At that moment the French hippies called out for another round. Chai Baba went over and collected their dirty glasses then slouched back inside the shop.
In the street a camel sauntered by with a load of firewood strapped to its back. A man walked in front of the big animal, holding a long tether that was secured, at the other end, to a bridle. The two of them moved leisurely in the direction of Harishchandra Ghat. Richard and I sipped our chai and watched the camel’s head as it faded into the distance, swaying gracefully, high above the crowded street, like a cobra dancing for a snake charmer. Richard put down his glass, removed a package of bidis from his jhola bag, and lit one up. The tip crackled and spit.
“Yesterday afternoon I may a’ passed up the opportunity of a lifetime,” he remarked casually, plucking a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicking it into the gutter.
“How’s that?”
“Guru-ji took me with him to a concert at that girl’s school over near Lahurabir. You know the one. Up toward Sanskrit U.”
I tipped my head slightly in the Indian manner, indicating I was familiar with the place. It was an English-medium school catering to the daughters of well-off families—the kind of people who considered themselves “modern.”
“There were at least three hundred girls in the audience—teenagers, you know? Guru-ji had me up on stage with him. Must a’ been waiting an hour, I bet. The principal and three or four other blokes up there talking. You know how they do before concerts—bloomin’ malas and everything. Guru-ji tuned his tablas, and I just sat there looking out at all those girls giggling with each other and whispering back and forth while the old men talked.”
I could easily picture the scene. Garlands of bright orange marigolds strung around the musicians’ necks and draped over the stage. The pristine white cushions where they sat, cross-legged, behind their instruments. Richard’s teacher powdering his hands and fiddling with the ring of wooden pegs that ran around the periphery of the drums, each peg tucked under a rawhide string that could be stretched by whacking it up or down with a small silver hammer, altering the tension on the head and changing the tone. Richard the handsome foreigner, doubtless the center of attention during those interminable speeches, sitting up next to his teacher in a position of real status. The girls and he could stare at each other to their hearts’ content, something that would be entirely inappropriate under any other circumstances.
“Guru-ji is always tellin’ me I should get married, how it would be good for my music. You know, sett’le down, get a woman to do the cooking an’ shopping an’ all. Mostly I just ignore him, but lately he’s made a bloody crusade of it. So get this: after we’d been sitting up there for a bit, he turns to me an’ he says”—at this point Richard puts on his best Indian-English accent—“‘Richard, while I am playing I want that you should be taking opportunity to examine these girls. So many girls. Surely one of them will make a good match for you. When I finish you will please show me your choice.’ Can you imagine, Stan? He was gonna try to fix me up—you know—with a wife! I swear to God I’m not joking. Cross my heart.”
He waved a hand vaguely over his chest then shook his head in consternation.
“For Chrissake, Stan. What would you a’ done?”
I doubt that Richard knew I had been married. He knew very little about my life before coming to India.
“I mean, there was nothin’ to say. Guru-ji started in playing, and that was it. So I sat there, you know, for the next two hours, sorta checking out the talent—as if I were a bloody nabob and the school was my private zenana. At first I just looked, but after a bit I came up with a system. I move slow, see, from one girl to the next, up one row and down another, get some good eye contact with each one. Make certain she knows I’m looking right at her, you know? Then, when I’ve got her attention, I give her a good, close, run over—hair, skin, lips. Imagine what it’d feel like to, you know, shag each one of ’em.”
He stopped here for a second to re-light the bidi. “I tell you, it was tiring. By the time the concert was over I was fagged.” He took another drag and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, the cigarette dangling between two fingers.
I stared at him, incredulous. The whole thing was beyond belief, truly a case of worlds colliding. Obviously, though, Richard was dead serious. “So, when’s the wedding?” It was all I could think of to say.
He shook his head. “No wedding, man.”
“Why not?”
“Stan, this was not a game.” He looked up at me and frowned. “All the time I was sittin’ there, I couldn’t help wondering what it would mean to really get married. I’d never given it much thought. I mean, you know, man, marriage isn’t all just about sex and food.”
A single sentence exploded into my mind: Marriage is about learning to love.
In my memory it was early evening and I was sitting in Anantacharya’s home in Delhi. I was talking with his son, Krishna, and Krishna was saying, “Outside of marriage there is only passion. Love is built on commitment to one’s dharma, on surrender to a sacred duty much greater than personal desire.” I had never forgotten his words: “There is no mystery, Mr. Stanley. Love is not about getting what we want. Love is about how we live with what we are given.”
Dharma: the foundation on which everything is built.
But is that really all there is to love? Duty and obligation? Sticking by a vow, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in drunkenness and in fighting and in cheating on each other, till death do we part?
I glanced over at Richard, who was rummaging through his jhola, looking for a match to relight his bidi.
Thank God, I thought, it’s not my world. I’m not bound by caste, not born to be a warrior or a sweeper—or a businessman, like my father. I don’t have to marry a stranger. I don’t have to marry anyone, for that matter, and I obviously don’t have to stay married. There’s always another option. I’m free to do whatever I want.
But what if I want to stop wanting?
