10th July 1937
(from the train)
My dearest Lis,
Half the way down to Madras, the heat still & stifling, the shaking monstrous. The air coming in through the window was fire. There was no rain. WS worries about my misery at leaving home, B says What’s Done is Done. You need to be tough, she says, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe they’re rather alarmed at the thought of having me on their hands, like a suitcase someone’s left you in charge of. It’s one thing finding a joyous friendship out of the blue, another to have the friend land on you forever—not what B & WS had bargained for, I am sure, when they came on their little trip to India. The other Indians in the stations & on the train seem scandalized/disgusted. You’ll say I’m dreaming up things. But I heard one man say to a woman (loudly so that I would hear & in Hindustani so that only I would understand) Some women are so shameless they don’t mind selling themselves to white men. They weren’t the only ones—mutterings & sneers in the train all around me. W asks me, What did they say? What did they say? But I don’t tell him. It makes me cringe. I want him to think well of us—whatever “us” is meant to be.
At one of the stations was a food stall with a board saying Adarsh Hotel. A man was ladling out the most delicious-smelling daal pakoras & steaming-hot tea. By this time two Englishmen were in our compartment—faces very sweaty, noses puffing with each word, big stomachs straining at the buttons, but polite to me, madam, madam after every sentence. Railway guards on holiday, they said. When you go to that stall would you bring us some food too, ma’am, they said. They said the food from there is delicious, but the Adarsh Hotel man won’t serve foreigners. So I went there feeling v. useful & got enough for everyone & we had a picnic inside the train. Then we trundled off again & in the evening, we were over the Godavari river & it was raining so I held my face to the window & the spray cooled it. Cool breezes at last through the window & for as far as the eye can see, brown wide water & green earth. I remembered from long ago Rabi Babu talking about this part of the journey & it came back to me after all these years—that time when I did this journey with my father. Rabi Babu had said about this very stretch that its beauty moved him so powerfully he knew he wants to be reborn in this country every time.
That thought made me wretchedly miserable about leaving home—as if all of life is lost somehow—all that I had dreamed on the deck of that ship when I was with the poet & my father—I had thought I would learn painting at Santiniketan, I’d have a life that would be different from the suffocation I saw around me at home—stupid, stupid. Ignorant. I’ve destroyed everything. I can never go back now, the doors are shut forever & I don’t know if this destruction will lead to anything good. It is as if a giant black mouth of a volcano is before me & I am about to fall into it, no idea what’s at the bottom.
In the train I was struck by a violent fit of crying & one of my ghastly headaches. My eyes throbbed enough to pop out of my head for the pain. Fear & misery to think of little Myshkin all alone. What must he be doing at this exact time of day? I should write to him, but I can’t bear to. Not yet. Once I am calmer. He must not know . . . will I ever be calmer? I lay with my back to WS & B, wept till my heart broke. Two nights running I had a horrible dream, such a fearful dream. It kept coming back to me even when I woke, of a fetus that was like Myshkin as a baby. Bloodied & dead, swollen eyes shut. Oh Lis. I couldn’t remember anything else about the dream, but I woke feeling terribly sick. How pleased my mother will be—she always thought the worst of me. This’ll exceed all her expectations. She will think I’ve betrayed my husband for another man & run away. Didn’t care for my child. What’s more evil than a woman who does not love her child?
Myshkin was meant to be here with me. How he’d have loved sitting by the window. I keep thinking of those times he got fever when he was tiny and I spent nights bathing his little head over a bucket of water. Now I sit by the train window, looking out, out, out. Even when it is dark. I haven’t much conversation. I listen to the others—Beryl: Say something; Beryl: Eat something. WS: Life is a painting & you’ve just applied the first strokes of the new brush. Still I can find nothing to say, I am afraid I will start crying if I speak. So I keep scanning the scene outside. I feel as dead as a stone for the grief & for the hideous sense of having made a mistake. Then in the next hour my thoughts change & I know I needed to leave or I might have gone mad. Actually mad—babbling, screaming mad. I cannot tell you how frightened I was the days it was almost unfightable—my sense that I was falling over an edge. Some nights, every part of my body was covered with misery inside out, like pond scum. I slept on the roof yet it felt as if I was in a room where, one by one, every window that led to air and sky was being slammed shut until I was all alone in a black cell. Once—only once—I ransacked my father-in-law’s medicine chest for pills to end the misery. But maybe he knew—wise old owl—I found only cough syrups & suchlike.
I wouldn’t have managed to board the train if not for you. If you had not given me the money—all your savings, isn’t it, Lis? I know it must be. One of the worst things with NC was the way he made me feel guilty about every expense. The household money counted out at the start of every week & the little extra given magnanimously to me for any foolish little thing I might want to buy, a hairclip or face cream, a bauble, a tube of paint. I was surprised the other day when I counted how much I had saved over the past ten years—by not buying hairclips! All hidden safely in your house. Yet another thing to thank you for. I am going to earn now & the first thing I will do is return your money to you. You might say no & call it a gift but I need to start this new life with no debts, even to you, Lis, however generously you give things away—money, your shawl, dresses (will I ever wear them? I haven’t worn a frock since I was a child, only saris!)—with no thought of getting anything back, only wanting me to be on my way, with M or without. If you had not pushed me into that coach, if you had not convinced me this was my only chance, I’d never have found the will. Life is full of regrets & thoughts going back & forth—mine are like a ping-pong ball, off goes a thought & back it comes before I know it, exactly the same. I am in pain—terrible pain that hurts my body as well as soul—these sickening headaches & stomachaches that feel as if my gut has turned into a rope knotted up & can’t be undone. I cannot keep down a morsel.
B says it is all in my mind. She reads me Arthur Waley’s Chinese poems to calm me down & I think that makes it worse. One more lost Chinese child from the 4th century bc weeping for his home & I will fling myself into the sea when I reach it, I promise. Her intensity scares me—a little. One morning I woke up & she was sitting quietly at the foot of my bunk, watching me. Just watching. When I opened my eyes, she pressed my ankle & said, “There. See, how it gets easier. You’re smiling.” She calls me her sunbird. Small, bright, flitting. Drink up all the nectar, she says, life doesn’t come twice.
I feel out of my element. They will go back to their lives. And I?
Oh, I can’t write any more, Lis. I’ll come back later.
All my love, Gay
(still from the train, 11th–12th)
Dearest Lis,
I am trying to chat, smile, to make things less annoying for W & B. I sketch on the train. It jogs a lot & the lines move around, but I still do it: faces of people, stations where we stop. Trees & hillocks. The folds of the valley in Chambal. Keeps my mind off things. Makes my hands move easier on the paper. It feels so long since I could draw & not be called to my duties. You are lucky not to be married, Lis, how often I have envied your freedom! The feeling of being trapped—trapped forever—I honestly thought I would know nothing but misery for my entire existence. There is a time after which the doors close & then where do you go? Nowhere.
When WS turned up out of the blue again, I thought for a fanciful moment that my father had sent him as my guardian angel. All the things that my heart & mind & soul were starved for ever since my father died—it is not just finding people who understand me, my sense of myself has been restored to me. As if all of life’s possibilities had been locked away behind a door which has opened again. Is it arrogant of me to be certain I have something that other people don’t have? At home there was a desert inside me, winds howling, scorching away every blade of green. I could not paint anything that satisfied me. Everything I do, every single thing, is meaningless when I am not able to do my own work well enough to please myself. It has been so long since every part of my mind was set alight with new ideas—oh this sounds vain, doesn’t it? Don’t you live in Muntazir too? Don’t you make happiness for yourself? But it is not the house or the town or the country, it is more tangled up than that. If you knew everything—what would you have done if you knew it all?
But you do know the agony of misunderstandings and petty quarrels my life has always been ever since I was married, you know how your life is different from mine. You are yourself, you answer to nobody. Though you had to fight for that, didn’t you? Or else your Aunty Joyce & Aunty Cathy would have had you roasting chicken for a brood of children by now, wearing a checked apron all day instead of a pretty red dress & high heels & matching nails!
