“Crazy bitch.”
She picked up the nail gun, pressed the nose piece to his forehead, and fired two inches of galvanized steel into his brain. He didn’t die immediately. His eyes rolled crazily for a little while. Blood trickled from his nose.
Faye walked from the basement, leaving him close to death and with his feet – which had covered so many miles, over so many years – gathered in his lap. She walked from her house and into the pink grapefruit light of early morning. The grass was heavy with dew and the air smelled of new leaves and daffodils. She picked one, then pinched one of its petals between her thumb and forefinger, trying to turn it upwards in a smile. But it only bruised and drooped. A sad face.
MEGAN’S VOICE CHIMED in her mind: You’re still hurting, Faye, and looking for a reason why Timothy died. You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.
Faye saw the sideways man multiple times that day. On a bicycle. Driving a tractor. In nearly every vehicle that passed her on Thornbury Road. She sat in the spot she had come to think of as hers. The place where Timothy had died.
“Does exist,” she said.
Her trained ear picked up the rumble of an approaching truck. She counted to ten. Stood up. Looked to her right. The truck – an eighteen-wheeled monster – rounded the bend. She would step in front of it at the optimum moment, giving the driver no chance to brake or steer around her. Not that he would, of course. Faye knew that, in the closing second of her life, she would see his buckled body propped behind the wheel, his timeless eyes reaching deep.
And like him, she would find what she was looking for.
THE CURE
ANIL MENON
Menon’s story echoes one of the earliest road stories there is, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with its theme of a spiritual or, rather, a metaphysical journey. We encounter four travellers, all heading towards an Indian temple for their own different reasons. The physical journey is really the least part of the tale, however. Like the Canterbury Tales, the meat of the piece is in the stories the characters tell each other – and here one story in particular throws a stark light on the protagonists and their personal journeys.
WE HAD ONLY been traveling into the dark for some twenty minutes but already regret had set in. My back ached, my legs were cramped. The Toyota Indica could carry a total of four people comfortably. In a pinch, it could carry five people. I’d learned shared-taxis in India are always in a state of pinch. Mrs D’Mello, her daughter Francesca and I were crammed in the back, the driver, Mani, and his precious cargo were in front.
Back in LA, Kusum had been studying the Google map. “Okay, Gabe, the distance from Salem to Dindigul is just over a hundred miles, so let’s say, a hundred-and-twenty miles in all to reach the Muthuswamy temple. Basically, we’re looking at about two hours by car. If we–”
Then I lost my cell connection. Notwithstanding my wife’s brisk, stoutly cheerful tone, I knew she missed me. Kusum always turned aggressively plural. We’ll need to do X. If we take this road Y. We should probably make sure Z.
Miss you too, cuddly-cakes, I thought. But I’d have to wait till I got back to Chennai or Madurai to tell her that. My American cellphone worked everywhere except where it needed to work. And it wasn’t because I was surrounded by tall hills, part of the Palani range in rural Tamil Nadu. The place had nothing to do with it. Everybody and their great-grandmother had a cellphone in this part of the world. Mrs D’Mello and her daughter certainly seemed to have no problem with their connections. I was the primitive here.
The word invoked a twinge of white-guilt. Primitives and heathen cultures, heart of darkness and oriental exoticism. Old toxic frames were hard to replace. I missed Kusum even more. She would tell me I hadn’t gotten everything wrong.
I suspected I’d picked the wrong driver. Mani was being so damn careful with his precious – a seat-belted, restrained and amply-padded LED TV set – it was likely the journey would take three, not two, hours. At this rate, we would reach the temple well past 2 AM. Sucked toads.
“Lean back, you’ll be more comfortable,” said Mrs D’Mello in her motherly manner. “Francesca, shift just a bit, look at how Gabriel is sitting.”
“Pasty white thighs squashed together,” intoned Francesca, “mid-forties belly bulging shyly over his Ralph Lauren belt, his pink face sweaty with the effort to be amiable, his mind churning–”
“Don’t mind her,” said Mrs D’Mello, with a very quick flash of teeth. “Francesca, just shift a bit. A little more. Francesca, this is not right. You’re not being very nice.”
