How long ago all that seemed here in Rome. I realised as the years passed that love threatened us both. I understood, sitting under another kind of sun, why Yohan no longer acknowledged me.
Marcella never talked to me of marriage. She bought me an expensive camera almost as soon as I arrived.
‘We can’t afford to send you to the University. We want you to have the best, but university – no. We cannot afford. You’re too late to sculpt. The camera is good, you learn and sell. That is how you will live.’
So my future was carved out, and I spent those early months walking miles every day, in the cold breeze and the spring rain, learning to use a camera. My early photographs – now with Father George – were mainly of fountains and plazas, colonnades and arches. Marcella was not pleased.
‘Stupid tourist bitch,’ I heard her screaming to Job.
‘Marcella, she’s a child, from the country. Don’t speak like that.’
‘Let her hear what I think.’
Two years later I did a study of the Colosseum. The earth was deeply stenched with rain, weeds grew. I sent them to a German magazine which printed them at once. Celebration! Marcella was pleased at last. She gave me one of her odd, rare and brilliant smiles.
I wanted to go back home, but Job dissuaded me.
‘Things will not be the same. Ammachi is dead, what is there to go for?’
‘Yohan is there, and Leelamma.’
‘Yohan? That silent boy, Abe’s son? You want to see him?’
‘I want to hear the rain, I want to eat mangoes, sit by the river.’
‘You’re a fool. Nothing is the same ever. Ask Marcella for money if you want to go. I have none now.’
So I never went back. Sometimes in the dark green Roman street, ancient cobbles under my feet. I would think of the old house where I grew up. There were children, frogs, spiders, crows in the backyard, dark recesses, mangoes ripening in hay, and hens laying eggs in a chest of rice. I missed the high pitched Syrian chants from the village church, and the white cotton clothes edged with gold metallic thread that our women wore. One day I would go back to my ancient village where the wind brought to us the sound of the sea, and the hush of river water.
It was the dry bare-bones of a long summer. I walked in the dust, with the hot winds blowing around me, paper scrapping in the alleys, the city deserted in the glare of the afternoon sun. I walked to the old fort. It was green and cool, the grass growing wild, the moat a little murky, but glistening silver where it escaped the shadows of old mortar. I heard the strange guttural calls of water birds, and the summer became at once another. I was seventeen then. The memory became an incandescent bubble in which I lay, slothful.
I don’t know how long I had been lying in the shadows of the old peepal. Vulture droppings had made the tree alien, and I sensed the death in the old tree – its gnarled roots were exposed like the knees of crones, and its scabby trunk veered upward. A million tiny ants crawled out of a hole and marched in single file around and around its base.
I knew it was madness to stay, but the tentacles of time caught me – the fort so old and unknown, spoke to me in a hundred ways. It was dusk when I arose and saw to my surprise that I was not alone. The man was tall, with the narrow brown eyes that I had known once before, both laughter and arrogance in them. He was older by twenty years, and I felt a deep sense of dread.
‘So you still come here.’
‘Yes, sometimes – when it gets too hot.’
He pointed at the steps where we had sat, those long years ago in our childhood.
‘Do you remember the flies? They used to circle us,’ he said.
‘Kings and horses, I remember, but not the flies,’ I laughed, looking at him, forgetting the years in between.
We had sat on the steps many times with our hands locked together, afraid to make love because I was too young to ask, and he, old-fashioned, knew we were not destined to marry. I remembered the dreadful intensity of our eyes as they looked into each others’, the world sailing past, and yet beyond it – a laughter which would redeem us, would allow us to jump down and go walking barefoot over the ancient graves and the jagged ends of broken walls.
‘Why did you go away like that?’ I asked him.
‘You were too young for me. You understood nothing about me.’
‘Are you married now?’
He took out a smooth black wallet, and from it pictures of his large, lovely wife and his perfect children. They were American, all of them. So was he, down to his Reebok shoes and his wine-coloured tie.
‘I missed you,’ I said.
‘You should have written.’
‘You left no address.’
He held my hands again.
‘Give me a hug.’
It was so American, so casual and innocent, that I had to hold him. His body felt the same, but it was softer, older – a body which did not have the tautness of desire, but had known love and the gentleness of wife and children, safe house, a big golden dog to walk to the woods.
We disentangled, and he smiled at me. It began to rain, and we went our different ways without looking back. It was too late to ask him ‘What did you do?’ Nor did he question me: ‘What have you become?’ or ‘Do you still live in the same house?’ Perhaps it was because we understood that our worlds could not meet, that in our tenuous and placid worlds the other was only a shadow.
My work on Carson McCullers had come to a standstill. I had no way of deciphering the silences in the narratives. McCullers had lived the world I had known and felt as a child.
I had read her short stories over and over again, and all the poignancy of childhood, of unutterable desires, of loneliness and of wanting, came back to me. I had a McCullers complex, and it ran deep. I applied for a grant and went to a university town in America. No, I told myself, it’s not in the hope of seeing Karan again, it’s just a coincidence that I know he lives there too.
The city I lived in during that summer was large and open and cold. Brownstone buildings, no trees. Billboards. Greek cafes. Bookshops and an aquarium, with an eleven-dollar entrance fee where I would go when I was lonely to look at the fish, and be crushed in the whirlpool of people. It saved me from the alienation of the neutral city. Americans had children. I realised this when I went to the aquarium. I suppose, in my heart, I hoped that I would meet my childhood friend again, his beautiful wife with the yellow hair and the children who looked like his mother from Jullundar. Where else, living in a city which didn’t really respect children, would he take them?
Then one day, I saw them. It was exactly as I had imagined. He was carrying his daughter aloft on his shoulder, safe from the crowds; his wife and son were behind, carrying bags of popcorn and wild-coloured umbrellas. It was raining outside, their hair was shining with rain drops in the blue dark, the artificial underwater world of the aquarium.
‘Karan!’ I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I was good at subterfuge.
‘Elizabeth! Of course, meet my wife Gina, and these are my kids. What brings you here? Where are you staying?’
‘At the University.’
‘Here? You’re on a trip?’
‘I live here.’
His wife looked at me, and smiled, and held my hands, and said, ‘You must come for lunch on Sunday. It’s not often that Karan meets friends from India.’
‘I’d love to,