Shadow Play (29 page)

That is why I didn't immediately realize Raj had run away. He had fled along the wall and was now hiding where he couldn't be seen from the other side of the gate. That was where he collapsed and threw up, and even after he refused any discussion of going inside and we returned to the hotel, I stupidly continued to believe he was reacting to the heat.

For a couple of days he insisted she had been a lifelong friend who was going through a difficult period. We remained in Ranchi, though he kept postponing a return to the institution. It was his mother – once we were back in Calcutta – who felt she owed me the truth, that Raj and Sunayani had been in love for years before he left for England, they were planning to be married, and that his remaining there without her, followed later by our relationship and marriage, had been successive shocks from which she'd never recovered. He was supposed to return for her, that had been the understanding, and this was the latest stage of a long decline.

‘But he never told me anything,' I said. ‘He never gave any sign that something was wrong. Did he know what effect it was having on her?'

‘Yes, he knew. He even decided to move back once, and make a go of it here. He found a job in a boarding-school
and promised her they'd soon be married. But he hated the atmosphere there, and had to give it up after a month. This time he went back for good to England.

‘She wrote to him a few times but afterwards, when she was too ill, I begged him to visit at least once, just to face her while he said his goodbyes. He asked me to explain that things had changed, and you had entered his life. Don't misunderstand me, Ana, I had no idea who you were, but I had known her for years. They had been friends in school since he was fourteen, and I was watching her fall to pieces.'

There isn't much more to say, at least not for me who never even met her. I saw a picture once and it justified her name – she had exquisite, drawn out, bright eyes, like close-ups of stars. And I certainly wouldn't have mentioned it here, if Raj hadn't managed not to mention it
at all!
This epilogue arose in response to two specific, supposedly ‘non-fictional' sentences that I couldn't allow to go unchallenged: when Raj recalls pleading with me, ‘you're the only person I ever craved,' and when he tells Seb in Rio that he broke up our family because he suffered from the disease of big ideas.

What an extraordinary portrait he has drawn of our relationship, without providing any background or history, selecting only the occasions when he caught me out with other men as if that was the reason we combusted – two sad, wrinkling swingers out of Updike. Yet, he found enough room to include lengthy excerpts of his favourite speeches – about waste and error and loss – as well as the characteristic lament for me from which I emerge appearing either deaf, incredibly heartless or plain stupid.

But not a word about Sunayani and the effect she had on our marriage. It is the most astonishing of omissions, because
from that visit onwards I literally watched us emptying: first the content drained out slowly and then rapidly the forms fell to dust. Initially there was a lot of resistance from me in the way of shouting and tears, but soon there remained only exhaustion. The strange thing is, he refused completely to discuss her but sometimes, during those nights when we didn't even bother talking, I swear I could see her lying behind him, on her side, gazing over him straight at me, expressionless.

She seemed to show signs of recovering during the winter, and we heard she was being brought back home. But she never arrived, because on her way to the bathroom, while her mother waited in the compartment, she fell out of a moving train. Or, as Raj immediately interpreted, she jumped to her death. And that also turned out to be our final period as a couple, because he disappeared a fortnight later without even a goodbye note, much as he has done now. At first we were sure he had left for Calcutta, but there was no sign of him there. Then, after six months, a friend of his took pity on us and told me he was in Hamburg. Raj had wired him for some money.

We found him in a large single room in a converted warehouse that stood on a narrow canal, facing the endless brick walls and windows of the warehouses opposite. Very little light made it into the corridor, and two-year-old Seb didn't even recognize the thickly-bearded man who opened the door. His room was filthy and so was he. Our conversation was insignificant. I don't know how much time passed, but both of us had barely spoken before I noticed that the door was open and Seb was missing. He was nowhere in the hallway where all the other doors were shut, he wasn't on the staircase or on any of
the other floors, and when I arrived downstairs the door leading straight onto the water was open.

