Home To India (2 page)

Was it before or after Helen had looked out the plate glass window so intently that the subject came up of her plans, much speculated about and mystifying. It might have been before. Perhaps it
had
been a peculiar way to put it, an
adventure
. Was it my word choice that offended her? Did it suggest something exploitive, some disgraceful motive that denied someone their humanity?

“I don't know why you keep harping on that,” she said. Or had she said, “I don't know why you keep
insisting
on that?”
Harping
was probably her word;
insisting
mine.

“Forget I said it,” I replied. Or I think I did. Or perhaps going over this scene so many times in my remembering imagination I am adding some things that might have been good or helpful to say at the time, but hadn't actually been said. I'm quite certain, however, that I went on to suggest that she was very brave.

“That's another strange word,” Helen took up immediately. “That and
adventure
. I'm not going tiger shooting.” Her manner, usually so straightforward, struck me as mocking and inexplicably unpleasant. “I'm not even going to go live amongst wild elephants. Just people. Like you and me.”

“You know and I know there are many kinds of bravery,” I said. Or perhaps I just sat there noticing the way she fumbled with her lighter as she took out a cigarette. Perhaps I just sat there, without even saying that, because surely she knew, and was merely pretending not to know, not to acknowledge, the other kinds of bravery that would present their demands when the time came.

I'm trying to remember what precisely was said (it has become important to me now that I'm putting all my things away). I'm also trying to discover why this particular occasion and not others comes to mind in relentless detail. Why I keep recalling the way the coffee shop felt that morning (like a too-warm garment), the sound of friends' voices at nearby tables, the rattle of plates and silverware, even the scraping of chairs and the shuffling of feet on the tile floor. It was an ordinary day, a working day. I had already gone to my Greek seminar, and the effort of sitting through the presentation by a Viennese refugee bent on trotting out trivia had made me hungry. I ordered a Spanish omelette and toast and sat waiting at the counter for it to be ready so I could move on to a table by the window. When I turned around, I saw Helen. She was already there, saving me a place.

“I overslept,” she said when I sat down opposite her, as if some explanation were due. “Missed my Goethe seminar.” She was halfway through a cigarette and black coffee. As always, she had her twin lens Rolleicord along. It sat in its shabby case amongst the notebooks on the table beside her.

“This is by way of breakfast,” she said. “I don't feel like having anything else.”

She sat with her elbows on the table, circling the white mug of black coffee with her white hands, her fingers still holding the cigarette and her wrists emerging white and stark from the pushed-up sleeves of her black cardigan. Like most tall women, she had, as if by design, arranged herself in the act of sitting down so that legs, arms, torso—all were composed, as it were, into an agreeable whole. She hadn't bothered to do her hair in a coronet of braids that day, but had simply left it loose to frame her face. The flat lighting of the room illumined her features and made them animated. No shadows settled there. Only her eyes, restless and bright with impatience, looked as though she had had no sleep. And then I remembered seeing her and Tej, in the midst of the ritual coffee break at eleven the night before, rush, laughing, through the swinging doors out into the lobby and down the stairs.

Someone at our table (labeled the “intellectual table” perhaps because it was frequented by Englishmen whose Oxbridge accents lent “tone” to the hot discussions) had said something at the time about Helen “crossing over.” I suppose what he meant by that was that she was nowadays more to be seen at the Indo-Pakistani table than at ours. She often sat enthralled by the company and the conversation, overheard tables away. It was as if these Punjabis, with their shared heritage, language, and culture, were surprised to suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of an international border and needed to talk about it … loudly. This proved more gripping to Helen than our prolonged arguments over the virtues of hypocrisy (it's better to believe and betray than not to believe at all), or the vice of mediocrity and ways to avoid it at all costs. Not even the presence amongst us of a couple of ex-Resistance fighters, recently arrived from France and high on the new existentialist writers whose books and articles they had brought with them, was enough to hold her interest.

As we sat there in the coffee shop that morning, it was obvious Helen didn't want to talk about herself and Tej. “
Tej
rhymes with
rage
, not
wedge
,” I remembered her saying once, correcting my pronunciation of his name. “You could also say it rhymes with
sage
, which is more like it,” she added with a laugh. “He's more wise than angry.” Now she didn't even want to mention him. For a moment his image came to mind. It was easy to picture him. He had a way, though slight of build, of filling up a space, enclosing everything around him in his aura. It had something to do with his musicianship, with the affair with his sitar that he celebrated, inviting all who listened to share his passion. But I'm making him larger than life. In any case I guessed from the way Helen looked around the crowded room searching for something else to talk about that she did not want to discuss him. We sat there without saying anything, I attending to my Spanish omelette and noting that the onions in the sauce were underdone; Helen lighting another cigarette.

“Are you really going away forever with your Sikh friend?” I asked, bringing up the subject again. If Tej had been just another enthusiasm in her store of enthusiasms, she would have been open and frank and amusing. As it was, mention of him caused her to withdraw behind a show of vagueness and inattention.

“Is that what people are saying?” she said without answering me.

“What about your folks?” I went on. If she had been someone else I would have said “family”; but Helen's people (like mine) were definitely folks. I hoped mention of them would provoke some response beyond her evasive counterquestions. I knew her mother, especially, was bound to lie at the bottom of a coil of any uncertainties she might have.

My remembering this now, after so many years have passed, is hard to explain. Why in such detail? Why this occasion? Why, even in those early days in Michigan did I keep going over it in my mind, at all odd hours, in strange places, amidst my own crises? She was, it is true, a good friend, and like a sister, even taken for granted. But what did her fate have to do with mine, or mine with hers, to make me obsessed with it? What happened to her? Why did she suddenly go silent after that last puzzling letter?

