“Maybe she’s just waiting for the right moment to speak.”
We took turns trying to tickle Richard awake with a leaf. I remember that day clearly. Maria wore a turban, which she said was French. It was a hat that shaped up and sat square on her head, while her dark curls dangled beneath the rim. Her skin was tawny, her eyes brown, Semitic and large. Melting, I thought. She looked like a painting by Matisse. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
“I dream of you,” said Richard. “I dream of you when I have coffee at the cafe. I dream of you when I buy a paper downtown. I dream of you at night when you are not beside me. I dream of you when I go marketing and pick up fresh, plump tomatoes. I dream of you whenever I eat mangoes. I dream of you when my mouth is full of your hair. I dream of you—” But here he stopped and broke off, thinking I was only a kid, a child, that he could not overwhelm me with the weight of his love and desire. He thought that if he told me things it would affect and change me. I didn’t know how to tell him that my feelings were already too big.
Juliet. Lolita. Beatrice. I said their names like charms to make myself believe there was nothing wrong with being in love at fifteen. To love someone as old as Richard was not at all correct, I knew, but I did not know why. My grandmother was married at thirteen. At thirteen, they dressed her in bridal red, hennaed her feet and hands, and placed her in a flower bower with my grandfather. I don’t know when they actually set up house together, at what point he walked up to her and untied the knot in her sari, but surely she wasn’t older than fifteen. In two years, she would give birth to my eldest uncle. Kirti, the servant girl, was very young, and I knew she had a lover. So why was I so tormented? Because my desire was so big.
I think Richard made me feel powerful in some way. I liked the fact that he could reduce—or elevate—me to a being whose actions were dictated by passion. And that I could do the same to him. It was as if we both had a private world, with the larger world shut out. Our passion defined us, made us whole and real to each other. I was fifteen, and he was thirty, but he looked younger. Twenty-six. Twenty-six would make him eleven years older than I, but thirty made me half his age. Half his experience, half awake.
I think I thought sex meant love. I had become naked with him, to him. He had seen what no one else had seen. That made him powerful and made me his love slave. I could see the color-comic headlines: “Seduced by a Stranger,” “Undone by a Hippie.”
I had Richard, my cupcake of happiness, my deep-sea fantasy, my afternoon-love-affair man. And in my depth of feeling for him, in the enchantment of first love, first lust, I forgot my mother. Her evasions, her indifference, ebbed away. Here was a man who charmed me with attention, who marked me with significance. Here was someone I could love, someone who loved me.
Thirteen
This was how things were for a few weeks. But then the mad preacher came to town. I saw him on the streets. He wore a leopard pelt over his dhoti and had long, matted hair that reached past his shoulder blades. He was very, very dark, his skin nearly matching the color of his hair, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
For a few days he just stood in the street, silent and only partly in the way of the cars, the motor bikes, the bullock carts that were always about. The rumors declared he was from Delhi, that he was from Sri Lanka, that he had traveled to Pi from the heart of the Himalayas. From our favorite cafe, Richard and I watched him. We were both fascinated.
He stood in the street with his arms hanging straight down his sides, like some giant Egyptian statue. He had a multicolored bag across his shoulder, a glittering thing stitched with jewelstones and mirrors, embroidered with beasts and birds. A peeling harmonica peeked from the inside. He wore no shirt; he wore no shoes.
Drawn by Richard and the preacher, I returned to the cafe day after day. On the third day, he began to speak. He said that something grand had happened. He said the world was ripe for a miracle. He said he had another baby Jesus growing inside his chest. He removed his bag and thrust out his chest so that we could all have a look. A crowd of passersby peered at him, and we were among them.
His name was Be’ve’nu, and he did not believe in bathing, I thought, for a strong smell came from him. It wasn’t unpleasant, but sweet, kind of smoky. Black hair curled sparingly on his chest, and on the left side was the outline of a tiny hand, almost a sketch.
