The Overnight Palace

by Janet Sola

  “Sahil,” I nearly shout. He lets out a sound something between a giggle and a groan. The adrenaline comes in starbursts, exploding in my knees, my stomach, my heart, my head. I feel sure they see my fear. With newfound strength, I grab Sahil, yank him to his feet, and put his arm around my shoulder. I hold my head high, and move toward them step by step, looking beyond them as if they don’t exist. “Please get out of our way,” I say when we reach the doorway. And they do.

  I drag Sahil through the adjoining room that leads to the staircase. I can feel their eyes on my back. Somehow, I manage to struggle up the stairs to our second floor room, Sahil leaning on me the entire way. Once inside, I deposit him on the bed, slam the double doors shut, then slide the iron bolt that spans the doors into its slot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Trapped

  I move across the room and open the French doors that lead to the tiny balcony. A gust of wind from the lake blows in and the long white curtains billow in response. They look like the ghosts of veiled women. I step through the doors. Two stories below me, the dark water laps against the stone walls. The moon floats on the surface of the lake. The night is a mirror.

  Then, in the silence, a thud. Then another. Sahil must be reviving. I turn to look, but he’s hasn’t moved. There’s the sound again. Muffled. Insistent. Thud. Thud. The sound is coming from the other side of the double doors that lead to the hallway. Thud. Thud. Thud. Then another sound. Sharper this time, a cracking sound, a hard object butting against wood. The sound of a rifle butt. No, the sound of two rifle butts. It’s the most sickening sound I have ever heard. I can’t move. I stare at the door where the sounds are coming from.

  The curtains billow again. My mind stops in mid-thought, freezes, then slides through a narrow bright opening to another dimension, a dimension where everything rational, everything civilized has been left behind, like so many silly customs, and what is left is very clear. The hunter and the hunted.

  I go through a mental checklist. I’ve bolted the double doors from the inside. It’s an iron bolt. It should hold, it will hold, at least as long as the wooden frame that holds the brackets does not give. The wood is old. Maybe a hundred years old. But still it should hold, right? There is no other way out. And no telephone. I pace, looking for the switch to turn off the overhead light. The light glares down on me. It’s so bright. The room is enormous, forty paces of black and white tiles. I find the switch, behind the curtain. I flick it. The light stays on. I flick it again. And again. Nothing changes. High up on the wall, the gazelle’s head stares down, its glass eyes terrified and terrifying.

  The sound again. Crack. The doors heave against the bolt. Think. What do they want? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know. They’re drunk. Hyped up. Mayhem. Violence. Robbery. Rape. They would probably settle for either of us. What will they do to get it? I don’t know. Sahil is lying on his back, arms out, looking as innocent as an exhausted swimmer drifting peacefully on the white raft of the bed.

  More cracks. More thuds. “Go away,” I shout, with what I hope sounds like authority. Inside I’m shaking. Then silence. Maybe they’ve left. I kneel on the bed again and shake Sahil. His head flops like a puppet’s. I’m furious at him for doing this to me. I want him to wake up and save me. I plead with him. “Wake up, please wake up.” My voice is hoarse, desperate. But he’s gone. I straddle him and peel back his eyelids. His brown irises are floating in white, like dark yolks, beautiful and blank. He’s dead, I think, he’s dead. The stuff he drank was poison and he’s died. I put my head on his chest, listen through his white shirt. I can hear his heartbeat. I put my hand above his mouth. I can feel the warmth of his breath.

  Then the sounds start again. Only now they are human voices, or inhuman, growls and rasps and howls, like wild beasts in nightmares. And the sounds aren’t coming from behind the doors to the room. Now they’re from the wall over the bed, an arm’s length away. Scratching sounds. Scraping sounds. Behind the bed, I notice for the first time, is an old connecting door with a glass inset that has been painted over on the other side of the glass. Now I see what the hunters are doing. They are scraping the paint off. The scratches go on and on until I can see a dark spot that is growing larger. They’re making a peephole. The better to see us with. They can see Sahil lying on the bed, me kneeling beside him. I know they are watching me, as if I were in a zoo or a prison cell. They're laughing. Drunken laughter. They’re shouting. I can’t translate, but I don’t need to.

