by Janet Sola
After he leaves I watch the birds as they make their graceful passage through the window to the fan, setting it in motion each time. Their nest is growing with sticks and leftover bits of cloth and even a shiny string of sequins. They seem to have no clue that the rule for birds is to build their nests outside. They don’t seem to understand the boundary concept. That’s the trouble with this place. The boundaries are blurry, including my own. What am I doing? This was supposed to be a lighthearted romance, an adventure. It is an adventure. And yet I feel I am moving into territory I don’t quite understand. Territory maybe I shouldn’t be in. I know I should go before it all becomes . . . I don’t know, too complicated. Where can it lead?
Just for fun, I sometimes try to imagine Sahil in America. Driving down the freeway in an SUV, getting a job, as what? A taxi driver? I think of him with the background of California and he’s no longer Sahil, because Sahil is not just himself, he’s part of this entire world of motion and music and people called Rajasthan. I think of a story the French couple told me about how a friend of theirs had fallen in love with an Indian man and taken him back to Chicago, but he just couldn't fit in. One cold night he was so miserable he flipped out and jumped out of their condo window and broke both legs.
In any case, Sahil tells me again and again he does not want to go to America. “Many of my friends they want to meet American or European girl and go to live there. But not me. My friend marries an American girl and goes to live in New York City. Then he comes back. Too cold, he says. And too much working.” He repeats his adage, “America is good for the work, but Rajasthan is good for the life.”
He hates his father, he says, who used to beat him. He is an ungrateful boy, his father told him, because he refuses to work with his father in his gun factory, because he insists on being an artist. But his mother, that’s another story. He loves his mother. “I cannot be far away from her,” he tells me. When he leaves here sometimes he goes to his studio to work or sleep or visit with his friends, sometimes he goes to his mother’s house. His father is off on business someplace, so she lives mostly alone. She lives in a house that overlooks the lake on the next hill over, a house full of flowering plants. He helps her water them as they talk. He is his mother’s favorite child, he tells me. She understands that he wants to be an artist. He is like her. When they finish watering the plants she gives him something to eat. Then he goes to sleep on the roof under the stars.
“I will signal you from the roof of my mother’s house,” he says one night to me when he leaves. It’s a warm night, with fireflies flicking over the lake, and the only sound an occasional jingle that might be the bell of a bicycle as it swerves down the frontage road, or the music of a tribal family out walking. On those nights I love sitting in the alcove by the window, writing in my notebook. The doubts fly away and I’m content, enchanted to be in this place.
Every once in a while I glance up and over to the hill beyond, to the place where Sahil told me his mother lives. And then it comes, the faint flash of a light, like a motionless firefly in the distance, like a signal from another planet. My very own personal alien, I think. On and off. On and off. On and off. Three times. I know it’s Sahil. I cover the candle on my little table with my notebook and flick it three times, trying to send the same signal back, although probably he can’t see it. Later he asks me “Do you know the meaning of this message?” But even though I prod him, he won’t tell me. “You must figure it out,” he says. I tell him I don’t want to, that there are too many puzzles in India. But he won’t give in.
He tells me the meaning of his name. Sahil means the shore, but the shore that someone at sea longs for. He is like that, he believes, looking for the distant shore.
There is something enchanting in Sahil, but also something mischievous, unpredictable. I wonder if I am reaching back to my own childhood, or to a child I wanted but never had, or if it’s something else—wanting to live in a kind of a dream world. “You will spend your whole life dreaming if you don’t watch out,” my mother would tell me on days when I’d be locked up in a tree house reading or writing or drawing when my friends were out swimming or at ball games. That’s what this feels like, a story book, not like real life.
On this particular morning, I’m writing at my table at the rooftop restaurant. The city outside is already shimmering in the heat. Then, suddenly everything is black, black, black. At first I’m startled. Then I hear Sahil’s laugh. He’s snuck up behind me and put something over my head.
“Now, tell me what you see.”
