My Secret History (60 page)

I remembered how as an altar boy at St. Ray’s serving at three funerals earned us a wedding. There was no relation between that empty ritual and what we had done this morning, which had been like taking the first awkward steps towards inventing a religion. It was the first sign I had ever had that I might find my way back to believing.

As we began to launch the raft I felt elated, recalling how we had carefully packed the pathetic bones and skull into the hole. It was like being in the presence of grace, the old confessional thrill of truthfulness and hope that I had felt as a child. It was a sweet Easter feeling.

“We dug the hole with our paddles,” I started to say.

“Don’t tell me,” Eden said—and she kicked the raft. “I don’t want to hear about it. I just want to get out of here. I’m freezing.”

Indoo understood. He said, “We are a bit short of time. We will take the quick way back. No rapids.”

“Thank God for that,” Eden said.

The day ended abruptly and not as we had planned. We stopped in Hardwar for
puris
, and on the way made stops for Indian sweets and ice cream.

Indoo said, “When I go on these trips I do all the things I
never do at home. I eat snacks. I drink colas. I take ice cream. I am happy.”

“I know how you feel,” Eden said.

“Maybe.”

“I hope you don’t think I overreacted to that dead body,” she said.

Indoo wagged his head, saying yes and no. He liked being enigmatic and I knew he was enjoying himself when he said to Eden, “We Indians say the world is
maya
—illusion. It does not exist. Truly. The secret lies in letting go of things.”

“That’s lovely,” Eden said.

“Some other day we will come back to the Ganga.”

A day or so later in Delhi I was in the hotel bar looking through Murray’s
Guide
and I saw Eden enter the lobby. I had mixed feelings about men staring at her. I was proud of her beauty, but I hated the stupid greedy way that men stared, doing it not in appreciation but with a kind of possessiveness. I particularly resented Indians doing it, because it was forbidden for anyone to stare at their women, and because I knew that they regarded most western women as brainless whores and bitches. I saw that hunger and contempt on their faces and hated them for it.

“Those men were eyeing you,” I said, when she came into the bar.

“They probably don’t have anything better to do,” she said. She wasn’t insulted; I wondered whether she had actually been flattered.

“Where have you been all afternoon?”

“Out,” she said, pursing her lips in a small girl’s mischief-mouth.

I had to admire her resourcefulness. True, this was only Delhi,
and it was easy to get a taxi and go anywhere in the city. But she had never been to India before: this was all alien and some of it threatening.

“Have a drink,” I said.

“I’d love some
lassi
,” she said.

Liquid yogurt, served cold in a glass: where had she learned about that? I decided not to ask her.

The salted
lassi
was brought. Eden took a sip and then set the glass down. She was perspiring slightly, her hair was damp, her skin glowed, her blouse clung to her breasts. She smiled at me and touched her throat, a graceful gesture, smoothing her nails against the pale skin of her neck. Watching her fingers I saw that she was wearing a new necklace.

“What’s that?” I said.

She drew sharply away and smiled at me.

But I had seen—I’d had a glimpse of a bone necklace of tiny carved objects.

“Is it skulls—one of those crazy Tibetan things?”

The carved beads were yellow against her skin.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said, and her hand moved from her neck to her breasts, lightly encircling them. “If you want to find out you’ll have to come upstairs.”

And she finished her
lassi
, licking the flecks of foam from her lips. She got up and left the bar, moving slowly with a lovely swing that made her hips seem thoughtful, and not noticing anyone as she passed through the lobby.

I was still seated. I called for the bill, and followed her; but she was already upstairs.

To be playful, I knocked on the door. She did not answer. I waited a moment and then knocked again. A small voice said, “Come in.”

When I opened the door she stepped from behind it. She was naked for the whole of her lovely length. She kissed me and began to fumble with my shirt. She was wearing the necklace—one moment it was squeezed into her cleavage, and the next it was looped around a breast. It was as I had thought a string of small skulls, carved from bone, staring with empty eye-sockets and grinning without lips.

