Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  It rattles him, the lack of privacy or security on these trains – anyone can hop on board the carriage when they stop, disappear forever at the next station. It seems a wildly unwise way for Baba to run his drugs across the country.

  He takes the neatly folded sheets off the sleeper bed and knots them into a rope, uses it to lash his backpack to the luggage rail. He tugs on it to test the strength of his security measures, and then, in a fit of prudence, retrieves the bag of pills from his backpack and slips it into the waistband of his shorts, tucks his shirt in over it.

  That’s when the woman walks in. He jumps, startled while fussing with his contraband. He stares dumbfounded at her as she smiles at him, scanning her body for, what, knives? A gun? Ninja stars? He doesn’t know what he thinks he is looking for and realises he is being ridiculous. This woman means him no harm. She’s a traveller, white, middle class, middle age, cute.

  Actually, she is exactly the sort of woman he would have pounced on had she strolled down his beach just a couple of days ago. Short, a little thick, black hair scrunched up into a messy ponytail. Her laugh is lovely – bright, sudden, a flash of teeth that are crooked and crowded. Faint furrows run from the sides of her mouth to her chin – the kind carved by a lifetime of worry. Don’t be an arsehole, he tells himself, forces himself to breathe, says hello, helps her put her bag up on the rack.

  While he is alongside her he brushes her arm with his, finds it faintly sticky and dusty. She smells nice – cheap American deodorant, sweet and simple, a little like cookies in the oven – not the rank smell of someone who lives in their travelling clothes. She must be new to India. He makes a quick triage of her belongings, more out of habit than anything, tries to eyeball what sort of money she might be working with.

  Her name is Sasha. She’s from New York, halfway through a long sabbatical, and is travelling to an ashram where she’s been staying. As she discusses her journey up to this point, Connor grows restless, bored with the story. He’s done his time listening to rich women who have travelled to India to find themselves.

  So he chats, friendly and noncommittal as he can be, and turns his bad ear to her and puts on his patient listening face, and, blessed relief, before long the train pulls into a stop and she stands up, announces she’s going out to stretch her legs.

  He stands and pulls the curtain back for her, watches as she saunters down to the door and alights from the train. A group of hawkers gets off the train, another takes their place. He hears the whistle blow, announcing the imminent departure of the train, and the woman is not back on board. Moving quickly, he darts down the corridor to scan the platform. He spots her climbing back on a few carriages down and, chillingly, he also sees a couple of police in khaki, leading a beagle on a leash.

  He seizes, reels back into the cabin, yanks the curtain so hard he nearly pulls it off the rails. Immediately he regrets his reaction. He’s not thinking straight. There was a time when he could have strolled right past those cops without breaking a sweat. His thoughts are sloppy, plans skitter away from him half-formed. He has lost his nerve – somewhere off the coast of Goa, out with the wreck, the bones of all that.

  The second he saw the cops coming down the aisle he should have continued down the corridor to the bathroom, disposed of the pills there, thrown them out the window or down the toilet.

  But then he would have been just as doomed as if the police catch him with them. He doesn’t care to imagine what Baba will do to him if he turns up in Chennai without the pills.

  Now that the train is moving, maybe he can duck between the carriages using the conductor’s doors, or even clamber onto the outside of the train, until it slows enough for him to jump. The idea gives him a jagged rush of hope. He struggles with the window of the cabin, through which the jungle rushes by, finds it has been welded shut to preserve the integrity of the air conditioning. He punches the window in frustration, hurts his fist, whimpers a little, sucks his knuckle.

  Down the carriage he can hear the police moving closer, pulling back the curtain to each cabin and in Hindi asking the passengers to take down their luggage and open it for inspection. He paces, pants, realises what he is doing and sits, forces himself to regain his composure, forces himself to think.

  No options for escape present themselves, but then paranoia strikes, momentarily stunning the fear out of him, and he can think clearly again. What are the cops doing on this train anyway? In all his years in India, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen a cop on an interstate train, much less one with a sniffer dog.

