The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  We have an excited reunion with Motty and Zvika Hillel on the street. They’d just stepped out of the hotel to go to the cyber cafe – to check if we’d mailed them about meeting up – and we troop towards each other joyfully. Zvika has sprouted a new pimple. Motty’s hair is neatly tied in a ponytail and he smiles shyly. Instantly, around us, there rises a billowing circle of hellos and hugs and what-have-you-been-up-tos that buffets us and carries us on to dinner. Even in this age of connectedness, there is something spectacular about meeting the twins again in these ancient streets with the new licks of paint. In a whoosh, my anxiety abates. We are starving. The last meal was in pre-jackfruit Jodhpur.

  The boys take us to a tiny restaurant they’ve been frequenting. We order from the menu that is, for the most part, a compilation of stuff backpackers across India seem to favour. Chocolate pancake for me, a mango lassi and cheese paratha for Zvika (‘Cheese-cheese or paneer-cheese?’ he asks the young waiter, who assures him it is cheese-cheese), a macaroni for Motty. S, wherever he gets one, picks the thaali.

  ‘You know, that day, when we left Jodhpur?’ Motty says, after thanking the waiter politely for bringing us water. ‘We didn’t get a bus. So we went to the railway station and took a train. We reached in the early morning. It was beautiful. Zvika went totally mad.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I took about a thousand pictures of the sunrise. But now I am excited about the real thing. Mwahahaha,’ Zvika says. ‘We have booked a camel safari for tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh?’ I reply, and look at S. The camel safari is something we have been arguing about. ‘When do you want to go on a camel safari?’ was the second thing the hotel manager had asked us (the first being the nature of our relationship. He too was disappointed that we were not ‘friends’.) ‘Let’s also go.’

  ‘No,’ S replies firmly. ‘It’s way out of the budget. You know that. We’ll have to do Jaisalmer on a lot less and move on to Barmer.’

  ‘Also,’ Zvika deflects mildly, ‘I don’t think they can add two more people at such short notice.’

  ‘What’s Barmer?’ Motty asks.

  ‘Ya, what’s Baaaarmer?’ I ask, mincing my voice and making a face. The boys laugh.

  ‘Barmer is a trading post from antiquity, which is now a wildcatter town of sorts. Of course, technically we can’t say wildcatter because it’s not independent bounty hunters looking for oil but two large corporations,’ S replies seriously. ‘But it’ll be interesting. Also, we’ve been in Rajasthan for almost eight days now. We have to be on the move. Hurtling pace, remember?’ He snaps his fingers.

  ‘Hurtling pace, remember,’ I mimic.

  The food arrives, and I begin to wolf down my pancake.

  Afterwards, I reminisce moral science classes from my schooldays, in the course of which we were taught graphic stories from the Old Testament: the heroic Israelites on the one hand, the cold-hearted Egyptians and the battle-ready Philistines on the other. In the Calcutta summers, the classrooms would be still in spite of forty tweens in crisp white shirts and maroon skirts modestly covering their knees. Outside in the gardens, the flowers would wilt in the strong humid heat; within, the seas would part for the Israelites to cross over into the Promised Land while the Egyptian army would drown.

  The boys are surprised that I remember the exact details of the travails of Samson and Delilah, Job, Noah, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob’s feud with his brother Esau and his love story with Rachel. Ours was a missionary school – chapel in the morning and nativity plays before the Christmas holidays. Once a year, a bunch of American missionaries would come and distribute Bibles and ask us, after a happy singing session in the school auditorium, if we believed in the God. All the girls in their maroon skirts and white shirts, irrespective of family faith and general knowledge, would all raise their hands dutifully. The Americans were guests after all. It would not do to be rude.

  The twins had no religious training in school, though they see themselves as Jewish. In Pushkar, they stayed in the Chabad House – it is free for Jews – and they did not particularly mind joining in for prayers. After Jaisalmer, they plan to go to Rishikesh where the Kumbh Mela is on. A second round of coffee arrives.