In particular, I need to know why this brief scene in the International House coffee shop that late morning has so taken hold. Sometimes I think the details I claim to remember are only my elaborations, variations on a theme recalled in old age. I wonder, for example, if I actually did ask her about her family on that occasion or if it was later, when it appeared she was determined to go away after all.

I can hear her voice now, the way it went faint as though she had wilfully turned down the volume: “What about my folks?” she said.

I had her at last! It was, then, not the first time she had considered her mother, her father, her three sisters, and all those Italian relatives. The fact was not lost on me that she had parried yet another question of mine with a question of hers.

“How do they feel about your going away?” I persisted.

When she understood I was not going to stop until I had an answer, she said, “They don't know anything about it.”

I tried not to look surprised. “I see,” I said, as I let this sink in. “Well, I guess you can look upon it as a kind of elopement then? But the distance is so great between here and …” I hesitated again.

“Now it's an
elopement
. Not an adventure any more, but an elopement,” she said. “Why do you insist on dramatizing it?” She smiled. I knew her well enough to realize that beneath her offhand dismissal lay a fierce reluctance to say anything further about Tej, about going away with him, about leaving everything here—family, country, years of study, all kinds of human investments that had nothing to do with money or time.

“If it's not an elopement,” I said, “then what will it be?”

I don't think she heard my question. And it is always here that I stop (as she did, to look out the plate glass window) and try to go on with what happened next. I shall try to conjure it up once more. She's looking out the window. I follow her gaze out toward the fog-wrapped city across the Bay, with the streets of Berkeley spilling away down the hills onto the waterfront, the day sunny this side, the Campanile striking the hour, unreal blue sky, theatrical clouds.

It's almost fall, and I know without seeing it that Faculty Glade it still all green grass, minus the pink-and-white daisies now, and that Strawberry Creek still cuts its way, as it has to, through the verdure. The air is chilly outside, but not cold, and I know without feeling it that a smart breeze is whipping the foliage of the eucalyptus trees down by the Forestry Building. Somewhere outside Sather Gate undergraduates are waiting to meet friends between classes or stopping to read the posters, sharing space on the steps of Wheeler Hall with the Great Danes from the fraternity houses, or just sitting in the sun.

None of these everyday sights could be the cause of Helen's sudden and complete attention. Whom or what had she seen outside? Under the force of her concentration, all else hung suspended. When I turned around again, she was already standing up, gathering her things, slinging the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, ready to go. For an instant, I had the irrational notion that she had been appropriated, taken over, possessed, so that, although the young woman in front of me
looked
like Helen, she was really somebody else. The illusion passed as quickly as it came.

“What will it be?” I asked again.

“Nothing. I don't know,” she said. “In any case, you're dead wrong, like everybody else.” She got up. “I've got to go now,” she said, and hurried away.

It might have been her final goodbye, but it wasn't. It doesn't seem to me that she has ever really taken her leave, even after years of my not hearing from her. I have one of her letters in front of me. It's one I picked up from the pile just now, and it happens to be one I got from her early on. It's dated June 26, 1950.

“Dear Carol,” it says, in the timeless voice that memory confers on the writers of old letters rediscovered, “Here I am …”

Summer

2

“… halfway around the world from Berkeley, in a Punjab village called Majra, sitting in our garden with a glass of cooled buttermilk in one hand and the
New Yorker
in the other. Can you picture it? It arrived only three weeks late (the magazine, not the buttermilk). The bearer is our village postmaster, a youth with a B.A. and a black umbrella who doubles as a postman and comes on a bicycle from Ladopur, the town two miles away, to deliver it. For news we depend on a battery radio. Yesterday, North Korea invaded the South. American troops are to be sent! It all seems to be happening so far away, although it's going on in our backyard.

“I write this amongst gaudy green parrots scolding each other in the mango trees and a bereaved gander, recently widowed, forcing—for the fifth time this morning—his amorous attention on a puzzled, but not unwilling hen.”

I interrupted my letter to Carol Thorpe long enough to take a swipe at a persistent fly. He had his small, compound lenses aimed at my buttermilk. I missed, he buzzed off, and I picked up my pen again from the unpainted wooden stand nearby, where I had set it down. I tried to imagine Carol over there, reading this letter. Good, dear Carol. The placid playmate from down the street whom I had grown up with. My frequent friend in high school. My college confidante in undergraduate days. And now the classics major. Carol had turned into a nag those last few months in Berkeley. But she was only doing what she did best—acting like my conscience, my Self in the sensible mode, me with an eye on what was in my own best interests. The older sister I never had.

What else would she like to hear, I wondered. I reread what I had written, all about the “cooled” buttermilk. How could I explain to Carol that what I was calling buttermilk was not the same stuff you got in cartons at the Safeway? And “cooled” was a turn of expression for “at-least-not-warm.” Which was all you could ask for without a refrigerator. And we didn't have one. Nor even electricity to run one. As a matter of fact, we had no plumbing, either. No running water, no faucets, no showers, no toilets. In place of the latter were adult-sized potty chairs with lids that the British, with their genius for uncompromisingly adapting to all sorts of places and situations, had devised and called
commodes
.

The trouble was, once you tried to explain one thing, a whole bag of supplementaries would need emptying, and there would be no end of trying to deal with them. Better to let the “cooled” go undefined. And a lot of other things as well.

For instance, I couldn't have told Carol I was writing this letter at the exotic hour of six o'clock in the morning because, after a couple of hours, it was going to be too hot to do anything but shuffle around, exerting as little as possible, before having lunch and then lying down for a nap until tea time, and then going for a walk through the powdered dust of paths through the fields before sunset (after sunset there might be snakes), then having dinner and finally going to sleep to the whine of indignant mosquitoes mad to get inside the net festooned on bamboo poles crossed at either end of the cot.