For some time, I had believed that my way out of the world was at best the mental asylum. But since I settled in this guest house, things have felt considerably lighter. This place is a perfected substitute, where the inmates and I live free, unsupervised, unmedicated. We must be the freest and the most unsupervised beings on earth, high on something—but what, I cannot begin to say. It might have to do with the air. It is much thinner here, you can feel it, entering your nostrils, delivering its sharp, needle stabs. There is always this light wind in the morning, when mist and clouds recede and the mountains grow into full view above the pine trees. The landscape is so stunning I wish it remained secret.
I take the dirt road behind the guest house and climb toward that place I like best, a couple of turns after the last tea stall. Behind the high crests lies Tibet, and further at a forty-five degree angle, the ridges of Nepal. When I turn around, there are hills, a tide of hills going down, where you can spot, here and there, plumes of smoke coming out of tiny meadows nested between swirls of villages. I walk up and down the hills, for hours on end, at dawn and at dusk, and then like a monk, I study. I bury myself in foreign, and the foreign becomes myself. I found a place to live. Everyone needs a place to live—or do they?
The very names of locations around here take me back to my childish dreams of maps, and I feel good, because I can see now that those dreams were so poignantly real. I was right to endow those maps with the marvels I’m immersed in now. I was right, and it makes me feel better about myself. And yet, isn’t that mesmerizing that I was sure of it at that time, so young and ignorant of things foreign? Places do not transform you because they are beautiful, or ugly for that matter, they do so because they hold a truth that keeps you alive, while the deadly forces of the familiar expect you to capitulate. Lately, each time I’ve travelled to a place I fantasized about as a girl, each time I’ve set foot in a location bearing a compelling name like Borobudur, Siem Reap, Macao, Pathankot, I’ve felt that way: thrilled and grateful that such places exist in real life because by allowing me to see them, they lift me up. They tell me I was right to dream with so much decision, so much heart, so much will and hope, enough to make them come true.
When I came up here, it was late winter. Some colleague in Delhi had bragged about his Himalayan hikes up north, his treks and his walks among rare flowers, and he had mentioned this place where tourists did not go. He had mentioned a cottage. The English word conjured up some fierce hybrid-looking thing. They could have called it a manor for all that. I got out of the train freezing, amid crowds of people covered with woolen blankets. A taxi took me up here. After the night on the third-class coach, the long, sinuous drive amid the pine trees was dizzying. It was so steep that at the end of the journey I could smell the driver’s anguish as he was maneuvering the wheel. He doubled the fare I had negotiated down in the valley. Setting myself in motion always worked wonders: the melancholy would go away as soon as a train would plod ahead. At that point I did not know yet if my exhilaration was due to the journey itself or to this place, but it soon grew obvious that it was the latter.
At the cottage, nobody seemed to care whether a reservation had been made, and I sat waiting in the sprawling dining room lined with windows overlooking a courtyard, where a wooden table was set against a huge devdar, a cedar tree. Later on, I gathered that the handful of guestrooms were on the ground floor, and that the servants had their quarters at the back of the kitchen, where they would unroll their cots at night. One of them came brandishing a nondescript washcloth to show me my bedroom. It was bare, but it came with a small cement-covered cabinet where a bright green plastic bucket stood upside down. Mahendra—that was his name—walked around the room as if he had not been there for a long time.
“Look. Scorpion was here. Good sign,” he said, grinning.
There it was, the greying, flat corpse of a scorpion, with its perfect arrangement of vertebrae-like shells. But the beast remained rather small and was made smaller by death altogether. I asked Mahendra if those were common around here, and he said it was not the right season. Soon would come leeches. Not so dangerous, he added. Then he went out of the bedroom and authoritatively pointed to a chair by a table in the dining room. I heard orders and the clicking and splashing of pots and pans for a long while, and he eventually brought an omelet and chai. I figured I was all alone in the guest house.
A few days later, Mr. Prakash, the landlord, came to say there would soon be other guests. If I wanted to stay long term, I would have to pay cash, three months in advance. He was an overweight middle-aged pundit, who also owned the general store. On top of the soap and washing powder and cookery utensils, he would sell the harvest of his fruit trees and hill gardens —tomatoes and greens, onions and potatoes—but also jams and jars and jars of peanut butter that were made especially for the Americans who came to the guest house, and who he seemed to enjoy most, peppering his talk with “right” and “all set” more often than he should have. He wanted to make sure I would not meddle with him. He had an eye for hippies and bums who would eschew their dues and run. But I was not one of them, and even though he did not show it at first, he knew. He also owned a couple of taxis, in case I wanted to go trekking, hiking, you name it—lots and lots of sights, so much better here than Ladakh and Kashmir. He was one of those men who never smile, let alone laugh, and impose on their audience an indomitable weight that levered something like fear and mistrust. But the peace had won me already, and there was to be no centaur capable of preventing me from becoming one with it.
