The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  “No, sir,” I heard him say as the children took hold, “it is forty rupees.”

  They were shouting and pushing each other to shake my hand. Some of the young boys shook my hand elaborately or with such force I began to worry that they could overpower me. The girls were less secure in their interactions with me. The boys crowded them out. I pulled out the address for one of them who was eagerly asking, “are you lost?”

  He stared at the square of paper for some time, rubbing his thumb across it as the others looked on.

  “English?” he asked finally.

  I read the street name off the paper. The children just looked enthusiastic and confused. I put it away and started walking, losing some of them to their street games and to the ice-cream stands. The streets were dominated by the gem trade. Workers sat hovered over rotating wheels, refining gems at the end of their sticks. There were jewelry shops boasting custom work and silver. The men stood in their doorways, calling me in.

  I would see him in a doorway, too, and my recognition would be immediate, and he would know by the way I hesitated to step any further that I had come for something impossible.

  I did not see him though, and when I asked the other shopkeepers they did not know the street I tried to pronounce. I began to think he must have written this name to confuse them—when they said it to themselves their minds went blank.

  I wanted to look into every doorway, see behind every curtain. The address he’d written was a hoax, a screen. But there was a part of me already resigned not to find him. I thought of us on that train—had we spoken at all? When I imagine us speaking now, there is a subtext of futility that drowns out our words.

  I entered a shop. The man in the doorway offered chai. His expression was gentle and assuring as he put his arm around my shoulder. I realized that I wanted John to tell me I wasn’t sick, no more than any other tourist, and that I wasn’t alone. The man displayed a tray of rings.

  I was looking at the stones. I was crying. The shopkeeper noticed at the same instant.

  “It’s just dust in my eye,” I told him, and took the tissue he offered. I pointed to the center of the tray. “Is this a Star of Burma?” I asked.

  “Very good,” he said excitedly, “do you know how you can tell their value?” He didn’t need to be a good salesman, but he was.

  “Can’t someone wire you the money from the States?” he asked, when I told him the price would break me.

  “Yes, I can take your traveler’s checks at a very good rate,” he persisted.

  I shuffled the last of my checks. This is another three months in India, I thought as I endorsed them. Somehow, I felt free of the burden of watching them diminish.

  The white star is like a blossom trapped in the pink stone, like-something alive in a glass ball. You judge the value of the stone by the fullness of its star, by the spears of light it emits.

  “You can sell this for hundreds of dollars back home,” he said, but it fit my finger perfectly.

  It was raining when I left his shop. I greeted it with the same enthusiasm I’d seen the Indians show at the train station. It was a brief rain, and there was a strange feeling of relief when it stopped. I came out of an alleyway to a large, paved street and hailed a rickshaw. The driver did not respond when I said Evergreen Hotel, but he began pedaling when I said Nevergreen. I thought of the name, and how it made the drivers laugh and I wondered if they’d ever thought it might apply to them, to their life in the desert, to its barrenness. Perhaps they only needed that light sprinkle of rain to assure them that all things come back

  And later, when the hotel guests sat laughing and talking around the tables as the sun sank behind the carnival lights, I wondered how they drew their strength and where their laughter came from. I wondered if they didn’t cling to their separateness, to the fact that they were tourists. And maybe it is better to travel with a camera, to consign those needy faces to paper, or to write letters, taking control over each story as you retell it. Even a distant observer of India could believe he had the power to save her people from anonymity, from their numbers. A photo makes them the object of someone’s love, and they will carefully assemble themselves before the camera as though it was a wedding picture, their marriage to you—just for looking at them.

  I could hear the crickets and the waiters squatting in a row, singing to themselves as they washed the plates in large tubs. The sun had set, and many of the tourists had dispersed, either to their rooms or out for the evening. I did not want to go to my room. It meant looking at myself in the mirror, taking off my clothes, and counting the ribs and notches of spine. There were sweet flowers outside that enabled me to forget the smell of my body. When I looked at my face in a mirror, I saw the face of a beggar, the white paste on my lips from dehydration, the skull that seemed to be rubbing out the skin. In my eyes, I saw the remoteness of my lover’s eyes.

