The PuppetMaster (25 page)

Kissing is not done in public in India. In Varanasi there might even be a law against it. Not wishing to break that arcane commandment, I felt a compelling urge to jog, possibly sprint, to a private place or shaded room. I ached for the woman standing in front of me at the river’s edge. I wanted her mouth on mine, her hair and skin touching me, our bodies wrapped like forest vines. But we didn’t sprint; we walked far too slowly towards the one of the foulest hotels in the city, The Riverview.

Near the Chauki Ghat, at the deepest curve in the bosom of the stream, I noticed a gathering--men, women, and children standing knee deep at the river’s edge. None were making the customary praying or bathing motions. That was unusual. They were bent over an object, not touching it. Two men started waving frantically to those further up, more people descended and finally the khaki and red of a police uniform trotted down.

The policeman waded authoritatively into the water in shorts and sandals as the crowd parted. Between the knees and hips of the curious I finally saw the object of their focus, and it took two full breaths to comprehend what I was seeing. My knees sagged and my hand slipped from Uli’s into an agonized fist. I whimpered softly, “No.” Faded green cotton, dark now with saturation, drifted about a bloated corpse. Plastic bangles and a sweetly familiar braid floated in the gray current. I screamed, “Soma!!” and leapt down the final steps to the water's edge. Uli, frightened and confused, followed.

A second policeman trotted down the embankment as I pushed through the crowd. Beggars, children, and old women stared with morbid curiosity at Soma’s body. They’d all seen corpses; it was impossible not to on the river, but few had seen a murdered woman, and when the second policeman turned Soma over, everyone knew that she had been. Her chola had been torn from her chest, leaving her half naked. Her neck had been sliced in a jagged crescent from ear lobe to ear lobe. A patchwork of gray bruises mottled the once gentle face.

I dropped to my knees in the shallows, and pleaded in English, “No, no, no, not her. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t know.” I moaned and tried to wrap the cowl of her sari across her exposed breasts.

Above me a brusque voice asked, “Do you know this woman, Sir?”

I managed to pull a single fold of cotton across her front, but the fingers of the current tore it away. I couldn’t seem to get a breath. “Yes.” I answered slowly.

A strong hand gripped my upper arm and lifted me firmly from my knees. I stared at the officer who held my arm. He was young and imperious-looking. Through a fog of tears I saw I was being regarded with suspicion. I looked around. Others in the crowd were assessing me the same way, and I understood. I was a ferenghi, a foreigner, and this was a low caste woman, young and pretty, half naked in the river. The authorities had seen these types of crime before, usually in the red light district of Shivdaspur, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. She was a prostitute and I was an overly aggressive client.

The young officer asked cockily, “And how might you know such a woman?”

Through a choking anger I snapped in Hindi, “Her name is Soma. She is the servant of my teacher, you moron, and I’ve known her for three years. She works for Master Jatanaka Devamukti of the Chowk District. I am the master’s vidyarthi and his close friend. And this woman that you insult so easily is my bahina.” Two dozen startled looks followed my outburst. I had just called the dead girl my sister, replied rapidly in the local dialect, and announced that I was studying under the most revered pundit in the city. None of those was anticipated. The policeman looked stunned, then mortified. Slowly he said simply, “was.”

“What?”

“Was, Sir. She was your bahina, and I am very sorry for your loss. I apologize. I did not realize. Perhaps we could ask a few questions of you? At the station?” He nodded in the general direction of the city and added contritely, “If it would be a convenient time, Sir.”

The policeman’s use of the past tense was a cold slap. Soma, my sweet, shy sister was dead. Her light, as Adam had so recently put it, had merged into the light of the universe. But she had merged that way from someone else’s hand. Brutally. My anger surged. I looked at the body in the river, not from a desire to see her face, but too burn the image in my mind. Then I squeezed my eyes shut.

Turning to the policeman I said, “No, it would not be a convenient time. You may take a statement here, or do whatever you do in such cases, but I will not be going to the station today.”

