Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  ‘We are building paradise. Do you know where this word comes from? It entered English from the French, “paradis”, but originally came from the old Persian, “paridaidam” –“walled enclosure”. You cannot maintain a garden without walls. In time, the work we are doing here will change the entire world, but until then it’s up to us to safeguard what we have built, and work for the divine consciousness.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  The guru makes a vague gesture. ‘I’m asking you to think about the company you keep. To take more care.’

  Sasha feels she is being scolded. ‘I don’t know if it’s really your business. We’re just having some fun.’

  ‘We trust your judgement, Sasha.’ The guru holds her hands up. ‘You are a rightful part of our kingdom. If this man is not, you will find it in yourself to invite him to leave.’

  Sasha is still testy. ‘What if he doesn’t want to leave?’

  The guru puts her hand on Sasha’s. ‘Nothing happens here without the grace of the divine consciousness. Nobody stays if the divine does not wish it. People with bad intentions do not feel the call of this place; if they arrive by mistake, the universe will send them on their proper path.’

  There’s a softness on the guru’s face. ‘I see you, and I love you. You’ll make the right choice.’ She lets go of Sasha’s hand. ‘Go spend time with your new friend. But don’t forget that you have a higher purpose here.’

  This is a strange season. Everyone says so. The monsoon has a petulant rhythm, so Sasha will be surprised by drenching rain while out walking and then be bone-dry minutes later. But the Seekers who come here year after year are worried; by this time of the year the monsoon should be relaxing into pleasant, even heat, endless blue skies. At breakfast they mutter darkly about global warming, ozone, CFCs, chemtrails.

  It’s romantic for the first three days, but then the damp gets into everything, condensation forms on the walls and runs down to pool on the floor, making her footfalls gritty and unpleasant. She sleeps badly, if at all, and the morning comes with watery light and the feeling that everything is rotting.

  Then another storm front blows in from the sea and the rain sets in for good. In the jungle, the levees built to redirect floodwaters spill over and the ashram is inundated. Sasha and Connor gather up their belongings, pile them onto the furniture, and retreat to the safety of their bed, where they are stranded with no distractions beyond each other. Sasha unearths a radio abandoned at the back of a cupboard by a previous tenant. It comes to life reluctantly, but when they turn the dial it produces nothing but a chiaroscuro of static.

  ‘It’s this weather,’ Connor mutters, fingers on the dial, pressing his ear against the speaker. ‘Even the fucking air is muddy.’ He ransacks the room, improvises an antenna out of coat hangers, and moves naked around the room, his forehead creased in concentration, oblivious to the delight the spectacle is causing Sasha. He throws the antenna up into the rafters and his face lights up as the radio sharpens into a broadcast in staccato Tamil.

  Sasha turns through the dial – can find nothing but babble and thumping Bollywood tunes. She switches it off, and Connor, affronted, switches it back on.

  ‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘I love that song.’

  ‘This?’ She is incredulous. ‘This is hardly a song.’

  ‘This is the song. This is the item song. The big sexy dance hit.’

  She has no idea what he is talking about and he cannot believe she’s never seen a Bollywood film, is indignant. She endures endless hours of convoluted, haphazard plot summaries, Connor relaying the formulas and tropes, bad boys and good girls, star-crossed lovers. He speaks with that same confidence Stephan has, that all men have, convinced his subject is made fascinating by his explanations. She tries, really tries hard, to get on the same page as him, but his talking refuses to reveal itself as anything but noise.

  On the third day the rain finally lets up. They pick across the waterlogged floor of their cottage to find blazing blue skies greeting them outside. Sasha announces that she wants to go on a date, anywhere, she doesn’t mind, she just needs to get away from the cottage for a while. They get on her Enfield and she tells him just to ride, to look for something to do, she’ll call out when she sees it.

  Down one jungle road they come across the rusted hulk of a Volkswagen beetle that drove into a flooded gully, and they stop the bike to take a look. The car’s been half buried in the jungle for decades, its rear bumper sticking up into the air. More recently, someone has painted the chassis with psychedelic colours and a fluorescent peace sign. Sasha is admiring it when Connor snorts and says, ‘That really sums this whole place up, doesn’t it? They should put this on the flag.’

