Out of Order (3 page)

“Don’t get too comfortable, cat,” he said. He took off his jeans and refolded them before turning off the light and slipping back into bed. “You can stay the night but tomorrow….”

But tomorrow what? He imagined what Vidya would have said about his finding the cat at three a.m. He had to take her in, he could hear Sriram saying, it was out of place and you know how Jason feels about things out of place. They would joke about having to add pizza to the cat’s diet and Sriram would make some comment about Jason finally getting someone to spend the night and somehow they’d all end up laughing.

But not tomorrow.

Jason lay on his back, his eyes open, nothing to see in the pre-dawn darkness, his dead friends’ cat purring at his side.

Chapter Three

“The airline tickets and hotel vouchers are all in here.” The girl tapped a bright pink nail on the complimentary plastic document folder, by chance or design striking the center of the round Bonnell Travel Agency logo. “The itinerary is in the Freedom Tour’s main brochure,” shifting her tapping to the glossy magazine to her right, “but I’ll print you out a text version. You don’t want to be lugging this all over India.”

“I don’t know,” Jason said, “I may need something to read at night.” He did his best to sound dashing and nonchalant.

Although it was only her first month on the job, Katie Phelps had an innate sense of salesmanship and, thanks to four notorious years in a party-crazed sorority, enough experience with men to know how to respond. She tilted her head down and to the side, her shoulder-length blonde-white hair framing her artificial tan, darted a quick look up under her long black lashes, and smiled a six-point-five percent agency commission smile.

It was just an idea when he walked in, an option he mentioned as he planned his spring trip to Daytona. Before he could stop her, Katie had covered the desk with oversized brochures and foldout maps, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the moonlit photos of the Taj Mahal, the golden beaches, the gaily decorated elephants and the action shot of the Bengal tiger leaping into a pristine lake. India had been just a word in a pick-up line. Now it was a non-refundable deposit reality.

“Anyway,” Katie said, giving her hair a playful toss, “you shouldn’t have any problems at all. Freedom Tours is a really great company. We book a lot with them.” She noticed Jason’s smile sag and quickly added, “But never to any place so cool. I have to tell you, I am impressed.”

Jason felt himself grinning like an idiot and ran his hand across the stubble on his chin to cover his mouth. “I’ve always meant to get there,” he said, hinting at countless trips that brought him so close to the sub-continent, but other than annual treks to Florida, a high school field trip to D.C., and a ten-day Caribbean cruise with an ex-girlfriend, Jason’s traveling had been limited to car-based daytrips and the occasional Yankees weekend in New York City.

“My friends talk about India so much that I figure I might as well see it for myself.” A week after the memorial service and three weeks after he had found Sheriff Neville waiting for him on his apartment steps, Jason still spoke of Sriram and Vidya as if they were getting together that night.

When he saw the information in their obituaries, Jason had thought about taking the day off and making the two-hour run up to the Hindu temple in Rochester. But funerals made him uncomfortable as it was and not knowing the religion or the language or the family, if there was any, would only make it worse. Besides, he reasoned, as a non-Hindu they might not want him there at all.

Later that week Ravi Murty had held a memorial service in one of the meeting rooms at Raj-Tech, attended by Sriram’s co-workers and people from the public library where, Jason learned, Vidya volunteered three days a week. There were no religious symbols, no many-armed statues of gods that might shock the mourners, just a few candles and a framed picture of Sriram and Vidya that Jason recognized from their living room.

“I first met Sriram in college in Bangalore,” Ravi had said in his brief eulogy. “I was always impressed with his quick mind, his eagerness to learn, and his dedication to his work.”

It was probably true, Jason had thought, but he would have mentioned Sriram’s sense of humor and friendship. Ravi then described Vidya as well educated and cultured, missing, Jason believed, everything that had made her special.

To everyone’s relief, Ravi did not mention the graphic details that had covered page one in
The Leader
—the long, rambling suicide note on Sriram’s computer, the unregistered handgun, the blood.

