Home To India (4 page)

If I sat outside, instead of writing the letter, the Punjabi conversations would flow over me in a pleasant stream of sound, low and easy and unnecessary to deal with, and reminiscent of something in the life I had left behind. A chance reference to Uncle Gurnam Singh, Mataji's much-talked-about younger brother, a stray word or phrase, half understood, would be enough to carry me gently forward into the next hour, the next day. The sounds, which by day were shouted across yards and up to rooftops in competition with the overwhelming brightness of the sun and the white blankness of the landscape, became soft and blurred at nightfall in deference, perhaps, to the peace that comes with evening.

Yet I had to tear myself back in time and distance long enough to say something to Carol, to speak in the language she spoke, drawing from the bank of experiences that we shared. She would like to know, now that the life I had sought was indeed mine, what I was doing with it. It called for an explanation. I ran through recent memories for clues. Random events, recollected now in more tranquility than I knew what to do with, lay strewn about like piles of snapshots waiting to be sorted and pasted into an album, an act that would surely provide some sense or sequence. They were glimpses of myself, of friends, saying goodbye to San Francisco and to each other. We're smiling, with arms linked self-consciously, and perhaps they're sensing as I do the recurring surprise one always experiences during snapshot taking: how another body feels—vulnerable, tentative, the nerves vibrating in the hollows of shoulders, the roundness of waists.

Here's one of me alone as I board the
Franconia
at New York, and another—a cartoon—drawn by my own anxieties and urgencies on a mind crowded with guilt and hope. I'm a lonely stick figure on a tightrope, swaying and dipping my way across a chasm between two cliffs, one with a big sign in block letters saying “California,” the other, “India.” I don't look right or left or backwards: I can't, because I'm blindfolded, going forward into the arms of Tej waiting at the end of the rope. I'm trusting to luck, to the right delicacy of balance, to chance, to a sixth survival sense and self-hypnotized out of my mind.

It was when I boarded the P. & O. liner, the
Corfu
, at Southampton that I met Edith Ritchie. Even before that, on the boat train from London, she had sat across from me, bosomy and sensible in a tweed suit and the no-nonsense shoes of a fifty-year-old British woman. Her coarse, steel grey hair was cut in a little-boy bob. I noticed her because she chainsmoked cigarettes through a carved ivory holder that had elegantly yellowed with age. It drove me wild, as I had recently given up smoking. She must have seen me watching her, or rather the cigarette, with unexpected interest, because later, when she introduced herself, she mentioned seeing me on the train.

“I'm going out to meet my brother in Penang,” she said. “Haven't seen him for twenty years. But we always write.”

That was the extent of information I got from her. But it was enough for me to take her on as a confidante, the kind possible to have on a ship because you know you will never see them again. Like a young, female Ancient Mariner, I grabbed her with my little plump hand and told her my story—as much as I wanted her to know, or needed to tell as we pitched and rolled through the Bay of Biscay, watched the dipping Portuguese fishing villages bob on the horizon, jammed the deck with everyone else to get photographs of Gibraltar, and discovered Algiers one Sunday morning rising out of the sea with its white concrete, red-roofed buildings balanced improbably on the African shore.

There was something about Edith Ritchie's Scottish, red-apple cheeks and half-closed eyes as she watched everything going on around us day after day in the upper lounge of the
Corfu
that made her seem safe and comfortable. In her low contralto voice and rolled
r
's there was wisdom and understanding and without her needing to prod me, I poured out my stored-up impressions. I told her about the dreary flatness of the Nevada plains, cluttered with short-cropped tumbleweed and sagebrush as seen from the window of a Union Pacific train bound for Chicago; about negotiating the narrow, fog-drenched, neon-lit, early-morning streets of that city in a taxi in which was piled my big red steamer trunk, as I sped from one station to another to change trains; about the banks of the Erie, ice-jammed and lined with lonely houses and old fences and presided over by a mournful, grey sky on a late March afternoon; about New York City itself, mental images of which had been so fixed in my mind by Hollywood clichés that I felt I had seen it all before, close up.

