Questions of Travel Read Free Page B

incident, had been reduced by the mapmaker to a trifle. If the island were to slide into a crack in the ocean and be lost forever, the map would scarcely change. He was visited by the same sensation that came when a wave pulled free from beneath his feet. Things tottered and plunged.
    Brother Ignatius was pointing out the conjunction of trade routes, ocean currents and deep-water harbors that had brought the Phoenicians to their island—and, in time, everyone else. It was vanity that led men to overestimate the force of history, he said, for history was a human affair. But, “Geography is destiny. It is old. It is iron.”
    Old. Iron. They were not so much words as emanations from the reverend brother’s core.
      
    When Brother Ignatius smiled—rather, when his thin mauve lips slipped sideways—boys trembled with fear. He could be glimpsed around the town on a high black bicycle, very early in the morning or at dusk, when the uncertain light, the silent glide of the bicycle and the figure in white drapery lent these sightings the quality of apparitions.
    Without the benefit of notes, Brother Ignatius spoke of the Zuiderzee, the Nullarbor, the Malay archipelago, evoking places he had never seen in such living detail that now and then, in years to come, a man arriving somewhere for the first time would be made uneasy by a persistent impression of familiarity, until, if he were fortunate, he would recall a lesson half attended to on a morning he could barely retrieve from the rubble of days under which it lay.
    When the reverend brother turned to the blackboard, there were boys who flicked each other with rubber bands or stared out of the window. The shadow of a great tree lying on the grass contained pieces of light, coins in a dark hand. But Ravi’s thoughts answered to the irrigation systems of vanished kingdoms, to the complexities that attend the siting of cities, to the almost-freshwater Baltic Sea.
    Brother Ignatius was a tea bush: born upcountry, a Tamil tea-plucker’s Eurasian bastard, the lowest of the low. Condemned to toil on the plains, he said, “Hills are God’s gift to our imagination.” And, “Who can say what lies on the other side of a hill?”
      
    Ravi waited until Priya was out. He knew where she hid her atlas. His thumbnail traced journeys across continents. He went for a walk across the world.
    When the time came to choose between subjects, he didn’t want to give up geography.
    Carmel Mendis, now in the purple stage of mourning, donned an uncrushable lilac dress and set out to address the problem at its source. Her hair was opulently pinned and curled, for Carmel had trained as a hairdresser before her marriage. Ushered into Brother Ignatius’s presence, she remained undaunted. He was imbued with the awful grandeur of the Roman Church. But she had brought children into the world.
    “My son is going into the science stream,” she announced.
    Brother Ignatius looked at his palms, which were paler than you might expect from the rest of him. “Junior science students are encouraged to study an arts subject if they wish.”
    Carmel was obliged to speak of a son’s duty to his mother. For what could a tea bush, abandoned at birth and reared by priests, know of that sacred bond? A Rodi woman had told Carmel’s fortune and assured her that she would not want for anything in old age. Carmel knew this meant that her son would be a surgeon. Her eyes, which were large and still brilliant, remained on Brother Ignatius to remind him of origins and limits.
    The next time Ravi mentioned going on with geography, the reverend brother’s lips shot sideways, and he assured his star pupil that there was not much future in it.

Laura, 1980 s
    AT SCHOOL THEY HAD said, Laura is creative. Into that capacious adjective, oddity, uncompromising plainness, a minor talent—in short, much that was inconvenient—could be bundled. Laura had acquiesced, wanting them to be right. Also, she so admired Miss Garnault,