The Overnight Palace

by Janet Sola

  “Smashing,” he says, as he guns his motor.

  In the middle of the night I wake up with a dull ache at the end of my nose. I examine it with my fingers. It’s puffy and tender to the touch. I pull myself out of bed, turn on the light, and look into the small mirror in the bathroom. There is no doubt about it. It’s red. It’s larger than it was. Not only that, it hurts, a pulsing, throbbing pain. I’m so thirsty. I need drinking water and the bottle in my room is empty. I throw on my robe and stumble through dim corridors that lead to the kitchen. On my way, I see one of the aunties, Aunty Peaches, in her pale cream nightgown. I’ve awakened her.

  When she turns on the hall light, she spots my problem immediately. She peers at my nose, touches it with the tip of her finger. She makes a clucking sound. “Doctor,” she says.

  She calls Aunty Cream, who stumbles into the hall with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. “Doctor,” she agrees. Before I know it, I’m off in the middle of the night in a taxi with Aunty Peaches accompanying me. We park on a tree-lined residential street, knock at an iron gate. In just a moment, a white-haired man in pajamas appears. They are very likely the same clothes he wears in the daytime, I think. The boundaries between day and night are different here. People sleep in the daytime and often get up to do their chores in the dark. In a way, it makes more sense in a place this hot. In any case, the doctor doesn’t seem at all perturbed that he’s being awakened in the middle of the night to treat such a banality as a swollen nose. He has such a kind face, a face I trust. “Come,” he says, as he leads us into his dark office. “Where are you coming from?” he asks as he shines a powerful flashlight on me. “How long are you staying in India?”

  As I am answering his questions, I notice more people have gathered around me. On the other side of the beam of the flashlight faces float like balloons, peering at me. I have no idea where they’ve come from. They just appeared. They must be neighbors, or servants. They seem to have no sense that they are intruding; they might be medical students with the doctor instructing them on the known treatments of this particular ailment. “Yes,” I imagine him saying, “we have seen very few cases of this. It’s generally associated with a premonition of terrible things to happen in the future. The nose is the vestigial sense that works at a different, more psychic level that the rest of our senses.”

  And because they are Indians, and their minds work in very complicated and philosophical ways, the medical students offer further insights. “Just so, doctor, but perhaps noses grow when people are lying—something like the Italian tall tale of Pinocchio. Even more, if one is lying to oneself. That is when the problem gets serious. This lady is very likely lying to herself.” All this goes through my mind in a second or two. I blink and see they are just curious onlookers after all, silent, shy, emerging from the shadows of the surrounding neighborhood because they sensed something mildly entertaining was happening.

  After a thorough examination, the doctor turns the flashlight off and offers me some pills. “Merely an infection,” he says. “These antibiotics will be clearing it up in a few days. If not, you must be coming to see me again.”

  He turns the flashlight off, and the onlookers scatter as suddenly as they appeared. The show is over.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Reunion

  From my window, I can just make out a string of red-clad elephants crossing the arched bridge in the distance, weighed down in finery. It’s the day of the festival. The women of the city will soon be emerging from their houses, their flickering eyes ringed in kohl, bracelets clinking, wrapped in jewel colors. I can almost hear their excited chattering.

  Because of the antibiotics and the strange middle of the night sojourn in the doctor’s office, I slept until almost noon. I awoke to a soft knock and there were the aunties, waiting at my door like sari-clad saints with breakfast on a tray, a pack of wet towels and murmurs of sympathy, patting their own noses in solidarity.

  I touch mine gingerly. It’s still tender, but no longer throbbing. I check in the mirror. Some of the swelling has subsided, but it’s still red and puffy like the nose of a drunk. I think about how to disguise it, but decide it doesn’t matter, really, as I’ll be alone.

  I nibble at my breakfast—coffee, chapatis, and a golden melon. I don’t feel like eating even though I know I should build up my strength. My Hindu deity book helps to pass the long minutes while I lie in bed with a wet towel plastered on my face. The cavorting gods and goddesses are so busy with their full lives of plotting schemes of revenge, transmigrating into new forms and carrying on in general that they seem like over-inflated, angst-ridden adolescents, inspiration for a Woody Allen movie.

