Maya (10 page)

I remember the unsettling silence of the funeral home, the rubber soles of my Keds brushing against the deep pile of the carpet, my mother's hand holding mine as we approached the casket. I was just tall enough to look over the edge. Inside was a gentle, familiar face, eyes closed, asleep in a wash of creamy satin. I was profoundly confused. I could not believe what the adults seemed to be saying, that this man I knew so well had simply vanished from my life. Was he not still here with us, sleeping? Would he not awaken, when he was rested, and invite me to sit and watch, once again, as he employed his old pocket knife to remove the peel from an apple in one long, winding strip of red and white? “You get a wish,” he always told me, “if the peel doesn't break.”

Shall I wish—on an apple peel, or a monkey's paw—that we might live forever?

I was a small child, struggling to understand. I could not see, then, that any effort to understand death is futile because death is nothing that can be grasped and held. Death is a blunt, unadorned absence, a black hole at the center of thought into which our hopes and dreams pour like light from distant stars.

There were no caskets here at Harishchandra Ghat, no stiff carpeting, no funerary bouquets. Only sand and water and fire.

As I watched, several men trudged up and down the stairs, each of them shouldering a load of split logs held firmly against his back by a woven strap that ran underneath the wood and up around his forehead. They were barefoot, dressed only in shorts and frayed t-shirts impregnated with soot. Their skinny legs were taut with muscle. Just above me, two men labored at splitting the knotted root of a mango tree. One of them held a wedge while the other swung an iron hammer that fell with a heavy, repetitive
thunk
. In the midst of this activity the bodies of the dead reclined on their fiery beds, smoke billowing up around them and spreading out over the river in a dense haze.

My eyes stung as I leaned forward, straining to see through air rippling with heat. Hidden in among the flames of the nearest pyre I could make out the contours of a human leg, the foot jutting out at an odd angle. Flesh bubbled and peeled away from the calf like blackened strips of bark. A man stepped forward from among the small group of mourners and approached the end of the fire farthest from where I stood. He gripped a stiff bamboo rod tightly in both hands. He paused and bent forward, staring intently into the flames. After a moment he seemed to find what he was looking for. He straightened up and planted his feet firmly in the sand. And then in a single motion he cocked back his arms and thrust the rod forward like a lance, plunging its tip directly into the crown of the skull, shattering bone, freeing consciousness from the burning rags of desire.

8

B
ACK IN
D
ELHI
, I dreamed of returning to Banaras and settling in there. I imagined myself living like Ed and Richard, meditating and reading Sanskrit in my own room overlooking the Ganges. But these fantasies were soon interrupted by plans that had been made weeks before, through the mail, to telephone Judith. We had agreed on two possible dates. My journal shows pages of contradictory notes on what I wanted to say to her, all of them infused with my apprehension at the prospect of talking again after being separated for so many months.

Telephoning from India to the States was an ordeal. The call had to be booked for a particular time at least twenty-four hours in advance. As the designated hour approached I peddled through the purple dusk of early evening to the Fulbright office. Ambassador taxis crawled through the smog like beetles, finding their way among a riotous swarm of bicycles and motor scooters. I glided past four barefoot men hauling a cargo of long, rusty iron rods loaded precariously across a wooden cart, the ends extending so far out in front and back that they sagged almost to the pavement. On Ashoka Road, just north of India Gate, I came upon a Tata truck collapsed in the middle of traffic; its rear axle lay shattered under a towering cargo of sugarcane stalks. One of its tires had spun off the road, and someone had set the rubber on fire. Dense plumes of smoke billowed up from orange flames. A group of men, heads wrapped in woolen scarves, stood around it warming themselves, drinking chai and laughing.

When I arrived at the Fulbright offices, I found Mahmud sitting on a cane stool outside the front gate, doing service as night guard. He saw me coming and stood up and offered an abbreviated military salute as I pulled my bike inside the yard. The lounge was completely deserted at this hour, the staff gone home to their suppers. I sat down on the vinyl couch next to the phone, where a single lamp had been left on, and waited for the operator to call.

