The Brothers K (77 page)

Whatever his needs, he had been sitting on the boulder since well before dawn, wearing the expression Irwin used to call “the Face” on his face. And his thoughts—though the face in the photo betrays nothing—were almost certainly so tormented that he couldn’t have cared less how he himself was feeling. And yet that torment was misplaced. The man was making the same blunder, there on his rock by the river, that our entire family was making that day. We could all feel, we all knew in our bones or blood that something we loved, or someone, was rapidly dying.

Our mistake?

We thought that someone was Irwin.

When I lived at Naples, there stood, at the door of my palace, a female mendicant to whom I used to pitch coins before mounting the coach. One day, suddenly perplexed at the fact that she never gave me any signal of thanks, I looked at her fixedly. It was then I saw that what I had taken for a mendicant was rather a wooden box, painted green, filled with red earth and some half rotted banana peels
.

—Max Jacob

W
ell into his year’s research on the internationally known poet-saints of medieval Maharashtra, Peter discovered a subtradition he’d never previously heard of. Most of the poets involved were low-caste. Some were illiterate, their work collected only recently in Indian books of songs. But among them were several whose verse and apparent spiritual attainment had been of a very high order. In the missive that followed his “unplugged” letter to Dr. Ramchandra Majumdar back at Harvard, Peter described some of these poets, and explained a few of the difficulties in studying them (scattered and bowdlerized manuscripts, archaic and idiosyncratic
dialects, reliable scholarship nonexistent, lives lost in folk legend). But he also shared his excitement over the apparent blending of Sufistic and Vedantic imagery he’d found in some of the verse, and included a few rough translations in his letter, including this, by a sixteenth-century seamstress, Anjana by name:

In another prompt and heartening reply, Dr. Majumdar predicted that this “wondrous subtradition” would soon lead Peter not only to a second full-year grant but to the publication of a book of “much more than merely scholarly appeal.” “But we have nothing at all on these poets here,” the doctor added, “so be sure to lay the groundwork for a complete proposal before you return.”

Peter therefore set to work on a second, simultaneous, full-scale research project. Fourteen-hour workdays became routine. Physical exercise and plain human intercourse became almost nonexistent. He also chose, so far as travel and research plans would allow, to become nocturnal, sleeping through the heat of the days and working all evening and night. As a result, he encountered the Indian crowds, chaos and squalor hardly at all, the tension inside him eased dramatically, and he decided that he had finally found his niche, that this hard, cerebral work was his calling, that the troubling inner conflict with India had resolved itself at last.

All winter and spring he lived and worked this way. He meditated twice a day, lived his waking life in libraries, traveled when he had to; he grew pale and quiet, emaciated himself on a diet of fruit, nuts and endless cups of chai, worked his brain hard, collapsed from exhaustion each
dawn, slept like a rock. He seldom hurt, seldom laughed, never cried or shouted. He never answered our letters. He didn’t remember his dreams. The Dark Lord listens.

E
ven on a long train journey, from Madras across the peninsula to Nasik, Peter kept to his owl-like schedule, working through the night in his private berth, falling to sleep in his bunk at dawn. But sometime after a brief, accidental wake-up in Hyderabad (luggage banging against his door as the train crept out of the city), Peter fell into a dream in which he was dying of some kind of fever—cholera or typhoid (“I theenk most poseebly both,” a disconcertingly happy Hindu doctor kept telling him). And the dream grew so protracted and painful that he finally woke himself with his own groans—

to find that his sheets really
were
drenched with sweat, that he could hardly breathe, that his body was burning up.

Tearing open his window shade, he groped for a catch, lock or lever. But in first-class air-conditioned cars the windows don’t open. He fell out of bed, pulled on his pants, flung open the door of his berth, and found himself gaping into the bloody—or no, just betel-stained—mouth of a tiny South Indian porter who began screaming, over and over, a sentence that sounded like
“Sahib yabbetahgabbetah!”

Peter’s first thought was that the man was trying to quarantine him. Then he realized that the porter too was sweat-drenched and short of breath, that the train was not moving, that it was the air inside the car, not his body, that was burning up. He asked, in Hindi, what had happened.

