Questions of Travel Read Free Page A

that followed, the command lost its power; it survived in the present as a joke. It wasn’t that Hester regretted the shift, exactly. But the saying belonged to a world that was imperfect and solid: how had it grown as light as mockery? She wiped her ringless fingers—carefully, one by one.

Ravi, 1970 s
    ON THAT DAY IN 1779 when Captain Cook died in Kealakekua Bay, an Italian apothecary arrived in Galle on a ship registered in Rotterdam to the Dutch East India Company. One of these men was already famous and the other would die in obscurity, but each had his part in a great global enterprise that ran on greed, curiosity and the human reluctance to stay still.
    Ravi’s pedigree reached back through two hundred years to the Italian adventurer; on his mother’s side, which didn’t count. Of his father’s ancestors, however, he knew almost nothing. No tales circulated of them, for they lacked exoticism and hence the glamour from which legends are made.
    Mindful of his wife’s European heritage, Suresh Mendis had once brought home a sideboard inset with speckled mirrors and a portrait of Edward VII. It was solidly constructed from teak, but two of its clawed feet had been sawn off and one of its drawers was stuck. Suresh told his wife that he had acquired it from a colleague who was emigrating and had let it go for next to nothing. Suspicion fluttered in Carmel, but this was in the first year of their marriage, and they hadn’t yet learned to look on each other’s wishes as flaws.
    Propped on bricks, the sideboard was placed on the back veranda to await repair. There it stayed and became, in fact, a useful receptacle for the odds and ends that every household accumulates: a pot of glue, string, receipts, a saucepan without a handle, a cracked dish that might yet serve for the dog’s rice. “Look in the sideboard,” the Mendises would advise each other when they had searched everywhere else for an elusive object.
    It was here that Ravi came to stand when his father went into hospital with pains in his stomach and failed to return. The sideboard, ever further advanced in decrepitude, one of its mirrors shattered by a cricket ball, a second monsoon-warped drawer now as unyielding as the first, had nevertheless endured. Ravi was just tall enough to lay his head on the battered board, beside a blurred whitish ring left by a glass. Marmite, believing this stance to signal a new game, trotted up and remained beside him, gently wagging her tail.

Ravi, 1980 s
    “HISTORY IS ONLY A byproduct of geography.” It was Brother Ignatius’s greeting to every new class, the gambit unchanged in thirty-one years. Then very deliberately, with the air of a curator about to reveal a precious artifact, he would manipulate a cord that unrolled a map of the world.
    Much creased, nicked here and there, the map brought an unsettling dimension to the room. At once, the gazes of all the boys flew to their island, a dull green jewel fallen from India’s careless ear. It was so small! But no one is insignificant to himself. And in a niche high above the classroom door lay a flat water bottle, its bright red plastic dull with dust, that had been flung up there to avenge a long-forgotten insult; and bedbugs moved in the wooden chairs that the pupils treated at the end of each term, carrying them outside and spraying them with Shelltox. Remembering this, the boys shifted in their seats, certain that the backs of their knees itched. The tips of their fingers grazed words gouged out with dividers and inked into their desks, and they recalled scraping the lids smooth with razor blades, after which they had applied a rag dipped in shoe polish to the wood.
    There was the matter of the Indian Ocean. These children were well acquainted with its fidgety expanse. There remained the problem of how to match it to a blue space labeled Indian Ocean. Ravi, studying the map, saw that what he knew of existence, the reality he experienced as boundless and full of