Split (37 page)

 

The night before my flight, I lay awake in Mau's darkened basement room, poring over the horrible visions I had compiled in preparation for my trip—snapshots of the disasters in store for me. I would be stoned to death in a remote village for showing too much forearm. I would get dysentery and languish in a dank hotel room, unfit to beg for medicine in the local tongue. As for Mau, it seemed likely that this would be our parting of ways. He seemed exceptionally sweet to me in light of this. He had been my friend. In the morning he would take me to the airport and put me on a plane for a distant continent and I might never see him again.

As the night wore on, I spiraled into pure anxiety. Desperate for sleep, I went upstairs to the kitchen and tossed back a water glass of chardonnay, the only sedative I could find. Then I went back to bed, queasy now and no less awake, and stared at the curve of Mau's back until the alarm went off.

Five
A.M.
He jumped up without complaint and pulled on his clothes.

"1 feel sick," I told him, burrowing deeper in the covers.

He brushed this off, but while he searched for his keys, I went to the bathroom and crouched over the toilet, feeling that telltale rush of saliva.

"I can't go," I told him. "There's no way I can get on a plane like this."

Mau handed me a zip-lock bag and a box of saltines and led me to the car.

At the terminal, we spent a desolate fifteen minutes or so in the waiting area. I laid my head on his lap, trying to find the one spot where the room didn't spin, thinking,
These are our last moments, I've got to make the best of them.
But it was no use. Finally, Mau walked me to the gate, gave me a quick hug, and took off.

When I was halfway down the boarding ramp, with passengers sandwiched in front of me and behind, I threw up into my cracker box.

"I'll be boarding late," I told the flight attendant. I walked back up the ramp, against the crowd, and tossed the box of vomit into a trash can. In the bathroom, I took stock under the fluorescent light. My skin was blotchy, my eyes rimmed red. I splashed water over my face, rinsed my mouth, and took a few deep breaths. I looked like hell, but I was feeling better. Suddenly I thought of Alison Rider, my soul twin from junior high, how we leaned into the mirror on those frost-raked winter mornings before school, assessing the goods. "I look like shit warmed over," she'd say. To which I was expected to reply: "How many times?"

As far as I knew, she was still in that tiny valley up north. I'd run into her once at a sports bar in town, not long after I'd moved to L.A. She was the same girl she had been at eight years old, sweet and tough and frail-boned, and glad to see me in a way that broke my heart. I had loved her once through and through, without a sense of how we differed, but that day I saw her from a distance, too thin in her stained parka, dragging a hand through her hair, brushing her chapped knuckles over and over against her nose.

In that stuffy airport bathroom, I couldn't say what seemed worse, staying put, as she had, or leaving everything I knew. Still, hitting rock bottom held an odd solace. "Oh well," I said out loud, my voice pinging against the empty stalls, "it can't get much worse." Then I walked down the gangway and into the plane.

Years later, I told someone the story of that wretched departure, and the first thing she asked was, "Why did you go?" That question stopped me short. Much as I dreaded traveling alone, I never seriously considered scrapping my plans. I thought I was a failure for being afraid of adventure. I thought I had to go, precisely because I wasn't suited to it. If I didn't, my anxiety might spread like a poisonous mold. I would become a shut-in, with the doors triple-bolted, the bathtub plastered with grip decals, every heavy object bolted to the floor. This wasn't the whole answer, though. I went not just to conquer my fear, but because I wanted to go, wanted to see the countryside of Buddha and Krishnamurti and the buildings Jim had projected on our living-room wall when I was a child. If no one would go with me, I would go on my own.

 

I had read descriptions of Bombay before I arrived—the squalor and heat and strangeness—but none of them prepared me. My flight landed late at night, and I was lucky enough to have been offered a ride from the airport by a family whose daughter was an acquaintance of Jim's. They sent the grandmother out to the airport, along with the baby of the family, five years old, and a driver. Somehow we found each other in the crowd outside the terminal, which was nothing more than a dusty hangar with a lurching baggage carousel and a few officials tallying the arrivals in moldering notebooks.

