by Liam Pieper
Then he is alone, the teenagers’ laughter disappearing down the street. He is furious – with the kids, with himself. What else did he expect? He doesn’t belong here, cuts a strange figure strolling the promenade, trying to sell drugs nobody is going to pay for. Better they did this than the police, he consoles himself, face in dirt. At least he was smart enough to leave the bulk of the pills back at the ashram.
He rolls over, tries to rise, finds the world unsteady. He rests for a moment and realises a woman is watching from the shadowed entrance to the ruin. As their eyes meet, she turns to move away.
‘Stop!’ he calls out, hitching up his pants. He stands, still too dizzy, and falls to his knees.
She approaches, kneels beside him, touches his face gingerly, asks if he is okay. She reaches into her bra, retrieves a colourful silk handkerchief, presses it to his nose, holds it there with force, tells him to relax, it’s okay, the bleeding will stop soon. Blood; he hadn’t realised he was hurt that bad. His head is tilted at an angle and he can see the lovely swell of her breasts, the sharp outline of her Adam’s apple. Her breathing is calm and measured. The bleeding stops.
His palms are grazed from where he broke his fall, his skull is ringing but not bleeding. No concussion, probably nothing worse than a nasty lump in the morning. Blood from his nose has stained his shirt, but it doesn’t feel broken, just a little tender. It’s not so bad, really, but at her insistence he accompanies her to her room at a nearby hotel. She dances there at night, but in the day it is deserted. Her name is Sangeeta.
She leaves the door to the room open just a crack as she cleans him up, wiping his face with wads of dampened paper towel. Tissues pile up on the dresser next to the bed, becoming lighter and lighter pink until the blood is gone. He still has money hidden in his shoe, which he takes out and places on the dresser. The door closes with the softest of clicks. There is no noise but the traffic, far, far away.
Sangeeta is well-connected in this town. She take his money and goes out, returns with a lump of hash and another of poppy tar wrapped in newspaper, which she steeps in water she heats on a little gas stove inside the room.
‘Ta, love,’ he says, sipping the tea gratefully. Soon he is calmer, then drowsy. He climbs into bed with Sangeeta and plays with the hem of her sari, listens to the tinkling of the bells on her ankle as she moves around.
When she shakes him awake, hours have slipped by. The shafts of light from the shuttered window fall at a steeper angle. He sits up, groggily searches for his shoes, his belt.
She tells him he’s stupid for trying to sell drugs on the streets of this town. She offers to help: he should leave the pills with her and she’ll sell them when the opportunity arises. She will be safe, he will be safe, they will split the profits. Connor thinks it over for a long, sleepy minute, then nods.
The tea has wrapped its silky softness around the world and as he takes the stairs to the street his legs have a pleasant elasticity to them, as though they are about to give out, then snapping back to take his weight on the next step. He makes it to his motorbike and rides in first gear all the way back to the ashram, letting the furious traffic scream away around him as he tootles down the road, enjoying the dreamy slow-motion sensation.
When he pulls off the highway and onto the dirt track, he’s still more than a little high. He beeps cheerfully at the ornate gates, startling awake the ancient security guard dozing in the shady overhang of his watch house. He staggers to his feet and shoots daggers at Connor, but lets him through and into the ashram.
Sasha is delighted when, one morning, out of nowhere, Connor snaps out of his funk. He bounces out of bed. He wants to make himself useful – offers to take the bike, drive to town, negotiate supplies. She’s being ripped off, he insists. He speaks the language. He can help.
He comes back that evening with half the money she sent him out with, a satchel full of medicine, and a lump of brown, rich-smelling tar, about the size of an eraser. ‘I was thinking,’ he says, the side of his mouth curling up. ‘You wanna make a mistake?’
The night is dark so their ride through the jungle is fraught with sudden brakes and flogging of the second gear. When they reach the ocean the Enfield is hot and cranky, the exhaust pipe pinging and hissing in the dark behind them as they tramp down through the dunes. Sasha cups her hands around Connor’s to shield them from the wind as he softens the lump of hash with his lighter, then crumbles it onto a bed of tobacco on a cigarette paper.
