Questions of Travel (13 page)
HIRAN PRESSED HIS FACE
into Ravi’s shoulder and rubbed. The child had returned from a visit to his mother’s family with something that had once belonged to her, a toy that was already old when she was young. He couldn’t wait to show Ravi this treasure: a small viewfinder fashioned in Germany from yellow plastic to resemble a TV.
A few days before this, a Tamil Tiger had driven a truck filled with explosives into the Central Bank. Ravi was called to the phone at work. On the other end of the line, Malini was frantic: her father had mentioned that he would be in Colombo that day. She had been trying to ring her mother but there was no answer. Confused reports told of hundreds of casualties; Malini was sure that her father lay among the dead.
It wasn’t until the evening that news of her parents came. Her father had woken with pains in his legs and decided to stay in bed. Later, he had gone out on the veranda and applied himself to the analysis of a bottle of arrack. Then it was his wife’s turn to lie in bed, ignoring the phone, with the sheet pulled over her head. Learning that her father was safe, Malini began to cry. She had been so sure he had died—slowly, under twisted concrete—that she had to see him. She set out the next day, accompanied by Hiran.
Examining the viewfinder, Ravi marveled at the mobility of
things.
By what elaborate journeys had the little souvenir waltzed over continents and oceans and ended up in his hand? Hiran showed his father how to place his eye to the peephole at the back of the toy and work a lever to produce a succession of three-dimensional images: a plumy fountain in a rose garden, swimmers at a lido, a mountain with its feet in a roofscape of blue slate. But it was the scenes featuring the interior of a bathhouse that held the child enthralled. There were dark green palms and a pale green pool surrounded by columns and mirrors. Archways repeated themselves endlessly. The watery, indoor light lent these pictures a remarkable quality: they appeared at once outdated and not-yet-seen. They were dreams and premonitions, scenes penetrated by the past and the future, irredeemably spooky.
Hiran loved the viewfinder to the point of preferring it to the TV in the lobby, but he avoided it after dark. It had to be placed in the suitcase that contained the family’s spare clothes, and the case padlocked, before he would lie down to sleep.
Sometimes he woke crying. There had been
a devil with long ears.
Malini learned that her best friend at school, shopping in the Fort when the truck exploded, had lost her sight in the blast.
At the time of these events, Malini was working for an international aid organization dedicated to improving the status of women. The NGO ran village clinics, microfinance schemes, adult literacy classes, that kind of thing. Malini volunteered her services at first, but after a while was paid for a few hours of work each week. She was quick, clever, brimming with
push.
Her responsibilities and salary expanded. Ravi informed his mother of these developments with pride. But occasionally he recalled the first time he had taken Malini to Mr. and Mrs. Basnayake’s house. Ravi had been examining their computer when his wife rose, crossed to the vase of orchids below the photograph of their dead son and set about rearranging the flowers. The old people stared as if watching the first flames reach the roof. Malini smiled: “That’s better.” Neither justification nor apology, it merely stated a fact. At moments of marital wear and tear, Ravi imagined her going about her rounds, the openmouthed villagers contemplating their improved lives.
HE HAD BECOME FRIENDS
with another assistant lecturer in his department. Nimal Corea’s father owned a printing business, and Nimal was familiar with phototypesetting. Investigating website markup, he had realized its resemblance to the typesetting code. Now Ravi and he were working together on building the university’s website. It was a matter of fierce principle that this should be accomplished without assistance from the specialists in Computer Science.
The Maths department had only one computer with a dial-up connection to the Internet; the two young men tended it like an altar. During the day, the phone line was always busy, so they took to working on the website at night. When the power failed, as it often did, they stretched out on the concrete floor, and didn’t wake until the lights came on again.
A new word entered Ravi’s vocabulary: “yahoo.”
Half mad from lack of sleep, he was in a state of exaltation known to pioneers and priests. He fanned himself with a newspaper—the fragrance of drains arrived, compounded by the cannabis with which Nimal was always well supplied. Mosquitoes were holding a banquet on Ravi’s ankles, but hyperlinks were irresistible: as
all-at-once
as a conjurer’s bouquet. Screens opened and vanished before him, dissolving and multiplying like dreams.
It was called surfing the Net. Ravi tried to describe it to Malini, the way one electronic landscape gave way to another, the thrilling suspension between surface and depth. It was magical: a string of typed words made wishes appear on the screen. Place had come undone, said Ravi. He spoke of flight and speed.