When Judith's phone rang in Chicago, it would be midmorning on
Saturday. I wondered if Bruce would be there, the two of them in bed together, curled up on the black satin sheets I had given Judith for her birthday the previous year. He might even answer the phone. What will I say? How can I possibly deal with that?

Fuck him
, I thought to myself.
If she can't answer the goddamn phone when she's known for a month exactly when it's going to ring, then fuck them both.

I sat on the couch growing ever more nervous and impatient, my palms sweating, when all of a sudden the phone went off. I took a deep breath and lifted the receiver. The lilting accent of an Indian operator crackled somewhere off in the distance.

“Mr. Stanley Harrington, please.”

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “This is Stanley Harrington.”

“Your call to the United States has gone through. Please hold the line.”

From far, far away I could hear the sound of Judith's phone ringing. And ringing. Either she wasn't home or she wasn't answering. I let it continue until the operator finally came back on the line and suggested that I book another call for later. Judith and I had agreed that if, for any reason, the first call didn't work out, we'd try again on Sunday evening.

I got through the night, somehow, and the next day, only to find myself waiting all over again by the phone. This time the moment the bell sounded I pounced on it, wrenched the receiver from its cradle and jammed it to my ear. When the call went through I began counting the rings:
One. Two. Three
. There was a distant click followed by a moment of silence. And then I heard the faint sound of a woman's voice, tentative, almost frightened, but unmistakably Judith.

“Hello?” Electrons collided with each other, pushed their way through the line, snapped, and buzzed as if exerting stupendous effort. “Stanley?”

“Judith?”

“Stanley?” More fuzz, then a rasping sound, like a file being dragged over the edge of a tin can. I thought of the old police radios on Dragnet. “Oh, Stanley, is it really you?”

“What?”

“Is it you, Stanley?”

“I can barely hear you!”

“What?”

“I SAID . . .” by now I was practically yelling into the receiver, “I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU!” Mahmud stuck his head in the door, saw I was on the phone, and abruptly returned to his post.

This incoherent exchange went on for a minute or so until we adjusted to the poor connection.

“I'm so sorry, Stanley.”

“Sorry?” I could tell she wasn't faking it. “For what?”

“Yesterday, when you called. I was helping Marsha and Phil move up to their new place in Evanston—Phil got a job at Northwestern, a one-year contract or something. They were supposed to drive me back Saturday morning . . .”

“They have a car?”

“They had to buy one, I guess, when he got the job. But the stupid thing wouldn't start. Because of the cold. At least that's what Phil said. He had to walk to a Kmart and get some jumping cables, and it took, like,
forever
. I'm sorry. Really.”

I swallowed. “It's okay.”

I wished her a happy twenty-sixth birthday. She thanked me. The line sputtered and popped. We both started to speak at once, then retreated into an awkward silence, each waiting for the other to try again. Even under the best of circumstances, it's not easy to hold an intimate conversation on the phone, without body language and eye contact, and this was far from the best of circumstances. An odd whining noise rose to a crescendo and then trailed off into the void.

“Stanley, I got a letter from Beth.” Beth was a good friend of ours, and I'd written to her several times. “She says you might be staying on in India.”

“She does?” I managed to sound astonished.

“Longer than the time you were supposed to, I mean.”

“She told you that?”

“But is it true? Are you thinking about not coming back this spring?”

I should not have written to Beth about my thoughts of staying on. But it was too late to think about that now. I couldn't tell whether Judith sounded simply hurt, or incredulous, or both. Her voice was so small, so distant.

“It's a different world here,” I stammered. “It's been hard, you know, just getting used to everything.”

“What do you mean?”

The line crackled and popped.

“Judith?” More static. “Are you still there?”

“Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me now?”

“Yes, I can hear you.”

“I said,” she repeated, “what do you mean?”

