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uncertainty in order to resolve it and dispel it. In growing up I’ve acquired skills and knowledge and experience, but at heart how much more am I than that little boy? Perhaps I am less in resilience and courage. But of course little boys aren’t consciously sexual. Sexual awakening brings doubt, and with doubt the hiatus of hesitation and the possibility of misunderstanding. Little boys are active; they don’t understand. For several moments, my heart thumping painfully, I am spellbound by the secret lovers. But it is too much, I must escape this quandary, and instead of going towards them, I scurry quickly away over the rocks like a frightened crab. By the time the sand is reached, my body and mind have become amazingly focused and my whole being overtaken by the profoundest dissatisfaction. And Gregory has packed up and gone home.
    Back at the hotel Big Bertha is cleaning my apartment – at 5 pm. Apologetically I take off my tarry shoes and find a newspaper to set them on. She says ‘To-morrow good sun’. I say ‘To-morrow I leave’ and give her some money before she escapes. Again she tries to refuse it, as though suspicious of what it’s for.
    Lying on the bed, my eyelids gently close – and snap open again. What was that about nostalgia and melancholy being forms of love? They are forms of paralysis! The sense of loss – enough of it! Let the pull of the past be succeeded by the pull of the future and the sense of loss replaced by the sense of expectancy. Our world is embodied contradiction, our lives possible only in the fluctuations of reciprocity, and now it is the turn of the future. Besides, I’ve run out of books and there is not a proper bookshop on the island. If I stay I shall be forced, like Gregory, to invent my own language, and a private language is one paradox I don’t go for. Hot water gushes into the bathtub and shampoo makes fragrant foam. To-morrow – another boat, another destination.

C HAPTER T WO The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry
    O OTACAMUND 1975 — There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and Rita Wallace, Sarah Moffett and myself were steaming up the side of the Nilgiri Hills in a little blue train. The wheels moved so slowly that sometimes we seemed to be hanging motionless among green coffee plantations, hardly breaking the cool air. ‘Nilgiri’ means ‘blue’ and by the time we arrived it was evening and blue mists were threading the valleys. First appearances however were a shock. We’d been told that Ooty, Queen of the Hill Stations, possessed houses like those of Sunningdale in the English stockbroker-belt, and that its setting had the airy drama of Northumberland, and that it was the last word in subcontinental gentility. To underline this expectation I had in Delhi come across a book of sepia postcards from its heyday circa 1920 in which Ooty looked immaculate. Yet here we were in some derelict station with a lot of mess going on down by the railway tracks. Rita was a divorcee and a redhead. She looked up at me. Her face in recent days had been blistered by the sun and there was entreaty, even despair, in it. I tried to be encouraging and said ‘I hear there are lieutenants at Wellington down the road.’ Her smile was touched with sadness. It was more than fatigue.
    A skinny porter in oily turban grabbed our bags, high-stepped across shiny railway lines, and deposited them at a trackside hotel. The matter was literally taken out of our hands but after three days of travelling – we’d left Kovalam on the morning of St Valentine’s Day by bumpy bus for Quilon, grateful for the pellets of opium we’d stirred into hot coffee, and took the inland boat at nightfall from Aleppey to Cochin and after that a sleepless but dreamy train journey via Coimbatore to Mettupalayam – and after all that, we had acquired the open-ended fatalism in the eternal present which is said to characterise