by Liam Pieper
Sasha should consider it. A special course studying the guru’s yoga was running upstate, and it didn’t cost that much money. You had to be invited, but she was one of a handful of people the guru trusted to recruit. She was sure she could score Sasha an invitation.
The course ran for a month and Sasha loved it. Sessions three times a day, each class beginning easy enough, a brisk warmup, but escalating rapidly through a sequence of increasing difficulty. The sequence ended, and repeated, and again. It was an oddly serene intensity, unlike anything Sasha had experienced before, and by the end of the day she was ruined, left gasping on her mat. The physical exhaustion was so profound it settled her mind, and the schedule left her with little time to worry about much else. For the first time in months she began to feel like herself again.
The yoga retreat was only a half-hour’s drive from Mama’s care facility, so on Saturday afternoons, when students were given the evening off, Sasha drove over to spend time with her mom.
Mama was wasting away. Every time Sasha visited, there was less of her, and what remained was pooling around her legs and stomach, drooping over the edges of the wheelchair.
She’d regained some movement in one arm but responded to no stimulus except for food. Sasha passed the time by cutting Mama’s meals up into tiny pieces, then feeding them to her from a colourful plastic spoon.
On the third Saturday, they served blueberry pancakes – thick, golden, lanced through with bubbles. Mama loved pancakes, so Sasha cut them into pieces, lightly coated them in syrup, loaded them into Mama’s mouth. She would not eat, chewed wildly, spat the pancake out. Soon both of them were covered in spit and soggy gruel.
Sasha grew impatient, swore, put the tray down on the table in front of Mama. She moved to the window, rested her forehead on the cool glass and took several deep breaths, used a simple meditation to calm down.
When she turned back Mama was choking. Sasha had left the plate too close to Mama and her mother had manoeuvred a whole pancake into her mouth. Sasha rushed to her side as her mother heaved, changed colour, changed colour again. Sasha remembered the Heimlich, but she couldn’t do it now, she’d break every bone in Mama’s body.
Sasha knew she should call for help. But she let a moment pass. Then another.
Mama was blue. She made a gasping, sucking noise, then the mass of half-chewed pancake was on the floor, and Mama was breathing again, good hand flailing wildly, one eye fixed on Sasha, who was already headed to the door.
She went back to the retreat, cried, pulled herself together, resolved to go back to NYC, to make it work, her marriage, her future, all of it.
On the way home, she stopped at Wholefoods to pick up ingredients for Stephan’s favourite meal. She threw open the door, her arms full of brown paper grocery bags, and found Stephan behind a woman, pumping away with his eyes open, one fist wrapped in her long blonde hair, watching his reflection in the large mirrors that opened to their shared closet. He caught Sasha’s eye and stopped, swore once, and scrambled under the covers, pulled the comforter up to cover the two of them.
That, Sasha was surprised to find, shocked her more than coming home to find her husband fucking someone else on their marital bed – that unconscious display of intimacy, of collusion, the two of them scrambling for protection from her.
It was very quiet. Even the air conditioning and the relentless honking of Manhattan seemed diminished before the moment.
‘This,’ he finally said, ‘probably is what it looks like.’
She hates Delhi; the traffic, the chaos, the air. She even hates the sun here, which sits low and hostile, baking the city into an unreal haze. Here she is certain of nothing, beyond the hatred she feels for the plump lawyer with an Oxford accent, who accepts her divorce papers and offers her a cola to drink on the way back to her hotel.
She declines, takes a taxi from the lawyer’s offices and resolves to hide in her hotel until the day her train leaves. Her room is depressing but functional – clean sheets, air conditioning. The vents are a little loud, but they help drown out the otherwise unbearable noise of the traffic.
The one window has a view that her online booking had described as riverfront, but is more of a canal, or was, once upon a time. Now it runs with a languid current, so choked with trash that a sort of garbage glacier has formed: a mess of plastic flotsam, glued together with human waste, sanitary napkins, a thick scum of oil.