“I see that you’re twelve years old.” He takes away the basket, that’s what it was, and swings into the chair next to mine.
“No, I am a twenty-seven year old man. Do you not remember last night?”
I cock my head to one side and resist smiling. “It’s all a blur.”
“Here,” he says, and takes my notebook and pen. “You can take a holiday from writing. I write something for you. Whatever you want to say, I say it for you.”
“I love this country,” I say. That phrase just comes out, without thought, as naturally as breathing.
“That is this,” he says. He writes something in my notebook in the extravagant curling letters of Hindi.
“Write in English for me. Please. So later I won’t forget what it means.”
“Of course, I do this for you.” I read it as he writes it. “India is mine.”
He glances up at me. “India is mine. You are mine. I am yours. This is the message I send to you with lights.” He looks around to see make sure we’re alone, and then he leans over and kisses me. I pull back from his kiss and look at him. Does he really think of me like that? As precious to him? We are so different. If I could conceive of someone as unlike myself as possible, I would have invented Sahil. He moves quickly, confidently. I move cautiously, as if I were crossing a stream and looking for a good rock for my next step. I have a past, with a few crumbling statues in my back yard, he is near the beginning of his journey. He is outgoing, things pour out of him and over him easily. I take everything in, nurture it, try to make sense of it.
“Tonight, I make you a special dish,” he says.
“What kind of dish?”
“A fish dish.”
“I didn’t know you could cook.” He’s smiling that show-off smile. I can’t quite take in that Sahil can actually cook. He is good at many things—at painting, at making people laugh, at getting things done in a country where the idea of time is a circle, not an arrow. But cooking?
“My mother teaches me to cook. To make very nice curry. We have a party. Tonight. Right here. I cook in the kitchen.”
“Here?” I gesture toward the enclosure where the waiter disappears to scramble the eggs for omelets each morning.
“Yes, of course. This is no problem. No one cooks here at night.”
“A party. I like that.” I smile and touch him on his perfect nose. “What a nice nose you have,” I tell him.
“Yes, like my father.” He laughs. “It is the only way I am like my father.” He frowns and reconsiders. “My father makes guns. And guns make money. I am an artist. And make not so much money.”
“We are poor artists together. Poor us.” I sigh an exaggerated sigh. I think, yes, we are different, but we are also alike, in a way that I have never felt with anyone else. I reach across the table for his hand and touch it lightly.
“But I am changing,” Sahil says. “I am making a new shop. You must come to see it soon. It is to be the best painting shop in all of the city. I am to be . . . what is the word?”
“Let me see. Successful?”
“Yes. I like this word. Full of success. I want you to look at me and think, he is successful.” He taps his fingers on the table, rhythmically, a drumbeat.
“Sahil,” I say, remembering our plans. “Who will we invite to this party?”
“We invite Vijay.”
Vijay, who sat silently with us through the dinner and movie date. I scrunch up my nose. �
��He is so young. And quiet. Not so good for a party. I know, we’ll invite the French couple.”
“Yes, very good. I like these people.”
“Who else?”
He places his fingers on his forehead in the place where the third eye would be. “I ask Amar. He take us in the taxi up the mountain.”
“Oh, yes. Amar, the taxi-driver with two wives. Maybe he will bring one of them.”
“Maybe Neela. She is a very nice lady. The one who helps me heal my foot.” And with that, Sahil lifts up his healed foot, now in its black sneaker. “I ask Amar to bring his CD player so we have music.”
I shimmy my shoulders and give him a sexy look in imitation of an Indian dancer.
“Very nice,” he says. His eyes close, then open with that deep, long-lashed look of his.
“Come,” he says, touching my shoulder. “I have a plan. At three o’clock we go to buy food. Now we go to dance in your room.”
”What a good plan.” I squeeze his hand.
