Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’ll all be your fault,’ Saira said, her lower lip jutting, now ready to cry.

  ‘I like her,’ Hanuman whispered. ‘I like her.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Abhay said, his eyes sunken and shining. ‘I’ll do my best. But I need more time. Fifteen minutes at least.’

  I looked over at Yama. He was twirling his moustache, one knee settled comfortably over the other, a foot swinging gently back and forth. He nodded, looking smug. I nodded at Abhay. He rose and began to pace around the room. The murmur outside began to grow. Mrinalini opened the door and peered out.

  ‘They’re going to start leaving,’ she said.

  Saira rose from the bed. ‘I’m going outside to tell them about you,’ she said. ‘It’s the only way you’ll keep them sitting. I’ll tell them Yama’s in here, too, and that he doesn’t want any children inside, so they won’t come rushing in when I tell them about a typing monkey; is that okay?’

  Yama shrugged, smiling, and I nodded at Saira, bowing to a superior judge of the masses and leader of men; already, I seemed to have forgotten the reasons for wanting to keep my appearance a secret. Some last pride, I suppose, some final need to belong, to be thought of as part of the human whole, but already this vain hope had been crumpled and consigned to the rubbish heap; at last, I am going to be what I had fought against becoming, a freak, a fool, an exile, that most pitiable (forgive my romanticizing —I am conscious of it —but at this moment a pose is all I have left) and yet most generous of creatures: a monkey at a typewriter, a poet.

  So Abhay paced up and down, and I hugged myself and massaged my arms. Again Yama called out to me: ‘Listen, Sanjay, a bit of friendly advice. You’re too attached to what-actually-happened. I recognized too much of what you told. You should be really going crazy, you know, twist your material inside out. Have fun with it.’

  I had my own reasons for being attached to what-actually-happened, but I was in pain and in no mood to start explaining myself to this overgrown green idiot who reminded me of the villains from some of the worst melodramas that (in a long-ago life) my father and uncle ever wrote. So I snarled at him, a monkey growl that startled two boys who were sidling in through the door. They looked like brothers, maybe nine and ten, and they both wore strange caps with the bills pulled back over their necks, and loose white shirts with lettering on them, one that said ‘Cowboys’ and the other ‘LA.’ They glanced at me and then scuttled over eagerly to Abhay.

  ’Abhay Bhaiya,’ the older one said. ‘Did you bring back a video camera?’

  ‘What?’ Abhay said.

  ‘Did you see any rock concerts?’ the younger one said.

  ‘What kind of car did you have?’

  ‘Did you buy a house?’

  ‘Does it have a swimming pool?’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘Where?’ Abhay said.

  ‘Here,’ they said, both together.

  Abhay shrugged, a look of confusion on his face.

  ‘Were you happy there?’ the younger boy said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Happy’

  Abhay’s face was blank, as if it had been wiped clean of sorrow, or joy. Then Saira came in, saw the two boys, collared them and had the both of them out of the door in a moment.

  The little one called decisively through the doorway, even as it closed: ‘You were happy there.’

  Abhay looked after him. ‘Happy?’ he said.

  Then he began to type.

  A Thin Kind of Happiness.

  ONE EVENING at the beginning of my senior year I was rewinding the second reel of Lawrence of Arabia when my friend Tom came into the projectionist’s booth playing with his dark glasses. He had a sort of nervous habit with his glasses.

  “Come on, effendi,” he said. “Time to go to great oasis.”

  I was the work-study projectionist and he managed the student film series. I had known him for three years, and we liked the same movies. He was talking about the Wednesday night party in the Alpha Gamma frat house, which we never missed.

  “Lead on,” I said. “Lead on.”

  So Tom and I came down the stairs into the basement room, which smelled of decade-old layers of beer and sometimes piss and always grass. We pushed through the brothers and got a beer and then found our favorite spot, where we could watch people pushing through the door.

  “They’re here,” Tom said.

