Priya often came with me to Auroville, riding pillion on the moped, her hair frequently flying into my face as she turned her head, one arm draped around my abdomen. There, in a café set in a shaded clearing between thick bamboo groves, we lingered for hours, drinking tea or nibbling at the walnut cake the place specialized in. I listened to Priya as she recounted the plot of The Scapegoat and Rebecca — she was devoted to Daphne du Maurier — in her vivacious sing-song voice, her head childishly drooping leftward, large eyes flickering to take in the fresh arrivals at the café, one hand habitually smoothing her unruly hair.
She often brought her notebook and wrote little haiku poems in it, wetting the tip of the pencil as she ruminated over a word. She never showed the poems to me.
‘You would laugh. Grown-ups are so cruel,’ she said.
I idly wondered about her life on the occasions she spoke about it. The schoolgirlish intimacies with other students, the crushes on male teachers and pop stars, the starry-eyed anticipation of the future — all of this seemed so remote from my own life and so embalmed in innocence.
It rained a lot in Auroville, especially in the afternoons; these monsoon showers, so heavy and furious, were consoling to me as we sat in the café, dry and safe. A light breeze carrying a fresh aroma of moist earth would be the first sign of approaching rain. Then the scattered black clouds would steadily blend into a vast, smooth canopy. A few outsized drops fell randomly at first and were immediately soaked up by the parched red earth. After a few minutes began a firm, regular pattering on the tarpaulin roof of the café’s veranda; the ground in front softened and then in a few seconds was scored with criss-crossing channels of water. Outlined against the dark foliage of mango trees and the brown corrugated-iron roof of the lavatory, the rain was all thick ropes at first and then, as it thinned, delicately fibrous.
Long after the rain stopped there would remain the flushing sounds of overflowing drains, the burble of tiny rivulets busily furrowing the pliant earth and, finally, the steady plop-plop of water sloping down the tarpaulin roof into a rusty Ovaltine tin.
The sun was quick to reappear and soon dried everything. Red dust swirled through the bars of sun below giant ancient banyan trees, and naked bronze-bodied children frolicked noisily in shaded ponds as we returned each sunset to Pondicherry.
As we neared the city, the traffic growing thicker all the time, the clouds on the horizon gloriously crimson and pink, a familiar disquiet would gnaw at me.
Once when the reception woman bluntly shook her head, Priya, who was standing next to me, said, ‘Why does that woman always shake her head when she sees you, and why do you suddenly turn so grim and silent?’
She was alert to my moods now; she had started questioning me about my own life. Her questions were bold and intrusive; they could exasperate me, but I could also sense, and was moved by, the simple curiosity that I thought lay behind them.
I told her nothing on that occasion. I said I hadn’t ever noticed the woman shaking her head at me; I denied being ‘grim and silent’.
I lay awake until late that night, suddenly full of self-recrimination and trying to work up a new resolve.
8
PRIYA WAS SITTING BEHIND ME on the moped, on our way to Mahabalipuram — the last of our excursions together — when I said that I was leaving the next day. I told her I was planning to travel around the country for a few weeks before heading off to Dharamshala to take up my job there.
She didn’t say anything, but I felt her arm wrapped around my abdomen suddenly slacken. She was sullen and withdrawn and dishevelled, her hair tousled after the long windy ride, as I parked the moped and walked down the sandy paths with her to the shore temples.
All through the morning I had known a familiar heaviness of heart: the special feeling before departure, which in this case was mixed up with the ever-present anxiety of not having heard from Catherine, and a sense of the unresolved things I would be travelling with.
I was expecting a day of small quiet distractions at the shore temples. But it was not to be: loudspeakers blaring Tamil film music followed us from temple to temple. Guides holding plastic-sheathed certificates and speaking pidgin Hindi lurked behind every sculpted column. Noisy school tour groups thronged the forecourts, and tourist coaches disgorged squinting Europeans in straw hats who were immediately set upon by a small army of half-naked beggars lying in wait outside temple gates.
After an hour of this, Priya said she was bored. She asked me if she could go for a swim, and when I agreed, the undercurrent of delight that always lay in her voice seemed to return. As we trudged through wildernesses of thick burning sand, she pointed and laughed at the corpulent Russian tourists slumped beneath faded beach umbrellas, the fleshy folds around their torsos glossy with suntan oil; she bantered with the ragged coconut vendors and drug pushers and masseurs that pursued us for a while before giving up.
She finally found a secluded place in a clump of coconut trees, and reappeared in a white swimsuit that set off the swarthy complexion of her thin arms and legs. She dropped her kurta and jeans by my side and then, in a sudden burst of energy, sprinted away, a tangle of brown limbs. She waded and splashed through a timid wavelet and then, with a squeal of girlish delight, dived headlong into a nascent breaker, only to emerge a few seconds later, shaking her head from side to side, wiping away wet sticky hair from her face.
She swam farther out than my half-shut eyes could see in the silver-blue blinding glare. A couple of coconut vendors came over, lingered a few feet away and shot hopeful glances at me. After them there came a long procession of young boys in dhotis, with caste marks on their foreheads, supervised by a short, stocky man in a silk lungi, their cautious steps leaving a trail of footprints on the wet sand. I had seen them filing out of their bus at the temples; they looked incongruous here.
After the boys went back, the beach remained empty. I occasionally saw Priya’s bobbing head in the far distance. From time to time a small breeze blew in from the sea, and when it did, the serrated shadow of a coconut leaf swayed over the unread open page of the book I held in my hand. The sun climbed higher in the hot white sky.
At some point I noticed Priya coming back. She was dripping with water; grains of sand stuck to the soles of her feet. There was a wan shy smile on her face as she collapsed on her stomach beside me.
We lay there silently for some time, the trees behind us swaying and crackling in the breeze, the surf hissing up the gentle slope to the beach and abruptly shimmying back, unveiling a glittering mirror of watery sand.
I had become so used to the silence that it startled me to hear Priya speak.
‘What were you thinking about?’ she said.
I turned to look at her face freckled with tiny drops of water, and she repeated her question, abruptly flicking back curly strips of wet hair from her face. ‘What were you thinking about when I was swimming?’
I quickly lied. ‘Nothing, nothing important,’ I said.
What were you thinking about? From Priya, it was now a recurring question, and it irritated me with the offhand way it unravelled the complicated web of thoughts within my mind.
I could tell her nothing: it would have shocked her to glimpse even a hint of the thoughts and memories set so far away from this flat bright seascape: the white glowing peaks straining defiantly against a star-spangled sky and the damp chill of the room in the rest house at Kalpi, the swaying shadows, the sound of falling water outside, the desultory intimate talk, the long melancholy silences during which I had suddenly realized that Catherine was watching me, an expression of tender expectancy playing around her soft moody eyes and enigmatically smiling mouth.