The Medicine Burns (16 page)

He dispersed them quickly with some harsh-sounding words. Then he stood there like royalty, undisturbed.

“My name is Sukesh,” he said, “would you like to see me again?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Tomorrow night?” he asked, taking hold of my hand again.

“Yes,” I said, “I don't have any plans.” The word
plans
sounded funny in my mouth, it had the rattle of a single coin in a beggar's dish.

“Ten o'clock. Here, on the corner.”

“Yes, that's fine,” I said, and we parted.

Later, I pulled my knees up to my stomach and let the thin sheet fall from the cot. I felt too weak to get to the bathroom. Too weak. Surely it hadn't been this way before India, but there had been days when I had no feeling for living. I remembered when my lover was still alive and wanted me to walk with him to watch the sunrise, or sometimes up the hill to the neighborhood store. I guess I felt weak even then, and guilty too, because my lover was watching those sunrises as though they were the very last he'd see, and he wanted to believe that every day was a new beginning. I slept through the messages in the sunrise. For me, it was merely the return of the same day - the slow, protracted, and sometimes painless day I'd spent innumerable hours in before. I always told him it was anemia, and that I'd always required a lot of sleep. But sometimes I thought it was him drawing everything out of me.

In India I didn't spend a moment without it, the weight of exhaustion in my arms and legs and lungs and brain. It sat inside me like a guest, an incubus.

A young boy was sweeping outside my room. I watched him through the small, screened window. He had his shirt off and was wearing a knotted lungi. He was not muscular, but I loved watching the rippling of his chest and legs as he squatted with his whisk broom. His skin was shiny with perspiration, and in the moonlight it looked like black oil. I felt stronger watching him. Like a machine clicking on, the thought of sex dissipated the cramps and strengthened my resolve to see Sukesh again.

I called out to the boy and he approached my doorway nervously. I propped my head up against the headboard and smiled at him. I could almost feel his dark eyes sweeping over my wet pajama. I felt my penis harden under the wet material, and I opened my legs.

“Sir?” he asked, looking to the floor. I imagined him thinking filthy tourist as his eyes took in the cigarette butts and empty bottles.

“What time is it?” I asked. He told me he thought it was nine.

“May I sweep here?” he asked, squatting reticently by the bedside. I saw him looking in my bag, at my Walkman, and I asked him if he would like to hear it. He took it in his hands and stood up with the headphones on. He stood smiling and listening and turning the recorder over in his hands inquisitively. But when he dropped it accidentally, he was very grave.

I took him by the arm.
Nothing is damaged
, I assured him. I moved my hand gently down his arm and squeezed his hand. He stepped away from me then, and his eyes were hard and mean, even as he apologized.

I walked slowly, deliberately to the corner. I felt punched in the stomach, that kind of pain. I told myself the cramps will stop. I know the rhythm by now. But there was a pool of light under the lamppost where I imagined myself standing, waiting. I imagined how worn I'd look under that light, how stripped and anxious I'd feel.

There was a blackout then, so common in Calcutta that every vendor had their candles burning, dimly illuminating their folded knees, a brocade stretched across their laps, a stitching hand. There were hundreds of these candles burning, but not one strong enough to connect itself to another. There were only the unrelated and anonymous images of labor stretching out before me.

I stood against a wall, conscious of the sewage that runs alongside these buildings. It flows through the gutters on bath waters. I could feel the heat of people around me. I heard them singing, praying, begging. The thought occurred to me that I would never see him in the darkness, or worse, that I would not recognize him, that he would have undergone some change. I was stricken with the thought that he might have forgotten about me entirely and that he would not come at all.

But someone always comes in India. They can detect when you are alone. I wondered if they were this way with other Indians, or could an Indian spend his life begging for contact?

A legless beggar was moving swiftly over the broken street, carrying his weight on his hands. He reached out and clung to my leg. He grimaced as he spoke. He wanted me to see the wounds on his torso, the results of dragging himself through the streets. “You see it is not easy for me, Baba,” he said, “if you need any help, just ask the people here for Hanuman. That is what they call me. They call me the name of the monkey god, because I move on my hands.” He turned his hands up to me to inspect. They were raw and black. “Like the bottoms of feet,” he laughed.

