In the hour or so before he finally subsided into sleep, Audie Blunden saw this with his Indian clarity. Because India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn’t say anything in India that hadn’t been said before, and if you succumbed to India’s vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie: The poverty’s a problem or All these cows in the street or It’s real dirty.
Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that hadn’t been done before. India was a reminder of the extravagance of human self-deception, and the fundamental lesson of Indian life was that people and even animals had previous existences, other lives, past incarnations. They’d lived on earth before, they’d been through all this—they had to have done so, for otherwise how could they stand it? Nothing was new, and even the illusions were hackneyed, the deceptions old hat.
I’ve lived enough, he thought, entering the mind of someone about to be reincarnated; I’ve had everything I wanted.
On this thinning note, at the vanishing point of consciousness, seeing so little ahead of him, out of hope but weary of the process of perceiving it, Audie fell uncertainly into sleep, at the end of that subterranean river that flowed into oblivion, as though he were no more than a pebble, smoothed by the current and dropped into the dark.
Beth was still awake. She sensed the ripple of resigned certitude pass through her husband’s body, relaxing it until he sank and breathed differently, something innocent in the air that entered his nose and mouth as he lay defenseless in sleep.
At moments like this, Beth felt like a sentinel. And the sense of her being his protector made her feel vulnerable and misunderstood, keeping guard over him and wishing to be concealed. She had spent most of her adult life standing by her husband or waiting for him to appear, and sometimes he was not there as she stood, or did not return when he said he would. Sometimes she had the feeling she had passed this time in suspense, being a woman, being a wife, being a housecleaner, a cook, a waiter. This trip to India had been her idea, yet they would not leave until he had given the word. The demeaning sense of needing permission wearied her by confining her to a world he occasionally visited and was often absent from. Maybe he had misgivings about what India would do to them? She didn’t know; as Audie Blunden’s wife she felt she didn’t know much. The decisions, the money, the activity, the gusto, the opinions were all his; she was his companion.
Krishna had gopis—milkmaids. She wondered if Krishna represented most men, because most men, like the blue god of power, had women tending to them.
Have I lived at all? was a question that had occurred to her only now, in India. The whole of India was visible in its chaotic streets, as big as its movie posters, the agonies of life and the flaming deaths. In the streets the big questions were asked and no answers were available, which was why she was so excited and frightened. She had been woken, she had been challenged, and the challenge was physical—the sight out the car window on their ride to Agni, the greasy water in sacred tanks, the emaciated animals, the tortured-looking trees, the women washing dirty clothes in a dirty stream. She was not disgusted. She accepted these as facts of life.
And that afternoon in the massage room, with the gong music and the chanting and the young woman working on her, the pressure of the fingers did not soothe her. She was roused again, excited as she had been riding through the towns and villages along the Indian road, seeing the market stalls and the shouting men, the jostling pushcarts and the faces of beggars and postcard sellers and curious children and owlish men at the window. Women in scarves, men in turbans and waistcoats, the thick jerkins of cotton and silk. Naked men too, the ones in diapers, with holy splotches on their foreheads, and the women forever showing the bareness of their soft bellies. She saw the faces now, especially the pretty faces and white teeth of the children, their big glossy eyes and long lashes, their downy arms and pale fingernails. Faces at the window.
Here at Agni the sensation had been keener: I have not lived, I have known only my husband, I have spent my whole life waiting; this is my life.
And she yearned to be touched again by the fingers of the masseuse—“massage therapist,” the girl had said, correcting her.
What was it like to be loved the way men were loved, casually, recklessly, never having to explain it? Men never needed to know all the implications of love. Men took a woman as though taking a drink, and moved on.
Audie had smiled at the mobs. He was not daunted. He believed he was invisible to these people, and perhaps he was, behind the tinted windows of the car. But she had feared suffocation—you could drown, you could sink and die in the middle of all these indifferent people. The crush of them was not exotic to her but rather like an intensification of her life. In India, even in this car, she was outdoors, in the world, confronted, as though being asked whether to live or not. In the car, Audie had seen the people struggling on bicycles or driving yoked buffalo or standing like anonymous victims or casualties, and he’d said, “Will you look at that?”
India was as near to life and death as it was possible to be on earth. But it was not one or the other: here was life in death, and death in life.
Still wondering whether she had ever lived at all, and smiling sadly, she tilted herself into sleep.
In the morning, exhausted by their dreams, they woke like campers in a wilderness and prepared themselves for the routines of the day, yoga, breakfast, treatments, the pool, lunch, all the rest of it, not even talking. They had come to like the program of undemanding events, finding serenity in the ordinariness of the routine.
But walking to yoga that day, each of them saw the smoke rising from beyond the perimeter of Monkey Hill, funneling up the slope where they’d been told that Hanuman Nagar was located. They smelled it too, as sulfurous, the sharpness of scorched dirt, that tang of burned excrement. But neither of them mentioned it, each thinking, It’s smoke, it will be blown away. And they continued in their routine.
But when, around noon, there was a break in their routine, they were disturbed.
Dr. Nagaraj had tucked a message under their door requesting a meeting at one o’clock in his office. He had never written before; his handwriting was black and severe and intimidating; and one o’clock was their lunch hour.
“What’s this all about?” Audie asked.
They met him together, feeling importuned, but Beth was sheepish when it turned out that Dr. Nagaraj was only being helpful. Somehow he had discovered—obviously from someone at the front desk—that she had been looking to buy a shatoosh, perhaps more than one. Dr. Nagaraj said that he knew a certain man, but that it was not possible for this shatoosh seller to enter Agni. It was not permitted.
“He is just a common hawker, you see. From the town.”
“The town we keep hearing about,” Beth said.
“Hanuman Nagar,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “His shop is that side.”
That name again, of the invisible place.
“How will we get there?”
“I will request a vehicle, a motorcar.”