The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  The food was bland. I was picking at the rice with my fingers when the serving boy said something in Hindi and my friend looked up from his food. The serving boy said something else. His eyes narrowed and were angry. An argument ensued. The proprietor jumped in and grabbed my friend by the T-shirt. They ushered him out with tears in his eyes.

  When I got up to follow, the proprietor handed me the bill. “This boy is no good,” he said. “It is not wise for you to spend time with people like that. If you want to give him a few rupees, that is OK, but you should not bring him around with you.”

  I took my change and walked onto the street, but the boy was gone. He never returned to the guest house. I had saved seven empty bottles for him.

  After that I became ill. I was sure it was the food. The manager at the guesthouse insisted that it was the monsoons which had just begun. “Any hospital you go to will be filled with Indian people with the same problem as you. It does not only affect the tourists.” He spoke with a prim, English accent, hurriedly, while flapping the pages of his check-in book. He offered this information as consolation to me.

  The shower spray restlessly moved from a weak drizzle to an almost painful blast. The water ran down the toilet at the center of the floor. Sometimes feverish, and watching the water drain down that hole, I’d think, “That’s what death is like,” then I’d remember my lover’s face, the expression fixed on it at death, and that was all I had to go on, the reason I remembered for being here.

  It was then I remembered Sukesh, and the previous night. The memory made me feel anxious and powerless.

  He might have been following me for some time. There was nothing awkward in his approach, nothing to suggest spontaneity.

  “Excuse me sir, where are you going?”

  His voice had such authority that I asked myself if I was lost before I remembered that I was walking without a destination.

  I answered, “I was thinking I might have a drink.”

  “Come along then,” he said, touching my sleeve. “There is a place just here on Park Street where you can drink. They also play live music there.”

  I followed him tentatively. I must tell him I don’t want a guide. But his face was so beautiful and determined. I thought, I must have a drink with him. His eyes were pulled slightly by his turban, which made them seem hard and judging, but his lips were soft. They were dishonest lips that could lie to me without the slightest tremble. I imagined the lies he could tell me that could make me feel right about my coming to India, lies that might have erased the heat and cramps, the overwhelming lethargy, as though I was slowly being consumed, a rabbit in a snake’s jaws.

  The doormen on Park Street wore long turbans and white kurtas and stood like grim sentinels under the gas lamps. The bar he chose had heavy curtains over its walls. We sat at a table not far from the empty stage.

  “Why did you come to India?” he asked, looking down at his menu.

  I felt I wanted to tell him everything, but I found myself empty of words.

  “I needed to get away from where I was,” I answered moodily.

  He called the waiter over and began speaking in Hindi.

  “I’ve ordered whiskey and sodas and some pakoras,” he said.

  “I guess that sounds all right.”

  “Are you married?” he asked suddenly.

  “No.”

  “I will marry soon,” he said soberly. “I will see a picture of her before the wedding, but she will not know me until the ceremony.”

  “Do you want to marry?” I asked. I wondered if his English was good enough to sense my attraction to him, the real question I was asking.

  “I want to fuck a woman very badly,” he whispered. “Is it true that in America this happens all the time before marriage?”

  “Yes,” I answered, swigging the rough whiskey, feeling dispirited and letting it show, hoping the disappointment in my eyes might at least discourage any further questions about American sexuality. The heavy drapes began to make me feel claustrophobic. I told him to order us another round.

  “What do you think of Calcutta?” he asked.

  Now that was a civil question. “Well, I think it’s very beautiful despite the heat.”

  He looked at me disapprovingly. “Do you think the beggars are beautiful? Have you seen the slums of Howrah?”

  I remembered the restaurant manager who thought I’d overstepped my boundaries by taking that boy to lunch. I’d noticed Indian stratification from the moment I’d arrived. I’d watched two fat women preening on their rickshaw pulled by a barefoot man who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. They paid him without looking at him.

