Karma Gone Bad

by Jenny Feldon

  I saw, I typed back. It was beautiful.

  Chapter 9

  “I just don’t get why everything has to be complicated,” I said. “It’s always no when it should be yes, or yes when it should be no. It’s like they see my white face and decide to sell me the biggest line of bullshit they can come up with.”

  “We’re always going to be outsiders. There’s just no way around it.” Alexis flipped through a dog-eared guidebook. “Can you believe this place used to be the diamond-mining capital of the world?”

  “Really? I thought Golkonda was a fortress or something.”

  “It was both. According to this, the Hope Diamond was mined here.”

  “Isn’t that the one that was cursed, the one that got Marie Antoinette beheaded or something?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Figures.”

  We drove past a baobab tree, ancient and massive, protected from a crowd of Indian tourists by a tall metal fence.

  “Elephant Tree, Ma’ams,” Younus yelled over the techno music blasting from the speakers. “Much famous Hyderabad. Criminals hiding inside in olden times.” With all those bulbous earlike branches, the tree did look sort of elephantlike.

  Just beyond the tree was Golkonda fort itself. Majestic and broken, it towered over grassy green hills. The six-kilometer ride from the city had been the usual combination of empty fields and dry, dusty desert. But now there was an explosion of color. It was like we’d stumbled into Middle Earth. Any minute, I expected orcs and hobbits to scramble over the crumbling battlements.

  Younus followed us out of the car.

  “I told him he could come with us,” Alexis said. “He’s driven here dozens of times but never been inside.”

  “Come on, Younus,” I called, beckoning for him to catch up and walk with us. But he shook his head, staying a few carefully measured paces behind.

  At the entrance gates, a tour guide took our admission fees—the five rupee “Indian rate” for Younus, one hundred each for Alexis and me—and handed us a site map. “Don’t forget to clap at the entrance to the main hall,” she said, demonstrating. “It is the most wonderful feature of Golkonda. Your clap will be heard all the way at the pavilion summit. It is how the guards used to warn the Kakatiyas against invasions by the Mughals.”

  The grounds spread out before us. Hallways leading to ancient tombs, gates to gardens that were once magnificent, but now ruined with age and neglect. There was a ceremony taking place in a darkened anteroom; through the doorway, I glimpsed an arrangement of spices in brass bowls, dozens of flower petals in patterns on the floor, and a man leading a goat on a wooden rope toward a makeshift altar. I looked away fast. Something told me the goat wasn’t just there as a guest.

  “Where should we go first?” Alexis asked, looking at the map.

  “Let’s do the steps before it gets too hot. We can eat lunch up on the pavilion.” I pointed to an entryway that led straight through the outer palace to the beginning of a winding path.

  “Wait,” Alexis said, grabbing my arm. “We forgot to clap.”

  On a silent count of three, we clapped. The sharp sound echoed louder off the clay walls, vibrations climbing higher and higher until they disappeared altogether, making their magical acoustic ascent to the summit. I wondered what it sounded like on the other end, if the clap was an exact replica or if it got altered in the translation. How could something as insignificant as a hand clap, so small, fleeting, and precise, exist in two places at once without losing its essence along the way?

  With Younus following a few steps behind, we began to climb. The ruins spread out on either side of the uphill path. There were 382 steps to the top, haphazardly placed, winding up the side of a cliff strewn with boulders and debris. Daily scenes, like hieroglyphics, were scratched into the crumbling granite walls. There was a Hindu temple carved into the side of a giant boulder, with painted murals of a blue-skinned goddess with four arms and a fierce, red tongue adorning the sides.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am! Please, will you photograph with us?”

  A family of Indian tourists was clustered at the front of the temple, posing for pictures. The photographer, a man, gestured frantically for Alexis and me to join the group. I looked at Alexis. She shrugged. We stepped respectfully to the back. Alexis and I were around the same height, barely five foot five, but we were a full head taller than anyone else in the frame.

