Just One Day 02: Just One Year (13 page)

A
fter 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.

“Thank you, Chaudhary,” Yael says.

He studies the two of us. Then shakes his head. “He is nothing like you, Memsahib,” he says.

“He looks like his baba,” Yael replies.

I know it’s true, but it’s strange to hear her say it. Though not as strange, I’d imagine, as seeing the face of her dead husband staring back at her. Sometimes when I’m feeling charitable, I’ll justify this as the reason she’s put such distance between us these last three years. Then the less charitable side of me will ask,
What about the eighteen years before that?

With a dramatic flourish, Chaudhary sets out toast, coffee, tea, and juice. Then he backs out of the door.

“Does he ever leave?” I ask.

“No, not really. His children are all overseas and his wife passed. So he works.”

“Sounds miserable.”

She gives me one of her inscrutable looks. “At least he has a purpose.”

She flips open the newspaper. Even that is colorful, a salmony shade of pink. “What have you been doing the last few days?” she asks me as she eyes the headlines.

I went back to Chowpatty Beach, the markets around Colaba, the Gateway. I went to another movie with Prateek. I’ve wandered mostly. Without purpose. “This and that,” I say.

“So today we do that and this,” she replies.

Downstairs, we are besieged by the usual congregation of beggars. “Ten rupees,” a woman carrying a sleeping baby says. “For formula for my baby. You come with me to buy it.”

I start to pull out money, but Yael snaps at me to stop and then snaps at the woman in Hindi.

I don’t say a word. But my expression must give me away, because Yael gives an exasperated explanation. “It’s a scam, Willem. The babies are props. The women are part of begging rings, run by organized crime syndicates.”

I look at the woman, now standing across from the Taj Hotel, and shrug. “So? She still needs the money.”

Yael nods and frowns. “Yes,
she
does. And the
baby
needs food, no doubt, but neither of them will get what they need. If you bought milk for that woman, you’d pay an inflated price, and you’d get an inflated sense of goodwill. You helped a mother feed her baby. What could be better?”

I don’t say anything, because I’ve been giving them money every day and now I feel foolish for it.

“As soon as you walk away, the milk’s returned to the shop. And your money? The shopkeeper gets a cut; the crime bosses get a cut. The women, the women are indentured, and they get nothing. As for what happens to babies . . .” She trails off ominously.

“What happens to the babies?” The question pops out before I realize I might not want to know the answer.

“They die. Sometimes of malnutrition. Or sometimes of pneumonia. When life is so tenuous, something small might do it.”

“I know,” I say.
Sometimes even when life isn’t that tenuous
, I think and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.

“In fact, the day you arrived, I was late because of an emergency with one of those very children.” She doesn’t elaborate, leaving it for me to put the pieces together.

Yael’s non-admission manages to make me feel retroactively guilty for faulting her—there was something more important—and bitter—there always is something more important. But mostly it makes me tired. Couldn’t she have just told me and saved me the trouble of my guilt and bitterness?

Then again, sometimes I think that guilt and bitterness may be Yael’s and my true common language.

• • •

Our first stop is the Shree Siddhivinayak Temple, an ornate wedding cake of a temple that is being attacked by a tourist horde of ants. Yael and I take our place among the masses and push into a stuffy gold hall, wending our way to a flower-covered statue of the elephant god. He’s beet-red, as if embarrassed, or maybe he’s just hot, too.

“Ganesha,” Yael tells me.

“The remover of obstacles.”

She nods.

All around us, people are laying garlands around the shrine or singing or praying.

“Do you have to make an offering?” I ask. “To get your obstacles removed?”

“You can,” she replies. “Or just chant a mantra.”

“What mantra?”

“There are several.” Yael doesn’t say anything else for a while. And then, in a low and clear voice, she chants: “
Om gam ganapatayae namaha
.” She gives me a look, like that’s enough of that.

“What does it mean?”

She cocks her head. “Roughly I’ve heard it translated as: ‘Wake up.’”

“Wake up?”

She looks at me for a second, and though we have the same eyes, I really have no idea what she sees through hers.

“It’s not the translation that matters with a mantra. It’s the intention,” she says. “And this is what you say when you want a new beginning.”

• • •

After the temple, we hail a rickshaw. “Where to now?” I ask.

“We are meeting Mukesh for lunch.”

Mukesh? The travel agent who booked my flights?

We spend the next half hour in silence as we weave through more traffic and dodge more cows, finally arriving at a sort of dusty shopping center. As we’re paying the driver, a tall, broad, smiling man in a voluminous white shirt comes barreling out of a place called Outbound Travels.

“Willem!” he says, greeting me warmly, grasping both my hands. “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” I say, looking back and forth between him and Yael, who’s decidedly not looking at him, and I wonder what exactly is going on. Are they together? It would be just her way, introduce the idea of a boyfriend by not introducing him as her boyfriend and leaving me to figure it out.