He lights it, takes a drag, hands it to her. She puts it to her lips and inhales. Her mouth fills with smoke and her cheeks puff up – she looks to Connor and his teeth are shining in the dark.
‘You’ve never smoked a joint before, have you?’
She shakes her head, exhales.
‘Here.’ He takes the joint back. ‘You breathe in, then take it away and breathe in again, to get it into your lungs.’ He demonstrates, a long draw and then a quick breath, holds it for a few seconds, lets it go in a luxurious plume.
Sasha tries again and feels it this time, the rush to the lungs then the head, and then the feeling that everything in the world is softening – feels the full pillowy softness of the sky, the sand. Her fingers dig into the sand, luxuriate in the feeling of it slipping away. She thrusts them as far as they will go, imagines sinking into the earth, disappearing under the dunes, until she is no longer sure of the divide between her body and the beach.
Sasha is aware of every grain of sand: against her butt as Connor shucks off her shorts, on her lips as she kisses his chest. She runs her tongue up and down him and gets a mouthful of salt and grit. She spits, then lies back while he moves on top of her. The world seems vast and wild and welcoming, her body like syrup, everything slow and sweet, the sand squeaking beneath her. Afterwards, the night is still. The clouds have cleared. The universe sprawls above and around them, and they stare up at it helplessly.
‘How do you feel?’ he asks.
‘Good. A little thirsty.’
He snakes an arm around her and she snuggles into his side, loops a hand around his neck.
‘What do you reckon the chances are,’ Connor says at last, ‘that we’d find each other.’
‘Highly unlikely. But so is everything.’
‘Romantic.’
‘I mean, what are the chances of anything? Mathematically, the odds of us existing at all are next to nothing. Look up. Look at all this.’ She used her free hand to gesture at the milky streak of stars above them. ‘At the centre of our galaxy is a black hole that’s responsible for everything. It makes the solar systems, the stars, makes our planet spin. Without that, Earth wouldn’t support life. The thing is, gravity is hungry. One day our sun will eat up all its hydrogen and swell until it eats our skies – although that’s insignificant when you consider that the black hole is pulling all of the galaxy into itself and will eventually consume everything we’ve ever dreamed existed. Without it, we wouldn’t have sentience, but sentience only lets us understand the inevitable nothingness.’
Connor says nothing for a while, and then, ‘I bet you’re fun at parties.’
‘I don’t get invited to a lot of parties.’
‘Me neither.’
She starts thinking about home, Stephan, and Sasha is quickly melancholy. Semen trickling down her thighs – the whole exercise seems gritty and pointless now. She no longer worries about the risk of conception, about blood-borne contagion, has given up trying to calculate every interaction’s potential for disaster. She has decided to be as ostentatiously careless as men have been since the dawn of time, as cavalier as Connor, who is sitting up and searching through his trousers for his cigarettes.
She has realised that procreation is as much a scam as capitalism – in every partnership, one side reaps the dividends while the other labours. Something she learned in college that rattled her: when a woman gets pregnant, it changes her DNA. The baby’s cells cross the placental barrier and thrive within the mother. With each successive conception,
the mother’s reservoir of foreign material grows deeper and more complex. Even without giving birth, the abortive pregnancies she’d carried would have mutated her into a chimera. Part of her was someone else – a little bit of Stephan, a little bit of that frightened, wide-eyed boy in a Long Island pizzeria all those years ago.
Why stop there? Why not keep going? Why not Connor? Why not stalk the jungle like a wild dog, find the servant who shares her bed sometimes, or a ropey old hippy walking home and leap on him from a treetop, pincer her legs around him, drag him back to her lair. There was nothing stopping her, not really. She could do that to any man in this world, and another, and another, churn through the zygotes until there was nothing left of her own DNA. She would be someone new, and she could start again.
