My Secret History (68 page)

There was no more. He did not know Jenny as I did. And as always she spelled it out.

“I know you want another tip, Hamish. But I’ve given you quite enough already. You should be happy with what you’ve got.”

Still he persevered, hoping to impress her, and just before we left he hurried us urgently to the south wall of the mosque, where there was an enormous gateway and a long flight of steps.

“Gate of Victory Buland Darwaza,” Unmesh said. “Look, look.” He was gesturing to an inscription in Arabic script. “I am read it.” He traced the script by moving his skinny finger through the air and said, “Issa, peace be on him, saying, ‘World is bridge. Pass over bridge but do not build house on bridge. World lasts one hour only—spend it by praying.’ ”

“Who is Issa?” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Unmesh said.

“Our Jesus?”

“Your Jesus!” he said triumphantly.

He looked hopeful, but there was no reward.

On our way back to Agra on the rutted road I prayed for something to go wrong with the car, as it had when I had traveled this way with Eden. The car was just as wrecked-looking and noisy, but rattled along without an engine failure or a flat.

So at a certain point, I said, “Stop the car, Unmesh. I have to make water.”

“What a quaint phrase,” Jenny said.

I slipped out as Unmesh’s face—his big brown nose, his close-set eyes, his spiky hair and narrow head—rose up from the front seat.

“Are you making water, missus?”

Her gaze went straight through his head and she did not reply.

I took my time by the roadside. It was late afternoon and the air was sultry and unbreathable, with the accumulated heat of the day. Dust clung to my damp arms. The fields next to the road were dried out and looked cracked and infertile. Voices carried from nearby huts—children’s laughter and the chattering of women. Where did they get the energy to raise their voices?

A young man approached the car. He looked in at Jenny with curiosity, his mouth open, and then put his tongue out and cringed and whined.

“He wanting money, missus,” Unmesh said.

“What is he saying?”

“He say he is very hungry.”

Jenny seemed undecided. She looked at him through her sunglasses.

I reached into our picnic basket and took out a slender cucumber and handed it to the young man. He screwed up one side of his face and muttered twice and stepped into the crumbly field.

Jenny called him back and gave him five rupees. He groaned, thanking her, as Unmesh looked on resentfully.

“You are such a jackass,” Jenny said to me softly, almost with affection.

I was still standing by the car, on the broken road.

“How would you like to live here?”

“You mean
here
in this scruffy little place, or in India in general?”

“Here—in that village over there.”

“I am know this willage,” Unmesh said.

But Jenny was laughing. “What a silly question!”

We left Unmesh at Agra Station one hot night. The darkness was like a thick blanket lying suffocatingly over us. Unmesh’s gesture of farewell was to show us snapshots of his daughter, Vanita. Jenny said, “She looks just like you,” but he protested, saying “Not at all!” as though this was an unwarranted slur on the little girl.

Two trains pulled into the station at once from opposite directions. This sent Unmesh into a passion of explanation.

“Over here Up-train. That one Down-train. This for Gwalior, that for Madras Express. Two bogies, four coaches freight, sleeping coach this one—”

At last I relented and gave him a tip to calm him. And he and the driver stood on the platform perspiring at us as we boarded.

Jenny said nothing about him until I asked her.

Then she replied, “He’s a funny little person, isn’t he? Do you suppose he’s a bit simple?”

The Madras Express was not air conditioned, but the scorching draft that blew under the raised window shutters was only part of our discomfort. There was no bedding, the compartment was dirty, the mattresses stank of bug shit, and we were told that there would be no food until tomorrow morning.

“This compartment has taken away my appetite,” Jenny said. “And I’m so tired I don’t think I’ll notice the lack of sheets. But God, sometimes you have the silliest ideas, Andy.”

She wrapped herself in a length of cloth she had bought in Delhi and she went directly to sleep. I lay awake cursing the train but also thinking that with Jenny this was a different trip. I had not decided whether it was better or worse; it was like a trip through an altogether different country. The hotels did not seem the same, the people were altered, Ismail was not Ismail, Indoo was not Indoo, and even the Taj had changed. The merchandise in shops—the antiques and crafts—seemed less exotic and rather crude. The weather was different, so hot I felt feverish, and the noise made it seem hotter still.

