All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  When he was pushing his way through the prisoners to try and reach the rafts and boats left on the ship, Father Unger spotted Walter Spies. He was still sitting in a cage on the deck. The doors had been cut open and it was empty but for him and a man lying in one corner of it, ill or dead. Father Unger shouted his name but did not wait to see if Spies would come. He got into a boat. They had only a few oars; for the rest they rowed with their hands. Over the next six days, out in the ocean half-mad with thirst, some were eaten by sharks while others died of the heat. Among the few who found their way to a shore was Father Unger.

  Walter Spies? He went down with the Van Imhoff, Gustav wrote. “I am sorry to tell you this. Also, I am afraid I still have no news of your mother, the Indian artist, but I will keep making efforts to find out.”

  A year after the war had ended, when my father was out of jail and Lipi had inched back to normal life and Lisa had shut her guesthouse and gone off to Canada with her husband, a letter arrived from Beryl de Zoete. It was addressed to Gayatri Rozario. Nevertheless, we opened it.

  My Sunbird, I picture you radiant and beautiful, reunited with your son. I am certain in my heart that is how it is.

  I have disastrous news. Walter is dead. He was in a ship full of prisoners bound for India and it sank off Sumatra. Such irony, dear Gay. To think he might have reached Dehradun—and you, and so many things he held dear—had the ship reached its destination. My only consolation is the news I have had from a friend in Siam, who met someone who knew a man who saw Walter die. He sat very peacefully and smoked his pipe as the ship went down, they said. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but it is how I would like to remember beloved Walter.

  I still hope to come back to India to finish my book on dance, to watch more of Kanta Devi’s splendid Bharatnatyam, to see you and talk of old times. I remember so well our journey to Bali, days of hope, fear, joy, adventure—and you in a storm of homesick tears every minute. Who knew then what deeper grief was waiting, beyond our imagining? The world threw us apart. We are no more than leaves in a storm.

  Please write to me. I will wait for news from you.

  With much love, Beryl

  The sunbirds that so fascinated Beryl when she came here hover around the garden still, in search of nectar. I saw a pair of them one morning after rereading her letter. They went from one flower to the next: iridescent blue concentrations of whirring energy. They were so light that the hibiscus hardly swayed with their weight when they landed on the petals and dipped their long beaks into the flower’s cup. I could see why Beryl had named my mother after them.

  Around me were trees that had been there for more than a hundred years, born long before either me or my mother. She had a way of talking to them, complimenting them for new leaves and flowers, stroking them in passing as if they were pets. Twice I saw her standing on the roof of our house at night, eyes closed, face raised to the moon, lips moving as she murmured something inaudible. Her hair floated down her back in a black wave. At such times my mother was an amphibious creature—of earth as well as air, yet not wholly of any one element. She might have taken flight and become a night bird, or her limbs might have turned into roots and branches, her torso the trunk of a tree. Anything appeared possible.

  I confess I too talk to trees I have planted, and when I walk by a river listening to the quiet sound of waterbirds and the distant thump of a washerman battering a riverside rock with clothes, it is that vision of my mother and her moon-silvered face that comes back to me. Trees, grasses, the sun, the sky, the moon, these were closer to her than humans, they were her religion—as they have become mine. My father went through his entire life oblivious of the natural world. What foolishness, what blindness, my mother must have told him. Like the man who never opened his window and lived his whole life by lamplight when the moon was outside, shining.

  “I blew out the lamp,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore, “with the idea of turning in to bed. No sooner had I done so, through the open windows, the moonlight burst in to the room, with a shock of surprise . . . [I]f I had gone off to bed leaving the shutters closed, and thus missed this vision, it would have stayed there all the same without any protest against the mocking lamp inside. Even if I had remained blind to it all my life—letting the lamp triumph to the end . . . even then the moon would have still been there, sweetly smiling unperturbed and unobtrusive, waiting for me as she has throughout the ages.”

