Quarantine Page 8

  I said to him right away I wasn’t sure this was going to work. We were in a taxi, driving through the slums that surrounded the airport. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you come.”

  “I would have come anyway,” he said, smiling. He pulled at my earlobe, and I brushed his hand away.

  At my grandmother’s flat, Thomas sat on the dwarf couch, drinking tea and looking small. My grandmother hovered above him, patting the key ring hanging from her waist, the one that unlocked the cupboards. Thomas wanted to sleep, but I convinced him he’d get over his jet lag more quickly if he stayed awake until bedtime. I suggested we take a walk to a nearby temple. I had been translating a poem about the temple at Walkeshwar and its famous Banganga water tank, but I had never visited, even though it was only a short distance away.

  As we walked, Thomas asked about the poem.

  I told him it was about the origins of the water, based on a famous tale from the Ramayana about Rama’s quest to find his beloved Sita, who had been abducted by the demon Ravana. Along the way Rama stopped at Walkeshwar. He had been traveling for years and was tired and thirsty, but he couldn’t find anything to drink. So Rama shot an arrow into the ground, and the holy river Ganga spurted forth.

  “Speaking of tired and thirsty,” Thomas said, “I think I’m getting heatstroke. Shoot me an arrow, will ya?”

  “The reason the poem is remarkable,” I said, “is that the poet argues that Ravana gets a bad rap in the Ramayana. He points out that Ravana held Sita captive for many years, but he never violated her, even though he could have. Ravana is actually a model of masculinity, because he protected Sita in a way that Rama, who let her get abducted, couldn’t. In the poet’s opinion, Ravana should be honored in the pantheon of gods, not demons.”

  “I’m not sure that not raping someone you’ve kidnapped is reason for canonization,” Thomas said.

  “You’re missing the point,” I said. “He restrained himself despite his desires.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “All I’m saying is I’m saying,” I said.

  During our walk, we collected a group of street children, who stuck to our legs like burrs. They begged, “Chocolate? Pen?” I had heard this request many times from street children, usually after they’d given up asking for money. I found the pen part confusing. It was obvious to me why they would want chocolate, but why a pen? Was I to believe that this was the reason, the only reason, they were on the street instead of in school: lack of school supplies?

  By the time we’d reached the temple and sat down by the water tank, we were surrounded. Thomas wilted. The children pulled at his sleeve until he fished around in his day pack and handed out three blue Paper Mates. When they weren’t satisfied, he found a roll of cough drops and gave them out, one by one.

  “That’s medicine, not candy,” I said.

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  There wasn’t enough for everyone, and one small child, who arrived too late, threw a tantrum. He pouted and wiped a soiled hand across Thomas’s chest and spat at him and started crying.

  “It serves you right,” I told Thomas. “Do you think you are helping by giving kids who have nothing cough drops? You were just trying to make yourself feel better.”

  “Why are you being so mean to me?” He looked down at the brown smear across his chest, lifted his shirt to his face, and sniffed. His nose crinkled. “This is shit.”

  He took his shirt off and threw it away. We left immediately, walking back under the hot sun without having had a look at what we had come to see.

  I hoped, after Walkeshwar, that Thomas’s visit would improve. It didn’t. We quarreled constantly and slept in separate beds, Thomas on a trundle, which, during the day, nested in mine: our beds intimate in ways we were not. He developed a vague, Victorian-style illness that left him feeling tired and numb. He lost his appetite for everything except oranges, which were expensive and hard to find.

  I blamed Bombay. “It’s the air.”

  I suggested we head south: first the mountains (“We might see tigers!”), then the beach. “South India is like a different country,” I said. “People there don’t even speak Hindi. We can both be foreigners.”

  “Do you think your grandmother will be OK alone?”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said, ignoring the fact that her ailments had gotten much worse since I had been in Bombay.

  “Maybe a relative can stay with her while we are gone,” he said. I shrugged.

