Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  ***

  The deeper they traveled into the heart of the Pink City, the more crowded it became. Businessmen and young women drifted by in faded jeans. Mothers in beaded salwar kameezes with their children hurried past the men. In the bazaar, Vik began speaking in Rajasthani to another man, and released Kai’s arm. Disappointed, Kai fell a little behind.

  In one stall, a white-haired woman perched on a stool behind a gold birdcage that housed a small green parrot. Tiny pastel strips papered the floor of the cage. Schoolchildren in plaid uniforms were handing the woman rupees and taking slips of paper in exchange. Kai watched for a few minutes. As they left, a little boy knocked over the birdcage. The cage door flew open. The parrot fluttered out and began hopping down the street.

  Kai stooped and picked up the parrot. The parrot’s heart, big and wild, was beating furiously beneath his bright, fragile feathers. His wings had been clipped. The old woman spoke to Kai quickly, and he shook his head, repeating, “I speak English.” His English broke and he fell into an accent. His cousins always mocked him, assuming this was an affectation, but falling into an accent happened every year when he came to India, as if he were remembering something he’d forgotten.

  Kai righted the cage and opened his fist. The parrot hopped back into the cage and pecked at the slips, uncovering a rose slip with his beak. Before the woman closed the door, the parrot hopped back to the door and bowed toward Kai. He smiled and took the slip from the parrot’s beak. The fortune was written in characters, probably Rajasthani characters, which he could not read. He turned to ask Vik what it said, but Vik and his friends were nowhere to be seen.

  He had not paid much attention to the geography of the bazaar. Where had he entered?

  As he moved down the street, a group of thin children with scraggly hair jostled him. He stepped on a boy’s bare foot. “Sorry, sorry,” he apologized. The boy looked at him with a fearful expression before hurrying toward his group. The sun dipped behind the buildings, sending the Pink City into heavy shadow.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked a young woman crossing the street. She wore acid-washed jeans under her beaded orange kurtha top.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the way to the palace hotel?”

  “Which one?” she asked. “There are several.”

  “The closest one.” Tears pricked his eyes. He couldn’t remember its proper name.

  She spun him and pushed him back into the bazaar, telling him to walk that way. He thanked her and hurried blindly in the direction she’d sent him. A man shoved him, and he reeled. A group of chickens blocked his way. Skirting them, he once again spotted the old woman and her parrot. He realized he’d already passed the vendors selling bric-a-brac—sandalwood elephants, miniature ivory gods, larger cowrie shells carved with tableaux, mindless seashell games—many times.

  The seashell games reminded him of eating murukku with his father on his grandparents’ patio and drinking down the rich cumin flavor with cold buttermilk. The fragrance of his father’s Old Spice aftershave as he leaned in to plop cowry shells into an indented wooden game board. There were periods he’d gotten along quite well with his father, often when his father helped him solve puzzles. There had been moments when his father proudly brought him to his office, introduced him to his pale, pocket-protected colleagues, and explained binary code to him. He knew the rift between them had developed long before he’d announced he was gay, but he couldn’t pinpoint the moment.

  Kai heard someone shouting his name. Still reminiscing about murukku and buttermilk and puzzles, he thought for a moment it was his father come to find him, but when he whipped around, he spotted Vik smoking a cigarette outside a building farther down the street and beckoning him.

  “There you are,” Vik said. Two blue smoke rings, no trace of worry in his face. “I am thinking you are lost.”

  “I was. But here I am.”

  “I will buy you a beer. You drink beer, no? Come.”

  Inside the warm bar, a ceiling fan was spinning and AC/DC reverberated on the surround system. Polo players and elephant whisperers huddled around tables, drinking beers. A few young women in jeans wove between the groups, laughing.

  After ordering their beers, Kai and Vik spoke about their homes, about their fathers, about what they planned to do in the future. Vik had grown up poor in a nearby village and moved to Jaipur only the year before. He worked as a jewelry salesman during the week, and as an elephant polo player on weekends. Kai revealed he wanted to be a musician and go on tour with his band, but his parents wanted him to be an engineer.

