Two messages were from people he didn’t know, the first from a man in Mumbai asking Jason to call when he arrived. Since Mumbai was hundreds of kilometers and many days behind them, he deleted the message. The second unknown sender identified himself as Ketan Jani, the chief computer systems manager for A1 Call Center Services.
“Our mutual friend in Jaipur, Mr. Attar Singh, has forwarded your itinerary and updated me on your journey. Contact me when you arrive here in Bangalore. I can recommend several pleasant accommodations that you and your lovely wife will most enjoy.” Jason printed out the man’s letter and contact information but doubted that he would call. It would be too difficult to explain his lovely wife’s absence.
Two messages remained, the first from Ravi Murty.
“I trust your trip is going well and that you don’t find India to be too overwhelming. When I first arrived in India to attend college I was stunned. I had never seen so many people in my life. And the poverty! It was too much for this Sooner! Well, as long as you keep your sense of humor intact, you’ll do fine.”
Around the small room, touch typists and hunt-and-peckers rapped out emails to all points of the world, the clicking keyboards reminding Jason of the clacking rails of his journey. He thought about his first day in India, sitting on a bus filled with geriatric tourists, with Danny, the fast-talking tour director, assuring everyone that the tour’s minute-by-minute itinerary made India completely hassle-free. He knew that if he had stayed with the tour he wouldn’t be where he was now, waiting for a late-night train out of Goa, a short chain of evidence connecting him to a backpack of drugs and a shit-load of trouble.
No hassles.
No delays.
And no Rachel.
He laughed to himself as he thought about his choice.
“Drop me a line now and then to let me know that you are safe,” Ravi’s email continued. “And be sure to contact my representatives in Bangalore. They know the city inside and out and can save you a lot of headaches. I’m in the midst of finalizing an outsourcing deal with a company there and it’s a nightmare trying to navigate that bureaucracy. I hope to avoid a trip to India, something I’m sure you’ll agree is a good idea!”
When the monkey had swung across the Jaipur streets with his backpack or as he stood on the platform in Ahmadabad, blood spurting onto the dusty concrete, Jason was sure he would have agreed with Ravi. But it wasn’t all thieving fleabags and homicidal attacks, and avoiding India would mean avoiding the other things as well—the sweet taste of masala chai, the faces of the children as they looked up at the tall, white man, Attar, Narvin, Laxmi and the someday-starlet Yashila, the unexpected landscape that flew past the train window, the unimaginable poverty, the unimaginable wealth, the way that, no matter where he was, he saw things he had never seen before and knew he’d never see again. This wasn’t Spring Break in Daytona, and for the first time Jason realized that he was glad. He clicked the little arrow and waited as Ravi’s message inched closed and the next message scrolled open on the screen.
“I trust that you and Rachel enjoyed Goa,” Narvin Kumar’s email began. “It’s a good place to flush the glitzy bullshit of Bollywood out of your system. For your sake I hope she didn’t keep up that silly ‘I’m his sister’ routine. That could make for some tough nights. Tell Rachel that when Laxmi finally runs off to marry some rich Indian ex-pat, I’ll be giving her a call.” There was no little typed symbol but Jason could picture Narvin’s playful wink.
“Drop me a line when you get to Bangalore. I’ve got a project starting there this week and might drop in to see you.”
Under his computer-generated signature and the three-color logo for his company, Narvin added a postscript and Jason felt his stomach roll as he read.
“I called that number the night you left. I figured you might as well get it over with. Lucky for you I was in my car and the call didn’t go through. The next day I saw this on that website and figured you had enough going on without me making it worse. Good luck.” Jason clicked on the small icon and waited fifteen minutes for the attachment to open.
It was a simple Word document, cut and pasted from the chat room Narvin had showed him that afternoon in Mumbai.
“I’m looking for Mr. Jason Talley, traveling through India with female companion named Rachel Moore. I need to find him. I will pay $500 US for valid information and I will honor any requests to remain anonymous.” There was no return email address and no signature, just the phone number that was already burned into his memory.
“It is the time of the closing,” the boy manager of the Beachfront Internet Café said. Jason looked up and noticed that he was the last person in the room, the others slipping past, his attention focused on the screen. Jason signed off and walked to the desk.
“How much?”
“Eight hundred and ten rupees,” the boy said, holding up the calculator as proof.
“The sign says twenty rupees for thirty minutes. I was on, what, an hour?” Jason said, pointing to the list of rates posted above the first terminal.
The boy’s head started swaying. “Ahcha. Just fifty minutes.”
“So it should only be forty rupees.”
“It is thirty-five rupees for the Internet,” the boy said, “and seven hundred seventy-five rupees for the printings.” He hefted an inch-thick stack of papers out of the wire basket next to the printer.
“I didn’t print those. Okay, maybe a few, but not all that.”
“You are the last one here. The columns must balance at the end of my shift.” He ran his finger down a long list of numbers in the ancient register book.
Jason shrugged his shoulders. “That’s not my problem, pal. I’ll pay for mine but….”
