Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  Sasha does not know what charas is. ‘Hand what over?’

  The cop moves further into the cabin, stands up taller, seems to gain twenty pounds of muscle as he does so.

  ‘Do not fuck with us!’ he barks, his face flushed.

  Sasha shrinks away from him and Connor is by her side, his own face flushing, talking fast in Hindi.

  She has no idea what is going on, but Connor and the cop are up in each other’s faces, their voices rising. The beagle has grown excited and is barking, the other cop is unhooking a big, evil-looking baton from his belt, while the first stands back and levels his rifle at Connor.

  ‘Okay!’ Connor yells. ‘Fine! You can look in my damned bag!’ He opens it and throws it at the cops’ feet. The big one covers them with his weapon while the other rummages through Connor’s bag, growing more confused and angry as he goes, scattering rumpled clothes all over the carriage. Finally he stands, shrugs.

  ‘There,’ Connor says, with a tight smile. ‘Are you happy?’

  The cops do not look happy, at all. They argue briefly in their language and then, switching to English, they ask to inspect Sasha’s suitcase.

  The big cop squats, his love handles bulging beneath his khaki shirt, and pokes through her belongings. He grabs a handful of clothes from the top of the suitcase, a pair of underpants slip off – by chance a very nice pair, a relic from a past life: French knickers, boy-cut, with black lace around the trim. All eyes follow them as they flutter to the ground. Sasha blanches, then blushes, and Connor jumps to her defence.

  ‘Do you mind leaving us alone in here? You are upsetting the lady.’

  The younger cop is flustered, he looks to the older one for instruction, then back at Sasha, then at the floor, where the beagle sits, patiently thumping its tail against the floor. Sasha is struck by inspiration and kneels to retrieve the bag of samosas from her handbag. She unwraps them and shows them to the cops, who look at the dog, and finally relent.

  ‘Very good,’ the older one mumbles. They back out of the cabin.

  She and Connor pack up their bags, and Sasha waits a moment to make sure they are alone before speaking. ‘Thanks for standing up for me there. You didn’t have to.’

  Connor shrugs. ‘It’s nothing. Fucking police. If they see a tourist they’ll try it on, every time. It’s worst for women travelling alone.’

  The ice is broken now, they’ve shared their little ordeal, and Connor is much chattier. Eight hours to Chennai on paper; much longer in reality, as the train frequently dawdles on platforms in village stops, or grinds to a halt in the darkness, the power cutting out and the lights with it.

  They pass the time together; alternate between dozing and chatting. He runs a dive school in Goa, is heading to Chennai to the Australian consulate to have his visa renewed. She tells him a little of the ashram, the guru, her work in the surrounding villages.

  Night falls and she starts yawning. Connor is tired too, asks if she wants to get some rest and yes, she does, now that he mentions it, she does. She hauls her suitcase onto the bunk to use as a pillow and finds a sarong to curl up underneath. With her eyes closed, she luxuriates in lying back, the gentle rocking of the carriage. Across the cabin she senses Connor fidgeting, shifting about, but after a while he sighs heavily and lies back on his own bunk. Not long after that she’s out cold.

  She is woken by the sun peeking through the shutters and Connor quietly buying two trays of breakfast from a porter. He places it silently next to her head while she pretends to keep sleeping. It’s a small kindness, and it lodges right between her ribs.

  When she stirs and sits up, he makes a theatrical bow. ‘Grilled cheese,’ he says. ‘Because culture.’

  When the train pulls into Chennai and she moves to retrieve her luggage, he stands and brings it down for her. Without asking, he walks with her down the ramp of the station, where they regard each other with faint suspicion, but also with the spark of a bond between them.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ he finally asks.

  She tells him she is on her way south, to the ashram, but supposes she will need a hotel for the night in Chennai.

  ‘I know a great place,’ he says. ‘It’s cheap and it’s quiet. They always have rooms. Would you like to share a taxi? We could stop for a drink on the way.’

  Part 3

  Her hangover wakes her, her body shuddering in protest. It takes a long moment to remember where she is, who she is with. Before her eyes open, the faintest spark of contact – his toe rasps against her ankle. For one queasy moment she can’t remember his name, waits for it to fall into place as the world reassembles around her.

