Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  He rides west, rides until he runs out of fuel, and then he sells the Enfield for enough money for a bus fare to Goa and some change. There is another party on there – organised by some people he knows from back in the day, a couple of loose Israeli party kids who came to Goa and never got around to leaving. He floated working this party with Sangeeta, but they’d decided against it – it was just too far to go.

  This time he does things by the book, walks in with what’s left of his stash, asks to see the promoters, pays them a fee to let him move his pills in peace. He does so quietly, a few at a time, taking in small bills until the pills are gone and his pockets are fat with cash. This is what he should have been doing all along – playing by the rules. Even the lawless have their bureaucracy. He has enough to start again anywhere in this country, to disappear into the darkness.

  He buys a beer to mark the occasion, and another, and another, and, as rain starts to fall, another. He finds a deserted chill-out tent, just a tarpaulin, really, with lights that turn his skin a sickly purple. He shuts his eyes, sips his beer, turns his good ear towards the rain, the bass, lets it drown out all his other senses. His mistake, he realises, was staying in one place for too long. Putting down roots only gave them a chance to rot. Sasha, Velli – they would both be better off without him, a thought that hurts but which he cannot stop probing like a loose tooth.

  Sangeeta too, poor thing. So much for her supposed powers over luck – Connor’s was worse than she could handle. Whatever happened to her, it was his fault, but that could wait for another day. Shame is like sweets, like drinks – there is always room for more. For now, he would take a drink, concentrate on the bass, on oblivion, a preview of a world without him in it. A moment of peace, a whole different world.

  A strong hand claps him on the shoulder.

  ‘I can’t believe you came back here, Connor. It is hilarious,’ Baba shouts mirthfully, over the rain. ‘Or it would be, if it wasn’t so fucking depressing.’

  The door creaks open and in the gloom Sasha can make out the empty space where his bags were, where he usually leaves his crumpled shirts.

  ‘Oh,’ she says to the emptiness. He hasn’t even left a note.

  She stays in bed the next morning, skipping breakfast, skipping yoga. When she doesn’t turn up to the evening meal, there is a knock at the door. A servant comes in, eyes fixed politely on the floor as he leaves a thali tray on the table. He glides out, leaving the door open, and then the guru stands in the doorway, softly clearing her throat.

  The guru pauses a moment to take in the scene – Sasha lying curled up on top of the covers – and then sits on the bed next to her. She smooths her sari and taps on her knee, and Sasha wriggles over until her face is nestled in the guru’s lap. She begins to play with Sasha’s hair, long strokes that leave tingling eddies across her scalp. Sasha closes her eyes and leans into the sensation. The tension melts out of her shoulders and tears well behind her eyes. One or two make a break for it, sneak out past her eyelids and down her cheek, where they are absorbed by the guru’s sari.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she snuffles. ‘I’m ruining your dress.’

  ‘You are ruining nothing. Allow yourself your grief.’

  Sasha sits up, shakes her head, wipes her nose on her sleeve. Her head hangs low and she takes a couple of deep breaths to get herself under control. A tear rolls down her nose, hangs suspended for a second before it falls, making a tiny crater in the dust on the floor.

  The guru reaches out and catches the next tear as it hangs on her nose. ‘You see? You see how your tears fall? Like your nose is put there by God to take your tears away. We’re made to hurt. It is the most divine thing we can do in this life.

  ‘Know that everything is pre-destined by the karmic flow. Pain is good. It is redressing the suffering you have caused in a previous life. At the end of the universe, when we have all balanced the ledger of good and bad experience, then all souls in this universe will be one, and nothing will hurt. Suffering is an invitation to grace, and grace is God’s free gift. We don’t deserve it, and we can’t earn it – it goes to whomever the divine wills.

  ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why this is such a spiritual place? Why so many religions are born on this continent? It’s because there has never been a place more beset by famine, war, rape, pestilence. It’s hell on earth, which means that it is heaven in embryo. This is why we built our community here. There is no place in the world more holy than India. There is no place more miserable. These ideas are not unrelated.’

