Without anything to guide us, we took at random a very broad, straight, empty road. Soon, we found we had left the water behind. The landscape was truly empty; fields of dry, salty scrub flanked us on either side; they were broken occasionally by groves of casuarina trees or palms, and in these once or twice I glimpsed a manorial house hidden in their shade. I had forgotten that Desai wrote, ‘the island on which they had arrived seemed flat, toneless’. We walked for a very long time without the landscape changing. We had been passed further back by a single rickshaw, also by two boys on a pushbike, but had met no one for a while. I began to itch for the sea.
‘I now followed instinctively,’ says Melville’s Ishmael, ‘the streets that took me waterward.’ Spotting a narrow path beaten through the scrub to our right, I told Priyanka that I had a powerful feeling it would lead to the ocean. We made our way into the dry grass that hissed with cicadas. After a little way the path faded, but we continued away from the road. The land rose—now I even suspected I could hear the sea’s unearthly sibilance. We climbed the ridge, and then we slid eagerly down its other side, for there was the ocean, grey and torpid like the humid sky!
My friend and I smiled deeply at each other as we walked onto the beach. A few largish fishing boats were moored in the shallows; I remember that they were painted sky blue and looked work-worn and old. The sand was littered with the detritus of both the natural and human worlds; foil wrappers and liquor bottles were tangled in the seaweed, as well as the discarded shells of the same extraordinary sea-life we had seen in Marve. Chickens and placid stray dogs picked at this refuse. Everywhere on the beach were signs of activity, yet that afternoon everything seemed to be dozing. Behind the beach, to the right, was a cluster of run-down houses, and a few people were about, strolling, children playing; a few sorted the catch of crustaceans as in Marve. I have never really been able to explain the particular brand of tranquillity that the sea casts across a scene, a tranquillity in which one feels an inkling of some extra-human power. Having rejoined it, we did not leave the sea again. It was a short beach; we walked to its end, where the sand gave way to a broad plateau of volcanic rock.
Barely anyone was around; the occasional lungi-clad gentleman navigated the rocks meditatively as we did. We walked for what seemed like hours across this lunar landscape, following the coast at all times. Rounding a corner at one point, the volcanic rock changed suddenly to smooth, grey slate that was cracked in such a way as to look extraordinarily like tiles laid by human hands, in right angles which yet somehow resisted forming any ordered pattern. I had never seen anything like it, and with the grey, restless sea to our left, the whole, deserted place seemed charged with a powerful magic. Once we passed a couple huddled furtively under a small, thatched awning. There was a quarter bottle of liquor between them; the woman, who looked very young and thin, wore a brilliant purple sari, indicating, presumably, that she was married.
After this long journey, Priyanka and I finally found ourselves at the long, clear stretch of sand that is Manori beach. Here, lots of people were swimming in the shallows or playing cricket on the sand. We re-entered the inhabited world as if from a long, strange exile.
Looking at a satellite image now, I realise that Priyanka and I walked right around the butt-end of the island, that instead of walking straight across the belt of the island to Manori beach, we must have turned left when we got off the ferry and thus wandered into the hinterland. Looking at the satellite image, whose clarity astounds me, I know this is right, because I recognise the turns we took as we followed the shape of the coast and, zooming in, the changing texture of the rock and, I think, even the path that first led us to the fishing beach.
Two friends of mine who had also come up from Bombay for the day met us at the beach. We sat around for a long time, smoking Gold Flakes. Priyanka and I talked about family. ‘I think what a lot of Indian British kids struggle with at the moment,’ she told me, ‘is the idea of conditional love. Their parents love them more than anything, but kids know that this love depends upon them living their life in a certain way.’
We bought a gaula from a brightly painted cart that the vendor had parked on the beach: a dessert of crushed ice on a stick with flavoured syrup, it is basically identical to a snow cone, and about as disappointing. My friend Alanna went swimming very far out, much farther than anyone else at the beach. ‘The brilliance of the sunset’ that Desai’s novel had led me to expect was indeed beautiful; the sky turned pink and grey, and against it the perfect, huge, orange orb of the sun descended slowly into the sea. ‘The sky and the water both turned to a toneless shade of pearl, then grey then darkness.’
We waited until the sun had disappeared , and then in the twilight we walked back along the beach. Alanna played an old film song from her phone, a ballad, and as an accompaniment to the island’s brilliance the song was so beautiful that tears came to my eyes:
On the path of life, we meet companions
Meeting companions, dreams are awoken
Having awoken these dreams, why do you then give us this separation?
Why did you create this world…
O Creator of the world, what got into your head?
I thought only peripherally about the transience of friendship; I was overcome, momentarily, by simple happiness. Leaving the water finally, we walked back through Manori’s residential streets. A lot like Goa or Kochi, the houses were spacious, expensive-looking bungalows with walled, paved yards and verandas. They were painted in bright colours, royal blue or orange or yellow. Many of the buildings sported Christian iconography. By the time we got back on the ferry it was fully dark.
