Dreaming in Hindi (23 page)

"You will be blacklisted by the Indian government," he said. "You will never be able to return to India." I imagined a functionary in the New York visa office snapping as he pushed my passport back, "It is known you have spoken to a dalit." It wasn't terrifically hard.

We paused to give me a moment for contrition. The evening picked up again as he regaled us with stories about the time terrorists had shot half the passengers on a plane he was on, then the next morning, he was on the first flight out. For a week after, Swami-ji and Vidhu had to teach standing side by side, to demonstrate that Swami-ji had been demoted. That requirement was soon dropped, and no other changes ever became evident. The visit had not been fruitless, however. The curriculum did improve, beginning with the quality of the weekly guest. No housewives he'd encountered on his way to check what the deal was with the mail, Swami-ji had evidently been told. For the debut upgrade, he announced he'd arranged for a special visitor, an activist from the community, a firebrand, an intellectual.

"
You will ask five questions.
" His tone was sure as he crisply passed out the prep sheets. "
This woman who is coming to the school is a crusader,
" he said with a smile of achievement. "
She is the author of many books, the woman you will meet today,
" he said, looking nothing like a man who was begging to be sent to Guyana to teach Hindi. "
This woman, she is a
dalit."

 

WHEN THE NOSEDIVE
that followed turned out to be Helaena's, I wasn't surprised to find that hurtle being analyzed all over town. By then, her face had often appeared in the papers, smiling demurely at various candle-hoisting events. She'd frequently been visible through the curtains of the maharana's car, or emerging from the snooty Mansai Plaza boutique calling to the sales force in the door, "Just send them to me at the palace." Her local renown had grown so, you'd have to have been blind and confined to a wheelchair to miss it.

Once, when I was walking down the street, my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a small stampede. Turning, I found five pimply Hindu guys huffing.

"Madam," the tallest, about nineteen, said. "Excuse me. Do you know," and he lowered his voice, "Helaena?"

Sure did, I said.

A shorter friend inhaled sharply. "Where is she?" he asked.

"Here," I said, meaning Udaipur. She'd been traveling. Their eyes widened, the boys went speechless, two gasped. Clearly, they thought I was saying, Right here, about to materialize in front of you.

"Oh, I love being me!" Helaena said annoyingly when I related this.

So when she had to flee the palace, the din of discussion that followed was no surprise. Dhanesh, the young goat who ran the Rose Garden restaurant, had the following meta-analysis: "Maybe she was proudy," he theorized. "She was getting free mobile phone. Free car. Maybe she was saying, 'Oh, I got all these things.' That is proudy." He was taking the long view, the karmic one.

But any proudiness—and certainly, there'd been some—had not, even indirectly, led to her departure, which had occurred in mid-November, about a week before. I was not about to tell Dhanesh what had, however, even though I knew, for Helaena had phoned me the night the maharana decided the bill had come due for the cable connection and all the French fries.

Two weeks before, I don't think she'd have called, but we'd recently gone on a weekend to Jaipur, and in the course of the trip, a friendship had set. Until then, what we'd had was, more exactly, an alliance. In the first weeks, I had not, truth be told, any intention of taking someone half my age seriously. Helaena had the same misgivings in the other direction, as evidenced by the time she grabbed my passport off a pile and, reading out the date of birth, exclaimed, "Why, I don't even
know
how old that would make someone." But that was early, before we'd both looked around and calculated what the friendship pickings were.

The occasion of the Jaipur trip was my birthday, which I'd been planning to spend hunkered down and oblivious. "Uh-uh," Helaena had said. "You've been sick half your adult life," something I'd recently melodramatically declared while confiding to her my medical history. "Do you want to be unhappy on your birthday? Or any day? I'm going to remind you of that periodically." She also, I knew, regarded Jaipur as a shopping mecca, but all the same, I was touched.

For the big day, we hit a Pizza Hut. Months of curry were making me desperate. We tried to go to McDonald's first, in fact, took a rickshaw a half-hour out, then discovered all they sold were Mc-Aloos, potato burgers. There was Ronald, and there were the arches and the children's play area, and there they were trying to palm off fake McDonald's, Helaena said, put out. Like
The Martian Chronicles,
I agreed. We took a rickshaw back, and the next day for lunch reverted to real life, the one we'd come into.