  She’s never drunk so much in her life, has never had a drinking partner race so methodically towards oblivion. Even her mother hadn’t drunk like that, not even right at the end. She remembers bits and pieces of the night before, puts them together in a leisurely way, like someone tidying their kitchen after a meal; his hands in her hair, squeaks of protest from the bed, the brokebacked geometry of their limbs as they moved to the floor. A constellation of fingerprints is bruised across her body; his skin is under her fingernails.

  The first hour of the day is rough. The bed seems to be spinning on a different axis to the rest of the world. This feeling of vertigo nests in her gut next to the low-key nausea that chases her until sometime in the afternoon when, after a room-service breakfast of beers and pakora – heavenly little messes of deep-fried onion rings – they find themselves playful and laughing at each other’s jokes – and, well, why not? In this heat they are barely dressed in the first place.

  Afterwards they lie marooned in the bedclothes. A cleaner passes outside, sweeping the concrete halls with a straw broom. They are bashful. They remember they are strangers and the remembering makes everything that came before seem absurd. How much noise they made, how sound carries through these cheap hotel walls.

  They are parched. Room service brings sandwiches – perfect little triangles of ultra-bleached white bread. They are stale and unappetising, but they finish them and order more. ‘Bring finger chips also,’ Connor says. The boy waggles his head and disappears.

  Days pass like that, a week. Sasha arranges herself like a bouquet – limbs, hair, spine strategically placed to make her sturdy and magnificent. He starts too gently, but still comes too fast. She doesn’t mind. They have all the time in the world.

  Her solitary pack of condoms runs out. Driven by necessity, they pause, naked, poised.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she says.

  ‘Me too. I’m always careful.’

  ‘Except right now, you mean?’ Her tone is half-teasing, but his jaw tightens. She wraps her arms around him, her legs. ‘Just go ahead. Nothing’s going to happen.’

  A gecko takes up residence in the corner of the room, chirps softly through the afternoon heat, waiting for its dinner of mosquitos to emerge at dusk.

  ‘Tell me about this place you’re staying,’ he says, eyes on the ceiling. ‘This ashram.’

  She tells him a little about it, the yoga, the guru, her role providing medicine to the needy, her cottage in the jungle, the wild dogs prowling the night. ‘I don’t know, really. It just feels like no other place on earth. Like no one will ever be able to find me there.’

  His cigarette hangs forgotten between his fingers, the red turning to ash. Above them, the gecko makes a dash across the ceiling and Connor’s eyes follow.

  ‘What if I came to visit? Would you like that?’

  ‘I might.’ She says this so lightly she is not sure he’s heard.

  As their taxi rolls through the streets of Chennai, she begins to wonder if she’s made a mistake. They’re slumped against opposite sides of the back seat, broiling, windows rolled up against the chaos outside. There is something wrong with the car’s air conditioning, it only seems to blow cool when the car is moving at a good clip, and, for the first hour of the drive, they are swaddled in gridlock. Any inch of space forfeited by another car is quickly annexed by two mo
re. Their taxi is bumper to bumper, the doors and fenders of other vehicles pointing at them from alarming angles.

  Motorcycles whizz through the narrow gaps in the traffic and, between them, a steady ooze of human beings presses up against the car, banging on the windows, trying to get their attention. Sasha tries to avoid eye contact, whereas Connor wears sunglasses, keeps his eyes closed behind them, his head tilted back as he sleeps off his hangover.

  A teenage girl bangs on the window, the bangles along her wrist clack against the glass. Sasha’s eyes meet the girl’s, who smiles winningly and holds up a baby, presses it against the window. Its eyes are white, frosted over with a milky gum, and it is quite still. The head lolls about as the girl wipes the baby back and forth against the window, holding out the palm of her free hand for alms.

  There’s cash in Sasha’s bag, loose rupee notes. She fumbles in her bag and is reaching to wind down the window when Connor’s hand snakes out and laces around her forearm. Over the rim of his sunglasses she catches his eyes, finds them surprisingly warm as he shakes his head once, no, tells her she can’t help them all. The world’s not hers to save.

