by Janet Sola
I look across the street and there he is, pacing back and forth in front of his taxi, his head bowed. “He looks even sadder today than usual.”
“Yes, I go to say hello. For one minute.”
I watch them as they talk. Sahil reaches out and puts his arm around Amar’s shoulders. I move a little closer, rolling my suitcase behind me, just within earshot but not too close. I don’t want to intrude. Amar keeps lifting his fist to his face as if he is wiping tears away. His head is hanging, his eyes are on the ground. Sahil is speaking to him in Hindi, in a hushed, soothing voice.
After a few minutes, Sahil leaves Amar and walks over to me. “I am sorry. I cannot go with you.” His voice is strained, almost a whisper.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I must stay with my friend.” He closes his eyes for a long time then opens them. I can see the pain there. I wait for him to say something. I know it won’t be good. He walks me back to the train platform. The train has started up, breathing smoke.
Sahil takes a deep breath and sighs. “Amar . . . .” He pauses. “Amar is a guide for the French people. The next day after our fish dinner, he takes them to Jaipur for two days. He comes back to his wife. Neela.”
“Yes, Neela.”
He pauses, and closes his eyes again. He wipes his mouth with his arm, and says something I can’t hear because his hand is covering his mouth.
“What did you say?” I ask him.
“She is suicide.”
“Suicide. Oh no. Oh no. What happened?”
“Her sari catches on fire with cooking oil. She is gone. She is dead.”
Gone. Dead. It makes no sense. Why would she want to kill herself? She was a professional woman. She had a man who loved her. The shock spreads through my veins like dry ice, hot and cold at the same time. “How is this possible?”
“She is alone,” Sahil says. “No one knows why. No one knows how.”
“That must have been what the police were asking Yvette about, what time Amar was with them.”
“Yes. Amar was with them in another city. Nurse Neela is alone. The neighbor of Neela finds her.”
And suddenly I know what happened. I remember the conversation Sahil told me he had with Amar. How Amar had asked if he should follow his heart. Something he heard in a song. And Sahil had said, “Songs are easy, life is not so easy.” Maybe he succumbed to the stirrings of his heart and told his first wife he was going to live with Neela. In any case, she found out about her rival. Neela did not kill herself.
“Sahil. You can’t really think it was suicide.”
“We do not know. Neela is alone. Maybe it is an accident.”
“You know what happened. You know it wasn’t suicide at all, Sahil. And not an accident either. It was murder. His first wife. Who in God’s name could do that to another human being? He should have her arrested.”
“No. He cannot do that. He has children with this woman.”
“The police then. Will they do something?”
“They do nothing. They cannot prove. They say accident. Or suicide.”
“Does Amar believe this?”
“He does not say what he believes. Because if they take the mother away from his children and put her in jail they have no mother.”
“You can’t just let a woman’s murder . . . not only a woman, but a woman you know. A friend. You can’t just let it go.”
“Maybe Neela is sad. Maybe she kills herself.”
“That’s ridiculous and you know it.” My voice is rising in pitch. I know I sound angry, but I can’t help it. “I’m not going. I will stay. I will at least try to do something.”
Sahil turns away from me and stares at the ground. Then he looks up at me. “I stay with Amar. You can do nothing. You only make more trouble for Amar.”
“Why do you say that? I want to help.”
“You help by going to Pushkar. This is a holy city. Maybe pray for Amar.” Sahil takes a ragged breath and puts his face in his hands. His shoulders start to shake.
I want to say something or do something that will change things, reverse the chain of events, reverse time so it never happened. I reach out to Sahil to put my arms around him, to put my head on his shoulder. He steps back. I have forgotten for a moment that immutable law of India. Men and women don’t touch each other in public, ever, for any reason. So we’re stuck in this moment standing here, frozen, not able to comfort each other. I bow my head and notice how shiny his new shoes are, how much trouble he took to look good for this trip. I notice his crocodile-pattern embossed belt holding up his perfectly pressed black slacks. The train whistles behind us. “How can I go, Sahil?”