CHAPTER TEN
The Dinner Party
I’m humming a tune in anticipation of our evening. I can hear it in my head. Tiki, tiki, tiki, then a big swell of violins. There’s a pulse, an urgency to Indian pop music that makes me feel a bit reckless. I hear it wherever I go, in the shops, in taxis, on the CD player Sahil has borrowed from Amar and set up in the rooftop restaurant.
It will be lovely to have a real dinner party. It makes me feel as if this is becoming my home and this little rooftop restaurant my dining room, my temporary home because at some unknown time in the future, I will run out of money. But that seems far away to me, now that I am settling into this life. This afternoon I picked flaming red flowers from the garden and set them in a glass jar in the middle of the table. I raided the larder and found plates, utensils, and mismatched glasses for the wine the French couple has promised to bring.
Still, I’m wondering where we will get food for our party tonight. The shops are filled with clothes and trinkets, not mounds of fruit or vats of fish. All I see here are a few vendors selling the local equivalent of fast food from their makeshift street stalls. And Sahil has warned me away from them. “Watch this one,” he said one afternoon, directing my eyes to a grizzled man who was cooking his chapatis on a mini-grill at his stand. “He scratches his balls, then he scratches the food.”
“You’re joking,” I said, rolling my eyes. But in no time at all, the vendor readjusted his lungi, reached his hand into its depths and made scratching motions, then turned over his chapatis with the same hand. I laughed, but I was glad I had only bought them from time to time to feed the forever hungry cows.
At five o’clock Sahil shows up on his motor scooter, and announces to me that Amar and Neela, wife number two, will be there. We go a long way, careening around the old road by the lake. As we take a curve, I wave to the stork who is waiting for his dinner to swim past, and I feel the shimmer of the water invading me, washing away the last calcified remains of the past. Sahil is an expert cyclist, maneuvering around the explosion of people, vehicles, animals that all seem to be moving in response to a crazy goddess’s choreography.
We take the long way to the center of town, then down dim back streets. When we arrive at a dismal looking square saturated with the murky smell of dead sea creatures, I know we’ve reached the right spot. The fish are piled high at a half-dozen tables, wrapped in newspapers, their tails emerging coquettishly. Sahil walks to one stand, then the other, engaging in serious discussions with each of the vendors. I like watching him, the way he handles everything so effortlessly.
“What would you like?” he asks me, “a big fish or a small fish?” He makes it sound rakish the way he says it. The fishmonger smiles with pride as he opens the newspaper. Just for an instant we see a flash of silver skin before a swarm of flies moves in. He closes it quickly. “Very good one,” Sahil says as he hands over the rupees. We stop at another market for a few vegetables, and with plastic bags containing our dinner slung over the handle bars, we make our way back through the streets to our rooftop dining room.
This is the best time of day here, when the sun goes down and I feel as if I’m floating in the warm darkness. Sahil is in the kitchen transforming the big sad fish carcass into something that smells delicious. I set the table for six, Western-style, with a fork on the left and a knife on the right, as I chat with the French couple. Yvette is a thin vivacious woman with an elegant cap of short dark hair. Her husband Robert is an unemployed journalist with a scraggly-looking pony tail and a quiet, self-possessed manner.
Cold glasses of wine in hand, we are having a jolly time. Our conversation has moved to the contrast between India’s ideals and reality. “Here we are in the country that produced Gandhi and gave the world the idea of effective nonviolent protest,” says Robert, who has spent great amounts of time in Canada and has almost no French accent. “And yet, look at all this violence between the Muslims and the Hindus, look at all the caste warfare that still goes on.”
“Not to mention zee oppression of women,” Yvette adds, sounding as if she were in a Paris café.
“The oppression of women seems to happen in every culture,” I say. “Including our own.”
“Oppressed. Yes, but this ees more than oppressed,” says Yvette. “Abused. Just today, I read in the paper about dowry burnings. Abom-eenable. Are these people cras-see?”
