by Anuradha Roy
How it tears its way in by its fingernails—I mean politics—& shreds your life to pieces.
All this time I had been thinking the problem was about men having relations with other men. But the whole thing hinges on age, we have now found out—they are doing everything they can to find proof against W to show he did awful things to little boys. In a way this is reassuring because everyone knows he has never touched a boy. They have found not a shred of evidence.
There are people telling him he should move back to Europe for his own safety, but he asks why. He has lived here for years & made no problems. Besides, he says, draining his last sip of whisky & banging two opening notes on the piano, “I don’t want to go back! I have absolutely not an iota of desire to return to Germany or Europe. Not one atom.” And then he plays Beethoven furiously & paints locked away for the next many days.
Yesterday, in the evening, I heard an impromptu concert. There is a little girl here to whom WS is teaching piano—he sits her on his lap & tells her stories & plays along—this is how the Balinese teach their children music & he follows the same method. He was teaching her a sweet, simple tune by a composer called Pachelbel. On & on they went, again & again over the same set of notes & I could hear them from my hut down the slope. I sat outside & breathing in the evening air & listening to the piano & to the birds & in the river down below two people chattering to each other in words I could not understand & out of the blue I found myself yearning for Brijen, he would have loved the music, the tranquillity. I imagined he was beside me, sitting outside as well, and my present troubles retreated with every note.
How idiotic to feel this way after I’ve left him—when I had the chance to be with him! It would have been so much easier to get Myshkin to Bombay than to Bali. Why didn’t I take a mad chance and run off with Brijen as he kept telling me to? But that would have been the end of my work. Everything new I am learning and doing would never have happened. What a tangle.
You cannot know how grateful I am that you don’t condemn me and that I can still talk to you freely. That was my biggest fear—it tortured me until I got your letter. Every line of it is warm and kind and understanding. Your heart is as big as the ocean.
With my love
Gay
February 1939
My Lis,
I haven’t been able to write back—I am sorry, sorry! Things are so very bad here & I cannot put it all in words—maybe the letter will mysteriously vanish if I do. WS was arrested last month. He is in what they call remand—waiting for a trial. To the end they found it hard to get any witnesses because not one Balinese would speak against him, but they managed to scrape together what they needed through the Regent, I believe, & are teaching two or three witnesses what to say. Ni Wayan says they can’t understand—what has the Tuan done wrong? She simply cannot see. Her mother, the eagle-eyed old one who hides under bushes waiting for pheasants to catch & cook, says these foreign rulers who come to other people’s countries are like poison thrown into a lake, they kill all the plants and all the fish. They leave a trail of waste and destruction.
Someone told me there are big politics at work in WS’s present persecution. Things to do with Japan & America—yes, that must be the real reason. You met him—you know him—can you imagine him ever harming a puppy, far less a child? Nobody who knows him believes any of it for a moment. We know he is innocent. But he can be so far removed from reality, he thought nothing would go wrong and he still thinks it is all a mistake.
WS unsquashable as usual. Dashing off long letters—although letters are censored so all of us have to watch what we say. He thinks prison is a pause for him, to think, recover, work again. He’s translating folk tales to while away the time. He has been allowed a gramophone & his painting materials. The prison guards are all smitten by him—naturally. He wants ping pong balls, he says, & paint . . . he feels new paintings entering him, they will settle & ripen, he says. In jail! It should be a lesson to me. I made excuses for not being able to paint at home in Muntazir & he has no trouble making paintings in a jail cell.
M. Mead says she is going to write out a defense of WS because she thinks he is of a rare artist type by birth. She has a theory that this type of person is at once more as well as less dependent on others—they want warmth & friendship, yet need to preserve themselves—keep their solitude, their personalities intact. I am of the mind that I am this artist type too, ever since I have heard of it!!! She says the Balinese instinctively understand this way of being—of light, even physical contact that is casual & easy, without being too involving. She says WS found freedom to work & affection without demands here—that is all there is to it. It is no crime & she will prove it. This seems to me to be correct—but will the police and the court think so? I cannot imagine Dutch judges gifted with empathy for artist types.