“The rules are most clear on this point,” the boy said and flipped open a three-ring binder on the desk to reveal a single typed sheet encased in plastic. He spun the book around, his index finger pointing to the relevant bullet.
“Look, I don’t care what it says. I didn’t print these out.”
The boy gave a sympathetic smile. “These must be paid for.”
Jason pulled a paper from the bottom of the pile. “Here,” he said, holding the sheet out for the boy to see. “This says it was printed at fourteen hundred hours. That’s what? Two in the afternoon? And how long did you say I was here?”
“Fifty minutes.”
“Right. So how can I have printed these?”
“But the rules….”
“The hell with the rules,” Jason said, his voice rising above the hum of the worthless ceiling fans. “The rules are just stupid. And I’m not paying. What does your rule say about that?”
The boy gave his head another side-to-side waggle. “The rules must be followed. As such, the rules state that I must now report you to the station master who will then notify the local police….”
“The police?” Jason said as he thought about all it meant.
“This is the rule.” The boy tapped the laminated sheet as proof.
Jason paused long enough to sigh before handing over the money. He scooped up the papers and headed for the door.
“No sir,” the boy said, blocking the door with his arm. “You can not yet go.”
“But I paid. You can’t call the police now.”
“You must wait for your receipt. It is the rule.”
***
It was eleven-thirty when the police arrived at the station.
Jason had been sitting alone on a wooden bench reading and grouping the papers he had bought. A third were in French or German or Spanish or some other language that used the same alphabet, none of which he could read. Another third were printed in a font he had never seen before, tiny circles and boxes and dashes that gave him a headache to look at. He made separate piles for each assumed language, tapping even the edges of the stacks on the back of the bench before tossing them in the trash.
The printouts in English were mostly hardcopies of email letters—important reminders of the things p
eople had come to Goa to forget. Updates on family members in Helsinki, reminders about college registration deadlines and syrupy notes from pining lovers, counting the days till this “finding yourself” bullshit was over. There were papers that Jason was certain someone would be tearing backpacks apart later to find—an invitation to a full-moon party on Ko Samui, complete with a detailed map and stock drawings of pot leaves, a list of phone numbers of reputable escort services in Athens, the address of an Australian abortionist in Madras who took credit cards, names of pawn shops in Calcutta that didn’t ask a lot of questions. He subdivided the money-from-home letters into three piles—ones that promised to wire funds to a Western Union office, ones that said they would not, and ones that said that this was absolutely the last and final time money would be sent, noting in capital letters or italicized type or both that they meant it this time.
There were a handful of “hilarious” forwards that “you have to read”—fifty reasons why a beer is better than a woman, fifty reasons why a cucumber is better than a man, two pages of light bulb jokes, ten pages of lawyer jokes, a list of stupid laws in Texas and the same list of laws, this time from Alberta. He was re-reading a piece downloaded from a London comedy club’s website—a “wafty crank of a monologue” that took on the way Americans “try” to speak and write in English—when he thought about Mrs. Maxwell.
Every student agreed that Mrs. Maxwell was the best teacher at West Corning High School. Her classes watched whole episodes of Cheers so they could learn about character development, they could rap out their evaluations of stories instead of writing essays, they read the comic book version of Mice and Men, they did collages, they held parties, they played Pictionary. You can’t cage the learner, she liked to say. Jason was never late for her class, never jerked around and, as the ninth grade standardized test at the end of the year proved, never learned a thing.
Every student agreed that Mr. Switzer was the worst teacher at West Corning High School. His classes were painful, nothing but sheet after sheet of equations and questions, the word problems lacking so much as a single damn train leaving a station. Correct answers on wrinkled papers were marked wrong, stray marks lowered test scores, and don’t even think about cheating. A disciplined mind starts with a disciplined desk, he said. No one was late, no one misbehaved, and no one scored less than a ninety on the standardized test.
In the four years that he took his classes, Jason learned a lot from Mr. Switzer.
He was thinking about the things he didn’t learn from Mrs. Maxwell when he saw the police out of the corner of his eye.
All three were dressed in starched khaki uniforms, spit-shined shoes and gleaming belts. Their brass buttons glowed in the fluorescent light. Two were tall and thin, their arms swinging free in their stiff short sleeves, like clackers in a church bell, the shorter man—still taller than Jason—walking just ahead. Their waist bands dipped an inch on the right, pulled down by heavy holstered revolvers. They didn’t twirl their billy clubs by leather straps or slap them into their open palm, using them instead as an extension of their arm, pushing open the station doors and prodding sleeping beggars out of their way, the official version of a ten-foot pole.
They moved with an easy grace—the last train was still a half an hour away and they could take their time, no one was going anywhere. They started with a small group of blond Rastafarians from Sweden who knew the drill. They stood when the policemen spoke, they smiled as clubs poked into bedrolls, turned torn pockets inside out and even helped spill open tattered backpacks. They didn’t complain when a Walkman dropped from a bag and shattered in half. If they were hiding something it was small and not worth the officers’ time and they gathered up their ratty possessions as the police moved down the line.
Rachel was still sitting, her back against an iron support. She had seen enough to understand what was going on and Jason watched as she turned back to face the tracks, her elbows on her knees, her hands hanging loose above her feet.
