by Mary Morris
We pass a school where a line of children stand in the yard, tugging on their own ears. “Why are they doing that?” I ask Dinesh, who tells me that these are children who haven’t done their homework and they are being punished and are on public display. “It doesn’t hurt them,” he says, “it just embarrasses them.”
Once more I ask about his son, whom he tells me is in boarding school. “Boarding school. Isn’t that a little unusual?”
And then Dinesh’s whole sad story unfolds.
Not long after their son was born, his young wife had a brain hemorrhage. She had surgery and was better, but then she hemorrhaged again. Another surgery, but when it happened the third time she refused the surgery, and she died. Obviously this was tragic, but then the story gets a little murky. There was some problem with Dinesh’s in-laws, who tried to take his son away. They took Dinesh to court. They sued for custody and lost. Since then Dinesh has never spoken to them. And his son has never seen them.
“So your son doesn’t see his grandparents?” Dinesh shakes his head. “Or his aunts, uncles? His cousins?” Again Dinesh proudly shakes his head.
“But who cares for him while you are on the road?”
“Oh,” he tells me, eyes on the road, “there is a woman who takes care of him when he’s not in school.” I am saddened at the thought of Dinesh’s lonely boy and I am also feeling weak. I am feverish and I’ve wrapped a scarf around my throat, but still I am coughing. “You need some medicine,” he tells me. “I will stop for you.” Dinesh seems to know everywhere to stop—for a bite, for cough drops. And he is an expert on bathrooms. He knows where all the clean bathrooms are. Something I’ll come to appreciate in the several days in which we are thrown together.
We drive along until we come to a town, where Dinesh pulls to the side of the road. He races in and returns with a bag filled with cough drops and a small flask of whiskey. “This is for your throat,” he says. Who am I to argue?
Driving on, we come to another village, and I ask Dinesh if we can stop. He nods his head back and forth, but I can’t really tell if it means yes, no, or maybe. But then it seems to me as if perhaps everything in India means “maybe.” He pulls over, so I assume it’s all right. But then I am uncomfortable. I don’t want to embarrass the villagers, but Dinesh assures me it won’t. “They will be happy for your visit.”
I bring my camera. In the village on a front porch we are greeted by a very old woman who has no teeth. The woman hollers something, and a man appears—also old and toothless. I am smiling at them and they look at me askance. Dinesh gives them the traditional greeting, putting his hands together, and says, “Namaste,” which means basically “go in peace.” A young girl appears with a pitcher and some water for us to drink.
I am hesitant but Dinesh takes a ceramic cup from her hands and a long drink. I feel bad about not accepting the water, but I am determined not to get sicker than I already am. In the car as we push on, Dinesh tells me not to smile at people in greeting. “If you smile at them, they think you are making fun of them.” From then on I will greet people only with my hands pressed together, bowing, and say, “Namaste.”
As we get closer to Pench the road is lined with red-faced rhesus macaque monkeys. They are everywhere and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that they are the least endangered primates in the world. These are the monkeys used in laboratories, to test the latest cancer drug or eye shadow. They have weirdly human faces—due in part to the fact that their faces are hairless. They stand on their hind legs by the side of the road, palms outstretched, begging for food. I think they are cute and want to take their picture until Dinesh tells me that they have left the jungle and come to the road because they are starving.
9
THE TIGER. Elusive, mysterious, hidden, hiding. You cannot make friends with the tiger, Pi’s father tells him in Life of Pi. It reminds me of a story a friend told me—though it sounds like an urban legend. An acquaintance of hers had a pet boa constrictor. The woman was in a lonely patch in her life so she began bringing the snake to bed with her. After a few weeks her snake stopped eating. Not even live mice could entice it. She took it to the vet, who could find nothing wrong with the boa and asked if she was in any way being intimate with her snake, and the woman confessed that she did let it sleep with her in her bed. “It’s getting ready to eat you,” the vet told her.
10
WE ARE ONLY seven meals away from anarchy. My veterinarian told me that. We were speaking about predators in general and he told me that if humans went without food for more than two days, we’d start killing one another with baseball bats. “You can imagine how desperate an animal can become if you take away its food.”
11
EXCEPT FOR animals that live in the dark recesses of the sea, tigers are one of the most elusive creatures on earth. They are apex predators, killing machines. Ambush hunters. They will watch their game for hours and sometimes days before they pounce, always striking from the back or the side. Their retractable claws can slice through any flesh. Tigers have no natural enemies, but they fear anything white. White does not appear in their dense jungle world. White is emptiness, blankness. They have no camouflage against it.
When the maharajas wanted to go hunting, they had their servants weave white sheets through the tiger’s terrain, flushing her out. And when the tiger ran away from all that whiteness, the maharaja shot her.
12
I HAVE ALWAYS had an interest in beginnings. The beginning of friendships, of romances, of books, of plays. Origin stories. The blank page. If I come in late to a movie, even if it’s just the credits rolling, I never recover. I must start from scratch. I go back to a March day. I know it is March because my father is preparing his taxes. At least that is what I’ve been told he is doing. And because it is rainy and gray and the garden, my mother’s garden, has yet to bloom. In fact all I see is mud. It is a miserable Sunday and my mother says to me that I can play in the den, but I can’t disturb my father.
