by Anuradha Roy
I wish I could do what we did in those days, just sit with you on your sofa & talk, knowing you understand. What I do long for is close friends. It was different when Beryl was here. Who can explain how I found so much in common with that learned Englishwoman years older than me? She has such plans: she told me before she left (I suppose in order to comfort me as you might a child) that she would be back in India and Bali before too long.
I wish she had stayed here some more months now. Why do we have so little time with those we come to love late in life? Although she was often acerbic, even forbidding, under all that there was warmth & a sharp mind—& a funny one. Once we were talking about different kinds of friendships & marriages & she told me she had been married once, to a man call Basil & she & he decided they would go without sex. (I blushed at how calmly she said the word. We are so prudishly brought up, I don’t think I’ve ever said “S-E-X” in my life. I have said it now. Sex.) Well, they decided not to—because it was so coarse. They gave up drinking liquor & eating meat too. A very elevated life based on platonic love was planned. Poor deluded Beryl! She found one day that her husband had abandoned vegetables for steaks, milk for beer, & platonism for carnal love with another woman. She tried to be calm about it, she said & uncaring, but then one day left him. Good thing, she said, or she may never have made her way to Arthur. Arthur has other women, she has hinted—she knows he is with them when she is on her travels. She calls them his other continents. She hasn’t told me if she & Arthur are platonic or not—I don’t know if that’s the thing driving him off to seek out Other Continents. She seems hurt about his other women—yet has made some arrangement with her own mind & heart about it.
Is this how we live as we grow older, Lis? Our minds & bodies changing shape to make room?
My body’s changing shape all right—I am an old crone, thin as a stick & skin gone all patchy & muddy. I keep getting bouts of fever & have to have quinine—it’s malaria, I’ve been told. Never had it at home, I suppose because of the good Dr. Rozario’s precautions.
Write to me, Lis. Tell me about Jeremy. Do you call him Jem or Jimmy? How many children will you have? A whole brood, I hope, to be Myshkin’s little cousins. I hope you will not try Beryl’s experiments at platonism.
As for me . . . that part of my life is gone. It’s gone forever & I feel no emptiness about it, I tell myself it is a relief. I don’t mourn Brijen anymore, not even in moments of sentimental gloom. It is as if I can see my past self from far away, as alien as a woman on a film screen, and I’m observing the screen-woman’s romantic oozing, nonplussed that she could be so deluded.
But I will not think of that. I will not think of love or the police or the dangers. I will not think of armies in far-off lands. All this will pass. I will not pine & worry about all of you. I will only think of you & Jeremy & wedding bells. Come here for your honeymoon! I will make you a canopy of blue lotus & a bed as big as a tennis court covered with the finest white cotton & serve you sweet oranges & whole roasted ducklings at dinner. WS will be here by then—he is out of jail, is spending some months in Java—he will play you a wedding march, we will have a temple dance & a feast, you will be dressed in gold & brocade, so beautiful that Jeremy will fall in a faint. You’ll revive him with a kiss.
With much love,
Yours ever,
Gay
4th March 1940
Dearest Lis,
How are you? It is very long since a letter came from you. Is the postbox swallowing them up? When I was a child I used to think of those red pillar boxes as monsters with an open maw. A little bit of me believes that still. Where do letters go when we drop them in there, how do they ever make their way anywhere—so many trains & ships & roads before they cross the distance from Muntazir to Tjampuhan. I come back from the hut where I work in the afternoon, hot & mucky, & go straight to Ni Wayan & when she shakes her head (for she knows what I am asking without a word said) my heart sinks. But I rally & say, maybe tomorrow. My father died early but he left me this part of himself: an undousable fire that lights me up inside & tells me things will get better, the clouds will lift. There will be a letter from you tomorrow or the day after that & maybe the day after that you will be here in flesh & blood, sitting with Jeremy, smoking your long cigarette, holding up your new silk sarong to show it to me while Myshkin goes down to our river to meet Sampih in person at last. (Did I ever tell you about Sampih? He once saved Colin from drowning—he is a fine dancer, WS’s protégé.)
