Playing Fields in Winter Read Free Page A

anything in but satisfied by the sounds of his mother fussing from the doorway – she would not have dared actually to come in and disturb him – and by the imagined vision of his name at the top of the termly class lists once again. Tributaries of sweat and water like the rivers whose names he memorised ran down his scrawny neck from the wet towel he wound around his head. His legs stuck painfully to his wooden chair. When his mother finally tiptoed in with a cold drink, he ferociously ignored her. His diligence naturally paid off in time. First he got into the college in Delhi and then, gloriously, Oxford. And all along no one knew, least of all his proud parents, that his motives were so unscholarly. It was not academic success he was after but his rightful horizon, which would reduce Lucknow to a picturesque childhood memory.
    When he was very small, Ravi had had a recurring nightmare . This had been brought on, he thought, by an incident on a bus journey. Where they were going or why, he could no longer remember, but he knew that the journey had been the cause of a great upset in his family; they should have been travelling in a private car and not by public bus,crowded together with all sorts of people in the worst of the hot weather. His mother was tense and upset and her unhappiness had communicated itself to him. Somewhere along the way, the bus had stopped at a roadside snack stall and his mother, screwing up her face in disgust, had taken him into the public lavatory. It was a fearsome place. There was no light in the low hut, but a fierce smell which seemed to make the darkness blacker. Small barred windows high up in the wall let in two square rays of light which showed, once your eyes were accustomed to the darkness, that around the lavatory hole the sloping floor was awash with faeces. So that he should not spoil his shiny shoes by paddling in the excrement, his mother had stood at arm’s length from the frightful hole and held up little Ravi over it to do his business as best he could, squawking and terrified.
    In his nightmare, Ravi fell and flew sickeningly down into the smelly dark shaft, falling further and further away from the light and his mother, into a bottomless black pit which he knew would eventually come out on the other side of the world.
    How many times he dreamed that dream, he had no idea, for it was reinforced so often in his waking hours. There was a dark world of dreadful filth which lay in wait for him outside his safe, clean home. There were holes in every public lavatory which led through to the other side of the world. And it was only by turning up his nose at it and sticking fast to what his parents taught him that he could steer clear of the abyss.
    *
    The college reminded her of school on the dull October day she arrived in Oxford. There was a familiar institutional smell in its long corridors – which aroused memories of lack of affection – and a disembodied jabbering, not produced by any particular voices but apparently generated perpetually by the community of females.
    She was given a room overlooking the garden. It was on the top floor of the least popular wing of the college and as well as the corridors, visitors had to negotiate a steep and rather forbidding staircase. It was room Number 102, butthe girls on either side had already put up little cards saying ‘Jacqueline Poliakoff’ and ‘Clarissa Rich’. Clarissa Rich knocked while Sarah was beginning to unpack and already giving way to a fantasy of not opening her suitcases at all but seizing what she cared most about and running away. She had found a hot-water bottle in a crocheted woollen cover lying forgotten in the wardrobe. It seemed to predict such chilly, spinsterish winters in the secluded room that she had thrown it into the waste-paper basket and now she was unwilling to put her belongings into the traces left by her predecessor. Clarissa Rich put her head round the door when Sarah answered and, seen