by Janet Sola
“I just want to be friends,” I say, even though it feels like a lie.
He is not at all discouraged. He just keeps talking, murmuring in a low, rhythmic voice. “Yes, you are my friend. We can be friends if you want but this is better, this is much better.”
And then, my inner eye, the same eye that watched myself drowning with calmness when I was a child, is now watching myself being kissed by this beautiful young man, and at some indefinable moment his mouth is no longer strange and I kiss him back. The same feeling as when he pressed the seeds into my palm is now flowing everywhere. He runs his fingers down my bare inner arm.
When the kiss is over, he looks into my eyes. “That is very nice, Elena. I like to kiss you. I like to say your name.”
Over his shoulder, I can see the tourists with binoculars ascending from the lower terrace. “Here they come,” I say, pulling myself away. “Shall we go back?” I ask, with as much nonchalance as I can muster, as if nothing at all had happened.
“Why do you hurry?” he asks, “We are not in the last day of our lives, remember?” Still, he picks up the satchel.
“Look, I’m just a bit nervous. No one has kissed me for a long time.” I begin walking down the road in the direction of our taxi. Sahil catches up with me, then moves ahead of me, stops and puts his crutch out just enough to stop me.
“I am sorry,” he says. He looks into my eyes as if he is trying to understand me. The truth is, I don’t understand myself. “No, I am not sorry, but I am sorry when you are angry.”
“I’m not angry.” Actually, I feel exhilarated, as if a thousand insects with cool downy wings had brushed against my skin. And yet . . . it’s strange but I want to be alone. I want to go back down the mountain and lie on my bed in my cool room, line up my thoughts and feelings like precious objects and mull them over. I want to think about how that kiss felt, and about how he smelled, like the earth after rain, plus a whiff of something lemony like a citrus aftershave, and of how cool his touch was as he ran his fingers down my arm. And yet, now he’s here in the flesh and I don’t quite know how to deal with that.
I force myself into the present. “Do you think the taxi driver will be waiting for us? We’ve been gone a long time.”
“Don’t worry. He is there. He is my friend. Plus he needs money for his two wives.”
“Two wives?” The sun is lower now, and the shadows of afternoon are stretching across the land below us. I am struck by his comment. India is many things, but always unpredictable. “Your friend has two wives?”
“Yes, it is true. He has two wives and I have none.”
“Isn’t having two wives against the law?’
“Yes. The first wife is official wife, the second wife is for love. She works in the hospital. She is a nurse. She helps me with my foot. I tell you this before. She is very nice. Very calm.”
“What does the first wife think about all this?”
“She is a bad woman. Crazy. I don’t like this woman.”
“Why?” I ask, but by now we have reached Amar, the taxi driver with two wives. He’s waiting patiently, sitting on the hood of his vehicle, running a hand through his head of greying hair as if only a moment has passed. He looks like an intelligent man, a thoughtful man. A troubled man. And yet, when he sees Sahil, he breaks out into a smile. The Sahil effect, as I am starting to think of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Email
“It was a beautiful picnic,” I tell Sahil when we part, half a block away from the guesthouse. “But I need my space for a while.”
“Space? Like the stars?” He cocks his head and looks at me as if he doesn’t understand. How can I explain?
“No. Not like the stars. I need some time alone. To think.”
He nods, but I don’t think he really understands. “Later I see you. Maybe we walk under the Rajasthan night sky.”
“Maybe.”
“OK. I come later.”
“Well, maybe I’ll be up for a walk in the evening, maybe not.” I don’t want to make any commitments.
“OK.” He shakes his head. He’s disappointed I know. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, this need for personal space.
I’m grateful that my cool room is waiting. But before I have a chance to put my key in the lock, I hear the tinny sound of a Madonna CD coming from cheap speakers inside. Strange. What’s going on? I rap on the door. It opens a crack and a wan male head, hair pulled back in a ponytail, peers through. “What’s up?”
“Uhmm, this is my room.”
“No, it’s my room, dude.” I can see a guy’s clothes draped around the chairs and the bed.
“Can’t be. I’ve been here for a week.”
He shrugs. “Dunno. All I know is I paid.”
I stomp off to the manager’s office, a tiny room behind a counter just off the courtyard. He’s at his desk, head down over a grubby ledger. I am amazed to see my suitcase propped against the wall, one forlorn sleeve of a violet T-shirt sticking out of it. This morning, that T-shirt and all my other things had been neatly stacked in that same room now occupied by someone else.
“Someone is in my room.”
“Your room finished,” he says. “No more rooms. All full.” Without looking at me, he lifts his chin several times in quick succession, as if he’s trying to shake a fly off his face.
“Excuse me, I have a room here. You cannot give my room away. You cannot just take my things and do what you want with them. That’s against the law.”
“You no pay. Today one week rent due.” He glances at me with his reptile’s gaze, the corners of his thin lips turned up.
“What? Yes, today it is due. And I was going to pay it.”
“Too late. No more rooms.”
“That is not the reason. You know that is not the reason.”
