Three Continents (50 page)

But she waved him away: “It's too late to have secrets in front of her—and especially that sort of secret. We're talking about money,” she told me. “I'm sure you've heard that talked about often enough by these people. It's all they ever think of. All they ever want from anyone.” Ignoring the Rawul's small cry of pain at this utterly unfair accusation, she said to me: “Is that why you're here? Did he call you to get some more out of you?”

I hated her coarse directness as much as he did but made use of it by answering truthfully: “I came to ask him about Michael. . . . I haven't seen him since last night. Since the party.” I looked at the Rawul to see if there was any change of expression at the mention of the party, but there wasn't. I said “Michael hated the party.”

“And he's right,” said the Rawul. “Right from his point of view—and from mine. Don't you think I feel the same way about these things? But alas I have had to learn to bow to necessity.” He literally bowed his head and neck as one submitting to a yoke. “Naturally for a young person it's more difficult. Impossible! Don't I know it? Wasn't I the same at his age? Fire and flame; fire and flame; shooting—whoosh!—up.”

“Don't let him fool you,” Renée said. “He knows very well what's going on.”

“Rani, Rani,” he implored.

“Of course you do! You always do! You're only pretending you don't know about her brother.”

I wasn't sure if she was hitting out at him blindly, or if she really knew of something that might have happened to Michael. I could see she was frantic on her own account and capable of saying anything.

“Ask him!” she cried. “Or his Bari Rani, why don't you ask her—call her, she's listening to every word anyway!” She took a few steps toward the connecting door, ready to fling it open and expose the Bari Rani listening at the keyhole.

The Rawul prevented her: not for his own sake, not for Bari Rani's, but for Renée's, to bring her back to herself. For it was painful to see her in this state. He grasped her hands; he begged her to be calm: “We'll talk about everything,” he promised her. “We'll try to satisfy you in every way. We'll do whatever you say.”

“Just give me my money and let me go! Give me all those thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands you made me get for you!”

“What hundreds of thousands?”

This was Bari Rani, who evidently
had
been listening at the door and now appeared on our side of it. At the sight of her, Renée pulled her hands out of the Rawul's tender grasp and turned toward her. The two women faced each other, and although Bari Rani was by far the smaller, rounder, softer, she appeared the stronger. She said “It's we who've given everything, and without looking for anything in return.”

“And what have I had in return?” said Renée.

“In return for what? You were only carrying on your business. You cared nothing for us-—no she didn't,” she said to the Rawul, who had made a movement to interrupt, “and the only reason she stayed—well, we know what it was.” Bari Rani looked at me and said: “Of course that's all changed now.”

“Nothing has changed,” said Renée. “We're clearing out—this girl too, and he and I. That's what they're afraid of,” she said to me. “That you'll leave. The same way they were afraid with Michael.”

Bari Rani came between us; she said “Don't listen to her rubbish and lies.”

Renée ignored her and went on talking to me: “Wasn't he getting wise to them?” she said. “Wasn't he planning to leave—and before his twenty-first birthday?”

I said to Bari Rani: “What happened last night?” When she didn't answer but stood there not looking at me, I said it again and louder.

“Nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing worth mentioning—a little scuffle between the young men—”

“What happened!” I cried to the Rawul.

“He doesn't know!” cried Bari Rani. “He was inside the tent with his guests.”

“Then what happened outside?”

“You saw yourself what a state Michael was in. He was ready to pick a quarrel even with me—of course I knew he was not well, I was concerned only for him, not for myself. But between young men it's different—they're hotheaded and ready to flare up at a word—”

“Was there something between the Bhais and Michael?”

“I don't know—after all, I did have three hundred guests to see to—I couldn't take care of everything that went on last night.”

“She's lying,” said Renée. “She's lying to both of us.”

