by Gayle Forman
That night in the hotel, there are five of us. Nash, Tasha, Argin, me and Jules. Jules and I share a mattress on the floor. Nothing happens. Not with us, anyhow. Her presence does little to stop Nash and Tasha from their late-night calisthenics, but when it happens, I can see Jules quaking with laughter, and then I am, too.
She rolls over on her side to face me. “Misery loves company,” she whispers.
• • •
The next day, I’m in the lunch queue for some dal and rice when the assistant director taps me on the back. I even pose this time for the anticipated photo, but there’s no camera. Instead he instructs me to come with him.
“Did you stain the suit?” Jules calls after me.
Arun trots up behind us, followed by Prateek, who looks stricken. How much can this suit be worth?
“What’s going on?” I ask Prateek as we walk past the set and toward the row of trailers.
“Faruk! Khan!” He sputters the name like a cough.
“What about Faruk Khan?” But before Prateek can answer, I’m pulled up the stairs and pushed into one of the trailers. Inside, Faruk Khan, Amisha Rai, and Billy Devali are sitting in a huddle. They all stare at me for what seems like an eternity, until Billy finally booms, “There! Did I not tell you?”
Amisha lights another cigarette and kicks up her bare feet, which are covered with vinelike henna tattoos. “You are absolutely right,” she says in a lilting accent. “He looks like an American movie star.”
“Like that one,” Billy snaps his fingers. “Heath Ledger.”
“Only not dead,” Faruk says.
They cluck in agreement.
“I think Heath Ledger was from Australia,” I say.
“Never mind that,” Faruk says. “Where are you from? America? UK?”
“Holland.”
Billy wrinkles his nose. “You don’t have an accent.”
“You almost sound British,” Amisha says. “Close enough to South African.”
“This is closer to South African,” I say in a clipped Afrikaans accent.
Amisha claps her hands. “He can do accents.”
“Afrikaans is close to Dutch,” I explain.
“Have you ever acted before?” Faruk asks.
“Not really.”
“Not really?” Amisha asks, arching an eyebrow.
“A little Shakespeare.”
“You cannot say ‘not really’ and then say you’ve done William Shakespeare,” Faruk says scornfully. “What is your name? Or should we call you Mr. Not Really?”
“I prefer Willem. Willem de Ruiter.”
“Bit of a mouthful,” Billy says.
“Not a good stage name,” Amisha says.
“He can change it,” Billy says. “All the Americans do.”
“Like the Indians don’t,” Amisha says. “Billy.”
“I’m not American,” I interrupt. “I’m Dutch.”
“Oh, yes. Mr. de . . . Willem,” Faruk says. “No matter. We have a problem. One of our Western actors, an American named Dirk Digby, he lives in Dubai, perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
I shake my head.
“Never mind. It appears Mr. Digby had some last-minute problems with the contract and had to make other plans, and this leaves us with a small part open. It’s a South African diamond dealer, shady character, who tries to woo our Miss Rai while also trying to steal her family’s Shakti diamond. Not a large part, but significant, and we find ourselves in a bit of a bind. We were looking for someone who can look the part and who can manage a few lines of Hindi and a few lines of English. How are you with languages?”
“Pretty good,” I say. “I grew up speaking several.”
“Okay, try this line,” Faruk says, and he reads me something.
“Tell me what it means.”
“You see?” Amisha says. “A natural actor would want to know. I don’t think Dirk ever knows what he’s saying.”
Faruk waves her off. He turns to me. “You are trying to keep Amisha’s character, Heera, from marrying Billy here, but really, you only want her family’s diamonds. It’s in English with some Hindi. This is the part where you tell Heera you know who she is, and that her name means diamond. I’ll say it, you repeat?”
“Okay.”
“Main jaanta hoon tum kaun ho, Heera Gopal. Heera, it means diamond, doesn’t it?” Faruk says
“Main jaanta hoon tum kaun ho, Heera Gopal. Heera, it means diamond, doesn’t it?” I repeat.
They all stare at me.
“How did you do that?” Amisha asks.
“Do what?”
