by Janet Sola
“I feel like an outcast.”
“Yes, many people are outcast in this country.” He is standing near me, leaning on his crutch, very calm, very patient.
“Maybe I am an outcast, an untouchable. How do you say it in India?”
“Harijan.”
“Yes, harijan.” I know I’m being ridiculously dramatic. Not to mention disingenuous. After all, on some level, I know I can go home, that the real untouchables that live here have lives and burdens they cannot escape. Thinking about that makes me sad again, as if all the sorrows in the world, big and small, were somehow connected in a web of misery. Just then, a threesome of baseball-cap-wearing, backpack-toting tourists—a man and two women—pass us, consulting their guidebooks. They seem far away, from a different world. I feel as if I’ve crossed some kind of invisible boundary.
“I am a harijan together with you,” Sahil says.
“Yes. We will be harijans together,” I agree. And I know when I say it that some part of me has always been in love with the idea of totally stepping away from the identity I was born with, leaving it behind as if it were nothing but worn-out clothes.
“Come, before it is dark.” And so I follow him as we walk, a long way, around the road by the lake. There are fewer cars here. People walk or ride bicycles or travel in carts pulled by donkeys. We cross an arched stone bridge over an estuary and make way for a turbaned man driving a camel the other way.
“I say I am harijan,” Sahil says, “but I must explain something to you. I do not believe in this untouchable. This is a Hindu idea that some people are better than other people. No, for me, all are the same.” He stops in the middle of the street and faces me, very close to me, enough so that a trio of women flash piercing glances at us as they walk by.
“I want you to know who I am,” he says. But I don’t know who he is, not yet. Just in that moment, looking into his eyes is like entering a forest that promises shelter, but also surprises, where I might weave around a fallen tree and find a fox waiting, or a sleeping tiger. A forest that is mysterious and dark and irresistible.
“So if I’m not untouchable,” I say, “does that mean I’m touchable?”
He looks puzzled for a moment, as if something has been lost in the translation and he has no idea what I mean. Then it clicks and he laughs. “Yes, very touchable. Very beautiful.” He pauses. “Come, we must find this place before dark comes.” He runs his fingers up my arm, just briefly, before we continue.
“See there.” Sahil gestures with his chin to a sober stone building that rises up directly from the water. Tangled greenery grows on the banks on either side of it. Here, the lake feels subdued, remote, a place away from the hubble-bubble of the town. A place where change happens very slowly. When we reach the hotel, we go around in back, away from the lake. A scrolled iron gate opens onto a garden of untidy flower beds. The roof of a porch shades two matronly women. Their gray hair is pulled back tight on their heads; their knotted hands are busy with embroidery. One has a tiny gold ring in her nose. When they see Sahil, they break into broad grins and clucking sounds of affection.
“These are my aunties,” he tells me. “They are not really my aunties, but that’s what I call them because from when I am a child they take care of me.” He says something to them in Hindi and they shake their heads and answer in high, worried voices. He says something back, and they raise their eyebrows, looking at each other and shaking their heads again, but this time in what seems like acceptance. The auntie who has a gold ring in her nose calls out. From inside, a tall, awkward boy appears. He takes my suitcase and we follow him inside, up a narrow set of stairs and down a dim hallway. “You are my friend,” says Sahil, “so they make a good price for you.”
The boy opens the door onto the most beautiful room I have ever seen. It’s spacious, with high ceilings and a tiled floor, and furnished simply, with a large bed in an alcove, a wardrobe, and a chintz-covered chair and table near the window. The walls are a mysterious shade of aquamarine that makes me feel like I’m underwater in a swimming pool.
“Come,” says Sahil, and leads me over to the window. A story beneath me, the murky water laps up against the building. In the distance is the arched stone bridge, and further, on the other side of the lake, the hills of the city proper where we came from. The pale buildings glow in the twilight. One by one, the lights come on, winking, as if the residents are trying to send us messages.
