Playing Fields in Winter (24 page)

That afternoon Sarah wandered through the chaotically narrow streets of the old city. They were alive with such feverish excitement that it seemed impossible that it could be an ordinary day. Every inch of space was given over to encouraging the excitement – shrines, stalls, garlands, incense. Now and then she would cross a wave of jostling, shrill pilgrims, who plunged past her as though she was invisible. Only their occasional kohl-eyed babies, their great eyes magically increased in size, would stare at her over the hurrying shoulders. In one small alleyway she came face to face with a cow, which butted its way absently past her as though she had no business being there at all. She spent the day in a state of happy shock, marvelling at the weirdness of it all, the adventure she had found for herself. She got lost, had no idea where she was, no idea what was going on. In a moment of whimsical abandon, she even bought herself some incense and a garland. In a busy temple, she met some French tourists from her hotel and, in the evening, she went out to eat with them in a restaurant full of the sweet fumes of dope.

On her second day, she went to the Durga Monkey Temple and the Shiva Temple. Little bells rang around her, informing the gods of the visitors’ presence. She was briefly shocked from her happy trance when a monkey snapped at her ankle. She went back to the old city again as well. She had no idea how long it would last, but, for the moment, she was having a lovely time. In the evening, she went with the French tourists to listen to some devotional music. One of them, a Christ-like blond hippy called Jean-Marc, put his arm around her as the sitar pulsed and tenderly caressed her breasts through her thin muslin kurta. For two or three days,
everything
worked out fine.

But on the morning of the fourth day, she woke in her stuffy hotel room and realised that she felt dreadfully ill. Below her window, someone was cooking on charcoal and it took her a moment to separate her sickness from the smell.
She was suffocating. But when she threw off her sheet and sat up to go and switch the ceiling fan onto a faster setting, the sudden movement made her head spin. She lay back and assessed her condition as the fan croaked round infuriatingly overhead. She must have a fever; obscene little trickles of sweat were rolling down between her legs and her hair, spiky with damp, all seemed to be lying in the wrong direction so that her scalp hurt. Her mouth, foul with the taste of the previous evening’s smoking, was dry and stuck together. She must have caught something. As she lay there, wondering how ill she really was, panic came over her in a cold sweat; she was going to be taken ill here, she was going to be overwhelmed by India. And she whimpered with self-pity; the prospect was just too terrifying for words.

She had to get up. Several times during the next couple of hours she told herself that and found the certainty
comforting.
At last her thirst forced her out of bed and, shuddering, she washed and dressed and went outside.

She went to Ahmed’s Kola Korner, a small dingy restaurant frequented by foreign tourists where she had taken to having her breakfast. It was already nearly eleven o’clock and most of the customers she knew by sight had gone. The restaurant, which was really just a small hole in the wall of a larger Import-Export company, was empty and quiet. Sarah sat down thankfully. It was dazzlingly bright outside and as she walked down the street, the lurid colours of the little shop-fronts had seemed to hammer at her eyes. She was relieved to reach the dark cavern of Ahmed’s, prop her head on her hands and shut her eyes.

She ordered tea and toast. Ahmed did a lively trade in mock European cooking. The toast came soft and utterly pliable and Sarah sat in front of it for a while, playing with it and feeling sick. Ahmed – at least she imagined he was Ahmed – watched her from his corner. His blank gaze annoyed her. But the tea helped a bit and after two or three cups, she began to think that she might be better. Ahmed came over to offer her some more tea, and they had a stilted little conversation about her health. It did her good to reduce her illness to simple terms: heat, fever, stomach, fatigue. By the end of their conversation she felt quite reassured,
convinced that as Ahmed said, it was only an upset. She sat on in the restaurant for a while, idly watching the morning.

Walking back to the hotel, she was suddenly sick in the gutter. Her main concern was that Ahmed should not see her and be offended. But it was hard to vomit
inconspicuously
because a circle of street children immediately gathered around her, and pointed and commented.

