by Smith, Skye
By the time Will got back to the van it was surrounded by local pedestrians all trying to look into every window at the girls. He yelled at them to back off. The words meant nothing to the crowd but the tone had them backing away. Inside the girls were hiding from all the eyes under the sleeping bags.
"Hang on," he said as he pulled the van out of the line of traffic and drove down the wrong side, the empty side of the road and right up to the downed pole. He got out and told Maya to be the driver. He was going to hold the pole up while she drove the van slowly under it.
The sight of a ferengi woman taking the driver's seat and rolling down the window gave him the attention of the truck drivers. This was a good thing because he needed their help to lift the pole. Though he could lift the end of it by himself, he could not lift it from the center because of the lack of leverage. With three of the truck drivers helping they got the end high enough so that Maya could creep the van forward underneath it.
Suddenly bells started ringing and red lights started flashing, and the pole was pulled down by the automated winch with all its force against the roof of the van. "A train," one of the drivers yelled and they all ran away from the van. Maya tried to back up but the pole had the van trapped. The nose of the van was on the tracks.
"Get out, get out, get out," Will was yelling as he opened the driver's door, and then the back door for Marique. "Now, run, get away from the van." He turned to the truck drivers standing with the huge audience that had gathered to watch the goings on of these crazy impatient ferengis. "Quickly", he said to them, "tell all these people to get well back. When the train hits that van there will be pieces flying in all directions."
Thankfully the truck drivers saw the wisdom of what he was saying, and started yelling at the crowd about the danger. Will ran backwards to where the girls were standing behind the cover of the first truck in the traffic jam. They stood there and watched and waited for their van and all their possessions to be turned into shredded junk by the train.
An express passenger train with only four cars whizzed by on the other track, and was gone. The flashing lights and the bells stopped. Everyone looked at each other and burst into relieved, hysterical laughter. The pole on the other side raised, and Will ran forward and with the help of a gang of men, hoisted the pole on this side. Two of the drivers grabbed an empty pallet from the bed of the first truck and wedged it under the pole. They were all still laughing and yelling obscenities at drivers who were now breaking queue to rush the open gate.
Maya took this opportunity to jump back in the driver's seat and gun the van across the tracks to the other side. She sat there waving at her friends to join her before she was swamped by men trying to have a good look at her. As soon as her friends jumped in through the back door, she was away, leaning on the horn and careening along the empty side of the road. The three of them drove the entire first mile howling loudly in relief and exhilaration.
Will drove them through the city of Jansi, a town at the crossroads of a booming trucking industry, then Maya took the wheel again so that Will could catch some zzzs. He had some special place he wanted to camp, and it would mean driving after dark, which was a risky thing to do in India. Oxen did not have reflectors. For that matter, neither did most bicycles.
By the time Will stopped driving and had parked under a peepal tree to camp, the girls were both fast asleep in the back. They had stopped for a meal and a washroom break while the twilight turned to black. Twilight was the most dangerous time to drive. Animals and pedestrians were active and the half-light played tricks on your eyes.
He got out for a leak and to flash a light around where he had parked. Everything looked okay so he climbed in the back, locked all the doors and snuggled into the space left for him between the side of the van and Marique. Marique did some naughty groping before she fell back to sleep.
He yawned and smiled. Life was good. Driving across India was an adventure in itself. Driving across India with two vibrant young women accentuated the surreal. Looking at India through their eyes was a complete re-education for him. It was like living in a movie-star fishbowl.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - Goa to Nepal by Skye Smith
Chapter 12 - Fatehpur Sikri, India
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. - Mahatma Gandhi
He woke to a knock on the window. He crawled through to the front. The sky to the east beyond the tree was orange. The sun was not yet up but it would not be long. There was a man in a cheap uniform, the kind worn by workers in official service, who tapped on the window again.
At night they always rolled the front windows down two inches and stuffed scraps of mosquito net in the crack. That and the opening vent on the roof in the back kept the air flowing inside. He said goodmorning through the netting.
An officious voice responded with, "You cannot be parking here. This is the monument. It is not yet opening. You should be parking down the hill in the car park."
"I am so sorry. We drove here in the dark and got lost and then, worse, the car stalled and would not start. My two daughters are asleep in the back, so I could not just leave it and go for help." He rolled the window down fully and put the netting on the other seat.
Fishing in the ashtray produced some small rupee notes which he handed through the window to the man. "Since I cannot leave the van until they wake up, could I ask you to buy three entrance tickets for us? You look like an honest gentleman." He had handed him twice as much money as the tickets would have cost.
"Of course. If you have women to protect, then I am having no choice but to help. When are you thinking that the car will be fixed?"
"Oh, two hours at most. I must wait for sunrise so that I can see to work on it."
"That is being most acceptable. I will tell the ticket collector that you have already paid. May your motor problems be small ones," wished the man and then he walked away recounting his morning bounty. This was going to be a very good day.
"Where are we?" asked Marique, yawning and stretching, "and more important, where can I pee?"
