Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (14 page)

He lifted the window shade and looked out. India coming up below, like a woman sprawled in the sun. Daylight, rugged brown
hills, green splotches of jungle. The cabin lights came on, breakfast was announced. He didn’t feel like eating much but puttered
around with fruit and toast, knowing it might be a while before he ate again.

The plane came down over the jumbled spread of Madras, port city on the Bay of Bengal. Estimated population over four million.
India treats such numbers casually, however, since the cities have a constant flow in and out, mostly in, of a wandering people.
India is on the move, that’s the dominant impression Michael always had. Look anywhere in the countryside or in the cities,
and there are people walking, riding bicycles, hanging off roaring buses or leaning out of train windows. Moving… moving… India.

He walked in from the plane past men holding military rifles. Long line at the desk for those with foreign passports. Michael
settled himself. You don’t hurry India. India has its own style, its own pace, and high-strung Westerners who demand all tasks
be carried out with speed and crisp efficiency don’t do very well there. Warm and humid, and Michael was glad to be traveling
light. The brown face above a dark green uniform looked at his passport, checked the ninety-day visa, and pounded the stamp.

Customs was no problem since Michael wasn’t carrying anything of value except cash and traveler’s checks. But he was bringing
in more than $1,000 U.S., and a form was required. India loved forms, though Michael had always been skeptical about where
these forms eventually found a home. It was hard to believe that a currency official somewhere actually paid attention to
the millions of handwritten documents gushing from the pens of travelers: “Hmmm, I see that Michael Tillman from Cedar Bend,
USA, brought thirty-five hundred dollars with him on 2 December. We’ll need to keep track of him in this country with nearly
one billion people and a telephone system that, at best, wobbles along.”

Outside the protection of a large Indian airport, no rules applied. Touts, hundreds of them, pushing whatever could be imagined.
Maybe a few rupees could be bilked from the tall white guy with the knap-sack. Except he looked a little roadwise, no luggage,
looked like a hard traveler. It would be better to move on to someone with a little more fat. Thousands of people were milling
around, coming and going, many of them simply hung on for the entertainment value provided by a major airport. The cops kept
most of them outside the airport, where they pressed their faces against dusty glass and waited for passengers to exit.

A tourist desk in the lobby was actually open for business, which was a new twist. India was apparently working harder at
getting gringos to come and leave some foreign exchange on their way through. On Michael’s earlier visits, he had the clear
sense nobody cared whether you came or didn’t, whether you died in the customs line or went home.

The man at the desk spoke understandable English. Michael said he wanted to go to Pondicherry. The man told him it was a three-hour
ride by car if the traffic was heavy and would be happy to arrange a car and driver for Michael. He quoted a price of $30
U.S. That sounded steep for India, and Michael said as much.

“Oooh, but you see, it is a six-hour round trip for the driver, since he must go to Pondicherry and come back empty. So you
must pay for both ways.”

Michael knew better. He knew the driver would hang around Pondicherry and maybe get a fare back to Madras. How about the guys
outside with their cabs?

“Oooh, yes, sir, they will say they will take you for quite a lower price. But, sir, they are not quite reliable and may just
take your money on the way, leaving you stranded.” Michael knew the man was speaking with some accuracy.

How about buses? Trains? The tourist official rambled on, running his finger up and down grimy, complicated schedules, and
Michael started thinking, C’mon, Tillman. For chrissake, what are you doing? You’re here in a panic to find Jellie Braden,
and you’re standing around haggling over a few bucks. For a moment, the spurious masculine pride in cutting the sharp deal,
which seemed to lie throbbing in the hormones until called upon, had caused him to lose his way. As it usually did.

The official arranged a car and driver, telling Michael to wait by the tourist desk. Michael asked the man if he had a guide
to Pondicherry, maps, anything at all. The man produced a torn little magazine from under the counter, which he claimed was
his only copy (Michael believed him) and started looking through it. A lecture on Pondicherry followed concerning the famous
ashram founded there by a mystic-philosopher-poet-patriot named Sri Aurobindo, about hotels and restaurants and the beauty
of the seawall.

