“My grandfather died without any warning.” Penny hesitated, “I don’t mean to imply that it’s the same, but we were very close.”
Colonel Singh finished his last sip of scotch, then began to revolve the empty glass round and round under his fingers, as though it were a prayer wheel capable of changing the past by granting him this one wish.
“This is a bit different, Miss Ainsworth. We could have had that chance to say goodbye.” His voice was controlled, but underneath there was a note of bitterness. Penny and I exchanged a glance. It was impossible to tell what he meant by this cryptic remark. He took a deep breath and exhaled a protracted, weary sigh.
“My family is from the Punjab. My great-grandfather came to Chandigarh from a small village. I was raised a Sikh, of course, but the truth is my parents were not religious people. I remember my grandfather would take me to Gurudwara when I was a boy. But he died when I was only eight years old, and after that I seldom went. From then on religion was something that came up only on special holidays. At those times we would burn a stick of incense under grandfather’s picture of Guru Nanak and recite some prayers. That was all. Our family was wealthy, and I was educated at the best English-medium schools. My father was a career military man, and he pointed me in that direction early on. He taught me to believe only in what I could myself see and touch.” Colonel Singh grabbed a fistful of air out of the space between us and held it clenched in the palm of his hand. Gradually the fingers relaxed, drifted back to the empty glass and fell to turning it in the same way as before.
“So it is evident that I am not at all religious.” He looked up at us again, “I am not what my father would have called a superstitious man. I have no sense for . . .” He seemed to be searching after the right word. His gaze passed over all the accumulated odds and ends, moving among the books and souvenirs, over the tiger’s head above the fire, and back across to the picture of his wife, finally coming to rest on Penny’s own green eyes. “For whatever it was, perhaps, that you referred to earlier.”
“Me?”
“Yes, when you spoke of the ‘power’ in that little prayer wheel. Such things have always escaped my attention. I really am quite hopeless in this way, and that is the reason I missed the chance—the chance we might otherwise have had—to say goodbye.”
Suddenly I knew where this was leading. “The hermit. You’re talking about Kalidas.”
The colonel looked up at me. “I told you his only visitors were Suresh and myself. But there was one other.”
“Your wife.”
“Yes, my wife. We first learned about him from the previous director, as I told you earlier this afternoon. He was already old when I assumed the post here. My wife took pity on him. Not that she necessarily believed the story. To her he was just a lonely old man, barely able to survive out there in the jungle. It wasn’t long before she began to visit him. Once in a while at first, then more frequently, especially after he fell and injured his leg. She had Suresh drive her over once every week or so with provisions.” The colonel’s face relaxed. “She always made sure to bring him something special, fresh sweets or what have you. He was quite old, even then, and my wife became worried. She began feeding him and mending his clothes. She would sit there with him, for an hour or more sometimes, the two of them silent. But then after some time he began to talk. Not much, you understand. Merely a few words now and again, from what she told me. But that was quite something for a man who had not spoken in so many years. For decades, so far as we knew. And he spoke only to her. Never a word to anyone else. Only to her.” He looked at Penny and smiled. “She was that sort of woman, you see. Very warm. Everyone felt at ease with Jasmeet.” He stared down at his hands. “The old man knew the whole time. He could bloody well have told us.”
Once again no one spoke. A minute or so passed, and Penny finally summoned the courage to ask what both of us had been wondering. “How can you be so certain that he knew?”