I hesitated. “I don't know what I mean . . . I mean it's strange. By the time you adapt to life here . . . something inside you has changed. You're utterly miserable, but you don't want to leave after working so hard to get
used
to being miserable.” I pretended to laugh, but what came up was more like a snort.

“You don't want to come back home?”

I couldn't think of how to respond to this, and for a while neither of us spoke. I listened to the static while precious seconds dropped like tiny sparks into the night air. At last her voice emerged from the steady hum of electrical silence.

“Do you like it there?”

“I don't know, Judith.”

This time she faked the laugh. “You don't seem to know much of anything.”

“Yeah, I guess I do . . . I mean, yes. I suppose I do like it here. Somehow.”

No response to that. Instead, she told me about a friend of ours who had recently moved to Chicago. They had gone to lunch together just the day before in an Indian restaurant not far from where he lived. She told me everything she had ordered: “some kind of mushy spinach and cheese, and tea with about a ton of sugar.”

“But it was good,” she added, in a faintly apologetic tone.

She talked about her job. I told her I was changing the focus of my research from Vedanta to Mahayana Buddhism. We exchanged this sort of disjointed information for another few minutes, punctuated by cries of “Hello? Hello? Are you there?” while I strained to take hold of the familiar sound of her voice as if it were something tangible, something I could touch and smell and taste.

In the end it was me who couldn't go on.

“It's hard to say goodbye,” she said. “Oh Stanley, I wanted this to work.” She was crying.

“Judith . . . I love you.”

“Do you? Do you really love me, Stanley?”

“Yes, of course.”
Of course
? What a totally stupid thing to say.

“Please write,” she said. “The letters help.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Soon, okay?”

“I'll do it tonight. I . . .” But there was nothing left to say. “Goodbye, Judith.”

“Goodbye, Stanley.”

I let the receiver fall from my ear, then realized she was still on the line and snatched it back up just in time to hear a soft, feminine voice disappearing into the ionic haze.

“. . . you so much.”

“Judith?” I pushed the receiver so tightly against my ear that it hurt.

She was gone.

9

S
HORTLY AFTER MY PHONE
encounter with Judith, there was a cocktail party at the Fulbright office, a reception honoring Frank Davis—the epigraphist who had been tagged for death by Margaret Billings. Since Davis was on my dissertation committee, I reluctantly decided to go over and mingle. Ever since my conversation with Margaret, I had more or less avoided the office. I never had been comfortable there, but lately it had gotten worse. I felt like an imposter, as though I might be exposed at any moment and arrested for impersonating a legitimate fellow.

It was almost nine when I arrived. The guard let me through the gate and I walked unobtrusively into the lounge, where the party was already well underway. There must have been forty or fifty people in all, mostly other American scholars, either new arrivals in India or those stationed in Delhi. Their Indian colleagues and research associates were scattered here and there among the group, several of them poised uncomfortably at the periphery of small circles of men and women who were talking and laughing loudly. It was evident that people were drinking hard. Waiters dressed in regal white coats festooned with rows of brass buttons circulated through the room bearing silver trays stacked with pakoras, samosas, and other South Asian hors d'oeuvres. Under one of the festive red turbans I recognized Mahmud. He looked my way and nodded a silent, formal greeting.

The typewriter had been removed from a table near the kitchen and replaced with various bottles of duty-free liquor and an assortment of Indian beer. Another of the regular office staff had been pressed into service behind the bar. Next to him stood the director, a distinguished Sikh in his late fifties, short, with the obligatory upper-class Indian paunch and a friendly smile full of white teeth. He was wearing an emerald green turban that perfectly matched his silk tie, a white linen shirt, and a conservative brown suit with barely perceptible, green pinstripes. As I approached the bar he extended his right hand, which carried with it two heavy gold rings, one set with a diamond, the other with a row of pink rubies.

“Good evening, Mr. Harrington. How are you this evening?”