by Karan Bajaj
Touts in stained white shirts, their thin, pockmarked faces shining with sweat, descended upon them. Buy. Buy. Buy. We have everything. What do you want?
Max touched Anna’s hands. “Do you want to head back?”
“No, no, this is . . . strange. Amazing,” she said.
Max and Anna walked toward the shops, the touts forming a loose circle around them, shouting bargains on antiques, electronics, drugs, aggressive but unthreatening. A six-foot Ganesha statue for three dollars. A hundred Vicodins for five dollars. A Kharma Enigma music system for a thousand dollars. Viagra pills for ten cents. An original Van Gogh for five hundred dollars.
A group of urchins raced past them chasing a giant black rat with a white belly. They flattened it against the wooden beam of a hut-shop and poked it with their thin sticks, laughing when its scared eyes bulged. The rat crumpled to the ground, dead. Bored, the kids left it and ran away to search for more rats.
A toy shop with a life-size panda covering its facade. A shop selling golden blond wigs, hundreds of them strung up on wooden beams inside the hut. Another filled with religious amulets of all faiths. A taxidermy shop with frog skeletons placed atop crumbling wooden tables. There seemed no method or organization in the arrangement of shops. Shops with printed umbrellas proclaiming I Love New York next to ancient Indian drug and spice stores with bags of roots and leaves, each shop impossibly filled with people bargaining and buying at rapid speed.
A short man with studious glasses emerged from a taxidermy shop with a stuffed deer on his shoulders. He was elbowed by a woman carrying boomerangs and Spider-Man masks, incongruous against her starched white sari and the red mark on her forehead.
The evening darkened. Yellow lightbulbs and white flashlights came on in the shops. Spicy food smells filled the air.
Max worried the market would close down. “Shoe shop?” he said to the men following them.
A sudden silence followed by a cacophony of shouts. “Giant shoes, giant shoes, giant shoes, giant shoes.”
A ripple spread through the market. Touts shouting to shopkeepers, shopkeepers to other shopkeepers. Within minutes, a pregnant woman came running breathlessly through the crowd. She caught his hand. “Come, come,” she said.
They followed her, wading through throngs of people, stopping at a hut selling bangles—hundreds and thousands of them in red, green, yellow, golden, blue, every hue of color, suspended from strings on wooden beams, fixed on nails on the mud walls, strewn across a table covered by a white cloth. The woman pulled a wooden box from under the table and threw the lid open to reveal plus-size rubber and canvas shoes, sandals and flip-flops. Nike, Adidas, Crocs, even Tom’s shoes.
“You like?” said the woman.
Max nodded, speechless. Some of those shoes could fit men much taller than him. Yet he hadn’t seen a single man in India taller than his six foot six inches.
“Can I take a photo?” said Anna. “No one would believe me if I told them.”
The woman shook her head. “Not take photo. Take shoe.”
Max put his hands in the treasure box, sat down on the mud floor, and started trying on shoes. He had the luxury of choice. Four or five pairs fit him perfectly. Max bought a pair of black Nike running shoes for one US dollar and put them on. He put his weathered Merrell boots in a plastic bag to take back with him, then hesitated. From the Grand Canyon to Kilimanjaro, the shoes had been with him for years. But they hadn’t worked in India. Nothing had. He had to let go of everything he knew to move forward. Max gave the woman his hiking boots.
“How much you want?” said the woman.
“Nothing,” said Max. “Keep them.”
She stared at him. “Okay. No problem.” She put the shoes into her wooden box.
They stepped out of the hut.
“I want Marmite,” said Anna.
Again a human wave surged through the market. Another man tugged them to a shop. Soon Anna had a small glass bottle of black Marmite—available for sale only in England and Australia.
“Barry M Dazzle Dust,” she said.
The British cosmetic was in her hands in ten minutes.
Next Max got new socks, T-shirts, and even running shorts that actually fit him.
