“If Jaryk Smith is not here, our production cannot happen,” the professor had said.
Now, down in the hotel lobby, she called him again from one of the plush cubby booths where hotel guests had private conversations. Each booth was sectioned off from the others by means of a velvet curtain, and the soft lighting inside suggested the conversations that happened here were more personal than political.
She got through to Bose’s office on the fifth ring. The professor didn’t sound as happy to hear from her as he had before. Maybe that was only his lack of morning manners, but he gave her directions anyway, enunciating each of the foreign words as if she were a child.
“Take the train from How-rah Station, not Seal-dah,” he said. It was about three hours, give or take, and would be a pleasant ride, he assured her.
* * *
………………
Lucy had never been anywhere as crowded as Howrah Station. The concierge at the Park Hotel had gotten her into a sedan with tinted windows, which had taken her, feeling nearly blindfolded, across the city. The car dropped her off next to the main terminal. There were over a dozen tracks, and the loudspeaker that declared the comings and goings of the trains was barely functional; announcements came one atop another, but the words were muffled, indecipherable noise.
Worse, from the moment she’d been dropped off by the driver, bands of poor children had begun to follow her. There were other foreigners around and certainly enough wealthy-looking Indians, but all the beggars seemed to gravitate in her direction. With so many yanking at her sleeve, grasping for her suitcase, she ran into the crowd and the crowd obliged, accepting her into its scores of colors: the bright greens and blues of travel saris; the reds of the turbaned porters, hunched with their weights; the blacks of the habits of nuns, who pushed and shoved as hard as anyone.
She reached her track an hour early and congratulated herself on the accomplishment by lounging atop her suitcase and eating one of the twenty-four granola bars she’d brought to sustain her on the trip.
The child who broke her heart had dirty, knotted hair. She climbed up from the tracks like a ghost, her tiny hands and feet finding the right-sized cracks to make it over the divider. When she saw Lucy, she ran over. She couldn’t have been more than four years old.
Stretching out her hand, the child said, “Milk, not money.”
At the mouth of the station, the children had asked for rupees, or “just one Amrikan dollar,” but this was new. The child repeated again and again, as if it were a chant: “milk, not money.” There were strands of red in her hair. She had the strong chin of tomboys everywhere.
“What’s your name?” Lucy said.
The girl seemed puzzled by the question, but she responded in her own time.
“Shristi.”
It took Lucy a few tries to get it right, but she liked the sound of the name. Shristi led her to the closest vendor’s stand, which carried everything from biscuits to Redbook magazine, and pointed to the largest bottle of milk in the refrigerator.
“That all for you?”
Shristi nodded. Her teeth were stained the same color as her palms, but her smile prodded Lucy in all the right places. She’d brought along a sketchpad and she thought that Shristi might want to draw with her, but before she had the chance to offer, Shristi was gone, walking back down into the tracks, where a pair of sunning dogs regarded her with territorial contempt, then up onto the other side of the station.
Lucy watched her for as long as she could. After Connor, she’d never found the right man in Mebane. Had she stayed, she would’ve found someone. That was how the law of attraction worked in small towns: live there long enough and some man would cleave through her defenses and ask for her hand; soon, a family would appear. But she hadn’t done that. She’d been a trailblazer of a kind. A woman with a career, her girlfriends back home said. But it didn’t mean she hadn’t thought of the possibility of a child, of the imagined serenity that would come. Now that was she living it, she didn’t feel any calmer. She felt anxious about how Jaryk would view the baby. She imagined him taking her into his arms and returning with her to America on the first flight home, though in her darker moments he was a different man. Full of mistrust, someone who viewed her and the life inside her as strangers. She wasn’t sure which she was going to find.
When the train arrived, she was crammed next to a couple of office workers stinking of cologne. They tried to strike up a conversation. She told them about the girl on the tracks who’d asked not for money but for milk, and both men laughed. They tried to absolve her of her charitable notions. The child would probably take the milk and sell it back to someone else, then bring the money to her parents the pimps. So the men claimed, but Lucy wasn’t convinced. After all, she hadn’t seen any of this herself. For all she knew, the office workers were talking about some other group of children at the station, not Shristi.
“Well, we can agree to disagree,” Lucy said to the men, smilingly but firmly.
* * *
………………
At the sleepy station of Prantik, there was a rickshaw waiting for her, courtesy of Professor Bose. It was no mean feat climbing aboard with her suitcase while managing her dress, but she pulled it off with grace. On her way to Shantiniketan, she passed by rice terraces, sloping fields that spread as far as her eye was willing to see. Here and there were a few cows in the middle of great bounty. Mist curved around the animals’ ankles and gave them the appearance of levitation—holy flying cows, she thought, which made her laugh.
