A few months ago, I would have been embarrassed to hear her say this. I only smiled this time.
I wondered if she was monitoring changes in my manner. I often made up an excuse when she offered to take me along on her social rounds through the city. I agreed to go with her to a party at Sarah’s house, but then had to feign illness hastily after I came to know that a concert by Anand was scheduled later that evening.
‘You look out of sorts. What’s wrong?’ she often asked as I went up to my room after a long, gloomy evening at the ghats. She was curious about my time in Mussoorie with Catherine: the maharaja, she said, hadn’t mentioned me in his account of our lunch at his hotel. She was especially curious to know about the unscheduled day and night in Kalpi. Was there a hotel there? What kind of room was it? Single or double?
She had, I knew, put somewhat less probing questions to Catherine. Did she suspect something? I couldn’t tell.
But there shortly came Shivratri, when I almost gave myself away.
*
In Benares’s calendar, teeming with festivals, Shivratri occupies a special place. Millions of pilgrims visit the city that day to bathe in the river; and it was to witness their slow exuberant late-afternoon progress through the streets and alleys of the old city that I arranged to meet up with Catherine and Miss West on Dashashvmedh Ghat.
I reached the top of the broad flight of steps a bit before the appointed time. It was, I remember, a day of streaming refulgence, one of those perfect days of March, whose tingly mornings, tenderly azure skies, soft, sun-caressed afternoons and long indigo twilights are the last parting gifts from the gods of spring before they are abruptly deposed in April by the malevolent spirits of the Indian summer. All around me, and in the far distance, swarmed a crowd of pilgrims, with not a patch of uncovered ground to be seen anywhere, pilgrims surging into the main road from all directions, through narrow lanes and maze-like alleys, from between houses leaning into each other; pilgrims holding marigolds and red hibiscuses, brass and steel platters filled with lit diyas and sweets and vermilion powder, pilgrims wearing pink and purple saris, crimson and white turbans, glossy silk and threadbare cotton, pilgrims ochre-robed and naked — ash-smeared, matted-haired Naga sadhus with gleaming tridents, their long penises slackly swinging as they walked towards the ghat — pilgrims everywhere, chanting slogans in praise of Shiva as they went down the steps, past the coconut and flower sellers, the anxious-eyed cows and the fat priests under their tattered straw umbrellas, to the river, throwing rose petals over their heads, up towards where the monkeys balanced on electric poles, quiet and watchful.
It was from this crowd that Miss West suddenly emerged, in sunglasses and straw hat, wearing a pale yellow kurta over blue jeans, her face flushed with excitement.
It wasn’t just the excitement of the surroundings; she had experienced that too many times. She had more stories of Catherine’s friends. Catherine was too protective of her friends to disclose to me anything more than what was strictly mentionable about their misadventures in India. She did confide them in Miss West, however, who thought them both deliciously funny and sad, and wasn’t slow in relating them to me in full detail.
This was the gossipy side of her. A strange fascination shone from her eyes as she quickly ran through a few of the stories, the crowd flowing past noisily all the time.
Claire, the woman with whom I had the argument about Evelyn Waugh, had returned from Orissa full of bitter complaints about young hooligans who accosted her at every street corner with obscene requests. She also had her camera and Swiss Army knife stolen by her honest-seeming host in Ahmedabad. Pierre — Miss West called him, ‘a troubled young seeker’ — found himself awakened in the middle of the night by his French-speaking Tamil host in Pondicherry, and offered his nubile daughter’s virginity as premarital dowry. Deirdre, an unhappily overweight woman Catherine knew through another friend, had unexpectedly got married to a young importer-exporter in Rajasthan; he could not pronounce her name and so called her Didi. And Danielle, an avowed Thervada Buddhist, had got involved with a Tibetan boy while on a ‘meditation retreat’ at Bodh Gaya, but then fled the scene in some panic when the boy began to speak about the wonderful life they would lead together in France.
From where I was, I could see quite far into the distance. Catherine would, I knew, stand out even in the massive crowd, but there was no sign of her anywhere. As Miss West spoke on, I began mechanically noting things: the hastily erected telephone booth, freshly painted, but without its constitutive instrument; the misspellings and malapropisms on the bright little posters for Keo Karpin hair oil on lamp-posts and the vaguely fluttering banners between them; the paunchy constables lathi-cutting a narrow swathe through the crowds for a VVIP visitor.
More minutes ticked past, and I began to grow slightly impatient. The appointed time came and went. Four, four-ten, four-twenty, half past four. The second hand moved with agonizing sluggishness.
I interrupted Miss West to ask her if she knew why Catherine was late. But she didn’t, and she didn’t seem very concerned as she carried on with her stories.
I began to speculate about what had happened to her. Grotesque visions danced before my eyes: a rickshaw accident, mangled metal and rubber, the indifferent bystanders. All the repetitive horrors and trite headlines of the local papers sprang to mind: broad-daylight kidnapping, rape, murder, absconding criminals. Where was she?
At five the crowds were still coming in, and it was with a kind of choking despair that I watched every fresh wave of cheerful unfamiliar faces roll past.
Miss West still hadn’t finished with Danielle’s story. Her abandoned Tibetan lover had followed her to Kathmandu, along with a crudely carved wooden-handled knife, which he pressed against her neck one morning in her hotel room, demanding suitable recompense for the humiliation and ridicule he had suffered in the eyes of his Tibetan compatriots, to whom he had already promised to send Disney T-shirts and levis from Paris. She had to shell out a lot of money before the knife was removed.
Miss West said, ‘Catherine said there is still a scar on the poor girl’s neck. She must be having a hard time explaining it to people in Paris.’
And then in the same breath she said, ‘Look! There she is! There’s our Catherine.’
She was pointing towards the river. Catherine had come by boat, not on foot as originally planned.
I saw her paying the boatman. There was the usual brief argument and then the boatman turned away, satisfied. Catherine now started in our direction.
Disappearing for a while behind the straw umbrellas, the billowing saris, she reappeared in the middle distance, tall, dark, distinctive, springily striding ahead of the returning throng of bathers, who had wet clothes wrapped around their shoulders and forearms, her white sleeveless kurta all shimmering folds and dimples.
She saw us and waved. Closer, closer, across and up the slushy flower-strewn steps, past the dazzle of the brassware stall, and I saw the pale skin aglow on her bare arms, her curly mop of hair gently bouncing behind her head, her mouth half open, as if in expectation of the apologies and explanations that would soon pour out. She came up the stairs in one last energetic spurt and now finally stood before me, panting and excitedly stuttering and gesticulating, and although I tried to listen, I couldn’t, and only kept nodding weakly in response to her flow of words. It seemed as if somebody had switched off the sound, and the whole of the teeming ghat had dissolved in a watery blur.