couple of occasions in the taxi but that might have happened to anyone and he had maintained his equilibrium for most of the time, only disturbed by the fat Sikh on flight AHK 417. He had done it without Marion too and he said I can keep doing this.
He reached across the bed and dragged his small backpack towards him. He unzipped the small front pocket and took out the envelope. The envelope that he had put away , the letter that he had read once and because it made him cry, he had chosen not to read again .The letter that he had taken from the bedside drawer and put in the front pocket of his small backpack just before Louise picked him up to drive him to the airport. Now he needed to read it. He opened the envelope.
Dear Eliot,
You know that you are so special to me and I think that I am lucky to have spent most of my life with you. When I have gone, value every day. Move on. Look to the future and do me proud by choosing the next stage in your life and by making it count.
With all my love
Marion xx
He put down the letter and tiredness had its arms around him and the letter made him feel melancholy. He had seen enough in life to know how lucky he had been. Those words had made him feel positive too, here was the permission to start a new life. He could never be without her but this was his journey. A good night’s sleep was what he needed now and then he would be ready for tomorrow. He lay on his back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. The air conditioner was starting to kick in, his neck was cool so he sat up and untied his ponytail and then the customary shake of his head and his hair fell over his shoulders. The idea jumped into his head like it had always being hiding somewhere inside there and what jumped into his head would be something that he would do in the morning, when the morning was still quite young.
13.
Not long after Eliot had closed his eyes and not too far away from the Emperor Residency, Pintu and Ravi sat on two pallet beds under a shelter of blue plastic tarpaulin in front of the house and taxi depot of Mr. Aadi Baag, the almost mansion of the owner of the clapped out taxi that they drove every day and night. Despite the hour, Mr. Baag was there in the heat of the night, ready to take his entitlement. As he waited for his entitlement he stroked his thin black moustache that had not a hint of grey. Sensibly Pintu and Ravi’s had a secret and that was that they had held back a bit of the money that they were expected to give up and tomorrow they hoped that the man with the ponytail would provide them with more.
The taxi’s engine made cracking noises as it cooled and they sat on the pallets and drank Director’s Special from a bottle they kept under the front seat from glasses that they kept in the glove box. Because they would be returning to Dum Dum in the morning and the morning was not too far away they had decided that driving to the comforts of home in Rajpur Sonarpur was not a good idea, so Pintu had sent a message to Nerada to say they would not be coming home, so that when the whiskey kicked in proper they could lie back on their pallets and catch a bit of sleep.
This Mr.Eliot he is OK I am thinking and he is not having his head up his arse like a lot of tourists and he is being friendly.
Yes he is OK, but they are all the same, he thinks that he will miss those rupees, it is like what do they say, chicken feet to him. In Australia he proabably lives on a big house with a swimming pool. You know my cousin, Ajit, he is living in Perth and he tells me that everyone has a swimming pool behind their house and maybe three cars in their garage and maybe a boat as well. Everyone is rich even if they don’t think they are.
Well all the better for us tomorrow Ravi, soon you can buy Aditya a new sari and little Virat his school books.
There is another thing that I don’t understand about the westerner men. Why do they dress like little boy? This Mr. Eliot is old but he dresses in shorts and sandals and silly T shirt. How old does he think he is? He is like our children. And I am looking at his hair and laughing inside. He is looking like a tail of a horse. I am thinking that when one is getting this old they should be home having their grandchildren on their knees. It is too old to be travelling like a single man who wants a bit of everything. I think that their fathers are spoiling them when they are growing up so maybe they never grow up
Yes I am seeing this too and maybe because life is too easy that is another reason that they never grow up, always being the little boy who is expecting everything to happen just for him, like he is wanting. Maybe you and I are lucky that we grow up in Kolkata where there are simple problems.....but I am also thinking I am tired and it is time for some sleep.
Pintu lay back on the pallet and rested his head on his hands.
Good night Ravi, tomorrow it will be another day.
Good night Pintu the door.
They both smiled in the half light.
14.
It was Carol’s first day at work, she had slept well in her new room in the nurses dormitory adjacent to the hospital, exhausted from the travel. The office girl, Fitri had just put a meal of Mie Goreng wrapped in brown paper on her desk. Carol was a little nervous because after morning break, in ten minutes, she would have a meeting with her boss Faraan and she knew that then she would better understand the challenges in front of her. Fitri stared across the office at her and smiled a smile of expectation. You like this food she said, not too spicy? Carol knew that she would have to get to like Sumatran food.
As Carol sat across the desk from Faran, when the new day was beginning to warm in Kolkata, Eliot absorbed the light and the smells like he had with Marion in Siliguri and Darjeeling years before and he was excited. He left his bed and put on his lungi and opened the curtains and the double glass doors that opened onto his balcony and the warmth felt friendly. A dog lay curled up in the middle of the road below and the chapati cart went around the dog and an old man on a push bike went around the dog, and the motorbike carrying four boys without helmets too and the dog didn’t move. He was in India. Across the road two women in colourful saris sat squatting beside each other hand washing some clothes in large metal basins and one looked up and noticed Eliot and waved with a smile and then the other and he waved back and he always knew that to acknowledge the existence of another human being who you didn’t know was a good thing.
He told himself that he had no time to waste. He wanted to get out in the street and enjoy the morning. He unplugged his mobile phone from the charger on the bedside table. There was at least an hour before he could expect Pintu and Ravi to arrive so there was plenty of time to do what he had to do. He quickly showered and dressed and then he remembered to put a new dressing on his toe. When his hair was up in his ponytail, he stuffed some rupee in a pocket, hid is backpack with his money belt under the bed and stepped out of his room
As he hit the footpath, the weight the dark of last night had disappeared. Now this world of little doubts, foreign and strange was gone. Special might say, maybe you could be desperately unlucky. Just when you leat expect it your luck might run out, your turn would come. But he had learnt from Marion. The challenges were not new. Pintu and Ravi were good people, he was almost sure of that. So he was sure that if he ran into trouble on a murky late night street corner in Kolkata there would be a solution to any problem that he faced if Pintu and Ravi were there.
He walked the streets of Salt Lake City which were now were friendly in the light of the day and he soaked up the atmosphere of this incredible country. As he walked he was reminded of some of the lessons of India, lessons that you are forced to reflect upon when you were there, because in India, your eyes become clamped on what you saw. The extraordinary sights. At the end of the first block he came across a public park enclosed by a heavy wrought iron fence that spoke of colonial times. On one side of the entrance were two men with street stalls, two low tables, one selling chai and the other roti and on the other side of the fence sitting in a line sat the wretched , the lepers, staring into nowhere with faces that said nothing except a story of pain. They sat without talking, the men in lunghis and bare topped and the women with their lehenga tucked up between their leg and some with a dupatta scarf loosely draped over their head, with their bandaged hands and feet protruding outwards to make them even more pitiful. One woman, with a baby at her breast pointed at the pewter bowl at her