He shrugs and peers at his ledger again. “You owe rupees, madam.”
“For what?”
“For too many toastbutterjams.” I really want to go in there and tear up his ledger. I really want to kick him.
“Belongings packed up and ready to go.” He puts my suitcase by the counter. The guests in the shadows bend their heads over their game, pretending not to hear.
“And who pray tell went into my room and packed up my belongings?”
“One of our boys, madam.”
“How do I know that all my things are here?”
He wobbles his head in that irritating way, like a light bulb loose in its socket.
“What does that mean?” I imitate his gesture in a mock sarcastic way and roll my eyes. “Does it mean yes, no, or I’m an idiot and don’t have a clue.” I can’t help myself. Adrenaline is shooting through me like hot tea.
The three or four guests in the courtyard look up expectantly from the board game they are playing. If they want drama, I’ll give them drama. I lean over, hoist up my suitcase onto the counter, open it up and proceed to take out my worldly possessions one by one. Four T-shirts, three skirts, two Indian style tunics, two dresses, various items of underwear. A cup and strainer for tea. Three long scarves. Sandals. My writing notebooks. My still empty writing notebooks. So sad. My copy of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (in which a young Indian man is accused of molesting the pure white English heroine, or is it simply a figment of her repressed imagination?), my five hundred years of Indian poetry book, my see-through plastic cosmetic bag with all my American products from hair conditioner to sunscreen to tampons.
It feels like a violation, knowing that some stranger actually picked up these things. The pile is getting larger. My manila envelope with my papers. My guidebooks. And my slightly lopsided copper cow from the ashram that I had used to do my water blessing ceremony just a few short days ago. I open the satin covered box that is my jewelry case and look over its meager contents, a garnet pendant, a silver chain, and the most recent addition, the painted seed Sahil had given me. I put the case on top of the pile. It all seems to be here. I want to call out, falsely, “My diamond ring, whe
re is my diamond ring,” but I know that whatever boy had packed my things would be in trouble for doing what he had been ordered to do. I don’t want to be like the overwrought heroine in Passage. I want to be sensible. I want to keep my head. I fail miserably.
Two new guests arrive, a young couple. They gaze with puzzled expressions at the pile on the counter. “You will love this place,” I tell them. “Fabulous service, including gratuitous clothes management.”
The manager mumbles. “Not necessary to pay rupees, madam. On the house.”
“Oh thank you ever so much,” I say and stuff my things back in my suitcase, roll it out the door on its barely functional wheels. I hate this country. I hate its stupid venal petty people, and its absolute disregard for anyone’s personal belongings and space, and especially I hate the hypocritical morality, where they presume to tell people what they can and can’t do.
I pull my suitcase with the wobbling wheels through the cobbled streets. It makes a thumping sound and every third step or so gets stuck and I have to give it an extra yank. My guidebook, with its recommended hotels and cheap guesthouses is at the bottom of the pile, and I don’t want to sit in the middle of the street to take it out. I’m on my own, with no idea of what my next step is. I am now aware of what poor independent travel skills I have. All my earlier travels were prearranged, prepackaged. I didn’t really have to think about much at all. Now that Cathy’s gone, I don’t know anybody except for Sahil, and I have no idea how to get a hold of him.
I feel as if I’m in a trance, as if I am reliving the exile I fantasized on the ramparts of the Monsoon Palace, only in a much more banal way. I’m not a princess or a maharani who’s been shut out of her castle. I’m an angry, homeless woman aimlessly wandering through the streets, dragging her pathetic bundle of worldly goods behind her. My feet ache. My hair is wet from sweat and flopping in my eyes. My face is burning from the sun and I have no idea where my hat is. I can feel the cobblestones transmitting their shape up to me one by one through the handle of my suitcase into my arm all the way to my teeth.
Children gather round a flavored ice vendor and cover their faces with their hands, then open their fingers to point at me, probably because I’m scowling like a witch. I pass my favorite trio of old men in white, their mustaches pomaded to extravagant perfection like the perfect horns of a bull, orange turbans and polished spectacles, bemused expressions on their faces. I want to stick out my tongue at them. And the child with the beautiful face who walks on all fours like a crab that tears at my heart. He extends his hand and I give him some coins and try to keep from crying. And yet even he exudes some kind of inner peace and understanding that eludes me. These are the denizens of deep India, who have always been here, as if this is a garden and they are the native plants that grow here. I’m a mere transient, a bug in the garden really, and my search for transformation and beauty has come back to mock me.
I take a random turn up a side street where at least there is shade. And there, miracle of miracles, is an internet café. I have one thought: If I rush in will I be saved. The café is a rundown mecca for Indians and Westerners alike: red walls with an eight-armed scary god painted in gold, a mishmash of tables, gooey sweets behind a cloudy glass cabinet. But there are three computers, two occupied by earnest-looking young Indian men. A guy at a table near me who has a European accent, German likely, although his speech is slurred, says namaste to me and then recommends a bong lassi, “guaranteed to take you to the moon,” he tells me, even though it’s quite apparent to me that we’re already on some version of it. He’d been going to catch a train three days ago and somehow he just couldn’t find his way to the train station. Another lost soul.
