Then, as it was too uncomfortable to hold me while standing, she slipped into bed next to me and held me tight against her.
She repeated her endearments of last night, her conviction of a lifelong friendship. Soon, we were babbling in the childlike way we had discovered, without, it seemed, any effort on our part. Then, a few fervent kisses later, we were re-enacting the rituals I had learned the previous night.
It was done with only a bit more competence on my part. Catherine joked about it and then, seeing me slightly put out, burst into laughter.
‘You men are all the same,’ she said, laughing, her teeth large and white, dimples on her cheeks. ‘You all worry about these things.’
The thought came to me, with a pang of jealousy, of the men she had spoken of last night, the men who had not worked out for her.
*
But the moment passed; I was eager to fall in with her cheerful mood.
Catherine mimicked the chokidar’s gait as we packed up our things; she spoke excitedly of the journey back through the mountains. As we walked away from the rest-house, weighed down by our backpacks, Catherine stopped abruptly and turned back.
‘One last look,’ she said in a cheerful voice. The sentimental gesture surprised me at first; but it was gratifying to notice her sombre face and sad eyes when she turned towards me.
Later, while waiting for the bus to Hardwar, we sat out on the rock by the river, eyes half-shut against the blinding reflection from the water. So new the world seemed, and everything of value in it present in this moment, when neither the discontentments of the past nor the desires for the future existed, everything touched by the pure happiness I felt — the snowy peaks, glorious in the sun, the rushing river, the rope bridge, the grassy hillsides spangled with dew, the whitewashed temple and the ochre pennant fluttering from the very top of the oak tree.
The sadhu from last night performed his morning rituals a few metres away, a picture of grace as he stood facing the sun, pouring water from a glittering brass jug, his long hair wet, his muscular torso gleaming with oil.
How remote and neutral he appeared to me now, so easily blended into the brilliant morning scene, all the complex of melancholy feelings he had brought on last night defused and almost unrememberable.
He nodded at us as he left. I suddenly noticed Catherine watching him unseeingly, her face a mass of quick conflicting emotions, and she broke down as soon as he had disappeared from sight.
She felt oppressed by the confusion of her life, she said between sobs that shook her entire body, the confusion and the uncertainty. And it was getting worse: there was her attachment to Anand, with all its attendant responsibilities, and now there was a new one, to me, and it had come with its own complications. Instead of detachment, she was getting more and more involved with other people.
Even in the midst of her tears, it was heartening to me to be spoken of as an encumbering attachment. I tried to console her, and after some time, she stopped crying. I brought her water in a plastic cup from the river; she washed her tearstained face and wiped it with my handkerchief. She gave me a quick surreptitious kiss, complimented me on my gallantry. Some of her gloom appeared to recede.
*
But the pattern was set. Her moods kept changing; and by following them as anxiously as I did, I became a prisoner to them. My eyes didn’t stray far from her face. The few moments of pleasure on finding her calm would immediately be cancelled out when she collapsed into a fresh fit of remorse and self-pity.
There were more tears from Catherine on the bus — tears hastily concealed when inquisitive peasant eyes turned in our direction. The landscape so closely observed on the way to Kalpi — the villages teetering from high cliffs, the neat little flowerbeds in dung-paved courtyards of houses along the road, the ancient men with wizened faces smoking hookahs in chai shacks, the primly dressed schoolchildren, the hook-nosed shepherds with white dust on their beards, the clean blue sky overhead and the white mountaintops — all of this now slid past unseen in a blur.
At Hardwar — where we went intending to take a direct train to Benares — a tout at the bus station led us to a dungeon-like guest house in a lane crowded with garishly decorated sweetshops and vegetable stalls. We remained there all day, too exhausted from the bus journey to do much, and drifted in and out of sleep. People came and knocked randomly on the door and then went away. Tinny devotional music blared through the windows and a voice on a nearby loudspeaker kept announcing the numbers of lucky-dip winners.
Between spells of sleep, Catherine broke into fits of weeping. Once again, I tried to console her, but was helpless to do so. Her tears seemed to come from a source unknown to me and often moved me to tears myself; but they were also puzzling and filled me with every kind of fear and insecurity. They created a new physical awkwardness between us: lying close together on a narrow hard cot, under a ceiling fan with broad rusty blades, we didn’t kiss even once.
Hunger finally forced us out of the room, where mosquitoes had begun to collect in busy swarms. We went to a roadside dhaba. Catherine didn’t eat much; calmer now, she talked about her travels in South India, and drank glass after glass of mineral water, fetched by an agile waiter-boy, who sat at the next table when he wasn’t serving us and stared at us unblinkingly.
Afterwards, we walked through the brightly lit alleys and their crowd of pilgrims and cows to the ghat at Har-Ki-Pauri — Hardwar appearing a miniature version of Benares — and sat there watching the evening aarti.
Grey-haired pandits with wrinkled paunches stood before the idols dressed in shiny dolls’ clothes and waved large brass lamps, tracing great golden haloes in the fog of incense smoke. Tonsured young initiates blew hard into conch shells. Down below where we sat, the lights of the ghat glimmered in the blackish river, which, so gracefully serene in Benares, heedlessly rushed on here, cruelly overturning and extinguishing the diyas which devotees had so gingerly set afloat upon it.
Catherine asked me about my father: how did he live by himself in Pondicherry? What did he do all day? She said she was intrigued by the idea of retreat and renunciation. She said she wanted to visit him; she said that parents were often the key to understanding people you cared for.
‘But I am happy,’ she added, with a sudden giggle, ‘that you are not following in your father’s footsteps any more, that you are not a celibate Babaji any more.’
I smiled weakly, to fall in with her mood, but could not but feel the flippant remark as inappropriate, especially the casual reference to my father.
After the aarti ended, little boys with vermilion marks on their forehead went around with collection thalis; they sprinkled holy water on devotees, who warmed their palms and face on the camphor flame and dropped a coin into the thali. A couple of them came towards us. Catherine dropped several coins, and then caressed my face with her warm palms.
Disappointment awaited us at the railway station. There were no sleeper berths available on the train to Benares. My somewhat abject entreaties to a thick-jowled ticket conductor managed to obtain a single berth directly opposite the toilets. But the door to the toilets didn’t close, and a stench of urine and excrement kept wafting out all through the long insomniac night. The train languished interminably at morgue-like platforms strewn with slumbering white-shrouded bodies and then lurched off again, creaking and groaning, into the night. Far-off lights beckoned in the dark, and came nearer and nearer, only to swerve away at the last instant; the train would mourn each such abandonment with a heart-rending wail.