The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  People lived in those tunnels, in the dank recesses, venturing out only to forage for food. Mole people, as he had heard them referred to, though he thought this term disrespectful and embarrassing. He couldn’t imagine living that far underground, though he’d read that the tunnels spread so far below the surface of pavement that it was possible to venture seven or eight stories deep. He had joked to Gita that one day real estate would be at such a premium that well-appointed condos with marble countertops and bamboo floors would have no choice but to spread to the netherworld that lay beneath them. Doormen would stand at attention at the mouths of stairwells that meandered far below the sidewalk, and the former valuable measurement of natural light would be replaced by mold-repellant abilities.

  “Just wait,” Karom had said, “until the most sought-after apartments are those that are farther below the surface. Humans always need one-upmanship.”

  After two hours of waiting on the Jaipur station platform, Karom stood up suddenly. Gita turned the page of her guidebook and shifted her position without looking up. Karom walked gingerly over the bodies sprawled across the platform napping, through a group of children playing a hand-clapping game and knelt at the platform edge. He sat down, his legs dangling over. A group of men playing cards and puffing on strong clove-scented cigarettes eyed him from the shadows of a snack cart’s canopy. Dust motes swirled in the early-afternoon sun and the slightest breeze lifted a piece of hair off Karom’s forehead and swung it over his eye.

  In an instant he had jumped down to the tracks. He glanced around, the walls of the platform looming up around him like a cave. He couldn’t see the passengers from here, only sky and the great expanse of the tracks in the distance, far away, leading to Agra. Karom stood with both feet on one of the rails, the cool metal cutting through the inadequate rubber of his sandals and massaging the sore arches of his feet. He walked, holding his arms out balancing himself, pretending there was a book upon his head. On the seventeen-hour flight from New York to Bombay, Karom had watched a documentary on Philippe Petit, the daredevil tightrope walker who’d walked between the World Trade Towers and lived to tell the tale. Karom bent his feet to span across the track like Petit, a make-believe balancing pole in his hands as he walked forward.

  He’d walked to the outskirts of the train station on the tracks like this when he heard Gita’s scream. Swiveling around, he tipped off the tracks. As he righted his balance, he saw the card-playing men in the distance watching him, squatting at the edge of the platform. He saw the children hovering on the edge, holding hands tightly. And he saw Gita, looking as though she was about to launch herself over the edge but being restrained by three hefty women in Punjabi suits.

  “Karom! Get off the tracks! Come back!” she shouted. Karom put his hand up in acknowledgment, but just as he did so, he felt a faint rumbling underneath the balls of his feet. He turned around and began a slow march back toward the station, putting one foot in front of the other on the metal track.

  “Come back to the platform. Please!” Gita shouted. He could see her face was stained by tears, her voice strained with panic. His rubber sandals slipped against the shiny metal, and the approaching vibration tickled his feet. He was at the station and had hoisted himself up onto the platform on his own before the Punjabi women released a sobbing Gita into his arms. He held her tightly and buried his nose in her hair.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby. I’m okay. See? It was just a walk. Nothing happened. It was just the game.” He let her cry in his arms until she quieted and spread out across their backpacks to nap.

  They didn’t say anything further to one another until they boarded a train two more hours later. As she climbed the stairs into their car, Gita put her hand up and smiled at the tour guide. “This wait is nothing,” he called back. “Very short. Very lucky.”

  They reached the Taj just moments before sunset, to the sights and sounds of children screeching, parents strolling across the manicured lawn, tourists adjusting one another’s hands for the perfect pose in front of the reflecting pool, others showing security guards how to operate elaborate cameras. The Taj was a deep aubergine, the setting sun glancing off the Yamuna River at a distance and cloaking the grounds and the shrine in darkness. They took a quick round, wandering through the arched doorways in their bare feet, marveling at the intricate inlaid stonework, tracing their toes over the perfectly symmetrical marble, and stood solemnly before the mausoleum before they realized they’d forgotten to take any pictures. The Taj was dark by then, lit only by eight floodlights where moths savagely attacked the bulbs.

