He came from a middle-class shopkeeping family and had been conventionally educated at a local school and university. His parents had arranged a marriage for him when he reached twenty-one. He hadn’t wanted to get married, but his parents had been attracted by the large dowry that came with the bride. His wife died soon after marriage — he barely knew her, but it was a devastating event for him; it set him thinking about his life and made him question everything he had held to be true. With that growing estrangement from the world he had grown up in, he had begun frequenting temples and ashrams; he had started to read religious texts. Then one day he had left home and travelled with some sadhus to Gangotri, the source of the Ganges. He had wandered around for some months, staying at various ashrams, and then had come to Kalpi. Here, he had lived with the man who was previously the priest at the temple. The man was old and ailing. He had looked after him, and when he died, he had decided to stay on in the village.
Catherine, who hadn’t spoken at all until now, and had been struggling to eat with her fingers, asked me to translate a question for her. She asked: ‘Do you keep in touch with your parents and brothers?’
‘No,’ he said, his handsome face impassive in the light from the lantern. ‘When I left, I left those relationships behind me. I didn’t bring them here. They belong to the past.’
*
It was dark when we returned from the temple, moving slowly, with the aid of Catherine’s torch, down the steep, muddy slope, past sweet whiffs of Rajnigandha. The sky overhead was luminous with stars; the black hillsides, their outlines blended with the sky, were punctuated by the tiny, wan lights of kerosene lanterns; a dog somewhere nearby kept barking; the rope bridge was dark and still against the white glowing water.
Catherine said she wanted to sit by the river for a while. We took the narrow dirt path that led to the water, past scattered boulders and twists of pony excrement, and found a suitable place on one of the huge rocks just above the water. The river was calmer here. I sat next to Catherine, legs dangling over the rock, feeling a fine cold spray on my face.
We sat there for a while, without exchanging a word. I thought of what the sadhu had said about his rejection of the past. It had briefly reawakened a feeling that had come to me earlier in the day, the old, almost religious sense of the Himalayas as a refuge from the futility of life elsewhere. I thought of his earlier life, his grief on his young wife’s death, his wanderings in the mountains.
I could sense Catherine’s thoughts weren’t far away from the sadhu. After sitting silently for some time, I asked her, ‘What did you make of him?’
It seemed as if she had been thinking of him; she instantly replied, without turning her face, ‘He is a weird man.’
‘Why weird?’
She thought for a while and then said, ‘Well, maybe “weird” is not the right word. I don’t know. Not normal, perhaps. .’
She stopped. A few moments later she said, ‘But I liked the serious way you spoke to him and took an interest in his life.’
I said, ‘But it’s an interesting life.’
She immediately spoke up: ‘Not for me, not for me. I find it empty, hollow. There is no love in it. It’s a life without love. What’s interesting about it? Nothing.’
The sudden passion in her voice startled me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing her blue beret, which accentuated the paleness of the skin on her face and sharpened her profile against the night sky as she looked out over the river. Out of nowhere, as though from a forgotten life and world, and so foreign in this setting, the words of Miss West came back to me — how badly she wants to be loved — and I felt a strange sad feeling come over me.
I wasn’t prepared when she abruptly asked me, giving a bizarre turn to the conversation, ‘But have you been in love? Do you know what I mean?’
The question held an implicit challenge. It flustered and abashed me. What could I tell her? I had no ready-made answers; the truth was too complicated and I was shy about revealing it to anyone. I had lived so far away from human contact of the sort Catherine implied. I hadn’t known any women apart from those in my family. Of love and romance, the less regulated but natural order of things, I knew only from books, and I followed other people of my background in suspecting it of being not natural. In the world I had known, romantic love was looked down upon as a kind of sensual derangement that briefly affected insufficiently acculturated or Brahmanized youth, and then left them broken and disillusioned soon afterwards. In this world, men and women were ushered into marriage after their elders had matched horoscopes and convinced each other about their respective social and financial status. Love was supposed to follow marriage, not the other way round; and it mattered little if it didn’t.
Catherine said, ‘You are not saying anything, which means you haven’t.’ She suddenly laughed; it was her full-throated generous laugh. ‘Maybe you want to be like that sadhu back there, no? Is that your real ambition? To be a lifelong celibate? Admit it, come on, come on,’ she said, gently pummelling my back with tiny fists, her beaming face turned towards me.
Her new bantering manner defused the tense awkwardness I was beginning to feel. She mentioned one of her friends, a gay man, who had turned into a monk and then fallen in love with a fellow monk. She told more stories of his later defrocking; she became more and more voluble.
Later, once back in the room — she said she was too cold and wanted to be under a quilt — we lay propped on pillows, unopened books on our chests, looking up at the wooden beams on the ceiling, and desultorily talked late into the night.
It was she who did most of the talking. I listened and occasionally asked questions. She spoke of her life at the university; she spoke of her school friends; she spoke of a great attachment she had formed as an adolescent to a middle-aged man who never became aware of her feelings towards him; she spoke of other unfulfilled loves.
She recalled these with unsettling frankness — unsettling, because I hadn’t ever heard anyone speak of their past in so direct a manner. She spoke of these relationships as something in which she had invested much of herself. In them had existed all the possibilities she thought had been denied by an indifferent, over-intellectualized atmosphere at home. Different men at different times had seemed to offer an escape from the emotional sterility she thought she had grown up with, and time and again she had succumbed, only to find that she had made a mistake. She spoke of men courting her for her beauty alone; she spoke of being constantly misunderstood.
I listened, suddenly entranced, but also sad. I had known next to nothing about Catherine’s past. The officious father, the disapproving mother, that was all I knew. These stories now began to fill in her background, but I wasn’t so held by the plain knowledge they offered about it. The fascination lay elsewhere: it lay in the enormous longing for love Catherine seemed to have, the promise of a lasting fulfilment that shaped her life. That the longing seemed to cause a kind of perpetual discontent only added to its appeal. It made for empathy; it made me see how much Catherine’s struggles resembled my own.
Most of Catherine’s stories, even the happier ones about her university days, looked back to wasted endeavours, to a time irretrievably lost and rendered futile by later events. They suggested a larger continuing failure and drift. But it was something I knew, to a lesser extent, in my own life, existing as I did so very far from the richness of the world as I imagined it, with no means of getting closer. The sense of a life somehow not working out, a life whose true flowering had yet to come, was familiar to me, and it was by this feeling, suddenly renewed, that I felt myself deeply moved — as I had earlier in the evening beside the river, remembering Miss West’s words.