NC is not a bad man in his own way, I can see that. I can see how principled & strong he is, just one encounter with Arjun & you know what a good man NC is. People respect him because he lives by rules that come from long thinking & much reading & he is not easy on himself. He is not easy on anyone else either. Not a minute’s rest! Always the striving to be meaningful. It’s such a bore! Before you know it you’re listening to a lecture & he thinks he knows best of course & you are no more than a foolish deluded woman if you don’t agree with him & his Mukti. One day I was listening to him—talk, talk, talk—and I could hear nothing, could only see how his spittle comes out of his mouth when he talks & how he sucks it back in with a “sss,” & I closed my eyes & thought of someone else so that I would not run that very day. He humiliated me every chance he had. He wanted his friends to laugh at me & condescend. He ridiculed the books I read & the paintings I made. And I thought I’d never, ever hear the end of the time I danced in the garden—when I was only eighteen—if just to not hear about that again, it’s worth running away!
Or maybe there is something wrong with me—home, husband & children are the world for women, they say. Why weren’t they enough for me? That woman was always up to no good, Dinu’s mother will declare in her theatrical way. Gayatri Flighty Rozario. Was her husband beating her up? Did he make her swab the floors and wash the clothes? Did he drink, did he have a lover? Did she have to tend to his aching legs every night?
NC did none of these things. Q.E.D.
There was a bird trapped inside me beating its wings. I had to tear my chest open & let it free. It makes me bleed, it hurts beyond words. There are so many things I cannot say still, even to you.
I thought I had found the best solution, I would run away with my son. It was not to be. Why was he late the one day I begged him to be on time? I still don’t know. Is he all right? I’ll be back for Myshkin within a year, I’ve sworn. Please, dearest Lis, keep an eye on him, give him treats & cakes, all the things his father thinks of as spoiling a child. Inspect his ears now & then to see they are not grimy: he hates them being cleaned. And he lets nobody else cut his nails but me. Will you cut them for him—to think of those grimy little nails growing longer & longer! He will agree if you dangle a treat afterwards.
Sometimes people are separated for a while. It can’t be helped, but it’s only for a time & if I didn’t know this to be true I could not remain away from Myshkin another day. I refuse to be miserable, I won’t be sick again or have headaches, this is adventure, not abandonment. I want to eat life, grab everything new & taste it. WS was gazing out of the window yesterday—we were passing a stand of coconut trees, some villages, a child near the train tracks waved at us—& he said it was like a fairy tale—all of life, the world—& he would never work for the future, only live in the here & now. I know exactly what he means. B says WS is gruff & cutting & brutal to people he doesn’t like—tells them uncomfortable truths to drive them away. She told me of a violinist he was particularly sarcastic about—a puny, well-meaning youth—yet WS complained that the man incessantly took photographs & somehow managed to “insinuate” himself into each one. And in just the same way, he said, when they were playing the Kreutzer Sonata together, the man “struck poses” on the violin that obscured “the view of Beethoven.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but WS can be cruelly scathing.
Still, he appears to like both Beryl & me & so far we are a harmonious group. We talk about dance and painting and travels. We make up stories about the passengers who come & go. We don’t fight & argue for every little thing. It feels new—to talk this way. I feel as if my brain is waking up again. I’ll work at last. Properly. In a new way, really work so that I am painting with concentration & intensity. The springs are rusty, the thoughts & images don’t come, they circle around, but I can’t reach them, they float away. I will make them stand still.
With much love,
Gay
July 14th 1937
Lis, dearest,
Madras is unbearable, the sweat drops off our eyelashes & foreheads. This letter paper is damp with sweat, the blurs in the ink you see are made by sweat. If you can imagine the heat having a damp stink, that’s how it is here. If I had not been able to reach you through that trunk call today and found out the news, I’d have given this up & come back home. (What home? Where?) Poor Myshkin, how he must have fretted at being late that day—he is such a fretter! I could not have told him why I needed him to come back on time, I was sure he’d let it out. I am so very relieved that you’ve reassured him & he knows all will be well.
We sail to Ceylon in a week or ten days after B has seen some Bharatnatyam. There is a new dancer here called Kanta Devi whom she is fascinated by. I think she is half in love. Is that possible? Why not? Kanta Devi is so athletic & tall & striking, she could be a man. Beryl never takes her eyes off her when they are in the same room. It’s quite funny.
Yesterday we went for a walk on the Marina. It is a beautiful promenade on the beach. A storm was building up & the waves were already high. I was frightened to think of being in the sea in a ship, lurching about on such waves. I was sad & longing for Myshkin, longing for home, longing even for Banno & Dinu & Brijen—in some strange way, I am missing the very place where I felt a prisoner. At times I feel such an outsider with W & B, Lis, I wonder if I made a mistake. I know I’ll be an outsider for good now wherever I am. When that thought came to me yesterday it made me go still for a moment. As if everything had stopped around me & I had too.
WS spoke to me for a long, gentle time as we walked. He told me how he had to live alone in the Urals after he was imprisoned by the Russians when they were at war with the Germans. The rest of his family had already left their home in Russia & gone back to Germany, he happened to be the one in the wrong place at the wrong time—at just 22. But he had his dog with him & had somehow got himself a piano in the wilds of Russia—typical of WS! After all, he even managed to find a piano in Muntazir, of all places. He made friends with the nomads, he learned their language & went off to the mountains with their herds of goats. He says he felt a slowing down, a settling into the rhythms of the seasons that has never left him since. The future is always elusive he told me, you have to be a chameleon & adapt to your present & live it as if it were a celebration. Can you imagine, he read books & learned enough Arabic & Persian in the wilds of the Urals to translate Arabian Nights? He said he had wanted to learn Hindi & Sanskrit also, but was released too soon, in merely three years. Beryl said she would arrange to send W back to Russia to finish his education when the next war broke out—WS was sure to be in the wrong place again & be imprisoned again.
WS told us how it had been when he set off for unknown Java. He did not feel at home in Germany after coming back from Russia. He was surrounded by Germans who hung on to Hitler’s every word. Can one exist in that way? Once you have been out of Germany, he said, you notice how terrible it is to live there, what a terrible country it is & what ghastly people inhabit it, so dry & without feeling. How unhappy it must be to feel an alien in your own country, I thought. He was afraid he would become like them, he said—to come by a sense of belonging there, he would have had to surrender his whole being, somehow have to sell himself, he said. He could not do that, so even when it meant leaving his friends, family, he preferred to go away & try to find himself a new home.
And Lis, I felt he was so right. (Not that I am saying NC was Hitler! Oh no.) There are times I have been afraid I will lose all that is myself. I felt myself turning into the person NC wanted me to be, just for a few moments’ peace, how easy to please people. How easy not to cause unpleasantness. My mother always said, Whatever you do, Gayatri, don’t cause any unpleasantness. As though pleasantness is life’s single goal.
It makes me laugh to think of your face when you read this. Fat chance, you will say & blow a big puff of your smoke into my face. Oh, I wish we were talking together in your living room, instead of me writing pages & pages in the half-dark inside a mosquito net in this airless heat.
All of the things WS told me as we walked past the boiling sea, tasting salt with every breath—they made me feel calmer somehow. A vendor came with peanuts & we bought some. We drank cold soda from those thick bottles with marble stoppers. In the end I felt stronger. I felt as if these big changes in life are like waves that take time to build up, starting miles out at sea & we only see them at the end when they come crashing onto the sand. We can’t see where they began, or where they will end, we can’t see what caused them to build up in the first place.
Please write to me: you know the address! Please make sure I have a stack of letters waiting! Give me all the news, about yourself, Myshkin, Arjun, Brijen: everyone. So that I feel I am with you all. Half of me is there still, I am a torn-up fragment.
I will write again from the ship, I know it is possible to send letters from ports, I remember my father spending all his time on board ships to Java & Bali writing letters. This trip brings back the one with him so clearly. It seemed short at that time—I was excited & young, didn’t want the journey to end. I had never expected the ship from Madras to Singapore to be so massive. This time I am prepared! Five hundred or more people, French, Vietnamese, Tamilians, Mauritians, all to live on that ship together for so many days. I remember they had four cooks for just the Indian travelers and believe it or not, one of the cooks slaughtered and skinned a goat on the deck a few feet away from the other cooks grinding spices on huge stones and peeling mountains of onion and garlic while the French soldiers stood around asking for snacks.
My father pointed out that the lack of a common language did not stop man from finding a common humanity, the natural urge is to live harmoniously, he said. And Suniti Babu, who was with us, said the happy camaraderie on the S.S. Amboise filled him with a special kind of self-loathing about the cannibalistic hatreds at home.
The days had gone by blissfully . . . the ten days from Singapore to Batavia passed as if in a few minutes. And then two days more to Surabaya & another two to Buleleng. How very, very long we traveled & not a moment’s misery. Uncomplicated joy. My father was like that, he made everything wonderful: interesting, meaningful, amusing. If only he had been alive! Everything broke into pieces the day he died.
