Indian Nocturne Read Online Free Page A

seemed an attractive, even exotic name, so there was no reason to take offence.
And then I went back over the following summers. Magda crying – I thought, why? Was it right perhaps? And Isabel, and her illusions. And when those memories took on an unbearable clarity,
sharp as if beamed on the wall by a projector, I got up and left the room.
    Six o’clock is a bit too late for lunch and a bit too early for dinner. But at the Taj Mahal, said my guidebook, thanks to its four restaurants, you can eat at any time. The Rendez-Vous
was on the top floor of the Apollo Bunder, but it was really too intimate. And too expensive. I dropped into the Apollo Bar and chose a table by the big terrace window looking out on the first
lights of the evening; the seafront was a garland. I drank two gin-and-tonics which put me in a good mood and wrote a letter to Isabel. I wrote for a long time, in a constant stream, with passion,
and told her everything. I wrote about those distant days, about my trip, and about how feelings flower again with time. I also told her things I would never have thought of telling her, and when I
re-read the letter, with the reckless amusement of someone who has drunk on an empty stomach, I realised that really that letter was for Magda, it was to her I’d written it, of course it was,
even though I’d begun, ‘Dear Isabel’; and so I screwed it up and left it in the ashtray, went down to the ground floor, into the Tanjore Restaurant and ordered a slap-up meal,
exactly as a prince dressed up as a nobody would have. And then when I’d finished eating it was night-time; the Taj was coming to life and sparkled with lights; on the lawn near the pool the
liveried servants stood ready to chase off the crows; I sat myself down on a couch in the middle of that hall, big as a football field, and set about watching luxury. I don’t know who it was
said that in the pure activity of watching there is always a little sadism. I tried to think who it was, but couldn’t, yet I felt that there was some truth in the statement: and so I watched
with greater pleasure, with the perfect sensation of being just two eyes watching while I myself was elsewhere, without knowing where. I watched the women and the jewels, the turbans, the fezes,
the veils, the trains, the evening dresses, the Moslems and the millionaire Americans, the oil magnates and the spotless, silent servants: I listened to laughter, to phrases comprehensible and
incomprehensible, whispers, rustlings. And this went on and on the entire night, till dawn almost. Then, when the voices thinned out and the lights were dimmed, I leant my head on the cushions of
the couch and fell asleep. Not for long though, because the first boat for Elephanta casts off from right in front of the Taj at seven o’clock; and along with an older Japanese couple,
cameras round their necks, I was on that boat.

IV
    ‘What are we doing inside these bodies,’ said the man who was preparing to stretch out in the bed next to mine.
    His voice didn’t have an interrogative tone, perhaps it was not a question, just a statement, made in his way; in any case it would have been a question I couldn’t have answered. The
light that came from the station platforms was yellow and traced its thin shadow on the peeling walls, moving lightly across the room, prudently and discreetly I thought, the same way the Indians
themselves move. From far away came a slow monotonous voice, a prayer perhaps, or a solitary, hopeless lament, the kind of cry that expresses nothing but itself, asks nothing of anyone. I found it
impossible to make out any words. India was this too: a universe of flat sounds, undifferentiated, indistinguishable.
    ‘Perhaps we’re travelling in them,’ I said.
    Some time must have passed since his first comment, I had lost myself in distant thoughts: a few minutes’ sleep maybe. I was very tired.
    He said: ‘What did you say?’
    ‘I was referring to our bodies,’ I