Home To India (25 page)

As long as I'm taking the occasion to reflect, I could ask myself if I miss the man I might have married or the three children I aborted, those faceless, sexless fetuses who would now be individuals in their own right—twenty-eight, thirty-five, and forty years old? I've never stopped and allowed myself to ask. And now those questions belong to the “what-might-have-beens” of life.

Helen's child would be middle-aged by now. It's an idea difficult for me to conceive of. This is because Helen, and all things and all persons surrounding her (including myself at the time I knew her) have been encased in a memory capsule for more than forty years. I can see myself locked in that capsule and I search in vain for some connection between that over-made-up, boy-crazy young woman that I was and the one who stares back at me now from the mirror across the room. Helen and Tej and the child (I never found out whether it was a boy or a girl) remain unchanged, there being no photographs, no further word to testify to their having grown older. I have wondered from time to time whether Helen and Tej grew older together. What did Helen mean by “the intolerable situation” she refers to in this last letter? What did she do about it? She says it has not so much to do with Tej as with someone else. Who was that “someone?” “Issues are at stake,” she writes, “touching on the very integrity of the relationship between Tej and me as a couple, and of both of us as parents of the child expected in six weeks' time.” In another place she says she hesitates to take any “irreversible action” (a chilling expression) because of the baby she's expecting. Yet, she says, she's being “driven to the wall.” By whom? By what?

She goes on to say everyone (presumably Tej's family) has been good to her, except for one person who “wishes her evil.” A way of putting it with gothic overtones. So overstated, and yet I know Helen was not given to exaggeration.

And so I felt—still feel—I should have done something: taken the first plane out; rushed to her aid; saved her somehow, from whatever it was, or whoever it was that prompted this letter; sent her wise counsel, at least. With so little to go on, it is difficult to say what that counsel could have been.

“I don't know if I'm doing the right thing,” she writes. “Or even if I have the courage to do what I must. I remember how you mentioned ‘courage' at least on one occasion before I left. I guess I dismissed the idea out of hand so that we never really talked about it. I pretended to take it on literal, physical terms to avoid getting into the ‘moral' or ‘psychological' courage you no doubt had in mind. At the time, it seemed all too grim: Now I'm having to come to grips. Wish me well.”

After that, just her signature, “As ever, Helen.”

And so, regretfully, I have to consign all that remains of my dear friend to the flames; regretfully, because there's so much unaccounted for. I will have to burn her letters along with all the other mementos, papers, and obsolete documents I've carried around like baggage all my life. From now on I have to travel light. Where I'm going, there will be no space for further doubts or unresolved issues or even memories, perhaps.

At the same time, I realize that it hasn't really been Helen that I've been saving for later all this time, but myself.

Summer, Again

23

It had helped to write to Carol. I finished my letter to her, then wrote and rewrote several times a tortured, brief note to Tej to tell him that I was okay, not to try to find me, and that I'd let him know later to what address to send my belongings, if he felt like sending them. I wrapped my camera, some film, and a few other possessions in a piece of cloth, put my passport and other important papers in the leather handbag along with the travel brochure, covered myself with my
chadhar
, and like any poor village woman, took off toward town before sunrise. I might have been on my way to sell milk or eggs.

Once in Ladopur, I wasted no time boarding a bus out of town, one that would take me far away from Majra. Not necessarily in the direction I intended finally to go. There would be time and opportunity later to change buses and destinations.

I was not the first woman eight months pregnant and loaded with baggage to take a breathless climb up the steep steps onto a bus. This was new to me, however, and I felt exhilarated at being able to do it. I found a corner seat near the back where I'd attract the least attention, and settled in to take stock of things and to rediscover during the ride that self I'd briefly resumed the acquaintance of in Delhi a few weeks earlier.

The California self. A single self. That self, I soon decided, had been a deceptive ghost that did not exist anymore. I had to let it go. At the same time, I wondered if I would always be setting out for somewhere. Would all the departures start feeling alike? Would it become easier, each new time, heading out? Would I become a constant performer on the tightrope? A perennial walker from here to there? Would there come a time when I wouldn't make it to the other side?

