Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  They walk back to town together, ridiculing the yogi. He tells the Talent that yes, the class is ridiculous, but he goes every week to support the poor lady. Connor has a soft spot for her, sees something of a kindred spirit in her hapless attempts to make a living as a yoga teacher when she doesn’t understand it at all. He finds it relaxing. The Talent shrugs again, supposes she knows what he means. She goes to a weekly yoga class at her gym back home, but she appreciates the physical side of it more than the mumbo-jumbo. Where is home? London.

  Connor is cheered, he likes Londoners; cynical only until the second drink, whenever it gets warmer than twenty degrees they lose their minds and remove their tops to lie in the sun.

  The only folk he likes better are Americans – sunny, gungho women with easy smiles and adventurous spirits who’ve learned about sex in wheatfields and sorority dorm rooms and will fake orgasm after a respectable interlude and then want to go out for snacks.

  Connor has been doing this a long time. He knows his charm; its limits. This thing he has, this dented lustre, is appealing to a certain kind of woman who shops in thrift stores, who fosters troubled dogs, who mends her own clothing out of virtue, not need.

  After the yoga class, it all goes easily. A spontaneous swim on the way home to sluice the sweat off the skin, and yes, she likes the ocean, but no, she isn’t a strong swimmer and no, thank you for the offer, but she has no interest in going out on his boat, but yes, dinner sounds nice. She’d like that.

  They eat one town over, at a restaurant where they serve curry on banana leaves, fish simmered in coconut, and the room lit low by lamps that burn on top of the tables to discourage mosquitos. He often takes dates here, for the ambiance, and because the bar staff spike the cocktails with homemade coconut moonshine. The Talent pounds the drinks faster than the staff can bring them, mixing beers and vodka tonics, drinking with world-obliterating abandon. By the time they are done eating, drunkenness has settled over the night. They stand for the bill and find the world reeling around them.

  They argue with the only auto-driver waiting outside the restaurant. The price he gives is outrageous, both parties understand, but he won’t budge. It’s late at night and he’s happy for them to pay his price or walk home. He wags his head from side to side in a kind of shrug.

  They decide to walk. It isn’t far, and Connor knows a shortcut through the sand dunes that will get them home in no time. It’s dark amidst the dunes and the moon is half full, half drunk, lazily throwing a sheet of light over the ocean. Waves break, a sleepy roar that drowns out any need to talk. The sand crunches under their footsteps, which are heavy and wild. He moves to kiss her and she darts away, punches him playfully in the chest, keeps walking. In his chest, radiating out from her punch, is the familiar feeling, the prickling ache that will grow and consume first him, then her, then for a few merciful hours everything. He bites it down. Patience is his virtue. He knows this road well.

  The trail through the dunes leads them slightly inland, and soon they are walking through a ravine, the walls rising steep and damp on either side of them. As they walk, the fireflies that rest in the salty vines along the gully walls dart up in alarm, flit around them, sparking soft lights here and there. With practised hands he reaches out and plucks one from the air, moves his cupped hands under her chin, opens them to show the tiny creature there, pulsing out its secret little warning. Their eyes meet, hover for half a moment, break away. The firefly escapes, dances away, and they walk on.

  Then, the trail breaks. The tide is in and a little lagoon has formed, drowning the path. The Talent worries about snakes in the water, fears her sandals will be ruined. He moves then, wraps one arm around her and places one hand just below her behind and sweeps her off her feet, then, before she can protest, is wading through the knee-high water with her safe, dry, and laughing crazily as he ferries her to the other side. He pops her down on the far bank then stops, stares up at her. With her feet on the shore, and his in the water, they are the same height, nearly, she has an inch or two on him. She leans down and brushes his lips with hers.

  Romance, of a sort that they are both familiar with.

  Over the next few days he takes her out on his boat, dives and retrieves treasures from the seafloor that make her squirm – a starfish, a sea snake. He makes excuses to avoid taking her back to his own cabin, pleading mess, bad plumbing, broken flywire and a plague of mosquitos.

