That sense of transportation, peculiar to traveling, often felt like the prelude to some profound event. It was an old confusion, not unlike the one I felt on the rooftop at Kerckoff Hall. I mistook that first sensory flush for information, as if the body were a gateway to knowledge. But those moments didn’t give way to anything else. They were the event, and then they were gone. The light changed, my feet chafed on the sun-baked floors, and still the carvings looked like no more than giant souvenirs. I liked beginnings, the first wondering glance, the first breaths of incense in the inner sanctum. I didn’t have patience for anything else.
When I first arrived in India, I met a couple trying to see the country in two weeks—only the highlights—taking short Air India flights between stops. They were miserable. I kept running into them, and each time they seemed more haggard and crazed. The woman looked as if she were considering a murder. She would swing her eyes around in search of a victim—the waiter who brought her rice studded with rocks; her husband, who was herding her through this whirlwind tour. Every time I crossed their path, I was reminded of my own useless railings against the interminable waits, the ennui of the dusty southern villages.
Stranded there in Ranakpur, it seemed foolish to fight our fate. There was nothing to do but follow the festival we had stumbled on. When we wound back around to the front of the temple, a group of devotees had formed a circle at the door to the inner sanctum. On a small raised platform, musicians played tabla and sarod, while, at random, men and women came forward and danced—shy, lumbering, happy—in the center of the ring. Nitzan and I had just taken a seat a polite distance from the group when an Indian man, dressed in white slacks and shirt, suddenly stepped from behind a pillar. “You are Americans, no?” He grinned broadly.
His appearance was so abrupt we could say nothing at first. He must have used the columns as blinds, approaching sideways like a novice private eye.
Nitzan was the first to answer: “I am Israeli. Lis, here, is from the United States.” I heard a note of irritation in my friend’s voice. He disliked being taken for an American. He figured his kibbutznik’s sandals and extended beard should read as clearly as the Israeli flag. In fact, his beard, which could have housed a nest of small birds, attracted considerable attention. Once, a group of children, chasing cows to gather manure for kitchen fuel, stopped and ogled the blond tuft. When he smiled, they came closer, gesturing at it with their sticky hands. Still, no one had heard of Israel, and it was beginning to wound him.
“Oh, United States, very fine,” said the man. “And you are staying at the dharamsala?” He leaned jauntily against a pillar, stroking his chin.
Nitzan explained our predicament.
The man seemed thrilled. “I am Sanjit Mehta,” he said, extending his hand to Nitzan, “and you must be my guests. My wife and I are staying at the tourist bungalow with our friend. He must go on to Udaipur tonight on some business. You can stay in his room.”
We protested vaguely, just for show, then thanked him for his offer.
“I assure you, the pleasure is completely mine,” Mr. Mehta said, as he led us to the low building we had seen upon our arrival and showed us to our room. “When you are properly settled, you must share some lunch. Last door on the left.”
Sanjit’s room faced a small courtyard. The walls were chalky blue and the furnishings simple: a wood-frame bed made with madras sheets, a long-stemmed ceiling fan, a few straight-back chairs. When we arrived, Sanjit’s wife was washing clothes in the bathroom and seemed embarrassed to have been caught indisposed. She wiped her hands quickly and dipped her head as we were introduced.
“This is Nitzan, an Israeli gentleman, and his wife, Lisa.” Sanjit gestured to us grandly. “My wife, Pune.”
I saw Nitzan open his mouth to explain that we were not, in fact, married, and just as quickly watched him close it. We had already lied about our relationship on several occasions, and since Sanjit had made this declaration of his own accord, it didn’t seem prudent to set him straight. Our room for the night may have depended on it.
“They have just arrived and are lacking accommodations,” he told his wife. “I have insisted they stay in Gupta’s room while he is taking the photos to Udaipur.”