“Oh, he knew all right. There can be no question. We were visiting his kuti together the very day she died. We saw him only hours before she went to sleep beside me for the last time. She had prepared a big basket of things for him. At the last minute I decided to ride over with Suresh and her. We made a few stops on the way. I remember checking in with one of my backcountry people, a man doing some tagging on a project with elephants. But that afternoon everything was different. When we drove up he stood in the doorway and waved us away. I had Suresh stop the Land Rover at the edge of the clearing. She walked up to the porch alone, but from what I could make out he seemed terrified. He shook his head and waved his arms like a crazy man. Refused to have anything to do with her. Would not even accept the things she had brought. He drove her away, shouting. After some time my wife set the basket on the porch, and we left him alone in the house. I know she was hurt. She could not understand. Of course neither did I.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I remember too well the last thing she said to me that night, before she went to sleep.” He lifted the picture and held it in both hands. “‘Why do you suppose he turned us away?’ she asked me. That was precisely what she said to me. I will always remember those words: Why do you suppose he turned us away? I was preoccupied with something. With the elephant project or some other nonsense. So I said to her, ‘Go to sleep, my dear.’ Just to get her to quiet down, you understand? ‘Go to sleep, my dear,’ I said. ‘He is just a crazy old man. The next time you visit him, he will be the same as always. Now go to sleep.’ And that is what she did. She closed her eyes and went to sleep.”
The last charred log crumbled and fell through the grate into a mound of embers. A melancholy hush descended over the house. Even the nocturnal birds outside seemed quieter than before.
“It’s late,” the colonel said. “Time for bed. You will discover we rise early here.” He gave us a small bow.
As we followed him down the hallway, I heard soft footsteps in the rooms behind us; Jagjit and Chota Hanuman circled through the house extinguishing the lamps.
15
I LAY UNDER the mosquito net watching Penny remove her sari. The shutters had been latched against the possibility of uninvited guests. Moonlight poured between the slats in pale narrow bands, streaming through the darkness and across the walls and floor, illuminating her movements as she unwound the fabric from her body. A faint odor of incense hung in the room, bringing to mind the dank, secret interior of Hindu temples. From outside came the screech of an insomniac bird. Eventually Penny reached the last layer of cloth, peeled it off, folded the sari, and dropped it on top of a pile of clothes in the open bag at her feet. All that remained was the petticoat and a short, tightly fitting blouse. She loosened the silver combs in her hair and let it spill down over her neck and shoulders, then tipped back her head and shook out the tangles. A cool white stripe of moonlight flexed across her stomach.
I thought of the colonel and his grief, and then of Judith, my own lost wife. We had shared so much—the excitement of our first days together, the hastily arranged wedding with our drunken, stoned friends, our endless conversations about art and religion, years of torment and passion. The imprint of her touch was embedded in my flesh like a ceremonial tattoo; the scent of her hair and skin would not be scrubbed away. But she would never know India. How strange that seemed. And how utterly final. She would never know this place. We would not share this room, this night.
Death, I thought. And in my mind I saw an aging black-and-white photograph of an Indian man and woman standing together, laughing in the sunlight. Departure, I said to myself, and remembered the evening I had sat alone in Delhi, knowing I would not return to Judith and she would not come to me. I had copied a Sanskrit verse into my journal. I lay on my back, my head propped against the hard foam pillow, and whispered the words of my English translation:
Death, departure, new birth, dissolution.
Separation from people and things beloved.
Never to come again or to meet again.
Like th
e leaves and fruits of the forest,
like the current of a river.
The nocturnal cloak of the jungle lay heavily against my skin. I inhaled deeply, and the smell entered my nostrils, bending each tiny hair, an ethereal, soundless current flowing like a subterranean river through the moist, hidden cavities of my body. Lungs rise, hesitate, then collapse inward, forcing the spent air back along the same mysterious route. The darkness of the jungle outside and the dark interior of my body are linked by this stream of respiration, joined at the turning point between inhalation and exhalation. Here is the alchemical flask where opposites fuse, inner with outer, life with death, loss with gain, reality with illusion. Samsara with nirvana. Nirvana with the ceaseless repetition of birth and death.