“You sounded as if you spoke Hindi fluently,” Billy says.
“I don’t know. I’ve always had an ear for languages.”
“Incredible, really.” Amisha turns to Faruk. “You wouldn’t have to cut the dialogue.”
Faruk stares at me. “It is three days shooting, starting next week. Here in Mumbai. You will have to learn lines. I can have someone help you with the Hindi pronunciation and translations, but there is a good bit of English.” He strokes his beard. “I can pay you thirty thousand rupees.”
I pause, trying to do the conversions.
Faruk takes my silence for bargaining. “Okay,” he counters. “Forty thousand rupees.”
“How long would I have to stay?”
“Shoot starts Monday, should last three days,” Faruk says.
Monday is when I’m meant to fly back to Amsterdam. Do I want to stay three more days? But then Faruk continues. “We would put you up in the cast hotel. It’s on Juhu Beach.”
“Juhu Beach is very nice,” Billy says.
“I’m meant to leave on Monday. I have a flight.”
“Can’t you change your flight?” Faruk asks.
I’m sure Mukesh can. And if they’re putting me up in a hotel, it would keep me from having to go back to the Bombay Royale.
“Fifty thousand,” Faruk says. “But that’s my final offer.
“That’s more than a thousand dollars, Mr. de Ruiter,” Amisha informs me with a husky laugh and a billowing exhale of cigarette smoke. “Too good to turn down, I think.”
Twenty-eight
The production immediately relocates me to a posh hotel in Juhu Beach. The first thing I do is shower. Then I plug in my phone, which has been dead for the past day. I half expect a text or call from Yael, but there isn’t one. I consider telling her I’m staying longer, but after our last conversation, after the last three weeks—three years—I feel like she has no right to this information. Instead, I text Mukesh, asking him to bump my departure date by another three days.
Immediately, he calls back. “You’ve decided to stay with us longer!” he says. He sounds delighted.
“Just a few days.” I explain to him about being an extra and now being cast in a small part.
“Oh, that is most exciting,” he says. “Mummy must be thrilled.”
“Mummy doesn’t know, actually.”
“Doesn’t know?”
“I haven’t seen her. I’ve been staying out by the studios, and now I’m in a hotel in Juhu Beach.”
“Juhu Beach. Very classy,” Mukesh says. “But you haven’t seen Mummy since you came back from Rajasthan? I thought she picked you up at the airport.”
“Change of plans.”
“Oh. I see.” There’s a pause. “When do you want to leave?”
“I’m supposed to start shooting on Monday, and it’s meant to take three days.”
“Safer to assume it’ll take double,” Mukesh says. “I’ll see what I can do.”
We hang up and I pick up my script. Faruk has written English translations above the Hindi and someone has made me a tape recording of the Hindi. I spend the afternoon repeating the lines.
When I’m done, I pace the room for a bit. It’s all modern and posh, with a bathtub and a shower and a wide double bed. I haven’t slept somewhere this nice in ages, and it’s a little too quiet, a little too pristine. I sit on the bed, watch Hindi TV just to
have some company. I order dinner in my room. That night when I go to bed, I find I can’t sleep. The bed is too soft, too big, after so many years of sleeping on trains, in cars, on bunkbeds, sofas, futons, Ana Lucia’s cramped bed. Now I’m like one of those rescued shipwrecked men who, once rescued and back in civilization, can only sleep on the floor.
• • •
Friday I wake up and practice my lines again. The shoot doesn’t start for three more days, and they stretch in front of me, endlessly, like the gray blue sea out my window. When my phone rings, I am embarrassed by my relief.
“Willem, Mukesh here. I have news about your flights.”
“Great.”
“So soonest I can get you out is April.” He tells me some dates.
“What? Why so long?”
“What can I say? All the flights are booked until then. Easter.”
Easter? In a Hindu/Muslim country? I sigh. “You’re sure there’s nothing sooner? I don’t mind paying a bit extra.”
“Nothing to be done. I did the best I could.” He sounds a bit insulted when he says the last bit.
“What about booking me a new flight?”