  A plate fell from a waiter’s hands and shattered. The last tourists laughed and applauded. But soon afterward, they gathered their things and went inside.

  In my room, I rolled my clothes into my suitcase. I went through my money belt. It scared me then—when I realized how little money I had left. It was as though I had put a pressure on myself to expire before it did. I almost hoped that I would, so I would not have to depend on mercy.

  5.

  The busride to Pushkar brought on a fever that ravaged me for a week. The bus was cramped with people. The seats were filled with mothers and infants. I pushed my way to the back of the bus and leaned against a rusted exit door. We were jostled back and forth over the unpaved roads that wound their way up the desert mountains. The people stood very close and still, shielding their eyes from the sand blowing in the windows and the brightness of the sun, which bleached out the landscape. The exhaust fumes were coming up from the floor of the bus, and I became drowsy and short of breath. I’d catch myself sleeping while holding myself upright. I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming the faces gathered around me, the Indian faces watching and laughing. I let my knees slacken and fell almost instantly asleep on my bag. But I soon felt them nudging me awake, shouting over the space I was taking up. They pulled me to my feet and were laughing again. I stood there with my head toppled forward like a puppet for their amusement.

  By the time we reached Pushkar, I had vomited out a back window and had begun feeling the dizzy signs of fever. I felt shame amongst the others and kept my arm crossed over my face. When the bus pulled in, I waited for the others to gather their bags and leave the bus before I began to drag my own bag behind me.

  A young boy approached me. I was standing still at the center of the activity. The driver was distributing the baggage alongside the bus, and the vendors wove their way through the new arrivals with food and strung flowers hanging from their arms. The boy offered to take the bag for me.

  “I will take you to my uncle’s lodge,” he said. He was wearing the customary earrings of the Rajasthani villagers, sixpetaled flowers with rubies, sapphires, or diamonds on each petal. The men wear them in both ears, and it seems to make them all soft around the eyes. His long, black eyelashes made him look both feminine and sad. We walked silendy together. There are no rickshaws in Pushkar, and the road was quiet and untraveled.

  Pushkar is a small village, a ring of civilization around a lake. The lake is holy; it is claimed to be the footprint of Brahma, and the businesses around it have sprung up like mushrooms. But the businesses are seasonal operations and haven’t destroyed the lake as a place of prayer and worship. There is an almost hypnotic rippling on the surface of the lake, a calm that manifests itself in the pace of life around it.

  We arrived at the Lotus Lodge, a small establishment of maybe eight rooms and a courtyard which sloped down to the lakefront. The boy dropped my bag and called out to the owner who approached me with his hand extended. He shook mine enthusiastically and asked the boy to make chai.

  We sat at a table on the lawn and he pulled his acc
ounting book from under his arm. His name was Acharya. He was balding at the top of his head and wore wire-framed glasses which acted as his business attire. The only clothing he wore was a pair of underwear cut like shorts and the Brahmin chord, a janai, loosely hanging from his shoulder like a sash.

  He told me the room would be very inexpensive because there was no business here in the summer.

  “Why haven’t you gone with your friends to Kashmir?” he asked.

  “I’m traveling alone,” I told him. “I wanted to come someplace quiet.”

  He began at once writing in his book and simultaneously telling me of the difficulties he’d had in getting someone to fix the fans in the room. While he talked, I looked over at the storage room, in which the boy was squatting before the fire, making our chai. There was no light on inside and it seemed like a cave in there, the boy’s eyes like an animal’s.

  Acharya explained that the room would be ten rupees a night since the fan was out and I’d most likely prefer to bring my cot out on the lawn and sleep there.