  “Maybe I do see beauty in the beggars,” I said angrily, “maybe humiliation is good for the human animal.”

  I might have gone on, but I worried that he might not understand me, if not my words then perhaps my privileged American viewpoint. And I wanted him to understand me because I suddenly felt very alone, and I would have sacrificed my strong opinions if he had asked me to, because the thought of my room depressed me the way my apartment had.

  I drank my other whiskey quickly and stared down at his hands which seemed softer than the look I remembered in his eyes.

  “What do you do in America?” he asked. His voice had a tentativeness which touched me.

  “Well, let’s see, I was somebody’s lover and before that I was my parents’ son.” I looked up at him smiling because my answer amused me when I thought about it, and I knew it would not satisfy him.

  He had a beaten expression, as though only Americans could afford to be vague; they speak with the mystery of their money.

  Maybe I should have lied and told him how hard I’d worked. By now, I was willing to make a concerted effort for him. I might tell him I was a tax accountant—what I imagined all the bespectacled workers in India’s banks to be doing. Honesty was simply out of the question; I felt protective of him.

  I hoped sex might make us equals.

  “I’d like to walk,” I said.

  He stood up abruptly and we began to leave. I noticed him watching the stage where the musicians were beginning to assemble.

  I paid the man sitting in the cashier’s window. Sukesh was standing at the door, looking away.

  When we left the restaurant, the street was slick.

  “It must have rained while we were inside,” he said. “Do you want to walk, or would you rather go back?”

  I looked at him. Perhaps I was staring. “Do you want to come back to the guesthouse with me?” My voice sounded obscene, the croaking voice of a man luring a young boy into an arcade booth.

  “Indians are not allowed into the guesthouses,” he answered.

  “Even if you’re my guest?”

  “This is how they do it in India. They protect the tourist from thieves, from any mistake they might make in their judgment.” He smiled ironically, an irony that suggested he was wiser than he’d let on.

  He took my arm and we began walking. School Street was unlit and silent except for the turnings of beggars on their mats. We stopped under the branches of a large tree grown over an iron gate. He stood behind me and I felt his face on my neck.

  “Do you like this?” he whispered while his hand ran down the back of my pants.

  “Yes,” I answered, feeling loose in my legs, almost feverish.

  Then he patted my ass coolly and resumed walking.

  I stood back for a moment, wondering if he would just walk off. I tried to imagine myself walking home alone, but the anger, the humiliation, and the dull cramp was too strong in me. I walked behind him until he turned around and smiled. There was that irony again, but there was something inviting, too. I imagined him thinking, Stupid little tourist, you’ll get into trouble this way.

  “I’ll walk you back,” he said. He had spiced betel in his mouth and I could smell it on the rain.

  It was not a far walk, but the silence between us added blocks to it. At the corner of my street a group of beggars and pe
ddlers came out of the darkness and stood around me with their enamel dishes, shaking one or two coins listlessly.

  He dispersed them quickly with some harsh-sounding words. Then he stood there like royalty, undisturbed.

  “My name is Sukesh,” he said, “would you like to see me again?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Tomorrow night?” he asked, taking hold of my hand again.

  “Yes,” I said, “I don’t have any plans.” The word plans sounded funny in my mouth, it had the rattle of a single coin in a beggar’s dish.

  “Ten o’clock. Here, on the corner.”

  “Yes, that’s fine,” I said, and we parted.

  Later, I pulled my knees up to my stomach and let the thin sheet fall from the cot. I felt too weak to get to the bathroom. Too weak. Surely it hadn’t been this way before India, but there had been days when I had no feeling for living. I remembered when my lover was still alive and wanted me to walk with him to watch the sunrise, or sometimes up the hill to the neighborhood store. I guess I felt weak even then, and guilty too, because my lover was watching those sunrises as though they were the very last he’d see, and he wanted to believe that every day was a new beginning. I slept through the messages in the sunrise. For me, it was merely the return of the same day - the slow, protracted, and sometimes painless day I’d spent innumerable hours in before. I always told him it was anemia, and that I’d always required a lot of sleep. But sometimes I thought it was him drawing everything out of me.

