Paris Was the Place (37 page)

A man wants to read my palm. Another wants to sell Macon a paper bag of lapis lazuli. “Come with me,” he says. “I’ll show you gems and electronics. I’ll change money. Change dollars. Come.”

Another boy wants to make a cobra rise up from a round basket he carries in his hands. “No,” Macon says politely and smiles. “No thank you.”

We walk faster, until we’re away from the crowds and pass a garage where a car engine’s spread out on the dirt like a banquet. Three lepers sit nearby in front of a wooden door. They have stumps where there should be hands, and they call to us and lean forward on the ground. An older boy in torn shorts pulls two small kids in a metal cart. The boy is three or four or ten years old; it’s impossible to tell. He parks the cart on the sidewalk in front of Macon.

One of the children pulls on my elbow. Neither of them has legs. “Please. Madame. Please.” The heat’s concussive. The kids look tired and dirty and hungry. I press two rupees into each of their hands and put coins in the metal bowls in front of the lepers.

“Willie,” Macon says, “I’m not sure it’s the right thing to give them money.”

“These children are hot. I want to give them something so they can eat.” I don’t know if I’m right. I don’t care. I think of Precy, living in her room on Rue de Metz, and her fierce questions. Is she still there?

“Why,” Precy asked me that first day of class, “are you helping us? What’s in this for you?” I hadn’t answered her honestly. Was I trying to prove something to Rajiv? That I could do it? That I could step outside my world of books and teach the girls? Gita told me I didn’t know how to take a risk. What if I’ve made the girls’ lives there worse by what I did? What if I’ve almost shut the center down?

“Do you see that food stand?” Macon points to a corner near the garage. “I’m hungry.” We walk toward it and a teenage boy sells us bottles of orange Fanta with straws. It’s the only thing he has to drink. We get potato samosas on cardboard plates and devour them—they’re so good. Then we walk.

When we get back to the hotel, it’s late in the afternoon and the sun has dipped behind filmy, striated clouds. The block outside is filled with men and women who hold big posters of the elephant god on wooden sticks. “All for the festival of Ganesh,” the hotel owner
says, and waves at us from his plastic chair in front of the blaring television. A half-eaten plate of chicken with some kind of brown sauce on it sits next to the TV.

We go up to our room to nap so we can stay awake for the festival. Macon turns the shower on. I take off my pants and T-shirt and lie on the bed in my underwear, listening to the water. Then he lies down next to me without drying off. The water on his legs feels so good against my legs. We fall asleep and miss the whole festival. At some point during the night, I move down to the floor to sleep, but I don’t remember doing it.

“Where are you, Willie?” Macon says before there’s a trace of light outside the window.

He climbs down to the floor next to me. “It’s hot in this country. And I think India is a crueler place than I imagined,” I say. The wooden ceiling fan whirs above us. “God, I’d love to go swimming now.”

“Are there lakes in Delhi? We need to find a lake.”

“When I was six, Dad taught us how to swim underwater in a lake near Mount Shasta. Luke got it right away and held his breath and glided back and forth around my ankles. I stood up to my waist, scared. In the car on the way, we’d sung this song, ‘Shoo, Fly, Don’t Bother Me,’ over and over.”

Macon says, “I’m starting to sweat down here. I think it’s cooler up on the bed.”

“ ‘Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, / Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, / Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, / For I belong to somebody.’ I don’t know why we picked that song, really. Maybe we missed our mom. I know I did.” Is it the jet lag? I can’t stop talking. “I’m not sure where Mom was. Dad finally got me to put my whole face in the water and hold my breath, but I didn’t like to get my hair wet. I wanted to get out. Then Luke shot up from the water and sang, ‘Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, / For I belong to somebody! I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star!’ It was our favorite line of the song and the whole reason we sang it. I held my nose and followed Luke down into the water. His eyes were big and
surprised underwater. I’m sure mine were like that, too.” I start crying on the floor in the hotel room. I don’t know why.

“Willie, why are you crying? We’re here. We’re in India. You’re going to get to do the research. You need to sleep more. We’re both really tired. We’re going to figure things out for Luke.”

“You really believe that? Or are you doing what I do—saying things you think will make me feel better?”

“I think better treatments are coming.” Then he kisses my hair and my neck. Maybe he’s right. Better treatments. A vaccine even. It’s all coming.

