Quarantine: Stories (3 page)

Bapuji said he needed to use the toilet. My mother helped him to the bathroom. When he got up, I noticed a brown stain on his bedsheet. His gown was open in the back, and I could see a bit of dried excrement on his backside and his skin peeling like birch bark. I remembered my parents telling me the TB medication made his skin dry.

When Bapuji was finished, he called for my mother, and she went into the bathroom and helped him clean up. I buzzed for the nurse to change the bed.

Watching my mother, I realized this could be her future: he could fall seriously ill, and she could spend many years taking care of him. My mother also knew this. I could tell by the matter-of-fact way she went about her tasks—cleaning him, rinsing his drinking cup, flipping his pillows—the blank look on her face while she did them, as though she were the one fading away.

J
eremy and I wake early the morning we are leaving my parents’ house. We eat cereal while my mom makes sandwiches for our car ride. She has cooked some extra Indian food for us to take with us, and she puts the curries and subjis and rotis in a small cooler and sets them in the foyer next to our luggage. “Everything is cooked. All you have to do is heat it up when you’re hungry.”

We are all standing in the foyer.

“I’m glad you guys came,” she says.

“Me too,” my dad says. “Bapuji!” he shouts up the stairs. “The boys are leaving.”

It is silent upstairs. My father shouts again, “Bapuji!” Still nothing.

“He is tired,” I say. “Let him stay in his room. I’ll go up.”

His bedroom door is shut. I knock, but he doesn’t answer. I open it. The room is dark. Bapuji is in bed. His broken eyeglasses are on the bedside table, on top of the Bhagavad Gita. He has the covers pulled over his head.

“Bapuji,” I say, quietly, “I am leaving.” He doesn’t answer. He is either asleep or ignoring me.

I remember so many years ago, my mother in bed after her father died, the covers pulled over her head, me approaching, hearing her cry, not sure how to comfort her.

I remember also my grandfather’s story about comforting his brother as he was dying.

Now, I don’t approach my grandfather. I don’t know whether he is crying under the covers. I stand in the doorway another minute, watching him, and then I leave.

When I go downstairs, my father asks if I did pranaam, and I say yes.

Jeremy drives most of the way home. We don’t talk much. I fiddle with the radio, which usually annoys him, but today he doesn’t say anything.

Back in New York, our apartment smells terrible, like we forgot to take the garbage out, or something died between the walls. Even though it is cold out, we open a couple of windows.

I walk into the living room to open another window, and I see the answering machine is blinking the number eight. I figure some of the messages are from my friends or from Jeremy’s friends, but I’m sure some are from my family. Probably my mom or dad. They’ll want to know we arrived safely. Maybe one is from Asha. Maybe there is one from my grandfather. I don’t play the messages.

I go into the kitchen, take my mom’s food from the cooler, and put it in the freezer. Jeremy is in the bedroom unpacking, and I can hear him opening and closing dresser drawers.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“Starving,” he says.

Jeremy wants some of my mom’s Indian food, so I take out a couple of Tupperware containers and pop them in the microwave.

As for me, I can’t stomach it. I reach for a box of spaghetti and set a pot of water on the stove to boil.

H
is clothes make me think he is one of us. Form-fitting T-shirt, Diesel jeans, leather loafers with contrast stitching and square toes. It is an outfit I would wear.

Later, I will notice he wears the same clothes every day. Later, I will notice the holes.

We meet him our first day in town. We are at the café waiting for pancakes and porridge, a reprieve from the heavy curries we have been eating for days. The food and the décor—sleek European modern—make us feel we are somewhere else, except for the café’s open front, which faces the street, and exposes us to its sights and sounds: a woman crouched with a bundle of sticks, sweeping; a feral dog begging for scraps, skittish from being beaten, but hungry enough to beg nonetheless.

He is sitting with a cup of tea at a nearby table. He asks me the time. He says his name is Rajesh. I say, “I’m Sid. This is Darnell.”

Rajesh says he likes my notebook, the one covered in raw silk. I say, “I bought it at Target.” He says, “Such a beautiful color.”

Darnell invites him to join us, and Rajesh slides over. Our pancakes and porridge arrive. Nothing comes for Rajesh.

“I ate earlier,” he says.

The way he looks at our food, I know this isn’t true.

As we start eating, Darnell reminds me it is time for our Larium, and I fish two pills from my daypack, one for Darnell, one for myself. I also swallow a Pepto-Bismol prophylactically.

Rajesh asks us, “Where are you from?”

“America,” Darnell says.

Rajesh says to me, “But you look Indian.”

“My parents are.”

“You are not?”

I shrug. “And you? Where are you from?”

Rajesh gestures up the street. “I have lived here all my life.”

I say, “When I first saw you, I wouldn’t have guessed. I would have thought maybe you were from London.”

