Split (39 page)

"He doesn't want anything," he told me with a shrug.

From Arjuna's darting glances at the soda rack, I could see this wasn't true. He was thirsty. I couldn't imagine why he would refuse a drink, unless he feared sullying our companionship. That restraint, that giving up of one thing for another, endeared him to me.

"Can you ask him where he lives?"

The shopkeeper posed my question in Tamil, and the boy answered.

"He is living with his uncle. The mother and father are dead."

"Why doesn't he go home?"

When the man questioned him again, Arjuna went still; even the hand in his pocket ceased working. When the boy finally answered, the shopkeeper's shoulders went soft. He had been curt with us at first—peeved, no doubt, at the boy for hanging on to a tourist, or peeved at me for my bleeding-heart attentions, which he knew wouldn't last out the hour. But while Arjuna spoke, the man's brows knit together. He looked straight at the boy for the first time.

"The uncle is beating at the wife and striking at the boy with a stick. He is afraid."

He paused for a moment, then said something in Tamil, something gentle and coaxing, and when Arjuna nodded, the man took down an orange soda from the rack and flipped off the top.

"Thank you," I said, and paid with two rumpled bills. While Arjuna and I sipped at our sodas, the man polished his countertop with a rag. From down the street came the rattle of shops locking up for the night. Squares of yellow light winked shut on the road. I drank very slowly, and the boy, sensing my cue, did the same.

What to do? I could take him to my hotel. The doorman would object, but I could probably soften him with a bit of money. But then what? Sooner or later I would leave Madurai, and he would be back on the street, just as I had found him. This was what my father had tried to teach me. If you didn't judge the world by its systems, if you didn't confront its inequalities at the source, the small sorrows would break your heart.

When our sodas were finished, and the shopkeeper had returned the bottles to their crate, I knelt down next to the boy. "Listen, I have to go to my room now."

For a moment he pleaded. "No," he said, holding on to my hand. He said it in English: "No."

"I'm sorry. I can't take you," I told him, starting to cry. In some odd way, my tears seemed to steel him. Perhaps he knew they meant I'd made up my mind. He let go of my hand and stood there in the street, staring while I fumbled with some bills.

"Please, take this."

He pushed the money back at me, but I tucked it in his pocket, the empty one, the one across from his collection of precious things, and turned away, down the shadowed street toward my hotel.

 

I traveled alone for the first month in India, and then I ran into Nitzan, an Israeli, in a small town near India's tail. We traveled north together for over a month, glad for tolerable company headed the same way. I was fond of hieing off the beaten track, but Nitzan was fonder. He couldn't miss a single temple or ruin or game park. I always swore I was going to take a day to relax, sit in town drinking chai, and pass the midday heat under a ceiling fan, and in the end I always went along. It was Nitzan who insisted we take a six-hour bus ride into the desert to visit Ranakpur, a temple set deep in the Rajasthani desert, with nothing around it for miles.

When we got off the bus at the compound gate, we were greeted by a toothless old man. "You are arriving to Ranakpur, India's most famous Jain temple," he said, spitting betel juice at our feet. There was something oddly solemn in his tone, in his use of the present continuous, that made us pause. We stood beside him, laden with duffel bags, while our bus rumbled out of sight. Then, when a proper interval seemed to have passed, we said a polite thanks and headed for the dharamsala in search of a room.

When we inquired at the booking desk, a willowy Jain nun, wrapped in white from head to foot and holding a swath of sari across her mouth to prevent the inhalation and death of any small insects, told us that we had arrived in the middle of a religious festival. All the dorms were full, and the kitchen was short of supplies. I asked about a low building on the other side of the temple that looked promisingly like a hotel.

"Ah, that is the Shilpi Tourist Bungalow. Those rooms have been booked for many months." She punctuated the word
many
with an outward wave of her hand, as if to sweep away any last hope for accommodation. The cloth fell away from her face to reveal a supple, generous smile. Then she covered her mouth, and bent over the ledger she had been tallying when we arrived.

Back out in the compound, Nitzan began studying the guidebook. This was mainly an evasion, since we were six hours from the nearest town, but he liked to preserve the illusion that he was in charge. We had been on tenterhooks from the first moments we met, bickering over matters of comfort, finance, and the like. Loneliness makes strange bedfellows.