Up to this moment, leaving Mama and Papa and my sisters had been as hard a thing as I'd yet dared myself to do. The time after New Year's the previous year had oozed on until I finally boarded the train for New York six long weeks later. It was Aunt Teresa who made everything all right the very day I was to leave.

“Give the kid a chance,” she told Mama and Papa as we all sat at breakfast that morning before leaving for the station.

Nicoletta, Gloria, and Julia sat at table stiffly, aware that something solemn was going on, but innocent of what it was. I was going away. Ten thousand miles held no meaning for them; nor did the fact that I had no return ticket. The rest of us, trying to forget these details, applied ourselves to the task of swallowing bites of cold toast on which the butter had hardened and drinking tasteless black coffee. Mama had bought a dozen doughnuts and some Danish pastries she knew I liked. It was one last turn of the screw, those Danish pastries, and I dutifully ate one in spite of the frosting sticking like paste to the roof of my mouth and the heated dough all gummy and tasting of stale shortening.

Mama said, as I knew she would, “This is Helena's last breakfast with us for God-knows-how-long.”

The last breakfast. Everything had been the last
something
for the past six weeks.

“Give the kid a chance,” Aunt Teresa said again. “She's in love. That's not so bad. Everything's gonna be okay. She'll be back here along with her husband before we know it. We gotta send her off with hugs and kisses, Fran, wishes and prayers, like we all needed when we started out. Nobody's gonna cry, okay? Nobody's gonna make her feel bad today. When she gets on that train, she needs to remember happy faces all the way to New York and then some. She needs some laughs. She's gotta long trip ahead of her.” She turned and looked at me then, through her bifocals. “Haven't you, sweetheart?” she said, giving me a hug.

I nodded and looked across at Mama. She was about to say something. Her eyes said it for her. And then she managed a smile. “Come back home soon, Helena,” she said, having trouble getting the words out.

Nicoletta looked with China-doll eyes from one to the other of us, while Gloria and Julia stabbed their Danish pastries with listless forks.

“Mario, watta you say?” Aunt Teresa nudged Papa. “Watta you say?”

He looked at Aunt Teresa and then at me, and then tried out his old way of talking in the new and dreadful situation. “Win, lose, or draw, kid, I'm always for you. You know that,” he said, attempting a smile.

And so he had been. His letters came regularly, if infrequently, and were my only link with the family on that side. He would be surprised to receive the cable I was mentally composing as I rode along in the bus through the morning that was becoming progressively hotter and dustier. The wording was important. I should not be going back defeated. I should, at the same time, give him room to say
no
if he couldn't afford the money for my return ticket. I could not even contemplate the slow torture of a return by sea. I had to go by air, and if I had known of some other way to buy the fare, I would have explored it. As it was, Papa was my only recourse. I knew he would help me if it were in his power; if his paycheck weren't already all taken up in installments to some finance company that kept him a constant captive.

By noon, I had made one change of bus and of direction and was heading northwest. Another change would see me due north by evening, if I remembered the details correctly. I'd save the cable-sending task for a large town, where the service could be relied upon, the boys on the bicycles more energetic, business transacted with more urgency. I remembered the rest house where bus passengers spent the night. I'd probably be sharing a room there with one or two other women passengers whose questions would have to be answered before we'd get any sleep, and so I gave over half an hour to anticipating what those questions might be and to inventing replies, since I wasn't good at on-the-spot fabrications.

By the time we reached Ghuntor the following morning, I had still not sent off the cable to Papa. Fear of missing the bus, or missing connections along the way, not knowing where to find the telegraph office in a particular town, and a dozen other concerns prevented me from getting it sent. The previous day I had picked up a blank form somewhere along the way, at some town whose name I couldn't even remember. But I had kept it in my purse without filling in the message I'd prepared so carefully. I hadn't even made an attempt to do so.

