In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,51
to come along with him on this, his third trip to India. He’s going for six months and the plan is that Anna will join him for the first eight weeks. And it seemed in the beginning like a good idea to everybody. Back home in Cape Town she has a powerful job with a very high profile and a future full of impressive possibilities. Normally she is more than a match for the challenges of her work, attacking it with a fervour that now looks suspect. But both her job and her relationship are under strain at the moment, and this is meant to be time out. A couple of months away from home, a chance for Anna to find herself and stabilize. Maybe it’s just what she needs.
Although the start has been tough, things will be easier, he reasons, when they reach their destination. They are heading for a tiny fishing village in south Goa, where he has spent the previous two winters. There will be nothing to do except lie around in the sun or go for long walks on the beach or swim in the warm sea. Surely the indolence will slow her down. Besides, as her psychiatrist has said, it will take a couple of weeks for the medicine to kick in properly. Better times lie ahead.
Before they can fully relax, however, there is still one more journey to get through, and on the train the next day a new drama develops. He is strict about supervising her medication, and even in the rocking train carriage he makes sure that she counts out her assortment of pills. As she starts swallowing them he turns away, but sees from the corner of one eye the jerk of her arm as she throws a tablet out of the window. What are you doing. She instantly breaks down weeping, I can’t handle it, these tranquillizers knock me out, I can’t function. He feels a stab of pity, at this early point he still has patience and compassion. You have to take them, Anna, your body will adjust.
He will soon establish, when he sits down to examine the note from her psychiatrist, that she’s been double-dosing on one of the tranquillizers, and when this imbalance has been corrected the medicine won’t touch her. But right now she sleeps most of the journey away, while he stares out of the window at the changing landscape outside. He is glad of this chance just to reflect quietly, while the dry vastness of the plains gives way by degrees to the lush, steamy heat of Goa.
He is middle-aged now and his travelling habits have changed. He has become more sedentary, staying in one place for longer periods of time, with less of that youthful rushing around. But this new approach has its problems. On a previous trip to India, waiting in a town far to the north for some bureaucratic business to be finished, he became aware that he was forming connections with the place, giving money to a sick man here, calling the vet to attend to a stray dog there, setting up a web of habits and social reflexes that he usually travels to escape. He wonders now if he hasn’t taken a step further down that road by bringing his troubled friend with him on the trip. Here they are, barely arrived, and already he feels chords of alarm twanging deep down. But the motion and heat are numbing, and he’s calmer by the time evening comes and they have broken out at last into paddy fields and stretches of blue water between palm trees. Anna wakes and looks out of the window in amazement. Are we there yet. Almost.
The sun is setting as they reach Margao, a dirty bustling town like countless others they’ve passed along the way, but fortunately there’s no need for them to linger. Their destination is a twenty minute ride by auto-rickshaw through tracts of greenery with the last golden light cooling overhead, and somewhere along the way she puts a hand on his arm and tells him how beautiful it is. Thank you for bringing me, she says. I’m so glad to be here.
When they arrive at the little family-run hotel where he usually stays, there are familiar faces to welcome them and a room has been kept aside. He takes a shower and when he comes downstairs to the restaurant she’s drinking a gin-and-tonic. Oh come on, she cries when she sees