“Where is he?” I said to Bari Rani. But I knew I could get nothing from her; she would continue to plead ignorance for herself and the Rawul. I turned to him—I felt that if he knew something he would tell me—but was met by his visionary eyes looking back at me out of his baby-plump face. I ran out of the room. All I cared about was to find Michael.

In the street, I jumped into one of those bone-shaking auto rickshaws and had myself driven over the pontoon bridge to the new colony where the Bhais lived. We were stuck on the bridge for a while, together with a host of cycles and a bullock cart loaded with cauliflowers that kept rolling off. It was hot, the season had changed, we had got into the Delhi summer, and its heat and dust blew through the open rickshaw in which I sat. There was no cooling water under the bridge, for the river was in its dry stage and had contracted to a few wet patches seeping into acres of mud flats from which flies arose. I waved them off me absently—my thoughts were elsewhere—I was thinking of where Michael could be, and
where Crishi was, and I was hoping I would find them together. In fact, by this time I was expecting them to be together, and that I would find them at the Bhais' house. And I thought, I must keep them together, reconcile whatever small differences there were between them; for it was unthinkable—unbearable—that the two people closest and dearest to me, the two tenants of my heart, should not be at peace with each other.

When I reached the Bhais' house, it was empty. They had moved out, leaving nothing whatsoever behind—not even a beer bottle or one of their film magazines. There was absolutely nothing and the doors were wide open from the front to the back of the house. Even their cooking grate was empty. Except for a little pile of ash, they had taken away the last piece of coal, but the ash was still warm. From the workshop next door there was the usual noise of people shouting to each other and machines whirring and a dog barking, but the house was completely silent and deserted, with no breeze to stir the desert dust, which had already begun to settle on the floors and window ledges.

I returned to the main road and found another auto rickshaw, which took me back over the pontoon bridge and into the bazaar streets near the railway station. Here it was even hotter, for the dense city streets had stored up the day's heat, along with the smells that had accumulated m the gutters and from the day-old produce of the vegetable and meat stalls. When I arrived at the hotel where the European followers stayed, I had braced myself to hear that they too had left; but the hotel clerk, smoking foreign cigarettes and with his feet on the counter, only told me that they were out. “What, all of them?” I asked. He said someone might be in and shouted to the hotel boy to go and see, but though he called him some bad names, the boy did not appear. He told me to go up myself and came around from the desk to watch me walk upstairs. When I knocked and got no answer, he encouraged me to go in. I did, and found Paul alone. There were as many of those string cots people sleep on as the room would hold, as well as everyone's baggage and bedrolls, leaving no space on the floor. Paul was lying on one of the string cots, the one right under the fan, and to get to him I had to
crawl across several other beds. He was sleeping but opened his eyes when I leaned over him. He said he had a fever.

He was certainly very hot, and eagerly drank the water I gave him out of the mud jar. When he had finished and I had tried to make him a bit more comfortable by settling his pillow and straightening the dirty sheet on which he lay, I asked him if he had seen Crishi or Michael. Maybe he didn't hear me; maybe his mind was wandering with the fever. Another possibility was that he didn't want to hear me. He took advantage of his weakened state to lie back with his eyes shut and ramble on about his own thoughts. He said this was the hotel in which they had first met Michael—the same blue distempered walls, he said, waving at them, except that they were more flaking and stained and scrawled with messages and phone numbers. After all, many, many travelers must have been here in the two years that had passed (only two years!). Paul remembered Michael distinctly, the way he had been. Michael had lived in a room of his own on the floor underneath this one; he didn't join them upstairs very often but kept mostly to himself. Paul had envied him—Michael came and went where he pleased and did what he pleased; he wasn't bound by anyone. Paul himself had been that way once upon a time—it was why he had come here in the first place: to get away, from home, from his family, from himself, his own personality as it had been formed by these outward circumstances; not to be bound by anything. But by the time he had met Michael, he had been more bound by circumstances than he would have ever thought possible. They all were, all the group around Crishi. Some of them, like Paul himself, had been in jail and, expelled as undesirable, were waiting for new travel documents; these documents were being got for them by Crishi, and it was he who was paying their bills in the hotel and doling out money to them. It wasn't only that they were materially dependent on him—most of them couldn't live any longer without him telling them what to do and arranging everything for them; and with some of them it was even worse—they needed him emotionally—like the German girl Ursula, who had been pregnant by someone or other, and when she couldn't get into Crishi's room, she had slept on the stairs outside it.