Was there a city map in the booklet? Yes, there was one, indeed, sir, a very nice map. Michael laid a five-dollar bill on
the counter, keeping most of it covered with his hand, and said he’d very much like to take the Pondicherry guide with him.
It was Michael’s in less than a second, and his driver in a smudged white outfit came up to the counter, smiling.

Outside, the sun was a hammer. Other taxi drivers swung open their doors and said they would take Michael to wherever he was
going for half of what the fellow in the smudged white uniform was charging. Michael said thanks, but he’d already booked
a car. After that they stopped smiling and were not his friends anymore.

As Michael’s car pulled away from the airport, the driver began rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the universal
symbol for legal tender and pointed at his gas gauge, all the while saying, “Petrol.” Indian taxi drivers were always running
on empty, and he needed an advance. On Michael’s last trip, two drivers had run out of gas while he was riding with them.

Impatient, Michael tapped his foot while the tank was being filled. He noticed a fruit stand nearby and bought three bananas
and two oranges, which he stuffed into the side pockets of his knapsack. Back in the car he waited for the driver. A ragged
man bent down and looked in the window, displaying the grisly stump of an arm severed just above the elbow. Michael gave him
five rupees. The man touched his forehead and backed away.

Finally they were rolling through the noise and smoke and dust that was India and would always be India. Michael’s nose was
still adjusting to the thick odors—smoke from factories and open cooking fires, leaded gas, excrement from humans and animals,
all of it mixed together and forming the dense and penetrating smell defining India. He never completely lost that smell.
Michael noticed when he watched a travelogue on India back in Cedar Bend, his brain immediately pulled up those old India
smells from wherever the memories of smells are stored. No other country had drilled its odors into him in the way India had.

The women. He’d temporarily forgotten how beautiful were the Indian women, even the poorest ones. It was easy to fall in transient
love every few seconds in India. A superb gene pool, male and female alike, maybe the best gene pool in the world when it
came to physical appearance. Orange saris and green saris, red ones and blue ones, and gold upon their bodies, bracelets on
their arms and combs in their hair. The women were lithe and walked just above the earth, so it seemed. Some with gold or
silver chains running from nose to ear.

He watched them as the driver constantly honked at goats and cattle and people, weaving through traffic, waved on by cops
standing on small pedestals at the busier intersections. Into the countryside on a two-lane, severely bruised blacktop. Ashok
and Tata trucks with workmen riding on top, their headwraps blowing in the wind. Buses careening around the curves, bullock
carts in front of them, an old woman pedaling a wheelchair contraption in the other lane, people walking, herds of goats crossing.

The driver turned up his radio, giving him and Michael the sound of a flute and drummers playing complex rhythms on tablas
beneath it. He pounded the horn and made the occult Indian hand signals telling other drivers what his intentions were. India:
moving… moving… tablas and flutes and dust, the road in front looking like a ragtag caravan put together with all the travelers
and vehicles from the last five hundred years.

Michael held a banana over the front seat. The driver took it and gave Michael a flash of perfect white teeth, leaned on his
horn, and peeled the banana, hot air roaring in through the open windows. They entered a town, and Michael unfolded his map
of India. Must be Chengalpattu. They’d be going slightly southwest to Madurantakam and then would make a southeast turn at
Tindivanam, where a small blue line ran over to Pondicherry on the Bay of Bengal.

Michael thumbed the five-dollar Pondicherry guide, looking at confusing street maps, reading the town’s history. It was a
union territory, a city-state much like Washington, D.C. The state of Tamil Nadu on its west, the bay on its east. Settled
by French traders in the seventeenth century, returned to India in 1954. Jellie, are you there along the streets of Pondicherry?
On the off chance she had ridden with this same driver to Pondicherry, if she had gone to Pondicherry at all, Michael took
out her picture and handed it to the driver.

