There was yelling coming from the front of the train, and it was getting closer. A wave of sound, and when it crested, my train car went dark. We were entering a tunnel, and people were screaming to hear it bounce off the walls. The train punched its way through the tunnel. Everyone around me was yelling, the wild herd of us taking pleasure in something as simple as echo. In that darkness, I was shouting just to have some part of me bounce off the world.
We pulled into Goa an hour and a half late. I hustled off the train with everyone else, unchaining my bag from the bottom of my seat, cinching my secret wallet tighter, damn near sprinting to get out into the parking lot. A woman who looked like the pictures off my digital camera waved to me from a tiny car rattling with music. As I got closer, the car was a cluster of body parts, arms and heads stacked up in the tiny compact. The woman jumped out of the car and wrapped me up in an embrace. It was Geeta. She was as beautiful as she was in the pictures.
Doubtful that I was going to fit in the little car, I chucked my backpack into the trunk. I opened the rear door, and a petite woman smiled up at me and told me that she was going to have to sit on my lap. I squeezed into the car, she shifted on top of me, I was introduced around, and someone handed me a bottle of warm Kingfisher beer. I recognized the song they were blasting. It was DJ Doll doing a cover of an old Bollywood song, “Kaanta Laga,” and it had been ubiquitous in Hyderabad, the controversial video (the young hot singer wore a thong that poked above her tight jeans) playing in every coffee shop, bar, and Internet café. It was all bass and the buzzing high nasal voice of women in Bollywood music.
The woman on my lap was good-looking but a distant second to Geeta, who turned frequently to smile at me. The woman on my lap had her arm around my neck in a way that I wasn’t positive was flirtatious. We went to dinner at an open-air place famous for its seafood. Everyone ordered Old Monk and Coke, and I fished out a carton of cigarettes for Geeta. Old Monk is an Indian rum notable for being cheap and dreadful. I drank it quickly to avoid the taste and was rewarded with another one. We had shrimp curry and naan and drunken conversation. The guy on the other side of Geeta was enthralled with her. He was marking out his territory, leaning into her to read from her menu, making sure to clink glasses with her last after every table-wide cheers. His chair was turned a few degrees toward her, so that when he laughed he nearly fell into her lap.
He was tall, thin, good-looking, smartly dressed, and an architect. I was none of those things, but it didn’t matter. I was the one who was going home with her.
Geeta had a flat that was the entire second story of a house. She had rooms she didn’t even use. She put me in the guest bedroom and warned me to wear slippers when I showered because there was some wiring loose in the electric water heater. Geeta came and lay on my bed, and we talked about my waking up in the train station. I told her that it was terrifying and lonely, and that I felt hollowed out and empty still. I told her that I was having panic attacks and smoking like a fiend.
She leaned in close and tapped the ashes off her cigarette into a soda can in between us. She was in a man’s white V-neck shirt and thin cotton pajama bottoms. I usually don’t notice clothing, but that outfit is burned in my mind. She told me that when I wrote her that e-mail, she called up the Fulbright people and cried with worry over me. I wondered how long we had known each other before I had gone off the rails—a month at most? Had I meant that much to her in so short a time? I wasn’t sure who I had been to have had such an immediate effect on her, but I was fairly certain that getting sick had drawn us closer together. It was as if the worst moment in my life had become a kind of shiny button I could wear to attract women like her. Using personal suffering as an emotional currency normally would be repellent to me, but sitting across from her and her white V-neck T-shirt and thin pajama bottoms, I could see its good points.
When I told her about my hallucinations, I didn’t mention Jim Henson. Instead, I described the one where I was an old man in a kitchen filled with my loved ones, my children, my friends, my wife. I lied and told her she was there. I said that it was beautiful and my hallucination was all about universal love.
She pulled back and wrapped her arms around her legs. She told me how worried she’d been about me, about her bad dreams as a result of Lariam and how she flushed her pills when she’d heard what happened to me. I thanked her for writing to me so often. I told her that she’d been a big part of my recovery.
She then said she’d had an affair with a woman who was on the Fulbright with us and that she was confused by the whole thing.
We talked until three, and she asked me to ignore the sounds coming out of her room in the morning; she had to do her vocal exercises every morning. She hugged me and drifted out of the room.
The next day, we borrowed a scooter and took off for the beach. Her landlady had offered her the use of the scooter when she arrived, but Geeta had no idea how to drive one and was afraid to learn. I knew that I had owned a motorcycle when I lived in North Carolina, so I guessed I’d be able to drive the thing. She sat straddled behind me and sang a Magnetic Fields song, “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.” It’s a song about an ugly man who gets to drive a beautiful girl around because he’s the only one she knows who has a car. She had a lovely voice.
At the beach I bought some cheap sunglasses off a vendor, and we watched a sidewalk tattooist draw designs on a young man with a needle gun powered by a foot-pedaled motor. Geeta’s bikini was white, and she was stunning, and even the presence of her white husband didn’t keep the men from flocking around her. We treaded water in the surf with a ring of men surrounding us shouting things in Hindi, things that I didn’t understand but made her throw her arms around me and kiss me.
