The Girls From Corona Del Mar (19 page)

Indeed, some kind of perpetual construction was at work in Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport that was carried out by what seemed to Lor to be fifteen barefooted men. At first she did not understand what they were doing because they had no uniforms and so few and clearly improvised tools, but gradually it became clear to her that they were repairing the building whether they were wearing shoes or not. If she and Arman were supposed to go through customs, they somehow failed to go through the right corridor because they never did see anyone official before arriving in baggage claim, where they had no suitcases to wait for. They pushed out the doors and into the bright, muggy Mumbai day, where forty cabdrivers promptly began to fight for their business.

——

Those first few days, Lor worried she had made a horrible mistake. India was overwhelming. She had not been prepared for any of it: for the crowding, for the poverty, for the sheer difficulty of meeting basic needs. That first night she and Arman checked into their hotel, then decided to go for a walk, just around the block, to try to put off going to bed for at least another couple of hours in the hope that this would help them get over their jet lag faster, but even walking around the block with no destination in mind proved to be exhausting.

“I don’t know if I can handle this many people staring at me,” she said softly as they waited at an intersection for the light to change. The air was heavy with exhaust and something both ammoniac and salty, like cat piss or burned anise seeds.

“Ha,” Arman said. “Everyone stared at me in the States. But here—do you see the way they look at my legs?”

“How are they looking?”

“They look like … like they think I must be important to have such nice fake legs.”

“And to be walking with such a pretty blonde,” Lorrie Ann said, as she watched a man with absolutely no legs at all push himself bravely into the intersection on a little mover’s dolly, just a square of plywood with wheels that he propelled by pushing off on the pavement with his hands.

“Oh, they probably think you’re a prostitute,” he said.

“Why?!” Lor said. She noticed a kid goat tied up outside a jewelry store, chewing at the decorative shrubbery. A two-year-old was standing next to it, petting its back roughly. There was no adult in evidence.

“You’ve got your shoulders bare.”

“It’s a tank top! It’s over a hundred degrees out!” she cried.

“Do you see a single other woman out here in a tank top?” he asked. Lor looked around. The streets were filled with women, most of them in salwar kameez in bright parrot colors, a few in saris, none of them with bared shoulders.

“But don’t they just know I’m American?”

“Maybe,” Arman said. “I don’t know. Who knows, maybe they go back to the slums each night and watch dubbed episodes of
Friends
.”

Just then a woman came up to them begging, holding out her hands, which had no fingers and so looked more like paws. Lor stared at the woman’s hands for what felt like the longest time, trying to sort out what she was seeing, before she understood that all ten fingers had been meticulously removed. Lorrie Ann said, “I’m sorry, no,” but Arman got out a few rupees and dropped the coins into the woman’s palms.

“What do you think she did?” Lor asked, when the woman was gone.

“What do you mean?”

“What did she do to have all her fingers chopped off?”

“Does it matter?” Arman asked.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have given her money. I would have given it to her. I just couldn’t stop staring.”

“Maybe she stole.”

“Maybe,” Lorrie Ann said, flaring her nostrils and breathing the twilight and exhaust fumes deep into her lungs. Did she even remember giving back that ten-dollar bill? Did she feel, like I did, that every moment of her new life, this wild romp through India, was something she had stolen? It occurred to me then that maybe Lorrie Ann had never been good, maybe I had been misunderstanding her. Maybe she had just been too scared to break the rules.

It was quite by accident that they stumbled upon the red-light district one night. It was not the first night they were in Mumbai (truthfully, no one called it Mumbai, preferring the older Bombay), but it was in that first clutch of nights when India was still new and overwhelming, when it seemed like a triumph to buy a soda or a pack of cigarettes. (Lor had taken up smoking.)

The red-light district was surprisingly devoid of red lights, but it was not difficult to figure out what it was because the women were displayed in cages, little prison cells that lined the street, and wherein the women stalked like bored tigers in their lingerie. Lorrie Ann felt they should leave and immediately, but Arman was fascinated.

“There’re other white people,” he pointed out. “It’s safe.”

