The bus stopped at a bend in the road, where a small stream cut down the mountain. There was a tea stall against the hill, and while the women bought chai and bags of peanuts, the men strolled over to the water and pissed in the creek. I don’t know why this made me delighted—it wasn’t such a good idea for the people who lived downstream—but it did. The animal pleasure of it, adding water to other water and watching it churn away.
There I was, taken by my surroundings, and yet I never once thought of kinship systems or agrarian reform. When I realized this, I felt relief, followed by a sobering dread. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be an academic, but I had no alternative plan. If I had the nerve, I would go home and get some silly job and try to write poems. Or maybe I could open a café, or become a clothes designer, or at the very least sew my own clothes—vests and paneled shirts that borrowed some of the jaunty style of the men in dhotis at creekside. I made frenzied sketches in the pages of my notebooks, bought peanuts from a roadside vendor, pressed my face to the window and dreamed.
Darkness fell, and the bus passed down a tunnel of banyan trees—each trunk glowing like a great arched rib in the headlights, so we seemed to be traveling down into the belly of the night. In the road ahead was an ox cart brimming with hay. I could see a man perched on top, curled over in sleep. The cart made me think of Ferdinand the Bull, chewing clover on his way to the fights. It was this kind of thought—a fishhook snagged on some childhood flotsam—that made me feel farthest from home. I turned to the woman on the bench beside me, an old woman with gray hair and seamed cheeks, and wished we could share some bit of useless conversation.
The bus passed the ox cart and cut across a darkened plain. A dry wind blew in the windows, and in the seats ahead of me a few passengers’ hair climbed upward—wild tentacles lit by the headlights. The old woman and I moved to tame our stray locks, and in the mirrored gesture we glanced at each other. Her face was settled; it seemed to be the face of someone who had reached some kind of rest. When the bus rounded a turn, momentum carried me toward her until our hips pressed together on the bench. I took comfort from the heat where our bodies joined, the way we swayed together in echo of the road.
Toward morning, we pulled into the station and the bus hissed to a stop. Hyderabad. I thought of that line from Light in August when Lena, after tramping across three states, says, “My, my. A body does get around.”
I could just imagine her voice: dust-choked as Faulkner’s prose, slow as the pace at which he followed her over the roads. It was a phrase that bloomed open after a while. First, an idle exclamation, and then a kind of quiet comment on the piling up of experience. It seemed that a body, pushed around like freight by the implacable will, could take so many turns in the road that the early miles seemed to have been walked by another person.
Hyderabad was a big city, with a large telegraph office, so I put in a collect call to my father. After I filled out a form and waited half an hour, a clerk shouted my name and pointed frantically to a booth against the wall. The phone looked to be forty years old, with a frayed cord and a heavy black handset. I shouted into it: “Hello? Dad?”
“Lisa? Is that you? Hello?”
My father and I talked for a few minutes, his voice so familiar beneath the crackle and static, it didn’t matter much what we said. I had caught the family during breakfast. In the background I could hear my sisters, shouting hellos. So normal, all of it. I could imagine the room, where each of them sat.
“Well, you sound like you’re doing great, honey,” my father said. “You’re really amazing. I’m going to put on Leslie and the girls.” The phone was passed around and then came back to him.
“Any word from grad schools?” I asked.
For a moment I thought the line had gone dead. “I’m sorry, honey, the news isn’t too good. Berkeley said no. So did Cornell. No word yet from Michigan.”
“Oh, well. To tell the truth, grad school doesn’t sound so good lately.”
I figured my change of heart would disappoint him. When I first declared my intention to study anthropology, my father thought it was a great idea. He seemed to like picturing me as a junior Margaret Mead. “You’re so smart, you could do just about anything,” he said. “But anthropology’s cool.” Now I braced myself for some protest, but I’d forgotten my father’s loyalty, the way he turned as fast as a jib in the wind. “No shit. Who wants to spend ten years doing a Ph.D.? You’re doing great out there on your own.”