  On the other side of the glass the woman sees the exchange, raps angrily on the glass, spits one filthy syllable at Sasha and moves on to the next car. Only when they finally clear the gridlock and roll on to the open road does Sasha realise she’s been holding her breath.

  The clouds gather and break all at once as they speed down the great coastal highway that takes them south to the ashram, and Sasha’s mood picks up with the wind. She rests her forehead against the warm glass and watches the clouds sweep inland, low and loaded, the little patches of sky visible through the blackness a startling blue. When the clouds burst, the whole of the world washes away and the back seat becomes a cosy little shuttle, nothing outside but the deluge.

  Sasha dozes, sleeps briefly, dreams she is back in Italy, lying with her husband in the ruins of the bed in their Amalfi apartment. They are watching fireworks rise from boats out on the water, some drunken hedge-fund managers out on a yacht lighting them one by one. They arc up into the sky at wild, random angles, and as they burst into cascading fire they meet their reflection in the inky water and the two wink each other out of existence. Her husband is scrolling through his stock options on his phone. He’s not trading; he just finds it relaxing to watch his money accrue. With her fingertips she traces his shoulder, his neck, the lobe of his ear, and when she runs them along the upper rim, he shivers and bats her hand away.

  She wakes with her fingers entwined in Connor’s hair. His head is in her lap and he is snoring. Somehow, in repose, they have ended up cuddling in the back seat. Still half asleep, she fingers the curls of his hair; thinning at the temples, stiff and salt stained, bleached from the sun, flecked with one or two greys but not enough to be noticeable. She brushes the hair back from his forehead to get a better look at his hairline and only then wakes fully into her body, realises what she is doing. The shock of this unintended intimacy too much for her, so alien despite everything they have already done. Her hand flits to neutral ground and Connor startles, sits up groggily.

  The car hugs the coastal highway, but the ocean is all but invisible through sheets of rain, just a thick grey band that grows darker towards the horizon. The driver hunches over his steering wheel, muttering softly to himself until the rain finally lets up, at which point he relaxes, slumps back into his chair, turns on the radio. Roadside stalls cluster along the highway, butt up against each other under the shade of scraggly trees that are themselves being choked by banyans.

  They turn inland and pass a marketplace, where gaunt women in saris are hauling sacks of magnificent dye out from under glistening tarpaulins, setting them up for display. The car stops in a little fishing village for the driver to buy gas from a roadside stall, clear plastic bottles of petrol lined up in the shade, and Sasha gets out to stretch her legs. She catches a glimpse of the ocean behind the tree line, the sand splendid with plastic debris, a row of colourful longships nestled on the shore.

  The rain is just a memory now and the sky looms blue overhead. It’s so hot and wet she feels as though she’s breathing through a damp washcloth. She finds shade under a banyan tree that spreads out to meet the sky, its strangling roots having found the patchy tarmac of the road and slowly boring a hole into it.

  As they continue to drive south the banyans start to thin out, replaced by sparse, crabby shrubs that soon peter out themselves. They are driving through a barren red desert, strung through with veins where the mud has been soaked and dried countless times. The driver heaves on the wheel to take them off the highway, onto a rutted dirt road that heads north, straight into the desert.

  The road rises slightly, then dips, then rises again, and when they cross a ridge, Sasha sees the forest, sprawling below. As the car negotiates the pitted dirt track to the main gate, she is struck by a strange sensation – of coming home, and at the same time realising how strange it is, this secret little community out in the jungle, out of time and place. She wonders what Connor must think of it, but he is inscrutable – face blank as his mirrored sunglasses.

  The security guard is already unlocking the gate as the taxi trundles to a halt. He calls out a warm greeting to Sasha as she climbs from the back seat, but his face falls when Connor gets out alongside her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sasha says. ‘This is my . . . friend.’ The guard glowers, and he grumbles about the rules, that he’s not supposed to let strangers through, but, after some easy assurances from Sasha that he is only here to visit, is her guest, he relents and swings the gate open.