There was a subtle officiousness in Mr. Mehta that was beginning to bother me. The man didn’t talk; he made pronounce ments. Soon he launched into a soliloquy about the Jains, puffing out his chest and dropping his chin like a third-rate Shakespearean actor. While he talked, Pune began laying out small tins on the bed. Curried vegetables and rice, crispy nan. Nitzan and Sanjit chatted about camera equipment and Sanjit’s hardware business in Jaipur. I asked him how he felt about India’s trade embargo, but he behaved as if I hadn’t spoken, fixing his attentions on my friend. Pune and I ate slowly and smiled when our eyes met.
I was having less enjoyment of the actual interlude than I was from the idea of it. As Pune proffered more curry and the men’s conversation droned on, I consoled myself with the thought that I was getting a glimpse of the Indian business class. I felt guilty about this attitude, this hoarding of exotica. Even as I was in the middle of an experience, I was calculating its value on some scale of authenticity, oddness, the absurd.
Then the conversation took a promising turn. We learned that the Mehtas had traveled to Ranakpur to visit their guru, Anil, a businessman who had given up his fortune in order to live the life of an ascetic.
“He reads faces,” Sanjit informed us. “You must come to see him. He is always looking for new types to study.”
As Sanjit pressed this idea, I began to get the feeling that he had taken us under his wing to satisfy the appetites of his mentor, but we agreed to make a visit. The swami was staying nearby, and Sanjit seemed to relish the chance to drive us there in his new minivan. He opened the side door with a flourish for Pune and me, then let Nitzan into the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel.
I spent the short drive staring at the unforgiving scenery. Other than an occasional gnarled tree, the landscape was quite barren. Out the back window, the domes of the temple rose like tiny lumps of sugar above the coffee-colored ground.
We were met at the gates of another low-walled compound by two Jain monks, dressed in the usual white robes. They seemed to know Sanjit well and, after eyeing us carefully, laughed with him and clasped his hands. Pune looked off into the distance, appearing for the moment to understand little of her native Hindi. My impression that we were to be offered as prey to a holy man in training seemed confirmed. Nitzan, untroubled by the exchange, checked out the compound through the viewfinder of his camera. As I saw it, there was not much worth photographing: a tamped-dirt courtyard bounded by concrete walls, and in the center a low blue building with a spindly bougainvillea inching over the doorway. The monks led us into a cool, darkened room where a third monk watched the news on a television mounted on the wall, then out the back door to a patio, set on the edge of a hill. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw a round-shouldered man in a faded peach robe, seated with his back toward us, and four chairs arranged in front of him. Sanjit hadn’t been anywhere near a phone since we met him, but the swami seemed to be expecting us.
We settled into the assembled chairs, and Sanjit made introductions. “This is Mr. and Mrs. Yarmar,” he said, sweeping a hand in our direction with a modest dip of his head.
The swami said nothing. He stared at our faces, first Nitzan’s, then mine, then Nitzan’s again. A faint smile played about his lips. “But of course you are not married,” he said.
“No,” Nitzan answered. “We’re not.”
Sanjit looked shocked, but the swami gave him a dismissive wave. He was already scanning our faces—devouring them. Then he closed his eyes and tipped back his head, as if he had just sampled a rare wine and was savoring the finish. After a moment, his head snapped forward and his eyes flew open. He stared at Nitzan with an alarming intensity. I looked over, trying to judge my friend with fresh eyes. Blond corkscrew curls burst from his he
ad; his beard jutted forward like an enormous chin. He returned the guru’s stare with an impassive expression.
The swami took a deep breath through his nostrils and spoke: “He is not a king, but a maker of kings. He cannot tell the lie. He does not have the forked tongue.”
No one spoke after these pronouncements, and I had time to consider their accuracy. Nitzan was often selfless, always loyal. In the beginning, I had been jarred by his blunt speech, but his frankness was predictable, and like all reliable traits in a friend, it began to seem like a virtue. He looked amused by the swami’s flattery.
“Note the development of the brow,” the swami said, moving one finger in an arc in front of Nitzan’s face as if smoothing out roughness in a clay bust. He seemed to be slipping into some kind of trance. “He is like the lion. He takes only from need, never pleasure. Consider the fullness of the lips…” The swami let this last comment trail off and made a grunt of pleasure under his breath.