  I can’t stay here. I try to imagine their sight lines. If I hug the common wall between us they won’t be able to see me. I get up from the bed. Sahil doesn’t move as I leave him lying there. I lean against the wall and inch my way along to a corner wardrobe. It’s made of a dark wood, probably wood from the forest that Mr. Prateek said used to be here. Where is that silly man? No doubt revising his ridiculous poem aloud and chuckling to himself.

  I slide to the floor, press my palms together to stop shaking. The henna patterns look strange now, nonsensical. I try to connect something of what I am doing at this moment to the woman who came here a few short months ago, maybe a little naïve, maybe a little overly romantic, but a nice woman, surely, a nice educated woman with a life and friends and a career—surely that’s a description of me. Will I ever get back to her? Will I ever get out of this room? Will I ever get out of India?

  Now, they’re now tapping on the glass, as if they are summoning me to come back into view. I slide my body along the floor until I reach the bathroom. It’s huge, marbled over every inch. There’s a lock on the door. A safety zone. But if they do manage to break down the door and get in, I’d be trapped.

  I slide along the floor back into the main room. I wish the light would burn out. It’s so yellow and bright, a tiny sun glaring down on a lonely solar system, light years away from the world I lived in for so long, where there were lunches and concerts and Shakespeare and lists of things to do. The universe of this strange place I’m in has its own rules, things are born and die here, yet no one, no one at all outside it will ever know. It will take any information that leaves here so long to reach the other world, the normal world, that the event will be long over. If they react at all, people will simply shrug, “What was she thinking?”

  But I am thinking, very sharply. I’m shot through with pure thought, aware of every detail of this room, of my body, of Sahil’s unconscious form on the bed, of the predators next door, still scratching, still knocking on the glass. In an instant, I formulate a plan. To accomplish it I need to be invisible.

  My heart is pounding as I go to my suitcase, search through my cosmetics bag for my bottle of nail polish, the color of the sunset Salena had said. I move back to the glass and stare back defiantly. I can hear their great drunken guffaws. I try not to imagine their faces. I shake the bottle, undo the cap, pull out the brush and start painting, first with small strokes, then thick sloppy fast ones until the glass is dripping with shiny coral polish. There is no more peephole. The show is over. The predators are muttering.

  They do what I thought they would do. They move back to the bolted doors and attack with renewed energy. They must be shoulder hammering, body hammering. The nauseating thud of rifle butts begins again. I wonder how long it will take before they try to shoot their way through.

  I take another look at Sahil. What would they do to him if they broke through? I don’t even want to imagine it. It seems so long ago, when Sahil and I sat on the parapets of the Monsoon Palace, telling each other childhood stories of our mothers saving us from drowning. Now, there is no one to save us.

  I step out to the balcony. I take a deep breath, close my eyes and call on one more goddess. Not those goddesses of creativity, or love, or wealth, those goddesses of transformation, of fulfillment, or happiness, all those lovely pursuits of leisure that are part of some other world. In this remote time and place where I find myself at this moment those things don’t matter. What matters is survival. I call on Durga. Durga with her many arms
holding her trident and conch shell. Durga who had to go it alone against some brute whose name I can’t remember, but one who abused his power, like the brutes with their guns now banging at my door, like all the brutes of the world. She had to do it by herself, without the aid of any males. Were they all sleeping, like Sahil? I don’t need the details, I just need her strength. Durga, goddess of courage, help me now.

  I look down to the black water below. It’s so far down. Fear crawls up my body like a cold, oily drug, into my legs, into my stomach, up to my heart, and through my arms. It paralyzes me. It’s only my spirit, a tiny thing, floating free, that escapes. That’s where Durga reaches me. It’s only water, she says, only an element, indifferent, calm, beautiful even. Unlike the malevolent forces on the other side of the door. You don’t have to change the whole world, but only respond to what you face in the moment. That’s all courage is.

  I step out of my shoes, delicate little embroidered slippers meant for that other life with those other goddesses. There is no breeze at all now. The low moon is suspended over the water, lighting a silver trail straight to me and shedding a ghostly glow on the ruined palace in the distance. I hear the low, two-noted hoot of an owl and, behind me, the cracks and groans at the door.

  How far down is the water? Twenty feet? Thirty feet?