✶
One day, as I am reading by the devdar, a man comes to me. Here everyone knows everyone else, you cannot escape being known. It might be disturbing at first, but it lays a safety net upon you, once you get used to it.
“You are the lady from France. Namaste ji. Let me introduce myself. I am Dr. Kumar, dean of the Holy Cross School, here in Krishnapur.”
He then monologues about the place and its sights, its renowned characters and the notion that here is the ideal place to educate children, a thought that hadn’t crossed my mind but that now feels undeniable.
“Our students are all very smart and every year we send them to the very best universities nationwide. And all over the world. Sorbonne, even. For the very best of them. As a matter of fact, we are presently looking for a lecturer in French.”
Doctor Kumar is the archetype of formality, clad in the Nehruvian jacket that I had noticed to be particularly relevant in the Himalayan weather, with its stiff woolen pattern covering the upper body all the way to the base of the neck. He also sports old-fashioned rimmed glasses and a thick dark beard.
“Come, I’ll show you around the premises.”
You cannot say no to a middle-aged man here. I realized how authoritarian people get as they age; in fact, age difference is the primary source of authority when an Indian and a foreigner come into contact. Within their own community it is another matter altogether, and age is weaved into an intricate network of power relations. But then I learned how not to go against precedence, and I have come to abide by the authority of my elders here. It reminds me of other circumstances, other times, other encounters while, again, giving me secure ground to stand upon. In India, social rules are written in big red letters all over, for better or worse. One does not grow these overwhelming doubts that plague social gatherings in the United States, France, and elsewhere, where guilt, good manners, and codes are always, even superficially, being redistributed as in a game where one casts the die again and again in a constant renewal of the odds.
He leads me on a path off my usual dirt road. We walk through a thick grove of pine trees the sun seldom penetrates, to reach a clearing where a dozen large chalet-looking buildings are set over several acres. These are dormitory units, and behind them stands the main building, a grand colonial house, which conceals the headmaster’s home at the back of it.
“It’s recess, you won’t see any students now. They’ve all returned home.”
There are quite a few servants waiting on the premises, all involved in some specific task: sweeping, tilling, raking, attending huge earthen flower pots. A derelict-looking man clad in a once-white shirt and pants two sizes too large retained at the waist by a piece of string, approaches the dean. Dr. Kumar delivers a “chai lao, do, chalo” in a fast, rolling voice he means not to be heard by me.
But to me, Dr. Kumar keeps speaking in a soft, even voice. I have learned to spot that self-awareness. Educated Indians know it is not proper to digress too lavishly, let alone put up a loud, shrill voice. So, he strives to appear sober and calm, countering his natural instinct. I sense that he deals with American people a lot, or he used to, perhaps he has studied there, and he knows how to import their manners with a white woman he sees as a paragon of distinction, which is funny, given where I come from. He assumes I am this learned female from the West, with degrees from Europe and North America. And I see it as my duty not to disappoint him. I am all of these things; I am no fraud. I have all those qualifications, even though he will never be aware of the painful efforts I put in to gain them. He assumes it all has been easy and nice and fluid.
I smile back, and I express my wonder at the impressive collection of French books locked in a dusty glass bookcase. I congratulate Dr. Kumar on Anatole France, Michelet, Alain Fournier, the war memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. The peon returns with two chipped white cups of steaming chai. The pine trees are especially pungent, endowing the French room with a heavy afternoon fragrance that makes me want to cry. I am trying to imagine all those students here.
“How wonderful to spend one’s youth here; this is the Garden of Eden,” I exclaim, not knowing if Eden would register in this context.
He is flattered but will not show he is. He delivers a great number of practical details I cannot fathom at once, but he makes sure I understand about the prestige attached to that school. That I have gathered from the start, even though I do not give a damn about it. All I care about is this place, this peace. I listen to his reel and smile along.
“I know that you would prefer, what with that degree you’re working on, to get a research position somewhere at a nice college down there, but here at Holy Cross it’ll be a good, good name on your résumé nonetheless.”