Eden took hold of me and pushed me down to the bed. She sucked me, more with eager greed than pleasure, and then
squatted on my nodding cock, fitting it into her with one hand, as her necklace of little skulls shook in my face. As I came she grunted and thrust harder and threw her head back, the necklace still rattling.

“It was a present,” she said later, when we woke from our sudden doze. And then she explained. She had found a shop that sold antiques—good ones, she said, real ones, the scarce one-of-a-kind that seldom reached the United States. She told the Indian owner (“a crazy little guy in a skullcap”) about her magazine and said she wanted to feature his shop in the Destinations section.

“The shop is full of great stuff,” she said. “Some of it is funky and some of it is incredible.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

She said, “Are you putting me on?”

She would do an article, she said, and commission an Indian photographer to illustrate the piece. The shopkeeper had accepted the idea.

“Did you think he might object?”

And he had sent her away with the necklace.

“He just took it out of a drawer and hung it around my neck,” Eden said. “He refused to let me pay him.”

“Do you find that strange?”

“You’re being really sarcastic, Andy. I can’t stand it when you run people down.”

She was right. I had vowed that on this trip I would simply wander with her and say nothing, and I had broken that vow.

I said, “They’re yak bones. Tibetan refugees carve them. I’ve seen them in Darjeeling.”

Eden dug into her bag and brought out two other objects.

“He also gave me this and this. One’s a flute and the other’s a drum, I think.”

“They’re Tibetan, too.”

“You say it with such certainty. How can you be so sure?”

“Because Indians would never make any object out of human bones. That flute is a legbone—looks like a femur,” and I stroked her thigh. “The drum is made from a human skull.”

Eden started to laugh, as though she had just been made the butt of a mild joke.

“I told you he was crazy!”

I looked at the bones and saw a whole human head in the little drum and a skinny brown leg in the flute. I began to grieve for the way they had been mocked: they were lying on the thick white marble table with a copy of last week’s
Time
magazine and an empty bottle of Campa Cola and some torn rupees that looked like dead leaves.

“Are you going to keep them?”

“I suppose you want me to bury them.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said, and thought of how we had laboriously dug a hole with canoe paddles at the edge of the upper Ganges for bones just like these.

Eden laughed again and stood up. She was still naked. She had a piece of lopped-off cranium in one hand and a length of legbone in the other, and clicking at her throat the yellow necklace of skulls on a string.

She climbed onto the bed, still standing, and I saw little pearls of dew glistening on the hair beneath her navel, the neat beard pointed and dark and damp from our lovemaking. She straddled me, and then put one foot on my chest in a clumsy conquering way.

“What are you looking at?” she said in a tone of fierce teasing, as she moved her legs apart.

We made love again, and she was even more active than before. Afterwards we lay exhausted on the bed with the Indian sun just before it set piercing the curtains and leaving a bright hot stripe across our bodies.

“At least meet the guy,” she said. “You might change your mind.”

He was a starved-looking Kashmiri named Ismail. He had a bony face and bloodshot eyes. I distrusted him for his quivering politeness and the way he praised Eden and deferred to me. He seemed on rather familiar terms with her, though he had only met her that one time. I disliked his attentiveness, his furtive scrutiny, his subtle pressure, and his habit of bending double to spit silently onto the floor. Most of all I detested his air of confidentiality, the way he whispered and pretended to be conspiring with us when he mentioned prices. Someone had taught him the word “maximum.” “It is maximum value,” he said. “In Europe it will fetch maximum price.”

I said very little. Ismail talked a great deal. When I spoke I could not keep the sternness and the impatience out of my voice. This made Ismail all the more deferential, and his whisper became a hiss.

“I can give you maximum advice,” he said.

He offered us
lassi
. He clawed through trays of moonstones, and trawled with his fingers in boxes of silver chains and anklets, and when he ducked under the counter for more I suggested to Eden that we leave the next day for Agra.

We took the Janata Express, one of the slowest trains in India. Eden sat suffering on the wooden seat, groaning each time the train stopped—which was often—and glancing up at me in a blaming way. The Janata was a steam train, and so soot and smoke blew through the windows.

“I hated to leave that hotel.”

“You can’t visit India without seeing the Taj Mahal.”

