by Rahul Mehta
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to buy anything. I had made a promise to myself.
A month before we came to India, some friends of ours, having recently returned to New York from a trip to Kenya, invited us to their apartment for dinner. They cooked steamed cornmeal and collard greens with cubed beef and said, “This is a traditional Kenyan meal.” They showed us photographs from their trip. On the living-room floor, they spread out all the items they had brought back: batik wall hangings, soapstone statues of stylized human figures with long necks and earlobes, wood carvings of giraffes and gazelles. With each item, the couple told an accompanying anecdote: one about being in the bazaar and having to bargain fiercely with a one-toothed woman, another about wanting to buy a set of wooden serving bowls but being directed to a shop that sold lingerie instead. They called the items “artifacts,” and invited us to pick one. We chose a soapstone pencil cup.
That night, on the subway home, holding the soapstone pencil cup, I told Darnell, “I don’t want to return from India with a suitcase full of trinkets and funny stories to tell my friends. I don’t want to be that kind of tourist.”
“What kind of tourist do you want to be?”
“I don’t know. But maybe if I don’t buy anything, I can find out.”
Darnell tells Rajesh now, “We would love for you to show us around.”
We don’t want anyone to know where we are staying. We are embarrassed. But everyone asks—the shopkeepers, the waiters in restaurants, the young men loitering outside shop fronts—and the town is too small for us to lie.
I can see their faces change when we tell them. They don’t understand. They have seen the hotel’s marble façade, the silver-and-glass mosaics of peacocks flanking the entrance, the turbaned doormen who stand all day in the heat. They have heard about the rooftop swimming pool with the three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the city. How can I explain to them that, to us, it is not expensive? I want to say, Back in America, I eat ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches every day. We are not rich.
We wouldn’t be able to afford the hotel were it not for the drought. It is the monsoon season, and the rains are heavy everywhere but here. The town has had bad luck for several years in a row, leaving its main tourist attraction—the lake—bone-dry for the first time in thirty years. Tourism is down, room rates slashed. Even then, we had to bargain.
The other reason we are able to afford the room is because my parents are paying: a detail that bothers Darnell, uncomfortable about taking money from his boyfriend’s parents.
I tell him not to worry. I tell him that forty years ago, they, too, visited this city, on their honeymoon, and someone else paid: my mother’s father.
Because of the drought, and the drop in tourism, the shops are empty. Everyone is idle. The drivers outside our hotel recline in the backseats of their auto rickshaws. They shout to us as we walk by, calling out popular tourist destinations: “Jagdish Temple. Sunset Point. Sixty rupees only.” They are disheartened when they see we have rented bicycles. They laugh at the floppy sunhat I wear reflexively from years of my mother telling me to stay out of the sun, warning, “If you get too dark, no one will want to marry you.”
Outside our hotel we meet another boy, about the same age as Rajesh, and an artist, too. He introduces himself as Carlone. When I ask about the name he says it is after a character from The Godfather. “My father took inspiration from him.” Carlone puffs out his chest. “So do I.”
I have never seen or read The Godfather, and I do not know who Carlone is or what he does. I do not know if he is a hero or a villain, whether he is sympathetic or not. But I do not trust this Carlone.
He has a shop just across from our hotel, which he keeps with four other young men from his village. He calls them his brothers. He is the leader, because he speaks the best English. They all live in the shop and sleep on the floor at night. They have no customers, so they spend all day sitting out front in plastic chairs.
Every day as we bicycle back and forth, Carlone shouts, “When will you come see my shop? When will you come have tea?”
One day he stops us by stepping in front of our bicycles. “Please come in.”
“We are in a rush,” I say.
Darnell is less brusque. “Your shop looks new.”
“It is. We have been here less than a year. Before that, we were farmers in the village. Then there was no money, so we left and came here. Please come in. Look at the paintings.”
“We are not interested in paintings,” I say. “We are not going to buy. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”
“At least you can look. At least you can drink tea with me.”
“We are late meeting someone,” I say.
Carlone knows Rajesh has been showing us around town. Everyone knows. As we are bicycling away, he says, “Why do you go with that boy?”
Darnell says, “Why not?”
Carlone says, “It isn’t right.”
Rajesh wants to show us the town’s three famous palaces: City Palace, where the maharaja spent his winters; Lake Palace, where he summered; Monsoon Palace, where he weathered the rains.
The most spectacular, by far, is Lake Palace. It is long and marble, and is designed to look like it is floating in the middle of the lake. But with the lake dry, the effect is ruined. The palace looks bloated and beached. The boats that normally ferry guests back and forth from the palace to shore have been replaced by camels and elephants and Tata SUVs. In the dry lake bed, we see children playing cricket, families picnicking, cows grazing.
Rajesh tells us the palace was converted into a hotel shortly after Independence, when the British left India and the maharaja had to find alternate forms of income.
I already know about Lake Palace, because it is where my parents stayed on their honeymoon.
I also know about it because it is prominently featured in a James Bond movie, Octopussy, which I saw as a child with my parents. My parents rarely took me to movies, not wanting to spend the money. But they were proud to see India in a major film, even if the portrayal was somewhat unflattering, the Indians clownish.
