have seen anyway: Aakash had found a girl. The next morning, just as we were leaving, the chowkidar brought up a little cane basket containing a great deal of fern and foliage, six pink gladioli and a note of apology in neat, rounded writing.
12
Months went by though I don’t know how.
The first two were spent in a village in the south of Spain. Sanyogita knew an English family who owned a hotel in the hills above Seville. They were of red earth, covered in orange, cork and olive trees. In the evenings, the long light and the silvery olive trees made the hills appear purple. The sky was cast in one pattern before evening fell. Then no matter how strong the wind in the hills became, it could never put the arrangement of clouds and clear sky out of true. Against the filters of this hung sky, the light distilled into darkness. From the semicircular window of the one-bedroom annexe we rented for 750 euros a month, we could see the white village of Cazalla. The red-tiled roofs on some of its houses were flat, smooth and new; and on others, rounded, mildewed, with browning stalks growing out of them. On all the bell towers and spires, great stork’s nests had appeared. The chattering from them at night, mixed with the croaking of frogs in a field below, and that most Mediterranean of Mediterranean noises, the whirr of a Vespa, kept me awake for hours.
It seemed at first that we had salvaged our relationship. The quality of life and produce in the village was deceptive. It briefly made the small, borrowed idea of our stay in a European village ring true. In the mornings, we’d have breakfast in a shaded bar with high stools. A stern, leather-faced man brought us long pieces of bread with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, salt and fresh orange juice. We posed as regulars, watching two inches of black coffee drip into clear glasses. The bartender assembled a saucer, a spoon and a large sachet of sugar as the milk heated. His self-assuredness stood out against our pretence; to him it was just another morning, cafe con leche just coffee with milk. And when the milk had heated, the saucers slid across the bar with a brief clatter. At lunch, in another place with tiles and a high wooden bar, there was fresh fish, salad and giant tomatoes with flakes of salt; all things that we hadn’t tasted during the summer in India. They created the illusion of happiness, of the good life.
But it was also these things, and the settled world they spoke of, that made India recede. For as long as sensual pleasures lasted, it didn’t matter. But when those satisfactions ran out, I realized I had no way into this kind of life. There was no context for Indians in Spain as there was for the English or Americans. The falsity of my situation overwhelmed me. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, I would look out of the semicircular window in disbelief at the cobbled streets and red-tiled roofs. The heat in the village dwarfed the heat of the subcontinent and this also added to my sense of futility. The streets were empty all day but for the occasional figure of an old veiled woman in black. The image might have been emblematic of the little village, perfect down to the late-afternoon blaze on the white houses and the bronze-faced lion spitting spring water into a mossy basin, but I wouldn’t have known; I was on the outside, with too little knowledge, knowledge I took for granted in India, to enter that picture of village life.
I joined the village gym. It was a single room, with modern frosted-glass windows embedded in an old facade. A beefy, middle-aged man who taught spin cycling classes to the women in the village charged me thirty euros for the month. One half of the gym was taken up by old weights machines; the other by the spinners, spinning on through a haze of coloured disco lights and techno music. Teenage Spanish boys, with bad skin and short-sleeved T-shirts, worked out around me, eyeing me with suspicion. A metal wall fan circulated the warm, stale air in the room.
It was after one of these sessions, almost six weeks into my time in the village, that my mobile, now carrying Movistar, beeped with a voice message. I stepped out of the gym. It was seven p.m., but the blaze had not subsided. It was late at night in India; I could hear the beeping of scooters and the tinkle of bicycle bells in the background. ‘How’s you doing, man?’ the voice began in English. ‘I hopes you feeling good, man.’ Then in Hindi, ‘Yaar, I miss you a lot. What’s this going and leaving your friend? Please, man, come back soon. There’s so much fun still to be had. OK, well, call when you get a chance. Your friend, Ash-man. Oh, and please say my sorry one more time to Sanyogita bhabi.’