I order a chai tea and a half hour online. I take my tea to the computer station, stash my suitcase by my knees and sign on. And there it is, threads from the world I had left behind, a world that’s hard for me even to imagine now. Big white rooms. Lawns. Freeways. Strange. I’m disappointed there’s nothing from Jason. After all, we did agree to try to meet in Kathmandu eventually. The trouble with him, I remember from that other world we lived in, is once he’s caught up in some romance, he gets very spacy. Among the spam, there are two I want to read. One from my mother, and one from Cathy.
I open the one from my mother.
We hope you are having a safe journey dear. It’s cold here, the middle of winter on this side of the world. Your dad is shoveling snow, and we’re getting ready for a visit from the Clausens. You remember them don’t you? Dorothy was about your age. Their daughter will be starting college soon.
How does she do it, and I know it’s on purpose, instead of asking about me, showing any interest whatsoever in my journey, she makes me feel like I have absolutely screwed up my life by not finding the right man and raising college-bound children. I continue reading.
I’ll bet it’s hot there, although we still don’t know what you’re doing on such a long trip. Travel does broaden one’s horizons, but why can’t you just see the sights and come home? We hope you can find a good job when you get back as the newspapers are full of talk about the bad economy. Your dad always said don’t quit your job till you have another one, but you obviously didn’t take that advice.
As to the other, well, you know I’m not surprised about Peter.
What did she mean by that?
But there are lots of nice professional men out there. Time to keep moving, as you know you’re not getting any younger. I’m certainly not. My bursitis is acting up again. Well, I have to go to bed now, they finally gave me three days of work at the hospital, which will be a help for our retirement savings. I have to be up early. I don’t need to say, write us.
Love,
Your mom (and dad.)
In a way she’s right. Maybe I am here because I can’t face my problems at home. There was a life I was supposed to be living, the next step in my career, a new, improved relationship, a home, a garden, I had always dreamed of my own patch of earth, belonging. Will it still be waiting? Do I want it to be waiting? I hit the reply button.
Dear Mom (and Dad),
I’m having a wonderful, productive time exploring the culture of this fascinating country. Travel, as you yourself have implied, will make me a more well-rounded person, and much more attractive to both future employers and suitors, if any.
Love, your daughter
I hit send. Then I think of how cold it is there. My old dad would be shoveling snow off the driveway so my mom can get up in the gray dawn, put on her registered nurse’s uniform and go to work. I feel somehow ashamed for being here, for pursuing such a chimera. I open Cathy’s email. I’ve saved it for last because I know it will cheer me up.
Yo Elena,
Delhi has been great, Mark (the guy from Australia) has an awesome high-rise pad with a view of the smog, which I don’t notice so much as mainly I‘m indoors in A/C comfort. I am trying to stay focused and do my work tracking down my grandfather (the Indian doctor who ditched my grandmother you remember that story I told you). He owes big time, though I’m not sure exactly who, as my grandma died a long time ago.
I’m still here for a while if J Depp turns out to be J Dipp. So reply already.
Cathy
I start to compose an answer, when something makes me look over my shoulder. There, beyond the spaced-out German, is Sahil, ambling across the room toward me, on just one crutch now. He’s smiling that lovely smile of his, as if nothing in the world can ever be wrong. He shakes his head when he sees me, as if I am the most exasperating person on the face of the earth. I just sit there, gripping the handle of my suitcase. “How did you find me?”
“I come here to see my friend.” He gestures to the man behind the glass counter. “Do you leave Udaipur?” he says, looking at my suitcase. “This makes me sad.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing.” I tell him what happened at the hotel.
“Yes, hotel wallah is a bad man. Because he sees me wi
th you. He does not like this.”
“In America I could get a lawyer for this.”
“Yes, same lawyer as you get for my foot. But he is in America, this lawyer, not here. When he visits, he can fix everything in India.”
This makes me laugh. “I’ll email him to come right away.”
“Do you want to stay or go?
“I really want to . . . ,” I hover for a moment, suspended. “I really want to . . . stay.”
“I am happy this is what you want.”
“But where? I can’t go back to that hotel obviously.”
“I take you to a very nice place.”
I nod and turn back to the computer to finish my reply to Cathy. Good luck on your search. More later.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Exile
Pulling my suitcase, I follow Sahil back to the street that no longer looks like chaos to me, but an order so intricate that it would take me a lifetime to discern it.
“From the window of this place you can see—what do you say—birds with long legs in the water.”
“Storks.”
“Yes, storks. Very nice birds.”
“Very nice birds,” I repeat mindlessly. We pass near the water pump. Usually the gang of ragged children are playing there, but now it’s quiet. It’s late in the day. Everything is hushed and silvery, the old walls and the cobbled streets and the sky. I walk over to the pump and lean on the handle. A gush of water comes out. I splash some on my face, let it run down over my throat and down my arms.