Out of Order

by Charles Benoit

  Given what he knew about Sriram and BWS, he assumed the photo had to be less than ten years old, yet the washed-out colors and satin finish made it look much older. Six men, all in their late twenties, stood shoulder to shoulder, leaning back against a whitewashed wall, the bottom half of the words Bangalore World Systems visible above their heads.

  He spotted Sriram first. Taller than the others, he stood towards the middle, one foot up against the wall, a club tie pulled loose to reveal a tee shirt under the white, short-sleeved shirt. He was smiling—Sriram was always smiling—gripping the edge of a clipboard with his right hand, his left resting on the shoulder of Attar Singh. In many ways the two men looked alike, both tall and thin, both with jet-black hair and a crisp right side part, but Attar’s closed-mouthed grin wasn’t as wide as Sriram’s open smile, and his hooded eyes lacked Sriram’s sparkle. It was a sadder, darker version of the man Jason had met in Jaipur. But then he remembered the anger that had flashed up as Attar described Sriram’s betrayal, and Jason wondered which image was real.

  “I didn’t think he was part of BWS,” Jason said, pointing to Ravi Murty. The future owner of Raj-Tech stood with both hands in his pockets, looking off to the left of the camera.

  “He wasn’t,” Manny said. “He was a couple years older than us, sort of Sriram’s mentor. He’d stop in now and then, give us some pointers, help Sriram with the tricky stuff.” Manny sighed. “I guess I hitched my wagon to the wrong star.”

  Next to Ravi stood Ketan Jani, his devilish goatee and gelled-down hair looking the same in the picture as it had looked when they met that morning for pizza. Instead of the uniform white shirt and tie, Ketan wore a black Ramones tee shirt, the punk rock pose lost with the pleated dress pants.

  “This is Ketan, right?”

  Manny raised his eyes, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “Mr. Rock and Roll. Someday he’ll grow up.”

  “Who’s this?” Jason said, pointing out the man to Sriram’s right who wore his feather-cut, blow-dried hair parted in the middle and his long sleeves rolled halfway up his muscular forearms.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Manny said, grinning, holding the picture alongside his glistening, round face.

  “I didn’t recognize you without your mustache.”

  “A common mistake,” Manny said, setting the picture back on the bar. “But I am sure you recognize Narvin Kumar.” A bulbous pinky tapped on the Bollywood millionaire’s chest.

  “Was he always so….”

  “So damn good looking?” Manny said, lifting his gin and tonic from the cardboard coaster as soon as the bartender set it down. “Oh yes. Captain of the rugby team, the cricket team, the debate team, top of his class academically, popular with the ladies, never at a loss for words, great singing voice. Yes, that was our Narvin.”

  Jason looked at Narvin, then down the row to Sriram, then back to Narvin. “Was this picture taken before Sriram met Vidya?”

  “I think what you are politely asking is why did Vidya run off with Sriram, leaving behind her handsome fiancé. But in asking that you are also asking how the mind of a woman works and for that, I’m afraid, we are all at a loss.” He paused while Jason laughed in agreement.

  “They were engaged for almost a year,” Manny said. “I thought they were happy but again….” He shrugged his round shoulders, the fat of his neck rolling up to touch his ears. “I can say most definitely that Narvin took the news hard.”

  “Would he have hurt Sriram?”

  “If the girl you loved ran off with a guy you thought was your friend, what would you do?”

  Jason took a deep sip of his martini. “That’s an interesting question.”

  “But, as the cliché goes, time heals all wounds. Or wounds all heels. Either way,” he said, dismissing it with a chubby wave, “that is all history.”

  Jason was ready with another cliché, the one about history repeating itself, but instead pointed to the short, wiry man at the end of the row that he had only seen once before.

  “Why did you call him Taco?”

  “I didn’t,” Manny said, glancing at the photo. “I called him Amrish. I think Narvin started it. Part of a joke, kind of cruel, really. Amrish dreamed of getting a job in the States, making big money, Narvin assuring him they were always hiring at this fast food restaurant.”

  “Taco Bell.”