He shakes his head as if he could shake out the grief, then lights a cigarette. “In one week time is a beautiful festival of Udaipur. The festival of Shiva and Parvati. Elephants ride in the middle of the lake. Dancing and singing. Come back for this. I wait for you.” Then he turns away and heads toward Amar.
In a daze, I board the train and take a seat near the back that looks out the window. Through the dust-streaks, I can see the two of them, Amar, and Sahil, pacing, smoking, Sahil’s arm around his friend. Will Sahil be able to comfort him? Will anyone, ever, be able to comfort him?
A small old woman wrapped in black is sitting next to me. All night, we rumble across the desert, a deep violet stretch of wasteland under the moon, gradually turning into a black nothingness.
All night, I see her life before me. Neela, a modern woman of India, her thick bobbed hair falls forward over her face, she brushes it back as she bends over a patient. Neela, the woman with a career, no children, who goes home to a small apartment, prepares dinner, and waits for the man she loves but must share. There is no question of him leaving his first family. And yet, maybe she was ambitious, maybe she wanted him all to herself, maybe she was pressuring him for something more. She usually wears loose pants and an overblouse, but that night she is wearing an orange sari; when he comes he will unfurl it. There is a knock at the door, but it is not Amar. It is his other wife, venal, thick-skinned and corpulent, her eyes narrowed, outraged because she is losing her grip on her husband. She would never confront him. That is not the way it is done. The oppressed turn on each other. She and her accomplice—her sister or her mother or her brother—have discussed this other woman. They feel righteous. She is a harlot, she must be destroyed. They take a can of cooking oil and go to her house; the sister and the mother hold her, the wife pours it, a match, and whoosh, she’s in flames.
I imagine her as the flames engulf her, unfurling her sari as fast as it burns, spinning as she casts it off, like a dancer, and finally, defiantly, emerging naked, beautiful, and unharmed into the arms of her lover. I imagine that because I can’t imagine what really happened. I want to cry but I can’t, I’m numb, in a landscape of nothingness that goes on and on. The woman next to me must sense my emptiness. She reaches out and pats my arm.
When the dawn comes, I don’t know if I’ve slept. The sky is filling up with light, tissues of rose and blue, and the light reveals what has always been here. This landscape has always existed in my imagination. A city rises up from the desert, a fortress of pale pink, a place where it never rains, where the wells are so deep that if you drop a coin you can’t hear its splash.
Yet when I walk the streets, here is the very real mix of beauty and squalor that is everywhere in this country. I look up and see exquisitely carved windows that cast tattoos of shadow on the faces of women behind them. I look down and I see children with fly infested eyes and the thin girls who hold them with one hand while holding the other hand out to beg.
After I deposit my things in a hotel, I suddenly feel very uncomfortable in my sari. I don’t want to be in a sari, it’s too beautiful, too feminine. I don’t want to be feminine at all when I think about it. In fact, I don’t want to have a body at all. Especially the body of a woman. It all leads to love and desire that ends with pain and suffering. Look at Neela. Look at so many women all over the
world under the yoke of their husbands, or their fathers, or bought or sold, or sitting in lonely rooms longing for someone who never comes, or contorting their bodies into ridiculous outfits to get the attention of a man. Even worse, it leads to women like wife number one, caught up in a furnace of jealousy, rage, evil. Turning into Kalis. I don’t want any of it. I want to rid myself of all of it. I don’t want to love Sahil either. It’s all a ridiculous trap.
I want to rip off this sari, throw it out the window. But it belongs to the aunties. It’s so hot and I can move only very slowly. I want to be invisible, I think, as I pull off the heavy silk from my shoulder, undo the tight blouse, unwrap the folds of the skirt. I want to be a spirit without a body. I want calm, I want peace.
I carefully fold the sari into a neat package and put it back in my suitcase. I put on loose pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt and a wide brimmed hat, buy a bottle of water in the lobby, and wander out into the baking afternoon. The world, amazingly, is still going on in its sacred circus way, as if nothing ever happened. People in pale pink and orange and scarlet are weaving around each other in the streets, murmuring presumably holy things and fingering their sandalwood beads. Because this is a holy town there is no meat and no alcohol. Nuts and vegetables are roasting on open coals. Humped neck cows are meditating. Even the most ragged children are chasing each other and laughing. And here I am in the midst of all this, walking and breathing even though I seem to have no feeling in my body.