The bath too, I discover, looks out over the lake. “It’s lovely. How much?”
“The aunties tell me three hundred dollars.”
“For a week? Very expensive!”
“For one month. You must take this room for one month.”
I take a deep breath. A real commitment. “All right.”
“Come see,” says Sahil, after the boy has left. He takes me again to the window and points to the near distance. Standing out against the dark water, a white stork is perched on one leg on a lonely rock. “He is very quiet because he is hunting,” says Sahil.
Then he turns to me and pulls me close and kisses me, a long, slow, sensual kiss. A very pleasurable kiss. Abruptly, he pulls away. “I must go. The aunties watch when I leave. Later I will come back. When you see the moon from this window.”
After he leaves, I watch the stork for a long time. He is so still, it’s hard to believe it’s a live creature and not a statue. Then, like the flash of a mirror in the fading light, his narrow head slices into the lake and he comes up with a silvery fish in his beak.
Now that I’m alone, I take off my limp, sweaty dress. I want a shower, although it’s not really a shower; it’s a nozzle connected to a hose. As the lukewarm water streams over me, I watch the silver skin of the lake’s surface. I wonder what’s going on beneath that skin. Little fishes and frogs, no doubt, are just living the lives that belong to them. I let the water run over my own skin and wonder what lies beneath it. All those murky things like anger and desire that seem to have lives of their own, like the fishes and frogs.
The nearly full moon comes out early tonight and shows up in my window. Sahil knocks. I let him in, and right there, by the door, he kisses me. Even in the dark, through closed eyes, I can see him. He is beautiful and strange and fascinating. He locks the door and I take his hand and lead him to the bed. “Does your foot hurt you?” I ask him as he drops his crutch by the side of the bed. “You heal me,” he says. We shed our clothes and the wind comes in over the water and through the open window to wrap itself around us.
Part of me is curious, merely curious, wanting to see where it will lead, this shocking softness of his mouth on my bare arms and shoulders. I love his touch. It’s as if my skin is the night and his hands are lanterns. Everywhere he touches me, I begin to glow. How strange that we are here, in this exact time and place, because of so many accidents—an overnight train moving across India, a girl leaving her handprint in the wet plaster before she walks into a fire, a search for a missing painting, the cracking of a foot bone, my own wandering spirit. All those things that have brought us together now in just this way, just for this. We are drowning, he says. I say it back and we both laugh. I can see his arms at my sides and his lean body over mine, the dark rectangle of the window appearing and disappearing as he moves. Our bodies become a path with only one direction, and we follow each other with abandon, like children on an adventure.
“You are very beautiful,” he says afterwards. And when he says it, I feel beautiful. Then, somewhere in the middle of the night, he dresses and lights a cigarette. He will come again tomorrow, but now he must go, he says, and kisses me. I watch the flickering ember of his cigarette tracking his path as he crosses the room. I already miss him.
In the morning, I wake up to the ceiling fan circling slowly over my bed. It’s one of those large old fans you see in movies about the tropics. Riding on its blades are a pair of mauve-colored birds, doves maybe. What am I seeing? I shake my head to make sure I’m not dreaming. A bubble of laughter comes up from somewh
ere inside of me. As I watch, the birds take off from the fan and fly out through the window, over the lake. A few minutes later, they return with twigs in their mouths. They land on the fan, setting it slowly in motion again. When the fan slows down, they flutter over to a high bookshelf and deposit the twigs. They are building a nest. Those crazy birds are building a nest in my room. It’s so exciting. Everything is so exciting. I feel like a little girl who is discovering up and down and inside and outside for the first time. All things seem possible if only I watch and listen, if only I open my heart.
I tiptoe to the shelf to look more carefully at the intricate design the birds have made with their twigs, leaves, bits of flotsam and downy stuff they must have pulled off a cattail at the water’s edge or maybe someone’s laundry pile. I wonder about their view of the world. They don’t have to think about their creativity, or do they?
