Travelers (4 page)

Strains of music came up from the garden. Lee moved to the window to see. The guests had come out of the house and were scattered over the lawn. Some sat on chairs, other lay reclining on carpets that had been spread there. They all faced a small platform on which sat a young man playing a sitar. He wore an exquisite embroidered muslin shirt and rings shone on his fingers; his hair was long and curly. He bent over the sitar and caressed it as one making love.

Asha said from the bed, “Quite often I'm led astray by others.
Unfortunately I have a very romantic character. . . . How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“You look out. I can see you are also a romantic type of personality. I can feel it like vibrations.”

“It's the music,” Lee said.

“Isn't it fantastically beautiful?”

Raymond and Gopi Meet Lee

Raymond had visited all the famous monuments several times, both by himself and later with Gopi; now there were others that were not listed in the guidebooks but lay, scattered and half forgotten, throughout the surrounding countryside. Gopi didn't care much for ancient monuments, either historically or architecturally, and he had only the vaguest idea as to what they were; but he knew them well, for he had often come here with friends for picnics and to smoke and look at girls who had also come for picnics. Today he had brought Raymond to a disused mosque standing in a walled compound with some trees, a tomb, and several scattered graves. Raymond had hired a taxi, which they had to leave standing on the road, and then they picked their way through a narrow track and some tangled undergrowth out of which there suddenly grew a potter's shed with the potter sitting inside it. They also met a very old man walking behind a very old bullock. After that there was no one.

They climbed up a steep staircase inside the mosque. The steps and the passageways in which they ended were totally dark, slippery with moss, and smelling of bats, but finally led to a terrace: from here there was a wide-open view of sky and landscape. Gopi, tired of climbing, flung himself down on the paved terrace. Sheltering in the shadow cast by the great cracked stone dome above him, he lay with his arms folded behind his head. Raymond leaned over the parapet to peer down at the decorated walls of the mosque. He wondered about
its date and guessed it to be around the fifteenth century. He leafed through his guidebook, hoping that perhaps he had overlooked an entry; but there was nothing.

Gopi said, “Why are you looking at that stupid book again?”

“It
is
stupid. I don't know how they came to leave this out. It's beautiful. Perhaps Lodi, I don't know—but the same time as those Mehrauli tombs. I think.” He looked at Gopi, who had wearily shut his eyes. Raymond smiled and said, “It's very old.”

This was a joke between them. Whenever Raymond speculated about a date, Gopi said, “It's very old.” When Raymond asked, “Yes, but how very old?” he would say, “One hundred years,” and if Raymond looked skeptical, he would emend it to five hundred years.

Gopi said in a lazy and tired voice, “If I weren't so lazy and tired—you know what I would do? I would take that book—and yes! I think I will!”

Suddenly he jumped up and tried to snatch Raymond's guidebook out of his hand. They struggled for it, laughing together. But it was too hot to struggle for long. Gopi let go—though before doing so he gave Raymond a push which was hard enough to send him sprawling against the parapet wall. Gopi laughed heartily; physical mishaps to others always amused him. Raymond also laughed, though, as a matter of fact, he had in falling somewhat grazed his arm.

Raymond continued to look out over the landscape. It had rained recently and there were sudden stretches of brilliant grass where one would have thought no grass had grown in centuries. Trees dripped with green, and hollows filled with rainwater glinted and danced with speckles of sun. Everywhere there were ruins in broken-off shapes—half a tower, a solitary gateway, steps leading to nowhere—and all of them set off against a water-blue sky that had small washed clouds frisking across it. And there was Gopi relaxed against the drum of the dome, grumbling he was hungry, why hadn't they brought something to eat, what was the use of coming to these places
unless you brought things to eat? He described a picnic he and his friends had had in this same place, and all the food they had eaten, and the games they had played. And he grumbled to Raymond, “You see, this is the trouble—you don't play anything, you're not fun for me.” But Raymond knew he didn't mean it.

Raymond crossed over to the other side of the parapet and now looked over the forecourt of the mosque with the little tomb and the graves shady under trees. He checked himself from wondering whose graves they might be. As he stood there gazing out, brimful of satisfaction, he saw a girl come in through a gap in the compound wall. She was an unexpected apparition in that place: a Western girl in a yellow peasant skirt and gypsy earrings. She wandered in and looked around and Raymond watched her. Gopi, always sensitive to whatever Raymond was doing, noticed a change in his attention and asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Come and see,” Raymond said.

