Out of Order (4 page)

“You have no idea of the role honor and revenge plays in Indian society. Families nurse grudges for centuries, striking out at seemingly innocent bystanders who had the most tenuous link to the offense. In India a laborer will break rocks for fourteen hours a day for less than the cost of lunch at McDonalds. Five dollars would get a man pushed in front of a train, for ten they’d slit his throat in broad daylight.”

Jason felt his hand sweat as he gripped the computer mouse, his mouth drying with each open-mouthed breath.

“To make it even worse, you tell them right where to find you. They could have spotted you at the airport and could be following you right now. You’re tall and you’re white. The light-brown color of your hair alone is enough to set you apart. You are hard to miss.”

He thought about the tour group, how Danny carried that red golf umbrella, how they drove around in the largest vehicle on the streets.

“It was a foolish thing you did and I hope it does not bring you to harm. Take my advice, trust no one you meet in India.” A postscript under the computer-generated signature provided contact information for the Raj-Tech offices in Bangalore and a final piece of advice. “Be damn careful.”

Chapter Five

Although the plants were larger and more lush and the uniformed staff more numerous and subservient, the lobby of the Holiday Inn in New Delhi looked like the lobby at any Holiday Inn Jason had ever seen. This one had more old people than most, but aesthetically it was cut from the same corporate-designed cloth.

He was sipping his first coffee and looking over the day’s itinerary when Rachel appeared in front of him, her backpack slung on her shoulder. She wore the same baggy khakis but instead of a tee shirt she wore a man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. With her hair tucked under her Blue Jays cap and her hands dug deep in her pockets, she managed to look sloppy and fashionable at the same time.

“Grab your bag,” she said, kicking at his foot. “We’re hitting the road.”

“Well, good morning to you, too.” Jason looked up to see her smiling and wondered if she realized how attractive she was. He held up the folded itinerary for her to see and said, “We’ve got another five minutes before they start packing us on the bus.”

“We’re not taking the bus. We’ve got to grab a cab to the station if we’re going to catch the next train to Jaipur.”

“That’s not on here,” Jason said, running his finger down the typed lines.

“Remember yesterday how we said we wanted to get out of this tour?”

“I remember that’s what you said.”

“Anyways,” she said, ignoring his correction, “I got us out of the tour. We took quite a hit on the buyback but Danny Boy added in a pair of India Rail passes so it almost worked out okay.”

Jason looked at her but didn’t say anything so she continued explaining.

“We won’t be able to stay at these four-star palaces and we’ll have to eat on the cheap, but we’ll do all right as long as we split the costs.”

“What are you talking about?”

Rachel brought her hands out of her pockets to help her tell the story. “Danny,” she said, pointing him out across the lobby, “bought our tour packages off us. We can go wherever we want.” She waved her arms out wide, symbolizing, Jason guessed, both the sale of the tour packages and their new independence.

“We can’t leave the tour. It’s not right.” He didn’t think it was that funny but it made Rachel laugh a light, cheery, beautiful smile laugh.

“It’s not right? What’s not right is that a couple of healthy twenty-somethings are traveling around with a herd of retirees when there’s a really cool country to explore. Now come on,” she said, shrugging her shoulders to readjust her backpack, “we’ve got to get moving to get that train.”

“Wait a second,” Jason said. “I can’t just….”

“Yes, you can,” Rachel said. “And you sort of have to. Danny Boy’s already sold our spots to an Australian couple visiting India for their fiftieth anniversary. Pretty romantic, actually. Besides,” she added, her voice dropping as she turned to look at him, “he refused to let me out of the tour unless you went with me. They’re still really sexist here.” She waited a half-minute for Jason to make up his mind before saying, “Well? We going?”

Jason sighed and stood up. “Do I have a choice?” He grabbed his backpack and followed her through the lobby and out the front door of the hotel.

***

Five hours later, his jaw hanging slack, his arms too heavy to lift, Jason fought to keep his eyes closed.

He’d been trying to fall asleep for hours but, just as he’d feel his muscles relax and his breathing deepen, every synapse in his brain would light up and with a frightened gasp he’d snap awake. In a moment of adrenaline-infused clarity he weighed the two possible causes.

The first was jetlag. Yes, his internal clock was all screwed up and, yes, he’d drunk way too much coffee at the hotel, but as he felt his brain spasm and race he knew that this was not the reason.

The second was India, and he knew that this was the cause.