But I have promised: I will stop all sad & useless thoughts as soon as I see them crossing the door & coming into my head. Out, I will say to the thought. When we reach Ceylon, I’ll use a passport for the first time since I had one ten years ago. What strings Beryl pulled to use that old dead document to get me a new one double-quick—I shall never know. My passport doesn’t mention a husband at all, it says I am an ayah! Beryl’s used to smuggling people out of countries, she told me airily—she has spirited away so many Jewish dancers from Germany. I am another of her missions of mercy, I suppose.
With much love, yours ever, Gay.
July 20th 1937
My dear Lis,
I will post this letter & soon we will leave again—for Singapore. What an explorer I feel. B plans to stay on here for several weeks & wishes me to stay with her to watch some kind of Ceylonese dance she is interested in, but I want to go on & reach Bali. I find dance doesn’t interest me so much anymore, I want movement myself, I don’t want to sit and watch someone else move! How to carry on ahead with W without being disloyal to Beryl? She can be commanding & sharp-tongued, sometimes she intimidates me, though not for long. Soon she makes a silly joke & all is well again. Yesterday she went to one of her grand British open-air parties to which I was not invited & Walter didn’t want to go. She came back & reported that the British garden was glorified by the most magnificent banyan tree she had ever seen, a forest of pillars, like a temple. The branches provided such generous shade over the tea table—as well as bird droppings, she said, which fell mostly on her. She reports all of this with such a straight face that it is only a few seconds later that you laugh at the absurdity of it. She kept brushing off imagined bird droppings from her head & shoulders & shaking out her black hair as she talked. Whenever I have my attacks of terror & sadness about leaving home, she says, “My dear Gayatri, the best things in life come by chance. And you can’t tell chance what clothes to wear when it comes.”
How I wish the old life did not have to be lost for a new one to be found!
We talked a lot, sitting on the deck of the ship. That is W talked mostly & Beryl did too, while I listened. I am so silent that B says I remind her of her Arthur. Words have to be dragged out of Arthur like wisdom teeth with dental pliers, she says. I was not this way, she knows that, but chooses to forget. My words have dried up this last week with worry & fear & who knows what else.
I’m going on & on when there are a hundred things I want to ask you, but I know some of those questions are answered in the letters you have written & sent ahead for me. Have you written, dear Lis? I am anxious to know everything although it is a great deal to ask of you when you have much to do—one does not say these things face to face because it sounds so grand & sentimental, but do you know how much I have always admired you for the way you make living alone & fending for yourself appear a constant celebration? This is why people flock to you. This is why your Home Away from Home has such an exuberant atmosphere. B & W were saying so as well: Beryl said you are full of infectious “joie de vivre”—I had to ask her what that meant & she said it meant joy of life. That is so true. She was remarking on how you dress with flamboyance (she called it), paint your fingernails just so & wear everything matching whether you are expecting visitors or not. She said you have a way of laughing without restraint till you’re out of breath & have tears in your eyes. I hope those tears of laughter are the only tears you will ever know.
With much love, Gay
30th July, Surabaya.
My dearest Lis,
Almost Bali. Surabaya. We have docked at Tanjung Perak. It is a curious thing—it is as if I am back somewhere familiar, as if I was here in my last life. It was not my last life—it was only ten years ago—the moment I stepped onto the jetty a whole rag-tag-bag of memories came tumbling into my head & I was as excited as a girl, skipping around, running here & there, trying to find familiar things. B & WS very tolerant, amused, happy to see me normal again, to walk around with me to take me to places I remembered. People stop WS with big smiles—they seem to know him, he has friends everywhere & they want him to inspect new musical instruments, songbirds in cages, fish in glass bowls. The market has all kinds of shops from Chinese shoemakers to Japanese dentists. Carved wood & printed cloth & animals painted in bright colors. Stone Buddhas & other gods & goddesses. The first thing I searched out was the Armenian photographer’s shop—Kurkdjian, he is called—he was still there, grayer but the same—I bought his postcards again, as I had the time before—the postcards enclosed are from there. I will send some to Myshkin too. WS managed to find a car—but of course—& we drove around from place to place. We had lunch at the Hotel Orange, where I recall the Indians had laid out a big lunch for Rabi Babu & his entourage (which by then included my father & me—on the fringes though we were). After we ate, WS dropped me off at Lokumull’s, a Sindhi merchant who has a shop here—I wanted to go because I remembered that too from the last time—a huge barn of a house with four floors, where the lowest floor is the shop & the rest are rooms for his family, for his workers, for storage. Bombay prints of gods & goddesses on the walls of his puja room & a dog-eared Granth Sahib open next to a copy of the Gita in Dutch! One of his relatives insisted I go up there & pray & so I did, sitting quietly for a few minutes, letting my thoughts roam to Myshkin, to home, to you, thinking how far away I am, how everyone must think me an ogre for what I have done. Strangely, that did not make me feel unhappy in the least. Let people think what they will. I know what I am & I know what I intend to do. I have never been more certain.
Lokumull sells everything in the world, Japanese silks, mainly, but also every other pretty or ugly thing from all over—what Beryl calls “objets d’art.” You would instantly find a place for one of the Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, or Burmese curios he has. Oh, I wish I could send you something. It is one among a series of shops run by Sindhis & he had looked after Rabi Babu a great deal during the day we spent in Surabaya. He recognized me from that time & asked about my “esteemed father” & shook his bald head sadly when I told him. When he heard of Rozario he was ablaze with excitement, began talking of Karachi & Rai Chand. I knew Rozario’s furniture shops were famous all those years ago, of course, but never imagined I would meet someone in Java of all places, who is familiar with them. This is only because Lokumull is from Karachi & the instant he knew of the connection, he wanted me to meet all his relatives, his wife, his grandchildren—it became a regular Indian gathering with much shouting, laughing, excitement. We were served very sweet, ghee-soaked halwa & sherbet in glasses tinted yellow. In the midst of it all appeared an urbane old gentleman named Badruddin, a Punjabi Muslim with a long beard & a paunch that settled comfily on his thighs. He fitted himself into a chair & held forth on Karachi, Lahore, Quetta & so on. THOSE DAYS! It was as if my presence gave them an audience for old tales they have nobody new to share with. When we parted there were loud & warm invitations to me to come to them the minute I was tired of Bali—there are very few Indians there, just a few illiterate petty traders, I would have nothing in common with them whatsoever, they assured me. Any time I was longing for home food or new saris, anything at all, I was to remember they were only two nights away by steamer. It made me smile, both their ardour & their conviction that I would pine for home food & home company. I was struck that they didn’t condemn me as a fallen woman—maybe because travel is a normal thing for them. They & their ancestors have always done it & so they do not find it unusual to encounter a woman traveling alone. They think I am here for a holiday & will go back soon. Of course I did not tell them the way I left home.
Before we sail for the last part of our journey, I will give this letter to be posted. My dear, dear Lis, I am going to be in Bali at last! It is the final stretch. Is it wrong & criminal that I feel nothing but excitement? My pangs of homesickness are gone. Well, gone for the moment, & why (as WS says) look beyond the moment. Everything in life happens for a reason, & good things happen out of bad. Onward!!
With much love, yours ever,
Gay
August 1937, Ubud
My dearest Lis!
In the water between Surabaya and Buleleng I thought for a minute—no, for many minutes!—that I would meet my Maker. (He did a bad job with me, didn’t He?) We could see hills on the island of Madura from the steamer and to pass it the steamer had to go through a narrow strait—would it go through safely or would it hit the coast? It seemed far too narrow for us. We stood on the deck watching, half-afraid, half-excited, even WS taut, though with excitement not fear, I suppose. In the event, we went through safely. Ships with billowing sails went past far away, nearer us were boats from which men were throwing out nets to catch fish. So beautiful when I stopped being anxious. In the early evening the moon rose big and orange, like half a setting sun, and the water became deep orange and blue. Slowly the blue darkened to almost black and at night the ship moaned and rocked and the moon hung so low and large in the sky it was close enough to pluck and eat. A hundred colors! My face is soaked in blue and orange. And then at dawn the shadows of hills on the island in the distance and a mysterious fragrance in the air—I cannot describe it, you have to be here to know it.