“And whose fault is that?” hissed Francesca.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I lied. Pasty white thighs? What the fuck? I smiled at Mrs D’Mello, to show I hadn’t taken offense. “It’s the car’s low roof that’s the real problem.”
“We’re lucky to have gotten a taxi, Gabriel,” said Mrs D’Mello, looking relieved. “If you hadn’t come along, I don’t know what we would have done.”
“Well, same here. I’m glad it worked out.”
Actually, I hadn’t been bothered by the sudden railway strike that had grounded all the trains at Salem’s famous junction. Perhaps it’s always the natives who are thrown by sudden local events; the stranger has fewer illusions. I’d expected to reach Namakkal by four in the morning, relax, get some breakfast, maybe even check out its famous rock temple, where the mathematical genius Ramanujan had supposedly communed with the Goddess Namagiri. I’d wanted to check out this Goddess who was into elliptic integrals and partition functions. I’d planned to hire a taxi to Dindigul later in the morning. When I heard about the strike, I’d figured, no big deal, find a local hotel, get a drink, hunker down for the night, travel onwards the next day.
“Oh, I knew it would work out,” said Mrs D’Mello, smiling. “The Good Lord helps those in need. He sent you to us, Gabriel.”
“Oh, it’s not God,” said Francesca, in that knowing, notes-to-self tone she used. She tapped her nose. Twice.
Poor girl. I was beginning to see why Mrs D’Mello might have become religious. Still, the God bit made me uncomfortable. I was an evangelical atheist, compelled by my faith to spread disbelief.
Besides, Francesca was right. God had nothing to do with it. Mrs D’Mello had looked totally lost at Salem railway station. Francesca was a pretty twenty-year-old, but a pretty twenty-year-old who clearly had something wrong with her, and there’d been something predatory in the way the just-standing-here types were looking at her. The panic on Mrs D’Mello’s face had been impossible to ignore. But as I approached, Francesca folded her arms and turned her back to me. It had almost made me change my mind, walk past them.
However, Mrs D’Mello had been approachable. Perhaps over-approachable. Mrs D’Mello seemed to lack the blanket of suspicion with which most Indian women, quite understandably, seemed to wrap themselves.
“Have you made arrangements to stay once you get to the temple?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. There’s a small guest house. My sister’s husband knows the local collector. Arrangements have been made. What about you, Gabriel?”
Mrs D’Mello obviously liked saying my name. I already knew quite a bit about her. The D’Mellos now lived in Mumbai, but had migrated from Nevalim in Goa. They had family all over the place. She was proud of her heritage, and far from resenting Portuguese colonialism, she seemed to instinctively understand it had given her the gift, perhaps accidentally, of setting her apart in a country where standing apart was how one belonged to the main.
“Info dump,” Francesca had muttered, as her mother outlined a wonderfully complex story of relatives, migrations, family ups and downs.
Francesca was a tall slim girl with a pale face that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Victorian sanatorium or in some ruined white mansion overgrown with weeds. She had inherited her mother’s hazel eyes, a light green with an admixture of brown. She seemed out of it all, sometimes jerking her head, sharply, once, twice, and at other times standing distract
ed, head tilted, as if listening.
“I’ll be staying with the temple manager,” I said. “One of the descendants of the original Muthuswamy. My friend Venkat–”
“You know the manager of the temple!” Mrs D’Mello’s hazel eyes gleamed in the car’s dimly lit interior. “Gabriel, can you do us one more huge favor and introduce us? It’ll mean so much to me and Francesca. There’ll probably be lots of people, and I am very worried about not getting enough time at the temple. Oh, dear goodness, you truly are a godsend.”
“Sure, I’ll do what I can. Not a problem. Must warn you though. It’s my friend Doctor Venkateswaran who knows him personally, not me. So I’m not sure how much I can help. How long do you plan to stay there?”
“Two weeks.”
“Only?” I was a bit surprised.
Most people stayed for six weeks. Venkat’s paper had mentioned some stayed for as long as a year or more. Legend had it that towards the end of his life, Muthuswamy, more or less a nobody in the village, had been able to cure the mentally ill merely through his touch. True or false? It didn’t matter. Muthuswamy had died, a temple had been built over his grave, and the legend had become fact.
