by Janet Sola
“I am not angry.”
“Why do you not talk with me?” I wonder if he is genuinely puzzled.
“Why are you so flaky?”
“What is this word flaky?”
“Actually,” and I stop and face him with what I hope is a serious expression, “flaky in my country means unreliable, undependable.” He smiles and cocks his head as I struggle for the right words. “It means someone who . . . doesn’t do what they say. Like showing up on time.”
“Yes, I am on time. I come for you. You are not at hotel.”
“What do you mean ‘I am not at hotel’?”
“I ring the bell, I ask the hotel man. He says to me you are missing.”
“What man?”
“The man who has skin with holes.”
Ah, the manager with his pockmarked face. “But I was not missing. I was there. Ready to go on our expedition.” I sigh and resume walking. We’re now in a busier, noisier part of town, bustling with the color and motion of cars and cows and rickshaws and people.
“Now I understand.” He sounds angry. “Your hotel man does not like me. So he says to me you are missing.”
“Really?” I think about this as I move out of the way of a bicycle rickshaw carrying the English boys I recognize from my hotel. They wave at me. Is it possible that Sahil showed up at the front gate and they sent him away without letting me know? How strange. Why?
“I come to tell you that I cannot go with you because my grandmother is very sick. I need to go to my grandmother’s village with my mother.”
I turn and look into his eyes. There is a look of worry there that seems genuine. “OK,” I say. “I’m sorry for your grandmother. Is she all right?”
“She is not so strong. She wants me to stay there in village, but I cannot. I must work.”
By now we have reached a busier part of town. Among the moving throng, three old men with white brush-broom mustaches and wire-rimmed spectacles are engaged in animated conversation. Sahil stops momentarily to chat with them and then catches up with me again.
“Where do you go today?”
“Actually, I’m going to the train station.”
“If you like, I can go with you.”
“No thank you.”
“I can help you get a ticket fast. Then I can take you today to find the master painter. Now I am free.”
“No, it was possible before but not now. Tonight I must leave on the train for Delhi with my friend.”
“What time is your train?” he asks me.
“I think there’s a train at ten o’clock in the evening. I don’t have the ticket yet.”
“This is not a problem. The bus to the town of master painter is twenty minutes. Also this is the place of very old temples. We have one or two hours. We find a very beautiful painting for you to take on your journey to Delhi. We come back here by five o’clock. Before the time on the town clock. See, here it is always six-thirty.” He gestures up to a huge clock face on a tower where the hands are indeed stuck at six-thirty. The clock looks as if it should be in England instead of India.
A thought occurs to me. Why does he want to take me to this town anyway? Does he see himself as my guide? If I accept his offer, should I pay him? I’m in a country where I don’t really know the rules. “Don’t you have things to do?” I ask him. “Your job. Your family.”
“My family is my mother only. I do not work today.”
The train station looms in front of us, crowded with people who seem to be more or less living there, squatting together in little family groups with ragged children running everywhere. Food vendors hawk chapatis and sweets and drinks from their mobile stands.
“Miss Elena, do you like one cold lassi?”
I would, but I refuse. “No, really. I must get my ticket.”
“OK.” Sahil’s attention is diverted by a middle-aged man in a white tunic standing by one of the taxis who is waving at him.
“Excuse me for a moment, Miss Elena. I must go see my friend.”
I smile and shrug. “That’s fine. Nice seeing you.”
Inside, ticket buyers are waiting their turns in a chaotic queue. My first task is to find the end of the line, which is a little vague, and then plant myself in it, making sure I inch forward. Twenty minutes later, I've made no progress at all. There seem to be endless interruptions at the front of the line, where people crowd in and shout at the clerks behind the partition. Rather than telling them to wait their turn, the perpetually nodding clerks seem to respond to the loudest and most aggressive demands.
