Playing Fields in Winter (20 page)

Soon they were summoned indoors to an immense buffet spread. A whole side room had been lined with huge tables of elaborate dishes. Ravi and Birendra helped themselves eagerly and Sarah, overcoming momentary misgivings at the sight of so many unfamiliar dishes, followed suit. Some lesser female relatives, Ravi explained, had been instructed to help
the guests and to make sure that everyone had plenty to eat. With heaped plates, they went back out into the garden where they joined a largish group sitting on rugs on the lawn around one of the dignitaries. As she ate, Sarah did her best to follow the puzzling conversation.

In the middle of the meal, Ravi’s uncle came up to their group. He was making the rounds of his guests spread over the lawn, stopping for a few minutes with each group.

He stood over them beaming and nodding, joined his hands in greeting to the dignitary and nodded benignly at everyone else. To each of them he spoke a few words, smiled, implied how pleased he was to welcome them in his home. Before he moved on, Sarah was introduced to him and he paused, his face expressing benevolence and concern for her welfare as he said, ‘I hope our Ravi and Birendra are looking after you?’ At the mention of Oxford, he asked her
knowledgeably
which School she had taken and when she said English, he nodded again wisely as if that was only to be expected. Delighted to find him so well-informed about her background, Sarah would have begun to talk enthusiastically about favourite authors and works, but his eyes were already moving beyond her and on to his next guest.

She was left with the impression of someone soft and infinitely accommodating but whom, perhaps because of his bulk, it would be impossible to move.

Later on, she slipped inside to go to the lavatory and as she sat there, enjoying the calm of the big vaulted cloakroom, she thought what a terrible pity it was that they were not staying there after all; everything would have been so much nicer, so much closer to the adventure she had imagined.

Before they left, the three of them went up to the uncle to say goodbye. He asked Ravi when he would be going home to his parents and when he heard it was so soon, exclaimed, ‘Well listen, young man, next time you just must stay here with us, do you hear?’ He turned to Sarah and asked her kindly what her plans were. She laughed and
answered
, ‘Oh, I’m going to Lucknow too.’

The uncle paused and for a second seemed to look at her more attentively than he had all evening. ‘Are you?’ he said. Then he turned to Ravi and gave him a searching stare.

Two days later, they caught a train to Lucknow. Sarah thought she was quite an old hand by then. She knew what to expect when they entered the railway station and steeled herself. But even so, stations always shocked her; there were whole families apparently camping on the platforms and unclaimed children working their way through the crowds. It seemed incredible that out of such a commotion she and Ravi should eventually find themselves in the right carriage of the right train, even if there were so many other people jostling and shrieking and squabbling in there too that she really did wonder how they could all reach their destination without a riot breaking out. It was dreadfully hot to begin with and until the train got going, creating a feeble breeze which brought in the ubiquitous dust, Sarah worried about how she would cope with the ten hours ahead.

Ravi began the journey in a filthy mood. He was going home without a firm offer of a job, only a hazy promise – of which he did not hold high hopes – of a position in a new social survey outfit, which would not be decided on for a couple of months yet. That he was going home was bad enough, but with no prospect of getting away for good and with the humiliating admission that he had so far failed to find a post, it was unbearable. Sarah was really the last straw. Since she had blurted out to his uncle that she was coming to Lucknow with him, Ravi had found himself becoming increasingly irritated by her. Time and again, she proved that she simply had no grasp of the realities of Indian life. Despite all the overwhelming daily evidence to the contrary, she persisted in hanging on to her stubborn little idea that somehow or other she could fit in here. Whereas in truth she stuck out like a sore thumb. In the long run, it exasperated him. Now she was sitting beside him, suffering nobly in the heat and the cramped space – as though millions of people did not put up with that as normality every day of their lives – and cultivating an expression of glazed affection for the people around hen That, Ravi thought, annoyed him most of all: the sentimental fondness she tried to show for Indian types for whom he had no time. It was insulting; it was as
though she imagined that they must somehow be dear to him, whereas in fact they left him cold. He wondered how she would have reacted to a parallel, in which he romanticised the sturdy shopkeepers and doughy college servants of Oxford. How was it that she could not see the unbridgeable boundaries which separated them? He had thought that a week in India would open her eyes
.
Up to the last minute, he had hoped that she would see sense beforehand and not come with him to Lucknow. But his family would open her eyes for her, soon enough. And at the thought of his family and the scenes ahead, his bowels constricted.