“Thank you,” he says, “Maybe someday . . .”

He asks how long we are visiting, and Darnell says maybe a few days, maybe a week or two. “You must advise us. What should we see? Where should we eat?”

“What do you like?”

“Pizza,” I say.

Darnell says, “You come to India and all you want is pizza and pasta and vegetable lo mein.”

Rajesh says there is a restaurant nearby where I can get pizza. He explains it is owned by the same man who owns the café, a German tourist who came many years ago and never left. The restaurant is called Savage Garden. I raise my eyebrow when Rajesh says this—the use of the word “savage” by the German seems wrong—but Rajesh doesn’t seem bothered, his tone is flat. He says Savage Garden the way I say Olive Garden. I say, “Aren’t you offended?” He says, “He is a nice man.”

I think I remember seeing him, the German, sitting in the café just before we met Rajesh. Darnell had pointed him out: a fat man in a silk kurta accompanied by a young, handsome Indian man.

I open my notebook to copy the address of the restaurant. As I am flipping to find a blank page, Rajesh notices a sketch.

“Who drew that?”

“An artist we met in one of the palaces in Jaipur,” I say. “We took a tour. He had a stall.”

Rajesh says, “Were his paintings good?”

“Typical,” I say. “Mostly miniatures, in the Mughal style, painted on parchment and silk, the kind you see everywhere. His were better than most. He drew this elephant in my notebook because he wanted us to buy a painting. He came from a long line of artists; he was proud. He said the men in his family had been artists for four generations, that they had painted portraits for four generations of maharajas, and all these paintings were hanging together in the maharaja’s private residence.”

When I am finished telling Rajesh about the artist, he asks to see my notebook. He finds an empty page and pulls a ballpoint pen from his back pocket. Quickly, he sketches a small elephant, very different from the one the artist in Jaipur drew. Compared to the fine brushstrokes of the Jaipur artist’s elephant, Rajesh’s elephant is a cartoon. “I am an artist, too,” he says.

Darnell says, “Very nice.”

“Soon I will start classes at J.J. School of Art in Mumbai.”

Rajesh says the school’s name in a grand voice, as though we should be impressed. I am. I know the school. It is famous.

“My paintings are on the Internet,” he says. “A French couple bought some. They own an art gallery. There is a website. When you have time, we can go to an Internet café together, and I will show you. Do you read French?”

Darnell and I shake our heads.

“Maybe I will go to France,” Rajesh says. “I will bring the French couple more paintings.”

After a few minutes he says, “Let’s do this. We are friends. I will show you around and help you with everything you need while you are here. Any sights you want to see, any food you want to eat, any people you want to meet—I will help you. Then, one day you can come visit me at my house. We will have tea, and you can look at my paintings. If you like, you can buy.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to buy anything. I had made a promise to myself.

A month before we came to India, some friends of ours, having recently returned to New York from a trip to Kenya, invited us to their apartment for dinner. They cooked steamed cornmeal and collard greens with cubed beef and said, “This is a traditional Kenyan meal.” They showed us photographs from their trip. On the living-room floor, they spread out all the items they had brought back: batik wall hangings, soapstone statues of stylized human figures with long necks and earlobes, wood carvings of giraffes and gazelles. With each item, the couple told an accompanying anecdote: one about being in the bazaar and having to bargain fiercely with a one-toothed woman, another about wanting to buy a set of wooden serving bowls but being directed to a shop that sold lingerie instead. They called the items “artifacts,” and invited us to pick one. We chose a soapstone pencil cup.

That night, on the subway home, holding the soapstone pencil cup, I told Darnell, “I don’t want to return from India with a suitcase full of trinkets and funny stories to tell my friends. I don’t want to be that kind of tourist.”

“What kind of tourist do you want to be?”

“I don’t know. But maybe if I don’t buy anything, I can find out.”

Darnell tells Rajesh now, “We would love for you to show us around.”

W
e don’t want anyone to know where we are staying. We are embarrassed. But everyone asks—the shopkeepers, the waiters in restaurants, the young men loitering outside shop fronts—and the town is too small for us to lie.

I can see their faces change when we tell them. They don’t understand. They have seen the hotel’s marble façade, the silver-and-glass mosaics of peacocks flanking the entrance, the turbaned doormen who stand all day in the heat. They have heard about the rooftop swimming pool with the three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the city. How can I explain to them that, to us, it is not expensive? I want to say,
Back in America, I eat ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches every day. We are not rich.

We wouldn’t be able to afford the hotel were it not for the drought. It is the monsoon season, and the rains are heavy everywhere but here. The town has had bad luck for several years in a row, leaving its main tourist attraction—the lake—bone-dry for the first time in thirty years. Tourism is down, room rates slashed. Even then, we had to bargain.