  “Neeli aankhen! Neeli aankhen! Blue eyes, blue eyes!” a little girl cried. We were jostled and bumped to the front of the crowd as the family crowded around us, each of them wanting to be immortalized in their vacation album standing next to a blue-eyed white person.

  “Blue eyes,” I hissed to Alexis. “Do you think that’s why they want us in the pictures?”

  “Maybe,” she whispered back through lips frozen in a camera smile. “Do you think they’re almost done?”

  Finally we pulled away, amid a chorus of elated thank-yous. We’d barely climbed another few steps before a second group pulled us off the path and requested pictures of their own. We looked to Younus for help, but he just laughed, sipping water from a paper cone while he waited.

  Four rounds of photographs later, we made it to the next level, where a mosque topped with four minarets stood overlooking the vast green lawns below. I collapsed against the side of the cliff, hot and thirsty and out of breath. A giggle from behind made me turn around, alarmed. Alexis, snapping photos of the minarets against the cloudy sky, turned too.

  A gaggle of preteen boys, lanky and barefoot, leaned backward over the metal railing, watching us and laughing. Younus glowered in their direction. Disappointed that my moment of rest was cut short, I heaved to my feet and started to climb again, slowly, hoping they’d get bored and move past us. But the boys hung back, mere steps behind me, so close their presence made the skin on my lower back prickle.

  The gang followed us up the winding stairs, whisper-quiet in one moment, raucous with teenage hilarity in the next. Their relentless attention felt worse than the staring I’d begun to accept as a fact of Indian life. I didn’t feel unsafe, exactly, especially with Alexis by my side and Younus trailing faithfully below. But the boys knew, as so many teenage boys do, which buttons to push to make me feel uncomfortable. A tense, threatening vibration between us stopped just short of danger.

  We passed the minarets. The summit, and the looming pavilion above, was almost within reach. I wished I’d counted the steps as we climbed; I had the sudden, intense longing to know exactly which step I stood on, how many more lay between me and the place I was trying to go.

  Alexis glared at our unwelcome entourage. “They’re kind of ruining this for me. Do you want to turn back?”

  I took one more glance toward the top and suddenly felt defeated.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  We took the downward stairs double-time. Younus, sensing our urgency, ran ahead, carving a path through the packs of Indian tourists who reached out and grabbed our arms, begging for pictures. The pack of boys was relentless, cackling at our heels. I’d come here to be a tourist, to marvel at ancient ruins and appreciate the culture of my adopted city. Instead, Alexis and I became the real tourist attraction, our otherness ten times more compelling than the crumbling fortress beneath our feet.

  ***

  “Ma’am, is something not to your liking?” asked Jena, wringing his hands. “Is your favorite dish, no? Can I be making you something other?”

  I’d been pushing a pile of aloo palak, creamed spinach with potatoes, around my plate for the past half hour. Jay and Anish talked on, oblivious, about their latest work crisis. Next to me, Anish’s wife Sunita smiled encouragingly. I knew how important it was to Jay that I make a good impression on his favorite colleague, but every time I opened my mouth to speak, I couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say.

  “Jay tells me you went visiting a
t Golkonda today,” Sunita said. She wore an exquisite turquoise salwar suit in thick raw silk. Tiny gold-edged mirrors adorned her bell-shaped sleeves, and a dozen filigree bangles dangled from her slender wrists. She scooped up a portion of rice with a piece of tandoori roti. “It’s always been one of my favorite places in Hyderabad. Did you make your way to the summit?”

  “No,” I admitted. “We wanted to, but…something stopped us along the way.” I explained about the boys, the tourists with their cameras, the stares.

  “Hyderabad is a wonderful city,” Sunita said, looking out over the balcony to the rush of traffic below. “There is culture here. Much strength. My family has lived here for centuries; we are proud of our history. But all this, it is moving very fast. We are not like the big cities, Delhi, Mumbai. It will take us some time to grow into the new Hyderabad. We were very accustomed to the old.”

