As we take a shortcut up the hill, I push a little bit. “I wonder if Solomon is right.”
“About?”
“The need for guards. I mean, he’s from here. He’s lived here his whole life. He knows more than we do.”
“Those are just superstitions. Surely you don’t believe in kalamoro.” Leon brushes his hair back a few times and climbs with longer strides. I have to run to keep up, and I feel slightly humiliated, as if I’m not worth slowing down for. “Solomon is just your typical Malagasy. So much in this culture is stigmatized—fady this and fady that. I read about all this in my grandfather’s journal years after he died.” His breathing is ragged, and he talks fast.
I’m silent for a moment, wondering how to respond. “You never did tell me what happened with your grandfather. Why’d he leave this country?”
“It was the late fifties and the natives were insisting on independence. My grandparents sold their plantation to the locals and returned to France and became traders. It still makes me so sad, how they were driven off their property, their farm! For no good reason. What’s got you jumpy?”
“I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling about not listening to people who presumably know what they’re talking about.” I feel embarrassed for him, that he truly believes what he’s told himself about his ancestors. And why is he willing to spend so much to buy a farm, but unwilling to pay guards? I have questions like this every day, but I rarely voice them, anticipating how quickly Leon will shut me down. It’s just that he’s got some blind spots, some weaknesses, I tell myself. It’s not that he’s a bad person.
“Trust me, we’re going to be fine. I know it can get a little lonely with just you and me and that lemur, but don’t give in to your irrational fears. We’re going to make it. Just hang in there, okay?” He slings an arm over my shoulder as we arrive, hearts pounding, at a grove of peeling cinnamon trees on the top of the hill.
***
A rumor circulates through the region’s arteries of gossip and speculation: a white couple has moved into a house near the palm-lined village square with its bleached cobblestone walkways and thin, sputtering stone fountain. Solomon picks up this rumor from Tanjona, a bartender at La Tropique, while trying to secure intelligence for Leon on when vanilla dealers will pass through the village. One day I see a couple sipping sodas on a bench by the empty marketplace building, a neglected relic of French colonialism. I introduce myself.
Alicia is tall and platinum blonde with toast-brown eyes and a pointy nose, sharp at the end like a beak. Brian is balding and wears glasses but is handsome in spite of his cheap ugly clothes, like a dime-store Gregory Peck. They’re from Michigan and Pennsylvania, respectively. Alicia was a high school drama teacher before joining the Peace Corps. “We met here in Madagascar while working for the Peace Corps,” Alicia says. “Both of us were completely enchanted.”
“With Madagascar and each other,” Brian adds. Perhaps the sincerity and syrupiness would have been off-putting in San Francisco, but here, it feels utterly charming.
They tell me about an initiative they’ve been working on, teaching the community sustainable farming techniques. “After our time was up, we decided we wanted to stay in this beautiful place and continue the work informally,” Alicia finishes.
“We have a little farm. You should come for dinner.” I’m thrilled at the way these words roll off my tongue, to be speaking in fluent English with someone besides Leon.
***
“How did you two meet?” Alicia asks that night over a bowl of noodles in broth. She pours herself another lowball glass of rum. Leon recounts how we met, arguing over who should get the last nopales at the farmer’s market. Leon had won, of course.
Two years ago, his aggressiveness was a sexy contrast to my ex-boyfriends, all of them slackers who found me too intense simply because I kept a calendar. He asked me out, and it seemed clear he’d been pretending to crave nopales in his breakfast tacos just so he could talk to me. I was flattered. For him, fight was flirtation. Determined to impress me, he whisked me to Gary Danko, a restaurant so expensive the cheese came around in a separate course on a silver cart, and I’d made him the breakfast tacos the following morning.
“She was exotic and domestic. A perfect combination.”
I’ve never heard him articulate this before, and it’s at that moment I realize he still doesn’t see me. I’m neither exotic nor domestic, and the description makes me think of a mail-order bride. We live alone together, but when he looks at me, he sees somebody else, an idea of me, but not the flesh-and-blood me.