How often Myshkin wrote to me about Sampih when he did write. There are few letters from him now. I had felt—hoped—that this drifting apart would not happen, or I would get him here before it did. I’ve been a failure, not selling nearly as much as I need to—not saving enough.
Ni Wayan fusses over me now that I don’t feel up to cooking, but I am not hungry. Though I long for a samosa! I woke up yesterday with the scent of Nanduram’s hot samosas in my nose—it was inexplicable. I must have been dreaming of them. Did I eat them in my dream, I wonder. I do hope so. The only thing I feel like eating is fruit. I eat mangosteens—they are sweet and sour, and these I can still taste.
WS came back quite some time ago & spent ages cleaning his garden. He came with ferns & water lilies & many other plants & since then has been wrapped up in digging a new pond for them—it is now ready—stone bound, very simple. I had not thought the place could be improved, but this pond brings serenity, the light shines on it & changes color all day. I sit by it in the evening with a glass of tea & watch everyone come & go about their jobs. There is again a low, happy hum of normality. A cataclysm came—but it has gone & life is settled again. In another of the verandahs, the old woman—Ni Wayan’s mother—is stretched out dozing and the mound of her tummy rises and falls gently. Near me one of the boys who hangs around here is polishing his kris—it is an ornamental dagger they carry. I will bring you a miniature version some day, to slit open your letters with.
Across the gorge, WS is creeping about, stalking dragonflies with a net in his hands. He is thinner but full of energy. He passionately collects these dragonflies & paints them—fragile, detailed paintings—who could have said an insect might be so elegant? He sends the pictures off to an insect specialist in Java. (A man called Gustav who came here a few times and was flatteringly taken with me, called me a great beauty etc. etc. If you saw what a haggard old stick I am! I am snorting with laughter as I write this.) WS has been running around seeing everyone on the island, there is great rejoicing that he is free & back & a general feeling that a great injustice was done to him.
All is peaceful, it is true—but I feel a shadow over us. The government is doing petty things to stop WS getting work. Why? He is unhappy about it, he complains bitterly. But everyone advises him to be quiet, keep his head down, provoke nobody & just paint. Perhaps that is how all of us have to become in this changed world. Invisible. Silent. Scurrying around in the dark under our separate rocks.
Don’t you abandon me too. Myshkin’s vanishing is bad enough. Write me many, many pages, at least twelve! Covered on both sides.
With much love,
Yours ever,
Gay
25th May 1940
Dearest Lis,
The news is grim. WS has been taken away to prison again—this time it was totally without warning. It is to an internment camp. This is because Germany & Holland are now at war. I do recall you telling me in a letter right at the start of the war that the British were locking away all the Germans in India. I suppose when countries are at war, our lives are not our own anymore even if the war is a million miles away.
How long will this internment be for? We don’t know. Since they have scholars, planters, artists—all sorts of people among that 3000, we expect they’ll check identities & set the harmless ones free to go back to their lives. After all, everything cannot be stopped, can it, just because there’s a war on an entirely different continent? Germans like WS who left Germany years ago, partly out of disgust wit
h the Nazis—what irony to imprison him. (And as for the Jews they are imprisoning here because they are German by nationality, no irony could be greater.)
The local people wonder why WS did not have the sense to change his passport years ago, since he had no intention of going back to Europe. But I suppose he had thought it wasn’t important. Who does? I am lucky to be Indian—the British & Dutch are allies so I am not in an internment camp & not likely to be. I’m safe, I suppose. The German women and children are in separate camps so families are all broken up.
Pugig, who is Ni Wayan’s cousin, works for the Grand Hotel in a place in Java called Lembang. He told us he was on the roadside when Dutch soldiers pulled over Bruno Treipl. Bruno T’s family owns the hotel & they are local grandees. He says the soldiers made Treipl crawl on his hands & knees all the way to the prison van & that they spat at him while he was down on the road. Oh, Lis, I fear that WS will have a harder time of it now, if for no other reason than numbers—there are just too many people in those camps, people turn into things when there are too many in one place.
