by Janet Sola
When the water is boiled for tea and the chapatis are ready, Salena and Sahil fetch the old man. Our mythical master painter. He is livelier this morning, but eats very little, preferring to work on his red betel wad. I bow to him. “I want to thank you for helping me to understand my search.” He listens, his hand cupped behind his ear, as Sahil translates what I say. After a while he croaks a reply.
“He wishes to tell you he can make one more painting,” Sahil translates. “Very much like the one you have lost. Salena has a sister who has a son. This son can deliver the new painting to where we stay. Tomorrow or the next day.”
“That would make me very happy,” I say.
Then Salena speaks. “Salena asks if you can you give some money now,” tells me. “Not for food. Not for hand henna. That is their gift. For the painting.”
“Of course.” My serious money is in my pouch, under my dress, a bit awkward. “Excuse me. I'll just get my things from the other hut.” Sahil follows me. “Should I ask how much, or offer something?” I ask him.
“How much do you give for first painting?”
I tell him.
“That is very much. Too much. Most is for the shop owner. A bad man. It is good I no longer have to work for this man.”
“It’s all right. If I can have a painting of his, it’s worth it. And he’s old. He needs the money.” Sahil nods and shrugs. “As you wish.”
I retrieve the right amount of rupees from my pouch, pack up my things, we tidy the hut and return. When I press the money into Selena’s hands, she’s overjoyed. “Lakshmi,” she says again. She reaches out for my hand. I think she is expressing affection. She turns my palm up and traces the henna design she created yesterday. Then she turns my hand over and strokes the fingers. “Very be-yoo-ti-ful,” she says again and then says something else in Hindi.
“She likes the color on your nails. They are a color like a sunset.”
“Thank you. It’s only polish.”
“She wants to know if you have some of this color you can give her.”
I like this polish, but more than I want to keep it, I want to please her. I nod and touch her sun-wrinkled hand. She smiles broadly and taps her gold tooth. “Lakshmi,” she says one more time.
“I wish she wouldn’t call me that,” I say to Sahil. But I know there is nothing I can do about the way she sees me. To her, I am and will always be the Lakshmi of the west, the representative of a different culture, a rich culture. So be it. I put my hands together and bow to her, and then to the master painter, who inclines his head ever so slightly in my direction. Is it a gesture in recognition of our connection or a bobble of the head brought on by the shadows of infirmity? Will he really be able to pull off this painting? With no good reason, I believe he will. I will have my painting at last.
“When the boy brings the painting, you can give him the polish,” Sahil says.
Everyone nods as if this is a wonderful solution. The bus will be coming soon. It’s time to leave. When I say goodbye to Salena with another promise that yes, she will have the sunset-colored nail polish, I feel a twinge of sadness that I don’t entirely understand.
The bus comes once a day. We’re part of a throng, women laden with wares and small animals and children, men with naked stovepipe legs and hard expressions. We’re all patient as trees as we wait. When the gaudily painted vehicle swerves down the road in a cloud of dust and fumes, it’s a different story. Everyone tries to get in all at once with whatever advantage they have: brute force, sharp elbows, or slithering ability. “Don’t push, slide,” says Sahil as the doors open. Try as I might, I can’t seem to make any headway at all. And then without warning, I’m being tugged in the opposite direction. Sahil is scrambling up a narrow ladder on the side the bus, and pulling me up after him.
“What are you doing?” I shout to him. But he just keeps tugging. Before I know it, I’m sitting with him on the top of the bus, the lone woman among grizzled old men in lungis and calloused bare feet, young men in jeans and polyester shirts, giddy boys, dozens of male legs dangling over the very narrow railing. I look around. There is no place to hold on. The railing that encircles the edge of the bus’s roof is no more than a few inches high.
“Sahil, I’d rather wait for the next bus than be up here,” I say. I try to sound nonchalant. The truth is I am terrified.