Aren’t we all just ideas to each other, though? Just ghosts walking around looking through each other at what we want to see? I don’t know. But Alicia and Brian nod as if they understand. I try to smile to be polite. “He was so generous in the beginning.”
“You don’t think I’m generous now?”
“No, you’re still generous. But we had a love-hate relationship at the start.”
“You hated me? I didn’t know that.”
“No, no, I didn’t hate you exactly, but we disagreed on a lot of things.” I turn to Alicia. “We still do. I mean, he’s a Republican. He’s the one percent—a total robber baron capitalist.”
“Well they’ve proven communism doesn’t work.” Leon laughs, a little too loudly. There’s a slight wheeze in his voice. “It’s not good enough to just complain about something that’s worked well for a lot of people. What exactly do you propose?”
“A lot of people? Really?” I expound on social democracy in Europe, but trail away, feeling inadequate and dumb with all of them staring at me so skeptically. Why did I bring up politics, something Leon and I will never see eye to eye on? Perhaps this is exactly what I should bring up now that we’re so far from home. Perhaps I can make him see me, instead of his shadowy idea of me.
“It’s true the Grand Old Party’s lost its way. I’m embarrassed every time I hear a Republican politician speak these days,” Leon concedes unexpectedly. Rescue. Instead of relief, however, I feel distressed. He doesn’t believe I had a good argument to make. Again, I fake a smile for appearance’s sake, but I’m so angry, I’ve gone blind. There’s a rage in me I didn’t know was there before we came here.
“Opposites attract!” Alicia’s voice is chirpy.
After Alicia and Brian leave, I let Howl sleep on the bed in defiance of Leon’s distaste for him. “I’ve been thinking, shouldn’t you release him back into the wild?” Leon blows out the candles. “He’s making this place stink. Remember what Solomon said about them being illegal as pets?”
“He’s bonded to me now.”
“You mean you’re bonded to him. I think you care about him more than you care about me.”
“He’s my familiar,” I whisper. I pretend to be asleep until Leon starts snoring. His aggressiveness seems more pronounced here, lying on this bed with Howl. I listen to the buzzing and scritching of predators, of the wild, just beyond the walls.
“You can’t make a big deal about any loss on the stock market,” Leon used to say at the start of our relationship. He was trying to explain to me what he did for a living. “Or you’d be yo-yoing up and down constantly.” But this is just what he does now that we are in Madagascar—makes a big deal about everything. What seemed at first like a kind of liberation terrifies me now. He’s always up, focused on the future, on the next big thing. Where can you go if you haven’t accurately assessed where you’ve already been? While his imagination is expansive and ebullient and fearless, mine, by contrast, is constipated, perpetually frozen, always already anticipating regret.
***
After a few shared meals, Leon uses his indefatigable charm to recruit Alicia and Brian to work on the farm. Soon we are spending all our time together and the delight that motivated my initial invitation dissolves into annoyance. While Leon is grateful to have more working bodies, I no longer have time to read or sit with my own thoughts. Every moment is swallowed up by this new group�
��interpreting their needs and desires and thoughts and spitting out what version of myself might work for them. I might as well be back in San Francisco, fielding the usual civilizational pressures. The coffee dates, the efforts to get mentorship, the casually racist remarks and the self-righteous gaslighting when you confront it, getting cornered by groping drunk tech bros at office parties or the boss over the copy machine. Even my pleasure in tutoring the little boys, something I assumed I could count on for years to come, has been cut short. Because Alicia knows Malagasy and speaks French fluently, she is better equipped to teach them English. Now they snuggle around Alicia at lunch reading the storybooks I special-ordered for them. Even worse, Howl takes a shine to Brian, occupying his lap for entire evenings.