  They go on a long motorcycle ride up the coast; they share a bed, meals. When she is reticent he has a little concoction, an eye-opener of ketamine and MDMA, which he sprinkles in her drink of an evening. In the intense hothouse of those days he learns everything about her; what her childhood was like, the first street she grew up on, her strained relationship with her parents, her mother’s maiden name. ‘I love dogs,’ he says, stopping to pet the lazy yellow hound who sleeps on the veranda of the Shanti Bar. ‘Did you ever have a dog? What was his name?’

  On her final night in town she drinks too much and Connor takes her back to her hotel room, cradles her head in his lap, trailing his fingertips through her hair until she drifts off. When she is snoring, he gently levers himself out from under her and, carefully, retrieves her suitcase.

  He starts with her wallet. She carries no more than a couple of thousand rupees, the big bills on the inside, folded around a tattered hundred-rupee note. He pockets half, replaces the rest.

  Very slowly he takes her hand, pinches the soft skin between her thumb and forefinger to test if she is near consciousness, and, when she doesn’t wake, gently presses her thumb on her phone’s fingerprint reader to unlock it, and the bank cards he hopes are loaded there. No luck, but no matter.

  He retrieves his own phone and photographs her credit cards, driver’s licence, passport, then carefully replaces them and gets back into bed, laces an arm around her hip, traces her collarbone with his lips as she stirs.

  In the morning Connor will pass it all over to Baba, take his cut, and move on. If, months from now, back home in London, she wakes up to find her bank accounts emptied and her credit cards maxed out, well, she’ll be covered by travel insurance. And if questions are ever raised, there is enough corruption and low-end graft in this part of the world that any investigation would dissipate long before they could narrow in on Shanti Beach.

  By then she will be half a world away, back in her weekend yoga class, and the theft will only be – like her holiday, like the nights they spent together – part of a strange adventure.

  When she leaves Shanti they kiss, chastely on the lips, a sort of formality to signal an end to the holiday fling, promise they will find each other on Facebook, knowing that they will not, and then she is gone, the bus rumbling over the hill and back to civilisation.

  There isn’t another bus for a week and, when it comes, there is nothing on it for him – families taking a weekend down from Mumbai and an elderly French photographer who takes a silent vigil on the crest by the beach every sunset, standing behind his equipment, waiting for the light. After a week he finally captures whatever he was searching for and moves on.

  The next bus is full of twenty-somethings – no good to him. There was a time when he saw potential in the young women who came through, looking to make a mistake, but he no longer knows how to talk to them. The conversations are impossible; a labyrinth of faux pas and preferred pronouns and political concepts he neither understands nor cares about. At least he could tell who had a trust fund – they were the ones who wouldn’t stop apologising for their privilege, declared it at the start of every conversation like they were presenting their papers at a border crossing. Worse was when they told him to check his privilege – like he didn’t wash himself with a bucket at night. Like he had options. The world was changing in ways he didn’t understand, and these women didn’t give him the time of day, didn’t look up from their phones as they wandered about miserably searching for reception.

  The bus reliably brings in enough tourists to justify the dive, so he hands
out pamphlets and wrangles and hustles until he’s filled the longboat with two neat lines of tourists, shimmying into rented wetsuits. This brings in a little money, but not enough to live on. Ferrying divers to the old shipwreck a little out from the beach, fitting them with hire masks, tanks and fins, bringing them back safe – ostensibly this is his job. Like everything in Shanti Beach, it runs on an ad-hoc basis, and he only goes out when enough punters have signed up to make it worthwhile for Baba, who owns the boat and everything on it – including, Connor realised after a while, Connor.

  How long has Connor been here? Years now, since he first rode into Shanti Beach, a loose end that Baba wove into his own plans. That day he’d been relocating, headed south after a nasty scene up in Candolim, and, cresting the hill into Shanti on his motorbike, he’d immediately been pulled over by the police.