We make love on the hotel floor after that and sleep some more. But his black watch begins beeping at four, and we sit up and throw our stuff in our backpacks. The Delhi train station is stifling hot and moves to some great, unseen order. Men rush back and forth, yelling and pushing more towers of bags. There are lots of goats. Cows mill outside the open doors. The crowds and the din make it hard to think. A long time ago someone painted the steel girders on the ceiling the color of limes. I stare up and feel farther away from home than I ever have and this time it’s a good thing. It’s almost narcotic even to be in motion at the station. To be leaving one Indian city and going across the Rajasthani desert to another.

There are so many trains to choose from. Halfway down one of the platforms, Macon shows our tickets to a man in a uniform who points to the second car, where two porters haul a cardboard box up the stairs. We climb on behind them and find the twelfth compartment. It is five-thirty in the morning. Two Indian men in black pants and blazers sit in the opposite middle seats dozing. Nearer to the door are men on either side in saffron-colored turbans. The train is called the Shatabdi Express. It will carry us as far as Jaipur. Macon and I are by the window. I stand and try to open one of the metal casings, but they don’t budge. He gets out a novel set in India called
Heat and Dusk
and starts to read. There’s a loud, violent hissing when the train’s brakes release. Then one big jolt. A pause. And we’re off, in the pouring rain.

We gain speed and pass hundreds of small shacks, which must be the homes of the people who stand in the dirt lanes, getting wet. Gita took a train from Jaipur—she and her mother and sister and brother, following Manju to the airport. Or was it a bus? Or someone’s borrowed car? The sprawl of Delhi slowly gives way to fields filled with pieces of metal plows and stacks of cement blocks, and a few half-built foundations. I never had any idea of the scale of this country. How big it feels. How wide and hot and long.

We ride for eight hours across the sand dunes, which look wind-beaten into hard clay for long stretches. Some of the land has been irrigated and farmed, with occasional clusters of desert trees, but mostly it’s sand in large swales and scuds like hills. The train stops in Jodhpur. The rocking motion ends and I miss it. Because when the train’s moving it seems to absolve me of important things—of any real decision-making whatsoever. I just give in to the lull of it, the rocking and the whooshing of air outside the window that sometimes turns into a high-pitched, very thin whistle. No one in our compartment gets off. There are mangoes for sale, and pineapple slices on wooden sticks, and sweetened rice balls in wax bags. Passengers slip rupee notes through the windows and reach for the food.

Then we start up again, passing smaller villages and rows of scrappy trees and endless fields of dry melon beds. I sink down low in my seat until I can see only the tops of the trees. I’m not exactly asleep, but I’m close. It’s trancelike—India passes by, a series of sun-drenched Polaroids. It’s as if the train erases our cares in the waking world. My stomach feels full, but I haven’t felt like eating much today. Maybe it’s the heat. I’ve missed my period, but I’m not concerned. My periods have always been a mystery to me. Never regular. They come and go with months in between. I close my eyes, and it’s three in the afternoon when I wake up.

The train station at Jaipur is smaller and hotter than the one in Delhi, but the crowds seem just as large. The men wear colored turbans—pink and purple and pale green. “How is it,” I ask Macon while we stand on the platform in the moving sea of people, “that the
men in this part of the country get to wear something so beautiful on their heads? Luke would love it here.”

He takes my arm. “Luke would wear a turban very well.” Six-thirty at night now. Only a few hours before darkness. We need to find Gita’s grandmother. The trick to tracking down her house will be locating a street called Swam Singa Road. How we will do this is unclear. We have a map, but no house number.

I want to try to finish this part of the story. I told Gita I would deliver her letter. At first Macon was suspicious of going. He thought it was a breach for him to go. But I’ve convinced him that no one will care and that Gita deserves to have the letter delivered.

In the cab outside the station I say, “Swam Singa Road,” to the driver, trying to get each syllable right.

“Swam Singa!” he repeats. He’s a tall man in a purple turban with a thick beard.

“Yes, Swam Singa! Do you know it?”

“I do not know it,” he says happily and keeps driving.

“Where are we going then?” Macon asks under his breath.

“I think it’s on the outside of the city,” I say. “Near the edge.”

The driver doesn’t act like he’s heard me. He speeds through two red lights and squeals up to an identical yellow cab at an intersection, where he leans across the passenger seat. Then he and the other driver yell back and forth through the open windows. Then our driver puts the car in first gear and guns it. He looks in his rearview mirror at me and says, “Swam Singa Road. Twenty minutes. It’s very good.”

