I’m going to kill a boy.
At first the words came to me as a vague, indistinct memory, the memory of a dream. Then they returned as a thought. And finally—all in a matter of seconds—they flashed into my mind with the full strength of a realization.
I’M GOING TO KILL A BOY.
The train was rolling forward, heavy steel wheels clanking over the rails. I stood and watched in horror, my eyes fixed to the spot where the child had disappeared—where he was now trapped. I was paralyzed, frozen in place, overcome with fear and guilt and a wild desire to flee while I still could. The train was rapidly gaining speed; very soon it would be going too fast for me to get on, and I would be stranded here in the darkness—god knows where—left to confront the consequences of my pride and arrogance. It was too much to bear. I wrenched my eyes away from the tracks and sprinted up the ramp and along the platform, running hard by the cars, passing a succession of square windows, each one a miniature proscenium opening onto its own cramped world where people slept and dreamed amid the chaos of things they had brought with them on their journey. The train picked up speed, and very soon it was overtaking me, the windows moving by me now in the opposite direction, the same scenes I had just witnessed repeating themselves in reverse order, as if I were sliding backward in time, losing ground, falling into the past.
This cannot be happening. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Please. This cannot be happening.
The train was moving fast, and I reached out in desperation and grabbed a handrail and held on, my feet flailing in midair as I was yanked off the platform and up into the open doorway. Within seconds the station was gone—lost—and I was once again hurtling through the void.
37
I AWOKE TO A FRENZY of activity, just as the train was entering New Delhi station. Up and down the aisle people struggled with their luggage, pushing their way toward the door. There was no point in moving, so I lay in my berth and waited until most of the passengers had gotten off, then climbed down and made my way through the crowded station. Outside I flagged a motor rickshaw and had him take me to the YMCA on Jai Singh Road.
Fortunately they had a vacant room. Once inside I secured the door and collapsed onto the bed and attempted to dispel the image of that boy from my mind.
I told myself that it wasn’t my fault he got trapped under the train. It had been a terrible accident. Buddhism teaches that the karmic consequences of any action are rooted in its intent; murder is not murder unless there is a clear intention to kill, and I certainly had no such intention. And anyway, I asked myself, how do I know he actually died? He could easily have crawled out on the opposite side of the train, where I wouldn’t have seen him. Or else kept low against the tracks and waited for the cars to pass. I remembered reading about someone who had done just that with a CTA train in Chicago. The man was completely unharmed.
This reasoning went nowhere. It wasn’t enough to not know whether I’d unintentionally killed a boy. Especially when I had to deal with the abject cowardice that had driven me to abandon him and run for the train—which was the only reason, after all, that I didn’t know if he were still alive. The truth was that I hadn’t even wanted to know. All I’d wanted was to get away.
So what did I want now?
I wanted to forget. I wanted to bury the memory of those few horrible moments deep down under wherever it is that memories get buried. Unfortunately, that was not possible. All of it was there, vividly present in my mind. Or at least most of it was there.
I remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and everything that followed—right up to the point where I flung myself into the train. But from there on things got hazy. Try as I might, I could not recall making my way back through the cars to my berth. After leaping into the train, the next thing I remembered was waking up in the New Delhi station. Obviously, it would have taken a while to find my way through the cars and get settled again and fall asleep—especially after what had just happened. So why couldn’t I remember any of it?
But of course there is so much we don’t remember or remember incorrectly. Nevertheless, this question triggered a string of other questions, for the more I puzzled over that mysterious lapse of memory, the clearer it became that there were several other peculiar things about the station. For instance, why did no one else get on or off the train? Even at the time the absolute silence of the place had struck me as odd. And why was the boy wandering all alone out there so late at night? And why would a chai shop be open at that hour, the chai wala way down there off the platform making tea for nobody? And why, it occurred to me now, would the Kashi Viswanath Express stop in the dead of the night at a tiny station in the middle of nowhere? Express trains don’t make such stops.
And behind it all, suffusing these questions with an ominous, indecipherable portent, was the dream I’d had just before leaving Banaras where I was driving the bus. I’m going to kill a boy. The words sent chills up my spine. They had freaked me out before, but now it was a hundred times worse. And all of it seemed to go back, somehow, to the original accident in the Punjab, which could itself have been a dream. And then, as I lay on the hard mattress at the YMCA, dissecting these subtleties, I recalled a detail of my experience on the Super Fast that had until that moment entirely slipped my mind: the cut on my lip.
That night when the bus skidded, just before striking the boy, I had been thrown forward against the metal bar separating me from the driver, and I had cut my lip. The memory was still crystal clear. But later when I was cleaning up in the bathroom at the Fulbright offices I hadn’t noticed any sign of the cut. No blood, no swelling or discomfort. Nothing. At the time I was too preoccupied to think about it, but it seems highly unlikely that I could have been bleeding like that on the bus and not found so much as a trace of dried blood when I looked in the mirror only a few hours later. Sitting on the bus I had distinctly seen and felt blood on my fingers and—as I now remembered—on my bag. Yes, a drop of blood had fallen on my bag. This could be confirmed.