Sahil said the master painter might be here. I don’t really believe it, but to occupy myself I go from shop to shop to make inquiries. I don’t even know his name, or what he looks like. “He makes beautiful paintings,” I say, and try to describe my vision. I feel as if I am shouting and yet no one hears me. Shopkeepers squint and frown and finally shake their heads. If Sahil were here, he would distract me with a joke or a story, even in the midst of tragedy, but I don’t feel lonely for him, just strangely hollow.
The French couple talked about Baba, the holy man who lives on a hillside near here. What did they say about him? It doesn’t matter. Looking for him will allow me to keep moving, to keep breathing. I have a plan. I will ride to the desert on a camel and search for him.
Camels seem to be as ordinary here as cars in America. They wander through the streets or stand idly by the roadside, looking down at me disdainfully through thick long lashes, like haughty grand dames, although definitely in need of a bit of perfume. The hawkers vie for my business once they see I am interested, each saying “very nice, very gentle” about their beast. I choose the smallest. “Girl camel,” her owner says. A portly man with a jovial manner, he pats the camel’s nose and invites me to do the same. As I do she curls her lip and shows me her yellow teeth. I’m not sure if she’s smiling or sneering.
“Do you know the holy man Baba?” I ask him. He nods solemnly. “Can you take me to see him?” He nods again. Then, in response to a gesture of his stick, the camel kneels, and the guide helps me on the saddle. In one awkward motion I’m in the air. It’s alarming at first, to be so far off the ground. But I’m too empty to feel my usual fear of heights, or speed, or anything the least risky. The guide holds on to a tether and accompanies me on another camel. Soon we’re back out through the city gates and strolling along a flat plain. There is an elegance to my camel’s step, a graceful rolling movement that comforts me. The hollowness inside becomes a bubble that expands and contracts, expands and contracts.
As we move farther away from town, the huts outside the city walls disappear, and the leafless shrubs became scarcer until there is nothing but hard sand that stretches to a horizon of bronze hills. On one of these, halfway up, a glimmer of white beckons. “Baba house,” my guide says, and begins to hum the same note over and over again.
Soon we come to a path of steps carved into the hill itself. Under a lone tree at its base, with a command from the guide, my camel falls to her knees like it was time for prayer. Her hindquarters follow. Miraculously, I’m able to slide off, the rubbery feeling in my legs distracting me from the hollow space that now seems stuck between my heart and my stomach. We leave our camels lounging in the shade to begin the long climb.
After what seems like a thousand steps, the glimmer of white becomes a strange dwelling with soft curving lines. It looks as if it’s an outgrowth of the hill itself, shaped like a gourd, with rounded openings for doors. A woman emerges as we approach, gray hair streaming, a radiant smile that shows her missing teeth. She makes me feel welcome, as if she had been waiting for me.
She gestures to us to remove our shoes, to follow her inside, to a tiled room, and to sit on the floor. The room is beautiful, the floor as polished as a counter. Each tile is hand painted with a picture of a Hindu deity in vibrant colors: Ganesh, the elephant god, Shiva in his dancing pose, Krishna with his flute, Saraswati with her swan, and so many others I don’t know the names of. Flower offerings are strewn before a statue of Vishnu in the corner. The rooms are shaped around openings that look out onto the desert and to the bright sky, so close here, so seamless. The woman leaves the room and in a few minutes returns with an old, old man, bent over, toothless and smiling.
My guide speaks. “This Baba,” he says. “No English. This lady not wife. Helper. No English too. Baba is teacher. Guru.” If he is a guru, he is definitely of the elfin variety. He is tiny. His eyes twinkle. He joins us on the floor, yoga style. The lovely old woman disappears and returns with golden pyramids of rice heaped on banana leaves. We eat with our fingers while we smile at each other. I am glad we don’t have to talk. I have nothing to say. I feel the throb of the heat, the beauty of the room, the tang of saffron in my mouth, and yet I feel them as if I were a floating observer of a depressed American woman looking for redemption by sitting at the feet of a comical looking old man.
