How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits

Chapter Two: The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry

C  T The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry 40 The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry O OTACAMUND 1975 — There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and Rita Wallace, Sarah Moffett and myself were steaming up the side of the Nilgiri Hills in a little blue train. The wheels moved so slowly that sometimes we seemed to be hanging motionless among green coffee plantations, hardly breaking the cool air. ‘Nilgiri ’ means ‘blue’ and by the time we arrived it was evening and blue mists were threading the valleys. First appearances however were a shock. We’d been told that Ooty, Queen of the Hill Stations, possessed houses like those of Sunningdale in the English stockbroker-belt, and that its setting had the airy drama of Northumberland, and that it was the last word in subcontinental gentility. To underline this expectation I had in Delhi come across a book of sepia postcards from its heyday circa 1920 in which Ooty looked immaculate. Yet here we were in some derelict station with a lot of mess going on down by the railway tracks. Rita was a divorcée and a redhead. She looked up at me. Her face in recent days had been blistered by the sun and there was entreaty, even despair, in it. I tried to be encouraging and said ‘I hear there are lieutenants at Wellington down the road.’ Her smile was touched with sadness . It was more than fatigue. A skinny porter in oily turban grabbed our bags, highstepped across shiny railway lines, and deposited them at a trackside hotel. The matter was literally taken out of our hands but after three days of travelling–we’d left Kovalam on the morning of St Valentine’s Day by bumpy bus for Quilon, grateful for the pellets of opium we’d stirred into hot coffee, and took the inland boat at nightfall from Aleppey to Cochin and after that a sleepless but dreamy The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry 41 train journey via Coimbatore to Mettupalayam–and after all that, we had acquired the open-ended fatalism in the eternal present which is said to characterise non-European temperaments, and so had followed the porter submissively. The large room in which we found ourselves contained half a dozen single beds. It would do for a night. Supper consisted of omelettes with bread, butter and tea at a table in the hallway, and we ate gratefully but without talking. Don’t know what the time would have been. But in our dormitory, slumped across the beds, which were all out of alignment and arranged in no purposeful manner, we smoked grass, finished off the Indian whisky, and crashed out. In those days marijuana was easily available everywhere for a nod and a wink and a few rupees, and usually came in twiggy clumps wrapped in newspaper, much like fish & chips in the United Kingdom. In the middle of the night Rita woke me with a scream. She said something had touched her. I said she’d imagined it and we went back to sleep. Some time later she screamed again and said she wasn’t imagining it and she could hear something as well–couldn’t I hear something, a scraping noise, a crunching noise? Our attention was riveted to the black silence. ‘I can hear Sarah snoring,’ I said at last. Next, with an awful yell, Rita propelled herself across the room and into my bed. ‘I’ve been bitten, you sod!’ Dutifully I slid out of bed, and went across to the door, and fumbled around on the wall for the light-switch. Before I’d found it, something with claws ran over my bare instep. I froze. Moving the switch frantically up and down and sideways, I managed to get the striplight to flicker into 42 The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry cold life and shot back to bed too. From above the parapet of our blanket, we looked and saw nothing, nothing at all, and so cautiously I crept across the room again and flung Rita’s mattress into the air and on to the floor. Holes had been ripped in its underside and tufts of flock stuck out. I lit a cigarette, watched and waited. Before long a black snout, followed by a pair of sharp black eyes, pushed outwards from a hole in the floor near the door and after twitching about a...