I resent these interlopers, resent having to feign being busy in the kitchen so they won’t guess that I’m upset. Before, the boys saw me as an ally. Before, I was the only person to whom Howl would cozy up. Although the villagers perceived Leon as vazaha and kept their distance from him accordingly, they’d liked me. Now, when I go to the market, I’m stuck with Leon, Alicia, and Brian, and there are almost no opportunities to strike up new friendships or even keep up my good relationship with Solomon.
I mention my anxieties to Leon that night, but he replies, “I don’t know what you’re so worked up about. It makes sense.” He lounges in bed, snacking on the lychees that grow nearby, peeling off their red bumpy skins with his dirty fingernails, and popping translucent white fruit into his mouth. “People want to be with people who are like them because it’s more comfortable. It’s easier. You don’t have to learn any new social customs or standards. Besides, you can still make friends with the locals. Who’s stopping you?”
“Nobody,” I admit. “But we spend all our time with this one American couple. It’s unhealthy. It’s incestuous. It’s like how my parents only hung out with other South Indians when we first moved to the States. I thought we’d be going to the local balls and getting to know our other neighbors. For me, the whole point of coming here was to start over, to get, I don’t know, psychologically further away from where we were. You just want to create a mini-America in a different location.”
“Well, your parents worked with other types at their offices, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t they want something comfortable in their off hours? And why would you want to go to the balls? Those are for Malagasy people, not expats like us.”
“I don’t see why you should expect to be comfortable if you uproot your whole life. Assimilation is uncomfortable.”
“For fuck’ sakes, what are you on about now?”
Looking at Leon’s sneer, I decide to stop talking. I’ve never felt these social customs that bind Leon, Alicia, and Brian—this small-talk way of relating warmly, but only politely—are truly mine. They’re merely an elaborate ruse I’ve performed my whole life, while simultaneously living a wholly different way with my parents and relatives, one full of loud, animated conversations about the news, pop culture, books, conversations marked by generous hyperbole and sharp honesty verging into offense, and what Leon would consider an excess of political passion. This idea that I belong with Leon, Alicia, and Brian, continuing a charade of polite remove, now seems laughable.
I doodle on a piece of paper with an iridescent purple pen. An indri in an inky rainforest peeping out from behind a tree, its mouth scratched over a million times with pen. Little music notes float out.
“Why do you forever insist on your difference?” Leon is smoothing his hair back, defensive again, but instead of retreating, going on the offense to settle the score. “You’re not special. You’re just as American and bougie as the rest of us.”
I say nothing. After all, how he sees me is exactly how I’ve presented myself from the first, and maybe it’s sort of true. But it’s only now—at the farthest point from California—that I understand I’ve been working a fraud upon my companions. Even in this lonely place, I feel closer to everything I see here than the people I grew up among.
***
That winter, Alicia starts working on a dramatic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. “I just finished drafting it. I’m not sure it’s any good.”
I remember my mother, an enthusiastic reader of murder mysteries, giving me a leather-bound copy of five Christie novels when I was ten, and this particular novel was among them.
“She’s being modest. I read it,” Brian says, lifting a forkful of pork dripping with ginger sauce. “It’s absolutely wonderful.”
I eye them suspiciously. Alicia and Brian relate to each other in a peculiar way, like they’ve taken a course on being a couple and are modeling perfection for Leon and me. We have been squabbling more and more, bitterly like brother and sister. I imagine that if we were to scan Alicia and Brian’s necks we would find regulating chips.
I’m giggling to myself when Leon says, “Well, what’s to keep us from putting the play on? We’ll gather the natives and do it in the square.” He finds a pad of paper and begins scribbling ideas onto it with the bug-eyed mania I recognize. It’s the same expression he wore in the weeks before we came to Tana. Brian and Alicia chime in with suggestions.
“Aren’t there ten horrible humans in this story? A butler, a doctor, a judge.” I tally the characters I remember on my fingers. “I don’t think we can find enough fluent English speakers to play all the parts.”