“It will be cooler in the rains,” the conductor said the following morning. “The monsoon is late.”

Dawn had come early and suddenly, the sun rising—an extraordinary size and shape from the simple flat fields. Then the whole sky filled with light and turned bluer, until at noon the day was drenched with heat under a white sky.

I watched black buffaloes submerged to their nostrils in the wallows beside the track, and I envied the naked children leaping from the top of culverts into ditches of frothy water.

That day Jenny hardly spoke. She said she was too hot to eat much. She read a novel she had brought from London, a plotty and pretentious spy story. “My holiday book,” she called it.

“Why do you read him?” I said, irritated by the serene way she sat on her berth turning pages.

“Don’t be jealous,” she said. “Write another novel and I’ll read it. In the meantime, please don’t bother me. This is a bit overwritten but it’s not bad. Just childish in the way that spying is childish. It’s a game that men play, isn’t it?”

“Who cares?” I said, and turned away as the train jogged along through the heat. “My next book’s going to be travel.”

“I hate travel books,” Jenny said. “Oh, don’t be offended. You know what I mean. What’s the point of them? It’s usually just
second-rate writers waffling on about themselves and looking for trouble. They have absolutely nothing to say.”

“Are you talking about me?”

“This is a discussion, Andy. It’s not personal,” and she smiled sweetly. “My feeling is that travel writers are like bitchy reviewers. They go to a place and review the weather, then they review the people, then the sights, then the hotels. That’s what travel writing is—it’s all bitchy reviews.”

She said this with such fluency and certainty that I found it funny, and as soon as I laughed, she faltered. She said, “They all write well these travel writers—that’s what’s so pathetic about them—” and then she stopped. “I’m hot,” she said.

She did not return to her book. Some minutes passed and then she said, “By the way, I’ve been watching you ever since we left Delhi.”

The train clunked across the points in a junction and then swayed as we passed a freight train. Jenny began to speak again, but she knew she would not be heard and so she paused until the noise subsided and we were in the open again.

“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been observing you,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. I mean, it’s so obvious.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t really looked at any of the sights. You hardly glanced at the Taj Mahal—and that was gorgeous. You just plopped down at Fatehpur-Sikri as though you had dropsy or something. And for the past two days you’ve just been mooning around with your mouth open.”

Perhaps that was how it seemed, yet how could I admit that I had been observing her?

“Forgive me for asking,” she went on, “but don’t you have any work to do?”

“I’ve been making notes,” I said lamely.

“I’m not asking you for an explanation,” Jenny said, “but your attitude does seem extraordinarily casual.”

Then she went back to her book. We traveled all that day in the dusty train, on a route that seemed longer than it had a month before. I murmured to myself a line from a poem I loved, as I looked at a stupa painted white in a village at the center of some drowned rice fields:
What spires, what farms are those?

I wished that Jenny had been reading something I had written.
I thought of the tube train that morning I arrived in London, when I had seen the young woman reading a book of mine. Just watching her turn the pages was such a pleasure for me that time had passed quickly and I had almost missed my station. I loved the look of absorption on the woman’s face, her occasional smiles; she was a friend and she knew me intimately.

Watching Jenny read someone else’s boring book made time pass slowly. But it was my fault for not being busier. I should have been writing—making notes, at least. I was doing nothing, and I was agitated. Jenny always looked serene when she was idle, and she was happiest in repose. Her own contentment helped me: she did not require my constant attention, she never said,
What are you thinking?
which always meant
Are you thinking about me?

