by Gayle Forman
And then I smell it. Beneath the competing scents of onion and incense and ammonia and wax, is the undeniable smell of citrus and wet earth. The scent, I realize with the clarity of something you’ve always known, but never needed to recognize before, of my mother.
I take a tentative step into the hallway and another blast hits me. And just like that, I’m not in India. I’m back in Amsterdam, at home, a long summer twilight. It had finally stopped raining, so Yael and Bram were outside, celebrating the minor miracle of sunshine. Still cold from the rain, I stayed huddled inside under a scratchy wool blanket and watched them through the big picture window. Some students who lived in one of the flats across the canal were blasting music. A song came on, something old and New Wave from when Yael and Bram were younger, and he grabbed her and they danced, head to head, even though it wasn’t a slow song. I watched them through the glass, fixed on the sight of them, pretending not to be. I must’ve been eleven or twelve, an age when such displays should’ve embarrassed me, but didn’t. Yael saw me watching, and—this is what surprised me then, still surprises me now as I remember it—she came inside. She didn’t exactly drag me out or invite me to dance with them, as Bram might’ve. She just folded up the blanket and pulled me up by the elbow. I was enveloped by her smell, oranges and leaves, that ever-present loamy tang of her tinctures, and the canals and all their murky secrets. I tried to make it like I was acquiescing, allowing myself to be led, giving no trace of how happy I was. But I must not have been able to fully contain it because she smiled back at me and said, “We have to snatch the sun when we have it, don’t we?”
She could be warm like that. But it came and went with as much regularity as the Dutch sun. Except with Bram. But maybe it was reflected warmth—he was her sun, after all.
After Chaudhary leaves, I lie down on the sofa. My head rests uncomfortably against the heavy wood arm but I don’t move, because I’m in the sunlight and the heat feels necessary, like a transfusion of sorts. I should probably get in touch with Yael, I think, but drowsiness and jetlag and a certain kind of relief are pulling me under, and before I can do so much as remove my shoes, I am asleep.
• • •
I’m flying again. Back on a plane, which feels wrong because I just got off a plane. But it’s so vivid and real it takes a beat longer than usual to recognize it as the dream; and then it warps and becomes lurid and surreal, heavy and slow, the way dreams do when your mind is rebelling against a betrayed body clock. Maybe that’s why in this dream, there is no landing. No illumination of the seatbelt sign, no inaudible announcement from the captain. Just the buzz of the engines, the feeling of being aloft. Just flying.
But there is someone next to me. I turn and try to ask, Where are we? But everything is heavy, lugubrious, I can’t get my mouth to work right because what comes out is, Who are you?
“Willem,” a voice in the distance calls.
The person in the dream turns. Still faceless. Already familiar.
“Willem.” The voice again. I don’t answer it. I don’t want out of the dream quite yet, not this time. Again, I turn toward my seatmate.
“Willem!” The voice is sharp this time and it pulls me out of the honey stickiness of sleep.
I open my eyes. I sit up and for a second, we just look at each other, blinking.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I’ve been wondering that myself for the past month, after my initial optimism about this trip faded to ambivalence and then curdled into pessimism and now has withered into regret. What am I doing here?
“You sent me a ticket.” I try to make it seem like a joke, but my head is cloudy with the dream, and Yael only frowns.
“I mean what are you doing here? We’ve been looking everywhere for you at the airport.”
We? “I didn’t see you.”
“I was needed at the clinic. I sent a driver and he was running a bit late. He said he sent you several texts.”
I take out my phone and turn it on. Nothing happens. “I don’t think it works here.”
She looks, disgusted, at my phone, and I feel a sudden and fierce loyalty to it. Then she sighs. “The important thing is you made it,” she says, which seems both obvious and optimistic.
I stand up. My neck has a crick and when I circle it, it gives off a loud pop that makes Yael frown again. I stand up, stretch, and look around the room.
“Nice place,” I say, continuing the small talk that has sustained us for the past three years. “I like what you’ve done with it.”