  In fact, he’s never seen a sniffer dog outside of the deep north, where every tourist has a backpack full of hash and is waiting to be shaken down for a bribe.

  He once met a retired smuggler, a man who’d flown from Thailand to Australia with bags of heroin strapped to his body. Easy work, and the money was good, but he’d given it up when he learned that the syndicate he worked for would periodically sacrifice one of their smugglers. On one flight they would send two or more separate travellers and tip off the cops about one of them. That way the police could be seen to be doing their job, while most of the drugs got through unmolested. The hapless mule would be taken to prison as a kind of tax – an insurance payment for the future of the syndicate. Usually they did it with white people: who the authorities would go easier on.

  The thought that they have been tipped off, that they know he is here with enough pills to have him rot in a Mumbai prison for the rest of his life, it’s enough to squeeze the breath out of his chest.

  That idea withers on the vine before it blooms. It’s beyond crazy, he’s not thinking straight. But a bribe is still a possibility, although a very slim one. He’s talked his way out of a dozen situations: pot, blow, drunkenness, public exposure; urinating against a wall on the way home from the bar. This, though, is very different. The sheer amount of drugs makes this a lost cause, the fine impossible to pay.

  In the way of someone who realises he’s fucked it all up, Connor begins to cast around for someone to blame. He lands on Sasha. The fact he is sharing the car with a woman with no local language and expensive luggage would only increase the fine to astronomical levels. Then he realises what he has to do. It is perfect. She hasn’t doomed him at all.

  Moving quickly, he stands and heaves the American’s luggage down from the rack. She hasn’t locked it. Everything inside the suitcase is neatly arranged – a pair of canvas sneakers wrapped in plastic in one corner, a toiletries bag safely tucked away as far from the shoes as the bag will allow.

  He lifts a stack of neatly folded shirts up and out, hoping for some kind of bottom he can slide out, finds nothing but smooth leather at the bottom of the case, so he pulls the bag of pills out of his pants and shoves it into the bottom of the suitcase, replaces the shirts on top.

  He tells himself that they will not search a woman as closely and, if they find the pills, she will be in a better position to buy her way out. His fingers are slippery with sweat and he fumbles the zip, only has it halfway done up when he hears the cops open the curtain to the adjacent cabin, hears voices raised in argument with a woman who doesn’t want to open her luggage for inspection.

  He boosts Sasha’s bag back up to the rack, sinks into his seat, and tries to compose his features in the half-second he has before the curtain swishes back. It’s Sasha. She strolls in, broad smile on her face, and says brightly, ‘Have you seen this dog out here? It’s beautiful. Do you like dogs?’

  Part 2

  Sasha arrives at Chennai Airport in the middle of the night. The heat batting at her with the caged ripeness of a high-school locker room. Moments after she is through the turnstiles she finds herself in a crush of bodies, indifferent eddies of humanity rippling around her. Standing on her tippy-toes, she spies a man in a cotton shirt and a sarong holding up a sign with her name on it and he fends off the other drivers while they find his car.

  Even at midnight the Chennai traffic is wild, nerve-shattering, an emery board rubbed briskly over
the human spirit, but she only starts to feel truly apprehensive when they clear the city and the car speeds up on the open road.

  Through the window she can see shanty towns that run up to the edge of the road. Occasionally cold electric light from a lantern flashes in the dark between the shelters, but more often it’s the low light of a smoky cooking fire, which, she sees as the car hits traffic and pulls up next to one, are made from small piles of trash, raked into a pyramid, doused in petrol and set alight.

  The heat. In the back seat of the taxi she feels she is simmering into barbecue, the heat melting her brain, leaving a chewy hunk of brisket in its place. She locates the handle to wind the window down and finds that although it rotates, spinning merrily as she turns it, the window doesn’t move. When she taps the driver on the shoulder and asks about air conditioning, he slams his fist into the horn, weaves into a different lane and yells, without looking back, that air conditioning is extra. He takes one hand off the wheel and reaches back with his palm out to take her money.