Gopi stood beside him. He looked at the girl and began to say bravado things, the sort he knew boys were expected to say about girls. When Raymond didn't react, he thought perhaps he wasn't going far enough so he went as far as he knew how. The girl remained totally unaware of them. She shuffled off her sandals and went into the mosque and then she came out again and looked around the tomb and then she sat on a grave under a tree.

Gopi said, “I'll go and talk to her.” He said it like a challenge and when Raymond didn't answer he added, “I'll pick her up.” It was a phrase he had learned fairly recently and he offered it—half daring, half timid—as if he weren't quite sure about it. But next he said, “You think I can't? You think I don't know how? Just watch me!”

He turned and climbed down the steps leading from the terrace. Raymond watched him emerge from the side entrance of the mosque and make his way toward the girl. Raymond
enjoyed watching him—he was proud of him and the way he advanced like a purposeful conqueror, tossing the hair out of his eyes. Gopi had a boy's figure with very narrow hips on which his trousers sat jauntily. Ever since he had met Raymond, he had laid aside the somewhat gaudy shirts he used to wear in favor of the more elegant ones that Raymond bought for him. He had natural good taste and had learned very quickly.

Raymond saw the girl look up. He also saw a look of annoyance on her face. This deepened as Gopi went on talking to her. They were too far away for Raymond to hear what they were saying, but evidently Gopi was saying all he could think of and the girl was answering him very shortly. After a while she stopped answering altogether and looked away from him. Gopi too seemed to have run out of conversation. He continued to stand there, continued even to display his air of bravado, but evidently he did not know what to say or do next. Raymond realized he would have to go down to rescue him.

Although he pretended to be in command of the situation, Gopi was clearly relieved to see him. He said, “She is not a friendly person.” There was a quite uncharacteristic leer on his face.

“Is he with you?” Lee asked Raymond. “Perhaps you could tell him it's bad manners to disturb people who want to be alone.”

“Why does she want to be alone?” Gopi said. “Ah-ha—you see, she doesn't answer. There must be a very bad reason.”

Lee looked at Raymond for help. Gopi too seemed to want help, to be relieved of the girl and the situation which were not turning out as expected.

“We'll go,” Raymond offered.

But they didn't. They stood there rather awkwardly and in awkward silence till Lee asked Raymond, “Are you American?”

“English.”

“Of course. . . . Are you with your embassy or something?”

“No. Oh, no.”

The emphatic way in which he said this pleased Lee so that for the first time she smiled a little bit.

Now it was Gopi who wanted to go. His natural dignity had reasserted itself and he was anxious to leave a scene where it had suffered such a setback. Lee seemed to sense this for she suddenly turned to him. “I'm sorry if I was rude.”

Gopi was no longer as impressed by apologies as he once had been. Living with Raymond, he realized that these people said sorry very quickly, perhaps even took some pleasure in it so that there was no need to forgive them every time. He ignored Lee and told Raymond, “Come on.”

Lee explained, “I come to these places and I get terribly engrossed.” She glanced rather nervously at Raymond: she was afraid he might be skeptical and put her down as just an intense girl. Of course she
was
intense, but that wasn't all, she liked to think.

“I love tombs of saints best,” she said. “There was one in Madhya Pradesh—it was some saint who was also a poet, I've forgotten the name. It was a very out-of-the-way place, up a rock; terribly difficult to get to, it took me days. But it was worth it. The tomb wasn't much—the roof had fallen in—but there was such a holy atmosphere. I sat there for hours. Oh, I felt good. Not a soul came and it was completely silent except there was a stream somewhere near and of course lots and lots of birds. . . . Whose is that?” she asked, pointing at the small tomb facing them. It was decorated with a few broken blue tiles which glinted in the sun and the names of God were engraved into the stone. There was a wasp's nest hanging inside one arch.

“There's nothing at all in my book,” Raymond said. “I find it frustrating but Gopi doesn't believe in guidebooks anyway.”

“I think you're so right!” Lee said. “Who wants guidebooks? Either a place has good emanations or it doesn't. If you don't have feeling for that, then what's the use of knowing facts? They just blunt you. Don't you think so?” she said, turning round fully to Gopi.

