by Abha Dawesar
“I still don’t know why we aren’t going to see the new Godard film instead or to the Musée Guimet, which we have spoken about many times now.”
“Because it’s a beautiful day and the sun is shining.”
“You lead, I follow.”
Maya grabbed Prem’s hand in response and, hailing a cab, lightly pushed him in.
“Les Buttes Chaumont, s’il vous plaît,” she said, getting in after him.
The traffic was flowing fast. Maya was in a summery maroon dress with thin delicate straps that lay over the hollow of her clavicles. She was in good form.
“Prenez à gauche,” Maya instructed the taxi driver when he turned onto rue Manin and the park. She directed him to rue Michel Hidalgo, and then they got off.
“What’s the matter? You’re very quiet,” Maya asked as they stood on the sidewalk.
“I spoke to my nephew and my grandson. It felt momentarily like being in India.”
“What did you speak about?”
“The elections.”
“How do you feel?”
“Less strongly than my nephew.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything.” Prem looked at Maya and smiled. He could not see her eyes too well behind her dark glasses.
“It’s a bit personal.”
“Vas-y.”
“You always refer to your nephew and your grandson. Do you mean your nephew Homi and his son?”
“Yes. Did I tell you his name?”
“No. I saw the dedication in Meher.”
“That’s right, it’s him. My sister died when Homi was ten, and her husband died when he was twenty, so I’ve been as close as a parent to him.”
Maya brought out her Plan de Paris and looked.
“Where are we going?” Prem looked up and down rue Michel Hidalgo.
“We’re going to go there,” she said, pointing east.
They walked along briskly. Prem was glad he had let himself get talked into this. Sitting by himself all morning thinking about Indian politics and missing Ratan would have been too depressing. They walked in and out of the shadow cast by the trees.
“You hardly talk about India, given how many times you’ve been,” Prem said.
“With my parents the trips were great. Then I went on that trip I told you about. I got so hassled by the guys because I was traveling alone.”
“That’s because you’re white and exotic.”
“Do you like white women like all the other Indians?”
“Sure. But I like dark ones too.”
“I would read the newspapers when I was there, and I found the matrimonial columns with their demands for fair domesticated brides very interesting.”
“Fair is the measure of beauty.”
“But everyone is so dark.”
“Exactly.”
“In Pondy in My Cherry one of your characters says that Indians love fair skin because they were ruled for so long by white skin. The British were light skinned and before that the Mughals were light because they had come from Central Asia.”
“Yes, Professor Bala says that.”
“Do you agree with Professor Bala’s reasoning?” Maya asked.
“Évidemment.”
Maya pulled out her small digital camera and took a photo. Prem looked at the sign on the street, rue de la Liberté. They walked for a short time before she pulled out her camera again for rue de la Fraternité.
“Let me guess, we are headed to rue de l’Égalité next?”
“You get just no marks for that one.”
“Even if I can prove that there is no equality? Nada. L’égalité n’existe pas.”
“There are equal rights for people, that’s just a fact.” Maya took a quick photo of the sign and tugged at Prem’s hand.
“And now, miss?”
“Villas. There are a large number of Parisian villas in this area for some reason.”
“You mean their kind of villa, with a cobbled pedestrian road and often a dead end?”
They had walked back to rue Miguel Hidalgo.
“Voilà! Villa Monet,” Maya exclaimed, taking out her camera again.
“Why are you shooting these signs?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write about them.”
“Come, let’s walk to the end.”
At the Villa Paul Verlaine Maya took two photos.
The next one was Rimbaud.
“That’s cute—they put the two lovers next to each other,” Prem said.
“I am mad about Paris because they love their poets,” she said. “The most beautiful villa is named after the most beautiful poet.”
There was a creeper growing beside a lamppost. The cobbled lane was so narrow the creeper had crossed to the other side, forming a natural bough. Sun filtered through its branches and formed a pattern on the ground.
“Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité,” Maya recited from A Season in Hell.
Prem thought of the rest of Rimbaud’s lines in the same section. To tan in a warm climate and to return seeming to be of a darker, stronger race was the opposite of what Homi and he had been talking about. Rimbaud’s theory was the opposite of Bala’s.
“There is a difference between Bala and me. Professor Bala thinks that Indians have a permanent inferiority complex about their race because the political hierarchy has always been arranged from fair to dark. I think he may have a point, but I’m too optimistic to think it’s a permanent complex.”
Sometimes Prem thought that he had managed to escape the colonial complex only because of Meher. When India was getting on its feet, he had been absorbed in his sister. And when he’d left for Oxford, he’d been so smarting from the turn of events in his personal life that entirely burying himself in Dostoevsky had been the only possible escape, outside of the politics of race, outside of the struggles of a newly born nation.
“Why give an extreme version of your views to your characters?” Maya wanted to take her question back as soon as she had asked it. When their conversation moved from the personal to the professional realm, Maya felt uncomfortable. When they discussed literature, books, and India, she was acutely aware of her shortcomings.
“Drama, opposition, black and white.”