  Sasha pauses. She wants very much to escape the choking air of the night, but she has an aversion to being cheated that runs so deep it is visceral. He isn’t even asking much, the equivalent of a couple of dollars, but the idea that she will allow herself to be scammed within miles of the airport runway makes her smoulder. She gives the guy the money anyway, and he turns on the air conditioning.

  She luxuriates in it, holds her face to catch the flow of cold air coming from the front of the car. The driver catches her eye. She feels marginally better, in the cool air, but also that she needs to unburden herself, to confide in someone the indignity of the flight from the US, the rudeness of the customs officials, the bribes she had to pay to get her visa stamped. All through the story, the driver grins, his yellow teeth making a glorious crescent moon in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘First time in India?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and then kicks herself a little. Every guidebook, and she’s read many, tells her to let nobody driving a taxi know she’s a greenhorn. ‘But I love to travel. I’m sure I’m going to have a good time.’

  ‘Of course you will! You’ll fall in love with it. You will have a wonderful time, but trust nobody.’

  She laughs, expecting a polite laugh in return, but his eyes are back on the road and he swerves to avoid something out in the darkness.

  They reach the ashram after a couple of hours cruising a dark highway. The scenery whizzing past shifts from urban sprawl to arid desert to scrappy vegetation that grows thicker and thicker, until the car is inching down an unpaved road, branches scraping at the windows. They finally come to rest at an iron gate, buttressed by crumbling walls, guarding a path leading further into dense rainforest. Just beyond the gate sits a little weatherboard watch house. The driver honks – really leans on the horn – until an ageing security guard emerges, blinking against the headlights, one hand raised to shield his eyes.

  Once she’s paid the driver and is out of the car, the guard ushers her through the gate – a bit of a procedure, juggling his rifle and her suitcase, which is bursting with everything she might need here, all the while corralling a pair of mustard-yellow dogs that weave around her feet, growling suspiciously.

  Inside the shed he offers her a seat while he checks her paperwork; confirming her booking, photographing her passport. While he shuffles papers, the dogs sniff at her heels. At the guard’s direction she offers them her hand, a pat, and a couple of dog biscuits he slides across the table.

  ‘So they know you are a friend,’ he says.

  A single high-wattage bulb swings from the ceiling. It makes the guard’s hair and beard a shock of white against the deep brown of his face. When the formalities are out of the way, he greets Sasha warmly, welcomes her to the community, hopes she will have a good time. He uses a two-way radio to summon a golf cart, which trundles through the jungle and takes her to the ashram.

  She is here on a three-month sabbatical; yoga and meditation. There is a community here – permanent residents who carved this place out of the jungle – but temporary places within the ashram are available to a select few. She is one of a handful of Americans who won a place.

  Each year, hundreds apply – a rigorous process that involves a letter of application, a background check, an actual cheque; she has paid a small fortune to study under this particular guru. As the golf cart whines through the dark and into the darkness of a forest clearing, she questions – not for the first time – the wisdom of this decision.

  Her heart sinks a little when she finally sees the room that she’s booked – a spartan little bungalow made of bamboo, thatch and fly wire. There she collapses, exhausted, onto the single bed, and stares wide-eyed into the dark.

  It’s eerie, the stillness. She’s startled to be lying in an empty bed without the wail of horns and sirens screaming in the street. Not even a bed, exactly, but some kind of lumpy fold-out cot surely meant for convicts and flagellants. She’s never felt less like sleeping. She can hear the creaking of insects in the jungle, the swaying of branches. As if there is not another human being in the whole world.