Everyone is trying to help WS. Beryl went back towards England last year—she is in Egypt, or somewhere in that region now, trying to get all sorts of people to rally around so he doesn’t get a ghastly long sentence. Let’s see what happens. Things change so fast from one day to the next now. To tell the truth, I feel my isolation terribly. I know nobody well apart from WS, not really. What if he is in jail for ages? What then? What will I do?
(Are we born selfish, Lis? Why do I think about myself at such a time?)
So often the future seems hidden just around the next loop of the road & you desperately need to be able to see around that loop, but there is no way. The future is there as it always is, it is waiting, it will come, good or bad. I don’t know if I’ll wonder why I ever came here, so far from everything familiar. Who will help me if things go wrong? What was I thinking?
You will say I am turning into a bundle of anxiety. Where is the Gay who used to be gay even on a bad day? Well, I am still that girl in spite of all my heartbreaks and evil deeds! One of the reasons he enjoys having me around, says WS, is that I make him laugh. He would keep asking me to imitate lions and monkeys and birds—I’ve discovered a talent for doing animal calls, people’s voices, I can even do WS. I know many of my worries are just that—worries. I am sure Brijen will come back after he’s got over his huff. Such vanity to think he would end his life for me when he had a dozen lovers scattered over town!
There. The minute I write to you, I feel lighter & can see that my head is full of nonsense & nothing will happen.
I forgot to tell you the news: I sold FIVE paintings before W’s arrest. All at once—three to WS’s European friends who were visiting, and two to the Raja of Karangasem, no less. He says he will put them in his palace for a few years and then in the museum. How grand I felt for a day! And rich!
My love to you. And please kiss Myshkin for me, exactly on top of his head & twice on each cheek. And not a word to him or anyone else about these troubles. He has enough of his own, poor child.
Gay
June 1939
Dearest Lis,
It is a relief to have your note. I read it many times and have left it where I can see it. I smell it to see if some traces of your smoke and vanilla cling to it still. I feel very alone. In a hut trying to work in lamplight while the rain falls outside. Soon there will be frogs croaking & always the river rushing & gushing. The sound feels like an echo of the turmoil inside me at times, this incessant river. When darkness falls there is a small square where the village men play the gamelan & in front of it women set up candlelit stalls selling all kinds of little things & people gather to play cards, listen to the music. I go there sometimes to sit & chat—if it can be called chatting—smiles & nods, a word or two, goodwill. (Language is a problem. I have picked up words, but too few, I am slow with words.) After some time, when the mosquitoes start to plague me—you know how I get horrible weals from mosquitoes—I leave & walk home although it is pretty there & I like the sense of people around me.
Tjampuhan is quite a distance from the main town. I have to cross the river to reach it & the way is dark & empty. I am not afraid, but I can hear my f
ootfall, my slippers’ flap-flap, & I keep turning my head back because I feel as if I can hear someone walking ten paces behind me, following. I walk fast to reach quicker. The only sound is the wayside dogs barking when they smell me. The trees are as tall as towers & densely packed. Long creepers hang loose from them. They disappear into deep, deep gorges. I feel tiny among those tall trees in the blackness. All along the way I can hear the chimes of the gamelan—sometimes repeating a wrongly played note, going over the same bit again & again.
When the gong sounds, the whole forest seems to go quiet. If there’s a full moon, everything is silver & gold & I sing the song from my childhood to myself—about a sky full of stars & sun—Myshkin used to love that song, it was our song, his and mine. It sounds alien here, in a language nobody else speaks. But it’s my most intimate language still, the words I mumbled when I was half-asleep were always Bengali & so were the songs I used to sing on the roof. That roof was my patch of sky to be myself under—only until the moment I heard NC’s footsteps on the staircase coming up. Then my heart would plummet. Here I am at least free of waiting with dread & gloom for those footsteps on the stairs, footsteps approaching my easel & stopping behind me, not a word said, but still a shout of disapproval. Maybe I exaggerate. Maybe I misunderstood.
