by Abha Dawesar
You’re so sensitive. The way you make love, the way you touch. It’s impossible to be that way with a woman unless you are in love.
Prem’s hands were the culprits. He touched women the way Meher had taught him to touch. But he did not feel for them the way he had felt when he touched Meher. And so Prem fucked them, not the way he had made love to Meher, but the way he had fucked Angie, in the early days when they were still fucking. He fucked almost as if it were a kind of revenge, a ruthless taking back of what had been stolen. The women mistook this for an insatiable greed for their bodies and therefore their souls. If there was ever any doubt in their mind, it was banished by the gentle postcoital caresses that he showered on them by habit.
For the first eight months of their relationship Prem had been in love with Angie. And in those months he had found himself confounded with emotions of which he had no previous experience: forms of love and bestial desire that had not existed in the Meher universe. The only expression of these new passions lay in sex. Angie had responded like a charm. Each day he had pushed the envelope with her, slapping her, humiliating himself, humiliating her, saying things pertaining to her sexual abuse as a child and using it as an aphrodisiac. In an environment of love and trust Prem believed they would both heal. But unfortunately for them Angie’s furious temper and Prem’s nonconfrontational style were so incompatible that steadily but irrevocably they began to despise each other. Their sexual life, rooted no longer in love but in habit, headed steeply in the direction of perversity for its own sake. After four years Prem unilaterally made the decision that even if they were unable to get rid of each other, he would not have sex with her again. Angie begged him, wept, pleaded, and on occasion jumped on him in his sleep, but apart from three instances in two years, Prem kept his promise.
Finally they split.
Prem’s agent before Edward, a mincing, effeminate man called Cole—who Prem was sure was gay—fell in love with Angie and took her. He left Prem in the capable hands of Edward. Looking back, Prem thought of this as a masterstroke—he got rid of a girlfriend and won a world-class agent.
Angie, however, continued to loom in his subconscious. She had left her imprint on the nerves leading from his dick that reported back to his brain. One day after he and Vedika had started their secret liaison, he found himself saying things to Vedika that he had learned from Angie, things that could be positively injurious to their relationship, if not utterly lethal for the struggling morality of a good woman cheating on her husband. To his shock, he found that Vedika had so given up any control of herself that even Prem’s incorporation of Harry Bedi into their lovemaking process was not salacious enough for her to pull away and slap him. Their trysts continued, day after day, in an abandoned and wanton celebration of their deception of the man whom Vedika called her husband and Prem his brother. Once Prem made her act out a Hindi film scenario where she, as a typical self-sacrificing wife, was raped by her brother-in-law and eventually turned into a whore. He had been talking dirty to her for weeks, but at this point when Vedika looked into his eyes pleadingly, he thought she would say it was time to stop. Instead she begged: in Hindi. And he had commenced with the few crude words available to a half-Parsi boy raised in Bombay speaking English.
Vedika revived Prem’s hope in life, in love, and in women. Where the relationship with Angie had filled him with disgust and the one with Meher with incredible loss, the one with Vedika had reinvented the very idea of eros. A man and woman so totally naked to each other, so intimate that they were able even to fuse their culpability and their conscience. After their first six months together, from spring to late autumn, Prem decided it was time to ask her to marry him. It was obvious to them both that Harry would sooner or later find out and Vedika said she could never again make love to Harry. Or to anyone else.
“I want to be with you forever,” Vedika had said in response to his proposal.
She would go to India for a month and announce her decision just before her return.
“It’ll be easiest for him that way if I give him a break from me.”
“That’s a good idea. You can move in with me when you arrive.”
Three weeks after her departure it was Prem who received a letter telling him that he had to forget her and move on. She knew he would never betray her by telling Harry or any of their friends about what had passed between them. In a profoundly religious moment in her parents’ home, Vedika had seen Prem and herself teetering on the edge of an abyss. They shared an intimacy of degradation, based on their inner fears, their base desires, their dark sides. But no! We share both that and the other side, the nobler side. Have you forgotten the hundreds of hours before we became lovers? Prem wanted to protest while reading her letter. But Vedika believed that they had suffered from an illusion that they could be saved by each other. Being in India had convinced her that the right path lay in fulfilling the promise she had already made to see her husband through his life, to be by his side. The individualistic self-aggrandizing life of sensation with Prem was not for her.
Prem was broken.
Prem called Harry to say he was off to Paris and to give his love to Bhabhi when she got back. He left North America with the hope that he would regain the stability and the balance to come back to New York in some months. He let his writing drown him like never before and forced himself to stand at the very edge of the cliff that so terrified Vedika. Prem determinedly looked at the precipice without a lifeline to protect him in case he lost his balance. Since then writing had been primary, he himself secondary.
p a r t v
I lifted her chemise and found marble.
—ARISTIDE MAILLOL TO PAUL GAUGUIN
ON CLOTILDE NARCISSE
The two men hit the autoroute to Dreux. Pascal had a new toy for the trip: a sleek white box that he claimed contained hundreds of symphonies. He connected it to the car and fiddled with a dial till Bach came on.
