The Overnight Palace

by Janet Sola

  “No, not for me.”

  “Why are you afraid? You tell me you can swim.”

  “I only swim in pools,” I tell him. It’s true. When I first fell or maybe jumped into the river as a child, I was not afraid. I remember telling Sahil the story that day at the Monsoon Palace that now seems long ago—how with my six year old eyes I’d watched the green water swirl around me as calmly as if I were paying an afternoon visit for tea to my aquatic ancestors’ watery habitat. And yet over and over again my parents told the story: She could have drowned soooo easily. If I had drowned, I thought, with some shock, I wouldn’t be listening to my parents tell the story. What a miracle I had survived. From then on, I would be more careful about my precious saved life. I would be more cautious. Soon after that we moved to the city and then the suburbs and I became a swimming pool child, and then a swimming pool adult. I like to know that there are no slithery things to rub against me or nip at my ankles. And I very much like to know where the bottom is.

  Once more Sahil goes down and comes up. The water plasters down his thick hair, runs in droplets down his smooth skin, beads on his eyelashes. He looks like a male water nymph. “No bottom, come see,” he says.

  I kick off my sandals, hoist my skirt up and go down, step by marble step into the water, up to my knees. “This is as far as I go,” I tell him. It’s hot, I would love to go in deeper, to feel his freedom, but there is something terrifying about its depth, its blackness, its mystery.

  Mr. Prateek, who along with his wife takes care of the place we are staying, a former hunting lodge, will only say the lake is “very very deep.” He likes to make pronouncements, his small chin nearly hidden under an enormous moustache that moves up and down like an awning when he talks. The temple ghat where we are sitting is really a dam, built only with great sacrifice. “What sacrifice?” I ask. But he continues. “Not so long ago, many famous people are coming to this place,” he tells us. “Tigers at one time are roaming this forest. And lions too.”

  “Forest?” I wonder if this place used to be covered with great swaths of vegetation, instead of the paltry patches of trees on the hills that I can now see when I squint into the sun.

  “Oh yes. Rich hunters came with their helmets and guns and whatnot to hunt. British and Indian alike. They are shooting the animals like anything else. Crack shots. Now, they are all quite gone, evaporated.” He throws both arms out, palms up, to make his point. There are still plenty of wild boars and grouse that attract a few hunters, he says, although they are not the high-quality, well-dressed game baggers of earlier times. They are more of the “roughneck” variety. In fact, he is expecting a party of hunters any time.

  The lodge’s courtyards walls are painted with images of beasts, peacocks, gazelles, tigers, boars. I can imagine how stylish this place must have been, when parties outfitted in their arrogance and pith helmets enjoyed gins in the courtyard and regaled each other with stories of the day’s slaughter. A tiger skin from those days is spread out in the lodge’s entryway.

  Sahil insisted on paying for the hotel. “I am becoming a successful businessman,” he says. Our second floor room is enormous, the bed a floating island in a sea of black and white tiles. A glass-eyed gazelle head stares out from its perch high up on the wall. A faded photo of a pair of doves hangs over the window, a bizarre echo of the live bird’s nest in Udaipur. A pair of French doors lead to a balcony that is suspended directly over the lake. The balcony is the perfect place to dive into the lake, Sahil thinks. It seems a very long way down for a dive, I tell him, but he just laughs. He goes in, his lean body arcing, feet pointed to the sky, a natural dive, not a practiced one. When he comes up, he swims the short distance to the marble ghat, climbs out, comes back up through the halls and to our room and does it again. I love standing on the balcony and watching him. I envy him his physical courage and grace and wish I had learned to overcome my fears.

  I’m happy to be here, away from the maze of Udaipur, from the sadness of Amar, the menace of Wally and the Shadow. And so is Sahil. He seems even wilder here, more passionate, more impulsive, but also more relaxed. I feeling myself expand too. It’s as if I’m a hostess in a gracious temple, with room for all my goddesses. In the mornings Saraswati wells up in me and I write while Sahil swims or wanders.