  Thomas had taken an interest in her. He filled her hot-water bottles and bought her a silk shawl at the market. The shawl was too vivid a red for a widow (I’d told him so at the time), but my grandmother wore it anyway. She’d grown to trust him. Once, she even asked him to help her get something from one of the mysterious cupboards she always kept locked. I asked him later what was in there, but he wouldn’t tell me. “If she had wanted you to know,” he said, smiling, “she would have shown you herself.”

  Before we left Bombay, we visited a used bookstore and bought a Malayalam phrase book, choosing the only one small enough to fit in a pocket. We didn’t look at it very closely until we were on the airplane.

  The book was copyrighted 1967. The cover showed a cartoon drawing of a tall, blond man with long hair and bellbottoms talking to a small brown man wearing a sarong and washing an elephant. Other illustrations in the book were similar. They all showed Indian men and women in traditional garb doing hard labor—pulling rickshaws, serving meals, scrubbing floors—with Westerners towering above them. We were horrified.

  The text in the book was even worse. It was filled with phrases like “That’s the boy’s job,” “Tell the boy to come in the morning,” “There is plenty of work for the boy,” “Can’t the boy work any faster?” “This room is filthy!” We vowed to throw it out when we arrived. But during our first day at a small hotel in the mountains, we recanted. Our room was filthy, there was plenty of work for the boy, though we didn’t have the courage to say so.

  One morning, eating breakfast on our terrace, we made the mistake of giving a monkey a mango. The next day he returned with three of his friends. When we refused to feed them, too, they made loud noises and hurled rocks and dirt at us. We huddled inside until the boy came and chased them away with his broom.

  Things were better at the beach. We splurged on an upscale resort and a room with an ocean view.

  The resort was staffed, exclusively it seemed, by beautiful boys—about a dozen of them in their late teens or early twenties, from all over India. They paraded before us like pageant contestants: Miss Orissa, Miss Bihar, Miss Rajasthan.

  Our favorite was Miss Andhra Pradesh. He walked around bare-chested in a sarong, like an illustration from our phrase book. The sarong came to his ankles, but if he needed to do a bit of hard work—like hauling a bucket of water or climbing a tree to fetch a coconut (a trick the hotel management actually encouraged guests to request)—he could, with one graceful movement, halve the garment to his knees. His thin, flat torso glistened with sweat, reflecting sunlight like a mirror. Thomas and I were dazzled.

  We took yoga classes at a nearby school: I, a beginning class; Thomas, an advanced one. In the evenings we practiced yoga on the beach and watched the sun set over the ocean: a spectacle that, as East Coast boys, neither of us was accustomed to seeing. We were seduced by the sight of water on fire. Later, we fed each other Cadbury squares under the night sky.

  In New York, Thomas had a knack for spotting stars: uptown, Ethan Hawke waiting for the A train, scratching his goatee; downtown, Holly Hunter inhaling a slice at Two Boots to Go-Go. I never saw them until Thomas pointed them out—evidence, perhaps, that it was I, not he, who didn’t notice what was right in front of me. Now, on the beach in Kerala, Thomas spotted different stars: Orion, the string of lights encircling his waist; Sirius at his side; stubborn Taurus, forever on the run.

  One night, walking home along the beach, Thomas stopped me under a palm tree and kissed me long and hard. I
caressed his cheek. Suddenly Thomas pulled away, and his eyes darted sideways. I heard what had stolen his attention: short, quick breaths coming from behind a nearby tree. At first we thought someone was hurt. After staring for some time, we made out the shadowy figures of Miss Andhra Pradesh giving Miss Orissa a hand job.

  The next morning, while serving us breakfast, Miss Andhra Pradesh said, “Yoga is hard.” He must have been watching us practice.

  “It just takes getting used to,” Thomas said.

  The boy twisted his arms and legs like a pretzel and screwed up his face in mock anguish. “I could never get used to this.”

  “There are other poses,” Thomas said. “For instance, savasana: corpse pose. All you have to do is lie still like you’re dead. It’s not so hard.”

  Thomas reached for a plate of idlis and his hand accidentally brushed against the boy’s arm. The boy smiled.

