When I arrived at the Fulbright offices, I found Mahmud sitting on a cane stool outside the front gate, doing service as night guard. He saw me coming and stood up and offered an abbreviated military salute as I pulled my bike inside the yard. The lounge was completely deserted at this hour, the staff gone home to their suppers. I sat down on the vinyl couch next to the phone, where a single lamp had been left on, and waited for the operator to call.
When Judith’s phone rang in Chicago, it would be midmorning on Saturday. I wondered if Bruce would be there, the two of them in bed together, curled up on the black satin sheets I had given Judith for her birthday the previous year. He might even answer the phone. What will I say? How can I possibly deal with that?
Fuck him, I thought to myself. If she can’t answer the goddamn phone when she’s known for a month exactly when it’s going to ring, then fuck them both.
I sat on the couch growing ever more nervous and impatient, my palms sweating, when all of a sudden the phone went off. I took a deep breath and lifted the receiver. The lilting accent of an Indian operator crackled somewhere off in the distance.
“Mr. Stanley Harrington, please.”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “This is Stanley Harrington.”
“Your call to the United States has gone through. Please hold the line.”
From far, far away I could hear the sound of Judith’s phone ringing. And ringing. Either she wasn’t home or she wasn’t answering. I let it continue until the operator finally came back on the line and suggested that I book another call for later. Judith and I had agreed that if, for any reason, the first call didn’t work out, we’d try again on Sunday evening.
I got through the night, somehow, and the next day, only to find myself waiting all over again by the phone. This time the moment the bell sounded I pounced on it, wrenched the receiver from its cradle and jammed it to my ear. When the call went through I began counting the rings: One. Two. Three. There was a distant click followed by a moment of silence. And then I heard the faint sound of a woman’s voice, tentative, almost frightened, but unmistakably Judith.
“Hello?” Electrons collided with each other, pushed their way through the line, snapped, and buzzed as if exerting stupendous effort. “Stanley?”
“Judith?”
“Stanley?” More fuzz, then a rasping sound, like a file being dragged over the edge of a tin can. I thought of the old police radios on Dragnet. “Oh, Stanley, is it really you?”
“What?”
“Is it you, Stanley?”
“I can barely hear you!”
“What?”
“I SAID . . .” by now I was practically yelling into the receiver, “I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU!” Mahmud stuck his head in the door, saw I was on the phone, and abruptly returned to his post.
This incoherent exchange went on for a minute or so until we adjusted to the poor connection.
“I’m so sorry, Stanley.”
“Sorry?” I could tell she wasn’t faking it. “For what?”
“Yesterday, when you called. I was helping Marsha and Phil move up to their new place in Evanston—Phil got a job at Northwestern, a one-year contract or something. They were supposed to drive me back Saturday morning . . .”
“They have a car?”
“They had to buy one, I guess, when he got the job. But the stupid thing wouldn’t start. Because of the cold. At least that’s what Phil said. He had to walk to a Kmart and get some jumping cables, and it took, like, forever. I’m sorry. Really.”
I swallowed. “It’s okay.”
I wished her a happy twenty-sixth birthday. She thanked me. The line sputtered and popped. We both started to speak at once, then retreated into an awkward silence, each waiting for the other to try again. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s not easy to hold an intimate conversation on the phone, without body language and eye contact, and this was far from the best of circumstances. An odd whining noise rose to a crescendo and then trailed off into the void.
“Stanley, I got a letter from Beth.” Beth was a good friend of ours, and I’d written to her several times. “She says you might be staying on in India.”
“She does?” I managed to sound astonished.
“Longer than the time you were supposed to, I mean.”
“She told you that?”
“But is it true? Are you thinking about not coming back this spring?”
I should not have written to Beth about my thoughts of staying on. But it was too late to think about that now. I couldn’t tell whether Judith sounded simply hurt, or incredulous, or both. Her voice was so small, so distant.
“It’s a different world here,” I stammered. “It’s been hard, you know, just getting used to everything.”
“What do you mean?”
The line crackled and popped.
“Judith?” More static. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Can you hear me now?”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“I said,” she repeated, “what do you mean?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what I mean . . . I mean it’s strange. By the time you adapt to life here . . . something inside you has changed. You’re utterly miserable, but you don’t want to leave after working so hard to get used to being miserable.” I pretended to laugh, but what came up was more like a snort.
“You don’t want to come back home?”
I couldn’t think of how to respond to this, and for a while neither of us spoke. I listened to the static while precious seconds dropped like tiny sparks into the night air. At last her voice emerged from the steady hum of electrical silence.
“Do you like it there?”
“I don’t know, Judith.”
This time she faked the laugh. “You don’t seem to know much of anything.”
“Yeah, I guess I do . . . I mean, yes. I suppose I do like it here. Somehow.”
No response to that. Instead, she told me about a friend of ours who had recently moved to Chicago. They had gone to lunch together just the day before in an Indian restaurant not far from where he lived. She told me everything she had ordered: “some kind of mushy spinach and cheese, and tea with about a ton of sugar.”