The guesthouse where she was staying offered none of the amenities of the Park Hotel, but it was close to a deer park and just rustic enough for her tastes. The staff had been waiting all morning for her arrival. They’d prepared a plate of Bengali-style lunch delicacies they presented with such pride that she couldn’t refuse, but none of what lay arranged made much sense for an empty stomach, at least for her empty stomach. The morning sickness, which in her case had been an any-hour sickness, still came when it wished. There were certain tricks that helped—sucking on lemons, for instance—but anyway, it wasn’t as bad as the first few weeks, when it had seemed she’d been infected with a rare virus.
She bit into the puffed warm pockets of fried bread and it was good and doughy in her mouth, but the various vegetable concoctions were either too bitter or too spicy to eat whole. In the end, she opted for a piece of toast and stuck it in a pot of jelly, but that too was full of spice.
When the waiter came by to ask if she needed anything else, she asked for directions to the university.
“Not far,” he said, pinching a straight line with his forefinger and thumb. “Two kilometers east.”
The distance shocked her. Two kilometers she could jog in ten minutes, maybe less. And what then?
“Perhaps, madam, you are requiring rest?” the waiter asked.
“No,” she said, firmly, and set out toward the town.
As she walked along the side of the road, receiving long stares from passersby, she worried whether she was properly dressed. It seemed innocent enough—a skirt and a sleeveless white top—but maybe the arms were too much on display, or the legs, which were free from the knees down. Then again, the women in saris were sending mixed signals: the garment did cover the legs down to the ankles, but it left open the midriff, and wasn’t that worse than a little leg? There was even a woman she’d passed with a cut-off blouse, who was showing just as much arm, who had stopped by the side of the road to fill a clay jug with water from a tube well. “University?” Lucy asked her, and was directed up the road.
It was like no other university she’d seen. Teachers were holding classes under tree shade; younger students in uniform walked alongside elder classmates, who wore brightly colored dresses and shirts; the buildings were gated by gardens with sunflowers and forget-me-nots. When she started asking for Rudra Bose, it seemed every
one from the rickshaw drivers to the security guards knew who he was, though reactions varied: one of the rickshaw drivers gave her an encouraging nod farther east, but the security guards barely hid their disapproval as they showed her to the Language Arts Building, where she found the professor.
Rudra Bose was sitting in a courtyard taking notes with an old-fashioned pen; every few strokes, he would dip it into an inkpot and leave a mark on the edge of his desk. He had unruly hair, graying at the temples, and a long handlebar mustache whose ends he chewed as he scribed. An immense, restless energy emanated from him.
“Professor Bose?” she said. “I’m Lucy Gardner.”
When he stood to shake her hand, Lucy noticed that a spot of ink had smudged his white pants. If they’d known each other better, she would’ve told him about it. She’d expected his grip to be soft, but his hold was exceptionally firm; she could feel the calluses on his palms. His breath smelled of sweetened coffee.
“A great pleasure to meet you,” he said, releasing her hand. “Why don’t you come into my office?”
Rudra Bose explained that he worked mostly at his outdoor desk to be among people and nature, and used his office only when visitors arrived. “Call it the sign of a sympathizing proletarian,” he said. “But fresh air keeps my mind fit.”
There was a musicality to his Bengali as he shouted for tea. A boy, maybe ten years old, delivered it, and the professor assumed the role of a mock-stern patriarch, scratching the boy’s shaved head as he poured two cups. The boy’s lack of hair made his thick, nearly fused eyebrows seem all the more severe. He was doing his best to avoid Lucy’s gaze.
“His name is Neel. Neel means the color blue,” the professor said. “He shall be a star performer in our play.”
The boy nodded gravely, his gaze still fixed on her feet, but Lucy wouldn’t have it. She tickled his ribs and got a laugh out of him. Though he nearly dropped the pot of milk, it was worth the smile he gave her. As he left the room, she noticed his knobby knees. He walked like a lithe dancer.
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t entirely remember our conversations,” Rudra Bose said. “I have been coordinating visitors from multiple countries. Still, I’m not sure how many will come. We’ve started getting the right kind of press, but the difficulty is that I’m not aligned to any cause. Not to the Congress Party and not to the CPM, or any flavor of The Communist Manifesto, for that matter, which means visas are harder to get for everyone involved. But this play, Miss Gardner, is worth all the trouble.”
“Tell me more,” she said, wanting to know what had kept Jaryk here for a month. “Why do this performance now?”
“Miss Gardner—”
“It’s Lucy, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, Lucy.” He seemed discomfited by having to call her by her first name, as he ran his hands through the wild mop of his hair. “Lucy, call me Rudra. I see The Post Office firstly as a work of art. When I teach the play, I refer to the composition and the themes and the way emotion is constructed. Like building a house, I say. But lately, I see it as something more than a literary mansion. I suppose it’s from my obsession with history.
“When I learned the play was performed in Paris the night the city fell to the Germans, when I discovered that it also had been performed in the Warsaw Ghetto during the time of the Great Deportation, I began to see it as an instrument of change. I suppose it has to do with the fact that it is performed by children. We older people are vaccinated against most strains of emotion, but the works of children occasionally manage to get through our defenses. So I’ve invoked the spirit of Paris, of Warsaw, of the original intention of Tagore, if it shall make a difference. And art has become academic, hasn’t it? Art has been pushed into the ivory tower where only academics may invoke meaning from it.
