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I wished I could tell Mau about the pigs. He spent hours watching nature shows and was always charmed by animal resourcefulness. But he was already in Venezuela by then. It would be eight months before I could reach him by phone. I went back to my room and stayed up for hours, listening to Bach's Magnificat in D on my earphones, shining the flashlight down at my feet, which cast great paw shadows against the wall. I was alone on that enormous wedge of subcontinent, and yet solitude wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I pressed the flashlight against my leg, and the beam sank into my flesh. I stared for a long time at that pink halo, shot with arteries like the roots of trees, the only patch of color in the darkness. I was alive, and whether I was lonely or not, my blood kept moving.

 

The next day I took a walk on one of the rust-colored roads beside the ocean. After a mile or so under the palms, the dirt track veered toward the water, and I came across a battered school bus parked beside a dune. It didn't look like a local bus; the paint job was too drab and there were no statuettes or garlands on the dashboard. When I came closer, I saw a weathered blond woman in the driver's seat, plaiting her hair.

"How's it going?" I asked her, approaching the truck.

"Very good these days," she said. She had a lilting accent I couldn't place.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"From Denmark."

"You drove?"

"Yes, we came overland."

Now,
there
was a journey. I came closer and peered into the cab. Same high leather seat, same glass rounds over the gauges. "I lived in a mail truck when I was a little girl," I told her.

"Really?" The woman brightened. "It's a fabulous life, eh? The only hard part is finding gas. We had some troubles in Afghanistan. I'm Sylvie, by the way." She extended her hand.

Just then a small boy, fair-haired like his mother, poked his head out from the back.

"This is Jan," the woman told me.

The boy scowled and cinched the curtains around his neck. He looked like he was prepped for the guillotine.

"Jan, will you say hello?" His mother reached out to brush a lock of his hair, but he reared back from her hand.

The woman sighed. "It's hard on him, this road life."

She said
hard
with her tongue pulled to the roof of her mouth, and the long vowel made the word seem softer, tinged with tenderness. She didn't need to explain the boy's sulkiness. But as I stood in the foot well, it was Sylvie I felt myself drawn to. She was living the kind of dream most people never took beyond their armchairs: to fill up the tank and drive into the day, unfettered, everything necessary for living rolling along behind.

I wished her good luck and walked out to the sea, where the breakers rolled over in neat sets, thinking of my mother, the way we used to sit in the sun-warmed cab of the mail truck, eating tuna fish on saltines and singing Woody Guthrie tunes. I was slowly catching up to her happiness.

 

I had been in India for nearly a month when I realized I'd all but forgotten my plans for anthropological fieldwork. On the long bus rides, swaying on a narrow bench for twelve hours at a stretch, there was nothing to do but think, a long undulating quilt of thought, stitched out over the miles. On one of those journeys, the bus radio blasted a tune from a Hindi musical, and a little boy did a skittering dance in the aisle, shaking his hips and making the passengers laugh. He leapt into his seat, every bit the bored satirist, and stared out the window. Suddenly I thought of my kindergarten friend Scotty Randall, no bigger than this sly sprout, his pinwale cords barely clearing the tops of his cowboy boots, how we wanted to be actors. We were so sure of our vocations at five. I was so sure. What had happened to that? I spent half my life wanting to study music, dance, and then I gave it all up. It seemed that these half-mastered skills were like lost limbs.

The bus stopped at a bend in the road, where a small stream cut down the mountain. There was a tea stall against the hill, and while the women bought chai and bags of peanuts, the men strolled over to the water and pissed in the creek. I don't know why this made me delighted—it wasn't such a good idea for the people who lived downstream—but it did. The animal pleasure of it, adding water to other water and watching it churn away.

There I was, taken by my surroundings, and yet I never once thought of kinship systems or agrarian reform. When I realized this, I felt relief, followed by a sobering dread. Maybe I wasn't meant to be an academic, but I had no alternative plan. If I had the nerve, I would go home and get some silly job and try to write poems. Or maybe I could open a café, or become a clothes designer, or at the very least sew my own clothes—vests and paneled shirts that borrowed some of the jaunty style of the men in dhotis at creekside. I made frenzied sketches in the pages of my notebooks, bought peanuts from a roadside vendor, pressed my face to the window and dreamed.