“But it was good,” she added, in a faintly apologetic tone.
She talked about her job. I told her I was changing the focus of my research from Vedanta to Mahayana Buddhism. We exchanged this sort of disjointed information for another few minutes, punctuated by cries of “Hello? Hello? Are you there?” while I strained to take hold of the familiar sound of her voice as if it were something tangible, something I could touch and smell and taste.
In the end it was me who couldn’t go on.
“It’s hard to say goodbye,” she said. “Oh Stanley, I wanted this to work.” She was crying.
“Judith . . . I love you.”
“Do you? Do you really love me, Stanley?”
“Yes, of course.” Of course? What a totally stupid thing to say.
“Please write,” she said. “The letters help.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Soon, okay?”
“I’ll do it tonight. I . . .” But there was nothing left to say. “Goodbye, Judith.”
“Goodbye, Stanley.”
I let the receiver fall from my ear, then realized she was still on the line and snatched it back up just in time to hear a soft, feminine voice disappearing into the ionic haze.
“. . . you so much.”
“Judith?” I pushed the receiver so tightly against my ear that it hurt.
She was gone.
9
SHORTLY AFTER MY PHONE encounter with Judith, there was a cocktail party at the Fulbright office, a reception honoring Frank Davis—the epigraphist who had been tagged for death by Margaret Billings. Since Davis was on my dissertation committee, I reluctantly decided to go over and mingle. Ever since my conversation with Margaret, I had more or less avoided the office. I never had been comfortable the
re, but lately it had gotten worse. I felt like an imposter, as though I might be exposed at any moment and arrested for impersonating a legitimate fellow.
It was almost nine when I arrived. The guard let me through the gate and I walked unobtrusively into the lounge, where the party was already well underway. There must have been forty or fifty people in all, mostly other American scholars, either new arrivals in India or those stationed in Delhi. Their Indian colleagues and research associates were scattered here and there among the group, several of them poised uncomfortably at the periphery of small circles of men and women who were talking and laughing loudly. It was evident that people were drinking hard. Waiters dressed in regal white coats festooned with rows of brass buttons circulated through the room bearing silver trays stacked with pakoras, samosas, and other South Asian hors d’oeuvres. Under one of the festive red turbans I recognized Mahmud. He looked my way and nodded a silent, formal greeting.
The typewriter had been removed from a table near the kitchen and replaced with various bottles of duty-free liquor and an assortment of Indian beer. Another of the regular office staff had been pressed into service behind the bar. Next to him stood the director, a distinguished Sikh in his late fifties, short, with the obligatory upper-class Indian paunch and a friendly smile full of white teeth. He was wearing an emerald green turban that perfectly matched his silk tie, a white linen shirt, and a conservative brown suit with barely perceptible, green pinstripes. As I approached the bar he extended his right hand, which carried with it two heavy gold rings, one set with a diamond, the other with a row of pink rubies.
“Good evening, Mr. Harrington. How are you this evening?”
“Fine, Mr. Singh.”
He shook my hand, a bit limply, then withdrew his fingers and dangled them over the bottles. The rings glowed softly, reflecting the tiered flames of a brass butter-lamp that burned at the end of the table. “What will you have to drink?”
I studied the labels on the beer. The choice was between Rosy Pelican, He-Man 9000, and Tipsy. “Any of these will be fine.”
“Balaram!” He turned to the bartender and spoke to him quickly in Hindi.
I accepted the glass, thanked Balaram, and nodded to Mr. Singh, who was already setting off to take care of some other business in the kitchen.
“Now what?” I wondered. I suddenly imagined myself, as if from across the room, dressed in white pantaloons and a loose white satin blouse with large buttons, my face painted with a frown.
I moved away from the table and surveyed the crowd. Three people were standing off to my right near a bookshelf displaying publications of past Fulbright scholars. I heard a familiar nasal voice and recognized Margaret just as she looked my direction and smiled, motioning me to come over.
“Stanley, how nice to see you here.” She gave me a knowing look. Before I could respond she turned to face an elderly gentleman wearing a baggy tweed coat and a pair of scuffed hush puppies. He had a drink in one hand, a pipe in the other. “Stanley, this is John McIntyre, from Harvard. He’s been gathering material for a study of early Buddhist logic. John, Stanley Harrington. Chicago. Quite an authority on Vedanta.” Once again she caught my eye with a portentous glance.
“Glad to meet you, Stanley.” He glanced at his hands, both of which were occupied, then shrugged and smiled.
“Good evening,” I said.
“And of course you and Frank are old friends,” Margaret continued, directing my attention to the man on her left. I hadn’t noticed until that moment who it was standing right across from me.
“Good to see you here, Stanley.” He gripped my hand and pumped it up and down a few times. “How’s the research going? We haven’t heard a thing from you.”
“Professor Davis,” I said, as enthusiastically as I could manage. “Hello. Welcome to Delhi.” He was a tall man with fleshy lips and heavy, sagging jowls. His hairline had retreated over the years, surrendering a pale, liver-spotted forehead to a pair of glasses with square plastic frames. His nose hung from the bridge like a rubber carrot.
