I had stopped at an ATM in the airport and so had rupees at the ready. I ordered two scotches from the attendant and dumped them into the little plastic cup. My drinking strategy now wasn’t an attempt to prove I was unsuitable for adult decisions. I was just trying to make it through the flight without crying. I gripped one of the arms of my seat with my sweaty palm and grabbed big swallows of the scotch between bumps. I had Gandhi’s autobiography with me, a present from Betsy, but I suddenly felt it would be pretentious to be the only white person on a flight full of Indians to haul it out. And Gandhi was dead, and anything associated with death felt like a no-no just then.
I was flipping through the in-flight magazine when all of a sudden I realized that I had no idea where I lived. I assumed that I’d take a cab, but I did not know what to tell the driver. My chest tightened. With each breath I couldn’t take in more than a teaspoon of air. My thoughts spun. I’d have to spend the night in a hotel, but even the next day in broad daylight I wouldn’t know where to begin. I knew I lived after a series of flyovers. Overpasses were called flyovers in India. I knew that. I knew that to get to my apartment you had to go over three of them. How many flyovers could there be in Hyderabad? It’d narrow my search, at least. I pulled out my wallet and flipped through it, hoping to find a scrap of paper with my address.
“Are you all right?” the man in the expensive eyeglasses asked. He was shorter than I and immaculately shaved. It was four a.m., and he looked absurdly fresh.
“I can’t remember where I live,” I said to him.
“You live in Hyderabad?”
“I do. I live in Tarnaka.” Talking made me remember the name of the section of town I lived in. “But I can’t remember the address. Could I just say Tarnaka to the cab driver?”
“You live in Secunderabad,” he corrected.
“No. I live in Hyderabad. Tarnaka, Hyderabad.”
“Tarnaka is located in Secunderabad. I have lived there all of my life.”
“Okay. I definitely live in Tarnaka.”
“I have a car. Do you want me to take you?”
“Maybe. I think I’d recognize it if I saw it. I know there are three flyovers in order to get there. Does that help?”
“Not really. But Tarnaka is not very big. We could drive around.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience you. It’s so late as it is.”
“I’m going to be awake anyway.” The man smiled at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, what is your occupation?”
“I’m a writer. A student. A student studying writing. I’m on a grant.”
“Very good. My name is—” He said his name, but he said it very quickly, and it slid out of my mind as if it were greased.
“I’m David.”
We chatted amiably. I worried about getting in a car with a strange man. Paranoia started plucking strings in my brain. Who else but a kidnapper would look so fresh at four in the morning? Who other than a murderer was this nice to somebody on a plane?
“I’m going to take a cab.” I fluttered my hands in front of me in a gesture I hoped meant that there was nothing to worry about. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
“The taximan might not speak English.” He brought up his fingers like he was ready to begin a list of reasons that I should accept his offer.
I interrupted him and said as firmly as I could, “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
It took another thirty minutes to land. We sat in silence the rest of the time. I stared at the lights of Hyderabad as we circled. Somewhere amid all those pinpricks was a room with my stuff, a place where I might belong.
When I deplaned and we filed across the tarmac to the terminal, the panic built in me again. The man who had been seated beside me had shouldered his bag and was walking briskly in front of me. I kept myself from running after him and begging him to drive me around town. We entered the terminal. The entire sprawling train of us made our way through the empty airport to the baggage carousel.
We left the secure area. The metal detectors and X-ray machines were unmanned, and there was a lone security guard eyeing us as we passed into the main hall. There was a length of metal fencing against which loved ones were piled up, sorting the newcomers with their eyes. A very dark-skinned man’s face lit up when I walked by. He had small gold-rimmed glasses and an amazing pompadour of black hair that split into two wings at his widow’s peak. He grabbed my arm as I passed.
“The hero returns,” he crowed.
I had learned to recognize people recognizing me in central Ohio. This man knew me.
He met me at the end of the metal fence.