  “No pictures,” Gita said sadly. “How will we ever remember that we were here?” They were stationed directly in front of the Taj, in front of the bench that thousands upon thousands of tourists sat on every day, with a perfectly cruel vantage point of the structure in front of them. Karom slipped his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. He read:

  “Should guilty seek asylum here,

  Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.

  Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,

  All his past sins are to be washed away.

  The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs,

  And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.

  In this world this edifice has been made,

  To display thereby the creator’s glory!”

  “It’s what Shah Jahan said about the Taj,” Karom said, folding the paper back into his pocket. Gita closed her eyes and leaned against him. He wanted to comfort her, but he too felt let down. Nothing had happened. There had been no revelations.

  Karom had been sure that he would leave the Taj Mahal with a deeper understanding of the world, of colors, of light, of love. He was sure that something magical would transform them, would transform him, the way he saw the world. He had placed too high an expectation on the Taj Mahal. After all, it was just a building. But it was a building that was homage to love, homage to the departed. He’d wondered if he would catch a glimpse of the past here, if he might tap into the spirit of the palace, the serenity of the courtyards. He’d wondered if, like a sinner, he too might be absolved, washed pure and clean, and set into the streets refreshed. He’d wondered if he might put lingering ghosts to bed and feel, for the first time, at ease with himself and finally, finally have the strength to put the game to rest.

  Finally, Karom took her hand, pulling her back outside the gates into a world of hawkers offering prayer beads, postcards and miniature hand-carved wooden replicas of the great shrine.

  On the rickshaw ride back to the train station, they quietly held one another’s hands. When their eyes met at a traffic light, Gita looked at Karom for a beat too long, causing him to snap, “I’m fine. I told you I’m fine,” and pull his hand away from hers. Gita felt suddenly vulnerable sitting in the rickshaw as it inched along the crowded streets. On either side, beggars and street vendors thrust their hands into the open sides of the vehicle, offering open empty palms or rickety plastic toys for sale. At that moment she couldn’t find solace even in the man who sat next to her; it was how she’d felt the first time she’d experienced one of his close shaves firsthand.

  The previous summer, the two had been on a road trip to Maine, where they’d stopped in Portland, lingering over a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and yogurt, crawling through the Marina district in their rented convertible so Gita could hop out and use her Pantone matcher to capture the vibrant colors of the homes along the water. Her travels heavily influenced her work in her interior design studio: swaths of curtains that curled around window edges like the Caribbean Sea and mosaic patios reminiscent of the shelled precipices in Santorini. She’d once re-created a tiled wall in an open-plan bathroom based on the textures and tones of a spice display she’d seen in
Essaouira.

  Karom sped while Gita sat with her face directly in front of the air-conditioning vent. “I like the smell of it,” she said when he looked at her quizzically. “It’s the smell of cold.”

  They were on the way to Archer’s Rock, the famous boulder that jutted out over the sea where families picnicked and sunbathed. “‘This rocky edifice may be the last bastion of the unsullied natural vantage point,’” Gita read from the National Geographic app on her iPhone. “‘Everything else has been filed down, shaved away, taking with it the history and fossilized evolutionary proof of our lives.’ Oh, Kar, we have to go there.”

  By the time their car pulled up to visitors’ parking, ambulances and police tape had cordoned off the graveled lot. Scuba tanks were stacked together in a pile near one of the medical vans, and medics scurried about, stricken, possessed, mumbling into walkie-talkies.

  “Park’s closed, sir,” a ranger said, directing their car. “Please turn around and go back the way you came.” Karom couldn’t believe that the ranger wore a hat just like on Yogi Bear. He spoke to the absurdly flat brim.

  “What happened?”

  “Wave.”

  Karom hesitantly put his hand up and looked around before he realized that the ranger wasn’t instructing him to gesture to anyone. He put the car in reverse. While Karom fiddled with the AM radio to find a local channel, Gita plugged in the address of their hotel into the GPS that would lead them out of the park and back toward the highway.