  ‘I know.’ Sasha wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve. ‘It’s just . . . it sucks. You know? It probably wasn’t going to add up to anything, but he didn’t even say goodbye . . .’

  ‘Some people are guided by destinies that we are not meant to understand.’ The guru shrugs. ‘Some people are just trouble.’

  ‘You were right about him.’

  The guru nods once and then says, with some delicacy, ‘Take some time for sadness, but remember that you have responsibilities here. There are many in this community who have come to rely on you. This little romantic adventure may have been necessary, but now that it is over, you must get back to those you’ve neglected.’

  The guru stands and folds her hands. ‘I see you, Sasha, and I love you. It pains me to see you make mistakes. I trust that it won’t happen again. The man was no good, and no good came of him.’

  A final storm, the last gasp of the season, breaks over the coast. For two days a steady patter of rain washes out the roads leading to the ashram.

  Sasha goes back to the schoolhouse, devotes herself to the children. She regrets the time she has been away. The children, whose understanding of discipline and quiet study was always imperfect, have grown rowdy to the point of chaos under Connor’s influence. The boys’ clothes are muddy and torn from roughhousing, and when the girls sit and fold their legs neatly below their desks, Sasha can see vicious bruises from soccer mishaps blooming on their calves. They aren’t disrespectful, not exactly, but the effort it takes to capture their attention would have been enough to give her poor mother – for whom education was everything – another stroke.

  She persists. Through a combination of vicious threats and bags of candy she manages to corral the class long enough to teach them fundamentals for the future: maths, geography, grammar, science.

  Sasha stands at the front of the classroom, takes in the children. They are all so beautiful, boys and girls both, as they sit at their school desks with brilliant grins bisecting their faces, photogenic as a sunset. When they smile, it’s easy to forget there is any bad in the world.

  Still, they struggle. They come to class surly, or hungry, or with black eyes, or will disappear for weeks at a time. A steady curriculum is impossible. Some stop coming all together.

  One day, as Sasha is leading them through their times tables, one of the children in the front row – quiet and pale all through the morning – is suddenly ill. She stands, raises her hand, but too late. She gags and vomit cascades onto her desk.

  The other children scream in horror and delight, hurl themselves away with a clamour of scraping chairs. The poor child bends and pukes her guts up. Sasha takes a deep breath and the stink of bile hits her nose sharp. She dismisses the class, asks the girl to stay behind so she can tend to her.

  The girl is not shy, not exactly. She follows instructions, turning this way and that, breathing in, sticking her tongue out and saying ahhh; doesn’t chat, doesn’t blush, keeps her eyes fixed politely on the floor. She doesn’t react when Sasha raises her shirt to put the cold stethoscope against her chest and back, but flinches when she feels her stomach for swelling.

  ‘Does that hurt?’

  The girl shakes her head.

  Sasha is baffled. The girl’s temperature is up very slightly, but she is by no means running a fever. Her belly is slightly swollen, but she’s reporting no tenderness. Pupil response is normal, no other signs of infection.

  ‘How old are y
ou?’

  The girl shrugs.

  ‘Have you started your period?’

  She blushes, shakes her head.

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘One time.’ She holds up a finger.

  ‘Only the one time? And then you started feeling sick?’ She thinks about it, gently presses her fingers into the child’s belly again to test for tenderness, and this time the girl winces. She stinks of bile and, under that, the deeper, earthier smell of unwashed bodies. This could be a kidney infection, pyelonephritis, any number of things, any of which is going to be hell to treat with the resources she has.

  With great tenderness, and the judicious use of candy, Sasha convinces the girl to provide a urine sample – she decants the pee from the cup into a bottle that she takes back to her bungalow. There are a million things that might be causing the child to suffer, and without a pathology lab she’s really just guessing, but what is practising medicine in this place but guesswork?