I have not said a word about my professional goal, but he is assuming from my degrees, and I let him think I agree. I will never stand a proper job, with proper career goals. Little by little I marvel at Dr. Kumar’s words. The teaching hours would be extremely limited, he said; I would be more of an exotic academic advisor. He has not said exotic, but that is how I hear it. He says I would mainly be proofreading, advising, correcting, mentoring. He is all about intellectual awakening and inspiring mentoring. Isn’t that counter to what education in Asian countries is all about? I am fine with that. He is offering me shelter in the pine trees, freedom, lack of supervision, colossal respect even, a low salary but with meals all brought to me as a stipend, no questions asked.
There is one thing that bugs him; he wonders if I will not mind being all by myself here. He mentions the history teacher, who is a widower, and the Sanskrit teacher, an old maid although he does not say the phrase. He also makes sure I understand that he personally does not see it as an issue because he knows how things work in the West, but I say I understand what he means. I am fine with all that, and I know the prejudice I will presumably fall prey to. If I accept the job, I will become the nun, the virgin, the learned monk. I will be up to the task, let me tell you. Since I arrived here, purity has befallen me, and I want nothing more than being that saint, that pure soul. I know it is temporary, that one day when I am ready, I will mix again with people, reality, with love perhaps, sex even. But I need to breathe first, and when he hands this job offer, so informally, so unexpectedly, I know that I will take it. Of course I will stay here. I thank him dearly and go back to the guest house.
A stray dog follows me. She does not come too close, but she smiles at me, or so I imagine. She is a she, that is a sure thing, so thin, with her rib cage showing and holes in her coat. Does she know me? For she lets it be known she knows me, trotting ahead of me, waiting for me at the foot of a tree. I look at her, and I smile back. On that day I am given a red carpet to walk on, chaperones and admirers, protectors and providers whom I had never felt entitled to before.
✶
In the past, holding a regular office job has killed me many times. I adapt so much I drown. I have tried all kinds of jobs with the remotest link to writing, editing, researching. Newsrooms, open spaces, telephone ringing makes me jump at all times. I am always ahead of deadlines, which makes me think that I missed something big; there is always some manager giving me a look I misinterpret. Besides, I have never shaken off my shyness, so how can you expect a shy reporter to do their job properly? I am ill at ease when I must extort an insignificant piece of information from a civil servant, who spits it out reluctantly on the other end of the line. I cannot seem to understand notions brandished as key to professional advancement: proactivity, outspokenness, nimbleness.
When I hold a job, each time I stall, my heart runs, my brain stops, and here I am, convinced I have no place in this world, with that ugly, stifling feeling that other people mean harm. Colleagues, on the other hand, look so well-rounded; they make sense of what they do and can speak about it in self-flattering terms, whereas I stammer when someone not even higher in the hierarchy asks me the most innocuous detail about my work. I stutter and blush, then recoil and use my hands instead, trying to convey that what I do has ramifications underground, overboard, inside, and out. And I get blank faces in return; people are embarrassed, I know it, even the best intentioned. I make people uncomfortable, although I could do well for myself, if I faced things coolly, lucidly, those faces seem to say. So, after a year in an open office, I am drained of all blood, sucked dry.
I tried a number of things, but each time I must report, I fall down. I am asked to perform tasks I cannot do whereas the things I do best are not required of me. They are given to others. Take teaching: I am given those classes that involve students in debating groups, communication, whereas I would like nothing better than to teach close reading, criticism. But such classes are always given to those with a stronger rhetorical power. So I am a poor lecturer, fumbling around with my papers, giving advice that does not look good to skeptical students. I fail at maintaining the illusion, as do my peers, expecting it from everyone around them in return, that what they do, what we do, is essential, sensible, rightful.
Job-wise I have become an expert at leaving as soon as I land a contract. Nobody tried as much as I did to adapt, to anticipate, to understand what is expected of me. But I always seem to associate either with the unfitting and the outcast, or, worse, with the tyrants and the bullies. Trust me, I have been bullied my share. I would not even notice it while I was at it, till the day I cried so much in the restroom I had to quit the following day, out of shame, of guilt, of out-of-placeness. But not out of a precise reason, nothing significant. I always seem to face the same type of boss: someone who hardly speaks but who unleashes the utmost degree of tension, while assuming awareness of his, often her, impossibly tricky demands. So, I quit.
My part-time stints as a librarian were by far the best experience I could possibly imagine. Once, I was given a night shift at a university library overseeing the circulation desk all by myself. My supervisor came to trust me so much, I worked longer hours than expected. The job offer in Krishnapur makes me think about that job, taking care of the old French book collections, sorting the mess, and giving reading tips.