It’s packed so tightly that to begin with Sasha took the canal for one of the piles of trash that seem to fill every vacuum here, until she noticed an old sneaker inching its way downstream. Sasha finds that by dinner it has made it three feet closer to its final destination. She fills the empty hours at that window, transfixed – it’s the last thing she looks at before bed, and the first thing she does in the morning.
With sunrise, a group of boys descend on the canal to collect bits and pieces to sell to recyclers. The older boys go first, shifting furtively through the trash on the banks of the stream, picking out choice bits of metal and plastic, before stuffing them into big plastic sacks that are larger than some of the younger boys who bring up the rear, who stagger under the weight of their bags.
When one scrappy child moves ahead of the older boys they surround him and lay him out with three quick blows to the face, then empty out his sack and divvy it up between them. After that, the little ones keep a safe distance, waiting until the seniors are done, then furtively dig through what remains, picking up bits of PVC, cigarette packs they tear the foil out of, plastic water bottles, and then they too move on.
She wants to intervene but knows it would be foolish; she has no authority here, and who knows what the kids would do to her. So she watches the solitary boy walking on water. In faded jeans and a striped polo shirt, he’s so petite, and the flotsam packed so tight, that he’s able to pick his way carefully across the trash and over the water to get to the more lucrative treasures stuck in the gunk. He moves carefully, testing each step with the toe of his sandal before advancing, then stopping and gathering up a morsel while the river moves beneath him. He spots a length of metal pipe sticking up from the trash that must be worth something, the way his face lights up. He crouches to tug on it, meets resistance, and is bracing his feet to get a better grip when there is a knock on her door.
It is the bellboy, who, since she made the mistake of over tipping him when he carried her bags from the taxi, has become overbearing and solicitous. He knocks on her door at all hours of the day and night to offer her food, water, beer, wine. He has little English, but endless enthusiasm, and Sasha ends up tipping him just to make him leave.
When she returns to the window the boy on the canal is gone. She sees, or imagines she sees, a gap in the garbage where the boy has fallen through, but just as quickly as she registers it, it closes up again, and the garbage is a hard, impenetrable shell once more.
She leaves Delhi the next day. There is nothing for her here – she planned to travel around a little bit, see the real India, but this city has demoralised her. The one time she ventured out in a rickshaw – to visit a clothing boutique in Hauz Khas the guru had recommended her, the driver ignored her instructions, took her to a series of jewellery stores, stiffed her on the fare, and finally dumped her outside a Fabindia, assuring her she was in the right place. She was cheated again by the next rickshaw driver, and propositioned by the one after that. By the time she finally made it back to her hotel she had been caked in grime from the sooty air.
From the way the guru encouraged her to take this trip, she convinced herself something fateful would happen along the way. But following her heart is just taking her straight back to the ashram.
Any jackassed idea that fate will find her in this city of millions of hustlers is long gone now. As she half rolls, half hefts her suitcase up to the platforms at the station, rickshaw drivers surround her, barking, ‘Taxi! Taxi!’
‘I’m clearly here to get on a train,’ she tells one.
The man doesn�
��t blink, just says, ‘Take a taxi instead? Where you want to go?’
She reminds herself not to lose her cool, that this is just a game, that the hungry, pushy horde of men means her no harm, this is just what they do, this is how their life works, and so, this is how it all works. She pushes through and the drivers let her pass.
At the entrance to the station a bored-looking guard X-rays her luggage and confiscates her water. It takes her a while to find her train – the clerk at the hotel booked her tickets and she is unable to decipher the mess of numbers and unfamiliar names, which of the stark concrete platforms she’s supposed to wait at. Everyone she asks stares at her blankly, then points, unsmiling, in a different direction.