  On one page is an illustration of Parvati changing herself from a dark goddess into a fairer one to attract the waning attentions of her boyfriend Shiva. She bleaches her skin, she doesn’t quite go blonde, although if she had, she might have been more successful. No matter. He still shuns her, so she further tries to win his approval by following his ascetic diet of leaves and wind, starving herself to skin and bones. She fits perfectly into the current ideal of feminine perfection that demands beauty as the price of love, and misery as the price of beauty. Love sucks, actually. Sahil can stay in his village or wherever he is forever for all I care. So much for the love goddess.

  I dress in my standard black silk dress. It hangs on me now. I add a brown sash and a strand of coral around my neck. I tuck a black silk shawl in my bag for evening. I can wrap it over my head and around my face, burka style, if I want to. I like the idea of being invisible. I like the idea of being alone. I came to India to become a stronger, more independent woman, not some slave to romance. I came to India because I wanted to experience a five-thousand-year-old culture, not hang out with a faux artist. I came to India to travel, not to be stuck in one place that is starting to suffocate me.

  They all await me, these mythic places: Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, then Nepal and the Himalayas, the top of the world. Here I am, half a planet away from home, with no one really to talk to, improvising as I go along and feeling as if yes, I can do this. I've come a long way from the timid, cautious woman who wanted control over every aspect of her life. I am surviving in one of the most chaotic countries in the world. The inner goddess I want to call on is not Parvati, but Durga, eternal virgin and warrior goddess with her eighteen arms, riding on her lion vehicle. Like her, I am facing my demons and fighting them.

  “I’m glad to be free of him, I’m glad to be free of him, I’m glad to be free, period,” I chant to myself as I move around my room, gathering things and putting them in my suitcase. There, next to the birds nest, abandoned now, are my few books. I pick them up to pack them away and notice an old writing notebook—the cheap, thin-papered, staple-clamped thing. I don’t know why I open it, but I do.

  And there, on the first page, in block letters written on blue lines, are the words Sahil wrote for me that morning when we were clowning around in the rooftop restaurant. India is mine. Then he had taken my hand and said: You are mine. I am yours. The bite of loss is sudden. Like a piranha attacking a swimmer, it tears into my body and moves directly to my heart, going for the tastiest flesh. Why is it we feel things in the heart, so physically? I toss the notebook in the suitcase and bite my lip. Tears well up, but I fight them. I know if I allow one tear to come, a torrent will follow. “I’m glad to be free,” I say out loud in the direction of the half-built nest on the bookshelf. “And I don’t give a damn if you birds come back either.”

  Unexpectedly, there’s a knock, a blunt, clumsy one. “Letter from you,” the house boy mutters from the other side of the door. I know he means “Letter for me.” My heart starts to thump involuntarily.

  “All right,” I reply. Some instinct makes my fumble in my bag for my sunglasses and put them on. I don’t mind onlookers seeing my red nose, but my teary eyes are a different story. I open the door and follow the houseboy to the lobby. Vijay, Sahil’s silent young friend, is waiting for me, with a silly grin and
a note in his hand. He hands me a carefully folded piece of heavy paper, the kind of paper Sahil sketched on. My fingers shake as I unfold it. I recognize his English block letters immediately. “I am back from the village,” the note says. “Please come to meet in Blue Sky café. I wait for you.”

  I don't even pause. “Tell him I’ll be there. In one hour.” He nods. I hope Vijay understands me. I write it on the back of the note just in case he doesn’t.

  The Blue Sky is a rundown and lively restaurant in the center of the city. Strangely, even though it’s on the lake, all the windows face the street, and on the wall is a mural of what would be the view. It’s a garish painting, the lake and the surrounding hills recreated in shades of iridescent blues and neon oranges. Plato was right, I think, we’d rather watch the shadows on the cave walls than the reality in front of us. I find a tiny table in the corner and look around at the mixture of Westerners and locals—mostly dressed as imitations of each other, the Westerners in loose cotton pants and kurtas, the Indians in denim and embossed T-shirts. A haze of cigarette smoke and maybe something stronger makes my eyes water.