On a shelf below the nest is an old pen, the kind with a coppery pointed tip. A small bottle of ink is there too. A former inhabitant must have left it. I take the pen and ink, along with my blue-lined notebook to the table by the window. I dip the pen into the ink, which is a very dark blue, the color of the lake beneath the surface. I call on Saraswati, the goddess of creativity, the goddess of the river that gathers everything in its eternal flow.
Stick by stick, word by word, I begin to write:
When I fled the ashram and took the overnight train to this shimmering city in the desert state of Rajasthan, India, I was not at all sure why I had come. But I knew the moment I first saw the Rajasthani people, wrapped in the flaming colors of the sunset, looking back at me with their eyes of fire . . .
PART TWO
PARVATI
Parvati is the goddess of love, beauty, and sensuality, the complement to the ascetic, world-denying tradition. And yet, madly in love with Shiva, she believes she can win his heart through a series of austerities, bleaching her body by sitting in the midst of four fires and starving herself by living only on leaves and air.
CHAPTER NINE
The Rooftop Restaurant
The heat is settling in, draping around us like a heavy silk sari. That’s why the birds have come into my room to build their nest, to escape the heat, the French couple tells me. They are the only other long-term guests in the hotel, now that the season for travelers in this part of India is drawing to a close.
In the mornings I go to the mostly empty rooftop restaurant that looks out over the lake. There are no glass windows in the room, just a waist-high wall, then pillars supporting a roof. Every day I order an omelet from the gangly boy who shows up with a stained towel over his arm. Yes, I can have an omelet, he tells me, but first he must go out to buy the eggs. There are no guests except for us, the French couple has explained to me, so there is no reason to stock up.
“Can’t you buy at least six eggs?” I ask the boy. But he buys only enough for that day. The next day, we go through the same conversation all over again. It’s a kind of comedy routine, or maybe it’s more than comedy, it’s philosophy. I represent the Western view of building capital, preparing for the future. The waiter represents the Indian view of expending only the energy sufficient for the day. It’s his country and he wins.
After breakfast I open a notebook and write. I’m going through them, but they’re cheap, a few rupees at the local news shop. They have pale blue tissue covers and thin lines that are like the grid on a map of an empty pale sky. In the afternoon, in spite of the heat, I explore, often on my own. I take pictures, sometimes real ones, sometimes in my mind. I go on expeditions with the French couple, Yvette and Robert. We have tea at the Lake Palace Hotel, shop in the markets, or wander through the luscious gardens of the many palaces and mansions of the city. Peacocks wander everywhere, fanning their feathers of a hundred iridescent eyes.
Sahil’s foot has healed, so when he’s not working, we go on expeditions. I’m still waiting for the discovery of the enigmatic master painter. We’ve been on several wild goose chases to various villages to find him. Each time it’s a different story, told by the locals, translated by Sahil. The master painter is visiting his daughter in another part of India. He has gone to a mountain to meditate. He will return. Be patient. He has taken on a strange allure for me, like a ghost in a family story.
“Tell me more about this master painter,” I say to Sahil.
He thinks for a moment, placing his fingers on his forehead. “This master painter is very calm. Very quiet. But also wild. Like a hunter. Not a hunter with guns. But a hunter like a bird or a lion that is hungry and beautiful. He thinks only of his painting. That is how he can discover new things.”
When he says this I feel that we are twin souls, connected in our search for beauty and meaning. The master painter is out there waiting for us to discover him. Then an hour later I think I have fallen under the spell of a magician who is concocting stories in a Scheherazade kind of way. I don’t push for answers. I like living with questions. I remember my finger tracing on the dusty window of the overnight train: Perhaps the universe began with a question: What will I be?
At night, when the stork flies away from the rock in the lake and is replaced by the turtle, when the air is free from the weight of the sun, when the sky overhead retreats into indigo infinity, then Sahil appears in my room, the swimming pool room, in his black T-shirt and black pants and sneakers. Here is a person who didn’t exist for me until a month ago and suddenly he’s here every night. I wait for his smooth breath, his dark eyes.