At Buleleng the water was shallow and the ship dropped anchor a long way away from the shore. We had to climb down the ship by a ladder and get into a boat which carried us and our muddle of luggage, including the sarod WS has brought back with him. He walked off to hunt for a car, which was supposed to be waiting for us, to drive us to Gianyar. It costs 26 guilders to rent a car for the day—new and exciting to think in guilders and not rupees! It would take us all day to reach, he said, it was almost forty miles away, over hills & volcanoes, down on the southern side of the island. The household would be waiting for us, he said. The cook must have roasted pig and duck to celebrate.
The most wonderful thing was that WS rented a car from the same woman who supplied the cars for Rabi Babu’s entourage on my last trip! I had so wanted to meet her again, and I did. She is a woman called Queen Fatima—she is such a character, she had made a great impression on me the last time—a billowy creature with a loud voice & teeth absolutely black with chewing tobacco & cigarettes. The story about her is that she had been one of the queens of southern Bali & when the Dutch came to conquer it, her husband the king & all his wives decided to kill themselves. Queen F did not want to die, so she ran away—all the way over hills & mountains, to the north. Here she changed her religion & became a Muslim. Some say it’s nonsense & she was no queen, she was a concubine. Whatever it is, I like her. I remember how she was terribly friendly & bade Rabi Babu “Selamat Jalan” again & again when we were leaving. After a while, a bit tired of her effusions, he had said in his dry way, “The lady is the kind of woman who has a past that is not yet wholly past.” He & his friends found her rather forward, which irked me even then & I was reminded of it when I sat with her a few hours ago—she’s not forward, she’s forceful. She is sure of herself & lives by her own means—runs her own taxi service & her own shop & orders her staff around & bosses over her daughters & spits her tobacco juice as far into the corner as any man—I suppose these things mark her out as forward.
I felt a great sense of freedom when I sat in her shop. Her enormous bulk poured out from every side of her chair & she grilled me via WS’s translations with great inquisitiveness (somehow I didn’t find it offensive)—who was I, what did I think I was doing etc. To her, I had no trouble saying I had left my husband! (There, I have written it too. For the first time.) In the end she said, “When you have to leave your family & home it is not easy & nobody does it without a thought. If you have come so far, you are here to stay.”
She wasn’t sentimental or profound, quite the opposite, sucking on her teeth, prying them with a pin for some bit of stuck meat while she spoke to me, but when I was leaving, she pressed a mother-of-pearl necklace & a little Buddha into my hands & said that if I needed a friend I had one & not to hesitate, etc etc. Then she said something to WS, which was possibly lewd (somehow, it felt like that from the way she smacked her lips & gargled with laughter), she slapped his shoulders & also Beryl’s (B loved her too) & the “Selamat Jalan” came in the booming voice I know from years ago.
And finally—here I am! Settled in a small bamboo & stone hut in W’s Tjampuhan. It is a part of his estate. It’s as WS described it when he came—a series of small bamboo huts with thatch roofs, each one with a verandah & above a fast-moving river that runs down a deep gorge far, far below & in the gorge are trees so tall their tops are level with our houses.
Life is quiet & pleasant here. Every morning you find someone on the steps of the verandah—they sit & wait until WS comes out & talks to them. They smoke something that smells sweetly, of cloves. WS might chat for a while, then go back in to nap or read, come out again when he wants to be with them & they just keep sitting there. They are villagers from nearby & at times from far away & they might stay for hours—very peaceably, smoking, chewing a paan-like thing just as at home & spitting out red juice also just as they do at home, blackened-teeth from it, just as Banno’s teeth were. (How my father-in-law hated her red spittle.) Some of the men come to show WS their paintings or sculpture, some just to share news.
There are two managers who run this place & a small group of foreigners too, all orbiting around WS. They gossip & squabble & there are undercurrents I can sense but not analyze—but everyone is at work or at play & somehow much gets done. A famous American anthropologist is here: Margaret Mead. Rather a stodgy, humorless person who talks in long words & once she starts a sentence you know it will be nothing short of a paragraph. I want to run when I see her approach. It’s like NC launching into a discourse on the economics of colonialism—all of it used to fly straight past my ears or above my head. M. Mead dislikes Beryl & calls her a sharp-tongued witch behind her back. Beryl does not say anything offensive, but I can tell the dislike is mutual. There is an American musician called Colin McPhee & his wife, Jane Belo—she’s very pretty & WS adores her.
Beryl & WS quarrel a lot these days, though it is not ill-natured fighting. He is amused by her but loses patience & she can be annoying, acts the little girl, jumps around with over-enthusiasm. He says it takes a long time for him to teach her to see & understand things. I can be of some help when they are going over their notes about India, but none at all when they discuss the dance here, which I understand only from a dim distance. I go with Beryl to watch the Balinese dances, but it has fallen away from me—my absorption in dance, the way I became charged lightning if I was watching a performance. The dazzling costumes, the formal precision, the beauty of the dancers . . . and yet after a while I find my thoughts are far away, or I am interested in drawing them rather than understanding. So I stay on the fringes while Beryl complains that WS is too lighthearted & too lazy. (What must she think of me?) She says everything takes twice the time because he does too many different things & rushes around Bali once to give a concert, the next few days to help out a film crew, or just to collect old musical instruments.
I am mesmerized by everything I see around me, but I still feel an onlooker. I feel as if I’ll visit for a while and then leave—I cannot think I am here to stay, it cannot be. When will I stop feeling like Cinderella at the ball? Time to go! Time to go! Every now and then I think I must stand up and say my thank-yous and go back home. But where is home? My home is where Myshkin is and you are. Does that mean I will never be at home again? I cannot think of not seeing you again, of course we will. You will come here.
I am somewhat starstruck. There is an old guest book here—so many visitors to this place. I have been going through it & find dozens of names I have only read in magazines before. Charlie Chaplin even! Noël Coward (he is an English playwright) came to visit WS & left him a long poem in the book. I’ll tell you a bit of it:
Oh Walter dear, Oh Walter dear,
Please don’t neglect your painting . . .
Crush down dear Walter if you can
Your passion for the Gamelan
Neglect your love of birds & beasts
Go to far fewer temple feasts
Neglect your overwhelming wish
To gaze for hours at colored fish . . .
And so on. It is so true, even if funny. The one thing WS needs to do—his painting—he is lazy about. He is always short of money but still he turns down work. He tells us he’d much rather sit under a tree & watch the birds & leaves or count the ants on a window ledge than waste life at an easel. This infuriates B at times & at times she finds it amusing, depending on her mood.
I, on the other hand, am already beavering away at painting with a kind of grim determination that ruins my work in the end—it is all stilted, forced, imitative—I feel down in the dumps about it—but I so want to sell & earn enough to bring across Myshkin, quickly. I want it to happen tomorrow! Right away! I would paint houses or buses or signboards if that brought money. I feel a hideous sense of urgency—as if I have only a year or a few months in which to work & earn & bring him & then the magic gate will close. It is all nonsense, of course.
In return for my board & lodging (though it is a paltry return) I help WS with some of the things his cousin Conrad used to do—do you remember the Kosya he talked about? He helped W to transcribe music, to care for his animals & so on. I will be useless with the music. I suppose I will be like an assistant, odd-job girl, animal-minder all in one. How jealous Myshkin would be! I wonder if he will grow up & be a zookeeper as he vows—only he would set all the animals free & tigers would roam the streets of Muntazir.
WS used to have a whole menagerie in Java, but in Bali they believe animals should not be kept captive. So he gave them away to a zoo in Java—except for a few monkeys from whom he refuses to part. He shares his own cottage with the monkeys & the bathroom is full of fruit bats. It is rather unnerving when you don’t expect them. I am used to lizards & cockroaches & spiders, even scorpions—but bats! I don’t go in there anymore. You stay in your world, I tell the bats & monkeys when I pass them, I’ll be in mine & do you no harm.
The trees & plants are so familiar—many I can recognize. Banyan, milkwood, banana, coconut, champa. There is lotus and hibiscus. There are other plants I’ve never seen before. It will take me time to find out about. I’ll draw them. Will you see that Myshkin keeps drawing? He made some nice pictures in his schoolbook this year—he has a gift. I have thought that one of the ways is for me to keep painting little pictures & sending him those in my letters. I’ve been drawing them for Myshkin and sending letters to him, I wonder if he gets them. Or if his father lets him read them. I suppose NC will want him to loathe me. That would be natural.
I wonder every day about what is happening at home—at precise times—my mind runs in a loop—now Myshkin is waking, now NC is coming back from his walk, now I am going into the kitchen to set out the day’s necessities, now I am sitting out in the verandah & Brijen has dashed across to try out a new piece of music, his hair standing on end because he’s been clutching it, now I am thinking about painting but not doing it, now I am scooting out of the gate to visit you—oh! I wish you were round the corner here too so I could run down to you. I have not had any letters from you yet—you have written, haven’t you? I hope they are not getting lost. I hope you are getting these letters from me.