“I was once a man like you,” said Be’ve’nu, letting everyone get up close. Strangely, his accent was French.
“I slept at night, worked in the day, until one morning I felt a great pressure in my body. It was as if I had swallowed something and could not get it down. I tried to cough, spit it up, but the feeling persisted. Finally, I put my hands to my neck, sick of the pain that was so agonizing I wanted to choke myself. But I heard a voice that stopped me.”
His voice was soft and full of wonder, his eyes round as he described the miracle that had befallen him. He spoke of touching the tiny hand that was on his chest, of his astonishment as he realized that a baby was inside him. The voice told him that it was another avatar of God, and that Be’ve’nu’s life would change.
The baby spoke to him at night, telling him to gather up his life in a bag made by his own sister and to walk barefoot until sunset. Then he was to immerse himself in the first body of water he saw, whether at a tap or in an ocean. He was to abstain from food for three days and to chant the name of God. He was to stalk a leopard and kill it with his own bare hands, a knife in his teeth, and to sacrifice the meat, keeping the skin as a trophy. He was to walk from village to village and relay the miracle that was the life inside his chest.
Hardly anyone in the crowd believed in another Jesus, but his voice, the sweetest I’d ever heard, was captivating. Soon he closed his mouth and offered nothing more. The crowd, disappointed—the crazy who had appeared two weeks before had let a basketful of snakes travel up and down his arms—dispersed. Luck brought this preacher who was thirsty for water near our table.
“Where are you from?”
It was Richard who asked this question, startling me with its directness.
“From a road that’s rapidly aging,” replied Be’ve’nu.
“How did you get here?”
“I walk out on my own, a thousand miles from home, but I do not feel alone.”
“How do you live?”
“You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”
He spoke only in Dylan. He did not use any other words except to tell his miracle. If I supplied mental guitar and harmony, it was like being at a rock and roll concert.
I went to lie in Richard’s arms that afternoon. The heat of the day made us drowsy, and as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined it was the dark one’s arms that held me, that the preacher’s wild hair lay about me, that it was his face I touched with my fingertips. I lost myself this way, imagining, in a shimmer of strange and vibrant energy. I startled myself out of it, though, realizing who was in the room. I felt awful, as if I’d betrayed Richard in a terrible way. I drew the sheet around me even though it was hot, and shifted to the edge of the bed. Untouched, I lay awake, trying to figure this new thing out. When Richard woke up, I smiled sheepishly, and he knew something was up. He looked at me with his green-grey eyes, but I shrugged mine away, merely saying I had to go.
What was funny was that Richard seemed as captivated by the preacher as I was, not missing any opportunity to listen to him in the square. It was he who figured out his name was really Bienvenu. Welcome. Richard and I had coffee together in the cafe every day for the next week to hear him recite again and again the circumstances of the miracle.
He said the baby would be delivered out of his mouth, but he wasn’t certain when, whether the period would be longer or shorter than the usual nine months for holy births. He believed it would be five months. He was trying to be careful of his burden but felt he could not really do harm, that the baby was protected from falls and bruises. Still, he said he did not understand how
women did it, how they could be in the fields from sunup to sundown, thrashing, thrashing grain with babies in their bellies. And how they could go through the process eight or nine times. Truly, he said, woman is the closest we have on earth to the gods.
Sometimes people questioned him, asking him to expand on the significance of the birth. He answered in rhyme, from the freewheelin’ years, from the electric era. Others were rude, not believing, wanting a fight, better still an arrest, but he was as Christian as could be and refused to become aroused. Most left him alone, for his prophecy was no longer news, and he was treated as a common street seer.