  That afternoon at the beach, Thomas and I practiced the headstand pose, which I had just learned that morning. I had trouble staying up even for a second and kept tumbling into the sand. Meanwhile, Thomas was serene in the pose.

  I crouched in front of him and said to his upside-down face, “You think you’re good? Listen to what Ravana did.”

  I told him the story. Ravana wanted Shiva to forgive him for all the bad things he had done, including kidnapping Sita, but Shiva wouldn’t. So Ravana stood on his head for a thousand years. When Shiva still refused to forgive him, Ravana, to prove his seriousness, chopped off his own head. Luckily, he had nine more. He stood on each head for a thousand years, chopping them off, one by one. Only after ten thousand years, when Ravana was about to chop off his last head, did Shiva finally agree to forgive him.

  “But it was a trick,” I said. “Ravana wasn’t really sorry. Or if he was, he wasn’t sorry enough. Despite his promises, he never changed.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Thomas said, still standing on his head, “all you’re saying is you’re saying, right? But weren’t you the one defending Ravana just the other day?”

  I shrugged. “Demons are complicated. They can be both good and bad.” I pushed Thomas over.

  That night, when it was time to go to bed, Thomas said he was restless and was going for a walk on the beach. When he came back, I asked, “What took you so long?”

  “It hasn’t been so long,” Thomas said.

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I heard Thomas breathing beside me. I imagined him, on his walk, coming across Miss Andhra Pradesh. The boy would have been leaning against a tree, his sarong flat against his thighs in the night breeze. I imagined Thomas spotting him and approaching. “Want that yoga lesson now?”

  I thought of a poem I had been translating, which described the goddess Kali straddling Lord Shiva’s dead body. Kali was fierce—a string of severed heads around her neck, her blood-stained tongue exposed, machete drawn—as she lowered herself upon Shiva’s dead, but erect, penis. Miraculously, the sexual act breathed life back into him.

  I imagined Thomas and Miss Andhra Pradesh taking turns practicing corpse pose in the sand.

  We returned to Bombay to find my grandmother’s health worse than ever. She refused to get out of bed except to use the toilet or take a bath, and even then she required help. The doctor said there wasn’t anything specifically wrong with her. She was just old and tired, and her body was giving out. She could persist for several years like this, or she could go tomorrow. At her age, the doctor said, a person who no longer wanted to live could essentially will herself to die.

  My grandmother called for help often, and Thomas answered her calls more often than I; he was leaving in a week and wanted to help while he could. He must have sensed I was feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of months of difficult caregiving. When he saw me feeling frustrated, he would send me on long walks. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “I’m here.”

  He had formed a connection with my grandmother that somehow I never had. I remembered a story he had told me about how his own grandmother, whom he had loved, had fallen ill while he was in college. It had been during finals week, and he had promised to see her when his exams were over, but she’d died too soon. Perhaps he was doing for my grandmother what he’d been unable to do for his own.

  My grandmother appreciated the attention. I noticed in particular that she seemed to need to be touched. She would offer any excuse. One time she complained about her earrings, large diamonds that had been part of her dowry. She said they were weighing her down. When Thomas went to remove them, his fingers brushed her ear, and I saw electricity travel up and down her body and light up her eyes. She handed him the key to the cupboard to deposit the diamonds for safekeeping. Another time she took his hand, placed it on her forehead, and asked if she felt feverish. When he said no and tried to withdraw his hand, she said, “Leave it longer, to be sure.” Thomas rested his hand on her forehead, gently stroking it until she fell asleep.

  On Thomas’s last night in India—after we had brushed our teeth and checked on my grandmother, and after Thomas had asked once again if I was sure I didn’t want him to extend his visit to help, and I’d said, yes, I was sure—I crawled into his trundle bed, kissed his ear, and whispered, “Thank you.” I continued kissing him, down his neck, across to the tender hollow between his collarbones, down his chest and torso. He shimmied his hips as I slid his shorts from his waist. I started to take his cock in my mouth. He moaned. Suddenly I stopped and pulled away. Thomas sat up. “What’s wrong?”