“Of course there are enough of us.” Leon sticks the pencil behind his ear. “We’ll go ask Solomon to round up some actors.”
“Solomon can’t make English speakers appear out of thin air. And I don’t know how interested the villagers are going to be in Agatha Christie.” It’s hard to disguise my irritation with Leon now. He stands for everything I’ve been trying to escape.
“The thing you’ll learn about Tarini is that she likes to fancy herself as somehow closer to the natives than we are.” Leon holds his palms out as if to say, what can you do?
“Well, maybe she is. She probably has a family history related to imperialism somehow.” Brian stacks Alicia’s and Leon’s dishes on his own and turns to me. “Don’t you?”
I’m simultaneously startled, uncomfortable, and relieved. A laugh escapes. I nod.
Leon looks confused. “What are you talking about? She’s not African.”
To explain himself, Brian says, “Well, but she’s Indian. I traveled through Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh after college. The psychological mindset of the colonized is different. Isn’t it?” He stacks dirty dishes in the sink and turns to me.
Righteousness burns through my body, a fire in my fingertips, and at first, I’m not sure why, because I kind of agree with him. But on the other hand, I’ve been proven right—I’m an outsider among them, they do see me differently, even though they pretend we’re exactly the same. “My grandparents organized and fought against the British, but weirdly they were Anglophiles, too. Their attitude was like Stockholm syndrome on a continental scale. Is that what you mean?” I immediately regret the metaphor. It seems a total betrayal of my family who loves me, and also unnecessarily hostile to Brian. Most of the time, I can’t find words to articulate my anger, but lately they’ve been gushing out.
“Sorry, maybe I didn’t phrase that right?” Brian laughs good-naturedly. Leon scowls at me, a look that warns me not to rock the boat, not to give these two people he likes so much cause to leave us here alone.
Alicia’s forehead furrows in concern. “So, you’re against Agatha Christie?”
“Not at all.” The version of the novel Mom gave me was structured around the ten little Indians nursery rhyme. Before it used “Indians,” it had used the n-word, and later editions I’d picked up simply referred to soldiers. The ten little Indians of the novel were lily-white Brits who had committed transgressions that escaped adjudication in court, and this was why they were invited to Indian Island—to be subject to a rough justice. A line floats up in my mind: One little Indian nothing to be done/He went and hanged himse
lf and then there were none.
“Great, so it’s settled.” Leon looks relieved. “We’ll find some natives to join us.”
***
The vanilla orchids bloom in November. Buds unfurl from their stems, curls of little white-yellow petals emerging waxy from the greenish buds, caterpillars crawling out of chrysalises. After my morning jog, the village boys—now numbering ten—show up to do the work of hand pollinating. The blossoms must be pollinated within twelve hours of blooming, or no pods will develop.
It’s a delicate balance, Leon says, since we can only hand pollinate a few blossoms on each stem or risk disease. Using beveled bamboo picks, I move the rostellum, the membrane between the anther and the stigma inside the flower, and smush the lascivious yellow pollen into the stigmas.
You push and push. You hope they connect.
***
Of course, the pieces of the play do not come together quite as quickly as Leon imagines they will. It’s too challenging to find fluent English speakers, so the president of the village suggests we translate the play and mount it in French instead.
I’m still not as fluent in French as the others are. “It’s okay. I’m not much of an actor anyway. I can be responsible for costumes or set design.”
Dismayed, Alicia adjusts the saffron kerchief tied around her head. “I want you to be part of things. I hope you don’t feel excluded.”
I smile to try to make her feel better. “Really, I can’t act to save my life.”
“You can direct,” Brian says.
“But I was planning to direct,” Leon says.
“He’d be much better,” I say. Alicia and Brian glance at each other. I’ve got an idea about what they think of my relationship.
While Alicia translates the play into French, I sketch a design for the set, and draw elaborate costumes. Leon gives me money to order cloth in bulk from abroad, and they come from Coimbatore, from my parents, in white and jewel tones.
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