She lay down in her hotel room, telling herself that it had been Ahmed’s unspeakable toast, and dozed for most of the afternoon. But the fear of admitting that she really might be ill forced her to get up and go out again later on. She took a tricycle rickshaw down to the ghats and sat by the river in the pink peace of the dusk, watching the quieter evening people come and go. A little way away from her squatted a young American, his face glazed, his muscular legs contorted in an imitation of an Indian crouch. That time she felt no elation, only a sense of her own redundancy and defeat.

The next morning, she felt worse. She had sweated a lot in the night and her sheets were damp and chilly. Her head was swimming. At first, she even wondered if she had the strength to get up. But staying in bed would have been an unbearable admission of illness. She forced herself to get up and was promptly sick again, except that not having eaten anything much the day before, all that she could do was retch hopelessly over the washbasin, thin viscous liquid. After that, she thought she felt better and dragged herself into her dirty clothes. As soon as she put them on, she began to feel intolerably itchy. She gathered her things to go out with painful care, hoping that the concentration would pull her together – bag, sunglasses, purse, key. She walked out past the staring receptionist with an expression of frozen dignity on her face. She knew she must look a fright.

She walked slowly down to Ahmed’s, fighting against rising waves of nausea. Whereas the day before the gaudy little shop-fronts had seemed blindingly brilliant, today they had receded to an uncertain frieze. The street danced at a great distance from her, on the far side of a shimmering layer of exhaustion peopled by jerkily gesticulating pin-men and women. It surprised her that the children in the bazaar still noticed her and called.

It took her eyes a minute or two to become accustomed to the total blackness inside the restaurant, and she groped her way to the same table as the day before. Ahmed was not in his corner and she sat down glumly to wait for him; he seemed to take ages coming. It was chilly and damp in there, she was the only customer and it seemed mournful and eerie. She fidgeted unhappily. Where the hell was Ahmed? This was really a nasty, sinister little hole. Whyever had she come here? As she tried to peer into the back of the restaurant to make out some sign of life, it suddenly struck her that the room was actually getting darker. She blinked and shook her head, her mouth filled with cold saliva and a wave of panic swept over her. She realised that she was about to faint and tried to get up and make for the bright open doorway, but it was too late.

The waiter and his brother retrieved the unconscious English girl from the floor where she had fallen. Acutely embarrassed, they made one or two discreet attempts to revive her with patting and prods and then called the brother’s wife. But when none of their measures had any effect and the wife noticed how hot the girl’s head was, they became frightened and the waiter shouted for a tricycle rickshaw and they took her like a parcel to the hospital.

‘Is there any history?’ Two doctors stood out in the corridor of the dilapidated hospital and an immense Indian sun spilt through the windows onto their white coats. From her bed in the large, silent ward, Sarah half heard them discussing her, a trifle dismissively. She was not presenting any of the usual hippy traveller’s symptoms, they said; she had not got hepatitis or dysentery or malaria. Yet she was clearly ill. She lay repugnantly white and bony on the much-laundered sheets and tried to roll her eyeballs inwards away from their probing examination. Her illness dispensed her from her well-brought-up inhibitions and before their hands, she gave way to hysteria and recoil. Their brown and smiling faces bobbed above her and as they examined her, they seemed to make fun of her predicament. She wanted to explain to them that it was not what it seemed; she was not just another piece
of European flotsam and jetsam cast up in Benares at the end of a farcical quest for the wisdom of the East. She was there for another, quite admirable reason. But they had waggled their heads in amusement at her protests and gone on
examining
her. At that point, she gave up and let them see that she was simply utterly sick of India and, not surprisingly, that insulted them.

Afterwards it seemed so pathetic to think that she had been in and out of the hospital in only five days, when at the time her illness had held all the endless terror of a nightmare.