  “Then you have only to worry about the monkeys in the morning,” he said. “When they come down from the trees they like to run along this back wall.” Even then, a family of monkeys was playing on it. “The boy did the painting on it,” he continued. “It is the symbol of the Om.”

  Just then, the boy emerged with a tray and the two cups of chai. He bowed with a strange formality as he served it to us, and his uncle asked him then to fill the shower tanks with lake water. Acharya and I sipped our tea in the heat, watching the boy trudge with the water buckets from the lake to the top of the hill where a cement shower room was built for guests.

  By the time we had taken our chai, I was ready to lie down, and the boy walked me to a room and placed my bag inside. I stretched out on my cot and closed my eyes, and the boy started singing one of the popular Indian songs I’d heard reproduced in every wedding procession and played in the streets from every radio. He sang it very quietly as he began to sweep the corners of the room.

  The fever escalated rapidly, as it so often did. There was always the exhaustion, but the fever didn’t allow sleep. My mind was moving restlessly like a fly. The delirium is often sensual - the whole body remembers.

  With my fingers on the porch screen, a memory surfaces with the heat and chill of fever. A man my father had employed to cut down a diseased tree that grew in our backyard. I was very young then, but I remember his features, a skinny laborer with moles on his neck and shoulders, some self-performed tattoos on his arms and chest that had faded and looked more like bruises or natural markings. I watched from the screen porch. The man, every now and then, would look over his shoulder and wink.

  When the tree fell, the man ran his hand over the wet, open trunk.

  “Wanna look at this, kid?” he asked. I went out and stood beside him. His sweat smelled like chicken soup. He pointed out the maggots spawning in the tree’s center. The trunk was soft and stank like garbage. “Imagine living in that,” the man commented. “Now stand back.”

  The tar emerged with a slow, thorough, and suffocating precision. The man rubbed his hands on his jeans, the smoke rising up before his face. “Pity we couldn’t have yanked out the whole thing.” He pointed at the roots running under the porch, thick as pipes.

  Then the fever felt like fingers on my throat, and I was gasping. The boy was sitting with me then, and by his bare feet he had a pail of lake water, and using an old rag, he wet me down with it. He did it with patience, as though tending to me was all he had to do for the day, and he continued singing, a melody that wove its way in and out of my delirium.

  He did this for days that I could not keep track of—keeping me in the shade during the day, and carrying first my cot and then me out to the lawn at night where it was cooler. He fed me curd and bananas in the afternoon, dahl at night. Finally the fever broke, and he quickly took the bedding from my room to wash.

  At sundown, I left the room and sat weakly in a chair facing the lake. The sky was divided—a band of fiery orange and, just above it, a night sky, black and heavy with stars. There was no one on the lawn, just the long shadows of the trees from behind me. There was a cool breeze coming off the desert, and the patches of grass felt cool on my bare feet. This is how I will die, I thought, just after the pain breaks, and I can feel again.

  I sat there silently until Acharya drew up a chair beside me. “You feel better?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And thank the boy. He was a great comfort,”

  “He is a hard worker, I was lucky to have found him. He was very sick when I first saw him. It cost me a great deal to have him taken care of.”

  “You are his uncle?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” he laughed. “He is convinced of it.”

  “He must be grateful to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I let him live here. He cooks and cleans. He is quiet.”

  Just then, I heard some music, faint but beautiful, which made our shadows on the lawn and the surface of the lake seem as luxurious as life depicted in a miniature painting.

  “That’s him,” he said. “He is a good musician. All of his family played.”

  I remembered the melody. He had been humming it at my bedside. I looked over my shoulder and there was a fire burning in the storage room, and in that light the boy was playing.

  “Both of his parents died. They were villagers, musicians. His father died when he was young. His mother died slowly; she was very sick. She could not see, she could not walk. He would come miles by foot to Pushkar to play the instrument his father left him. He would make money and bring back food and medicine to her. He was always playing, and he was always serious. Then one day he came out of the desert. I noticed him, from far off. He looked so broken and so old, like a sadhu. But he was just a boy, crying over the loss of his mother. I could see he was very sick himself. I told him he could work for me when he got well. He has worked for me for five years.”

