The Other Language

by Francesca Marciano

  He joined her at the beautifully laid breakfast table. There were flowers arranged in small clusters, linen napkins and silverware polished to a glossy shine. An attendant immediately came to pour his tea.

  “Where is our prince?” he asked his wife.

  “He just left. We had a lengthy discussion about food. He wanted to know about fried zucchini flowers, believe it or not. Apparently he had them in Rome once and has never forgotten them. He wants me to teach him the recipe. Isn’t it hilarious?” She laughed. “You must come and take a picture of me in the kitchen while he and I cook together. Will you?”

  He nodded absentmindedly. They both knew that he’d find an excuse not to and that eventually she’d find someone else, either a waiter, the cook or the woman who swept their room—people whose names she’d already memorized—and hand over the camera. It was the kind of photo she most sought to have and to show: immortalized in her shalwar kameez, next to her charming prince, intent on cooking in his kitchen! That would show their friends how far inside real India they’d managed to reach.

  “Tomorrow he’s organized a classical dance performance on a tiny island upriver for a group of friends who arrive tonight. We’re invited, of course. Would you like to go?” she said.

  He nodded vaguely.

  “Let’s see how the day goes.”

  “His friends are from Delhi,” she added, as if to stress that the level of familiarity they’d accessed with the prince woudn’t be offset by the arrival of a bunch of foreigners. It was an all-Indian soirée they’d been asked to.

  “It’s an Odissi dance performer. Apparently she is the best in the country, he said. The number one.”

  She waited for him to show some interest.

  “Odissi is the classical dance we’ve seen in the temple sculptures. In Puri, remember? Those beautiful bas-reliefs?”

  “As long as it’s not a four-hour-long ordeal. You know how entertainment can drag on forever here.”

  “It won’t, I’m sure. I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. He’s so good at creating fabulous sets using just lights and flowers.”

  “Do we have to answer now?” he asked. There was a hint of impatience in his voice.

  “Not immediately. But I think it would be polite to let him know by tonight, don’t you?”

  “Fine. We will. Can you pass me a piece of toast, please?”

  He began to butter the slice of brown bread and she went back to The Hindu.

  She still looked beautiful, despite her age. She was already forty-two. Good bone structure—that, she had. High cheekbones, a straight aquiline nose, lips still full and thick eyebrows. It was a handsome, strong face. There were lines, of course, there was sagging and creasing in places. But she was still holding on graciously. Men still looked at her and found her attractive.

  “You look ravishing today,” he said, feeling guilty. He knew he had been unpleasant.

  She immediately touched her face.

  “Really? I can’t look at my face, it’s so drawn. And my hair is a horror.”

  “Don’t be silly. You are glowing.”

  She rested her hand on his.

  “Thank you. That makes me feel a lot better.”

  He needed a little time alone, he’d said as they finished their breakfast. They would meet again for lunch, after the zucchini flowers experiment. She was used to this kind of announcement, it had been such a big part of their marriage, the off-limits zone he declared at random that had to be immediately cleared. Whenever he said he needed to be alone it meant he had to think and when he had to think it meant he had to walk. Apparently moving at a fast pace produced a parallel flow in his mental processes, facilitating an entryway into the story he was beginning to shape in his head. This rule she had learned to observe with respect, even awe. The first few years they were together she took it as a sign of his artistic temperament and had been proud of his mannerisms.

  He left her reading the paper at the table and walked down the steps that led from the Fort to the ghats below. The riverbank was quiet in the early-morning light. There were only a few women washing clothes or bathing in their saris, slowly combing their long, wet hair. The water sloshed quietly against the steps, lapping at the feet of the small marble nandis that lined the bank. Each one of the divine bulls carved in stone had an oil lamp at its feet, and at night people would light them. He had seen their glow from the Fort’s terrace at night. Who took care of that? And since when? Perhaps those oil lamps beneath the feet of the nandis had burned nightly for centuries and there would have been someone attending to this ritual every night. Even at this time of day, so early in the morning, the white marble bulls had already been laden with garlands of fresh jasmine and marigolds. He also wondered where all those flowers came from. Every morning all across India, from the north to the south, whether there was snow or desert, people bought garlands to crown their gods. He assumed thousands of tons of flowers must be strung in garlands every day. Yet he never saw flowers growing anywhere, all he had seen in weeks of traveling was red dust, burned grass, yellowing reeds. How did all the flowers travel, how many trucks drove across the country at night, loaded with marigolds and jasmine? How come these garlands always looked fresh, undeterred by dust and heat? Surely his wife would love to research this conundrum.

  He walked some more, all the way to the Shiva shrine at the end of the ghat. He had had no useful thoughts about the story he was trying to crack. India wasn’t a place conducive to creativity, he decided; it occupied too much space with all its unanswerable questions. Despite his efforts not to be distracted, he too had been encumbered by India’s too many layers, its multiple souls, by the myriad messages it sent everywhere one looked.