“You are OK. Only relax.” When the bus starts to move, my first instinct is throw myself flat on my back. “You must sit up. Hold on here.” He shows me how to grip the railing with my hands, which seems like trying to ride a horse by hanging on to its tail. Sahil sways from side to side with the motion of the bus, as if there were nothing to it. The lake, visible in frames between the trees, lies placid under a hot blue sky, but the tree branches that hover near the road are moving up and down as we bump along. The more we bounce, the stiffer my body gets. An animal panic rises up my spine.
“Enjoy,” Sahil says. “Relax. Do not be afraid. Elena, you are too afraid.”
I am not too afraid, I’m just afraid enough, I think. Every time we take a curve my heart drops to my stomach. Then, without warning, Sahil pushes me down onto my back. He goes down with me. Just above us a heavy branch passes in a blur. A branch that would have hit us if we hadn’t gone down. When he pulls me back up I see that the men on the roof are laughing at me. Sahil too laughs.
I hold my breath until the whole thing is over. All the tenderness I felt for him just hours ago is draining out and in its place absolute fury is pouring in. “There was nothing funny about that,” I tell him after we are back in our room at the lodge. “I could have been killed. You could have been killed.”
“But you are not killed. You are not hurt. I save you.”
I look at him and see the same fine-boned face, the same luminous eyes, the same smile, the same nonchalant stance. But he is no longer the charismatic lover who is opening the windows of transformation for me. He’s an irresponsible, immature brat. I try to merge these two images, the Sahil that I was falling in love with yesterday and this new person who is emerging. And yet I know that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this side of him. It has always been there. On the white side of the seed is his charm, his magic, even his kindness. On the black side of the seed is his casual recklessness. He appears and disappears in ways I can’t predict and can’t understand. I feel confused. Blindsided. Disoriented.
“I don’t want you to save me.” I struggle to find the right words but there aren’t any. There’s just raw emotion. “I want you to . . . leave me alone.”
He takes a step away from me, then shakes his head as if he can’t believe what he is hearing. “I am sad you are saying this.”
“Sahil, I’m sad too. I’m very confused. Let’s talk about it later.” Right now I feel hot and dirty from our village trip. My shoulders ache from carrying the pail of water. I need to take a bath before dinner. “Right now, I want to be alone,” I repeat.
“Do what you want to do,” he says. He looks so out of place, so fragile, in this big room, with its gazelle head propped high on the wall, its scuffed inlaid furniture, shopworn tributes to another era, that my anger fades and I want to put my arms around him. Instead I watch him go.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Another Dinner Party
I find Sahil and Mr. Prateek in the garden having drinks in the flower-filled courtyard. “Your friend tells me you are a writer lady,” Mr. Prateek says to me when I sit down next to Sahil. “This is what I feel myself to be. That is, not a lady, but a writer person.” He is dressed in shiny Western clothes, a yellow shirt and dark trousers. His moustache is smartly trimmed and looks as if it has just been combed, and his black eyes glisten above it.
The savory smell of cooking grouse is in the air. The hunters Mr. Prateek had said were coming have had a successful day in the scrub. The chief hunter, a bearded, gruff looking sort who smells of alcohol, along with his “assistant,” are grilling today’s kill in an alcove off the courtyard. Every so o
ften the hunter comes by and pours our glasses full of a milky alcoholic mulch. To me, it looks and tastes like poison. After the first sip I refuse any more. Mr. Prateek is drinking nothing at all. Sahil seems to be enjoying it though. In fact, every time the hunter comes by with his bottle, he raises his glass for more. Already, his eyes are taking on a glazed look and his speech is slurring. When I gently tell him I think he’s drinking too much, he ignores me the first time. The second time, he looks at me in a curiously expressionless way. “You do not care about me, so why do you care what I do?”
“Sahil, that is not true,” I tell him, keeping my voice low. Mr. Prateek politely ignores what is going on between us.