All the yogic traditions of India begin and end here, before creation, where the breath turns back on itself, where the breath of God moves like wind over the waters of the deep. In my memory I am lying on my back in the Himalayan night under a canopy of striped moonlight, watching. And in my body each breath revolves on a gossamer axis, meeting and merging with its opposite: inhalation becoming exhalation, exhalation bending around on itself in the same elusive transmutation. Turning inward I find my way along an ancient path, gathering together what is and what is not. I let my attention rest on the pull of the abdominal muscles, on the lungs filling, expanding, tapering off, on the incorporeal vein of air growing ever more thin, the sensations ever more subtle, weightless, flexible, malleable, alive, still moving in toward the center. With exquisite patience I search for the place of crossing over, the bridge between breathing in and breathing out—that infinitely precious and fragile interface between opposites, a hidden chamber of the heart where self and other meet and trade places in the simplest, most elemental act of love.
But what if the turning point is concealed in the very act of attention? In awareness itself? That would explain why the goal always seems to lie so tantalizingly near at hand and yet forever beyond my grasp. Awareness: present only in its absence, as the reflected image of what it is not. Awareness is always manifest as nothing. Nothing to find and no one to find it. Is the very act of observation, then, the ultimate illusion? Who sees the seer?
“Did you say something, Stanley?”
“What?” I looked up at the sagging net, then through the gauze into the dimly lit room. She was not there. “Sorry. Not really. I was thinking out loud.”
Her voice came from inside the bathroom where a candle flickered. A shadow climbed up the opposite wall, around and over the ceiling, a distorted black ghost washing and drying itself with a spectral towel that twisted and bent as it danced over the uneven surface of the plaster. A phantom hand swept down like a raven, lifting the candle, and Penny emerged from the door with her fingers cupped around the flame. She walked over to the vanity and set the candle to one side, then sat down and looked at herself in the mirror for a few seconds before beginning to brush her hair. She was still wearing the petticoat and blouse.
“What do you see in the mirror?” I asked.
“A woman brushing her hair.”
“That’s all? You don’t see anything else? Look closely.”
She bent forward and stared into the glass. “What? See what?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?!”
“Yes. Exactly. That’s it.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” she snapped back, her expression moving swiftly from confusion to exasperated disbelief. “You’re being philosophical, aren’t you?” She jerked the brush down through her hair. “Stanley, don’t do that. I was certain you saw some horrible insect crawling in my hair.”
I stretched out under the sheets, clasping both hands up behind my head. When I spoke again it was with my best parody of her Oxford intonation. “So tell me, Miss Ainsworth. Perhaps I am mistaken, but were you not a tad uneasy earlier this evening when our host broached the subject of our accommodations? The single room, I mean.”
“Uneasy?” She considered. “Yes, I suppose I was.”
“And why might that be, my deyah?”
“Are you blind, Stanley? Have you really not noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“The colonel, he sees me differently now.”
“Differently? What do you mean?”
“Shall I spell it out? He knows I’m available. He’s interested in your girlfriend.”
“Rayally?”
“Yes, rayally, you idiot!”
“Hrumph! Well, then, I must say that I’m not a bit surprised. Surely you must be familiar with that quaint old Punjabi adage.”
“No, I am not. But I’ll bet you’re about to tell it to me.”
“Since you asked. How does it go? Let me see . . . oh yes: You can wrap a nice ass in a sari, but men will still want to bite it. There. You see?”
“That’s an old Punjabi adage?”
“Damn right it is. You hear it all the time in the streets of Chandigarh. I’m told the original has a sort of rustic elegance that’s lost in translation. Of course I don’t speak the language, so I can’t evaluate such claims. But you get the point.”
She continued to brush, unimpressed.
“So Singh wants to bite your ass. But I still don’t understand what that has to do with our sharing a room.”
“Stanley, sometimes you positively amaze me with your naiveté. Wake up. This is India. I realize that you’re a male and therefore have not been compelled to deal personally with all of this. And you’re not exactly the sensitive feminist type.”
“Whoa there! What’s that supposed to mean?”
