It was better not to say anything, better just to smile, to let his hands work on her, to give nothing a name.
In spite of this, another whole unthought-out line came to her. “I’d like to see them.”
“Yes, please.”
“Maybe sometime.”
“Madam, tonight.”
Against her will she found herself agreeing, and just afterward, avoiding Audie at the pool, she felt excited, thrilled and yet jittery, like a girl.
Satish had said he’d meet her below the laundry building, which lay on the path that wound down Monkey Hill to the main road into Hanuman Nagar. She told Audie she was going up to the spa—“a treatment.” He smiled and said, “Have a good one.” But instead of climbing up the road, she ducked through the bamboo grove and walked quickly through the thick flowering trees, into the smoky air that rose from the town.
She felt on her face the sourness of descending the path into a thickening smell, plunging toward shadows, ducking beneath the silken daylight of dusk in this upper world into the fugitive and divided lamplight of the town below.
A person thrusting a broomstick at her rose up on the road and caused her to gasp.
“Moddom.”
“Who are you?”
“Chowkidar, moddom.”
“What do you want?”
Fright made her severe, and her severity made the man deferential.
He said, “Protection only, moddom.”
His mildness calmed her. She found some rupees in her pocket—in the darkness she could not tell how much—and handed the notes to the watchman. He touched them to his forehead, then bowed to let her pass.
The downward path was so narrow her shoulders brushed the bushes on either side of it, and she imagined that at that time of day there might be monkeys, crouching to observe the setting sun, like the ones she’d seen with Audie a week or so before, when they’d heard the name Hanuman Nagar from the spectral old man.
The sense that she was leaving one world for another was palpable: in the rising dust and the sound of impatient voices, the men shouting at the monkey temple, the smell of smoke, the sharp Indian yell, meant to be heard at a distance and to make the hearer submit to it. The grating of traffic, too—heavy trucks, the laboring bus, all shuddering metal and hisses. And, farther from the clear air and the tidy gardens of Agni, the stink of the town—dirt, dung, smoke, mingled with cooking odors and scorched oil. Disorder was also a stew of smells.
Where she thought she saw a monkey squatting on its heels, a man stood up. Too startled to scream, her hands flew up to protect her throat and her face. She saw it was Satish.
“Not to worry,” he said.
She hoped he wouldn’t touch her. Rattled from her uneasy descent from Agni on the filthy path, she said, “I can’t stay long.”
“It is near,” he said, placing a finger on her elbow to steer her, and when she reacted, he said, “Sorry!”
His touch made her stumble, the path here littered with loose trodden stones. He was still apologizing as they passed behind a shop, a wall that reeked of urine and was scribbled on, and came out onto the road. In the distance, at a curve in the road, she saw the shop fronts of Hanuman Nagar, merchandise hanging in doorways, and the fires at the monkey temple—men waving torches, some people chanting, the line of policemen holding sticks.
“Cart road,” Satish said, blocking her way as a truck went slowly past in gusts of diesel fumes.
“That temple,” Beth said.
“Hanuman shrine. Long ago, Mughal time, Muslim ruler put mosque in its place. Now it is restored to Hindu. Now everyone so happy.”
“Why are those people shouting?”
“Muslim people,” Satish said, hurrying ahead, away from the center of town.
She followed him, her head down, walking just above the gutter and the storm drain, by the roadside, thinking, This is insane.
“I have to go back.” She felt even more like a girl, but a foolish one.
“It is just here,” he said, fluttering his fingers into the middle distance.
All she saw were small yellow windows, like lanterns hanging in darkness, faces at some of the windows, the blue flicker of TV sets, and the woof-woofing of dogs somewhere. At one doorway she smelled meat grilling, the sputter and hiss, the pucker and bust of hot snapping fat.
Satish must have smelled it too. He said, “Muslim people. Many here. This we are calling”—he was pointing at Monkey Hill, but the sweep of his arm seemed to take in the whole province—“Muslim belt.”
She said, “I can’t go any further.”
“We have arrived,” he said, and led her up a path of broken paving stones that rolled under her feet, past a small astonished girl in a bright pink dress dawdling by a lighted doorway, past a padlocked shed, to a door latch which Satish manipulated, pushing the door open. Beth stepped inside quickly, fearing to be seen, and was at once suffocated by the smell of cooked food, steaming on a low table.
“Bhaji,” Satish said, lifting the lid of a tin pot. Then more lids up and down. “Mung dhal. Uttapam. Bindi. Naan bread. Rice.”
“Very nice,” Beth said, overcome by the heat, the stifling aromas, and a distinct odor of turpentine.
“Gurd,” Satish said, offering her a dish of crudded yogurt.
“I really must go back,” she said.
“Madam,” he said, “take some food.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said, and remembered from a book on India that it was considered offensive to refuse food in an Indian household, but that a small symbolic mouthful was all that was necessary. She said, “But some of that curd would be delicious. Just a touch.”
He spooned some into a bowl and handed it to her, saying, “Sit, please, madam. A drink. Hot tea. Juices. Cool water.”
She was rechecking the position of the door, preparing her exit, when she saw an assortment of foot-high paintings propped on a shelf under a bare light bulb.
“No, thank you. Are those your pictures?”
She was still standing, eyeing the door. He went to the paintings and selected a highly colored one of a fat naked baby attended by a smiling chubby-cheeked woman in a yellow sari.
“Bal Krishna,” he said. “Krishna baby. Mother Yashoda.”
Moving closer to the shelf, she saw other pictures she had taken to be animals, yet some of them had human features in spite of their snouts and multiple arms.
“Ganesh. Hanuman. Durga. I do with brush. Classical.”
“Superb. Thank you. Now I must go.”
“Madam.”
But as soon as she turned and found the latch and got the door ajar he was next to her, embracing her, pressing himself against her, whinnying, “Madam. Madam.”
“I don’t feel at all well,” she said.
“I have aspirin, madam.” His hands and fingers flexed on her waist as though testing its pliability.
But now she had gotten the door fully open, and the night air had a chilly smell of dirt and woodsmoke in it that clung like grime to the bare skin of her face and arms.
Just a few feet down the path the small girl in the pink dress gaped at her, the light from the open door falling across her face, brightening her wide staring eyes. Satish had pursued Beth, but when he saw the little girl he hesitated, seemingly overcome, and he dropped his arms to his sides, gathering his hands into his pajama top as though in a reflex of shame.
Without a word, moving efficiently in fear, Beth stepped along the walkway, those same uneven paving stones, and fled into the road, keeping her head down when car headlights passed her. She looked back several times to make sure she was not being followed.