  People think you have to travel—to the mountains, to the sea—to find what they call “natural beauty.” These days, when the sky is glowing with the thousand neon lights of Muntazir’s new markets and streets, the moon struggles and the stars are switched off. I can hardly see them any longer. Are they really waiting for me somewhere else? If I were a magician and the sky were the roof of my tent, I would turn off all the lights of the city to see the stars leading their own remote lives, a million years away from our blighted world.

  The awareness Rabindranath Tagore had of a wider, deeper, more meaningful world that exists independent of human ephemera—I have been alive to it as my mother was, but I wonder if it is possible for those who have known nothing but crowded cities to possess this seventh sense. As a child, I would place my back against one of our trees and feel its reassuring solidity, its immobility. It was not going to move, it would never go anywhere, it was rooted to its spot. For as long as they are alive, trees remain where they are. This is one of life’s few certainties. The roots of trees go deep and take many directions, we cannot foresee their subterranean spread any more than we can predict how a child will grow. Beneath the earth, trees live their secret lives, at times going deeper into the ground than up into the sky, entwined below with other trees which appear in no way connected above the ground. Had we been trees—my father, my mother, Brijen, Lisa, Dinu, my grandfather, and I—which direction, I wonder in idle moments, would our roots have taken below the earth?

  I have been setting off on long, restless walks, unable to sit still after reading my mother’s letters. A thousand questions crawl within my brain, as persistent and maddening as head lice, and I struggle to comprehend what actually happened in the ten years that my mother was married to a man she never loved and lived next door to the man she was in love with. Betrayal, duplicity, infidelity: these were not words I would ever associate with her, not even now, yet it is also clear that for all my life I have known only a partial version of her.

  Understanding nothing of the complicated reasons for her flight, I had sometimes hated her enough as a boy to want to blind her picture with my cigarettes. I wondered if my father or grandfather had known about her hidden life but had sheltered me from the knowledge out of love—or out of shame.

  If the truth had been revealed then, would I have waited quite as anxiously for news of her for years on end?

  Gardeners are good at the business of waiting, they are in tune with the rhythms of the earth, which are slow. There is no anxiety in this kind of waiting, only anticipation. But to wait as we did for news of my mother, that was like blood being drained from our bodies until one day there was no more left.

  Yesterday, I stopped my writing and went into the back garden. The area below the tamarind tree had overnight turned into a fresh yellow and white—tiny zephyranthus lilies stretched into the far corners. I stood there transfixed for a while and then, as if in a dream, brought paper and pen and sat down on the grass in the early morning heat of June, drawing studies of the zephyranthus one after another until the noontime sun was directly above me, burning the hair off my head.

  This was the very spot, I was sure of it, where my mother had flung her box of imported paints and I had crawled into the bushes searching out each one. I could not recall if the zephyranthus was there then. It is a tiny crocus-like lily that asks for nothing, no manure, no care, it goes underground when not in bloom and emerges this way each year: overnight, hundreds of them, signaling the imminence of the monsoon.

  The day after I drew the zephyranthus, I wo
ke moments before sunrise and the first thing I did, without consciously deciding to, was that I went to the front of the house where I stood in the purple half-light, resting my back against the tree below which I used to ring my bicycle bell to wake my mother.

  The impatient, shrill tones of that long-lost bell rang in my ears as I raised my face to the sky cut up by a forest of fleshy leaves. It is a Magnolia grandiflora more than sixty feet tall, with densely knit branches and a long, thick, smooth trunk. I got a ladder and propped it against the tree even as Ila grumbled about my sanity and held the ladder steady. I climbed high enough to reach a branch laden with ivory-colored flowers, each one as big as a bowl and scented with a fragrance that immediately brought back that last morning when the tree had showered my mother with raindrops and she made me promise to come back in time from school so that we could go on our trip together.

  I placed the cut stems in a vase near the painting of my mother that had come in the envelope. I drew detailed studies of the magnolia’s leaves, buds, and flowers. I painted a few of them.

