Karma Gone Bad

by Jenny Feldon

  “Doing what? And besides, I don’t have a work visa.”

  “I could hire you. Do you know how to play video games?”

  I brightened for a moment. “You mean, like Super Mario Brothers? Or Donkey Kong? I used to be awesome at Donkey Kong.”

  Kyle grimaced. “I meant something a little more…current.”

  “What about tutoring people in English?” Diana suggested, dipping a piece of garlic roti in a bowl of tomato sauce. Her blond hair, tied back in a messy bun, caused several people to stop by our table and stare.

  “I’d need to speak Hindi for that. Or Telugu. I’m having enough communication problems on my own. I probably shouldn’t be responsible for anyone else’s.”

  Jay looked up from his BlackBerry. “Well, there’s always waitressing,” he said, nodding toward a man staggering under a platter of giant trays. “Maybe Little Italy is hiring.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said.

  “Who said I was joking?”

  Every couple of days, in that brief evening window when the electricity stayed on, I tried to write. For all the bragging I’d done about coming home from India with the world’s greatest novel tucked under my arm, I’d never felt less like a writer in my life. My heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to dash off exciting posts about third-world adventures, but when my fingertips touched the keyboard, still all that came out were my frustrations about Pizza Corner, anecdotes about Tucker, and my lingering fear of cows. The manuscript for the novel I’d been working on remained untouched.

  It was the middle of July and unbearably hot. There were actual thunderclouds in the sky every day, but no storm ever came. Every day was the same: dull, smoggy. Life was an ever-brewing storm, never breaking, a permanent state of just about to happen. The heat was so thick it felt three-dimensional, like you could scoop it out of the air and mold it like clay. There was constant, invisible pressure in the air, contradicting movement, making normal things like walking and breathing and smiling feel like herculean tasks.

  “Rain coming, Madam,” Venkat said each morning, staring moodily through the Scorpio’s dirty windshield. “Rain coming soon.”

  “How soon, Venkat? When are the rains coming?” I couldn’t wait for the monsoons. They were late this year—according to the calendar in Lonely Planet, they should have started weeks ago. I’d always loved the rain. It made me feel peaceful, hopeful, like the world was being drenched with new possibilities. I loved the sound of raindrops against windows and splashing in puddles with my tall green Hunter rain boots (a major score on sale at Bloomingdales). Rainy days in New York were my favorites—cozy inside with books and soup and blankets, Tucker curled up in my lap.

  The word “monsoon” made regular rain sound exotic and fun. Monsoon Wedding was one of my favorite movies. Secretly, I was hoping it would be like that: all romance and excitement and dancing on the sidewalks, with drops that shimmered down from the sky and made everything prettier. A change in season was just what Jay and I needed. A new outlook on life for me, something to drag me out of the slump I was in. And for Jay, something to distract him from the nonstop work and the office drama. A wet reminder that life was still spinning outside Region 10’s walls. Hey! This is India! Come outside and get wet!

  Venkat didn’t seem so excited about the monsoon. As the days passed and the rains still lingered behind a curtain of ominous clouds, his mood grew darker. I tried to cheer him up.

  “Look, Venkat. That guy is lighting his cooking fire with lighter fluid! No safety!”

  He didn’t even look up. I wasn’t used to this kind of a role reversal. Usually I pouted in the back while he tried to lift my spirits with the most jaw-droppingly dangerous things he could find. He pointed out collapsing temples and hand-strung scaffolding and exposed power lines—whatever he thought might make me smile or gasp or recoil in horror. I didn’t know what to do with this sullen, withdrawn Venkat.

  “Is there something wrong, Venkat?” I asked one afternoon. We were on our way to Shilparamam, the local craft village. Sunita had recommended the artisan bungalows there when I’d mentioned wanting to do some souvenir shopping. I leaned forward into the front seat so I could read his expression beneath his pulled-down beanie. Wearing the hat was a bad sign too; Venkat’s greatest pleasure in life was styling and restyling his glossy black hair. When the beanie came out, it either meant it was “cold” outside…or that something was weighing on his mind.