"We thought we'd never find you!" the grandmother said, leading me to the car. It was an old British sedan from the forties, from before independence no doubt, with curved fenders and weathered seats. We piled in, the driver in the front, Grandmother and baby and I in the back, and the boy soon fell asleep across her lap. While he dozed, she commenced a brisk patting against his cheek, which somehow failed to wake him, all the while telling me stories of a near accident on the drive out, how they'd nearly given up on finding me and returned home, and how the baby—
smack, smack, smack
—was too thin and refused to drink his milk. I could barely listen. I was transfixed by the view outside the window: miles and miles of shantytowns, rivers of sewage by the roadside, bands of children dancing before open fires. I told myself I wouldn't last in that country two weeks.

The Lalvanis were well-off, and their house, set in a genteel section of Bombay, was very comfortable: a formal living room with embroidered pillows and a hanging swing; a long hallway, where breakfast was served, opening onto a leafy courtyard. I was to sleep in the guest room with Grandmother, who was visiting from Hyderabad. I soon saw, when I was shown to the room, set with heavy furniture and a single queen-size bed, that they meant this literally. After I got over a bit of shyness and changed into my pajamas, this arrangement comforted me. It seemed like a week since I'd woken up, nauseous, in Mau's bedroom. I curled up under the bedspread, and Grandmother, leaning against the headboard, kept me awake for a good hour, telling family tales and combing her long gray hair.

 

I spent the next few days wandering through Bombay. Reading back over my journal, I am struck by the inconstancy of my feelings. I was happy when an old woman pinned a marigold in my hair at the bus stop, and then lonely in the middle of the mad crowd jostling for the bus. The seats were taken by the strongest comers, and the brave bulged out the door, hanging from a rickety bar. I let four buses pass before I had the nerve to fight my way on. Finally I made it home to the Lalvanis', the old house looking patrician above its skirt of refuse, the latticed balconies elegant despite their chipping paint. I went on like this, slipping in and out of moods, feeling bereft at odd moments, then somehow sated, as if going wherever I wanted, in silence if I chose, were satisfaction enough.

On one of my first days in the city, I met a Belgian woman in the marketplace. Her name was Corrine, and I was struck by her easy bearing, her weightless silk shirt and silver bangles.

We walked together through the packed stalls, and finally I asked the question at the top of my mind: "So, how is it, traveling alone?" I was drawn to other people's courage the way you lean toward a fire on a cold night.

Corrine looked at me for a beat. "Well, you're alone. How do you find it?"

I was startled to see she was right. "But you don't seem ... miserable," I told her.
Alone
had come to mean: alone and liking it. That I had yet to master.

 

Corrine was headed for Goa, a beach community swamped by hippies. "They have the best banana pancakes," Corrine told me. "And the beaches are wonderful." I agreed to join her there in a few days, and she picked a hotel from the guidebook where we would meet.

A few days later, I went to Victoria Station to catch a train south. At the concourse, families were sprawled out on the floor with their bags, eating curry out of tin dishes. Children ran between the columns, dodging the nightsticks of the railroad policeman. I went to a bookstall in the station to buy gum and scan the reading material: mostly Indian comic books, but near the front a selection of paperbacks, stacked six deep, each volume secured with a rubber band: Joan Collins, Robert Ludlum, William F. Buckley,
Joy of Cooking.
That last title made me pine for my mother, who knew the pie-crust recipe by heart, but still opened to the appropriate flour-dusted page out of ritual while she pinched and stirred.

Twenty-four hours later, I arrived in Goa, took a bus to the beach, and got off at the main intersection. It was Sunday, and I could hear singing from a white building by the road—a church, by all appearances. I walked down the dirt track toward the sea, looking for signs of rented rooms. On either side were rice paddies, neatly squared. The air was faintly salty, and bird cries sifted down from the palms. I passed a small shack where a man sat in the doorway paring a mango, and farther on, a large house, which looked from far off like a military bungalow, the porch fronted by a wide set of stairs. The stairs were flanked by long concrete banisters, which ended in two smoothed seats, shaped like cupped palms. In these seats were two old women, arms folded across their chests, who watched me as I passed.

I hated the faint disgrace of entering a new town, guidebook in hand, travel weary and half lost. From a side path, a couple strolled past in swimsuits and lungis, sandals dangling from their fingers. They looked me over and quickly glanced away. A week before, they had probably arrived with the same awkward packs, but now they were unburdened and nicely browned, and they preferred not to be reminded they were tourists.

I walked on to the end of the road, without catching sight of the hotel Corrine had selected. It seemed that many more shacks had sprung up since her guidebook was published. It wouldn't be easy to find her. I stood at a sandy turnaround, trying to decide if I should turn back or walk along the beach to the few hotels I saw facing the ocean, when a group of boys approached me.

