“I call that another miracle,” Beth Blunden said as they strolled under the starry sky to their suite.
2
They woke to a brilliant sunrise and felt there were no days like this anywhere but on this hilltop in India. The rest of India and the stormy world were elsewhere.
Was it two weeks they’d been there? With a clarity of mind and a lightness in their bodies that was new to them, they had lost their sense of passing time. Being at Agni had strengthened them, and they were surprised, for it was like a cure for an obscure but tenacious ailment of which they’d been unaware. Rested, well looked-after, like children on an extended holiday pampered by adults, they were invigorated, enjoying the power and poise of contentment. Audie had even stopped teasing the waiters about the food, calling the uttapam “shit on a shingle.”
Everyone was pleasant to them, the staff always pausing to say hello or namaskar. Always smiling, deferential without groveling, they waited on the Blundens, devoted servants, prescient too, anticipating their desires. “Carrot juice again, sir?” “Green tea sorbet again, madam?” And when the Blundens skipped meals the waiters would say, “We missed you last night, sir,” as though their absence mattered and was a diminishment.
The Blundens were, to their surprise, grateful and patient. What Audie said about owning “a bunch of businesses” wasn’t a hollow boast—it was true. They were wealthy, they owned four homes in four different states, and they knew all about employees and servants. They had gardeners, housekeepers, caretakers, odd-job men, but all of them were so well paid and so used to the Blundens as to be unafraid and presumptuous. You need us seemed to show in their resentful eyes. Indian workers were different, neither presumptuous nor servile; well spoken, educated, and skilled, they were like people from another planet whose belief was We need you.
“I should start a company here,” Audie said. “Or do what everyone else is doing, outsource here.”
They had arrived in the dark smoky midnight at Mumbai Airport and had been driven swiftly past lamp-lit shacks—a vision of fires, of torches—on the way to the brilliantly lit hotel, where they stayed in the Elephanta Suite—Audie intoned the name printed over the carved doorway. They had slept well, waking at dawn to be driven to the airport for the one-hour flight, after which they had been met by a driver in a white uniform holding a signboard lettered Belondon in one hand and a platter of chilled face towels in the other.
What the Blundens had seen of India, the populous and chaotic India they’d been warned about, the India that made you sick and fearful and impatient, was that one-hour drive from the airport to the top of Monkey Hill, the Ayurvedic spa known as Agni. Audie thought of the drive as a long panning shot, the sort you’d get in a documentary with a jumping camera, the very first image a woman with no hands, begging at a stoplight just outside the airport, raising her stumps to Audie’s window (“Don’t look, honey”), then the overloaded lopsided trucks with Horn Please written on the bumper, the ox carts piled high with bulging sacks sharing the road with crammed buses painted blue and red, the sight of women slapping clothes on boulders in a dirty stream (“Laundering,” the driver said), others threshing grain on mats. Wooden scaffolding on brick buildings that already looked like ruins, whitewashed temples, mosques with minarets like pencils, gated houses, hovels, the lean-tos and tents of squatters. (“Gypsies—many here, sir.”) Small girls in clean white dresses, boys in shorts, men in business suits on bicycles, youths on motorbikes, skinny cows chewing at trash heaps, a man pissing against a tree (“Without a pot to piss in,” Audie said), another squatting at the edge of a field, the whole country on the road. Every few miles huge billboards showing movie posters of bug-eyed fatties in tight clothes. This India had no smell and hardly had a sound: the windows of the car were closed; the air conditioner was on. Whenever the subject of India came up, the Blundens referred to their drive from the airport, through the small city and along the road and up Monkey Hill to Agni, that one hour of India.
“They’ve got zip,” Audie said, his face to the car window. And in conversation with various Indian guests at Agni, peering at them closely, “Sure, I saw the Indian miracle.”
The miracle to them was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people—a big horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they’d found a remote part of it that was safe.
Agni seemed to be in the heart of India, yet India seemed far away. Perhaps that was the secret to experiencing India, to bury yourself deeply in it to avoid suffering it. The few times at Agni they’d seen something exotic or strange—like the monkeys staring at the sunset, or had they been looking at the town?—it was not anything they’d anticipated, not the India of stereotype, and that was so disconcerting, they withdrew into the Agni gate and shut India out.
They had been surprised to hear the old man say he lived “just here” in the town, Hanuman Nagar. Where was this? They had believed they were on a rugged foothill of the Himalayas, an empty hill. Where was the town? They had no idea there was a settlement anywhere near Agni. And the “venerable temple” was news to them too. They suspected that the old man, a fantasist and yarn spinner, was indulging in hyperbole, another Indian trait, for how could there be a village nearby? Agni—the spa and maharajah’s residence—occupied the serene top of Monkey Hill, at the end of a road that wound around the steep slope. Had there been a village, they would have spotted it on the drive up that first day. Instead, they had seen a yellow forest of trees with dusty leaves, staggering cows, glossy big-beaked crows, a few people on foot, and that was all.
The Blundens had woken refreshed in the silence of their suite, a powdery dawn at the window, of pink dust and diffused light. They stretched, they bathed, they put on their white suits, like pairs of elegant pajamas, and they went downstairs and across the lawn to yoga.
But here was something new. On this morning following their encounter with the old man, they looked down the hill and saw ropes of smoke untangling in the sky from the direction where he had pointed with his skinny hand. There was an earthen odor of damp flowers but also a smell of that distant smoke.
They crossed the lawn to the yoga pavilion. Half a dozen others had preceded them and sat on rush mats, in lotus postures. Some had their eyes shut in meditation, a few greeted them softly; all were wearing the same white suits. The Blundens took their places. Vikram, the yoga teacher, sat on a raised platform, his hands clasped under his chin.
“Om,” Vikram intoned, auuummm, three times. Then, “Rub your hands, massage your eyes, feel the energy, feel the vibration. Open your eyes slowly, listen to the birds singing.”
The Blundens, without communicating this thought, each smelled the smoke they’d seen earlier, and another smell penetrating it, something sharp, like burned toast.
They stood, they stretched, they did “the tree,” balancing on one foot, then the other. They raised their arms, locked their hands, and stood on tiptoe. They felt like children, faltering in an exercise they barely understood, and, like children, not caring.
“For tadasana, mountain pose. Think, ‘This is Hanuman Mountain.’ Find something to concentrate on,” Vikram said. “A brick. A leaf.”