“Then why do you say you want me to leave you alone?” Sahil asks. “I want to live with you. To have a child with you. You do not even answer me. You come here to be part of India, I am part of India too. So why do you not care?”
His words sting me, but I have no answer, so I settle for a retort. “Why do you behave so badly?” I want to stop his imbibing. But as we don’t have to drive anywhere, or even walk anywhere except upstairs, I am trying not to be upset about it. Or at least to pretend I’m not upset. I try to concentrate on the story Mr. Prateek is telling about the building of the dam-that-looks-like-a-temple that created this enormous lake, the biggest in all of Rajasthan. Each time the effort at building the dam failed, he explains. Halfway through, the construction would collapse and the river would come pouring through.
“The British did many good things for this country,” Mr. Prateek declares. “I don’t care what anyone else says. From them we learned engineering.” But engineering could not stop the gods who were angry at the arrogance of humans. “Failure, failure, failure like anything else. ‘The gods demand a sacrifice,’ the people said. Just so. Volunteers were called for, a man who was willing to sacrifice his earthly life for the honor of being named in the inscription of this dam.”
“So did they find such a person?” I ask. “I hope not.”
At that moment the hunter appears and grumbles something, and shortly after that, the one permanent employee in the hotel aside from the manager, a short man dressed impeccably in a white kurta shirt and trousers, announces dinner with a bow. “Our storytelling is continuing in the dining room,” Mr. Prateek says. With Sahil weaving, we move from the courtyard, through the reception area with its grand staircase, into a large room where a table has been set next to long dusty windows. Cracked china dully shines on almost-white linen. I think of the opulence of the dinners that must have taken place here in the past, the guests swathed in brocade and jeweled turbans as they sat down to freshly killed and cooked boars stuffed with apples in their mouths.
We seat ourselves, and Mr. Prateek picks up his story. “You ask if they found such a man. Indeed, one was obtained. An ordinary man, a peasant, but one who believed in mighty progress.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “This man was willing to give his life for the advancement of civilization and for immortality. He stood in the trench as they were building and was covered with cement and mud. And after this the dam was completed with great speed and success. He is still here, buried.”
“Buried alive. So you are saying this is native ingenuity?” It would seem like another Indian legend, except for the forthright way in which Mr. Prateek tells the story.
“We in India are very much a mixture of the practical side and the spiritual or artistic side, favoring both. In fact, I have written a poem about this, it captured my fancy so much. Would you like to hear it?”
“How could I resist hearing a poem on such a topic?”
“Presently you will hear it. Just now, dinner is served.” The servant appears with five or six plump and blackened birds piled on a china platter, accompanied by heaps of rice and curried sauces. Mrs. Prateek, he explains, has made the side dishes although she is not at the table. Mr. Prateek takes over the carving of the birds. A bottle of wine is opened, and the hunter appears. Indian men, even the poorest, give an air of being clean and groomed. With his unkempt hair and scruffy beard, the hunter seems have stepped out of a Russian novel. Mr. Prateek toasts him for his contribution of the grilled grouse. He growls in acknowledgement.
The hunter begins to shout and wave his fork around. Every so often he pours a bit of the mulch straight from the bottle into his mouth, and then passes it to Sahil. Fortunately, Mr. Prateek reaches out to intercept the bottle, sniffs it and hands it back to the hunter with a reprimand.
As he works on carving the birds, Mr. Prateek gamely tries to make introductions. But his ever so cheerful voice fades away as the hunter bellows who knows what jokes, followed by chortles of approval from his assistant, a gangly young man who has wandered in still wearing his hunting hat and dusty boots, his rifle slung over his shoulder. The hunter grins, wipes his mouth, grabs the carving knife from Mr. Prateek, and makes a show of cutting the birds. When he’s done, his assistant picks up a drumstick before skulking off and sitting on the floor with his knees spread apart, his rifle resting beside him.
“He is not accustomed to chairs,” Mr. Prateek explains.