I have traveled my share in the past years, and India has had an unparalleled effect on me. I got rid of what I owned and a lot of what I knew. I try not to get too involved with people. It is easy when you do odd jobs that never last more than a few months. I learned foreign languages but a lot less thoroughly than the languages of bodies. I am learning to watch myself and to look all around. And now I look up to those people who have nothing at all but their own body, which is used to the core: the rickshaw pullers, the sweepers, the mothers in rags crouching in the sun with babies thrown upon their backs, disentangling this and that piece of junk to sell each and every bit of. During the time I lived in Delhi, every day I would meet a group of cripples in the shade of a bridge. Getting used to is not the right phrase. You get used to the sight because they got used to themselves so thoroughly. The utter horror that befalls these people is of such abject nature that you need to brace yourself in order to merely look. Elephantiasis, poliomyelitis, missing limbs by birth or by accident, all of these ailments and suffering are in the open and taken care of in their own way.
The begging and bumming that go with them seem to say, we are here, don’t you dare say you have not seen our spines that form inhuman bumps, our lower limbs that go this and that way. When you see how these people move around on one knee or on two arms cut to the elbow or with a twisted back, with no expectation of help, you learn to look, not to drown yourself in awe, but to take in the full blow of humanity. I could never make myself ignore them. The only individual action available to me is looking. Sometimes I wish the people I grew up with looked. I want to say to them, look. Those people are with me, as signs and warnings against my own tendency to suffer and to collapse, for they tell me I have no right to suffer and to collapse.
And I am only seeing a limited amount of this vastness. I can only imagine the inside of their shacks, the exact meaning of their words, their whereabouts at night, the precariousness of their health. The sight of kids I still cannot fathom, and yet I came to look forward to seeing them around, contradicting everything I thought I was believing in. There are tons and tons of them, skinny and terribly lively. And they at once stick to their mothers and live away from them, outside, like fierce and wild animals in the vast, hostile habitat they know inside and out. And they come to you fearless; they are not yet subdued; they are everything but tame; they work hard at making known they are here. They speak and speak and they touch you. Barefoot, covered in grime and dust, their gestures brisk and precise, their smiles white and toothy. What I see is their life, their bloody liveliness, even the crippled ones, and it has turned my idea of childhood upside down.
At night I play a game: I fancy I am making a list of all the people I have met in my life. That would be a challenge, wouldn’t it? All of them, listed on a page, each of them holding a portion of what I am, holding a piece of truth or a piece of lie about my existence. Imagine, all the names of the people whom I’ve come in contact with since my birth, all of equal importance, all of equal insignificance. Aren’t they all human souls? I try to match a name with a face, and I go on like this, starting as early as I can dig, kindergarten flashes of stern headmistresses looking like witches, the dumb neighbors and drowsy classmates I cannot start to imagine with grown-up features. My memory plays tricks on me, giving me a few hints but no clue, cluttering my mind pointlessly. And I file, and I sort, and on a good day fewer than ten names can be conjured before I am fast asleep.
Because there is one thing about this place: I sleep in it. I get a healthy, sufficient dose of sleep, and I now know to delight in yawning shamelessly to the face of the innumerable birds in the blue-white sky when I come back from my walk. I have never slept so soundly, and I wax and wane along with the sun, not giving it a thought. My sanatorium is the best on earth, I write in imaginary letters. I cannot expect anyone to understand my choice, but I have decided I would stay. I write; there is no better place to write in. I have been looking for this place my whole life. But you are only twenty-five, I hear someone say to me. I feel old and battered, you know. Did you know that this place has cured my myopia? When you must look far ahead, your eyes adjust. I needed more space to see. But you spent your nights reading books at a goddamn library, no wonder. Well, I decided to see this as a bunch of signs, and I cling to my good nights as omens that would bring me enduring luck. The sounder I sleep, the deeper my roots. I can feel them growing into a welcoming and fecund earth; I can feel them thrive underneath. But I cannot say that aloud, either. I am wary that sharing such thoughts would make them vanish, like in those dreary fairy tales.
✶
One morning I hear Mahendra talk animatedly with someone, and I think at first it is Mrs. Prakash, because the female voice sounds so authoritative. As I come out, I spot a white woman clad in a silky, balloony salwar kameez, dyed in garish colors that match her hennaed hair. She is seated, looking dubiously at her chai, speaking to herself after Mahendra left. I say namaste, quite content to see someone.
