The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  I also owed him.

  Our conversations would slalom through various topics. He had a friend who was obsessed with the literary critic Stanley Fish, and he’d rattle on about Stanley Fish, and I’d pretend to know who Stanley Fish was. Then I’d talk about the books I was reading, and he’d pretend to know who Barry Hannah was. Then he’d tell me about the Russians who were set to attend the school in the spring.

  “Some very strong and lovely opportunities for you, Hero,” Veda would say and wink.

  Veda worked at the Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages (or CIEFL—“sea-full,” as everyone called it). It was both a college for locals as well as a place foreigners came for intensive foreign-language study. These foreigners were not coming to learn Hindi or Urdu or even Tamil or Telugu. They came from West Africa for English, they came from Spain for Russian, and they came every year from Russia for a two-week boot camp in conversational English. The Russian groups were always almost entirely composed of women. Veda was deeply unhappy in his marriage, and he wanted to cheat by proxy.

  Veda’s misery was something he polished and wore like a tie clip. His marriage was awful; his children were poorly behaved; his dissertation was going to be unfinished forever. I never was able to get a handle on how old Veda was. It was one of those things that I was embarrassed to ask because I was sure I already knew but had forgotten. He was probably in his early forties. At least he sat in chairs like a man in his early forties. Veda liked to say I was bright and beautiful and young and could have sex with any and every young thing. Sometimes dinners would devolve into him explaining how great and perfect I was, with me then trying to talk him out of it.

  The bill would come. Veda would reach for his wallet. I’d wave him off, and I would pay it. We’d leave the intense dark of the restaurant and enter the purple beginning of night. He’d offer me a ride on his scooter. I’d say that walking was the only exercise I was getting. We’d shake hands; he’d kick-start the scooter and take off. I’d stand there for a few moments, trying to brainstorm things I could do. Rickshaws would accumulate near me. Men poked their heads out of the black and yellow exhaust-belching things and called to me. I waved them off, and for want of anything else to do, I’d go back to my rooftop flat. I’d smoke cigarettes, and with the CD player going, I’d try to memorize Merle Haggard songs. After an hour or two of doing laps smoking and softly singing “Big City” or “I Can’t Hold Myself in Line” to the night sky, I’d climb into my cot, down some Valium, and will myself to sleep.

  I was still haunted by my hallucinations. I had been denied entrance into some higher order. When my brain malfunctioned, this was the story that got dredged up out of that two pounds of gray matter. Lodged inside of me was a feeling of inadequacy. It was a feeling ingrained as deep as the biochemical level.

  I came back to India feeling unworthy, feeling like I needed to put things right. My first job was to thank the people who had helped with my recovery. Veda, I saw almost every night. There was Geeta, who I planned to visit in a week or so, who sent me e-mails every single day, and who may or may not have been flirting with me. I told myself that I was visiting her to reconnect with a fellow Fulbrighter, that my visit wasn’t only about being close to a beautiful woman in a bikini. Geeta was a singer, so I told myself it’d be good to spend time with a fellow artist.

  But there were also Mr. DeSilva and Sampson, the two men who came to Mrs. Lee’s guesthouse and prayed over me. There was Dr. Pat, the American who got me transferred from Apollo Hospital to Woodlands, but my parents had told me that they were donating to her organization, so I didn’t feel the need to thank her myself. There was Richard, the poet who looked like Jim Henson and brought me cigarettes.

  I didn’t want to go to Mrs. Lee’s house. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t a drug addict. It felt like it was more magnanimous to let her believe she had led a successful intervention.

  And Rajesh/Josh. I needed to find him. I needed to thank him most of all. If I had ended up on a train that day, if anyone other than Rajesh/Josh had found me . . .