Mukesh tells our driver to wait and then goes back into the travel agency to pick up a plastic bag, and then we climb back in and drive through fifteen more minutes of traffic to the restaurant.

“It’s middle eastern,” Mukesh says proudly. “Like Mummy.”

Mukesh pushes the menu aside and calls over the waiter, ordering platters of hummus and grape leaves, baba ghanoush and tabouli.

When the first platter of hummus arrives, Mukesh asks me how I’m liking Indian food so far.

I explain about the dosas and the pakoras I’ve been eating off the stands. “I still haven’t had a proper curry.”

“We will have to arrange that for you,” he says. “Which is why I’m here.” He reaches into the plastic bag and pulls out a number of glossy brochures. “You don’t have so much time here, so I suggest you pick one region—Rajasthan, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh—and explore that. I have taken the liberty of coming up with a few sample itineraries.” He slides me over a computer printout. One is for Rajasthan. It has everything. Return flights to Jaipur, transfers to Jodhpur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer. There’s even a camel trip. There’s a similar packed itinerary for Kerala, flights, transfers, river cruises.

I’m confused. “Are we taking a trip?” I ask Yael.

“Oh, no, no,” Mukesh answers for her. “Mummy has to work. This is a special trip for you, to make sure your time in India is tip-top.”

And then I understand the guilty look. Mukesh isn’t the boyfriend. He’s the travel agent. The one enlisted to bring me here. The one enlisted to send me away.

At least I know why I’m here. Not for new beginnings. A hasty invitation that was foolish to issue, foolish to accept—and most foolish of all to solicit.

“Which trip do you prefer?” Mukesh asks. He seems unaware of the thorny dynamic he’s stumbled into.

My anger feels hot and bilious but I keep it bottled until it doubles back and I’m mad at myself. What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

“This one,” I say, flicking the brochure on top of the pile. I don’t even look where it goes to. It hardly seems the point.

MARCH

Jaisalmer, India

I
t’s ten o’clock in Jaisalmer and the desert sun is beating down on the sand-colored stones of the fortress city. The narrow alleys and staircases are thick with heat and smoke from the early morning dung fires, and that, along with the ever-present camels and cows, gives the city a particular aroma.

I skirt past a group of women, their eyes kohl-dipped, downturned, shy it seems, though they manage to flirt in other ways, with the swoosh of their electric-colored saris, the tinkle of their ankle bracelets.

At the bottom of the hill, I pass several stalls hawking local textiles. I stop at one of them, peering at a purple-mirrored wall-hanging.

“You like what you see?” the young man behind the counter asks casually, no sign that he knows me except for the twinkle in his eye.

“Perhaps,” I say noncommittally.

“Is there something particular you like?”

“I have my eye on something.”

Nawal nods solemnly, no hint of a smile, no hint that we have had almost this exact same conversation for the past four days. It’s like a game. Or a play we started acting in when I first found the tapestry I want. Or rather, Prateek wants.

Two days into my tour of Rajasthan, when I was still full of bitterness and bile and of half a mind to just fly back to Amsterdam early, Prateek sent me a text about his “grand proposal!!!!!!!!!!!” Turned out to be not so grand. He wanted me to shop for Rajasthani handicrafts that he’d sell back in Mumbai for a markup. He’d reimburse me for what I spent and we’d split the profit. At first I told him no, especially after he texted the shopping list. But then one day in Jaipur I wound up in the Bapu Bazaar with nothing much to do, so I started looking for the kind of leather sandals he wanted. And from there, I kept going. Combing the markets for spices and bangles and a very particular kind of slipper has given the trip a sort of shape, allowing me to forget that it’s actually an exile. And because of that, I’ve extended the exile, having Mukesh lengthen it by a week. I’ve now been gone three weeks, and I’ll get back to Mumbai with only a handful days before my return flight to Amsterdam.

In Jaisalmer, Prateek has instructed me to buy a particular kind of tapestry that the area is known for. It must be silk, and I will know it is silk because I must burn a thread, and it will give off the odor of burnt hair. It should be embroidered, sewn, not glued, and I will know it’s sewn because I must turn it over and yank the thread, which also must be silk and must be tested with a match. And it’s to cost no more than two thousand rupees, and I must bargain, hard. Prateek had grave doubts about my bargaining ability, because he claims I overpaid him for the taxi, but I assured him that I’d seen my grandfather barter down a wheel of cheese by half in the Albert Cuyp market, so it was in me.

“Some tea, perhaps, while you look?” Nawal asks. I look under the counter and see that, like yesterday, the tea is already prepared.

“Why not?”

