I looked at my host in amazement. He had sat down and was watching me with what seemed like curiosity. ‘So he isn’t in Bombay any more,’ I said. ‘He’s in Goa, at the end of September he was in Goa.’
He nodded and said nothing. ‘But why did he go to Goa?’ I asked. ‘If you know something, tell me.’
He clasped his hands together over his knees and spoke calmly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what your friend’s life is really like, I can’t help you, I’m sorry. Perhaps the circumstances of that life of his haven’t been propitious, or perhaps he himself wanted it that way; one must never know too much about the mere appearances of other people’s lives.’ He smiled coyly and gave me to understand that he had no more to say to me on the matter. ‘Are you staying on in Madras?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been here three days, I’m going tonight, I already have a ticket for the long-distance bus.’
I thought I saw an expression of disapproval cross his face.
‘It’s the reason for my trip,’ I felt I ought to explain. ‘I’m going to consult some archives in Goa, I have to do some research. I would have gone anyway, even if the person I’m looking for had not been there.’
‘What have you seen here in our parts?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been to Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram,’ I said. ‘I’ve visited all the temples.’
‘Did you stay the night there?’
‘Yes, in a little government-run hotel, very cheap: it was what I found.’
‘I know it,’ he said. And then he asked: ‘What did you like most?’
‘Lots of things, but perhaps the Temple of Kailasantha. There’s something distressing and magical about it.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s a strange description,’ he said. Then he quietly got up and murmured: ‘I think it’s late, I still have a great deal of writing to do tonight. Allow me to show you out.’
I got up and he led me down the long corridor to the front door. I stopped a moment in the porch and we shook hands. Going out I thanked him briefly. He smiled and said nothing in reply. Then, before closing the door, he said, ‘Blind science tills vain clods, mad Faith lives the dream of its cult, a new God is only a word. Don’t believe or search: all is hidden.’ I went down the few steps and walked a little way along the gravel drive. Then all of a sudden I understood, and I turned quickly: they were lines from a poem by Pessoa, only he had said them in English, that was why I hadn’t immediately recognised them. The poem was called Christmas. But the door was already closed and the servant, at the end of the driveway, was waiting to close the gate after me.
VII
The bus crossed an empty plain with just the occasional sleeping village. After a stretch of road through the hills with hairpin bends that the driver had tackled with a nonchalance I felt was excessive, we were now speeding along enormously long straight quiet roads through the silence of the Indian night. I had the impression that we were going through a landscape of palm groves and paddy fields, but the darkness was too deep to be certain and the light of the headlamps only swept quickly across the landscape when the road made a bend or two. According to my calculations we ought to be quite close to Mangalore, if the bus was keeping to the schedule set out in the timetable. In Mangalore I had two alternatives: I could either wait seven hours for the bus to Goa, or stay for a day in a hotel and take the bus the following day.
It was difficult to decide. During the journey I had slept little and badly, and I felt quite tired; but a whole day in Mangalore was not a particularly attractive proposition. Of Mangalore my guidebook said: ‘Situated on the Arabian Sea, the city preserves practically nothing of its past. It is a modern industrial city, laid out on a straightforward urban grid and with an anonymous look about it. One of the few cities in India where there really is nothing to see.’
I was still weighing up the pros and cons when the bus stopped. It couldn’t be Mangalore; we were in open country. The driver turned off the engine and a few passengers got out. At first I thought it was a brief stop to give the travellers a chance to relieve themselves, but after about a quarter of an hour I felt that the stop was unusually protracted. What’s more, the driver had calmly sunk down against the back of his seat and looked as if he had gone to sleep. I waited another quarter of an hour. The passengers who had stayed on board were sleeping quietly. In front of me an old man with a turban had taken a long strip of material from a basket and was rolling it up with patience, carefully smoothing out the folds at every turn of the cloth. I whispered a question in his ear, but he turned round and looked at me with an empty smile to show he hadn’t understood. I looked out of the window and saw that near the edge of the road, in a large sandy clearing, was a sort of dimly lit warehouse. It looked like a garage made of boards. There was a woman at the door. I saw someone go in.
I decided to ask the driver what was going on. I didn’t want to wake him, he’d been driving for a long time, but perhaps it was as well to find out. He was a fat man, sleeping with his mouth open; I touched his shoulder and he looked at me confused.
‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t Mangalore.’
He pulled himself up and smoothed his hair. ‘No, sir, it isn’t.’
‘So why have we stopped?’
‘This is a bus-stop,’ he said, ‘we’re waiting for a connection.’
The stop wasn’t indicated on the timetable on my ticket, but by now I had got used to this kind of Indian surprise. So I asked him about it without any show of being taken aback, out of pure curiosity. It was the bus for Mudabiri and Karkala, I discovered. I made a suggestion that seemed logical to me. ‘And can’t the passengers going to Mudabiri and Karkala wait on their own, without us waiting with them?’
‘There are people on that bus who will get on our bus to go to Mangalore,’ the driver replied calmly. ‘That’s why we’re waiting.’
He stretched out on the seat again to let me know that he would like to go back to sleep. I spoke to him again in the tone of one who is resigned: ‘How long will we be here?’
‘Eighty-five minutes,’ he replied, with an exactness that I didn’t know whether to interpret as British politeness or a form of refined irony. And then he said: ‘Anyway, if you’re tired of waiting in the bus, you can get out. There’s a waiting room at the side here.’
I decided it might be wise to stretch my legs a little to make the time pass faster. The night was soft and damp with a strong scent of herbs. I took a turn round the bus, smoked a cigarette leaning on the steps at the back, and then headed for the ‘waiting room’. It was a long low shed with an oil lamp hanging at the door. On the door jamb someone had stuck a picture of a divinity unknown to me, done in coloured chalk. Inside were a dozen or so people, sitting on the benches along the walls. Two women standing by the door were talking busily to each other. The few passengers who had got off the bus were scattered round the circular bench in the middle around a support post to which were attached leaflets of various colours and a yellowing notice that might have been a timetable or a government directive. Sitting on the bench at the far end was a boy of about ten with short trousers and sandals. He had a monkey with him, hanging onto his shoulders, its head hidden in his hair and its little hands clasped together round the neck of its master in an attitude of affection and fear. Apart from the oil lamp on the door, there were two candles on a packing case: the light was very dim and the corners of the shed were in darkness. I stood a few moments looking at these people who appeared to take no notice of me at all. I thought it strange, this boy alone in this place with his monkey, even if it is common to see children alone with animals in India; and immediately I thought of a child who was dear to me, and of his way of cuddling a teddy-bear before going to sleep. Perhaps it was that association that led me toward the boy, and I sat down next to him. He looked at me with two beautiful eyes and smiled, and I smiled back at him; and only then did I realise with a sense of horror that the tiny creature he was carrying on his shoulders was not a monkey but a human being. It was a monster. Some atrocity of nature or terrible disease had shrivelled up his body, distorting shape and size. The limbs were twisted and deformed with no proportion or sense other than that of an appalling grotesque. The face too, which I now glimpsed amid the hair of his carrier, had not escaped the devastation of the disease. The rough skin and wound-like wrinkles gave him that monkeyish look which together with his features had prompted my mistake. The only thing that was still human about that face were the eyes: two very small, sharp, intelligent eyes, which darted uneasily in every direction as if terrified by a great and imminent danger, wild with fear.