  I know why Sahil has chosen this spot. It’s one of the few places where we can feel comfortable, unjudged. No one looks at me or at my red nose, the state of which now dismays me. I wish I were younger, more beautiful, blonder, thinner, more voluptuous. Just like Parvati, I think ruefully, a slave to passion.

  I order chai and while I’m waiting I take out my black scarf and wrap it around my hair and over the lower part of my face. When the waiter returns with my cup, I stare at it, trying to figure out how women who have to wear veils over their faces drink tea in restaurants.

  When I look up there is Sahil. The light from the doorway creates a halo around his lean frame. I think of the first time I saw that effect, when he pressed the seed into my hand, a lifetime ago, a moment ago. He spots me immediately, in spite of my cover-up, and looks into my eyes as he approaches, holding them as he pulls out his chair. He looks frailer than I remember him, as if he’s been eating only rice and vegetables. He’s rolled up the sleeves of the white shirt he’s wearing, which emphasizes the thinness of his arms. He’s had his hair cut, a bit too high on his neck, so he looks even younger, more vulnerable. And yet he’s beautiful. The way he moves is beautiful. The way he almost smiles is beautiful. Everything about him is beautiful.

  “Elena, your eyes are very nice with this . . . ,” he says as he sits down, and he raises his hand over his face, in imitation of my scarf. “You look like Moslem wife.” He reaches one hand across the table and leaves it there, his long elegant fingers extended, very close to mine, an invitation. For a moment I pause, then extend the tips of my fingers until they touch his. The thrill is lovely and intense, but I pull my hand away. I want to be calm. I want to talk things over in a rational way.

  “We must talk,” I say, and pull off my scarf in a flourish.

  He looks at me, tenderly, I think, and finally a smile spreads across his face. “Your nose is hurt by a fly, no not a fly . . . a bee, bee sting,” he says. “Do you hurt?”

  “I don't know what it is. I had to go to the doctor. He gave me some medicine. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it looks awful, I know.” I shrug and smile sheepishly.

  “I do not care if your nose if big or small or red or white. I only care that I see you again.”

  I feel him drawing me in, so quickly, so easily, as if I were a child following the Pied Piper. But there is an equal and opposite resistance to that feeling, that old voice that says be sensible, now is your chance to walk away, and if you don’t, whatever follows will be your own fault. The words of the strange man in the business suit in Pushkar come back to me, “Remember your center.” What is my center anyway? Is it what’s in my heart? Or the oasis of peace that I felt on the hill with Baba? Or that state of being that I imagined was embodied in the painting I lost? Or is it just platitudes and empty words?

  “Sahil, how can you say you care so much about seeing me again when you disappeared?” I try to read his eyes. He has the look of a spirit lost in the forest, a village boy in the big city, an innocent in spite of all his bravado. But I don’t trust him.

  I think he is going to apologize, but instead he says, “I think maybe you do not come back.”

  “Don’t turn this around,” I say. I’m determined to make my point. “We agreed to meet before the festival. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember. Today is festival. I am here.”

  I take a deep breath. “I have been here waiting for you since I came back from Pushkar. For days. For a long time.”

  Both his hands are the table now, his fingers tapping out a gentle rhythm. He closes his eyes and shakes his head very slowly, as if he is saying something I am not understanding. “I go to my village. My grandmother is very sick. Now I am back.”

  I try to keep my voice calm, light even. “Sahil,” I say, “do you know this man who hangs out by the ghat? He’s a skinny guy, with a big . . . Adam’s apple.” I move my finger up and down near my throat. Sahil frowns. “Anyway, this man tells me . . . he tells me you are not in your village.”

  “What does he say?”

