Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  They stop for dinner at a roadside stall, where Connor orders thalis – fish for him, vege for her. The place isn’t much to look at, has all the warning signs of a dismal tourist trap – a dreamcatcher dangles from the canopy, brass statues of deities stand in the corners – but the food is good. They eat in silence, chewing while their fingers shape the next morsel. Connor watches Sangeeta as she eats – wolfing down the food before anyone can take it away. He himself ate like that for years, before he forced himself to acquire better habits as a means to an end.

  When they arrive at the party, security is tighter than he’d anticipated. The last time he was at one of these he’d been little more than a teenager, and then it had just been a scattering of deeply drug-addled individuals thrashing along to Goan trance on a backwater beach.

  The demographic has changed wildly since then. Gone are the slightly-too-old hippies with waist-length dreadlocks, replaced by a mixture of European goths and Japanese kids in fluorescents. Here and there he hears the shrill quack of Australian accents, arousing the same curious mixture of pride and cringe it always stirs in him.

  Another change from the old days: more than half the crowd are Indian. Young professionals in brand-new party wear, dripping in gold and glowsticks. He hears the drawling Mumbai accent on a couple of rich kids ahead of him in the line to get in. ‘Yaar, the MD at these parties is damn good.’

  Everyone’s lined up at the turnstiles to the fenced-off party area in couples, small groups. From the way some of them are grinding their jaws and jiggling up and down to the bass, Connor knows he’s picked the right party. There are only a few punters going in alone, and security – well-built men with turbans and lanyards and collapsible batons at their belts – are paying extra attention to these loners, throwing out water bottles, emptying out bags to run their hands over the lining, instructing them to stand spreadeagled so they can be frisked.

  Sangeeta does not seem fazed, just excited. As they inch forward in the line and the bass pulses ever stronger under their feet, her hips start to twitch and her foot starts to tap. The little circlet of silver bells she wears there jingles, becoming less audible as the bass grows louder.

  From what he’s observed, Connor figures it’s safer for him to walk in on Sangeeta’s arm, but at the last minute his nerve fails him and he drops back a couple of places in line, leaving her to face security alone.

  One of the guards stops her, and although all other sound is obliterated by the bass, he sees the guard direct her to prepare for frisking. Connor quails, prepares to run. But Sangeeta does not miss a beat, simply stands legs akimbo and holds out her arms, looks down with an expression of easy scorn as the guard runs her hands over her ankles, calves, thighs, butt. It’s only when her hand grazes her cock that she looks up, recoils. Sangeeta’s expression does not change. She stares at the guard with haughty contempt, then sweeps past and into the party, the pills still safely concealed in her bra.

  The guards stop Connor too, frisk him thoroughly, and then he is through, into the party. Sangeeta is already tearing up the dance floor.

  The stage is a monolith of sculpted metal, with fire-jugglers and dazzling fractal projections dancing across it. Two DJs wearing giant plushie heads, one a mouse and one a cat, bob about behind their consoles. A tight nucleus of enraptured kids in tiny shorts and singlets is crushed together at the front of the stage, pulsing up and down on their feet. The crowd unknots further out, where people move in ragged circles, or by themselves, a few of them dancing to tunes only they can hear.

  Connor moves through the crowd to Sangeeta, and she pops the bag into his hand. He doesn’t have that many pills to move – half still safely hidden in Sasha’s mattress – but he’s rusty. In another life he would make ends meet by sometimes selling pills outside clubs in Kings Cross, back when there were clubs in Kings Cross, but it’s been a very long time, and he’s twice the age of most of these kids. What are pills even called these days? Googs, bickies, drops, molly? Who knows.

  It isn’t long before he’s just tapping people on the shoulder and shouting at them that he has some spare ecstasy and would they want it. Nobody is interested. One pretty little Brit laughs in his face and tells him to fuck off, and he retreats in shame.

  He can spot the Australians by the shuffling side-step dance they do, and they prove more lucrative. You can always rely on an Australian abroad to buy suspect drugs off a stranger; it makes him feel almost patriotic. Soon word spreads and tanned, wiry munters are crowding around him, trying to bargain him down.