  The emotional heft of the hallucinations haunted me, made me feel consigned to this menial existence where I scrubbed my clothes in a bucket on my roof and where my stomach wasn’t good with any of the food. I lost ten pounds within the first three weeks I was back. The foot pads on my squat toilet were slippery, and I had already twice stumbled and put my foot in my own mess. I spent my days reading the books in my library. I read The Idiot in two days. I left my apartment only to write e-mails to Geeta, coordinating my visit in mid-December; to pick up milk packets, which I’d boil before pouring over my Wheaties; and to meet Veda for a dinner I’d then spend the rest of the night squatted over a hole evacuating.

  The hollowness was lessening, though. There was so much clamor in the streets and inside of my intestines that I only felt the hollowness right before sleep and right when I woke up. I was remembering more of my life. I was functional, but the shame remained. In addition to the shame, torpor was taking over me. Cigarettes, Valium, booze, books, and the hours recording the silversmiths? I needed to get out of my apartment and interact with the web of people who’d saved me. I needed to make amends.

  I started with Mr. DeSilva. I called to thank him for his help. I was embarrassed and effusive; I hadn’t planned out what to say beyond “thank you.” I figured the rest would have taken care of itself, that I’d feel some kind of tumbler clicking into place with each expression of gratitude. Instead, I rambled on about how difficult it had been and how lucky I was to have him and Sampson help me. I think he finally invited me to dinner to shut me up.

  But then he had a better idea. He asked me to attend church with his family.

  So the next Sunday, I put on khakis and a nice shirt and caught a rickshaw to the Anglican church on the roundabout. The service was in English: standing, sitting, singing, saying the things printed in the program in unison. The sibilant hiss that filled the church when everyone got to the “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” line in the Lord’s Prayer was something I then remembered from my childhood—Sundays upon Sundays at Asbury Methodist. I celebrated each of these little remembrances that came back.

  When I declined to go up and take communion, Mr. DeSilva pulled me aside and assured me that the wine and host were all safe, even for foreigners.

  After the service, the congregants filed into the parking lot for cookies and punch, and the DeSilvas brought over every white person they could for me to meet and chat with. Mr. DeSilva told me that I was welcome to have lunch with them, and that I would stay with them through the afternoon and attend a night service at a different church before coming back to this church for a celebration. He said I would like the other church even though most of the service would be in Urdu. It was a big time for the other church because we were in the middle of Ramadan. I knew that Ramadan was going on since I lived in a neighborhood with three mosques, but I had no idea why the Muslim holiday would’ve mattered so much to this other church.

  At their house, I was fed mangoes, bananas, and small cucumber sandwiches in the kitchen, where a TV tuned to an evangelical channel babbled on a narrow table in the corner.

  The hours crawled by. Slowly the sun descended, and we piled into DeSilva’s car. We parked in front of a mosque. There were dozens of men milling around in long white kurtas reaching past their knees and with white knitted kufis perched atop their heads. We crossed the street and walked up a flight of stairs on the outside of a white stone house. At the landing of the second floor we had to squeeze by a giant speaker that was facing toward the mosque. Inside, there was a meeting room with about thirty adults and two young boys in shirts and ties setting up folding chairs on a dusty red painted floor. A chalkboard hung behind a podium with a microphone. The Anglican church had been three times as large, and the priest hadn’t needed a microphone.

  I asked DeSilva what kind of church this was. He assured me it w
as nondenominational. I asked again. He said that the woman who founded it was a former Muslim, and she had started up her ministry to let other Muslims see the light. I was in for a treat because she was going to be delivering the sermon tonight. DeSilva let me know that there’d be a translator as well. I wouldn’t miss a thing.

  The founder of the church came up after we sang a song about Jesus’s immense glory and told the story of her conversion. She said that she’d been an observant Muslim who had never missed one of the required five daily prayers. Her husband, who rarely prayed, had claimed that he was going to get into heaven by grabbing her ankles as she was lifted up. Everyone laughed. She talked about what a beautiful religion Islam was, but that it was like a vase: pretty and able to hold the beauty of the world, but shallow and easily broken. She then enumerated the glories of Christ.