  She went back upstairs to their room and sat on the cushions by the bay window overlooking the river. She was relieved to be alone again. Looking through the latticed shutters she was able to make out the silhouette of her husband walking slowly on the ghat right below her, heading toward the Shiva shrine. In his blue polo shirt and khaki pants, he stuck out like a sore thumb among all the women standing knee-deep in the river. As usual, he walked with his head down, looking only at his feet. He didn’t look happy, or inspired by his walk, that much she could tell. She wished that every now and then he’d make the effort to look up at what was around him rather than gazing constantly inward. They had been three weeks on the road by now and she’d begun to feel how tiresome it was to travel with someone who never seemed to enjoy himself. As usual, she had had to do all the work, like a puppeteer moving all the characters across the stage, or a ventriloquist doing all the voices, in order to keep the audience entertained. Sometimes it became too demanding. Though she knew that if she stopped working at it they would both sink into a silence and that could get scary. Once she had tried it: she had allowed herself to plunge into a wistful silence and he’d begun to question her relentlessly, not because he sincerely worried about what might have upset her, but rather, she felt, because he was alarmed at the idea that his private jester may have gone on strike.

  Although she hadn’t formulated this thought in its entirety, she knew exactly why she’d come up to the room and what was going to happen next. She watched herself open her husband’s laptop and go online. Watched her fingers tap her ex-lover’s name. She just wanted to check how difficult it would be to find him. She could look for his name on Skype first. That would be easy and quite innocent. No need to call or send a message. All she wanted was to find a way to get in touch with him, so that someday—and only if she wanted to—she would know how.

  At lunch the two of them sat in the shade at the table by the pool. He was relieved to be alone with his wife, so they wouldn’t have to sustain a polite conversation with strangers. Thank God the prince never joined them at lunch, only at breakfast and dinner. Evidently two meals with his guests were more than enough for him as well.

  The waiter brought a plate of golden fried zucchini flowers. A starter, he announced.

  “You an
d the prince made these?” he asked his wife.

  She nodded.

  “Very tasty. The batter is nice. What is it?”

  She was looking beyond the pool, beyond the trees, somewhere out of focus.

  “Chickpea flour, I think.”

  He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. They ate in silence. The waiter took away the plates and presented the main course, shrimp sautéed with chilis served with mango slices over arugula. The food here was tasteful, understated and the staff didn’t wear funny turbans or garish Bollywood-style outfits. They had a simple uniform like that of the staff in a house where one didn’t have to show off or pose in front of a camera all day long.

  “Did you have fun?” he asked.

  She turned to him, surprised, as if shaken from a thought.

  “What?”

  “In the kitchen. With the prince.”

  “Yes, we did. It was a lot of fun.”

  “Are you all right? You look tired.”

  “Maybe. I didn’t sleep very well last night. I might take a nap after lunch.”

  “Good. Then I’ll do some work. I think I’ve just had an idea I want to get down.”

  She didn’t ask him what the idea was. She just smiled with a blank expression, not having listened to what he’d just said.

  When he came down from the room around seven, the guests from Delhi were sitting on the terrace around the low table set for the evening drinks. He had a hard time getting their names right when the prince made the introductions, the names being always so complicated in India. One of the guests was an older playwright—our living legend, the prince had said—a thin, elongated man who resembled a stork, with fine birdlike features and an impressive mane of flowing white hair. The playwright stood up and shook his hand, emanating a subtle aroma of sandalwood. He wore a finely tailored silk kurta that reached his shins and had a very fine, soft shawl wrapped around his shoulders. His wife, an ex-dancer, was a beautiful woman in her early sixties, draped in a blue and gold sari. Her ears and nose were studded with diamonds. There was a middle-aged choreographer, a tall, bald, bulky man in loose white pajamas and tunic who had lived in New York in the seventies (and had danced with Martha Graham and then performed with Peter Brook, it was explained). His friend, or perhaps his companion, was a younger man, a translator, who was the only one wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and had longish, uncombed hair. Unfortunately the translator spoke with a very thick Indian accent that was hard to understand, so he made sure to sit at the opposite end of the table, in order to avoid having to decipher him.

  The bald choreographer had just come back from London and had brought a rare bottle of gin infused with cucumber and rose petals. Everyone was having cucumber gin martinis, so he agreed to have one and found it deliciously refreshing. In order to include him in the conversation the group was eager to know what kind of books he wrote and whether they could read them, had any of them been translated into English? Yes, a few had, so everyone made a mental note of the titles so they could look for them in Delhi. They mentioned names of the few Italian writers they’d read (Eco, Calvino), then mentioned Fellini and Antonioni’s films so that the conversation could seamlessly shift from them to him and he could take the lead. He felt at ease, well liked, especially after the second cucumber gin martini. This was what it must be like to live here, he thought, to have a normal conversation with people who do not address me just as a foreigner but as an intellectual: these people could easily be my friends as well. Then he asked them about Indian literature, a subject to which he—unlike his wife—hadn’t given much thought until that very moment, but the company inspired him and he wanted to return the courtesy. They discussed the problem of translation, how Indian literature was written in so many different languages and so much of it couldn’t be read by the rest of the country. There was an immense amount of excellent literature bound to remain unknown. It was so unfair. The young translator with the impossible accent was indicated as one of the best, if not the best, translators of Tamil literature into Hindi. He had translated epic novels, contemporary essays and poetry that would have been lost otherwise to all the Indians who didn’t read Tamil. There were twenty-two major languages, and most of the regions that spoke them had their own flourishing literature. What to do? He mentioned the few Indian novels translated into Italian he had read and praised them, to show them that not all Indian literature had been lost to foreigners. They pointed out that those novels were of a different kind, though, as they were originally written in English by writers who no longer lived in India or were born abroad and either wrote about their parents’ origins or wrote about the discovery of their roots as adults.

