Questions of Travel (17 page)
MALINI DECIDED TO SPEND
the weekend with her parents. She would leave work at midday, collect Hiran from school and take a bus into the green monotony of the interior, returning on Sunday night. She liked to arrive unannounced at her parents’—that way her father had no time to hide the empty bottles.
The Mendises now occupied a large, quiet room tucked away down a passage at the rear of the rooming house. On Saturday afternoon, Ravi was correcting students’ work when his pen ran dry. Looking for a new one, he found a bracelet of blue plastic beads inside a box of odds and ends. How was that possible? They had searched their old room so thoroughly for the trinket. He dusted the bracelet off and placed it prominently on the table, smiling as he anticipated his wife’s delight.
That night, Ravi was woken by a distant shout. This would turn out to be the night watchman—he executed his duties by muffling his head in a towel and stretching out at the bottom of the stairs. When the police questioned him later, he would say that he had woken at a blow to his ribs; someone had stumbled over him. He heard a car accelerate and realized at the same moment that the street door was open.
Ravi rose and opened the door of his room, his thoughts still molten. Seeing no one in the passage, he almost went back to bed. But something like instinct directed him along the corridor, towards the lobby; he was still sleepily knotting his sarong around his waist when he arrived. In the grayish dark, he could make out the chairs grouped around the television like guests who had fallen asleep at a party. But there was an unfamiliar bulk on top of the set. The watchman, arriving at the head of the stairs, switched on the light. Ravi blinked, and still couldn’t decipher the object in front of him: a thing half known but unspeakably strange. Then he understood that he was looking at a female torso that had been sawn off halfway down the thighs and above the breasts. The cavity at the top had been enlarged and the amputated limbs crammed inside. The whole arrangement resembled a vase from which outlandish flowers of feet and hands emerged on fleshy stalks.
He must have moved closer, because just before he fainted he saw his name: RAVI, in white letters scratched on a shin.
HE SLEPT AND SLEPT.
The shock, said Freda Hobson, the shots her doctor gave him and the pills he had prescribed. Ravi heard her out and yawned.
On the day of the funeral, he could barely keep awake. Finally released by the police, the bodies lay at Malini’s parents’ house. Mourners came from all over the island. They stood in line for an hour to file past the big coffin and the small one, both closed. Hiran had been found in the street, not far from the rooming house. In the uproar caused by the discovery in the lobby, the small body had gone unnoticed at first. Then a young constable, vomiting out of sight of his colleagues, wondered why the dog lying in the crevice between two buildings hadn’t stirred.
A crone shrouded in silk rose up and embraced Ravi. Her arms were clammy and hard, and her breath was unfresh. It was like being clasped by something that had risen from a grave. “That girl,” said Mrs. Basnayake. Her spectacles appeared to be leaking. “That wonderful girl.”
There was a commotion in the middle of the room. Ravi’s father-in-law, drunk of course, had collapsed at the foot of his daughter’s bier.
On the afternoon of the abductions, witnesses had seen Malini talking to a young man in wraparound sunglasses. Hiran was with her, in his favorite red T-shirt with the yellow smiley face. The stranger was leaning against an ice-blue Mercedes parked around the corner from the bus station. He held a ballpoint pen, which he clicked absently as they talked. The conversation seemed unhurried, relaxed.
When the man opened the rear door of the car, Hiran climbed in. His red Mickey Mouse pack, a birthday present from Freda, was strapped to his back. Malini followed her son, and the stranger went around to the driver’s seat. The windows of the car were tinted. But there were those who claimed to have seen another man, waiting in the back.
The Mercedes was a novel touch. As a rule, a white van was preferred.
A pale-eyed man in plain clothes was always present when the police interviewed Ravi. He remained in the background but was memorable for the polished gray stones in his face. He spoke only once. That was at the end of the second interview, when he came up very close to Ravi and said, “Don’t you think there are questions it’s better not to ask?” His tone was pleasant and conversational. He said, “You’re lucky. You know they’re dead.”
Freda Hobson had scooped Ravi up and installed him in her flat. She lived in a district of expensive apartments, and large new houses that filled up their grounds as if they had been dropped into place by a crane. At first Ravi was in no condition to refuse Freda, and later he was glad. The flat was a blank place. He had never been there with anyone he loved.
What he remembered of those first weeks was brightness and space. Here and there, objects stood out as clearly as if outlined in black. Light moved through him unimpeded: there was a window at either end of the room in which he slept. Or so he thought—later he would be amazed to find that there was only a single long window above the bed.