“Feel free to change it,” he said to Prem, smiling.
“Yeah, right! I was barely ever competent with the radio dial or the car stereo, and now you have to go get something that all the kiddywinks play with.” Prem peered at the display, afraid to press any of the buttons.
“Turn the dial—you’ll see the choices.”
Prem tried turning the dial, but the LCD flashed the same thing again and again. He placed the little box by the gearbox. Outside the car the trees were a leafy green. Paris seemed far away. It had been a while since Prem had experienced this anticipation of a new place. He knew practically nothing about where they were headed. He had very few images and a few faded lines from Maupassant to feed his imagination.
“New things to discover even at this age!”
“That’s right, mon vieux!” Pascal was wearing his dark glasses and steadily accelerating. Prem threw a sideways glance at the speedometer.
They saw her at the same time: the hallucinatory blonde in black clothes sitting on a chair at the edge of the forest as if she were waiting for Luis Buñuel to step out and direct her. Prem undid his seatbelt to turn around fully and look. She smiled.
“Did you see that?” His heart was thudding.
“Yes, wasn’t it amazing?”
“What do you think she was doing there on the edge of the highway, sitting like that with a cigarette in her mouth?”
“What do you think she was doing?”
“Come on—no one can stop here to pick up a whore.”
“No? We almost did.”
“But there’s still no exit! No place to pull off. I think she was there for a surrealistic photo shoot.”
“That must be the edge of a park. People probably have access from inside.”
Prem put his hand on his chest. It was still beating fast.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. It was just so unexpected.”
“Makes one want to fuck. I didn’t feel anything like that with the woman who came home with me the other night.”
“The settin
g was sensational. Whoever saw a woman sitting like that on a desk chair without a table? Smoking in a black skirt. In the middle of the day!”
“This calls for Wagner.”
“Oh, no!” Prem groaned.
“Just a few minutes, I promise.” Pascal reached for his white toy and tried to manipulate it, one hand on the steering wheel.
“Can we please pull over and do this?”
At the next exit Pascal pulled to the side and with a few efficient turns of the dial turned on Wagner. Some ten minutes later Prem couldn’t bear any more.
“Can we move on to Mahler? Or even Strauss?”
“Ha! You’ll have to learn to operate the new technology. Bon courage!”
“Damn you.”
Pascal explained how Prem could move back and forth with the dial, choose an artist or a song, and then change what was playing on the car stereo.
“Not that hard, see.”
“No. Homi would love this. I should buy one for him.”
They fell silent to Symphonie fantastique. Prem remembered his last road trip. It was twenty years ago with Lilia the singer. Prem had felt that it was time for him to write about America. A big American saga. The Emergency in India was over, and Prem felt finished with Indian politics. But America was huge and unknown, even though he had been living in New York for several years. Lilia suggested a cross-country drive. Coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts every morning, motels, motels, more motels at night. Lilia beside him as he drove, choosing the radio, fighting over the music. Tapes, talk shows, diners, and a lot of eggs and waffles. And then Lilia sitting on his face, Lilia fucking him, him fucking Lilia. At night before sleeping. In the morning while getting up. Lilia, the only easy relationship. Without love but with understanding. If he didn’t want to talk, she’d let him be. She was the only person who never assumed he loved her. And she didn’t insist on more than he could give. Lilia with whom he never felt culpable.
Pascal pulled into the main parking lot of a village for lunch. “We’ve made good time. We’re already in St-Hilaire. But we should’ve stopped earlier. It’s hard to get a meal in some of these small towns except between noon and two.”
The two brasseries turned them down.
“We can get a sandwich at the boulangerie, no?”
“I want a meal,” Pascal carped.
“It’s not going to kill you to eat light for a day.”
Pascal glared at Prem. Prem ignored him and walked to the boulangerie, the glass doors opened automatically. He ordered himself a small quiche. Pascal ordered the same.
They stepped out and found a bench where they ate in silence. Pascal looked unhappy.
“Should we get a beer at the bar there?” Prem suggested.
“Yes.”
Seated at the stools on the bar, they both watched the girl who was busy cleaning the floors and tables. The television on top of the bar was on.
“I can’t believe you grew up in a small town like this,” Prem said.
“I knew I had to leave. I didn’t even do my classe préparatoire there. I just fled.”
“I was thinking about Lilia earlier. The sex with her was so uncomplicated.”
“You can have it again now if you really wanted. I can introduce you to women.”
“I can’t do it. I couldn’t do it then. Somehow she got through the net.”
“I’m getting laid tonight. I have to.”
“Do it. It starts to fade fast after seventy.”
“That’s why I want the prize now. It’s no use getting it when you can no longer get it up.”
Prem was quiet. He hadn’t told Pascal whether or not he could still get it up. But Pascal’s comment wasn’t about Prem’s virility, it was about that seething ambition that swam inside him and occasionally bubbled to the surface, throwing a wedge into their friendship.
“You don’t think they’ll pass me up totally, do you? That’s not possible, is it?”