  I subscribed to the Deccan Chronicle, the Hyderabad newspaper, and had been reading about the history of communal violence in India. There had been a new rash of riots resulting from the debated demolition of a mosque in Benares because there was archaeological evidence of a Hindu temple underneath it. Hindus and Muslims were fighting each other in mobs, but in neither of those religions is there an evangelical imperative. Muslims were not trying to convert Hindus, and vice versa.

  I’d wandered into something bad. Outside were dozens of Muslims, hungry Muslims, and we were blasting them over the speaker with messages of how flawed their belief system was, a belief system for which they’d spent all day denying themselves sustenance. The service lasted more than two hours, and it was dark when we left. All the bearded men glared at us as we left the apartment building. I tried to make myself invisible.

  I was ready to head home. Two services and a lengthy afternoon spent listening to church television had soured me on God, but DeSilva told me that I must attend the celebration the Anglicans were having.

  Sampson was going to be there.

  Sampson still had a halo about him whenever I thought of him. He had been so kind to me during my hallucinations. DeSilva had been kind as well, but his glow as a living angel had faded during that day of church services. Sampson, though, with that crown of silver hair, was still holy.

  So I went to the Anglican celebration.

  It was full dark when we arrived. There was a tent set up in the back. We ducked through one of the vinyl sides, and inside was the heady thick smell of meat trays bubbling over Sterno flames. I’d spent the day drinking Pepsi and eating mangoes, so my stomach felt queer, and it was sending tremors of weakness through my arms.

  The smell of the food had lost its initial attraction. I went outside and lit up a cigarette, inhaling the hot gravel of the Indian brand deep into my lungs. The grass had been watered earlier in the day, and my feet sank into the ground, the dampness seeping into my running shoes. I tried to make the stars fit into some of the constellations I knew, but I was on the other side of the earth, so nothing made sense. I stood there for a while, hoping that Sampson would materialize beside me, kind of just amble up and point out which star to watch.

  I wanted to believe in God the way DeSilva did. I wanted to see someone across the tent, and we’d fall in love instantly. I wanted the straps and the drugs and a nurse who thought I was funny. I wanted something else to take control for a while; it didn’t matter if it was Jesus or a lover or a hospital ward.

  I pitched my cigarette over the gate into the alley and went back inside to say good-bye to the DeSilvas.

  DeSilva didn’t try very hard to convince me to stay. He told the people at the table that I was a young student on scholarship studying in Hyderabad and was interested in local languages. Leaning in a little more, I asked DeSilva about Sampson. I’d like to thank him is all. DeSilva craned his neck around.

  He’d just left for food. Had I tried the food? It was a shame that I was a vegetarian, because I was missing out on some excellent biryani.

  “I’m not a vegetarian,” I told him.

  “You said you were at the hospital,” he said, wiping his hands on a napkin. “We brought you food, some roast lamb in rice. But you said you didn’t eat meat.”

  “I did?” What had I told them? Had I denied the food they had brought for me? “I was a vegetarian in college.”

  I stood up to leave and knocked into a man holding a paper plate, sending his samosas into his chest and leaving little triangle-shaped grease stains on his polo shirt. I apologized profusely and grabbed a napkin off the table, and only when I offered it to him did I realize it was Sampson.

  He eyed me warily.

  I checked my desire to hug him. I felt squishy inside. Here was my angel, shorter than I remembered, but still . . . I effused immediately about being glad to finally see him. He pulled back. He asked if I had fully recovered.

  “I’m fine now. I sometimes feel a little lost still,” I said. “Just sad, but better.”

  “I would hope so,” Sampson replied, and then said good-bye to me and sat down at the far end of DeSilva’s table.

  My chest was tight. I was worried what I might have said to him when I was hallucinating. Did I tell him how beautiful he was? Was he standoffish because he thought I had a crush on him or because when he first met me I was thrashing in a bed and covered in piss? I hailed a rickshaw. The night had brought a chill with it, and my thin button-down shirt wasn’t heavy enough to protect me from the wind that buffeted me in the back of the rickshaw. We navigated the flyovers and the turns with my broken Hindi. Did Sampson know me better than I did? What had he seen?