“Sahib yabbetahgabbetah!”
came the reply.

He tried English, then what he hoped was Urdu.

“Yabbetahgabbetah! Yabbetahgabbetah!”

Moving the porter aside, he started down the corridor, saw that the entire car had been vacated, found an open window in a bathroom, stuck his head out, and saw that both the men’s and the women’s first-class cars were not only empty but sitting alone on a side track. He realized what must have happened: while he’d been sleeping the air-conditioning had failed, the stifling cars had been uncoupled, and the passengers had been moved to replacement cars.

Stepping back into the corridor, he saw the little porter staggering off
in the other direction with his luggage, his drenched pillow and his forty-pound book bag all stacked on his head, now shouting, with beautifully rolled r’s,
“Trainsport, yes! Trainsport! Yes yes!”
Hoping he meant transfer, Peter followed.

The man led him down the stairs on the opposite side of his car, through a teeming station crowd in what turned out to be the city of Secunderabad, and over to a bona fide train—or at least to a row of cars sitting on the main track, connected to an engine. And sure enough, in the windows of the very last car Peter was relieved to recognize the hot, disgruntled faces of some of his first-class co-travelers.

Then he recognized something else: every car in the train, his included, was one of the trusty open-air third-class jobs that Gandhi had cherished. Like Americanness, raw India is not so easy to escape.

T
he porter placed Peter’s belongings upon the only vacant seat left in the car. He then moved up so close to Peter that it became impossible to move, and remained there, rigid as a statue. Peter was baffled—till he remembered his home-appliance servant, Lakshman. He then reached in his pocket, gave life to the porter-statue with a limp rupee, and watched it join its palms, bow, and disappear.

Digging his emergency purified-water bottle out of his suitcase, Peter drained it dry against his own better judgment, grabbed a couple of texts and a dictionary out of his book bag, stashed the rest of his gear in the chickenshit-spattered luggage rack, settled as comfortably as he could onto the impossibly uncomfortable bench, looked out the jail-like bars of the window, thought of bleacher seats, thought of church pews, thought of the three hundred circuitous miles and eight or ten stops between himself and his destination, and sighed out the single, quintessentially American word: “Shit.”

“My sentiments exactly,” said the man on the bench across from him.

Peter was surprised. The man’s complexion and clothes, the small-boned body and diffident manner, the undersized wire-rimmed glasses and little Nehru cap all said India. But the accent was plainly East Coast Yankee—maybe Long Island. The man gave Peter an exhausted smile. “Was it Chesterton or Kipling who said that an adventure is just a misfortune correctly understood?”

Peter smiled back—a little too eagerly, perhaps, but the prospect of traveling with a man who could quote even Occidental literature beat the prospect of a man who could quote nothing. He said, “Was it Dickens or
Trollope who said that train travel isn’t travel at all, it’s being shipped off to a place like a parcel?”

Long Island rubbed his stiff neck and sighed. “If only we
were
parcels! But was it Johnson or Jonson, Sam or Ben, who said that the miserable are sacred?”

Peter smiled. “Neither, I suspect. And you know it, I further suspect. But wasn’t it Socrates who said that becoming literate was a good way to forget who said everything?”

“No no no,” Long Island countered. “The way to forget everything, Socrates said, is train travel.”

Peter laughed, and began fishing through his head for another quotation. But before he’d come up with one an Indian boy of eleven or twelve burst into the car and began to emit a dreadful singsong sort of sales pitch. Or Peter assumed it was a pitch, since the kid was hawking wooden snakes. What it sounded like was a dirt bike with no muffler. The kid had a sales demo too: it consisted of squeezing a sample snake’s scissorlike handles, causing it to extend in a lifelike strike right into a potential customer’s face. Nor were these the only distractions the boy had to offer: his lips were crimson, his cheeks covered with rouge, his eyes and lashes black with something like mascara; he wore bangles on his wrists, brass bells round his ankles, and his hips were writhing like a stoned hula dancer’s. “Mother of God,” sighed Long Island. “Here comes our next adventure.”