Asking this question was like looking at one of those optical illusions where you stare at it forever, and then for no apparent reason the ground all of a sudden shifts, and you see everything from a radically different perspective.
Who am I kidding? I can’t stop wanting. My entire identity is built on picking and choosing. If I stopped wanting one thing and not wanting another, I’d totally cease to exist—just pop like a bubble! It’s exactly like Pundit Trivedi said, just like one of those fucking Chinese finger traps: The whole idea of escape—wanting to stop wanting—just gets you in deeper! There’s no way out. The truth is, I’m not free to do whatever I want—I’m compelled to do whatever I want.
“The truth is,” Richard was saying, “I got it down to two girls—both of ’em pretty, too. Real little charmers.”
I struggled to find my way back into the conversation. “And . . . your guru?”
“Right. The whole time he’s playing, he’s givin’ me the eye. When he finished, he asked me to show him the girl. I said I’d come up with two. No problem, he says, just show me which two and we’ll see what we can do. Honest to God, Stan: he would not quit. It was damn scary. But here’s the best part. I mean the really weird part. When I refused to point out the girls, Guru-ji got angry. Seriously. He was pissed.”
Richard stopped short and stared sullenly at his chai.
“Off his trolley, he was. All because I wouldn’t lay claim to some fifteen-year-old virgin. What kind of nuthouse is this, anyway?”
He continued grumbling to himself, until I spoke up. “That’s it?”
He shrugged his shoulders and let the cold bidi slip from his fingers to the ground between his feet, then planted his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his palms.
The scrape on my leg was throbbing, and I’d had all the conversation I could handle. I downed the last of my chai and was about to beg off when Richard let out an anguished groan. I followed his gaze to the side street tha
t led down to the river. There was the same line of rickshaw-walas I had passed earlier, but now every head was turned, every eye focused on the statuesque figure of Parvati as she walked by, oblivious to the attention.
“God damn it, Stanley. How the bleedin’ ’ell does she get away with that in this town?”
A shadow swept over the crowded street, and I looked up and saw two immense wings spread wide against the sky. A vulture soared downward then dropped heavily onto the edge of a nearby rooftop and settled in, his bald pate bobbing obscenely between steep, feathered shoulders.
29
AMONG THE VARIOUS MATERIALS distributed to new Fulbright fellows prior to their departure for India, I had received a packet of information on health issues in which I was told that during my stay in India I should treat even the slightest abrasion with care. In the language of the institute’s glossy brochure: “If the surface of the skin is broken, the chief line in the body’s defense system has been compromised, rendering the site vulnerable to invasion by a variety of pathogenic bacteria peculiar to the subtropical regions of South Asia.” The military trope achieved its intended effect: since my arrival I had been zealous about keeping every superficial scratch scrupulously clean and slathered with antibiotic ointment. Nevertheless—almost two weeks after my encounter with the rickshaw—the scrape on my leg was still inflamed and crusty and sore to the touch. In addition to using an antibiotic salve, I had recently put myself on a course of oral cephalosporin. A man behind the counter at the Lanka pharmacy thought it would be a good idea; he sold me a bag of capsules.
Fear, it has been said, is the recollection of pain endured, a peculiar form of memory inscribed on the mind like a wound that will not heal. Desire, too, is a form of memory: the memory of pleasure. But desire wanders free, homeless and incorporeal, a hungry ghost forever reaching out to eat, perpetually searching for a way back into the flesh.
One morning, after cleaning and dressing my leg, I went over to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the row of bindings. I located a familiar, thick black volume bulging with paper markers and removed it. The cover was embossed with gold lettering: Visuddhimagga, or The Path of Purification. This medieval text, originally composed in Pali by an Indian monk named Buddhaghosa, is as close as you come to the Bible of the Theravadan Buddhist world, a world that extends north from Sri Lanka through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. A quick check of the contents located a chapter titled “Foulness as a Meditation Subject.” I thumbed through a few pages and began to read:
This is the body’s nature: it is a collection of over three hundred bones, jointed by one hundred and eighty joints, bound together by nine hundred sinews, plastered over with nine hundred pieces of flesh, enveloped in the moist inner skin, enclosed in the outer cuticle, with orifices here and there, constantly dribbling and trickling like a grease pot, inhabited by a community of worms, the home of disease, the basis of painful states, perpetually oozing from the nine orifices like a chronic open carbuncle, from both of whose eyes eye-filth trickles, from whose ears comes ear-filth, from whose nostrils snot, from whose mouth food and bile and phlegm and blood, from whose lower outlets excrement and urine, and from whose ninety-nine thousand pores the broth of stale sweat seeps, with bluebottles and their like buzzing round it, which when untended with tooth sticks and mouth-washing and head-anointing and bathing and underclothing and dressing would, judged by the universal repulsiveness of the body, make even a king, if he wandered from village to village with his hair in its natural wild disorder, no different from a flower-scavenger or an outcaste or what you will. So there is no distinction between a king’s body and an outcaste’s in so far as its impure stinking nauseating repulsiveness is concerned.
But by rubbing out the stains on its teeth with tooth sticks and mouth-washing and all that, by concealing its private parts under several cloths, by daubing it with various scents and salves, by pranking it with nosegays and such things, it is worked up into a state that permits of its being taken as “I’” and “mine.”