  The usual pantomime with the cops – he had to pretend that he owned a driver’s licence and a passport, and that he’d forgotten both, while the police pretended that he could go on his way once he’d paid the fine. One cop wrote down a number on a sheet of paper, handed it over to Connor, while the other cops made a show of looking elsewhere.

  Connor read the number, in the thousands, and shook his head sadly, telling him that the fine was too much, that he would have to pay by credit card, would need a receipt. ‘Or,’ he added lightly. ‘I could give you one hundred now. I have cash.’

  Business as usual, gently establishing that he would pay the bribe; the cop berating Connor for driving without his licence, threatening jail time, taking off his beret and flexing it to wring out the sweat, finally deciding it was too hot, too much work to take Connor to the station and confiscate his vehicle, he pocketed the bribe with theatrical reticence.

  Normally it was understood that the bribe would last Connor a while – weeks, months even – until he moved on to the next town. But the next day the same cop wanted the same bribe, would not acknowledge they’d ever spoken before – the same again the next day, and the next. Each time Connor rode past with a talent on the back, the cops would pull him over and humiliate him, until finally he cracked it, refused the fine, and found his bike confiscated and his date stomping off in the dust, disgusted and furious.

  Shortly after that he slumped into the Shanti Beach bar, brooding on what to do, when Baba sat down across from him, carefully folded his legs over one another like a mantis, and stared wide-eyed at Connor.

  ‘You look like you’ve had a day,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you a chai?’

  The tea arrived in two little plastic thimbles, and Baba ignored his as it congealed, grilling Connor about his life, his past, his dreams, his future, and in between the Australian’s evasions and half-answers he gleaned that Connor knew how to dive.

  ‘Perfect!’ Baba cried, almost singing. ‘Perfect! I’ll buy you a boat! You can work for me!’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘What the fuck do you mean, “No thank you?” This is an opportunity. I’ve got work for you. I could use someone with your talents on my team.’

  ‘My talents?’

  ‘And complexion.’

  Baba has a theory: that every foreigner who comes to his beach does so for a different reason, but all have one profound thing in common, which is that if they’ve travelled this far, through the wild clamour of Mumbai, a day to the north, and a hundred desolate villages between there and Shanti, they will all hate India a little bit.

  They won’t admit that they hate it to other travellers, or even to themselves. They will never say anything racist, or even think it, will actually go out of their way to show how very far from being racist they are. But the fact remains that those who fly to India in search of some soulful awakening, after being ripped off by a dozen taxis and groped in line to buy tickets to the Taj Mahal, find room in their expanding worldview and spiritual growth for a nascent distrust of brown people. Baba told Connor his theory. He was very excited.

  ‘Everyone wants a little bit of namaste. But what they really want is to get it from someone safe, someone the same colour as them. Am I wrong?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Connor said, taking a sip of his chai. ‘Nah.’ Baba was not wrong. ‘But I don’t know how to drive a boat.’

  ‘You can swim.’

  ‘I’m Australian.’

  ‘Well.’ Baba held out a hand for Connor to shake. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  So he stayed, and works for Baba, taking his dive boat out in the tourist season. When there aren’t enough travellers in town to justify a dive, Connor is free to work his own grift. When he can fill a boat, it always works out well for him.

  The spot is, if not exactly famous, well regarded in diving circles for the unique features of the wreck. Sometime, ages earlier, a storm had dashed a British steamer against the coral reef. Over the years, as the ship fell apart and the coral rose to meet it, the hull tilted up towards the surface and the steel ribs of the ship fell artfully into haphazard arches.

  Had it not snagged on a rocky overhang of the coastal shelf, it would be resting on the bottom of the infinite blackness of the Arabian Sea, rather than in 15-metre-deep warm water and splendour. It’s right on the lip of the coastal shelf, close enough to shore that silt makes visibility poor and a diver can’t make out the shape of the wreck until they are swimming through the middle of it, a little Eden of tropical fish, sea slugs and turtles beneath, the arches overhead, backlit by the sunlight, which at that depth is soft, searching, dreamlike.

