Quarantine

by Rahul Mehta

  Now, as Jeremy and I plan our trip, my father warns us the commune isn’t what it used to be. He says there was a murder a couple of years ago, and the head of the commune was arrested for tax fraud and embezzlement. Still, I insist on showing Jeremy.

  It is my father’s idea to invite Bapuji.

  “He’ll get in the way,” I say. “We’ll have to stop every five seconds so he can pee.”

  “C’mon,” my dad says. “He hasn’t been to temple in years. Besides, he can use an outing.”

  I tell my dad I’ll think about it. Later, Jeremy says to me, “If we stay late it will give your mother a break from your grandfather. Think of it as a favor to her.”

  The three of us drive up the valley on the two-lane road. We drive through one-light towns with old church steeples and country general stores, and picturesque hills broken only by the spitting smokestacks of the chemical plants that have proliferated along the river.

  When we reach the town, it is even more depressed than I remember. The penitentiary was shut down a couple of years earlier when the state ruled that the prisoners’ cells were too small, that keeping inmates in such cramped quarters was cruel and unusual punishment. Many people lost their jobs. The town is still suffering.

  To get to the commune, we have to take a narrow road that snakes up a large hill. It is separated from the rest of the town. Both the Hare Krishnas and the town’s residents prefer it that way.

  The Hare Krishnas own the whole hill, including the road. It is in such bad condition, I have to drive extra slowly. The sign for the temple is so faded I almost miss it. Once there were cows on the green hills and white men with shaved heads wearing necklaces made of tulsi beads, and women in saris with hiking boots and heavy coats in the winter. Now the hills are empty. Many of the houses are boarded up. The cows are gone.

  Our tour guide at the Palace of Gold speaks with a Russian accent and explains how, in Moscow, under the Communists, he had to practice his religion in hiding, at secret prayer meetings. He is lucky to be in America, he says.

  The palace isn’t heated, and Bapuji shivers beneath his layers—two flannel shirts that don’t match, two crewneck sweaters, a heavy jacket that once belonged to my dad. He pulls the coat collar closer to his neck.

  Outside, much of the gold leaf has flaked off the structure, and inside there are cracks in the ceiling. The marble and wood need polishing. One stained-glass window is broken. The tour guide tells us we should come back in summer when the rose garden is in bloom. “It’s really beautiful,” he says.

  After the tour we eat a late lunch with the devotees. There are only a dozen of them, and we all sit silently in rows on the floor eating off stainless steel thalis. The food is modeled after Indian food, but it is nothing like my mother’s. It is bland and tasteless—beige and brown and gray.

  When we go to the temple, the alcoves with the statues of gods are all covered with velvet curtains. A devotee tells us they won’t open them until the aarti at five o’clock. He says we should stay. Jeremy and I decide to take a walk around the commune, and Bapuji says he’ll wait in the temple. He is talking to the devotees when we leave him.

  Jeremy and I find a pond flanked by fifty-foot-high statues of Radha and Krishna dancing. Their hands are joined in the sky, forming an archway. Small cottages, modern-looking with large windows, surround the pond. I tell Jeremy that one year my father wanted to rent one so we could visit on weekends, but my mom refused. I tell him there used to be peacocks. We walk around searching for them. We find deer and swans and rabbits, but no peacocks. Not even a feather.

  When we return to the temple, the aarti has already begun. The curtains have been lifted, revealing a gold statue of Krishna in the center and Hanuman and Ganesh on either side. They are layered with garlands and surrounded by candles. My grandfather is standing in the front of the room before the statue of Krishna. To our surprise, he is leading the aarti, chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram.” He is holding a large silver platter with coconuts and flowers and a flame and burning incense, and he moves the offering in clockwise circles. He seems too weak to carry such a heavy platter. I wonder how he is managing. Everyone is watching him, following him, echoing his chanting. Jeremy and I sit in the back silently.

  Afterward, several devotees talk to my grandfather. They want to know about India. Are the temples beautiful? Has he been to Varanasi or to Mathura, birthplace of Krishna? He is smiling and gesturing and he has more energy than I have ever seen. It is only with great difficulty that we are able to pull him away.