I am used to him now, to his smell that reminds me of water in mountain pools, to the taste of flecks of turpentine on the edges of his fingers. I am accustomed to his lean arms around me, to the heel of his hand that he drags down the center of my back until it reaches the hollow just at the base of the spine, the magnetic pole of the universe of the body, the antipode to the heart. I know how he clears his throat and rolls a cigarette and lights it, and then offers it to me. Sometimes I take a drag, savoring the feel of the smoke inside my body, then I cough and hand it back. I tell him they are bad for him, but he just smiles and shrugs. I watch as he moves out of the room, his cigarette a moving ember in the dark, a graceful pattern that finally fades away.
He has a motorbike, one that works intermittently. One golden afternoon, I take the route that leads me across the arched stone bridge to town. Suddenly, Sahil is beside me, gesturing for me hop onto the back. I shake my head. “Come to India to lose your fears, Miss Elena,” he says. He reaches out and swoops me onto the back and we’re off, swerving through the town into the hills, the wind in our faces.
This morning, as I drink sweet coffee and wait for my eggs, I am reading Indian poetry, a dog-eared paperback that I found in the tiny English language section of the local bookstore. Here is Janabai, a famous fourteenth century poet, who says, “cymbals in hand . . . I go about; who dares to stop me?” She then writes about defying convention by casting off her sari in crowded marketplace “without a thought.”
That’s how I feel. I have cast off all those old garments from my past—the fears and the inhibitions of my old life. I have thrown away the typical tourist eyeglasses. I have a lover—a young beautiful passionate lover. And best of all, I don’t care at all that he doesn’t fit into the box of society’s conventions. I feel, sensual, alive, and braver.
I know Sahil is young, but not too young to have a past. I discover this one morning when he walks into the garden where I am sitting under the umbrella shaped tree with the “aunties,” the hotel’s landladies. I call them Aunty Peaches and Aunty Cream because they are so sweet and motherly. They are busy embroidering white muslin pillowcases with blue stitches that create a line of tiny prancing peacocks. Sahil chats with them and soon they’re chuckling. But when I get up to leave with him, one of them puts a finger in front of my face and wags it. Of course they know what is going on. But I suppose they need the rent I pay, small as it is, so they look the other way. Still, they feel they must express indignation. One says something that I interpre
t as rascal. The other nods vehemently.
Then the boy who fetches my egg every day tells me, “You are nice lady, better than French lady before.”
“Ohhh?” I say. Sahil gives the boy an angry look.
“So who is this French woman?” I try to sound casual, a little teasing.
“Only a woman who stays here.”
But in the late afternoon, when we are lying on the bed, watching the progress of the birds building their nest on my bookshelf, he tells me. “I was not telling you truth about French girl.” He’s propped up on a pillow, with his eyes closed as if this is all too much for him, and reaches blindly for the pack of cigarettes at his side.
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke,” I say. “It bothers the birds.”
“You are right,” he says and puts it down. “I care very much about this girl. When she goes back to France, she says she comes back. But she does not come back. She sends me a letter to say she marries to someone else. I was very sad. Not just sad, very angry. Sometimes I dream I go to see her in France and find her house and she answers the door and I kill her.”
“Kill her . . . what are you talking about?” I feel the heat rising to my face.
“I only dream this I tell you. It is not my fault what I dream. I would not hurt anyone. I am not like my father who one time hits my mother.” He is agitated and gets up and pulls on his clothes quickly. “I must go. I have a job to paint pictures,” he says and moves toward the door.
One of the birds has dropped a twig in the middle of the floor. Sahil sees it, picks it up, then, holding it with two fingers as if it were a precious object, places it on the nest on the bookshelf. He looks at me, his handsome face is serious for once. “I am glad I find you,” he says. He kisses me on my shoulder before he goes out and shuts the door behind him.