Paris Was the Place (39 page)

Macon grabs my elbow and pulls me down into the seat. It happens so quickly I’m not sure it’s him. “You’re losing your mind,” he hisses.

“Stop pulling my hair!” I try to stand but he pushes my head down again.

“I’m warning you. They’ll take you away, for Christ’s sake.”

Passengers turn to watch us. An older man makes his way down the aisle wearing a large gray turban. He points his finger at me and places it on his lips. Then he motions to the soldiers outside and runs his finger across his neck. “They will hurt you.” His English is slow and deliberate. Then he goes back to his seat.

The soldier with the doe eyes yells at the driver, who opens the door again by pushing on the black metal handle next to the steering wheel. The engine idles so loudly it’s hard to hear.

“They will hurt you,” Macon repeats. “If you say another thing. It will be a really stupid way to die.”

The soldier goes row by row, questioning each passenger. Oh fuck. Oh God. How could he have heard what I yelled? Then there’s noise outside. One of the handcuffed men runs toward the woods. The soldiers start screaming at each other. Our soldier jumps off the bus and fires a shot at the man’s leg. Misses. Shoots again at the man’s foot, and the man falls down but keeps crawling toward the trees.

“Oh Christ. Oh Jesus.” Macon is still holding on to my waist. My whole body rings from the sound of the gun. The driver has us in second gear, then third. I turn in time to see the tallest soldier bang his rifle against the side of the fallen man’s head. “Oh no.” And again.

We’re a quarter mile down the road. Darkness all around us. No one talks or moves. Macon and I sit with our hands on top of one another’s and say nothing.

W
HEN WE GET TO
Dharmsala, it’s five o’clock the next night. We’re let off at the base of town and have to make our way north, past wooden houses built along the sides of the mountain. We’re looking for a place to sleep. We haven’t talked yet. I’m not sure we have words. Macon carries my pack. Most of the houses have stone courtyards and piles of firewood and a thin cow or goat for milking chained outside. The main street runs along the edge of the small mountain. We pass two Tibetan monks in long red robes and a man with a chiseled face leading a donkey on a rope. There are hardly any cars.

We find a teahouse with a sign outside that reads
MOMOS AND BAGLEP. SERVE ALL DAY. FREE POCHA. ROOMS
. I look inside the door, and a thin woman in a black apron waves us into her kitchen. Three Western girls sit at the table behind us, smoking little hand-rolled cigarettes. The girls look maybe twenty years old. College students
on summer abroad. I could be their teacher. I take a sip of the butter tea the woman places in front of me. It’s salty and hot and doesn’t go down easily. “I wonder how much I’d fight for my life.”

“If those men are Kashmiris in India illegally, then they will be arrested,” Macon says. “But the legal system works differently at midnight in Himachal Pradesh.”

“I have no idea what it would be like to risk my life for something.” I look down at my plate and back at the women starting to gather their rolling papers and money together. I want to tell them about the men we left on the side of the road. I want people to know. “I think we should report the soldiers to officials in town. It’s still July, isn’t it? What day in July?”

“They would laugh at you at the police station. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“I don’t have the capacity to imagine more violence. Maybe this is a weakness of mine. Do you think the soldier killed that man? Do you think he’s dead?”

“It has been a long couple of days for you. Now you need to rest. We need to go upstairs to the room this nice woman is renting us, and we need to put you to bed.”

The room is perfect—just the bed with a red Tibetan blanket and a dark wooden trunk by the door. There’s a closet down the hall with a toilet that flushes and a bucket of water for washing. The woman speaks some English, and when Macon asks her about hotels, she tells us of a house for rent a quarter mile down the hill that we can see in the morning.

I dream a dreamless sleep. Then I wake up in the middle of the night with cramps again. I trace forward until I remember the men by the side of the road and I see the handcuffs and the guns, and none of it was a dream, and I can’t sleep again after that.