At which point, the script ends and conversation takes over. Hours of it. I sit down in the canvas chair next to Nawal’s, and as we have done for the past four days, we talk. When it gets too hot, or when Nawal gets a serious customer, I leave. Before I do, he will drop the price of the tapestry by five hundred rupees, insuring that I’ll come back and do the whole thing again the next day.

Nawal pours the spicy tea from the ornate metal pot. His radio is playing the same crazy Hindi pop that Prateek loves. “Cricket game on later. If you want to listen,” he informs me.

I take a sip of the tea. “Cricket? Really? The only thing duller than watching cricket is listening to it.”

“You only say that because you don’t understand the particulars of the game.”

Nawal enjoys schooling me about all the things that I don’t understand. I don’t understand cricket, or soccer for that matter, and I don’t understand the politics between India and Pakistan, and I don’t understand the truth about global warming, and I certainly don’t understand why love marriages are inferior to arranged marriages. Yesterday, I made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with love marriages, and I got quite a lecture.

“The divorce rate in India is the lowest in the world. In the West, it’s fifty percent. And that’s if they even get married,” Nawal had said, disgusted. “Here, I tell you a story: All my grandparents, my aunties, my uncles, my parents, my brothers, all had arranged marriages. Happy. Long lives. My cousin, he chose a love marriage, and after two years, no children, the wife leaves him in disgrace.”

“What happened?” I’d asked.

“What happened is they were not compatible,” he’d said. “They were driving without a map. You cannot do that. You must have it arranged properly. Tomorrow I will show you.”

So today, Nawal has brought a copy of the astrological chart that was drawn up to decide if he and his fiancé, Geeta, are compatible. Nawal insists it shows his and Geeta’s happy future, ordained by the gods. “With matters such as these, you have to rely on forces larger than the human heart,” he says.

The chart looks not unlike one of W’s mathematical equations, with the paper divided into sections and different symbols in each one. I know W believes that all of life’s questions can be solved through mathematical principle, but I think even he would find this a stretch.

“You don’t believe in it?” Nawal challenges. “Name me one good love marriage that lasts.”

Lulu had asked me a similar question. Sitting at that café, arguing about love, she’d demanded to know one couple who’d stayed in love, who’d stayed stained. And so I’d said
Yael and Bram
. Their names had just popped out. And it was so strange because in two years on the road, I had never told anyone about them, not even people I’d traveled with for a long time. As soon as I said that, I’d wanted to tell her
everything
about them, the story of how they met, how they seemed like interlocking puzzle pieces and how sometimes I didn’t seem to fit into the equation. But it had been so long since I’d spoken of them, I hadn’t known know how to do it. Though in some strange way, it seemed like another unsaid thing she already knew. Still, I wish I’d told her everything. Add it to my list of regrets.

I’m about to tell Nawal about them. My parents, who had a pretty spectacular love marriage, but then again, maybe it was there, in the charts all along, how it would end. I have wondered: If you could know going in that twenty-five years of love would break you in the end, would you risk it? Because isn’t it inevitable? When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you’ll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.

“I think this whole falling in love business is a mistake,” Nawal continues. “I mean look at
you
.” He says it like an indictment.

“What about
me
?”

“You are twenty-one and you are all alone.”

“I’m not all alone. I’m here with you.”

Nawal eyes me pitifully, reminding me that, pleasant as these days have been, he is here to sell something and I am here to buy something.

“You have no wife. And I’ll wager you have been in love. I’ll wager you have been in love many times like they always seem to be in Western films.”

“Actually, I have never been in love.” Nawal looks surprised at that, and I’m about to explain that while I haven’t been in love, I’ve fallen in love many times. That they’re separate entities entirely.

But then I stop. Because once again, I’m transported from the deserts of Rajasthan to that Paris café. I can almost hear the skepticism in Lulu’s voice when I’d told her:
There’s a world of difference between
falling
in love and
being
in love
. Then I’d dabbed the Nutella on her wrist, supposedly to demonstrate my point, but really because it had given me an excuse to see what she tasted like.

She’d laughed at me. She’d said the distinction between falling in love and being in love was false.
It sounds like you just like to screw around. At least own that about yourself
.

I smile at the memory of it, although Lulu, who had been right about me so much that day, was wrong about this. Yael had trained as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, and she once described how it felt to jump out of a plane: hurtling through the air, the wind everywhere, the exhilaration, the speed, your stomach in your throat, the hard landing. It always seemed the exact right way to describe how things felt with girls—that wind and the exhilaration, the hurtling, the wanting, the freefall. The abrupt end.

Oddly enough, though, that day with Lulu it didn’t feel anything like falling. It felt like arriving.

• • •

Nawal and I drink our tea and listen to music, talk about upcoming elections in India and upcoming soccer tournaments. The sun blazes through the canopy roof and we go quiet in the heat. No customers come this time of day.