  “No rain so long, meaning bad rains, Madam,” he replied, dark eyebrows knit downward. He looked, in that moment, less like the rakish teenager he was and more like a middle-aged man, careworn. “I am fear for mine mother and sisters in mine village. Bad rains, no good fortune. No fruits. Animals dying, bringing fever to water. Much danger.”

  “You mean because the monsoons haven’t started yet, they’ll be worse?”

  “Yes. More worse. Rains bad, bad for mine village. Bad Hyderabad.” He scowled deeper, then brightened and patted the wheel of the Scorpio. “But you and Jay Sir lucky, buying much good car. Much safety in the rains.”

  Venkat’s first vehicle had been a tractor on his village’s farm. From there he’d graduated to driving the “biscuit truck,” a delivery lorry for a local Indian company cookie manufacturer, which Venkat drove back and forth from Hyderabad to Bangalore twice a week. Finally, he’d logged enough driving hours to move to the city and become a “personal driver,” the most prestigious and highly coveted transportation job of all. But Venkat was a farmer at heart. Someday, he’d go back to his village to raise livestock and tend fields, his memories of city life fading as the years went by.

  We pulled up outside the towering, dusty clay walls of Shilparamam. Two stone warriors on horseback, painted red and gold, stood two stories high in front of the elaborate entrance gates. Tucker was along for the ride. Since the craft village was outside, I figured no one would mind if he walked with me on his leash along the greens. I paid twenty-five rupees to the guard at the gate and kept Tucker hidden in my bag. Here, at least, there was no inflated foreigner admission fee.

  Shilparamam was enormous, sixty-five acres that stretched across an otherwise empty expanse along Madhapur Road just outside of HITEC City. Craft artisans from all over India came to sell their creations to tourists and locals alike. At night, the whole place was lit up with red and green lights. Several nights a week there were live concerts. Hundreds of people would line up at the gates. Pushcart vendors hawked their wares long into the night—heart-shaped helium balloons, fresh young coconuts with painted wooden straws, steaming mounds of sweet-spicy chaat, and greasy yellow pani puri dough balls.

  But during weekday daylight hours, Shilparamam was all but abandoned. Tucker and I went unnoticed as we walked around the greens. Everywhere square plots of sod were stacked two and three feet high, waiting to be turned into the green grass checkerboards that passed as lawns in Hyderabad. A grounds man in billowing red harem pants was trimming a patch of grass with a pair of huge brass scissors. Tucker sniffed at an empty fountain and lifted a leg. I glared at him. He put it down and trotted back to my side.

  The craft huts themselves were tiny, with baked clay walls and thatched roofs. It was midday and hot. Many of the artisans had stretched out on woven rugs to take naps or sat cross-legged inside their huts, scooping up handfuls of rice and yellow lentil dal from steel lunch pails called tiffins. Trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible, I moved from stall to stall, admiring hand-carved Ganesh key chains and woven prayer blankets and papier-mâché bracelets. They’d make perfect souvenirs to send back to the life I’d left behind.

  As the vendors finished their lunches and woke from their naps, they observed my progress with ravenous eyes, beckoning me with gestures and guttural, incomprehensible clicks of the tongue. I smiled and tried not to make eye contact, which I knew would open the door to a hard-sell that rivaled the ones from the faux-Louis Vuitton peddlers on Can
al Street.

  At a booth selling gorgeous dyed leather bags—hand-laced, weathered, and soft to the touch—I caved and looked the elated artisan straight in the eye.

  “Kitne?” How much? One of my only Indian phrases so far, other than dhanyavad or shukriya for “thank-you” and kuta for “dog.”

  “Ah, lovely American lady, for you, two thousand rupees only. Made from the finest buffalo leather. So very soft for you to be touching, carrying needs for all essentials.” The man—shirtless in a maroon dhoti, scarred arms stained with dye from fingertips to elbows—pulled the prettiest bag off the hut’s display table and stroked it suggestively with his fingers. The bag was a golden saffron yellow, casting a bright, tempting glow in the afternoon’s gloom.

  “Too much,” I murmured, moving ahead to a rack of leather slippers covered with gold embroidery.

  “No, no too much. Is bargain, you will never be of finding such authentic fine item where you are from. You are from London, Australia, yes, Ma’am?” He sidled close, not quite touching me, but enough to force me to take a step back.