Octopussy is shown every night in town, at one hotel or another, advertised on wooden signs outside the establishments. One of the hotels uses the original movie poster, with Bond standing, holding a gun, three women hidden behind him, their arms extended, so that he looks like he has eight arms, like an octopus, or a Hindu god. But most of the other hotels don’t use this poster; they have designed their own posters, painted in exaggerated, hyperreal colors, in the style of Hindi film advertising. In these posters, the stars are barely recognizable as themselves and look more like Hindi film stars. Roger Moore resembles Shah Rukh Khan; Maud Adams, Madhuri Dixit.
In the movie—which we see that night, at Rajesh’s insistence, my first viewing since I was a child—Lake Palace is occupied by a sexy, wealthy Englishwoman. Her father was a member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, like Bond, but she has taken a different route. She is the head of an organized crime ring, consisting of other beautiful white women, all living with her in Lake Palace. When Bond asks her where she finds so many young Western women, she says she finds them in India, wandering. She doesn’t know what they are looking for, she says, but they are everywhere.
We tell Rajesh we want to see the real Rajasthan. He says OK.
We expect him to take us to some part of town where tourists never go. Or maybe to a nearby village, a real village, not one of the fake villages with gift shops and billboards on the highway.
Instead, he takes us to an old mansion in town that has been converted into a cultural center. We sit on the floor in a covered courtyard and watch what are billed as traditional Rajasthani classical and folk performances, though it is clear they are designed especially for tourists.
In one of the acts, marionettes engage in a salacious, pelvis-thrusting dance, which sends titters through the audience and makes me feel uncomfortable. In another, women in mirrored head cover
ings and ankle bells dance around a fire.
When it is time for the final act, Rajesh nudges me. His eyes widen. “Watch this.”
The announcer explains that in the villages, it is the woman’s job to collect water for her family. She may have to walk many miles, often over hot, desert sands. In a drought, the announcer says, she will have to walk even farther. The more she can carry in one trip, the better.
The performer emerges in a dark purple gagra choli with a large brass pot on her head. I expect someone young, but she is old. Her face is wizened. There is a drum, and she moves along with its beat, mechanically. Her eyes are foggy and far away.
After a minute or two of dancing, she makes her way to the edge of the stage, where a man standing on a raised platform adds another pot to the top of her head. The dance goes like this, every couple of minutes the man adding one or two more pots. When she is carrying six, and everyone in the audience has figured out the pattern, a new element is added. While the man on the platform is adding pots, another man is spreading something on stage for her to dance over, barefoot: one time hot coals, another time a shattered mirror, a third time nails.
Everyone in the audience oohs and ahhs as each new thing is added.
By the end of the dance, she has twelve pots on her head. There are twelve swords on stage, turned on edge, lying head-to-head in a straight line. She balances across them like a tightrope walker.
That night, Rajesh suggests we eat dinner at a place that specializes in Rajasthani thalis. It is farther into town, away from the tourist center.
Everyone there is Indian. Within a minute or two of our arrival, the waiter has already brought us our food: a large, stainless steel dish for each of us, with several compartments filled with different delicacies. We eat quickly, without talking. Everyone else is eating the same way. The restaurant has the hushed quality of a place of worship.
Any time one of us is about to finish a particular selection, the waiter instantly appears to replenish it without our having to ask.
It is our day to take Larium, and I swallow one pill and give one to Darnell.
Rajesh asks, with his mouth full, “What’s that?”
I say, “It’s to prevent malaria.”
“Good, Sid, you are very smart, you Americans are so clever, protecting yourself, because there is so much malaria here, there are dead bodies everywhere from malaria, haven’t you seen? Mother Teresa should come.” There is nothing good-natured about the way he is joking. His sarcasm has a mean edge.
“Better safe than sorry,” I say.
Rajesh’s face hardens, even as he chews. “How can there be malaria? There isn’t even water.”
His anger unnerves me. I am accustomed to his being affable and docile. It is such a small thing, this minor outburst, but I suddenly realize how little I know him. I wonder, Was this the real Rajesh all along?
I am reminded of Carlone’s cryptic comments about Rajesh as we were bicycling away from him, the day he stopped us outside his shop. Why do you go with that boy? It isn’t right. I am worried. Just this morning I was reading in Lonely Planet about a scam in Agra, involving touts who lead tourists to restaurants where they are poisoned and then taken to fake doctors and charged exorbitant medical fees. Some tourists died. Perhaps a similar scam exists here. Perhaps Rajesh is in on it.
I am reminded, also, of something my mother said when I saw my parents just before my trip. My parents were both full of warnings, they who have barely visited India since emigrating forty years ago, and even then, not in years. “Be careful of bottled water. Check the caps. Buy them from reputable stores, not vendors on the street, who might find empty bottles in the trash and fill them with tap water. Don’t leave your luggage unlocked. Don’t go with just anyone, even if they seem friendly, even if they speak English.” I rolled my eyes (though I would later heed their advice). When my mother saw my exasperation, she leaned in and said, quietly and deliberately, “Desperate people will do desperate things. You are young and lucky. You will learn.”