  He turned toward the storage room where I was watching the boy’s shadow flicker along the wall, and shouted out for chai. The boy put his instrument down and went for glasses.

  Acharya leaned toward me from his chair. “I have alcohol,” he whispered, “the boy picks it up for me in Ajmer. Pushkar is dry. It is not acceptable for a Brahmin to drink.” I could smell the liquor on him then and his eyes were deep with his confession. “That makes me an unacceptable Brahmin.”

  The boy came with chai in tall glasses. He handed us each a glass, and smiled at me as though he were pleased with his nursing and my recovery. He said goodnight and walked back to the room where the fire was burning. I saw him take his lungi off and spread it on the floor, and that is where he slept.

  Acharya spiked his tea with whiskey he had transferred to a plastic water bottle. “The inspectors come whenever they want,” he said. “They come to look for drugs in the rooms. They look over everything. It would be a disgrace for me to have alcohol found here. They would ask for baksheesh, more than I could pay.”

  “Have you had any trouble in the past?” I asked.

  “No problems yet,” he said. “But they came at night once, and I had been drinking and the boy had to talk to them for me. He told them I was sick.”

  He pulled his legs up to his chest and sat rocking for a while, like a child, but with a troubled face.

  “He was so happy after they’d gone. I felt relieved, but not happy. I felt ashamed of myself for having involved him. I could not accept his help, even though I had pulled him out of the desert.”

  In the morning I awoke to the shrill cries of peacocks, hysterical in the trees, as though they were stranded there. Acharya was still sleeping, in a cot near mine.

  I walked down to the lake. There were groups of monkeys huddled by its shore, and a swimmer at its center. I took off my shirt and pants and left them in a pile at the edge of the lawn. I walked down to the water and put my foot into it, and watched it, blurry under the surface. I worried that someon
e would take notice of my illness, which seemed to afflict my whole body in one way or another. I had the ravaged look of a Holocaust survivor. The patch on my chest had grown, and there were other small, irregular marks on my legs and thighs.

  The swimmer had made his way back to the shore, and was only a few yards away before I recognized him as the boy who’d taken me here and nursed me. He began to call for me, waving his hands above his head.

  “The water is good for you,” he said, laughing. “Don’t be afraid.”

  I stepped carefully into the water, then pushed myself away from the edge using my feet on the algae-covered rocks. He swam toward me and grasped my hand when he could reach it. We kept ourselves afloat with just our legs paddling in the currents beneath us. He put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Try to stay still,” he said. He was smiling and drawing me close to him.

  “What’s that?” I asked, almost jumping out of the water.

  “That’s the fish,” he laughed. “They’re kissing us.”

  It felt suddenly like there were hundreds of them, brushing between our legs, lightly connecting their mouths to us.

  “I should go back,” I said.

  “I’ll go with you.” He offered his hand again and we swam back together. He pulled me up on shore and carried my clothing down to me.

  “Do you want chai?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Today I am going to walk and see the rest of Pushkar.”

  “Let me take you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you can be my guide.”

  He was wearing Rajasthani shoes that point at the toe, his lungi, and turban with multiple knots and gatherings. He carried his instrument with him. The shops were quiet. The tailors sat on their folded fabrics smoking bidis and reading newspapers. Cows wandered through the streets with flowers in their mouths. When we passed a tourist, he lifted his instrument to his chest the way country musicians in America hold their violins. And he started to play, something that repeated itself, with the bells dangling on the bow keeping time. It was a sad, serial melody that developed slowly and slighdy, music that is sweet and painful, returning mournfully to its themes like a memory of childhood. There is even a resonance to pain—a nostalgia—that makes it hard to die.