We took turns lying down on the narrow berth. Still sleepless, we sat side by side in the end, wordlessly watching the fleeing night through the open windows. Between spells of calm, Catherine cried quietly, and long after the journey I would remember how the dust blowing in through the window marked her wet pale cheeks with dark trails.
*
Morning brought Benares, huddled under a dark canopy of rain clouds; shuttered shops and broken roads and slime-covered drains and defecating men passed our weary eyes. At the railway station truculent coolies bargained with passengers driven to near-hysteria by the simple act of offloading family and luggage. Ragged urchins screeched ‘Chai, chai’ while cracked loudspeakers above droned out details of delayed arrivals and departures. Outside, rickshaw drivers with thin, unshaven, moustachioed faces and blood-red eyes jostled, harangued and taunted arriving visitors.
The world, held at bay for so long, was beginning to filter in, but my own gloom was yet to come.
It had drizzled for a brief while earlier that morning and the sky was still overcast. Muddy water ran down the broken pavements in narrow self-made channels. The streets were littered with tiny soaked slips of paper and rotting vegetables and cow dung, the profound silence cleft only by the slow grind of rickshaw wheels. The houses on both sides looked wretched and dark. Here and there on rickshaw seats lay slumbering bodies in cramped postures.
‘At least,’ Catherine said, as if reading my thoughts, ‘at least we have got another day together.’
She was referring to the fact that Anand was still in Bihar, visiting his parents.
It pleased me to hear that. I was beginning to long for some reassurance of her affection for me. I wanted to be alone with her again, and it was with a thumping heart that I ascended the staircase with the familiar mural of Rama and Sita.
Catherine leaned forward and kissed me lightly as she turned the key to her door. I followed her into the room to encounter, first, a chaos of sitars and tablas and discarded clothes and overflowing ashtrays, and then Anand, spread-eagled lifelessly on the floor — not dead, as I thought in one instant of great alarm, but sleeping.
*
All through the long journey from Kalpi, I had been more conscious of the little time I had alone with Catherine. I had known again and again the sharp, wounding realization that the hours we had between ourselves before we reached Benares were few and dwindling fast. To see Anand now was to be jolted into an awareness of the problems that lay ahead.
I felt a new kind of unease: it was the beginnings of the guilt I had not known until this moment. Watching him as he lay there, appearing so vulnerable and exposed in his deep slumber, was to have a dark, heavy sense of the relationship that now bound me to him.
Even as I stood there, the first moment of shock wearing off, I was surprised to see how adroitly Catherine handled the situation. Such great reserves of calm she drew upon as she woke Anand up and, as he opened his eyes sulkily and squinted at us, began to ask him why he was still in Benares. Had he gone to Bihar at all, or had he returned early?
She went on with her questions. Anand, still lying on the floor, kept wearily staring out of sleep-blurred eyes at her. I began to notice that he looked distinctly unwelclass="underline" his hair was rumpled, he hadn’t shaved for some time, there were dark shadows under his eyes and his mouth had a pinched look.
Catherine finally ended the questioning, but with a request: ‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said, smiling, and then added, a contrived note of weariness in her voice, ‘but could you make us some tea now? We are both exhausted, totally, completely exhausted.’
Anand seemed to have been waiting for that cue; he got up in an access of fresh energy, kissed Catherine on the cheek and started making tea, apologizing all the time for his inaction of previous days.
Later, the tea made and served, he brought out photographs of Catherine’s friends from their time in Benares. Most of them were fairly innocuous: smiling faces in front of temples, ghats and restaurants. It was the photographs taken at Ramnagar, on the sandy beach across the river, that held my attention. In one of them, Anand appeared in a skimpy bathing suit, his thin hairy body exposed, splashing water over the broad sunburned back of an oblivious Jacques. He seemed so different in these pictures, so free and relaxed; Catherine and her friends seemed to have brought out in him such a childlike enthusiasm for life.
I watched the pictures with growing discomfiture. They made me feel guiltier about Anand. I saw Catherine, her face freshly washed and glowing, exclaim and smile over the photos, and felt even worse.
Within minutes she had slipped into her old role with Anand: here, she was strong-willed and purposeful, hard to recognize as the fragile person I had known in the last few hours.
The small room suddenly felt oppressive. I left soon after finishing my tea. Catherine and Anand came to the top of the stairs to see me off. I had noticed Anand scrutinizing my face, frank curiosity in his eyes; he now looked especially closely at me as I said something to Catherine about meeting soon.
Outside, boredom hung heavy over familiar alleys and shops. The day, only just begun, already seemed stale, the white light dull, the river, glimpsed sporadically from the alleys, torpid.
The sadhu with matted hair did not look up as I passed him. Behind him, a boy attempting to ride a bicycle much bigger than he was tipped over and fell; a veiled woman watching him from the roof suddenly broke into laughter. The vegetable vendor kept on monotonously reciting the prices of tomatoes and cabbage.
Back at the house, Mrs Pandey and Shyam looked up from platters of sliced onion, tomatoes and garlic as I came up the stairs, and then hung their heads again. A shiny new padlock glistened on the door to Miss West’s room. The open-air bathroom was without water, and there was no power in my room. Street sounds — snatches of excited talk, the jangle of rickshaw bells — rushed in through the window I opened; dust swirled in the rays of sunshine that struck the floor; dust rested in a thin film over the books on the table; a new cobweb hung from one of the ceiling beams.
On the floor lay a letter from my father, postmarked Pondicherry; Shyam would have slipped it beneath the door. The letter had come registered. Why the importance and urgency? I wondered as I opened the envelope.
Inside, there was a brief precise note in unfamiliar handwriting that said that my father wasn’t well, the old heart problem, and hoped I would come to Pondicherry soon to see him.
I untied my shoes and lay on the bed and imagined my father in Pondicherry, in a whitewashed house along the coast. I thought of leaving Benares, and there came to me immediately the painful thought of being separated from Catherine.
4
SO BEGAN MY LAST DAYS in Benares — days of gnawing restlessness and gloom.
The weather, so beautifully benign, clashed with my mood. Winter was slowly receding, and though the mornings were still misty and chilly, the afternoons were one long stretch of breezeless sunshine. Scarcely a cloud lingered overhead, and the smell of roasted peanuts hung all over Assi and Lanka. The evenings steadily lengthened.
The violence I had witnessed at the university had had ramifications. The student agitators had eventually organized themselves and declared a general strike. More violence had followed while I was away. Police excesses had become the new rallying point for the strike leaders, whose list of demands grew to include the withdrawal of all policemen from the university. A big crackdown by the authorities was now expected; the talk at chai shops was of more instability and violence, and for a few days after I returned to Benares I kept away from the university.