Now he lay with whisky at hand and his thoughts drifting, as they did in this mood, to a room with a polished concrete floor. Some years earlier, on a stopover in India, he had been persuaded by his mother to call on a relative, a third cousin who lived in Pondicherry. Eileen had married a man ten years older, a Tamil with cracked purple lips. He accepted Tom’s bottle of duty-free single malt with both hands, and placed it on a glass-fronted cabinet between a vase of nylon hibiscus and a plastic Madonna containing holy water from Lourdes.
Children’s faces bloomed at different heights in a doorway hung with a flowered curtain. Tom smiled at a stumpy tot with plaited hair, who burst into tears. ‘Take no notice,’ said Eileen. ‘That one is needing two tight slaps.’
A girl entered the room bearing a tray of tumblers in which a bilious green drink was fizzing. It dawned on Tom that his cousins were teetotallers.
Cedric held an obscure clerical post in a Catholic charity. Before her marriage, Eileen had worked as a stenographer. They had applied to immigrate to the States, Canada and Australia, and been rejected on every occasion. There remained New Zealand, and what could be salvaged of hope.
Eileen summoned her eldest son: ‘Show Tommy Uncle your school report.’ On a settee covered in hard red rexine, Tom read of proficiency at chemistry and mathematics. A boy with fanned lashes stood beside him, breathing through his mouth. ‘He is pestering us all the time for a computer.’
The scent of India, excrement and spices, billowed through the house. On a radio somewhere close at hand, a crooner was singing ‘Whispering Hope’. A ziggurat of green oranges glided past, inches from the barred window. The walls of the room were washed blue, of the shade the Virgin wore in heaven.
Eileen brought out a heavy album with brass studs along the spine. From its matt black pages de Souzas gazed out unsmiling, each new generation less plausibly European.
On his return to Australia, Tom struggled to find a rhetoric suited to the episode. When Karen had travelled with him through India on their honeymoon, she had made up her mind to be charmed by everything she saw. It was an admirable resolution and she kept it, heat, swindles, belligerent monkeys, spectacular diarrhoea and headlines reporting communal murder notwithstanding; her tenacity boosted by air-conditioned hotels and sandals of German manufacture.
Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual. From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India ’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and fl agrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed superstitious nonsense into luminous grace.
Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all. And then, there was the global nation: the India of the IT boom, the pavement-vendor of okra with his cell phone clamped to his ear, the foreign-returned graduates climbing the executive ladder at McKinsey or Merrill Lynch, the street children enthralled by Bart Simpson in a store window, the call centre workers parroting the idioms of Sydney or Swindon. The energetic, perilous glamour of technology and capital: spiritual India, existing outside history, was disallowed that, too.
Faced with Karen’s curiosity about his cousins, Tom thought of Cedric’s eyes travelling in opposite directions behind heavy-rimmed spectacles; of the way Eileen’s hand fl ew to cover the deficiencies in her smile. In India bodies were historic, tissue and bone still testifying to chance and time.
In the former French quarter of Pondicherry, Tamil gendarmes in scarlet peaked caps strolled the calm boulevards; bougainvillea stained colonial stucco turmeric, saffron, chilli. At sunrise, managerial Indians jogged the length of the seafront, where the waves were restrained by a decaying wall. The wines of Burgundy were served in the dining room at Tom’s hotel. The maître d’, who bore an unnerving resemblance to Baroness Thatcher, had once been a waiter at the Tour d’Argent. At mealtimes he was to be found surveying his domain with a cramped countenance. The table napkins, although freshly starched and mitred, were always limp from the heat. It is not the absence of an ideal that produces despair, thought Tom, but its approximation.
Eileen lived in a street of stalls and small, open-fronted shops on the wrong side of Pondi’s canal; the Indian side, the ville noire, encrusted with time and filth. A crow picked at something in the gutter by her door. Tom feared it was a kitten.
In Australia, separated from his wife by a length of Tasmanian oak, the racket and reek of the bazaar returned keenly to him. Eileen’s azure room was oppressive with calculation and yearning. Children were its familiars. It held fl eeting, unique lives. Tom could not find a way to convert these things into narrative. The dailiness of India was too much with him.
Yet his wife required an anecdote. He spoke of the bureaucratic pettifogging that dogged his cousins, of immigration officials who didn’t have a clue; thus engaging Karen’s sympathy and deflecting her attention. She was given to causes, her imagination too broadly netted for the merely individual.
Tom had taken his camera with him when he visited Eileen. He came home one evening with packets of newly processed fi lm to find Karen drinking wine with a colleague. The two women sifted through his photos of Pondicherry, exclaiming over flame-coloured blossom arched above a pair of rickshaws, and a brass-belled cow grazing in front of a bicycle-repair shop painted sugar-almond pink. They loved India, they agreed.
Eileen and Cedric sat side by side, posed on red rexine.
Tom recalled what he had noticed when taking the picture: that being photographed was not a casual affair for his cousins. The flash found them smiling and attentive. Their image would circulate where they could not. It was not something to be yielded lightly.
Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Well, the whole Christian thing-it’s not like it belongs in India.’
The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, fl oated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.
Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that fl oated and gleamed.
In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.
His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.
He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.
Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.