  “Who?”

  “Freshwomen alert. Here they come.”

  I turned my head, and they were already past me.

  “Go get one, bud,” Tom said.

  “There’s only one way out of here,” I said. There had been a glimpse of a face half-turned toward me. So we waited and drank a couple more beers and talked about Lawrence. The one in the movie, I mean, not the real one. The music suddenly got louder, and it was Echo and the Bunny-men doing “The Cutter.”

  Just as the song ended I saw them coming back.

  “What should I try?” I said.

  “Which one?” Tom said, leaning closer to me.

  “In black. Red hair.”

  “Angst, baby. Be crazy but cool.”

  So when she was beside me, looking down and trying not to spill her beer, I leaned over and said, into her ear: “Elvis has not left the building.”

  She laughed. We introduced ourselves: she was Amanda James, Scripps freshman from Houston, Texas. Tom and I laughed at that and teased her about being from Houston and the soft southern twang in her voice. Then Tom, maybe noticing something, maybe the way I was looking at her, disappeared discreetly, and Amanda and I stood there looking at each other silently.

  “They met in Los Angeles,” she said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “They met in Los Angeles,” she said, “at a party while Echo and the Bunnymen throbbed in the background.”

  “Feeling the cocaine rush through his brain,” I went on, “he wondered if he had seen her before. In New York at the Palladium or in L.A. at Parachute. Then he realized it didn’t matter.”

  “And then she —” Amanda stopped suddenly, and then asked: “Where are you from?”

  “India.”

  “Oh.” After a long pause: “Are you a Brahmin?”

  “No.”

  “What are you?”

  “Nothing.”

  She looked away, and then another girl tapped her on the arm. They whispered to each other.

  To me: “I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m here with the other girls on my floor,” she said, “and they want to leave.”

  “You don’t have to go with them.”

  “We’re going to hate each other soon anyway. I should be nice and loyal for a while.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  “Okay.”

  I pushed through the crowd, nodding at people, looking for Tom. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Hey. Abhay.” Kate was blond, beautiful in a kind of distant sculptured manner. We had slept together during our sophomore year, and still did sometimes, although we didn’t need to be as drunk as we used to be and didn’t hold on to each other as hard as we used to. That night she was dressed in a white sweater and looked like she was out of some purposely muted black-and-white picture from a fashion magazine.

  “Katie.”

  She smiled. “How’re you doing, Abi?”

  I shrugged and smiled, and she moved closer to me, and I had to get my beer out of the way and we put our arms around each other’s waist and we stood for a while. People pushed past us. Her hair was fresh, fine. I liked to touch it.

  When I came up out of the frat room a bunch of the brothers were hauling a large plaster statue of somebody vaguely Oriental seated in the lotus position toward the staircase. I stopped and listened as they argued. Finally they left the statue at the top of the stairs and went down to get a beer. I went home to New Dorm, my feet scraping over the concrete, a
nd let myself in.

  I lay on my bed and peered at the pictures on the wall, darkened and indistinct in the silver light of the streetlight outside my window. Then I sat up and tried to unclench my jaw but couldn’t without having the muscles on my face flutter. I went out and down and back to the frat room. Echo and the Bunnymen were still doing “The Cutter.” Somebody really liked that song. I saw Kate talking to a girl I didn’t know, and I walked up behind her and laid my face on the back of her shoulder, rubbing my nose across the smooth furriness of her sweater. She reached back, without turning to look, and began to rub my neck. “Spare us the cutter,” said Echo and his Bunnymen.

  When I woke up, my legs were under Kate’s. She twitched suddenly and made a small sound at the back of her throat. I pulled my legs from under her and touched her hair and felt a slight sting in my fingertips and she turned to me, still asleep. After a while I let go of her and got out of bed. As I put on my clothes I could see pictures of her on a closet door, Kate with her mother, Kate at high school with friends, Kate with her horse, Kate in Paris with a boyfriend, Kate with various red-faced white-haired people.