She barely makes it to the train on time, after lugging her suitcase up and down the stairs to four different platforms. Her clothes are sweated through and her mood is foul; it does not improve when the conductor checks her tickets and she realises she’s been ripped off. The hotel clerk has overcharged her. Instead of the direct train to Chennai, he’s booked her on a meandering route via Bangalore, in the heart of the country. It will be a day and a half to Bangalore, then another eight hours to Chennai – two days on the road at least, barring further catastrophe.
At least she has the cabin all to herself – the four sleeper beds tucked away, the air-conditioning on full blast. She folds down a bed, digs through her luggage, finds a blessed loose Ambien, dry-swallows it, and sinks gratefully into a dreamless stupor.
She wakes being gently shaken by a porter, and groggily eats the breakfast of rotis he brings her. Outside the window the sun is high, and the blasted sprawl of Delhi has given way to jungle that hugs the train as the railway wends through. Her spirits lift instantly.
In Bangalore she finds her platform easily, flies down the steep ramp to the waiting train, her suitcase hurtling ahead of her as she jogs along behind it. She finds a friendly conductor who points her towards the right carriage. She finds her cabin and pulls back the blue curtain that divides it from the rest of the car.
She says hello to her fellow passengers – a family of four, crowded onto the bed opposite, eating their lunch off plastic plates, swaying a little in rhythm with the train as it shunts into motion. Using their fingers, they mash curry and rice into fistfuls and scoop it into their mouths. Sasha knows she isn’t supposed to be grossed out, that table manners differ wildly between cultures, but still; watching them eat turns her stomach a little.
When they finish eating and throw their plates out the window and onto the tracks, she is relieved they are no longer eating but aggrieved by the casual littering. She puts it in perspective – there are worse tragedies in the world; starving children, warming oceans. She takes some deep breaths.
After a moment, the dad of the family takes out his phone and starts watching a film, the Bollywood soundtrack blasting tinny and loud through the cabin.
She gives up. She is furious at these people, feels small for letting herself get so angry, thought she’d left all that behind in New York. Before she loses her temper properly, she retrieves her bag and slips out into the corridor, and searches until she finds a cabin with a free bed. One occupant only, a white guy, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
He snaps to attention as she enters, swings his legs off the bed, sits bolt upright. He looks startled, glancing at her, then up at his luggage. Her eyes follow his up to the luggage rack and she sees his canvas backpack is lashed down with a length of cord, which, on closer inspection, is the bedsheet from his bunk. The thought that someone might want his raggedy little rucksack that much is kind of sweet.
‘Hello!’ she says, brightly. ‘Looks like we’re going to be roommates.’
He nods a cautious hello, doesn’t speak.
His clothes are worn, mismatched, kind of ugly – cargo pants, Converse, a shirt that has taken on the stiff texture of having been sweated through, dried, and sweated through again. He’s a good thirties or a bad twenties. It’s hard to tell with someone who’s seen so much sun – deep crow’s-feet line his face, and the skin on his hands and legs is the deep reddish-brown glow of skin not meant for the tropics.
She sticks out her hand. ‘I’m Sasha.’
He takes it, his handshake watery. She detects a faint tremor. ‘I’m Connor,’ he says. ‘You’re American.’
‘Mostly!’ she says. ‘A bit of this and that, but I’m from New York. What about you?’
‘Australia.’
‘Oh! I would love to go to Australia! What’s it like?’
‘It’s like Texas, but with smaller cars, fewer guns and low self-esteem.’
He smiles for the first time, a shy thing that creeps up from the corner of his lips to eclipse the rest of his face – a lovely feature for an otherwise shop-worn face. He stands to help hoist her suitcase into her own luggage rack.
In spite of herself, Sasha is relieved to find someone with good English. She hasn’t realised how much she’s wanted to make easy conversation without having to worry if her precise meaning is getting across. It seems like forever since she had someone to just talk to.