With much love, yours
Gay
November 15th 1937
My dearest Lis
At last a little news from you. It makes me so relieved to know that things are not as bad as they might have been, but Lis, do try to write me longer letters—more news—tell me everything that is happening. You are not a longwinded letter-writer, I am finding out, not as long-winded as I am—but then that takes time, doesn’t it? And loneliness. You have neither of those things. Your days are full & you have a hundred friends & two hundred things to do every day to keep your guesthouse running.
I have started collecting money for my passage & Myshkin’s & I am painting with great determination. WS has promised he will paint a big painting by next year that he will contribute to what he calls the “Bring Home Myshkin Fund.” He keeps saying he will give me money to bring him right now—but there is something stubborn in me, I need to do it on my own. I think I need a little time to settle down before Myshkin comes. There has never been a time in my life when I could set everything aside & forget meal times & sleep times & just work!
In the middle of the late evening, twice, I’ve run out & stood breathing the dark air & the dense forest around & listening to the gamelan’s gong, so deep it hums in my bones. I stand there feeling the forest enter my body, smelling the scents I don’t know yet. Then the sound dies down & slowly comes back chime by chime. It makes me shiver, their music. It makes me understand how far away I am from everything I used to know. I go back in & I go to bed & wake before it is light & lie still, eyes closed. I can see what I am going to paint so clearly before me.
But certainly, no handouts, none—well, other than the board & lodging—that is somehow not as bad as taking money to bring my son across. (Will Nek let him come or will I have to kidnap him?) I am saving & saving, I spend on nothing. Once M is here, W says he will take him all over the island, “fore & aft” to show him around! Why does WS do so much for me? He’s not close to me in the way he is to Jane (Colin’s wife, I told you about her in an earlier letter) or to the other people here. It must be because of some memory of meeting me as a girl with my father—ten years ago—but what an age ago that seems. The world’s gone through two ice ages between then & now—dinosaurs & mammoths were wiped away—a new world came.
I am painting better. I noticed WS’s visitors stop before a picture I finished the other day and contemplate it for a long, long time. It is a scroll-like picture, about 5 ft long, in which all of Balinese village life is happening down the levels from top to bottom, and I’ve done it somewhat in the style of the local painters. It will find a buyer, WS said, sounding certain, & I was as pleased as a child getting a prize!
WS long ago started a foundation to help local artists: to teach them new ways to paint & to sell their paintings. It is called Pitamaha (after Bhishma from Mahabharata—unexpected to find these Indian traces here, I had almost forgotten them). Most artists are so selfish they don’t want others to succeed & here’s WS who spends his own time & energy & thought trying to make others famous. When art galleries in Berlin & Paris want his paintings to be part of Bali-art shows, he does not send any because he wants the local work to get the attention. Maybe one day he will send one of my paintings! It is thrilling to think of earning from my own work, but I’ll have to work hard & sell many pictures. A guilder here is only a little bit less than a rupee, and the money from home—so much of it from your savings, Lis—will serve me for a while, but not for long.
I envy WS’s gift. It is a lesson to watch him at work—when he does start working he doesn’t stop, for days you don’t see him at all. The other day, when he had run out of money, he locked himself up for a week & painted a picture. He says it’s indecent how he can paint something with no effort at all & sell it for a heap of money. And it did—it sold for enough to buy him a car. The trouble is, though, that the minute he makes any money he spends it—either on himself or on his friends & so he is perpetually short.
It will cost a lot to bring Myshkin. Somehow, on that holiday with my father, it had felt a much shorter distance. I remember one afternoon when our ship had halted in Singapore & Dhiren Babu, Rabi Babu’s friend, was lost in playing the esraj all day—from Bhairavi to Ram Kali & back to Bhairavi the esraj went with its plaintive notes & time melted away—in just the way it does when Brijen sings. (Brijen claimed that every night, when he used to sing on his terrace, it was only so that I would listen to his songs from my bed on my roof and fall asleep to them. Such a mischievous flirt. How is he?)
That trip with my father has been coming back to me with everything I see. I miss him continually these days. How he would have loved to visit me here—he would have come here with me, he would have rejoiced in the painting, the music, the travel—he was always ready for adventure, endlessly thought up new things to do. He said the way to live was to fill your mind & body with pleasurable things so that unpleasant things simply had no room in your life. Which is much as WS thinks & I suppose that is why they got along. One of my life’s great regrets will always be that Myshkin never knew my father—his sense of music, his love for painting, his way with children, his faith that I was something unusual & gifted. What keeps me alive through these months of separation is that this change in my life is as much for Myshkin as for me: once he is here, he won’t be stifled by worthiness anymore, new worlds will open up for him, of art, or animals, of living among people who are different, who value something other than politics.
Anyway, no room for self-pity, none! I am here. I came because I chose to, I will not mope & moan, I will work.
I must tell you: Bali is not at all unlike India & not only because of the Hindu gods here. When we came here with Rabi Babu, the Dutch were afraid he would incite the nationalistic Javanese—to follow in the footsteps of the Indian freedom fighters. They sent Dutch people with him everywhere, watching him. He might have—he saw many similarities between India & Bali. When he came here to Gianyar he said it was as if an earthquake had destroyed a great old city—India he meant—and it had sunk beneath the ground. In its place had risen up the homes & farms & people of later years, but in many places the past had come back to the top & the two, cobbled together, make up the culture of Bali.
On that journey with my father, I was too young to understand such complicated things—or maybe not too young—after all, it made such an impression on me that I have not forgotten it. All those years ago the place felt both familiar & quite unknown. The villages are very like those I saw in Bengal when I went with my father—the land is green & blue as gemstones & with little houses with two-tiered roofs of thatch. Coconut palms, jackfruit, shining paddy fields, the sound of water everywhere. The stands of bamboo are as tall as big houses & sway gently all together from the base when there is a wind—a creaking sound that goes on and on until you feel drowsy.
All around are things I want to paint! There are not enough days in my life to paint all the pictures I have in my head. The painters here make exquisitely detailed scenes of village life and although I did that one long painting of the same kind, I could never paint another like that, my mind doesn’t work that way. They have an elegance & artistry that is from another time. I remember Rabi Babu pointed out how the ordinary village people here are artistic about their homes, furniture, doorways. He thought that because they have enough food they can paint & make beautiful things out of nothing. I don’t agree. Is prosperity the only barrier against ugliness & squalor? The rich parts of our country are not beautiful as the most ordinary villages are here. Every courtyard is serene & enchanting, pink & blue lotus grow in still pools. Wherever you turn your gaze there is a stone frog or stone dog below a champa tree showering it with flowers. There is no sloppiness of the wretched, shabby kind we have at home. In every village there is dance & theater. Music fills the nights. Elaborate, gorgeous costumes & jewelry at the dances. Flowers in their hair, ornate headdresses. The men wear flowers in their turbans or tuck one at their ears. Many of the women are exquisitely beautiful & have a direct, unafraid gaze that I love.
Rabi Babu’s friend Suniti Babu said the men & women were as if they came off the walls of Ajanta & Ellora—& he was right. (Suniti Babu was fascinated by Balinese women. He noticed their clothes, their hair, their gait, he even noticed how they had their mouths a bit open at all times so that they have an expression of permanent wistfulness . . . It makes me smile now—how closely he must have been examining them, that old Bengali scholar! Indian men! If lechery is not their primary characteristic I don’t know what is—though not for a moment was Suniti Babu lecherous, he was attentive.)
Suniti Babu pointed out then what I know to be true now—that Java & Bali are magical, exotic, fairy lands to the Europeans who come here. But for us from India, it is not so. It is only another version of the East. Suniti Babu would keep reminding us that patterns of dress, rituals, homes, temples were similar in a huge swath right from the northwest frontier of India to Bengal to the Malabar & Indochine, Java & Bali. He used to point to examples from archaeological finds, from statues in Indian temples. He knew a great deal—so many languages & history—that he could see & hear rhythms across civilizations that I simply could not, certainly not then, at sixteen. At that time I listened, but did not understand too much. Now I find myself thinking back to the things he said, more & more.