The moment they stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel into the early morning sun, Freedom Tours’ version of India ended and the real India began. Rachel waved off the doorman’s offer to hail a taxi as she led the way out past the gate to the main road where a swarm of three-wheeled, black and yellow cabs crowded the entranceway. When they spotted their bags, twenty men leapt out of the open sides of their cabs and raced towards them, each shouting offers in their own version of English, wading through a mob of young boys that flew in from the streets, some waving tourist maps, some fanning picture postcards, one holding up a classroom globe.

Jason gripped his backpack with both arms, his eyes wide as a score of hands reached out to him. The cab drivers responded, snapping thin leather straps across the boys’ legs, and Jason watched as they jumped in pain or in sport, laughing and kicking out at the old men before sprinting away. Then the men were on him, each shouting that his was the best cab in all of Delhi and that the others were thieves and liars. At six feet even, he towered over most of the men, all dressed in button-down shirts and pants that were at one time black but now faded to gray, and all of them fighting to be heard. At the fringe of the crowd he spotted Rachel as she climbed into a cab. She gave an impatient wave and tapped her finger on an imaginary wristwatch.

Jason turned back to see his former companions making their way onto the Freedom Tours bus, and he wondered who would room with Bob Froman.

“Come on already.” Rachel’s high voice cut through the din and Jason turned back, the crowd parting as he walked to the cab, scanning the hotel entrance for other tourists willing to wander off on their own.

“It’s not a cab per se,” Rachel said after the driver kick-started the engine and U-turned his way through four lanes of traffic. “It’s called an auto-rickshaw. They say they’re the best way to get around in the cities. Oh, and it’s not the wrong way,” she added, noticing the panic in his eyes. “They drive on the left here. It’s an old British thing.”

Stuffed in behind the driver and sharing a narrow bench seat made for one, there was little chance they would be thrown out the open sides despite the jerky last-second turns. The overtaxed engine screamed its way through the gears while the rounded shape of the roof and the placement of the tail pipe ensured that little of the leaded gasoline fumes escaped.

He watched as the four-star hotels gave way to no-star flophouses, a mile of road and a ten-million dollar drop in value. Concrete office buildings, their faded white paint peeling off in newspaper-sized sheets, lined the street, hand-lettered signs covered in the squiggly lines of Hindi tacked up on the walls.

Although they passed within an inch of the tin sides of the auto-rickshaw, Jason couldn’t identify any of the cars that muscled their way down the street, squat rounded boxes that were not much larger than his golf cart-sized cab, their fenders and doors dented from countless commutes. Delivery trucks, tarted up with bright paint, lights and bits of shiny metal, coughed out hot coils of black smoke while on the left a bus crept by, every seat full with another forty passengers clinging to the sides like army ants pulling down a doomed beetle. An endless stream of scooters weaved through the traffic carrying sari-clad women sitting sidesaddle behind the stern-faced drivers or families of eight stacked on like a circus act out for a ride, the smallest toddler astride the handlebars. Seeming to flow backwards through the traffic were the bicycle rickshaws, their sweating drivers hauling passengers and cargo many times their own weight.

Despite the images recalled from a high school social studies filmstrip, there were no cows wandering the streets, but as the driver bounced his dented cab against the side of a truck and up onto the sidewalk to avoid a lost rear axle rolling down the street, Jason felt that this said something about the wisdom of the cow.

And everywhere—squeezing between the auto-rickshaws, cutting in front of brake-less trucks, darting out from behind parked cars—everywhere there were people. They spilled off the sidewalks, poured in and out of the buildings, and filled up every space not taken by something larger or immoveable. Most of the men were dressed in long-sleeved shirts and slacks, the styles five years out of fashion. Some wore designer suits, some wore knock-off NBA jerseys, and some wore a matching two-piece outfit that looked to Jason like a cross between hospital scrubs and pajamas.

Most of the women he saw wore a
shalwar kamiz
, the female version of the scrub/pajama hybrid, theirs adding a scarf draped stylishly down the front with the tail ends tossed over each shoulder. There were teenagers in jeans and roaming pockets of girls in bright school uniforms, but fewer women in saris than he had expected and none who wore a sari as elaborate as the one bundled in the bottom of his backpack.

Where the buildings near the hotel had been shabby and neglected, the ones they passed on the way to the station were decrepit and best forgotten. The traffic thinned out, but there was more trash in the streets, and gaping potholes threatened to swallow their cab. The suits and designer clothes were gone, replaced by ill-fitting and dirty castoffs, flip-flops or bare skin replacing the leather sandals. The people here moved at a different pace, the shuffling, nowhere-to-go gait of the unemployed. There were fewer smiles, but the ones he spotted seemed somehow more real.