Grief moved by stealth. In the act of putting on a shirt, he might think, “The last time I wore this, they were still alive.” A banyan tree was always close at hand, now expanding, now shrinking. Its branches formed a black square. It encompassed all that was unimaginable: the future, for one thing, or the last minutes of his son’s life.
A week earlier they had been alive. Ten days. Twelve. The last time he had cleaned his nails, the last time he had sneezed.
Run, run, run and bring me…
The roots of the banyan were lifting inside Ravi, and dry contractions seized his stomach. He couldn’t remember the magical object that would restore his wife and child.
It was Malini’s fault that their son was dead. He could have killed her at times.
Carmel Mendis, weeping into a neighbor’s black Bakelite phone, nevertheless reproached her son for staying alone with an unmarried woman. What would people say?
Ravi repeated Freda’s argument: he was safest there. The apartment block, white and streamlined as a plane, had a monitored alarm system and was patrolled day and night by a guard. The compound wall was three meters high and bristled along its length with upside-down nails. When Freda pointed out these defenses, Ravi had thought how easily circuits are disabled and men frightened or bribed. But he said nothing. Precautions soothed her and left him unconcerned. Freda mistook his silence for dullness and listed the security arrangements again.
Ravi relayed them to his mother, and added that he had his own room. “My own bathroom, also.” As he spoke, it struck him as extremely strange that two people should have
a bathroom each.
He was providing all this information in an undertone. Freda had gone into her bedroom and shut the door when his mother called. This had the effect of making Ravi vividly conscious that she was there, on the other side of the wall.
Curiosity, a resilient emotion, rose up in Carmel. “Son, what is it like there?” Her mind, running through scenes from
Dallas,
reached for something fabulous and unattainable, but stuck on an older ideal: Valenciennes lace. She also asked, “Can’t you get a chaperone, child?” The peculiar word, fished up from the sunless depths of his mother’s girlhood, went through Ravi like pain.
Nimal Corea turned up with a laptop, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and ganja already rolled into a joint. He wanted to show Ravi the website he had set up as a memorial to Malini and Hiran. There was an email address to which people could write if they had information about the murders. It was understood that faith in the police investigation was limited, at best.
Ravi refused to look at the photograph of his son. In fact he didn’t want to look at the site at all but didn’t know how to say so without giving offence. Nimal scrolled down, and Malini looked out from the screen in a mercilessly exact rendition of her gaze.
Nimal was wearing a ring set with a garnet on the little finger of his damaged hand. He had grown heavier, and called with corpulent oaths for justice and revenge. He spilled the contents of a manila envelope on the table, and Ravi shuffled printouts of emails. There were messages of sympathy and heartfelt, righteous denunciations, but no one had anything useful to say. Nimal looked on, jiggling his knee. But now and then he would lower his head and turn his ring with a sheepish air.
Ravi, who had never tasted alcohol, never used ganja, didn’t hesitate to sample these gifts. It was like attending the funeral of his wife and son: not a thing he had expected he would do but suddenly unavoidable. A glassy remoteness encased him whenever anyone spoke of what had happened. It was not that he was unmoved by Nimal’s efforts, but everything—the condolences from strangers, the modular leather furniture, his friend’s declarations—had the overlarge quality of a film. He had noticed, and it was consistent with the fantastic unfolding of events, that one of the emails offering sympathy came from Deepti Pieris, Malini’s old adversary at the NGO.
When the whisky was two-thirds gone, Nimal broke down. He wanted to offer Ravi a place to stay, he said, but his lodgings consisted of a room above the RealLanka office. With the collapse of dot-coms across the world, the public float of the company had been postponed, and Nimal’s salary was devoured by the cost of living in central Colombo. And, “Work, work, work, all the time,” he wept. There was no
time,
he said, over and over again, as snot and tears mingled on his plump, childlike face. “Everything is faster, we must work faster, eat faster, shit faster.”
Ravi paid no attention. He had just caught sight of his hand—a surprise! What was it doing there at the end of his arm?
Time passed, and although he continued to swallow pills, Ravi stopped sleeping—so he would have claimed. But there were mornings when he could remember having spent hours on a beach looking out at black waves.
One day he asked Freda, “Who would want to harm me? Why do I have to stay here?” She had just come home; her keys were still in her hand. She drew in her chin and looked hard at him, but it was plain that his bafflement was sincere.