  She tries to remind herself that Connor’s cynicism is not her responsibility, he thinks he is being funny, and the only work she can do is on herself. She bats away her irritation and instead cuffs him playfully on the back of his head. He twists around, grabs her wrist and drags her off the bike, which clatters into the dust, the kill-switch silencing the engine, the hot pipes pinging in protest.

  They kiss, and his hands sink into her behind, find purchase to heave her up and onto the rear bumper of the ruined car. There is nobody around, but they keep it quiet; Sasha bites onto his shoulder to shush herself, clasps a hand over his mouth to stifle his grunts. His teeth lock around her knuckle.

  Birds flit overhead, a column of ants troops over his feet. When they hear a motorbike approaching they pause, hold their breath, eyes wide, until the far-off two-stroke takes a turn, begins to travel away from them. They laugh like lunatics.

  Afterwards they collect their dignity and the fallen motorcycle and ride back to her bungalow, where they begin again.

  Sasha will make the most of this – a chance connection given intensity by its ephemerality. Every minute is deliciously finite. She hears it when she rests her head on his chest; tick tock.

  Both of them know to make the most of it while it lasts. It’s the only thing they have in common. When they talk it is about nothing; sleepy, depleted conversations in bed, the same kind you have at the end of a day at the beach, when the water is still and sunset is soaking into the sand, that feeling that the night will soon blanket everything.

  Sasha’s never enjoyed something like this – so isolated from consequence, it could consume her entirely. It’s so much easier to ask for what she wants when she knows she’ll never see him again. She makes a map of him with her fingertips, learns which parts sing at her touch. Also the faults and fissures; scars across his face, a long-ago broken nose, bones that ache in the damp, one ear half-deaf and the other all the way dead.

  He explains it’s pointless, that he can’t hear anything at all out of that ear, and she says that is the point, she can whisper whatever she wants into it – secrets, threats, things she is too shy to ask for, things she doesn’t want. ‘Fuck me in the ass,’ or ‘Choke me,’ or, ‘I miss my husband.’

  Sasha was promising, but in the end Connor is disappointed. She has money, or at least a monied husband tucked away somewhere, but keeps none of it in her cottage. Connor finds a black Amex slipped inside her passport, but without Baba’s contacts it’s just a useless hunk of plastic for him. He resolves to move on but by the time he’s ready to leave the ashram, the rain has washed the world away, and no taxi or auto-rickshaw can ford the flooded roads leading to the ashram. For the time being, he and Sasha are stuck together.

  In the heat, the temple becomes unbearable, yoga and meditation impossible, and with nothing to do the Seekers abandon their cottages and string hammocks under the trees. Every cool spot in the ashram is commandeered, all shade taken up by ruddy Seekers in sweat-soaked cotton, sending the help to fetch them bottles of water that are warm by the time they get back from the kitchen.

  With eyes everywhere, Sasha and Connor keep to themselves. When the day becomes too hot for their cottage, they retreat to the beach Sasha found beyond the jungle, where sun scours the sand of Seek
ers.

  The beach is where they are at their best. As the monsoon fades, Sasha bakes brown, the ghost of her bikini top just visible in the line across her back. She doesn’t wear it anymore, she lies out in the sun heedless of the village children, who skitter up and down the beach collecting trash, and the sleepy mutts who keep watch from the next dune over.

  The skin protected by her bathing suit is stark white, takes on a heavenly glow in the dark of their room. Connor’s eyes follow her around the room; she catches him staring, strikes a pose.

  From the moment Sasha got up to leave the train – before Connor had a chance to retrieve the bag of pills from her suitcase – he has felt a clock running out on him. By the time he manages to retrieve the drugs, Sasha quietly snoring in the bed, he has already missed his connection in Chennai, and with it any chance of explaining his disappearance to Baba.

  No phone reception reaches into the jungle, and when he finally gets a signal by climbing high into the canopy of a banyan, he finds a single message from Baba: an emoji of a skull and crossbones. Stricken, Connor powers down the phone, slides down the trunk, skinning his hands badly but not feeling it at all.