  At the front of my apartment building I argued briefly with the rickshaw man about the rate, then instead of waking the doorman from his tiny cot, I climbed over the gate and walked up the seven flights of stairs to my rooftop flat.

  I was treating gratitude as if it were an act of penance. I expected that if I completed the rounds, then I’d have righted the scales, and everything inside my head would immediately feel better. I’d knocked two people off my list, but I still felt miserable, and I spent the night as usual, pacing the roof, chain-smoking, memorizing country songs, and doing my best not to think about throwing myself to the pavement below.

  I stood on the platform, the noise and stench and chaos thickly enveloping me. It was early December, and I’d arrived at the station an hour and a half early for my train. Around my waist, under my pants and shirt, I had my passport and money secreted in a pale yellow belt. I had packed the belt two days ago and slept with it under my pillow. That day I had set an alarm so I would have enough time to unpack it, catalog its contents, and repack it again before I left for the train station. I wore the belt cinched so tight that it left marks.

  I had my second-class ticket folded in my fist, and it was quickly becoming wet, the blue type smearing into a pulpy mess. I was not hallucinating, I reminded myself over and over again. I knew who I was and where I was going. I had a ticket for a window seat, and Geeta was going to pick me up at the train station in Goa. I was going to be fine. I was fine.

  I bought an omelet from a man in a stall. The clanging of his pan made me flinch, but I was not hallucinating, and I knew who I was and why I was going to Goa. As long as there was chaos, I was okay. It was when everything congealed into a meaning-making machine producing feelings of unity within the world—if a moment like that came, then I should be worried.

  If chaos was comfort, then the Secunderabad train station on a Wednesday morning was like an overstuffed sofa. I choked down the greasy egg and white bread and waited as my train pulled into the station. It was a big monster of a train. The red and blue paint job on the engine had blackened over the years, and in comparison the blue paint of the cars was new and had a heavy lacquer sheen to it. It was tacky to the touch. Above the windows, numbers were painted, and I kept count as the train rumbled by me, peering through the windows, desperate to know if I had a good seat. Everyone told me how important a good seat was—Geeta, Veda, the ticket broker—but no one told me exactly how to pick one. The numbering on train cars
varied, and so it was difficult to predict. I’d be traveling through the southern middle of India, coming off the Deccan Plateau and into the lush valleys that emptied into the ocean. I wanted a window seat so that as we traveled, all the palm trees would tilt toward the ocean, and all the tiny rivulets and streams would congeal into rivers that’d join, and then join again, and empty inevitably into the ocean, and it would all push me along, all tilted and rushing, toward Geeta.

  I remembered riding trains with Duncan and Emil during our trip in 1998. Second-class cars have six seats on the wide left-hand side and two seats on the narrower right side. I had a window seat, but on the narrow side. There was a group of uniformed soldiers in my car, and they began drinking right away. There was an old man in the seat across from me, and we smiled at each other. We were both alone. I stared out the window like it was top-notch cinema. I was separated from everyone around me in a little glass bubble of impenetrable silence, watching the landscape slide by. I thought of Geeta. I put my bag over my lap and kept staring out the window. The sun kept pace with the train. We were both slowly traveling west, with a billion internal explosions happening each millisecond powering us.

  Because smoking was prohibited in the berth, I snuck back toward the open doors and sat with the guys who didn’t have tickets. Where those open doors were, with the wind and landscape rushing by, was a kind of lawless zone that the conductors pretended they didn’t see. It was like international waters. You could sit on the steps and smoke. The bathrooms were right near where I sat. I was happy to be on the steps and watch the landscape tear by. If I shifted my weight one way, I’d be pitched out into the trees and gravel and die; if I shifted my weight the other way, I’d fall back into the puddle of questionable muck coming from the bathroom. It felt better than sitting in my berth. There on the steps everything was clear for once. I had to maintain perfect balance, and it was exhilarating.