The Overnight Palace

by Janet Sola

  He murmurs to the driver and we turn a corner and stop in front of my hotel’s wooden gate. “You must meet me at the tunnel and we go together.”

  “Why don’t you come here to get me?”

  “No, I cannot come here to meet you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why. This hotel is only for tourists—for you.”

  “I cannot believe that.”

  “Yes, this is true.”

  Something angry flashes inside of me. “I don’t care. It’s all right. Come here tomorrow morning, at eleven o’clock. Come inside and ask for me.”

  He shrugs. “You see.”

  Before I get out, he presses something into my palm, secretly. It’s just a touch, and yet that spot feels like the flaring center of its own tiny universe.

  “Friends,” he says. “Like the film.”

  “Yes, friends,” I say. In the dark, I can see only his smile and his white shirt.

  Back in my room, I turn on the light to see what Sahil gave me. It looks like one of the seeds we used to play our game with yesterday. Black on one side. I turn it over. On the white side, there is a tiny ink drawing of a woman with long hair playing a lute. Saraswati.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Monsoon Palace

  When I wake up the next morning to the smells and sounds of the lake coming in through my window, I think back over the evening, how awkward and silly it all was. Then I think of the little things Sahil did, not just arranging “the dinner and movie” date, but explaining the film to me, and especially pressing the seed with the drawing of Saraswati into my hand. I pick it up again. She’s sitting on wavy lines meant to be a river, with other wavier lines for her hair. It’s beautiful that he did this little art work for me, but a little scary. On the other hand, isn’t that what I keep telling myself I’m here for, to get beyond being scared of everything? I have an insight, a small one: There are two kinds of people in the world, those like Cathy, who push their way through life, full of chutzpah and bravado, willing to tackle whatever comes their way. Then there are those like me, who feel themselves pulled, like the sea pulls the river. All I have to decide is whether to resist the pull or let myself go with it.

  What does Sahil want? I don’t know. What do I want? I don’t know that either. But I feel the bitterness that followed my breakup with Peter gradually seeping out of me. I want to be free of desire, because I know its traps. I want to stay in the peaceful watching place I felt in the temple. And yet with all my heart I also want to go up to that dark palace on the hill with Sahil, the palace of the monsoons, and feel the wind and the rain on my skin.

  I’m sitting in the courtyard waiting for Sahil when the manager approaches me, black eyes simmering in his pockmarked face. “Someone comes for you,” he says, not looking at me. “He must wait outside.”

  “Why must he wait outside?” I use my best California “peace and love” tone of voice. I’m determined to stand up to this bully without spoiling my exuberant mood. It’s a gorgeous day, warm, pale blue sky, with the hint of a breeze that scatters leaf shadows across the stone floor.

  “This hotel is for tourists. Only for tourists. He is no good.”

  “What do you mean by that remark?”

  “Many Indian men no good.”

  Maybe including you, I think, as I grab my daypack. Sahil is outside the gate. Today, thankfully, there is no sidekick. He’s leaning against the wall, crutches dangling, His white shirt is immaculately ironed, even his blue jeans look pressed. He’s wearing black athletic shoes, one of them loose to accommodate the elastic wrap. He looks so vulnerable that I feel a little bad putting him through all this. I could have met him away from the hotel like he suggested, but no, I had to prove a point. “You see, I tell you,” he says.

  “Oh, who cares about him? He’s a bigot.” I shrug, to make light of it.

  “What is this word, bigot?”

  I think for a moment about how to communicate this concept—by talking about the treatment of blacks in America, Cathy’s bi-racial mother, any of a million examples of prejudice and intolerance. But in this case, the bigot was trashing someone of his own race. I saw the complexities. “A bigot is someone who thinks they are bigger than everyone else, even though inside they are very small,” I say finally.

  He frowns as if thinking it over. “This is a good word. I remember this word. Bigot.”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry you had to go through that. And how is your foot?”

  “OK for our picnic at the Monsoon Palace,” he says, and pats a leather satchel radiating rice and curry smells that’s slung from his shoulder. We make our way down the street to a shop where he buys cold sodas that he adds to the satchel.

