by Gayle Forman
We drive out of the airport complex, past a bunch of ramshackle houses, before climbing onto an elevated expressway. I tilt my head out the window. It’s pleasantly hot, but not as hot as it will be, Prateek warns. It’s still winter; it will get warmer until the monsoons come in June.
As we drive, Prateek points out landmarks. A famous temple. A spidery suspension bridge crossing Mahim Bay. “Many Bollywood stars live in this area. Closer to the studios, which are near the airport.” He thumbs behind us. “Though some live in Juhu Beach, and some in Malabar Hill. Some even in Colaba where you are staying. Taj Mahal Hotel is there. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Roger Moore, Double-Oh Seven. Also American presidents all stayed there.”
Traffic starts to back up. We slow down and Ganesha stops his dance. “What is your favorite movie?” Prateek asks me.
“Hard to pick just one.”
“What is the last movie you saw?”
I flipped through a half dozen of them on the flights over, but was too antsy to focus on any one. I suppose the last movie I watched in full was Pandora’s Box. That was the movie that started it all, that led to the disastrous trip to Mexico, which funnily enough, has now landed me here. Lulu. If she was far away before, she’s farther now. Not one but two oceans between us now.
“Never heard of that movie,” Prateek says, wagging his head. “My favorite movie of the last year is a tie. Gangs of Wasseypur. Thriller. And London, Paris, New York. Do you know how many films Hollywood studios produce a year?”
“No idea.”
“Take a guess.”
“A thousand.”
He frowns. “I speak of the studios, not an amateur with a camera. One thousand, that would be impossible.”
“A hundred?”
His smile flips on like a switch. “Wrong! Four hundred. Now do you know how many films Bollywood produces a year? I won’t make you guess because you will be wrong.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Eight hundred!”
“Eight hundred,” I repeat because it’s clear he thinks the number warrants repeating.
“Yes!” He’s smiling broadly now. “Twice the number of Hollywood. Do you know how many people in India go to the movies every single day?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“Fourteen million. Do fourteen million people go to the movies every day in Germany?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m from Holland. But given that the entire population isn’t much more than sixteen million, I doubt it.”
He beams with pride now.
We exit the expressway onto the streets of what must be colonial Mumbai and turn into an area with an arbor of trees and a line of idling double-decker buses belching out black exhaust.
“There is the Gateway of India,” Prateek says, pointing out a carved arch monument on the edge of the Arabian Sea. “The Taj Mahal Hotel I told you about,” he says, pulling past a massive confection of a hotel, all domes and cornices. A group of Arab men in billowing white robes are piling into a series of window-tinted SUVs. “Inside is a Starbucks.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Have you ever had a Starbucks coffee?”
“I have.”
“My cousin said that in America they drink it with every meal.” He pulls up in front of another graying building, Victorian, and it seems, almost sweating in the heat. The sign, in fading elaborate cursive, reads bo bay ro al. “Here you are. Bombay Royale.”
I follow Prateek into a darkened, cool lobby, quiet except for the whoosh and squeak of ceiling fans and the faint chirping of crickets nesting somewhere in the walls. Behind a long mahogany desk, a man so old he seems original to the building is napping. Prateek loudly rings the bell and he startles awake.
Immediately, the two start arguing, mostly in Hindi but with a few English words thrown in here and there. “Regulations,” the old man keeps saying.
Eventually, Prateek turns to me. “He says you can’t stay here.”
I shake my head. Why did she bring me here? Why did I come?
“It’s a private residence club, not a hotel,” Prateek explains.
“Yes. I’ve heard of those.”
Prateek frowns. “There are other hotels in Colaba.”
“But this must be the place.” This is the address I’ve had for her for the last few years. “Look under my mother’s name. Yael Shiloh.”
At the mention of her name, the old man’s head whips up. “Willem saab?” he asks.
“Willem. Yes, that’s me.”
He squints his eyes and grasps my hands. “You are nothing like the memsahib,” he says.