  She has a basic field-testing kit with a reactive stick that will be able to confirm kidney infection, which is her leading theory at this point. She waits for it to change colour. No kidney infection, no bacterial infection. She’s stumped, bites her lip – it occurs to her she could be looking at an appendix about to burst, a surgery she has neither the equipment nor the training to perform.

  Then another thought strikes her, remote, ridiculous, but still, the remaining pregnancy tests are right there, in her bag. She dips one into the urine sample, clumsy, and spills it everywhere.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, as the cup and the stick go rolling across the floor. The stick has landed under the bed and she has to get down on her hands to retrieve it, gingerly, wary of the spreading mess. When she brings it up into the light she finds, glowing in cheerful blue, two little bars.

  ‘Well fuck,’ she says.

  Connor has no idea how long he’s been down here, the cramped little dungeon Baba has brought him to. It’s dark, utterly and always, and without any way to mark passage of time he loses all perspective.

  For a while he counts the days off by the stretches of time he is asleep, but this is futile; the beatings come frequently, but at irregular intervals. It seems that every time he nods off he wakes with the toe of Baba’s patent-leather Cuban boots rocketing into his ribs. Sometimes he is woken by a bucket of freezing, piss-smelling water, horrible but welcome, as he has a chance to lick a little of it up before it sinks into the muddy floor, while one of Baba’s goons stands in dazzling silhouette against the door, laughing.

  The first few beatings they have questions – where has he been, what did he do with the pills, where can they find them – but Connor gives the same answer again and again: they are all gone. There is nothing left. After a while the questions stop, but the beatings do not.

  He knows the dimensions of it intimately; in the endless hours he’s explored the feeling of the rough brick walls, the damp dirt floor. He’s had time to map it out by touch, four feet by six feet, one inch at a time.

  In the dark he is overcome by an earthy smell and, underneath that, an animal smell, like that of a barnyard. In time that smell is eclipsed by his own funk – sweat, blood, fear – so strong that when he curls up to sleep on the floor he retches in disgust.

  Connor is out cold when the door swings open. He startles awake, already scrambling away from the blinding triangle of light, whimpering a little. Baba comes in, a complicated expression on his face; disgust, anger, pity. He closes the door behind him, leaving only a crack to let the light in.

  ‘Hello, old friend,’ says Baba. ‘Just like old times.’

  Connor snuffles a little. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘And Sangeeta?’

  Baba snorts. ‘The girl? She’s fine, better than fine.’ He tells Connor he hasn’t laid a finger on her, even after the mauling she gave his men. In fact, he’s impressed, sees potential, thinks she should be on his payroll. Her only real mistake was letting herself get mired in Connor’s shit.

  ‘Why do you have to get strangers tied up in your nonsense?’ Baba sounds genuinely baffled. ‘Why can’t you just stick to the fucking plan?’

  Baba explains that he’s not angry, he’s hurt, which is much worse. He thought he and Connor were friends, had mortgaged a lot of money and credibility with the Shanti Beach police to secure him a second chance. A dead tourist was bad for business, and although Baba talked them around, he regrets that now; Connor is clearly a fuckup, can’t stop hurting people.

  ‘Karma is coming for you, there is no escaping it. But if you apologise to me, tell me where to find the rest of the pills, I will at least make it quick.’

  Connor shakes his head wearily. There are no pills, they are all gone, lost, he’s sold them and pissed the money away. He begs Baba to let him go, give him one more chance to make it up to him.

  Baba looks at him with great pity. ‘You just don’t understand, do you, Connor? Your time’s already up.’ He bangs on the cell door. It swings open and two hulking silhouettes slip into the doorway. Connor whimpers and crawls away from the light.

  The guru’s serene expression falls when Sasha tells her what she has found, but barely – almost imperceptibly. Just a slight dip of the mouth that flickers and is gone. Sitting behind her desk, her pen pauses as it hovers over the page she is writing.

  ‘I see. And the father?’