  I take off my jewelry, a rope of a necklace, a twist of bracelet and let them drop. Only one step. One step. Take it. Whatever happens, Durga says to me in her soft voice, as I step over the railing and off the edge, know that you are part of this world that is lovely beyond compare.

  The lake swallows me in an instant. Cold. Wet. Dark. The panels of my silk tunic float up around me, wrap around my face and arms like tentacles. Like a cold lover, the water pulls me down, down, down into its embrace. It’s so strange. Like India was strange when I first arrived. Not mine. Then it became mine. Like the dark water is becoming mine. Down, down. It’s so silky against my skin, no longer cold, like going back to a womb, to a place before I was born, to my natural element. I want to get to know it. How deep is it? What other creatures live here? Are they welcoming their clumsy new inhabitant? Are they haunted too by the ghost of the man buried in the dam? But I have no time for the answers to my questions. My lungs ache, and there is no air on my downward path. Breathe in, the other lake creatures say, join us in our peace. Yes, says my body, breathe in, you will adapt like other creatures that returned to the water. You have to breathe. Wait, says Durga. Courage is endurance too.

  Then, when I can’t stand it another second, I’m suspended, the force pulling me down in perfect balance with the force that wants to pull me up. I rise. The lake inhabitants, the fish, the eels, the kelp, the ghost, they all expel me from their midst. I don’t belong here after all. I emerge on to the glittering surface. The moon streams toward me. I open my mouth and air, sweet air, flows in. The owl is hooting its two notes, over and over again.

  It’s a short swim to the steps of the ghat, perhaps a hundred breast strokes with my clothes weighing me down. I search for the underwater steps with my feet and hands. I find them, slimy, but I pull myself up to my knees, and then my feet. The elephant guardians are waiting in the moonlight, their trunks stretched out in greeting. I shake myself off and make my way up the stairs, through the courtyard, and into the lodge and its halls. From faraway, up on the higher floor where I had come from, I can still hear the thumps of the drunken hunters. Light comes from under the door at the end of the hall. The manager’s residence. When Mr. Prateek answers my knock, groggy but fully dressed, I put my finger to my lips. We must not give the brutes any warning.

  “You said you had a gun,” I say in a low voice. “Get your gun.” He looks at me, his lips pursing, one eyebrow raised in a question mark. “Get your gun. Get your gun like anything else.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  The Final Fight

  Set on the table in our room are a pot of steaming coffee, baguettes and omelets, all on a white tablecloth with a vase of flowers. Mr. Prateek delivered it personally this morning. “Dear lady writer,” he assures me, “the scoundrels are safely locked up.”

  I am half listening to him, half to Sahil, who is in the bathroom, retching into the toilet bowl.

  “This is what I am meaning when I say the forces of civility must fight the forces of chaos. Lock them up.”

  “I think that fight could be more easily won if you had not left your guests with crazy men with guns and gone off to write a poem.”

  “I neglected to do my duty to protect my guests,” he admits, hanging his head. “In the future I will have more vigilance.”

  As Mr. Prateek tells the story, he used his shotgun to come up from behind and surprise the drunken hunters, took their guns, locked them in a room, guarded them till their loud snoring told him they were asleep, and this morning had them carted off to the local jail. I stayed in Mr. and Mrs. Prateek’s rooms, with a blanket around me, until Sahil finally, after repeated poundings by Mr. Prateek, woke up enough to unbolt the door. Mr. Prateek returned for me and escorted me to the room. I pulled off my wet clothes, took a hot bath and crawled into bed beside Sahil.

  When Mr. Prateek leaves, still mumbling apologies, I pour myself another cup of coffee and pick at my omelet. Sahil ventures out of the bathroom and slumps into a chair, a towel over his shoulders. I tell him everything that happened. I walk around the room recreating the story. “Here,” I kneel on the bed and tap on the glass, “here is where they scraped off the paint and I put the polish over it.” I can hear my voice rising. “And here is where they tried to break down the door.” I gingerly touch the splintered wood. Then I move to the balcony. In the daylight it looks less dangerous, and yet I still can’t believe I did it. “And here is where I jumped into the lake.”