Five or six years later, when dial-up and Mosaic were dim monuments of digital prehistory, he would recall how slow it had really been. He was waiting to cross a road in Bondi, and the woman jogging on the spot next to him kept hitting the pedestrian button. Her request had been electronically registered the first time, and the lights weren’t going to change faster whatever she did, but the heel of her hand continued to punch. Ravi remembered waiting for the upload all those years ago, jiggling his mouse, circling it on its mat, humanly reluctant to relinquish control to mere technology.
Eager to experience these modern marvels, Malini visited Ravi at work one evening. Nimal was there, perched in a spiral of smoke. A childhood accident had left him with a withered arm; he was chubby, bulge-eyed, gifted. Watching his friend build the site, the almost wasteful elegance of his ingenuity, Ravi felt the scrape of envy. His own mind was an iron: it smoothed. It could improve on what Nimal, who worked fast and with a degree of disdain for the immaculate, had produced. But Ravi was aware of belatedness: of his painstaking ability grafted onto another man’s casual flair.
Early on, Nimal had linked into the wealth of pornography on the Net: its unfree flow. His good hand trembled on the mouse, but he had no credit card and no prospect of obtaining one. However, he had discovered Jennifer Ringley, an American student who had set up a webcam in her room to document her life. JenniCam refreshed every three minutes. There were dull hours of Jennifer holding forth about herself, but Nimal had once watched her masturbating. She had promised to strip for the camera, an event both men anticipated keenly. What if it coincided with their teaching duties or a blackout? Jennifer had said that she wanted to give everyone a really open, honest view into her life. It was appalling and riveting: Jennifer Ringley was a new kind of person. Every tyrant in history had dreamed of spying on hidden lives—but that dream required subjects who wanted to hide. It shriveled before a pudgy eighteen-year-old, exposed on camera to the world,
who didn’t care in the least.
Now Ravi saw Nimal’s huge eyes, reddened by ganja and fatigue, linger on Malini’s breasts. To distract her, Ravi spoke hurriedly. “You’re you and anyone you can imagine. There is the same as here.” He felt the insufficiency of words as he guided Malini through portals and loitered with her in chat rooms, trying to demonstrate this disembodied travel. Webcams showed them a fish tank in San Francisco; in a basement in Cambridge, coffee dripped into a pot. The world had shrunk, said Ravi, and at the same time it was tentacular and unconstrained. From New York to Negombo, life would be digital and linked. What mattered weren’t computers but the possibilities they unleashed. He declared, “The Internet will free people from
this.
” The sweep of his hand took in damp-stained walls, the large brutality of politics, the petty humiliations of making do.
He said, “Soon everyone will be a tourist.”
Malini was typing words into a search engine:
human rights sri lanka.
In bed that night she spoke of a forensic scientist who had identified the remains found in a mass grave in a wildlife park. She said, “Bodies are always local.”
But their embraces were Venetian: fluidly magnificent. Melting inside her, Ravi was assailed by images: of streaming and connection, of data and bodies. There was HTML, there was DNA. Things flowed together on his mind’s screen.
The NGO was involved in a rope-making enterprise in a village in the south. Malini returned from it with the story of an eight-year-old raped nightly by her father while her mother was working in Geneva as a nanny.
“Everyone knows what’s going on.”
“Why don’t they report it?”
“The father’s a constable. His brother’s a sergeant. For all I know, he’s in on it as well. We’ll have to do something.”
“But what? It’s terrible, but what can we do?”
“I meant the NGO.” She said, “No one expects you to do anything.”
At the onset of a storm, Carmel Mendis would go from room to room in her house hanging towels over mirrors to keep them from attracting lightning. It was the kind of thing that Malini couldn’t stand. She had nothing but scorn for her mother-in-law’s superstitions and pieties: the palm-leaf cross, the plastic crucifix on which Christ hung glowing and green.
But Malini harbored fetishes of her own. Ravi learned this when a bracelet of hers disappeared. It was a childish thing made of bright and dark blue plastic beads—Malini rarely wore it, but left it here and there, and now it was lost. She was panic-stricken at first, then inconsolable. Ravi, not understanding, said he would buy her a replacement. But the bracelet was charged with magic and luck.
I’ll never get to the end of her, Ravi thought, and was filled with joy. This led to further confusion, for although he remained grave, Malini sensed his happiness and believed him indifferent to her grief.
THEO OFTEN SAID THAT
he favored the beaten track. “Europe’s what I am, for better or worse. There’s nowhere I want to go that can’t be reached on a train.”
“Australia!”
“A dream place. Best left to the imagination.”
“India?” For there, in plain view on his shelves, was a small library of large volumes about the subcontinent.