  He is worried that he will accidentally try to offload onto one of the house dealers. These setups always have a few guys who cater for the party, operating under the protection of the organisers and whatever local authority they’ve paid off, who all get a cut. If they spot him he’s likely to be handed over to the police, or worse.

  He isn’t cut out for this. He worries he is conspicuous – knows Sangeeta is. He has asked her to act as demure as possible, to stay out of sight, but she is smack in the middle of the crowd, lost in a sort of rapture. She’s kicked off her chappals and is dancing barefoot in the mud, her sari billowing out as she twirls. With each rotation he catches a glimpse of her eyes, the pure wild joy on her face, before her long braid whips around again.

  She stands out from the rest of the dancers with their improvised, grinding electronic-music shuffle. Her dance moves are polished, ripped from Bollywood films. He cannot imagine a more conspicuous sight than this hijra cutting sick on the dance floor, throwing butterflies into the air. Drawn by her cheesy dance moves, a party of young Indian girls in jean shorts is dancing alongside her, joining in on the dances from the old movies.

  In this ecstatic moment, Sangeeta is shifting the world around her, the air becoming lighter to accommodate her. Connor is so entranced by the spectacle that he fails to notice the men moving towards him through the crowd until he is surrounded. A tap on his shoulder – one of the security men, huge, and smiling hugely. To make himself heard over the music, he leans in close, like he’s got a particularly juicy piece of gossip.

  ‘Hello,’ he says brightly. Connor is grabbed from behind in a headlock. ‘We’d like to have a word with you in private, please.’

  As they start pulling him away, Connor collapses. Just lets himself go limp. It is the one thing he’s managed to retain from a long-suffering gangster in Sydney, who many years ago tried to teach Connor how to handle himself. He’s never been much of a fighter, but he knows making yourself into dead weight makes you harder to haul around, giving you time to come up with a plan.

  The goon holding him is unprepared, and Connor slips through his fingers, hits the dirt hard, just manages to avoid winding himself by landing on his arm. He rolls up and is sprinting, pushing through the crowd, panicked, dashing past the very high teenagers, who try to embrace him. Security follows, slipping through with the rhythm of the crowd.

  He tries to yell a warning to Sangeeta, but his shout is lost in the drone and roar of the party. He can only watch helplessly as two goons make their way towards her. One approaches from behind, the other from the front, and that one reaches out and grabs her sari with a meaty fist. Sangeeta stops dancing, wraps her fingers around the man’s fist and twists it away from her, so it dips into his own chest like a prayer. He yells in surprise and pain even before her palm shoots out to break his nose. Connor imagines he hears the crack and scream all the way across the party.

  The man behind her is caught off-guard, but he rallies and seizes her in a bear hug, which she struggles against. Connor closes the distances and barrels into the two of them. All three go down in a tangle of limbs and silk, but Sangeeta is first on her feet – she raises her leg, toned and thick from years of dance, and brings down her heel on his solar plexus, and then again, on the side of his head.

  She’s raising her foot for another stomp when Connor grabs her hand and starts dragging her to the exit. They need to get to their bike. They barge past gacked kids waving
glowsticks, svelte dreadlocked crusties in sweaty pleather.

  One of the security men catches up, launches at Connor, and brings him down. His chin hits the dirt. He is seeing stars, then a bright flash. Sangeeta has grabbed a fire stick from a startled hippy and is now grinding the flaming torch into the attacker’s face, who rolls away, his hands up to protect his eyes. She helps Connor up – she is a vision, wild, triumphant, her makeup smeared, the seams of her sari loose and tailing behind her, the flaming spear in one hand as she drags him to the bike with the other.

  The Enfield is temperamental at the best of times, but now it roars to life. He takes off, rear wheel spinning, Sangeeta sitting neatly side-saddle, her sari and scarves streaming in the wind. Connor glances over his shoulder, takes in the sight. She is magnificent, iconic, and he is so taken by the sight that he lets the clutch go a second too late and one of the security guard’s outstretched hands closes on Sangeeta’s scarf. She falls, and the bike, suddenly light as air, roars off without her.