  Outside, the sky was graying. I walked across the Scripps lawns toward Pomona. A black German shepherd with a blue bandanna around his neck ran up to me and I sat down and rubbed his face, enjoying the warm panting breath on my face. I ran my fingers through the thick hair on his stomach, and he squirmed and reached up and licked my face, pushing me over. We lay happily on the grass laughing at each other and I realized it had been a long time since I had touched an animal. I got up, and he followed me for a moment and then veered off, running easily through the water arcing up from the sprinklers.

  In the lounge the phone was off the hook. I picked up the receiver and laid it back in the cradle. There was a note on my door: “The phone’s been ringing every ten minutes and it’s somebody with a foreign accent.” I went back out to the lounge and sat by the phone. The wall in front of me went from gray to orange and I felt heat spread across my neck. The phone rang, and I picked it up. An operator asked for me, fuzzy and distant, and then my father cleared his throat.

  “Abhay.”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “Abhay, your grandfather, he passed away yesterday.”

  I could hear birds far away, muffled by the door and the glass and the concrete.

  “Abhay?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “I’m going there tomorrow for the… He was in hospital with the old heart trouble. They said he was sleeping and then he seemed to wake up for a minute.”

  We were silent for a moment, and I could hear him breathing and I imagined the signal flashing up from land into space and bouncing off metal and then miles of space again until finally I could hear it.

  “Pa.”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh… I…”

  “Yes. Listen, I’ll call you again soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right.”

  “Tell Ma I’m okay.”

  “Yes.”

  I went outside and sat on the stairs and the sun sparked at me through the sprinkler sprays. I was feeling nothing and knew it would come later. I tried to remember my grandfather’s face but could think only of his cupboard full of dusty medical books and homeopathic medicines. My father’s father had been trained to be a lawyer but preferred to spend his time studying tattered old books and dispensing sweet white medicines to people who didn’t trust the doctors with regular modern degrees or couldn’t afford them. When I was very young we’d go to visit him in his old, old house, and I’d play chess with him, old Indian rules, and then there would be a knock at the door and he’d go away and I’d see a thin face, anxious and sometimes in pain, and my grandfather would scoop up thousands of little white balls in a glass vial and carry it carefully to the door and bring back some little white balls for my waiting mouth and he’d sprinkle them on my tongue, laughing his toothless clown’s laugh. When I grew older he began to ask me when I was going to have my upnayana ceremony and be able to wear my sacred thread and become one of the twice-born, but I’d been to school in the meantime and had learned about the evils of the caste system, so we didn’t play chess anymore. Just before I left for the States we went to visit him, and I spent most of that week up on the roof, reading and watching the kites weave in the sky. My mother came up and sat on the bed next to me and said he’s getting old and you’re going away and he worries, you know, you are the oldest son, he really worries, you could do it just for the old man; and for a moment I remembered the way his fingernails clicked against my teeth when he put the sweetness in my mouth and the innocence of his smile but I shook my head and went back to my book, and now I wondered what he’d thought of in that last moment of wakefulness.

  The water stopped. I still couldn’t feel anything.