  When we return to the car, it is almost dark. Bapuji is quiet again, moving slowly. I ask if he wants to sit in the front seat. He shakes his head no.

  After twenty minutes in the car my grandfather says, “I want to go back.”

  “We are going back,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “To the Hare Krishnas.”

  “Did you forget something?”

  “I want to stay there,” he says.

  “You can’t,” I say.

  He taps Jeremy on the shoulder so that Jeremy turns around, and then he whispers, “I am not happy.”

  Jeremy looks at me.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” I say.

  The road winds around a corner and I can see the moon reflected on the river up ahead. After a couple of minutes, Bapuji says again, “I want to go back.”

  I grip the steering wheel tightly, and my shoulders tense. “Be quiet, Bapuji.”

  “Your friend understands me,” he says, tapping Jeremy on the shoulder again.

  “He’s not my friend,” I say. “We are a couple, like you and Motiba were.”

  Bapuji is silent for a few minutes. Then he says, “Your mother is a bad person.” “Do you want to talk about bad people?” I say. My hands are shaking. “You are a bad person. You are the worst person I know. You have caused nothing but pain in my family.”

  “Be careful,” Jeremy says. “Watch the road.”

  “Your life is nothing anymore. Look at you. Pathetic. Let my mother be happy.”

  I look in the rearview mirror and see my grandfather’s face in shadows. It catches the light from a streetlamp, and through his glasses I can see his eyes and cheeks are wet and he is trembling.

  Jeremy screams and grabs the wheel. I hear a horn and look forward and see flashes of light.

  When we finally come to a stop, our car is in the grass beside the road facing in the wrong direction. A car honks loud and long as it passes us, and the sound disappears in the distance.

  I flip on the overhead light and look over at the passenger seat. Jeremy is OK. He is staring at me, trying to catch his breath. I look in the backseat. I can see my grandfather’s seat belt is fastened, but his head is down, his chin on his chest. “Bapuji?” He doesn’t respond. “Bapuji?”

  I get out of the car and open the back door. I put my hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. Even with all the layers of clothes, his shoulder is thin and narrow. My grandfather looks up. His glasses have fallen on the floor and the lenses are cracked.

  “Are you OK?” I ask. He nods.

  I walk around the car a couple of times to see if there is any damage. We try the engine, and it starts. Jeremy drives the rest of the way home.

  When we reach the house, Bapuji goes straight to his room.

  “Is something wrong?” my dad asks.

  “He’s probably tired,” I say.

  My mother asks us if we are hungry, and we say we already ate. I tell them I am tired and we have to leave early the next morning so we should go to sleep. Even though it is early and it is our last day, my parents don’t argue. My mother says she is tired, too.

  A few years ago, while I was away at college, Bapuji contracted tuberculosis. At first, we couldn’t figure out how he got it. We had never heard of anyone getting TB in America. Then my father remembered that Bapuji’s younger brother had died from it when they were both children. The doctors said Bapuji must have been exposed to the bacteria then
, and that it had been dormant in his system all these years, waiting for his body to weaken, waiting to attack.

  For the first few days of his illness, Bapuji was quarantined in the house. He wasn’t allowed to leave his room except to take a bath and use the toilet. The doctors said he could be dangerous to others. They advised my parents to limit their contact with him, and not to let anyone else enter the house. Later, when his health got worse, he was admitted to the hospital and isolated in a room with special ventilation. Whenever anyone visited, they had to rub antibacterial liquid on their hands and forearms and wear masks and gloves before entering the room, and they could only stay for a short time.

  My mother visited the most. She brought him homemade food during lunchtime and sat with him every evening. My father came less frequently. My mother said it was too difficult for him.

  One weekend, I flew home to visit my grandfather. Just before going to the hospital, I gulped coffee and ate nachos. When I put the mask on, I couldn’t believe how vile my breath was. I couldn’t escape it. I thought, This is what’s inside of me.