I don’t have to know what that means to know who he’s talking about. It’s what everyone says.
“But where is she?” he asks.
There’s a kernel of comfort. I’m not the only one in the dark. “Oh, you know her,” I say.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he says, doing the same head nod/shake as Prateek.
“So can I go to her flat?” I ask the old man.
He considers it, scratching the gray stubble on his chin. “Regulations say only members can stay here. When memsahib makes you a member, you will be a member.”
“But she’s not here,” Prateek points out helpfully.
“Regulations,” the old man says.
“But you knew I was coming,” I say.
“But you are not with her. What if you are not really you? Do you have proof?”
Proof? Like what. A surname? Mine is different. Photos? “Here,” I say, pulling out the email, now damp and creased.
He squints at it with dark eyes that have gone filmy with age. He must decide it’s enough. Because he gives two quick nods of his head and says, “Welcome, Willem saab.”
“At last,” Prateek says
“I am Chaudhary,” the old man says, ignoring Prateek and handing me a sheaf of papers to fill out. When I finish, he heaves at the opening to the front desk and creaks out from behind. He shuffles down the scuffed wooden hallway. I follow him. Prateek trails behind me. When we reach the elevators, Chaudhary makes a tick-tock gesture to Prateek with his fingers. “Members only in the elevator,” he tells him. “You may take the stairs.”
“But he’s with me,” I say.
“Regulations, Willem saab.”
Prateek shakes his head. “I should probably get the car back to my uncle,” he says.
“Okay, let me pay you.” I pull out a wad of filthy rupees.
“Three hundred rupees for no AC. Four hundred with,” Chaudhary says. “That’s the law.”
I hand Prateek five hundred rupees, about the price of a sandwich back home. He backs up to leave. “Hey, what about that korma?” I ask him.
His smile is goofy, a little like Broodje’s. “I will be in touch,” he promises.
The elevator lurches to the fifth floor. Chaudhary opens the gate onto a light-filled corridor, smelling of floor wax and incense. He leads me past a series of slatted wood doors, stopping at the farthest one, and pulls out a master key.
At first, I think the old man got the wrong room. Yael has lived here for two years, but this is an empty suite of rooms. Anonymous bulky wood furniture, generic paintings on the wall of desert forts and Bengal tigers. A small round table against a pair of French doors.
And then I smell it. Beneath the competing scents of onion and incense and ammonia and wax, is the undeniable smell of citrus and wet earth. The scent, I realize with the clarity of something you’ve always known, but never needed to recognize before, of my mother.
I take a tentative step into the hallway and another blast hits me. And just like that, I’m not in India. I’m back in Amsterdam, at home, a long summer twilight. It had finally stopped raining, so Yael and Bram were outside, celebrating the minor miracle of sunshine. Still cold from the rain, I stayed huddled inside under a scratchy wool blanket and watched them through t
he big picture window. Some students who lived in one of the flats across the canal were blasting music. A song came on, something old and New Wave from when Yael and Bram were younger, and he grabbed her and they danced, head to head, even though it wasn’t a slow song. I watched them through the glass, fixed on the sight of them, pretending not to be. I must’ve been eleven or twelve, an age when such displays should’ve embarrassed me, but didn’t. Yael saw me watching, and—this is what surprised me then, still surprises me now as I remember it—she came inside. She didn’t exactly drag me out or invite me to dance with them, as Bram might’ve. She just folded up the blanket and pulled me up by the elbow. I was enveloped by her smell, oranges and leaves, that ever-present loamy tang of her tinctures, and the canals and all their murky secrets. I tried to make it like I was acquiescing, allowing myself to be led, giving no trace of how happy I was. But I must not have been able to fully contain it because she smiled back at me and said, “We have to snatch the sun when we have it, don’t we?”
She could be warm like that. But it came and went with as much regularity as the Dutch sun. Except with Bram. But maybe it was reflected warmth—he was her sun, after all.