Anna clapped her hands together. “I thought I had seen everything, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “They sell tiger claws and elephant tusks in Togo, but none of the other stuff.”
A man with a light mustache and a bright red scarf around his neck grasped her hand. “Animals, madam, come with me,” he said urgently.
They looked at each other, then followed him.
Max’s feet breathed easily again in his new running shoes and socks. Past the clutter of shops they went, ignoring the solicitations of touts selling Parisian fur coats, Jamaican coffee, Portuguese porcelain, and even a black moon rock. They reached the far end of the field. There the crowd thinned and the din quieted. A herd of thin cows slept on the withered grass. Max stopped.
“Please sir, come with me,” said the man, his lips quivering.
He looked small and unthreatening. They followed him through the darkness, stopping at a thickly crossed barbed wire. The man flopped down and went under the wire. “Please, please. Trust,” he said, sensing their hesitation.
They flattened themselves against the mud field and crossed over to a dark street. A turn. Another row of shops with yellow wick lamps and blue-white flashlights. Cries. Smells. So many of them.
Each hut-shop was full of animal cages stacked on top of each other. Max’s heart raced. Mewing cats. Yelping puppies. Aquariums with colorful fish. White signs with black English lettering. “Pets!” “Science Experiments!” “Exotic Animals!” “Protectors!” “Predators!”
There were more cages with parrots, sparrows, cockatoos, mynahs, crows, other blue and yellow birds, crying, cawing, shrieking. Smells of wet, mangy bodies, animal waste, and the sweaty humans standing in front of them. They walked past the cages in a daze. The shops were smaller, even more crowded than the ones in the large field. A woman walked past them with a wicker basket full of hens, another with twelve squawking parrots tied to a stick with a string, a man with an aquarium filled with sparkling blue fish, another with a burlap sack with a moving, squealing, indeterminable animal in it.
“Come, come, come fast,” said the man.
Their morbid fascination pulled them forward.
Sheep. Rams. A deer with antlers. How could the animals survive in this heat? They took a turn in the middle of the huts. The lamps dimmed. The men standing in front of the cages were tall and heavily built, unlike the thin Indians he had seen thus far.
A glass jar with six large turtles paddling in knee-deep water, colliding against each other. Max stared, fascinated, at another closed jar with a bundle of yellow and black snakes locked in an embrace, unnaturally quiet. A ten-foot cage with a moving black mass in it. Jesus, a black bear. Another cage next to the bear with two zebras flicking their hind legs restlessly, nuzzling against each other, a terrified look on their faces.
This couldn’t be legal.
Grunting followed by a sharp growl. Anna dropped the bottle of Marmite on the mud field. Her face was red, forehead lined with sweat.
“All animals. Everything. What do you want, sir?” said their guide.
The zebras cried.
Another growl.
Max’s pulse quickened. “Let’s go,” he said.
He found Anna’s hands and turned back. Their guide followed them. He caught hold of Max’s shirt.
“Do you want tiger? Leopard? What? We have everything,” he said. He bared his teeth and made a hissing sound. “Snake venom? Cure for sex disease, for all disease.”
“Nothing, nothing,” said Max, extricating himself from his grip.
“Arre, faqir ho, sahib,” said the man. “You are beggars, sir
.”
They retraced their steps quickly, walking with their heads down, ignoring the terrified squeaks, yelps, and mews, under the barbed wire, through throngs of people in the field, past the naked children sifting through the garbage in the alley outside and the stoned men in front of the huts, onto the main road. Civilization again. Max had never been more relieved to hear the pervasive Indian sounds conspicuously absent from the market: the honking and roaring of vehicles, the scream of sirens, the blaring music from the roadside religious processions and marriage parties.
“What was that?”
“Don’t talk,” said Anna. “Just kiss me. Please.”
Max pulled her red face toward him and kissed her on the lips. She took a deep breath and pulled away.
“God, I’m sorry, I’m acting hysterical,” she said. “For a moment, I was sure the bear would break open its cage.”
