Catherine
THREE
1
THE WORLD IS MAYA, illusion: it was one of the very first things my father told me. But it is a meaningless idea to a child, and the peculiar ordeals of adulthood take you even further away from true comprehension. New deprivations and desires continually open up within you, you keep learning new ways of experiencing pain and happiness, and the idea of illusion, never quite grasped, fades.
The world you find yourself in then becomes the supreme reality: the world you have to go on living in, with or without your private griefs.
I left Pondicherry the next day and travelled around the country for several weeks. I had little money and I travelled cheaply, mostly by bus and train. The plan and itinerary I was hoping to draw up, and had postponed formulating while in Pondicherry, hoping to do it in a calmer state of mind, never came into being. My travels came to be ruled by whim and chance; the map traced by them, if I were to draw it today, would resemble the aimless drifting of one of those sadhus you still find travelling in second-class train compartments, people with gaunt blank faces and depthless eyes fixed on the passing scenery.
In some sense, I travelled everywhere and nowhere. The miles clocked up, and there came a point when I could no longer distinguish between the settlements clattering randomly past my jaded eyes — the overpopulated slums with their tottering houses, fetid alleys and exposed gutters, their cooped-up frustrations and festering violence, their hardened ugliness. The small and big towns where I often spent a sleepless night in a tiny bare hotel room all began to merge together. I would often be kept awake by the varied cacophony emanating from the other rooms, where young men of distinctly criminal appearance drank rum and watched jaunty Hindi musicals.
Something in me longed intensely for unfamiliar sights. But unfamiliarity couldn’t have, and didn’t, last long on the peculiar trails I took. In the weeks that followed my departure from Pondicherry, I came to know all too well the plangent cry of the speeding train in the night; the whine of the overused pneumatic door to an overcrowded waiting room where sleeping bodies lay swaddled in white sheets on the floor. It all came to be very predictable after so many journeys — the heat, the dust, the noise, the anxiety, the fatigue and the cold bucket-bath in a dismal flophouse at the end. Thrown into the chaos of a railway platform I could already anticipate the eerie silence that would descend after the train had gone. A sense of futility hovered above the long hours spent waiting at desolate mice-infested bus stops in the middle of nowhere, over the greasy late suppers among the coloured neon lights and throbbing speakers of all-night dhabas.
And as it turned out, the unfamiliar world I longed for proved to be disturbing in an unsuspected way. It was nowhere more so than in the towns I passed through, that had experienced Hindu — Muslim rioting over the then still standing Babri Masjid. In these places, I couldn’t walk a few yards away from my refuge for the night without encountering some conspicuous trace of recent violence: burned or scorched buildings, charred cars, buses and scooters, upturned carts with missing rubber tyres that, I would read in the papers, had been used as ‘flaming garlands’, looted shops showing the wretched brick behind the now destroyed panelling, shards of broken windows on empty roads and, here and there on the ground, faint grey stains of unwashed blood.
I saw all this — the clumsy brutality, the rage, the dereliction, the damage I had so far read about in the papers — and the great grief I felt was reduced gradually to wordless fear. I kept telling myself as consolation: this isn’t my world, I’ll soon be out of it.
Yet it was hard to deny that something in it matched my own state of mind. I knew I couldn’t get away from it by simply taking the next train out.
*
At this time of pain, and in the numb years that followed, there would often come to me the memory of the boy I had seen near Rajesh’s mother’s house: the boy with the cows whose sad melodious jingling I had heard that vacant afternoon in the mango grove, among the mute trees, the golden dust, the gnarled, humped roots.
The image came to me as if from a recurring dream, and it was always as unexpected during these travels, and had the same effect, as that sudden rent in the wall of rock streaking past train windows which reveals, for one brief second, sheep grazing quietly on a grassy meadow, around a pond whose still surface mirrors the clean blue sky.
The image with its perfect configuration of solitude, contentment and beauty was a kind of balm in those days of exhausting travel; it revived me by throwing me into daydreams of a simplified life and world — the kind of world where children herded cows all morning and returned home late in the afternoon to meals cooked on dung-cake fires.
It was pure fantasy, and I now recognize it as such. But we live by fantasies, and this one did then what, in retrospect, was a necessary thing: it created new hopes in order to offset the destruction of old ones. It diminished, however briefly, the feeling I had known after Pondicherry that I had been contaminated in some profound way. It made bearable my random travels, and made it possible for me to think that I had another chance.
And when that chance came — by luck much sooner than I could have expected — the fantasy not only survived but filled what appeared to me as the large and ominous void of the future.
In Dharamshala, where I arrived at the end of my travels to take up the job Deepa had arranged for me, I found new ways of being that weren’t far from my daydreams of that simple life.
*
Dharamshala was then, and has remained to a great extent, an unambitious little town. Its small population consisted mainly of Tibetans who had arrived in the 1960s as refugees from their homeland, and something of the private and incommunicable melancholy of permanent exile hung over its huddled houses and pinched streets. This effect was deepened when I arrived early one monsoon evening.
Stocky monks with tonsured heads, swirling robes and oddly garish socks scurried in and out of the fog swaddling the mountaintop town in grey vapour. Hollow television voices and pressure-cooker hisses escaped through curtained doors of tiny houses leaning into each other. Open iron-barred windows revealed cramped fluorescent-lit rooms where Tibetan women sat sewing, and in dimly lit shops, ageing men with broad, lined faces sat still and pensive behind jars of sticky sweets. They looked remote and abstracted even while talking to you, and you wondered what memories of lost homelands were decaying behind the piercing sadness of their stoic faces.
Part of my luck lay in finding the right house, and it began the very first night, when I saw a handwritten notice behind the receptionist’s desk at the hotel I was staying in. ‘Vacant,’ it said, ‘a two-bedroom house. Long-term tenants welcome. Contact Uma Devi at Harry’s Restaurant.’
I remember well going next morning to Harry’s Restaurant, and my first glimpse of the house I was to live in. I felt relatively calm that day; it was part of the minor satisfaction of travelling as I did, cheaply and randomly. To arrive at an unknown town after a long, exhausting bus ride; to squat under a vigorously flowing tap; to change into a freshly laundered shirt and pair of trousers and then step out, renewed, into the garish bustle of a bazaar — every one of these minor acts contained a brief but precious moment of well-being.