A lighter flares in the dark, startling her. Connor’s eyes shine behind his cigarette. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing.’ She sits up, starts to gather herself. ‘Nothing at all.’
They ride back to the ashram in silence. Black clouds skid in, low, almost touching the palm-fronds. They race the storm back to their cabin but don’t quite make it, arriving soaked to the bone and their clothes ruined with road dust. They strip, leave their musty clothes piled by the door for the servants.
Sasha turns the boiler on to fill the wash bucket and while they wait they crouch together on the tiled floor of the bathroom, shivering. Connor’s hands are cold and rough as sea sponge, raising hackles of goose flesh – across her neck, the hollow of her collarbone where soapy water gathers – that disappear under a sluice of water poured from the brass bucket, so hot she cries out. The knuckles on one hand are swelling, little crescent moons of broken skin turning the lather pink.
‘It’s nothing. Here,’ Connor winces as he dips a washcloth into the steaming water. ‘Let me get your back.’
Connor stays a while, and a while longer again. He remains grumpy, but Sasha is sure he is warming to life in the ashram. He’s been growing sunnier with the weather; he becomes more interested in her life, accompanying her to yoga, taking meals in the communal dining hall.
Since his arrival, the guru has kept up a campaign of concerned asides to Sasha; she is worried about his intentions, would like him to move on, and Sasha has continued to make it clear, firmly, cheerfully, that Connor is her guest, and will be until she decides otherwise. The guru can hardly argue – ashram doctrine is on Sasha’s side.
Still, their one-one-one chats over tea start to shift from roving meditations on Sasha’s happiness to something more combative. Sasha, trained by Catholic schooling to twist dogma into spectacular new shapes, finds herself quoting the guru back to herself during arguments over time spent with Connor – time the guru considers wasted. Over the months, the guru has reiterated that Sasha spends too much time worrying that the way she has lived her life is wrong – which is, ironically, a waste of a life.
‘You’ve told me again and again that the only important thing in life is bringing kindness and love into the world,’ Sasha says. ‘That in lovemaking there is no wrong.’
‘True.’ Each time the guru is broadsided by one of her own truisms, she purses her lips in a tight smile. ‘But not all love is equal, not everyone equally deserving of it. I don’t want your development to be sidetracked by this man. Are you sure that you love him?’
Sasha bats the question away. ‘Does it matter?’
The guru doesn’t bite, doesn’t dignify this with a response beyond tightening her smile a few degrees. Sasha grows exasperated, finds herself reminding the guru that she’s paid a small fortune to join this community, that she’s invested in every way, and surely that buys her the benefit of the doubt, but if that’s not appreciated she could always leave.
‘Oh no, Sasha, we don’t want that,’ the guru says, gently, waving for one of her attendants to clear away the teacups, grown cold while they’ve sparred. ‘It’s just that in our community, we all rely on each other. Here you really matter. Where else in the world can you say that?’
Snookered, she goes back to the cottage and picks a fight with Connor – a prelude. He takes offence easily, but his anger is easily dammed and diverted. ‘Fuck me,’ she urges, wrestling him to the bed.
He does it wrong. He is gentle, too gentle, unless she spurs him on like a stock horse, teeth and nails sunk into his flesh. She wants to do it in a way that reduces them both, that makes ridiculous the conceit of lovemaking; nothing is being made here, certainly not love. If anything, something is being destroyed, the world broken down into its components; electrons and protons, spinning around each other, helpless playthings of gravity.
The guru’s high-minded indifference to all things carnal seems transcendent sometimes – if Sasha really thinks about it, love is just a poorly devised thesis to explain a chemical reaction that spurs the transfer of genetic material. Perhaps it isn’t even that that complicated. What would her child have been beyond a kind of sexually transmitted malady that would cannibalise her body and derange her priorities? Truly, her life can be reduced to a kind of reliable transit for DNA, as majestic as a used Toyota.