Also striking about my satellite photo of Manori is the patent lack of development on the island compared to Marve across the water, which is dissected by the right angles of buildings and streets (not that I have ever really considered labyrinthine Bombay as right-angled). ‘Twilight, shade and darkness—these made up not only the natural but the necessary atmosphere of the island’. One is used to writing about Bombay’s landscape largely in terms of people—what they say, what they look like, where they’re going, their homes and jobs. Manori, separated from the overpopulated city by a strait so small you could swim it, is characterised by emptiness, demanding description without human beings. In Where Shall We Go This Summer, Manori for the heroine Sita is a place where she can retreat into landscape, in reaction to the misery of human drama. ‘She could talk, it seemed, only out on the beach where the sea and the sky were brilliantly lit and open to each other.’ The connection between the sky and the sea, I have sometimes thought, plays a role in the strange power of coastal landscapes. ‘Following the faithful band along the sea’s edge, she had watched the sea birds settle and rock on the maternal waves, and the phosphorus that rose glinting out of the ocean as darkness descended.’
Having spent the early years of her life amid the struggles of the independence movement, in which her father was active, Sita moves with her father and siblings to Manori in 1947. Of political life, she says: ‘now she saw it flung to the winds, to the sea.’ On Manori, Sita’s father gradually becomes a kind of legend, believed among the island’s inhabitants to possess the power to perform miracles and administer magical cures. After my trip there, I find it easy to see Manori as a ‘magic island’, as Sita calls it. ‘It was only gradually, as the light of the ordinary world grew stiff, static and petrified around her, as the streets and walls ceased to offer security or safety but implied threats of murder instead, that she once again began to think of the island. She saw its shape again, that dark saucer on the steel pale sea, white birds suddenly rising to swoop across its breadth, and Moses’ small boat setting out from the rusty coast to fetch her back into its ring of magic.’ Desai’s rigour and skill as a descriptive writer always blows me away.
Bombay is constantly presenting new faces that astonish me with their beauty. The Marve to which we returned presented yet another unexpected face. The beach was lit by myriad little kerosene lamps which, from a distance in the darkness, seemed to hang in mid-air. Drawing nearer, it became apparent that they belonged to food stalls. A market had set up on the beach, and it had drawn a crowd. The beach was alive with people in the dappled light-and-darkness, the shushing sound of the invisible waves lending its characteristic peace. There were puri wallahs with sacks of puffed rice and golgappe and perfectly-formed mountains of (bhajji?). There were gaula carts and ice-cream carts. Several stores sold corn-on-the-cob, roasted on hot coals in little braziers; others sold incredibly spicy chana masala with hard little chickpeas and fresh coriander and onion and lime. I’d eaten nothing but fruit all day, and fell upon this street food with enthusiasm, buying one of everything. Afterwards I was still hungry, so Priyanka and I went into a restaurant near the beach and shared a paneer tikka masala. I asked Priyanka what the Indian food in England was like, telling her, ‘I’ve always imagined it’s amazing.’
‘Yeah, it’s good,’ she told me, ‘But the food in India is something else.’ Soaking my chappati in the sweet-spicy gravy, I knew I couldn’t argue with that.
On the way back to Malad station, the traffic was very bad, and we sat in the back of the rickshaw talking and talking.
‘The more I learn about India,’ I admitted, ‘The less I feel I am able to know anything about it. It’s so big and so complicated; there are infinite different language groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, castes, traditions… You can’t even scratch the surface. As soon as you learn the first thing about it, you realise you can’t know anything.’
Priyanka looked gratified. ‘It’s really nice to hear that kind of humility,’ she said sincerely. ‘My friend and I got into this huge conversation the other night about how tired we are of hearing non-Indians make pronouncements about what India is. And I realise I’m in an odd position, because I’m Indian but I’m British, I didn’t grow up here. But yeah, my friend, who’s from here, and I, we realised we’ve both had the experience of people trying to tell us what India is, what India needs, oh it’s like this, this is what happens here… people who have been in the country like three weeks!’
I was glad my admission of ignorance pleased Priyanka. But I was also aware of the danger of being, myself, one of the people she was talking about. I have always felt that my love for Bombay is unrequited; it doesn’t really want me.
There is an episode in Where Shall We Go This Summer in which an older Sita and her own family are driving home from a trip to the Ajanta Caves. They pass ‘an extraordinary looking, excessively blonde, tall, and stooped foreigner holding a large placard before his face with a kind of insane patience and hopefulness.’ The man is hitchhiking to Ajanta caves, but he is standing on the wrong side of the road, utterly oblivious about which direction he needs to go in. Later, Sita and her husband argue about him, Sita calling him ‘brave’. ‘ “Brave? Him?”’ retorts her husband. ‘ “He was a fool—he didn’t even know which side of the road to wait on.”’ This scene stays with me because I am afraid to see myself in it, adventuring meaninglessly in an India to which I remain irrelevant, only ‘seeing picturesque figures pass before me as a frieze’ like Miss Quested in A Passage to India. I recoil at the thought of always being a Hemingway in Constantinople, obsessed with the dirtiness of an exotic he can’t come to terms with, or the Ajanta hitchhiker, ‘distressingly ineffectual’, or a Miss Quested, who goes on and on about seeing ‘the real India’ only to make a terrible mess of things.
I put these depressing thoughts out of my mind. Priyanka and I finally reached the station. In the empty train, we browsed the wares of the saleswomen who laboriously trawl the carriages—earrings, nail polish. We also invented a game called ‘Most Alarming Thing We’ve Seen Today’. Retrospective winners included the man in Colaba who removes his false leg to use it as a pillow and the guy I accidentally saw giving his girlfriend head during a film at the cinema. That day, the crustaceans on Marve beach were a strong contender, but we ended up giving the title to a sign we saw on a clothing shop that said, ‘Buy 1, Get 4!’
Stella McMillan- Author 