  Not far away is a stand of tuk-tuk taxis. Sahil goes directly to the driver, and greets him. It’s the same man he spoke to in the train station a few days ago. “Elena, this is my friend Amar. He takes us up the high mountain.”

  “Namaste,” I say. He nods without smiling, and yet there is something quietly gracious in his manner. Amar is a handsome man, a few years past forty I’m guessing. Why are his eyes so sad, I wonder. He extends his hand to offer us seats in yet another vehicle that resembles a dilapidated golf cart, and we’re off, winding through the urban parade of people and animals and machines at a pace that takes my breath away. “He is a good driver, no, my friend Amar. He is a good man, his wife is a nurse at the hospital. She helps me with my foot. I am good as new very soon.” Amar turns around and smiles, as if hearing about her gives him pleasure.

  With Sahil alongside of me, the swirl of colors and motion and smells starts to fragment into individuals with quirks and back stories and motives, like characters in a play. He points to an elderly man weaving along on a broken down bicycle. “He is a rich man until he gives all his money to his daughter to buy her a husband. Now, the husband does not give money even for a new bicycle.” When we pass a band of gypsies, the tiny mirrors in their skirts and the gold teeth in their smiles catching the sun, Sahil tells me this is the land where gypsies began, where they played their music all night until the maharajahs were jealous “because, you see, the gypsies are poor and also happy, and the maharajah is rich but not happy, so he is jealous and tries to drive gypsies away.” I am lulled, almost hypnotized, by the rhythm of his voice. I love the way he sees the world. But he belongs to this land, to this vision. And I don’t. I am just an enchanted traveler.

  Ahead of us, the road twists its way up the barren hill. Long ago maharajahs must have come here in ornate covered pallets carried by servants. As we climb, the switchbacks get sharper and our flimsy vehicle swerves with every curve. We sway with it, sliding back and forth. I self-consciously try not to bump against Sahil. And yet, here we go, around a hairpin, and my hand reaches out to brace myself and somehow ends up on his jean-covered thigh. I quickly withdraw it, but as we sway back on the next curve, he reaches out with his own two hands and holds mine, just briefly, as if my hand were a very special and lovely thing. “Don’t worry, Elena,” he says. “We are safe in this mountain place.” As he puts his hands back in his lap, I notice his wrist bones extending from the ironed cuffs of his white shirt, strong, yet delicate too.

  With two curves in the road to go, the engine makes a popping sound and stops. Amar gets out, Sahil follows, they look under the hood and shake their heads. “Sorry,” says Sahil, “we must walk. Amar waits for us here.” I offer to carry his bulky satchel for him, but he refuses, pressing it tightly under his arm as he moves up the road on his crutches with an agile thump and glide rhythm, urging me to keep up with him. The climb is exhausting, and without the breeze from the motion of the tuk-tuk to cool us, I feel the heat of the sun on my skin through my gauzy dress. A trickle of sweat glides down between my shoulder blades. It takes two or three switchbacks of trudging before we arrive at the lonely palace at the top of the hill.

  The palace is fortress-like, a sprawling monument of terraces, staircases and massive walls of stone. Sahil sta
shes the picnic satchel in the shade of a tree, and we wander around, moving from terrace to terrace, vista to vista. The plateau spreads out below us. From this distance, all appears still: the sunburnt land in meditation, the lake—two interconnected lakes I see now—a pair of sapphire eyes staring back at us.

  With a quick movement, Sahil scrambles on top of a low wall. He holds his crutches in one hand, balancing his weight on his good foot. Then he holds out his free hand to me. I let him pull me up. I catch my breath when I see I am looking over a sheer drop of at least a hundred feet. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. The wall is several feet wide, just enough for a maharajah’s sentries to patrol. My pulse is pounding in my ears. When Sahil looks over his shoulder at me, I smile and shrug. I feel tingling, alive, exhilarated. I can’t believe I’m here, in this place, with this man.

  He waves his crutches as if they were the extra arms of a deity, then hops down and again holds out his hand for me. “I have a plan,” he says. “We must go inside.” He pounds on a massive door with the tip of his crutch. I pound with my fist, caught up in the moment. We make our way around the palace, pound on door after door, but they all look as if they’ve been bolted for centuries.