“They’re calling me a whore,” she whispered in my ear.
“Let’s go,” I told her. “The waves suck anyway.”
At her house we made ramen noodles and started having sex. The noodles burnt to the pot and filled the kitchen with smoke. We had sex three times, and she fell asleep. I did not. I was quivering with happiness. In that erotic haze, I felt I had been found. I was convinced that this was the life I was meant to have. Her AC was on the fritz and we were covered in sweat, which the night air chilled. Geeta and I had a connection. It took a lot of awful stuff to happen to us, but here we were—we had found each other. I believed that the rest of my life would be spent in that tiny single bed with her. I felt swept up by love, carried by it, and that I’d never be lonely again. I was going to use her to reorient myself; our love would be my true north.
As she slept, I talked to our future children. I told them about how their mother and I first met and how we fell in love and how we made them and how I was a fragile mess of a man until she came along and became something beautiful for me to hold onto and order my life around. I listened to her breathe and mentally cast generations of beautiful children from her—born in a world where all of my genes were recessive.
We stayed inside the next day, the air acrid with the stench of the burnt noodles. We ordered in food and kept having sex. That night as she slept, I talked to our children and grandchildren again, and told them how important love was and how you should always be with someone you didn’t think you deserved. I told them that in order to be happy, they had to date out of their league.
The next day, the pale green of her apartment was oddly fungal in the morning light. She woke up and gave me a look that I couldn’t categorize. I hugged her close. She told me that she’d just gotten out of a relationship with a white guy and that she didn’t think she could be another white man’s ethnic girlfriend. She described how beautiful it was to have sex with the other woman, who was African American, saying that when two women of color orgasm together, it’s something singular, gorgeous, and an act of protest against the white patriarchy.
She didn’t want to have to be somebody’s primer on race relations.
She wasn’t ready to date another white guy.
She told me
that she needed to brush her teeth, and it’d be best if I moved my stuff back into the guest bedroom.
My return train ticket wasn’t for another two days.
Another Fulbright student was coming into town, and when we picked him up I knew I was obsolete. He was Ivy educated, tall, handsome, strapping, and brown. His name was Kishore. We fit three on the scooter: him in back, Geeta between us, me driving and hanging onto the very front point of the seat with my tailbone. I listened to them flirt. I watched his lame moves and noted that his departure ticket was four days later than mine.
Kishore and I shared the guest bedroom. I hated him as politely as I could.
The next two days I pined for Geeta. I chauffeured her and Kishore around as they flirted. I took them to the beach, and they’d swim and splash each other while I walked on the sand and moped. I was excluded. I thought I’d found something to hold on to, but she turned out to be like Sampson and DeSilva, unwilling or unsuitable to be the handrail that I’d cling to in order to make it through life. We met up with her friends at night for dinner, and Geeta pointed out my sunburn to her friends.
“Who in the world gets pink from the sun?” she cackled, and everyone laughed—everyone except the brittle architect. He’d been moved three seats down from Geeta. Kishore was sharing her menu now. The architect knew what I was going through.
The last day I was there was her birthday. I went to a market and bought yards and yards of flower garlands and strung them all over her sea-green bedroom. She was out studying with her singing guru, and I spent the afternoon balancing on her furniture, hanging garlands everywhere. I finished up just as she was climbing the stairs and putting her key in the lock. I raced into the guest room and opened up a book, trying to look—despite my panting and racing pulse—beatific, sensitive, and forgiving. What I expected for my three hours of work and 300 rupees was for her to realize in a flash the kind of man I was: I was hardworking and thoughtful and willing to overlook her recent behavior in order to make her birthday special. Didn’t she realize that she was my true north?
She opened her bedroom, and she realized exactly the kind of man I was: needy, mentally unstable, and unable to take a hint.
I caught a cab for the train station three hours early.
It was a lonely ten-hour ride home, and the entire ride I apologized to our imaginary children, who now would never be born. I thought I’d found something to order my life around. I had wanted Geeta to be what Jesus Christ was to DeSilva. I needed some solid surface off which I could hear my own echo. I kept seeing Geeta’s face as she opened up her bedroom, the wave of stink coming off the marigold garlands strung everywhere. The person who had done this big crazy gesture was me. Those other mes—the maniacal country-music DJ or the guy who could never keep a straight face in pictures—were they always acting, always mugging, always hyperbolic because they were there to contain the toxic emotional neediness I had at my center? Geeta had kicked me out of bed, Jim Henson had kicked me out of the astral plane—and I felt like I deserved it all.
I resumed my hermit ways when I got back to Hyderabad. I’d stay in almost all day. I was turning down offers from Veda, from the DeSilvas, to go out. Some days the single social interaction I had was waving to kids on other roofs as they flew kites. I read a lot and wrote nothing but diary entries. Every day I would force myself to leave the apartment and go down to the Internet café, sending e-mails to my parents and sisters, reading CNN and The Guardian UK.
At 40 rupees an hour, I inhaled whatever data I could find—movie reviews, sports recaps, anything. I brought take-out Chinese and stacks of magazines back to the rooftop with me.