Maya was quiet.
Prem continued, “You forget that Pondy in My Cherry also had Bala’s wife, a bleeding heart. A soft-headed, well-intentioned idealist. Well, she represented my rather nonsystematic and mishmash views on Indian politics. There you have it. Make fun of me if you will.” Prem tapped his walking stick on the ground. An expedition to the nineteenth had seemed so far away to him that he had felt they were going outside Paris, so he had brought his walking stick along.
Maya laughed at Prem’s admission. He had never confessed to holding the views of his characters in the press interviews she had read.
“Should we get something to drink?” she asked.
“Yes. Where should we go?”
“Let’s go to the Place Armand Carrel, in front of the town hall. Then afterward we can walk inside the park for a while.”
“You planned it all out, didn’t you?”
“You’re talking as if we were on an excursion to Giverny.”
She was right. He made less of a fuss going from his suburban New Jersey residence to Manhattan. They were just a few miles from his quartier on the Left Bank.
“I told Pascal we might go to the nineteenth today, and he was hysterical. He told me to carry my hat and a bottle of water if it got too hot.”
“We still have to walk for a few minutes. You’re not tired, are you?” Maya asked with genuine concern, suddenly aware that he was an old man.
“I’m fine. I’m almost as energetic as you at this time in the morning.”
Maya had asked the cab to stop at one of the higher parts of Buttes Chaumonts so that Prem would not have to walk uphill for any distance. The walk now was a steep downhill. Prem put his walking stick down with each st
ep as if he were afraid of putting too much pressure on his knees. Maya wanted to hold his hand as they walked but stopped herself.
“Now that we’ve come tumbling down this hill, I am thirsty,” Prem complained.
“It isn’t a hill. It is just rue Compans. We’ll be there in ten minutes.” Maya could not stop herself from sounding out the names of all the streets she passed. She would walk around in her neighborhood to buy her baguette and read off rue des Troisfrères, rue la Vieuville, rue Garreaux, as if the street names were like shlokas from some ancient Vedic text that would illuminate the truth about life. In her yoga class the Indian teacher would often chant a mantra in Sanskrit and then explain its meaning. For Maya the streets of Paris sounded like the building blocks of an epic love poem, the scriptures of a religion called Art.
“Mademoiselle des rues. Peripatetic Maya,” Prem said.
“Isn’t it unfair that in English the word refers to Aristotle and the philosophers who walked and talked, but in French the feminine form péripatéticienne refers just to a whore? You’re right—there is no equality, not of the sexes.”
“A woman of loose character. Anyway, I used the English masculine word for you because that’s how you seem as we take this promenade.”
“You make fun of my love for this city, but you told me you’ve come back here every year since your first trip.”
“And often for months at a time.”
“An even greater malady than mine.”
“I was here for the girls, not the streets.”
“But you’re not here for girls anymore, so what’s your excuse now? May I remind you that you are here for an aging fellow writer whom you claim as your evil twin and for this yellow stone that you love as much as I do? You are a patient like me. Le mal de Paris.”
Prem caught his breath. Did she really think he was here for Pascal? Had he actually mumbled that at some point? He could no longer remember anything very well and certainly not the small white lies he had told Maya.
They sat at a corner café by the square in front of the town hall.
“Un café, s’il vous plaît,” Prem ordered the waiter.
“The same,” Maya added.
“Alors, deux cafés,” the waiter said, walking away with a smile.
A middle-aged man from another table looked up at them and stared.
“What’s the matter? Something happening behind me I should know,” Maya asked.
“That guy is staring at us. He thinks I’m too old for you.”
Maya felt her pulse race at Rustum’s comment. Did he intend the obvious implication? In her nervousness she turned around indiscreetly.
“That is your book in his hand.”
“You have hawk eyes. Which book? Is it in English or in translation?”
“L’odeur de la boue humide.”
“I don’t feel like talking to anyone,” Prem said warily.
“I can pretend to be your bodyguard.”
“A woman came up to me when I was with Pascal the other day and said she knew Judith Q, the New York nutcase.”
“You are giving away your trade secrets. You’re really Mrs. Chitra Bala with a Pondy in your cherry, and you spend as much time thinking about your stalker Judith Q as she does thinking about you.”
“More time than she ever did.”
“Why do that to yourself? Why write about something that’s already unpleasant enough to live?”
“I made most of it up. But you’re right. I’ve always done that, taken the most gut-wrenching merde in my head and fed it with my own self until I have a novel.”
“Art from angst,” Maya summed up. Prem felt slighted.
“Café, café,” the waiter announced, placing the two cups on the table.
“Whatever,” Prem said.
“You’re angry,” Maya said.
“It was gut-wrenching merde. Meher was.”
“I didn’t mean to make light of it.”