All along the roads here are statues & temples. I have not seen a single beggar. The children don’t seem to cry & the mothers don’t scream at them as we in India do. Not many women in villages of the remote south of Bali cover their chests. In the north because of the Dutch & Christianity, they have become prudish. It was astonishing for me at first to see how normal it was to be bare-breasted here—after a while it seems the most natural thing. It used to be the same in the Malabar & in Bengal long ago as well—women wore no blouses. Well, I am relieved to have been born late!
Before you ask: no, I haven’t taken to their style of (un)dress!!! I still wear my normal sari & blouse & petticoat, haven’t had the nerve to wear one of your beautiful dresses yet—though I do wonder where to get new saris when I need them. I could just cut up meters of cloth. Or I could take up Lokumull’s offer & ask him. I exchange letters with his family occasionally & saw them once more when we went to Surabaya to fetch Beryl. As usual they started frying and cooking the instant they saw me and insisted I eat with them. Lokumull has a grumpy old relative—nobody knows how old—she sits there in the shop all day scolding the boys who work there, but she has a sweet way of nodding off to sleep in the middle of conversation, even her own, & the room goes still while everyone suppresses their laughter. She wakes after a few minutes & notices the mirth & is scornful. “Laugh, laugh while you can,” she says. “The dried fruit lasts longest, the green ones fall from the tree & rot.”
I don’t miss Indians, nor do I seek them out, but I so miss you, Lis. And I ache for my darling Myshkin. I even miss my sharp-tongued, fault-finding old Father-in-Law . . . at this rate I might start missing Arjun and Brijen. Or Bechari Banno. All right, all right, I know you are fond of old Batty Rozario. Sometimes I think that if you were closer in age—oh, so many possible lives! I should never have been married at all. I was never meant to be owned, I needed to be free, a vagabond or a gypsy. I’d have done less damage. But they forced me & I was so young. What else would I have done? My mother owned me, she transferred me to NC & then he owned me. Life would have been so different if my father had lived longer.
It is pointless to think such thoughts. Out, sad thought!
And on that note, with much love, yours as ever,
Gay
Feb. 1938
My dearest Lis,
I have had my first letters from my son! Two came together. He doesn’t seem to have got a few of my letters. Maddening. But I feel grateful NC is kind about this—he lets him have my letters and answer them. How adorably he writes, with rubbed-out black bits where I can see the spelling mistakes he is trying to hide from me & all his news of Rikki & Dinu & his Dada. He asks me what time next week he should go to the station so that he can come to me: oh, that broke my heart! Will you explain to him please, so that he understands—& you mustn’t crush his hopes, just make him understand that it will take a little time. You’ll need to be a trapeze artist to do that.
I am working very, very hard. I am immersed in work, it thrills me & consumes everything I have—I don’t want to spend a minute doing anything else but work. It is as if I have turned a corner of a winding road that seemed to have no end & I have found my way of painting, what appears true & interesting & real. When I am not working, I think of it—continually & intensely—my dreams are drenched in color—there are nights when I close my eyes & can see nothing but topaz, gold, jade, purple, the deepest red, ocher & midnight blue & they are dazzling & brilliant & ever present. The colors of the forest and water here particularly: a million blues, & thousands of greens & the fading away of leaf into vine into weed into a blue-green distance made of hill & rice field.
We travel here & there & I carry my watercolors & a camera WS has lent me, one of his old ones, so that I can use the photographs to paint from later: this was something he advised me to do, he had done it in his early days in Java, he said. Even though it cannot capture the colors it reminds one of the scene, the positions of trees and so on. He told me not to scream and scare the animals when I hear the news . . . that I am to be included in an exhibition in Batavia next month. Can you believe that? I will have to work even harder now!
Last month we went on horseback to Kintamani in a group—it is a remote place which has a volcano surrounded by bare fields of lava, black & strange, sprouting dry straw-like grass & nothing else. The top of the volcano is flat & its sides are bare. The mist that permanently obscures the top gives it a brooding mystery quite unlike other mountains. It is a bleak beauty. Through this we wandered & it was chilly at times & exhilarating. When we were tired we would settle in the shade somewhere & eat and drink. WS has created a wickerwork basket which can be attached to a saddle so that he can carry beer & whisky & gin & port with him on these travels. He takes a childlike glee in offering a choice to his friends posted in remote villages doing survey work. You should see how their mouths fall open—you would have loved it, wouldn’t you? And you’d have remembered to pack lemons to slice & top the glasses with.
We had some dried roast duck, fish, boiled eggs—and a black dog with a curly tail appeared. We threw it scraps of food & it came closer, though it was wary. It was so scrawny, as if it had hardly eaten for days. As we left, it would not take its eyes off us & that was miserable, to see that wire-thin dog lost among the black rock & weeds—the edge of the lonely world. When we’d come down & reached the villages, we saw there was the dog still, following us. To cut a long story short, it has joined the household & WS has named her Indah, which means Beauty, though she is really anything but that in her present scabby, flea-bitten, miserable state. She has blisters—from not eating enough, I am told. WS aims to set all that right & the first thing that happened when Indah came home was that she was given a bath (she smelled foul) which she hated & ran from, despite the heat! And then she gobbled down fish & a great heap of rice, hardly even stopping to breathe until it was finished. She will learn to live with the monkeys and bats, WS says, with great confidence. Let us see.
W has been tramping all over Bali collecting artifacts for a museum he is curator of. I don’t go on these trips, I stay back & work—how odd it is to call painting “work”! NC always insisted it was a “nice hobby” for women, painting pictures. Everything was permitted as long as it remained trivial. He should see the way I paint now! I’m covered in paint & mud (I am making things with stone & clay too), my face is smeared, my hair is glued together.
Ni Wayan Arini, a woman who does some housework for me, laughs her head off each time she sees me. She’s one of the few Balinese I can talk to, even though her English is broken, she has picked it up playing around as a child with visitors to WS’s home, I think. She pauses with an open mouth & mutters in her own language when she is hunting for a word—then our eyes meet & she shakes her head & grins & gives up. It pleases me no end that the people you pay to help with menial jobs are not servile here in the way our servants are—& our servants are like that because people treat them so badly. It is ingrained in us to be savage and cruel to poor people, as if they were some other life form—neither human nor animal. I have seen Arjun slap across his face the boy who cleans his car when he finds a fingerprint on the windscreen.
Anyway—I was telling you about W’s collecting trips—someone else drives while W keeps his eyes open for things to collect. The car is a bit like Arjun’s Dodge—but is a different one. It is called an Overland Whippet. It’s anything but a whippet, more a lumbering, trundling thing that is piled high with the oddest things from carved doors and musical instruments to kitchen goods when it comes back. Beryl said the other day that it was just an excuse for boys’ days out & beachcombing, this museum. They have a few others helping with descriptions of the things in Dutch & English & then off the things go to the museum—it already has many visitors.
What surprised me here was to see how completely immersed WS is in music—he hears music in everything—there are always scores coming for him in the post. He often talks about the way Brijen used to take him to listen to singers nobody knew about, old maestros tucked away in moldy old tenements—but W could not make much sense of Indian classical music he says. He jokes that like Hinduism, you probably have to be born to it.
When WS is here rather than at his other home in Iseh, I know at once because of the music that spreads over our hillside. I am sure the birds pause to listen, it is so lovely. Colin & W are at the piano together, sometimes W alone, playing something sublime I cannot remember or hum but long to listen to again. W has retuned a piano so that it sounds like the gamelan—the gamelan is not one instrument, it is the orchestra here. I can’t go into long descriptions, but it is made of xylophones & drums & gongs & the sound is a very strange, rhythmic, repetitive one which is somehow mesmerizing. Have I already told you about it? Forgive me if I have!
Colin’s wife Jane Belo is an anthropologist. I get the sense when I am with them—I can’t put my finger on it—but I feel she & Colin don’t care for each other, they don’t even like each other, husband & wife. (I wonder if people felt this way when they saw me with NC. Oh dear. Was I awful? Tell me, was I?) There is much tension in the air. WS says this is because Colin is neurotic & spoilt. But he does not mind Colin’s tantrums because he is dedicated about music. They play together at a Steinway piano Colin has bought, WS loves it.
Colin is also quite a cook & tries out all sorts of strange foods: hornbills, flying fox, porcupine, there is nothing he does not turn into a roast or stew. I don’t always feel happy with this & find a way not to eat: I think some animals need to be left on their trees or burrows, wherever it is they live. I don’t know what Jane thinks of all this, she seems distant & is silent or talks too much & the air fairly crackles with unsaid things. It can be rather uncomfortable. I creep away & make myself scarce. WS sits aside with her at such times for ages & ages & they have long conversations—they are very close & can talk of anything under the sun. When they are in different places they even write letters to each other.