“I didn’t mind at all,” said Max.
A woman on the sidewalk tried to sell them jasmine garlands to put on each other. Max took Anna’s hands and walked through the Colaba market, toward their hostel.
“God, that was a zebra, wasn’t it?” said Anna.
“And snakes?”
“That taxidermy shop had a stuffed elk,” she said.
“And so many shoes and clothes my size?” he said. “I can’t find such variety in a big and tall store back home.”
“My fiancé was as tall as you,” she said unexpectedly. “He was killed in Afghanistan six months ago.”
Hats for you, tall sir? Ayurvedic cream for you, fair lady? Half price only. The man selling cosmetics and hats from the afternoon was back with deeper discounts. Max bought a hat, the mindless act of giving money and getting something regular in return making him feel in control again.
“I’m sorry, I should have told you before,” said Anna.
“We just met,” said Max.
She put her hand through her hair. Again, Max caught a glimpse of the tattoo of the couple on her wrist.
“You got this after?” he said, pointing to the tattoo.
“Before. We were together since secondary school,” she said, her brown eyes dropping.
Max hugged her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No, I must thank you,” she said. “I’ve been traveling since I left the army six months ago but haven’t felt alive until today.”
His heart lifted. “I haven’t felt more comfortable with anyone in years,” he said.
Anna kissed him lightly on the lips. “Should we head back?” she said.
Max put his warm, sweaty hand in hers. They cut through the Colaba Causeway, dodging tuk-tuks decked in rainbows of colors racing past them, and made their way back to the hostel.
• • •
“HOW LONG ARE you planning to stay in Mumbai?” she asked as they climbed up the stairs to the hostel on the second floor.
He pressed her hands. “How long do you want me to stay?” he said.
Anna smiled. “I’ll have to know you better to decide, won’t I?” She walked him to his room.
“Are you sure?”
Anna nodded.
Max’s groin tightened. He felt a familiar rush of blood. He opened the door to the small room with its dim light, peeling paint, and hard wooden bed. Water had seeped onto the bedroom floor from his bucket shower in the bathroom earlier that afternoon.
“We can take a hotel,” said Max.
She walked into the room on the tips of her toes. Max hardened. He followed her inside. She sat on the bed.
“Is this for me?” She smiled, looking at the bulge in his pants.
She unzipped his cargo pants and fondled him. Max blanked his mind, trying not to come immediately. She put him in her mouth and sucked vigorously. Max put his hands on her head. Her back arched. He bent forward, unbuttoned her shirt, and fondled her warm, full breasts. She sucked harder.
Max pushed her against the bed. He took his shirt off and kissed her thin, angular body. The smells of her perfume mixed with the smells of the market. He entered her. She moaned, moving her arms up against her head. In a frenzy, he thrust harder. She thrashed around wildly. Max came with a cry.
• • •
SHE NESTLED IN his arms, her eyes wet with tears. He put his arms around her warm, naked body. The red tattoo on her wrist glistened with sweat.
Anna whimpered.
“It’s okay,” he said, ruffling her hair.
Max stared at the dirty pink bedsheet, feeling the familiar emptiness after the overpowering sexual urge had drained.
How long do you want me to stay?
He was fronting as some kind of a lover boy now. Just who was he? He had come to India to find the end of suffering and here he was fucking a vulnerable woman with a dead fiancé.
Max held her tight. Icy mountains. Afghani opium. Exotic markets. Zebras. Tigers. Sex. This was India. There was much to see, more to do. But he wasn’t a hippie on a sightseeing trip. He had wasted too much time already; he had to get his act together. His backpack, soaked and dirty, lay propped against the bathroom door. Inside the zipper at the top was the address Anand had given him. Now he understood why Anand had been reluctant to share the address with him. Max didn’t have the seeker’s focus.
He touched the tattoo of the couple embracing on her wrist. “Anna,” he said.
She opened her eyes. His chest tightened.
“I have to leave.”