The house in the woods has a square wooden table in the kitchen and a stone sink and a mattress on the floor covered in a white sheet. We rent it for three days. The back window looks out on a thicket of cinnamon trees. Years before, someone dug a small well and circled it with stones, which have begun to fall down in places. The front is a tangle of evergreen vines, but a path has been cleared a hundred yards up to the door. There are so many birds making a racket on the first morning.

I stand in the kitchen in my T-shirt and pants and watch Macon take a bucket out to the well. Dozens of insect bites itch on my thighs—small, raised bumps that I can’t stop scratching.

“All the birds talk about is rain,” Macon says and puts the bucket into the sink. “They are amazing.” He kisses me on the lips. “How are your cramps? Do you want to rest?”

“The cramps come and go, but they’re better. I’m still bleeding, but the doctor said that might go on for weeks. I can’t rest. We have a date with Sarojini’s daughter. I’m so excited I can’t think straight.”

I change into my skirt and the cleanest-looking T-shirt in my pack. Then we walk into town, toward a teahouse Padmaja gave me the name of over the phone. Little boys and girls play in the tall grass outside their houses. A woman in a burlap dress walks out of what
looks like an animal stall and smiles at us and waves. I kick a stone along the road. When it falls over the side of the mountain, I start with another one. The mountains are steep, and the trees are green and lush. I want to go back to the hours when I was pregnant but didn’t know it—before the bleeding started. The surprise of the miscarriage hits me again. “Wow,” I say. “There was going to be a baby.”

Macon pulls on my shoulder. “Let’s go back to the house. This is too much. We can meet Padmaja tomorrow.”

“Oh no we can’t. You haven’t talked to her. You don’t change plans on her. I’ll meet her at the café at ten or I’ll never see those manuscripts. I’m okay. There was going to be a baby. I’m just thinking. It’s pretty incredible.”

“It will happen again when we’re ready.”

“You know what you’re saying, don’t you?”

“I’m a lawyer. I always measure my words.” He kisses me on the side of the road.

“I hope she takes me seriously. Padmaja will either like me or finish her tea and never talk to me again.”

“I bet on her liking you.”

“I’ve thought about this meeting so damn much and planned what I would say to win her over—a small speech about the importance of Sarojini’s work being released to a Western audience and the great opportunity to spread her poems. But now that we’re here, I don’t know what I’ll say. I’m so nervous. I’m tired.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

“She’s in her seventies. When I called her from Delhi, she told me to look for an old woman with white hair in a French twist.”

We get to the teahouse, and Macon puts his hands on both my shoulders. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

“No, she asked to see me alone. Just me.”

“Then I’ll go for a walk and meet you back here.” I feel too self-conscious to kiss him on the street, so I squeeze his hand. Then I open the door to the café and step inside the cool darkness.

“You are here,” Padmaja says from a small table in the corner. The cooking fire snaps. “We will speak English, you and me. I don’t
speak French.” I smile. “Here.” She pats the red cushion on the chair next to her. “Have a seat. My mother spoke Urdu, Telugu, English, French, Bengali, and Persian. I am lucky to have the Bengali and the English and the Urdu!” She takes my hand in hers, then lets it go and reaches for the tea. On the phone she had a deep, throaty voice. In person, she’s much larger than I imagined and wears an expensive pink-and-gold sari, with gold chains around her neck. “I am lucky in other ways, too,” she says. “No husband anymore. He was boorish, and brought me here for diplomacy with the Tibetans. He’s been gone five years. I have stayed. Sometimes I like it here. I have no children left in Himachal Pradesh. They all went back to Bengal when my husband died. But I have my mother’s poems, and I have my memory, when it serves me. You want the poems, don’t you? I can tell. I may let you see them. The poems are why I am here still—the library is good. The officials offered to house my mother’s poetry, and they offered to house me.”

“How kind.”

“You are too thin. Why don’t you eat more? American girls are always too thin.” I smile and take a sip of my tea. “But you are smart, too.” Her face is wide and wrinkled in that androgynous, handsome way that older women’s faces can become. “I can tell you are smart by your face and that you are in love with that man I saw out on the road.”

“You mean Macon.”