“Is he not accustomed to leaving his guns outside either?” I ask. “I mean that’s what they did even in the Wild West.”
Mr. Prateek chuckles. “This is the Wild East, you might say then. I myself have a gun for hunting these very delicious birds. I have led the odd expedition or two and am a crack shot like anything else.” I nod. The hunter continues at top volume. Mr. Prateek rolls his eyes in the hunter’s direction. “We must ignore him.”
I try do just that, concentrating on my bird, which really is very good. I encourage Sahil to at least eat, and he does take a few bites. He is uncharacteristically quiet in the midst of the din of the competing voices of the bellowing hunter and Mr. Prateek, who is going on now about how much chairs have contributed to civilization. Sahil seems to have tuned us all out. When the bottle of wine is passed around, he fills his glass to the rim, and downs a half of it in the first gulp. “Why are you doing this?” I ask him.
Sahil looks at me in a wounded way. “I drink because I want to be happy and I am sad because you are angry at me.” His words slur when he says it.
“Sahil, please stop. I’m not angry. We can talk about everything later.”
“Would you like to hear my poem?” Mr. Prateek asks again.
“Of course.” I smile, determined to retain the façade of a civilized dinner party. Mr. Prateek has to speak very loudly to be heard over the hunter. “And so,” he begins.
They strived to build the mighty dam
Bu their work, alas, would not stand
The water came like anything else in a torrent
Drowning all who could not flee the current
Until one humble man came to offer
The greatest thing a man can proffer
“Cover me,” he said, “with all your cement
And in your hearts do not lament”
So the work like anything else proceeded
Until the gods at long last heeded
And the mighty water crop was stopped
And so in conclusion the British were topped
He finishes his poem and waits. I think it’s been so long since Mr. Prateek has had a guest who can appreciate his enthusiasm for language, if not his skill, that I put down my knife and fork and applaud him. Mrs. Prateek, sweet-faced in a pink sari, who has quietly crept into the room, and even Sahil in his stupor, clap their hands along with me.
Mr. Prateek looks very pleased. “Sometimes life is a struggle between the forces of culture and the forces of incivility,” he says, casting a disparaging glance in the hunter’s direction. As if he could understand and were taking offense at the comment, the hunter barks back at all of us, then gives a command to his crony. The man stops gnawing on the drumstick and springs up from the floor, gripping his rifle as he does so. They both stumble out of the dining room.
“They will sleep it off.” Mr. Prateek shrugs. “What the world has
come to with so much rudeness and drunkenness. We must continue the fight, we writers, with our words.”
“Yes, we must,” I agree. I'm glad to be rid of the hunters.
“Thank you for your wonderful company, fellow writer lady,” Mr. Prateek says, standing up and bowing slightly to me. “I sadly must leave you. I must do the paperwork as always.”
“I really did enjoy your poem. And the story. I hope it was only a story. Or as we way in America, an urban legend, or in this case, a Rajasthani legend.”
“Quite so. Quite so,” he says enigmatically, before he and his wife make their exit.
By now, darkness has settled outside, the window panes are black, the room lit only by a few oil lamps. The servant in white has cleared the table and left. Sahil’s normally animated face is flattened by alcohol or whatever else was in the hunter’s concoction. Now his eyes are rolling and his head is bobbing on his chest. “Time to go,” I tell him. He doesn’t respond. I sigh. It’s a long flight of stairs to our room, and I’m not happy about having to support him the whole way up. “Come on. Chalo,” I say, tugging at him.
Anger is futile at this stage. I'm trying to figure out how to lug him away from the dinner table when I hear a muffled sound. Shuffling. Muttering. Something I know instinctively will be very unpleasant, even before I turn in the direction of the noise. And there they are: the hunter on one side of the door, his crony on the other, framed by the doorway like a painting. Their rifles are pointed upright as if they were guarding a palace. Their eyes are moving from Sahil to me, and back again, looking both of us over as if we were grouse.