  Parvati, the love goddess, lurks backstage, waiting impatiently for her turn. She is rewarded. The French doors to the balcony are open and my back is to the sun. We take turns undressing each other. He unbuttons the pearl buttons on my white blouse, one two three four, then unties my skirt where it’s knotted around my waist. Then strap by strap slips off my camisole. He kisses my shoulders, my breasts, I unbutton his shirt, put my mouth on the pulse at his throat, run my hands down his smooth brown chest. I can feel each bone, each muscle. Then we lead each other to the island bed.

  The first afternoon, after we make love, he tells me he would like to have a child with me. This shocks me a little. Is he serious? I can never tell with him. It’s such a farfetched idea for so many reasons, just one of which is that I'm forty. In a stage of my life that seems like long ago, I had the dream of a child, but only with the right partner. It turned out not to be Peter. Sahil though, from a practical perspective, hardly seems like right. “Oh Sahil, I’m sure it would be a beautiful child, but where would we live? How would we live?”

  “We will have a house in the village. I will work. I will have the best art shop in all Udaipur.” I notice he’s using the word “will.” He’s speaking in the future tense instead of just the present. It’s something he’s never done before.

  “Children cost a lot of money.”

  “Not children. One child. One child who talks like me and looks like you.”

  When he says that, something in me softens. Something in me wishes it could be true.

  “Yes, like me and you,” he says. “I love you.”

  He says that more and more often now. And now I say it back. “I love you too.”

  He leans over me and with one finger, traces the curve of my lips. “You see this curve.” He follows the arc of my upper lips, the up and down and up curve. “This is the sign of om, the sign of the universe. It is everywhere this sign. “You see,” he traces it again on the bedsheet. “It holds, but very gentle, hold, then let go.”

  I don’t know what he’s thinking of but I’m thinking of the vagina, the womb, the arms, the heart. Especially the heart. “Hold, then let go.” The pulse of the heartbeat. It sounds easy. And yet I’m wondering if I can do that. I’m wondering if I have to do that. Maybe I don’t have to let go.

  In the evening, we take a rowboat out on the lake. The water is calm, the air warm. I watch the rhythm of Sahil’s arms as they pull and release the oars, the soft waves of the wake fanning out until they disappear. He has given up shaving every day while we are here. His shadow of stubble makes him even handsomer. I think I would like to stay here forever with him.

  From where we are on the lake, I can see the outline of a ruined palace on the distant shore, an ethereal fantasy of slender columns, blackened fingers that hold the twilit sky between them.

  “This fallen-down palace you see is very special,” Sahil tells me. “If you want, I tell you story of the queen who made this palace. A very annoyed queen.”

  “Only if it’s true.”

  “True. Yes. The maharajah and the maharani live in a big castle. Far off, over the next mountain. They are very happy. But one day the maharajah acts very bad. This makes the maharani angry. She says, ‘I cannot live with you anymore.’ But he says, ‘Ha, you must live here, because you have no other place to live.’ And this is true, for a long way there is only forest. ‘I do not care, I go,’ she says. She takes only herself and goes to this place we see. In one night only she calls on her spirit friends and makes a palace that is more beautiful than the palace of her husband. A magical palace. That is what you see.”

  “The Overnight Palace.”

  “Yes, I like this. The Overnight Pal
ace.”

  “Do you want to go there?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Why not?” He smiles his playful smile. With a few strokes of his oars, he’s turned the boat in the direction of the palace. It’s a very long way away. “I think it’s too far and too late to go in this little boat,” I tell him.

  “Lose your fears, Miss Elena.” But he speaks softly as he says it and reaches out and touches my hand. It’s so quiet as he rows, just the slip of the oars in the water, the splash as they come out. The sky glides slowly into night, each shade of blue deeper than the one before it. A star appears on the horizon, just over the ruined palace, then another and another and another. We are suspended on this little boat between water and sky. Both flicker with darkness, but the water, as I dip my hand into it, is wet and cold and so close, the sky so far away, now burning with stars, a million fires from distant universes. I don’t remember ever seeing the sky ablaze like this.