In fact, the only place they had seen more tourists was Leopold Café, the famous expatriate bar. Ahead of them were a giggling German couple, and farther downstream in the sea of people Lorrie Ann could see a gaggle of Japanese, their cameras at the ready. And so they continued to drift, slowly, down the street, eyeing the hubbub and circus around them. The street was indeed crowded, mostly with young Indian men who were grinning foolishly and laughing at one another, gesturing to the girls on the balconies and in the cages, daring one another to approach. The prostitutes were decidedly less energetic. Some of them were quite old and fat, while others appeared to be no more than nine or ten and seemed malnourished. The vast majority, of course, were between fifteen and twenty-five, with skin that ranged from the darkest black to the palest snow. There were also boys for sale, as well as transvestites of both the obvious and the not-so-obvious varieties. The street was permeated by a deranged carnival feel that reminded her of Pleasure Island in
Pinocchio
, where all the boys slowly turn into donkeys.

“So is this legal?” Lor asked. “Is that why it’s so … open?”

“It must be,” Arman said, just as they passed a cop laughing with his arm around what could only be a pimp. “Do you want to get one?”

“What?” Lor asked, though of course she had heard him perfectly well. She was just surprised he had the poor taste to ask. She moved out of the way so that a water buffalo could pass.

“You’ve never made love to a woman,” he pointed out. “It would be an adventure.”

Her anger was so fierce and so intense that she didn’t know what to say. These women were in cages with dirty mattresses wearing soiled clothes. Not to mention the burgeoning AIDS epidemic that was ravaging India. An adventure? Honestly? She watched the pavement under her feet as she walked and avoided stepping on a dead bird.

“Never mind,” he said, clearly put out by her silence. “I forget how puritanical you are.”

“I’m not puritanical,” she said.

“Whatever you want to call it,” Arman said, then chucked her on the shoulder. “I love you anyway, all right?”

The next day they visited Elephanta Island to look at the cave sculptures. They did not know who the gods depicted in the sculptures were, but they wandered through them, in awe, as around them massive figures, twice as tall as Arman, writhed in the stone, frozen mid-coitus or splitting into snakes. There were no plaques that explained any of it, at least not in English.

“This is incredible,” Lor said. “But what does … I wish I knew what it meant.”

“I think that’s Shiva,” Arman said, trying to be helpful.

“Right,” Lor said.

Later, when they were buying a soda, they watched a monkey swing down from a tree and wrestle a bag of chips away from an eight-year-old. The startled child fell to the ground, but did not cry out, and then watched in wonder as the monkey ran away with her chips. Lor and Arman watched the monkey eat the chips up in the tree as they drank their Fanta.

“So Shiva is …?” Lor finally asked.

“The god of destruction,” Arman said.

“How appropriate.”

Arman fished in his travel pouch and handed her a Starburst. This was their preferred daytime drug administration method: they carefully inserted a quarter or half of a pill of oxycodone into each Starburst, then wrapped it back up again. During the day you could simply unwrap the candy and chew it thoroughly, crushing up the pill fragment with your teeth, but keeping yourself from gagging by means of the sour Starburst flavor. At this point they were still not shooting up. That would come later.

When they began their descent down the thousand steps that led from the sacred caves to the docks, a man behind them began to take pictures
of Lorrie Ann’s hair. She became nervous and tripped, and unable to catch her balance, wound up falling down thirty or forty steps quite brutally as all the while the little man chased after her with his camera, taking shot after shot. He kept shooting even as she finally stopped herself from falling farther, panting on her hands and knees on a step, looking up at him, her nose bleeding. It took Arman a long time on his legs to catch up to them, and so for almost a full minute Lor simply looked at the man as he took pictures of her bloody nose.

She did not think he spoke English or maybe she would have yelled at him, at least said something indignant. At no point did he offer her a hand up. When Arman made it down to them, he shouldered past the man saying, “Show’s over, buddy,” and offered Lorrie Ann one of his crutches.