Connor lies naked next to her, his dick sleepy and harmless across his thigh. In the empty hour after sex he disappears – rolls over and throws a forearm over his eyes, leaving behind a gently snoring husk. When he wakes, he is like a crying puppy – hungry or horny.
He is eminently pleasant and patient with her, and she can’t stand it. He has no curiosity about her. There’s so much he doesn’t know. He never asks about her husband. He’s never seemed to notice the band of pale skin fading around her ring finger.
Some nights she rolls over and shuts her eyes, pictures Stephan, imagines she is back in New York, on her hands and knees in front of the mirror with her eyes closed. Some nights Stephan is there in the ashram, eating dinner with them. Some nights Stephan sleeps between them all night long.
When unhappiness seizes her, she concentrates on breathing, wills it away. But sleep doesn’t come. She is awake to watch the sun start to filter through the jungle leaves, the day already too hot to bear.
To the ocean, then. Where his deficiencies fall away, seem unimportant under sun so hot it bleaches the colour from the world. He’s not much for conversations, but has extraordinary faculty with practical things. He could, if called upon, produce from memory a list of dangerous sea animals and the remedies for their bites, stings, maulings. When they go into the water together, he kicks to the ocean floor, returns with creatures plucked off the seabed that wave their little appendages in courage at finding themselves in the air.
He teaches her how to duck dive, how to equalise the pressure in her ears by holding her nose and breathing gently. He’s so graceful in the water, a different person entirely – to see him dive under the waves and pop up an improbable distance away, playful as the foam, makes Sasha wonder how many different people a person can house inside them.
Connor is so proud of what he knows. She gathers he never finished school, and has instead scoured books for bits and pieces of history, science. He has the autodidact’s habit of butchering pronunciations. Unexpected phrases erupt out of him at odd moments, words that are too long or too arcane or too weird to be something he learned from other people. He namedrops his favourite authors and mispronounces them every time; he cannot believe she’s never read Jack Keroosh’s On the Road.
He reminds her of roughnecks from Brooklyn and Long Island, the way he gets insecure and pulls out a polysyllabic word to cover it up. ‘Glasses’ become ‘spectacles’. One night they are eating a fish curry by the ocean that he describes as ‘incandescent’. Another time she asks him what he was like as a child and he says ‘truculent’. She can’t stop laughing and he becomes upset. She apologises profusely, she doesn’t mean to offend him, she just thinks it’s cute the way he reaches for the wrong word. She knows the minute she says it that this is the wrong response, that you don’t call a truculent man cute.
But his sulks never last long, and h
e is soon in a good mood again. There is something cautious about his steady temper, like a driver who once spun off the road on a patch of black ice and now views every road with suspicion.
‘The guru doesn’t like me,’ Connor says, the first thing after a long, sleepy silence. They’re lying on sweat-drenched sheets in her bungalow. He worries out loud that the guru wants him gone, that she will find a way a way to vanish him. Each time he rides back from Puducherry after a supply run the elderly guard at the gate is less happy to see him, takes a little longer to sigh theatrically and unlock the gate.
He plants a kiss on Sasha’s chest, more where the rib floats out from her stomach, her stomach, her hip – wonders aloud if there is some way he can make himself useful to the guru.
Sasha is delicate in her answer, will neither confirm nor deny the guru’s antipathy. But she has some ideas on how he might endear himself. She waits until he rolls over and fumbles for his smokes, lies on his stomach to light one. He exhales sharply into the air, blowing smoke rings that drift lazily into the fan, which poses no threat to the sticky night. They both keep their eyes on the lazy arc of the rings as she tells him about the schoolhouse, asks for his help.
Children come and go as their parents’ employment at the ashram fluctuates, but there is a small core of students who attend every class, sitting quietly up the back, not taking part in discussions. These children have nowhere else to go, they are wards of the ashram – either the children of Seekers who have passed away, or homeless children who have been rescued from the streets. Like Velli, they tend to be quieter than the boisterous local kids. More than one have a visible physical infirmity – a polio limp, eyes milked over with cataracts.