‘What are you doing here?’
‘Those charm school lessons are paying off, I see,’ she drawled, sounding very American. She arched one eyebrow, and pursed her lips in a sarcastic smile.
‘It’s not safe here,’ I scowled.
‘I know. Didier ran into one of your friends from here. He told me about it.’
‘So, what are you doing here?’
‘I came to help you.’
‘Help me what?’ I demanded, exasperated by my worry for her.
‘Help you … do whatever you do here. Help other people. Isn’t that what you do?’
‘You have to go. You can’t stay. It’s too dangerous. People are dropping down everywhere. I don’t know how bad it’ll get.’
‘I’m not going,’ she said calmly, staring her determination into me. The large, green eyes blazed, indomitable, and she was never more beautiful. ‘I care about you, and I’m staying with you. What do you want me to do?’
‘It’s ridiculous!’ I sighed, rubbing the frustration through my hair. ‘It’s bloody stupid.’
‘Listen,’ she said, surprising me with a wide smile, ‘do you think you’re the only one who needs to go on this salvation ride? Now, tell me, calmly—what do you want me to do?’
I did need help, not just with the physical work of nursing the people, but also with the doubt and fear and shame that throbbed in my throat and chest. One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone. And I loved her. The truth was that while my words warned her away to safety, my fanatic heart connived with my eyes to make her stay.
‘Well, there’s plenty to do. But be careful! And the first sign that … that you’re not okay, you grab a taxi to my friend Hamid’s. He’s a doctor. Is that a deal?’
She reached out to place her long, slender hand in mine. The handshake was firm and confident.
‘It’s a deal,’ she said. ‘Where do we start?’
We started with a tour of the slum, visiting the sick and dispensing packets of the solution. There were, by then, more than a hundred people presenting symptoms of cholera, and half of them were serious cases. Allowing just a few minutes with each of the victims, it still took us twenty hours. Constantly on the move, we drank soup or sugary chai from sterile cups as our only food. By evening of the following day, we sat down to eat our first full meal. We were exhausted, but hunger drove us to chew through the hot rotis and vegetables. Then, somewhat refreshed, we set off on a second round of the most serious cases.
It was filthy work. The word cholera comes from the Greek word kholera, meaning diarrhoea. The diarrhoea of the cholera sickness has a singularly vile smell, and you never get used to it. Every time we entered a hut to visit the sick, we fought the urge to vomit. Sometimes, we did vomit. And when we vomited once, the impulse to retch and gag was stronger than ever.
Karla was kind and gentle, especially with the children, and she filled the families with confidence. She kept her sense of humour through the smell, and the endless stooping to lift and clean and give comfort in dark, humid hovels; through the sickness and the dying; and through the fear, when the epidemic seemed to be getting worse, that we, too, would sicken and die. Through forty hours without sleep, she smiled every time I turned my hungry eyes on her. I was in love with her, and even if she’d been lazy or a coward or miserly or bad-tempered I would’ve loved her still. But she was brave and compassionate and generous. She worked hard, and she was a good friend. And somehow, through those hours of fear and suffering and death, I found new ways and reasons to like the woman I already loved with all my heart.
At three after midnight on the second night, I insisted that she sleep, that we both sleep, before exhaustion crushed us. We began to walk back through the dark, deserted lanes. There was no moon, and the stars punctured the black dome of the sky with a dazzling intensity. In an unusually wide space, where three lanes converged, I stopped and raised a hand to silence Karla. There was a faint scratching sound, a whisper and scrape as of taffeta rustling, or cellophane being squeezed into a ball. In the blackness I couldn’t tell where the sound began, but I knew it was close and getting closer. I reached around behind me to grab Karla, and held her pressed against my back, turning left and right as I tried to anticipate the sound. And then they came—the rats.
‘Don’t move!’ I cautioned in a hoarse whisper, pulling her to my back as tightly as I could. ‘Keep perfectly still! If you don’t move, they’ll think you’re part of the furniture. If you move, they’ll bite!’
The rats came in hundreds and then thousands: black waves of running, squealing beasts that poured from the lanes and swept against our legs like the swirling tide of a river. They were huge, bigger than cats, fat and slimy and rushing through the lanes in a horde that was two or three animals deep. They swept past us at ankle-height and then shin-high, knee-high, running on one another’s backs and slapping and smacking into my legs with brutal force. Beyond us, they plunged on into the night toward the sewer pipes of the rich apartment towers, just as they did every night on their migration from nearby markets and through the slum. Thousands. The black waves of snapping rats seemed to go on for ten minutes, although it couldn’t have been so long. At last, they were gone. The lanes were picked clean of rubbish and scraps, and silence clogged the air.
‘What … the fuck … was that?’ she asked, her mouth gaping open.
