The paper was thin and glossy and the writing, in Urdu, was poorly transmitted, some illegible. The office had received streams of such poems. Other embassies in the city also received them. All carried my name and all originated in Nairobi. I paged through them without interest. There was my name, scrawled in someone else’s hand. All looked like dreary love poems, desire, loss, the usual sentimental ambit. I could care less.
“We got phone calls from all the consulates and embassies in the city asking who this phantom Indian poet was who lived in Nairobi.”
I dropped the pages onto the desk and shook my head. Someone was playing a trick, I said. The Consul was not convinced. Everyone here was an artist of one sort or another. The Consul himself, though not an artist, was a critic of the early Mughal style in painting. He waved his hand at the miniatures on the walls. “Don’t hide yourself. We know it was you. You must write more like this.” He pressed his finger down onto the stack of faxes. “That is why I gave you an assistant. Think of those days in Nairobi as an apprenticeship. Now you at last have the ease to spread your wings. Your assistant can do your work, yes?”
I started to laugh. “Is this why I was transferred?”
“Of course!”
I could think of nothing else to say. The whole situation was ridiculous. “I’m not a poet,” I said finally, my voice flat.
“Do not lie to us.”
I stood and found that I was shaking. The tone of the Consul’s insistence made me angry, and I clenched a fist as I walked out, saying only that I had an appointment.
The corridor met me with silence. Behind every door were hidden mouths no doubt sunk in scorn and laughter. Perhaps the joke had not originated in Nairobi but here. Perhaps someone here wanted to make a fool of me. I clattered noisily down the wooden stairs.
A teenager waited for me in my office. He was no more than sixteen, a high school student, and writing a paper on the history of languages for an honors history class. Could I tell him something of the Indian languages? I clapped my hands. Of course! For half an hour I fed him nonsense. All Indian languages, I explained, were derived from Hebrew. “That’s where Hindi comes from. Notice how Hebrew and Hindi sound alike.” I was gratified to see him scribbling. Hebrew was a Dravidian language and therefore all Indian languages were also Dravidian. “King David’s original name,” I said, “was Dravid. Thus, Dravidian.” All except Punjabi and Jain, which were invented by rajas for the sole use of eunuchs. “All modern Punjabis and Jains are the descendants of eunuchs.” He wrote furiously.
With the so-called honors student gone, I exploded into spasms of laughter and Baggie popped his head around the door to ask what was so funny. I told him and he looked at me crossly, like an angry mother, and slammed the door on his way out. My thoughts returned to the current problem: who was it who might have worked alongside me in Nairobi, who might be here, scribbling those dreadful lines? I thought of those love poems sent across continents in seconds, the very handwriting of the writer, anonymous and electronic, a pulse on phone lines, a transmission from one satellite to another, drowning the sky—the whole spectrum of electromagnetic bands—in the hieroglyphs of miserable and repetitive passions.
The next morning found me having drunk a half bottle of bourbon, cotton-headed from a hangover, and curiously exhilarated on sighting Baggie with his downcast eyes. My assistant was still angry over the trick I played on the kid, and I told him I got drunk to celebrate, that’s how good a joke it was. In the afternoon, Double Love was announced. “A Miss Love,” Baggie’s voice crackled over the intercom. Across her eyes I recognized that same torpid lusterlessness I had seen at her father’s house. She wore a tight black skirt that stopped above her knees and a white tanktop and held a leather jacket slung over one shoulder. Before Baggie could close the door, she had thrown the jacket violently onto the desk and kicked off her shoes.
“It’s so boring out there. He makes me stand there handing out that shit. God, I hate him.”
Her anger invigorated me and I was flattered she had come to see me. Our sex was hurried and anxious, performed standing up, her body pinned to the wall under the portrait of Singh. She was quick and unenthusiastic and, when she left, I noticed how her odor clung to me. I settled back into my chair behind the desk and replayed the feel of her body as it pressed against my skin and hands. When she had come, I was sure the hint of an expression had glimmered on her face. That memory stayed with me for days.