I got up from the bed, went over and found the bag, and took it outside on the veranda. In the bright sunlight I meticulously examined every square inch of the canvas fabric. There was no hint of the dark stain I remembered seeing that night in the Punjab. Of course the bag was dirty, and the spot could have faded with the passing of time. Or maybe in the poor light of the bus I hadn’t really seen what I thought I saw.
Things are not what they seem—memories and dreams, whole worlds that exist only in the mind—nor are they otherwise.
It was mid morning and I had been lying in bed wrestling with this conundrum for too long when I finally gave up. I went down the hall to the communal bathroom and took a hot shower and then ordered tea through room service. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since the day before in Banaras, so when the tea was finished I left the hotel and walked across Connaught Place to the Glory—a dhaba on the outer circle, one of several among the maze of shops near Shankar Market. I found a seat among a crowd of mechanics and auto-rickshaw drivers. All around me men conversed loudly, laughing and eating with relish. It was a relief to get out of the hotel room and stop obsessing about something I could not influence, one way or another. And it felt good just to eat: I consumed a saucer of pickled red onions, a fiery plate of mattar paneer, two thick, steaming tandoori rotis, and a saucer of mung dal.
When I finished eating, I went to the back of the restaurant to rinse my hands and mouth. Bent over the small metal sink, massaging my gums with the water from the tap, everything seemed at once both familiar and remote. I was doing something I’d done dozens of times before in exactly this place. I splashed the cool water over my face and stood up from the sink feeling somewhat refreshed. Since I had no intention of looking up Nortul Rinpoche today, I had the rest of the afternoon free.
I hailed a motor rickshaw and had him drop me on the south end of Lodi Gardens, near the mausoleum of Shah Sayyid, the fifteenth-century sultan of Delhi who had claimed to be a direct descendent of Muhammad. I paid th
e driver and walked through the gate. It was mid afternoon now, and the sun was blistering hot. A man slouched in the shade, watering bushes, waving a nozzle aimlessly back and forth over a tangle of thorny leaves. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around. I climbed the cracked masonry steps, passed under the arcade, and paused near the entrance to the tomb. The cool air of the interior smelled of stone and earth. Two mynahs swooped and soared in the shadows under the dome with its arabesques. Beneath them the grave was marked by a heavy slab of sandstone. I sat down to rest under the high lintel and looked out over a nearby grove of eucalyptus. Behind me the faint swish of the birds’ wings reverberated off the stucco walls. A peacock moaned.
I thought about those other afternoons when I used to stop here on the way back from my Sanskrit lessons with Shri Anantacharya. When the goal is liberation, he had assured me in his solemn tone, one cannot afford to exclude anything. Poetry as a path to moksha. But I was not convinced he really wanted such a liberation from cities and seas, from mountains and the passing of the seasons, and certainly not from the poems of his beloved Kalidasa. In any case, I thought, Anantacharya is gone. And his son, Krishna, will soon be married to a woman he barely knows. Love is about how we live with what we are given. I recalled how Penny and I had walked here one morning, after sex and coffee, exploring a newly enchanted world. We had been entertained at the foot of these very stairs by a man with two trained monkeys. The male was clothed in absurd little cotton pants, the female with a tiny frilled smock. “Shaadi karo!” Their master snapped an order and they pretended to “be married,” gripping each other in a furry embrace, their long tails curling upward like the handles on a vase.
The man with the hose was down on his hands and knees now, pulling grass from around the flowering plants. Seeing him there, an image of the boy in the station flickered into my mind. All over again he was crawling at my feet, groping for coins, his face contorted with panic and confusion. And I wondered, all over again, if it really might have been a dream. The mere fact that I could imagine such a possibility seemed altogether too fantastic. I must be losing my mind even to consider such a thing. And then I remembered what Mickey had said about how life is a war zone, and a big part of the battle is waged in the effort just to live with yourself—with the guilt, as he put it, of being here at all. So is that what this is about? Guilt? If so, I asked myself, then just how much am I willing to doubt or to believe or to simply forget in order to avoid confronting the consequences of my own pride and arrogance? There is no way to calculate the extent of our obfuscation, no way to know who or what might already have been sacrificed simply in order to keep going. No way to know how deeply I could be fooling myself. Or trying to fool myself, by turning an actual child into a bloodless fantasy.
But then, it occurred to me, maybe it’s not that far-fetched. The border between memory and imagination is notoriously porous. This business about fooling oneself is a double-edged sword. Don’t I fool myself every night when I dream without knowing I’m dreaming? And that’s the least of it. In Banaras I had dreamed of waking up and gotten all the way downstairs before I even suspected I was still in bed asleep. So if I can be that wrong about a dream, then why couldn’t I be wrong about a memory—the memory of a dream?
“Sahab.” I looked up and the man was standing directly in front of me, his arm extended, a key dangling from his fingers, addressing me in Hindi. “Is it yours?”
It was the key to my hotel room. But how I had managed to drop it in the grass I don’t know. I took it from him, thanking him profusely, and stuck it back in my pocket as I stood up. He remained where he was, motionless, palms joined. It took me a second to realize that he was waiting for baksheesh. I dipped into my pocket and dug out a few coins and dropped them into his outstretched hands, then walked quickly down the stairs and out to the road, where the auto rickshaw I had come on was still parked.