I left the telegraph office elated. Miles away, someone knew me, remembered who I was. I had a life there and I would go back to it. My father understood how I needed that grounding. I found out later those calls cost him a hundred dollars a pop, but he talked as if we were sitting at the breakfast table, passing scrambled eggs and salt, his voice easy and unhurried and full of love.
I went farther south from there—to Madurai, a beautiful inland city—and found myself a room near the train station. After dinner, when the suffocating midday heat had lifted, I walked through the still-warm streets to the temple. Inside, the Brahmins carried a statue of Shiva to the goddess Parvati’s bedroom for a cosmic tryst, the palanquin carried by two emaciated men, staggering in time to a squealing clarinet. There were a handful of children hanging at the fringes of the procession, barefoot, dusty, jostling one another.
One of them approached me and pointed to his chest. “Arjuna,” he said.
I shook his hand. Arjuna, named for a mythic warrior, came up to my hip and had the shaven head and deep-set eyes of an old man. He stood there, chin tipped down, smiling at me, hands tucked into the pockets of his shorts. He looked to be about my brother’s age, maybe four or five.
I strolled around the temple, and Arjuna followed. He seemed to sense that I was charmed by him. When a group of devotees approached, and we stepped aside to let them pass, he leaned gently against my leg, a babyish softening in his face. We had stopped beside a small shrine to Ganesh. Arjuna bent over and brushed his finger in a pile of powder at the elephant’s feet, daubing it on his forehead and miming at me to do the same. I gave myself the red dot, though I knew I would regret it when we were out on the street. The boy nodded his approval and led me out of the vestibule, a new directive briskness to his movements.
Out on the street, I searched for my sandals in the pile by the door. A group of boys were gathered out front, and when they saw us they rushed forward. “Come, madam, one rupee, one pen.” A thin boy of about ten was at the head of the bunch, and as he recited the litany he plucked at my sleeve. There was no heat to his voice; it seemed more a bit of business that had to be done, and a pen or a rupee might come of it, but if it didn’t someone else would come along. Meanwhile, there was a bored inspection going on beneath his banter.
“Madam, what is your good name?”
“Lisa,” I said, moving toward the tea stall across the road, where a man was lofting a thick stream of tea from a pitcher above his head and catching it in a waiting glass.
“And your country coin?” the tall boy persisted.
Arjuna huddled beside me, clutching my hand.
“The penny,” I said, “which has developed a bad name.”
The tall boy gave Arjuna a little kick. “Why this boy? This ruffian?” he asked, pointing at my companion.
Arjuna looked stricken. He was younger than the other boys and didn’t yet know how to manage his emotions. They were tough and sly, full of the brassiness that street life required, and you could fault them for it—their tricks and taunting—and allow yourself to pass them by.
“He’s my friend,” I said. I knew from my playground days that he would pay for this later.
The tall boy smiled and shook his head. “I am your friend. Why not giving me one penny?”
“I don’t have any pennies.”
A muscle rippled in the boy’s cheek. He looked down at Arjuna with a raptor’s cold eye. “Why not bring your friend to the festival?” He turned in the direction of the main boulevard, where a crowd was gat
hering, and strode off at the head of his crowd.
After the gang had gone well ahead, Arjuna and I followed. The boy was glued to me now. We wove through the thickening crowd, and he looked up from time to time, flashing an artless smile. His belly bulged beneath his frayed dress shirt.
“Where do you live?” I asked him.
He shrugged. Still, my attempt at conversation made him quicken, and when the procession turned a corner and we were alone on a darkened street, he tugged at my sleeve. I bent down to his level—he seemed to want this—and he pulled a fist out of his pocket and opened it in the light from a nearby storefront. On his palm were a watch without a band, a bottle cap, a pretzeled nail. I stared at the stuff, uncertain what he wanted. He moved his hand forward a little.
I picked up the watch, and turned it over. It was a cheap Swiss round-face, lost, no doubt, by some tourist. The glass was smashed, stopping the hands. “It’s very nice,” I said, putting it down next to the other items.