Gopi responded. He liked her manner—her openness toward himself—and he liked what she was saying. She seemed a very different type of person from what he thought Westerners usually were; she certainly seemed very different from Raymond. He pointed at Raymond. “I've told him so often but he doesn't understand. I think he's too materialistic.”

“Are you?” Lee asked Raymond earnestly.

“If Gopi says so.” Raymond was glad to see Gopi relax and get over his hurt feelings; and he always found it amusing to be called materialistic by him.

Lee studied Raymond and said, “Really you look quite sensitive.”

“He is not at all a sensitive person,” Gopi assured her. “He doesn't believe anything except what he sees before his eyes. When I took him to Kutb and told him about the ghost of Adham Khan, he didn't believe.”

“I never said that,” Raymond protested. He had scrupulously refrained from making any comment, hoping to get by; but now he realized that he hadn't.

“You did not say but you thought. You thought it's all nonsense and Gopi is very stupid to believe in these things. But I think you're stupid.” He said to Lee, “He doesn't believe in astrology.”

“So many things come true.”

“Everyone knows it. I can tell you from my own personal experience . . .”

He was now sitting next to Lee on the grave. He had very good feelings toward her. He felt he was making a new friend and he loved new friends. A sensation of peace and human affection came over him. He was very different from the boy who had come to pick her up just a short while ago.

Lee

I had a long talk with Miss Charlotte. She's been in India for thirty years and loved every moment of it. She hasn't always
been in Delhi but has moved all around the country, in Calcutta and Kanpur and Hyderabad and up in Mussourie and some other hill stations. The mission used to have branches in all these places and she was moved from one to the other, wherever she was needed. I asked her which place she liked best but she said the work was the same in all of them. She looked very cheerful when she said that but my heart sank. I thought of the school room and the dispensary and all those people who come there. Especially I thought of their smell. Poor people in India all have it. It isn't that they don't wash but that they don't have the opportunity to wash well, or change their clothes very often; and they all live and sleep crowded together in airless places and this gives them a sort of dank herd-smell. And sick people have a worse smell. Once I asked Miss Charlotte to let me help in the dispensary, give out aspirins and things like that. But I couldn't bear it. All those people asking you to feel lumps in their bodies, and there was one old man with the toothache who opened his mouth wide and took my hand and guided it right inside to shake some blackened old molar that was hurting him.

Miss Charlotte is small and dumpy and wears terrible missionary clothes. Her face is completely round and it shines with happiness, it really shines. She goes to church only on Sundays and then she wears a hat (what a hat). She always says grace before meals but in a sort of businesslike way, the same way I hear her give orders in the kitchen; sort of brisk. I know she says her prayers at night because I've seen her. She was kneeling by the side of her bed in a white cotton nightdress; but it didn't take her long, and then she hopped up on the bed and pushed her nightie up her leg so as to rub ointment into her knee where she suffers from some rheumatic pain.

Well, I had this long talk with her but I couldn't get her really to
say
anything. Oh, she talked plenty but it was all about things I didn't much want to hear about though they were very interesting really: I mean, sort of anecdotes about incurables that had been cured, and cute little foundlings adopted by Swedish
parents, and Christmas Day in Kalimpong with a party for 450 orphans. She also spoke of some other missionary workers. There was one they all admired very much who spent fifty years in India doing marvelous work, though in the end she got very feeble and sick; she was nearly seventy by then. They all tried to get her to retire and go home to England but she kept putting it off, saying next year and then the year after. In the end she never went because she got chronic dysentery and died and was buried in the Christian cemetery at Gorakhpur. When she said that Miss Charlotte's face became absolutely radiant as if it were the most wonderful thing in the world to be buried in Gorakhpur, the fulfillment of every earthly desire anyone could possibly have. But when she spoke about some other workers who had not been able to stand the climate and had had to be sent home, then she spoke in a pitying way and was sorry for them. I asked were there many like that and she answered reluctantly, well quite a few, poor things. Some of them got sick with the heat and others got various diseases of which the most common were jaundice and amebic dysentery. I asked her had she ever had anything like that, and she said oh, yes, but she had always been very lucky and got over them quite quickly and afterward she was sound as a bell. Then she laughed and she
rang
like a bell, a very clear one, and obviously she considers herself a very very lucky person indeed.