Rules of the Game (51 page)

But once I learned the game, everything changed. Wherever I went, new adventures beckoned. I visited Croatia and ended up having sex in the ocean with a nineteen-year-old who hardly spoke a word of English. I flew to a small town in the Midwest for a
New York Times
article and fooled around with a rich housewife, then slept with her niece. And on my first night in Sweden, I met a girl who stripteased to ABBA in my hotel room as foreplay.

Now I'm in Bangladesh, where there are no clubs, no alcohol, and no dating. And I have options.

But I don't know the rules here. And I'm worried that I'm about to get myself killed.

I'm staying at the Dhaka Sheraton. The only other person who knows me here is my traveling companion, Franz Harary, the illusionist. He has longish blond hair, usually wears yellow shirts with puffy patches on the chest, and has a very gentle demeanor. Think Yanni with magic tricks.

He thinks I'm sick right now.

But I'm in my hotel room, waiting for Tripti to arrive, hoping that Ali Raj and his henchman don't get here first.

Here, really quickly, is how this all started:

Harary is here at the invitation of Ali Raj to perform at the First International Magic Festival. I'm here working on a book that I haven't told anyone about. I've been traveling the world in search of people with powers that defy scientific explanation. I want to find real magic, proof of the existence of the unknown, something to believe in. And there's a village on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital city here, populated by a small tribe with a blind elder who can supposedly perform miracles on command.

Both the festival and the village are frowned on by local authorities. Bangladesh is largely a Muslim society and, as such, considers magic and miracle working a sin. According to strict Islamic law, these acts are punishable by death. Importing magicians from all over the world is a luxury that only a man like Ali Raj, with a lot of money and high-level government connections, could have made possible.

We first saw Ali Raj himself when we cleared customs. Lean, with perfectly feathered black hair and a dark walking suit, he reminded me of a wax statue of a matador. I don't believe he ever spoke a word. Trailed by a motley entourage of magicians, goons, relatives, and cologne-splattered men who identified themselves as traders, he led us to a press conference that had been set up in an airport waiting room.

The reporters clustered around Harary, who made a Coke bottle—the symbol of America—vanish for the cameras. The reporters were amazed, but Ali Raj was not. He nodded to one of his henchmen, a fat-faced Bangladeshi with a fanny pack, who ended the press conference.

Raj's men herded Harary and me into a minivan with the magicians. As we drove through the crowded streets of Dhaka, women with missing teeth and bleeding gums, men with fist-size tumors on their faces, and children with club
feet and shredded lungi skirts swarmed the van at every red light, begging for change. And though the poverty was appalling, the people in the street seemed happier than the average middle-class American. I suppose if you've never had anything, you don't have anything to lose—just surviving is an accomplishment. At home, we tend to take unlimited upward mobility for granted.

I saw Tripti for the first time in the hotel lobby as I was returning to my room from breakfast the next morning. She stood out not just because she was the only female in sight, but because she was wrapped in an immaculate all-white sari with a matching sequined shawl around her neck. She had long black hair, the full lips of a supermodel, and large, round breasts that seemed to lift the fabric away from her body.

She was standing with Ali Raj, so I assumed she must be his wife and I shouldn't be staring at her breasts.

Raj, as usual, didn't speak. “Harary?” she asked through perfectly formed lips.

“He's up in his room working on the helicopter vanish,” I told her. Raj translated, and we entered the elevator together.

“I like,” she said, touching my earrings.

The earrings are silver spikes I bought after learning about a concept called peacocking. The idea is that, just as the peacock spreads its colorful plumage in order to attract the female of the species, so, too, must a man stand out in order to attract the opposite sex. Though I was initially skeptical, once I began experimenting with these items, as obnoxious and uncool as they seemed, the results were immediate—even in Bangladesh.

She gestured to my shaved head and asked, “I touch?” Without waiting for an answer, she rubbed her hand warmly on my head. Women in Bangladesh rarely get this physical in public with men. Her touching my ears and head was the equivalent of a woman grabbing your crotch in an elevator in America.

I led them to Harary's room and took my leave as he gave Ali Raj his requirements for the illusion—a helicopter, a pilot, a field, and a helicopter-size sheet.

For the rest of the day, Tripti sat at a table in the hotel lobby, selling tickets to the magic show with the rest of Ali Raj's team. Every time I walked past, she shot me a lingering glance that conveyed an invitation to so much pleasure.

So I decided to accept the invitation.

“Why don't you take a break and get some lunch with me?” I suggested.

She looked at me sweetly and smiled blankly.

Translation: Keep it simple.

“Lunch?”

As she tried to explain something too complicated for broken English, a short, muscular Bangladeshi man with black hair and a red shirt arrived with two Styrofoam dishes of some rice concoction he'd bought in the street.

I introduced myself. “I am Rashid, my friend,” he replied. “I am cousin to Tripti.”

“Do you also work for Ali Raj?”

He nodded in the affirmative. Everyone works for Ali Raj.

I suggested that we all eat together upstairs. If I couldn't get her alone, at least I could win the trust of her cousin. This was Bangladesh: I wasn't expecting to get very far anyway.

I took them to Harary's room and sat with them on the couch. Tripti's cousin politely handed me one of the rice dishes. I tried a small spoonful, and some sort of hot, deadly venom seared my internal organs.

“You like, my friend?” he asked. It's interesting how whenever someone calls you his friend when you're not really his friend, it sounds malicious.

“It's great,” I choked.

Sometimes, in the heat of passion, there's a temptation to have sex without a condom. At that moment, I felt like I had performed the culinary equivalent: every guidebook warned against eating street food in Bangladesh.