  Somehow – I have no idea how, but I do remember it was over coffee – we get to numbers. I have before me a loose page where one of the boys has written 1 to 10 in Hebrew. I remember labouring over the pronunciation. And then, in my precise hand, there is 1 to 10 in Devanagari. ‘Teach us to count in Indian,’ they’d said. ‘Indian is twenty-four languages,’ I’d exclaimed, ‘and counting!’ And thus, next to the Devanagari, is written in Bengali: Motty Hillel, Zvika Hillel.

  After dinner, the twins have made vague plans to meet another group of friends (also Israelis) who are supposed to come to Jaisalmer. They are likely to check into a hotel in the fort. Which hotel, the boys do not know, but it is near the first Jain temple. ‘Right,’ S says. ‘Girls in the group? Or a certain girl?’ Zvika blushes violently. His pimple turns puce.

  Motty says, ‘You are exactly right, SJ. This is the group Zvika was travelling with before I came from Nepal. I think he blames me for losing that group.’

  ‘Nothing like that, nothing like that,’ Zvika protests.

  ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ I sing.

  ‘Come, come, see our room,’ Zvika says.

  We walk with the boys to their hotel. It is an old house with many rooms beside a long verandah. The boys have one on the ground floor, a small square with pitiless lighting, but clean enough, with an attached bath, bright bedspread and a picture of a camel on the wall. They have got all their clothes laundered; these are stacked in many piles on the bed. The hotel guy comes to us and offers camel safaris and rooms at very reasonable rates. S keeps his card. I get my hopes up again.

  The twins are now behaving mysteriously. They collect a plastic bag kept in the corner of the room and speak to each other in rapid Judaic; Motty, it seems, does not entirely approve of the plan. Zvika is trying hard to appear in control. It is quite funny. They finally lock their room and we step out together. Near the first Jain temple, rather regretfully, we leave them floating around. I would have liked nothing better than to observe them go to every one of the hotels in the region, looking for their group of friends who may or may not have checked in this evening. With the girls. ‘Bye,’ we say, after the customary handshakes and hugs and maybe-we-will-meet-after-twenty-years. Motty lingers shyly, even after Zvika has walked a few steps ahead and Saurav has crossed the road. ‘Keep in touch, Dippy,’ he says. ‘I hope your book is a big success. Then you can come to Israel and write a book about our country.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I hope you have a fabulous trip. And next time, come live with us in Calcutta.’ And then, both Zvika and Saurav, their faces at once open and craggy in the uncertain light, call out goodbye and wave.

  ‘Your packet is tinkling, Zvika,’ is my parting shot. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Oh, that?’ Zvika sparkles, and his smile, clean and toothy like a child’s, spills out of his face. ‘Just water.’

  22

  The big fight begins lightly. And in the first few minutes, there is the possibility that its comic possibilities will triumph.

  That at seven o’clock or so, when the sky is probably a quiet eggshell blue, the birds are barely cheeping and I am stirring in the deepest depths of somnolence, if he insists unreasonably that I wake up and get ready, I shall not respond at all. It’s hilarious he’d even expect it. I’m exhausted; we’d trudged around the bloody fort till midnight; in any case, morning is when I get my restorative sleep. I might open one eye and crack a joke, lumber out of bed and bite his ear and return to sleep. Better perhaps, I should figure out, for I love him and we are married, that it has nothing to do with waking up in the morning and rushing to the fort – doing Jaisalmer – at all, but that, really, he is worried about money and the future. And that worry – for
anyone who has embraced uncertainty on the flimsy optimism that the pursuit of art or knowledge is sustaining in itself will know – peaks and ebbs with the regularity of tides. When it peaks in flood, restlessness is a symptom, snapping is a symptom; and there is only the relief of a long sweet brawl. An avoidable one, since its signs are so textbook. He has not slept well at night and that sour iron smell has transferred from his forehead to his tongue. I will understand all this in an instant. I will be funny and wise.

  But what happens in Jaisalmer that morning – as in love and marriage, frequently – is not any of the above.