She ignored the interruption and continued. “But you really ought to be aware of what the rest of us are enduring, at least the Europeans and Americans. I can’t claim to speak for what it’s like to be an Indian woman. Put down your Sanskrit texts and take a look around. We are walking a very fine line here, Mr. Buddhist philosopher.” She drew her hair around one shoulder and down over her chest, brushing the ends.
“How so?”
“Listen closely now, and you will learn something important: class is in session. In India there are five roles for women. No more, and no less. First, mother: threatening in her own way, no doubt, the mother is basically an archetype of pure, nonsexual or spiritual love and total, unwavering acceptance. You come to her and she takes you, as you are. Especially if you happen to be a man. Or, more precisely, a boy who has never grown up. Of course all five roles are assigned from the male point of view, but in India this should more or less go without saying. The second role is sister: still pure, with the emphasis here on chaste. Virginal. Untouched. As you Americans say, her cherry has not been popped. Did I get that right?”
“Yep, that’s what we Americans say.”
“So that’s number two. Woman’s role number three is daughter, which is pretty much the same as number two so far as the virgin thing goes. And then we have woman’s role four: wife. The operative word here is loyal, as in Sita is the model of the loyal wife, because she was willing to be burned alive to prove her fidelity to Ram. Of course that’s only the ideal. As often as not I suspect the reality is even less pleasant. If you want to call the role sexual in some sense I won’t quibble, it’s in there somewhere, I’m sure.” Her voice trailed off. “So anyway, that’s role number four: woman as wife.”
“Isn’t this maybe, well, just a bit cynical?”
“Maybe. I’d like to think so.” She paused in her brushing to fiddle with a recalcitrant tangle. “Which brings me to the last of the five possible roles.”
“Let me guess. Uh . . .”
“Think hard and it will come to you, I’m sure.”
“Wait a minute! Wait just a minute! I believe I’ve got it: prostitute!”
“That’s it. Now think again, Stanley. Does anything seem to be missing here?”
I gave it a couple second’s consideration. “Girlfriend? Lover?”
“Bingo.”
“You know, though, prostitut
e isn’t a bad substitute. In a pinch, that is.”
“Very amusing,” she said dryly, not deigning to glance toward where I lay under the net. “But with a little more reflection I’m sure you’ll grasp the point. In Colonel Singh’s eyes I am a whore. A sexual woman.”
“Hot to trot.”
“Marvelous. Another charming Americanism.”
“And this explains why you were uncomfortable when he brought up the room arrangements?”
“Now you’ve got it, Professor. He knows damn well we’re not married. Keep the little lesson I just gave you in mind, and I guarantee you will see and understand a great deal that you might otherwise miss.”
“So,” I said, idly checking out the penumbra cast by the moonlight as it arched around and under her breasts, “aside from the fact that he wants to fuck you, what do you think of our host?”
“I like him. He can’t help it if he was raised in this screwed-up society. What the Mughals didn’t accomplish in five hundred years, my prudish Victorian ancestors more than made up for. Anyway, I’m accustomed to it by now. I don’t take any of it personally. But I’ve had enough encounters with fellows like Mr. Bhattacharya, whacking off behind his desk. I like to keep on my toes. That way I’m not caught by surprise too often.” She paused. “But Colonel Singh really is a charming man. He’s quite handsome, too, Stanley. Maybe you ought to be jealous.”
I was fiddling with the mosquito net now, trying to grip the sheer material between my toes. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
She slapped her forearm with the back of the brush, picked up the miniscule carcass of a mosquito and flicked it toward the shutters.
“Getting thick out there?”
“A few. Not bad.”
“Tell me, Penny.” I loosened my toes and let go of the net, turned around and adjusted the pillow so I could lean back on it and get a better look at her. “What do you make of his story?”
“Which one? We heard about two dozen.”
“Not the wild animal act. I mean all this stuff about the hermit. Kalidas.”
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