Her relationship with Dexter was a brief affair, perhaps inevitably so. Looking back in search of incidents to remember it by, Leela would only be able to recall a general feeling, something like being wound tightly in a blanket on a cold day, comforting yet restrictive. Even when things were at their best, they never moved in together. Leela preferred it that way. She preferred, too, to sleep alone, and often moved after lovemaking to the spare bed in her apartment. When you slept, you were too vulnerable. Another person’s essence could invade you. She had explained it once to Dexter. He had stroked her hair with fingers she thought of as sensitive and artistic, and had seemed to understand. But apparently he hadn’t. It was one of the facts he dwelt on at some bitter length before he left.
“You’re like one of those spiny creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean,” he said. “Everything just slides off of that watertight shell of yours. You don’t need me—you don’t need anyone.”
He wasn’t totally right about that. A week after he left, Leela ended up in the emergency ward, having swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.
An encounter with death—even an aborted one (Leela had called 911 as soon as she finished taking the pills)—alters one in unaccountable ways. After having to deal with the hospital, the police, and the mandatory counselor assigned to her, Leela should have heaved a sigh of relief when she returned to her quiet, tidy apartment. Instead, for the first time, she found her own company inadequate. Alone, there seemed no point in opening the drapes or cleaning up the TV dinner containers stacked up on the coffee table. The place took on a green, underwater dimness. Her computer gathered dust as she wandered from room to room, sometimes with her eyes closed, trailing her fingers as though they were fins across the furniture, testing the truth of Dexter’s accusation.
She didn’t know when it was that she started thinking about India, which she had never visited. The idea attached itself to the underneath of her mind and grew like a barnacle. In her imagination the country was vast and vague. Talismanic. For some reason she associated it with rain, scavenger crows, the clanging of orange trams, and the purplish-green of elephant-ears. Were these items from some story her parents had told in her childhood? No. Though her parents’ stories had spanned many topics—from the lives of famous scientists to the legends of Greece and Rome—they never discussed their homeland, a country they seemed to have shed as easily and completely as a lizard drops its tail.
When she called her parents to inform them she was going, she did not tell them why. Perhaps she herself did not know. Nor did she speak of the suicide attempt, which filled her with a rush of mortification whenever it intruded on her thoughts. As always with her decisions, they did not venture advice, though she thought she heard her mother suppress a sigh. They waited to see if she had more to say, and when she didn’t, they told her how to contact Aunt Seema, who was her mother’s cousin.
“Try to stay away from the crowds,” her father said.
“That’s impossible,” said her mother. “Just be sure to take your shots before you go, drink boiled water at all times, and don’t get involved in the lives of strangers.”
* * *
WHAT DID LEELA expect from India? The banalities of heat and dust, poverty and squalor, yes. The elated confusion of city streets where the beetle-black Ambassador cars of the rich inched their way, honking, between sweating rickshaw-pullers and cows who stood unmoving, as dignified as dowagers. But she had not thought Calcutta would vanquish her so easily with its melancholy poetry of old cotton saris hung out to dry on rooftops. With low-ceilinged groceries filled with odors she did not recognize but knew to be indispensable. In the evenings, the shopkeeper waved a lamp in front of a vividly colored calendar depicting Rama’s coronation. His waiting customers did not seem to mind. Sometimes at dawn she stood at her bedroom window and heard, cutting through the roar of buses, the cool, astonishing voice of a young man in a neighboring house practicing a morning raag.
At the airport, Aunt Seema had been large, untidy, and moist—the exact opposite of Leela’s mother. She launched herself at Leela with a delighted cry, kissing her on both cheeks, pulling her into her ample, talcum-powder-scented bosom, exclaiming how overjoyed she was to meet her. In America Leela would have been repelled by such effusion, especially from a woman she had never seen in her life. Here it seemed as right—and as welcome—as the too-sweet glass of orange squash that the maid brought her as soon as she reached the house.