W has a gift of being close & friendly with married women—they are less likely to pounce on him with a view to seduction, I suppose! Most people here know that WS is not interested in women—not in that way—as you had guessed from the start. He has male lovers openly, nobody thinks it wrong. Do you remember how he was with that young sarod teacher of his? You found it odd, you said so then. Remember what you saw once when he had left his door ajar by mistake? Your mouth went into an O of shock, your face was as red as an apple! It was so funny!
I cannot help feeling, as I write these things, that I shouldn’t. You say you find it interesting, but when one doesn’t know the people or the place is it possible to be interested? I am no storyteller. But I tell you all of this, Lis, so that I don’t lose you. I want you to share my life & me to share yours as closely as we used to in Muntazir—or more. Sometimes it is possible to be closer in letters than in life, don’t you think? There are things we can say in letters that we never would find the word for, or the courage, when we are face to face.
Give me more news in your next, dear L. Are there any interesting guests? Is Boy behaving? Did you go for any of the parties at Christmas? I hope Myshkin is not being bullied in school—you will tell me, won’t you, even if the news is not good?
With much love,
Yours ever, Gay
10th April 1938
Dearest Lis,
I am astonished to hear that NC has left home & with nothing more than a cloth bundle. What on earth was he thinking? And if you hadn’t told me about it, I wouldn’t have known—what a silly baby Myshkin is. He did not tell me his father had gone off in search of the Truth! Has he found it, I wonder? Was it hiding under a rock or behind a tree? Well, who am I to be sarcastic? I am the wicked, evil witch who left my husband & child & home. In the old days they would have stoned me to death or buried me alive.
And that Brijen is gone too—nobody knows where he is? How can that be? How bad was his fight with Arjun, and what do you mean it was about a woman he was in love with? He is in love with a hundred women! What was special about this one that it made him get into a fight with his brother? It is a great torment to be so far away and not know anything about the people one saw every day. Will you send me more news when you have it? I am worried sick.
Things are somewhat different here. I find it rather frightening, but the others seem to think nothing much will come of it. The police have started some sort of surveillance on people—including WS—to prove that they are up to bad things. Apparently there is a lot of pressure from Christian missionaries to arrest men who have had relations with other men & the new Governor General is very sternly Christian, married to a woman who is from a terribly over-religious American family. WS finds this amusing (as he does most things). He says Bali has always been left alone by the Christians & men having relations with men is not thought of as illegal or bad here—no amount of Christian outrage will lead to anything. (This reminds me again—how absurd it was to know from your last letter that everyone thinks I ran away with WS for love. I suppose they think I am like that girl in Calcutta who fell in love with the visiting Romanian. Love! Nobody imagines a woman might do anything other than for the love of a man, it seems to me. Well, they are wrong.)
WS says it is as if Nazi Germany is entering Bali by way of the Dutch—the same intolerance, the same self-righteousness, the same strictures. This is why he left Germany, came halfway round the world to find the freedom to live—but it’s an infection that will make the whole world ill, this joyless censoriousness, this horror of anything that is not in the rule book. The nose-puffing way the powerful have of deeming what is good & what is bad—who are the Dutch to decide? The Balinese think it is quite normal for men to love men, or men to love women or women to love women—well, who knows what, as long as somebody is loved & nobody is harmed! It is another of those things that makes me realize Rabi Babu was right—he used to say that Bali felt as India must have been in ancient times. There must have been a time when love did not have moral guardians saying you may do this but not that—this is how it is in Bali now & how it was in our country hundreds of years ago. My father had said that the Bali we were then experiencing would not last. How long can an island remain an island? Baba would say in the grimmest, gloomiest tone he could muster, “Open your eyes & ears wide, see & hear everything, memorize everything. This will vanish one day. You may never come again.”
But here I am. I’ve come back. And things are indeed changed. It is a strange & frightening thing when you feel that people you don’t know—the government—is watching what you are doing inside your home, even if you are harming nobody. Jane says her servants were being questioned about what goes on in their house. WS has harmed nobody. It’s very hard to have secrets here. Yet he is being watched by the police & so are we.
WS does not take it seriously, not for one minute. They sent policemen to tail him at one of the evening dances & we spotted them at once—standing about, ridiculous in pajamas & sandals & spectacles. WS was very naughty & told the dancers to kiss the policemen & flirt with them . . . after a while the policemen were thoroughly derailed & began to dance with the boys too. It was foolish of WS to do this. Where does this desire to court danger come from, I wonder? Or is he a genuine innocent blundering about in an alien world?
You will wonder where all this libertine thinking comes to me from, you are imagining me in orgies. How am I talking this way when I never thought of these things before? It’s just that I am finding out how limited my world was. There is so much outside it. I thought romantic love, if it existed at all, happened between men & women. (On 3, Pontoon Road, Muntazir, it did not happen even between men and women.) I have understood I was naive. Life is far more interesting than I had thought!
It must be getting hot already in Muntazir—or is the springtime there still? You must be in your cool room, drinking your icy G&T on the sly & slipping a few drinks down the stairs to my father-in-law. One day someone will call him the Drunk Doctor & it will all be your fault! Such a puzzle of a man, so very elegant, ever civilized & considerate, yet hard to know. He found a hundred ways to make me feel better in the days when I first came to Muntazir, still crushed by the death of my father & cut up about being married off in such a hurry. He could see from the start that we were not well matched, NC & I. He didn’t get into battles with his son, how could he? Come between a man & his wife! Tauba, tauba!
But he found many ways to tell me he understood my misery. Gave me books, a desk to sit & work at, words of praise if I made anything at all: whether a rogan josh or a painting. I didn’t find a way to repay his kindness—he has great self-sufficiency—it’s hard to see what one could do to make a difference to him. You are able to—somehow you’ve always known how to make him smile. You have such a gift, I envy you.
Tell me all the news. Is Dinu behaving himself? I worry he will make Myshkin grow up too soon. You say he reads & re-reads my letters in the clinic. How happy that makes me, & also how terribly sad. I wonder what you are doing at this moment. I worry about you too, managing everything on your own. You have so much to do & to add to it, my father-in-law and his wounded heroes. WS laughed & laughed when I told him about how the two of you patch up revolutionaries on the sly. He says it’s lucky the Dutch don’t have to deal with Lisa & Batty or their East Indies empire would certainly collapse.
I am folding in a scrap of a silk scarf with this letter. I hope it reaches. It is meant to match your green silk dress.
Write to me. Soon. I need your words.
With much love
Gay
2 July 1938
Dearest Lis,
I have received both your letters—they came together. You’ve no idea what they mean to me—I’m parched earth waiting for rain. I pine for news. It is a miracle any letters reach across all these seas & continents, I should be grateful only a few get lost. These letters to you have become a diary for me, you know, I almost forget I am writing to you, just scribble & scribble over many days. A letter is chatter in written form, Rabi Babu told me, when he sat on the deck writing one on that old journey. He said everyone has a special notebook, it has loose leaves, and it is for writing to which nobody attaches value. It is for writing that turns up disheveled, no turban on its head or shoes on its feet. It goes where no questions are asked for coming without reason, its whole reason for arriving is to chatter aimlessly.
That’s what my letters to you are. They are me running down to your guesthouse without purpose or need, just to talk. I never know when I start a letter how many days it will take me to finish it. That’s wrong, isn’t it, & you must find it annoying, all my rambling. Do you? Now I can see you getting up from your chair & stomping out of the room saying, “I’ll come back when you get your head in place, Gay.” You never had room for mawkishness.
But I am in a sad, mad, bad temper. I was not there for Myshkin’s tenth birthday for the first time in his life. How I used to wait for the 30th of June every year, to see his starry eyes when I held a wrapped present towards him in the morning. Instead, this time I went to a temple to pray for him. I had not stepped inside a temple except into the courtyards for the dances. But I felt the need to do something, so I woke early and when I walked down the street there were women putting out leaf cups filled with flowers and incense on their doorsteps. I never pray & I felt an impostor, I looked for a place to leave my slippers, but a man standing around there gestured to say I need not be barefoot. I suppose he could see right away I didn’t know the first thing about praying at a temple in Bali (or elsewhere) but he didn’t stop me. I was tongue-tied & I fumbled with the offerings, but maybe God, if he or she exists, understood what I was trying to say. My body is torn into a thousand pieces with the pain. How could I do this to him? Will I be able to live with it? At this moment it is unbearable to think of my callousness. He’ll hate me forever. (No, he won’t, he’ll forgive me when he grows up.)