“Really, Willem, it is only a matter of weeks, and flights are expensive this time of year, and also full.” His voice has gone scolding. “It is just a few extra days.”
“Can you keep looking? See if any seats open up?”
“Certainly! Will do.”
I hang up and try to fight off the sense of impending doom. I’d thought the film would keep me here a few extra days, all of them in a hotel. Now I’m stuck. I remind myself that I don’t need to stay in Mumbai past the shoot. Nash and Tasha and Jules are going to Goa for a few days if they can cobble the cash together. Maybe I’ll go with them. Maybe I’ll even pay.
I send Jules a text: Is Goa still a go?
She texts back: Only if I don’t kill N&T. Last night unbearably loud. You are a traitor for deserting.
I look around my hotel room where last night it was unbearably quiet. I take a shot of the view from the balcony and send it to Jules. It’s quiet here. And there’s room for two if you want to desert, I write.
I like dessert, she texts back. Tell me where you are.
A few hours later, there’s a knock at the door. I open it and Jules comes in. She admires the view and hops on the bed. She picks up the script from the coffee table.
“Want to run lines?” I ask. “There’s English translations.”
She smiles. “Sure.”
I show her where to start. She clears her throat and arranges her face. “And who do you think you are?” she asks in a haughty voice, her attempt, I think, to mimic Amisha.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I reply. “The name on my birth certificate reads Lars Von Gelder. But I know who you are, Heera Gopal. Heera, it means diamond, doesn’t it? And you glitter as brightly as your name.”
“I don’t care to discuss my name with you, Mr. Von Gelder.”
“Oh, so you know me after all?”
“I know all I care to.”
“Then you know I am the top exporter of diamonds in South Africa, so I know a thing or two about precious gems. I can see more with my naked eye than most jewelers can with a loupe. And looking at you, I can tell that you are a million carats. And flawless.”
“Word has it that you’re after my family’s diamond, Mr. Von Gelder.”
“Oh, I am, Miss Gopal. I am.” I pause for a beat. “But perhaps not the Shakti Diamond.”
At the end of the section, Jules puts down the script. “This is quite cheesy, Mr. Van Gelder.”
“It’s Von Gelder, actually.”
“Oh. Sorry. Mr. Von Gelder.”
“It’s very important, you know? Names,” I say.
“Oh, yeah? What’s Jules short for?”
“Juliana?” I try. “Like the Dutch queen?”
“Nope.” Jules stands up from her chair and walks toward me, smiling as she folds herself into my lap. Then she kisses me.
“Juliet,” I try.
She shakes her head, smiling as she unbuttons her shirt. “Not Juliet. But you’re welcome to be my Romeo tonight.”
Twenty-nine
The next morning, Jules leaves, back to Pune and the ashram with Nash and Tasha. We make vague plans to meet up in Goa the following week. I never do find out what Jules is short for.
I feel hungover even though we didn’t drink, and lonely even though I’m used to being on my own. I call Prateek to see what he’s doing this weekend, but he’s helping his mother at home today and tomorrow he is going to a big family dinner with his uncle. I spend the day wandering Juhu Beach. I watch a bunch of men play soccer on the sand and it all makes me miss the boys in Utrecht. And then all the missing congeals, and it’s Lulu I miss, and I know it must be displaced, my loneliness a heat-seeking missile, her the heat. Only I can’t seem to find a new source of heat. I don’t miss Jules at all.
• • •
• • •
By Sunday, I’m going stir-crazy. I decide to take a train out of the city, a day trip somewhere. I’ve just opened my guidebook to figure out where to go when my phone rings. I practically leap on it.
“Willem!” Mukesh’s jovial voice echoes through the line. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to hear from him. “What are you doing today?”
“I’m just trying to suss that out. I was thinking of making a day trip to Khandala.”
“Khandala is very nice, but far for one day so you must leave early. If you like, I can arrange a driver for you another day. I have a different proposal for you. How about I take you around?”
“Really?”
“Yes. There are some very lovely temples in Mumbai, smaller temples tourists so rarely see. My wife and daughters are away, so I have the day free.”