It’s like a reflex, trying to make her smile. It never worked for me before and it doesn’t work now. She walks away, opening the French doors leading to the balcony, overlooking the Gateway, the water beyond. “I should probably get something closer to Andheri, but I seem to have grown too accustomed to living on the water.”
“Andheri?”
“Where the clinic is,” she says, as if I should know this. But how, exactly? Talk of her work has been strictly off limits in our casual chit-chat emails. The weather. The food. The myriad Indian festivals. Postcards, without the pretty pictures.
I know that Yael came to India to study Ayurvedic medicine. It was what she and Bram had intended to do once I left for university. Travel more. For Yael to study traditional healing methods. India was to be the first stop. The tickets were booked before Bram died.
After he died, I expected Yael to fall apart. Only this time, I would be there. I would put aside my own grief and I would help her. Finally, instead of me being an interloper into her great love affair, I would be the product of it. I would be a comfort to her. What she wasn’t as a mother, I would be as a son.
For two weeks, she locked herself in the top-floor room, the one Bram had built for her, shutters closed, door locked, ignoring most of the visitors who’d stopped by. In life, Bram had been all hers, and in death, that hadn’t changed.
Then, six weeks later, she’d left for India as scheduled, as if nothing had happened. Marjolein said Yael was just licking her wounds. She’d be back soon.
Two months later, though, Yael sent word that she wasn’t coming back. Long ago, before she studied naturopathic medicine, she’d had a nursing degree, and now she was going back to that, working in a clinic in Mumbai. She said she was closing down the boat; she’d already boxed up the important things and everything else was being sold. I should take what I wanted. I packed up a few boxes and stored them in my uncle Daniel’s attic. Everything else, I left. Not long after that, I got kicked off of my program. Then I packed up my own rucksack and took off.
“You’re just like your mother,” Marjolein had said, somewhat mournfully, when I told her I was leaving.
But we both knew that wasn’t true. I am nothing like my mother.
• • •
The same emergency that kept Yael from the airport is apparently pulling her back to the clinic after all of an hour in my company. She invites me to come with her, but the invitation is halfhearted and rote, a lot like this invitation to come to India, I suspect. I politely decline, with excuses of jetlag.
“You should be out in the sunshine; it’s the best cure.” She looks at me. “Though make sure you cover this.” She touches the mirror image on her face where my scar is. “It looks fresh.”
I touch the scar. It’s six months old now. And, for a minute, I imagine telling Yael about it. It would infuriate her if she knew what I said to the skinheads to take their attention off the girls and onto me. A one four six oh three—the identification number the Nazis tattooed on Saba’s wrist—but at least I would get a reaction.
But I don’t tell Yael. This goes way beyond small talk. It goes to painful things we never mention: Saba. The war. Yael’s mother. Yael’s entire childhood. I touch the scar. It feels hot, as if merely thinking about that day has inflamed it. “It’s not that fresh,” I tell her. “It’s just not healing right.”
“I can mix you up something for that.” Yael brushes the scar. Her fingers are ro
ugh and callused. Workers’ hands, Bram used to say, though he was the one who should’ve had the rougher hands. I realize then we haven’t embraced or kissed or done any of the things one might expect for a reunion.
Still, when she takes her hand away, I wish she hadn’t. And when she starts packing up with promises of things we will do when she has a day off, I’m wishing I had told her about the skinheads, about Paris, about Lulu. Except even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have known how. My mother and I, we both speak Dutch and English. But we never could speak the same language.
Twenty-two
I am awoken by the ringing of a phone. I reach for my mobile, remember it doesn’t work here. The phone keeps ringing. It’s the house line. It doesn’t stop. Finally, I pick it up.
“Willem saab. Chaudhary here.” He clears his throat. “On the line for you, Prateek Sanu,” he continues formally. “Would you like me to ask the nature of his business?”
“No, that’s okay. You can put him through.”