  “Yes, that was it.” Manny paused, then shifted his bulky frame so that he could look straight at Jason as he spoke. “Sriram was in charge of security and when that failed, Amrish needed someplace to direct his anger. But with Sriram gone…I guess he just took it out on you. I want you to know that no one blames you for what happened. He had been unstable for years and I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, maybe not being killed by a train, but you know what I mean. I am sorry he hurt you,” he said, nodding down at the scar on Jason’s arm. “The Amrish I knew, he would be sorry too.”

  Both men finished their drinks in silence, Manny waving over the waiter to order another round. A Hindi version of a Madonna song blared overhead, the tune the same, the words lost in the translation. When the drinks arrived, Jason bit the olives off the sword-shaped swizzle stick.

  “I stopped by the bank today to see Piyush Ojha.”

  Manny’s laugh was so loud and unexpected that Jason felt himself flinch along with the other patrons at that end of the bar. “Good old Piyush. I am sure he was absolutely thrilled to see you.

  “That reminds me of a time,” Manny said, launching into a string of BWS stories, all ending with an inside joke and a “you just had to be there” refrain. The story of dripping light fixtures led to the one about the upside-down monitors, followed by the thrilling details behind the chapatti eating contest and the office chair races, Manny pausing between tales to catch his breath and gulp his drink. While he knew some of the names and had to struggle to follow the long-winded accounts, Manny’s accent thicker with every gin and tonic, Jason kept drifting off to his own memories, of trains and saris and a beautiful auburn-haired liar.

  It took the better part of two hours, but as Jason aligned the five plastic swords on his napkin, Manny ran out of stories. As the bartender shook up a fresh double martini, Jason remembered why he was there.

  “Manny,” he said, louder than he had meant. “Manny, my friend. I need a favor. Can you do me a favor, Manny?”

  At first Manny’s head nod was slow and deliberate but as the seconds dragged out he picked up steam, taking on a side-to-side ahcha waggle, reminding Jason of an obese bobble-head doll. “It’s like this,” Jason said, pausing, trying to recall what it was like, starting again. “It’s like this. I have something—had something—that I want, no I wanted to deliver. It’s a surprise so I can’t tell you it’s a sari.”

  “Not a word,” Manny said, pulling an invisible zipper closed across his lips.

  “It’s really nice. Well, it was when I started. It got shot and a monkey poured my best aftershave on it.”

  “Damn monkey,” Manny mumbled, his head rolling from side to side.

  “So I had it and then I go and screwed up the only thing Sriram ever asked me to do.” Jason felt his chest tighten and took a deep, choppy breath, holding it, letting it out in a long, slow airy whistle.

  “But I’m gonna make it up to him. I’m going to explain to his mom what a great guy he was. He was a great guy, Manny, you know that?”

  “Great guy.”

  “That’s what I’m gonna say. I’m gonna say Mrs. Shumb…Suhunderrunder….”

  “Sundaram.”

  “Mrs. Sundaram, your son was a great guy.”

  Manny blinked several times to focus his eyes. “These are the words any mother longs to hear.”

  “I need her address because I wanna tell her how Sriram brushed off my car and he gave away candy and made poor people eat frozen turkeys.”

  “This was a good man.”

  “So, do you have it?” Jason said, tapping Manny’s bloated
arm with the back of his hand.

  “The frozen turkey or the address?”

  Jason took a sip of his drink and considered the question. “Just the address,” he said.

  “I do not know the exact address but I can get you close enough. It is in a small hill station, very beautiful this time of the year but chilly.”

  “Chilly is not a problem.”

  “It is south of here, a place called Uthagamanadalam.”

  Jason raised an eyebrow.

  “It is also called Ooty.”

  “Ah, Ooty,” Jason said, nodding his head. “Can we go there tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow. A week. Maybe ten days. But, yes, I can take you.”

  “No, that’s not good, Manny,” Jason said, easing his drink down onto the bar. “I gotta go right away.”

  “Getting to Ooty requires several days and I would need to make many arrangements. A week is good. Not much more.”