  “What is the monsoon like when it comes?” I ask him, out of breath. We are at the highest point in the complex now. He stops for a second, leans against the wall and looks out at panorama below us as if he is trying to remember. I move closer to him, so we are shoulder to shoulder. “Very beautiful. Many families have picnics at monsoon. They sit on the roof and are happy for the gift of rain.”

  He gestures out toward the horizon with his crutch. “This is my India,” he says, melodramatically. And then, in my imagination, the empty blue expanse fills with great cauldrons of clouds that rumble and spill down cool sweeps of rain on us. The sky is a giant breathing creature, the palace walls a play of light and dark. I can feel the whip of the wind in my hair and hear the rattle of the bolted doors. The monsoon has begun.

  “I feel like it’s four hundred years ago and I am seeing the monsoon in front of me,” I say.

  “Maybe I am maharajah and you are maharani.”

  “We’ve come here with our camels and horses and servants so we can watch the rain from our windows inside the palace. But wait, we’re locked out. We’re in exile.”

  “Exile? What is exile?”

  “Sahil,” I say and sigh, “you’re ruining the mood. Let’s see, exile, we have been sent away because we have done something wrong. We’re . . .” illicit lovers, I almost say, but catch myself.

  He gives me a wild flash of a smile, and moves closer to me. It’s almost as if I see water running down his face, dripping from his eyelashes, plastering his hair to his head. My own dress is soaked and clings to my skin. I want to reach out and push the wet hair off his forehead.

  Just then, at the edge of my vision, a party of people, real people with tourist clothes and binoculars which they are directing our way, appears on the scene. Abruptly, the imaginary clouds give a few last coughs before they withdraw and disappear. “The monsoon is over,” I say. A good thing, I think, as I’m getting a bit too carried away.

  Sahil raises one eyebrow and gives me a half smile. “It is good the rain is stopped. Our picnic is in the sun.”

  We find our way back to the picnic satchel and a grassy spot with a view through the trees. Sahil puts his crutches behind him, spreads out the provisions between us, a series of tins that he lines up in a row. When he pries off the lids, little culinary wonders are revealed, scented with fragrant spices that traders hundreds of years ago traveled thousands of miles to obtain. Food from a very old civilization. “Today we eat Indian style,” he says. He scoops up a bite-sized morsel of rice with his fingers, then dips it in sauce, from where it takes a precarious journey from the plate to his mouth. And yet the fluid way he uses his fingers makes it look natural and elegant. “Do like I do,” he says.

  I try. At first it’s awkward, and a few rice bits don’t make it. Sahil is amused by my efforts. But then I get into the rhythm, scoop, dip, into the mouth, lick the fingers a bit. It’s an entire new sensual experience. This is the kind of food that should be eaten with hands, I think. After all, it comes from a long chain of hands that planted it, sowed it, threshed it, prepared it and spiced it. When I really think about it, knives and forks are a bit clunky. They’re manufactured tools meant for Western food that is grown in mega-farms and processed by huge machines and broken down in food factories and packaged in plastic—a chain not of hands but of machines.

  “It tastes better this way,” I say. “Better than any food I’ve tasted in India.”

  “This food is from my mother. She likes to cook for me.”

  “Oh. Your mother.” Now I understand why his clothes are so pressed, his mother probably does his laundry for him as well. I feel a little strange eating the food she prepared. I’m sure she would be shocked if she knew he was sharing it with an American woman, that is, knowing that women marry and have children in their teens, probably not that much younger than she is. But I suppose I am getting used to feeling strange.

  “Do you live at home?” I can’t help but ask even though I’m afraid of the answer.

  “I have a place, a studio. I paint there. Sometimes I sleep there.” I’m relieved to hear it. He sighs. “I love my mother very much. My father is very busy in his business, because he cares too much about money. My sister lives far away with her husband. My grandmother lives in her village. So my mother is lonely in her small house by the lake. Sometimes I go to visit her and she cooks very nice for me.”