Arjuna picked up the nail and held it out.
“I can’t take it,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment, then tucked the stuff away. We walked farther in silence, past the tailors’ market, where a few men in dhotis still toiled over their pedal machines. It was nearly ten at night. When we turned the corner onto Dingigul Road, Arjuna took my hand and I noticed a movement in his pocket. He was fingering those bits of junk, turning their surfaces over and over. I thought of my velvet box and the lonely months I spent at Twin Oaks School in Eugene, how I passed those days with a hand in my desk, stroking the weathered nap of that fabric. I knew then why Arjuna had emptied his pocket. He wanted me to see his secret talismans.
By now, the procession had broken up. Soon my hotel would close; the doorman would pull down the corrugated-metal door and go to sleep on a pallet in the hall. Up ahead was a soda stand. I stopped and asked for a lemon drink, gesturing to Arjuna to pick something out.
“Take something, boy. She is offering,” the shopkeeper said. Then he spoke to him in Tamil.
“He doesn’t want anything,” he told me with a shrug.
From Arjuna’s darting glances at the soda rack, I could see this wasn’t true. He was thirsty. I couldn’t imagine why he would refuse a drink, unless he feared sullying our companionship. That restraint, that giving up of one thing for another, endeared him to me.
“Can you ask him where he lives?”
The shopkeeper posed my question in Tamil, and the boy answered.
“He is living with his uncle. The mother and father are dead.”
“Why doesn’t he go home?”
When the man questioned him again, Arjuna went still; even the hand in his pocket ceased working. When the boy finally answered, the shopkeeper’s shoulders went soft. He had been curt with us at first—peeved, no doubt, at the boy for hanging on to a tourist, or peeved at me for my bleeding-heart attentions, which he knew wouldn’t last out the hour. But while Arjuna spoke, the man’s brows knit together. He looked straight at the boy for the first time.
“The uncle is beating at the wife and striking at the boy with a stick. He is afraid.”
He paused for a moment, then said something in Tamil, something gentle and coaxing, and when Arjuna nodded, the man took down an orange soda from the rack and flipped off the top.
“Thank you,” I said, and paid with two rumpled bills. While Arjuna and I sipped at our sodas, the man polished his countertop with a rag. From down the street came the rattle of shops locking up for the night. Squares of yellow light winked shut on the road. I drank very slowly, and the boy, sensing my cue, did the same.
What to do? I could take him to my hotel. The doorman would object, but I could probably soften him with a bit of money. But then what? Sooner or later I would leave Madurai, and he would be back on the street, just as I had found him. This was what my father had tried to teach me. If you didn’t judge the world by its systems, if you didn’t confront its inequalities at the source, the small sorrows would break your heart.
When our sodas were finished, and the shopkeeper had returned the bottles to their crate, I knelt down next to the boy. “Listen, I have to go to my room now.”
For a moment he pleaded. “No,” he said, holding on to my hand. He said it in English: “No.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t take you,” I told him, starting to cry. In some odd way, my tears seemed to steel him. Perhaps he knew they meant I’d made up my mind. He let go of my hand and stood there in the street, staring while I fumbled with some bills.
“Please, take this.”
He pushed the money back at me, but I tucked it in his pocket, the empty one, the one across from his collection of precious things, and turned away, down the shadowed street toward my hotel.
I traveled alone for the first month in India, and then I ran into Nitzan, an Israeli, in a small town near India’s tail. We traveled north together for over a month, glad for tolerable company headed the same way. I was fond of hieing off the beaten track, but Nitzan was fonder. He couldn’t miss a single temple or ruin or game park. I always swore I was going to take a day to relax, sit in town drinking chai, and pass the midday heat under a ceiling fan, and in the end I always went along. It was Nitzan who insisted we take a six-hour bus ride into the desert to visit Ranakpur, a temple set deep in the Rajasthani desert, with nothing around it for miles.