  Although she’s been gone only a little while, she returns racked with guilt for abandoning her responsibilities – and a suitcase full of treats for Velli.

  Shopping in an antiseptic strip-mall in Delhi, she’d been struck by the fact that she had no idea what to buy. What was the appropriate gift for making amends to a child who’d been mauled because of her mistake?

  At a loss, Sasha bought a bag of tchotchkes: fancy soap, a little wooden horse, a box of soft pastels, a modest wardrobe of house dresses and a light shawl. As she rides out to the schoolhouse that afternoon, she wonders if she’s overdone it.

  The dormitory where the village kids sleep is dim and cramped, flywire windows with hurricane shutters, a basic washroom behind a plastic curtain. It’s just long enough to accommodate two rows of five beds, all neatly made. Most of them are empty, but three girls turn and stare at her in alarm as she enters. She’s making her apologies, and backing out, when Velli emerges from behind the bathroom curtain. She surprises Sasha by accelerating into a run and barrelling into her for a hug.

  Bewildered, a little winded, Sasha squeezes her. She is delighted by this development. Just a few months after her accident, she’s in remarkable health – her scars deep and irreversible, but no longer in danger of infection, and there’s a little meat on her bones now, some colour in her cheeks. She accepts her gifts gratefully, brings her hands together and nods as she accepts them. The dresses are a little small – the short sleeves pinch and gather because of the new plumpness around her arms.

  She encourages Velli to open her new box of pastels, fetch some paper, and they draw all through the afternoon, until the evening storms claim the last of the light. Then she returns to her bed, where Connor is waiting for her.

  There’s a knock at her door, the first break in their solitude in days. Connor is at the edge of the bed, curled up into himself. The overhead fan is drying a film of sweat on her skin, and when she answers the door she is acutely aware of the smell of sex in the room. The servant – her usual attendant – won’t meet her eye, murmurs that the guru wants to see her.

  The guru invites Sasha to take tea; just the two of them, or at least as close as it can be to that. The guru is never really alone; a handful of Seekers perform their seva by attending to the earthly needs of their leader, and there is always someone hovering nearby, bringing her a shawl, a cup of tea,
a pen.

  Sasha has surmised it’s a great privilege to be chosen for this role. Once, while speaking with the guru in this office, she saw an attendant place the guru’s tea down on a notepad rather than the coaster. The guru broke off, mid-sentence, and stared at the cup for an excruciating minute, until the Seeker realised her faux pas and rushed to move it. A little circle of condensation remained on the paper, blurring the ink of the handwriting there.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ the guru said, almost inaudibly. ‘That will do.’

  The next day that attendant was replaced, and the Seeker left the community, her bungalow empty except for the servants who were scrubbing the floor in anticipation of a new guest.

  It takes a certain talent to tend to the guru – one has to be omnipresent, but at the same time so small and inoffensive as to be invisible. It works. After a few months spending time with the guru with her attendants hovering around, Sasha no longer notices, the same way she no longer pays attention to the help – she can move her feet to make room for a maid sweeping under her chair without ever really seeing them.

  The guru greets Sasha warmly, but doesn’t stand. She’s perched on a pile of cushions by a low hardwood table, back straight, knees tucked to the side. When she speaks, it gives Sasha a small start.

  ‘I understand you have a guest.’

  Sasha murmurs an affirmative, nothing further.

  ‘Who is he?’ The guru’s tone remains light.

  ‘A . . . friend.’

  ‘Is he a good man?’

  ‘He’s good at some things.’

  The guru doesn’t take the invitation to levity. She lapses into silence again and Sasha waits, knowing there is intent behind her silence. Finally, she asks Sasha if she remembers the day they first really spoke.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you ever wondered why we keep the dogs here? Why we need them?’

  She is a realist; understands the reality of leading an ashram in such an impoverished place. The far reaches of the jungle crawl with feral things – hyenas, scavengers and thieves; the camp dogs help make sure nobody comes to the community uninvited. In time, she says, the world will be ready to live as the ashram does, without the polluting influence of drugs and alcohol, without money, in perfect harmony, but until then it is necessary to protect it.