  S leaves the bed at around six. He is jittery, annoyed. He goes to the bathroom. After coming out, he begins to clear the mess in the room noisily. We had unpacked in a hurry last night, in our rush to meet the twins, and things are strewn all over.

  I loathe this thing: this cleaning up of rooms at the crack of dawn before I have left the bed. It fills me, unreasonably, with guilt. I am always in a state of precarious hysteria about anything that might be perceived as a slight on my general way of living. Unfortunately, I live in constant mess, lurching through mismanaged episodes. So if someone is cleaning up showily, on a bad day it hits me as direct – not to mention very cruel – criticism.

  Dum, doosh, bam, blim. There’s the swish of a flying coat. The splat of a chappal hitting the floor. The wlooozz of a bag being zipped up. The noises wake me up fully; guilt floods my gut. And then, because my years of feminism have built in me a Pavlovian response to this (very female) guilt business, anger takes over. I cannot reconstruct the conversation exactly but here’s what is likely to have happened.

  ‘Why are you cleaning up at this hour?’

  ‘Because things will start getting lost. I could not find the Tata Photon, for example. It had got misplaced in the tumble of your clothes.’

  ‘Stop blaming me,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I’ll put the clothes away when I get up.’

  ‘What do you mean when you get up? You have to get up now.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘What do you mean why? I will keep everything packed and ready. Get dressed and give me your pyjamas. After we spend the day at the fort, we can take a bus to Barmer. We are haemorrhaging money in Rajasthan. One day in Barmer, and then onto Gujarat. We have to move on. We’ve barely covered any territory in these last few days.’ The red rucksack lands on the bed with a mighty thump. Shloop, shloop, shloop, the t-shirts land in them.

  At this I sit up. ‘Are you insane? How can we leave tonight? What about the desert safari?’

  ‘I have told you again and again and again that we cannot afford it. The cheapest safari will be something like 3,000 rupees. We have the budget to monitor. I’m the one having to keep an eye on the finances. You are in your la-la land. We don’t have money pouring into the accounts every month. It’s just getting depleted. You know what they say – money talks? It’s usually saying goodbye. We spent quite a bit on dinner yesterday. Please get up and get ready.’

  The anger that has been swirling in me gets a new force of life. ‘Do not talk about money like that, okay?’ I say this bitingly, knowing well that there is some truth in what he has just said. He is responsible for fund allocation. And yes, our resources are low. Even so, my fury has reached the tongue. ‘Stop ordering me about. I cannot get up. I am exhausted. We can’t leave today. What if I had my period?’

  ‘But you don’t. When you do, we will stop and take a break. But now we have to keep moving. You know the deal.’

  And on and on.

  At some point, it seizes to be a civil back and forth and turns into an uncivil volley. The sun rises higher on the horizon. The windows shimmer. There are breakfast noises outside, people walking in the corridor. And then, when S wants to wind down, I do not let him. What we do in Jaisalmer seems to become a metaphor for the rest of our lives. Are we simply going to go hurtling through – without taking my obsession with details into account? What if we never ever come back to Jaisalmer? Then all this beauty will be lost to us and I will have to live with that regret all my life.

  What if our money runs out, he says, before we are any closer to completing the project?

  What if unhappiness is all we shall ever have?

  It becomes an all-consuming squall. The fury in the room heats up the air, it expands and drifts to the upper reaches, to the decorated ceiling with its pretty cornices, above the large paintings of full-bodied girls in traditional ghaghra-cholis, past the shimmery orange curtains, leaving us breathless with fear – the truth that runs below the rivers of dissonance and breaks onto the surface like this: fear. The nameless fear that we will be crushed by the risks and they will win, all those people who predicted this failure, all those who have savings and investments and EMIs and stuff.

  In the resulting vacuum, I shout and rage and cry bitterly, bashing my head against his chest. We had fallen in love during a hot Calcutta September eight years ago, the sun beating down relentlessly on hectic noisy streets; something of that weather persists in our relationship. The last two years of impecunious existence; the reinforced co-dependence of living as writers together; the truth about marriage in the fine layers of knowing and not knowing; the heady mix of too many books and too little money; the everyday anxieties this journey throws up – there is enough hurt below this bedrock to offer a steady supply of material for cruel accusations to be flung at each other for an hour or a day, depending.