By this time my friend was beginning to glow like the well-fed beast to which the swami had likened him. I looked over at Sanjit and Pune. They looked radiant. Suddenly, a wave of envy broke over me. This was the last of a load of irritating trifles I’d put up with since we crossed the Mehtas’ path. I looked down at the swami’s feet, hoping my fury wouldn’t show. He was wearing a type of sandal I’d seen on other holy men: a flat wooden sole, with a single peg between the toes. Minimalist footgear—it must have been some kind of penance to walk in them. For a moment, I considered seizing one of his shoes and braining him with it.
Then the swami turned to me and spoke. “You,” he said, his eyes bugging wide, then narrowing, “have a lot of aggression.”
I worked to smooth my face.
“You have intelligence, but little patience, little patience.” He sighed. “Someday you will meet a teacher and your life will be changed.”
I thought of my crusty high school math teachers; of Professor Howe at UCLA, chasing Descartes. I couldn’t imagine myself falling under a teacher’s sway. The swami leaned forward and whispered to Sanjit, as if he were tutoring an apprentice: “Please notice the difference in the eyes.” Then to the group, without preamble: “People have forgotten— om is the sound of air entering the body.” His head wobbled back and forth, as if held by a weakening spring, and he folded his hands in his lap.
It appeared that he was through with me. I held out hope for a few more predictions, since he’d spent such a long time fawning over Nitzan’s bone structure, and no sooner had this thought crossed my mind than the swami gave me a desultory glance. He wore the expression of a man checking his plate for a few last morsels.
“Everything is possible,” he said. “If one man can achieve a thing, any man can do it. He has the curly hair.” He gestured in Nitzan’s direction. “Just think of it, sing the name of Ram, and you will have this hair.”
Then the swami closed up shop before our eyes. The bones of his shoulders sank into their cloaking flesh. His chin dropped to his chest and he gusted gently.
“The reading is exhausting for him,” Mr. Mehta whispered, ushering us back through the compound.
Before we boarded the van for the drive back to Ranakpur, our host had us pose against a sun-bleached wall. “A photo for Anil,” he told us from behind the lens. “He keeps an album of the faces he’s read. Something to browse over in the evenings.”
When we returned to our rooms, Mr. Mehta asked Nitzan if he would enjoy a massage; he had been receiving one daily from a man at the dharamsala, and insisted on treating his new friend to the experience. Perhaps I might enjoy the company of his wife, who planned to spend the afternoon doing laundry.
Nitzan took little note of our parting of paths. He even asked, in the most innocent tones, if I would mind scrubbing a few of his shirts—I was so good at it. I had begun to notice a subtle imperiousness in him since Anil’s reading, a certain noblesse oblige in the way he handed out coins to the boys crying “One rupee, one rupee” near the bungalow, but this was the trump. While he was getting his massage, I went to the tea stall by the road and inquired about the next bus to Jodhpur.
It was a night bus, but I was determined to be on it. When Nitzan returned from his rubdown, pink cheeked and in terrific spirits, I told him he was free to stay on with the Mehtas if he liked, but I was heading for Jodhpur. He claimed he needed to think it over, but when I walked to the bus stop at two in the morning, he was striding along several paces ahead of me. A few devotees were conducting a tabla marathon in the courtyard, their elastic rhythms bouncing off the walls. The bus stop was deserted except for a few conductors eating melon in the yellow light from the tea stall. They tossed the rinds at their feet, then shared a smoke. The night air turned sweet with fruit and tobacco.
Nitzan and I settled at a table and ordered chapatis and tea. I fell asleep and woke later to the sound of pots clanking in time to the radio. The tea had not come. In the kitchen doorway, I caught sight of the flashing pant leg of the tea wallah. A foot appeared and did a little wild circling in the dust. I felt as if I hadn’t slept for days, and before me stretched the seven-hour ride to Jodhpur. Then I caught sight of a line in writhing script on my menu—“A little patience will enjoy you a majestic service and the superior food”—and I thought of Anil bent over his album on a quiet evening years hence, devouring like a bitter delicacy my impatience, my quicksilver greed.