I shuffled wearily up the embankment behind the officer, while others lifted Soma from the water. They wrapped her in a thick, oily cloth, and I wondered absently if the cloth had been used for the same purpose on other occasions. It looked as if it had. We stood near the top on a stone ledge below stained wall, and the young man asked me routine questions. Name and address. How long had I known her? He paused to bark at the curious who had gathered to stare. They withdrew and then proceeded to tell the new arrivals to do the same. Uli pushed through and found me, and without speaking or touching, stood close enough that I could feel her warmth and the rippling of her scarf. The policeman didn’t ask who she was, and my expression warned him not to.

As we neared the end of his inquiries, Soma’s body was carried past us, not on anyone's shoulders, but low like a scarred steamer trunk. And suddenly, it seemed so minimized, like the disposal of some unwanted refuse. She had lived seventeen years and now, like a leaf of autumn, she would be burned with the other inconsequential leaves that had fallen.

I felt Uli’s shoulder rub against the muscles of my upper arm. The policeman had just asked me a question that I couldn't answer. I wanted to. Desperately, but I couldn’t.

I didn’t know Soma’s last name.

“Wait!” Uli walked rapidly, almost at a trot, up the steps. The crowd parted and the two officers carrying Soma’s body turned and halted. She lifted the long orange scarf and drew the stained sheet from Soma’s face. She lifted Soma’s head with one hand, and with the other, slipped the scarf under the neck and across her face. In a final act of veneration, she crossed it over Soma’s breasts.

The policemen began their ascent again and I barked, “It stays right there. Do you understand? Right where it is.” They nodded firmly. The silk would not be removed.

Forty-One

“She was your sister?” Her fingers rose unpretentiously to tuck a length of wet hair behind my ear and then to linger at the side of my face.

It took a long time before I could reply. “She was . . . my teacher’s servant, a sweeper girl with a batch of luck no one on earth should ever have. Young and widowed. Her husband fell from a train just before I came here. She was fourteen and treated like a street dog by everyone but my master and his family, so I sort of adopted her . . . for a while anyway. I never really told her, but she knew. It was like a game we played.”

Uliana and I stood just inside the threshold of the hotel room. The door was open, the room, tiny and dingy, smelled strongly of hashish and urine. I wanted to grab the backpacks and be out the door and into a cab. Not an open rickshaw where all the world’s eyes could peer in, but a large, darkened sedan. I wanted to shut the city out, and for the first time since entering the it, I wanted to leave and be completely away. I needed one of the most treasured commodities one could have in a country of a billion people. Privacy.

She closed the door and her soft accent pulled me back. “What was she like?”

I ached, grasping for words. They came slowly, then bumpy and swiftly, like a stream through a gorge. “Soma? She . . . was shy, and sweet, and intelligent in her way. But sadness held her, penned her in, and she chewed betel nut too much. Her smile was like moonbeams through the clouds. We came to be like . . . old people talking about early parts of our lives, undemanding, effortless stuff. I wanted to teach her to read, because she deserved. . . something better than being kicked around for being a goddamned widow.” I winced at what I had said. “And she was tough in ways I don’t think I could ever be. Never once wore the white saris or shaved head widows are supposed to. And she trusted me.” My chest pinched. “God, she was only seventeen, Uli. How could anyone. . .?” My words slowed and suddenly my hands and neck felt sticky. I smelled the rankness of the river in my clothes and had a burning desire to brush my teeth and scrub my body with strong soap.

She sat on the corner of the bed and leaned forward onto her elbows. “Would it help if you told me what it is about, Bhim? I’m not asking you to, only asking if it would help.”

I looked at her and Master’s words returned. “Valuable means dangerous.” Too many loved people in my life seemed to die. The cherished were gone. I couldn’t lose another. I wanted Uli with me, sitting across from me at restaurants. I wanted her next to me, wrapped in my arms. And for those reasons, as strange as it sounds, I knew I had to tell her.