‘The damn things come through here every night about this time. Nobody minds, because they keep the place clean, and they don’t worry you, if you’re inside your hut, or asleep on the ground outside. But if you get in their way, and you panic, they just go right over the top of you, and pick you as clean as the lanes.’
‘I gotta hand it to you, Lin,’ she said, and her voice was steady, but fear was still wide in her eyes. ‘You sure know how to show a girl a good time.’
Limp with weariness and relief that we weren’t badly hurt, we clung to one another and staggered back to the clinic-hut. I spread one blanket down on the bare earth. We stretched out on it, propped up against a stack of other blankets. I held her in my arms. A sprinkling shower of rain rappled on the canvas awning overhead. Somewhere, a sleeper cried out harshly, and the tense, meaningless sound swooped from dream to dream until it disturbed answering howls from a pack of wild dogs roaming the edge of the slum. Too exhausted to sleep just yet, and tingling with sexual tension in the press of our tired bodies we lay awake and, piece by painful piece, Karla told me her story.
She was born in Switzerland, in Basel, and she was an only child. Her mother was Swiss-Italian, and her father was Swedish. They were artists. Her father was a painter, and her mother was a soprano coloratura. Karla Saaranen’s memories of her early childhood years were the happiest of her life. The creative young couple was popular, and their house was a meeting place for poets, musicians, actors, and other artists in the cosmopolitan city. Karla grew up speaking four languages fluently, and spent many long hours learning her favourite arias with her mother. In her father’s studio, she watched him magic the blank canvases with all the colours and shapes of his passion.
Then, one day, Ischa Saaranen failed to return from an exhibition of his paintings in Germany. At close to midnight, the local police told Anna and Karla that his car had left the road during a snowstorm. He was dead. Within a year, the misery that ruined Anna Saaranen’s beauty, and killed her lovely voice, finally smothered her life as well. She took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Karla was alone.
Her mother’s brother had settled in America, in San Francisco. The orphaned girl was only ten when she stood next to that stranger at her mother’s grave and then travelled with him to join his family. Mario Pacelli was a big, generous-hearted bear of a man. He treated Karla with affectionate kindness and sincere respect. He welcomed her into his family as an equal in every way to his own children. He told her often that he loved her and that he hoped she would gr
ow to love him, and to give him a part of the love for her dead parents that he knew she kept locked within her.
There was no time for that love to grow. Karla’s uncle Mario died in a climbing accident, three years after she arrived in America. Mario’s widow, Penelope, took control of her life. Aunt Penny was jealous of the girl’s beauty and her combative, intimidating intelligence—qualities not discernible in her own three children. The more brightly Karla shined, in comparison to the other children, the more her aunt hated her. There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons. Aunt Penny deprived Karla, punished her arbitrarily, chastised and belittled her constantly, and did everything but throw the girl into the street.
Forced to provide her own money for all her needs, Karla worked after school every night at a local restaurant, and as a baby-sitter on weekends. One of the fathers she worked for returned, alone and too early, on a hot summer night. He’d been to a party, and had been drinking. He was a man she’d liked, a handsome man she’d found herself fantasising about from time to time. When he crossed the room to stand near her on that sultry summer night, his attention flattered her, despite the stink of stale wine on his breath and the glazed stare in his eyes. He touched her shoulder, and she smiled. It was her last smile for a very long time.
No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla’s aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt’s home, and never contacted her again. She moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job, shared an apartment with another girl, and began to make her own way. But after the rape, Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her—friendship, compassion, sexuality—but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.
She worked, saved money, and went to night school. It was her dream to gain a place at a university—any university, anywhere—and study English and German literature. But too much in her young life had been broken, and too many loved ones had died. She couldn’t complete any course of study. She couldn’t remain in any job. She drifted, and she began to teach herself by reading everything that gave her hope or strength.
‘And then?’
‘And then,’ she said slowly, ‘one day, I found myself on a plane, going to Singapore, and I met a businessman, an Indian businessman, and my life … just … changed, forever.’
She let out a sighing gasp of air. I couldn’t tell if it was despairing or simply exhausted.
‘I’m glad you told me.’
‘Told you what?’
She was frowning, and her tone was sharp.
‘About … your life,’ I answered.
She relaxed.
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, allowing herself a little smile.
‘No, I mean it. I’m glad, and I’m grateful, that you trusted me enough to … talk about yourself.’
‘And I meant it, too,’ she insisted, still smiling. ‘Don’t mention it—any of it—to anyone. Okay?’
‘Okay’
We were silent for a few moments. A baby was crying somewhere nearby, and I could hear its mother soothing it with a little spool of syllables that were tender and yet faintly annoyed at the same time.
‘Why do you hang out at Leopold’s?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked sleepily.
‘I don’t know. I just wonder.’
She laughed with her mouth closed, breathing through her nose. Her head rested on my arm. In the darkness her face was a set of soft curves, and her eyes gleamed like black pearls.