  Well, at least he doesn’t actually live at home. And I like that he cares so much about his mother, about his family. My fingers now feel sticky. Sahil hands me a plastic bottle of water and a napkin. He, or maybe his mother, has thought of everything.

  “We are at the Monsoon Palace, so I tell you a monsoon story about my mother. When I am a small child, I am very bad. I always do things she tells me not to. One day, after much rain, the water is very high. My mother walks on the bridge and sees her friend. She tells me to stay close when she talks to her friend. But I do not. I see a swimming bird and jump from the bridge to get him, and I go under the water. But my mother does not swim.”

  He pauses, and takes a final swipe of the curry, then opens a soda for himself and one for me. It’s warm now but I like the sweetness.

  “So what happened?”

  “She takes off her sari right there.” He makes a twirling motion with his hand. “She throws it to me and I catch it and she pulls me in. So I am saved. Even though she is naked in her underwear in front of many people walking on the bridge.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t think that would count for very much compared to saving her son.”

  “You do not understand India,” he says, but with a wry smile.

  I too have a memory of almost drowning. I tell Sahil the story of when I was six years old, standing with my brother on a dock by the swirling river that ran beside our house in the mountains. I don’t know if he fell or jumped, but suddenly he was in the river. I jumped in after him. I can see it now as if it happened yesterday—the cold green of the water as I went down, the realization that my short life was nearly over, and my calmness about it all because at I had not yet learned to fear death. We were wearing life jackets, so we popped back up. And both my parents jumped in after us. “Afterwards they told the story many times of how I had jumped in to save my brother,” I tell Sahil, “but I knew I was not being brave. It was really some mysterious pull that I was following.”

  “Ah,” he says, when I’ve finished, “I understand you. I too feel that. We are alike. Yes, we both almost drowned when we are children. But we are both saved from drowning.”

  That thought gives me shivers. At one point both of our lives could have taken a path to oblivion, and then someone or something reached out for us.

  The shade from the fortress above us has shifted so we are no longer in the sun. Our legs are d
angling over the edge of the terrace. I look at him and notice that the shadows under his eyes are blue, the shadows of experience, and yet his smile when he turns toward me is so innocent, so open. The childhood stories we have told make me feel closer to him, almost as if we are still children and the differences in our cultures or age don’t matter. The world where that matters is far below us, and no longer watching.

  We are nearly finished with our picnic. The bugs are coming out to nip our ankles and arms and a few brown birds are hopping around, looking for a meal. We put our tins back into the satchel, which stays between us. We watch the bravest of the birds come up to nibble at the grains of rice. I think it will be too spicy for them, but they gobble it up nevertheless. Again, I have the feeling that I had that day at the temples—this is a moment that could last a hundred years. “You know in America, they have a saying, live each day as if it the last day of your life. But I don’t agree with that. I think you should live every day as if it’s the first day of your life and everything is new, and you have a very long time to . . . I don’t know, breathe it in.”

  “Because if it is the last day, then everyone gets drunk, even Hindu, who do not believe in drink.” It’s not really that funny and yet I start laughing and he does too, and then we can’t stop laughing. We laugh until it feels like we are laughing with the bugs and the birds and the ghosts of exiled lovers and the almost-drowned children in our memories.

  “Elena,” he says abruptly, “I tell you a lie.”

  “About almost drowning?”

  “No, that is true. I do not lie about that important thing. But when I say you do not understand India. It is not true. A lady gives my mother a cloth to cover her. People are very kind. They are happy I am saved. They kiss me.” He moves the picnic satchel so it’s no longer between us.

  “I would like you to kiss me.” He leans over and very deliberately puts his mouth on mine. It shocks me a little. I know in India kissing is not allowed in public, although I’m not sure what the penalty is. Maybe jail. Maybe just horrified looks. But of course no one is watching at the moment, so I guess there is no public. He is kissing me and I can’t seem to shut my eyes. I simply stare at his face, his closed eyes, now so close to mine, and all the easy familiarity I was feeling with him a moment ago disappears instantly. It’s startling in a physical way. He is suddenly a complete stranger. The perfect mouth which had seemed so beautiful when it opened over his teeth in a smile is now like some tide pool creature, opening and closing for its prey. I pull away.