Between the sexual energy emanating from Tripti, the brutal spiciness of the rice dish, and the awkwardness of the situation, beads of sweat began sprouting on my forehead. It was ridiculous to think I could have an affair with this girl. Our cultures are too different when it comes to dating and sex. We prefer premarital sex; they prefer arranged marriages.

I decided to cut my losses and take a nap in my room. This just wasn't worth risking days of diarrhea.

As I rose to leave, however, Tripti turned and whispered something in her cousin's ear. He nodded, then she stood up to join me.

When I walked into the hallway, she followed. So I led her to my room, uncertain of what she wanted or expected.

As we entered, I was mindful to leave the door open so she didn't feel uncomfortable. I wanted to demonstrate that I understood the morals of her society.

I sat down on the bed and she maneuvered into position next to me, too close for conversation. Suddenly, diarrhea seemed like a worthwhile risk.

I've seen many Bollywood movies, and one of the strangest things about them is that the hero and heroine never actually kiss. Instead, they just come excruciatingly close to doing so all through the film. So I stroked Tripti's hair. She didn't flinch. I looked her in the eyes and brought my lips close. She smelled like muscat, like desire, like something forbidden.

Suddenly, she pulled away. Then she stood up and walked toward the door. Perhaps I'd been too forward and misinterpreted her actions.

Instead of leaving, however, she closed the door. “I like you,” she said as she walked back toward the bed.

Evidently she was more a fan of Hollywood films than Bollywood—which are Indian anyway. So I threw her onto the bed and we began making out.

This was where things began to get weird. I realize they were already weird, but they got weirder.

She placed my hands on her breasts and began speaking in a stream of fractured Bengali-English. It came breathy, in my ear, difficult to make out. All I could catch were the names “Bill Clinton” and “Monica Lewinsky.”

And this completely confused me, because I wasn't sure if she was offering me a blow job using the only English words she knew as a synonym, or if she was simply sharing her thoughts on American politics.

Assuming the best, I decided to try to remove her sari. Never having actually removed a sari before, I wasn't sure where to start.

She shivered with pleasure as I fumbled around her neckline, then she yanked my hand away. “I good girl,” she said. “It is okay. I like you.”

Translation: “I don't normally do this, but actually I do normally do this. I just don't want you to think I normally do this.”

She unbuttoned my shirt and ran her fingers along my chest. Her other arm leaned directly against the bulge in my pants. Then she began whispering, over and over, sensually. At first I thought she was saying
“cholo.”
But the tenth time around, I sounded it out as
“chulatay.”

Every cell in my body was vibrating with desire for her, while every cell in my brain tried to compute how and why this was happening.

Three
chulatays
later, she disentangled herself, straightened her sari, and stood up as if nothing had just happened. “No person,” she said as she put a finger to her lips.

Translation: Either “Don't tell anybody” or “I will kiss no one else because we're now engaged.”

Then she said the two words that struck fear in my heart, “Ali Raj,” and made a slashing motion over her neck.

“Good girl,” she repeated.

I knew I was in over my head. Yet something inside propelled me to proceed. Perhaps it was the same impulse that compels a child, when someone draws an imaginary line in the grass with the toe of his shoe and orders him not to cross it “or else,” to gingerly dip his foot on the forbidden side of the line in response. It's not just an act of defiance, it's a call for adventure. His side of the line is boring; the other side contains the unknown, the “or else.” The Ali Raj.

While waiting for the festival to begin that night, I made it my mission to find out what
chulatay
meant. I eventually narrowed it down to one of two interpretations: either “hanging” or “I'm hungry.” Hopefully, the latter interpretation was correct.

That night, the streets around the magic show swarmed with police and reporters. The theater was in a university neighborhood, the center of Islamic radicalism, and there had been several bomb threats. Every time someone bicycled past with a package in his handbasket, I imagined the next day's headline: “Terrorists Make Magicians Disappear.” Nonetheless, I headed inside. Who wants to live in a world without magic?

I found Tripti walking through the foyer and led her to the back row. As an illusionist from Spain named Juan Mayoral performed some sort of magical love soliloquy to a wire mannequin, Tripti took hold of my inner thigh. She squeezed it and, her breath wet in my ear, whispered, “How is Babu?” She then began rubbing Babu through my pants.

I looked around the theater: there were Bangladeshi men everywhere and a few scattered families. Everyone was staid, mannered, reserved, intent on the show, and I had this Muslim girl moaning in my ear. Every man has his secret fantasy: This, I realized, was mine.

As happens with most fantasies, however, reality soon intruded. The fanny pack-wearing Ali Raj henchman from the press conference plopped down in the seat next to me. Tripti quickly withdrew her hand.

“Are you married?” he asked. He knew exactly what was going on.

“No,” I told him.

“Will you marry her?”

“I just met her.” I couldn't tell if he was cockblocking, or if this was all some kind of plan to marry Tripti off to an American.

Between acts, I decided to try to find a secluded place to take Tripti. There were all kinds of stairwells and rooms backstage. But when we stood up, Fanny Pack rose with us and cleaved closely to our sides.

“My friend,” a voice greeted me as I walked into the foyer with my growing entourage. It was her cousin. My enemy. All men here were my enemies.

He threw his right arm around my shoulder. “This is the American writer,” he said to three nearby men, who were either family or Ali Raj henchmen or both. They circled me and all began friending me at once. Whenever I craned my head to look for Tripti, they redirected my attention to their conversation: “Is this your first time in Bangladesh?” “How do you like Bangladesh?” “You must come to my home for traditional Bengali dinner.”