Three Continents (36 page)

“Are you all right? You're sure?” he said—wanting to go but making himself inquire soliticiously. “No headache? You're not sick? Tell me. Rani.” “No no,” she said. “Go and write your birthday speech.” His round face lit up with pleasure: “I've found such a good quote—shall I read it to you?. . . No not now, later,” he answered himself, smiling at her, and at me, “when she's feeling herself again. We have to look after her. Such a precious person,” he said and lifted her hand to his lips, dropping it quite soon; he hurried away, on tiptoe as if in deference to an invalid. I said to her, “Are you sick?” “Sick to death, that's all,” she answered.

She came upstairs that night—I guess I had expected her to—and she sat on the end of our bed and told Crishi what Rupert had warned her about. Obviously it was a great relief to her to tell him; she was like a person laying down a heavy burden for someone else to pick up. He listened to her and was completely calm; in fact, he made out he knew about it and had planned what to do. When she finished, he said “Is that all? Is that what's been bugging you?” She burst into tears; it was as sudden as her outburst with the Rawul had been. She buried her head against Crishi's chest and sobbed—heavy, heavy sobs, of relief more than pain. And Crishi held and comforted her, and at the same time he smiled and shrugged the tiniest little bit at me. It took a long time before she had finished; in fact, she never really quite finished. When he laid her on the bed and put a pillow under her head, her sobs continued intermittently and new tears came trickling from under her closed lids. This continued even after she fell asleep; the passion inside her was inexhaustible.
She slept there alone, for Crishi had gone to sit by the window, and I was squatting on the end of the bed, where I could watch his face in profile. It was lit up only by whatever light came from outside, so that it was mostly in shadow; and this may have accounted for the gloomy, brooding look I saw there, so different from the carefree, sunny aspect of himself he had shown only a moment before.

I
T may have been that night that the decision was taken to begin the next phase of the movement. I tried to remember how it had been when we had passed into the present phase—that is, had come from America to England—but could remember only what a shock it had been to realize that everyone was leaving. Now I lived much more intimately at the center of the movement and was in on the earliest stages of planning. Or was I? Crishi made out that he was working to an absolutely preconceived program and that the decision to begin on the next phase—that is, to go to India—had been taken long before and had absolutely nothing to do with Rupert's warning. Renée, entirely herself again and not in the least like the Renée who had sobbed herself to sleep, also acted as if it were a longstanding decision. She began to be very busy with the arrangements for our departure, and for the consolidation of the English chapter. And by the following day the Rawul too seemed to think that we had been planning all along to leave for India, and that the coming celebration had been intended both as Founder's Day and as a valedictory occasion.

Only the Bari Rani had not anticipated our departure and had made all sorts of plans in England for the coming year. Daisy had started a typing course, and the other two girls were learning I think it was French; the Bari Rani herself was taking lessons in ikebana, and she had also found the most wonderful girl for her hair—no one had ever understood
it so well. All the same, she did not seem displeased by our plans for departure; on the contrary. But she continued to warn me about the Rawul's kingdom of Dhoka—“oh my God, that dump,” is how she referred to it—and advised me to take every kind of necessity, like Tampax and ballpoints; she said you couldn't get one single thing there, except of course for diseases you had never heard of and thought had been wiped out since the Middle Ages.

The kingdom of Dhoka: Up till now I had thought of it as sort of mythical, even though I knew it to be a real place. That was because of the way the Rawul spoke of it. It was his home—the place where his eyes had absorbed the color of the sky; where the gods had come down to be men; the country not only of his own birth but that of all humanity; the cradle of civilization. Well, naturally, hearing all that, anyone would want to go there: but now that we actually were going, I couldn't quite believe it was there and I would see it. And that was how it must have been with the followers who were being left behind—they envied those of us who were going but accepted that they themselves weren't worthy or at any rate ready to go there yet, like people feel themselves not ready for paradise or some such higher sphere. But there was also Renée's view of it—and to her it wasn't a bit mythical but a very definite place, even a place of business like the other ex-royal kingdoms where she had gone for art objects and antiques to smuggle out and sell.