  “Tragedy struck at Acadia National Park today as a giant wave crashed over Archer’s Rock, claiming the lives of dozens of hikers and picnickers. Body count is still unknown as medics and scuba divers continue to comb the rocky coast to recover up to 50 park visitors who are expected to have been on the rock. Accounts confirm that a rogue wave such as this one hasn’t struck the area in nearly 40 years, the last similar tragedy occurring in 1971.”

  The trees rushed by them, faster and faster, a blur of green in ascending brightness past their windows. They flew by the distinct odor of skunk and a tiny manicured graveyard, past which Gita held her breath. The two-way road was narrow and Gita was glad that Karom was driving. She felt nervous driving in situations where the car might graze against the side of another. She panicked easily in tunnels.

  Karom pressed the button to clean the windshield, the blades scraping dully against the already clean glass. Gita pressed the window down and a small spray of window cleaner struck her cheekbone. Karom pulled the car to the side of the road, though there was no shoulder there. He leaned down to the steering wheel and rested his forehead in the center of the wheel, little bleeps emitting sporadically from the horn like a suffering goat.

  “Karom,” Gita said, rubbing his ear. “It’s not the same thing. Look at me, baby.” He didn’t move.

  “Baby, look at me. It’s a completely different situation, okay? I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You’re fine. You’re safe. I’m here.” She grabbed his head, the hair in the back where it had grown long and scraggly, and pushed it into her shoulder. She could feel him slowly disintegrate against her body, his long sobs penetrating through her thin windbreaker, his breath forcing muffled gasps and soggy exhalations. They sat there like that, allowing cars to whiz by their window, first a few at a time and then the ambulance they had seen in the parking lot, an underwater detection van and then another slew of cars. It became dark in the trees before Gita finally tapped his leg and Karom moved away, averting his face in the embarrassing dance of drying his tearstained face.

  They traded places; Gita slid into the driver’s seat, put the car into drive and navigated the rest of the way to their budget hotel while Karom leaned back in his seat, one arm swung over his eyes to shield them from the glow of the dashboard.

  * * *

  In the rickshaw, Gita forced herself to remember that while their trip to Agra had been uneventful, without epiphany or excitement, that was what had made it a success. She forced her hand back into his and snuggled against him, turning her back to the beggars and hawkers in the road.

  * * *

  “Hang on,” Gita says now, as they sidestep two dogs sleeping in the middle of the lane. “When Ammama prays, is it in Hindi? English?”

  “Definitely not English,” Karom says. “But she says my name. Repeatedly.”

  “May-be,” Gita singsongs, pressing her body against him, “she’s praying for you to propose to me.”

  “Ha.” Karom steps slightly away from her as they pass through the gates of Ammama’s compound.

  “Oh, get over it,” she exclaims, grabbing his hand.

  Karom stiffens. “Not here, Gita.”

  “Of course here,” Gita insists. “It’s the birthplace of the Kama Sutra. Romance was practically invented here.”

  But there is a sense of decorum in India, regardless of the historical ramifications of one dusty volume of intimate positions that sex shops like to pass off as exotic and sensual. Karom understands that the things that they take for granted back home in New York can never be accepted in this land so easily. The idea of boyfriends and girlfriends and dating, of sleeping in the same bed, even of traveling together, are all acts that had he grown up here, he himself might have frowned upon.

  On their first night in Ammama’s flat, Karom had reverently touched her feet as he knew she would appreciate and asked, “Where will I be sleeping?” and then “Where will Gita be sleeping?” before placing their backpacks in the appropriate rooms: Gita sharing her grandmother’s double bed, Karom on the wooden pallet in the sitting room. He wondered if Gita asked her grandmother if she could sleep in the bed away from the door or away from the window, whichever it was that she was most worried about. Most women had a side of the bed, the right or left, but for Gita it was the side that she felt least vulnerable in. If they stayed in a hotel room, it was the side farthest away from the door; if they were on the ground floor in a room with garden access, it was where Gita felt intruders would be least likely to enter.