She smiled, covering her breasts with the bedsheet. “To get dinner?” she said. “I’ll come. I could do with a good nosh up.”
Max pulled himself up. “I have to get on with my journey.”
Anna stared at him blankly. “Why so suddenly?”
He got up from the bed. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you before,” he said. “My mother died. I came to India to find truth, some insight. But again and again I’m just not . . . moving forward.”
“I know what it feels like,” she said. “You’re just taking a break.”
Max put on his pants. “No, I wasted many years after college like this,” he said, tying his shoelaces. “I’m still the same person, still looking for things and experiences, getting carried away easily. I have to get away from all this.”
She sat up, pressing the bedsheet against the curve of her body. “Where will you go?”
“I know of an ashram down in the south.”
“And you have to go alone?”
Max nodded. “I need to learn to be silent. I need to become someone different altogether.”
THE YOGI
The Yogi is superior to the ascetics and even superior to the men of knowledge. The Yogi is also superior to those who perform action with interested motive. Therefore, O Arjuna, be thou a Yogi.
—LORD KRISHNA, THE BHAGAVAD GITA
13.
At least he wasn’t lost, thought Max. No one could get lost here. Everything was flat land, not a crop, farm, or shelter in sight, just orange earth and the narrow yellowish-brown dirt track on it. He poured another half a bottle of water on the towel around his head and gulped the other half down, his eighth liter since morning. Walking in the hundred-and-ten-degree heat made him a little dizzy, but he wasn’t worried. He had packed enough food and water to survive a week if things went wrong. The shoes were his only mistake. Even the Nike running shoes were too thick for the scorching earth. His feet were full of blisters now. He should’ve gotten sandals instead. Not that they would have been much better. Avoiding physical discomfort in India was harder than seeing God face-to-face.
He ate yet another melting, gooey chocolate bar, one of the twelve he had bought in a shop outside the Pavur bus stand. His backpack straps cut into his shoulders. Four hours of continuous walking in the relentless heat. At this pace, he had at least six more miles to go to Ramakrishna’s ashram. He didn’t regret his decision to wal
k the twenty miles from the village. Not yet, at least. He had needed to overcome the sinking inadequacy he felt after his Himalayan misadventure. So he trudged along in the blazing afternoon sun, marveling at how quickly he’d gone from shivering in the Himalayas to sweating buckets in Pavur. It wasn’t just the weather that had changed. The people in the South seemed smaller, darker, and quieter. They ate more rice and gave less advice. No one asked him why he wasn’t married or judged his travel plans. They’d probably give him the same blank good-natured smiles they had during the journey if they saw him now—stripped down to just his underpants. Not that anyone was looking. He hadn’t seen one sign of life in his fifteen-mile walk yet—no man, animal, or insect. Just hot wind and him, the last life in the universe. The heat seemed to have burned everything else to dust.
Two more hours of walking. Still nothing. His heart beat faster. He would turn back after forty-five minutes sharp, so he could walk back to the village before dusk. Half an hour later, he saw four thatched huts in the distance. Tears stung his eyes. He thanked the red sun above and sat down on the burning earth. A small round black beetle, the first life-form he’d seen all day, scuttled by. He put his T-shirt and pants back on, wincing as the rough cotton touched his sunburned skin. He removed his shoes and walked the remaining distance barefoot. The hot earth pressed against the blisters on his feet, yet it pained less than wearing shoes.
Max knocked on the wooden doors of the four thatched huts one by one. No one answered. The guru must be out in the fields. He took off his backpack and sat down on the long bench in the space between the huts, resting his head on the bare wooden table for a moment before going in search of him.
• • •
A TOUCH ON his back. Max looked up with a start. A thin, lightly bearded, middle-aged Indian man with big, silent eyes stood by his side. Max couldn’t take his eyes off him. The man’s smooth, unblemished skin radiated a white light.
“I’m sorry. I think I fell asleep. Are you Ramakrishna-ji?” said Max.