She returned the following week, and soon she was visiting every few days, sometimes three times a week. Always at the office, never where I lived, though I told her where that was. She preferred the cool afternoons, and we made love with increasing regularity. With each visit I detected a larger crack in the façade of her apathy. I wanted to break the mask completely. With her gone, I thought about her constantly. My body ached after the increasing violence of her movements and the diversions that normally propelled me through the days—my fantasies and tricks—lost their appeal.
I confessed this to her one afternoon. We were sitting together against the wall in the office, our bodies glistening from the sweat of our exertion, drinking tea Baggie had carried in on a tray. I no longer cared what he thought, yet I discovered there was something irreducible about Baggie’s good nature. His anger never persisted long and soon he had grown used to Double Love’s presence and prepared tea for her with extra sugar and not so much milk, the only way she said it did not totally disgust her.
I was in my underwear and she in a shirt whose flaps hardly covered the triangle of her crotch. Baggie now grinned on repeating his claim that I was corrupted within and without. Only rarely did his face cloud with worry on looking at me, but such times I ignored, and instead I experienced a growing fondness for Baggie and his ways. In a certain fashion he had become a regular aspect of my afternoons with Double Love.
I told Double Love I wanted her to come live with me. She immediately turned away and said it was impossible.
She hated her father and hated living there. Every moment was one of boredom and tedium. It was the straightforward solution, I argued. We would live together, in the same small room, and I would work and she would do exactly as she pleased, whenever she pleased. She shook her head and said she couldn’t explain. I pressed her for a reason. I took her face in my hands and turned it toward me and demanded to know why. After a minute, she confessed that if she left her father, he would kill her. She was sure of it. He had done it before. He had killed her mother. When her mother tried to leave, he shot her. “He made it into an accident. He spent a year inside for manslaughter. That’s when he discovered who he was.” She laughed scornfully. “The Seventh Avatar!”
Several days passed before I saw her again and I was given time to think over her confession and the Seventh Avatar’s crime. After work one afternoon, I purchased a gun at an antique store south of the city, the kind I remembered from old westerns, with a silver barrel and a dark leather handle and a solid weight to it. Once home, the gun felt strangely light in my hand. When I bought it, I had no clear purpose, only guessing a gun might somehow help me free Double Love. Now I could protect her. That night I loaded the gun and slept easily with it close by on my bedside table.
I picked up a bottle of bourbon before work and opened it in the car. Baggie looked at me with concern when I walked in—he could smell the alcohol. By the early afternoon, when Baggie knocked to tell me I was wanted upstairs, I was drunk. The Consul again.
I allowed a half hour to pass before I stood and made my cautious way to the Consul’s office. Along the corridor the same sounds echoed—faint strains of music, a chisel on stone, a man beating a desk. It occurred to me that I had seldom encountered my co-workers. The few I’d met appeared the dour and quiet fellows indigenous to diplomatic postings, except that here, the bustle of other consulates was absent, as was the morning rush when employees gathered to chat over tea.
The Consul offered me a jalebi but I refused. The bright orange sweet l
ooked distasteful after the whisky. In the corner, instead of the sitar, stood a white marble statue of a hermaphrodite with a thick, erect penis and rounded breasts. The Consul’s desk was free from the pile of papers that had littered it previously.
“So what of it?” he asked immediately.
“What?”
“How goes it? The work and all.”
“Very well. I saw five people yesterday and—”
“Yes, yes—that’s not what I asked. The poetry. No one comes here to work. We do other things. The poetry. How does it go?” He violently thumped the desk with his index finger.
I looked at him with hatred. “It doesn’t,” I said as bluntly as I could. “I am not a poet.”
He breathed in loudly through his nostrils and let his head fall back. He sat like this for some moments, examining the ceiling, eyes rolling from corner to corner as if seeking inspiration in such a truncated vision of heaven.