“My husband did not have a kind face. He was in tea and shipped it from Darjeeling around the country. Now I find myself an old woman, talking to a girl from America. Who could have predicted this? Maybe you will take me back to America with you. Could you do that? Find room for me on your plane and take me back. It is a country I have always wanted to see.”

“America has great beauty,” I say. Does Padmaja really want to come to the States? “I live in France now.”

“France! Ah! My mother went as far west as England. King’s College London and later Girton College, Cambridge. She met famous men of her time—Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse. It was Gosse
who convinced her to stick to the great Indian themes: our rivers and temples, our inequality, our textured society. I never got over the Indian border. It is a good life here, though. The books are well taken care of at the library. There are three of them, you know.”

“I do know.”

“My mother and Gandhi were both sent to prison, she for almost two years. I have a memory of him talking to my mother in his courtyard with that smiling face of his, reaching for my head with his open hand. She was part of the independence movement. My mother called him Mickey Mouse. Can you imagine? She had a nickname for Gandhi.” I smile. “Don’t worry.” She laughs out loud and throws her head back. “I am not keeping you hostage here much longer. You want to see the poems.”

“I would like to, yes.”

“But why? Why do you want the poems?”

“I want to see what your mother was thinking while she wrote them. Everyone in India read her poetry.”

“It is a mystery, isn’t it? My mother got first in the matriculation examination at the University of Madras. She was only twelve. A child prodigy. She was a mathematician. Then she wrote poems about daily life in India and began calling for women’s rights. She became famous and married out of caste. No one was doing this then. She was speaking the truth, and the women listened. There is no other way for me to explain it. She was the second Indian woman to become the president of the National Congress and the first woman to become the governor of Uttar Pradesh. They have made her birthday into Women’s Day here. Now come. We must go.” She gets up and leans on a red lacquered cane that’s been against the wall. “It is time for my nap. We will meet at the library in the morning. Nine o’clock. Do not be late.”

I’m awake before the birds the next morning. Dressed by six with a bucket of water pulled from the well for tea. Macon wakes up, and we eat the bread and cheese he got in town while I was with Padmaja. The library’s a half mile toward the main street, then left up a steady hill. We get to the stone building and sit on a wooden bench outside the front door to wait.

She arrives in a silver Oldsmobile sedan. The driver gets out and opens the back door. Padmaja emerges with her cane and a flowing magenta-colored sari. “You have brought the man this time. Good. Macon, is it?” She extends her arm as she walks slowly toward the bench. He stands and meets her on the path.

“It is Macon, and you are Padmaja, the keeper of the manuscripts?”

“They are my inheritance,” she says. “Under lock and key. I am deciding whether or not you get to see them.”

I stand next to Macon and I smile but it’s excruciating. The manuscripts are close now—right inside the library. It will be a quiet book if I get to write it. A small book. But it will have sound research and it will be thorough. I will do the poems justice. Is Padmaja really going to deny me?

“She is a fine scholar,” Macon says. “She will write a good book on your mother. I would bet on this.”

“I am not a betting woman. Follow me.” Padmaja walks past us, into the dark library, and takes us to a small room way back with white plaster walls and wooden beams across the ceiling. “This is where we sit.” She points to the oval table with a brass lamp in the middle. She hooks her cane over the back of a chair and leans over and turns the lamp on. Then she takes two steps to a painted armoire that sits against the wall. A steel padlock hangs on the metal latch, and Padmaja takes a key from a long chain around her neck. She opens the doors of the armoire, and they swing wide. The shelves are filled with cardboard boxes of papers and notebooks and bound books.

“Macon,” she says. “Please take everything out and put it on the table. Then keep me company. Willie won’t want to talk to us once she gets into this. So you stay.” She reaches out and puts her hand on Macon’s arm. He smiles at me and begins stacking boxes on the table.

My heart soars—I bet the typed manuscripts are inside there. “You are the first American to see the drafts of the poems like this. It is because of your book on the French poet Albiach. It is a good book. I did my research. The people here at the library helped me learn about you. I want you to do that for Sarojini. What you did in that first book. Do that for my mother. Do that for the Nightingale of India. Bring her out of India.”