  He holds his head between his hands as if it were a melon about to burst open and closes his eyes. He refuses to take any responsibility. “It is not my fault life is full with bad, crazy people.”

  “You deserted me. I am in your country.” I go back to my nearly untouched breakfast, look at him evenly over my coffee cup. “You brought me to this place. What if they had broken the door down? What if I couldn’t have escaped by swimming? Who knows what would happen? I could have been raped. You could have been raped, for that matter. Or killed.”

  “But this did not happen. It is good you jump off balcony to swim. This means you are not afraid any more.”

  “You think this is all is a joke.”

  “Leave me alone,” he says. “You are not my mother.” He rubs his eyes with both hands.

  “You are a child though,” I say. “You don’t care about anybody but yourself.”

  “I cannot help it. It will not happen again.” He says this with a shrug.

  I can‘t believe he can be so cavalier about the whole thing. “You know what Sahil, I take it back. You are not a child, you just do whatever you feel like, whatever your instinct tells you to do.” I am shrieking now. “You’re not a child. You’re an animal.”

  Instantly, he is transformed. He moves toward me in a cold fury. “Do not call me that. I am not that. I am a man. An Indian man. I will show you that.” He reaches out for me with both arms and pushes me back on the bed.

  He has my arms pinned down over my head. I’m not moving, not trying to fight him. I want to use my will alone to stop him, to bring him back to what he was before. I stare into his eyes, trying to fathom what he is thinking. But they’re black, unreadable.

  “Do not ever call me an animal. That is the something you can never say.” I’ve touched some forbidden cultural zone, the one my Hindi teacher warned me about. Maybe I should apologize, but I say nothing. He pulls himself up and turns away. “No,” he says, “I do not want you. I hate you. You are driving me crazy. You do what you want to do. I am leaving.”

  “Leave then, yes, leave,” I say.

  “Yes, I leave. And I will not come back.” He is still in the clothes he was wearing yesterday, his black T-shirt and jea
ns, rumpled now. He picks up the blue and white woven scarf I gave him from the floor and wraps it around his neck. He runs his hands through his hair, then picks up his satchel. I watch him walk across the room. He does not even look over his shoulder. He pushes opens the splintered door, goes out, and slams it behind him.

  I sit for a few minutes, feeling my anger, feeling my righteousness. Taking pleasure in it, in fact. Good. It’s over. I’m free. It had to be. I start to pick up my own things and pack. There is the bottle of nail polish Salena wanted, half gone now. I’ll leave the remainder for Mr. Prateek to give to her if she comes. I wonder if the painting would have showed up along with it. I doubt it. I don’t care now. I fold the few clothes I brought with me, the colorful silk skirts and dresses and scarves I’ve grown so fond of. Sahil has likely taken the bus back to town or hitched a ride. I’ll have to make the bus ride alone. It will be good to wear something that hides me on the way. I opt for a loose pale blue dress that completely covers me. I take off the jeans and T-shirt I put on this morning. As I undress, I see that my period has come after all. I’m relieved. Thank the goddess, Durga it would be, who needs no man. Once I’m dressed, I sit on the edge of the bed. It’s so eerily quiet. Not a sound except the faint lap of lake water. Long rectangles of gray sky press against the windows. It’s as if I had made this journey all alone, as if Sahil had never existed.

  Then it starts. I don’t even try to stop the tears because I know I can’t. I throw myself on the bed and cry, great sobs of pain, for lost love, for what I cannot hold on to—riding a bicycle through the fields and holding a lamb in my arms, for fried fish in the rooftop restaurant, and the birds building a nest in my room, and for the lovemaking at night with this beautiful man that I loved maybe simply because of his beauty, and the arc of his cigarette as he left, and the basket over my head that blanked everything out except our laughter. And then I cry for my lost youth that I will never have again, and know I will never cry for again, but today I am crying for it and can’t stop. Because I know after this I will find Cathy in Delhi and Jason in Kathmandu if I can, and eventually go back to where I came from, to the other side of the world, I will have another relationship maybe, surely, but it will never ever be as wild and as beautiful and as heartbreaking as this one. Is there a goddess for angry, forlorn women? For women who make bad decisions? For women who are leaving their youth behind? Maybe, but I don’t know who she is. I’m alone, with just me, or the shell of me.