“Your ghazals are fine, modern ghazals. Some of the finest. When I read them I thought of Faiz.”
I responded derisively. “Why did you bring me here?”
He looked back at me and for a moment appeared genuinely puzzled. “To write, yes. Why else?”
I dropped my head into my hands. It felt pointless to protest further.
“I thought maybe seeing all your poems on my desk made you shy, so I have hidden them this time.” He pulled open a drawer and there appeared again the many faxes. He started to read. It was atrocious and I insisted that he stop.
“Why?”
His incomprehension touched me. His motive truly was an uncomplicated one. He had brought me here to write, like an ancient Khan who gathered around him the writers and artists of his time.
“I did not write those. I could not have. Didn’t you get my file? I am a drunk. I am drunk. Now. I have the lowest rating in my office. Probably the lowest in the whole service. No one dared promote me.”
“Yes, yes. I know. But you poets are like that. We have a tabla player. One of the best here on the West Coast. He beats his wife and children and every now and then the police take him away for a few days. But he is a tabla player.”
I wanted to hit him now. He had begun to resemble the ambassador in Nairobi—if I poked hard enough I was sure he would burst. In a single gesture, I threw my arm across the desk and snatched the few poems he held in his hand; then standing, I tore them violently and scattered the fragments over the desk and floor. He rushed forward, surprised, and tried to stop me.
“There! That’s the only poetry I’m capable of!”
Soon he was on his knees frantically gathering the pieces of paper. “You don’t understand!” he shouted. “You can write here!” His pleas followed me out through the door.
In the corridor I heard steps hurrying toward me. It was Baggie, he was running and breathless.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“That boy’s father is here.”
“Who?”
“That boy. Remember, the one you told all the tales to. The father is screaming downstairs. I couldn’t keep him out of your office.”
“Come on,” I said. I walked quickly past Baggie and down along the corridor. His footsteps echoed mine and arriving at my office I didn’t hesitate throwing the door open with a thrust of my hand and walking inside.
He was a tall man with short blond hair and I was struck by how much he resembled his son. They both displayed an arrogant air about their eyes, their noses sleek and elegant. His cheeks were red and I could see the simmering fury in his face.
“Was it you?” His voice was deeper than his son’s, and it carried in it the familiar menace of weak but violent men. I knew immediately he was no match for me.
“Who told your son stories? Yes.” I walked across to my desk and casually picked up a file that lay among my papers and pretended to study it.
“Do you know what you did?”
“I can’t imagine. Why don’t you tell me?” I didn’t look at the man.
“The teacher threw him out of the class. This was an honors class. He was going to go to Stanford. I went to Stanford.” He spoke with a metered determination at the end of which I knew waited a fist.
“The teacher told him if he couldn’t take his papers seriously he obviously wasn’t cut out for the honors program. They threw him out of all the honors classes. You ruined him.”
“Your son didn’t deserve to be in that class. He should have checked out what I told him. That kid was stupider than he looked.”
Much to my joy, he raised a fist and prepared to strike. As he did so, the door burst open and Baggie charged in with two guards. The man stood motionless for a brief second and before the guards reached him, I had time to get a punch in. My fist landed square on his face and he fell back scrambling for balance and crying out in pain. The guards took hold of him and carried him out while he kicked and swore.
“I know your name,” he shouted from the doorway, trying to fight his way free. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
I could still feel his face on my fist. I’d been cheated from a real fight. I turned to Baggie. “Who asked for your help?”
“That man is a maniac.”
For a moment I thought of striking Baggie, but turned away and told him to get out.
I took a drink of the bourbon and felt for the pistol in my briefcase. There it was and now was the time. Swinging the briefcase wildly, I walked out telling Baggie to cancel all appointments for the rest of the day. If Double Love came by, I told him to keep her occupied. “Give her tea and read her ghazals.” His eyes telegraphed turmoil and confusion, but thankfully he said nothing, and I was able to escape without resorting to explanations.