As a rule, Nitzan chose to walk instead of taking rickshaws, allowed himself a room with hot water only once a month, and favored overnight bus rides because they saved a night's hotel costs. I lobbied for comfort and a taste of the subcontinent's small luxuries: a dinner buffet at a maharaja's palace, a hotel room with pressed-tin sunflowers on the ceiling. Of course, I admired Nitzan's restraint—he had a competence and calm that matched his economy—but on a few things I refused to budge.

Overnight bus rides were one of them; I couldn't sleep sitting up. The first time I gave in to all-night travel, I spent the ride bolt upright on the bench—grain sacks under my feet, two snoring women slumped on my shoulders. I seemed to be the only witness to our bus driver's nocturnal habits: long detours down gutted dirt roads for what appeared to be impromptu visits with relatives, or the practice, when another vehicle approached at full speed, of turning off his headlights so as not to blind them. I passed the night clutching the seat in front of me, feeding peanuts to the goat tethered in the aisle, and casting the evil eye on Nitzan's lolling head.

Perhaps life on the kibbutz had given my friend a taste for hardship. He had stories of boyhood trials that rivaled Jim's 4
A.M.
paper route: waking in the dark to harvest bananas before school, riding on a tractor, dust billowing around him, and nicking the bunches free with a small knife. He told these stories with a flat voice and a shrug. When I got worked up over some trivial matter, he always had a ready phrase: "Hey, Lis, don't take it so hard."

So a night without lodging or food didn't faze my friend. He snapped the guidebook shut, as if something had been solved, and suggested we take a look at the temple.

When we got closer, I had to say he was right: it was worth it to come. The temple, set in a cleft in the hills, was made of white marble and had the high-flown beauty of a circus tent cast in stone. A broad flight of steps led to a room cut open to the desert: carved columns held up the upper floor, and set among the columns were marble sculptures—a bull on its haunches surveying the desert, an elaborately carved wheel. Above us were domes worked into filigree, delicate as inverted wedding cakes.

We wandered up a narrow stairway that led to the roof, and there all the detail dropped away: smooth domes and spires and pyramids, as stark as an astronomical observatory, an abstract plane hovering over the ornate. Jim would have loved that place. He would have snapped off half a roll of film, after waiting politely for the man in khaki and a crimson turban to move out of the frame.

I went back downstairs and sat cross-legged on the steps. Someone nearby was murmuring in Hindi, and the smell of jasmine and sandalwood wove a cowl about my head. The courtyard was like a ballroom, cool and luminous, the light echoing from wall to wall without losing incandescence. I imagined it was like the light inside an egg, when the roost was empty and a shaft of sun hit the shell.

That sense of transportation, peculiar to traveling, often felt like the prelude to some profound event. It was an old confusion, not unlike the one I felt on the rooftop at Kerckoff Hall. I mistook that first sensory flush for information, as if the body were a gateway to knowledge. But those moments didn't give way to anything else. They
were
the event, and then they were gone. The light changed, my feet chafed on the sun-baked floors, and still the carvings looked like no more than giant souvenirs. I liked beginnings, the first wondering glance, the first breaths of incense in the inner sanctum. I didn't have patience for anything else.

When I first arrived in India, I met a couple trying to see the country in two weeks—only the highlights—taking short Air India flights between stops. They were miserable. I kept running into them, and each time they seemed more haggard and crazed. The woman looked as if she were considering a murder. She would swing her eyes around in search of a victim—the waiter who brought her rice studded with rocks; her husband, who was herding her through this whirlwind tour. Every time I crossed their path, I was reminded of my own useless railings against the interminable waits, the ennui of the dusty southern villages.

Stranded there in Ranakpur, it seemed foolish to fight our fate. There was nothing to do but follow the festival we had stumbled on. When we wound back around to the front of the temple, a group of devotees had formed a circle at the door to the inner sanctum. On a small raised platform, musicians played tabla and sarod, while, at random, men and women came forward and danced—shy, lumbering, happy—in the center of the ring. Nitzan and I had just taken a seat a polite distance from the group when an Indian man, dressed in white slacks and shirt, suddenly stepped from behind a pillar. "You are Americans, no?" He grinned broadly.