  It takes the better part of the day.

  By the time the original quarrel breaks down into vicious little eddies, each circling in one corner of the room, generating its own narrative of melodrama, I use my final weapon. ‘I hate you.’ And at that moment, I do. I relish the words. At that moment, everything is already ending. I cannot comprehend a future, two hours/two days/two weeks later, when I am calm and happy again. I narrow my eyes with hatred and the words shine like polished knives. ‘In 2006, you did this.’ I am unstoppable. ‘That day, in that season of that painful year: how could you have said the thing you said?’

  ‘2006? You want to bring up the past again?’

  Now that there is no hope of retrieving the morning, S surrenders to the luxurious extravagance of the fight. Things are said. Things are hurled.

  At one point, I heave on the bed. He sits with his head buried in his hands. There is a turn in the wind: a hesitant allocation of blame elsewhere. ‘It was yesterday’s awful incident in the bus,’ I say. ‘That is what has depressed me.’ He murmurs something in consolation.

  But then something leads to something else and we are off again.

  Noon arrives. Noon departs.

  ‘If I’ve made you so unhappy, why don’t you go away?’

  The light outside seems post-meridian. Sobbing, I pull on my jeans, throw my coat over my pyjama top, grab my purse, take my three add-on credit cards (no bank in their right mind would have issued credit cards to me) and throw them at S. ‘You’d better call the publishers and tell them this is off. Or,’ and here my voice quivers, since, as you know, this had been my idea, ‘you can do the journey yourself.’

  I hoist my already packed bag on my shoulders and storm out.

  Five:

  How to Sell Reproductions of Old Masters in Europe and Other Stories

  Whatever celebrity Jaisalmer possesses as a commercial mart arises from its position as a place of transit between the eastern countries, the valley of the Indus, and those beyond that stream, the Kitars (the term for a caravan of camels) to and from Haidarabad, Rori-Bakhar, Shikarpur and Uchh, from the Gangetic provinces, and the Panjab, passing through it. The indigo of the Duab, the opium of Kotah and Malwa, the famed sugar-candy of Bikaner, iron implements from Jaipur, are exported to Shikarpur and lower Sind; whence elephants’ teeth (from Africa), dates, coco-nuts, drugs, and chandan, are imported, with pistachios and dried fruits from Bhawalpur.

  – ‘Annals of Jaisalmer’, Annal
s and Antiquities of Rajasthan (By Lt Col. James Tod and Edited and With an Introduction

  and Notes by William Crooke)

  23

  I storm out and push the door behind me. The finality of the slam is empowering – for about a second.

  The corridor is deserted. Afternoon plays out on the stippled orange walls. Dust motes dance in a funnel of sunlight. Our room is on the ground floor. From the corner of my eye, I can see that the door of the next room is ajar. I can feel a pair of eyes watching as I march along. It is difficult to affect a dignified posture while sobbing. ‘A-and she’s off,’ I hear a clipped British accent.

  Outside, as I emerge from the darkened corridor, the sunlight blinds. I trudge along for a few feet, eyes flickering, in the direction opposite to where the cow had died. I turn left and there, just across the dusty road, the fort looms, radiant in the sun. I increase my speed, annoyed with the fort and its beauty – I have nothing to do with it now – and turn into a side street, where I find a large stone to sit on.

  I sit and sit and nurse my injuries. In spite of the rage boiling inside me, something in the quiet warmth of that sunny spot begins to play tricks on the primary cortex in the brain, and the rush of fear abates. A supremely healthy cow ambles along and stops next to me. It flicks a fly with its tail smartly. Without the powerful sea of fear buffeting the rage, it loses steam.

  I know, of course, that I will return to our room and we will travel on. He knows I will return. One time, I’d stormed out of his room in the hostel – that sad little room with a broken window and dirty corners – after a similar fight. When I returned exactly two minutes later, he’d laughed and said, ‘I was doing a countdown. You returned at fifty-three.’