Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “Yes. He seemed nice.” She wiped her cheeks, folded the sodden tissue, and stuffed it into her pocket.

  “I always liked him,” Mother said. She picked up the knife and another potato and went back to work.

  Sarah

  On a cool, windy morning, Sarah, Sanjay, and William rode through the park with the film crew. In the hour before the sun broke over the hills to the east, they spotted chital deer, sambar, langur monkeys, wild boar, and an iridescent flash of blue as a kingfisher crossed their path. At midmorning they stopped for a quick breakfast. As they packed up, they heard voices in the core area, the tones suggesting argument.

  On the far side of a hill, they found a dozen Vinyal herdsmen facing off with three forest guards while cattle and water buffalo snuffled the dirt for fodder. A guard raised a radio to his mouth. A herder brandished his stick.

  The film crew got to work. One of the herdsmen stepped up to the camera and spoke directly into its lens. Sanjay quietly translated. “‘What do they want us to do? Our lake is dry. Our animals are dying of hunger and thirst. This is the only fodder and water near our village. We have no choice.’”

  “Hey, lady.” A nasty catcall, loud, in Hindi. Padma’s son, Om. He caught Sarah’s eye and blew her an ugly kiss. “My friend’s father is in jail because of you,” he called.

  She stared back at him to show she wasn’t scared. “This is fucked up,” she muttered. “We need a dredger to dig out that lake.”

  Back at the Tiger Survival office, they worked the phones for hours. Geeta and Sarah put out calls to other NGOs and government agencies, trying to round up emergency funding. Sanjay and William called their construction contacts in search of earth-moving equipment, though with the ground baked so hard, the equipment might prove useless. At the end of the day, they gathered for a briefing. “The best we can do is start in ten days’ time,” William said.

  “And until then?” Geeta asked.

  “I can think of only one solution. Bring the water in by tanker.”

  “Expensive,” she said. “And insufficient. But I don’t see a way around it.”

  Sarah said nothing. Her period was due to begin that day. When they left the office, Sanjay fell into step with Sarah. She could feel his question.

  “Nothing yet,” she said.

  .

  Three days passed. At the village, the sun shone on a listless crowd. They’d been waiting for more than an hour, empty tin waterpots dangling from their fingers. Some of the women had turned the pots over and were using them as stools, chins in their hands, dupattas dragging the ground. The sarpanch skirted the crowd. “You promised water. Where is it?”

  Four o’clock. The tankers should have been there. Sarah glanced at the Sumo, gauging how quickly they could reach the vehicle if things turned ugly. Dust hung like a scrim in the air.

  A few days before, Quinn had emailed with the news that Mother had almost taken them back to the States when she and Marcus were five. It would have been a completely different life.

  Sanjay pulled out his mobile phone and called the dispatcher in Jaipur. Afterward he scanned the crowd. “They’re not far. A half hour, maybe.”

  The congregation grew, all eyes on the road. Like churchgoers, Sarah thought. Or refugees. She found herself making eye contact with the wife of the man arrested for poaching. The woman strode to her, clutching a baby to her chest. Sarah might not have understood the words, but there was no mistaking the woman’s finger poking Sarah’s chest, the aggrieved and rising tone, the gestures she made to her baby and the children arrayed around her, who stared at Sarah with sullen faces.

  “Do you want me to translate?” Sanjay asked after the woman marched off.

  “I think I got it. I’ve ruined their lives, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “We didn’t do anything to help her,” Sarah said. “Her husband’s in jail, and we didn’t invite her to join the collective. We should have done that in the first place.”

  “She might not be interested,” he said. “If I were in her shoes, I might not want help from an organization named Tiger Survival.”

  Tiger Survival. She could understand how that name must sound like a taunt. “It’s not supposed to be a zero-sum game.”

  He looked over at the woman, clutching her dupatta miserably. “But you can see how it would look that way to her.”

  They stood silently, waiting.

  In a low voice, she said, “I was thinking I could go to Delhi. Stay with Ayah, maybe.”

  “Forever?” he asked, dubious.

  “I don’t know.”

  They watched the sun slide toward the western horizon.

  “What if you came with me?” she asked.

  He said nothing.

  In the distance, a line of dust appeared. A murmur went up, the first hopeful sound Sarah had heard in weeks. The dust grew into a cloud. Sunlight glinted off metal skin. And there they were: three water tankers, their silver bodies shimmering in the afternoon light. They turned off the paved road and rumbled into the village center, cabs and bumpers garlanded with pink and orange plastic flowers, tailpipes spewing exhaust. The ubiquitous words Horn Please were hand-painted in Hindi and in square-lettered English on the bumpers. The tankers turned off the track into a stubbled field, where the drivers killed the engines, climbed down from the cabs, and cranked open the spigots. Gleaming water began to gush into tin pots. Hundreds of people crowded, jostling and hopeful. Even the cows and goats looked interested. Dogs circled beneath the taps and lapped at the forming puddles.

  She and William exchanged a small smile. “It’s not a solution,” he said, “but it’s a start.”