It seems amazing that Raj, otherwise so rigorous with himself, so profoundly and publicly confessional, could narrate a testament without a
single
mention of either Sunayani or those twelve months of living in her shadow. I hadn't come to Hamburg with any decisions, I was far too worried and relieved for that, but I remember exactly that it was the second when I re-entered the room with Seb to find him lying in bed just as I had left him, that I understood I would be leaving with a divorce. It was as if I suddenly saw he didn't care at all about us, because there was no way he could have missed hearing my frantic cries down the hallway and up the stairs. He made it easier by admitting he had no intention of returning home. He said whatever measures I was going to take, he agreed to in advance: now that I knew where he was, I should just send him anything that required his signature.

And that is why I am not his Rosebud. I do believe there is a lot of truth to the feelings he has described about me, but I know even now that it remains a tremendous denial, a willed attempt at illusion, for him to substitute Sunayani and pretend that I am what he needs to be complete. I'm not sure if he wished to exclude her memory from the gaze of others (in which case I'm guilty of disrespecting his wishes), or for his own sake. Perhaps it is what he sincerely wants to believe, but it is not the truth, even though I too have wanted to believe it for most of these intervening years, though part of me still wishes to believe it.

But Sunayani can never die, not since she fell off that train. She remains alive in every story. She turns into a kitten and falls down a stairwell, and returns more alive than ever.

I have one last memory with which to close this epilogue. I suppose I felt guilty when I recalled it, and perhaps I am including it out of a spirit of expiation.

It's from the time I shot my film
Shakuntala
in India, about seven years ago. I was on a train leaving Calcutta, on my way to a location near the Nepal border in North Bihar, to assess its suitability for shooting. One of the assistant cameramen who had grown up there had described the setting so evocatively, it sounded ideal for our purpose – decaying palace, marble rocks, fast-flowing river and unspoilt forest. He had left already to make arrangements for my stay and would receive me early next morning.

I had laid out my sheets, answered as many questions from my co-passengers as briefly, politely and untruthfully as possible, and the compartment light had been switched off. I was soon in the state where I kept realizing I had nodded off only when I abruptly awoke again. I'm sure it was already the third or fourth time when I noticed I was waking up on the same note each time, with the sense that someone was repeatedly asking me to get off the train. I would start up, wonder what had happened, try and hold on to the fading wisps of the voice and form an
impression of what I had heard. But a clear tone eluded me, though its words were always the same: ‘Leave this train at the next station, the
next
station, leave this train at the next station.'

My way of ignoring it was to try and sleep by turning over and closing my eyes, but when it had happened more than five times, I sat up feeling overwhelmingly ill. The metal shutters on the windows had been brought down. I had no choice: I felt that whatever happened, I needed fresh air. Trying to lie down was useless because it only weighed harder upon my chest. But once I sat up I needed to stand, when I stood I had to walk around, and when I'd walked the length of the carriage and even visited the toilet to no avail, I knew voice or no voice I was getting off the train. It didn't matter that it was one in the morning, I had no idea where we were arriving and there was no one still awake I could ask.

I spent the night in the first-class waiting room at Sitarampur, where a very kind but extremely puzzled railway policeman laid out as much bedding as he could muster on a bench for a crazy memsahib, whose story was that she realized in the middle of the night she was on the wrong train. ‘But why did the TT not warn you, madam, when he saw your ticket? Then you could have got off at Burdwan or even Asansol and gone to a hotel. Here there is just a circuit-house, ten minutes from the station, but I can knock loudly and wake them up if you like.'

I assured him that all I needed was to rest until daybreak when I would take the very first train back to Calcutta. After he left me with repeated guarantees that he would be only a shout away no matter what the time was, I lay back to find I was feeling absolutely fine. The memory of being unwell now seemed nothing more than a stupid fit of hysteria. I had
never experienced anything of the sort before, and wouldn't have imagined myself succumbing to such a feeling. Watching the still shadows in the dim moonlight stealing through the window, I considered the possibility of continuing onwards in the morning. But I couldn't face the thought of telling my benefactor this, not after the midnight harassment I'd caused him. So I decided I would return within the next two days, rather than embarrass myself before him once more.