  Kai searched his pockets, planning to buy the next round. He realized with a start that his wallet, which had only held two 1,000-rupee notes and some change, was gone. He remembered the children who’d rubbed against him. “Oh my god, oh my god,” he gasped. “I was pickpocketed.”

  “This is happening to tourists all the time.” Vik went to the bar to order two more beers.

  After drinking another beer, Kai ambled into the bathroom. A stench rose from the concrete floor—a foulness so strong it made him woozy. Kai unzipped. It took a few minutes to relax enough to piss in the unfamiliar bathroom. He finished and went to wash his hands.

  Vik opened the door and closed it behind him. He stood there for a moment, not smiling. “You like me, no?”

  Kai shrugged. He remembered the electricity of Vik’s arm touching his arm, the hairs on both arms tickling each other, the sensation of desire. But he knew, too, he might be reading this wrong. There might be signals crossed, there might be disgust.

  Then Vik took Kai’s face in his warm palms. He held Kai’s face for a moment and his eyes shimmered as he swooped in and touched Kai’s mouth with his own, before kissing him. Kai felt himself drowning and then saved, as Vik’s tongue explored his mouth. Vic’s calloused hands slipped under the back of Kai’s shirt. He smelled something on Vik, an odd animalic smell, perhaps the elephants. Vik pulled away and unzipped Kai’s pinstripe trousers.

  “Soft hands,” Vik whispered as he turned Kai around. Kai’s jaw pressed against the cold concrete wall, and for a moment, he wondered whether this was it and he wanted to giggle, soft hands, soft hands.

  ***

  After it was over, Vik left to smoke outside, and Kai washed himself in the sink. They returned to the palace hotel in a companionable silence, with Vik’s arm slung around Kai’s shoulders. All the vendors at the bazaar had cleared out their wares.

  “Where you are going now?” Vik asked as they approached the gates through the indigo darkness.

  “Agra. Tomorrow we go to the Taj Mahal.”

  “And when you will be home?”

  “Next week.”

  “I will come to California to visit you someday,” Vik declared with great confidence.

  For a moment, Kai was pleased, but his joy quickly soured. He hadn’t expected to see Vik again. He didn’t even want to see him again, but he couldn’t say why. His English faltered as he tried to reestablish their connection without the assistance of a beer buzz. Kai imagined his friends’ reactions to the funny elephant polo player from Jaipur. Anticipating his father’s reaction, he found the prospect of a visit terrifying.

  Still, Kai agreed, and Vik handed him a pen. He wrote his name on the back of one of Vik’s jewelry shop cards, a tacky affair with mismatched gold retro type.

  Vik took hold of his hand. “You will remember me, no?”

  Kai nodded. When they kissed, their lips were soft and smoky, tongues blunted by beer, tracing their departure. Kai tried to memorize the smell, so he wouldn’t forget: elephants, musky cologne, sweat, coconut oil, metallic hair gel. But in a moment, too quickly, Vik pulled away.

  He clapped Kai on the shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you!”

  At the gate, a guard asked, “Are you Kailash Sarma, sir?” He explained that Kai’s parents had called the police for fear that Kai had gotten lost. The gates opened, and Kai looked over his shoulder. Vik was gone.

  As he
and the guard trudged toward the well-lit lobby, Kai pictured his father’s possible reactions, variations on his prior reactions to various misadventures. They would go back to the hotel room, and his father would beat him with a belt, as he had once many years before. They would go back to the hotel room, and his father would start yelling. They would go back to the hotel room, and his father would not talk to him, his deafening silence saying so many things while saying nothing at all.

  By the black marble concierge desk of the lobby, two men in olive uniforms were talking to his parents. Hema, clutching her bigheaded baby doll, noticed him first and barreled toward him. “You’re okay!” She wrapped her tiny arms around his hips.

  “We were so worried,” Prabha said, enveloping him in her familiar scent of honey and talcum.

  “What happened?” his father asked. Kai couldn’t read his face.

  “Everything all right, sir?” an officer asked.

  “Yes. I thought I’d take a walk in the Pink City, but I got lost and pickpocketed. One of the polo players from this afternoon recognized me from lunch and brought me back.”