Mixed in with the pedestrians who crowded the streets, beggars approached the cars, tapping on the windows of the larger sedans, pre-teens holding up dirt-smeared babies in tattered rags as they stared into the air-conditioned cars. He felt Rachel draw back against him as a leather-faced old woman approached the cab, mouthing her toothless request for rupees. Two small boys appeared on his side of the open vehicle, one holding the stump of his arm, the other saying, “Mister look” while he balanced himself on his cane, his withered leg dragging across the pavement.

He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to feel. He recalled a notice he had seen in a New York City subway: “Giving money to beggars keeps them beggars.” He wanted to believe it was true, but as a sideways glance caught the milky eye of the old woman, he wasn’t so sure. A break in the traffic ended his moral dilemma as the auto-rickshaw rocketed ahead.

“There’s the train station there,” Rachel said, pointing at the image in her guidebook and then at the massive red brick building at the end of the block, a second fleet of yellow and black auto-rickshaws lined up ten deep out front. He paid the driver with a wad of multi-colored bills and together they worked through the maze of cabs to the main entrance.

Although it was busy, with luggage-laden passengers crisscrossing from every direction in the open lobby and porters in sweat-stained red smocks pushing handcarts stacked ten feet tall with taped-together suitcases, after the cab ride Jason found the train station calming. Rachel insisted on getting the tickets, not wanting to miss a moment of the train experience, and, despite the signs that stated that the taking of photography was strictly not to be advisable, she snapped a dozen shots, half of trains, the other half of empty tracks. They found their train—the Pink City Express—just as it started to lurch forward, laughing as they stumbled aboard.

Now, as Rachel stood in the open doorway, the train racing past miles of treeless farmland, Jason gave up on sleep and pondered his stupidity.

The trip had been a mistake, something he knew before he had even left Corning. He wasn’t the kind of guy who got off on exotic passport stamps and tales of white-knuckle escapades in strange-sounding places. He was a relax-by-the-hotel-pool-and-build-an-impressive-bar-tab-while-working-on-your-tan kind of guy. With just ten vacation days a year, he didn’t have room in his life for an adventure. He thought about the time difference, wondering what was happening at the clubs he always hit at Daytona Beach, but gave up when he decided that no matter what it was it was better than riding a train in India.

He didn’t have to stay with Rachel. He could take his share of the buyout and hook up with another tour group, one that had a set itinerary and no auto-rickshaw rides, and leave her to her trains, salvaging something out of this mess. But as he watched her holding tight to the handrails, her ponytail bouncing as she leaned out into the desert-dry wind, the back of her pants dipping down to expose the swirls of a tribal-style tattoo on tanned skin, he knew the trip would be better with her around.

The car was only half-filled, the airline-style chairs tilted back as the other riders—families, business types, and a few tourists—were lulled asleep by the hypnotic clacking of the rails. Across the aisle an older woman stood to remove a water bottle from the open, overhead luggage rack. She wore a green, tight-fitting tee shirt under a lighter green sari, part of which she draped over her shoulder, adjusting the end to serve as a headscarf. The material was a light cotton, the simple pattern machined along with the cloth. Jason pictured the sari he was carrying with its heavy silk and detailed embroidery and thought about its significance.

When Jason had unrolled the bundle back in Corning he was amazed at what he found. It was a little more than a yard wide, but it stretched from the front door of his apartment, past the kitchen, down the hallway and halfway into his bedroom. The intricate, hand-stitched gold and silver design filled only the last three feet of the fabric, but a thin-lined yellow and black pattern ran the entire length of the sari, ending at a cloth-covered button at the corner. There was something familiar to the designs, something in the pattern he had seen before. He studied it for an hour before giving up and refolding the sari, the bundle somehow larger than the one he had unwrapped.

Sriram had said it was a tradition for sons to give their mothers saris but Jason wondered if the tradition changed when the son died and a stranger delivered the gift. He still did not have an address for Sriram’s family in Bangalore or any idea what he would say when they asked him how their son and his wife had died. He didn’t have a four-star hotel bed waiting for him in Jaipur, didn’t have as much money as he feared he would end up needing, and he didn’t have a clue why he found himself drawn to this bossy Canadian.