  “It’s because if someone were to break in, I wouldn’t be the first thing they’d see,” she’d explained to Karom.

  “But I would,” he’d snorted. “And I’d be the one they mauled or kidnapped or beat up. That’s okay with you?”

  “No...you would protect me,” Gita had said. “My big strong man.”

  He’d shaken his head. It was a stupid argument, but still he couldn’t help feeling slighted by her selfishness. He wondered if Gita was okay with her grandmother falling victim to hypothetical marauders in her second-floor flat in the suburban residential colony in East Delhi.

  * * *

  When they return to the flat later, after a long afternoon of shopping, Karom steps hesitantly through the door. But Ammama isn’t focused on him; she tells Gita that she has something to show her. While Gita slips behind the curtain that serves as the door to Ammama’s room, Karom busies himself with taking his purchases out of the bags and laying them out on the sofa: Calvin Klein shirts, a Kenneth Cole suit, all gathered at severely discounted prices. He holds up a shirt and breathes it in. It is so reassuring how much the fabric smells like India, like the mustiness of cardamom and mustard and mothballs all in one. He hears jingles and snaps and coos and sighs before Ammama slides the curtain open and beckons shyly at him. Karom follows her into the bedroom.

  The bedroom is dimly lit: Ammama has drawn the curtains against prying eyes and sunlight is poking in at the corners of the windows. Gita is sitting on the bed with what appears to be a heap of gold in front of her. She sorts through it, trying on a large chandelier earring with curlicues and licks of rubies in her right ear while an enormous jade hoop perches perkily in her left nostril.

  “Wow,” Karom breathes. “What is all this?”

  “My trousseau,” Ammama says, pushing aside some of the tissues that had protectively padded the jewelry. “I
want Gita to choose something. Help her decide.”

  Karom sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. He picks up a string of pearls and lets them slide through his fingers. Gita is wrapping a thick yellow-gold necklace with braided chains around her neck.

  “Close this?” She turns around and Karom snaps the clasp at the nape of her neck. “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s all so delicately elaborate.”

  “You have first pick and then your sisters can choose when they come next,” Ammama says, taking a step toward the door. “Take your time. I’ll make tea.”

  “Her family must have spent years collecting all this. Imagine how long it took to put it together,” Karom whispers.

  “Here, I need help with this headpiece.” Gita aligns an emerald stone that glistens like a giant waterdrop in the center of her forehead, glancing in the mirror to make sure that the chain falls neatly into the parting of her hair. “What do you think?”

  “It seems so sad to break up the set that symbolizes the start of her new life as a bride. But I guess she’s passing on the legacy.”

  “Trust me, she doesn’t want the memories. They’re not happy ones. Besides, I’m here, Karom. She wants me to have something. What do you think of these?” Solid gold bangles cuff her wrists, glinting in the dim light.

  “They’re nice. I’m going to...” Karom nods toward the doorway and slides off the bed. In the kitchen, Ammama is pouring tea into the Bodum pot Karom has brought her. Her hand shakes a bit as the last drop fills the strainer. “I hope you like the teapot. Gita told me how much you like your tea. ‘Once in the a.m., once in the p.m. and once before R.E.M.’ Right?” Gita had also told him that Ammama would trot it out while they were there and then rewrap it in its original box and place it in the back of a cupboard until visitors came.

  “It’s beautiful. You shouldn’t have wasted so much money,” Ammama says. Karom places the pot on a tray along with the small ceramic box of sugar and a matching pitcher of milk. Gita appears at the doorway, wearing a heavy yellow-gold necklace. It droops down nearly to her midriff, rubies and emeralds twinkling brazenly. The inner strands are unpolished grayish oblong seeds rather than the now seemingly artificial perfect globes of pearls Karom has seen the ladies wear with Chanel suits on the Upper East Side. Gita doesn’t look very comfortable, but she sticks her chest out and says, “I want this one.”