  But something was happening. Sarah lay a hand on William’s arm and nodded at the nearest tanker. A skinny teenaged boy was climbing its ladder. She recognized him instantly: Om. “This water,” he shouted when he reached the top, “this water is nothing. A pot for each of us when we should have a lake.” He turned his head and spat, hitting someone below. People in the crowd shouted up at him. Padma, looking furious and scared, ordered him to come down.

  Sanjay translated Om’s words. “You meenas are content to go along, even if it means we all die of thirst. But we should be at Ranthambore. We belong there. Are we worth less than a bunch of wild animals? Are our cattle worth less than the tiger that killed my father?”

  Most of the people weren’t listening, instead scrambling around the spigot, filling containers and staggering away under their loads. “Listen to me!” Om shouted. He climbed down the ladder, grabbed the handle, and threw his weight into it, heaving till water poured out hard enough to slap buckets from hands and soak the people standing nearest. An old woman slipped and fell. Precious gallons soaked into the ground as the throng stood watching and yelling. The sarpanch pushed through the crowd, grabbed the handle, and heaved. Metal squealed as the torrent narrowed to a stream, then a drip, then nothing. The crowd cheered.

  A man strode up behind Om and hit him hard on the back of his head, knocking him to his knees.

  Padma cried out, “Mandeep, no!”

  Mandeep slammed a fist into Om’s eye and kicked him in the stomach. Om fell over and curled into a ball. Padma ran at Mandeep, but he pushed her to the ground and began kicking her. Sarah started toward them, but Sanjay caught her arm and stopped her with a look. A dozen people shouted at Mandeep, but no one stepped forward to stop him.

  Mandeep drove his foot into Padma’s back. “You should be killed for raising such an idiot! You think it’s funny he disgraces me?” With the next kick, his sandal flew off, and he shifted position and drove his bare foot hard into Padma’s belly. She cried out in pain.

  Om, back on his feet, tackled his uncle and knocked him to the ground.

  “You little dog-fucker. I’ll kill you,” Mandeep shouted, but Om straddled his uncle’s chest and wrapped his han
ds around his throat, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you,” until his uncle’s face turned purple and his tongue protruded.

  The sight of that tongue seemed to shock Om. He hauled his uncle to his feet, walked him to an upturned bucket, and sat him down. Mandeep held his throat, heaving for breath.

  “Listen to me, Uncle,” Om shouted. “You will never, ever touch my mother or me again, or any of our family. If you do, I will kill you. I promise you that.” His uncle glared up at him. “And starting tomorrow, I’m going back to school.”

  Sarah helped Padma to her feet, trying to determine whether she needed medical help, but Padma’s sister waved her off and led Padma away. Sarah walked alongside, uninvited, gesturing for Sanjay to come translate. “Padma-ji, you need to see a doctor,” she said. “You could be bleeding inside. Let us take you to the hospital.” But already Padma was glancing back at Mandeep.

  “It would just make him angrier,” she said, and her sister ushered her away.

  Sarah watched them go. She turned to Sanjay. “How long do you think this water will last?”

  He tilted his head side to side.

  .

  Weeks passed. She mailed off a package of Christmas gifts to the twins, strung some lights in her apartment, stared at the calendar on the wall.

  She arrived at Sanjay’s flat as the air was filling with woodsmoke from breakfast fires. She didn’t have to say anything. She wore the news on her face.

  They sat on cushions in his front room. He couldn’t stop staring at her belly. “So this is it,” he whispered. “You have to leave.”

  “I could have an abortion,” she said grimly.

  “Sawai is too dangerous for you now. You should be seeing doctors. If you go to an obstetrician here, everyone will know by the end of the day.”

  She looked up at him. “Sanjay.” As in: Pay attention.

  “Is that really what you want?” He looked sick.

  “What I want?” Her eyes reddened. “It’s the only way I could stay here with you. With the work. But it would ruin everything between us.” She looked up at him. “You do have a say in this.”

  “You know what I want.”

  She did know. To her surprise, she wanted it, too. Before Sanjay, she’d never even considered having children. She looked down at her hands. “I could still lose this baby, you know.” He looked away, and she wondered if he thought she was hoping to lose it, or that she was making a dig about Lakshmi’s miscarriages. She took his hand. “We can figure this out.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what my dharma is anymore. I have a duty to Lakshmi. But how can that mean I don’t have a duty to you now, and to our baby?”

  “Come with me,” she said. “It’s only complicated because we’re making it that way.” Which was pure wishful thinking; they both knew it. Sarah could work anywhere. For Sanjay, the choices were limited. “You could teach,” she said. “Or, I don’t know, work for another NGO.”

  “I wouldn’t be free. I couldn’t marry you. I will always be bound to Lakshmi.”

  “So you live out of wedlock with me and our baby. We’ll scandalize everyone. So what?”

  He stood and crossed the room. “Do not treat this lightly, Sarah. This is India. We’d be outcasts. We wouldn’t be able to rent a flat. No one would hire us. No one would want us even shopping in their shops. I would fear for your safety. For both of you. For all of us.”

  “Then we go to America.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Then Vietnam or Argentina or Tanzania. Somewhere.”

  He sat back down next to her. They fell silent, thinking.