  Tucker, back in my bag so as to attract less attention, popped his head up and growled, sensing someone invading our personal space. The leather man shouted and leapt back, horrified. Only a moment passed before he recovered, turning the shocking discovery of a small white dog in my purse into a sales pitch.

  “Ah, I see you have the finest taste and need for the strongest materials,” he said, holding out the yellow bag again. “Look where there is room for your animal, your mobile, your money and possessions, all strong and much secure where you are needing it to be.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Five hundred and my family is starving, Madam. Five hundred and my hands are being stained and broken for nothing. To make my family suffer in this way is much cruelty.”

  His tone suggested this wasn’t at all true, but I caved anyway. Jay would kill me if he knew this conversation was happening. He was a ruthless negotiator. I, on the other hand, was the world’s biggest pushover.

  “One thousand. Final offer.” I reached into my bag and took two five-hundred rupee notes from my wallet. I needed to ditch the YSL anyway. I hated to admit Carole was right, but the purse was frivolous and impractical in Hyderabad, mocking me with my naïve fantasies every time I picked it up. The yellow bag might not be designer, but at least it was one-of-a-kind, handmade by a tradesman who would use my thousand rupees (which was how much, again?) to feed his family. I hoped.

  The leather man snatched the bills from my fingers in a practiced, invisible movement. He hid the rupees in the folds of his dhoti and handed me the bag with an elaborate bow. I smiled and thanked him.

  CRACK. There was a clap of thunder, so loud I could feel it vibrate down through the base of my spine. Tucker whimpered. Storms, like fireworks, terrified him. I looked around and saw mayhem. The vendors were throwing grass mats over their clay bungalows as fast as they could, dumping items into plastic trash bins, racing back and forth in total panic. I looked at the sky, trying to see what they saw, and then the clouds opened up and it was Armageddon.

  Rain. Not droplets, not even sheets, but oceans of rain crashed down from the sky. Already water was pooling around my ankles, rust-colored, mosquitoes swarming in from nowhere to take part in the madness. I shielded Tucker with my body and ran as fast as I could toward the exit. In seconds I was drenched—rain sluicing off my body, jeans water-logged, T-shirt soaked and see-through. My flip-flops skidded in the mud as I hurtled through the iron gates and straight into the Scorpio’s open back door, boosted in by an already-waiting Venkat. His wool beanie was soaked through, dripping into his eyes as he climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine. The monsoon’s arrival seemed to have lifted his cloud of anxiety.

  “Rain coming, Madam. No good rain coming,” he said with a grin.

  I rubbed at Tucker’s fur with tissues. He was soaked through and shivering, half his normal size without his fluffy pile of white fur. His skin was freckled and pink. He looked miserable and confused, more drowned rat than purebred dog.

  The streets were chaos. Not the usual, controlled, life-in-India chaos I was getting used to, but the sheer madness of panic and survival. The roads were already bottled up with cars, horns shrieking over the crash of water that continued to pour from the sky. The Scorpio glided along, steady and sure, over the muddied dirt roads. For once, I was grateful for the hulking, diesel-sucking Scorpio. The smaller cars, tiny Tatas and Marutis, were hydroplaning dangerously. Cars were stranded along the side of the road, some of them abandoned, others with worried faces inside, pressed up against the fogged glass windows, watching the rain. Most terrifying of all was watching the motorcycles—average number of passengers, four—tip frantically back and forth, riders clinging to each other, the drivers stoic and determined to keep themselves balanced on the undulating road.

  Animals were everywhere. Chickens, dogs, the ever-present buffalo—it was like all of India’s living things had come out to brave the monsoon together. There was nowhere for them to take shelter. For the first time, the story in the Bible about Noah and his ark didn’t seem so far-fetched after all. A pair of soaking-wet goats circled an abandoned motorcycle, nuzzling against it like a long-lost mother. Venkat seemed to feel for the plight of the goats more than the people who were huddled together on the side of the road, cowering under newspapers and plastic bags, helpless and immobilized by the deluge.

  “Goats sad,” Venkat said. “Much wet. No good fortune being for goats.”