Corning was small enough that Jason had recognized some of the faces at the reception but didn’t know any by name. He was standing off to one side of the room, sipping a glass of fruit punch and thinking about leaving when Ravi Murty approached.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Ravi had said, extending his hand. Unlike Sriram, with his subtle accent and exact pronunciation, each word clipped clean, Ravi had a middle-America dialect that made him sound like a local news anchor. “I’m Ravi Murty. Sriram worked for me at Raj-Tech.”

“Jason Talley. I live in their apartment building. Thank you for arranging all this.” He matched Ravi’s firm, corporate, three-beat handshake. “I’m sorry I didn’t get up to Rochester for the funeral,” he had said, fumbling with the last word, unsure if that’s what it was called when Hindus did whatever it was they did with their dead.

“It was nice. The people at the temple were most helpful,” Ravi had said, and Jason realized then that no one else had shown up. “It’s funny—you meet someone in college, you never think you’ll be the one making their funeral arrangements.”

“I didn’t know that Sriram went to school in America.”

“He didn’t. I went to university in India—sent, really. My parents’ last attempt to get me in touch with my roots.” The way he had said it—his tone sarcastic, his fingers waving—made it clear what he thought of the idea. “I guess I stood in for all of his college friends as well.”

“I still have a hard time believing it,” Jason had said, trying to ignore a rising sense of shame. “I know what the papers say but they were the happiest people I knew.”

The man gave a slight sigh. “Well, I’m glad that’s how you’ll remember them.”

“I think that’s how most people will remember them.”

“That and the cookies,” Ravi said. “Every Monday morning Sriram would bring in a batch of cookies, put them in the break room. Oatmeal raisin, peanut butter chocolate chip, sugar cookies with those sprinkles on them…let me tell you it made the work week a lot easier to face.”

Jason had laughed, remembering the dark Monday mornings and the still-warm bags of cookies on the front seat of his car. “So that’s why you hired him.”

“Yeah,” Ravi said, “that and the fact that the man was good. I worked with him in a mentor program at the University, taught him a few tricks, nothing he wouldn’t have learned on his own. Quick learner, too. Show him something once and the next day he’s teaching you.”

“Is that when you decided to hire him?”

Ravi shook his head, laughing again. “No, I wasn’t that smart. Besides, at the time Sriram had formed a small software development company with several of his classmates. It was not unusual. We were fresh out of college, we all wanted to be the next Bill Gates.”

Jason recalled a profile on Ravi in the Lifestyles section of
The Leader
. It had talked about how this thirty-something computer genius had begun Raj-Tech, borrowing five dollars to type up the company plan on a rented cyber-café computer. Ten years later that same company was poised to release a new program that could be worth millions.

“They worked hard but Sriram realized that his little group lacked the vision needed to take it to the next level. By this time I had already established Raj-Tech here in Corning. Sriram contacted me. I recalled that he had shown some potential and I agreed to hire him on and help him get his green card.”

“How’d his friends take it, him leaving them like that?”

Ravi shrugged his shoulders. “That’s exactly what they wanted for themselves. Some were upset—a couple
really
upset—but that’s business, right?”

Jason swirled the last of the fruit punch in his glass and thought about disgruntled partners and business deals gone sour. “Is there a chance it may not have happened the way the police described it?”

Ravi tilted his head to one side. “You mean to Sriram and Vidya? Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Anyway, I’m glad you gave him the job,” Jason had said, sensing the conversation had gone too far into areas neither of them wanted to talk about.

“Sriram was a good nuts and bolts man. He was good at cleaning up a rough program, working out some of the tedious details.”

“And I’ll miss Vidya’s cooking,” Jason said, his voice lightening as he remembered the foods he didn’t think he’d come to love.

“You can’t go wrong with Indian cuisine,” Ravi said, taking up Jason’s tone. “Actually, you can’t go wrong with anything Indian. Personally I prefer my India imported but it’s becoming quite the popular tourist destination.”

“Hey, I’ve got lots of time to use up,” Jason had said. “Maybe that’s where I’ll go next.”

Now, a week after the memorial service and a half hour after walking into the Bonnell Travel Agency to book a flight to Florida, Jason was finalizing a fourteen-day, thirteen-night all-inclusive package tour of a place that up to that moment had been a V-shaped mass on a map.