“Stanley, Abe tells me you haven’t written to him. Not once since you left. That’s no way to treat your advisor!” He chuckled and glanced over at Margaret, who responded with a tight smile. “He told me to look you up, see if you hadn’t perhaps run off to the Himalayas to meditate in a cave or something.” Once again he turned to Margaret and laughed, as if meditating in a cave were the most preposterous thing in the world.
It was true, I hadn’t written a word to my advisor. “I guess I’ve been so busy I, uh, let it slide.” Frank, you and I both know that the bastard wouldn’t care if he never heard from me again. He’s far too busy with more important matters.
“Well then, tell us what you’re up to with your work on Shankara.”
“Actually,” I said, before realizing my mistake, “I’ve recently changed the area of my research. That is, I’m sort of shifting the focus of my concern, you might say.”
The carrot twitched. He reached up and adjusted his glasses with the tip of one finger, pushing them back in place. “How so?”
“I’ve gotten much more interested in Buddhism.”
“Isn’t that a bit like switching horses in midstream?” He frowned. “I believe you were awarded the Fulbright on the basis of the proposal approved by the members of your dissertation committee.”
Professor McIntyre had perked up at the reference to Buddhism and was about to say something when Margaret chimed in and cut him off. She had obviously been following this exchange with growing concern. “This is news, Stanley.” Somehow she managed to pack a staggering amount of disapproval into the single syllable is. “How intriguing. This must have happened sometime after we talked?”
“It had been coming for a while before then. But yes, I made the decision not long after our conversation.” Poor Margaret. This odd maternal affection I inspired in her was obviously hurt by my apparent disregard for the advice she had given me.
McIntyre drained off a bit of something that looked like a Manhattan and pulled on his pipe, letting the smoke roll out one corner of his mouth. “What exactly are you reading?”
“Nothing in particular yet.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Margaret’s look of disbelief. I fully expected her to reach over any second and prod me. “I’ve been going over a lot of Pali sources, reviewing the grammar, trying to rebuild some fluency. I spent a couple of semesters with the language a year ago.”
“The Pali canon?” McIntyre looked surprised. “That material has been pretty much raked over, hasn’t it? What do you hope to find?”
“It seemed like a good place to start, that’s all. I want to go back and take another look at all the basic texts,” I said, aware that I was beginning to sound defensive.
Once again McIntyre was about to respond when he was interrupted, this time by Frank Davis. “Your advisor will most certainly be interested in all this,” he said with a vaguely sardonic air of authority. “Perhaps you ought to drop him a card when you make up your mind.”
Margaret looked distinctly uneasy. She was unquestionably perturbed with me for letting things get out of hand like this. I could tell that she was busy cooking up some scheme to bail me out. “John doesn’t live very far from you, Stanley.” She turned and addressed Professor McIntyre, rather presumptuously, it seemed to me. “Aren’t you over in Lajpat Nagar, John?”
It was impossible to tell if he even noticed Margaret’s tone. He was simply pleased that the conversation had finally turned his way. “Not far from the market,” he announced proudly. “‘A’ Block. One thirty-seven.”
“You wouldn’t mind giving Stanley a little guidance on this, would you?
“Not at all. He could drop by anytime.” Having said this much, he pulled his shoulders back just a touch and puffed contentedly at his pipe, then swiveled about to face me. “By all means, Stanley. Do come and visit. I would love to bat around some ideas I’ve had on Dignaga’s Pramanasamucchaya. I’ve come to believe la
tely that Hattori might be a little off base here and there.”
“You should get together with John and talk.” Margaret impaled me with her gaze, then took a drag on her cigarette and withdrew it from her lips slowly. I noticed that it was an Indian brand. The Dunhills must have run out sooner than she had expected. Meanwhile, McIntyre, who interpreted her remark as an invitation to proceed, launched into a monologue on the intricacies of Dignaga’s critique of Sankhya theories of perception.
Medieval Indian Buddhist epistemology is an amazingly boring subject to all but a small club of intellectuals who have for some unknown reason staked it out as their territory, but the monotonous drone of McIntyre’s voice took the heat off me, and I was more than happy to stand there and swill my beer while he held the floor. In fact I was deriving some real pleasure from watching Margaret and Frank Davis suffer, when just about this time Mahmud approached with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
While the others gathered around the food, I chanced to look over his shoulder and spot an attractive young woman standing alone near the bar. It was Penelope Ainsworth—the art historian from Agra. I was surprised to see her here. I had no idea she was in town. She was wearing a sapphire-blue sari that cascaded to the floor in a stream of elegant folds. A thin gold chain hung from her neck and trailed down over her angular collarbones. I watched as she examined the bottles and made her choice, directing Balaram to pour her an immense scotch on the rocks. Twice she politely instructed him to add more to what he had already poured, not backing off until the glass was full. She picked up her drink and casually scanned the room.
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