We pass dirt roads lined with small wooden shacks. Dogs and chickens and goats stand in the yards. Any of these could be Gita’s house. Then we take a sharp right onto an even narrower, rutted lane. The cabdriver says, “Swam Singa Road” and points out the windshield.

“Slow, please,” Macon says. “Could you go very slowly, please.” We creep over potholes and around the dogs that stand in the middle of the road barking blindly at the car. Then we pass a yard where an old woman with a long white braid stands petting a goat.

“Stop the car! Stop the car! It’s got to be her!” I yell. The driver turns sharply to the left and pulls the emergency brake. I jump out with the letter in one hand and a Polaroid Sophie took of Gita in the other. This woman is even tinier than Gita—a little granny with black eyes in a nest of wrinkles. She holds my arm tightly and laughs whenever I say Gita’s name out loud. This is how I know we’ve found the right house. Macon takes a picture of her and me standing in the yard together. He says he wants to give it to Gita. How will that ever happen?

Inside, Gita’s granny takes the sunglasses off the top of my head, puts them on, then points at me and screams with laughter. She’s a widow who lives alone, and her only son is dead. But she thinks everything about me is hilarious, and not just me. Macon, too. The camera. The sunglasses. All of it is comical. She keeps touching my hair, fingering it like it’s a foreign substance she’s never felt before. Then she laughs some more.

The whole time we stand in her dark house she wears my sunglasses, which makes it even darker for her. I laugh when she tries out a series of poses with the glasses—standing in profile and grinning and generally cracking herself up. I try to imagine Gita sleeping in this house. The first floor is more like a stable, with the kitchen and rooms for the animals. The smell of hay and dung overpowers everything else. Did Gita leave through the kitchen door and walk to school? The woman makes us tea and insists on pouring. She’s so bossy that I stop worrying about how she lives on her own. We drink it on straw mats on the kitchen floor, and I remember what we’ve come for.

I hand Gita’s letter to the old woman and say “Gita” again. “Gita.
Shukriya. Shukriya. Namaste
.” She waves the envelope in the air like a fan and laughs and wipes away tears in her eyes. But she doesn’t show any interest in opening the envelope. How will she know what’s inside? Can she read?

We walk back outside, and she still has my sunglasses on. She’s holding my arm in her right hand and the envelope in her left. Maybe there’s a message for her inside the letter. Maybe she’ll open it later,
when these strangers have left and she has privacy or can go find a friend to read it for her. The cabdriver has his engine running. I don’t know how to say good-bye to this woman. It’s almost like being with Gita again to see her. I wish I had some news about the girl—some word from the other side of the world. I have nothing except the letter and the sunglasses, and I leave her with both.

“Namaste,”
I say, and she laughs. Is it my bad Hindi that’s so funny?
“Namaste,”
I repeat, and she thinks that’s even funnier. She pats my back like she’s always known me. Like she understands everything. Then she pats Macon’s back and lets him take another photograph of her wearing the sunglasses. I get in the cab. Macon gets in the cab. How are we leaving? She’s my connection to Gita. But we back down the narrow street. Gita’s grandmother is alone in the yard, waving Gita’s letter.

That night we sleep in a pink stone hotel in the old part of Jaipur. There’s a talking parrot in an orange tree down in the garden that I can hear under our mosquito netting. This distance from France is a gift. I promise myself to be more hopeful when we get back there. More patient with Luke’s disease. Nothing feels as urgent in Jaipur. Or as stark as the old rooms in the back of the St. Louis Hospital.

In the morning we walk to a Hindu temple that sits behind a palace in the center of town on a quiet, narrow street. There’s a pink stone wall that opens to a hard clay courtyard, which leads to the temple’s entrance. To the right inside the wide doorway is a tall statue of Vishnu—almost life-sized. A stone altar stands at the front of the room, and coils of incense burn on the floor. Many people are on their knees praying. They’ve all taken off their shoes. Macon and I add our sandals to the jumble of flip-flops at the door. Then we kneel on the floor. It’s cooler in here. Quiet. I think of Gita and hope that she’s healthy. I make a wish for Luke’s health. Then I stand and put rupees in a basket near Vishnu’s feet, and Macon does the same.