I am too troubled to write more. I don’t know what is going to happen to me. When will we go back to normal life?
All my love,
Gay
10th October 1940
Dearest Lis,
All on my own! That is my only excuse for not writing for months, I was so busy talking to myself I forgot to talk to anyone else. Don’t be angry, I am sorry! You know how it is—I hate being a moaner, yet all I was doing was moaning. (To myself, in tiny whispers, all day and all night.)
Now I have apprenticed myself to a toothless old potter called Nyoman Sugriwa and it gives me something real to write to you about. He has a face as weathered as old wood & he sits in a loincloth & spins the wheel. I sweat rivers in the heat, my sari tucked up to my knees, crouched over the wheel trying to still one tiny part of this wobbly, chaotic world. We need no words, he shows me things with gestures & we smile a lot & nod or shake heads.
I am trying to view this as time for myself to learn & make—am trying to emulate WS in prison. After all, I am in a beautiful prison too, am I not—no way of leaving. No money. No friends. Even Jane gone. M. Mead, whom I never liked much & would never have asked for help, left ages ago. I think—am determined to think—WS will be back home soon & I want to be here and take care of things so he comes back to a normal world. I know there are people who have been here longer, doing that. But still. Indah, the Kintamani dog—you remember?—she sleeps in my room now that WS is gone. The monkeys. The cockatoo. All of them need care. I can’t abandon them when they are his very life to WS—who has done so much for me.
I am babbling. But I do need to take care of things, you know. The other day a Dutch woman, Mrs. Hueting, came visiting. It’s nonsense to think there is any threat from the Japanese, she announced, the Allies are too many. The Japs (she calls them that) know they’ll be finished if they try out any moves in the Pacific. There’s no danger to the Netherland East Indies—none whatsoever. Her husband has told her. As though that is the conclusive word on the matter. She is a planter’s wife, she said she’d come to see if WS had left any paintings she could take for her drawing room. I ask you! They have coffee & rubber, thousands of acres & live like kings & queens with virtual slave labor. They are brutal to the workers. She has a pudgy face & popcorn eyes & seems very pleased with herself. I disliked her intensely, I wish I had stuck a big drawing pin into her giant buttocks.
Are things at all changed at home because of the war? Are there shortages? I haven’t been hearing from you. Nor from Myshkin. Maybe the post offices no longer work. Maybe our letters are sinking in the sea. I will pray this reaches you. I feel as if the world broke into a hundred pieces last year & scattered us far away from each other.
With love,
Gay
July 1941
My dearest Lis,
I have thought I will number my letters to you so that you know how many you are missing. You accuse me of not writing, but the fact is that for the last few months I have written at least every two months. You must have missed three or four, maybe more! Letters do cost money to send, I have to be mindful of that too. Mine invariably tip over into the number of grams that takes them to the costliest level, though I try to keep them within 25 cents because I write to both you & to Myshkin . . . I sound such a miser, but am earning hardly anything now, I am down to selling what little jewelry my mother gave me & it makes me very angry to think all that effort & money & my words & thoughts are floating in the murky depths of the Indian Ocean along with sundry other wrecks. It is not fair.
I am rather crochety, have not been feeling well. Keep getting fevers, can hardly keep food down. Still am trying to work. Sugriwa is teaching me how to weave cane into pots. My fingers are cut all over, but I persist. I am tired, tired, tired. I finished one bowl yesterday, woven with cane, & Sugriwa approved, gave me a Western thumbs-up! I live in splendid isolation. People have been advising me to leave, but even speaking hypothetically, where will I go? My mother is not going to garland me with roses for coming back & NC won’t let me in through the door. Where will I live? What will I do? How will I earn? Here I was earning—until WS was locked away.