“So you have a bag or something? I have a cab outside waiting.”
I didn’t recognize this person, but I knew his voice. As soon as I heard him, I knew I knew him. It was Veda. I knew Veda. He’d been my Fulbright-appointed facilitator when I came to Hyderabad. He’d helped me find my apartment. The gears in my brain were rusty, but they were slowly grinding to life.
“How did you know to come get me?” I asked.
“You sent me your information by e-mail. You don’t remember this?”
“I’m sorry; I don’t.”
“You are such a kidder,” he said, throwing his head back and laughing. “Come on, let’s collect your baggage.”
In a rusty van that rattled and jumped with every pothole, I watched the city slide by. Everything was foreign; I recognized nothing. There were palm trees and people sleeping on sidewalks and four flyovers. We made turn after turn, passed a small Anglican church on a roundabout, and passed a marvelously lit-up temple, which was so white it looked wet like fresh paint. The tip of that temple was gold.
Veda was chatting with me, asking about my parents, about Anne. He knew so much about me. My brain spun, trying to salvage memories about our friendship. He told me that his students, especially the females, were waiting for my darshan. He explained that a darshan was when a god revealed himself to ordinary people.
“The girls are really quite taken with you, Hero. You are quite a lady-killer.”
“I have something for you.” I spun my suitcase around and unzipped it. I came out with the anthology. “Anne got it for you.”
He held it in his hands and flipped to the copyright page. “Perfect.”
“She stole it from a library.”
Veda closed the book. He handed it back to me. “Please have her return it.”
“It’s already done. Take it. You’re picking me up at four in the morning? Take the book.”
He wasn’t happy, but he flipped to the index and read through the poets. “Please tell Anne that I wish she would not have gone to so much trouble, but that I appreciate it very much. She is a prize. You are very lucky, my friend.”
At a random corner, we turned off the main road and passed an array of apartment buildings. We pulled up to one, and Veda said that we had arrived. I had been in the apartment only a month prior, packing my things with my parents, and supposedly I was well at that moment (drugged up and fresh from Woodlands but post-Lariam, at least). And this building still didn’t look familiar. It was flat and lifeless.
A gang of puppies wrestled on the street. When we stepped out of the van, they ran at us, squirming and nipping at our hands and pant legs. I pulled at their ears and rubbed their scabby heads.
Veda paid the driver, then clapped his hands at the dogs. They fled, whimpering.
“Filthy beasts. Full of vermin.”
Veda banged on the gate. After a while, a thin man in a tank top and a length of cloth wrapped around his waist climbed off a cot, unlocked the gate, and swung it open for us.
We took the elevator to the top floor and then went up a narrow flight of stairs. This was more familiar. I’d climbed this stairway before. We stood at the door to a flat on the roof, and Veda handed me a set of keys and a plastic bag.
“There’s toothpaste and some milk and noodles in there. Enough to last you for the day.”
I thanked him.
&
nbsp; “Okay. I must be off. Perhaps get some sleep before the monsters wake up and start causing terror.”
“You have kids?” I asked, embarrassed that I didn’t know.
“I will ring you later on your mobile, and we can have dinner tonight at your favorite restaurant.”
I grabbed Veda, and I learned that he didn’t like to be hugged. After unpeeling himself from me, he waved and disappeared down the stairs.
Immediately he came back up.
“Hero, there is the topic of the rent that we must cover. I paid it for you while you were gone, and . . .” He dodged his head back and forth.
“I’ll pay you back. Let me go to the bank tomorrow, and I’ll pay you back. Of course.”
“No problem. Pay me whenever.”
“I’ll pay you tomorrow,” I said.
He disappeared again, and I realized that I didn’t ask him how much my rent was.
Alone, I lit a cigarette. I stayed on the roof surrounding my apartment because I didn’t want to smoke inside. The morning was bruising the eastern edge of the sky. Pacing the roof in the darkness, I watched my brain. It was wired and spinning from the flight and from Veda.