During the worst of it she could only cry and what were tears and what was sweat she could not really tell. She lay in the sad-smelling ward and dimly hoped that she would die, as a punishment for Ravi. Of course the worst of it could only have lasted a day or two, but she was not aware of that at the time. She thought she really might die under that scaly ceiling and, all in all, she found the thought quite attractive.

It came to her that she must have known all along that it would end like this. She must have known all along that her plan was impossible. Had she ever really seriously envisaged marrying Ravi Kaul and settling down in India? Or had she only embarked on this adventure because underneath she had known all along that it would lead her safely back to home?

She let herself float off into a feverish dream, because there was no hospital and no India there. There were no questions and no reproaches. There was only Ravi Kaul as she had imagined him long ago in a wintry city, the Ravi with whom she had walked on the playing fields, hand in hand with the promise of an adventure.

But sometimes she floated into an echoing white space where sing-song voices jabbered at her continuously, preventing her from completely drifting away.

‘You’re not as naïve as you pretend to be.’

‘If you remember, I did warn you.’

‘Spitting in Holy Tank is Quite a Bad Habit.’

‘I could hardly spell things out, could I?’

‘I told them what was necessary. Not specifics.’

‘Attention, please! Your attention is solicited.’

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

‘You are wanting tea cosy?’

‘Promise me you’ll take care?’

And although she knew that the voices were inside her head, so she must be making them herself, still she could not silence them and eventually they made her cry too. She wanted to retreat inside her illness, where India was only an idea. It was almost with disappointment that she realised she was getting better.

When the worst of it was over, she lay in the silent ward and wondered what on earth to do next. The fever had been her last adventure and now there she was – washed up, alone, ridiculous, in the middle of a pink landscape which had nothing to do with her any more. She regretted bitterly that in a moment of weakness at the beginning, she had tried to ask the doctors who were examining her to fetch Ravi. Luckily, they had just laughed at her. Because now she was determined to get herself out of the nightmare on her own. She recalled Ravi’s mocking voice on the train to Lucknow: ‘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.’ So she visualised herself leaving the hospital and going grimly back to Delhi. She visualised herself booking a seat on an aeroplane and going quietly home again to England. For when the worst of it was over, she found there was nothing left.

One of the kindlier doctors said to her, ‘This malady is, should I say, principally the effect of our climate. You know, here we have different constitutions, different ways. Your system, your metabolism is, should I say, acclimatised to London, to your English frost and cold. You are not made for our heat and brightness.’ He looked down at Sarah
pityingly
and added, ‘In your country, maybe
I
should fall ill!’ And he gave a jolly laugh, as if to show how very unlikely he thought that was.

Sarah discharged herself from the hospital. She saw a weary, overworked administrator, who clearly found her a light relief from his usual duties. When she had filled in his
forms, giving the hotel as her place of abode in India, he leaned across his desk and advised her to go home to England. And perhaps to demonstrate his command of English idiom, he winked at her and added, ‘Go home. Home is where the heart is!’

She went back to the hotel to collect her belongings and found that a lot of them were missing. When she tried to reclaim them from the receptionist, he denied all knowledge of them. He implied with a condescending smirk that Sarah had invented them. Tears of helpless rage began to prick her eyes. She was not up to arguing with his smooth denials and she turned away, taking her pilfered case and walked unsteadily out of the hotel.

It took her a day or two to fix up a seat on a train to Delhi and she moved into a cheaper, nastier little hostel right opposite the railway station. Her room smelt dreadfully of drains.

She thought of letting Ravi know that she was coming back, but the queues in the Post Office looked interminable and she couldn’t really be bothered to wait. She thought of taking a bus trip to Sarnath, the cradle of the Buddhist faith, but that didn’t seem worth the effort either.

On a warm apricot-golden evening, which smelt locally of cumin and car exhaust, she crossed the road to the railway station and pushed her way in through the crowds of rickshaw drivers and beggars. She found the night train to Delhi and climbed aboard. By ruthless pushing, she got a place at the window and defended it with a nasty glare. Then she sat back on the wooden seat and shut her eyes.