“We first want to see the conditions,” said Mrs D’Mello, and though she smiled, her darting eyes revealed her anxiety. “Who knows? Francesca also has to like the temple.”
“There is no Francesca,” said Francesca.
Mrs D’Mello smiled, shifted her head slightly to block her daughter’s face.
“Venkat told me the place has helped a lot of people over the years.” It was awkward to pretend Francesca wasn’t there. “But there shouldn’t be much of a crowd at the temple. In three months, he observed about thirty visitors. It’s not like the Mehandipur Balaji Temple in Rajasthan.”
“Oh, we went there.” Mrs D’Mello shuddered. “The place is a disgusting shame. Gutters overflowing, people treated like cattle, full of crazy people. I told Francesca, forget it, let’s go back to the hotel, this is not for us. I was so upset. Now I see why it didn’t work out. We were meant to meet you.”
“I don’t know about that. But I’m glad we met.” I once again marveled at the ecumenical nature of Indian belief. Mrs D’Mello saw nothing paradoxical about relying on a Hindu temple to cure her mentally-disturbed daughter. “It’s a nice coincidence.”
“Nothing nice about it,” muttered Francesca. “Stay tuned, buddy boy.”
As Mrs D’Mello put a warning hand on her daughter’s arm, Mani suddenly pulled over to the side of the road.
“What’s the matter, Mani?” I asked, in Tamil. Then noticing Francesca’s inexplicable terror, I added, “Such sudden stops, please consider there are ladies in the car.”
Mani didn’t bother to reply. He got out, went around the front of the car, opened the passenger seat. Tug, check, adjust padding, close door. There was something obsessive, even crazed, about the way he worried about the TV. When he’d agreed to take us to Dindigul, he’d been really taking the damn TV to Dindigul.
Mani got back in and started the engine.
“Mani, I don’t think you take such good care of your child even,” I joked, again in Tamil.
Mani half-turned his head, and I caught the gleam of a gap-toothed smile. “Sir, all this is to take care of my child only. From where did you learn such pure Tamil?”
From Kusum. But I didn’t want to discuss my wife. It would merely reinforce the fact I wouldn’t get to see her for another three, maybe four, months.
“A previous life, from where else, Mani? Now tell me, why this comedy with the wretched TV?”
“Aiyyo, not a comedy sir, a complete tragedy. My whole life is a tragedy.” Mani launched into a Father India saga, complete with floods, bandits, item numbers, countless taxi rides, two deeply cherished daughters. The younger daughter had fallen ill, the older daughter’s in-laws had paid for her care, she’d died nonetheless, and now the in-laws wanted their money back. Or a large Samsung LED TV. They’d sent the older sister back to demonstrate their seriousness. Seven months had passed, she had to be sent back, Mani was desperate to send his daughter back before things really spun out of control.
Once, such a story would have made me furious. But after twenty years as an economist, after twelve years with Kusum, I had become a little smarter. Mani’s actual life probably didn’t bear much resemblance to the story. Indians used stories to hide themselves. Every living inch of this world was barnacled with stories. The stories said one thing, meant another.
The legend of the Goddess Namagiri was a case in point. The mathematician Ramanujan may have credited her for his brilliant intuitive leaps, but in myth, she was wedded to Vishnu’s fourth incarnation, Narasimha, the Lion That Devours All Categories, also Indian logic’s traditional term for extreme skepticism.
At one point, as Mani described his daughter’s death, Francesca shook with silent laughter. It was unlikely she was understanding a word of Mani’s Tamil, so it had to be the driver’s dramatic inflections and gestures. I decided to ignore it. But Mrs D’Mello didn’t. With an almost absent-minded motion, she drew her daughter’s head downwards to rest against her shoulder. Francesca quietly acquiesced. The Madonna pose did something funny to my heart.
I wished I had recorded Mani’s story. My aching body, the Indica’s cramped interior, the alert hazel eyes of the anxious woman next to me, the pale repose of her troubled daughter, the unexpectedly smooth road, the indifferent darkness streaming by our mobile campfire of a billion years: the only witness of this moment would be my unreliable memory.
“Liar,” whispered Francesca, her eyes still closed.