If I am lucky, Ni Wayan or her mother walks back with me & they take pity on my solitude & tell me to come to their house & sit on their verandah & eat something with them. They have two oil lamps and that pool of flickering light shuts off the darkness. I feel sheltered for a time there with them, listening to their quick chatter, understanding hardly a word. I am happy eating as they do, sitting on the floor, a big heap of rice on a banana leaf, using my hands as at home, not a spoon. They were taken aback the first time they saw me do this—they had found a bent aluminum spoon from somewhere & kept it beside a plate as if it were a Western table setting. When I ignored the spoon & ate with my hands, Ni Wayan’s mother slapped her thigh with delight. She said something I didn’t understand.
She’s been very loving to me ever since. Whenever I come, she finds fruit or pieces of food to give me. Food is the only way she has of showing me she cares for me. She makes dumplings with pork, she roasts duck meat, she fries fish, she grates coconut and puts it into almost everything. I love her cooking and so I have almost stopped making food for myself. The other day she had fried something crisp & crunchy & handed it to me heaped up in a coconut shell. I ate it—all at once I was sure it must be a fried insect & started to feel almost faint.
Then I told myself firmly, Gayatri, what did your father teach you? When you are in a new country, you must not turn your back on anything. And what is a shrimp or prawn but a big cockroach? So I ate some more of the fried (delicious) thing & asked no questions. And I’m still alive to tell the tale, am I not? But I know I am a coward at heart. If I go to a feast and see the mounds of turtle shells near the men chopping up turtle meat, a shudder goes through me. I just cannot eat turtle, cannot steel myself enough. I know you would have felt nothing but curiosity.
I was always isolated here, neither part of WS’s inner circle of Western friends nor close to the Balinese because of problems of language. Without WS in his cottage next door, it feels worse. It should not, because he had moved away to Iseh these last years & only visited here now & then—but it still felt as if he would turn up any time, and he did. To think he is in prison—a squalid prison cell, all day & all night, counting the hours, wrongly accused. Before they transferred him further away, to Surabaya jail, the gamelan players did the sweetest, bravest thing: two orchestras he had helped went to the jail compound, set up all their instruments & there, outside, they played their latest compositions for him.
When I heard this I had tears in my eyes. You have seen what a free spirit he is—the way he would vanish to those villages when he was in our town. It is as if a magnificent genius of a man was caught in a machine that chewed him up & spat him out. Beryl’s words in Madras come back to me—that they would have to have another war just so he can be sent to another prison camp to learn new languages, new ways of painting. He has written to Margaret to say it is all for the best. Everything is clear & settled inside him, new ideas are appearing, all the energy & youth is back, he says. He’ll return to a new life. He sounds perfectly peaceable about his time in Hotel Wilhelmina (that is what he calls jail, after the Dutch Queen). He is to be released in August.
Take care of yourself, dear Lis, & take care of my beloved Batty father-in-law. Do please try & write more—I pine for news, for your voice, for the smell of home—whatever comes with your brief & infrequent little notes. Is there really a chance Brijen may be alive and well? That is such good news I am almost afraid to believe it. Will you try & send me confirmed news and maybe photographs in your next? You’ve been promising for ages! I may not recognize Myshkin. Maybe he’ll grow a mustache soon!
Much love
Gay.
December 1939
Lis, dearest,
It is frightening to think of the things my father-in-law is doing, still patching up those wounded revolutionaries with a war declared & all of the problems in India. If the British find out? And NC—his articles, his work for the wretched Mukti Devi—what if they both get arrested? Who will take charge of Myshkin then? His new, mad stepmother? I was horrified to hear how she set everything on fire—I don’t mind losing my things, I was never going to see them again, but ghastly for Myshkin to witness it. Oh Lis!