I now knew how being married to her had freed me. What we were today we would continue to be, and so I could see clearly this same scene, but on the Cape, one afternoon under a cloudy sky left by a severe winter storm. We were in our house, the same house as ever, but it was warmer, cozier, quieter. Jack was going to call tonight from London, where he lived. In our silence we were anticipating that—his news, his mood, his new life. There was a kettle of stew on the stove, bread in the oven, the makings of a salad on the butcher’s block. We were so used to one another we hardly talked, and our lives were somewhat separate—we each had a car, and Jenny did some consultancy work in Boston. As ever she protected me from people I did not want to see, and I used her as my excuse. This was the life I had been tending towards for years, and this was the house I had planned, filled with my artifacts from India and China. Jenny had made a place for herself in it, though she occasionally complained of being an alien—in America, in this house. At intervals, short or long, like a sudden fit of sobbing that gives relief, we made love.

She saw me watching her.

“This book isn’t half bad,” she said. “I mean, it’s rubbish but it’s fairly readable.”

Then she looked out of the window of the train, at the evening sun dissolving into a flooded field of rice.

“God. India. Still there after all the miles we’ve gone.”

That night, still traveling, we shared a sticky meal.

“I’ve had better Indian food in Clapham,” Jenny said.

We turned in, climbing into our separate shelves, and we lay there in the heat, listening to the clatter of the wheels and every so often passing a station on the line and being raked with the glaring yellow lights of the railway lamps.

In the darkness, Jenny said, “Do you suppose anyone ever makes love on these trains?”

I said nothing; she was still murmuring.

“You’d probably dislocate your back.”

“Do you want to make love?” I asked, whispering from the lower berth.

“Not now. I’m too hot,” she said, and after a moment, “I’d rather have a nice cup of tea.”

Mr. Thumboosamy, the manager of the Hotel Vishnu in Madras, was anxiously watching Jenny’s face for a reaction as she took a deep dramatic breath. The door to Room 25—I had requested that one—had just been opened, but Jenny had hesitated on the threshold, Thumboosamy beside her with her bag in his hand.

“Yes,” Jenny said, and sniffed again.

Thumboosamy looked eager.

“That’s the smell of my mother’s house in Balham,” Jenny said, turning to Thumboosamy. And now she smiled. “Mice. I hate mice. I’m not superstitious. I’m not frightened of mice. I can’t stand them. They’re dirty. They spread disease. They crawl over you when you’re asleep. I’m not staying in this place.”

“This room, darling?”

“This hotel,” Jenny said.

“It’s the only hotel in town with rooms free,” I said.

Mr. Thumboosamy confirmed that this was so. Madras was packed with tourists, he said.

“There must be something,” Jenny said.

“Not available,” Mr. Thumboosamy said, making it a cluster of consonants, like a Tamil phrase.

“That’s absurd,” Jenny said. “Madras looks a hideous place. And this is the hot season. Who would want to come here? There must be lots of hotels with empty rooms.”

I said, “What if there aren’t any?”

“Then I’ll sleep under a tree,” she said. “Anywhere but here.”

We went to the Taj Coromandel, the luxury hotel just off
Mount Road, and were told they had plenty of spare rooms. “This is more like it,” Jenny said of our clean pleasant room with its view over the city. She did not jeer at me, as I guessed she might, but simply said that perhaps I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about traveling in India.

“Maybe I should come along with you more often,” she said. “Aren’t you glad I found you a nice place to stay?”

We rested that day—had a nap, made love, and then swam in the hotel pool. The water was uncomfortably warm and after the swim I felt limp and exhausted as though I had been stewed.

Our room overlooked a mosque, and in the early evening there was a call to prayers. We watched the muezzin climbing into the minaret. Jenny had been reading her spy novel. She put it down and crept to the window, when she heard the muezzin clearing his throat in the loudspeaker.

Below us the faithful were gathering. I watched Jenny’s intense concentration and admired her reverence. She picked up her camera quickly and fingered it and focused. But she did not shoot a picture—out of respect, I felt. She said nothing, only watched, and I kept looking at her, the way she scrutinized the scene at the mosque. I thought how travel was composed of moments like this: discoveries and reverences separated by great inconvenience. These encounters, taken together, added up to one’s experiences of a place—the inconvenience had to be forgotten and displaced by the epiphany—like this call to prayer.

I had never seen Jenny so patient, and I felt the same love for her that had welled in me when I had seen Eden in front of the Taj Mahal sobbing for the beauty of it.