They sat side by side on the wooden seat and although they did not talk to each other much, they were united by the stares surrounding them. Sarah was the only foreigner in the carriage and fair game to while away the tedium of travelling. An hour or so into the journey, an old man opposite them, a self-elected spokesman for the passengers nearby, started to question Ravi about Sarah. After a while, Ravi said rather rudely, ‘Ask her yourself!’ So the old man cleared his throat and in quaintly archaic English, put the same questions to Sarah all over again. Although this annoyed Ravi, at least it saved him the effort of answering and he sat back rather sullenly and stared out of the window, lulled by the
mechanical
banality of the old man’s questions and Sarah’s
well-meaning
answers.

When Sarah could stand it no more, she turned to him and whispered, ‘Help me out, you lazy so-and-so.’

‘Get out your book,’ Ravi answered.

‘Oh, but Ravi, that’s such a put-down. Why are you in such a bad mood?’

‘I’m not. Look Sarah, you create your own problems, then you protest and make an outcry. It’s like the Lodi Gardens all over again. You encouraged him.’

‘I did
not
!
I was just polite, that’s all. What am I supposed to do? Confront them all with a stony stare?’

‘We might get a bit of peace and quiet if you did.’

‘Oh Ravi, you’re being a pig.’

During this exchange, the old man had been painstakingly
translating his conversation with Sarah for the benefit of the passengers who did not speak English. Now he had finished and leaned forward again, waiting with new questions from the others. Continuing their argument became a way of shutting out the rest of the carriage.

‘I don’t mean to be. I’m just getting fed up with you landing in sticky situations all of your own making and then turning to me, wide-eyed, for help. You’re not as naïve as you pretend to be.’

‘Yes, I am!’

‘Well then, you won’t have an easy time in India.’

‘I’m not
having
an easy time in India! I’m having a bloody difficult time in India and you don’t lift a finger to help me. Or is
that
a sticky situation all of my own making too?’

‘Hah!’

‘Oh God, you’re the
end
!’

‘Sarah, we’re not going to have a row in a railway carriage.’

‘Why not? We’ve had one just about everywhere else.’

‘Gosh, you can be so childish.’

‘And you’re such a despicable conformist!’

‘Attention please,’ the old man interrupted. ‘Ahem! Your attention, please. This old lady on my left wishes to ask you one very foolish question. Is your mother white-haired?’

‘Just a minute,’ Sarah said. ‘Just a minute.’

‘A conformist?’ Ravi repeated in genuine surprise. ‘That’s a new one.’

‘Yes,’ Sarah repeated bitterly, ‘a bloody weak-willed conformist. You care so much about what people think, don’t you? You just don’t dare defy them. All the things you blamed on India aren’t India at all; they’re you!’

‘I see,’ Ravi said coldly. ‘You mean it’s my fault that this is such an impossible country and that you’re not having a nice time here? Is that it? Well, if you remember, I did warn you.’

‘Yes, you warned me,’ Sarah burst out, ‘but you didn’t tell me that that was how you
wanted
it, that you didn’t actually
want
to fight against it, that you were quite happy to be part of this … this travesty.’

‘Let’s go and stand in the corridor,’ Ravi said. ‘I don’t want to make a spectacle of myself, even if you do.’

They squeezed outside. The pink plain slid past them in the late afternoon sun, pockmarked by the occasional village, a pustule of huts. They stood at the open window and observed a moment of truce. Sarah looked so miserable, staring out at the foreign landscape, that Ravi briefly put his hand on her shoulder. She did not shake him off.

‘Why didn’t you tell your aunt and uncle who I was?’ she asked after a while. ‘Would they really have been that upset?’

Ravi withdrew his hand. He looked out too onto the late afternoon landscape, bathed in the peaceful coral light of exhaustion, and his expression was remarkably similar to Sarah’s. ‘In a word, yes.’

