Playing Fields in Winter (23 page)

‘You’ll have to leave,’ Ravi said without moving.

Of course, she knew that. She could not sleep another night in that house, which she had turned upside down. She could not go on sitting with the family at table in the ghastly silence, which now filled the house. But where could she go?

She looked down at Ravi, defeated on the bed. He offered no solution, no comfort. He was sprawled across it,
overwhelmed
by his own misfortune. But then, she did not feel that sorry for him either.

‘Where to?’ she asked.

Ravi made an impatient little movement as though that, for heaven’s sake, were the least of his worries. ‘I’ll get you a train ticket.’

‘I’m not going back to Delhi.’

Her decision surprised her. ‘I’m not just going to be packed off home like a naughty school girl. I’ve hardly seen anything yet.’

‘Haven’t you seen enough?’ Ravi asked and Sarah was suddenly enraged that at that frightful moment, he could be so sarcastic.

‘No, I’ll go to Benares.’ (Their train from Delhi had been eventually bound for Benares. Reading its destination on the station board, she had imagined going there with Ravi.)

‘Varanasi?’ Ravi said.

‘Yes,’ said Sarah, ‘I’ll go to Varanasi. Why should I miss that too?’

Ravi shook his head. ‘Are you sure? On your own? You could go back and stay with Birendra for a bit.’

That decided her. ‘No, I don’t want to stay with Birendra. I want to go to Varanasi. I can cope. I shall go and spend a few days in Varanasi and then … then maybe I’ll go to Khajuraho and have a look at those temples.’

Ravi looked amazed. For a moment, he seemed about to argue with her, to try and persuade her for her own good not to go. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s your decision.’

And losing any remnant of control she had kept, Sarah shrieked, ‘Yes, it is!’

Wildly she tugged her suitcase out from under the bed, roughly pushed aside Ravi’s dangling ankle and started to fling her belongings into it, with tears running down her face.

Of course, afterwards she still had to face his parents. She couldn’t get a train ticket just like that, she couldn’t
evaporate.
They were both grimly correct to her, as though it cost them dear even to look at her. When she finally dared emerge from her bedroom, (‘Look, I don’t care,’ she had said to Ravi, ‘I’ve just got to get some tea,’) the house had at first seemed deserted. Waiting for a howl of fury, she had made her way as far as the kitchen corridor and gingerly coughed. One of the servants, Ila, shot out of the kitchen and gestured wildly at her not to come in. Sarah thought sadly, ‘She thinks I’ll pollute it.’ She said, ‘Chai,’ tea, one of the first Hindi words she had ever learnt, and turned back to her room. As she turned, she caught sight of Shakuntala gaping at her from the other end of the kitchen corridor, but Shakun at once scurried away.

Ila brought them both tea, her face bunched and sorrowful. Sarah remembered long ago Ravi telling her that Ila had wept when he went away to England. She wondered what thoughts were running through Ila’s mind now as she contemplated the end result of that foolish journey. Ravi got up off the bed and washed his face. They drank their tea and discussed what they should do next; Sarah’s hysterically half-packed suitcase lay unavoidably at their feet.

They went to the railway station to fix up her ticket and on the way, Ravi said again, ‘You know, you don’t have to go haring off into the blue. You’re quite sure you don’t want to go back to Delhi? You could always stay at the YWCA.’

But Sarah answered, ‘Sure. Why should I miss Varanasi on top of everything else?’

Ravi looked doubtful. ‘It’s a tricky old city.’

Sarah shrugged. ‘It’s hardly been a bed of roses here.’ Because she had been thinking, in the meantime, that this
was her last chance. If she turned her back on India now and fled home to safety, then she would never really have come face to face with her adventure. Naturally she was scared stiff, but that fear in its way was exciting. While at first she had been reluctant to turn to mosques and temples for lack of Ravi, her surrogate interest had turned to a real one. She found that immersing herself in that brilliance gave her an almost comparable thrill. And anyway, if anything went wrong, then her fate would be a punishment for Ravi.

Ravi said, ‘I wish I could come with you.’

Sarah answered, ‘No you don’t, Ravi. It’s too late to pretend now.’