“What is the driver saying?” asked Mrs D’Mello, anxiously. “Does he want more money? Is there a problem?”
“No, no. He was telling me about his daughter.” I gave in and sank back into my seat. My thigh pressed solidly, indecently, against Mrs De’Mello’s thigh, but I simply couldn’t care anymore. “Sorry, Mrs D’Mello.”
She patted my hand. “What are you doing here, Gabriel?”
“Info dump. Dimensionalize character.”
I’d become used to Francesca’s little outbursts. And I was dimly beginning to understand the pulsing, black, tentacled nightmare in which she lived.
“I’m here for a project. I do a lot of contract work for World Bank. I’m an economist. I’m looking at community-based palliative care. My wife, Kusum, she makes documentaries. Educational, inspirational stuff. Kind of a mix between TED talks for villagers and short movies. She was making a documentary and I got interested in the topic. I have a team in Bangalore, we’re studying palliative care, and we’re excited because we think it’s going to be at least as big as microfinancing. Mental health care” – I didn’t glance at Francesca – “doesn’t scale well, so it’s costly, at least in the US, and when I read Venkat’s paper on the Muthuswamy temple, I thought I’d come check it out and see if we should set up a data collection unit here. So that’s why I’m here.”
After I’d finished, a small silence filled the cab. It was one of the reasons I resisted explanations of what my wife and I did. Our project-driven lives offered little purchase for those with real careers. But even if Mrs D’Mello had nothing to say, Francesca did.
“Your wife,” she said, hesitantly, “Kusum, she’s a movie director?”
Mrs D’Mello’s face broke into a delighted smile. I took it to mean that by speaking to me directly, Francesca had just paid me a huge compliment.
“Kusum’s a lot of things. She works with small budgets, so she’s whatever she needs to be.” I laughed, remembering. “Once, she even roped me in to act.”
“She made you act?”
“Yes.”
“In a movie?”
“Well, an educational movie.” I couldn’t see what Francesca was getting at.
“It had a story?”
“Oh, yes.” I smiled. “I played an evil western capitalist. British, of course. She made me sport these ginormous sideburns and say t
hings in a villainous Hindi. My Hindi is pretty good, actually.”
“Was there a Gabriel the Economist in that world?”
“Pardon?”
“In the story world, was there an economist dude called Gabriel who’s into saving brown people?”
“Francesca!” Mrs D’Mello managed to smile apologetically and bark at her daughter at the same time.
“No, it’s all right. It’s a good question. You’re asking about metafiction, aren’t you Francesca? I’m afraid it was just a straightforward morality play. And I wasn’t trying to save brown people. Quite the opposite. But my evil plans are foiled by plucky villagers led by a brave maiden who’d studied economics and played by none other than my lovely wife. Kusum made me gnash my teeth at the end. It’s harder than you’d think.”
“So there’s no Gabriel the economist?”
“Nope. It wasn’t relevant.”
“Oh, but it is. Your wife played an economist? If Gabriel the economist isn’t there, it means all the papers which cite your work aren’t there. Ditto for the economists who wrote those papers. Do you think Adam Smith would exist in that world? So how can your wife play an economist? The Butterfly Effect, have you seen it?”
I waggled my hand. “Interesting point. But not necessarily. In an alternate world–”
“Have you seen the movie?”
“Butterfly Effect? No. Ashton Kutcher is in it, right?”
“No. Some guy who looks just like Ashton Kutcher. Weird thing is, no one tells him, oh, my god, you look exactly like the famous actor Ashton Kutcher. There are no Ashton Kutcher fans in that movie. Or take the Silence of the Lambs. I watched it thrice. I think I watched it thrice. I am told to say I think I watched it thrice.” She jerked her head, twice, as if shaking off a restraining hand. Then she resumed. “No one tells Hannibal Lecter, man, you look just like the actor Anthony Hopkins. The FBI doesn’t think that’s relevant, for some reason. For that matter, no one’s bothered that the FBI agent looks like Jodie Foster. Nobody’s going, isn’t this bizarre, we have an FBI agent who looks just like Jodie Foster going to interview a master criminal who looks just like Anthony Hopkins.”
End of the Road Page 15