After our meal, we go outside to the terrace that overlooks the desert. Baba begins to chant ram ram ram ram ram. Soon the woman and my guide follow. There is something absurd and yet also soothing in the sound. After a while I join in. Ram ram ram ram ram ram ram we sing until our voices merge with the desert and the sky and the hawks circling overhead. In the face of such a meaningless heartbreaking world, to sit in a simple dwelling with an old man and sing ram ram ram ram seems to make as much sense as anything else.
We chant for a long time. Ever so slowly, some kind of feeling returns to my body, just the feeling of my breath going through me, and my mouth full of sound, which must mean I am alive in the universe now along with the hawk who is still circling looking for his food, and maybe there is no meaning beyond that. Is that giving up, or accepting?
Much later, after drifting off to a dreamless sleep in my hotel bed, I wake up to a different kind of chanting. A wheezing, agonized sound. I get up, wrap a shawl around my shoulders and go out to investigate. There, with shaggy coats that are almost white under the moonlight, are a pair of donkeys, braying desperately at the moon or each other. I wonder if it is their own kind of ram ram ram.
I stay in the holy city of Pushkar for four days, going to see Baba on the same little camel every day. She has no name, but I call her Aunty, for no reason except I miss the aunties in Udaipur. She lifts her long eyelashes when she sees me as if she’s flirting with me. I pat her nose, she smiles at me with her yellow teeth and gives me a whiff of her badly-in-need-of-mouthwash breath, and patiently takes me where I want to go. The guide has started to play his wooden flute, a haunting melody that Aunty and I sway to on the hour-long trek to Baba’s and back. The camel driver tells me he is happy for my business because his son and daughter now can have school shoes. At least I am contributing in some way.
Ram is the sound used to chant to Rama, I have learned, a blue god like Krishna, who went into exile in the forest with his wife Sita. But it makes no difference. For me, it is just the sound and the clear air and the simplicity of this ritual. I sing ram ram ram for Amar and Neela and Sahil and my parents in their snow-covered house and for the elegant hawk and smelly camels and bray
ing donkeys and, finally, just for being alive in this moment. Gradually, I feel my own breath begin to flow more easily. Slowly, I come back into my body. And suddenly, I miss Sahil.
The night I leave I have an early dinner alone, with a book on Hindu deities propped in front of me, at the restaurant in the old fortress walls. There is a man at a table near me who interrupts my reading to tell me he has engraved the entire Mahabharata, the ancient epic Sanskrit poem, on a grain of rice. I am getting used to bizarre statements, and yet I frown with the effort of even trying to imagine this one. What is his hustle? He doesn’t look like a hustler. He is a middle-aged, middle-class looking man with a pleasant face, dressed in a business suit. “You are leaving here soon,” he says.
“Yes, that’s true.” Of course he could say that to anyone here in this city of pilgrims and tourists and it would be true.
“I see you are returning to the place you have traveled before. This may not be wise.”
I shake my head and turn back to my book.
“Remember one thing when you go back,” he says. “Remember your center.”
He nods at me and goes back to his meal. Everything is so odd, so strange.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Shadow
I travel all night on the train again, back to Udaipur. Fine dust from the cracked window by my seat is blowing in. I wrap my shawl around my face. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by going back. Sahil should find someone his own age, from his own culture, and I’m keeping him from that. And then Neela. What about Neela, will her so-called suicide still be shrugged off? It’s all turning dark and disturbing. And yet in the end, I’m left with the image of Sahil’s eyes, his smile, and my longing. I know if my journey is to make any sense at all, I must see him again.
When I arrive early in the morning back at the hotel, the old aunties smile and nod. I hand them the neatly folded sari and thank them. I wonder what they would think of Neela’s death, but I don’t know how to approach such a subject.
