Want Not (28 page)

One afternoon, beside a biscuit stall near the Anjuna market, she watched a pair of toddlers scraping stray lentils—so few she could probably have counted them—out of a discarded plastic bowl with their fingers. A backpacker’s leftovers, plucked from the street: She’d seen the disposal, and the rapid scavenging too. With tender formality, the pair took turns scooping equal-sized gobbets from the bowl, the boy licking his fingers clean while his sister dug in, and vice versa, then vice versa again. The sight was not extraordinary, by any means, but something about it—the mature resignation on the toddlers’ faces, perhaps, or the poignancy of their diplomacy—struck Micah as unbearably, crashingly tragic. For a long while, jostled by crowds of backpackers and trinket-hawkers and scam artists poking metal rods into tourists’ ears to sell them bogus ear cleanings, Micah waited to see if a mother might appear, her chest as tight as when she’d waited all those weeks and months for her own mother to reappear. To this story, at least, she needed an ending. Then Leah came to fetch her.

“Been looking everywhere, Jesus,” Leah said, her voice tinged with a burr of annoyance. “You have got to see these bangles down this way. They’re so freakin
you.
” She tugged at Micah’s arm, and then, sensing resistance, asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” Micah wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead she bit her lip and kept staring, forcing Leah to survey the scene for clues. Leah frowned, shifting her weight to one leg with the audible harrumph of someone hamstrung by a riddle. She saw a splotchy humpbacked cow ambling through the litter. A mustachioed man pedaling a rickshaw down the street, a giant black vat of something tethered to a trailer. A woman sitting crosslegged and shut-eyed behind a basket of bananas. A torrent of motorbikes, a rainbow of sari-draped women. And then there, at the side of the biscuit stall, the two toddlers: expressionless, the boy in a crouch, rocking on his heels, and the girl picking listlessly at a knee-scab, their exhausted bowl of lentils overturned beside them.

“Them?” she asked, and Micah nodded. When Micah said nothing more, Leah sighed with enough theatrical emphasis to be heard over the street clamor, and said, “Yeah. It’s awful.”

For a few respectful beats, she waited, then tugged at Micah again. Again Micah resisted.

“Okay,” said Leah, drawing a pink thousand-rupee note from her beaded change purse. “Let’s do this.”

Micah watched as Leah made a swift, efficient beeline for the children. She had the air of someone conducting an unpleasant business transaction, similar to the way she’d approached a hosteler in Mumbai after contracting 240 volts through her finger via a ceiling fan switch: her gaze level, her posture impeccable, her movement crisp and considered.

The boy peered up at her indifferently. Then, spying the rupee note, he raised an open palm which Leah covered with the money. She said something to the children that Micah couldn’t hear, and the boy nodded weakly and passed the money to his sister, who examined it with the same enervated half-interest she’d given the scab on her knee. Leah turned back toward Micah, almost but not quite smiling, and Micah watched—with a sudden sadness more focused and intense than the sadness preceding it, though far less scrutable—as the crowds parted for Leah, fell back to let her stride untouched through the visible shimmers of heat.

By the time Leah was beside Micah again, yanking her toward the bangle stall with blithe tenacity, Micah was no longer in love with her. Micah would agonize about this, and reconstruct the scene over and over again in her head in an effort to determine just what had broken the spell and if perhaps it was just a sag rather than a snap, but it wasn’t, and she was never quite able to pinpoint the cause: It was as if the indifference on the boy’s face, as he’d squinted up at Leah, had been transferred to Micah via some telepathic, love-smothering infection. She was suddenly, even violently immune to Leah as she encircled Micah’s wrists with various bangles, deliriously colored yet uniformly drab, her inability to select one impelling Leah to buy half a dozen of them for her, the languorous, charmed way Leah sidled up to the shopkeeper contrasting so starkly with the way she’d approached the smeary-faced children crouching beside the biscuit stall. It wasn’t as simple as a case of insufficient pity, of Leah’s casual regard for the toddlers revealing some hidden chilliness within her, or the way she’d used her father’s money as a kind of salve, like the rosebud salve Micah’s mother used to rub onto Micah’s scrapes and insect bites, in order to rescue not the children but the moment,
her
moment; Micah had dismissed those theories by nightfall. No, something larger had come between her and Leah, she thought, something that had little to do with Leah and possibly just as little to do with
her
and Leah, or her and anyone. In those moments, as she’d watched the children scooping salvaged lentils into their mouths, love—the act of it, the narcosis of it, the exclusivity of it—struck her as an indefensible luxury on a par with the computerized toilet in Julie’s apartment or the cruise ships towering above the Embarcadero. The memory of her and Leah tattooing each other’s bodies with
paan
-dyed lip-prints amidst a coral sea of poppies—which had seemed, in its silky recollecting, an inexhaustible fount of pleasure—had come back to her corroded and drained of color, etched by guilt. In its wake, with fierce vividness, came another memory: “It’s a beautiful world,” Leah sleepily announcing from the wide-grained floor of the cabin (a line she’d repeated, over and over again, in that swaying field of poppies), and John Rye wagging his head and saying, “She’ll see.” Had she seen? But seen what?

