologist. I get the sense when I am with them—I can’t put my finger on it—but I feel she & Colin don’t care for each other, they don’t even like each other, husband & wife. (I wonder if people felt this way when they saw me with NC. Oh dear. Was I awful? Tell me, was I?) There is much tension in the air. WS says this is because Colin is neurotic & spoilt. But he does not mind Colin’s tantrums because he is dedicated about music. They play together at a Steinway piano Colin has bought, WS loves it.
Colin is also quite a cook & tries out all sorts of strange foods: hornbills, flying fox, porcupine, there is nothing he does not turn into a roast or stew. I don’t always feel happy with this & find a way not to eat: I think some animals need to be left on their trees or burrows, wherever it is they live. I don’t know what Jane thinks of all this, she seems distant & is silent or talks too much & the air fairly crackles with unsaid things. It can be rather uncomfortable. I creep away & make myself scarce. WS sits aside with her at such times for ages & ages & they have long conversations—they are very close & can talk of anything under the sun. When they are in different places they even write letters to each other.
W has a gift of being close & friendly with married women—they are less likely to pounce on him with a view to seduction, I suppose! Most people here know that WS is not interested in women—not in that way—as you had guessed from the start. He has male lovers openly, nobody thinks it wrong. Do you remember how he was with that young sarod teacher of his? You found it odd, you said so then. Remember what you saw once when he had left his door ajar by mistake? Your mouth went into an O of shock, your face was as red as an apple! It was so funny!
I cannot help feeling, as I write these things, that I shouldn’t. You say you find it interesting, but when one doesn’t know the people or the place is it possible to be interested? I am no storyteller. But I tell you all of this, Lis, so that I don’t lose you. I want you to share my life & me to share yours as closely as we used to in Muntazir—or more. Sometimes it is possible to be closer in letters than in life, don’t you think? There are things we can say in letters that we never would find the word for, or the courage, when we are face to face.
Give me more news in your next, dear L. Are there any interesting guests? Is Boy behaving? Did you go for any of the parties at Christmas? I hope Myshkin is not being bullied in school—you will tell me, won’t you, even if the news is not good?
With much love,
Yours ever, Gay
10th April 1938
Dearest Lis,
I am astonished to hear that NC has left home & with nothing more than a cloth bundle. What on earth was he thinking? And if you hadn’t told me about it, I wouldn’t have known—what a silly baby Myshkin is. He did not tell me his father had gone off in search of the Truth! Has he found it, I wonder? Was it hiding under a rock or behind a tree? Well, who am I to be sarcastic? I am the wicked, evil witch who left my husband & child & home. In the old days they would have stoned me to death or buried me alive.
And that Brijen is gone too—nobody knows where he is? How can that be? How bad was his fight with Arjun, and what do you mean it was about a woman he was in love with? He is in love with a hundred women! What was special about this one that it made him get into a fight with his brother? It is a great torment to be so far away and not know anything about the people one saw every day. Will you send me more news when you have it? I am worried sick.
Things are somewhat different here. I find it rather frightening, but the others seem to think nothing much will come of it. The police have started some sort of surveillance on people—including WS—to prove that they are up to bad things. Apparently there is a lot of pressure from Christian missionaries to arrest men who have had relations with other men & the new Governor General is very sternly Christian, married to a woman who is from a terribly over-religious American family. WS finds this amusing (as he does most things). He says Bali has always been left alone by the Christians & men having relations with men is not thought of as illegal or bad here—no amount of Christian outrage will lead to anything. (This reminds me again—how absurd it was to know from your last letter that everyone thinks I ran away with WS for love. I suppose they think I am like that girl in Calcutta who fell in love with the visiting Romanian. Love! Nobody imagines a woman might do anything other than for the love of a man, it seems to me. Well, they are wrong.)
WS says it is as if Nazi Germany is entering Bali by way of the Dutch—the same intolerance, the same self-righteousness, the same strictures. This is why he left Germany, came halfway round the world to find the freedom to live—but it’s an infection that will make the whole world ill, this joyless ce
nsoriousness, this horror of anything that is not in the rule book. The nose-puffing way the powerful have of deeming what is good & what is bad—who are the Dutch to decide? The Balinese think it is quite normal for men to love men, or men to love women or women to love women—well, who knows what, as long as somebody is loved & nobody is harmed! It is another of those things that makes me realize Rabi Babu was right—he used to say that Bali felt as India must have been in ancient times. There must have been a time when love did not have moral guardians saying you may do this but not that—this is how it is in Bali now & how it was in our country hundreds of years ago. My father had said that the Bali we were then experiencing would not last. How long can an island remain an island? Baba would say in the grimmest, gloomiest tone he could muster, “Open your eyes & ears wide, see & hear everything, memorize everything. This will vanish one day. You may never come again.”
But here I am. I’ve come back. And things are indeed changed. It is a strange & frightening thing when you feel that people you don’t know—the government—is watching what you are doing inside your home, even if you are harming nobody. Jane says her servants were being questioned about what goes on in their house. WS has harmed nobody. It’s very hard to have secrets here. Yet he is being watched by the police & so are we.
WS does not take it seriously, not for one minute. They sent policemen to tail him at one of the evening dances & we spotted them at once—standing about, ridiculous in pajamas & sandals & spectacles. WS was very naughty & told the dancers to kiss the policemen & flirt with them . . . after a while the policemen were thoroughly derailed & began to dance with the boys too. It was foolish of WS to do this. Where does this desire to court danger come from, I wonder? Or is he a genuine innocent blundering about in an alien world?
You will wonder where all this libertine thinking comes to me from, you are imagining me in orgies. How am I talking this way when I never thought of these things before? It’s just that I am finding out how limited my world was. There is so much outside it. I thought romantic love, if it existed at all, happened between men & women. (On 3, Pontoon Road, Muntazir, it did not happen even between men and women.) I have understood I was naive. Life is far more interesting than I had thought!