‘But
why
?’
Sarah asked. ‘Why? I mean surely they’re perfectly on the ball and they realise that things like this go on? And anyway, would it really matter? I mean, basically – so what if they get upset?’

Ravi went on staring out of the window. So many things were going wrong; it was hard to separate Sarah from the general mass of difficulties. He resented that she had come now, bringing her extra intractable problem, when it was more than he could do to stay afloat here on his own.

‘Sarah,’ he said, and he sounded very tired, ‘you knew when you came here that it couldn’t be a long-term thing, didn’t you? We’d had it all out. You knew we wouldn’t be able to carry on here like we did in England, so it’s totally ridiculous of you to keep on insisting.’

Sarah rounded on him. ‘I knew it wouldn’t be easy,’ she retorted. ‘I knew I would have to fight, but I didn’t know you wouldn’t make any effort at all. I didn’t know you were such a stick-in-the-mud!’

The word aroused him; it was so quaintly incongruous in that dusty train, spat against the tired orange landscape. He knew then that Sarah would never free herself from the legacy of the playing fields, that she would judge every country she encountered by the rules of her own checker-board country. And he laughed. He did not mean to be callous – he laughed in recognition of his helplessness, as much as anything. It was as if Sarah had flourished a hockey stick at him and that was the girl he had first loved: Sarah Livingstone at her best. He would have liked to hug her, to show her what he felt,
but his laugh had hurt her too much. She laid her forehead on the window ledge and quietly began to cry.

Later, they did talk more affectionately. In the evening they unwrapped their picnic supper and made fun of
Birendra’s
mammoth scale of provisions. They were unusually polite to each other, offered each other the chapatis and the pickles; the confrontation in the corridor had shaken them profoundly. Afterwards they sat in silence, while opposite them the old man read aloud from his newspaper to a group of attentive passengers. They watched him and smiled. Everyone in their carriage was relaxed and cheery and
eventually
someone started to sing.

Sarah sat looking out of the window at the huge, unbroken night. The dark was soft and total. She breathed in the sugary smell of bidis and shut her eyes. For a while she imagined that she was by herself on the train, travelling alone through a quite different adventure, and she admired herself for her courage. The country around her was weird and wonderful and with her eyes closed, she began to enjoy it independently of Ravi for the first time. She fell asleep in a benign trance, but woke soon afterwards when the train stopped at a small station. She woke several times during the night, once to see a long naked foot dangling down in front of her face from the bunk above. It was unexpectedly cold in the carriage and the last time she woke up, she was glad to see that the sky was paler because the wretched night was nearly over.

Maybe if she had not come down with a tummy bug the very day she arrived at Ravi’s home, everything might have worked out. Maybe if she had been more on the ball at the beginning, more receptive, she could have sensed what was going wrong and retrieved the failing situation. But as it was, Sarah’s introduction to the family was a write-off.

She had begun to feel queasy on the train, but had put it down at first to the bad night and the motion. They arrived at Lucknow early in the morning. She told Ravi that she felt sick as they got their luggage together, but not surprisingly he must have thought she meant with nerves, because he
answered her brusquely, ‘Don’t worry! I doubt if there’ll be anyone there to meet us.’

Since he had not let his family know when they were coming, it seemed unreasonable to suppose that anyone could be there. But all the same he seemed to look around
expectantly
– or was it apprehensively? – as they got off the train and, in fact, between the train and the exit from the station they did run into two people whom he knew. Considering the size of Lucknow, that seemed extraordinary to Sarah, but Ravi and his two acquaintances appeared to take it for granted, exchanging enthusiastic but not astonished greetings and clapping one another on the back. The second one turned out to be a friend of the family, who had arrived by first class off the same train and was being met by a car. He offered to drive them home. Not terribly enthusiastically, Sarah thought, Ravi accepted, the man’s persuasion being hearty and forceful. He and Sarah sat together in the back of the car while the man himself climbed in beside the driver and turned round over the front seat so as to carry on talking to them on the way. He and Ravi had an animated
conversation,
mixing Hindi and English, but Sarah, sitting in the corner and fighting her rising nausea, did not take in a lot of what was said.