The drive to Dr. Boyce’s house had me speeding through several stop signs. In the daylight, I saw how close the building stood to the ocean. The water stretched at the end of the road and a breeze swept along the street.
The pistol felt like a toy when I pulled it from my briefcase. It was hard to believe it could kill. I thrust it into my inside pocket where it pressed hard against my lung.
Dr. Boyce smiled when he took my hand and said he was always glad to meet with a disciple of Atatatata. He looked smaller than I remembered and walked like an old man, and his joints appeared stiff from arthritis.
Nothing was changed from my previous visit, except for Double Love’s absence, and I took a seat on the same sofa while the Divine Avatar prepared coffee in the kitchen. The air of mustiness mixed with the aroma of recently burned incense. A faint haze of smoke hung lazily in the room.
Soon the doctor was talking, as he had before, about the coming union of East and West, having shown no interest in why I’d come. In reality, he explained, there was no such thing as East or West. “You stand in China and what is to the east? America. We are the Chinese east. And you stand on the coast here in California and it is Japan that is our west.” His voice sung crisply from the kitchen and, on returning with the coffee, he resumed his familiar peregrination around the room, forming the same, simple figure eight while his eyes searched the corners and the masks and the books for that other, spectral guest. The bright afternoon light revealed a heavy coating of dust burying all his possessions.
Taking a sip from the coffee, I placed the cup on the table and pulled the gun out from under my coat. It was best to end this quickly, in case anyone else should arrive, or I should lose my resolve. I didn’t know what to expect when Dr. Boyce saw the gun, but the last thing was that he would simply continue his figure eight, talking as if nothing had changed. Even the rhythm of his speech remained unaltered. “There will come a time,” he said, “when the West will have taken so much from the East and the East will have taken so much from the West that the one will become the other. East will be West but West will be East.” I raised the gun and pointed it at him, following him with the barrel. Still, he did nothing. His body passed so close that if I hadn’t pulled the gun away his thigh would have struck it.
“That is w
hen the Divine Atatatata will make his appearance.”
Then I understood: he was blind.
I waved the gun in the air as he passed by, making sure it crossed his field of vision. No reaction. There I sat, following him with the gun for several minutes, not knowing what to do.
Finally I asked what I had wanted to ask all along. Did he really kill his wife?
The question brought a pause from Dr. Boyce and he turned toward my voice, not in the least surprised. “Yes,” he said. “It was because of me she died.”
I cocked the hammer of the pistol and prepared to squeeze the trigger.
“If I had not married her,” he continued. “If I had not wanted a child.”
“What?” I said, holding the pressure firmly on the trigger.
“She died giving birth. Twenty years ago.”
Then, searching among the objects in that small room, I saw what I had not seen before. Not one photograph of Double Love showed her with her mother, though several showed Dr. Boyce with his wife, a young couple starting out. Not proof, for sure, but right then that wasn’t what I needed. I released the pressure on the trigger and dropped the gun into my lap. My body began to shake and I no longer knew what to do. What was it that I wanted? Dr. Boyce continued his ramble around the room, unaware of what had just occurred.
Double Love was standing on the sidewalk, leaning against my car. She saw the gun in my hand and looked into my face. I don’t know what she read there.
“Did you do it?” she said, as I ran down the steps toward her. She revealed little emotion, neither hope nor fear, but a generic lack of curiosity used when asking about the lives of distant, little known relations, and maybe a sense of trepidation.
“What?”
She pointed to the gun. “I was hoping—” she said but broke off and turned away. “I hear him calling,” she said, indifferently, showing no concern at discovering he was still alive. She frowned. “I guess I’ve got to go.” She climbed the stairs but stopped before reaching the door.
“You can live here,” she called out from the top of the steps. “Like me. Pretend this is home.”
Good Indian Girls: Stories Page 2