Aunt dressed Leela in her starched cotton saris, put matching bindis on her forehead, and lined her eyes with kajal. She forced her to increase her rudimentary Bengali vocabulary by refusing to speak to her in English. She cooked her rui fish sautéed with black jeera, and moglai parathas stuffed with eggs and onions, which had to be flipped over deftly at a crucial moment—food Leela loved, though it gave her heartburn. She took her to the Kalighat temple for a blessing, to night-long music concerts, and to the homes of her friends, all of whom wanted to arrange a marriage for her. Leela went unprotestingly. Like a child acting in her first play, she was thrilled by the vibrant unreality of the life she was living. At night she lay in the big bed beside Aunt (Uncle having been banished to a cot downstairs) and watched the soft white swaying of the mosquito net in the breeze from the ceiling fan. She pondered the unexpected pleasure she took in every disorganized aspect of the day. India was a Mardi Gras that never ended. Who would have thought she’d feel so at home here?
So when Aunt Seema said, “You want to see the real India, the spiritual India? Let’s go on a pilgrimage,” she agreed without hesitation.
* * *
THE TALK STARTS at the end of the first day’s trek. In one of the women’s tents, where Leela lies among pilgrims who huddle in blankets and nurse aching muscles, a voice rises from the dark.
“Do you know, Mrs. Das’s bedroll didn’t get to the camp. They can’t figure out what happened—the guides swear they tied it onto a mule this morning. . . .”
“That’s right,” responds another voice. “I heard them complaining because they had to scrounge around in their own packs to find her some blankets.”
In the anonymous darkness, the voices take on cruel, choric tones. They release suspicion into the close air like bacteria, ready to multiply wherever they touch down.
“It’s like that time on the train, remember, when she was the only one who got food poisoning. . . .”
“Yes, yes . . .”
“I wonder what will happen next. . . .”
“As long as it doesn’t affect us. . . .”
“How can you be sure? Maybe next time it will. . . .”
“I hate to be selfish, but I wish she wasn’t here with us at all. . . .”
“Me, too . . .”
Leela wonders about the tent in which Mrs. Das is spending her night. She wonders what people are saying in there. What they are thinking. An image comes to her with a brief, harsh clarity: the older woman’s body curled into a lean comma under her borrowed blankets. In the whispery dark, her thin, veined lids squeezed shut in a semblance of sleep.
STRUGGLING UP THE trail through the morning mist, the line of pilgrims in gay woolen clothes looks like a bright garland. Soon the light will grow brutal and blinding, but at this hour it is sleepy, diffuse. A woman pauses to chant. Om Namah Shivaya, Salutations to the Auspicious One. The notes tremble in the air, Leela thinks, like silver bubbles. The pilgrims are quiet—there’s something about the snowy crags that discourages gossip. The head guide has suggested that walking time be utilized for reflection and repentance. Leela finds herself thinking, instead, of accidents.
She remembers the first one most clearly. It must have been a special occasion, maybe a birthday or an out-of-town visitor, because her mother was cooking. She rarely made Indian food from scratch, and Leela remembers that she was snappish and distracted. Wanting to help, the four-year-old Leela had pulled at a pot and seen the steaming dal come at her in a yellow rush. It struck her arm with a slapping sou
nd. She screamed and raced around the kitchen—as though agony could be outrun. Long after her mother immersed her arm in ice water and gave her Tylenol to reduce the pain, she continued to sob—tears of rage at being tricked, Leela realizes now. She’d had no intimations, until then, that good intentions were no match for the forces of the physical world.
More accidents followed, in spite of the fact that she was not a particularly physical child. They blur together in Leela’s memory like the landscape outside a speeding car’s windows. She fell from her bike in front of a moving car—luckily the driver had good reflexes, and she only needed a few stitches on her chin. She sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s van, and a stone—from who knows where—shattered the windshield, filling Leela’s lap with jagged silver. A defective electrical wire caught fire at night in her bedroom while she slept. Her mother, up for a drink of water, smelled the smoke and ran to the bedroom to discover the carpet smoldering around the sleeping Leela’s bed. Do all these close escapes mean that Leela is lucky? Or is her unlucky star, thwarted all this time by some imbalance in the stratosphere, waiting for its opportunity?