When they came back to the house, it was already
lunch-time.
Mrs Kaul was setting dishes on the table. At first she pretended not to notice them come in.

‘Sarah’s going to Varanasi tomorrow afternoon,’ Ravi announced unnecessarily loudly. ‘She wants to see the big sights before she leaves India.’

His mother nodded primly, merely acknowledging that she had taken in this piece of information, but still she did not look up at them.

They ate the meal in near silence. Neither Mr Kaul nor Asha was there and naturally Sarah did not dare to ask where they were. She hardly ate anything and, for once, Mrs Kaul did not try to push more food on her. She sighed gustily at intervals through the meal and once or twice pressed her fingers to her suffering temples.

In the afternoon, Ravi and Sarah went out for a walk, walking well apart and not holding hands. They went
automatically
in the opposite direction from the night before, to the ruined Residency in its neo-classical park. There they sat under a tree and, in the end, were surprised by how little they had to say to each other.

‘God, I’ll be glad to get out of this place,’ Ravi said.

His family had never felt at home in Lucknow and, in bad times, they always remembered it. They had come there unwillingly, uprooted by the imperious demands of Mr Kaul’s Government job. They had come determined to resent the stuffy provincial city, a far cry from Delhi where they had been so at home. And they doggedly resented it, even
as children, outnumbered at school by cocky indigenous classmates. Only, in time, involuntary associations had grown up and all of them found themselves occasionally, despite themselves, feeling affectionate towards Lucknow. Eventually they even settled there and knew that when Mr Kaul retired, they would not have the motivation or the energy anymore to return to Delhi. But when things went wrong for them, they still remembered that they had never wanted to come there and they blamed Lucknow for their misfortunes.

Around them a few families strolled through the Residency compound, surveying the smashed arches and columns with a contrived, educational interest.

‘When do you think you’ll be able to get away?’ Sarah asked conversationally.

Ravi shrugged hopelessly. ‘God knows. I suppose I might hear soon if I’ve got that job in Delhi. If not, I shall have to go back and start looking again.’ He hesitated. ‘Let me know when you intend to get back there, won’t you? I’ll try to come up then so that I can see you off.’

Sarah didn’t answer.

‘You’re really going to go trekking off on your own?’ Ravi asked her. ‘Promise me you’ll take care.’

Sarah rounded on him. ‘I don’t know why you’re keeping up this pretence!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s the point?’

They sat a little longer without speaking. Then, finding the silence between them harder to bear sitting still, they got up and started to walk back to the house. Ravi made one or two further attempts to talk on the way, but nothing came of them and by the time they got back to the house, they were both on the verge of tears.

That night Sarah wanted to miss the family dinner. But she realised that staying in her room would only make things worse, if that were possible. She walked into a hostile silence in the dining room and her ‘Hello’ sounded fragile and tinny. Only Mr Kaul replied severely, ‘Good evening, Sarah,’ and Ravi said in an artificially cheery voice, ‘Have you finished packing yet?’

She sat down in her usual place on Mr Kaul’s right, opposite Ravi, and looked down at her plate. Still none of
them said anything and a ripple ran around the table – of revulsion, Sarah thought. She wanted to run away at once, to escape from that solidly united censure. Asha passed her the potato curry and-she insultingly took a ridiculously tiny helping of it so that they should all see what she thought of them. After all, what, for God’s sake, had she done wrong? She did the same with everything else which Asha silently passed her, until Mr Kaul announced stiffly, ‘You’ll need more than that for your journey, Sarah.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she said sullenly.

‘I think none of us are,’ Mr Kaul replied reprovingly, ‘but we are still managing to eat.’

Sarah looked around at the family and the family looked back at her. It was not really true that they were managing to eat: Mrs Kaul certainly hadn’t taken a mouthful and only Ravi was miserably putting food into his mouth for lack of anything better to do. Asha sat huddled and silent; she had a fiercely stony expression as she stared down at her place, but whether she was triumphant or appalled at the disaster she had brought about, Sarah could not tell.

Throughout the meal, very little was said. The atmosphere was painful and everyone got up and scattered as soon as possible when it was over.

Ravi and Sarah went out into the garden. Ravi said to her, ‘That was “The Last Supper”,’ and Sarah giggled sadly. It was their last joke.