Walking back through these empty cobbled streets, with their narrow pavements and leather-faced men staring vacantly at me, I knew I had to leave. I just didn’t know how I would tell Sanyogita. Money had become a problem as well. In India my mother had helped me with a small allowance and the few thousand I had left in sterling from my job in London had gone far. The village was cheap, but many times more expensive than India. Every meal was out; Sanyogita always ordered fish; we must have been spending fifty euros a day at an increasingly unfavourable exchange rate. The only hopeful news was that the revised version of my novel was complete. It was not an inspired revision, but I’d had detailed notes and had followed them closely. The manuscript was already with the agent in New York and I was awaiting a reply.
That night at the village casino, which was really just a restaurant with red velvet curtains, deep leather chairs and tiled walls, I tried telling Sanyogita that I needed to go home. But I framed my reasons around my confusion at being in a little village in Spain. Sanyogita seemed receptive. She listened quietly, sipping a small glass of sherry and occasionally wrapping a finger around a piece of acorn-fed ham. When I’d finished, she responded with a sweeping gesture which left me, like with the study, reaching in desperation for adequate feelings.
‘Baby, listen, I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ she said, ‘and since this was all my idea in the first place, I feel I should do the cleaning up on my own. I wasn’t going to tell you this till later in the month, it was going to be a surprise, but since you’ve brought it up, I’ll tell you now. I have this friend, Nargis, who’s a publisher in the East Village. She’s like a big Buddhist and a Free Tibet person. And basically, she’s decided to extend the privileges of her citizenship, especially since America has done so little for Tibet, by marrying a Tibetan in Delhi so that he can escape the tyranny of the Chinese and come and live in the States.’
I felt the frost round my glass of Cruzcampo start to melt.
‘But if he’s living in Delhi, hasn’t he already escaped the tyranny of the Chinese?’ I asked, feigning concern.
‘Yes, yes, all right,’ Sanyogita said, laughing, ‘but Nargis doesn’t know that. She’s a big-hearted person, you know, a real do-gooder, so maybe she hasn’t thought of that part. It all seems the same from America, anyway. But that’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘That I’ve done a flat swap with her! She needed a place to stay in Delhi and so I’ve lent her Jorbagh for two months. In place of which, we have the most adorable little flat in the East Village with a cat called Kuku. You can work, I can do my thing. We’ll have breakfast at the Clinton Street Bakery, we’ll watch films, it’ll be so nice.’
It wasn’t that I didn’t have a flat in Delhi where I could return to; I had my mother’s. It wasn’t that Sanyogita, in feeling she had to clean up this summer mess, had already bought our tickets to New York; I would gladly have reimbursed her, thinking of the money I would save by not having to live in New York for two months; it was that I knew Sanyogita, and I knew the place from where the gesture had come. This was no entrapment; it was a heartfelt and hopeful gesture, from the depths of Sanyogita’s fairy-tale imagination, dreaming always of escape.
And so, despite great misgivings, I gave in.
After a summer of boredom and waiting, I left New York under these circumstances.
I had heard nothing from the agent. For two months, I waited, viewing every ending week with sinking hopes and every new one with fresh, but misplaced, anticipation. I checked my emails constantly, and if I was away from the computer for too long, I felt an ache at the thought of what news the little blue orb in my inbox might have brought. I tried to live my agent’s life, thinking of when she would come into work, when she might be having lunch with a publisher, when – shaking off the effects of a bottle of red wine – she would write to me to tell me of what he had said. I thought of how she would have half-days on Fridays in the summer, and of where and for how long she would go on holiday. I thought obsessively of these things even as my agent sat in an office barely a few miles away. But I couldn’t bring myself to contact her first. I felt certain that this action would turn good news to bad. I played games with myself. Every changing light – would I make it across the street while the little man was still white? – every arriving train – would the next train be an express train uptown? – every Sunday book review – would it contain any indication of what was popular these days? Indian writing still in? – became heavy with