Then other rumors began, that he was not as pure as one might think, that he visited a brothel frequently, that he drank a bottle of rum toddy at night, that he smoked ganja. Of all the rumors only one was true: The preacher named Welcome liked to smoke marijuana now and then. When Richard lit up a joint and offered it to me, I, struck by a boldness inspired by the sun, offered it to the madman. He reached out his hand languidly and took the paper wet from my lips. Staring into my eyes, he took a deep drag and handed it back. He didn’t hide the act, he didn’t care if anyone watched. Richard was shocked that Be’ve’nu smoked.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked, naming the saints and seers who used drugs to induce states of revelation. Even the Oracle at Delphi had been steeped in the fragrance of ganja. Drugs were not anathema to polytheistic religions; it was only the West that demanded that its clergy free their lives of the senses.
But think of the Buddhists, said Richard; they desire to be stone to temptation, to transcend the puerile pleasures of the earth, to meditate upon the godhead. And didn’t Hindus require their mystics to go unadorned into the forests, relinquishing all worldly goods?
There’s a difference between jewels and drugs, I said.
Which is?, he asked.
To smoke is to ease out of the present, to get rid of the bonds of earth, to concentrate on the holy, I said, mad at him for being such a dolt.
But when a person is pregnant, the use of drugs … he said.
There was fire in the preacher’s speech. It could move trees. His words whipped out from the dark to form illuminated pearls. He was so convinced of the truth of his beliefs that there was no room for anything else, and doubt shattered like glass around him. He was Orpheus, he was Apollo, he was Krishna who could swallow butter and reveal the world on his tongue. When the heat began to make blue spots appear before my eyes and turned the street into a river, I imagined the preacher was Bob Dylan in disguise, tanned and hidden, seeking refuge from the West. There’s a wicked wind blowing from the upper deck, he said, and I searched vainly for the meaning of his words.
I saw him being bit by a dog. I saw him when dirty wash water landed at his feet. I saw him with his hand to his heart, feeling the life within him.
Never had the town been so hot. The preacher developed a habit of joining us at the cafe. He drank only water while Richard and I drained bottles of beer, Richard left us to get bottles of mineral water, which were on special.
The preacher and I did not speak to one another. He was seated on my right; droplets of heat appeared on his arm and face. His breath stirred my shirt. I was conscious of my breathing, my rising breasts. He smiled at me, right into the inside of me. It was so hot the air was rippling, the sounds around us amassed into one drone. He smiled into my eyes, his eyes were on my eyes, my mouth, my throat.
He held out his hand, and we walked toward a waterfall We kept on brushing against one another, my fingers grazing his body, his hand near my shoulders, a whisper of contact. We sat under a tree. There was no one around us, nothing to interrupt us. His forehead was jeweled with sweat, and I lifted a large silk handkerchief to wipe his brow. His hair was bound up in bright string, and I untied it, letting it fall about his neck. The string turned to flowers, and roses were in his hair, in my hair.
O sister when I come to lie in your arms, do not treat me like a stranger, he said.
His words breathed into my ear.
You must realize the danger, he said.
His words roared like a lion as we embraced.
Time is like an ocean but it ends at the shore, he said.
His words whispered as he sank his teeth into my neck.
Richard came back. We were clothed and apart, seated and being served. I was shaking all over. A bus rattled down the road blowing exhaust. The sun traveled relentlessly in the sky.
The preacher Be’ve’nu left town the next day. The cafe owner said that he had delivered his message and was off to the next town. Some rumors floated about, of debts and robberies, but they were idle, played with to fan away the heat. I was sad and Richard could not help me.
Fourteen
“When you grow up, Richard, you’ll never be stuck in rush hour.” This is what Richard’s mother had told Richard when he was young and living in New York. “When you become an artist, you’ll sleep until eleven, and never face traffic,” she said. Richard’s mother was always talking like this, dreaming a future for her son that was miles away from her own experience as a design consultant at New Look Graphics, Inc. “Listen, I’ve been working since I was sixteen, mixing protein shakes and greens and juice for every Joe off the street. I studied at night and hustled like mad to make it. You don’t need to do this.” Constantly, Richard told me, she drummed into his head the benefits he’d have when he grew up.