I woke up at very early dawn, and spent a few minutes watching the play of dust particles in the first pale beams of sunlight. I was thinking of my final dream, in which I was a girl strolling down an icy path somewhere in the English countryside. All around me was the sparkling sunlessness of snow-covered fields and a few houses on both sides, far away. Underneath the ice were clearly visible hundreds of brightly coloured snakes, red and green and blue, all unmoving. I continued down this bejewelled path, trying not to tread too hard, when an equally young and unfamiliar Raj approached me. He stopped with some elaborate explanation about how the cold forced the snakes out of their holes and they emerged only to be trapped in the ice. I said to this beautiful boy that it reminded me of Coleridge's
Kubla Khan
.

I wanted to phone my cameraman as soon as it was morning, but within a few minutes a policeman knocked loudly and entered with two other excited railwaymen, one of whom was the stationmaster. ‘This is the memsahib,' he announced by way of introduction, and then turning to me, he continued, ‘Madam, a very strange thing happened. You were very lucky to get off last night. Thank god it was the wrong train. Do you know, it derailed at three a.m. two hours north of here?'

‘What?'

‘Yes, madam,' said the stationmaster, ‘we are not getting the exact casualty position yet since it happened in the middle of the night. But policemen are already at the scene, four or five bogeys went off the rails, and they have telephoned up and down the track. The entire route is closed for the time being.'

Perhaps their opinion of the memsahib's nerves fell even further, because I found myself overcome by helpless sobbing. But they brought me tea, which I gratefully accepted, and a big railway breakfast I couldn't face. They sat opposite me until I'd calmed down, and the stationmaster kept repeating, ‘Madam, this is destiny, no one can overturn it. You were not meant to be on that train. You mustn't feel bad. It has nothing to do with you.' I felt very grateful for their attention during what must have been a frantic time for them. Even when they went to receive calls they left a deputy to attend to me, right until I was safely on another train that came in from further west and was going on to Calcutta.

The story has a small sequel. We found our palace afterwards, near Murshidabad. But two days later I went to see Raj's mother, and she was the first person to whom I described every detail of that night. I hadn't told her about the trip before because she would have worried about me in North Bihar. We were sitting in the safari park by the Dhakuria Lakes and what surprised me, as much as her words themselves, was the absolutely unruffled, even tone of her voice.

‘Sitarampur,' she said. ‘But that must be along the same route on which Sunayani's accident happened.'

This time I didn't react. I merely asked her if she was certain. She said the track bifurcated soon afterwards and Sunayani's train would have been approaching from the west.

Neither of us said anything more. I was watching the birds on the tips of one of the bare trees up ahead. Then my eye fell upon a little slum girl who was walking absent-mindedly towards a lone couple seated at the far end of the lawn. Her hands were outstretched above her head, and her feet were following the swoop and rise of one of the many crows flying low above her: now she would run a few steps, and then slow down again. Almost disinterestedly, as if it were an annoyance and a chore, she went up to the couple and asked them for money. But she didn't stay a moment after their first refusal; she had done her bit and no one could accuse her of not trying. She re-crossed the lawn in the same way, making for another couple who were about to take the bench a few yards down from us. She pestered them a little more conscientiously, but with highly original methods. She plucked a flower off the bush beside them and tried to stick it in the lady's hair.

By now I had looked in my bag and found a five-rupee note to give her, but for some reason she didn't even glance in our direction and again made for the far end of the lawn, part skipping, lightly running, but never in a straight line, never with a sense of purpose. A little child was about to kick a plastic ball in the direction of her older sister, and this was the game that had caught her eye. She ran to retrieve the ball, rolled it back to the baby, and entered into the circle easily and enthusiastically, as if they were well-known to her and she had been expected to come along. But the parents were lying on the grass a few yards away, and they shooed her off. She stayed a moment and then continued in the opposite direction, unburdened as ever, tracing the flight of another crow along the grass, gaze upwards, arms outstretched.