The other reason we are able to afford the room is because my parents are paying: a detail that bothers Darnell, uncomfortable about taking money from his boyfriend’s parents.

I tell him not to worry. I tell him that forty years ago, they, too, visited this city, on their honeymoon, and someone else paid: my mother’s father.

Because of the drought, and the drop in tourism, the shops are empty. Everyone is idle. The drivers outside our hotel recline in the backseats of their auto rickshaws. They shout to us as we walk by, calling out popular tourist destinations: “Jagdish Temple. Sunset Point. Sixty rupees only.” They are disheartened when they see we have rented bicycles. They laugh at the floppy sunhat I wear reflexively from years of my mother telling me to stay out of the sun, warning, “If you get too dark, no one will want to marry you.”

Outside our hotel we meet another boy, about the same age as Rajesh, and an artist, too. He introduces himself as Carlone. When I ask about the name he says it is after a character from
The Godfather
. “My father took inspiration from him.” Carlone puffs out his chest. “So do I.”

I have never seen or read
The Godfather
, and I do not know who Carlone is or what he does. I do not know if he is a hero or a villain, whether he is sympathetic or not. But I do not trust this Carlone.

He has a shop just across from our hotel, which he keeps with four other young men from his village. He calls them his brothers. He is the leader, because he speaks the best English. They all live in the shop and sleep on the floor at night. They have no customers, so they spend all day sitting out front in plastic chairs.

Every day as we bicycle back and forth, Carlone shouts, “When will you come see my shop? When will you come have tea?”

One day he stops us by stepping in front of our bicycles. “Please come in.”

“We are in a rush,” I say.

Darnell is less brusque. “Your shop looks new.”

“It is. We have been here less than a year. Before that, we were farmers in the village. Then there was no money, so we left and came here. Please come in. Look at the paintings.”

“We are not interested in paintings,” I say. “We are not going to buy. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

“At least you can look. At least you can drink tea with me.”

“We are late meeting someone,” I say.

Carlone knows Rajesh has been showing us around town. Everyone knows. As we are bicycling away, he says, “Why do you go with that boy?”

Darnell says, “Why not?”

Carlone says, “It isn’t right.”

R
ajesh wants to show us the town’s three famous palaces: City Palace, where the maharaja spent his winters; Lake Palace, where he summered; Monsoon Palace, where he weathered the rains.

The most spectacular, by far, is Lake Palace. It is long and marble, and is designed to look like it is floating in the middle of the lake. But with the lake dry, the effect is ruined. The palace looks bloated and beached. The boats that normally ferry guests back and forth from the palace to shore have been replaced by camels and elephants and Tata SUVs. In the dry lake bed, we see children playing cricket, families picnicking, cows grazing.

Rajesh tells us the palace was converted into a hotel shortly after Independence, when the British left India and the maharaja had to find alternate forms of income.

I already know about Lake Palace, because it is where my parents stayed on their honeymoon.

I also know about it because it is prominently featured in a James Bond movie,
Octopussy
, which I saw as a child with my parents. My parents rarely took me to movies, not wanting to spend the money. But they were proud to see India in a major film, even if the portrayal was somewhat unflattering, the Indians clownish.

Octopussy
is shown every night in town, at one hotel or another, advertised on wooden signs outside the establishments. One of the hotels uses the original movie poster, with Bond standing, holding a gun, three women hidden behind him, their arms extended, so that he looks like he has eight arms, like an octopus, or a Hindu god. But most of the other hotels don’t use this poster; they have designed their own posters, painted in exaggerated, hyperreal colors, in the style of Hindi film advertising. In these posters, the stars are barely recognizable as themselves and look more like Hindi film stars. Roger Moore resembles Shah Rukh Khan; Maud Adams, Madhuri Dixit.

In the movie—which we see that night, at Rajesh’s insistence, my first viewing since I was a child—Lake Palace is occupied by a sexy, wealthy Englishwoman. Her father was a member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, like Bond, but she has taken a different route. She is the head of an organized crime ring, consisting of other beautiful white women, all living with her in Lake Palace. When Bond asks her where she finds so many young Western women, she says she finds them in India, wandering. She doesn’t know what they are looking for, she says, but they are everywhere.

W
e tell Rajesh we want to see the real Rajasthan. He says OK.

We expect him to take us to some part of town where tourists never go. Or maybe to a nearby village, a
real
village, not one of the fake villages with gift shops and billboards on the highway.

Instead, he takes us to an old mansion in town that has been converted into a cultural center. We sit on the floor in a covered courtyard and watch what are billed as traditional Rajasthani classical and folk performances, though it is clear they are designed especially for tourists.

In one of the acts, marionettes engage in a salacious, pelvis-thrusting dance, which sends titters through the audience and makes me feel uncomfortable. In another, women in mirrored head coverings and ankle bells dance around a fire.