Later on, when she was in her room, Ravi stood close to the door. Freda was talking on her mobile: “I mean, yesterday I really thought there were signs of improvement. And then today, I actually had to spell out that he’s at risk because it would be assumed Malini’s passed on information they’d rather he didn’t have. And he still didn’t get it. He said, ‘But I’ve never done anything.’ So I said, ‘Exactly. And they don’t want you to start.’”
Then Ravi heard, “I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure it’s the medication. He’s just not making connections.” And, “Yes. Super-sad.”
When Freda was at work, Ravi went into her room. It was his mother’s bedroom, secretive and calm. But Carmel’s room was crowded with heavy, dark furniture: a modest landscape packed with gloomy lakes and cliffs. Here, there were small, entrancing things: necklaces, painted boxes, photographs, the bright spines of books beside the bed. Ravi realized that when his mother had asked him what Freda’s flat was like, what he should have said was that everything in it was new. He had just understood the meaning of money: it was freedom from ugly, inherited tables, from lumpy pillows and chairs that sagged.
Rings sparkled on a tray. Like all his countrymen, Ravi was a connoisseur of gems. He saw the diamond Freda called The Millstone and left lying around the flat, and the magnificent sapphire—he spied her Jaffna Tamil mother in its blue depths. There was a turquoise lozenge bound with silver, and an opal for bad luck. And there was sheer rubbish, a big red rose molded from plastic, a glass band in which purples and lilacs merged.
He handled the jewels. They were cold as corpses.
From their first meeting, Freda had reminded him of someone. This impression, a bird he had to identify from its shadow, hovered fuzzy and persistent in Ravi’s brain. He studied a group of framed photographs on a chest. A fair-haired man was genial in one of them; in another, his padded arms clasped Freda against a backdrop of snow. Ravi went out to the living room and examined the larger photo of him there. He filled the frame, a squared-off man. Ravi thought of good English butter. He thought of all the red roast beef the man contained.
The balcony where Ravi stood smoking looked into a broad-leafed tree. On the far side of the street, just where a bat had hanged itself in the power lines, a car pulled up and a girl got out. She wore jeans and a UCLA T-shirt, but her hair, lustrous with oil, flowed to her hips. When Hiran was very young, he had delighted in undoing his mother’s plait and staggering around her with her hair in his fist, imprisoning her with its locks. Peering through leaves, Ravi watched the girl, who was now addressing an intercom. The gate before her began to swing open. There might still be time to leap from the balcony, seize her, shear the hair from her head.
Freda plugged in her PowerBook and answered emails. She was a news junkie, she informed Ravi with pride. “Get this!” she would say. There might follow the
Washington Post
’s opinion of a summit about Palestine, or
The Guardian
’s retrospective take on the Y2K bug. A dead man hovered at her shoulder: Ravi saw his father, chin propped on hand beside his shortwave radio, lost in
Letter from America
or smiling at
Just a Minute
on the World Service.
When Freda invited Ravi to use her laptop, he declined. What he didn’t say was that things had their own size and were not equal—even the primitive technology represented by Father Ignatius’s old map had known that. But the Internet, abolishing distance, undermined relativity; it offered sapphires and plastic with an even hand. When arguing with Malini, it had been usual for Ravi to say things like, “These people who were raped or tortured or killed have no connection to you. Why are you concerned with them?” Why hadn’t she replied, “What connects you to the level of coffee in a Cambridge pot?”
The living room contained a phone and an answering machine, but it was often Freda’s mobile that rang. Ravi watched her thumbs move over it, agile and dark. He noticed that she didn’t like to be parted from the sleek little phone, carrying it with her from room to room and never leaving the flat without checking that it was in her bag. He thought of the oval St. Christopher medallion that accompanied his mother everywhere, safety-pinned to nightie or bra.
Freda played her messages.
Hello, this is Luis. Just me, darling. Hi, it’s Djamilla/Nick/Fran.
She would tell Ravi, “Imogen and I were in college together. She’s in Ho Chi Minh City now.” Or: “Joel’s such a sweetie. Nothing like one’s idea of a New Yorker, actually.” The fair man had acquired a name,
Martin,
a job description,
head of client relations in an Anglo-American mining consortium,
and a vocation,
helping Africans see why they needed Anglo-American mines.
A postcard came of the Valley of the Kings. Freda propped it on a shelf, beside a card from Seville. One of the magazines by the couch contained a map of the world on which swooping lines traced an airline’s routes. Global, connected: that was how Ravi pictured Freda Hobson’s life.