  In India I didn’t spend a moment without it, the weight of exhaustion in my arms and legs and lungs and brain. It sat inside me like a guest, an incubus.

  A young boy was sweeping outside my room. I watched him through the small, screened window. He had his shirt off and was wearing a knotted lungi. He was not muscular, but I loved watching the rippling of his chest and legs as he squatted with his whisk broom. His skin was shiny with perspiration, and in the moonlight it looked like black oil. I felt stronger watching him. Like a machine clicking on, the thought of sex dissipated the cramps and strengthened my resolve to see Sukesh again.

  I called out to the boy and he approached my doorway nervously. I propped my head up against the headboard and smiled at him. I could almost feel his dark eyes sweeping over my wet pajama. I felt my penis harden under the wet material, and I opened my legs.

  “Sir?” he asked, looking to the floor. I imagined him thinking filthy tourist as his eyes took in the cigarette butts and empty bottles.

  “What time is it?” I asked. He told me he thought it was nine.

  “May I sweep here?” he asked, squatting reticently by the bedside. I saw him looking in my bag, at my Walkman, and I asked him if he would like to hear it. He took it in his hands and stood up with the headphones on. He stood smiling and listening and turning the recorder over in his hands inquisitively. But when he dropped it accidentally, he was very grave.

  I took him by the arm. Nothing is damaged, I assured him. I moved my hand gently down his arm and squeezed his hand. He stepped away from me then, and his eyes were hard and mean, even as he apologized.

  I walked slowly, deliberately to the corner. I felt punched in the stomach, that kind of pain. I told myself the cramps will stop. I know the rhythm by now. But there was a pool of light under the lamppost where I imagined myself standing, waiting. I imagined how worn I’d look under that light, how stripped and anxious I’d feel.

  There was a blackout then, so common in Calcutta that every vendor had their candles burning, dimly illuminating their folded knees, a brocade stretched across their laps, a stitching hand. There were hundreds of these candles burning, but not one strong enough to connect itself to another. There were only the unrelated and anonymous images of labor stretching out before me.

  I stood against a wall, conscious of the sewage that runs alongside these buildings. It flows through the gutters on bath waters. I could feel the heat of people around me. I heard them singing, praying, begging. The thought occurred to me that I would never see him in the darkness, or worse, that I would not recognize him, that he would have undergone some change. I was stricken with the thought that he might have forgotten about me entirely and that he would not come at all.

  But someone always comes in India. They can detect when you are alone. I wondered if they were this way with other Indians, or could an Indian spend his life begging for contact?

  A legless beggar was moving swiftly over the broken street, carrying his weight on his hands. He reached out and clung to my leg. He grimaced as he spoke. He wanted me to see the wounds on his torso, the results of dragging himself through the streets. “You see it is not easy for me, Baba,” he said, “if you need any help, just ask the people here for Hanuman. That is what they call me. They call me the name of the monkey god, because I move on my hands.” He turned his hands up to me to inspect. They were raw and black. “Like the bottoms of feet,” he laughed.

  “Shall we go?” I heard someone ask. It was Sukesh. He gripped my arm and pulled me aside. Hanuman followed until Sukesh smacked him on the back of the head. Then he slunk away.

  “You must think we have a very backward country,” Sukesh said with a shame as red and complex as his turban.

  “No,” I answered, “I don’t think there is any society without need.” But he didn’t want to hear this. He walked a little ahead of me, and I thought, he is colder tonight.

  “What have you seen in Calcutta?” he asked. I was thankful he spoke. We were both trying not to be strangers.

  “I’ve been sick,” I said, “so I haven’t seen much. I spent an afternoon at the Ram Krishna mission, I saw the four Jain temples.” This is stupid, I thought, I don’t want to talk about tourist sites. I stopped talking.