When Sahil appears again, he tells me it was important to talk to his taxi-driving friend who has many family troubles. He repeats his offer to help me buy my ticket. “No thanks,” I say. I really do want to do this ticket-buying thing on my own.
“Miss Elena,” he says, “see that old man over here?” He nods at an elderly man sitting in one of the alcoves, a vacant stare on his face. “He comes here a long time ago to buy ticket to see his wife in Delhi. He waits and waits in the queue. She waits and waits for him and he does not come. Then she dies. Now he is very sad, you see, and sits here all day.”
I shake my head at the ridiculousness of it. “You are making this up.”
He holds up his hand in a gesture of scout’s honor. “This is India.” I look again at the hopelessly stalled queue.
“OK, I need two tickets to Delhi tonight, first class. How much?”
“Do not worry.” He’s gone in a flash. A minute later I see him behind the glass partition, chatting with one of the harried clerks, who now is emitting a series of chuckles. In what seems like seconds, Sahil appears at my side. “Two tickets to Delhi, ten p.m. train, best class,” he says, and names the price, which seems very reasonable to me. I give him the rupees, he reappears with the tickets, and it’s done. I expect angry stares from the people ahead of me in the queue, but no one seems to mind or even notice.
Sahil breaks into a grin as I put the tickets away. “You see. You save much time. And now chalo, let’s go. We use this extra time to take the fast bus to the beautiful town of the temples.”
I’m a little dazzled by how he easily he’s maneuvered through the maze of train ticketing. But I still have my doubts that going to a village for the afternoon would be a wise choice.
“You say you believe the master painter might be in this village?”
“Yes, Miss Elena, I believe this.”
Who is this master painter? I would love to meet him. If he were there, I could not only find something close to the painting I lost, but maybe others of equal beauty. But then there’s Sahil. I don’t like the way he appears and disappears. It’s disconcerting. On the other hand, he’s part of this amazing culture that I want to get to know. There are the two voices inside of me again, one saying “be careful” and the other “why not”? They always seem to be vying for top place. The “why not” is now whispering in my ear, very seductively.
“I have to be back by five o’clock.”
“Before five o’clock.”
Minutes later, across the street from the train station, Sahil finds the right blue bus in a herd of dilapidated busses, and soon we’re swerving down the road into the countryside. There are a few other passengers—a woman with a large bundle of rice and a small bundle of child, some shy young women who peek out from behind their veils, several old men with bare sagging chests in lungis. Sahil finds a seat for me as the bus starts up. But instead of sitting next to me, he walks up and down the aisle, conversing amiably with his fellow passengers. He’s speaking in Hindi, so I can’t follow, but whatever he’s saying seems to bring guffaws of hilarity.
We rattle past huts and oxen and barely miss whole families of orange-wrapped pilgrims walking by the side of the road. Finally, he sits down next to me. “Miss Elena,” he says, “you are from a famous place called America. But when I first see you, I think you are French.”
“Why did you think so?” I ask. Do I look mysterious? Sexy? Do I want to?
“Because American people are happy all the time. Talk loud. Laugh loud. You are more … more thinking, like French people. You are more, what is the word . . . serious.”
Well, it’s not exactly a compliment, but I decide to make the best of it. “Very serious.” I frown and turn down the corners of my mouth.
He laughs. “But today you are very happy. We find the master painter. I like his painting very much.”
“How about you?” I ask. “Are you serious? When I first saw you in your shop, you seemed quite serious.”
“Yes, moi aussi. Serious. I am a serious painter.” Where does he get his French phrases, I wonder. He turns toward me and puts on a long-faced expression, just briefly. “Since I am sixteen I study to paint. This is true. For ten years I work to become a good painter. It is very difficult. I go to Varanasi to study. The place they call Benares. My first teacher is the master painter we go to find today. ”
“The holy city where they burn the dead by the Ganges. I would love to go there.”