She thinks finally of the suicide attempt which, since she arrived in India, she has quarantined in a part of her mind she seldom visits. Can it be classified as an accident, an accident she did to herself? She remembers the magnetic red gleam of the round pills in the hollow of her palm, how unexpectedly solid they had felt, like metal pellets. The shriek of the ambulance outside her window. The old man who lived across the hall peering from a crack in his door, grim and unsurprised. The acidic ache in her throat when they pumped her stomach. Leela had kept her eyes on the wall of the emergency room afterward, too ashamed to look at the paramedic who was telling her something. Something cautionary and crucial which might help her now, as she steps warily along this beautiful glacial trail, watching for crevasses. But for her life she cannot recall what it was.
EACH NIGHT THE pilgrims are assigned to different tents by the head guide, according to some complicated logic Leela has failed to decipher. But tonight, when she finds herself in Mrs. Das’s tent, her bedroll set down next to the older woman’s makeshift one, she wonders if it is destiny that has brought her here.
All her life, like her parents, Leela has been a believer in individual responsibility. But lately she finds herself wondering. When she asked Aunt Seema yesterday, she touched Leela’s cheek in a gesture of amused affection. “Ah, my dear—to believe that you control everything in your life! How absurdly American!”
Destiny is a seductive concept. Ruminating on it, Leela feels the events of her life turn weightless and pass through her like clouds. The simplistic, sublunary words she assigned to them—pride, shame, guilt, folly—no longer seem to apply.
“Please,” Mrs. Das whispers in Bengali, startling Leela from thought. She sits on the tarpaulin floor of the tent, propped against her bedroll, her legs splayed out crookedly from under her sari. “Could you ask one of the attendants to bring some warm water? My feet hurt a lot.”
“Of course,” Leela says, jumping up. An odd gladness fills her as she performs this small service. Aunt, who was less than happy about Leela’s tent assignment tonight, had whispered to her to be sure to stay away from Mrs. Das. But Aunt is at the other end of the camp, while destiny has placed Leela here.
When the water comes in a bucket, Mrs. Das surreptitiously removes her shoes. They are made of rough leather, cheap and unlovely. They make Leela feel guilty about her fleece-lined American boots, even though the fleece is fake. Then she sucks in a horrified breath.
Freed of shoes and socks, Mrs. Das’s feet are in bad shape, swollen all the way to the calves. The toes are blistered and bluish with frostbite. The heels weep yellowish pus. Mrs. Das looks concerned but not surprised—this has obviously been going on for a couple of days. She grits her teeth, lurches to her feet, and tries to lift the bucket. Leela takes it from her and follows her to the opening of the tent, and when Mrs. Das has difficulty bending over to wash her feet, she kneels and does it for her. She feels no disgust as she cleans off the odorous pus. This intrigues her. Usually she doesn’t like touching people. Even with her parents, she seldom went beyond the light press of lips to cheek, the hurried pat on the shoulder. In her Dexter days, if he put his arm around her, she’d find an excuse to move away after a few minutes. Yet here she is, tearing strips from an old sari and bandaging Mrs. Das’s feet, her fingers moving with a deft intelligence she did not suspect they possessed, brown against the matching brown of Mrs. Das’s skin. This is the first time, she thinks, that she has known such intimacy. How amazing that it should be a stranger who has opened her like a dictionary and brought to light this word whose definition had escaped her until now.
SOMEONE IN THE tent must have talked, for here through the night comes the party’s doctor, his flashlight making a ragged circle of brightness on the tent floor as he enters. “Now what’s the problem?” he asks Mrs. Das, who attempts a look of innocence. What problem could he be referring to? The doctor sighs, hands Leela his torch, removes the sari strips, and clicks his tongue gravely as he examines Mrs. Das’s feet. There’s evidence of infection, he says. She needs a tetanus shot immediately, and even then the blisters might get septic. How could she have been so foolish as to keep this a secret from him? He pulls a thick syringe from his bag and administers an injection. “But you still have to get down to the hospital at Pahelgaon as soon as possible,” he ends. “I’ll ask the guide to find some way of sending you back tomorrow.”