  “That’s not good. I’ve got a job to get back to. An important job. I don’t have time for Ooty. And I’ve got a gift for Sriram’s mom.”

  “A sari,” Manny said.

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  Manny shrugged. “A lucky guess.”

  “I promised Sriram I’d deliver it myself,” Jason said, realizing as he spoke that he had never promised a thing. “That big sari holiday coming up. The one where sons give their mothers new saris.”

  “Ah yes. One of our most cherished traditions.”

  “But the problem is I can’t get the sari to Sriram’s mom.”

  Manny cleared his throat. “This is not a problem. I will deliver the special gift for you and relay your message.”

  Jason propped his elbow on a wet spot on the bar, dropping his chin into his open palm. “You’d do that for me, Manny?”

  Eyes closed, Manny gave his head a quick bob, letting Jason know that it was as good as done. Jason sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then say nothing.”

  For five minutes they stood at the bar and listened to the pounding dance music and the static wash of a dozen conversations.

  “You know, Manny, I feel like a complete idiot.”

  “This is understandable.”

  “The one thing I came here to do I gotta pass on to someone else.”

  “Please,” Manny said, lightly touching his own chest. “It is my privilege.”

  “No, what I mean is I came here to deliver that sari and now I’m not even going to do that. I went through all this,” Jason said, arching his arm overhead, “all this for nothing.”

  “It may not be Corning, New York,” Manny said, tilting his head down, looking out from under his heavy brows. “But I would hardly call India nothing.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I really like India. I mean, I didn’t at the start—it’s just kinda hard to get used to. The things that happened to me, the stuff that Rachel dragged me into—the drugs that were really a robot and the monkey and getting shot and me almost dying and having to sing for the police and standing there naked….”

  Manny set a heavy hand on Jason’s shoulder. “I think it is best you stop now before you say something truly embarrassing.”

  “I just thought there’d be a reason, some point of me being here.”

  Manny smiled. “There is a reason. And it is in here.” He prodded Jason’s chest with his finger. “You did not come to India for Sriram Sundaram. You came for Jason Talley. Something inside here made you buy that ticket. Look in here for the answer.”

  “Is that it?” Jason asked, rocking back on his heels with every tap on his chest. “That’s why I’m here?”

  “That and the party I am throwing for you tomorrow night. A little get together at the old BWS site.”

  “You didn’t have to do that, Manny.”

  “Oh yes I did. The others, they all insisted. It will be a nice little reunion. We shall have a cookout. But, my friend, I must warn you of one thing.”

  Jason swallowed down the lump that sprung up in his throat. “What’s that?”

  “When they come in the room, be sure to jump,” he said, his voice just above a thick-lipped whisper. “It is supposed to be a surprise.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Ringed by small stacks of emails and printouts, Jason sat cross-legged in the center of the king-size bed. It was just after five in the morning and he’d been awake for over an hour, the bed spinning too much for him to lie down.

  It was the same thing every time he drank—eyes popping open at sunrise, a shot of adrenaline firing up his system, sputtering out long before noon, resetting his internal clock like liquid jetlag. There was never any nausea or dry heaves, just a blinding headache that shrugged off aspirin and ibuprofen, responding only to a double dose of daytime sinus pills and a sugar-heavy cola. The breakfast of champions.

  The hotel was quiet, a few auto-rickshaws beeping a greeting to the day. He didn’t remember walking home from Nineteen Twelve or riding up in the elevator or who paid the bill, if they paid it at all, and he tried not to remember how it felt when, lights off, he had sat on the end of the empty bed, knowing she wasn’t coming back.

  While he waited for the antihistamine and caffeine speedball to kick in, Jason read through his expensive stack of emails yet again.

  Most were wrinkled and water damaged, a reminder of his post-shower afternoon with Rachel, and all but the most recent bore a hole just large enough to pass a twenty-two slug. The dozen pages of linguistic study—that wafty crank of a monologue—lay fanned out on the bed, after ten readings no longer quite as wafty but he found it more interesting each time he read it. There was a steady, practiced efficiency to the way he worked, picking up each email, reading it through, underlining words with a stubby hotel pencil, shifting emails from pile to pile to pile, stacking and restacking, organizing the chaos, separating the darkness from the light.