“One moment.” There is a series of clicks. Then Prateek’s voice echoing hellos, interrupted by Chaudhary, declaring. “Prateek Sanu calling for Willem Shiloh.”
It’s funny to be called by Yael and Saba’s surname. I don’t correct him. After a moment of silence, Chaudhary clicks off.
“Willem!” Prateek booms, as if it’s been months, not hours, since we last spoke. “How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“And what do you think of the Maximum City?”
“I haven’t seen much of it,” I admit. “I’ve been asleep.”
“You are awake now. What are your plans?”
“Haven’t worked that out yet.”
“Let me make a proposal: Pay a visit to me at Crawford Market.”
“Sounds good.”
Prateek gives me instructions. After a cold shower, I head outside, Chaudhary trailing behind me with dire warnings of “pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and roving gangs.” He ticks off the threats on his thick fingers. “They will accost you.”
I assure him I can take it, and in any case the only people to accost me are begging mothers, who congregate in the grassy medians in the center of the shady streets, asking for money to buy formula for the sleeping babies in their arms.
This part of Mumbai reminds me a bit of London with its decaying colonial buildings, except it’s supersaturated with color: the women’s saris, the marigold-festooned temples, the crazily painted buses. It’s like everything absorbs and reflects the bright sun.
From the outside, Crawford Market seems like another building plucked out of old England, but inside it is all India: bustling commerce and yet more surreally bright colors. I walk around the fruit stalls, the clothing stalls, making my way toward the electronics stalls where Prateek told me to find him. I feel a tap on my shoulder.
“Lost?” Prateek asks, a grin splitting his face.
“Not in a bad way.”
He frowns at that, confounded. “I was worried,” he says. “I wanted to call you but I don’t have your mobile.”
“My mobile doesn’t work here.”
The smile returns. “As it happens, we have many mobile phones at my uncle’s electronics stall.”
“So that’s why you lured me here?” I tease.
Prateek looks insulted. “Of course not. How did I know you lacked a phone?” He gestures to the stalls around us. “You can buy from another stall.”
“I’m joking, Prateek.”
“Oh.” He takes me to his uncle’s stall, crammed to the ceiling with cellphones, radios, computers, knockoff iPads, televisions, and more. He introduces me to his uncle and buys us all cups of tea from the chai-wallah, the traveling tea salesman. Then he takes me to the back of the stall and we sit down on a couple of rickety stools.
“You work here?”
“On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays.”
“What do you do the other days?”
He does the head nod/wag thing. “I’m studying accounting. I also work for my mother some days. And I help my cousin sometimes to find goreh for movies.”
“Goreh.”
“White people, like you. It’s why I was at the airport today. I had to drive my cousin.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?” I joke.
“Oh, I am not a casting director, or even an assistant to an assistant. I just drove Rahul to the airport to look for backpackers needing money. Do you need money, Willem?”
“No.”
“I did not think so. You are staying at the Bombay Royale. Very high class. And visiting your mother. Where is your father?” he asks.
It’s been a while since anyone asked me that. “He’s dead.”
“Oh, mine, too,” Prateek says almost cheerfully. “But I have many uncles. And cousins. You?”
I almost say yes. I have an uncle. But how do you explain Daniel? Not so much a black sheep as an invisible one, eclipsed by Bram. And Yael. Daniel, the footnote to Yael and Bram’s story, the small print that nobody bothers to read. Daniel, the younger, scragglier, messier, less directed—and not to forget, shorter—brother. Daniel, the one relegated to the backseat of the Fiat, and consequently, it seemed, the backseat of life.
“Not much family,” is all I say in the end, bookending my vagueness with a shrug, my own version of the head wag.
Prateek presents me a choice of phones. I choose one and buy a SIM card. He immediately programs his number and, for good measure, his uncle’s into it. We finish our tea and then he announces, “Now I think you must go to the movies.”
“I just got here.”