  “But you weren’t hurt, were you?” his mother asked.

  Kai repeated he was fine, half wanting to admit to his mother—for so long his staunchest ally, even though, of late, she had served as a foe—that something had changed, that his body hurt, that the same thing that hurt also made him feel victorious and confident. He decided not to say a word—perhaps this was the plastic sort of son his parents had wanted all along, a son whose adventures were carefully concealed from them.

  Inside their suite, a tray of oranges, figs, lychees, coconut chunks, and mango slices rested on a wood divan carved with marching elephants. “We ordered room service while we were waiting for you, but we saved you some.” Hema kicked off her slippers.

  “Have some pomegranate seeds.” Prabha handed him a silver dish.

  Kai eased onto the edge of the master bed with its enormous dream-white canopy, dug into the pile of pomegranate seeds with his fingers, and waited for his father to tear into him for going to the Pink City without them. To his surprise, Gopal patted him on the shoulder, the way he had when he was small. “I love you, Kai.”

  “I’m sorry I worried you,” Kai repeated, oddly touched. His heart came up in his chest, clenching with an unfamiliar ache. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had said he loved him.

  “Can we go to the magic show on the lawn?” Hema climbed on the bed and began running from one end to the other. The bed rippled with her bounces.

  Gopal glanced at his watch. “We might just make it.”

  Kai’s pinstripe suit pants were splashed at the cuffs in some sort of greyish-brown liquid, possibly sewage or mud. He searched his luggage for fresh clothes.

  As he changed in the bathroom, he found the rose fortune written in Rajasthani in his pocket. He opened it and looked at the foreign characters. He’d forgotten to ask Vik what his fortune was. Nobody he knew could translate it. After he had changed into fresh clothes, he slipped the rose fortune into a pocket of his suitcase. Already Vik’s finely chiseled cheekbones and luminous light-brown eyes were fading from his memory.

  That night on the lawn, the Sarma family would sit in the long shadows witnessing fire-eaters and muscular men striding barefoot on hot coals, and the following afternoon, they would ride the train to Agra to see the world’s greatest monument to everlasting love. Just one week later, they’d fly in a rickety domestic plane to Chennai to bid teary farewells to Kai’s grandparents, before flying via Singapore to SFO, where they would settle back into their modest house, and Kai would finish his senior year of high school, never again speaking to Gavin or skateboarding in the bowl. Although Kai would never hear from Vik all the rest of his life, he would remember as an aphrodisiac the odor of elephants, and he would remember the parrot that plucked and handed him a rose fortune in a language he could not read.

  I might have been a small boy when I first heard about the lost continent of Kumari Kandam, and when the stories came up in a folklore seminar at UC Berkeley many years later, a strange shiver moved through my heart, a moment of nostalgic recognition.

  Legend goes that Shiva bequeathed Kumari Kandam to his daughter Pandaia. There in that deep southern paradise, Tamilians fished for pearls and wore dresses fashioned from flowers and foliage and animal skins. The Pandyan kings formed three Tamil sangams, assemblies of poets and scholars, to foster a love of literature, poetry, and knowledge among their subjects. But as everyone knows, bliss never lasts, and utopias are, by their very nature, doomed. The ocean swelled. Whipped into a frenzy by some mysterious force, tsunamis swallowed the sangams with unmatched ferocity. Men continued to die of thirst for Kumari Kandam, but the homeland was submerged, lost forever in the salty black waves.

  My father unspooled tales of the lost continent on warm nights. Rattling and keening, trains chugged past our Palo Alto bungalow and the ghostly scent of star jasmine blew into my bedroom window. My mother knew the stories better, and after he started, she would embellish them in her warm husky voice, and so it was her voice, thick with wonder, that followed me into my dreams.

  What I didn’t realize back then was that the Kumari Kandam legend was about a longing for what was past and glorious for Tamil people. A longing for origins in a vast land that stretched from Tamil Nadu to Madagascar—origins that might never have existed.

  ***

  When I was twenty-eight, I was awarded a Fulbright research grant that would take me back to Chennai. To explain the purpose of the grant, I reminded my father and mother of the stories they’d told me.

