As she went on, Catherine’s tone grew more and more melancholy; her voice grew softer. She often fell silent and then for long stretches stared at the tall flickering shadows on the ceiling.
It was during those spells of silence that I felt her turn away from the ceiling and look at me with her sad and tentative hazel eyes, her soft curly hair falling over her face and spread across the pillow, gently ticklish where it touched the side of my neck.
It wasn’t a moment I had, or could have, anticipated; but suddenly now, in that cold damp room with the dingy rug and sour smells, the giant shadow of the candle’s flame restlessly licking the walls of the room, the world outside shut doors and windows reduced to a dim murmur of falling water, I wanted that moment of intimacy to stay.
3
LATER THAT NIGHT, during one of her spells of melancholy silence, Catherine reached out and kissed me. I responded, fumbling, but with an avidity that filled Catherine with mirth and left me feeling embarrassed.
It is hard for me to describe the physical aspect of what happened next. It was made memorable only by my incompetence in everything that followed upon Catherine’s first disencumbering kiss: the first nervous explorations, the fumbling with buttons and hooks, the awkward impasses and shameful lonely climaxes.
Even if I could describe it without being meretricious, I would still be false to my memory of the event, which matched at only a very crude level the usual adolescent fantasies I’d had about the savouring of unknown pleasures.
The revelation was of a different order, and in it lay all the sweetness of that moment — the moment I wanted to prolong indefinitely, for it had awakened a part of me I had never known. It came to me later, in a calm moment after the disorder of the physical act, as I lay next to Catherine, listening to her endearments, her declarations of love — the declarations she said she had long wanted to make to me, and which I reciprocated clumsily, making her laugh — watching her face, so tender and beautiful, in the candlelight, the vision reminding me of the first time I saw her, playing the tanpura, sitting very straight on the mat, her face bathed by the golden light from the flickering diyas.
I couldn’t get over the affinity that had so abruptly and spontaneously sprung up between us, this intimate proximity with someone who seemed until a few minutes ago a remote and unsettling stranger. Our nakedness; Catherine’s glowing face, which had never failed to hold me and which was now so close to mine that its features took on an unfamiliar cast; the infantile nature of our conversation; our quick easy laughter over silly things — it all appeared miraculous.
Is this love? Is this love? I kept asking myself, more insistently than in the recent past, when I witnessed it only from a distance, and the part of me that was made uneasy by the unreal quality of it all — listening to Catherine’s words of love for me, which referred to someone other than the person she saw before her — was soon overwhelmed by the part that embraced eagerly the possibility that Catherine had seen things in me I hadn’t, the part that wished to surrender to the mood of the moment, to the new intense emotion it released within me — the emotion which was also a suddenly acute awareness of the great yearning that had lain suppressed within me for a long time.
I wanted the moment to go on for ever; I wished never to let go of its intensity, and the morning, when it came, felt like an unwelcome intrusion.
*
I had stayed awake for a while after Catherine drifted into sleep, her head resting on my shoulder, the shadows from the candle still swaying across the walls and ceiling of the room. I felt restless and exuberant; strange wild thoughts criss-crossed my mind and then faded out of sight. At some point after the candle burned itself out and the room plunged into darkness, I too fell asleep.
I woke up, and the first wakeful moment was suffused with the thrilling memory of the previous night’s events, before being almost immediately assailed by panic.
Catherine was gone. A mess of bedclothes and wrinkled sheets were piled where she had lain the previous night. Where was she?
Then I heard the noise of the tap and the din of water falling into a steel bucket. She was in the bathroom, and between registering this rather too plain fact and the panic of finding her absent from my side, I felt the memories of the night recede.
The room itself looked ordinary, stripped of drama, in the bright glare filtered through the dirty green curtains. Random sunbeams fell on discarded backpacks, untidy bundles of clothes and shoes; there was something monotonous about the even noise of the river.
The tap in the bathroom was turned off. I heard the quick, squelchy sounds made by her flip-flops and then, after a short mysterious spell of silence, the flush toilet with the rusty chain roared and gurgled.
The door opened, and Catherine appeared wrapped in a black towel, her hair wet and glossy, tiny beads of water on her bare shoulders, which were bunched up against the cold. She didn’t turn to look at where I lay, half-propped on my elbow. With short mincing steps, she went up to where her backpack rested against the wall, rummaged for a brief moment through it, brought out first a white T-shirt, then her underclothes, and holding them in a bundle she turned, as I knew she would, towards the bed, where her jeans lay on the floor.
She noticed my gaze. She walked towards me, a small reluctant smile on her face. I smelled the sandalwood soap she had used on her face as she leaned down to plant a quick kiss on my forehead. She withdrew abruptly and untied the towel around her.
Naked, her breasts shaking slightly, she dressed herself, and I, still supine on the bed, couldn’t help but watch: first the underclothes, and then the T-shirt and jeans and the woollen jumper. All this — elastic straps slapped into place, hooks and buttons fastened, zippers zipped — was accomplished with a practised ease and a matter-of-factness that left me oddly flustered, and the exchange of tenderness that I half hoped for as she came into the room began to feel inappropriate.
She bent her torso to one side and began to dry her thick mop of hair.
She said, between the sneezing sounds the towel made, ‘I see. . Indian women. . doing this. . in Benares. . They do. . it really. . well.’
So composed and remote she already seemed, so different from the tender and high-spirited person I had held in my arms. It was peculiarly painful to hear her mention Benares — the larger world that the last few hours of our intimacy had managed to keep at bay and to which we were now going back.
Every time Catherine hit her hair with the towel, a fine spray of water rose from her head and briefly passed through the golden sunbeams crossing the room.
I suddenly remembered something. ‘There is a woman who lives right next to my house in Assi,’ I said. ‘I can never see her face but I hear her drying her hair every morning.’
She didn’t respond. When she stopped and straightened up, her expression was solemn. She was panting slightly; loose strands of hair fell over her eyes.
She said, her voice neutral and low, ‘We must not let Anand know what happened last night. He would not be able to deal with it. It would crush him, and I can’t let that happen. I feel responsible for him. I love him too, you know.’
My thoughts had been far away from Anand; this emphatic reminder of her connection with him — after that already painful reference to Benares — couldn’t have come at a more vulnerable moment. She saw the puzzled hurt on my face. She leaned down to embrace me. I smelled the sandalwood soap; the wet cold hair against my skin made me shiver.