I am going to stay. I will be found here one day, the mad old woman from India, surrounded by her paintings & misshapen earthen bowls. I am not going to leave, why should I? How will I take my years of work? I’m not going to just abandon it—I’ve done good work, Lis. When I feel doubtful I think of my painting in the museum, and the two others in the Raja’s collection and all the others that people have bought. My work will come to something again once this madness is over. Or else I will be found as in those old graves of the Egyptians, buried with the things that were precious to them. If I die here, that is how they will find my body. You know, they don’t cremate the dead immediately here, they wait for an auspicious day and meanwhile leave the body mummified. Maybe I’ll tell them to leave me embalmed for you to find some day!
Such ghoulish thoughts.
WS is not back & nobody knows when he will come. A Dutch soldier who had once come to Tjampuhan as a guest wrote to someone to say he glimpsed WS across the barbed wire in the internment camp on his watch a few days ago. WS scrawny & thin, start of beard. Their eyes met, only briefly, then WS started rolling a cigarette, he said. A tormenting thought—W caged up like an animal behind barbed wire.
He has sent a few postcards from the camp. It is badly overcrowded, serried ranks of cots, clothes festooned on ropes overhead, not a minute’s solitude. Clouds of mosquitoes. He is trying to keep up his spirits, even paint, but the last letter did sound downcast. A portrait he was painting had failed, he said, he had lost at ping pong, he has no more butter, his last Russian novel has been read through! He tried to make his misery sound funny—absurdly pathetic—but it makes me sad. I am not allowed to send anything there now. And am not allowed to visit. Nobody is.
There is another German family in Java—young parents, two infant children, and I hear the mother has died in the camp and the children are alone there. The father in a camp for men only. The Germans are putting the Jews through far worse brutality, I know—but does one brutality even out another? Is all of human history nothing but an endless cycle of revenge carried out on the innocent? And we are caught in this ghastly machine, our lives being crushed out of us. It makes me think of the film we saw—was it at Grace or Delite—a matinee, remember, so that Nek wouldn’t be annoyed? The one where a woman was being pressed to death under boulders. It has never left me—the savage glee of the people torturing her to death.
Yesterday I wasn’t feeling well again—well, what is new about that, you will say. I went to Nyoman Sugriwa as usual because it was worse to be sitting alone at home doing nothing. I tried to work on the wheel, but my hand would not be steady, my body was out of tune with the clay & I ached and gritted my teeth & pounded more & more clay into balls, tearful, getting furious with myself for not being able to
control one little ball of clay while Sugriwa kept saying things to me I could not understand—he was probably telling me not to waste my time & his clay & go home. Nothing in my life is in control any longer. Nothing. Finally he got up & stomped off outside. I could see him puffing away. The scent of his clove smoke.
My eyes fell on Indah, who always follows me to Sugriwa’s house. She was lying in one corner of the bamboo shed, dozing through the heat. It is so hot, so blazing hot in the afternoons, it is like being inside a volcano. You cannot imagine the sweat and discomfort, though now I am better able to bear it. (The nights are cooler, there is often a breeze.) Indah raised her head & her brown, calm eyes were on me—one long moment. Then her head fell back on the floor. She is an old dog—she was old when we found her, I’ve realized—& is still painfully thin despite the food. Her eyes are marbled with cataract, they see little if anything at all—I cannot tell. Her black muzzle is gray & her ribs show when she lies in that way on the floor although her coat is shiny black. At night she sleeps near my bed, but never in it—even when she accepts that she needs you, she does not woo you in the way of other dogs. You sense she has a world inside her that you’ll never be able to share. Such stubborn solitude! Who knows how she lived all by herself on the rocks of the Kintamani all those years before she followed us home? What did she eat? Where did she find water?
I haven’t any notion what passed between us when she placed her gaze on me for those few seconds, but from that moment the clay started spinning evenly & smoothly under my hands again. A flawless bowl slowly rose between my fingers & thumb. If only I could make you understand what happened, Lis! And how spiritual it felt. If there is the divine, it was this. I will pray to whatever force it was that steadied my hand & body that it may still the world too & reunite all of us one day. Be well, dearest Lis. If this letter reaches, or even if it doesn’t, please write! Tell me about Myshkin. I will not rest till I see him again. That’s a promise. I will find a way.