  She’s glad to be across the world, away from the ruins of New York. The fact of her being here, in this bungalow, in this corner of the world, still strikes her as unlikely. Only the improbability of each moment, each successive decision, has kept her moving towards this place. Surely she would cancel the trip, she kept thinking, as she shopped for woollen shawls and linen shirts. Any minute now she would come to her senses, although it couldn’t hurt to get the shots – half a dozen of them, right in the arm, spaced out over weeks – because she’d already booked them in, and who knew when an immunity to Japanese encephalitis would come in handy? I’ll cancel my stay, she would say, logging on to the ashram’s janky website and balking when she realised her deposit was non-refundable.

  Then the departure date came and she found no reason not to go. She should have been sitting at home, quietly reflecting on the enormity of what had transpired, failing to break in a pair of orthopaedic sandals because she refused to grimly tramp around Manhattan wearing them. Yet there she was, and now here she is – she managed to defer making a choice only to find inertia has made it for her.

  In the morning she is woken by the sound of a bell chiming. The world around her is light, alive. Her hut overlooks a square paved in granite that is now thronged with people in pyjamas, robes, flowing and expensive resort wear, everyone on the go, no one in a particular hurry. Sasha stares, disoriented, blinking as a tall woman with a deep tan and silver hair tied up in a bun passes by and flashes a brilliant, expensive wristwatch as she brings her hands together in namaste.

  At the heart of the ashram is an ancient, tiered Hindu temple that has been repurposed as a non-denominational meditation hall. Stripped of its idols and gaudy paint, the austere stone structure rises from a centre of the clearing in the jungle. It is spartan inside, all lamplight and whispers – no trace of the old religion except the marble-smooth floor, worn down by centuries of worshippers’ bare feet.

  The rest of the buildings are scattered around the temple, spreading out in a roughly spiral layout until the cleared land runs up against the thick rainforest that surrounds the ashram on all sides. On one side of the clearing run banks of standalone bamboo-and-thatch huts, including Sasha’s hut, which is right at the edge of a neat row of bungalows. So close to the rainforest that stray branches reach over her roof and scrape against the thatch when the wind picks up.

  That first day, one of the yogis who is nearing the end of her own sabbatical – a Californian woman with Ray-Ban sunglasses and posture like a redwood – gives her a short tour. The temple, the cottages, the communal dining hall. She is loudly enthusiastic – her praise for every aspect of the ashram echoes through the quiet of the morning. She makes a solemn promise to Sasha that her time here will change her life, that if it seems a little rustic she will get used to it, it doesn’t take long to adjust. As they stroll back to the cabins, Sasha t
railing behind her, the woman asks Sasha what brings her to the ashram.

  ‘Oh, you know.’ Sasha does not want to talk about it. ‘Just a bit of a vacation.’

  The woman stops in her tracks, turns to face Sasha so quickly that they are standing only inches apart. Her eyes are huge, wet, locked on Sasha’s in an intense and uncomfortable show of intimacy.

  ‘I was like you once, honey. I’ve been exactly where you are. And you know what, at the time, I thought I was running away from something. It took me a while to realise I was really moving closer to being here.’

  She tells Sasha that she’d once worked in intellectual property law – hated every minute of it, hated herself, until she attended one of the guru’s classes, back in California.

  ‘She saw me up the back of the class. I was a wreck. Overweight, high blood pressure, bad back, the works. The guru saw me and said, “Who is that poor woman? Who is that broken-bodied woman? What’s the matter with you?”

  ‘And she told me, “Come to my home, study with me, and in two months I will give you a new body and a new life.” And what do you know? She did!’

  ‘How?’ says Sasha. ‘What did she do?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain.’ The woman’s eyes mist up a little further. ‘But you’ll get it when you are in the same room as her. She . . . sees you. Really sees you. She’s just the mo—one of the most beautiful people who’s ever lived on this earth.’

  For the next month Sasha’s days at the ashram follow the same routine. At 3 am she wakes up, the alarm in her wristwatch buzzing gently, seconds before a Seeker passes her hut, walking in slow, measured steps, ringing a bell every few paces, summoning the sleeping to begin the day. She crawls out of bed, slips into loose cotton pyjamas, and shuffles in her sandals to the temple.