On an impulse I decided to stop by the Fulbright offices, and ten minutes later I was walking through the front gate. The chaukidar was someone new; he raised his palms in greeting. Where was Mahmud? I pushed open the door and entered the lounge, where I immediately succumbed to an array of conflicting emotions. The first thing that hit me was the frigid air-conditioning. Such ostentatious, technologically controlled comfort immediately suggested everything good and bad about the institutionalized world of academia—all of it bound up with money. Work hard, play by the rules, publish, and network and—if you’re among the fortunate few to be anointed with tenure—your future is secure. No one was anywhere to be seen. I recalled that on this very day Morarji Desai was being sworn in as prime minister; the staff probably had the afternoon off. I stood and surveyed the all-too-familiar room. To my left was the couch where I had sat talking with Margaret Billings on our first meeting. The sound of her patient, maternal voice still lingered in the air, advising me on strategies for professional success. And that grueling conversation at the party, with Frank Davis cross-examining me about the dissertation.
I peered down the hall to the director’s office, the scene of debauchery. I was overwhelmed with an old sensation that I had not experienced since moving to Banaras. All over again I was the child, the clown, the intruder—the one who must wear a mask. The one who does not belong. Suddenly I wanted out. Out before I had to shake hands with anyone. Out before I had to answer a single pointed question about my research.
I turned to leave and my eye came to rest on the row of mailboxes by the door. I stepped over and peered into the one marked “H.” There was a pile of envelopes. I drew it out and began to sort through the various letters and cards. Surely there couldn’t be anything here for me, not after all this time.
Wrong.
There, on the bottom of the stack, was an airmail envelope from the States, addressed to Stanley Harrington. I thrust the rest of the letters and cards back into the box and scrutinized the sky-blue paper, the row of canceled US postage stamps, as if I were holding an artifact that had somehow been carried over intact, through the bardo, from a previous life. On the back of the envelope, in a scratchy, grade-school hand that I immediately recognized, was the return address: Judith Harrington, 85 West Division Street #15, Chicago, IL, U.S.A. I dropped onto the couch and simply gazed at the writing for several more seconds before teasing open the flap.
The letter inside was dated December 28, 1975. One month before the fateful telephone conversation in which I first acknowledged my intention to stay on in India. One and a half months before I next heard from her when she wrote suggesting we file for divorce. How could I have missed it? I used to rifle through this box two, often three, times a day. Nothing could possibly have escaped my attention. I turned the empty envelope over in my hand and examined the postmark: September 14, 1976. There could only be one explanation. It must have been lost in the post office here in Delhi for several months—or held up by the censors—then eventually processed and delivered sometime after I had gone. And ever since then the envelope had been lying here in this box. Waiting. I slumped back into the couch, unfolded the translucent stationary and began to read.
Dearest Stanley,
So, Christmas is over. Our first Christmas apart. I know how much you hate all the commercial hype, but it’s still a time when families are supposed to get together and I’ve missed you. Will it really be four more months before we see each other again?
I am chez parents—since a few days before Christmas. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. The place is insane as ever. Mom insists that Dad is putting on weight and she rides him about it constantly. Of course he ignores her. Since I’ve been here (for the last week) he’s spent most of his time sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of Cheetos watching football. Matt came home for Christmas, but he’s leaving tomorrow to go back to school early to meet some new girlfriend—the second one in the past six months.
It’s been okay, I guess, but it does seem pretty strange not to have you here.
Thanks so much for the gifts. You mu
st have mailed them months ago! I love the perfume. Really. Even the bottles are exotic. Sealed with wax, no less. I hated to open them. But the silver necklace you sent—I don’t know what to say. It’s absolutely beautiful. Thank you, Stanley. Mom is so happy with the silk scarf, and the wallet is perfect for Dad. You know how he is. He immediately emptied out his old one and put everything into the one you sent. He couldn’t get over the idea that it’s made out of water-buffalo leather. I heard him telling one of his friends on the phone. And the shirt was ideal for Matt. It’s loose enough that it fits great. A “kurta,” right? (I’m sure you’re happy to see that I’ve picked up a few Hindi words from your letters.) Anyway, thanks for being so kind. Now I feel more guilty than ever for not sending you a Christmas present. But remember—you told me not to!
Mom and Dad haven’t said much, but it’s obvious they want to know what’s going on. I’ve been thinking a lot about us lately, and the only thing I know for sure is that I still love you. In spite of everything, this love I have for you is still there. You’re my husband and I can’t seem to get beyond that fact. We agreed to spend the rest of our lives together, and it does mean something. “The bondage of holy matrimony,” as you used to say. You are the most perverse man on earth. How many times did you refuse even to give me a hug or a kiss when I asked? It had to be “spontaneous” (whatever that means) or you couldn’t do it.
So here we go again . . . I’m so tired of raking back over all the horrible stuff we’ve been through. I wish I could just forget all those times you turned away from me, and how angry it still makes me. Sometimes I think you never really wanted to be married. Or at least that you regretted it within a week.
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