This came near the end of the trip, which, coupled with a bout of giardiasis that reduced Leah to a dismal, shuddering groan-state, relieved Micah of the immediate need for painful declarations. She had only the vaguest bookish notions of what happened at the end of love, and of how you treated its remains. Still, Leah knew. The teasing and playfulness commenced a slow fade-out, leaving only somber affection. Every touch lingered, as if each was the last. The clearer farewell came when Leah fell ill and they reversed roles: Where Leah had been the older, wiser guide to the exterior World, the midwife for Micah’s entry into civilization, Micah became the guide to Leah’s interior landscape, nursing her through the cramps and cradling her head while she vomited, applying cool damp rags to Leah’s forehead just as she’d done for her father. She spent her eighteenth birthday in a luxury hotel suite in Mangalore (Leah abandoned the freewheeling hostel-and-streetfood mode of travel the very instant she got sick, handing Micah a heretofore-unseen Amex card), reading an Ivan Illich book she’d scrounged from a hostel while monitoring Leah’s sleep from a silk-cushioned rattan chair.

For the rail trip back to Mumbai and its international airport Leah dosed herself so heavily with Xanax that she spent most of the journey immobile; every few hours she would stagger to the bathroom, her crusty, slitted eyes of limited use to her as she’d feel her way down the aisle, then sink back into her seat like a water buffalo submerging itself in mud, dunking herself into a brown subconsciousness.

Theirs was a first-class car with air conditioning. Across from them, in a sheenful pinstriped suit, sat a middle-aged Indian man holding a cordovan briefcase atop his lap, as if fearful to place even an inch of distance between the briefcase and himself. Because this reminded Micah of Dilly with his beaded colostomy bag, and because the man’s suit reminded her of all the lawyers who’d milled indifferently about the courtroom during her custody hearings, she took an instant dislike to the man—this despite the warm, beatific, slightly amused expression he aimed at her throughout the long ride, and his endearingly clumsy attempts at conversation. “I see that your friend is ill,” he said, several hours out of Mangalore. “Yes,” replied Micah. “That is extremely unfortunate and I am sorry to hear it,” he said, before another hour passed between them.

That’s when Micah noticed the plates. The first one, barely: a white disk flitting in and out of her peripheral vision, from outside the window, quick as a diving bird. But then another, and a minute later another. She glanced at the man to see if he’d noticed them too, but he was staring straight ahead as he’d mostly done since Mangalore, engaged in some businessman’s version of meditation. Noting her glance, however, he smiled and nodded and parted his lips to speak. Sharply, Micah returned her gaze to the window where, again, she watched a polystyrene plate sail by. Bewildered, she stood up and, leaning over Leah, peered out the window at the tracks. How had she not noticed this before? Thousands of smeary plastic plates were strewn alongside the tracks, where bonesleeve dogs were licking them along the dirt here and there—a fringe of multicolored saucers lining the tracks for as far as she could see. As she watched, more and more plates came coursing by; passengers were apparently flinging them out the windows of the car or cars in front of theirs. Her grimace, as she fell back into her seat, was acute enough to provide the businessman an opening.

“This troubles you?” he asked, jutting his chin toward the window.