When we got off the bus at the compound gate, we were greeted by a toothless old man. “You are arriving to Ranakpur, India’s most famous Jain temple,” he said, spitting betel juice at our feet. There was something oddly solemn in his tone, in his use of the present continuous, that made us pause. We stood beside him, laden with duffel bags, while our bus rumbled out of sight. Then, when a proper interval seemed to have passed, we said a polite thanks and headed for the dharamsala in search of a room.
When we inquired at the booking desk, a willowy Jain nun, wrapped in white from head to foot and holding a swath of sari across her mouth to prevent the inhalation and death of any small insects, told us that we had arrived in the middle of a religious festival. All the dorms were full, and the kitchen was short of supplies. I asked about a low building on the other side of the temple that looked promisingly like a hotel.
“Ah, that is the Shilpi Tourist Bungalow. Those rooms have been booked for many months.” She punctuated the word many with an outward wave of her hand, as if to sweep away any last hope for accommodation. The cloth fell away from her face to reveal a supple, generous smile. Then she covered her mouth, and bent over the ledger she had been tallying when we arrived.
Back out in the compound, Nitzan began studying the guidebook. This was mainly an evasion, since we were six hours from the nearest town, but he liked to preserve the illusion that he was in charge. We had been on tenterhooks from the first moments we met, bickering over matters of comfort, finance, and the like. Loneliness makes strange bedfellows.
As a rule, Nitzan chose to walk instead of taking rickshaws, allowed himself a room with hot water only once a month, and favored overnight bus rides because they saved a night’s hotel costs. I lobbied for comfort and a taste of the subcontinent’s small luxuries: a dinner buffet at a maharaja’s palace, a hotel room with pressed-tin sunflowers on the ceiling. Of course, I admired Nitzan’s restraint—he had a competence and calm that matched his economy—but on a few things I refused to budge.
Overnight bus rides were one of them; I couldn’t sleep sitting up. The first time I gave in to all-night travel, I spent the ride bolt upright on the bench—grain sacks under my feet, two snoring women slumped on my shoulders. I seemed to be the only witness to our bus driver’s nocturnal habits: long detours down gutted dirt roads for what appeared to be impromptu visits with relatives, or the practice, when another vehicle approached at full speed, of turning off his headlights so as not to blind them. I passed the night clutching the seat in front of me, feeding peanuts to the goat tethered in the aisle, and casting the evil eye on Nitzan’s lolling head.
Perhaps life on the kibbutz had given my friend a taste for hardship. He had stories of boyhood trials that rivaled Jim’s 4 A.M. paper route: waking in the dark to harvest bananas before school, riding on a tractor, dust billowing around him, and nicking the bunches free with a small knife. He told these stories with a flat voice and a shrug. When I got worked up over some trivial matter, he always had a ready phrase: “Hey, Lis, don’t take it so hard.”
So a night without lodging or food didn’t faze my friend. He snapped the guidebook shut, as if something had been solved, and suggested we take a look at the temple.
When we got closer, I had to say he was right: it was worth it to come. The temple, set in a cleft in the hills, was made of white marble and had the high-flown beauty of a circus tent cast in stone. A broad flight of steps led to a room cut open to the desert: carved columns held up the upper floor, and set among the columns were marble sculptures—a bull on its haunches surveying the desert, an elaborately carved wheel. Above us were domes worked into filigree, delicate as inverted wedding cakes.
We wandered up a narrow stairway that led to the roof, and there all the detail dropped away: smooth domes and spires and pyramids, as stark as an astronomical observatory, an abstract plane hovering over the ornate. Jim would have loved that place. He would have snapped off half a roll of film, after waiting politely for the man in khaki and a crimson turban to move out of the frame.
I went back downstairs and sat cross-legged on the steps. Someone nearby was murmuring in Hindi, and the smell of jasmine and sandalwood wove a cowl about my head. The courtyard was like a ballroom, cool and luminous, the light echoing from wall to wall without losing incandescence. I imagined it was like the light inside an egg, when the roost was empty and a shaft of sun hit the shell.
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