  Sasha doesn’t know. How could she know? Although she has some suspicions – it must be someone from the ashram, someone who could find time alone with the students, but there’s a dozen possibilities – anyone who volunteers is given the school for the day, can take the children on an excursion through the jungle, to the beach, to the dunes. Or the Seekers who come through, paying thousands of dollars to further their yoga – dozens of them over a season. It could be anyone. It could be everyone. The more she thinks about it, the deeper her dread; the way the orphaned children sit up the back of the class, not talking, quietly drawing. The way they disappear without warning and she never sees them again.

  The guru hears her out, thanks her for bringing it to her attention. Then she returns to her writing, the fountain pen scratching at the paper. Sasha hovers uncertainly, then moves forward and reaches across the table to arrest the guru’s writing hand. She looks up, a slight crease of annoyance between her brows.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ says Sasha.

  The guru slips her hand free of Sasha’s, finishes the sentence she was working on, sighs. ‘We’ll make sure she is compensated. She will find a place in one of the villages, or perhaps stay and work for us if she likes. It’s not really our concern.’

  ‘We have to go to the police.’

  The guru exhales sharply and puts her pen down. She speaks very deliberately in the same lilting tones she uses during class.

  ‘That would be a waste of their time. Who are they supposed to talk to? You don’t even know yourself. No. We do nothing. It’s not our business. You have no idea what her situation is. Maybe she has a boyfriend? Maybe your lover, who has so conveniently disappeared?’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Sasha snaps, but she realises the doubt is there, already in the back of her mind, and the guru is still talking.

  ‘Or perhaps someone from one of the villages? Who knows? Can you imagine the shame you would bring on them? Whole villages would be ruined, because of our vanity and your bourgeois, colonial morality.’

  Sasha is bewildered, lost for words. ‘My . . . what?’

  The guru asks Sasha to remember where she is, that the ashram serves the divine consciousness, and need obey no law beyond that. ‘Our community is a place where people can explore who they are. There are things people will travel a long way for.’ The guru pauses to see if her words are being understood. ‘People pay a lot of money for that freedom.’

  Sasha is staggered. A wave of nausea shudders through her, and she has to place both palms on the desk to steady herself. ‘I don’t believe this. You can�
�t be . . . she’s just a child.’

  ‘And yet in many cultures she would be considered an adult. Forcing your own morals onto a culture you know nothing about is sheer arrogance. There is no evil here, or good; just the balancing of karma. Anything that has happened to the girl is the will of the divine.’ The guru’s mouth twists in disapproval. She looks, for the first time since Sasha has known her, tired. She rises, but her shoulders sag. She walks around the desk until she stands before Sasha, then embraces her.

  ‘You should take some time to consider whether you belong in our community. If you decide you do not, I will remember you with kindness. But you will never be happy without us. If you leave us now, I promise you will regret it.’

  Baba drives with one wrist draped loosely over the wheel, the other on his knee, tapping along to the song on the radio. He moves his hand to the gearstick as the SUV turns off the highway and onto a rough dirt road, but he doesn’t miss a beat.

  Connor sits in the back seat, his hands bound, lurching dizzily every time the car jolts over a pothole. Broken bones; ribs, clavicle, a few fingers, nose. He feels the topography of the road acutely in the damage to his body. The fractures are the least of his worries – some vital cog in his mind has been knocked loose. His thoughts are slippery, and his field of vision keeps glitching as he tries to focus. Whatever he concentrates on slips away from him like a TV losing tracking.

  He’s flanked by two of Baba’s goons – white, enormous, dressed in singlets and shorts that show off the stars tattooed on their knees. The one to his left has an elaborate tattoo of the Kremlin across his back, the spires reaching up from under his tank-top.

  Connor looks to the rear-view mirror and catches Baba’s eye. He is grinning. ‘I bet you never thought you were going to get killed by someone wearing chappals, did you?’

  Connor tries his jaw, finds it more-or-less intact. ‘We call them thongs. But no.’