Darkness fell, and the bus passed down a tunnel of banyan trees—each trunk glowing like a great arched rib in the headlights, so we seemed to be traveling down into the belly of the night. In the road ahead was an ox cart brimming with hay. I could see a man perched on top, curled over in sleep. The cart made me think of Ferdinand the Bull, chewing clover on his way to the fights. It was this kind of thought—a fishhook snagged on some childhood flotsam—that made me feel farthest from home. I turned to the woman on the bench beside me, an old woman with gray hair and seamed cheeks, and wished we could share some bit of useless conversation.

The bus passed the ox cart and cut across a darkened plain. A dry wind blew in the windows, and in the seats ahead of me a few passengers' hair climbed upward—wild tentacles lit by the headlights. The old woman and I moved to tame our stray locks, and in the mirrored gesture we glanced at each other. Her face was settled; it seemed to be the face of someone who had reached some kind of rest. When the bus rounded a turn, momentum carried me toward her until our hips pressed together on the bench. I took comfort from the heat where our bodies joined, the way we swayed together in echo of the road.

Toward morning, we pulled into the station and the bus hissed to a stop. Hyderabad. I thought of that line from
Light in August
when Lena, after tramping across three states, says, "My, my. A body does get around."

I could just imagine her voice: dust-choked as Faulkner's prose, slow as the pace at which he followed her over the roads. It was a phrase that bloomed open after a while. First, an idle exclamation, and then a kind of quiet comment on the piling up of experience. It seemed that a body, pushed around like freight by the implacable will, could take so many turns in the road that the early miles seemed to have been walked by another person.

 

Hyderabad was a big city, with a large telegraph office, so I put in a collect call to my father. After I filled out a form and waited half an hour, a clerk shouted my name and pointed frantically to a booth against the wall. The phone looked to be forty years old, with a frayed cord and a heavy black handset. I shouted into it: "Hello? Dad?"

"Lisa? Is that you? Hello?"

My father and I talked for a few minutes, his voice so familiar beneath the crackle and static, it didn't matter much what we said. I had caught the family during breakfast. In the background I could hear my sisters, shouting hellos. So normal, all of it. I could imagine the room, where each of them sat.

"Well, you sound like you're doing great, honey," my father said. "You're really amazing. I'm going to put on Leslie and the girls." The phone was passed around and then came back to him.

"Any word from grad schools?" I asked.

For a moment I thought the line had gone dead. "I'm sorry, honey, the news isn't too good. Berkeley said no. So did Cornell. No word yet from Michigan."

"Oh, well. To tell the truth, grad school doesn't sound so good lately."

I figured my change of heart would disappoint him. When I first declared my intention to study anthropology, my father thought it was a great idea. He seemed to like picturing me as a junior Margaret Mead. "You're so smart, you could do just about anything," he said. "But anthropology's cool." Now I braced myself for some protest, but I'd forgotten my father's loyalty, the way he turned as fast as a jib in the wind. "No shit. Who wants to spend ten years doing a Ph.D.? You're doing great out there on your own."

I left the telegraph office elated. Miles away, someone knew me, remembered who I was. I had a life there and I would go back to it. My father understood how I needed that grounding. I found out later those calls cost him a hundred dollars a pop, but he talked as if we were sitting at the breakfast table, passing scrambled eggs and salt, his voice easy and unhurried and full of love.

 

I went farther south from there—to Madurai, a beautiful inland city—and found myself a room near the train station. After dinner, when the suffocating midday heat had lifted, I walked through the still-warm streets to the temple. Inside, the Brahmins carried a statue of Shiva to the goddess Parvati's bedroom for a cosmic tryst, the palanquin carried by two emaciated men, staggering in time to a squealing clarinet. There were a handful of children hanging at the fringes of the procession, barefoot, dusty, jostling one another.

One of them approached me and pointed to his chest. "Arjuna," he said.