His appearance was so abrupt we could say nothing at first. He must have used the columns as blinds, approaching sideways like a novice private eye.

Nitzan was the first to answer: "I am Israeli. Lis, here, is from the United States." I heard a note of irritation in my friend's voice. He disliked being taken for an American. He figured his kibbutznik's sandals and extended beard should read as clearly as the Israeli flag. In fact, his beard, which could have housed a nest of small birds, attracted considerable attention. Once, a group of children, chasing cows to gather manure for kitchen fuel, stopped and ogled the blond tuft. When he smiled, they came closer, gesturing at it with their sticky hands. Still, no one had heard of Israel, and it was beginning to wound him.

"Oh, United States, very fine," said the man. "And you are staying at the dharamsala?" He leaned jauntily against a pillar, stroking his chin.

Nitzan explained our predicament.

The man seemed thrilled. "I am Sanjit Mehta," he said, extending his hand to Nitzan, "and you must be my guests. My wife and I are staying at the tourist bungalow with our friend. He must go on to Udaipur tonight on some business. You can stay in his room."

We protested vaguely, just for show, then thanked him for his offer.

"I assure you, the pleasure is completely mine," Mr. Mehta said, as he led us to the low building we had seen upon our arrival and showed us to our room. "When you are properly settled, you must share some lunch. Last door on the left."

Sanjit's room faced a small courtyard. The walls were chalky blue and the furnishings simple: a wood-frame bed made with madras sheets, a long-stemmed ceiling fan, a few straight-back chairs. When we arrived, Sanjit's wife was washing clothes in the bathroom and seemed embarrassed to have been caught indisposed. She wiped her hands quickly and dipped her head as we were introduced.

"This is Nitzan, an Israeli gentleman, and his wife, Lisa." Sanjit gestured to us grandly. "My wife, Pune."

I saw Nitzan open his mouth to explain that we were not, in fact, married, and just as quickly watched him close it. We had already lied about our relationship on several occasions, and since Sanjit had made this declaration of his own accord, it didn't seem prudent to set him straight. Our room for the night may have depended on it.

"They have just arrived and are lacking accommodations," he told his wife. "I have insisted they stay in Gupta's room while he is taking the photos to Udaipur."

There was a subtle officiousness in Mr. Mehta that was beginning to bother me. The man didn't talk; he made pronounce ments. Soon he launched into a soliloquy about the Jains, puffing out his chest and dropping his chin like a third-rate Shakespearean actor. While he talked, Pune began laying out small tins on the bed. Curried vegetables and rice, crispy nan. Nitzan and Sanjit chatted about camera equipment and Sanjit's hardware business in Jaipur. I asked him how he felt about India's trade embargo, but he behaved as if I hadn't spoken, fixing his attentions on my friend. Pune and I ate slowly and smiled when our eyes met.

I was having less enjoyment of the actual interlude than I was from the
idea
of it. As Pune proffered more curry and the men's conversation droned on, I consoled myself with the thought that I was getting a glimpse of the Indian business class. I felt guilty about this attitude, this hoarding of exotica. Even as I was in the middle of an experience, I was calculating its value on some scale of authenticity, oddness, the absurd.

Then the conversation took a promising turn. We learned that the Mehtas had traveled to Ranakpur to visit their guru, Anil, a businessman who had given up his fortune in order to live the life of an ascetic.

"He reads faces," Sanjit informed us. "You must come to see him. He is always looking for new types to study."

As Sanjit pressed this idea, I began to get the feeling that he had taken us under his wing to satisfy the appetites of his mentor, but we agreed to make a visit. The swami was staying nearby, and Sanjit seemed to relish the chance to drive us there in his new minivan. He opened the side door with a flourish for Pune and me, then let Nitzan into the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel.

I spent the short drive staring at the unforgiving scenery. Other than an occasional gnarled tree, the landscape was quite barren. Out the back window, the domes of the temple rose like tiny lumps of sugar above the coffee-colored ground.