There would be a long stop at Ghuntor. Last time, I recalled, we had waited for hours for the connecting bus. The memory from the recent past threatened to multiply into others and I willed it away. I had, instead, to apply myself to the present and find a post office. This was my last chance. I searched around for a quarter of an hour and found it housed in a shed clinging to the side of a mountain and manned by a village youth whose Hindi was uncertain and who knew no English at all. I waved the cable form in front of him, and he nodded an enthusiastic
yes
.

Outside the post office I sat down on a stone bench that seemed to have been made for a giant. When I began to fill in the message, the lines on the form went all queer. There was no way I could hold them still; besides, the directions were first printed in Hindi, with the English translation printed below; neither was legible because of the poor printing job. Even the familiar California address looked odd, once I had written it down. I had to assure myself that
Mr. Mario Graziani
was Papa. I began to wonder what the message would look like when it reached the other side, with white printed strips pasted on pink paper. Mama always got excited by the arrival of a telegram, taking it to mean bad news. She would cross herself before opening it.

I was ready to hand the form over to the youthful postmaster when I was interrupted by the sound of the wheels of a bus crunching over the gravel on the road above the post office. The insistent honk of its horn bounced off the opposite mountain side, returning as an echo. Past experience told me I had to be fast on my feet if I was to make it; there would be numberless villagers and pilgrims from the plains fighting for the seats. I grabbed the uncompleted cable form, stuffed it into my purse, picked up the rest of my things, and made for the bus that had just arrived from Ranikaran and would return there as soon as the driver had turned it around. It could be anywhere from two hours to two days before it appeared again.

It wasn't a very unique thing to think of doing, I said to myself when I'd settled in for the last lap of the journey. Not very original. Sending home to Papa for money. Going off in the first place. Then getting stuck. Thinking of running home to Mama and Papa when events piled up crazily. When people didn't do what you thought they were going to do, or what you considered they ought to do. Took strange stands. Became unpredictable. Finally, I thought about the possibility that every failure in life begins with a telegram home (literal or figurative) asking to be bailed out. Sending mine off would be the sign of a mediocre kind of defeat, I decided at last. It wasn't for me.

The two weeks in Ranikaran remained a period in time altogether apart. The place was small, hemmed in by mountain and river, so there was no place else to go. More days than I can say passed without anything happening but the predictable rhythm of the place beating gently away while I caught up on lost sleep and slowly came to myself again after days of traveling.

It was only after emerging from this cocoon that I woke up to the metamorphosis. I was
alone
. The sounds I awoke to were all different from the everyday sounds of Majra: strangers' voices speaking strange languages. Only occasionally did I pick up the brisk, nasal lilt of Punjabi. No voice of the sitar sang me to sleep at night or woke me in the morning like the echo of a dream. The river thrashed against boulders in its way; steam hissed from the hot springs.

The sights were unfamiliar too. New pilgrim faces appeared each afternoon after the arrival of the bus two miles below Ranikaran ashram and disappeared again, the following noon. None of them looked like anyone I knew.

The Ranikaran villagers who helped the Babaji serve the meals were rendered faceless by the similarity of their dress and speech and behavior. Only the Babaji and the old Sikh in the pink turban who distributed bedding and collected it again were reassuringly familiar. However, they carried on with their routine without reference to me. I joined the villagers when help was needed in serving food or washing utensils and spent long hours in contemplation by the side of the pool. I took warm baths in the womblike covered area which, illuminated by a single candle, was especially reserved for women. In there I duplicated in another dimension and on an amplified scale the slow, floating life of the child inside.

At night no warm body slept next to me in the bed, no arm was flung in sleep across my stomach, no legs were entwined in mine, no soft breath reached my ear, no muscular back was there to curl around. I spent the dark hours swallowing back panic with wide-open eyes, replaying that last night in Majra and reigning in, with doubtful assurances, my galloping thoughts of an uncertain future. The frightening certainty that I had, indeed, made a successful getaway left me suspended over a void with nothing holding me up but the tenuous thread of my own self-awareness. If I let go of it, I would be lost.