“Except for the Indian restaurant,” I told Edith. (She said I should not observe formalities, but call her by her first name.)

“Oh?” she said. As she spoke her half-closed eyes were not looking at me, but across the room at the gin-powered piano player with thinning blond hair who indefatigably tinkled out show tunes for a Noel Coward or a Gertrude Lawrence to sing to: “Tell me about it.”

“Well,” I went on, remembering it as it was and planning how I should present it to her. “It was on one of the picturesque little streets in the middle of Manhattan. I had turned off Fifth Avenue, west on Forty-Seventh Street. I was looking for this restaurant I had seen advertised in the
Times
. It's called The Maharajah.”

“I see,” she said.

“Anyway, there were all these restaurants and antique jewelry stores jammed tight together and a kosher delicatessen. It started to drizzle, and I had no umbrella. Once I found The Maharajah it took me a moment or two to realize it was up a flight of stairs.”

“And then?” Edith said.

“I remember the sign outside said: ‘East Indian Curries: Pakoras, Chapattis, Rice, Halwa.'”

“Did you enjoy your meal?” Edith asked.

“Oh yes,” I said, recalling the place, the way it was. At two-thirty in the afternoon it was empty. I sat, damp-haired and chilled, at a table by the window, looking out through droopy lace curtains at the dismal scene. The service was vengefully slow: the Brooklyn waitress resented my coming so late for lunch, and was going to make me suffer. When the meal arrived, the curry was lukewarm and the rice cold, but the red chilies in the sauce more than compensated for this, and I ordered tea to neutralize their effect and the feeling, sharper than the chilies, that I was alone.

Halfway through the Mediterranean I said to Edith (we were standing together at the rail after lunch, watching dolphins plunge and play in the wake of the ship), “This is itself a kind of microcosm, isn't it? I got the same feeling on the ship crossing the Atlantic.”

“I suppose it is,” Edith agreed.

The idea did not appear to be original to her, but I went on in my own mind, seeing us as on a Flash Gordon spaceship. It was a place neither here nor there, a place where time had its own meaning, or no meaning at all. But above everything I had the sense of myself as going back the way my Italian grandfathers Graziani and Colombo had come just a generation ago, back across the sea to the Old World, and beyond. I thought about my bewildered, obedient grandmothers, traveling in steerage with all those children. Not understanding where they were going. Already homesick for their villages. Wondering what awaited them in the new place. Was the urge that drove me against their tide the same that drove the Crusaders, the Venetian traders, Marco Polo, beyond the Old World, back to where everything began? Had religion and trade merely been excuses for finding out what the source was really like? There was no end to my ability to trivialize history as I tried to make sense out of my own urges to discover a real home. At that moment, and by that ship's rail, watching the dolphins play in the receding Mediterranean, I felt I had left my Western birthplace and yet was going home where yesterday and tomorrow met. Tej would be waiting for me there.

Before long, we were ready to enter the Suez Canal. I still had not told Edith about the two weeks in London between sea journeys, the shows I went to, the sightseeing I did, about the ham sandwich, cut up into nine neat squares and served by an Australian boy who had come to London to be an opera star and was waiting counter at the Silver Cross in Whitehall until that happened. I hadn't told her about the things I had bought in London with money saved from what Tej had left for me there at the American Express: a pair of slacks and a blue negligé with ruffles at the neck. In fact, I hadn't mentioned Tej so far. Instead, I said, “I saw Anton Walbrook one night, at an Uday Shankar show in Swiss Cottage.”

“I see,” she answered, as if she had not really heard of the famous Hungarian movie star before, nor of Uday Shankar either, nor felt she ought to have, for she went on in quite another direction. “No matter how long you stay away from your home and family, my girl,” she said, making
girl
a two-syllable word, “always keep in touch. Always write to them. That's very important. Don't forget it.” She punctuated her words of advice with stacatto jabs of the cigarette holder and warmly patted my arm with her free hand.