After Chaudhary leaves, I lie down on the sofa. My head rests uncomfortably against the heavy wood arm but I don’t move, because I’m in the sunlight and the heat feels necessary, like a transfusion of sorts. I should probably get in touch with Yael, I think, but drowsiness and jetlag and a certain kind of relief are pulling me under, and before I can do so much as remove my shoes, I am asleep.
• • •
I’m flying again. Back on a plane, which feels wrong because I just got off a plane. But it’s so vivid and real it takes a beat longer than usual to recognize it as the dream; and then it warps and becomes lurid and surreal, heavy and slow, the way dreams do when your mind is rebelling against a betrayed body clock. Maybe that’s why in this dream, there is no landing. No illumination of the seatbelt sign, no inaudible announcement from the captain. Just the buzz of the engines, the feeling of being aloft. Just flying.
But there is someone next to me. I turn and try to ask, Where are we? But everything is heavy, lugubrious, I can’t get my mouth to work right because what comes out is, Who are you?
“Willem,” a voice in the distance calls.
The person in the dream turns. Still faceless. Already familiar.
“Willem.” The voice again. I don’t answer it. I don’t want out of the dream quite yet, not this time. Again, I turn toward my seatmate.
“Willem!” The voice is sharp this time and it pulls me out of the honey stickiness of sleep.
I open my eyes. I sit up and for a second, we just look at each other, blinking.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I’ve been wondering that myself for the past month, after my initial optimism about this trip faded to ambivalence and then curdled into pessimism and now has withered into regret. What am I doing here?
“You sent me a ticket.” I try to make it seem like a joke, but my head is cloudy with the dream, and Yael only frowns.
“I mean what are you doing here? We’ve been looking everywhere for you at the airport.”
We? “I didn’t see you.”
“I was needed at the clinic. I sent a driver and he was running a bit late. He said he sent you several texts.”
I take out my phone and turn it on. Nothing happens. “I don’t think it works here.”
She looks, disgusted, at my phone, and I feel a sudden and fierce loyalty to it. Then she sighs. “The important thing is you made it,” she says, which seems both obvious and optimistic.
I stand up. My neck has a crick and when I circle it, it gives off a loud pop that makes Yael frown again. I stand up, stretch, and look around the room.
“Nice place,” I say, continuing the small talk that has sustained us for the past three years. “I like what you’ve done with it.”
It’s like a reflex, trying to make her smile. It never worked for me before and it doesn’t work now. She walks away, opening the French doors leading to the balcony, overlooking the Gateway, the water beyond. “I should probably get something closer to Andheri, but I seem to have grown too accustomed to living on the water.”
“Andheri?”
“Where the clinic is,” she says, as if I should know this. But how, exactly? Talk of her work has been strictly off limits in our casual chit-chat emails. The weather. The food. The myriad Indian festivals. Postcards, without the pretty pictures.
I know that Yael came to India to study Ayurvedic medicine. It was what she and Bram had intended to do once I left for university. Travel more. For Yael to study traditional healing methods. India was to be the first stop. The tickets were booked before Bram died.
After he died, I expected Yael to fall apart. Only this time, I would be there. I would put aside my own grief and I would help her. Finally, instead of me being an interloper into her great love affair, I would be the product of it. I would be a comfort to her. What she wasn’t as a mother, I would be as a son.
For two weeks, she locked herself in the top-floor room, the one Bram had built for her, shutters closed, door locked, ignoring most of the visitors who’d stopped by. In life, Bram had been all hers, and in death, that hadn’t changed.
Then, six weeks later, she’d left for India as scheduled, as if nothing had happened. Marjolein said Yael was just licking her wounds. She’d be back soon.