“You were smart to jump on that last-minute opening,” Katie said, checking her computer screen. “You saved about fifteen percent. But that puts the pressure on you. We’ll take care of the visa, that’ll be easy. I just hope they understand at your job.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem,” Jason said, still looking at the list, wondering now if it would be a problem.

Katie sighed as she looked at the cover photo on the brochure, a sunset shot of the Taj Mahal. “You are going to have
such
a good time.”

Chapter Four

“On behalf of everyone at Freedom Tours let me officially welcome you to India and say
nameste
.” As he said the last word the handsome, pencil-thin man placed his palms together below his nose and angled his head forward with a practiced solemnity. Jason noticed that several in the group returned the gesture while others recorded the moment in both digital and standard film format.

“My name is Dayama Panjaj Satyanarayan.” He paused as the tourists mumbled astonished remarks, then grinned and added, “But you can call me Danny.” Most of the thirty-five members of the Freedom Tours’ spring excursion chuckled, saying that it was a darn good thing while others tapped their hearing aides or shouted from the third row that he needed to speak up. Jason smiled as well, but only because his new roommate had stopped patting his knee long enough to cup a hand behind his ear to listen as Danny spoke.

The Air India flight had taken off from JFK Friday night, touched down for a three-hour layover in London just after dawn, and had flown all day Saturday, arriving at the Indira Gandhi International Airport early Sunday morning. By the time they had recovered their luggage, cleared customs, and piled on the Trailways-style tour bus it was close to three in the morning. It was a forty-minute ride to the hotel, the windows tinted so thick that all he could make out were the hazy glows around streetlights and roadside campfires. When they arrived at the gated entrance of the Holiday Inn in Connaught Place there was a pinkish hint of dawn in the sky and Jason realized that it was already the third day of his trip and he was just arriving.

It was in the lobby of the Holiday Inn that he also learned that the great deal that Katie the travel agent had secured for him was based on double occupancy. “I hope you don’t snore,” was all his new roommate had said as they passed out the keys.

Jason knew that people didn’t look their best at four in the morning, especially after spending the better part of twenty hours in coach class seats, but looking around the lobby he realized he could have done worse than drawing Bob Froman as his roommate. Bob didn’t need a walker, didn’t wheeze, and unlike most of the other single men, he spoke—when he spoke at all—in a normal, conversational tone, never asking people to repeat their already deafening comments. Even when he woke up three hours later in their hotel room to find Bob, fully dressed, sitting on the edge of his bed watching him sleep, Jason knew his roommate wasn’t the worst of the lot.

“I’m sure that you are all a bit tired this morning,” Danny was saying now, standing behind the music stand that served as a podium. “You may find that the real effects of jetlag won’t be apparent for several days,” he continued, saying
jetlag
as if it were italicized. He paused again as the tourists agreed and exchanged red-eyed travel anecdotes. His fifteenth tour with Freedom Tours, Danny Panjaj Satyanarayan knew his audience.

Looking around the meeting room—a room that looked just like the meeting rooms he had seen at the Holiday Inn in Corning—Jason worked some numbers in his head. Adding in his statistically anomalous twenty-seven as well as an estimated twenty-five for the auburn-haired girl in the front row, Jason put the average age of his fellow Freedom Tourists at an even sixty. He flipped through the glossy brochure the travel agent had given him, noticing for the first time all the pictures of laughing, gray-haired travelers.

“After we enjoy a light brunch here at the hotel,” Danny was saying, “we’ll head out for a pleasant day of sightseeing. We’ll start with a visit to an authentic Rajasthaani silversmith workshop where you will see traditional designs worked into elaborate patterns before your very eyes.” He waited for the women of the group to nudge their husbands and joke about needing the credit cards.

“We will then visit my nation’s capital building, where, due to post September Eleven security measures, we will unfortunately be unable to disembark. But that will mean we will have more time when we visit the Modern School of Mughal Art, where you will have the opportunity to see with your very eyes the ancient traditions of Mughal miniature portrait painting continued to this present day,” Danny said, adding that the school was equipped to take U.S. dollars, travelers checks, Visa and MasterCard.