  A diver can hover at the mouth of the wreck and let the current drag them through the ribs of the ship, sea turtles crankily rolling alongside, the sunlight lancing through the beams in startling little bursts. The current that runs through the ribs grows in strength closer to the coastal shelf and rookie divers are always startled as it pulls them through. Some get spooked and retreat, paddle gingerly over the wreck. But the three minutes or so it takes to swim through the guts of the ship are profound, enough to drop even fretful divers into deep calm.

  Once Baba decides something should be so, it tends to happen, and there is something in the way of things in this village, a compulsion to dive the wrecks, that’s as irresistible as the rip that takes you out to it. The relentless suggestion falls on every visitor from the moment they arrive. Baba pays a kickback to anyone who signs someone up for the dive, so everyone you speak to – the bartenders, the drug dealer in the old Portuguese quarter, the Tamil girls on the beach selling Nepali bracelets – asks if you’ve signed up to dive yet, and if not why not?

  Each time a traveller checks into a hotel, takes their breakfast, jumps in an auto: You must see the wreck! You cannot come to Shanti Beach and not see the wreck! Soon the travellers are asking each other the same question, and themselves. When are you going to see the wreck?

  Few people leave the beach without at least taking a desultory snorkel over the wreck. Connor ferries them out, takes the most adventurous through the belly of the ship, pockets a little cash, hands most over to Baba. Money is tight. It’s always tight.

  The next bus brings in perfect talent – middle aged, middle England, above-average income, nasty divorce in the rear-view mirror, but she is uninterested in Connor. When he goes in for a goodnight kiss after a stilted dinner, she steps back and slaps him. He watches forlorn as she storms away into the night, Kate Spade handbag swinging furiously from her balled-up fist.

  Connor tries again with another woman, approaches her on the beach, brandishes a bottle of sunscreen, asks if she can help put some on his back. The look on her face as she shakes her head is desiccating.

  He begins to worry that he’s lost his touch, that the world has changed in some way that’s passed him by. He’s been doing this for so long, has so many angles and strategies to meet women, but as the years pass it’s getting harder and harder. After he strikes out a third time, he goes to the Shanti Bar, where he finds a young woman drinking alone. He approaches, offers to buy her a beer, and is horrified by what he sees in her eyes: pity. He reels away, buy
s a bottle of Old Monk rum from the bar, retreats to his cabin to drink it. He remembers perhaps the one true thing his father ever said to him, late at night when he was at the philosophical mid-point of a mean drunk: ‘If you can’t spot the sad cunt in the bar, you’re him.’

  These days he is slowing down, aches in strange places in the morning. Every time he dives, bruises up and down his body linger for days. Once, he enjoyed the cuts from the coral for the faint scars they left, but now they don’t heal right anymore, growing nasty over the weeks of repeated dousing in seawater, infecting, reopening. He drinks too much.

  Connor polishes off the rum, abuses himself, rests, does it again. He’s been alone too long. It’s not just the money. There is something feverish and unhealthy about the way he pursues these women. He is aware that those first delicate stirrings when he sees a woman opening up to him are the only time he really feels alive, worthwhile.

  It’s been this way since the beginning. There are nights he can roll off a strange woman and feel that he has performed a service, that he has gone some way to fixing whatever caused her to wind up on this dismal beach, that what he does is valuable. Then there are nights, more frequent every year, where he rears back right before climax to take in the splendour of the woman beneath him and feels he is a crow, feasting on a carcass.

  And then the mornings, when he feels more like a scarecrow, every day knocking a little more stuffing out of him. While he was still man-shaped, more or less, he felt he was growing more threadbare with each passing season. Now this season is nearly over.

  These final weeks before the monsoon can be halcyon days – the mounting heat provides a hum of anticipation, frustration, the promise of release. The weather trips a wire inside people, makes them febrile, wild. All those sleepless nights tossing and turning make a body reckless.