I needed the world to be stable. I needed people to be simple and trustworthy. I stayed inside and ate Wheaties covered in hot milk for breakfast and takeout or masala-flavor ramen for dinner. I drank Kingfisher beer until I fell asleep, folding my thin pillow over my ears as the elevator engine whined its awful whine.
I washed my own clothes and hung them out to dry, then took pictures of them drying.
After several tries, Veda got me to agree to come out one night for dinner. I got there late and ordered drinks as soon as I sat down. I made a point of ordering rice and naan. Veda handed me a plastic bag.
“I kept forgetting to give this bag to you,” he said. “In it are your things from the hospital.”
“I already got my stuff from there.” I glanced in the bag, but it was too dark in the restaurant for me to see anything.
“This bag is from the first hospital. When they transferred you from Apollo to Woodlands, they gave me this bag with your possessions.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Veda wanted me to know that the Russians were coming at the end of the month, and he’d be happy to arrange a meeting. I told him that he was using me. I wasn’t some sort of cash cow, I told him; I was broke. He thought I was rich because I was white, and that was racism, and I wasn’t going to stand for it any longer, I said. I was making a scene, and I was asked by the headwaiter to please be quiet. I ordered another beer and sulked in the dark room covered in mirrors.
Veda paid the check, and we didn’t talk for two weeks.
Inside the bag were a couple hundred rupees, some receipts from Mrs. Lee’s guesthouse and the Internet place Rajesh had taken me to, a shirt that I thought had been lost, and a pair of white cotton panties. Victoria’s Secret, size medium.
The mystery of those missing hours between when I left my apartment and when I was found at the train station kept getting weirder.
One night in December, I caught a rickshaw over to have dinner with Richard, my ersatz Jim Henson who had played stand-in for God in my hallucinations. I hadn’t seen him since he’d jammed a stack of poems under my arm as I was being ushered out of the Taj hotel. Richard was in India illegally, having overstayed his visa by three years. He was living with a young woman named Shoba, who was a lawyer and a fiercely brilliant activist for civil rights. She was also oddly deferential to Richard, who seemed less like a lover and more like someone who’d been crashing on the couch for years.
We had dinner out on the roof of Shoba’s modest house. She’d been in court all day, but she still busied herself with serving dinner to Richard and me. Richard was pudgier than I remembered, and his beard and his remaining hair were wilder. His conversation was manic. He talked about the Hegel he was reading and wanted to know if I was interested in hearing some of his latest poems.
I asked Shoba if she needed any help in the kitchen.
Our folding chairs made awful noises on the crumbling concrete floor. I sipped at my water, trying not to drink it too quickly since it’d make Shoba get up and refill my glass. When I asked Shoba about her work, she said how helpful Richard had been and how much Richard had read. She wanted to know if she should leave and “let the Americans talk.” She was self-conscious about her English. Richard said he’d been working on it with her for years now. He didn’t speak any Hindi or Telegu.
When dinner was over and the plates were cleared and Richard and I had both lit cigarettes, the entertainment portion of the night was to begin. It was decided that there should be singing.
Shoba went downstairs and wrangled one of her nieces, a girl of about eleven, to come up and sing for us. The sun was setting, and the bats were darting about in the air. The girl’s voice wavered. She moved her feet as she sang. Back and forth. It was an old Tamil film song. Shoba brought up coffee. Richard never thanked her.
We applauded. The niece sang two more songs. Shoba asked Richard to sing. He waved her off, then acquiesced immediately.
“I am going to sing a song by Paul Robeson,” he said.
Then he gave us a lecture on Paul Robeson: his life, his activism, the effect of his music on the civil rights movement. Then he told us the history of the song he was going to sing. He took a drag off his cigarette. He sat up straighter, then leaned forward. The sounds of the street below came up, all rickshaw engines and bicycle bells. He began to sing.
He pitched his voice very deep and sang “Old Man River.” He dragged each note through his baritone.
It was ponderous.
Shoba was dazzled.
When he finished, I got up to leave. Richard was confused; we hadn’t talked about his poetry yet. He had all these new poems to show me. I told him I had work to do. We shook hands. I was in a rickshaw on my way back to my flat when I realized I had forgotten to thank him for being there in the hospital when I was ill.
One day in January, I sat at one of the outdoor tables at the café a block from my house. I started making it a habit of going there and having a coffee and a pair of samosas after I had come home from doing my rounds of e-mails at one of the Internet cafés. There was a DVD rental place on the way home, and I could rent bootlegged discs for 30 rupees for three nights. These bootlegs were shot in American cinemas with handheld cameras and then sent to India by way of Taiwan. The American movies would often have Chinese subtitles. The discs were terrible quality. The camera jittered, and the sound was awful. At one point during Gangs of New York, Scorsese’s epic set in 1863, the guy filming the movie got bored and put the camera down. For fifteen minutes of the movie the camera was pointed at the back of the seat in front of the cameraman. Since I had no TV, these bootlegs, which I played on my laptop, were my main source of current American pop culture—jumpy, barely audible, and subtitled in another language.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 14