"Good hotel? We are taking you. Right now, madam."

"No thanks, I know which hotel I want."

"Which one?"

"The Laksmi."

They waved their hands in protest: "No, no. Not possible." One of them, a heart-faced boy with glossy hair, spit in the dust to register his distaste. "Five rupees. We take you to excellent place. Top-notch."

"Well, thanks for the tip, but I'm going to the Laksmi. My friend is there."

"Friend? And what is he looking like?"

"She. Tall, blond hair, orange backpack."

The boy's face lit up: "I have seen her!"

"Yes? Which way did she go?"

"Five rupees." He held out his hand.

"Oh, Jesus. I'll find her myself." I started to stride off, though it was hard to look cutting with my huge bag and straw hat. The boy pulled alongside me.

"All right, madam. She is going this way." He pointed south along the dunes. "Not far. Laksmi Hotel." The other boys gathered around us, grave faced, arms draped around each other's shoulders.

I looked at the boy for a long moment. There was no sign of duplicity in his face. "Well, all right, thanks," I said, and headed across the dimes in the direction of his hand.

It was slow going. I sank into the sand with each step, post-holed by the weight of all my trinkets and toiletries. The sun was harsh, unfiltered, and the sea, though not far off, didn't offer much of a breeze. After about a half mile, I began to doubt my young guide, and a quarter of a mile farther on, I came to a low-ceilinged shack tucked into the dunes. The place looked deserted.

"Hello? Is this the Laksmi Hotel?"

A woman stuck her head out of the doorway, shielding her eyes from the glare.

"Hotel Laksmi?" I asked again, knowing it was hopeless, but wanting to explain why I had intruded on her sandy yard. The woman shook her head.

I started back. Sand had worked into my shoes and was grinding my heels raw. Rivulets of sweat rolled down my stomach. With each step, I planned the exact phrases with which I would curse the little scoundrels when I got back to the road. I started up the face of a steep dune, lost my footing, and pitched forward, propelled by the weight of my pack.

Facedown in the sand, a little snort escaped me, then more giggles. I imagined those boys, doubled over with glee to see me trudging off in the wrong direction. I caught my breath, rolled onto my side, and got up. I had sand in my hair and between my fingers. My thighs looked like two breaded cutlets.

When I reached the road, the boys promptly appeared, feigning concern, a few of them smirking into their hands. I handed over my five rupees without a word and let them lead me to a room.

 

I stayed for several weeks in the house of Fatima Fernandez, an Indian Catholic, her faith a relic of the days when the Portuguese ruled Goa. She was a soft-spoken woman, a widow, with three daughters and two sons. Her husband had left her the house and an enormous mud oven in the yard, where the boys baked bread for the town. To make ends meet, Fatima rented out rooms to foreigners for a dollar a night.

The shower was in the kitchen, and so the slap of water and the smell of lather mixed with the curry bubbling in a cast-iron pot on the stove. I wasn't sure how to negotiate this mixing of rooms with sufficient modesty, and finally settled on entering the shower fully dressed, piling my clothes on top of the concrete slab that walled off the shower from the rest of the room, then wrapping myself in a lungi behind the damp curtain and scooting through the kitchen with my shoes clutched to my chest.

There was no indoor toilet, only an outhouse set back in the palms, past a scraggly patch of corn and a bare yard strewn with kitchen scraps. My first visit there was made after sundown. I found the hut by flashlight and unlatched the door. Inside was a raised concrete platform, with a slanting chute cut down to the ground. Propped in one corner was a long stick and a pile of newsprint. There was no bucket or tap. Once I was up on the platform, I cut off the light, but soon I heard a wet snuffling sound echoing through the darkness. I fumbled for the flashlight and cast its slim beam around the hut. Nothing. Then the suckling began again, and I located its source. Directly beneath me, at the base of the chute, was a tiny pig, eating with evident relish. He was soon joined by a brother, who butted him aside and tried to scramble up the sluiceway. All at once I divined the purpose of the stick, but it was another thing to get it from its spot in the corner with my pants around my ankles and a flashlight in my teeth. Once claimed, I used it to keep the piglets at bay, though if I looked down I could still see them waiting, their tiny snouts tipped up in expectation.