I thought of the letters that had already arrived from California and that had begun reaching me even when I was still in Berkeley those last few days. They were messages that I would have to answer sooner or later. My mother saying, “Hurry back to the U.S. and give yourself time to decide on marriage. Don't be swayed too much by Mr. Singh. Your Papa says I'm taking it too hard and Gloria and Julia and Nicoletta are disgusted with me. Still, I hope that you meet a handsome
American
on your way over who will be more convincing than I have been. Dreaming again!”

Papa wrote to me in London and said he hoped I had enjoyed my trip and that everyone spoke of me a lot.

I went back to my cabin and read the letter from Tej, the only one I had received from him since I left Berkeley: “Aren't you glad we shall be together in no time now?” It began. “Seven months is a long, long time. Do you know what I am doing now: I am sitting in a mango grove, keeping watch over the house being built and the material lying about. You will be surprised to know, there are no serious musicians for miles around. Not even a tabla player I can practice with. And, yes. I must tell you this. My revered Guruji, Pandit Shankar Dayal, is no more. He died after a long illness a week ago in Jullundur. I have no heart to go on with the sitar.” I read the last few lines again, as well as the spaces between them: Tej had left a lot of pain unexpressed. The old sitar maestro had been his mentor and his inspiration.

At Suez I got my first taste of what the future was going to be like. The time of pretty picture postcards was over. The white sky of Egypt settled over the white sands, and hot winds blew through the ship's lounge. The British rubber planters on their way to Malaya, in obedience to some unwritten edict, came down to lunch in knee-length, white cotton drill shorts and white stockings between which peeped pale, bony knees. The piano player had tied a white handkerchief around his neck, inside the open collar of his sweat-soaked shirt. Moreover, ship romances were getting out of hand, now that we were well out of European waters. It could have had something to do with the heat. Passengers and crew met on intimate terms as stewards became favorites with the British girls going out to seek their fortunes in Kuala Lumpur and points east. They could be seen after lunch in the lounge, reclining on divans in attitudes of amorous lassitude, oblivious to the music from the piano, to the occasional partnerless onlooker, to Edith who sat watching them through her after-lunch gin and cigarette, deeply inhaling smoke through the carved ivory holder.

“I have a portable record player,” Edith said. “We could listen to some music out on deck after dinner tonight.”

I took her up on the offer. “I have some records of ‘Scheherezade',” I said.

After all, it was the Red Sea: Ali Baba country. It would be something to remember, those violin cadenzas weaving an arabesque of sound as smooth as the waveless water that the ship glided over, as oriental as a silken cushion thrown on a Persian carpet.

And it
was
memorable in its own way. The stars that were supposed to enhance the scene were absent, as was the cool breeze that should have brought relief from the heat of the day. In their stead, a pall of dust hung suspended in the air. The first cadenza was hardly over when Edith remarked that, judging from my abstinence from the goings-on after lunch in the lounge, I didn't seem to fancy the young men on board as much as one would imagine a young girl might.

“No,” I said.

“Smart girl,” she remarked. She smiled the smile of a conspirator.

Something veered me off from taking the conversation any further in this direction, but Edith continued.

“You seemed to be different from the others,” she said, “even on the boat train.”

“I'm a very ordinary person,” I replied, not knowing what else to say, and feeling there was something not quite right about the way she squeezed my hand as she made a point and failed to release it afterward: it was casual but not uncalculated.

“My dear, you are not ordinary at all, going out by yourself, halfway around the world, traveling all this distance … a beautiful girl, really.…” She squeezed my hand again.

“I have a very ordinary purpose,” I said, withdrawing my hand from hers. “I'm going to get married.”

“Oh,” she said.

“To the most marvelous man in the world,” I added foolishly. I knew Tejbir Singh was not the most marvelous man in the world, except in the only sense that mattered to me. Yet I needed something extravagant to say, something to turn off the scene so that I could retrieve my “Scheherezade” records and get back to my cabin. Bombay was still three more days away.

4

As the
Corfu
approached Ballard Pier, the Gateway of India became a constant on the skyline of Bombay. The closer we got, the larger it loomed as it floated midway on the waves of an opalescent horizon. Even close up, after the
Corfu
had dropped anchor, the Gateway wouldn't stand still, but bobbed and tilted in the foreground.