  We came out on B.B.D. Bag. It was silent and looked different without its crowds. I began to ask him why the Indians hadn’t changed the storefronts to match their businesses.

  All over Calcutta, the British business names were still painted on the windows, but of course they were Indian businesses now. The Indians were living there like ghosts. They sold saris from antiquarian bookshops and Indian sweets from British knife shops. And though there were “European Coffee” signs, the Indians sold only Nescafe.

  “It couldn’t cost that much to change the signs,” I said.

  “Maybe the Indians are trying to pretend this is still an empire. Or maybe they like to deceive the tourists,” he said. I heard him laugh but he wasn’t sharing it.

  He turned off into an alley and I followed mechanically. He did not turn around to see if I had followed him. We were walking through a maze of streets, littered with garbage and smashed chai cups. There were goats nuzzling each other in the smell of slaughter, and blood in black patches on the ground.

  He stopped walking and turned to me. He kept his eye on his zipper as he opened it. “Do you want this?” he asked. I went to him and pressed my lips to his neck. He pushed me down by the top of my head. I felt my foot sink into one of the gutters where the sewerage flowed. He was gruff and impatient with his hands and wouldn’t let me move.

  And then there was that moment when my discomfort didn’t matter, and only his pleasure did. I no longer cared about the goats’ blood that stained the knees of my pajamas. There was only my need and his pleasure between us. He slumped over me, and for a moment I felt his cheek brush my back. And that was it - he was finished with me.

  When I stood up, he looked down at my shoes and the stains on my knees.

  “Go get cleaned up,” he said, “there is a well over there.”

  “Which way is my guesthouse?” I asked.

  He pointed in the direction we had come from and began walking away from me, tentatively at first, and then with determination. I stayed with the goats for some time, and while I stroked their fur, I could smell their blood in the air.

  When I arrived at the guesthouse it was late. They’d locked the door and I stood outside knocking to wake the manager. He was angry and disori
ented. “This cannot go on any longer,” he said. “If you want to stay out all night you should stay at another guesthouse.”

  I wanted to defend myself. I’d stayed on for many weeks and this was only the third time I’d arrived after the door was locked. His behavior seemed irrational to me. I had always been prompt with my payments, I certainly wasn’t noisy in my room, and as the signs posted in the lobby demanded, I had neither indulged in nor kept drugs in my room.

  But looking past the manager into the small office where the cot and the bedrolls for the cleaning staff were set up, I saw the young boy I had seen earlier, the boy who had been sweeping in front of my room. He was standing in the shadows, but I could see the same nervous expression he’d had at my doorway. And then I thought I could feel something conspiratorial between the manager and him. I wondered if he had told, if he had felt me seducing him or just thought there was something depraved in the way I talked to him, looked at him, or touched his hand.

  3.

  “Dashashwamed,” I said to the skinny boy with the bicycle rickshaw, “Shiva Lodge.”

  He nodded, smiled, and placed my bag on the seat.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Thirty rupees,” he said. He was firm in his price. He refused to haggle and I dropped it. We moved out into the traffic with him ringing the little bell on his handlebars. The streets narrowed and the horns and bells of the trucks, auto rickshaws, and pulleys grew more chaotic and threatening. I watched the driver’s bare, spindly legs working the pedals, the dirty lungi gathered at his thighs. He turned around as we began coasting down a hill. “Shiva Lodge is full,” he said, “I’ll take you to another lodge, very nice, very cheap.”

  “No,” I told him, “I’m meeting a friend at Shiva Lodge. Take me there.” Of course I had been warned of this. The Sikh on the train had sighed, “Banares—the holy city and the city of cheats. Beware of the commission boys, they will never take you where you want to go.”

  He slowed the rickshaw and stopped before a large yellow house with white columns. “Shiva Lodge,” he said, pointing.