  I twist around and lie down with my head on Sahil’s lap as he rows. I’m drawn in to the mystery and beauty above me, as if we’re making an entrance into a great starry theater that exists only for us and will let us play any roles we like. Everything is possible.

  “I remember what you say Elena. That the stars we see may be burned out already.” I laugh when I recall my farfetched analogy. “But that is sad,” he says. “I think the stars are forever. I would like that to be for you and me.” He strokes my hair. I love that feeling. When I think about it, light keeps travelling forever, sound for a short while, but taste and touch—especially touch—can only be experienced up close.

  A low moon lights the shore, but the silhouette of the ruined palace is getting smaller. The breeze, gentle as it is, seems to be keeping us from make any headway. “I think we should turn back.”

  “Do you remember my name meaning? The faraway shore that I wish for from the water?”

  “Yes, I remember. Sahil. Now I wish for it too.”

  “Because you ask me, I will do as you say.” We have only a weak light as a guide, but the light is yellow with the warmth of what must be our lodge. It takes us over an hour of rowing to reach it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cathy’s Email

  Strung around Jaisamand Lake, like clay beads on a necklace, are a series of small villages. We’re headed for one. A “surprise” village, Sahil says. But before we go, I ask Mr. Prateek if I can borrow his computer to check my email.

  Mrs. Prateek, a small quiet woman, welcomes me into their living quarters just off the main lobby. Mr. Prateek takes me to his office and proudly shows me his antiquated PC. “I am able to do my bookwork and also my poems ever so fast,” he tells me. It takes a while to get the internet connection going, but when I log on, there is one from Jason and a reply from Cathy, subject line Not in Delhi Anymore.

  Yo Elena,

  So you won’t believe all that’s happened. Finally I got Gramps to commit to having lunch with me—his own grandchild, hello!—at the most expensive restaurant in Delhi, challenged him into having a drink, which he says he never does being a good Hindu (I mean it’s fine to treat your mistress and the mother of your child like shit but to have a drink might contaminate his holy self). Well, after using my intimidating interviewing skills, plus a gin and tonic, I guilted him in to talking.

  The weird thing is that he has this big-toothed smile that reminds me, I hate to say it, of me, or at least the elderly male version of me. But here’s the good news: my Grandma Rose did not walk into a river. She actually went off to an ashram. He wouldn’t say how the drowning story got started but my opinion is he put out the story himself all those decades ago because he didn’t want anybody coming looking for her, then him.

  So that’s where I found her, this little ashram in the far south of India. And that’s where I am right now. I walk into this garden and there she is, this kind of beautiful old lady (she’s 83!) sitting under a banyan tree. She has very short hair, and looks a little like an elf with very good posture and a perfect British accent.

  At first it was hard to believe she was my grandmother, and likely she felt the same way about me. After all, I can’t bring myself to give up my khaki shorts and boots. She told me her story. She had always been spiritual, I knew that. After all that’s what attracted her in the first place to my grandfather (he was originally a Krishnamurti devotee if you remember the story). A few years of misery after she sent my mother to England, she decided the best thing she could do with her life would be to help the poor of India. So she found this ashram and she started helping in a center they run for women, battered women, abandoned women, threatened women, a place where they could come and live in safety with their children and learn crafts to make a living.

  She couldn’t explain very well why she didn’t write my mother. She knew my mom was safe, and thought she’d be better off without her. She was just in too much pain she said, too ashamed, and wanted to forget her past. The sad thing was that I had to tell her Mom had died. She cried naturally. And then we talked a lot about her, and how all our eyes have the same kind of shape even though different colors. But now Rose and I are in each others’ lives. That’s something.

  OK, here’s the very best part. I’m heading back to Delhi soon for one reason. To put the screws to the grandpa’s rich ass and get him to cough up some money for Rose’s women’s project, which could really use it. I won’t leave him alone until he does. I’ll walk around with my big mouth telling everybody about his slimy behavior. I have a feeling he’ll give a substantial donation. And I’ll hand deliver it to Rose. And then I’ll stay for a while and help her in her projects. I think it will feel good.