“We had such a beautiful room,” she said. “I loved being with you there.”

“There’s a good hotel in Agra.”

She looked doubtful. Her face was damp, there was a smudge on her cheek, her T-shirt was dusty and so were her feet in her sandals. I had never seen her dirty. It made her look youthful and reckless and even desirable. When I tried to tell her that she accused me of mocking her.

The Indians stared at her. None of them was traveling very far. They crowded into the coach, they stood and jammed the corridors and they sweated, and after a few stops they fought their way out and were replaced by others, looking exactly the same—just as lusterless and tired.

A man pushed towards us with a wooden box on his shoulder.

“Ess crim. Ess crim. Ess-ess.”

He flipped the lid open and showed us the melting contents.

“It looks like poison. It’s probably rancid,” Eden said. “You’d better be right about that hotel in Agra.”

We traveled in descending darkness past ditches of noisy frogs and bushes screeching with cicadas. Eden put her head down and seemed to be holding her breath to make the time pass.

We arrived at Agra Fort Station and were jostled by Indians
with bundles as we made our way along the platform. People were shouting, women shrieking, men heaving crates, children howling, as the train gasped and slavered. We were pushed from behind by impatient bony fingers.

“Sah, sah.”

This man pushing me was trying to get my attention.

“I carry your bags, sah. I have taxi.”

He was a small and slightly popeyed Indian in a torn white shirt. His hair was spiky and oily. One of his front teeth was missing, but the violence suggested in the gap made him seem more like a victim than a bully. He badly needed a shave.

“Take hers,” I said.

“Please, missus,” he said, and lifted Eden’s big bag onto his head.

His taxi somehow matched him. It was a small black jalopy with brown fuzzy upholstery and a broken grille. Its headlights were close together like the Indian’s eyes. The window cranks were unusable. One window wouldn’t open, the other wouldn’t close.

“I am Unmesh,” the man said, taking his seat next to the driver. He rested his chin on the seat back and faced us.

We said nothing.

“I am know everything.”

“That’s good, Unmesh.”

“This man is my employee,” Unmesh said, of the man at the wheel. The man resembled Unmesh: whiskers, red teeth, torn shirt, damp eyes. “This is my driver.”

“Isn’t this a taxi?” Eden said.

“This is vehicle of tour company,” Unmesh said. “Vanita Tourist Agency.” He smiled and wagged his head with pleasure. “Vanita is my daughter.”

The picture of the little girl was suddenly in his skinny hand: an astonished tot in a frilly dress.

“I call this automobile Vanita, too.”

The seats were broken and lumpy—I was sitting on the bulge of a spring. The driver swerved without slowing down as we passed clopping tongas. The rising dust was like dense fog as it shrouded the lanterns of the roadside fruitstalls.

“I am managing director of Vanita Tourist Agency,” Unmesh said. “I tell you, I am know everything.”

We entered a long driveway lined by hedges. Eden looked out—hers was the open window. We came to a portico, a marble doorway, a bright foyer, and an Indian in a turban, looking like a maharajah, opened the door of the car. He wore white gloves. From behind the hedge came the wail of a peacock.

“This is more like it,” Eden said, and got out.

Unmesh lifted his chin from the seatback and said, “You want to see Taj Mahal? I take you. I show you. I am know everything.”

“Be here tomorrow at nine o’clock,” I said.

Unmesh looked very surprised, almost shocked; and then he recovered and said, “Thank you, sah. Thank you. Oh, thank you,” and pressed his hands together before his nose.

Eden had a bath and a drink and was happy. And after we ate she was relaxed and amorous.

“I love you,” she said. “I love being here with you. I’m sorry I was so cranky on the train.”

“Were you cranky?”

“I think I was,” she said. “But I’m not cranky anymore. I’m going to be a good little girl from now on.”

“Prove it.”

“Put me to bed and you’ll see,” she said, and she breathed, “I want you to make love to me. Wait here—give me five minutes.”

She was wearing a sari when I entered the bedroom. She turned slowly and let me unwrap her, but not completely. We made love in a tangle of silk.