All at once I am convinced that Rajesh is trying to poison us. I make a big show about pushing my food away. I try to signal to Darnell that he should not eat his food either, but he doesn’t understand my code. It is too late. We have already eaten too much.
The next morning, when I wake up, Darnell and I are fine. Of course. No poisoned food. Darnell is sitting on the veranda in the morning sun, reading the paper and drinking tea.
I blame my paranoia the previous night on the heat and side effects of the malaria drug, which I vow to stop taking.
I decide perhaps I am overtired. We send one of the hotel boys to tell Rajesh that we will not be meeting him today. We spend the day relaxing in our room, blasting the air conditioner, and swimming in the rooftop pool. We make friends with a young couple: a Western-raised Indian from Canada and his white girlfriend. We have seen them around, they are difficult to miss, there are not many guests.
We make fun of them behind their backs because they are trashy. We see them in the pool, midafternoon, making out, the girlfriend straddling his hips. That night, when we eat dinner together in the rooftop restaurant, she wears a tight dress with a low neckline, and a wide, gold lamé belt.
When the bill comes, the boyfriend pays for all four of us. I knew he would. Earlier, he told me about his father, who had come to Canada with very little money and little education, and had made a fortune starting stores that box things up and ship them all over the world. When the boy pays the bill, signing the charges to his hotel room, I can see in his face the pleasure and urgency of someone who is only one generation removed from having nothing.
The next morning, Carlone stops us again in the street.
“You will visit my shop today?”
“Time is short,” I say. “We are leaving tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Carlone says. “How could that be? How is that you have not even had tea with me once?”
“We are in a rush,” I say, and Darnell and I edge past him.
“You are always in a rush,” he says, angrily.
We meet Rajesh at the café. He tells me he likes my pants. I have worn them before, and he has complimented me before. They look generic, but they are expensive designer pants I bought cheap at a sample sale in SoHo.
“Those pants have so many pockets.” Rajesh says. “They are good for keeping paints and brushes.”
Rajesh has probably noticed the frayed hem. He probably thinks I will not want to bother taking such shabby trousers back to America. I understand this is how he acquired the Diesel jeans, the leather loafers with contrast stitching.
Today is the day Rajesh is taking us to his house to look at his paintings. It is centrally located, and I wonder why we haven’t been meeting there all along, instead of at the café.
It is an old stone house, one story tall, with four or five small rooms facing an open-air courtyard, and covered walkways connecting the rooms. The walls are cracked and crumbling. Nothing is painted. A scalloped archway separates the house and the courtyard from the street, which itself is only a small side lane.
As we walk past one room, he points inside and says, “Those are my sisters,” but he doesn’t invite us to meet them or to enter the room. From the courtyard, the room seems small and dark. His sisters are sitting on the floor, sifting lentils in front of a large, old television with dials. The reception is bad. Through the static, I recognize a song from a popular Hindi film.
We pass another room with the door shut. “That is my mother’s room.”
I know, without his telling me, that she is sick. I know by the closed door and the heavy silence within the room. I know by the sisters sifting lentils alone.
I also know, by a garlanded portrait hanging in the hallway, that his father is dead.
When we enter Rajesh’s room, I am surprised by the mess. It is a very small room, poorly lit, like the sisters’ room, with old newspapers and rags stacked in corners. There are pens and pencils and paints
everywhere.
Rajesh unlocks a metal cupboard, and withdraws a cardboard portfolio. He clears a surface on the cluttered desk and opens it, spreading out the paintings. “Pick any you like,” he says. “I will give you a good rate.”
The paintings are just as I would have expected, just like the ones I see in the windows of every tourist shop in town: miniatures painted on silk and parchment, subjects like camel caravans, courtyard scenes, men with delicate beards relaxing under trees, smoking hookahs.
He shows us a triptych with the three palaces—City Palace, Monsoon Palace, Lake Palace—each with a different animal in front of it. He explains to us that the peacock represents beauty; the elephant, strength; the camel, love. In the painting, the lake is full. “This is my original design,” he says. “You won’t see it anywhere else.”
Earlier that day, Darnell and I argued about whether we would buy a painting. Despite everything, I was hesitant to break my promise to myself. I said, “We have already given him so much: fancy meals he would never have been able to afford otherwise.” Darnell said, “We owe him this.” In the end, I agreed.
We finally settle on two portraits from the very few paintings that are not in the miniature style: a Rajasthani farm man in a red turban with a blue background and a Rajasthani woman in a yellow sari with a green background. We already have two frames at home the perfect size.
Rajesh tells us how long it took him to paint each portrait, and then he multiplies that number by an hourly rate to arrive at the price. He shows us the math, which he scribbles on the back of an envelope. Darnell and I do not haggle.
“What about the rains?” I ask Rajesh. “We still have a month of traveling. Won’t the paintings get ruined in our backpacks?”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I will wrap them nicely. Nothing will spoil them.”