  The lights are off when Sasha gets home from her rounds. Most nights, Connor turns up the lamps at dusk so that when she gets home the bungalow is lit up like a Kinkade print, through the window his silhouette, slightly stooped, moving around, hopeful bugs batting themselves to death against the flywire. Tonight, everything is dark, she hears the absolute silence of her home. Even the animals, out in the tangle of the jungle, are hushed, spooked.

  Sasha wakes up hungry. Without the sleepy warmth beside her, she snaps awake in the cool of the morning. Outside, the birds scream from the jungle’s canopy and the camp dogs are whining. She fishes out the rotis from her untouched dinner and feeds them to the dogs, lets them lick her hands, her face, wraps her arms around one of them and nuzzles it. She decides she will not worry, will ignore her rising anxiety – tucks Connor and his abrupt disappearance away in the part of her mind where she keeps difficult things for some future spring-clean.

  She resumes her medical rounds of the villages, having borrowed a second bike from the guru – this one even more heavy and unwieldy than her Enfield. The roads have dried up, but some of the smaller ones are cobwebbed with cracks where they have flooded and baked hard again. She rides carefully, a scarf wrapped around her face against the clouds of dust that kick up as the crust breaks.

  She regrets the time she has been away from the villages. The monsoon has made a mess of the world, and at every stop she is inundated by families, whole villages that have been laid low by cough, cold, fever.

  At her very first stop she is waylaid by a young mother pleading with her in rapid-fire Tamil she has no hope of understanding. The woman is joined by another, then another, and then their husbands, and soon she is surrounded by angry faces. She has to push her way through the throng to get back to her bike, ride away with their voices fading behind her.

  Her next stop goes no better – she is listening to a child’s breathing through her stethoscope when he coughs up a mess of phlegm and blood that soaks the front of her lab coat. She smiles grimly, but the second she is out of visual range of the village she tears it off and throws it into the garbage-choked drainage ditch by the side of the road.

  The coat was a stupid affectation, as hopeless and vain as her idea of making a difference to these people’s lives. She doesn’t know what she’s doing; she has no capacity for pathology, no way to figure out what is making her patients sick, and so no course of action beyond handing out antibiotics like Halloween candy.

  She runs out of pills by the third stop. At the fourth, a woman invites her into her home and with great ceremony unwraps a bandage around her foot to reveal skin that is blackened and shrivelled, fungus threaded into the flesh and between the toes like webbing. The smell fills the tiny room instantly and Sasha retreats, gagging, choking out an apology.

  Shamed by her reaction, she spends the rest of the afternoon in that village, carefully seeing to the various maladies of the children as they are brought out, shyly, one by one, and at the end of the day she gratefully accepts a meal of lemon rice served on a banana leaf.

  The next day she wakes up, seized by nausea that yanks her from a dreamless sleep and sends her scrambling for her wash bucket. She spends a miserable morning lying on the floor of the bathroom, her cheek resting on the cool of the tiles, stoically dissolving electrolyte tablets in her water bottle, sipping carefully, then throwing it back up.

  By twilight the nausea has receded and her appetite returns, and she has dinner in the dining hall, shovelling fistfuls of rice at her face, making small talk with Seekers. Looking around, she realises she doesn’t know anyone. She hasn’t really engaged with any Seekers throughout the whole monsoon, and everyone she’d come to know seems to have moved on.

  Not even her own face is familiar – the woman waiting in the mirror back in the cabin is tanned, gaunt, all angles and shadow in the lamplight. Her clothes hang off her, except around her hips and stomach, where the diet of buttery rice is starting to pool. Her bed is melancholy – her little house at once claustrophobic and lost in an endless expanse of lonely jungle.

  The nausea comes back the next day, and the next, but Connor does not. She retrieves her neglected travel medical kit, with its absurd little yellow booklet of vaccinations, and roots through it for a broad-spectrum antibiotic. In her head she runs through a taxonomy of intestinal horrors she might have picked up in the villages: giardia, tapeworm, cholera.