“That was Mutti. She was such a proto-hippy. She dragged Gaby and me to Mexico as well. Everything was wonderful, and we didn’t understand any of it.” He took down one of the Indian books, turned pages, held out a photograph of a dancer crowned with seven cobra heads. “This man. The beliefs that move him, that got him here—I’d always just be gawking.” He rubbed his wide forehead, trying to explain.
“Isn’t that the point? Discovering things?”
“There’s no past in tourism. It’s one thing after another. There’s no time for time to accrue.”
He also said, “I hope for the moment when
what I know
turns strange.”
But one of Theo’s great qualities was that he never tried to diminish by belittling where a friend enthused. So he studied maps with Laura, argued about destinations, passed on tips about bargain fares.
He turned up one afternoon at a house Laura was minding in Belsize Park. It had rained all morning; Theo had walked under dripping trees. When she opened the door, Laura thought calmly, He has come for me. That was because the fresh smell of rain had entered the house—the connection made sense to her, if to no one else. Inside, Theo glanced around—it was a contemporary, impersonal, chic kind of house with polished concrete and slabs of light—and said, “How relentlessly interesting.” His hair was damp, Laura saw, and his shoes. He told her that he had run into a friend he hadn’t seen for a while. Meera Bryden was the brand-new editor of the
Wayfarer,
glossiest of travel glossies. “Of course she wants to revamp it all. So I said I knew just the person she should be begging to write for her.” He handed Laura a card. “She’d like you to call.”
“Darling Theo!” said Meera. “He’s coming to supper tomorrow. Why don’t you join us? I’m dying to meet you. And do bring something you’d like me to read.”
Laura rang the restaurant where she worked and claimed that she had the flu. She set up her laptop and sat down. Theo had said, “Meera won’t mind where you write about. India. Sydney. All those stories you’ve told me about places you’ve been—pick any one.” The latest issue of the
Wayfarer
lay beside Laura. She opened it at random and read:
Africa is adventure. That was what I discovered on my epic overland journey.
A blackened stone spire rose in her mind like a warning finger. She was thinking of a story she hadn’t told Theo, and would never tell anyone, about a man she had met in Strasbourg. An airline’s midweek special had lured her there the previous year. She took a room in the sort of hotel that can reliably be found near a railway station, and went out to look at the city—her guidebook promised a famous cathedral and, in it, a famous clock. Later, wandering around, still unnerved by what she had seen, Laura spotted a shop that sold
confiture de bière.
Beer jam! Why hadn’t that occurred to Australia? No need to stop at jam, either: beer bread, beer sausages, beer pasta…Clouds were advancing, lengthening like strands of greasy wool combed out. They rushed over her, darkening the city. It should have been frightening, but the clouds moved on quickly—they were people hurrying home, hectic and smug. Night fell. Laura walked along a canal full of upside-down houses. She went into a bar and stood at the counter drinking wine. The French were addressing each other in precise, declarative sentences. A man remarked that he was suffering from
un flux nasale.
This was so plainly superior to a runny nose that Laura turned her head away to smile.
She met the eyes of a man sitting alone at a table, with one hand curved around a beer. His nails were trim and shaped like spades. Quite soon, Laura and Émile were walking along a moon-chilled street. A high, blank wall ran down one side. Where it ended, there was a tree like a candelabra; its branches, innocent of leaves, bore upturned, waxy flowers.
In her hotel room, Laura scarcely had time to set the scene by switching off the overhead light in favor of the bulb above the basin in the corner. Some hours later, Émile was getting dressed when he asked the kind of perfunctory question a resident asks a tourist. Laura answered that her first sight of the cathedral, at the far end of a street, had terrified her. “I had this awful feeling I was looking at something that had gone wrong—the scene of a disaster. The cathedral’s so dirty and so huge and so crowded around with other buildings. There’s no perspective.” What her mind was showing her, as she spoke, was something that couldn’t be looked at—it could only be encountered. Walking away, she had glanced back at the side of the cathedral. She saw the wing of a giant bat that had crashed and turned to stone where it died.
Émile listened attentively. Then he told her that when he was nineteen, he had left home forever. There was a flight to Marseille, another to Grenoble. It was late when the plane touched down. The uncle who had arranged his papers and paid his fare drove Émile through darkness punctured by headlights to an apartment on the outskirts of the city. The next day he woke to the rapturous thought that he had arrived in France at last. He had analyzed its revolutions, memorized its poems, listed its principal exports. He hastened to the window and threw back the shutters. Then he screamed.
It was explained to him, when he was led back into the room, that what he had seen was a mountain. The high-rise that housed him was wedged against its stony black flank. If he were to lean from the window, he might touch it—that is, if someone hung on to his feet. “But I couldn’t forget. My first sight of
la belle France:
a catastrophe that blocked the sun.”