I shook his hand. Arjuna, named for a mythic warrior, came up to my hip and had the shaven head and deep-set eyes of an old man. He stood there, chin tipped down, smiling at me, hands tucked into the pockets of his shorts. He looked to be about my brother's age, maybe four or five.

I strolled around the temple, and Arjuna followed. He seemed to sense that I was charmed by him. When a group of devotees approached, and we stepped aside to let them pass, he leaned gently against my leg, a babyish softening in his face. We had stopped beside a small shrine to Ganesh. Arjuna bent over and brushed his finger in a pile of powder at the elephant's feet, daubing it on his forehead and miming at me to do the same. I gave myself the red dot, though I knew I would regret it when we were out on the street. The boy nodded his approval and led me out of the vestibule, a new directive briskness to his movements.

Out on the street, I searched for my sandals in the pile by the door. A group of boys were gathered out front, and when they saw us they rushed forward. "Come, madam, one rupee, one pen." A thin boy of about ten was at the head of the bunch, and as he recited the litany he plucked at my sleeve. There was no heat to his voice; it seemed more a bit of business that had to be done, and a pen or a rupee might come of it, but if it didn't someone else would come along. Meanwhile, there was a bored inspection going on beneath his banter.

"Madam, what is your good name?"

"Lisa," I said, moving toward the tea stall across the road, where a man was lofting a thick stream of tea from a pitcher above his head and catching it in a waiting glass.

"And your country coin?" the tall boy persisted.

Arjuna huddled beside me, clutching my hand.

"The penny," I said, "which has developed a bad name."

The tall boy gave Arjuna a little kick. "Why this boy? This ruffian?" he asked, pointing at my companion.

Arjuna looked stricken. He was younger than the other boys and didn't yet know how to manage his emotions. They were tough and sly, full of the brassiness that street life required, and you could fault them for it—their tricks and taunting—and allow yourself to pass them by.

"He's my friend," I said. I knew from my playground days that he would pay for this later.

The tall boy smiled and shook his head. "I am your friend. Why not giving me one penny?"

"I don't have any pennies."

A muscle rippled in the boy's cheek. He looked down at Arjuna with a raptor's cold eye. "Why not bring your friend to the festival?" He turned in the direction of the main boulevard, where a crowd was gathering, and strode off at the head of his crowd.

After the gang had gone well ahead, Arjuna and I followed. The boy was glued to me now. We wove through the thickening crowd, and he looked up from time to time, flashing an artless smile. His belly bulged beneath his frayed dress shirt.

"Where do you live?" I asked him.

He shrugged. Still, my attempt at conversation made him quicken, and when the procession turned a corner and we were alone on a darkened street, he tugged at my sleeve. I bent down to his level—he seemed to want this—and he pulled a fist out of his pocket and opened it in the light from a nearby storefront. On his palm were a watch without a band, a bottle cap, a pretzeled nail. I stared at the stuff, uncertain what he wanted. He moved his hand forward a little.

I picked up the watch, and turned it over. It was a cheap Swiss round-face, lost, no doubt, by some tourist. The glass was smashed, stopping the hands. "It's very nice," I said, putting it down next to the other items.

Arjuna picked up the nail and held it out.

"I can't take it," I said.

He stared at me for a moment, then tucked the stuff away. We walked farther in silence, past the tailors' market, where a few men in dhotis still toiled over their pedal machines. It was nearly ten at night. When we turned the corner onto Dingigul Road, Arjuna took my hand and I noticed a movement in his pocket. He was fingering those bits of junk, turning their surfaces over and over. I thought of my velvet box and the lonely months I spent at Twin Oaks School in Eugene, how I passed those days with a hand in my desk, stroking the weathered nap of that fabric. I knew then why Arjuna had emptied his pocket. He wanted me to see his secret talismans.

By now, the procession had broken up. Soon my hotel would close; the doorman would pull down the corrugated-metal door and go to sleep on a pallet in the hall. Up ahead was a soda stand. I stopped and asked for a lemon drink, gesturing to Arjuna to pick something out.

"Take something, boy. She is offering," the shopkeeper said. Then he spoke to him in Tamil.