I had a favorite restaurant.
I had rent that needed to be paid.
What I wanted was to walk into that apartment and find all of my stuff and be able to click into my life like a LEGO block. I had books in there with my own handwriting in the margins that I didn’t remember reading. I’d have to read them all again. Make new notes. But was that really unusual? Who remembered every part of every book he read? But I needed to remember. Every unrecognized bit of marginalia was an indictment.
I had to reconstruct this life. But what if it happened again? What if I lost my memory again, and then I’d have to do this work all over, read these books again, remember the awful crap from high school again, invest myself in strange pictures again, recollect again everything—my family, my friends, the dog.
What if it hadn’t been the Lariam? What if my brain was just wired wrong, and I’d spend my life waking up to this life again and again and again? This hollowness. This need for placement. This need for a restaurant full of people who’d all know me and love me and locate me. I hated this stupid flawed brain that forgot that I’d arranged for Veda to pick me up from the airport, that forgot Veda and Anne and everyone who meant anything to me. It was an ingrate, chemically constructed to hurt people who cared for me. I’d rather throw myself off the roof.
Music.
From three different points tucked deep in the darkness of the city, men’s voices warbled and cracked. There was the static crush of bad speakers. The voices echoed throughout the sleeping city, calling people to prayer. The day was beginning. Allah was asking through Mohammed through these men through these speakers for all Muslims to come and worship.
I waited, worried that the songs were in my brain, worried that it was happening again. I waited and watched the three different songs swirl in my brain. I waited and was terrified that the songs would cohere into a theme song from my childhood. But they stayed separate. The songs were not about me, and they stayed separate from me. I was okay. For the moment, I was not insane. I wasn’t going to jump. I wasn’t going to stick the burning cigarette into my arm. I wasn’t going to writhe on the gritty roof and piss myself.
I stabbed my cigarette out on the little half wall that surrounded the roof, flicked it, spinning and orange, to the asphalt seven stories below me, and walked into the apartment furnished with the belongings of a stranger.
Hyderabad and Secunderabad are the twin cities of southern India and referred to as a single entity in the same way Minneapolis–St. Paul are, by which I mean, by everyone except for the people who live there. It’s an odd city perched on the Deccan Plateau and not frequented much by tourists, no matter what the tourism bureau claims. Its most beautiful vistas are of the rock formations that dot its borders. After erosion washed the soil away, the rocks were left stacked in awkward towering pillars. The city is both Hindu and Muslim, with the Old City predominantly Muslim. The most famous bit of architecture in Hyderabad is the Charminar (the name coming from char, which means four, and minar, which means minarettes). It’s a tall structure, and you can pay 20 rupees to climb the stairs and look down at the traffic snarled around it. In the spring, the fruit sellers are out with long cartloads of Alphonso mangoes, and when they are viewed from above it’s like the sides of the street are paved with lumps of ripening gold.
A few blocks away from the Charminar is a tiny shop front; in it there are six men squatting over two six-inch blocks of metal and wood. Sandwiched between the blocks is a sliver of silver. The men beat on the blocks with small hammers, a tiny ping with each hit, creating a rhythmless rhythm that you could get swept up into very easily. They fall into patterns with each other and then fall out just as quickly. They beat the silver into wafer-thin sheets that are then placed on fancy desserts.
Instead of doing what my grant had said I was going to do, completing interviews with people and examining grammatical patterns, I went down to this shop front and set up the fancy equipment I’d found in my flat and recorded these guys for hours. I’d let their labor fall into a rhythm in my head and then realize that there was no such pattern, that it was all chaos, and then I’d find the pattern again. Every once in a while one of the guys would hand me a thin square of silver, and I’d set it on my tongue. The wet metal melted, and it was salty. It became my favorite part of Hyderabad.
I was in Hyderabad by crazy chance. When I applied for my Fulbright, I had wanted to be in Benares, a big city for tourists and pilgrims alike.