  Over the next weeks, my long-unused sketchbooks filled with studies of the trees and plants in the garden that I associated with my mother: the pearly carpet of parijat flowers, Nyctanthes arbortristis, that she loved walking on barefoot; the neem near the bench where she had sat with Beryl listening to the story of Aisha. I barely slept, I forgot meals, I drew and painted her garden as if possessed. I drew the crepe myrtle and Queen of the Night, the common oleander and hibiscus; the young mangoes on the tree in June, as raw as they had been when Beryl de Zoete and Walter Spies first came to our house.

  It took me five days to finish my studies of Queen of the Night and then I turned to the garnet blossoms of the Plumeria rubra, the champa. I painted the long, elliptic leaves, the swollen stem tips, the fleshy branches that go from gray to green and ooze milk if bruised or cut. I blended in the ocher at the edges of the petals with the deepening incandescence of the red in the depths of the flower.

  As I painted I could see a man’s hand reach out and place in my mother’s palm the flowers that had fallen from her hair, then close her fingers over the petals.

  I went through stacks of paper and many tubes of paint, ink, and charcoal before I stopped painting as suddenly as I had begun, drained, spent, emptied of thought.

  Even though it was morning and I had drunk a cup of tea, I dropped off again in my chair. My sleep was sudden and deep.

  I dreamed of Indah, the dog my mother had carried with her to Surabaya. She was thin and old and she was running from one street to another, nose to the ground, searching with her blind eyes for anyone she knew. I wanted to reach her but I could not. I tried to find the house where my mother lay ill, the roads turned into oceans and I could not keep afloat, I was breathless and desperate, I was trying to swim, I was holding a watermelon, Tobu was nearby, but I kept swallowing water and he would not help. Body parts floated near me, torsos, a head, the jellified hand from the jar in my grandfather’s clinic. Nearby a ship listed and fell on its side with an enormous crash.

  I opened my eyes and a burst of heat and light exploded onto my face. I was glad to wake up from the dream. It has been coming to me from time to time ever since I read my mother’s letters and I am always glad to wake up.

  I put on my glasses, drew my sheet of paper closer, and applied myself again to my long-postponed task.

  “I, Myshkin Chand Rozario, being of sound mind and body, do hereby . . .”

  I put down my pen and turned away from my paper to the bustle around me of loaders, cooks, officers, engineers, mechanics, going about their business, paying me no attention. I am as good as cargo to them, the only man on board not at work. The railings of the deck were a few yards away from me: a real deck, not one I had dreamed up from pictures and letters. And this was a real ship, a cargo vessel headed for Singapore in which I had one of two cabins earmarked for passengers.

  I am making the same journey as my mother, by train, ship, steamer, boat, across the Indian Ocean, past a thousand islands, stopping every few days, pausing until I want to go on. I will scour the archipelago for traces of her. Perhaps there are still some people alive who knew her and who know what became of her. I will stop at Surabaya and find Lokumull’s shop, I will search for the descendants of Queen Fatima, I will go to the museums in Java and Bali and find her paintings, I will find the houses she inhabited, the rooms she worked in, the village potter who became her teacher.

  I left my chair. The slate-gray iron of the deck was hot enough to scorch the soles of my shoes as I walked to the railings. Waves splashed the discolored sides of the ship, white froth churned in its wake. Had she noticed that the ship, when it cut a path through the foam and waves, sighed constantly, the great poet had asked my mother on her first journey to Bali; did that never-ending sigh not sound as though the waters of the ocean were washing the earth with tears of grief?

  I could hear my mother’s incredulous, impolite, teenage laugh in my ears. Grief was the last thing on the mind of a girl exulting in a new world, painting every part of it. I wanted to believe that for my mother the ocean’s sigh had not changed its meaning through all her crossings.

  I leaned over the railing, as far as I could. I heard a shout from somewhere on the deck: “What the hell’s that old man doing?”

