It was as she pottered about the kitchen, blindly reaching out for shelved jars and cups, that I remembered Debbie. Where was she now? I wondered, and sitting in the narrow, dimly lit room, surrounded by the clutter of Mark’s days in Benares, I had a sudden melancholy awareness of the large store of unrecalled and unreflected-on memories I carried within myself.
Mark came in soon after we finished our tea. He looked delighted to see me, and his news came out in a rush.
He said he had recently reached a momentous decision in his life; it was something he had agonized over for years now. He was going back to America. He was going back next year, and planned to settle down with Rekha in California. Yes, the time had come. He loved India deeply, particularly Benares, and it hurt simply to think about leaving it. But it had to be done. It was a now-or-never thing.
I kept waiting for him to move on to Miss West. I didn’t dare ask about her myself, for fear of being confronted with unsettling subjects. It was why I hadn’t had any news of Miss West for a long time. I had written to her from Pondicherry; she had replied with a postcard, one of whose innocuous sentences had leaped out and startled me: it said she was going to Paris for the summer to see some friends, including our mutual ones. I had received the postcard soon after I arrived in Dharamshala, and a sudden attack of dread had made me tear it up. I hadn’t written to her again.
Now, according to Mark, she too had made a ‘momentous’ decision in her life. She was still in Benares, but was planning to leave soon.
Mark said, ‘She has broken off her long-standing relationship with the guy in England. It wasn’t going to work out. It took her twenty-seven years to realize that, and I think she’s pretty devastated by it all, but she’s so English, she wouldn’t let on anything to anyone. All I know is that she has bought a house in East Anglia, somewhere in the country, and plans to live in it for the rest of her life. I’ve been there once; it’s very flat and damp. I can’t imagine why she wants to go there — I mean, she could move to California, or some place less depressing — but I think she has basically given up on the idea of waiting for this guy. She has to go somewhere, and I think she’s leaving Benares and India because it wasn’t going to work out for her. Too many memories, I guess. I guess she wants to be in some place she can call home.’
And now Mark went on to make a long speech. He said, ‘I don’t know if she’ll be happy again. I was talking to my Hindi teacher the other day and he was giving me his usual line about how everyone in the West thinks about nothing except pleasure and happiness. I was trying to make him realize that there is a different kind of pain attached to this kind of life. It comes with adulthood, like hair on your chest, a pain in the gut like the one your father probably had and it’ll stay with you the rest of your life. Maybe drugs and alcohol and art would relieve it for a little while but it always returns. You could win the academic lottery, get tenure or whatever, but even that won’t knock that pain out. And what I was trying to tell him was just this: that it’s a different kind of pain no more and no less than what you see here. People are people all over the world, in America or anywhere else, and they really all want one thing and little else: love, which is really lacking in life as we live it today.’
This monologue — halfway through which I remembered that I had heard similar things from him, turned out to be the prologue to the plans Mark now disclosed to me, plans for, as he put it, ‘feeling and conveying love’, ‘expressing our common humanity’. He had already given up his research on Ayurvedic medicine; he was now also going to give up his interest in Indian classical music. He was going back to work for a rehabilitation centre for AIDS victims in Berkeley. In the time left over from this demanding work, he would serve as a volunteer for an environmental organization.
All this had been arranged by Rekha, he said, turning back to where she was sitting. But, unnoticed by him, she had quietly left the room some time ago. As he turned back towards me, he mumbled something about getting married to her later in the year.
He continued, ‘I find it hard to believe that I was once a fanatical scholar who cared for nothing apart from his work. But Rekha really has given me the courage to face up to my real self and cut through the bullshit. And made me see what I really want. It was so simple. Like everyone else, I also want to love and be loved. Just that.’
And then, looking up at me with clear confident eyes, he grew unexpectedly wild. ‘There is another thing I realize. It’s that we are made of flesh and bone and this flesh is the most important thing we have. You know, you realize after some time what a load of bullshit’ — he raised his arm and pointed towards the jute bookstand, which I had examined when Rekha was in the kitchen: it was full of books published by presses called Shambhala and Tricycle and Wisdom — ‘all these great religions and philosophies are, this thing about solitude and loneliness being good for your spiritual and artistic growth. So you end up starving yourself in every way, waiting and hoping for this truly awesome spiritual jackpot that never comes, and then one day you are down there all alone on Manikarnika Ghat turning to ashes with not a single soul on the fucking planet who feels sorry for you. .’
*
I left Mark’s house feeling a bit disorientated. It was dark outside; I had forgotten to bring my flashlight, and after stumbling once or twice on the cobblestone path, I began to walk very slowly.
Mark’s words were still ringing in my head, and I couldn’t but feel their alienness. I hadn’t heard anyone speak like that for years now; the vocabulary, the concerns, the themes and the passion all came from another world.
As he spoke, I had begun to recall something Miss West had told me: he wants to get home. . insecure. . As he went on, more memories came to me, including one of the conversation I had overheard the evening of Miss West’s party; and I felt that Mark’s words were meant as much for himself as for me. He needed to convince himself through other people’s approbation; he needed to measure himself in other people’s eyes.
It was how I sought to place Mark. But his words, particularly the second part of his monologue, kept coming back to me, and I couldn’t but be aware of the odd resonance they had. There was also something vaguely threatening about them, about the way in which they forced me to reassess my own life.
For years now, I had lived neutrally, on the surface. I had learned to live without the feeling I’d had for all of my childhood and early adulthood, the quiet certainty that had existed over and above the fear and pain of those years, that something good and precious was growing within me. I no longer felt that way, and now that that sense of inner growth had faded, I didn’t have the same self-doubts. I didn’t miss the old intensity of contradictory hopes and fears, the hopeful blind striving I knew in the days I came to live in Benares, which I often felt was leading me nowhere. Instead, I saw its fading away as a good thing. I thought it meant that I had reached the end of a time of bewilderment.
This placid life I had in Dharamshala was severely judged by many people: my father, my colleagues at the school, whose slightly malicious gossip often reached my ears. But it was all I had. I had tried hard to build it up, using all the means at my disposal, and on more optimistic days I could even think that this detached, eventless life wasn’t very far from matching the old Brahmin idea of retreat, from fulfilling those ancestral obligations my father still wrote to me about.
Mark had asked me to visit them again, but I stayed away. I had gone the first time out of curiosity, but now I was fearful — so much so that once, seeing him hunched over a shelf at the bookshop, I turned and quickly ran down the steps, much to the puzzlement of the boy at the counter.