His friend looked lost for a moment. Afraid. This was why he needed Irène, the woman who had always calmed him, given him a mothering kind of love. Prem ran his hand through Pascal’s hair and imagined for a moment he was Ratan. Pascal calmed down.
“On y va,” he said firmly to Pascal, putting down money for their beers.
They walked back out in the sun and found the car.
“They probably thought we were gay,” Pascal said as he put on his seatbelt.
“Je m’en fous.”
“I think we’ll be there in another hour if the traffic stays light.”
Pascal seemed to have a new determination as they drove. His teeth were mildly clenched and his foot somewhat aggressive on the gas pedal. Prem played with the new toy he had just learned to manipulate and saw them through Saint-Saëns’ Le carnaval des animaux and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.
The first sight of Mont-Saint-Michel was unexpected and spectacular. It stood up high against all the surrounding marshlands. The long straight approach road was only a few kilometers, but somehow time itself seemed to flatten around the edges of the edifice, lending a profound longitudinal effect. A few large drops of rain fell on the car.
“We’ve had such splendid weather. Why is it raining now?” Pascal hissed as he pulled into the parking lot. A woman directed them to a free spot. Rain hit the windshield harder and with increased frequency.
“We’d better wait in here. I don’t want to send an old man like you to his death,” Pascal said. A satanic grin played at the edge of his mouth.
“No, then they’ll never give you the prize,” Prem said.
Pascal glared at him.
Prem moved the dial on the toy and chose Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Pascal started whistling. The rain was beating down hard now, and the entire îlot and its dramatic monastery were invisible. Even the cars in the parking lot were barely discernible. Pascal and Prem were isolated, a universe of two. Apart from the women he had loved, if Prem had to choose anyone to be in this situation with, it would be Pascal. He wanted to tell him that. But Pascal was still whistling to his favorite music. His stubble was reddish and unruly. He had probably not shaved in the morning.
Almost as abruptly as it had started, the rain stopped. The skies cleared in cracks, and a pink light peeped out. Pascal’s eyes were closed. Prem shook him.
“Wow.”
“I wish Maya could see this. She loves the play of light and color.”
“I’ve been here two times before, and it was different each time. It really transforms with the changing colors of the brooding gray sky so typical of Normandy.”
“Should we get out?”
“Be careful—it’s going to be slushy.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep the cane.”
Prem pulled out his cane from the backseat and placed it on the road after he opened his door. He tested it for a second while still seated in the car, then hauled himself out. His shoes caused water to splash on to the cuff of his pants.
“We’re actually staying at a hotel inside. We’ll need to climb a little”
“I can climb. I’m just slow.”
“I’m worried about myself,” Pascal said. Both of his hands were supporting his paunch.
They walked to the narrow wooden bridgelike contraption that led to the main gates of the medieval city. A busload of French kids on a school excursion came running toward them. Pascal and Prem waited against the side of the wooden bar, letting them pass.
“The other hotel was even higher up, so I chose this one,” Pascal huffed as they continued on the incline leading up to the hotel.
“Nonetheless, we’ll have to climb up all the way to see the monastery.”
“We don’t have to. We can go halfway and take in the atmosphere and the view.”
“We’ve come a long way for this. If we give it time, we’ll make the top tomorrow.”
They checked into the hotel, and Pascal handed his car keys to the reception desk with instructions for their bags.
“I’m going to take a
siesta. Should we meet here in an hour?”
“Yes. I need to lie down and straighten my back,” Prem said.
In his room Prem threw open the curtains and lay down, looking at the pale palette of the sky through the window. He couldn’t remember why he had been so upset by Maya’s remark. It didn’t seem all that bad in retrospect. What seemed amazing, however, was that he had followed her all the way to Paris. Of course he’d told himself he would have gone anyway to see Pascal, and if things hadn’t worked out with her, it was a good excuse to spend time with his friend. He hadn’t skipped more than one or two summers in two decades. Prem had moved away from most of his friends and acquaintances; apart from Pascal, the only other person he felt close to was Edward. But there were intrinsic limits to his relationship with Edward: while one of immense confidence, it remained professional. After Julie and Valérie he had not opened to any woman or even been tempted to. He couldn’t help feeling as if events had conspired to lead him to Maya. Pascal had mentioned meeting girls on the Internet, and he’d met the boy who had sent him those stories and come to lunch. He’d found Maya just the way Pascal had said he would find her.
Maya made him feel young even though he was never as aware of his age as when he was around her. For example, today he had had little doubt that had she come with them on this trip, both Pascal and he would have been more enthusiastic and basked in the glow of youth that she cast with her sunniness.
He awoke to the sound of the phone in his room.
“I overslept, but it seems like you did too.”
“Yes, I was asleep. What time is it?”
“Six. We were knocked out. Should we meet in the lobby in ten minutes?”
Prem washed his face and changed his shirt. The nap had done him good. He thought he should call Maya and tell her that he wasn’t upset anymore with her. But when he looked at the watch, ten minutes were already up. He swung his cane in his hand and made his way to the lobby.
“Are we ready for a climb?” Pascal asked.