I skimmed the rest—something about how men delight in women because men fail to perceive how “in the ultimate sense there is no place here even the size of an atom fit to lust after.” I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, making a mental note to share this passage with Richard the next time he dropped by. It had been a favorite of Judith’s. Once when I was studying Pali in Chicago, I made the mistake of reading it to her, and she had never forgotten. From then on, every ache and pain, every case of the flu, every menstrual period, it was the “foul body” acting up, or the “foul body” with its persistent demands for food, clothing, sex.
Opposite my window a gang of male monkeys strolled insolently along the ledge looking for trouble. They were strangers in our neighborhood, so far as I could tell, exploring new territory. Perhaps for this reason my neighbor was out on her roof, keeping an eye on her laundry drying on the line. She was also, I noticed, watching me. This was the opening move in a discreet game we had been playing, repeatedly, for several months now—ever since she had spotted those monkeys on my roof and called out to me.
A very extended Bengali family lived next door. I had counted some fourteen people, give or take an infant that may have been visiting or was accidentally counted twice. Most mornings, though, this girl—she was maybe seventeen or eighteen years old—was up there working all alone. A scarlet gash of vermillion sliced through the part in her hair, leaving no question as to her marital status. I assumed she was the newest bride, which would mean that she occupied the lowest station in the family hierarchy. This would explain why, in my observations, she appeared to be saddled with more than her fair share of domestic responsibilities. A few of the other women showed up now and again to boss her around, but I never once saw her husband on the rooftop. I was pretty sure, though, it was him I spied coming and going through the front door below, while just upstairs his young wife and I pursued our respective labors, separated only by a few iron bars and three feet of open space that spanned the alleyway between our buildings. Of course, she never left the house. He would not have permitted such a thing. It would be out of the question for an orthodox, new Hindu bride to traipse around in public under the gaze of other men. Under the circumstances, then, I alone was allowed to gaze.
It was shortly after that first encounter that I realized that my west windows overlooked the otherwise secluded rooftop of another man’s one-woman harem, and I soon became aware that she seemed to be watching me at least as closely as I was watching her. It didn’t take long to appreciate the erotic significance of this peculiar arrangement and to formalize the conventions of a protracted flirtation that could only make sense in a situation where a young woman is virtually imprisoned in a household, where the days and months pass and she is thrown into regular, surreptitious visual intercourse with a man outside of her family circle, where that man is a foreigner, and where that foreigner is himself otherwise devoid of female companionship and randy as the proverbial goat—despite the obvious fact that “in the ultimate sense there is no place here even the size of an atom fit to lust after.”
But what about the soft brown slope of a woman’s neck where it curves to meet her shoulder? Or the supple turn of her ankle, a delicate bare foot, tender toes adorned with silver rings? What of a narrow nose, a small mouth, and moist lips painted red like a ripe strawberry? And what of those eyes—two luminous pools rounded by dark shores of kajal?
The game. I sit at my desk untangling Sanskrit syntax; she squats across from me on the rooftop, sorting laundry or perhaps combing through a pile of lentils, searching for and removing tiny stones and scraps of debris. One end of her sari is pulled demurely over her hair, trailing low across her forehead; her lashes curl against its hem. She peeks out from under the sari and watches me where I sit at my desk for as long as I can endure the caress of those eyes as they move from the top of my head slowly over my arms and hands and shoulders and chest, ruffling every blond hair on my body, explor
ing every exposed inch of my pale, alien flesh. In short, she is allowed to have her way with me, to stroke my body with those invisible fingers, until—and only until—I look up from my books. Until that moment we are still gathering momentum, rising, slowly and tentatively, toward a point of no return. But when I look up, at the very instant our eyes meet, all the rules are broken. This coming together of the eyes is a moment of exquisite intimacy, a shameless, brazen violation of every societal norm, an indecent coupling that never lasts for more than two or three seconds at the most before she reluctantly turns away, prolonging our misery and our exultation in a smoldering sidelong glance straight out of the pages of Kalidasa’s Abhijnana-Shakuntala:
If love will trouble her
whose great eyes madden me,
I greet him unafraid,
though wounded ceaselessly.
Where all of this left my neighbor, I was never sure, but in my solitude this very uncertainty about her feelings provided an opening for endless speculation. After one of our scandalous encounters, she would retreat back under her sari, rise, and walk briskly to the far side of the roof, occupying herself there with one or another innocuous chore. More than once she disappeared down the stairs, only to resurface five or ten minutes later with a heartbreaking expression of calculated insouciance. As for myself, I would generally collapse forward onto the open text I had been reading and let my face sink into the page. And when I raised my head, the whole thing was likely as not to start all over again, only this time with me in the role of aggressor.
I stare at her unflinchingly, mauling her body with my eyes, while she in her turn feigns total indifference to my attentions. She lolls on the rooftop, stretches like a cat in the sun, runs her small hands down along her hips, stands on tiptoe draping her husband’s kurta over the line with her naked stomach exposed to the warm winter sun. All of this, I somehow know, is for me.
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