From the veranda of a palace hotel, we watched a peacock fan the air. The weight of his tail made him stagger like a drunk. Over
aloo gobi
yellow with cumin, we told each other stories about our lives, adjusting for decades the way I'd learned to with Renee. We did twenty minutes on whom we'd liked in eighth grade to buoy Helaena's spirits, twenty on careers to lever mine, and she contributed with good cheer, though she didn't yet have one.

The stories entered the family realm. I said I'd been a stepmother. She mentioned having one. Her father, an academic like her mother, had moved out when she was eight, had been asked to, it sounded like. For a while afterward, she told me, he'd dogged them.

"He wouldn't stop showing up," she said. "Even when we moved. A shrink told me that didn't necessarily mean he wanted me. It seemed like that, but it didn't mean that." The father had gone on to have two girls in another marriage, not the two, I supposed, that were in a photograph on her wall, alongside the maharana's. I pegged them as the two more her mother had had, for she then told a story about how once, when she'd gotten an internship in her father's town, her stepmother had barred her from the condo.

"I could stay two nights," she said, and paused. The peacock, down the lawn, was making racketing prehistoric sounds. "Two nights," she submitted. "That was it," and she laughed. "She just didn't want me there."

Jaipur was the first time I heard her voice go flat, no lilt, no slow amused roll. The second was the mid-November night my cell phone went off in my room, a stuttering, close to midnight, that made me quickly sit up. "You're going to have to hear this. You're my only friend here," Helaena said, starting off on a drawl. The next sentence, she was uncurled, all business.

At a reception that night, she said, she'd worn her finest sari, a Banarsi silk thick as cream. This was the first palace affair she'd been summoned to in weeks, but Sri-ji, what relief, was himself again, teasing her under his breath when she circled past, casting appraising glances while nodding to a diplomat. Before the meal was laid out, he cocked his head. When she stopped beside him, she mimed surprise, as if she'd just now found him. She smiled conspiratorially:
The palace wags had nothing on them.
A project had come up, he said. He needed her support. They were going to have to move on this thing fast. He could tell her more when they met after dinner, and he named a room she didn't know, one that sounded dim and far away.

When she crept in after searching the halls, she discovered no servants holding trays that sparkled with diamonds, the way the books said the preliminaries went. No naked girls frolicking in a bubble-bath pool, beckoning her to join them. All she found was that up-close, the maharana's beard was more
paan
stained than she'd thought. When he smiled and described the project he was imagining, she saw how blackened the betel nut juice had left his teeth.

To this day, the central mystery of India for me remains how Helaena could have been shocked by the encounter, but I could hear, at that moment, she was. Her voice caught, lost its high scalloping, till she sounded small and unadorned, till she sounded how she must have back when she'd taught Sunday school in Pulaski, Tennessee. Another puzzlement is why, to fend him off, she thought a foolproof dodge would be to claim she was frigid. "All he said was we'd have to take care of that," she said sadly on the phone.

The line did buy her time, though, and that Friday, when the maharana left to visit his wife in Bombay, I corralled two rickshaws and pulled up at a side entrance to the palace around dinnertime. If fleeing implies haste, Helaena didn't do that, but she was gone by the time he got back.

A few days later, I ran into her at Renee's hotel, where she'd moved in her self-deposed exile. How was she? I asked.

"Why, I am so mad," she said. I waited for her vowels to stop elongating.

But why? I asked.

"Well," she began, "last year, you know, someone took naked photos of me?"

"They took naked photos," I said flatly. I hadn't.

"Yes," she said. "And, you know, they sent them to me at the palace."

To the palace?

"Yes, and before I moved out, I tore them up." This said primly. "And I made sure to throw them away." This, ruefully. "But the houseboys found them and pasted them back together, and now they're circulating all over the palace."

She brushed a speck off her knee, as it was taking me longer than Meena to get the gist. Then I did, and my eyes bugged out.
Here you go,
she'd in essence told the maharana.
Here you go, bud; take a look at what you're missing.