“Oh hi, I didn’t know there were other guests.”
I cannot quite place her accent, close to British, but definitely not British.
“What a mess it is around here. I wanted my chai without milk, and I’m telling you I know my Hindi. That gentleman came up with that. I said ‘Ji, dudh nahin,’ and look what he just brought. I said to him, ‘dudh, dudh.’ My god, aren’t they backward. Oh well. What kills me is how they’re always saying, yes of course, and they have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Up close, she is in her early thirties, with a nose ring and a missing tooth in the corner of her upper teeth. She has put kohl on her eyelids, and she does seem to know her way about here. She asks me a few questions and says: “Thank god here it’s not the usual crowd you bump into in the touristy places. I come from Rishikesh; never again. I should be OK once I settle down a bit.”
I will find out later that Sue has a sharp sense of humor, and that she takes a keen interest in everything genuinely Indian. She has brought a radio, and she will listen to All India Radio, especially the programs in Hindi, from which she will dig the oddest bits of knowledge and share them around. She does not really say why she is here, but she means to stay long term. She has already spent months, years even, who knows, in that country, and has developed the habit of going back and forth to Nepal to renew her visa to be able to stay longer. She does odd jobs, tutoring kids in English, translating this and that, thinking of launching her own business.
One day as we are chatting in the courtyard, a frail woman comes up and asks if there are any rooms to let. Given that our cottage is the highest point of Krishnapur, people often arrive here having been told about the view, looking for a resting place after their climb up. Usually, they are middle-class tourists coming out of a taxi, their white sneakers showing beneath the folds of their kurta pajamas. They summon Mahendra sternly and get some paratha with chai before going back down. But the woman is alone; she says she does not like her hotel down in Krishnapur’s main market and wants to have a better experience of the hill station. She emphasizes the word “experience,” as if she had borrowed it from an American advertisement for a ski or a sea resort. She puts on an eager, polite smile, and we are both helpful, though mildly reluctant at first to give away our secret paradise.
In time, we will do so more willingly. As the season moves forward, we have our share of visitors, domestic mostly, but also mountain climbers in a hurry and the odd foreign tourist ready to escape their Rajasthan tour before rushing back to Frankfurt. But Alicja is not that sort of tourist. In fact she is not a tourist at all. She lives full time in Delhi, married, happily she insists, to an Indian engineer. They met in Holland, her home country, she says with a pout, and after a stint in The Hague, they relocated to the subcontinent. She has adjusted perfectly to her new life except for the heat; that’s why she is looking for cooler temperatures in the Himalayan foothills.
Like Sue, she has donned a salwar kameez and silver jewelry, and she looks lovely in her exotic attire, her thin clavicles showing underneath, encircling a sunburnt area around her neck. She must be in her mid-thirties, and her hair is greying, in a way that makes her all the more youthful. It must be her candid, gullible eyes or her fairness, for she appears to be one of those excessively fragile-looking beings. Sue patronizes her, explaining what to order and what to expect over here, and Alicja listens attentively, not questioning her authority. Sue’s matronly personality resembles the familiar feminine icon deemed to rule in Indian society. And in her own way, she becomes our holy mother: Sue, the white, South African, childless matron. Everybody craves her opinion, her ideas, her outrage. It is decided that Alicja will move that day, and Sue orders Mahendra to go down to her hotel and fetch her things.
Alicja’s marriage to Mukesh has come as a shock to her family back in the Netherlands, and she admits it is a relief to be out in the East, away from them all. The issue of her in-laws is however something of a mystery: we can never quite figure if they are fine with her being all alone up in Uttaranchal while Mukesh is avowedly toiling away in Delhi. She mentions his visiting at some point. She is here to perfect the language, and we get closer when we share our resources and tutoring lessons with a retired teacher who is drilling us in Hindi with high efficiency. I come to appreciate Alicja, and I do not ask her too many questions. By claiming to be married you can get away from people’s insistence on making sure you are not living shamefully or dangerously. We joke about that, imagining details of our so-called spouses back in town.
The guest house gradually swarms with bustling animation as rooms fill out for spring. Most people come and go. One day, an American man comes for lunch and has so much to eat we cannot but stare in awe. He says he is a vegan, and he wants to know if the dahl has been dosed in ghee, which does not elicit any clear response from Mahendra. The latter has no idea what a vegan is, and even though he is a vegetarian Hindu all right, his skills and hygiene as a cook are such that there is no way to know exactly what goes on in the kitchen. But regardless, Jason eventually eats everything he is being given, once he has made his introductory petition.