He’s a good listener, tilting his head very slightly towards her, saying little but occasionally offering a soft empathetic murmur at one of her story’s more dramatic turns. She finds herself telling him everything that’s happened to her since landing in India, and in a roundabout way is getting back to New York and all of that, when he all of a sudden snaps to attention.
‘Seiko!’
The word is like a sucker punch.
‘What?’
‘Your watch. It’s a Seiko. A dive watch. Are you a diver?’
‘This? No, it belonged to my dad. He died when I was young.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ He looks away, out the window. Silence falls and they watch the countryside whip by.
When the train pulls into a small station she gets out to stretch her legs. The day is growing muggier; the puddles across the uneven surface of the platform seem to be evaporating before her eyes. Under the shelter of a corrugated iron roof a hawker is selling samosas, frying them in a huge wok-style dish, adding them to a cooling pile of pre-fried snacks. He looks so miserable that Sasha buys several, more than she can eat. The man wraps them in newspaper and she slips them into her handbag.
The whistle blows and she clambers aboard the train just as it starts to roll again, and she is forced to wait in the doorway as stragglers rush to disembark. She watches them out the window, wonders where each of them is going, what they are working towards, where everyone needs to be in such a hurry. What would they say if she asked them? What could she say if someone asked her?
There is still that tightness in her own chest, a strange feeling of anticipation that she assumed would dissipate when she signed the divorce papers, but it’s still there, knotting her up.
She walks down the corridor, passing two uniformed policemen, one carrying a rifle, the other walking the cutest little Labrador she’s ever seen, wearing a snug little working vest. She says a cheerful ‘namaste’ and slips past them.
She decides she quite likes this man, Connor, likes the idea of being on the road with him. When she enters their cabin she decides to befriend him. ‘Have you seen this dog out here? It’s beautiful. Do you like dogs?’
The curtain is pulled back by one of the cops, who looks like a cop in the way that cops all over the world look like cops – late thirties, khakis, moustache, overweight. The rifle rests against his love handle where it bulges under his shirt. The other cop, younger, more eager-looking, waits in the corridor, holding the even more eager-looking beagle on a leash.
The older cop has to turn slightly to manoeuvre his way through the narrow cabin door, pivoting at the hip to accommodate his paunch and the rifle. It falls forward slightly and he shrugs it back into place, slung over his shoulder. The gun is an antique, a wooden stock, polished smooth over a century of use. She imagines the gun misfiring, exploding backwards like in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, leaving the
portly cop with a face full of soot while a criminal made his escape.
The cop catches her staring at his belly where the rifle’s barrel rests and she looks away, chastened.
‘Sir,’ he says. ‘Madam. We are checking the train for contraband, please. Put your luggage on the floor in front of you, please.’
Sasha stands, heaves her suitcase down from the rack, unzips it and stands back. After a moment she remembers her handbag, unslings that and tucks it into the suitcase.
Connor takes a deep breath, stands, shakes his head. ‘Do you have a warrant?’ he asks.
The cop’s eyes narrow. He stoops, brings his moustache down to the level of Connor’s eyes, asks him his name, his point of origin, his destination, asks to see his passport.
‘It’s back in my hotel. I forgot it,’ he says, flatly.
The cop barely acknowledges he has heard, just turns to Sasha. ‘Where are you going?’ he asks her.
‘Chennai.’
This makes the cop raise an eyebrow. ‘You are travelling together?’
‘No,’ Sasha says. ‘We just met.’
The cop looks unconvinced. ‘Dog!’ he barks, and the beagle comes scampering into the cabin, truffles its little nose over Connor’s stuff. Then it turns, executing a neat three-point turn in the cramped cabin, and does the same to Sasha’s. It catches a scent, sniffs ferociously, then sits down, looks up at its handler expectantly.
‘Madam, is there something is your luggage you shouldn’t have?’
‘No? I mean . . . what do you mean?’
‘There is contraband, madam,’ he says inquiringly, almost gently. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Like what?’
‘Is it charas, madam? It will be better if you hand it over to us.’