  “We have time,” she said. “I won’t start showing till February. We’re smart people. We can figure this out.” She let her head tip back and allowed herself a deep groan. “God, Sanjay. I would have stayed here. The park. The collective. The tigers. Instead I did the one thing that makes that impossible.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. “If you went to America, where would you go?”

  “I think Louisville. You’d like it there.”

  “I’d be a foreigner in a country with no history, no tigers. Not a single memory that belongs to me.” He paused. “It’s a very long way from here.”

  “But it’s the only family I’ve got.”

  .

  India wouldn’t let her stay, and it wouldn’t let him leave. She lay in bed with him, thinking. Round and round till she was out of ideas.

  The room was dark, the sheets cool. The lovemaking was frantic, raw. Afterward they lay in a sweaty heap, chests heaving, eyes focused on the blank spot where their futures should be.

  “There are Hindu ceremonies for the pregnancy and afterward,” Sanjay said. “Promise me you’ll do them.”

  She sat up and stared as if he’d slapped her.

  “The first one is at three months into the pregnancy, punsavana. It’s to protect the fetus.”

  She shoved him hard in the shoulder. “Are you giving up on me, you jerk?”

  He caught her hand. “I just keep trying to see how to make it work, and I can’t. I’ll keep trying.”

  She glared at him. “You’d better.”

  .

  The new year arrived: 2001. Sawai Madhopur marked the occasion with fireworks and parties. Sarah couldn’t bring herself to celebrate. It only meant one day closer to the end of everything.

  Another night, another bout of anxiety-fueled sex. Fuck the future, Sarah thought as they drove their bodies together. Afterward she felt sticky and sore and half-drugged by the hormones and chemicals racing through her bloodstream. Their heads lay side by side on the pillow. They stared up, panting.

  “I want to name him after you, if it’s a boy,” she said.

  “We don’t do that here,” he said. “It’s forbidden in Hinduism, actually. We’ll come up with something that suits him, after we’ve met him and gotten a chance to see what he’s like.” He fell quiet. “I want to raise him here, with you as my wife. I want us to take him to the park together and show him how the tigers’ stripes work as camouflage for hiding in the tall grass.”

  An idea was beginning to form in her mind, right on the threshold of words.

  He lay his head against her chest. “Tell me everything is going to turn out all right.”

  She petted his hair absently, listening for the thought to coalesce.

  “You could come back,” he said. “You could stay in Delhi or Jaipur.”

  That was it. She threw back the sheet and paced to the window. Sanjay sat up, watching her. “We’re thinking about this wrong,” she said. “Let’s look at it logically. What’s the nature of our problem?”

  “I can’t leave. And you can’t stay.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I’m married to someone else.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I need to talk to her.”

  .

  Two days later, they met at a café in a distant part of town, where no one was likely to know Lakshmi, even if they recognized Sarah. Lakshmi, clad in a spring-green salwar kameez, seemed perfectly composed. She was attractive in a quiet way, with an attentive face framed by neatly bobbed hair. She’d known who Sarah was immediately when she’d called the day before to arrange the meeting.

  They were seated at a small table overlooking the courtyard. When the server left their table, Lakshmi placed her napkin in her lap and said, “Your call came as a surprise. How can I help you?”

  So it would be down to business right away. “You know I work with your husband,” Sarah said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  Sarah drew a breath. “Our relationship isn’t just professional.”

  For the merest moment, Lakshmi looked startled. She recovered quickly. “So this is a personal conversation we’re having, then.”

>   “Yes.” She struggled not to look away.

  The server returned and set down hot tea in small, handled glasses, along with a bowl of sugar cubes. Lakshmi added sugar to her tea and stirred with a small spoon. “And what is it you want from me? You’re here to ask my permission?”

  “I’m here to ask what it would take for you to agree to divorce him.”

  The merest flicker of surprise crossed Lakshmi’s face, barely there before it disappeared. She sat silently for a moment, then folded her hands on the table and leaned forward. “And why am I talking with you instead of Sanjay?”

  “Because I insisted, basically,” Sarah said. “Because I’m divorced myself, and I know that the conversations between a husband and wife can fall into a rut and never find their way out.”

  “You’re divorced,” Lakshmi said. “And how has that affected your life? Are you treated poorly because of it? Did you lose all your friends and end up isolated back in your parents’ home because everyone thinks you’re an embarrassment?”

  It was a hard-edged question, but Sarah met Lakshmi’s eyes and held her gaze until something softened in the other woman’s face. “Did those things happen to you?”

  “Every one of them, as a matter of fact. And I’m not even divorced, just separated—but in this town, that’s bad enough.”

  “You’ve sacrificed a lot in order to live apart,” Sarah said.

  “I assume he told you about the miscarriages,” she said. “It was just too much sadness, year after year. Too much disappointment.” Her face had gone sorrowful, but she looked steadily at Sarah. “And what about you? What’s your story?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Nothing like yours. We just chose poorly. In the end, I wanted to keep living my life and he wanted to keep living his, and there didn’t seem any point in being together if we weren’t going to build a life. Getting divorced was hard, but the consequences were nothing like what you’ve gone through. I lost more friends when I left journalism, to tell you the truth.”