Two months later, though, Yael sent word that she wasn’t coming back. Long ago, before she studied naturopathic medicine, she’d had a nursing degree, and now she was going back to that, working in a clinic in Mumbai. She said she was closing down the boat; she’d already boxed up the important things and everything else was being sold. I should take what I wanted. I packed up a few boxes and stored them in my uncle Daniel’s attic. Everything else, I left. Not long after that, I got kicked off of my program. Then I packed up my own rucksack and took off.
“You’re just like your mother,” Marjolein had said, somewhat mournfully, when I told her I was leaving.
But we both knew that wasn’t true. I am nothing like my mother.
• • •
The same emergency that kept Yael from the airport is apparently pulling her back to the clinic after all of an hour in my company. She invites me to come with her, but the invitation is halfhearted and rote, a lot like this invitation to come to India, I suspect. I politely decline, with excuses of jetlag.
“You should be out in the sunshine; it’s the best cure.” She looks at me. “Though make sure you cover this.” She touches the mirror image on her face where my scar is. “It looks fresh.”
I touch the scar. It’s six months old now. And, for a minute, I imagine telling Yael about it. It would infuriate her if she knew what I said to the skinheads to take their attention off the girls and onto me. A one four six oh three—the identification number the Nazis tattooed on Saba’s wrist—but at least I would get a reaction.
But I don’t tell Yael. This goes way beyond small talk. It goes to painful things we never mention: Saba. The war. Yael’s mother. Yael’s entire childhood. I touch the scar. It feels hot, as if merely thinking about that day has inflamed it. “It’s not that fresh,” I tell her. “It’s just not healing right.”
“I can mix you up something for that.” Yael brushes the scar. Her fingers are rough and callused. Workers’ hands, Bram used to say, though he was the one who should’ve had the rougher hands. I realize then we haven’t embraced or kissed or done any of the things one might expect for a reunion.
Still, when she takes her hand away, I wish she hadn’t. And when she starts packing up with promises of things we will do when she has a day off, I’m wishing I had told her about the skinheads, about Paris, about Lulu. Except even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have known how. My mother and I, we both speak Dutch and English. But
we never could speak the same language.
Twenty-two
* * *
I am awoken by the ringing of a phone. I reach for my mobile, remember it doesn’t work here. The phone keeps ringing. It’s the house line. It doesn’t stop. Finally, I pick it up.
“Willem saab. Chaudhary here.” He clears his throat. “On the line for you, Prateek Sanu,” he continues formally. “Would you like me to ask the nature of his business?”
“No, that’s okay. You can put him through.”
“One moment.” There is a series of clicks. Then Prateek’s voice echoing hellos, interrupted by Chaudhary, declaring. “Prateek Sanu calling for Willem Shiloh.”
It’s funny to be called by Yael and Saba’s surname. I don’t correct him. After a moment of silence, Chaudhary clicks off.
“Willem!” Prateek booms, as if it’s been months, not hours, since we last spoke. “How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“And what do you think of the Maximum City?”
“I haven’t seen much of it,” I admit. “I’ve been asleep.”
“You are awake now. What are your plans?”
“Haven’t worked that out yet.”
“Let me make a proposal: Pay a visit to me at Crawford Market.”
“Sounds good.”
Prateek gives me instructions. After a cold shower, I head outside, Chaudhary trailing behind me with dire warnings of “pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and roving gangs.” He ticks off the threats on his thick fingers. “They will accost you.”
I assure him I can take it, and in any case the only people to accost me are begging mothers, who congregate in the grassy medians in the center of the shady streets, asking for money to buy formula for the sleeping babies in their arms.
This part of Mumbai reminds me a bit of London with its decaying colonial buildings, except it’s supersaturated with color: the women’s saris, the marigold-festooned temples, the crazily painted buses. It’s like everything absorbs and reflects the bright sun.
From the outside, Crawford Market seems like another building plucked out of old England, but inside it is all India: bustling commerce and yet more surreally bright colors. I walk around the fruit stalls, the clothing stalls, making my way toward the electronics stalls where Prateek told me to find him. I feel a tap on my shoulder.