  In the slanting yellow light of early morning Mount Baldy looked closer than it really was, as if you could easily walk into the shallow dark gullies on its slopes, if you wanted to. I was still sitting on the steps when people started leaving for their first classes, and they stared at me curiously in passing, not saying anything. They were used to finding me asleep in the lounges or on the patch of grass outside, but I was, I suppose, especially ragged that morning. I pushed myself up and went back into the dorm, picking up my neighbor’s copy of the New York Times on the way. I sat in the lounge, next to the phone, because he didn’t like his paper disappearing, and read a front-page article about students marching in Beijing, raising slogans about freedom. In the Brazilian jungle, Catholics from New York were quarreling with evangelists from Texas about which was worse: frightening tribal Indians into conversion with sermons about hellfire and damnation or persuading them gently with lessons on agriculture. On the editorial page, under the headline “In India, Some Things Are More Important than Time,” somebody named Krause complained about the thirty minutes and assorted forms it took him to get a taxi at Bombay International Airport and about the basic inefficiency of Indian methods of producing television sets under protective tariffs. “Some things should be more important than self-sufficiency,” he said. On another page, the chief correspondent of the paper’s New Delhi bureau had an article about a holiday he had taken in Darjeeling and the hotel he had stayed in, which was, he said, “full of the charm of the British Raj.” This, I swear, was the New York Times the morning after my grandfather died, and as I sat there I felt as if I was in a film, and that I was expected to react somehow, but my head was pounding and I couldn’t decide whether this was ironical or absurd or something else or anything at all, so I went into the bathroom and brushed from my mouth the accumulated bitterness of the night.

  This feeling of being in a film hung over me even later, when I sat at the back of a classroom and listened to a fellow named Lin talk about Asian revolutions. The British, he was saying, changed India for the better with their efficient railroads and efficient administration and so on, and for a moment I felt that I should be saying something, but then, sensing my face flush, full, somehow, of the realization that whatever I said wouldn’t make any sense, would sound crazy, I opened a notebook and doodled instead, and at the end of the period I found that I had drawn birds and airplanes soaring across the page.

  Outside, the smog had moved in like a curtain and Baldy was invisible. I could feel my eyes stinging, and the acrid tickling moved slowly across my nostrils and into the back of my throat. Kate swung around a corner, laden with books. She snapped the hair out of her face with a quick jerk of her head.

  “I have to be in class in three and a half minutes.” She didn’t smile.

  “Okay. Talk to you later.”

  I stood there for a moment, stretching, watching her white skirt move on the back of finely muscled calves as she tip-tapped away with quick, little steps. Back at New Dorm, in the lounge, I sat and listened to the Talking Heads echo in the courtyard outside: “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa, fa, fa, fa; fa, fa, fa, fa fa fa.” There was a torn newspaper
under my foot, and a tank platoon ploughed through a field on the front page. The door opened in and Tom walked in, wearing silver-rimmed glasses with mirrored lenses. Again, I felt like I was in a film, and I liked it less and less, that feeling, I mean.

  “What’s up, buddy?” He sat down next to me. “You look like you dropped down a cliff. What’s the matter, hungover?”

  “No,” I said, again unable to talk about Babuji, and so I pointed at the newspaper. “It’s just geo-fucking-politics. Gets me down.”

  “You’re not supposed to talk about it,” he said, thumping me repeatedly on the back, just below the neck. “No, no, no, no. Very passé, Abhay. It’s much better just to say it’s angst. Everyone will understand.”

  “Right. Yeah. Let me wear those.” I put on his glasses.

  “Let’s go see what Lawrence is up to.”

  So I sat in my booth and Lawrence went looking for whatever he was looking for across the burning desert. After the movie was over and I had put away the reels I was exhausted, drawn out like a string. I told Tom this.

  “You’re just susceptible to depression today, asshole,” he said. “Or actually the last few days. Listen, let’s go into town. Somebody’s playing at Parachute. It’s a bummer being around you when you’re like this. Got to get you up again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll get a ride. There’s a whole bunch of people going.” “I don’t know.”

  But there wasn’t much else to do that evening, and I didn’t want to be alone, so I sat in the backseat of somebody’s car and listened to the tires humming on the freeway. The club was in a basement, very dark, and the music was loud, violent, the usual stuff. I bought a beer and walked around, scraping against the wall. I leaned on a round pillar and watched the band for a while, but then Tom found me and crooked his arm around my neck.

  “Let’s slam, Abs,” he said.

  “Isn’t that passé?” I said.

  “But it feels good,” he said, and dragged me through the crowd, to where a circle of people, men and women, boys and girls, spun in a circle, bouncing off each other, impacting.