Prem had never looked so exposed. Even in their lighter moments together Maya felt that he was very much a superior both because of his age and his stature. Now he seemed just like any other person, a hurt person. She had glimpsed the possibility of this in Orsay, but it hit her now as if for the first time. As she stirred the two small sugar cubes on her plate into her coffee, she couldn’t help but wonder if he had indeed loved Meher in that way. Was he the young boy who had been hurt by the sister who was the love of his life? In Meher the male characters had all seemed like foils—the narrator who was the brother and the cousin who was the lover. But the love felt real. And when Prem uttered Meher’s name in real life, Maya had the feeling that the love in the book was real. She suddenly hated their calling as writers. If only what was fact and what fiction could be really clear for this moment. Was she with a Nobel laureate who had the reputation of a Rasputin or with a boy who had felt abandoned by his sister?
Maya removed her dark glasses. Prem was staring away from her at the bus stop in front of the town hall.
“Prem, please look at me.”
He turned to look at her, still cross.
“I am sorry.”
“Pascal was right. A friendship with someone fifty years younger is impossible.”
“Don’t say that, please.”
Maya could think of no arguments. It had been impossible to imagine spending so much time with a famous man who had reached the acme of success in a métier she had just started out in. She felt as if she were still in kindergarten. What did she know about angst or writing books? All she had were a few stories published in decent literary journals and a jury of four people behind her who had decided to give her money one summer to go to Paris.
They sipped their coffees silently. Usually Prem gave his sugar to Maya. But today he didn’t offer it, and she no longer felt as if she could just pick it up. The espresso was bitter.
She saw Prem looking beyond her. Then the young man was upon their table, holding out his hand to Prem.
“Mr. Rustum, I am a big big fan.”
“Merci!” said Prem offhandedly, shaking the hand with a loose grip.
“Mr. Rustum, this book is just so beautiful.”
Prem shrugged at the compliment.
“What inspired the title, can I ask?”
“Go to India in the rainy season, and smell the earth after the rain.” Prem looked away from the man as if dismissing him.
“Yes. I leave you alone. Thank you.” He walked away.
“I want to go back home,” Prem said to Maya. She wanted to take him to the park. She had saved the view of Sacré-Coeur from Le Parc des Buttes Chaumonts, its grotte, and its stunning jardin à l’anglais for the end. But she felt defeated, sunk.
“Yes, of course,” she said, going into the café to pay for their coffees. When she came back out, Prem was on his feet looking around for a taxi stand.
They got into a cab and rode in silence. At Prem’s apartment Maya got off as well.
“Well, au revoir,” Prem said coldly.
Maya watched him go past his big, heavy porte. Then she crossed the Seine and walked up past the Place Madeleine and the Opéra, cutting across the ninth to the Place des Abbesses.
Le malheur à Paris. For the next several hours Maya understood the complete significance of being miserable in a beautiful city. The external world receded. An uncertainty from within took its place. She ignored two messages from Jean-Pierre before calling him back, only to say she couldn’t meet for dinner, she was in a funk.
“A funk? What is a funk?”
“J’ai le blues. J’ai le cafard.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“What happened? What can be so bad?”
“Prem is not talking to me anymore.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“T’es fou?”
“Please don’t isolate yourself like this from everyone else.”
“I already have.”
She spent the res
t of the day staring at the light from her window as it faded. When she felt cold, she got up once to close the window and then turned away from the darkness to sit in the light of a dim lamp. She wanted to call Johnson in New York and tell him what had happened. He didn’t even know that she knew Rustum, but she felt he was the only person who would understand.
Maya stepped into the bathroom and reached for a pair of scissors. She gathered a clump of hair and cut it. Then another. Soon she was no longer looking at the mirror while doing it. The left hand was grabbing randomly at whatever tuft of hair it could, and the right was snipping. Snipping. Snipping. The bathroom floor was a mess. Maya dusted her shoulders, her T-shirt, and her face. Then she found the vacuum cleaner and sucked up the fallen hair as best as she could. Her face had been transformed—without the slightly wavy, always shining brown halo, she looked stark. No one would notice her on the streets now.
Do I matter even in the least bit to him? I don’t know why he ever responded to my ad, and now maybe I’ll never know. Why did he touch me like that in front of the Degas? She wanted to know everything about his life, about the Degas woman stepping into the bath, about the French filles he had been linked to, about Meher. She wanted to drink up on Rustum, satiate herself with his company for all the years in her future when he would no longer be around.
When he had been upset, he had looked like Maya’s grandfather just before he had died. Old, feeble. She wanted to have every minute that she could with Prem—there wouldn’t be enough. Thoughts of his imminent death came into her mind, and they displaced all the other questions and the coldness with which he had said goodbye to her. In the emptiness of her apartment Maya found her eyes fixed on the telephone. She wanted to call Prem and apologize, but she was afraid that this would anger him further. She had to wait till tomorrow. How she would pass a whole night without calling him, she didn’t know. She went down to the Internet café and found Johnson’s e-mail. She was too scattered to comprehend it, even though she clicked it open and stared at it a few minutes.
She felt her nose twitch and a large lump form once again in her throat. Maya logged out of the computer and asked the man running the kiosk for an international calling card. Then she enclosed herself in a booth to call her father at home.