"We are parked inside a national monument. There are public washrooms but they won't be cleaned or open yet. Wake Maya. There is an ancient building on the rise above us. We can go there to watch the sun rise, and no one will see us pee."
The three of them found their sandals and locked up the van and walked up the slight rise to the closest building ruin. The stone building was built of arches in the Muslim way, and they walked under the arch on their side and kept walking until they were under the arch on the eastern side. In front of them was not just the sunrise, but the sunrise over an entire ancient and vacant palace, and fort, and city.
The two women gasped at the view. "What is this place?"
"Fatehpur Sikri," replied Will. "That brown smudge between us and the sunrise is the putrid smog of Agra, where the Taj Mahal is. The Mogul emperor Akbar built this city to replace Agra as his capital back in the mid 1500's, but there was too little water to support a city, so it wasn't the capital for very long. It sure shows that Akbar and the Moguls cherished their Persian heritage. Look at all the domes and arches."
"Was he the same guy that built the Taj Mahal? He seemed to like building follies." asked Marique, as she borrowed Maya's tiny monocular so she could have a good look around.
"The Taj was built by his grandson. I guess architectural follies ran in the family."
"Or stupidity," Maya's depressed, glass half empty attitude was already emerging for the day. "This must have cost a fortune. Maybe not. They probably used slave labour. And then they just abandoned it. Like, they never thought to ask the locals about the water as step one. Sheesh."
Marique lost her patience at Maya's continuing downer. "Give me a break. Merde! Poor baby, life is so unfair to you. Born in California, twenty and pretty and fair, already named as an actress on an 'ollywood film, 'ave an invisible power that can he
al or kill, and 'ere you are 'aving adventures in India. Poor baby. Merde, you make me so angry. We pass a thousand women a day on this 'ighway that would trade places with you in an instant. Suck it up, princess."
"Hey, everyone cool it," soothed Will. "Just enjoy the view. It's pretty amazing."
"Who's she?" Maya asked hoping her two friends would stop staring at her. She pointed behind them to a woman coming up the slope from their van with a basket on her head.
"Someone who heard that some crazy ferengi’s were throwing money around," said Will. The woman yelled to them that she had eggs and chapattis. "Ah, breakfast at one of the most surreal places in a surreal country."
The woman unpacked her basket and set up a kitchen where she would be in the shade of the building in the heat of the day. "I being tea lady to workers," she introduced herself. She lit a small but solid-looking kerosene stove and put a huge aluminum tea kettle on it to heat. She had a covered pot filled with warm chapattis which she put on the lid, which became a tray. In another pot she had fresh eggs and butter.
In the way of the third world, they settled on a price first, because if you didn't settle on a price first, they always surprised you with the high cost. Marique danced down to the van and came back with their plates and cups. They sat beside the woman while she cooked and they watched the day unfold around her, and drank a most foul concoction of sweetened canned milk and stewed tea,
They all agreed it was the finest cup of tea they had ever had in their lives, because it was served up with one of the most eerie and fantastic views on earth. As they waited while their eggs and chapattis fried in butter that was probably lard and would be greasy and disgusting and fabulous, the first tour bus of Taj tourists from the hotels of Agra arrived and wafted the morning mist into swirls.
As more and more people took the organized tours of the compound below them, the workers migrated to their knoll for their first tea break of the day. The three of them sat on the dusty steps of the building drinking tea with the locals and joining in their scathing remarks about the average weight of the people in the tour groups.
"We are all the time having our tea up here," said the gentleman who had woken them at the van, "because none of the tourists are climbing this slope. It would be attacking their heart most certainly dead."
One old toothless man cackled and said something while wagging his head. "He is saying that here in India, fat is most respectable. It means that you have not been being hungry for many long whiles. He says that when is coming the next famine, we will eat the fattest ones first." All the workers were laughing so hard that they could not stop. It was contagious and the three friends could not stop themselves, no matter how macabre the thought.
Will noticed that the woman had charged him more for each of their teas than she charged all of the workers combined. She grinned at him and would accept no more money for the eggs and chapattis.
The gentleman gave her the money that Will had given him this morning. "She is being my true wife of twenty years now, though I have since married her widowed sister to keep her from starving. She is thanking you for being her first customer of the day and you will carry her blessing all of this day."
"I want to see the Taj Mahal," announced Marique.
"Oh, no, no, no." said the gentleman. "This is a mustn't do today. There is a workers' strike blocking the roads to the Taj for all of today. That is why there are so many tour buses coming here."
"Merde, it is my luck. You know I have been to Paris a dozen times and I 'ave never been up la Tour d'Eiffel. Always there is some problem stopping me. Last time it was an 'oliday and free entrance, so the queue was to the Seine. Merde."
"You are not so unlucky madam." the old guard chuckled as he held something out to show her. "I am having here the key to the washrooms. I must be opening them in fifteen minutes. If you and your sister come with me now, you can have them clean and to yourselves for all of that time."