  She looked at me with understanding. “My whole life I have been close to family. My children run in and out of my house, into their aunts’ and cousins’ houses, cared for by their grandparents the same as by their mum and dad. This is what home means to us. I imagine a life without family would be very lonely for you, when you and Jay are being so very far away.”

  “Yes,” I said, playing with the tablecloth. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Jay says your children are lovely. Do you have pictures?”

  Sunita reached into her bag and pulled out a folding cascade of snapshots. I examined each one with an enthusiasm I only half-felt. I envied her connectedness—to her husband, to her children, to her city. To Sunita, “home” was something identifiable and real. But my home wasn’t anywhere. My life in New York, and the person I’d been there, felt a million miles away. We still hadn’t found a home of our own in Hyderabad, and the Matwala Shayar flat felt more foreign every day. I didn’t know where I belonged anymore. If anywhere would feel like “home” again.

  MONSOON SEASON

  Chapter 10

  Sightseeing. Indian food. Food poisoning.

  Grocery shopping. Chai stand. Food poisoning.

  Bookstore. Coffee Day. Food poisoning.

  Walk the dog. Take a nap. Do the laundry. Food poisoning.

  Repeat.

  Repeat.

  Repeat.

  Somewhere between episodes of “Delhi belly,” as my weak American stomach rejected everything from Indian biryani to Indian bananas, I realized that for all my fretting about the laundry and the groceries, I’d failed to address even half of the task at hand. I’d given up my job, put my writing career on hold, left behind everything to become the world’s most perfect expat housewife…and then forgot all about the word “wife.”

  Secretly, I loved the idea of turning into ’50s June Cleaver: cookies in the oven, lacy apron starched white, pink-lipsticked smile over perfectly even, TV-Land teeth. Welcome home, dear. Here are your slippers. How was your day? Wifely responsibilities didn’t just include putting roasted chickens on the table and making sure everybody had clean socks. Women were supposed to nurture their families, be good listeners, right wrongs. But in the first year of my marriage, the same intimacy shorthand we’d employed when we were dating seemed to do the job just fine.

  Even in New York, Jay worked all the time. I was a graduate student working a full-time job. In the odd hours we spent together, we tossed “sharing” and “listening” back and forth like hot potatoes, going through relationship motions as fast as possible on the way to something else: dinner reservations or a movie screening or the dog park. It was like those hospital dramas where the writers, who don’t know any actual medical terminology, fill their scripts with “MEDICAL! MEDICAL!” in places where real doctors and nurses would yell things like “CODE BLUE!” or “Blood pressure one-ten over sixty!” or whatever. Later, real medical professionals would go through the scripts, making the scenarios feasible and inserting proper technical dialogue in all the right places. But Jay and I had no such professionals.

  “Graduate Thesis! Graduate Thesis!” I’d say. To which Jay would nod sympathetically for a minute, eyes on his BlackBerry. And then he’d say: “Fraud Investigation! Fraud Investigation!” And I would cluck my tongue and smile, my yellow highlighter never missing a stroke across the pages of Anna Karenina.

  Jay and I talked to each other. We supported each other. Even at our worst, we loved each other like crazy. But in seven years together, seven so very busy years where we were traveling and corporate-ladder-climbing and studying and working and partying, did we ever really talk to each other? Or were we just throwing out terms like wobbly Little League pitches, imprecise but cheered for anyway, a mutual unspoken agreement to swing regardless of what was actually coming over the plate?

  Six years of dating before we tied the knot made us complacent. There had been an indefinable moment when I’d stopped listening, stopped taking in new information about the man I’d chosen to spend the rest of my life with. I had the basics down: intelligent, funny, handsome, affectionate, driven. Flips pizza dough in the air with one hand. Wears long-sleeved shirts in 100 degree weather. Will make an incredible dad one day. And then once all that settled into gray matter, as permanent as if it were carved in stone, somehow I stopped paying attention. I had only the most rudimentary grasp on concepts that, as his wife, I should have understood as effortlessly as the multiplication tables I’d memorized in third grade.