  I crumpled my interrupted Last Will and Testament into a tight ball and tossed it high in the air, out into the sea.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The point at which I knew this book was going to be written came one afternoon on a street in Ubud, Bali, when Rukun Advani and I were drooping in the heat, on the brink of giving up the search for Walter Spies’s second home. And then Nyoman Gelebug drew up and opened the doors of his car.

  Until then, nobody had appeared to know how to get there, and every taxi driver had refused us. As if by magic, Nyoman turned out to be a native of Sidemen, East Bali; he knew exactly how to reach the house in the remote village of Iseh, near Mount Agung. Standing in fields full of ripe red chilies in front of the house, with the calm blue volcano on the horizon, it immediately felt as if the book-in-progress had the blessings of Walter Spies.

  Born German in 1895, Spies spent most of his life in Bali, where he met both Rabindranath Tagore and the renowned dancer Uday Shankar. He wanted to learn Sanskrit and come to India to research Indian dance forms, but he was drowned at forty-seven when the ship on which he was a prisoner of war was bombed and destroyed. In part, this book imagines what might have been had he made the journey to India.

  Since this is a novel in which fiction and history overlap, I have relied greatly on the help of other people as well as books.

  In Bali, Janet de Neefe provided many pointers, including to the splendid Agung Rai Museum to look at the paintings of Spies and his contemporaries; she also directed me to his estate in Tjampuhan, now the Tjampuhan Hotel, where his simple thatched cottage is perfectly preserved. In Djakarta, the writer Dwi Ratih Ramadhany gave me crucial help with Balinese names and Lans Brahmantyo of Afterhours Books gave me permission to reproduce material from John Stowell’s magnificent biography, Walter Spies, A Life in Art (Jakarta: Afterhours Books, 2011). This rich, beautiful book is filled with illustrations and translations from the letters of Spies, from which are drawn many of the words he says in this novel. Rahul Sen made sure the book reached me, passed hand to hand all the way from Djakarta, via Singapore and Jaipur.

  Only in one of his letters does Spies speak of Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Bali, and it is not reproduced in Stowell’s book. That letter (Letter 56, dated 21 September 1927, in Hans Rhodius: Schönheit und Reichtum des Lebens Walter Spies—Maler und Musiker auf Bali 1895–1942, Den Haag, 1964) was obtained for me from the British Library by Professor Francesca Orsini. However, it was in German. Katharina Bielenberg translated it into English and lines from her translation now constitute one of the epigraphs. I have lost count of Katharina’s many kindnesses, this is only the most recent.

  I first
came across Walter Spies in Cristina Jordis’s dazzling travelogue, Bali, Java in My Dreams (translated from the French by George Bland, London: Harvill, 2002). It made me want to know more, and I turned to Colin McPhee’s A House in Bali (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), a poetic memoir of his life in Bali, especially its music. For a sense of Bali in the late 1920s from the Indian point of view, I have relied on two astute, learned, observant books in Bengali: Rabindranath Tagore’s “Javajatri’r Patra” (“Letters from a Traveler to Java”) in Rabindra Rachnabali, vol. 19 (Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1968), and Suniti Kumar Chattopadhayay’s Rabindra-Sangame Dipamay Bharat O Shyamdesh (The Islands of the Indian Ocean and Siam with Rabindranath) (Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1940). Manishita Dass, ever-resourceful book sleuth, not only got hold of both the books for me, she then read my first draft and checked my translations.

  As always, Myriam Bellehigue did a detailed reading of the first draft, and gave me a clearheaded sense of its problems.

  One of the fortuitous happenings during the writing of this book was that I picked up, purely by chance, a novel by the eminent Bengali writer Maitreyi Devi. She was a relative of mine, a paternal uncle’s wife; her book had always been in our house, but I had never read it. When I did, I was deeply moved, as well as struck by parallels between the protagonist of her autobiographical novel and the protagonist of my book. I began translating it, and eventually a few passages became a part of my novel. For permission to reproduce these passages from Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate (It Does Not Die), I am indebted to Rupa Sen and Priyadarshi Sen. The translations into English are mine.