At this point, Émile and Laura found themselves with nothing to say to each other. What they had done in the bed with the dip in the middle was timeless. But now the past had shown up. It was a tree whose roots split the dusty gray carpet; its branches brushed the walls. They held bright, harsh-voiced parrots and a soldier planting a
tricolore
in a mound of corpses and a boy who slept with
The Three Musketeers
beside his pillow.
In London the night deepened, and Laura worked on her story for Meera Bryden. She was still exhilarated by the effortlessness of writing on screen—skaters must know that swift swoop and glide. But as her work took shape, her enthusiasm ebbed. The traceless erasure of mistakes, first thoughts, alternatives masked the fallible labor that paper preserved. By the time she had finished writing, she no longer trusted her processed words. Unblemished but unfresh, they put her in mind of supermarket apples. She raised her linked hands above her head and stretched; she was thinking of Émile. His hands had smelled faintly of pepper. He rocked inside her, and in the depths of the hotel room, the door of the wardrobe sprang open; a misshapen wire hanger dangled. It was only now, remembering that night, that Laura realized this: the stories they exchanged had had nothing in common. One was about place, the other about time. She had told a traveler’s tale about the jolt delivered by strangeness, while Émile had described the first step on the road to disenchantment—it was really a story about the end of childhood. Relating it, he had looked serious and kind. But afterwards he put on his jacket hastily, as if distancing himself from a blunder, and left at once.
“Don’t fret,” said Theo. “Meera’ll love your story—and you. She’s completely sweet. And she’s gone and married this fabulous man.”
Lewis Bryden said, “Orstraylia? I had the most marvelous time jackarooing there. All that marvelous Outback. It seemed so much more real than Sydney and Melbourne. I mean, what is the point of Orstraylian cities? They’re just so secondhand.” To Laura, he added kindly, “But I believe the whole country’s come on awfully well. There was that marvelously good film about the schoolgirl murderers. Darling, what was it called? With Kate Winslet.”
He carried on like that throughout the evening. His jaw was regulation issue, his profile designed for the screen. But something in the way his head sat on his polo-neck suggested that it would come away without a fuss. So time passed happily while Lewis held forth—Laura was watching him pace about with his head tucked under his arm.
The Brydens hadn’t been married long. Lewis found reasons to touch his plump, sexy wife: leaning across the table to stroke her fingers, resting his palm on her haunch as she changed his plate. When Meera, describing email to their guests, said that Lewis and she were addicted to it, his smirk insisted on the kind of messages they exchanged.
Theo, leaning on Laura’s arm as they walked to the Tube, exclaimed rather thickly, “Lucky, lucky Meera!”
He had added to his collection of Beloveds, Laura saw.
As they started down the stairs to their platform, he swayed. A Fraser instinct for self-protection, a vicious, vital mechanism, kicked in. For a second, Laura saw her pretty hand shoot out and the long length of Theo broken on concrete. She grasped him, steadied him, of course.
The surface of their relations remained the same after that evening at the Brydens. But something invisible and crucial had changed. It cleared a space for observation. Laura noticed that Theo no longer pleaded when friends tried to leave the house in Hampstead. Now he said, “
Must
you be so fucking dreary?” He spoke lightly and mockingly and meant it. More often than not, Laura gave in to his pleasant, edged hostility. She was a good sport—wasn’t that the Australian way? The following day would be sour with resentment. Her muscles cried that she earned her living on her feet while Theo sat at a desk like a child.
The junk he brought home was spreading. The bedsteads from the garage had found their way indoors to rest against a desk. The heavy curtains in the dining room had vanished, replaced with orange venetian blinds on which a printed sunset flared. Mirror tiles had conquered a wall in the hallway, swirly mauve and silver paper was crawling over the downstairs loo. Throughout the house, tiny rubber dinosaurs paraded on ledges. Shaggy hot-pink or teal rugs, shorn from sci-fi sheep, had settled on carpets. Everywhere, the milk crates had multiplied.
A child in buttoned boots rose from an Indian grave and ran through the depths of the mantelpiece mirror. Laura heard Hester say,
Ruth choked and died—her throat was lined with gray velvet.
That memory misdirected. It led Laura to think of the ugly modern house rising within Anna Newman’s walls as an infection rather than as something struggling to be itself.
The two shapely armchairs that cradled conversation had been joined by a third, a giant recliner striped in nubbly brown and fawn. He had found it on a pavement, said Theo. Imagine that, Laura replied.