‘I mean, Didier and Modena and Ulla, even Lettie and Vikram, they all fit in there, somehow. But not you. You don’t fit.’
‘I think … they fit in with me, even if I don’t fit in with them,’ she sighed.
‘Tell me about Ahmed,’ I asked. ‘Ahmed and Christina.’
She was silent for so long, in response to the question, that I thought she must’ve fallen asleep. Then she spoke, quietly and steadily and evenly, as if she was giving testimony at a trial.
‘Ahmed was a friend. He was my best friend, for a while, and kind of like the brother I never had. He came from Afghanistan, and was wounded in the war there. He came to Bombay to recover—in a way, we both did. His wounds were so bad that he never really did get his health back completely. Anyway, we kind of nursed each other, I guess, and we became very close friends. He was a science graduate, from Kabul University, and he spoke excellent English. We used to talk about books and philosophy and music and art and food. He was a wonderful, gentle guy.’
‘And something happened to him,’ I prompted.
‘Yeah,’ she replied, with a little laugh. ‘He met Christina. That’s what happened to him. She was working for Madame Zhou. She was an Italian girl—very dark and beautiful. I even introduced him to her, one night, when she came into Leopold’s with Ulla. They were both working at the Palace.’
‘Ulla worked at the Palace?’
‘Ulla was one of the most popular girls Madame Zhou ever had. Then she left the Palace. Maurizio had a contact at the German Consulate. He wanted to oil the wheels on some deal that he was working on with the German, and he discovered that the German was crazy about Ulla. With some heavy persuasion from the consulate officer, and all his own savings, Maurizio managed to buy Ulla free from the Palace. Maurizio got Ulla to twist the consulate guy until he did … whatever it was Maurizio wanted him to do. Then he dumped him. The guy lost it, I heard. He put a bullet in his head. By then, Maurizio had put Ulla to work, to pay the debt she owed him.’
‘You know, I’ve been working up a healthy dislike for Maurizio.’
‘It was a shitty deal, true enough. But at least she was free from Madame Zhou and the Palace. I have to give Maurizio his due there—he proved it could be done. Before that, nobody ever got away—not without getting acid thrown in her face. When Ulla broke away from Madame Zhou, Christina wanted to break out as well. Madame Zhou was forced to let Ulla go, but she was damned if she was going to part with Christina as well. Ahmed was crazy in love with her, and he went to the Palace, late one night, to have it out with Madame Zhou. I was supposed to go with him. I did business with Madame Zhou—I brought businessmen there for my boss, and they spent a lot of money—you know that. I thought she’d listen to me. But then I got called away. I had a job … a job … it was … an important contact … I couldn’t refuse. Ahmed went to the Palace alone. They found his body, and Christina’s, the next day, in a car, a few blocks from the Palace. The cops … said that they both took poison, like Romeo and Juliet.’
‘You think she did it to them, Madame Zhou, and you blame yourself, is that it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Is that what she was talking about, that day, through the metal grille, when we got Lisa Carter out of there? Is that why you were crying?’
‘If you must know,’ she said softly, her voice emptied of all its music and emotion, ‘she was telling me what she did to them, before she had them killed. She was telling me how she played with them, before they died.’
I clamped my jaw shut, listening to the ruffle of air breathing in and out through my nose, until our two patterns of breath matched one another in rhythmic rise and fall.
‘And what about you?’ she asked, at last, her eyes closing more slowly and opening less often. ‘We’ve got my story. When are you going to tell me your story?’
I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. I knew we didn’t have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she’d excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she’d included. The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lover
s find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.
Somewhere out there in the night, Jeetendra wept for his wife. Prabaker mopped at Parvati’s sweating face with his red scarf. Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla’s sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE LOST NINE PEOPLE in the cholera epidemic. Six of them were young children. Jeetendra’s only son, Satish, survived, but two of the boy’s closest friends died. Both of them had been enthusiastic students in my English class. The procession of children that ran with us behind the biers carrying those little bodies, garlanded with flowers, wailed their grief so piteously that many strangers on the busy streets paused in prayer, and felt the sudden burn and sting of tears. Parvati survived the sickness, and Prabaker nursed her for two weeks, sleeping outside her hut under a flap of plastic during the night. Sita took her sister Parvati’s place at their father’s chai shop; and, whenever Johnny Cigar entered or passed the shop, her eyes followed him as slowly and stealthily as a walking leopard’s shadow.
Karla stayed for six days, the worst of it, and visited several times in the weeks that followed. When the infection rate dropped to zero, and the crisis had passed for the most serious cases, I took a three-bucket shower, changed into clean clothes, and headed for the tourist beat in search of business. I was almost broke. The rain had been heavy, and the flooding in many areas of the city was as hard on the touts, dealers, guides, acrobats, pimps, beggars, and black marketeers who made their living on the street as it was on the many businessmen whose shops were submerged.
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