She got up slowly, entered the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t seen him in almost fifteen years. She didn’t even know where he was anymore, whether he was married or had children. Then why, she wondered, why would he come in her dream so forcefully, so completely out of the blue? She splashed her face with cold water. Her eyes looked puffy again, she noticed with dismay. It felt almost as if he’d ambushed her, leaping out from the depths of some repressed memory. And what was the dream meant to be? A secret message? A prophecy? How about telepathy? Could he have been dreaming of her too, on the very same night? Was this some kind of message she was meant to pick up and do something about? After the kiss, when he’d made love to her, the feeling was so visceral, she couldn’t accept it had been just something she’d fabricated. She must have had an orgasm or something, it just wasn’t possible to feel this way otherwise. She looked at her face, more closely this time, till her breath fogged the mirror. Puffy eyes, crinkly at the corners.
This was insane. Yes, insane. But she wanted him back now—how did that happen?—after years of not even thinking of him. She would have to track his number, his Facebook page or search his username on Skype. Nobody could disappear entirely anymore. She unscrewed the cap of jasmine bath gel, one of the luxurious ayurvedic products offered in the hotel, and turned on the shower.
He knew exactly what was going to happen to her hair. As it thinned out—and it would, eventually, with age—it would go limp and disclose the unseemly shape of the back of her head, which was flat. He knew it would happen, because of her mother. That’s exactly what had happened to her head and he found the detail deeply depressing, as though this plane at the back of her mother’s head, its lack of roundness, signaled a weakness. It made the older woman look even more helpless, especially since she was unaware of this particular flaw, being at the back where she couldn’t see it. He had never liked his mother-in-law. She was a petulant, self-centered and uninteresting woman who relentlessly talked rubbish. Often he’d had to stop himself from shouting at her to shut the fuck up. That was another problem with marriage, you were stuck for life with people you didn’t care for.
Why these days did he always wake up to unpleasant thoughts such as this one? They’d come just like that, surprisingly clear and specific. His wife’s hair issue wasn’t a particularly bad one compared to others. Most days the first thought he’d have would concern his own death. It was like a message flashing an alarm just as he was floating back to the surface of consciousness. A little voice would warn him, getting louder and louder till he had to open his eyes: “Good morning, you are going to die! It will occur soon, every day it’ll be a day sooner!”
He’d started having these deathly reminders since he’d turned thirty-five. It was the age when he’d became physically aware that half of his life had gone past him. Once he’d heard a well-known writer at a dinner party, much older than him, say that since he’d turned fifty he’d had the distinct sensation that he had more past than future, as on a scale that tilts the other way. The concept had terrified him. These unpleasant thoughts, such as his wife’s hair eventually flattening with age (which he put in the same death department as this idea, too, had to do with the passing of time and the loss of youth), would greet him as soon as he opened his eyes with a frightening punctuality, like that damned crow cawing so loudly outside the window, that horrible sound that always woke him with a fright. There was nothing to do. Crows, he had told his wife since the day they arrived, were the sound track of India. And so was death. According to the clichés.
He stumbled out of bed and went into the shower. There were signs of his wife having just left: a damp towel abandoned on the floor, the bottle of shower gel uncapped, covered in droplets. His wife was an early riser and her morning routine was always a fast one. It was one of the first things he’d observed about her when they’d first started sleeping together. She could be ready in fifteen minutes and look perfect. He thought that it was an attractive trait in a woman; he hated having to wait around and didn’t like women who put on too much makeup. The shower was pleasantly hot, the bath gel’s fragrance was sweet. As usual, sinister thoughts were washed out under the forceful jet. They were not to come back again, at least until the next morning.
He had been to India before, loved it, and had enjoyed playing the India expert for decades. This time however, he wasn’t sure he loved it as much. Maybe he was just in a bad mood, and India could be difficult if taken the wrong way. Things that had never bothered him were now beginning to take a toll. The pollution, the ugly malls sprouting everywhere in the big cities. Even the food was tiresome. When they had gone up north in Rajasthan two weeks earlier, nothing had felt authentic, it had all seemed a circus, a façade for the wealthy tourists. When he had traveled through the same regions back in his twenties, he had felt as though he had continuously stumbled upon fairy tales happening before his eyes. The magnificent haveli in Jaisalmer that cost only two hundred rupees a night where no other guests were staying, seemingly open just for him and his friend; their room with exquisite wall paintings and a balcony carved in sandstone overlooking the desert. The lovely country residence of a local Thakur outside Bikaner who had taken him horseback riding through the plains and led him inside a thatched hut, its mud floor swept clean, walls painted in bright turquoise lime, where they’d been offered opium tea by the Bishnoi, a vanishing tribe over which the Thakur family had ruled for centuries. Now the haveli looking out on the desert had been badly restored and was on Trip Advisor and the Thakur had handed his family home over to a hotel chain, so that now travel agents offered guided tours in the huts of the Bishnoi with “opium tea included in the price.” It all had to do with time, of course. That was then, when he was young and India was poor, this was now, when he could afford a seven-star hotel and India’s economy had grown at a stellar rate.