“Exactly. What is more Indian than that? Fourteen million people—”
“A day go to the movies here,” I interrupt. “Yes, I’ve been told.”
He pulls a heap of magazines out of his bag, the same ones I’d seen in the car. Magna. Stardust. He opens one and shows me pages of attractive people, all with extremely white teeth. He rattles off a bunch of names, dismayed that I know none of them.
“We will go now,” he declares.
“Don’t you have to work?”
“In India, work is the master, but the guest is god,” Prateek says. “Besides, between the phone and taxi . . .” He smiles. “My uncle will not object.” He opens a newspaper. “Dil Mera Golmaal is on. So is Gangs of Wasseypur. Or Dhal Gaya Din. What do you think, Baba?”
Prateek and his uncle carry on a spirited conversation in a mix of Hindi and English, debating the merits and deficits of all three films. Finally they settle on Dil Mera Golmaal.
The theater is an art deco building with peeling white paint, not unlike the revival houses Saba used to take me to when he visited. I buy our tickets and our popcorn. Prateek promises to translate in return.
The film—a sort of convoluted take on Romeo and Juliet, involving warring families, gangsters, a terrorist plot to steal nuclear weapons, plus countless explosions and dance numbers—doesn’t require much translation. It is both nonsensical and oddly self-explanatory.
Still, Prateek gives it a shot. “That man is that one’s brother but he doesn’t know it,” he whispers. “One is evil, the other is good, and the girl is engaged to the bad one, but she loves the good one. Her family hates his family and his family hates her family but they don’t really because the feud has to do with the other one’s father, who engineered the feud when he stole the baby at birth, you see. He is also a terrorist.”
“Right.”
Then there’s a dance number and a fight scene and then suddenly we are in the desert. “Dubai,” Prateek whispers.
“Why, exactly?” I ask.
Prateek explains that the oil consortium is there. As are the terrorists.
There are several scenes in the desert, including a duel between two monster trucks that Henk would appreciate.
Then the film switches abruptly to Paris. One moment, there’s a generic shot of the Seine. And then, a second later, a shot down the banks of the river. Then we see the heroine and the good twin broth
er, who, Prateek explains, have gotten married and fled together. They break out into song. But they’re no longer on the Seine; now they are on one of the arched bridges that span the canals in Villette. I recognize it. Lulu and I cruised under it, sitting side by side, our legs knocking against the hull. Occasionally, we’d accidentally knock ankles and there had been something electric about it, a turn-on, just in that.
I feel it now in this musty theater. Almost like a reflex, my thumb goes to the inside of my wrist, but the gesture is meaningless, here in the dark.
Soon the song is over and we’re back in India for the grand finale when the families reunite and reconcile and there’s another wedding ceremony and a big dance number. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, these lovers get a happy ending.
After the movie, we walk through the crowded streets. It’s dark now, and the heat’s gone wavy. We meander our way to a wide crescent of sand. “Chowpatty Beach,” Prateek tells me, pointing out the luxury highrises on Marine Drive. They sparkle like diamonds against the slender curving wrist of the bay.
It’s a carnival atmosphere with all the food vendors and clowns and balloon shapers and the furtive lovers taking advantage of the darkness to steal kisses behind a palm tree. I try not to watch them. I try not to remember stealing kisses. I try not to remember that first kiss. Not her lips, but that birthmark on her wrist. I’d been wanting to kiss it all day. Somehow, I knew exactly what it would taste like.
The water laps against the shore. The Arabian Sea. The Atlantic Ocean. Two oceans between us. And still not enough.
Twenty-three
After four days, Yael finally has a day off. Instead of waking up from my fold-up bed to find her rushing out the door, I see her in her pajamas. “I’ve ordered up breakfast,” she says in that crisp voice of hers, the gutturalness of her Israeli accent ironed out from all the years of speaking English.
There’s a knock at the door. Chaudhary, who seems to always work and to do every single job here, shuffles in, pushing a trolley. “Breakfast, Memsahib,” he announces.