“Shall we go?” I heard someone ask. It was Sukesh. He gripped my arm and pulled me aside. Hanuman followed until Sukesh smacked him on the back of the head. Then he slunk away.

“You must think we have a very backward country,” Sukesh said with a shame as red and complex as his turban.

“No,” I answered, “I don't think there is any society without need.” But he didn't want to hear this. He walked a little ahead of me, and I thought, he is colder tonight.

“What have you seen in Calcutta?” he asked. I was thankful he spoke. We were both trying not to be strangers.

“I've been sick,” I said, “so I haven't seen much. I spent an afternoon at the Ram Krishna mission, I saw the four Jain temples.”
This is stupid
, I thought,
I don't want to talk about tourist sites
. I stopped talking.

We came out on B.B.D. Bag. It was silent and looked different without its crowds. I began to ask him why the Indians hadn't changed the storefronts to match their businesses.

All over Calcutta, the British business names were still painted on the windows, but of course they were Indian businesses now. The Indians were living there like ghosts. They sold saris from antiquarian bookshops and Indian sweets from British knife shops. And though there were “European Coffee” signs, the Indians sold only Nescafe.

“It couldn't cost that much to change the signs,” I said.

“Maybe the Indians are trying to pretend this is still an empire. Or maybe they like to deceive the tourists,” he said. I heard him laugh but he wasn't sharing it.

He turned off into an alley and I followed mechanically. He did not turn around to see if I had followed him. We were walking through a maze of streets, littered with garbage and smashed chai cups. There were goats nuzzling each other in the smell of slaughter, and blood in black patches on the ground.

He stopped walking and turned to me. He kept his eye on his zipper as he opened it. “Do you want this?” he asked. I went to him and pressed my lips to his neck. He pushed me down by the top of my head. I felt my foot sink into one of the gutters where the sewerage flowed. He was gruff and impatient with his hands and wouldn't let me move.

And then there was that moment when my discomfort didn't matter, and only his pleasure did. I no longer cared about the goats' blood that stained the knees of my pajamas. There was only my need and his pleasure between us. He slumped over me, and for a moment I felt his cheek brush my back. And that was it - he was finished with me.

When I stood up, he looked down at my shoes and the stains on my knees.

“Go get cleaned up,” he said, “there is a well over there.”

“Which way is my guesthouse?” I asked.

He pointed in the direction we had come from and began walking away from me, tentatively at first, and then with determination. I stayed with the goats for some time, and while I stroked their fur, I could smell their blood in the air.

When I arrived at the guesthouse it was late. They'd locked the door and I stood outside knocking to wake the manager. He was angry and disoriented. “This cannot go on any longer,” he said. “If you want to stay out all night you should stay at another guesthouse.”

I wanted to defend myself. I'd stayed on for many weeks and this was only the third time I'd arrived after the door was locked. His behavior seemed irrational to me. I had always been prompt with my payments, I certainly wasn't noisy in my room, and as the signs posted in the lobby demanded, I had neither indulged in nor kept drugs in my room.

But looking past the manager into the small office where the cot and the bedrolls for the cleaning staff were set up, I saw the young boy I had seen earlier, the boy who had been sweeping in front of my room. He was standing in the shadows, but I could see the same nervous expression he'd had at my doorway. And then I thought I could feel something conspiratorial between the manager and him. I wondered if he had told, if he had felt me seducing him or just thought there was something depraved in the way I talked to him, looked at him, or touched his hand.

3.

“Dashashwamed,” I said to the skinny boy with the bicycle rickshaw, “Shiva Lodge.”

He nodded, smiled, and placed my bag on the seat.

“How much?” I asked.

“Thirty rupees,” he said. He was firm in his price. He refused to haggle and I dropped it. We moved out into the traffic with him ringing the little bell on his handlebars. The streets narrowed and the horns and bells of the trucks, auto rickshaws, and pulleys grew more chaotic and threatening. I watched the driver's bare, spindly legs working the pedals, the dirty lungi gathered at his thighs. He turned around as we began coasting down a hill. “Shiva Lodge is full,” he said, “I'll take you to another lodge, very nice, very cheap.”