So he
had
noticed. But because his tonal emphasis was on the word
troubles,
Micah construed the question as a challenge, as if he was goading her to pass judgment on his country and his countrymen’s habit of chucking their trash out the window. Still, it
did
trouble her, so she met the man’s eyes and said, “Yes.”

“Me too!” he blurted, then laughed as uproariously and incredulously as if he’d just discovered they were cousins. “It is
terrible!
”

“Well,” Micah demurred, not sure if it was terrible or just ugly.

“But there is an explanation,” he said, raising and shaking an index finger. “To proceed you will tell me your name.”

“Micah.”

“Mica!” This seemed to him another happy discovery; the way his eyes glowed, Micah half expected him to say it was his name too. “An extremely important mineral,” he said, his voice shifting suddenly into professorial mode. “Did you know that the Kodarma district in Jharkhand has the greatest deposits of mica in the world?”

“I didn’t.”

“It is
true.
”

“Okay.”

“I am pleased to know you.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Cool.”

He craned forward so that his arms were bunched between his torso and briefcase, as if he had a major confidence to reveal. “Now I will explain this unfortunate scene,” he said. “In the past, not so long ago, when you bought food for your journey, it came to you wrapped in banana leaves. This was how it was done. You would eat your meal, and throw the banana leaf out the window. Like this!” Stiffening himself upright, he whipped his arm toward the window and laughed a bubbly little laugh; he was clearly cherishing some recollection from childhood. “I remember this! And the cattle would line the tracks to eat the leaves. That is the prior situation.”

Micah said, “What happened?”

“Plastic!” he exclaimed. “Do you know its history? A man named Alexander Parkes exhibited it at the Great London Exposition in 1862. It was to be, in his view, a replacement for ivory.” At this the man lifted his eyebrows, and awaited a reaction from Micah. When none came, he frowned. “Which comes from elephants.”

“Right,” she said. “I know that.”

“You know this! Then you will be most interested to know that Great Britain, during its control of India, consumed enough ivory to require the deaths of four thousand elephants a year.”

“That’s awful,” Micah said.

“I am in agreement with you!”

“But . . .”

“Yes.” He waved a finger.
“But!”

Micah waited.

Lowering his finger, the man sighed. “This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems. You are too young to comprehend this but in time you will reach these conclusions. One could contend that Alexander Parkes saved the elephant from a swift and inevitable extinction. This is in fact my contention, and not only because my business happens to be plastics and their molding. But in order to preserve elephants we must also have—this.”

As if by conjuring, another polystyrene plate went whirling past the window.

“But what was wrong with the banana leaves?” Micah asked.

“A most incisive question!” Perhaps too incisive, because the man fell into a brow-knitted silence for a while, his smile drooping. “But to ask that,” he finally said, “is to ask why this train we are on is preferable to a cart. Or why this berth we are in is preferable to the sleeper class car ahead of us. It is to question progress. To question motion.”

Micah frowned.

“Also,” he went on, “the plastic costs less money for the vendors, and is not vulnerable to rot.”

Micah turned her attention outside: a sheet of pure cloudless blue above a scrubby green flatness.

From behind her shoulder the man said, “You must select what you see when you look out the window. You may see plastic, up and down the tracks. This is understandable, and you are right to be troubled. But do you know what I see?”

She turned to him. “What?”

“I,” said the man, “see elephants.”

For the remainder of the ride Micah stared out the window in search of elephants, metaphorical or otherwise. Despite the man’s lawyerly suit, she liked him, and wanted him to be right—wanted the elephants to fill her with the same faith and solace that the red parrots of San Francisco had. But all she saw was plastic, mile after mile of it, floating in bronze-colored ditches and snagged in camphire shrubs. When she glanced at the businessman, she saw he was also scanning the trackside, and she wondered if he too was watching for elephants, whether for his own benefit or hers. But there were no elephants, and after a time their absence began to feel oppressive, as though the two of them were waiting for someone to arrive whose dire tardiness was now casting doubt on the arrival itself.

As the train slowed into Mumbai, however, Micah finally saw one, and springing up from her seat so that her torso draped Leah she pressed her nose to the glass for a deeper look.