  “Why on earth would we tell you those lowbrow tales of Kumarinatu?” my father asked, scratching his grey beard. “There’s no scientific proof for them.”

  My mother said nothing. She leaned against the back of the scarlet couch and shut her eyes. She’d felt fatigued and unwell for some time, so I thought nothing of her silence.

  “Maybe you wanted me to feel a kinship?”

  My father swiveled away in his natty grey office chair and gave a short barking laugh. “Looking at you now, how I wish I hadn’t.”

  ***

  “What a thing to say,” Komakal said with disapproval when I recounted the discrepancy between my father’s account and mine on one of our dates.

  With dark amber skin, she was slight and graceful, but she had muscular thighs like the trunks of two palms. The long mass of her hair streamed in a curly, undulating tangle down her back. She pursed her lips and rolled over and away from me. I rose from the hard cot where we’d finished having sex and pulled a stainless steel jug of water I’d boiled from the refrigerator. I poured the water into a tumbler and drank it, then sank down next to Komakal again, running a hand along the supple curve of her hip.

  “Yes, but he just wishes I’d become an engineer or doctor. He thinks maybe he sent me off on the wrong path by telling me Tamil myths instead of reading me nonfiction.”

  “But Tamizh is your mother tongue! Or it should be. Typical Brahmin. He probably thinks Sanskrit is a better language. Ridiculous! But you agree that Tamizh is the most beautiful language in the world, don’t you?” Komakal stroked my cheek with her warm hand. Unlike me and the other second-generation kids I knew in the Bay Area, she pronounced the name of our language correctly and spelled it Tamizh the way purists do. Not Tamil with an “l,” but with the “zh,” a sound more like a “rah,” a sound with no English equivalent. This was one of many tiny things that endeared her to me.

  I didn’t know Sanskrit well enough to say, but I wanted to keep looking at her, into the summery midnight of her long-lashed eyes, and I already understood her—she would storm out if she suspected me a traitor to her cause. I nodded.

  “It’s an ancient language. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t. And I don’t think I would like your father much.”

  “No, no, he’s kind, he’s smart. You’ll love him.” He did have those traits, but I wasn’t at all certa
in she would love him. She’d assessed him correctly. Behind closed doors, my father did occasionally disparage lower-caste people, in spite of marrying my mother, and he did see his family as a kind of chosen people. Worse yet, from Komakal’s perspective, he was the son of a long line of bureaucrats. His father was a reasonably well-to-do civil servant for the British who apparently hadn’t cared if India would acquire its independence at all.

  “I’d rather meet your mother,” she said. I’d told her that my mother, a successful engineer, was of a lower caste. Which one was unknown, because her parents had been vigorously anti-caste, and didn’t want her to carry any sort of stigma. This satisfied Komakal. In my mother, she saw a tough and independent woman who had risen from oppression, a kindred spirit.

  I met Komakal while she was working at the university library where I spent many anxious hours, not at all sure that my research had value. I was blocked. Superficially, I understood most of what I was hearing and reading, but so much was foreign, all these things to which my parents had never exposed me, but that I was assumed to understand.

  On the day I first spoke to Komakal, I’d taped a short, blustery man in a crisp white dress shirt who reminded me of my father. He said he didn’t understand why they still taught fabrications like Kumari Kandam in Tamil Nadu. “We should be focused on IT, on becoming a global power for IT,” he said, adjusting his gold wire spectacles. “Instead some people stay bogged down in myths, in rewriting the past. Pathetic.”

  After interviewing him, I’d walked to the library to hunt for memorable passages of text to intersperse with the interview. Eventually, I thought, I might have enough to make a documentary.

  Wearing an aquamarine salwar and jeans that set off her dark skin, Komakal was standing on a stepladder shelving linguistics books about Tamil. There was something regal in her bearing, a don’t-fuck-with-me look, that had immediately attracted me. I had an excuse to talk to her because several books in that section were about the Tamil nationalists who’d resisted the forceful imposition of Hindi after independence from the British and spurred the Tamil devotion movement—they were among the greatest raconteurs of the Kumari Kandam legend.