“Yes. That is the place. Many Western people like to go to this city. But I do not like it. My friends do not like it. I do not like the dead people. It has a smell. But I stay. I paint very hard. But now you see, I cannot be famous. Because in Rajasthan they don’t care about the painter. Only the shop owner can make money.”
“Then it’s like America. There too, it’s difficult to be an artist.”
“I think you are an artist too,” he says. “I see this in your eyes, sometime serious, sometime happy. I think there are many things you want to say.”
“Well, I don’t know if I am an artist. I’d like to be. But instead of paint, I use words.”
“Ah, yes, words are good. Like paints. Blue words. Red words. Black words. Gold words. So many colors of words.”
“But lately, I haven’t been able to . . .”
He cuts me off. “I think you are like Saraswati.”
“Oh, yes, Saraswati. The goddess of the arts.” I think of the moment this all began, when Jason’s statue of this very goddess fell off the shelf and broke.
“I like this Saraswati. She has many colors inside as well. Like you.”
“I wish that were true,” I say. At first, I feel myself being charmed by him, being pulled along by that idea. Then I pull back. It feels like false flattery, like being told you are beautiful on a day you know you look awful. In spite of my incantations, Saraswati has not made an appearance. Those goddesses inside of me, how can I wake them up? If I were really like Saraswati, I could just channel all the colors in the exploding universe instead of facing my blank sheet of notebook paper.
Sahil changes the subject. “I would not like to go to America,” he says. “Paris. Maybe. America, no. My friend goes to America and says, good for making money. But not good for the life.” In the middle of nowhere, in a countryside of dry grass and brown hills, the bus heaves several times and comes to a jerking halt.
The town is not at all promising. It is not a town at all, in fact, but a nearly deserted dirt street lined with hole-in-the-wall shops hovering over knee-high cement sidewalks. The few people here, mostly shopkeepers hiding behind their wares, are barely moving. A child sits on one of the sidewalks, humming to herself and dangling her feet over the edge. A white-haired woman, perhaps her grandmother, dressed in a bright yellow sari with a flower tucked behind one ear, is gracefully lying on her side. She looks like a sleeping bodhisattva.
The breeze from the open window in the bus cooled me off on the trip here, but now I’m starting to feel the heat seep under my skin. Sahil buys a Fanta in a milky glass bottle for me. It’s delicious, an icy orange explosion in my mouth.
“I talk to these shop people to find the master painter,” he says. As I sip and wait under the shade of a metal overhang, I watch him chatting in Hindi with the shopkeepers. I like watching the way he moves. He looks so effortlessly graceful in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Even with his shiny leather dress shoes, a little incongruous with his blue jeans, he somehow looks cool. I wonder how old he is, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I’m guessing. Too young for me. He gestures in the air, his lean arms and long fingers flashing, hypnotizing to watch. In response, the shopkeepers bob their heads vehemently.
Is he really describing this master painter? He could be talking about cricket scores for all I know. After some time of back and forth gesturing and bobbing, Sahil shrugs. He reports back to me in a solemn voice. “The master painter is not here now. Business maybe. Family maybe. But is possible he is here later today.”
I am disappointed, but somehow not surprised. There is the feeling of wild goose chase about this entire expedition. I feel alternately charmed and bamboozled by this mercurial young man. “Possible? Not possible. So what do we do now?” I’m not sure I’m successful at keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’m not sure I want to.
He cocks his head and looks puzzled, as if I’m being purposefully difficult, which maybe I am by Indian standards. “Miss Elena. We are here. We see the master painter later, the temple now, very beautiful. Not very far.”
“I suppose as long as I’m here I might as well see the temples,” I say with a sigh. I want somehow to convey to him that he promised one thing and didn’t deliver. Sahil takes our empty Fanta bottles and returns them to the shop, and then leads the way down a path away from the dusty street.
Outside of the one-street town, we cross a sparse landscape, fields of stubbed grass littered here and there with crumpled plastic bottles. Sahil is ahead of me. I have to hurry to keep up with him, brushing away buzzing insects as I go, heading for a green patch on the horizon.