My father was a methodical, orderly man, especially with his business affairs, a trait I have tried to emulate without much success. There was also a much darker, more complicated side to him, but that is not what this anecdote is about. On this March day my father sits at a card table in his yellow cashmere sweater and brown slippers. The table is covered with slips of paper, all neatly stacked, thick pads of yellow paper, and pencils, sharpened to a fine point. He has his big, wide checkbook open before him.
“You can play in there,” my mother says, “but don’t bother him.” Of course if I go into the den, I am going to bother him. I have nothing to do. The den has sliding doors and I like sliding them back and forth. I can do this hundreds of times in an hour. Another thing I like is to sit on the couch that looks out onto the garden and blow my breath on the glass, then scribble on it. I do not know how to write. I do not know how to read. I am four years old and bored.
My father tries to shoo me away, telling me to go and play. Or watch TV. But I refuse to leave his side. For lack of anything better to do with me, he writes my name across the top of a lined yellow pad. MARY. There, he says, that’s your name. Now: “You write it.”
Of course, he knows I can’t. I don’t know how to write. But it is a good distraction for half an hour, if that. I’m often surprised at how I recall this day with perfect precision. Its grayness. My father’s somber, serious face. His yellow sweater and brown shoes. The yellow pad and its stripes and MARY written across the top. I am given a pencil and sent to the floor, where I try to do what my father has shown me.
I clasp the pencil like a dagger. The way a woman about to commit a crime of passion might hold a knife—by its handle, a weapon, ready to plunge. I have not yet learned the delicacy of holding a pencil as one holds chopsticks between thumb and index finger. Certainly I cannot write in what will become my clear, loping script.
Also it seems that I am left-handed.
My father cannot show me how to hold the pencil or the proper slant of the pad. (In fact, for my whole life I will turn the page almost upside down. Once a flight attendant knelt down beside and asked me, “Can you really write like that?”) I struggle. Even to this day I can see the letters forming one after the other. I try over and over until I believe that I have correctly copied my name. I know that my father will be pleased as I present it to him. My nose just reaches to the table as I push the pad back onto the card table. I am proud of what I have done. I am on my tiptoes. And I see it now, as if it is the hand of God, my father’s finger coming down. “The R is backward,” he says.
The R is backward. My father’s harsh words. I have certainly heard worse critiques of my work in the ensuing years, but that one has reverberated for decades. It is the critique that made me want to persevere, to never give up. I want to get it right, no matter what it takes. My first revision. I go back on the floor, pencil in hand, and begin again.
13
CUBS ARE PRIME TARGETS for predators, including their own fathers.
14
IT’S 1967 and my father gives me my first journal. I am about to depart for France for my junior year abroad—a year during which he will never visit me. Before I sail, he gives me a soft green leather book with gold trim on the pages and my name embossed in gold on the cover. What makes my father do this I’ll never know. He hated the fact that I was leaving, and that I had in some way already left. He had never encouraged me to write before. Yet he gives me this book.
In it he inscribes: “This book with its blank pages is for you to bring to life during your year in Paris. Your special thoughts, your precious experiences can be relived in future years. Bon voyage. We will miss you and love you always.” On the first page I write that this book belongs to me not because my name is embossed on the cover but because of my father’s inscription inside.
That year in Paris the city explodes, and I spend much of it behind student barricades and dropping acid in the Bois de Boulogne. My writings are the scribblings of a tormented soul—angry diatribes, lonely pleas, a brief fling with a butcher’s son who sang partisan songs as we crossed the Champ de Mars at four in the morning, and some generic rage at my parents for being part of the problem and not the solution. Not much came of my early scrawls and rants and poetic outpourings. Yet I was drawn to the word, cliché though it is, as the moth to the flame. After that year abroad I always kept journals, never thinking that they’d ever see the light of day. Or that I would have the nerve to call myself a writer. Still I wonder if my father knew that he was sending me off on an even greater journey than the one I embarked upon to France.
15
India, 2011
IT IS SO COLD in Pench that the bananas have frozen on their stems. The crimson hibiscus that grows around the hotel and the tomatoes in the vegetable patch have all turned brown. Still, there is a warm sun beating down as we pull into the Pench Jungle Camp. The hotel is made up mainly of tents with some bungalows. I am in tent #2, and I’m amazed at how toasty warm it is, and spacious, with a nice bathroom. I’ve never really stayed in a tent before, so I like the rustic feel. I quickly settle in and, though I am tired, I head out immediately for a walk on the grounds. There are flowers everywhere and the air is filled with butterflies. Tiny blues, huge white ones, lots of black swallowtails with red speckles on the end of their wings.
Dinesh leaves me soon after we arrive. He is staying in town. I don’t know where and I have no way of reaching him, but he assures me that he will return in five days. For hours, as we drove down, he talked nonstop. It was a little like sitting next to an insane person on an airplane. All I could do was listen. Still, after he leaves, I realize that I am startlingly alone. Not just without someone to talk to, or rather to listen to, but I fear, correctly it seems, that I am the only guest at the hotel. It is midweek and winter and no one else is here.