I'm not sure how Crishi saw it. Sometimes he would repeat the story he had told Anna and make it sound like a place of miraculous happenings; but at other times he would look grave and say “I don't know how you're going to cope with it, Harriet—it's so primitive and you're used to such a nice standard of living.” It was no use scanning his face to see if he was serious—he would start out looking very serious but next moment his lips twitched in amusement. I didn't always like it that he should be laughing at me—I was beginning to feel that I should be taken seriously sometimes, treated like an adult the way he treated Renée, like an equal, like a wife. When I said that, he did become serious, even sad; he said “See, you're getting tired of me—you don't laugh at my jokes anymore. I knew it would be like this, and why shouldn't it;
a person like me with such a bad record. And what will happen next June when you come into your money—”

“What will happen?” I took him up, quite annoyed.

“You'll take off; You won't want anything more to do with me. You'll leave me up there in Dhoka without a dime and go back to Propinquity and never even answer my letters. It's going to happen.”

His eyes danced over my face; I knew it was as easy for him to read my thoughts as it was impossible for me to guess his. And on this subject of next June I didn't want him to read my thoughts. I knew what most other people said, and there was a part of me that shared their opinion. This didn't change my feelings for him, but it did make me afraid. I wanted a way to fasten him to me apart from the money and real estate.

Michael was so busy nowadays that we hardly met, and when we did, he didn't seem to see me at all. Michael never really
saw
other people, but with me, even if he didn't physically perceive me—if anyone had asked him does Harriet have long hair or short, he would have had to think about it—all the same, he used to have this inner vision of or communion with me. But now—when his cold sailor's eye fell on me, it was as blank as though he saw nothing. Perhaps that was my imagination. Anyway, I could hardly during those days have expected him to spare much time for me, since he had to both prepare for Founder's Day and wind up our activities here. This included deciding which followers were dispensable—not an easy task, for naturally none of them wanted to be thought dispensable after pouring their devotion and energy into the movement. They had accepted the fact that they would not be accompanying us to India. It had been presented to them as a political decision, but the truth was we couldn't afford their fares, and besides they would be superfluous in India, where there was enough cheap labor already. A skeleton force was to be left behind to keep the movement going—or rather, keep the houses going, for in the same way we had Propinquity and the house on the Island in America, in England there were the Bari Rani's properties and the old guru's house.

I watched Crishi and Michael one evening at home, going
over the list of followers and deciding who was to be part of the caretaking force and who was to be got rid of. They looked like a couple of Roman tribunes—Michael had the list and a pencil, and when Crishi said “No, she won't do,” Michael struck that name off in one firm exterminating stroke. I noticed that the people struck off were the most idealistic ones, all those who were waiting to immolate themselves for the movement, whereas the ones to stay were more hard-headed and practical. That made sense, I suppose, since their job was a practical, caretaking one. Michael was to carry out the task of informing the others that they were no longer wanted. No doubt he was the right person for the job since he would hand down the decision without giving anyone the chance to argue with him. For the people's own sake, I wished it had been Crishi, who would at least have let them say something in their own defense—not that it would have made any difference, but it might have relieved their feelings. Unlike Michael, Crishi would also have gone to the trouble of telling some lie to make them feel better.

Anna was one of the people who was to be let go. She didn't fall into the category of followers, but I can't define where she did fall. A change had come over Anna, and also our perception of her. We were hardly aware of her anymore—there were days when she didn't emerge from the flat, not even to go downstairs, although she was supposed to be taping the Rawul and writing this book about him. She had sometime ago stopped waiting for Crishi or trying to attract our attention, and we tended to forget about her; only Renée sometimes said “Can't you tell her to turn that thing down,” and Crishi would rap on the wall for her to lessen the volume of her TV or cassette player. He went in there only when he wanted to know about the progress she was making on her book. At first she must have taken the trouble to lie to him, but as time went on and no progress was made, he would get very impatient with her and once I heard him say “Then what use are you to us?” She laughed—not bitterly, a matter-of-fact sort of laugh.

