The Medicine Burns (17 page)

“This looks quiet,” I said, looking up three flights and at the chalky white dome overhead. This looks quiet, my voice echoed down.

“It's very quiet,” he said.

“I hear the room at the top has a nice view,” I said.

“The choice is yours,” he said. “There's no one staying here now.”

I liked the place at once. And I liked him. The place seemed impenetrable, like a fortress or a chamber room. I felt I needed to shut things out, and the heavy door closing out the dusty sunlight relaxed me almost immediately. Even my voice, echoing from the dome, secured me.

“I need to sit down,” I told him. “I feel weak.”

“Relax,” he said, drawing up a chair, “The room is twenty rupees a night. Do you smoke?” He put the chillum in his mouth and lit it. The hash smelled sweet and I savored the scent, watching the smoke drift up through the empty guesthouse.

“Yes,” I answered, and he passed it to me.

I took the room at the top, and when the large wooden shutters were opened, I had an unobstructed view of the Ganges and the pilgrims descending to its edge. Sometimes, the monsoon rains would cool the room and leave the floor around my bed wet, and the moonlight glinting from the floor and the Ganges would connect them so that it seemed I was floating on its slow, gray surface. I remember a dream I had after falling asleep during one of the rains. In it, my bed was a raft on the Ganges and I saw religious people bathing in the waters. The water was silver, like a daguerreotype, or a mirror. The people were bringing the water up to their faces which would change by that contact, suddenly bearing the immutable expressions of old photographs. I remember putting my legs over the side of the raft and the water not being liquid, but ash. And when I cupped my hands and brought it toward my face, the ash began to separate like mercury, revealing a scalp and teeth. And then my legs were brushed by something and I was certain it was the rest of this body I had in my hands. I woke up sweating and would not let myself fall back to sleep. It was five in the morning when I left the lodge and began walking.

The ghats were silent except for the boatmen calling me down to the water. The sadhus sat meditating under large umbrellas, and from the temples I could hear a singer and the tanpura. I walked to the burning ghats where the cremations were well underway and stood above the bodies being prepared with clarified butter and broken sticks. The men who prepared the bodies and the people who mourned and the others who took pictures were all lost in the smoke and the fires which burned all day. And I remember feeling haunted by a loneliness that made me want to get too close to the body on the pyre, as though I might recognize him.

The lodge owner's name was Bijay and after returning from my walk I was greeted by him, sitting on his bed, in his underwear, and smoking his chillum. I sat down next to him and he began by asking me what I had bought. I showed him the bottles of colored powders the Indians use for puja. “You paid too much,” he said. “You can get that for half the price, maybe less.” He began a lament of Banares' hustlers, of the crude tactics of his contemporaries, and he ended by saying, with his hands weakly held in front of himself, “this is my prison and my sanctuary.”

He had to stay there and wait for tourists. It was useless to ask him out. So I would always make sure to bring in treats for us, mangoes, pomegranates, and the Indian sweets I knew he loved. This would always cheer him, or at least grant him the power to speak dismissively about what he considered a conspiracy on the part of his neighbors and friends to put him out of business.

“Why do you think my lodge is empty,” he asked, “when all the others are full? I refuse to pay these commission boys so they refuse to take people here. But it is not just them,” he said, both angry and despondent, “it's the neighbors, too, the people I've grown up with. They don't like when I tell the tourists the right price for things. They all own shops, but they make a living by cheating. Once a beautiful Swedish girl stayed here and one afternoon she came back to the lodge with some brocades. She told me she had bought them from Aurobindo De, and I was thrilled because I've known this man my whole life. But I was astonished when she told me how much she'd paid. So we went back to his shop together. He was so angry with me because he lost face, and he kept asking me if I was calling him a cheating man.
No
, I told him,
but you've made a mistake
. By the next day, no one in the marketplace would wave to me. They all thought I was having an affair with this Swedish girl. That night they threw trash at my front door. I watched them from her window, friends of my parents, even my friends, throwing their trash at my door.”