Benares, also known as Varanasi, has the holy river Ganges flowing through it. It’s got the Westerner’s checklist of Indian exotica: ubiquitous religious iconography; people bathing in public; a labyrinth of narrow alleys choked with free-roaming garlanded cows; holy men on every corner; monkeys that steal food from your plate; beggars who race you to your hotel before you check in so they can score a kickback; a dozen different scams going on in the streets at once; the gnarled fists of lepers cradling their begging bowls, beseeching passersby; parades with corpses lifted above the crush of people, winding down to the river, where the dead are settled onto biers of logs and set alight. American tourists love Benares for its exotic wildness. Even Mark Twain visited the place.
I remembered being there in 1998 when I traveled after college with my friends Emil and Duncan. I had been sober and overwhelmed by the place, but Emil and Duncan needed more and sought out local hallucinogens. Their eyes were the size of saucers, trying to take it all in visually, pharmacologically.
Benares is a city hyperdense with sense data, and it was where I had wanted to spend a year writing when I applied for the grant in the fall of 2001.
The form asked if I had any university affiliation in India. I didn’t, and I didn’t have any idea how to get affiliation without cold-calling Indian universities. I did a search on Indian academics and Fulbright and English literature, and I came up with Meenakshi Mukherjee. At the time Mukherjee was teaching at Berkeley. I sent her an e-mail asking if she knew how I could get university affiliation in Benares. She wrote back and apologized that she didn’t know anyone in Benares, but that she did know of a literature professor who had done a Fulbright at Stanford and that he’d probably be happy to volunteer to be my advisor.
Mukherjee is a giant among academics. Her books on India’s postcolonial literature are bedrock texts, heavily referenced by other academics. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have so blithely e-mailed her. But I did, and she graciously helped me. If I had received the Fulbright and gone to Benares and had the amnesia episode there, a tourist hot spot with the train stations crawling with stoned foreigners, and the touts and dacoits who prey on them, surely I would not have been able to find the immediate assistance that I received in Hyderabad. It’s because Mukherjee didn’t know anyone in Benares that I was safe. Because the person she did know at the University of Hyd
erabad had a graduate student, that student became my Fulbright-appointed facilitator. After he had helped me set up my life in Hyderabad, I became friends with him. When I was found in the hospital, he rounded up every white face he could find so I wouldn’t feel alone. When I came back to India, he picked me up from the Hyderabad airport at four a.m. with a plastic bag with toothpaste, milk, and ramen. As far as I knew, Veda was my only friend in Hyderabad.
I called him the next day and the next, and we began a ritual of conversations and dinners that would last me nearly the rest of the year I spent in Hyderabad. What I knew about Hyderabad, I learned from those dinners. I’d leave my apartment at seven p.m. and meet him at this little place that was dark and covered with mirrors. Walking in, I’d always feel as if my eyes would never adjust enough to see. The host was supremely attentive and escorted me to my table immediately. I’d walk to my table-that-is-just-now-ready-this-way-please nearly blind. I was perpetually ten minutes early. I kept thinking the walk to the restaurant would take longer than it did. I’d watch the clock and count down the minutes until I could leave the apartment and actually have someplace to be. I’d come in and be seated, and before my retinas had dilated enough to take in the mirrored walls and globed candles at each table, I’d ordered a beer and a whisky. I’d have the whisky down before Veda got there.
Veda and I would order baskets of naan and share a dish of palak paneer or malai kofta, and he’d always be surprised that I’d want rice as well. It was part of our ritual for him to point out that rice did the same thing that naan did and that it was wasteful to order both. My part of the ritual was to nod and say that next time we’d only get one of them. I paid for these meals. The bills for them rarely went over 400 rupees, which was about $8, depending on how much I would drink. My grant wasn’t for a lot of money—the Fulbright people figured that for the grantees, living on a “local salary” was part of the experience—but Veda was a grad student with two kids, so I figured I had a lot more disposable income than he did.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 12