What had happened to her? It seemed to be the opposite of what happened to other people caught up in the movement. When I thought of Debbie and other followers, it was
clear to me that, whatever the conditions under which they were living—and in the Earl's Court house they were pretty dreadful—and however hard they had to work for the organization or as personal body servants, they found it more than worthwhile: They found it fulfilling. The same was true of Michael, for whom the movement had become the higher objective he had been seeking all his life. But Anna hadn't been seeking anything. Of course she was older—no one knew how old, for she was the type to keep very quiet about her age, and she could get away with it, for she was petite and in a good light could have passed for young. And Anna had a career, was a successful journalist, whereas everyone else didn't have anything—for instance, Debbie, though a college graduate, took on jobs waiting tables or selling door to door or anything she could get by with: So naturally Debbie was looking for something better, something else. But although all Anna had been looking for was a place to live, she too had got attached to us in the same way—or rather, Crishi had attached her to us. When she had first come to Propinquity, I didn't let myself look too closely at the situation, but it must have been clear to everyone that she was having an affair with Crishi. Probably for Anna any assignment meant a love relationship with someone, it was almost part of the deal for her; everyone knew how she had slept with the Lebanese guerrilla leader who was later executed, and how she had become so involved with a member of a terrorist group that she had become part of their gang for a while. But once her story was finished, so was the affair that went with it, and maybe this was what she had intended to happen with Crishi. He didn't see it that way. For one thing, he needed her as a publicist for the movement; and for another, and I had noticed this with him before, he didn't like to let people go. Once they were involved with him, he felt they had to belong to him; that his brand was on them.

Maybe if she had met him in earlier years, Anna could have passed on from him as easily as from everyone else. She used to take it for granted that she would always be a top journalist, in demand for her in-depth political-plus-human-interest stories. But these magazine stories were being replaced more and more by television profiles; and lately she
had not been picking the right kind of subjects—that is, her instinct for what was central in the public interest was no longer as sure as it had been. She herself said that choosing our movement as a topic was a mistake. “I must have been crazy,” she told me one time. “Who would want to know about a cheap little crank outfit like that?” I wasn't used to hearing the Rawul's movement referred to in those terms, but I put it down to her general disappointment. It couldn't have been pleasant for her to be left to rot in the upstairs flat; or the way Renée did nothing to disguise her contempt for her; and, worst, Crishi's neglect. I had seen him treat her very differently before, doing everything to attach her to us, making her feel wanted for herself and not only because she was writing a book about the Rawul. Now he made no secret that all he wanted out of her was the book, and if she wasn't going to deliver it, she was no use to him. So it happened that when he and Michael came to Anna's name on the list of followers, Crishi negligently waved his hand and Michael crossed it out.

Anna didn't drink or smoke or take anything else to blunt the edge of her very sharp mind, and that made her more aware than people usually are of what happens to them. I mean, most others, and that includes myself, when something bad happens to them and they suffer, they don't so much analyze the causes as tend to blur them. But Anna faced up to the truth absolutely. She said she had been used—by Crishi—and at first she blamed herself more than him, for letting this be done to her. It must have been particularly humiliating for her because she herself had made a career of using people—literally a career, getting them to throw themselves open to her so she could throw them open to her readers. She felt outwitted, and brooded in the way someone who has played a bad game of chess goes back to analyzing the causes of why he lost. It was strange to me, how she could do that when the stakes were herself; but she was a very cool, strong person, not unlike Crishi. She said he had got her at a bad moment, when everything was going wrong for her: but of course, she said, that was just when someone like him did get hold of people, when he knew that they were in need. “Like you and your brother,” she said. I objected to, I denied her view of us, but she laughed at me and said Michael and
I were the neediest people she had ever met. “The young always are,” she said. “They need a future, like the middle-aged need to recover the past that didn't come up to expectations.” But she wanted to talk about herself, not us; she said several times, “He got me wrong,” narrowing her eyes, determined to set him right and show him what she was really like.