  It was only after six weeks in the damp mustiness of the Matwala Shayar flat, countless hours of toilet bowl hugging and traffic, groceries and boredom, even more hours spent waiting for Jay to come home and tell me about his day, his job, his career—to give me the chance to prove how very June Cleaver I could be—that I realized we’d screwed up some key element of communication in a tragic, fundamental way. Because when he did come home and told me about his day and his job and his career…I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

  It didn’t help that we were never alone.

  Privacy just wasn’t an operating concept in India—somebody was always around. Venkat, Subu with his key and his unannounced visits, Ritu with the laundry deliveries. The cleaning ladies with their stick brooms and their downcast eyes. And those were just the people who were around out of necessity and Indian custom. It’s hard to properly dote on your husband when there are ten other people at the table, drinking Kingfisher and yelling over each other, waving pieces of tandoori roti in the air for emphasis.

  “Technology! Technology!”

  “Gigabyte! Gigabyte!”

  I was perpetually in the background, Jay’s plus-one. The person who didn’t have any reason to be in India except that legally, I was supposed to do whatever he did and go wherever he went. But nowhere in my marriage vows had it said I promise to follow you to a third-world country and smile politely while you drag me along to work dinners and ignore me until the car ride home.

  In New York, we’d rarely been alone either—there were too many friends to see, social gatherings to attend. Jay and I chatted in the backs of cabs on the way to other places, which gave us just enough alone time to hit the highlights (“Writer’s Workshop! Writer’s Workshop!” “Forensics! Forensics!”) before we morphed into our other, public selves, drifting away into separate conversations, coming back together for a quick kiss, a drink refill, a slight nod that meant come on, babe, it’s time to go home.

  However flawed, it was a system that worked. We were happy. We fought about normal stuff like credit cards bills and paint colors for the bathroom wall. On Sundays, we’d cook together in our tiny kitchen or curl up on the couch with a DVD and a batch of homemade popcorn, making up for the rest of the we’re so busy, disconnected week. Those small moments where the whole world was just about the two of us were enough to make everything else feel balanced.

  Part of this housewife thing, I knew, was to be shiny and bubbly and supportive, a yin to his yang, an anchor of support in the rocky professional waters he was nav
igating. In New York, I took my corporate wife role seriously, trying for the perfect blend of charm and grace. When it came to steering conversations away from office talk, I always had something to bring to the table. I was a whole person, interesting and ambitious, enjoyable to be around.

  In Hyderabad, I had no job, no academic career, no New York Post to give me worldly knowledge or celebrity gossip. The Times of India was filled with Bollywood celebrity sightings and random acts of violence and horror: wife slayings, accidental drownings, cooking fire mishaps. My days consisted of Ragu-scavenging trips to Q-Mart, walks with Tucker, and naps on the living room sofa. Not exactly fascinating stories to tell over non-veg appetizers at Fusion 9.

  Jay was flourishing. He grew more vibrant and Technicolor with each passing day. All those years of not paying attention to the nuances of his career left me wide open to be dazzled by him now: his tenacity, his innovations, his success in circumstances that would drive others straight down the path to failure. India, no matter what the sacrifices were, had been the right choice for him.

  But if India was making him sharper and clearer, proving his rising stardom in his complicated, corporate world, it was making me fade. Spending entire days being stared at and misunderstood—ignorant of the language, ignorant of the culture—was making the old, charming me disappear. Frustration and bitterness hung over my head like thunderclouds, coloring my moods dark. Struggling to survive food poisoning and teaching Tucker not to attack Subu was not enough to keep me sane. I needed more.

  “Maybe you should get a job,” Kyle suggested over pizza at Little Italy. The novelty of Chef Boyardee-inspired cuisine had long since worn off, but we still somehow ended up there several nights a week.