  He knows that Baba will hunt him down, it’s just a matter of where and when. He hides the phone at the bottom of his bag. For now, he will stay put; he figures this place, with its thick walls of jungle and carefully cultivated obscurity, is as good as any to hide out. He stashes the drugs in Sasha’s bed – he carefully slices into the seam on the underside of the mattress and slips the pills in between the springs. Still in their waterproof wrapping, they’ll be safe enough from the monsoon there. They’ll probably outlive him.

  He’s been running away from one thing or the next for as long as he can remember, and having to stay still is intolerable. He has far too much time to think. Each night he thrashes and frets next to Sasha until she sleeps, after which he creeps out and sits on the veranda, lighting one cigarette off the next, waiting for the dawn. Most nights one of the ashram dogs, a skinny, mustard-yellow thing, slinks out of the jungle and flops at his feet with a sigh. Connor starts keeping scraps of roti in his pockets to treat the mutt – which it accepts with a polite lick of his hand. As the weeks pass, the dog starts to put on a little weight, the ribcage no longer sticks out so starkly, and Connor is glad to see it – he himself can barely eat these days.

  Or sleep. When he does, nightmares hollow him out, leave him with a feeling of dread that lasts later and later into the day. The awful sensation from his dreams – that his ribs are squeezing in on his heart and lungs, shortening his breath and dimming his vision – have started striking at odd moments through the day. He cannot stop it or predict it. He’ll be dozing in the post-coital lull, reach out to Sasha, and a cold, waterlogged hand will slip into his and he’ll jolt awake, realise he’s alone in the room, his heart trying to punch its way out of his chest.

  Whenever Sasha crawls out of bed to go about saving the world or whatever, he has nothing to do. Right when he can least afford to be in his own head. He’s discovered he has an imagination – one that kicks into high gear when he is lying sleepless and exhausted in their sweaty sheets, watching the ceiling fan swat uselessly at the soggy air. He counts his compounding worries, wonders where Baba is looking for him, tries to calculate how long he has until he finds out where Connor is lying low. A billion people in this country, not nearly enough of a buffer to give Connor peace of mind.

  And that’s only if Baba tracks him down before the police do. He has no idea if he is still of interest to the police of Shanti Beach or if he’s been bumped up to a hungrier police force. He imagines the Talent’s drowned body washing up somewhere crowded – in the middle of the day on Marine Drive in Mumbai, torn half-apart by crabs and sea snakes but the name of his dive company written neatly on the inner lining of her wetsuit, her body splayed grotesquely, one ruined finger pointing east.

  It’s even worse when he does sleep, sinking into a recurring dream where he is in a stretch of infinite underwater darkness, kicking madly, trying to grab her hand – or trying to escape from something chasing him through the water – and he can hear the sound of beer bottles breaking on rock somewhere far above.

  The problem is sobriety; the ashram has been dry for decades. Connor hasn’t gone a day without a drink for nearly as long.

  Moderation in all things – especially moderation. He read that, framed above a bar toilet, as he loomed over the bowl, one hand on the wall to steady himself. He’d never been good at moderation – pinot noir, a plate of cake, cocaine, he would gobble it all down without a thought and then be distressed when it was gone.

  He would like to be gone himself. When Sasha tells him she needs to ride into town to visit a pharmacist, he jumps at the chance to go in her place. She writes him a shopping list and, as she adds items, he does some quick maths, calculates how he can mark it up, how much profit he can make on the exchange. Not enough to give him the means to leave the ashram, but enough for a drink, at least.

  And besides, he is safe in the ashram for now, probably safer than anywhere else in India; surrounded by a mile of forest patrolled by dogs and armed guards and who knows what kind of avenging hippy. Baba would not think to look for him here. Until a better opportunity presents itself, he will bide his time.

  The nearest city is Puducherry, half an hour away by borrowed dirt bike – a temperamental little two-stroke Sasha procured for him, it couldn’t take him much further than that, but it can handle the monsoon-wrecked roads.