  Jason knew that Manny had been right. There was a reason he had come to India. It wasn’t about Sriram. It wasn’t about Vidya or the sari and it wasn’t about him either. It was about a moment. The split-second flash of a moment just before Sheriff Neville spoke. The last moment things were in order, the last moment the universe made sense.

  He leaned back and stretched, the spinning not as bad now, but he could feel his heart picking up the pace and he knew that sleep would be impossible. He tossed the pencil on the bed and thought about the red sari. He didn’t remember thinking much about it that night that Sriram handed it to him in the laundry room of his apartment, didn’t see it as special, didn’t know what it meant. A dozen weeks and thousands of miles later, he still didn’t know what it meant. But he knew he was close.

  The schematic pattern looked so obvious when he saw it on the big screen. Now, as he tried to remember the geometric design wrought in silver threads and crisscross embroidery, he thought it looked too simplistic, more like the instructions to an old Tandy radio kit than a cutting-edge microchip. Maybe it was a case of relevance. The pattern didn’t seem like much to him, but to a computer expert it might tell a different story. Sort of like the reams of papers and government forms that crossed his desk every day at the office—meaningless unless you knew what they meant. No, that wasn’t true. Even if you knew what the forms meant, they were still meaningless.

  Maybe he was being too literal—no surprise there, he thought as he remembered half the arguments he’d had with past girlfriends. Maybe the sari’s meaning was more symbolic, something more complex than a blueprint, more intricate than the most complex computer program. Sriram knew the meaning, knew that he had to get the sari to India, knew that he had to keep it from Vidya. His dark, Oedipal secret. Or evidence of something else.

  The files that Ravi uncovered rambled on about Vidya’s infidelity, real or imagined. Jason let his own imagination wander. A bored, underemployed substitute teacher. Long, sweaty workouts at the fitness center at the Radisson Hotel. An ex-lover, a former fiancé. A gift from Bollywood, a little memento of hom
e, of an old life, found, crumpled and dirty, hidden under their bed. An unannounced flight to India never taken, a confrontation at the studio that never occurred. Or maybe a slow day at the office, sneaking out for a long lunch, Vidya in bed, naked, alone now, laughing at how long it took him to figure it out.

  Jason shook the images from his head, forcing his imagination down another path, one that featured a jilted lover with everything in the world but the one thing he lost.

  The key piece was there, and his sources—a B-grade movie actress and her infallible Stardust Magazine—were far enough removed to be believed. Narvin Kumar had spent the winter in the States. For a man like Kumar the States meant Los Angeles and New York City, the stuff in the middle beautiful from thirty thousand feet. It was an easy four-hour ride from Manhattan to Corning, five if you stuck to the scenic and seldom used back roads. A half-day road trip to settle things forever. Then, a month later, Sriram’s lone friend shows up in India, dragging around a bolt from the past. Giving him the chance to run up the score.

  There were other paths to explore. Attar, ruined, with family in Binghamton, spitting distance from Corning. Amrish “Taco” Sharma, angry enough to kill a stranger, with a loving, forgiving, understanding family who might have been willing to help. Then there was the unknown stalker with the cell phone. What about Ketan Jani, the pizza-loving man with the long memory? The crazy banker Piyush Ojha? Manny Plakal, Ravi Murty, Sheriff Neville, Mrs. Dettori in apartment B—maybe it was that loner guy, Jason, in the basement apartment, the one who everyone at the mortgage company would describe as “really nice” and “kind of quiet.”

  There were a thousand possible answers. But only a few that made sense.

  Jason swung his legs over the piles of paper and off the side of the bed. The clock on the nightstand said ten-thirty. Time for a coffee break. He’d shower, get something to eat and, if this day went like any other post-drunken binge day, he’d lie down—just to rest his eyes—around one, waking up hours later. Manny wasn’t picking him up until four. Plenty of time to practice looking surprised for the going-away party slash Bangalore World Systems reunion.