  Bapuji seemed disoriented and didn’t recognize me at first. He was tired. The mask must have made me look strange.

  In the car, on the way to the hospital, my mother had told me that when Bapuji’s brother was dying of tuberculosis, and he was miserable and in pain, Bapuji would let him rest his head on his chest, and sing to him until he fell asleep. This is how Bapuji got exposed to TB. I couldn’t quite picture the scene. Such tenderness didn’t fit with the grandfather I knew.

  Bapuji said he needed to use the toilet. My mother helped him to the bathroom. When he got up, I noticed a brown stain on his bedsheet. His gown was open in the back, and I could see a bit of dried excrement on his backside and his skin peeling like birch bark. I remembered my parents telling me the TB medication made his skin dry.

  When Bapuji was finished, he called for my mother, and she went into the bathroom and helped him clean up. I buzzed for the nurse to change the bed.

  Watching my mother, I realized this could be her future: he could fall seriously ill, and she could spend many years taking care of him. My mother also knew this. I could tell by the matter-of-fact way she went about her tasks—cleaning him, rinsing his drinking cup, flipping his pillows—the blank look on her face while she did them, as though she were the one fading away.

  Jeremy and I wake early the morning we are leaving my parents’ house. We eat cereal while my mom makes sandwiches for our car ride. She has cooked some extra Indian food for us to take with us, and she puts the curries and subjis and rotis in a small cooler and sets them in the foyer next to our luggage. “Everything is cooked. All you have to do is heat it up when you’re hungry.”

  We are all standing in the foyer.

  “I’m glad you guys came,” she says.

  “Me too,” my dad says. “Bapuji!” he shouts up the stairs. “The boys are leaving.”

  It is silent upstairs. My father shouts again, “Bapuji!” Still nothing.

  “He is tired,” I say. “Let him stay in his room. I’ll go up.”

  His bedroom door is shut. I knock, but he doesn’t answer. I open it. The room is dark. Bapuji is in bed. His broken eyeglasses are on the bedside table, on top of the Bhagavad Gita. He has the covers pulled over his head.

  “Bapuji,” I say, quietly, “I am leaving.” He doesn’t answer. He is either asleep or ignoring me.

  I remember so many years ago, my mother in bed after her father died, the covers pulled over her head, me approaching, hearing her cry, not sure how to comfort her.

  I remember also my grandfather’s story about comforting his brother as he was dying.

  Now, I don’t approach my grandfather. I don’t know whether he is crying under the covers. I stand in the doorway another minute, watching him, and then I leave.

  When I go downstairs, my father asks if I did pranaam, and I say yes.

  Jeremy drives most of the way home. We don’t talk much. I fiddle with the radio, which usually annoys him, but today he doesn’t say anything.

  Back in New York, our apartment smells terrible, like we forgot to take the garbage out, or something died between the walls. Even though it is cold out, we open a couple of windows.

  I walk into the living room to open another window, and I see the answering machine is blinking the number eight. I figure some of the messages are from my friends or from Jeremy’s friends, but I’m sure some are from my family. Probably my mom or dad. They’ll want to know we arrived safely. Maybe one is from Asha. Maybe there is one from my grandfather. I don’t play the messages.

  I go into the kitchen, take my mom’s food from the cooler, and put it in the freezer. Jeremy is in the bedroom unpacking, and I can hear him opening and closing dresser drawers.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask.

  “Starving,” he says.

  Jeremy wants some of my mom’s Indian food, so I take out a couple of Tupperware containers and pop them in the microwave.

  As for me, I can’t stomach it. I reach for a box of spaghetti and set a pot of water on the stove to boil.

  Two

  Floating

  His clothes make me think he is one of us. Form-fitting T-shirt, Diesel jeans, leather loafers with contrast stitching and square toes. It is an outfit I would wear.

  Later, I will notice he wears the same clothes every day. Later, I will notice the holes.

  We meet him our first day in town. We are at the café waiting for pancakes and porridge, a reprieve from the heavy curries we have been eating for days. The food and the décor—sleek European modern—make us feel we are somewhere else, except for the café’s open front, which faces the street, and exposes us to its sights and sounds: a woman crouched with a bundle of sticks, sweeping; a feral dog begging for scraps, skittish from being beaten, but hungry enough to beg nonetheless.