  He sets out for Puducherry but becomes distracted in a little town on the way, where a makeshift bar has sprung up between a convenience store and a mechanic. It’s invisible from the road, can only be reached by gingerly treading down a muddy alleyway that has been reinforced with duckboards for the monsoon, but Connor spots the line of beat-up motorcycles out the front and his heart leaps. It’s not that he trusts his gut – his instincts have rarely steered him in the right direction – but at least he knows how to find a drink when he needs one.

  There isn’t actually a bar, just a tarpaulin strung up in the alleyway and a guy who sells chilled Kingfisher beers out of an Esky. There’s plastic furniture, but the rain has liquefied the ground and the chairs have sunk into it, so the men – and there are only men, it would be calamity for a woman to come down this alley – huddle under the tarpaulin, resting their beers on plastic tables.

  Connor might have a language in common with some of the men, but he doesn’t care to find out, and besides, not much talking gets done here – the men are dedicated to a very specific kind of drinking. Nobody talks, and many are past the point of speech all together, slumped motionless in their chairs except to raise their drinks up. This is solemn, two-fisted drinking in the pursuit of oblivion.

  A radio rests precariously on a stool, tuned to a station that plays classic movie soundtracks, turned up so high the bass is as muddy as everything else in the bar. It’s cranked up in rebellion against the nearby temples, which bristle with tannoys, woofers and loudspeakers in order to blast prayers at one another in an escalating devotional arms race.

  Through it all, Connor drinks. One frosted beer after the next, until the day has exhausted itself and the ice in the Esky has turned into dusty slush. With each beer he begins to feel more and more hopeful. It occurs to him he’s not without resources; the bag of pills he never delivered is worth a fortune, could be converted into cash, and that cash into a new passport and a whole new life. He still has Baba’s Chennai contact – who may be loyal to Baba, but he’s never met someone whose ultimate loyalty isn’t to money.

  The next time he goes out on an errand for Sasha, he retrieves a handful of pills from inside her mattress and shoves the smaller baggie down the front of his pants. All he needs to do is find someone to sell the full stash to and he can flee this country for good, make his way to Thailand, set up there. Open a dive school, Ko Tao maybe – somewhere he can live out the rest of his life in the sunshine, far from trouble.
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  He spends a fruitless afternoon walking up and down the crumbling seawall in Puducherry, where tourists promenade in the heat, taking snapshots of all the French-colonial mansions that have crumbled into ragged piles of concrete and hardwood, loosely corralled by the facades that remain proudly intact. Now the desolate and the destitute pass their days there, drunks sheltering from the sun, rough sleepers, a few streetwalkers who are shunned by the hotelier pimps who normally provide these services. He sees a hijra – tall, regal in her bearing – being bodily marched out of a cafe, not even tolerated by the underclass. Connor averts his eyes.

  In between the sexes, hijra are considered by superstitious people to have so much bad luck that it’s contagious. When a hijra turns up at your doorstep, you pay money for them to go away. For a little extra, they turn up on your enemy’s doorstep. Connor has been close to a couple of them over the years, before they moved on down the road. All very different, but all wearing their hardship and cheap makeup the same way.

  Along the ruined waterfront, under the shade of a giant statue of Gandhi, he finds a group of young men, barely teenagers, who are passing a bottle of whisky back and forth. He approaches, solicits, and – after a rapid conference, none of which Connor understands – they lead him to a surreptitious place in the ruins behind the arched, whitewashed facade of the old Hotel de Ville.

  They insist on seeing the pills before they hand over the money, and as he is reaching down to retrieve them from his jocks, a dull blow hits the back of his head.

  It’s not a particularly powerful strike, or well-aimed – a chunk of timber glancing off the crown of his head, far from the squishier parts of his skull. His assailant has been drinking, but then, so has he. He sprawls in the rubble, lashes out, misses, catches his knuckles on a hunk of rock, loses some skin. He’s just getting up when a bare foot places itself on the back of his head and stomps, crunching his nose into the gravel. Two kicks – desultory, unnecessary – and then hands are holding his shoulders, pinning him while the kids locate and steal his stash.