Of course it was awful that, in the end, Sarah had to leave so suddenly, so sordidly. There was something horrid, Ravi thought, about the way his parents wanted her packed out of the house straight away, as if she carried some shameful germ. They had been beside themselves at the revelation – quite naïvely, he considered, for surely they must have had some inkling of his relations with Sarah? But he knew it was not the revelation in itself which upset them, so much as its implications: if a child like Asha had found them out, then who else might not have done? Ravi knew that, in his father’s mind, a circle of his office colleagues stood around them at Shah Najaf, looking on in outrage and scandal as his son
disgraced himself. There was A. B. Habibulla, their pompous visitor of the other night, puffing and pontificating; there was ‘Nonesuch’ Nair and there was Major Mehrotra, the father of the charming and sweet-natured girl whom Mr Kaul had still hoped that Ravi would one day marry.

Now that the truth was out, even if so far it had been kept a family secret, what was there to stop other people finding out in any case? The family might keep its mouth shut and expel Sarah like a serpent from its bosom, but once such a superlative piece of scandal became public it would be impossible to suppress it. In a gossipy provincial place like Lucknow, even the ceiling lizards told tales.

In the end, he was genuinely upset to see Sarah go. With her departure the last link with his university days was being severed and he knew that for years to come he would still sometimes miss her. He was sorry that she had decided to go off, so innocent and ill-equipped on her touring. But his life would be, oh so much easier when she had gone.

Even as he watched her pack, even as he took her to the railway station, he could not ignore the treacherous little voice which whispered under his sorrow, telling him that although today might be terrible, ahead of him at last his destiny was clear.

In the morning, after a virtually sleepless night, Sarah put the last few things into her suitcase. The art book with the dog-eared page she pushed down to the bottom, because she was afraid that later on the sight of it might make her cry. She forced down some breakfast and managed to reply quite calmly when Mr Kaul said goodbye to her before leaving for his office. Asha and Shakun had avoided her, skittering off to school as soon as she was up. Mrs Kaul had one of the servants prepare her a picnic for the journey and Ila brought it to her wordlessly as she closed her suitcase. Sarah felt as though her very presence were unhealthy.

Her train left at two o’clock, so she and Ravi set off to the station soon after one. Asha and Shakun were out and only Mrs Kaul stood stiffly on the verandah and watched them go, her face a composition of distrust as if she suspected
that Sarah might still spirit Ravi away and he would never come back.

They did not say very much, even on the way to the station. What was there to say in the face of such an
irredeemable
mess?

Ravi said, ‘Make sure you put your handbag under your head if you go to sleep on the train.’ And, ‘Don’t miss going to Sarnath from Varanasi, will you? It’s supposed to be really interesting.’

Sarah said, ‘I get down at the Cantonment Station, don’t I?’

‘Look, you’re sure the rickshaw men in Varanasi will know where this hotel of yours is?’

They went in silence past the school where they had watched the boys playing football. Nearer the station, they just talked about platforms and tickets. Everything was very rushed once they got there and, in the end, they did not even say goodbye to each other properly because that very morning a letter had arrived to say that Ravi had got the job in the social survey outfit in Delhi after all. So they just agreed that when Sarah’s adventure was over, she would get in touch with him there.

Varanasi Station was no worse than any other station she had been to and the hotel, which Ravi had given her the name of, was no worse than any other hotel. There were plenty of foreign tourists there, which reassured her until she
remembered
that really she ought to be disappointed.

She went down to the Ganges to watch the sun rise on her first morning and saw a sight which made her forget for a good two hours that she no longer had a reason to be there.

The pink disc of the sun moved up over the wide silver river and all along the steps which lined the river bank, people were plunging. They bathed, absorbed in their ritual, and paid no attention to the foreign tourists standing watching them. They held up brass cups of water to the rising sun. As it grew brighter, individual ceremonies emerged from the general washing: a shrunken old woman in widow’s white squatting in the mud, a contorted, emaciated yogi doing
exercises on a stone slab, a powerful matron in an infinite sari wading into the water. They were at one with the spreading morning and as the colours entered the crowded ghats and temples, the bathers too grew livelier and more jubilant.