The Japanese girls giggled nervously as the policemen asked them questions, their embarrassed blushes misinterpreted as exotic flirtations. There was a great deal of smiling and head bobbing and ahcha head swaying, but other than glancing at their passports while pretending they weren’t looking down their baggy tee shirts, the police left them alone.
Sprawled out next to a chai vendor’s stove, two guys, college-aged, glared up at the police who stood over them. Jason didn’t hear what the one said but the other laughed and he saw the officer’s jaw tighten, the billy club coming around fast and sharp and catching the laughing student on the knee. He yelped and rolled back, his friend standing halfway up before a second club rapped on his wrist and he fell back down hard. The one clutching his knee was shouting in English, a heavy Teutonic accent adding the attitude, when the smallest officer stepped forward and set the tip of his club on the man’s stomach, leaning on it as he explained the situation in a low, calm voice. Whether it was the words or the club or something else Jason couldn’t see, the man was soon nodding and, flat on his back, dumping the contents of his pack onto the concrete by his head. The officer waited, still leaning, as his partners shifted through the pile with their clubs, and, finding nothing, tipping his hat as they walked away.
Rachel had tilted her head back, the bill of her Blue Jays cap pointing into the night sky. She curled her lower lip between her teeth and he watched as her shoulders rose and fell in jerky bursts.
After their chat with the two young Germans, the three policemen regrouped for a moment at the edge of the platform, the tallest knocking a discarded clay chai cup off the platform to break on the tracks three feet below. For a moment Jason thought that they would turn away and wander down to the far end of the track where dark shadows waited on dark benches, but they turned back to scan the crowd for the usual suspects. The shortest, silver tabs on his epaulets denoting his rank, rocked back on his heels, sniffed the humid night air and stepped towards the woman in the baseball hat who sat crying against an iron column.
They were four feet away when the singing started.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…”
He was off key, off beat and his voice was cracking, but Jason was loud enough to attract the attention of every person at the open-air station.
“…oh what fun it is to ride a something horse open sleigh, HEY!”
The police officers, like everyone but the crying girl, stared at the singing man, the tallest bringing a hand up to conceal a bright, white smile. The officer in charge smiled too, but they hadn’t moved towards him, still towering above the crying girl.
Jason looked at the police, drew in a deep breath that came out as a desperate sigh, held imaginary reins in his hands and broke into a prancing gallop.
“Dashing through the snow, in something something sleigh, over the hills we go, laughing all the way, ha, ha, ha….”
It was the laughing that got the police moving. They walked over slowly, billy clubs now behind their backs, surrounding him. Jason stopped singing but held tight on his reins. “Oh, hello,” he said, with a polite, I’m-not-dangerous smile.
“What are you doing?” the officer in charge said, his partners looking away to keep from laughing.
Jason raised his eyebrows, the answer obvious. “I’m taking a sleigh ride,” he said, and held up his hands to show the invisible reins.
The officer nodded. “Where are you from?”
Jason was tempted to say something about over the river and through the woods but he sensed that he’d already gone far enough. “The U.S. I’m an American.”
The officer nodded again. “American,” he said to the taller men, as if that explained everything. “Is that your bag?” He pointed with his club.
“Ahcha,” Jason said, and gave his head a slight bob.
“Pick it up. You will come with us,” the officer said. “And leave your horse here.”
Chapter Seventeen
Despite the impressive brass na
meplate on the door, the stationmaster’s office was small and cardboard boxes filled with old station logs and office supplies lined the walls. The two taller guards stood with their backs to the closed door, their billy clubs held diagonally across their chests, the shorter man motioning to a chair against the wall as he stepped behind the room’s only desk and took a seat.
For five minutes no one said a word as the officer flipped through Jason’s passport, the sound of the turning pages slow and deliberate. By the door, one of the policemen sneezed and rubbed the end of his nose with the back of his hand that held the black club. Jason tried to think of what he would do if they started beating him, realizing then that he could do nothing at all. The officer set the passport on the desk, and said something to the tallest policeman, who took Jason’s backpack, placed it on the desk and began the inspection, starting with a long, critical look at the bright pink Hello Kitty shoulder strap with its trendy Japanese cartoon cat logo.
The first thing the policeman pulled out was a handful of Rachel’s underwear.
“A souvenir,” Jason said, forcing himself to smile as the man held up a wispy red thong. The police officers exchanged glances before conversing in Hindi, the meaning evident in their disgusted tone. He was waiting for them to pull a bra from the backpack when he remembered that Rachel seldom wore one.
They went through the pack, pocket by pocket, pouring the shampoo down the floor drain in the center of the room, breaking open his disposable camera, squeezing toothpaste into the wastepaper basket. There was no malicious bullying, no leering grins, just a quiet efficiency that Jason found frightening. They unfurled all six yards of the red sari, the two taller men holding up sections and examining the silver embroidery with its circuit board pattern, tugging on the button, holding the fabric up to their nose, the smell of the cologne still strong, the officer first looking at the sari then at Jason, then back at the sari, saying nothing.
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