  Happy ending for a change. So tell me what’s going on with you, your relationship, your search (sorry I was so snarky about it before, I am herewith changing my ways).

  Cathy

  A happy ending. A fabulous ending, like a story in a novel. I wonder if it’s the same ashram that I started out in. I don’t remember a banyan tree though. Nor a center for abused women. I try to imagine Cathy hanging out in a place like that adorned in her safari outfit and her in-your-face slang. Knowing how headstrong she is, it’s a stretch. But that’s the thing about India. It changes you. It’s as if every moment is layered with meaning, and you want so much to decipher that meaning, but you can’t. You just have to keep moving forward with the wave of life and responding to it as you move. And on the way, you encounter new layers in yourself, you surprise yourself. Cathy, I think, is discovering her own hidden goddesses.

  And yet, I would like to write another ending. I would like to wind back the clock of time. Neela would have escaped from the “cooking fire,” Amar would have left with her for Delhi, and Cathy’s grandfather would have found her a job in the medical field, far away from the evil that threatened her. Like a novel.

  Jason’s email is just a few lines. He’s on his way to Kathmandu and planning on taking a trek. If I’m interested in going, let him know. I decide to wait to send replies. To see how it all works out with Sahil’s and my story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Village of Clay

  Monsoon season is still a ways off. I understand why people and animals alike long for the relief it delivers from the oppressive heat. For our trip to the village, I wear my floppy wide-brimmed hat and the lightest thing I own, a loose purple cotton dress with an orange scarf tied at the waist that I can also use for a shawl. Sahil tells me I look beautiful. I know, like Parvati after her fast, that I’m thinner. And my hair is blonder from the unrelenting sun. But Sahil is talking about something else. A glow, he says.

  Not far down the road near the lodge, we board a bus already brimming with people, brown arms hanging out of the windows, squawking baskets of poultry everywhere, children piled on their mothers’ laps, men crammed on the roof, their skinny legs hanging over the edge. The lake and the hotel seemed deserted. Where do all these people come from?

  We squeeze in. I grasp the nearest rickety support
as we lurch to a start. Sahil free-stands and rolls with the bumps as he chats away with his fellow passengers. There are so many bodies that it feels like we have to take turns breathing. I am eye-to-beady-eye with a scruffy-looking chicken, his beak inches from my still tender nose. And yet, somehow, it’s all delightful.

  Every five minutes, we stop at a hamlet. Everyone gets off to let people in the back of the bus off, then everyone gets back on again. “Efficiency is overrated,” I tell Sahil, laughing, as we squeeze in again for the third time.

  “What is this word efficiency?”

  “Efficiency is . . . figuring out how to make something happen faster so you can get on to the next thing.”

  “The next thing is important. I will think about this,” he says. Ah, the future tense again. While I am ever more in the thrall of the present moment. Maybe we’re trading places. We bounce along for another half hour, while I look beyond the chicken to trade silly expressions with a little girl being held by her sister. Finally, we get off and don’t get back on.

  “This is village. Chalo.” Sahil cocks his head toward two women in dark flowing clothes who were also on the bus. We follow them up a long path scattered with shadows of sparsely leafed trees. The village, when we reach it, is lovely. The clay dwellings have been molded into sinuous shapes that flow into one another, and are covered with intricate patterns of blue and red and black. Everything is spotless. It’s as if the entire village had just been created that morning and pulled from a potter’s kiln.

  “The village of artists,” Sahil says.

  “It’s magical Sahil. So this is the surprise.”

  He tips his head sideways in that way of his and smiles. “Wait here,” he says and disappears. In a moment he reappears, accompanying a woman in a bright yellow sari. She is probably about the same age as I am. When she smiles, her face dissolves into a lavish map of lines. Sun lines, life lines. Sahil converses with her briefly, then introduces her.