Mrs. Das clutches the doctor’s arm. In the flashlight’s erratic beam, her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, glint desperately. She doesn’t care about her feet, she says. It’s more important for her to complete the pilgrimage—she’s waited so long to do it. They’re only a day or so away from Shiva’s shrine. If she had to turn back now, it would kill her much more surely than a septic blister.
The doctor’s walrus mustache droops unhappily. He takes a deep breath and says that two extra days of hard walking could cause gangrene to set in, though a brief uncertainty flits over his face as he speaks. He repeats that Mrs. Das must go back tomorrow, then hurries off before she can plead further.
The darkness left behind is streaked with faint cobwebs of moonlight. Leela glances at the body prone on the bedding next to her. Mrs. Das is completely quiet, and this frightens Leela more than any fit of hysterics. She hears shufflings from the other end of the tent, whispered comments sibilant with relief. Angrily, she thinks that had the patient been anyone else, the doctor would not have been so adamant about sending her back. The moon goes behind a cloud; around her, darkness packs itself tightly, like black wool. She pushes her hand through it to where she thinks Mrs. Das’s arm might be. Against her fingers Mrs. Das’s skin feels brittle and stiff, like cheap waterproof fabric. Leela holds Mrs. Das’s wrist awkwardly, not knowing what to do. In the context of Indian etiquette, would patting be considered a condescending gesture? She regrets her impetuosity.
Then Mrs. Das turns her wrist—it is the swift movement of a night animal who knows its survival depends on mastering such economies of action—and clasps Leela’s fingers tightly in her own.
LATE THAT NIGHT, Mrs. Das tries to continue up the trail on her own, is spotted by the lookout guide, apprehended and brought back. It happens quickly and quietly, and Leela sleeps through it all.
By the time she wakes, the tent is washed in calm mountain light and abuzz with women and gossip.
“There she was, in the dark on her own, without any supplies, not even an electric torch, can you imagine?”
“Luckily the guide saw her before she went beyond the bend in the mountain. Otherwise she’d be in a ravine by now. . . .”
“Or frozen to death . . .”
“Crazy woman! They say when they caught her, she fought them tooth and nail—I’m telling you, she actually drew blood! Like someone possessed by an evil spirit.”
Leela stares at Mrs. Das’s bedroll, two dark,
hairy blankets topped by a sheet. It looks like the peeled skin of an animal turned inside out. The women’s excitement crackles through the air, sends little shocks up her arms. Are people in India harder to understand because they’ve had so many extra centuries to formulate their beliefs? She recalls the expression on Dexter’s face before he slammed the door, the simple incandescence of his anger. In some way, she had expected it all along. But Mrs. Das . . . ? She curls her fingers, remembering the way the older woman had clasped them in her dry, birdlike grip.
“Did she really think she could get to the shrine all by herself!” someone exclaims.
Leela spots Aunt Seema and tugs at her sari. “Where is Mrs. Das now?”
“The guides have put her in a separate tent where they can keep an eye on her until they can send her back,” Aunt says, shaking her head sadly. “Poor thing—I really feel sorry for her. Still, I must confess I’m glad she’s leaving.” Then a suspicious frown takes over her face. “Why do you want to know? Did you talk to her last night? Leela, stop, where are you going?”
MRS. DAS, WHOM Leela finds in a small tent outside which a guide keeps watch, does not look like a woman who has recently battled several men tooth and nail. Cowled in a faded green shawl, she dozes peacefully against the tent pole, though this could be due to the Calmpose tablets the doctor has made her take. Or perhaps there’s not much outside her head that she’s interested in at this point. She has lost her glasses in her night’s adventuring, and when Leela touches her shoulder, she looks up, blinking with dignity.