“By then we’ll be ready for a break, so we’ll enjoy our late afternoon tea in the shady courtyard of a nineteenth-century villa, previously owned by a British government official and now home to the silk-weavers cooperative, and I must say home, too, to the finest bargains on traditionally dyed and adorned scarves in all of Delhi. We’ll finish our first day off with a true Indian feast here at the hotel, followed by a multimedia presentation in this room on the history of Delhi’s Red Fort.”

The auburn-haired woman raised her hand. “Why don’t we just go to the real Red Fort and see their sound and light show?” She glanced down to the Lonely Planet guidebook in her lap. “Nine-thirty p.m. One hour. Fifty rupees.”

Although his smile stayed in place, Danny’s narrow shoulders dipped. “I’m afraid that show doesn’t run on Sundays.”

“It says nightly,” the woman said, her finger pointing out the word as she held up the book.

“We’ve found,” Danny said, speaking to his main audience and over the head of the troublemaker, “that after such a long flight and such an adventure-filled day, most people prefer to relax here in the hotel.”

“Shopping is hardly an adventure-filled day and I don’t think any of us flew halfway around the world to see a stupid video with the real thing a couple miles away.” There was a sharp edge to the woman’s tone and Jason could feel the nervous tension begin to radiate off the members of the tour group who found shopping and movies quite adventurous enough.

“Well, it’s a
bit
more than a couple miles and it
is
in a less
safe
area of town and traffic at night
is
tricky, and there is the jetlag to consider….” Danny paused as if he were considering the idea. “I suppose we
might
be able to do it, that is if that’s what you
all
want.” The way he said it let the group know that it was definitely not what they wanted and the group was quick to agree.

The matter settled, Danny gathered up his papers. “There are fresh bagels, pastry, and toast in the buffet line as well as coffee and Sanka, so please, help yourself.” He smiled at his audience and said, “We have quite an adventure-filled day ahead.”

***

“Well, this sucks,” the auburn-haired girl said as she plopped down hard in the open seat next to Jason. They had just finished their tour of the silk cooperative, a fifty-minute scripted sales presentation that had proven to be effective with most of the tour, and were climbing aboard the bus for the ride back to the hotel. “I didn’t come to India to go shopping,” she said, reaching up to feel if there was anything coming out of the round air-conditioning vent.

Jason had only caught a few glimpses of her as they were shuttled from shop to shop but now, with her sitting next to him, he was surprised to see how attractive she was. Her clear, brown eyes were several shades lighter than her shoulder-length hair, pulled back into a ponytail that poked out through the back of a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap. Her skin, flushed from the late afternoon sun, was smooth, and a thin line of sweat beaded up on the ridge above her lip. Despite an oversized tee shirt and a pair of khakis just baggy enough to be in style, Jason could see that she had the lean body of an athlete, the small bump on her nose the souvenir of a home-plate collision or a well-spiked volleyball. She pulled a water bottle out of her backpack and, after taking a long pull, offered it to Jason saying, “We gotta get outta here.”

Jason waved off the bottle, holding up one of his own. “Get out of where? India?”

“This bus. This whole tour thing,” she said, gesturing with the bottle before taking another drink.

“It’s just the first day,” Jason said. “I’m sure it’ll get better.” He didn’t know if he believed it but he was hoping it was true.

“I doubt it. I asked Danny Boy if the whole trip was like this and he said that no, in some places the shopping is even better. This is what I get for buying a raffle ticket from a nursing home.”

“You won this trip?” Jason said, thinking about how much he had paid.

“Yeah, go figure. A two-dollar ticket and I win India. If it’s all like today I got ripped off. I’m sorry,” she said, turning to face him. “I’m not usually like this. I’m Rachel.”

“Jason,” he said, offering her his hand. “What part of Canada are you from?”

“Brockville. Up on the St. Lawrence, the Thousand Islands area.” She paused and looked at him sideways.

“It’s your accent. The way you said
dollar
and
sorry
,” he said, accentuating the Os in both words. “That and the Canadian flag pin on your backpack.”

“Clever. You from the States?”

“New York—but not the city. A small town called Corning.”

She nodded. “It’s a pretty area. I rode my bike down your way back in high school. So did you win this trip, too?”

“I’m not that lucky. I got it through a travel agent who has some explaining to do when I get back.”