The ringing of my phone disturbs the idyll. It’ll be Mukesh. He is the only one who calls me here. Prateek texts. Yael does neither.

“Willem, is everything tip-top?” he asks

“A-okay,” I say. In Mukesh’s hierarchy, A-okay is one step above tip-top.

“Excellent. Not to worry you but I call with a change in plans. Camel tour is canceled.”

“Canceled? Why?”

“Camels got sick.”

“Sick?”

“Yes, yes, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible, terrible.”

“Can’t we book another one?” The three-night desert camel tour was the one part of his planned itinerary I was actually looking forward to. When I extended my trip a week, I’d asked Mukesh to reschedule the camel trip for me.

“I tried. But unfortunately, next tour I could get you on was not for another week, and if you take that, you miss your flight to Dubai next Monday.”

“Is there a problem?” Nawal asks.

“My camel tour was canceled. The camels are sick.”

“My cousin runs a tour.” Nawal is already picking up his mobile. “I can arrange it for you.”

“Mukesh, I think my friend here can book me on a different tour.”

“Oh, no! Willem. That will be most unacceptable.” His ever-friendly tone goes brusque. Then, in a milder voice he continues: “I already booked your train back to Jaipur tonight, and a flight back to Mumbai tomorrow.”

“Tonight? What’s the rush? I don’t leave for a week.” When I asked Mukesh to extend my Rajasthan trip by a week, I also asked him to book my return flight to Amsterdam for a few days after I am due to get back to Mumbai. I had it all timed out perfectly so I’d only have to see Yael for a couple of days at the tail end. “Maybe I could stay here another few days?”

Mukesh clucks his tongue, which, in his particular argot, is the exact opposite of A-okay. He starts rattling on about flight schedules and change fees and warnings of me being stuck in India unless I come back to Mumbai now, and finally there is nothing to do but give in. “Good, good. I’ll email you the itinerary,” he says.

“My email’s not working right. I got locked out of it and had to reset the password and then a whole bunch of recent messages disappeared,” I say. “Apparently there’s a virus going around.

“Yes, that would be the Jagdish virus.” He tsks again. “You must set up a new account. In the meantime, I will text you your train and flight itinerary.”

I get off the phone with Mukesh and reach into my backpack for my wallet. I count out three thousand rupees, the last price Nawal had dropped to. His face falls.

“I have to leave,” I explain. “This evening.”

Nawal reaches behind the counter for a thick square wrapped up in brown paper. “I set it aside on day one so no one else would get it.” He peels back the paper, showing me the tapestry. “I put a little something extra in it for you.”

We say good-bye. I wish him luck with his marriage. “I don’t need luck; it’s in the stars. You, I think, are the one who needs luck.”

It makes me think of something Kate said when she dropped me off in Mérida. “I’d wish you luck, Willem, but I think you need to stop relying on that.”

I’m not sure which one of them is right.

I pack up my things and then walk to the train station through the late afternoon heat. The city looks golden up the hills, the sand dunes rippling behind it, and it all makes me feel wistful, nostalgic already.

The train gets me into Jaipur at six the next morning. My flight to Mumbai is at ten. I haven’t had a chance to set up a new email, and Mukesh has texted nothing about a ride from the airport. I text Prateek. He hasn’t replied to any of my texts in the last two days. So I try ringing him.

He answers, distracted.

“Prateek, hey it’s Willem.”

“Willem, where are you?”

“On a train. I’ve got your tapestry here.” I rattle the package.

“Oh, good.” For all his manic enthusiasm about this latest venture, he seems oddly blasé.

“Everything okay?”

“Better than okay. Very good. My cousin Rahul, he is sick with influenza.”

“That’s terrible. Is he okay?”

“Fine. Fine. But bed rest for him,” Prateek says cheerfully. “I am helping him out.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “With the movies.”

“The movies?”

“Yes! I find the
goreh
to act in the movies. If I can get ten, they will put my name in the credits. Assistant to assistant director of casting.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” he says formally. “But only if I find four more. Tomorrow, I return to Salvation Army and maybe to the airport.”

“Actually, if you’re coming to the airport, that’s perfect. I need a ride.”

“You return on Saturday, I thought.”

“Change of plans. I’m coming back tomorrow now.”

There’s a silence, during which Prateek and I have the same idea. “Do you want to be in?” he asks at the same time I offer, “Would you want me to be in . . . ?”

The line echoes with our laughter. I give him my flight information and hang up. Outside, the sun is setting; a bright flame behind the train, and darkness in front of us. A short while later, it’s all dark.

Mukesh has booked me a sleeper seat in an air-conditioned car, which India Rail chills like a meat locker. The bed has nothing but a sheet. I shiver, and then think of the tapestry, thick and warm. I unwrap the paper; out tumbles something small and hard.