I gratefully accept, and at noon, Mukesh picks me up in a small battered Ford and proceeds to speed me around Mumbai. We stop at three different temples, watching young men do yoga-like calisthenics, watching old Sadhus meditating in prayer. The third stop is a Jain temple, the acolytes all hold small brooms sweeping in front of them as they walk. “To brush any living creatures out of their way so not to inadvertently take a life,” Mukesh explains. “Such care for life,” he says. “Just like Mummy.”
“Right. Mummy is practically a Jain,” I say. “Or maybe she’s aiming to be the next Mother Teresa?”
Mukesh gives me a sympathetic look that makes me want to break something. “You know how I met Mummy, do you not?” he asks as we walk through a breezeway in the temple.
“I assume it had something to do with the fascinating world of air travel.” I’m being unfair to Mukesh, but such is the price for making himself her emissary.
He shakes his head. “That came later. I was with my own mummy who had the cancer.” He clucks his tongue. “She was having her treatments, tip-top doctor, but it was in the lungs, so not much to be done. We were coming from the specialist one day, waiting for a taxi, but Amma, that’s my mummy, was quite weak and dizzy and she fell on the street. Your mummy happened to be nearby and she rushed up to ask if she could help. I explained to her about Amma’s condition—it was terminal,” he lowers his voice to a whisper. “But your mummy told me about different things that could help, not to cure her, but to make the dizziness and the weakness better. And she came, every week, to my home, with her needles and her massages and it helped so much. When my amma’s time came, her journey to the next life was so much more peaceful. Thanks to your mummy.”
I see what he’s doing. Mukesh is attempting to interpret my mother to me much in the way Bram used to do when he’d explain why Yael seemed so gruff or distant. He was the one to quietly tell me stories about Saba, who, after the death of Yael’s mother, Naomi, came undone by one tragedy too many. He turned overprotective, paranoid, or more overprotective and paranoid, Bram said, not allowing Yael to do the simplest things—swim in a public pool, have a friend over—and forcing her to keep disaster preparation checkl
ists for any kind of emergency. “She promised she would do everything differently,” he said. “So it would be different for you. So it wouldn’t be oppressive.”
As if there’s only one kind of oppressive.
• • •
• • •
After the temples, we have lunch. I’m feeling bad about how I acted toward Mukesh, so when he tells me he has something extra special he wants to show me—something very few tourists ever see—I paste on my smile and act excited. As we bump across Mumbai, the streets becomes more dense: bicycles, rickshaws, cars, donkey-pulled carts, cows, women with bundles on their heads, all converge onto choked streets that don’t seem built for such traffic. The buildings themselves suffer from the same syndrome; the mix of high-rises and shacks are all overflowing with rivers of people, sleeping on mats, hanging laundry on lines, cooking on small fires outside.
We turn down a dank narrow alley, shrouded somehow from the bright sunlight. Mukesh points to the row of young girls in tattered saris, standing. “Prostitutes,” he says.
At the end of the alley we stop. I look back at the prostitutes. Some are younger than me, and their eyes look blank, and it all makes me feel ashamed somehow. Mukesh points to a squat cement building with a name written on it in both swirly Hindi and block English. “Here we are,” he says.
I read the sign. mitali. It’s vaguely familiar.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Why, Mummy’s clinic, of course,” he says.
“Yael’s clinic?” I ask in alarm.
“Yes, I thought we might pay her a visit.”
“But, but . . .” I sputter for excuses. “It’s Sunday,” I finish, as if the day of the week is the problem.
“Sickness does not take a Sabbath.” Mukesh points to a small teashop on the corner. “I will wait for you there.” And then he’s gone.
I stand in front of the clinic for a minute. One of the prostitutes—she looks no older than thirteen—starts to walk toward me and I can’t stand the thought that she thinks I’m a client, so I shove open the door to the clinic. The door swings open, right onto an old woman crouched just inside. There are people everywhere, with homemade bandages, and listless babies, napping on pallets on the floor. They’re camped all up the cement stairs and all around the waiting room, giving new meaning to the term.