I sat and asked if she really wanted to hear it, and added that it might be dangerous. She did, so I described the cave and the walls of words written so many centuries ago. I told her about the pundits, and what Kangri had said about a cure for something not yet known. I told her how Jotilal Sukkha had been crushed, and my encounter with Ralki, and his cruelty toward Soma.

She listened without comment, question, or judgment.

The darkness of evening crept in and Uli stood to switch on the bulb that hung naked from the ceiling, and when she sat back down, in that fetid light, in that foul room, I told her about Lilia. Part way through, I began to weep. I explained how she died, and I wept. I described our apartment, how we lived together, how her hair drifted and spread as we swam in the waves, and how her lips felt on mine. I wept and sadness flowed out like water from a shattered vase.

Eventually, nothing was left. Emptied. Uli's arms folded about me. The drone of the city's noises drifted in and filled our silence.

Softly, she said, “She was very fortunate to have had you, Bhim. They both were. So lucky to have been loved by you. A minute of love is eternity if it is pure.”

With a strained voice, I answered, “It’s just so empty where she was. . . inside me.”

“But she is still there. You feel it, the light inside you. It isn’t empty. Everything you see and touch, she is in it. It is as Adam said, now she is the energy in you.”

She pulled my head onto her thighs and stroked my face and neck, and after a time I whispered, “I disappeared, you know, when she died. Just fell out of touch with it all and ran.”

“Und was that wrong? Losing such love would make any of us want to be somewhere else. But . . . you have come through to the other side now.”

I wanted her to know what it had been like for me, why I had fled. “For over a year all I could feel was anger. Not at people, just anger at whatever had taken her away.”

“But your anger has gone now?”

“A long time ago, I think.” I sighed, wanting to remain where I was, my head in her lap. There we were in one the dingiest, foulest space imaginable, and I didn’t want to move. But Adam’s words kept returning. “Remember, you are an impetus. Don’t tarry.”

We needed to go.

As I stood and wiped my face with my hands, she whispered, “And do not forget Bhimaji Martin Scott, I am here . . . if you wish me to be. Right here.” She touched my lips with her fingers and I lifted the packs.

Forty-Two

Uli and I settled for a small taxi back to the flat, but the streets were dark now and few people were passing along the avenues. No one took notice of us. We didn't talk as we passed through the center of the city and into the more spacious outskirts. I watched the shuttered store fronts slide by and felt her closeness, her touch offered without shyness. That contact lifted my spirit slightly from the horrors of the afternoon.

She understood completely now who I was in the rawest of terms, and she still wanted to stay. I’d beset her with the pain of Martin, the deaths of Lilia and Soma, had made clear the perils that had leapt into my life, and still she erased my fear that she would disappear the way she had entered. In a place as transient as Varanasi, where foreigners always had ancillary destinations, where corpses became ash, and the river and death were the only truly permanent fixtures, the feeling was unreal. It was if she had appeared just for the purpose of being with me. Three days, one date, a single kiss, and it felt as if she wanted to be next to me as much as I with her. I had to know.

Nearing the Asi bridge, I turned to face her. “Uli?”

She smiled in her knowing way. “You are going to ask me why, aren’t you? Why it is you und me?”

I nodded, beyond understanding how she could divine my thought.

“Has there ever been something that you knew was made just for you, something you knew was chosen for you, but with no reason you could understand when it arrived?”

I thought of the time I opened that Sanskrit primer at Berkeley, the first time I heard Lilia cursing behind me in the admissions office. I thought of the script in the cave, and the first time I saw Adam. I thought of a thousand perfect waves that had been created just for me. None were coincidental, they were designed. “Yes. They were the most important, the most wonderful moments of my life.”

She set fingertips against my cheek, rose on sandstone, and I closed my eyes. They slipped lightly across my lips, along my jaw to a place below my earlobes, and as we slowed to cross the bridge at the river she kissed me deeply, with every part of herself.