I cannot write any more today. I will try and come back.
Two days later: I am posting this, Lis, with nothing further added. I haven’t written for so long I want to send you something quickly, but seem unable to write words that will even qualify as aimless chatter. On some days I feel heavy, can’t make myself get up from my cot in the morning, can’t muster up the appetite for work or talk. A blackness inside me that will pass—it is missing poor M’s birthday that has started this fit of bottomless gloom. Tell me if you baked a cake for him and if he got a gift from his grandfather. I cannot bear to think of a little boy spending his tenth birthday with neither of his parents by his side. I have done this to him.
With all my love,
G.
Dearest Lis,
So many changes! To think NC has come back with a new wife. How will she be with Myshkin? What did you think when you met her? Is she a kind person? Will she be gentle to him? They say a loving woman heals many wounds—I just didn’t have it in me, I suppose, to be a loving woman. I was always the one causing the wounds. No, I was not cut out to be a mother— strange that there are so many opposing pulls & tugs in us—it is not as though I don’t miss Myshkin achingly, fiercely. I do. But it is not a constant missing. I am glad to have time to work. There I’ve said it! I can confess it to nobody but you. At times when he was tiny & ailing I forgot his medicines & his meal was late because I was daydreaming or doing who knew what. Then I’d spend a week eaten up with guilt, spoiling him till he was thoroughly confused. He is so easily turned into a quiet mourner who goes into a shell. Does he still hide in that broken carriage, I wonder. He’s always thought that nobody knows he goes there.
But to marry a village woman with a small child—madness! (Oh, but each time I write these things I want to scratch them out—who am I to criticize? When I’ve done what I’ve done? I’ve forever lost my right to pass judgment on anyone.) Myshkin has not told me about any of this. It’s over a year since I left home. Myshkin at first sounded so impatient about coming here, & now he hardly asks. I suppose he’s lost hope, or forgotten. Children tend to forget things quickly. He writes once a month or so and does not sound unhappy, which is a great blessing. It allows me to work & plan for the future. I have saved some amount already & I think that by the early part of next year, or at most the middle, I will be able to go—or perhaps send you the money and you can bring him!
My thoughts change every minute, such a mess, my head. Can it be that there is still no news of Brijen? How is it that people think he has killed himself? That is a demented notion & it makes me go wild with anxiety even to think about. He couldn’t have done himself harm, he is not like that. I need news of him, please tell me anything you find out. There is no other way I have of getting news . . . one of the miseries of leaving has been not being able to write to him for news—where would I write? To his home address? There is no choice now but to tell you—I said nothing then & I don’t know if I have the courage now—will you forgive me? Will you think of me in the old way when you know? But you guessed, did you not, about Brijen? You know me too well not to have had suspicions.
For so many years it was only about music & the stories he wrote & my painting, finding a sympathetic soul next door where there were none. Someone for whom music was the point of living, as painting was for me. I can’t put my finger on when it changed—at least two years ago—it stole up on me. I don’t know when it was that I found we had a different way of looking at each other, seeking each other out. I would feel his eyes on me and when I turned towards him, he would hold my gaze as if there was an invisible thread between our eyes, twanging with life. On the days when my head & heart felt as if they would explode from suffocation at home, it was a relief to find him, to know he was next door when I fell asleep & when I woke. Yes, he did sing me to sleep from his roof. Sometimes whole ragas through the late night, Bageshwari & Bahar, I could not fall asleep without. I lay in bed long after everyone else (despite Banno’s endless sarcasm) right till Myshkin went on & on with his cycle bell—because Brijen used to sing the Bhatiyar from his roof. He would start before the sun rose & go on through the change of light, the songs of birds, while I lay there listening.
Lis, do not think me an adulteress, it did not feel like that. I had never been in love before, it hit me like a hammer. For a long time I could make no sense of what had happened to me & there was nobody I could talk to. Not even you. What would you have said? What would any sane friend have said? I did not tell a soul, Brijen included. Nothing was ever spoken between us—it didn’t have to be—and the first time he kissed me it was without a word said, as if all had been mutually, miraculously settled. Our lives had been converging over the years to this & this point alone. No time for the niceties of proposals & plans. I did not stop to think about anything—home, husband, child—who might overhear us or see us. Not one thing. The Dodge stopped beside me when I was out in the market one day. He was alone in it, and even before he had driven us off far into the fields, his hands were recklessly off the wheel and all over me. Are you filled with horror? Revolted? I should have been.
When I came back home I shut the bedroom door & took off all my clothes and stood before the mirror. There was a stranger in it. A woman with smoldering red embers for eyes. I felt as tender and bruised as a rain-sodden rose. I scanned my legs, my hips, my shoulders—all of me—as calmly as I might examine a stone sculpture on a wall. But with a racing heart. Why was I looking that way at myself? I feel almost ashamed now—I think I needed to know what he had seen. My body had been nothing but a thing for a lifetime, like a disregarded, uncared-for, unloved house I had lived in so long I hardly noticed it. To see for myself what a man had seen and desired! I don’t know how long I was in front of the mirror that day. I locked myself in for many days after that, sitting before the mirror, drawing my own body. Every stroke of my pencil on the paper made me feel his touch.
I’m sorry, Lisa, to be writing all of this—do you think me crude and disgusting? I may never post this letter. But I need to tell you, who else can I tell! It was only with Brijen that I understood there is nothing well-mannered or pretty about love, it is raw and fierce, it’s not poems and songs, it is torn-off clothes, snapped buttons & sweat & blood & body parts & it scorches whatever is in its way. It destroyed all that I knew.
How I managed to keep my good-wife face on after that is beyond me. I suppose I wasn’t entirely successful—things grew so much worse between NC and me, do you remember, you asked me why that was so? And I began to think it was altogether too dangerous when I spent every single minute of that last summer holiday in the hills longing for Brijen—I was happy enough but it was disastrously incomplete.
And at the same time, on that holiday, I could see I was already starting to retreat from him. One afternoon when everyone was dozing in our vacation cottage, I sat watching one of those fat round clouds come down onto an opposite hill. You know how clouds in the mountains come down low and make everything misty & romantic. So it was. Then it started to fade away & the hill became visible again & with that, I felt I could see Brijen more clearly somehow—what I had been trying not to see for many months, but now I could no longer un-see. Even as I pined for him, I could tell I was tiring of him—his wit & waywardness, all that charming irresponsibility, his conviction that the world revolved around him, his ever-tousled hair & fine muslin clothes—the very things I adored & what made him who he was—I could see its self-love & I was weary of it. It was as if a chain had begun to bite into my flesh. Suddenly that was Brijen to me.
How contradictory I am, Lisa! These civil wars inside me are continuous and exhausting. One part of me fighting another with remorseless ferocity. I was still in love with him—and yet I wanted to be free of him. I did not love him, I have come to understand, I merely loved his addiction to me. I am not made for love. I want nobody. I need to be absolutely free. I am repelled by my indifference. I wish I were another kind of woman, a lovable one, not so cold and hard that I am hateful to myself. Maybe it is my own self-love that I saw in him and was disgusted by.
The train journey down from the hills last summer—my father-in-law ill, poor Golak scuttling about the coach trying to medicate him—I could not stir myself to help or care. Why do we come to these agonizing crossroads where each fork leads to despair? Beryl had spent days in Muntazir and then each one of those days in the hills convincing me to go away to Bali with them—a chance at another life, the one I was meant for—she would make the arrangements, she would take charge, she said. I had never been more torn in two & never so sure . . . I knew at the end of the journey that my mind was made up. Brijen sat hunched over his knees when I told him I was going away. He left the room all of a sudden—not a word said—we hardly spoke after that—of course he took it as a betrayal. He had wanted to take me to Bombay with him, start a new life—as though that would make either of us happy. He is even less capable of loving than I am, only he has more delusions about himself. In his own eyes I am sure he was a romantic hero who was rescuing me. Imagine the hero’s annoyance with a heroine who does not want to be rescued!
I laugh at the wrong times. I’m dangerous & evil, I ruin things, it would have been better if I had never been born, Lis! He doesn’t have my address here, even if he wanted to tell me where he is, he cannot. Will you give him my address when—if—he comes back?
Tell me you understand. I did no wrong other than in my own head. Doesn’t everyone? I destroyed no families, not in the way I might have if I had stayed.
With much love
Gay