Sometimes, after we had passed the chillum between us, I would ask him, “What do you need them for?” and he would shrug it off. “I don't need them,” he would say. But the silence of the empty lodge would come between us, and when I thought of leaving, and him alone there, I wondered how he'd keep from going mad. Another tourist will stay at his lodge, listen to his stories, and perhaps, like me, take some of his sadness with them when they leave.

I had the fever again. Usually at some point during the day I could get out for an hour or two. Often I had to sit, and I never traveled far from the lodge.

I went to the ghats and sat down. The sun was bleary on the horizon. A boy walked toward me carrying a rolled up mat under his arm. He walked up smiling. He stood behind me and squatted down. I felt his knees in my back. He put his hands around my forehead then, still gripping, drew his hands back across my head, pulling my hair back tightly. “Indian head massage,” he whispered in my ear, “twenty rupees.” I closed my eyes and let him continue. He pressed at my temples with his palms. The fever made it feel like he was shaping fire in my head. I felt myself sweating and breathing hard. I imagined his mouth on my neck and on my ears while his hands covered my eyes and his fingers pinched my eyelids. And then I let my strength go. His fingers pressed at every indentation of my skull. I felt so weak that it seemed he was holding my head up, that his hands had gotten inside my skull and were opening my eyes up from behind.

I felt his hands on my shoulders and under my arms where my lymph nodes were swollen and painful. “Take off your shirt,” he said, but he was already lifting it off. Then he rolled out his mat and laid me down on it. He touched my stomach and I winced with pain. “This is all swollen,” he said uncomfortably. “I'm not well,” I said, trying to lift my head up to see it.

It looked horrible, frightening. My ribs were sunken in, but my stomach looked massive and painful. I couldn't hold my head up any longer and I let it fall back on the mat. I felt my breathing go dry and wheezing. I felt his fingers on my legs and at my thighs. I felt embarrassed by how sexual I felt, and looked down the steps of the ghat. Only the boatmen were out, the sun bleeding over the Ganges. I looked at his eyes, dark and troubled, and at the thin black hair over his lip. He was smiling as his hands came to my groin. But I wasn't sure of his smile, if it wasn't the smile of someone who will have their revenge.

He put his hands under my neck and lifted me slowly into a sitting position. “I am finished now,” he said, “you must feel better?”

“I feel dizzy,” and I gripped his arm.

“Eighty rupees,” he said, “for the full body massage.”

“Twenty,” I said, but I suddenly felt choked, like crying.

“Eighty,” he persisted.

“OK, eighty. But please help me,” I asked. “I don't think I can get back on my own.”

But with the rupees crumpled in his hands, he was gone.

I walked up the steps of the ghat and came to the marketplace, but I was already slumped in exhaustion. I was still haunted by his hands—wherever they had been I ached, like he had brought the sickness up in me. The vendors, just setting up, called me over, someone's hand was on my sleeve, I heard, “My brother's shop.” I felt myself being pulled along. I was only seeing the ground, the feet passing, a woman's toe ring, and the slime on the stone. I was pulled through the market, but they were forcing me, so I pulled away. I imagined my face looked bloodless and terrible like a mask. I no longer saw the man who had entreated me to follow, just the blank expressions of the rushing crowd. They watched me walk up the street, then I fell forward, everything went black, and I hit the stone.

Then it resumed more maddening than ever. I came to, and there was pain, light, and noise. People were standing over me, and I didn't want their hands. I was so angry to be back. I pushed the hands away, but I saw it was Bijay. I think I laughed when I saw him. He lifted me up, and I let myself be heavy in his arms.

He tried to carry me to the lodge, but he had to stop. A neighbor stood in her doorway, and he talked to her. She took us to a bed and he put me down. I heard him breathing hard over me. I wanted to reach up and touch him but the woman, standing in the shadow of the door, had her arms folded and watched us impatiently. Bijay was sitting next to me on the bed. “You can relax here for as long as you need,” he said. But the woman came closer and talked to him in Hindi, and her expression was reserved and fearful. Even through the fever and the pain in my stomach, I was able to imagine her discomfort. Maybe she felt pressured into this, and worried that if her husband came home he would not understand her charity. Maybe, like the Swedish girl, they had whispered about us. They were superstitious of us.