* * * * *
The highway they chose completely bypassed Agra. It was a good thing, because the dome of yellowy grey haze above the city was thickening by the minute. If they had gone to the Taj, they would have suffocated in the smog.
They chose country highways rather than the expressway to Delhi and doglegged straight north to give Delhi a wide berth. India, like the rest of the third world, was filled with vibrant villages and towns, but their cities were soul-destroying, overbusy, and polluted.
One thing the city sprawl made very clear was that India's recent economic miracle was based on trickle down economics. The rich landlords and bankers were building huge mansions at home and buying holiday villas in Europe. The middle class were wasting all of their new credit on flashy cars and smart phones.
Meanwhile, the poor were paying more and more for food and necessities. But the most telling thing was that every pile of trash was being worked over by a crowd of gleaners and their ragged children, who were truly reaping the new wealth that trickled out of the garbage.
"I grew up in the wilderness," Will told them as he drove with one eye on the ox cart coming up, and the other eye on the road atlas. "I have always been thankful for the mega cities. They keep all the hurried harried humans away from the precious places on the planet. I cannot tell you how glad I am that you don't want me to drive through Delhi."
That night they stayed in what was formerly a government bungalow used by visiting administrators. They never did figure out if it was still funded by the government, but the room had an old-fashioned grace to it, complete with a ceiling fan with long blades that moved very slowly and silently.
Being just north of Delhi they were now close enough to the Himalayas that a cool wind dropped the temperature to where they put on long sleeves. A man in the clean white jacket and pants of a colonial waiter brought them tea and a menu. The bungalow no longer ran a kitchen or a dining room, so the menu was for food from the restaurant across the street.
The restaurant seemed to be a hangout for the local hot scooter club, so they decided to order in. This also decided Will that he would sleep in the van because that was easier and faster than locking everything up inside the bungalow.
That night, using the wonders of electrical lighting, they scanned all the English language papers from Delhi looking for any reference to the fire in Goa, or the slave trade, or a burning drug truck. They found nothing.
"That cannot be," argued Marique. "a dozen men died in that fire. The bus driver was shot by the police. There were over seventy sex slaves rescued. It should be in the papers for months. Sure, not front page, but somewhere."
"There are elections coming up," Will replied. "The papers are filled to overflowing with political BS. No party is taking a stand on sex slavery, so no party wants to keep it alive in the press."
"A dozen men," Maya whispered. "I still can't get my head around that. We killed a dozen men. Why don't I feel more, you know, like inner turmoil. It's been a week and yet it is as if I wasn't involved. It's like it's just something I read about in the newspaper."
"That's because you feel no guilt about them," Will replied. "Guilt changes everything. It creates nightmares, and the nightmares create strong negative memories because they keep playing it over and over so you can't forget it."
"Still..." Maya started to argue.
"Oh stop it," Marique interrupted. "They 'ad over seventy girls in that firetrap with their 'ands bound, waiting to be sold to brothels. If a fire 'ad started by accident, the dozen men would have escaped and 'ow many of the seventy do you think they would 'ave saved?"
The three of them digested that for a moment. Maya decided it was time for a neat segue. She turned to Will.
"So, Will, how are your nightmares?" Maya asked. "Still having them?"
"No, not at all. Of course, after driving Indian roads all day, I fall asleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. Maybe it's time I told you where the nightmares came from."
"Kosovo, when you were a peace keeper," said Maya, who'd g
uessed this already.
"Yes. My outfit was securing a small town in a mountain valley. I broke the second rule. Don't get involved with the locals."
"The second rule?"
"The first rule of peacekeeping is don't take sides. You are a there to interrupt the cycle of vendettas and vigilantes, to protect non combatants. You aren't supposed to judge right or wrong, just halt the cycle of violence so everything can calm down. If you break the second rule, you almost always end up breaking the first."
"You took a lover?" Marique asked him.
"Naw, on my leave I bought some soccer balls for the local school. The trouble was, the Serbs that were guarding the pass at the north end of the valley also had a new toy. A big mortar. Every once in a while they would lob a shell at the town just to keep us on our toes."
"I don't want to hear any more," said Maya putting her hands over her ears. She knew his nightmares.
"The school boys were practicing with my new balls in the school yard when a mortar blew them through the chain link fence." He said it in a hurry all in one breath. He had to get it out.
"What did your outfit do?"
"Sent an officer up the road to make an official complaint to the Serb commander. Helped to clean up the mess. Stopped two old men with ancient AK47's from going after the guys with the mortar. The usual peacekeeper stuff."
"What did you do?" asked Maya, uncovering her ears.
"Went AWOL with one of the AK47's. Killed all six of the mortar crew."
"Six against one. That was fair, considering," replied Marique, touching him softly. He was getting very tense.
"It snowed heavily that night. They were on a mountain ledge trying to stay warm. I was trained as an Artic ranger for Christ's sake. They were sitting ducks. They didn't have a chance. Four of them were barely old enough to shave." His voice went soft. "My nightmares weren't about the kids in the school ground. They were about the kids on the mountainside. What made it worse was I couldn't admit to it."