  “We have a word for them, you know …,” the playwright said with a hint of a smile. The choreographer joined in and finished his sentence.

  “We call them Indonostalgics,” he said, and everyone laughed.

  Indonostalgics, he repeated, savoring the word, and making a mental note. That was exactly the kind of inside knowledge he enjoyed.

  “Isn’t your wife joining us tonight?” the prince asked.

  He had completely forgotten to mention her. She had decided to stay in the room. She said she wasn’t in the mood to talk to lots of people tonight.

  “Unfortunately not. She wasn’t feeling too well. She might come for dinner, otherwise she’ll order room service, if that’s not a problem for the kitchen.”

  And as he said that, heads turned toward the opposite end of the terrace. A woman had appeared and was walking toward them.

  The men stood up.

  “Ah, here she is, at last,” the prince said and went over to embrace her.

  There was a suspension, while everyone in turn greeted her.

  “This is Ushma Das, our greatest dancer. She is to perform for us tomorrow night,” the playwright said.

  The woman wore a short red cotton sari over green shalwar pants. The sari was neatly pleated in the front, as in the temple sculptures. She was barefoot and her anklets made a lovely sound as she moved.

  “I’ve just finished a brief rehearsal with the musicians,” she was saying. “I was going to bathe and change before joining you, but then I heard your voices and …”

  She turned to him, surprised to find him there.

  He introduced himself, and she looked intently at him with her big, almond-shaped eyes penciled in black kohl.

  “Very nice to meet you,” she said, and let him hold her cool, bony hand.

  “Please have a drink with us now, dear. The light is so lovely,” said the older ex-dancer with the diamond studs in her nose. “You can freshen up later. We are having cucumber martinis.”

  “You know I am not supposed to drink, Auntie,” Ushma said with a little smile. Everyone rebutted at once. Of course she could have a small drink after rehearsal. It wasn’t going to get her drunk at all. They would make it very light. She took another look at him; he was standing speechless in front of her beauty.

  “I’ll have a club soda, that’s all.”

  Then she sat down in the chair, erect, with royal gravity.

  “And where is home, for you?” she asked, tilting her head toward him with what he took for sincere interest.

  Earlier in the day, while her husband was on his inspirational promenade on the ghats, she had been staring at his laptop screen, open to Skype, while beads of sweat ran down her neck. The sun came straight through the bay window and the old-fashioned ceiling fan didn’t help against that heat. She had typed the ex-lover’s name in the space that said “enter name or e-mail address of the user you’re looking for” and had clicked on search. Only three names like his had appeared, and next to them a green icon with the + sign. One lived in Buenos Aires, but the other two were actual possibilities. One in Paris, the other in San Francisco. More likely, he would be the one in California, but she might send the same message to both. She had been staring at the green icons for a while now. What if he was happily married with kids and his wife would
intercept her message? Would that be a problem? She should write something so neutral and blameless that even his wife could read it and think nothing of it. The wife could ask him, “Who is that?” And he might say, “Just someone I knew ages ago when I lived in Italy.” He might reply to her innocent message in a similar tone, something like “Hey, how’ve you been?” although he wasn’t the type that would ever write “hey.” After a lot of composing and scribbling on a scrap of paper in order to get it just right, she typed the message into the space. She stared at it. Then erased it. This was a mistake. He’d probably completely forgotten about their affair. But then she thought, What if he wasn’t married, what if he had had the same dream or he had been thinking of her too? What a wasted opportunity, right? She typed the message again. It read, “Are you the Tyler I think you are?” signed with her name. She stared at the words again, then, after what seemed an agonizing amount of time, she said out loud, What the hell, and clicked on the green icons next to both Paris and San Francisco. She jumped up from the chair as if it burned. She felt exhilarated, as though she had just sent a missile into space from Cape Canaveral.

  Since that moment she had been feeling hopelessly anxious, as if time had taken on a completely different speed. After lunch by the pool she’d waited for her husband to leave the room so she could check her Skype page. She could’ve easily checked the same page on her cell phone but she just couldn’t make herself do it with him in the same room. He had decided to read his book in bed, had fallen asleep, and woken up and ordered tea, which they took on the terrace together. He asked her to take a walk with him in the village, after which he took a shower and changed for evening drinks. Finally she had gotten rid of him, if only for a few hours. The minute he was out the door she ran to check the laptop. A tiny red light was blinking next to the Skype icon. Her heart leaped.