“Impossible to understand,” I say, nodding. “Maybe it started with the women that threw themselves into fires if their men were defeated. Jauhar, they called it. You can see their handprints on the walls here.”
“There is some kind of cultural expression of death by fire,” says Robert. “It wasn’t so long ago that wives were expected to politely join their husbands on the funeral pyre.”
“Oh, but even worse, I have read it is the mothers-in-law, conspiring with their sons, who do this dowry burning. They say it is suicide, then nothing can be proven. Then the men marry someone else for another dowry. It is nothing but grrreeed, pure grrreeeed,” says Yvette. Her throaty rrrs make her statements even more melodramatic.
I cannot even imagine the state of mind that would allow a mother-in-law to murder her own daughter-in-law. To set her on fire. It’s such an unnerving topic of conversation that I excuse myself to help Sahil in the kitchen. He’s whistling as he dashes bits of spices on the fish, whose eyes have turned a gelatinous white. I move up behind him and kiss him on the ear. “Let me help you.”
“No, you enjoy the night,” he says. “I cook this fish. You can see what cooking I learn from my mother.” He is lucky he has such a mother, I think.
When I return to the guests I deliberately change the subject. “What do you think of French films these days?” I ask Yvette and Robert.
“It is sad, no?” says Yvette, “that the great French films, that marvelous period of filmmaking—do you know Truffaut and Godard—is finished.”
“Long ago finished,” says Robert, “ancient history. But we have many great films coming out of France. They are more . . . you know what you call action films. Relationship films. But this is what needs to be expressed. You cannot worship old gods.”
“No, Robert dear, we need to worship ze old gods,” Yvette says. “As they do in this country. You cannot have a new god every year, it is crazy making.”
“But they do not worship the old gods here,” Robert says. “What about the films of Satyajit Ray, the Bengali filmmaker who was so famous internationally a few decades ago. Who goes to see them now? No, they go to see the Bollywood films.”
“They are the most stupid, vulgar escapist pieces of sheeet,” Yvette says.
“Wait a minute, the new gods exist right alongside the old,” I say, getting into the spirit of the conversation. I’m really enjoying this. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for Western culture talk. “I mean what I really love about this country is that there is a popular scene. It’s not just borrowed from American pop culture. It’s their own. It’s not just a false pre
servation of something ancient or revered for the sake of the tourists.”
“Tourists,” says Robert. “There are no tourists. India is too big. They are swallowed up. We are swallowed up.”
Sahil is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, spoon in hand, listening. “What do you think of Yvette’s opinion of Bollywood films?” I ask to include him in the conversation. Immediately I wish I hadn’t. For a moment, I feel part of the Western tribe, a supercilious observer and commentator. And I’ve embarrassed Yvette who is smiling stiffly.
But Sahil is eternally socially graceful. “I like these films,” he says simply. “They are for making you happy. Is that not the most important thing?” Just then, I feel a surge of the happiness he’s alluding to, or some similar indefinable emotion, that I am in this room with this sweet, amazing man. And that later he will come to my room and we will be lovers. Yet I feel sad too, because I know I can’t keep him forever.
“He speaks true,” says a voice from the doorway. Amar enters the room, serious and handsome in a freshly pressed shirt. He is followed by a woman in a blue and white punjabi outfit, a tunic worn over loose cotton pants fitted tightly around her slender ankles. She is probably the same age as Amar, mid-forties, and calmly beautiful. Threads of silver wind through her black hair, which is worn loose and chin length, and her big-eyed gaze is serene as an owl’s. It is apparent from the way Amar guides her to a chair, as if he were touching her gently, but not touching her, his hands hovering over her shoulders as she sits, that they are deeply in love.
So this is wife number two. I envy them. They can go into a future together.
Sahil plays the host as smoothly as if he were acting a part he had seen in a film somewhere, introducing and cajoling and entertaining. “To everyone, this is Amar and his beautiful wife Neela, the best nurse in all of Udaipur, who helps me heal my broken foot,” he says.