“No,” I told him, “I'm meeting a friend at Shiva Lodge. Take me there.” Of course I had been warned of this. The Sikh on the train had sighed, “Banares—the holy city and the city of cheats. Beware of the commission boys, they will never take you where you want to go.”

He slowed the rickshaw and stopped before a large yellow house with white columns. “Shiva Lodge,” he said, pointing.

“No, I don't believe you,” I said. I had been told that the lodge was on the ghat and the upstairs room looked out on the Ganges. I saw only dust and traffic and two small children squatting by the side of the house. “I'll check it before I pay you.” I started to get up, but he punched the pedals and we were out in the traffic again. He was angry now. Over his shoulder he said, “I will take you to Dashashwamed, then you will have to walk a little way. The streets are too narrow to go by rickshaw.”

I said, “Take me as close as you can, walk me to the door, and then I'll pay you.”

We came into a circular marketplace with several small alleyways running out of it. Along the roadside, hundreds of rickshaw drivers were stretched out in their passenger seats shielded from the sun by torn, brown canopies. We were seized upon by beggars and commission boys doling out business cards. I told my driver to walk with me to the lodge, but he refused. He drew the crowd closer, blending in with them and slipping back into the chaos. I couldn't hear his voice over the others. I threatened that I would not pay him unless he showed me the way to the guesthouse, but the crowd began to jostle us and there was nothing but patience in my driver's smile. So I took my bag, paid him, and he pointed down an alley. “Follow it to the ghat. You won't miss it.”

The alleyways connected and broke apart from each other, a labyrinth which narrowed and darkened. There was the heavy scent of cow dung burning under chai pots and the hypnotic ringing of temple bells which seemed to vibrate the stone walls. Those walls seemed to close in until I felt a friction in the passing of veiled women and sadhus, and even from the cows passively eating the flowers off the altars. I felt pursued by a menace darker than these faces shrouded and clustered around me; the threat of God that cramped these streets began to eat away at me, and I thought I'd faint at any moment and it would stop. I leaned against a wall and slid down, weak, and retched between my knees. There was blood in it, and flies swarmed it immediately.

I looked up and a boy was standing before me, thin and dirty, holding his hand out stiffly. “Can I help you stand up?” he asked, a persistence in his voice which nagged me.

“I need to sit for awhile. Go on,” I said, shooing him away with my hand, “I'll be fine on my own.”

He looked around and reluctantly squatted next to me. “Where are you staying?” he asked.

“I'm looking for Shiva Lodge,” I answered, noticing his knee pressed against my leg, “I can't find it, damn it.” I sounded angry, expecting resignation. “I'm sick,” I said. “I can't keep walking around like this.”

That rickshaw driver deserves every miserable minute of his life, I thought. And then I remembered the grief in his face as he rode uphill, the stress in his skinny legs, his wheezing breath, and I felt miserable. I trembled that I had any feeling left.

“I'll take you there,” he said, pulling me to my feet. I gave him my bag, held his arm, and kept my other hand to the wall. “I know the owner of Shiva Lodge very well. He will try to sell you ganja or charas but don't buy from him. I give you a better deal. You can see me out here all the time,” he said, walking me through the broken streets.

I stared at the ground. Suddenly they all seemed so ridiculous, trying to sell me, sell me, sell me. I laughed out loud.

“What are you laughing for?” he asked.

“You're all the same,” I said harshly. “You'll talk behind your best friend's back to make a deal. You sell each other.”

“That's not true,” he said. “I only want to make you the best deal.”

“Take me to Shiva Lodge and I'll pay you five rupees. That's all I want from you.”

The owner stood at the door in his underwear, shaking his head sadly and telling me not to pay the boy. “I don't hire commission boys to bring people to my lodge, but you still end up paying.” He led me inside, shouting something in Hindi after the boy. The building was silent, cold, gray. The only warmth came from the corner of the room where his large bed was covered in an intricately patterned bedspread, burgundy and purple. A standing lamp cast a dim light on his chillum and pad on a nearby table.