His wife had never been to India before and she loved everything she saw unconditionally. Before they left she had devoured guidebooks, Indian novels, essays on Hinduism and Jainism, and was determined to get the most out of this trip. She was an enthusiast, a firm believer in the glass-half-full theory. He had married her partly for that reason: he knew that as long as he held on to her, she would save him from the gloom that haunted him at every corner.
During the trip she noticed things he no longer saw or that didn’t interest him enough to notice.
“I love the way everything happens on the floor. How good people here are at doing things we can do only on tables.”
“Like what?”
“Eating. Ironing. Lots of stuff. Have you seen how the tailors squat and hold the material down with their big toe when they cut it?”
Images like that stuck. Now, whenever they happened to see a tailor at work on his haunches, he couldn’t help checking his feet, how deftly he was using them to clasp the fabric.
“Do you realize these women drape six meters of fabric around their bodies with only one pin, if any? They tuck the pleated fabric of the sari into the petticoat. No buttons, no stitches, nothing. And the way they put those flower garlands in their hair? It takes one second for them to do, and yet they stay on for the whole day.”
She had wanted a garland in her hair too, and women in the temple during a pooja had pinned one in her short ponytail. It didn’t look as good as theirs. For some reason it kept dangling wildly in a way that it never did on Indian braids or buns. After twenty minutes, she lost it.
“See? That would never happen to them,” she said, defeated. And immediately added, “I must study the way they clip this thing on.”
She was constantly figuring out how things worked or why they didn’t, compiling her own India instructions booklet. This attitude she had of being always on the outside, looking inside, mildly irritated him; he’d always disliked the idea of being a tourist. He believed in that quote by Paul Bowles—how did it go again?—the one that made the distinction between a tourist and a traveler. Of course he wasn’t a travel
er. He was just a tourist who hated to be one.
The first week she had worn her own clothes, light fitted shirts and cotton pants, her nice sandals. It turned out that these had too many straps and were an inconvenience to put on and take off each time they entered a shop or a temple, so she got herself a pair of chappals. That was the beginning of the transformation. Then came the kurtas, the long shirts women wear over their shalwar pants. She found them so comfortable that soon she had to get the pants as well, in matching colors, and then the dupatta, the scarf that women so artfully throw across their chest. The dupatta for him was the last straw. It turned her outfit into a dress-up costume, plus it kept falling off her shoulders so that she was readjusting it every five minutes.
He loved her—that went without saying—but they’d been together for almost sixteen years and it was normal to find her tiresome at times. He had to admit that it was lovely, the way she found so many things interesting and worth being investigated; it was a sign of her vitality, and he cherished that. He only wished she had stuck to wearing her own clothes instead of those Indian outfits that were slowly multiplying inside the suitcase, which she didn’t know how to wear.
He came out to the garden terrace, where they served breakfast. It was still chilly in the morning. A thin fog had descended over the river, blurring the contours of the forest on the opposite bank. Its outline, with its wide canopies and dangling roots, reminded him of a faint watercolor on the jacket of a Kipling novel he had owned ages ago, painted by one of those nineteenth-century British women artists who’d traveled all over the East in search of exotic flora to draw. The river was still, unperturbed, save for a slim boat, a shikara, slowly breaking the surface with its oars.
There she was, alone at the table under the trellis, wrapped up in the new pashmina dyed with natural pigments that had taken the place of her black sweater (“Black? Who wants to wear black anymore, once you see all these vibrant colors?”).
“Hi, darling,” she said, smiling. She was usually in a good mood in the morning. She always said that it was her happiest time.
“Would you like to see the paper?” She slid The Hindu across the table. It was another ruse she had taken up, this pretense of being interested in Indian internal affairs, with all those intricate party names and corrupt politicians. However, in only a couple of weeks she’d become an authority. She knew the candidates for the next elections by name and had even picked the one they should root for.
“No thanks, not now,” he demurred. Every now and again, he resisted her voracious curiosity; it was his way of keeping her in check.
What about his own enthusiasms? Why had they dwindled, why did he no longer take pleasure in discovering new things? He feared there might be only one answer to that, and it was age. He was only forty-seven—just three more years to go before the old writer’s epiphany—yet he felt his scale had already tilted over to one side. Surely the portion of future available to him as a youngish-looking, energetic and still attractive man was much smaller than what he had put behind already. Shouldn’t he make an effort, make the best of it? Why could he not gather the energy to feel passionate again about what lay outside his own head?