Danny came down the aisle of the bus counting the heads of his charges before shouting something up to the driver in Hindi, the driver responding by pulling the door shut and easing the engine into gear. The afternoon sun was blinding but the thick polarized tint on the windows made it look like midnight.

“Well,” Jason said with an exaggerated sigh, “at least we get to see the Taj Mahal tomorrow. That ought to be cool.”

Rachel shook her head. “Not me.”

“It’s part of the tour. We leave the hotel at six a.m….”

“I know. I just don’t want to see it.” She unzipped her backpack and shoved the water bottle inside, crushing down wads of papers and loose camera gear.

“You come all the way to India on a free trip and you don’t want to see the most famous thing in the whole country?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to see it,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t. There’s an old legend that says that the first time you see the Taj Mahal it should be with someone you love.” She shrugged, a comment on the stupidity of the idea or her romantic nature, Jason wasn’t sure. “I’ll see it someday,” she said, as if it were an art-house movie that might turn up on video.

“I’m not so sure about me,” Jason said, adding a self-mocking laugh. “I’d better see it while I can. What
do
you want to see then?”

Rachel drew in a breath and held it a moment before she answered. “Trains.”

“Trains?”

“This is the point when most guys I meet suddenly see a friend at the other side of the bar or remember that they had to rush off for surgery. I like trains,” she said, her voice taking on the quality of an apology. “I like spotting trains, I like riding trains, I even have a five track setup in my apartment.”

“Trains, huh? That’s sort of….”

“Strange? Creepy? You can say it, I’m used to it.”

Jason found her confident smile sexy. “No, I find it fascinating,” he lied. “It’s not something I’m into myself….”

“I know, I know. I promise I won’t try to convert you.”

Jason pulled the folded itinerary from his shirt pocket. “You’re in luck. We take at least two train trips.”

She looked down at the wrinkled paper. “Oh, I think there may be a few more that aren’t on the list yet.”

***

Catering to the changing needs of the international business traveler, the Holiday Inn had converted its little-used barbershop into a business center, complete with photocopiers, fax machines, scanners, and ten computer stations, everything state-of-the-art and available at a competitive rate to registered guests. After watching the first few minutes of Freedom Tours’ multimedia presentation, Jason had paid the concierge five hundred rupees for ten minutes of high-speed Internet access. At a dollar a minute, Jason typed quickly.

He found ninety-five new emails in his Hotmail account. He skimmed down the list, deleting the obvious junk mail, leaving twenty messages, all but one from people he did not know.

When he had realized that there was no way to back out of the contract without losing more than a vacation should cost, Jason had focused on organizing the few non-structured moments on the package tour, including “a morning on your own to discover the surprises of Bangalore.” Using addresses pulled from a mass email Sriram had sent—a collection of funny headlines from the local paper—Jason wrote an open letter explaining that he would be traveling through India and would like to meet any of the couple’s friends and family along the way. He had included his flight information as well as a link to the Freedom Tours’ website.

With screen names like Currycrazy, way2fast4u, Tigerlilly, and namapuraturum, and most of them Hotmail or Yahoo accounts, Jason had no way of knowing if the recipients were in India or down the road in Corning, but the first email he opened let him know it had been a good idea.

“I am Ram Shankar and I attended college with Sriram. If your travels chance to bring you to Trivandrum, please ring me up.” A row of winking smile faces was followed by a phone number and street address. He wasn’t sure where Trivandrum was or if his travels would take him there, but Jason printed out the message and continued down the list. Most of the letters were from people living outside of India—Boston, San Francisco, Dubai, London—wishing him luck or suggesting sites to see on his trip. Out of the twenty letters in his inbox, five came with offers to help, and Jason added each to the printing queue.

It was the last email that made his heart race.

“I wish you would have contacted me before you sent that letter,” Ravi Murty had written. “There were things I didn’t tell you about Sriram, things that have to do with that computer company he helped start. It’s too complicated to get into, but there are people out there who still blame Sriram for destroying their dreams and I’m afraid they might take their frustrations out on you.” Jason smiled at first as he read the line, Ravi sounding like an old woman who watched one too many spy movies. The smile disappeared as he read the rest of the message.