  “Do you have goats in your village?”

  “Yes, many. Making cheese and milk. My village will keep them no wet,” he said, shooting an accusatory scowl toward the absent, negligent goat owners responsible for the ones currently suffering beside the Scorpio. “No taking good care of goats, no good fortune for peoples.” I tried to reconcile these two Venkats in my mind, the baggy-jeaned swaggering one who loved loud music and street chaat and hair gel, and the gentle, goat-protecting farmer he must have been before he left his village.

  The Scorpio inched through the streets. The windshield wipers worked furiously. The rain had done nothing to abate the heat; steam rose up in columns from the street, shrouding everything in dense, soaked fog. Venkat hunched over the wheel, navigating the treacherous roads with confident determination. He saw me watching and read my mind.

  “Mine driving good, Madam. Much safety.”

  The rain beat down against the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of Jay’s office building. The security guard, swaddled in a garbage bag, waved us through from the safety of his small booth without bothering to check Venkat’s personal driver badge. We pulled down into the parking lot of C block. Jay was already waiting by the elevator.

  “This is crazy,” he said, climbing in beside me. “I was watching from the windows. There’s, like, roosters floating downstream out there.”

  I curled against him, Tucker still shivering in the crook of my elbow.

  “You’re wet! And what on earth happened to the dog?”

  “We got caught in the rain. I’m freezing. Make me warm.”

  Jay pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around me. I pressed closer to him.

  “You don’t have a dinner tonight?”

  “Everyone left early because of the rain. It’s a bad night to be on the roads. I thought we’d just grab Pizza Corner on the way home. Extra cheese American style, thin crust no veg,” he teased, bobbling his head. He picked up his BlackBerry, started to scroll.

  “Don’t. Please. Just for the ride home. Just be with me.”

  To my surprise, he nodded and put the phone in his briefcase. The rains crashed down around us, beating furiously on the Scorpio’s roof, sluicing across the windows and turning the world blurry and dark. The orange glow of headlights lit the path before us, only a few feet visible, blind faith and Venkat steering us forward. In th
at moment, there was only us, and the dog, and the rain. I wanted to stay there forever, wrapped in Jay’s jacket, shivering in his arms, safe and close while the monsoon turned the world to chaos around us.

  Chapter 11

  July passed into August. It rained for weeks and weeks, just like the guidebooks promised. Rivers and oceans of rain, rain so infinite that you forgot any other state of being was possible. Every afternoon, just for a few minutes, the downpours would stop. A held breath like a baby’s hiccup, an eerie pause where the sudden absence of sound was somehow louder than the roaring of the storm itself. The clouds would roll and shift and I would run outside to the parking lot to walk Tucker before the sky cracked open and it all started again. And then, there was no better excuse to hole up inside in my sweatpants with a stack of books and a cup of chai.

  At first, the monsoons were as beautiful as I’d imagined. The skies filled with rainbows that peeked from behind power lines and half-demolished buildings, the dichotomy making the majestic arches all the more magical. In the mornings, children ran from their tent villages, racing into the fields holding lumps of soap made from sandalwood oil. Boys and girls chased each other across the muddied earth and lathered themselves with giant clouds of suds. The air was full of the soap’s woodsy fragrance and the hypnotizing sound of their laughter. Naked and gleeful, spared from their usual tasks, the children played games in the rain, opening their mouths to taste the drops the way I’d tasted snowflakes on cold winter days.

  But the monsoons were terrible too. The streets were thick with water, every surface covered with slow-moving rivers of feces, waste, and debris, knee-deep in places, toxic everywhere. In a city that had endured monsoon season for centuries, the total lack of drainage was mystifying. Despite the never-ending construction, there was no new infrastructure in place to prevent or restore the damage: fallen trees, ripped-out power lines, dead animals floating downstream. Posters that shouted Beware Typhoid—Do Not Walk! and Caution: Danger of Cholera! printed on official green-and-white City of Hyderabad paper in English, Hindi, and Telugu were plastered on every electrical pole. The poles themselves—fraying wire bundles shooting sparks toward the ground, the occasional stray cable flailing in the hurling winds—were hardly the place for the warnings.