The Other Language(54)
She was constantly figuring out how things worked or why they didn’t, compiling her own India instructions booklet. This attitude she had of being always on the outside, looking inside, mildly irritated him; he’d always disliked the idea of being a tourist. He believed in that quote by Paul Bowles—how did it go again?—the one that made the distinction between a tourist and a traveler. Of course he wasn’t a traveler. He was just a tourist who hated to be one.
The first week she had worn her own clothes, light fitted shirts and cotton pants, her nice sandals. It turned out that these had too many straps and were an inconvenience to put on and take off each time they entered a shop or a temple, so she got herself a pair of chappals. That was the beginning of the transformation. Then came the kurtas, the long shirts women wear over their shalwar pants. She found them so comfortable that soon she had to get the pants as well, in matching colors, and then the dupatta, the scarf that women so artfully throw across their chest. The dupatta for him was the last straw. It turned her outfit into a dress-up costume, plus it kept falling off her shoulders so that she was readjusting it every five minutes.
He loved her—that went without saying—but they’d been together for almost sixteen years and it was normal to find her tiresome at times. He had to admit that it was lovely, the way she found so many things interesting and worth being investigated; it was a sign of her vitality, and he cherished that. He only wished she had stuck to wearing her own clothes instead of those Indian outfits that were slowly multiplying inside the suitcase, which she didn’t know how to wear.
He came out to the garden terrace, where they served breakfast. It was still chilly in the morning. A thin fog had descended over the river, blurring the contours of the forest on the opposite bank. Its outline, with its wide canopies and dangling roots, reminded him of a faint watercolor on the jacket of a Kipling novel he had owned ages ago, painted by one of those nineteenth-century British women artists who’d traveled all over the East in search of exotic flora to draw. The river was still, unperturbed, save for a slim boat, a shikara, slowly breaking the surface with its oars.
There she was, alone at the table under the trellis, wrapped up in the new pashmina dyed with natural pigments that had taken the place of her black sweater (“Black? Who wants to wear black anymore, once you see all these vibrant colors?”).
“Hi, darling,” she said, smiling. She was usually in a good mood in the morning. She always said that it was her happiest time.
“Would you like to see the paper?” She slid The Hindu across the table. It was another ruse she had taken up, this pretense of being interested in Indian internal affairs, with all those intricate party names and corrupt politicians. However, in only a couple of weeks she’d become an authority. She knew the candidates for the next elections by name and had even picked the one they should root for.
“No thanks, not now,” he demurred. Every now and again, he resisted her voracious curiosity; it was his way of keeping her in check.
What about his own enthusiasms? Why had they dwindled, why did he no longer take pleasure in discovering new things? He feared there might be only one answer to that, and it was age. He was only forty-seven—just three more years to go before the old writer’s epiphany—yet he felt his scale had already tilted over to one side. Surely the portion of future available to him as a youngish-looking, energetic and still attractive man was much smaller than what he had put behind already. Shouldn’t he make an effort, make the best of it? Why could he not gather the energy to feel passionate again about what lay outside his own head?
He had figured he no longer did because by now all he really cared and worried about were the books he still needed to write before it was too late and he’d have nothing more to say. “Egotism—necessary/?essential trait,” he’d once scrawled in a journal, thinking that one day he might use the idea in an essay. At this point in his life all he actually longed for was to be able to sit still in one place with as little disturbance as possible in front of his computer, waiting for the words that would, line after line, compose the unformed story in his head. He knew he wasn’t alone in that; every other writer had said the same thing when asked about the mystery of their profession in any interview: the act of writing was a sedentary, solitary work, where no other people were needed. He had stashed away enough experiences when he was a younger man; now he just needed to elaborate on that material, organize it. He didn’t need to live it again, did he?
It was either that or depression, this lack of want for life.
Secretly, a year earlier, he had seen a psychiatrist, a friend of a friend whom he’d met at a party. “Only half an hour of your time is all I really need,” he had told the kind-looking doctor. But the minute he sat across from him in his luscious, book-lined studio, he poured out his unpleasant thoughts of death, how his appetite for life seemed to be tapering off. The older man, with his gentle face and sympathetic expression, had said he didn’t sound depressed—depression being a serious clinical condition. But he’d be happy to prescribe something mild if he felt he needed “just a little help.” He said he didn’t need it and came out of the doctor’s studio both relieved and disappointed. The idea of “a little help” was humiliating; he’d somehow wanted his mental condition to be either all or nothing.
He realized in the taxi home after his session that what he forgot to tell the psychiatrist was that his novels didn’t sell nearly as well as they had in the past. There were reasons, of course. New, younger writers for one, to whom people were more drawn because of their looks, their reckless lives, the wordplay they used. There was also the fact that he, along with so many other writers of his generation, had lost his luster (the author’s photos on the jackets had had to change, no more leather and ruffled hair, but tailored suits and receding hairlines). And lastly, possibly, he had to admit to a certain repetitiveness in the plots of his novels. Like most writers, he’d always had a specific theme and followed the same thread (wasn’t that a quality rather than a flaw? Didn’t great writers essentially always write variations of the same book over and over again?). His particular theme had revolved around the existential musings of a character who had been the protagonist of most of his novels. Throughout the years the character had kept the same name, the same job, he had grown, aged, lost his hair, just like him. Somehow though, as of late, his readership too had thinned. Not dramatically—he still sold enough to keep his publisher happy and enough money coming in—but the phone calls from his agent to keep him up to date on the sales were not nearly as effervescent or as frequent as ten years earlier.