I’ll write again soon and send you an address once we have one.
A long kiss,
Catherine
*
I had read the letter for the first time on the train to Madras, Benares sliding past the window. I had read it in a hurried disconnected way, jumping from middle to end and back, and I had raised my wet eyes to meet the unblinking stares of the colonel and his family. I had read it several times since then, waiting for the bus to Pondicherry at Madras bus station, in the jolting bus to Pondicherry, in the taxi to my dark, curtained room at the hotel, and the growing exhilaration I felt then had tinged everything on my journey — the night light in its rattling cage as well as the colonel’s daughter reading her Archie comics on the train to Madras; the pinpoints of yellow light in the dark night outside the window; the bright paddy fields and coastal mountains in the morning; the bustle of Madras bus station; the muddy country road through dense coconut groves to Pondicherry; the schoolchildren in neat uniforms at village stops — with the kind of all-suffusing private joy that could redeem even the grimy interiors and surly waiters of the South Indian café where I usually had lunch.
In recent days, I had come to read the letter more carefully, pausing over each word and sentence, turning them over, examining them for deeper sentiment and larger implications. I paused longest at the last sentence: I’ll write again soon and send you an address once we have one.
Such promise lay in those words, and it was why I felt so keenly the stab of disappointment every afternoon. I had gone to the local post office and inquired about the time it took for letters between France and Pondicherry. By my calculations, Catherine would have written by now, but the days slipped past and no letter came. She was supposed to have left for France six days after my own departure from Benares; I had more than once imagined her — Anand always absent from these mental pictures that came to me from films and books — at the airport in Delhi, where I had been once as a child, the brightly lit chaos of the terminal pressing on her from all sides, counters with Closed signs over them, empty telephone booths, shabbily dressed tourists squatting on luggage trolleys, forlorn bales of merchandise and anxious-looking Sikhs travelling to a better life in the West. I imagined the take-off into darkness, the brisk solicitude of remote, self-possessed air hostesses, the long stupor of stopovers and duty-free shops and then the arrival next morning in another world. I wondered if her parents came to the airport to meet her. What were her thoughts during the moment of arrival? What kind of house did she spend her first night in? Why hadn’t she written?
I imagined her letter as answering all these questions. I imagined it full of memories of our time together, of the kind of heartening messages I had found in the letter she had handed me in Benares, the few handwritten words on paper that had possessed such power as to cancel out the days of disquieting doubts and gloom I knew in Benares after my return from Kalpi. I no longer thought of those days, and the separation from Catherine felt less painful when I set it against the hopes for the future I now had, a future in which a quick and lasting reunion seemed a possibility.
There was no doubt in my mind that something of great significance had occurred in my life, and I was filled with a sense of wonder again at how the vague longings and expectations of childhood and adolescence had crystallized into a clear, sharp feeling for someone who was a stranger to me in so many ways, a foreigner I wouldn’t ever have known had I not gone to Benares. I had a growing conviction that I had all along been marked in some mysterious way, that after the dull, pointless years of drift, the long years of childhood and adolescence, the time during which I had increasingly felt myself homeless and unprotected and lost, I had been predestined for the moment when I met Catherine — the encounter in which some of the richness of life and the world were revealed to me.
I felt blessed and fortunate, and the desire to share this private certainty often came over me. But whom could I have shared it with? No one I knew could have followed me in my new life. Nevertheless, the desire to give it some public form made me start a letter. I had already written to Miss West, describing my days in Pondicherry and returning her the money I had borrowed for the rail ticket. I now began a letter to Catherine.
I wrote with some awkwardness; the peculiar vocabulary of intimacy that Catherine possessed so naturally and employed so fluently felt heavy in my hands. I wrote several drafts and threw away all of them. In the end I decided to wait for her own letter before writing about more personal things, and instead described Pondicherry’s French colonial connections at some length.
I also wrote about my father. She had been curious about him, and my own curiosity about him — which had not been aroused before when all I knew was the world he had brought me into, where he was an aloof, reticent parent — was provoked by his proximity to Deepa, who was rarely away from him. He turned to her very often for advice and support; he listened with great care to everything she said, his slightly droopy eyes alert and apprehensive. I remembered him as an aloof and self-contained father and husband. The softness in his manner when Deepa was around was odd and disconcerting.
He had changed considerably in the last year. I hadn’t forgotten what he told me soon after my mother died, one evening on the ghats in Benares. Freedom from all bonds was what he had desired: this harsh ascetic resolve had brought him to Pondicherry. The intimacy with Deepa now made me wonder about the life he had shared with my mother, the deprivations he had come to know in it, the special needs which Deepa appeared to fulfil.
Deepa herself was aware of this. She often dropped hints about her dissatisfaction with the way my father had led his life so far. These remarks, and the proprietory claim they appeared to make on my father, made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to respond. Hopeful thoughts of Catherine would usually banish the anxieties I felt about my father.
*
The days drifted past, and I began to feel a bit bored and restless. The hotel didn’t cost much and food in Pondicherry was cheap. But there was little reason to stay on. The heat, for one, was an extremely discouraging factor. All that had once struck me as somewhat interesting for its newness — the dazzling sea, the blinding white light, the geometrically straight boulevards stretching emptily into a trembling haze, the high grey walls of secluded houses and their knife-edged shadows — all that now seemed stale, and as I awakened every morning to the curtains fading slowly in the harsh light from the sea, I told myself: let Catherine’s letter arrive today, and I’ll pack my bags and leave tomorrow.