“But what if you could have a revolution with art? What if instead of machetes and guns and bottle bombs and guerrillas in the night we could stage plays? What if the exploited could stage the plays themselves? What if the ivory tower transformed into a weapon the poor could use to change the world?”
Rudra Bose paused to take a breath; the vein in his temple was pulsing like a trapped snake. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I fear I’ve lost you.”
His hair covered an eye. A flush rose over his cheekbones. It was true that she didn’t understand his history and wasn’t in a position to judge, but his passion was contagious. She’d found herself compelled to listen. There was something in the creases of his face that implored her, asked for her trust. In that moment, she was willing to give it. “You haven’t lost me,” Lucy said. “But what is the change you’re hoping for?”
“Specifically, as it relates to Gopalpur, it’s a claim to land. That little boy you met, Neel, and his father walked across Bangladesh into what had been unsettled dirt. During the elections, they were visited by folks who told them who to vote for, and all the villagers showed up and did as they were told. In return, they were promised schools in the village, jobs in the winter. Instead, after the elections, they got nothing.
“Neel’s father was one of the protestors. He threatened to go to the papers with the truth of the vote rigging. That’s when the village was visited by thugs. That’s when Neel’s father died. Afterwards, the authorities came and said the land was needed to build a car factory. By the end of the year, all of the villagers have to go. But where? They’ve fled violence in Bangladesh. They’ve no money, no friends in high places. In Warsaw, The Post Office helped to prepare the children for death, but here it’s all about a new life. About resistance! Their performance gives them publicity. It provides safekeeping.”
Safekeeping. She was taking it all in. She tried to make a story of it in her head. Once upon a time there was a village in India, or rather there was just land. Into the land came people who were running from something. Or, once upon a time there was a boy who was fleeing with his mother and father. Now he was serving tea to a professor. He was missing his father.
“And Misha? What did he have to do in all this?”
“Ah, Misha,” said the professor with a twinkle in his eye. “Misha was here for a short time only, but he fell in love with the village. He was their protector, you could say, much like Jaryk is now.”
She flushed at the mention of Jaryk. What had he gotten himself into? “I can feel the importance of this play,” she said. “But how long do you think it will take? To get the children ready to stage the production?”
“Well, that depends on a few aspects. Depends, for example, on how quickly we can find our collective vision. A few months, I would think.”
It wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. She wanted Jaryk to return home with her and, as soon as possible, to begin planning for the baby. A gang of children had gathered by the door and were pointing at her and giggling. She smiled at them, distractedly. It came out of her then, the question she’d been keeping to herself, guarding across interminable stretches of ocean. “So where is he, the man I came all the way here for?” she asked. “You know where I can find Jaryk—don’t you?”
“Of course,” Rudra Bose said. “A man who does good work is easy to find.”
* * *
………………
She told the professor she needed an hour. Then he would take her to see Jaryk.
The ease of it confused her. She had imagined a series of possibilities, many of which involved her wandering aimlessly in a country she didn’t understand. But while her father had tried to inoculate her against upturns of fate (“There is no such thing as a golden fish,” he’d told her when she was four) her mother had encouraged her imagination. Her wanting of impossible things.
The man she’d been searching for was on the other side of campus, but she was in her hotel room. Pacing. From bed to table to chair.
She would go to him, and when she saw him, either she would give him a good slap for disappearing on her,
or she would kiss his mouth. Or maybe both.
She picked out a dress and steamed it in the bathroom to exorcise the wrinkles. It had been her mother’s favorite for the summer—a sweet blue chiffon with a respectably plunging neckline—and of the few things she’d taken from Mama’s bedroom after the funeral, this had been one. It fit her perfectly. She studied herself in the mirror, feeling prettier with each turn. Her left breast had begun to waver below the right, and the moles along her calves had become too many to count, but she felt all right in blue chiffon.
* * *
………………
The professor was sitting in the front seat of his open-top jeep. If he was surprised by her outfit, he didn’t let it show. They traveled along the arterial road with such little hesitation that her hair lost its form and became as wild as the country itself, the half-sparse, half-dense forests of taal the area was famed for.
The professor had explained that Jaryk had been engaged to direct and supervise the play’s production. If it was going to have the feeling of the performance in Warsaw, the professor said, then it should be directed by someone who had taken part in the original; he himself would strive to be nothing more than a facilitator. “It took some time, though, to convince Mr. Smith,” Rudra Bose said.
When they reached the village of Gopalpur, they had to leave the car and go by foot through a grove of slender birchlike trees the professor explained had been transplanted to the area. From above the tree line came birdsong: grave, in octaves so somber Lucy at first confused the melody with the sound of water. They passed through a dirt trail, a pair of dragonflies hurrying them along. The professor asked questions, but she barely heard. She was woefully overdressed for the occasion, she realized, and the drumming of her heart kept her from conversation.
A Play for the End of the World Page 15