But Michael had been completely free. He might sit in their room with them and accept some hashish, but if he didn't care for the atmosphere—if it got too tense for him, or someone went berserk from having taken too much—he left them and went off on his own. Sometimes Paul sat at the window to look out for him; it gave him pleasure to see Michael walking down the street by himself. It was a very crowded street full of tourist hotels and the eating stalls catering to them, with homeless animals as well as some people hanging around for something to be thrown to them; and there were also stalls selling garlands and incense and offerings of candy to be taken into the Hindu temple opposite. For the sake of coolness and convenience, Michael was dressed like everyone else in muslin
kurta
and pajamas; but he walked there apart and alone, as if nothing and no one could touch him. And somehow people were careful to walk around him, and even when someone in a great hurry bumped against him, Michael went on undisturbed—gaunt, fair, self-sufficient, with his light eyes fixed on some far horizon

“Do you know where he is?” I interrupted Paul. “Have you seen him since last night?”

“Why are you crying?”

I hadn't realized I was, but now I brushed the tears away. I was angry with myself, and with Paul, for saying all that and bringing up Michael as he used to be. I had to get going, I had to find out where Michael was—and Crishi—instead of sitting here listening to Paul. But he hadn't finished yet.

“I'm going to be like him, you watch,” he said. “Just let me have my papers and get out of here—I know a girl, Monica, she lives on a farm in Yorkshire; it's not much of a farm but it's near a river where you can swim and there's masses of yellow flowers growing on the bank. She says I can stay with her, she wants me there. Just let him get me my papers and my fare home. That's all I want from him.”

“But where is he? Can't you tell me? Hasn't he been here?”

“Oh he's been here all right—I said have you got my passport—he hadn't but he said he was getting it, soon, tonight, not to worry, he said. Not to worry: how many thousands of times I've heard that from him. And then he said, If Harriet comes here—”

“Yes yes, what?”

“Tell her Michael's okay. He was here too.”

“Who, Michael?”

“Yes they brought him here. Carried him in and put him on the bed there. That doctor came—the little Bengali, the same one they brought for the German girl after she took the pills—he fixed him up and then they took him away.”

“Away where? Where, Paul? Can't you tell me any more?
Paul
?”

“I suppose the Bhais' house.”

Here the bells started ringing from the Hindu temple, completely filling the room the way Michael had once described to me. Michael had said that it was a very loud sound and got even louder when the devotees started singing, as if trying to outshout the bells and vie with them in fervor. This was happening now.

“He was as white as a sheet, but he was always pale, wasn't he? It used to strike me, that very white skin of his. A bit unnatural I thought it was.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“He didn't speak to anyone. I think he was unconscious. They said it was only a flesh wound. Not to worry, they said. Not to worry,” he repeated, twisting his face.

I asked him question after question—I begged him to tell me every detail he could remember, but they were few. Michael had been carried in by Crishi and some Bhais, the doctor came, then they carried him out again: probably to the Bhais' house. “Harriet,” he said, “if you see Crishi, tell him I'm waiting. Tell him he promised me for tonight. . . Oh don't carry on, Harriet. I wish I hadn't told you. These things happen all the time. It's those damn Bhais—they're just animals, and they have these knives they can't wait to get out. I've told Michael before, he shouldn't be carrying his dumb Swiss army knife—it only makes them mad to think someone might get at them first. Give me some more water before you go, and don't forget to tell Crishi about tonight. Go to the Bhais' house, that's where they are, I bet you.”