  “That’s the boy’s job,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the boy’s job. That’s Miss Andhra Pradesh’s job.”

  “What are you talking about? Wait, what do you think happened?”

  “There’s plenty of work for the boy.”

  Thomas stood up, pulled his shorts on, and walked to the other end of the room, where there was a chair. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Nothing happened between us. I swear.”

  I remembered the words from the phrase book, and said them in Malayalam.

  “Can’t the boy work any faster?”

  “I’m really sorry about what I did in New York,” Thomas said. “Really. I fucked up. But can’t we at least talk about this like mature adults?”

  “This room is filthy!”

  “Remember, you were the one who left.”

  “Filthy!”

  The next morning, as Thomas was finishing packing, my grandmother called us to her room. She was lying in bed. She said, “My heart is weak.” She pulled aside the thin sari cloth covering her torso. “Feel.” She was blouseless; her breasts were stretched and scarred. I recoiled.

  Thomas took my hand with both of his and placed my palm on my grandmother’s bare chest, holding it there. She breathed deeply. I tried to look her in the eyes, but I couldn’t. A moment later, Thomas released me. I found my grandmother’s red shawl draped over a chair, wrapped it around her, and left. I finished packing Thomas’s suitcase for him, while he sat by her side.

  On the way to the airport, Thomas asked if we could talk about what had happened the night before in the trundle bed, and I said no.

  Several minutes later, he asked what I had meant when I’d warned him, before he came, that he would see things in India that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  “Haven’t you seen things?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I want to know what you meant.”

  The week before that conversation with Thomas—the same conversation in which he’d told me he had cheated—I had been walking in Colaba in South Bombay. I was looking for a shop that sold carved wooden boxes. I turned onto a side street and stumbled across a woman lying in the middle of the sidewalk, completely naked. She was almost unrecognizable as a woman. Her skin was flaking, black, and charred, as if burned. Her eyes were white and wide open. Her right index finger was hooked between her legs, massaging her clitoris vigorously, violently. Passersby stepped around her, barely looking at all. No one stopped except me. She watche
d me watch her for a moment, her eyes wild, her finger furious, her face tensed as if with pain. Soon the passersby were glaring at me, as though it were I and not she who was crazy: crazy for stopping, for not turning away; crazy for having the audacity to look straight at what was there.

  “Nothing,” I told Thomas. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  When I returned from the airport, I found the card I had written Thomas, the one with the sheep with the Kleenex wedged in its hoof. Thomas had left it on my pillow. I read it before I went to bed. He was right, of course. I did sound naïve. I was naïve.

  In the days that followed, my grandmother kept asking for Thomas, wondering again and again where he had gone, unable or unwilling to remember. Not long after that, she died.

  I telephoned my parents. My grandmother’s phone still hadn’t been connected, so I had to call from the laundry. I told them to come right away.

  Outside, one of the boys from the wall approached me and tried to sell me a packet of Lipton instant chicken-noodle soup. When I refused, he said, “Go back to America,” and returned to his friend.

  The other boy shouted, “Go home! Your boyfriend’s pregnant!” The boys gave each other high fives.

  The funeral was a traditional affair. My father and I and the other men in our family shaved our heads and carried her body through the streets. The burden was heavy, and I realized how accustomed I had become in India to having other people do the hard work for me.

  According to tradition, we dropped coins periodically along our route. The street dwellers eagerly swept them up behind us. Our female relatives met us at a designated site by the sea. We rested my grandmother’s body across a pile of logs. My father said a prayer and lay a torch upon her.

  My parents and I spent the next few days sorting through my grandmother’s things, preparing the flat to be sold. Her locked cupboards, it turned out, held nothing special, odds and ends from her life—old clothes, scraps of paper, years’ worth of greeting cards. I found a toy car I remembered losing when I was ten—a sleek silver Aston Martin identical to the one James Bond drove. It had been my favorite. I collected the car, along with other items that seemed of marginal value, in a Benzer shopping bag, which I eventually delivered to the boys outside the laundry.