He had figured he no longer did because by now all he really cared and worried about were the books he still needed to write before it was too late and he’d have nothing more to say. “Egotism—necessary/essential trait,” he’d once scrawled in a journal, thinking that one day he might use the idea in an essay. At this point in his life all he actually longed for was to be able to sit still in one place with as little disturbance as possible in front of his computer, waiting for the words that would, line after line, compose the unformed story in his head. He knew he wasn’t alone in that; every other writer had said the same thing when asked about the mystery of their profession in any interview: the act of writing was a sedentary, solitary work, where no other people were needed. He had stashed away enough experiences when he was a younger man; now he just needed to elaborate on that material, organize it. He didn’t need to live it again, did he?
It was either that or depression, this lack of want for life.
Secretly, a year earlier, he had seen a psychiatrist, a friend of a friend whom he’d met at a party. “Only half an hour of your time is all I really need,” he had told the kind-looking doctor. But the minute he sat across from him in his luscious, book-lined studio, he poured out his unpleasant thoughts of death, how his appetite for life seemed to be tapering off. The older man, with his gentle face and sympathetic expression, had said he didn’t sound depressed—depression being a serious clinical condition. But he’d be happy to prescribe something mild if he felt he needed “just a little help.” He said he didn’t need it and came out of the doctor’s studio both relieved and disappointed. The idea of “a little help” was humiliating; he’d somehow wanted his mental condition to be either all or nothing.
He realized in the taxi home after his session that what he forgot to tell the psychiatrist was that his novels didn’t sell nearly as well as they had in the past. There were reasons, of course. New, younger writers for one, to whom people were more drawn because of their looks, their reckless lives, the wordplay they used. There was also the fact that he, along with so many other writers of his generation, had lost his luster (the author’s photos on the jackets had had to change, no more leather and ruffled hair, but tailored suits and receding hairlines). And lastly, possibly, he had to admit to a certain repetitiveness in the plots of his novels. Like most writers, he’d always had a specific theme and followed the same thread (wasn’t that a quality rather than a flaw? Didn’t great writers essentially always write variations of the same book over and over again?). His particular theme had revolved around the existential musings of a character who had been the protagonist of most of his novels. Throughout the years the character had kept the same name, the same job, he had grown, aged, lost his hair, just like him. Somehow though, as of late, his readership too had thinned. Not dramatically—he still sold enough to keep his publisher happy and enough money coming in—but the phone calls from his agent to keep him up to date on the sales were not nearly as effervescent or as frequent as ten years earlier.
The trip had been her idea. He knew he owed it to her. It was only fair for her to demand they spend time alone together, have a few weeks with nothing coming between them. Yet he couldn’t help thinking of it as a duty rather than a gift. She’d proposed that after handing in the last draft of his novel he take her to India. Since they’d been together, he’d promised just this. But something had always come up and the trip had always been postponed.
“I’ll divorce you, otherwise,” she’d said jokingly.
In the fall he rang an expensive travel agent who organized upmarket tours in the vein of Paul Bowles followers. Then he wrapped the itinerary and tickets in a golden envelope and gave it to her for Christmas.
They’d been at the Fort three days now and so far they’d been the only guests. She had instantly fallen in love with the place and had asked him if they might lengthen their stay instead of moving on to their next destination. He was relieved at the idea of canceling what was left of their exhausting itinerary and settling down somewhere. He didn’t mind that some of the hotels had already been paid for, he’d never been fussy about money. What was more important was the relief of no more hours spent driving on those terrible roads risking their lives, always too close to the HORN PLEASE signs on the backs of those overly painted trucks; no more dark temples with sticky floors, poojas, milk poured on shiny lingams, no more beggars, fumes, swarms of motorcycles carrying husband, wife and two children squeezed on one seat with no helmet; no more ghastly bazaars selling dusty junk, no more haggling with rude rickshaw drivers. They could sit still, make this beautiful place their home, so that he might be able to jot down some lines at last while his wife read and went looking for the handloom textiles the region was famous for.
The hotel had been the family home to a dynasty of
maharajas for four hundred years. It was an impressive fortress perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the banks of the Narmada River. It had only a handful of exquisitely furnished rooms open to guests; the rest was still the maharaja’s private home. He was the last heir to the dynasty, a handsome man in his midfifties with a slender, elegant figure, who spoke fluent French, Italian and English with a pleasant American accent, due to the years he’d spent there in college. He joined them every morning for breakfast on the terrace in the rampart, overlooking the river, in a beautiful coat cut in Mughal style, and he reappeared in the evening in a starched kurta and woolen vest and a ruby on his little finger. The maharaja had a Danish wife, who was in Copenhagen at the moment, but they’d seen a picture of her in a silver frame on one of the tables in the drawing room. She was beautiful and wore her sari like she’d been born into it.
Being the only guests had enhanced the feeling of being at home and allowed the fantasy of owning the place. They dined each night in a different courtyard lit by hundreds of candles that flickered in the dark, designing graceful geometric patterns. Every night his wife engaged in conversation with the maharaja—she was of course enraptured by his elegance, his knowledge of the local traditions, but also by his worldly manners and his wit. She was delighted to have the prince all to herself.
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