At the field’s edge, we follow a path that takes us into a woodland of broad-leafed trees. The light changes suddenly and dramatically. We’ve entered a quiet world of dappled sunlight, of birdsong, of the cool smell of smooth-barked trees. Our footsteps are nearly silent on the soft floor of fallen vegetation. I feel myself relaxing, as if time itself is slowing. Sahil has wandered ahead and I’m alone. After a while, I come to a shallow stream. Clear water ripples down the streambed; moss creeps over the stone wall that follows the opposite bank.
I round a bend and come upon a woman sitting back on her haunches on a flat rock in the middle of the stream. Her brown legs emerge from a scarlet sari, startling in the midst of the green, like a bright tongue or a flower. The sari wraps around her head and hangs over one eye. As she wrings a rope of cloth, the muscles of her arms flex. She looks up to see me watching and smiles. Her teeth show white, and her face is beautiful in the light. Not beautiful in the way we think of in America—TV-beautiful—but beautiful with a spirit that says she loves being in the world, in this place.
I want to linger a while, to somehow cross the barrier of my station as a traveler just passing through. I want to get to know this woman. We would not have to talk. I could simply sit by the stream and wash clothes with her. I try to imagine her life. She would go home to her husband and children and cook chapatis near a fire outside her hut. Her children would be playing and she would be humming. And then the stars would come out and she would go inside and sleep on a mat on the floor next to her husband. Her eyes would close and the warm Indian night would pass. She would wake up to another day very much like this one. It’s a kind of happiness, I think, so different from America, where happiness is something always in the distance that can be reached only by accomplishing a long list of goals for self-improvement, where we are always chasing something, the next thing, without even knowing why.
“I think she is very happy,” I say when I catch up with Sahil.
“Yes, she is happy. She enjoys her life.” He says it with such conviction that I feel he understands her, that the inhabitants of this corner of the world have a shared knowledge that is just beyond my grasp.
We emerge from the woods into pastures of hip-high grass. A family of women and children are moving through it, cutting the grass as they go, brightly colored fish in a sea of gree
n. I can now see the temples in the distance, three of them, like pale ships on the horizon.
“Look,” says Sahil, gesturing toward a small nearby tree. “This place has a special bird.” On the tree’s spindly branches sit a pair of blue birds with long, brilliant red tail feathers. They look like elegant parrots. “When I was a small child, I come here and try to catch these birds. But they are too fast for me.”
I smile at this little story. His childhood must be very close to him. All its memories. My own childhood seems almost like another dimension. A demure little girl in a smocked coat and rubber boots who, even then, had the conflicting urges of wanderlust and trepidation. My mother loved to tell the tale of the time when I was four and I announced I was leaving on a trip, and then packed my cardboard suitcase with my toy tea set. My parents, highly amused, watched from the picture window as I marched down the street as if I knew exactly where I was going, until I got to the first corner at the end of the block. There, my confidence wavered. I could not get the courage to cross the street. Eventually I turned around and came home to where my parents were waiting for me. So far away, that childhood, or was it? I had almost done the same thing this trip, almost gone back before I started, but somehow I had gathered my courage. And now, like Alice, I was on the other side of the looking glass. But I was still me, with all my anxieties, pulling them along wherever I went.
Sahil calls my attention to birds again. They are on the ground now, pecking around for something to eat, heads down, red tail feathers moving from side to side. “We call these birds the tuk-tuk. Because, you see, they move their tails just so. Tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk.” He makes a motion with his hand, back and forth. “They like to move their tails very much.”
Is he trying to be racy, to get a reaction from me? I roll my eyes, although I’m not sure if he sees it, or even if he did, whether he would know what it means.
“Yes, they’re pretty birds,” I say blandly, to take the conversation in a different direction. “Their colors are beautiful. And they’re free. Where I come from, we like to keep pretty birds in cages.”