And the photos weren't all that Helaena had left behind, I discovered several weeks after when Piers asked me to the royal birthday party, a lavish annual event. Everyone in town knew that fat nawabs and princes so handsome they robbed the court artists of their abilities would arrive glittering with jewels. Court musicians would compose ragas for the occasion that were denser and more narcotizing than opium. The palace bards, the
charans,
would write verses as perfumed as sandalwood paste. There'd be fragrant platters of mutton and fowl, melons carved with images of geese and swirling fish, though the thirty-six Mr. World contestants I found when I arrived were a complete surprise. Beauty pageants were all the rage then in India, to such a degree, the governor of Gujarat had just outlawed them in his state. The country had gone pageant mad since India had taken the Miss Universe title a few years running, but it was hard to get people to let their sisters and daughters work it onstage, so what you ended up with were a lot of pec show extravaganzas.

The evening got off to a labored start. I had to spend a good part of it in the bathroom, tugging on my sari. Not having put one on before, I didn't know that unless the fit was plumb, any movement, walking or breathing, would cause the fabric to start to bunch at the middle. Some algorithm of sari silk would take over, the drift would gather force, till you'd find you were bulbous about the waist, like you had on a giant diaper. Every half-hour, I had to mince into the ladies' room in what, except for the clutching, might have been mistaken for a stately slide, till I waylaid a partygoer who was washing her hands and got her to rewrap me.

The slow strolls were very nearly worth it, though, for the chance they afforded to admire the courtyard of the zenana, the old harem quarters, site of the festivities. The quadrangle was dazzling that night, transformed by candlelight and the guests. Delicate women in gold-lined saris were wearing gems the size of fruit. Men in fitted white britches and with diamond buttons on their jackets had postures as straight as their swords. The zenana glittered even at the foreigners' end, where the Mr. Worlds were seated across five tables, hair coiffed and gleaming.

Piers, who'd made a beeline there, dragged Mr. Germany back. Mr. Germany settled in at our table and detailed the rules of competition, repeatedly winking as if he'd been interviewed too often. Several of his companions joined him: Mr. Smile, Mr. Photogenic, Mr. Physique. Mr. Argentina, who had Fabio hair. Mr. Swaziland explained that when he wasn't in beauty competitions, he was employed as a financial adviser. "Best believe I'm handing over all my rupees pronto," I said sotto voce to Piers.

"What, no Mr. America?" I inquired of the table, after a glance around.

"There was someone in Mr. Manhattan Manhunt, but that was as far as it went," a skinny Mr. Landmass said in a clearly pitying tone.

"That's outrageous! I'm contacting the embassy!" I mugged. Mr. L. M. nodded—good idea. An official hurried over. The misters were collected and taken to be presented to the maharana. On the way back, they broke into a spontaneous chest-to-chest catwalk strut, reflexively, without being told.

"What, you've never met him? Come on," Piers said. He stopped to greet the nawab of Gujarat, a portly young man in a white Nehru tunic, then escorted me to where the Divine Mr. M. was standing, somber-faced, by a cannon. "Divine" here is a literal, not figurative, description. The rulers of Mewar are descended, it's believed, from the god Shiva. At introductory range, this one wasn't intimidating in appearance—about five foot four, with sprouting werewolf hair on his ears and the wide, clear glasses AV crew members wore in the 1970s—but I was terrified all the same. For this was when I discovered what else Helaena left behind.

"One minute," he said after performing Braille calculations on my face with his scowl. "You are an American here?" he asked.

Sort of, I said. I had some idea where this was going.

"Do you know Helaena?" he repeated.

I'd possibly seen her at my school, I replied.

And that's when I learned what else she'd left: one rankled potentate. The maharana's surname, like all Rajputs', was Singh—"Lion," and this one now roared.

"She is crazy. Helaena is crazy. This girl is very very crazy," my host thundered, then calming himself, invited me to spend Christmas Eve at his quarters. He had concerns he wanted to air. "We are in our office at nine-thirty in the morning," he said, directing me to phone that day.

As Piers steered me back to the table, my hair looked spiked, the way Swami-ji's had. But later, I reflected that while the maharana's growl had caught me off-guard, that wasn't what was really startling about the night. Helaena had, after all, just turned a 1,200-year-old tradition of royal rampaging on its head. A bellow was only in order.