  At the bottom of the kit she uncovers a box of First Response pregnancy-test wands, purchased in more hopeful times before a romantic trip to Hudson with Stephan. She does some maths, tries to work out where in her cycle she should be, what sort of hormonal kaleidoscope she must be running between the on-again-off-again diet of pills to prevent malaria and mood-swings and sleepless nights, and realises that, yes, her period should have come two weeks ago. It is two months since she met Connor and now she is two weeks overdue. Her hands tremble as she opens up the box.

  Connor spends the night in a guesthouse, paying cash, a little extra so he doesn’t have to show ID. He sends a boy out for a bottle of Old Monk, drinks it with black tea until his hands stop shaking, and then neat, straight from the bottle, until sleep finds him. In the morning he rides east, towards the safety of the ashram.

  Taking no chances, he opts for the long way back, driving inland for hours and then back down to the coast only when he is certain he’s not being followed. The roads are emptier than usual, and he lets himself sink into the ride – grateful for the effort it takes to keep the hulking monster of a bike on the shattered road, his mind and body working in harmony, the meditative calm that he can reach when he opens up the throttle on a corner and the tyres rebel, always on the verge of sliding and snuffing him out. The faster he goes, the less attention he has to pay to what he has done, and what he is going to do next. Most of the money is lost, the pills too, most of them, dragged off the back of the bike with Sangeeta. Nothing to be done about that now.

  He has just a small bag of pills, together with those stashed in Sasha’s mattress worth enough, he thinks, to cover the cost of a passport from Baba’s Chennai connection, enough for a ticket out of this place.

  He reaches the ashram entrance, finds the gate secured with a heavy black bolt. Impatient, Connor honks the horn of his bike, a feeble, tinny little sound, and when that fails to summon the elderly watchman, guns the throttle until the Enfield’s engine screams in protest and stalls.

  He dismounts and shakes the gate angrily, calls for help. Finally, he listens. From the watch house he hears little bursts of static from a two-way radio, a conversation in hushed Tamil. A moment later he hears the whine of scooters threading through the jungle – the guru and two of her attendants, riding up to the gate. The attendants dismount first, glaring at Connor through the bars. They flank the guru as she slips off her scooter and steps gingerly through the mud until she is inches away from the gate. She folds her hands in front of her and looks at Connor, eyes focused somewhere below his.

 
; ‘Hello,’ she says. Her expression is flat, a little annoyed, a little bored. ‘We hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us, and I wish you the best for the future, but you are invited to leave our community.’

  Connor is about to launch into a protest but she holds up a palm for silence. Hers is the face of someone who’s found a bug in their salad and isn’t sure if it’s worth making a fuss about. She is succinct, to the point – the police have been in touch, they are concerned about a foreigner causing a scene in public, one driving a motorbike registered to the ashram. The community thrives on its good standing – a tacit understanding with the authorities that neither will cause trouble for the other.

  Connor should leave now – the police are already on the way. While she speaks, the watchman shuffles out of his guardhouse, dragging Connor’s backpack with him, heaves it over the bars of the gate. Inside Connor finds his few possessions; clothes, books. But not the pills, presumably still in Sasha’s mattress.

  ‘I can’t just leave. Let me at least talk to Sasha.’

  ‘Out of the question. She’s a special soul. We cannot let you take advantage of her kindness.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be the first, then, would I?’

  The guru’s eyes narrow, any semblance of courtesy gone from her voice. ‘I know your type. You are a parasite on others, and on this country. I can see your soul and it is disgusting. You’re not worthy of Sasha, or a place in our community. You are emotionally – and spiritually – retarded.’ She turns away, moves towards her bike.

  ‘Hey!’ Connor kicks the gate in frustration and it rings out a dull, metallic note. By the time it finishes rattling, the guru is gone.

  Connor considers his options, takes in the dogs sitting by the guard’s feet, panting expectantly. The guard has a rifle, an antique thing, dull steel and lovingly polished wood slung lazily over his shoulder. Would he use it if Connor tried to storm the gate? Sneak through the jungle? Connor will not test his luck. He hauls his bag over his shoulder and walks away.