  He is sitting with a cup of tea at a nearby table. He asks me the time. He says his name is Rajesh. I say, “I’m Sid. This is Darnell.”

  Rajesh says he likes my notebook, the one covered in raw silk. I say, “I bought it at Target.” He says, “Such a beautiful color.”

  Darnell invites him to join us, and Rajesh slides over. Our pancakes and porridge arrive. Nothing comes for Rajesh.

  “I ate earlier,” he says.

  The way he looks at our food, I know this isn’t true.

  As we start eating, Darnell reminds me it is time for our Larium, and I fish two pills from my daypack, one for Darnell, one for myself. I also swallow a Pepto-Bismol prophylactically.

  Rajesh asks us, “Where are you from?”

  “America,” Darnell says.

  Rajesh says to me, “But you look Indian.”

  “My parents are.”

  “You are not?”

  I shrug. “And you? Where are you from?”

  Rajesh gestures up the street. “I have lived here all my life.”

  I say, “When I first saw you, I wouldn’t have guessed. I would have thought maybe you were from London.”

  “Thank you,” he says, “Maybe someday . . .”

  He asks how long we are visiting, and Darnell says maybe a few days, maybe a week or two. “You must advise us. What should we see? Where should we eat?”

  “What do you like?”

  “Pizza,” I say.

  Darnell says, “You come to India and all you want is pizza and pasta and vegetable lo mein.”

  Rajesh says there is a restaurant nearby where I can get pizza. He explains it is owned by the same man who owns the café, a German tourist who came many years ago and never left. The restaurant is called Savage Garden. I raise my eyebrow when Rajesh says this—the use of the word “savage” by the German seems wrong—but Rajesh doesn’t seem bothered, his tone is flat. He says Savage Garden the way I say Olive Garden. I say, “Aren’t you offended?” He says, “He is a nice man.”

  I think I remember seeing him, the German, sitting in the café just before we met Rajesh. Darne
ll had pointed him out: a fat man in a silk kurta accompanied by a young, handsome Indian man.

  I open my notebook to copy the address of the restaurant. As I am flipping to find a blank page, Rajesh notices a sketch.

  “Who drew that?”

  “An artist we met in one of the palaces in Jaipur,” I say. “We took a tour. He had a stall.”

  Rajesh says, “Were his paintings good?”

  “Typical,” I say. “Mostly miniatures, in the Mughal style, painted on parchment and silk, the kind you see everywhere. His were better than most. He drew this elephant in my notebook because he wanted us to buy a painting. He came from a long line of artists; he was proud. He said the men in his family had been artists for four generations, that they had painted portraits for four generations of maharajas, and all these paintings were hanging together in the maharaja’s private residence.”

  When I am finished telling Rajesh about the artist, he asks to see my notebook. He finds an empty page and pulls a ballpoint pen from his back pocket. Quickly, he sketches a small elephant, very different from the one the artist in Jaipur drew. Compared to the fine brushstrokes of the Jaipur artist’s elephant, Rajesh’s elephant is a cartoon. “I am an artist, too,” he says.

  Darnell says, “Very nice.”

  “Soon I will start classes at J.J. School of Art in Mumbai.”

  Rajesh says the school’s name in a grand voice, as though we should be impressed. I am. I know the school. It is famous.

  “My paintings are on the Internet,” he says. “A French couple bought some. They own an art gallery. There is a website. When you have time, we can go to an Internet café together, and I will show you. Do you read French?”

  Darnell and I shake our heads.

  “Maybe I will go to France,” Rajesh says. “I will bring the French couple more paintings.”

  After a few minutes he says, “Let’s do this. We are friends. I will show you around and help you with everything you need while you are here. Any sights you want to see, any food you want to eat, any people you want to meet—I will help you. Then, one day you can come visit me at my house. We will have tea, and you can look at my paintings. If you like, you can buy.”