  I pause before I say it, but forge ahead. The mural of the lake on the restaurant wall makes me feel as if I am in a facsimile of Udaipur, a Las Vegas style India dream imitation that is closing in on me. “He tells me that you are seeing another woman. That you have many women.”

  “This man tells a lie.”

  “Why would he tell a lie?”

  “I do not know why. He maybe is jealous.” Part of me wants to accept his explanation, the other part of me can’t let my doubts go. I look into his eyes, searching for the truth. His face is a mask of calm. He touches his fingers to his forehead and closes his eyes. It’s that familiar gesture that usually means I am thinking, but now I know it means something else. I’ve ever seen him angry, but now I know he is angry, and also fighting the anger. “I know this man,” he says. “Everyone knows him. He tries to make trouble all the time.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because this is his way, his dharma. He has no job, nothing better to do.”

  I want to believe him, I want him to present some proof to me. “Why should I believe you?” I say this in almost a whisper.

  He pulls his hands from the table as if I had slapped them. His face tenses, his mouth quivers and he pushes himself away from the table. “I go,” he says as he stands up. “I go and do not come back.” My heart sinks at those words. I want to say something but nothing comes out. He turns to go. Then he pauses, and comes over to me. He touches my shoulder. “I am sad you believe this bad man instead of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to believe,” I manage to blurt out. I can’t look at him. “Everything I think is true one day is not true the next day. And vice versa. And don’t ask me what vice versa means.” My voice comes out at a high pitch. Tears well up again but this time I can’t stop them. People are staring. My nose is throbbing. I grope for my sunglasses in my bag, put them on and hurry out with as much dignity as possible through a haze of tears and smoke.

  I hear Sahil’s footsteps behind me, but I keep going. The street is thick with moving blurs of color and a rising crescendo of sounds, crunches, clinks, drones. I don’t even have a clear idea of where I’m headed, I just keep following the familiar road by the lake. When he catches up with me, tears are running down my cheeks.

  “Elena,” he says, keeping pace with me. I stop and turn to face him. “Come sit.”

  I can’t speak. I just nod. He leads me through a row of blossoming trees to a dusty little park bench that faces the lake. The overly sweet smell of flowers drifts around us. A few peahens are nibbling at the ground, oblivious to the nearby male peacock’s dazzling fan of tail feathers.

  Sahil sits next to me without touching me, just his arm resting on the back of the bench. He’s so close to me. I breathe in his smell of grass and earth, of having been born in a v
illage. It’s that smell of the first time he put his mouth on mine on the hill at the Monsoon Palace. And so many times since. And I know then that I want to believe him. Not that he’s telling the truth, but that I want to believe him because I need something to hold on to. Maybe this is what it comes down to, never knowing the truth, but simply choosing to believe in someone, in something, as the followers of Jesus, or Sai Baba, or Jason’s guru do. Or believers in love do. As I have never been able to do.

  “I do believe you. It’s myself I don't believe,” I say. The tears are coming faster now, and I start to sob. All the confusion of the last weeks, all the pain I’ve been holding in, for myself, for Sahil, for Neela, for Amar, for India itself, is streaming out.

  “It is good that you cry. It is not good to be happy all the time.” He pulls a white handkerchief from someplace and hands it to me. Even though he is younger than me, at this moment he is the parent and I am the child.

  “I tell you a story,” he says. “You see that palace?” He points up to a faraway building on the hill across from us, ochre-colored walls that rise into spires.

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “In a very old time a king and queen live there. They want all the time to be happy and dance and sing. So they pay other people to cry for them. How do you say it, professional criers.”

  “You’re making this up.” But my tears are drying up and I’m starting to smile.

  I take my sunglasses off and dab at my eyes with Sahil’s handkerchief. It smells of turpentine. When I unfold fold it, I see there are smears of paint on it. “Your painting handkerchief?”

  “I am sorry, I have other one,” he says. He searches in his pockets. “My grandmother give me these cloths. When I visit her in the village I paint. You tell me to paint the life of India. Not just copy. So I try. I show you in my studio.”