That afternoon I find a place to rest in the garden in the sun. It is near a fire pit filled with ash. Around the pit is a circle of chairs and I collapse into one. The warm sun beats on my face, and I soak it in, but soon the air starts to cool and by four I go inside. I struggle not to fall asleep reading and decide to have dinner as early as I can.
The darker it gets outside, the colder the air. It’s just a little after six when the sun goes down, and I head to the dining room. Clearly this is the off-season. The room is empty except for the servers. Dinner is a buffet of creamy chicken curry, lentils, and rice. A waiter with a pitcher of water stands just to the side of my table, watching me eat. It is rather disconcerting. It is also freezing in the dining room, which has nothing but screens and more or less open doors. I am so cold it surprises me. And now there’s no way around it, I am getting sick. Really sick. Not the kind of sick you get in India. I’ve been around the world too many times, I think, for that. I am getting hit with a very bad virus, a kind I get only when I am run-down.
My throat is killing me. I am coughing and my head aches. I ask for tea. Lots of it. I’m still hoping this is exhaustion from the travels, but I remember that I was starting to feel sick even before I left home. I told it to go away and it did—until now, when it seems to be blossoming inside my chest. I try to convince myself that what I need is rest. It is still early as I head back to my tent, but I am tired and I have a jeep picking me up at six in the morning to take me on my first tiger safari. I think I will read, take a bath, maybe do some writing. As I follow the dark path back to my tent, I can see my breath. Later I will learn that this is one of the coldest winters in India in recorded time.
I am grateful for my cozy tent until I step inside. Now it is just as cold inside as outside. The warm air of the afternoon has leached away. The tent has no insulation. I am inside only a moment or two before I am shivering. I decide to take a shower because at least that will warm me up. The bathroom itself is completely exposed to the elements. I may as well be in the woods. I turn on the shower and wait, but it doesn’t even get warm. I wait, fiddle with the valves, but no matter how long I stand there, my teeth chattering, there’s nothing I can do. Not only do I not have heat or protection from the cold, I have no hot water either. Perhaps there is hot water only during the day.
I don’t want to complain. I rinse off as best I can and decide a shower will have to wait until tomorrow. I have my hot-water bottle with me, thanks to Susan, and I scurry back to the main house, where a group of hotel workers are sitting in winter coats, watching a Bollywood film. One of the men notices me and takes my hot-water bottle—no questions asked (the problem is obvious). For a few moments I sit trembling in the main hall, the Bollywood film in black-and-white piercing the night in what I assume is Hindi. When the man brings the bottle back to me nice and hot, I race to my room, clouds of breath in front of my face. I thrust the hot-water bottle under the covers. A few moments later I slip into the sheets. My hands are too stiff from the cold for me to write. I’m too cold to read. And my throat is on fire.
In my layers of clothing I wrap myself around the hot-water bottle. I sip from the flask of whiskey Dinesh bought me—more perhaps to calm my nerves than to soothe my throat. I drift off this way, but when I wake in the middle of the night, the hot-water bottle has grown cold and for the rest of the night I lie trembling in my tent. I hate to be cold. I think it must be because of my Mediterranean blood. I’d much rather lie around like an old sloth in the heat than shiver like this in bed. I lie there, barely sleeping, wondering what the point is. What am I trying to prove by traveling all this way—halfway around the world—alone? Perhaps the time has passed for me to engage in such escapades. I’ve lost my edge. I should stay closer to home.
16
IN FOREST PARK, QUEENS, in 2004, a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Apollo walks out of his cage that is inadvertently left open in a circus trailer. He strolls past sunbathers, a choir group, and families hosting barbecues, and then he climbs onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway
. Unsure of what to do, he pauses as drivers, in disbelief, crash into one another. Some abandon their cars, dashing away. One couple shrieks as the tiger jumps on their hood. No one is hurt. Shortly thereafter his trainer lures him back. Apollo, who has known only his cage, goes willingly.
17
New York, 2010
ON A BRIGHT December morning just weeks before I am to leave, I’m up early. I have to go get my visa to India. It’s a freezing-cold morning and I bundle up. I have a reservation and, surprisingly for me, I arrive on time, only to find a line out the door. I thought the fact that I had a 10:40 a.m. reservation would be relevant, but apparently it is not. The guy before me had a 9:40 a.m. reservation. It’s going to be a long morning and I have to get to work. It is the last few days of the semester.
I’m perhaps fifteenth in line so I think I should go and tell the Hispanic guard with the walkie-talkie and the wire in his ear that I have an appointment. I’m not certain that everyone ahead of me does. A woman in a fur coat with a red-dyed fur hat is putting on her mascara behind me and I ask her if she’ll hold my place. “I’m not in line,” she tells me in a thick Russian accent.
As I approach the guard, a Russian man (the husband of the woman in fur, it turns out) with a lot of dandruff is shouting about not having an appointment but needing a visa. He’s going into a long, complicated story about his documents and why his passport has expired and his need to travel, but the guard will have none of it. “Go to the back of the line, sir.”