There were things about India that Lorrie Ann simply could not understand. Prostitution was legal, but not in some enlightened, liberal, secular wet dream, not in a Nevada Bunny Ranch or Amsterdam sex club kind of way. The women seemed to be in an obvious state of enslavement. Yet it was not hidden. Indeed, you could see vibrators and dildos on display, laid out in neat rows on blankets, at the electronics market near Victoria Terminus Station. India was the birthplace of
The Kama Sutra
, after all. Porn DVDs were sold on almost every corner. And yet most marriages were arranged; most women were virgins when they married; to bare your shoulders was to announce yourself as a prostitute. Bombay was undoubtedly dangerous, yet women walked around unafraid, even at night, even by themselves. Lor simply could not figure it out.

She also noticed how the women dressed. She loved their flowing salwar kameezes, their bright scarves, their proud lipstick. They seemed decorated not for the eyes of men, but for themselves. Even ugly or fat women took care with their appearance in this way. Part of it was the colors, which were wildly bright: blue silk pants with bright marigold
tops and shimmering citrine scarves. Lorrie Ann couldn’t get enough of it, and eventually she asked Arman if he would think she was foolish if she bought one.

“Buy one,” he said. “They look comfortable.”

And so, in a session of awkward, virginal haggling, Lorrie Ann bought a beautiful olive green and mango salwar kameez from a vendor on the street, down past Leopold Café in Colaba, where there were many white people and where she was sure she would be ripped off, but at least able to negotiate in English. She tried it on that night in the hotel room and was stunned by how light and breathable it was. The relief from the heat was almost instantaneous—the breeze moved right through the fabric.

“I’m never wearing anything else,” Lorrie Ann announced and threw her wadded-up jeans in the tiny wastebasket in their hotel room.

“Good,” Arman said. “You look beautiful.”

She waggled her head back and forth like an Indian girl for him. “You think so?” she asked, in a fairly good imitation of a Hindi accent.

“Like a Bollywood star,” he said.

“Yaar,” Lorrie Ann said, “you lie like a rug.”

Perhaps they would have stayed in Bombay longer, or perhaps not, but they decided to leave after visiting the Haji Ali Dargah.

The mosque was, quite simply, the most beautiful thing Lorrie Ann had ever seen. The mosque was built out at sea and was connected to the shore by a low seawall, so that at high tide it became an island, unreachable except by boat. At low tide, anyone could walk along the seawall and visit it. Her guidebook highly recommended it and told the story of the incredible Haji Ali for whom the mosque had been built, a saint who, it was said, met a woman in distress in the street who was holding an empty vessel and asked her what was wrong. She told him that she had tripped and spilled the oil her husband had sent her to get and now she was afraid to go home because she knew her husband would beat
her. Saint Haji Ali asked her to take him to the spot where she had spilled the oil, and he stuck his thumb into the ground there and oil began to spout from the earth. The woman filled up her vessel, thanked him profusely, and went home. At first Haji Ali was well pleased with his act, but gradually he became worried he had harmed the earth in some way by so brutally jabbing it with his thumb. Full of remorse and suffering from constant nightmares, he soon fell ill and died. His coffin was sent out to sea, but through a miracle or else some trick of the tides, floated back to shore and so, where his coffin had been found, the mosque had been erected in his honor.

The whitewashed dargah stood like a mirage upon the shimmering sea, and to Lor its minarets and spires looked like something from her dreams. The afternoon sun was blinding, and it was difficult to feel she wasn’t really in a dream as she and Arman slowly made their way along the seawall. Legless beggars were laid out on blankets, chanting, begging for alms. They made low buzzing sounds in their throats and waggled their amputated limbs in slow, rhythmic circles. Lorrie Ann asked Arman for money and he handed her a fistful of change. She gave a rupee or two to every beggar they passed. She did not know if they were lepers or if they had been disfigured another way. Some had faces that looked like heads of cauliflower. She stooped silently to place the coins on their towels, watching her own shadow move quickly over their prostrate bodies.

“Cover your hair,” Arman said to her, very quietly and out of the corner of his mouth. Lor reached up and touched her hair, which was loose over her shoulders. She was wearing her salwar kameez, but she hadn’t even thought about a head scarf. She took the long narrow scarf that had come with her outfit and tried to wrap it around her head.