There were people gathered in her doorway, curious and respectful of the pallor of death on my skin. I told Bijay hoarsely that he could walk me back to the lodge. It did not seem too soon for him, either. The fear I had imagined in the woman by the bedside, I realized, was his too. As he guided me carefully into the daylight, I looked back, and her expression and the expressions of the people massed around her seemed livid and jeering. I imagined them with stones in their hands as I laid my head on Bijay's shoulder.

He carried me up the narrow, stone steps to my room at the top of the lodge. “The light,” I murmured, and he closed the shutters. “You must eat only curd and bananas,” he said. “Maybe we should have a doctor come.” I remember fighting his suggestion. “I don't need a doctor,” I said bitterly, “I just need to rest.” That's just what I'd told my lover. I didn't want to confirm anything. That's what doctors do, just when you start to live with yourself, with the clock winding down in you, just when you begin to tolerate the pain you've always expected. My lover was under a doctor's care after his first bout with pneumonia; he took the pills that sickened him, and when the veins dropped out they put a catheter in his chest. But he never learned to live again; he just kept the apartment in order, an extension of his body, and talked of going somewhere soon, imagining he was not alone when he came home and saw me sitting at the table, a
penitente
. That is why I say he never knew me, because I wouldn't live that way or die that way.

Bijay asked me how it happened, how I came to be so sick. I told him I had an Indian head massage on the steps of the ghat. I wanted to ascribe my sickness to the boy's hands. That's how it felt.

“How much did you pay?” he asked.

“Eighty rupees for the full body,” I told him.

“You paid too much. You could have paid forty rupees for an hour in your own room.”

“I don't care about it,” I said. “I'm not an Indian, and I've never paid an Indian price for anything.”

He frowned at me. “You should care,” he said. Then he closed the door behind him.

I slept restlessly while the shutters banged. I remember waking up at intervals and the light being different in the room. Then it was extinguished. I felt nauseous and walked to the bathroom. I stood over the squat toilet and liquid, like rusty tap water, began to drain from me. And then the vomiting started, but there was no food to bring up. I felt everything convulsing and couldn't stand anymore. I lay curled on the floor a long time, shivering and dehydrated. I told myself to keep quiet. I was afraid of Bijay, of his concern.

The next morning I heard a rattling at my door, and I lay there watching it, amused, thinking it was Bijay carrying curd, not wanting to wake me. Then it burst open, and a monkey baring its teeth stood aggressively in the doorway, watching me. I sat up, though not quickly, frightened but not wanting to scare it. It shot forward into the room and leapt up on the bedframe. Its face was horrifying and compelling. It reached down near my foot and began gathering the blanket in its hand. It drew the covers slowly off me until I was naked there with it. I watched my heart pounding under the skin, I imagined the animal tearing it out. Maybe I would have screamed for Bijay, but the animal became spooked and darted from the room, the covers dragged over the floor.

“I think it would be better for me in America,” Bijay said. “Indians are very nosy, they watch you all the time.” For three days I had been in bed and no more active than he. I would watch him from above, lighting his chillum and filling his clay pots with bath water. There was nothing here in his tower of silence, nothing but talks with foreigners he couldn't fully understand and who couldn't understand him. No, it was more than language, but life that kept him apart. Maybe he should have cheated, and kept his Indian friends. Now he was completely alone, as far from India as I was, and no closer to America. “I can do whatever I want,” he said, “I am still a bachelor, I have no wife, and no dowries to pay. But what good is freedom in India when everyone is watching you, waiting to see what you will do, what mistakes you will make?”

When I left Shiva Lodge, Bijay asked me for my address in America. He handed me the pad and pen and I wrote the old address mechanically. I wondered if, some months down the line, Joshua would get a letter in some uneven hand saying, I will be in America on such and such a date. But I knew he'd be gone, with everything in the apartment, the very last of it.