Peter shook his head. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying. Which by our definition makes him a misfortune, not an adventure, for me.”

“So you don’t speak these infernal languages either,” his new friend said.

Peter shrugged. “I read Hindi and Marathi, but Indians speak both so fast I don’t grasp one word in five. I carry a quote unquote Practical Urdu handbook, but usually can’t tell when I’m hearing it, so I hardly know when to refer to it. I read and write Sanskrit, which is exactly as useful here as Latin is in, say, New Jersey. Ich spreche Deutsch. My name’s Chance, by the way. Peter Chance.”

“Dessinger,” said Long Island, and the two Americans shook hands. But Dessinger was growing too irritated to talk. The snake boy was manipulatively, aggressively loud. “Is he some kind of transvestite or what?”

“I think he might be a Hijara,” Peter said. “Which is nearly the same thing. I’ve never seen one, but they’re an outcaste tribe of males who dress and behave like women. Or in this case, like a nasty parody of
women. Good musicians, I read somewhere, but this kid shoots that theory too. Wealthy Hindus pay them to make merry at weddings and mourn at funerals. I heard they traveled in groups to protect themselves from persecution, but again, our young friend here seems—”

His discourse ended when the sample snake darted almost into his mouth. Peter smiled wanly and shook his head no.

The boy extended the snake into Dessinger’s face. Dessinger ignored it. The boy chanted louder, writhed his hips faster, sent the snake striking forward again and again. Then it hit Dessinger’s glasses. In a flash he ripped it from the boy’s grasp, tore it to pieces, and flung the splinters against the boy’s chest. “Piss off,
faggot!”
he snarled, pointing down the aisle.

The boy stared at him without surprise, then fluttered his lids and flounced away. “Sorry,” Dessinger said to Peter. “Fell back on my old subway instincts there. I’ve been two days on the rails, and I’m just too tired for that kinda shit.”

“I know the feeling,” Peter said. But he was lying. The violence of the man’s reaction had shocked him.

“How far are you going?” Dessinger asked.

“Clear to Nasik,” Peter murmured, trying to withdraw.

“Going to sleep soon?”

“I haven’t slept on a third-class train car yet. I’m going to try to get a little work done.” He tapped the books on the bench beside him.

“Would you mind waking me in Jalna, then? I’m getting off at Aurangabad, but I hear it’s a little crazy there these days, so I want plenty of time to wake up.”

“No problem,” Peter said.

Dessinger covered his head with a shirt, curled up on the bench, and almost instantly fell asleep. Peter opened one of his books, eyed the words for a while, but felt too claustrophobic to lose himself in them. The air was like a cross between a sauna and a latrine. He slid over next to the window. There was no breeze. Just as he began to grow frantic, the train jolted violently and began to roll. He wiped his face, and tried to steady his breathing. Dessinger didn’t stir.

O
n the blazing hot concrete of the Nizamabad station platform, a woman with no legs and a grotesquely hunched back was dragging herself
along on a board with wheels, like an auto mechanic’s dolly. A girl of four or five accompanied her. They were begging, in tandem, from the cars on Peter’s train, dumping the coins they collected into a brass pot nailed to the front of the dolly. The girl was pitiably cute in her dirty rags—a perfect UNICEF ad for the back pages of some American fashion magazine. But the woman was something else again …

Her only piece of clothing was a kind of loincloth. Her hump was naked, and had been exposed to the sun till it was as cracked and crosshatched as the mud in a dry riverbed. The backs of her hands were gnarled, the knuckles worn fuzzy as old warts from pulling herself along the streets. Her face was concealed by her dusty gray hair, but when those she passed on the platform dropped coins into her pot she would blindly place her palms together, above her hair, in thanks. As she neared the train a shower of coins began to tinkle all around her, sometimes hitting her hump, once striking her head with an audible thud. She didn’t seem to mind. With the patience of a sea turtle on sand she dragged her dolly along, gathering what money she could reach while the little girl chased down the rest.