The driver looked at it, turned his head, and grinned, shouting over the wind and flute music, “Pretty lady. You go see her
in Pondy?”

Michael worked back down into pidgin English. “Lady ride this car?” He pointed at Jellie in the photo, then at the driver
and the interior of the car. Michael said it again: “Pretty lady ride this car?”

It took the driver a second, but he got the meaning and shook his head. “No, no see lady.” Michael nodded and put the photo
back in his bush jacket.

The guide said Pondicherry had a population of 150,000, but Michael knew that was probably a best guess, far under the true
count. Where to start? Like all Indian cities, he figured it would be a maze of little streets and complex buildings tied
in with one another via walkways and alleys. Even if she was in Pondy, it was not going to be easy. The ashram attracted people
from all over the world who came to study the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and his consort, a French woman known only as “the
Mother.” Both of them were dead. But, according to the guide, the ashram flourished. A visionary settlement called Auroville,
also known as the City of Dawn, supposedly fashioned around the teachings of Aurobindo and the Mother, had been developing
for over a decade just outside of Pondicherry. The guide quoted Mother: “Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual
researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.”

That sounded like Jellie. Anthropologists, many of them, at least, had a strong inclination toward matters of the spirit,
something to do with their trade. If Jellie was running and seeking spiritual guidance, the ashram and Auroville might be
a good place to start.

He’d need a place to stay and looked at advertisements in the guide as the driver swerved and honked and signaled.

Ajantha Guest House—An Oasis of Luxury

Hotel Aristo—A Touch of Class, Truly an Aristocratic Experience

Hotel Ram International—It’s a Whole New World

To the Western eye and ear, Indians had a penchant for overstatement, not to mention hyperbole, and Michael discounted heavily
what he read. Not that he was fussy. He’d stayed many nights in small Indian hotels where a hole in the floor worked as a
toilet and the shower was cold, if there was a shower at all. After a few nights, however, he’d forget there was any other
way than cold showers and a hole in the floor, and it all worked just fine. A hot shower, in traditional south Indian terms,
would justify the claim “Truly an Aristocratic Experience.”

He concentrated on Jellie, thinking hard about her ways and what he knew of her preferences. Where would she stay? The Park
Guest House was part of the ashram and had a Spartan attitude toward smoking, liquor, and human weaknesses in general. Jellie
had come to think things over, according to her cable, and the guest house with its gardens, vegetarian restaurant, and meditative
overtones spoke to that way of life.

Initially Michael thought that finding Jellie, if she was in Pondicherry, would not be all that difficult. White skin stood
out in most of India. But it was a much larger town than he’d anticipated, and the guide stated many Westerners came to bathe
in the rarefied spirit of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And, as Michael had already considered, it was easy to get lost in
India if that’s what you wanted. India could present a silent, impenetrable face when it chose, leaving you on the outside
with no view to the interiors. Jellie was an old India hand, apparently with good connections, and would know how to conceal
herself if she made up her mind to do that.

If you were in a hurry, India could be infuriating. The driver decided lunch was in order at Madurantakam. He pulled over
and went up to an outdoor food stand. Michael wasn’t hungry but drank a cup of tea and ate one of the Snickers he’d bought
in Heathrow. People gathered around him at a respectful distance and stared; routine curiosity, nothing more.

The sun was high and hard at noon. He clumped the old cotton hat on his head, fending off the kids who were less circumspect
than their elders and wanted something, anything, from him. He bought some more oranges and handed them around, though the
kids would have preferred something more wondrous, such as a cheap ballpoint pen from America. Sweat soaked through his shirt,
ran down his chest and back. Michael was wiping his face and neck with a red bandanna when the driver signaled it was time
to leave.

Forty-five minutes later they made the turn at Tindivanam and headed southeast toward Pondicherry, running along a rough surface
in worse shape than the road they’d just left. This was semiarid land, palm trees arching over the road. People were spreading
stalks of grain on the pavement, drying the grain, and letting vehicle wheels act as kind of a primitive threshing machine.