Richard always spoke of his mother with irony, sometimes with genuine humor. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he’d lived with her in the “upper Eighties” in New York City, in an apartment that was primarily decorated in pink and white, with lots of plush couches and lots of plastic. She had already looked at an apartment for him in SoHo when he was attending high school, speculating incessantly about paint chips and fabric swatches. But Richard wanted to make documentaries and skipped college for Amsterdam. In a way, Richard’s mother had groomed him for departure and travel to India all his life. I was five years old when he landed in Bombay in 1975.
She made commercial life seem awful but unwittingly made the life of an artist appear even worse. “I think she wanted me to paint so I could give her something to hang on her wall,” he said, promising me he was joking.
I liked listening to Richard talk about his mother. It made him even more real in my life, giving him history, and for me, providing comedy. His upbringing sounded romantic to me, living in New York City, and then leaving. I made him recite the subway stops he’d use, and I’d chant with him—Lincoln Center, Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Sheridan Square—because to me they sounded so magical. Tell me about the time you were in Washington Square and thought the “No Littering” sign was a long-lost friend, I’d say, or tell me about the time you skipped school and roamed about in Chelsea because that was the one place your mother’s friends wouldn’t be.
I also instinctively liked his mother. Here was someone who cared deeply for her child and went to great lengths to provide for him. Interference, said Richard, but it seemed to me love. My mother wouldn’t care what career I embarked upon after college, or where I lived. All she seemed to do was mock me, watch me like a curiosity, if she could be bothered to see me at all. She was like the bird which abandoned her young in other birds’ nests.
I knew something was up when I arrived at Richard’s flat. A servant woman was doing his dishes, mopping up the floor, and he was picking up his discarded shirts from around the room. I liked the messiness of his life and was surprised at the busy cleaning.
“I don’t believe it, but she’s actually visiting,” he said, staring at an unidentifiable stain on one of his T-shirts. “What do you think this is?” he asked.
“Who’s coming?”
“Harriet.”
“Your mother?”
“On holiday. With the Ladies Who Travel.” Richard’s mother belonged to a group of women who met monthly to travel to nearby places together. They liked to visit. Now the group was taking a “tou
r of the Orient,” and his mother was to stay in India for a week, in Madras and Pondicherry. She then planned to spend an afternoon on Pi with Richard.
Richard hadn’t seen his mother in five years. The last time they’d met was in London, when she’d sent him a ticket. “I was tripping, but not on purpose,” he said. “It was pretty scary. I kept on thinking the salad was infinite.”
He was nervous about my meeting her, but I looked forward to it.
She was arriving on Wednesday. I was impatient with my morning, trying on different outfits and trying to wear my hair up. Finally, I changed to what I had first put on and went over to Richard’s flat. So it was with a sense of excitement that I met Richard’s mother when she arrived on Pi.
Harriet was dressed in a purple and pink caftan, with earrings that looked like grape clusters and lots of bangles. Her hair was blond and worn up under a broadbrimmed hat. She was large and seemed a giant next to skinny Richard. I thought she was beautiful.
“This is my friend Sonil,” he said.
She pressed her cheek to mine and kissed the air. I thought this only happened in the movies.
Then she announced that she might stay.
“Mom?”
“Baby, I understand why you want to live here. Life in America is worrisome. All that endless running and chatter. I’m ready for a change of pace. I want to be on a different level, mingle with real people, get in touch with myself.”
“Mom, you’re about ten years out of date.”
“Is it too late to want spiritual fulfillment? Is it wrong to add another dimension to my life? Are you telling me I’m too old, Richard?”
“You’re not old. But living here—god, Mother, I don’t think it’s for you. And anyway, who would take care of the cats?”
“I can have them shipped here. They can become vegetarians. Stop worrying, Richard.” She told us that she had already found a guru.
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