Thirteen
I HAD BEEN LUCKY in India thus far. All my fears of typhoid and theft and drugged cookies proffered on trains had been for naught. Then in Jodhpur, I got violent food poisoning from a bowl of corn flakes and milk and spent most of the night vomiting in a communal hotel bathroom. It was a good eighty degrees in the middle of the night, and when an episode passed, I rinsed myself with a bucket, rinsed the floor, then went back to bed to lie for a few minutes in peace before I had to head down the hall again.
Nitzan woke off and on through the night and stroked my hair.
“Could I be dying?” I asked him at one point. It seemed like a real possibility.
He muttered something soothing in Hebrew—a feat, since most times his language sounded like someone gargling stones.
At last, after twenty or more trips, the pain ceased, and I lay on the mattress while the first honks and rewings of traffic pierced the window. It was almost cool, just before dawn. I curled up under the sheet and slept.
When I woke, even the bottoms of my feet hurt. Nitzan went out to buy bottled water, and while he was gone, I stood at the window watching a woman making chapatis on a nearby rooftop. She squatted under the shade of a tarp, licked her fingers, and flipped the bread on a rickety griddle. In the folds of her sari was a tiny child, suckling at her breast. Just the thought of that milk made a wave of nausea rise up my throat, but I was touched by her persistence, out there in the heat. I backed into the room. Lumpy bed. Light branding the walls. Nowhere to go and no one to marvel that I’d survived the night.
I decided to place a call to my mother. Always an imprecise science. Only some hotels even made an attempt. I gave the number to the desk clerk, then went upstairs to wait. An hour later a rap came at the door.
“Madam, call is going through.”
I went downstairs, palming the wall for support, and picked up the receiver. Clicking and fuzz. The vast humming of distance. Then, miracles, my mother’s voice.
I told her I’d been sick, that I was going to Nepal soon.
“Be! Safe!” my mother said, as if shouting across a canyon.
I rummaged my head for news, anything to keep her on the line. Hearing her voice was a kind of banquet; I felt I had to come bearing gifts. “I might buy a roll of silk for a friend back home. She knows the name of a dealer in Delhi and says we could get twice—”
Our voices crossed somewhere over the Pacific.
“Think! About! Smugglers!”
My mother never got the knack of those calls, the bounce and delay. She talked like a telegram, her message boiled down to the bone
s. When I was a little girl and the visits to my father’s house made me lonely, she made up a ritual to keep us linked. “We’re both under the same moon,” she told me. “You can look up at the moon and think of me.” We had no moon in common now, no shared weather or landscape or stars. I hung up the phone feeling lost.
“Do you know, madam, you are talking twenty minutes total?” the desk clerk asked me when he saw I was through. This would cost a pile of rupees. He seemed to admire the extravagance.
Not long after that, I headed for Nepal. Nitzan, who’d already been there, would travel north, into the Indian Himalayas. I think he would have gone with me if I hadn’t asked him not to. We were in our hotel room in Jodhpur when it came up, sipping glasses of cold tea. I was mending the hem of my favorite shirt—worn paper-thin from scrubbing—making tiny stitches and trying to measure my words.
“So how are you thinking about this Nepal thing?” Nitzan asked me. The subject had been raised before.
“I don’t know. I want to try to get there before the rains.”
He gave me a bare look. “I don’t mean weather.”
Nitzan had never pulled a punch with me, so I figured I owed him the truth. “I’m scared to go there alone, to be by myself again, but that’s why I came here.” What I didn’t say: that I’d begun to chafe at his company, the way he considered himself in charge. I feared I was missing the instructive grit of solitude.
“I understand,” he said.
“I’m going to miss you,” I told him, but he held up his hand.
“Not so much, you won’t.” He kept his face light. “You’ll be staying in some fancy hotels now for sure.”
A week later, when Nitzan came with me to the train station in Delhi to say goodbye, I wept like a baby. That stubborn, bearded lunk looked like the best friend I’d ever had. The platform was packed, a river of bodies, and his was the only familiar face. We sat down against a wall, waiting for the last call aboard. I gave him an electronic address book, which I bought back home as a gift for some potential host, and which he had often admired.
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