The sole happy part of life at this time is to know of your man. Wonderfully exciting! Jeremy Gordon. I like the sound of his name, Lis, my girl! What’s Aunt Cathy saying now, eh? How lucky he was to be quartered on you, to find you where he had expected nothing but flies and mosquitoes in a foreign country. I devoured every word about him—he sounds just right for you, the blue eyes, the big build (come, come, I know you always loved tall men), the brown hair, the singing voice. And he must be right for you because you have written me a long letter at last! I loved to read how he is teaching Indian soldiers to drive. It makes me smile, your story of how Indians are used to horses so they step on the gas when they sight a ditch. I start grinning each time I think of Jeremy saying, “Ruddy idiots think the car will sail over the ditch if you kick the damn thing.” I remember Arjun making this kind of complaint long ago when they first got their Dodge. (I have never seen a man who flies into rages as Arjun does, never. No wonder Dinu lives in such terror.)
My mind is not here—I am consumed with memories of home suddenly and so long to see you in your new life! I hope you’re dressing up—the dark green silk dress, the navy shoes, please—when you go out with him. I’m trying to picture the new Muntazir you describe—the droves of Tommies, the new bars & restaurants, the jazz music in Hafizabagh (can’t imagine that!!!), the trenches . . . oh, my mind can’t fit it in, I can’t see it, but I worry. Will the war really come so far? I cannot imagine Banno’s sons as sailors on some far-off British ship. Myshkin must be wide-eyed about it all. Does he know about your Jeremy? I have not heard from him for so very long. I long to hold him and smell his baby smell—milk, soap, powder—even though that went ages ago.
I am relieved to hear that it is now confirmed Brijen is alive and has thought it fit to inform you even if not his own family. Is that because he assumes you will send the news on to me? If that is the case, and it is undying love that makes him tell you now, could he not have let you know earlier? Why take more than a year over it? I have no patience with such thoughtless self-indulgence. I am sorry to think I wasted all those sleepless nights worrying about a man so feckless and inconsiderate. It confirms me in my view that I was right to leave him, even if it felt heartless and cold at that time. I shall not waste a minute more mooning about him.
W’s friends are nice enough to me, but without him, the center of gravity is shifted, nothing is the same & I am much on my own. I prefer this loneliness to the one with NC. That was isolation of the most desperate, soul-destroying kind, like being a
lone in a boat in the middle of the ocean and nothing but water in sight and no oars to take you to safety. This loneliness is temporary, it has to be borne till WS is back and things return to normal.
The evenings feel long, but I am so tired I fall asleep quickly. All day I work like a madwoman. I have no clock on the wall, sometimes when I come out of my hut it is evening & the music has started to chime. More & more I am making things with my hands—then I use them in my painting. Bits of terra-cotta clay I shape & fire (in a very primitive kiln) & then work into a plaster surface on which I am trying to make a fresco with clay parts molded in. I’ve given up watercolor, I do oils, collages. I spent hours just observing other painters here at work—and I have been learning new ways to work. I’ve been going to the museum, and looking at W’s art books—I feel as if I am growing new eyes all over my head. Like a big fat fly!
Did I tell you one of my paintings hangs in the museum now? Would you have thought it possible? I steal in every now and then, I slow down when I reach the room where I know it is and wait and linger over the other paintings that come before and my heartbeat keeps growing faster. “Still Life with Missing Woman,” it says. “By Gayatri Rozario.” It makes me go funny, as if I am puffing up and dissolving in a puddle all at once. Maybe one day Myshkin will be here and see that his mother did something with her life!
These days I spin clay on a wheel to make bowls, it is magic to feel them grow under my fingers. How NC would have gawped to see me sitting legs apart at a primitive wheel alongside the wiry village men in their headbands, with their bare bodies sweating. But they don’t look at women here in the way they do in our country. Here the women are free & easy & self-assured. You should see the way young Ni Wayan Arini puts white gardenias in her hair & sways off to the market in her yellow & red sarong, pausing every few minutes to exchange news with passersby. No woman can loaf & lounge on the street in our part of the world, can they? People raised their eyebrows at me merely going to visit you every day or at Brijen popping across to see me. Who knows what Dinu’s mother thought we got up to? She never stepped outside her home except to visit her relatives in a car.