“Monkey temple?” Audie said as they passed the shouters, the fires, the sign carriers, the policemen.
“Hanuman temple,” Dr. Nagaraj said.
“How long has this mob scene been going on?”
“Some years now.”
Beth sat stunned and heard Audie inquire in a reasonable voice, “Would you mind explaining your story? Maybe I’m stupid. But I don’t get it.”
“Listen, my friend. Grandmother of Sanjeev said to me, ‘Don’t be sad. Garuda guided the little bird to his death unknowingly, as you guided Sanjeev. You were meant to deliver him.’”
They continued on to Agni in silence, and at each curve in the road a little of Hanuman Nagar was lost, first the sight of it, then the sound of it, and at last even its smoke. When they entered the Agni gate, it was gone.
“‘Maybe this is your purpose in world,’ she said.” As soon as the car slowed down, Dr. Nagaraj began speaking. “‘To guide people to their fate. You are wee-ickle.’ Better we stop here.”
After Dr. Nagaraj dismissed the driver, the three walked the rest of the way up the hill. Audie asked the cost of the scarves. Dr. Nagaraj seemed relieved and mentioned the price, and he smiled as five thousand dollars was counted into his hand.
“A great bargain, sir. And you are so lucky. This antelope is almost extinct.”
4
The shock of the day, and her excited fear, gave her perfect recall. At yoga the next morning, during a massage—hot oil, slippery fingers—inside the pavilion, by the pool, she remembered everything. She was not able to rid herself of the images of the town of Hanuman Nagar: the cows, the bus stop, the shops, the cracks in the old walls, the paper advertisements peeling from the walls, the thick bars on the windows of the liquor store, the mocking boys like little fearless old men, the overworked women, the secretive shatoosh seller, the whole weary town held together by rusty wire and wooden braces. One oblong pothole in the street had looked to her like an open grave—she could have fitted in it.
Most of all the confusion at the monkey temple. Audie had explained it over breakfast. A mosque had been built centuries before on the site of an ancient Hindu temple, and protesters had besieged it and reclaimed it, torn the mosque apart, and built a shrine to the monkey god. The Muslims were angry and protested the occupation, but the Hindus were defiant, chanting and stoking their fire.
She remembered details she had only glimpsed at the time, chief among them the sight of idle monkeys scampering among the occupiers and protesters, snatching at bags, biting each other, swinging up the trees and onto the parapets of the shrine itself.
Now, in the stillness of Agni, she believed that she could hear the loud voices from the town, the straining of car engines, music, fugitive laughter, the pinching smell of smoke. Or was that a sense of life from the other world, the sounds from the hidden place, another illusion?
“Amazing story, eh?” Audie said.
She stared at him. What story? was in her smile.
“About that guy Sanjeev. The Lord of Death. Kind of an Appointment in Samarra thing.”
Beth said, “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Anyway, didn’t you say he was a quack?”
“It doesn’t really matter if he’s a quack. He makes me feel better.”
“You said his story keeps changing.”
“I like that he could talk a dog off a meat wagon,” Audie said. “And I sometimes think I’m a quack. When I was on a board, I never wanted to admit when I was wrong. Lots of times I thought: I’m a phony.”
She stared at him again, distancing herself with a smile.
He said, “Don’t you ever think that?”
“About you?”
“About yourself.” Normally he became hot and impatient when he needed to clarify something obvious to her—she could be so slow sometimes. But he wasn’t impatient now; he was sympathetic and mild.
“Never,” she said. And she thought: I have never believed I was a phony. If anything, I felt more real than anyone ever took me for. There was more to me than they realized or cared about. To those people who looked at her and thought wife or woman, she wanted to say, I am more than anything you see.
Now it was early afternoon. She was reading by the pool, on the platform under the trees, hidden by a hedge from anyone who happened to be in the lounge chairs—but there was no one there, or at the pool. And Audie was at a treatment. She had ordered a lemonade and a grilled vegetable sandwich, but had only sipped at the drink and eaten just a bite of the sandwich.
With an accompanying thump, something landed behind her, the sandwich was snatched, and she flinched, raising her arms, and saw the monkey bound away. In her instant memory it was a monkey; at the moment of muddled confrontation she had seen the thing as a hairy hostile child—like one of the mocking boys she’d seen at Hanuman Nagar—and she was too panicked to scream, though her hands were raised to protect her face and breasts.
After leaping into the biggest of the trees, the monkey found a branch, grasped it with his feet, and began to gnaw at the sandwich, scattering vegetables. These were seized by other monkeys—six or seven—no, more, maybe a dozen, big and small, more insolent than afraid, with a malevolent patience, a defiance that she identified—just a hunch, something about the set of their jaws, the biting faces—as the courage of hunger.
They moved toward her without a sound, scarcely seeming to touch the deck boards in their tumbling, noiseless flowing at her, their wicked faces twitching. She opened her mouth to shout but could not make a sound.
Their hair prickled on her body, the dampness itched as it scraped at her legs. They had pinched more of the loose vegetables that had been lying on the deck, poked them into their mouths, yet kept their eyes on her.
She knew they wanted to eat her face, push her legs apart and knock her over, squat on her breasts and stink. The stink was in the air, preceding them as they pushed toward her.
She covered her face with one arm, flung her other arm across her breasts, and went numb from the waist down, as in a dream where she found her legs so slow as to be crippled. She wished she could scream as she saw that the monkeys, perhaps twenty of them now, were about to overwhelm her with their dirty paws and wet teeth.
The crack of something landing in their midst—a heavy clattering stick—startled her, and the monkeys fell back. Then another stick landed with a thump, and a man hurried past Beth shouting, “Shoo! Shoo!” Holding his sandals in his hands, the man waved his arms, still shouting, physically thrusting the creatures away, into the trees, finally picking up the sticks he had thrown and flinging them again, until at last the monkeys retreated and were out of sight.
As the man had advanced, Beth had stepped back, recovered her strength, and climbed the stairs to the apron of the pool. She found that she was out of breath, her chest tight, and panting from the simple effort of backing up. But she was still afraid.
“Don’t worry, madam,” the man said—he was young, hardly a man, in white pants and a white smock, barefoot. He looked beautiful.
Beth was choking with anxiety, unable to speak, her upper body rocking for balance.
“They are very bold,” the man said. He retrieved his sandals and slipped them on. He was smiling—lovely teeth, great confidence, not even breathing hard, not fazed at all. Audie would have been gasping.