He is the typical American traveler, sunburnt and clad with a set of torn-down technical equipment, sandals in polyurethane coming with Velcro straps, cover-all glasses set at the top of his cranium awaiting further, imminent use, linked together by a string of waterproof rope. One of his T-shirts advertises a festival of Californian indie rock music with dates and names of groups that made me think of a long-lost boyfriend for a second. I ask if he is from California.
“Yes. Well, no. Actually I was born in Washington State, up in the West Coast, but I grew up in San Jose. And Las Vegas, as a matter of fact.”
Americans always try to make sense of their whereabouts, as if they desperately want to convey that they do have a sense of roots, an alma mater so to speak, which I find slightly ridiculous for some reason. But you always realize that most of the time they do not really care about where they come from. Home does not have the same meaning as in the old world, and I enjoy the idea that you can betray anything and make yourself at home anywhere far and unknown.
Jason is extremely talkative, although you cannot call him friendly or joyful. He gives the impression that he is permanently thinking about something complex or challenging. He is in his early twenties, and a huge amount of energy comes out of his athletic body. We can surmise his resistance from what he tells us about his past, day after day. He is a high school dropout and has made a living by working for the Oregon forestry department, where he used to carry out thorough counts of trees on a given territory. He went days on end deep inside those wild woods and combed every square meter of land with a pencil and a writing pad, recording the sort of tree, the species of greenery, everything.
Here in Krishnapur he says he is taking a long holiday, but he does not know how long, in order to spot the red-headed goldfinch. Other birds, too, of course, but this one most of all. It is not a rare bird, but he encountered it only once, while bird-watching in the Rocky Mountains, and he knew the species did not belong there. It is a Himalayan bird, belonging to the Himalayan pines. He had developed a passion for this lost bird on another continent, and he decided to go and spot the rest of his family, so to speak.
He engages in a thorough description of the bird’s feathers, the size of its head, much bigger than usual birds, the distinctive red color, and its whistle. Jason excels at mimicking bird calls, and he performs at will an extravagant number of them. He describes himself as a bird-watcher, which is a hobby I had never heard about before. It is fairly common, though, according to him. You need not be an ornithologist, just have good eyes. He shows us his binoculars, a set of small yet technical lenses he cannot live without. Alicja asks him to take her in one of his trips. She cannot wait to watch birds, she says with starry eyes. He looks at her, probably wondering if he could really stand having someone tagging along.
He says he does butterfly-watching sometimes, but bird-watching is what he prefers. Sue finds him a bit boring, and she casts me looks when he starts rambling about the red-headed goldfinch. Yet he becomes a favorite fixture at the cottage. He gets up earlier than I do, and I run into him when I go out for my walk, already sweaty and up for a chat about what he has seen in the hills at sunrise. We also have long talks about psychology, as he seems to struggle with an inner longing for understanding a thing that I cannot quite place. He borrows my Dickinson collection of poems and other novels that he reads eagerly and discusses later with the genuine and passionate outlook of an autodidact.
✶
Alicja, Sue, Jason, and I are at heart solitary beings, and although we share this intimate setting and take all our meals together, we remain at a distance on our magic mountain. But at dinner, sometimes we linger. I tell them about my job offer, and they cheer. Alicja talks animatedly about the babies she would like to bear. She would like nothing better than becoming pregnant and morphing into a mother.
“Wouldn’t the mother-in-law be thrilled, na?” says Sue.
Sue disagrees with that baby business. She does have an eye for boys, but she thinks the world is harsh enough for the living, so why inflict it onto newbies? Yet Alicja is adamant. She says they have tried and tried. One night she is on the verge of crying, and we all say to her, don’t give up, you’re young, you have all the time in the world. But she is confident she is the infertile one; they have run tests. Sue says to her, eat more, Bharat is eating at you, look how thin you are. And that is true; she is the anorectic kind. How can she become pregnant in that state?
I say, you know, I stopped menstruating here. I have not had a period during my whole time in this country. And I can tell you I am not pregnant. My womanhood has been put on hold. Or, I like to think, I have fallen prey to enceinteté, pregnant of something, so to speak. I coined that French word for my amenorrhea. There is no word in French that denotes pregnancy, just “grossesse,” which sounds as vulgar as “engrossed.” So I made up that word, I am in a state of enceinteté, with no human baby in sight, no male partner to claim he inseminated me, nothing but my holy sanctity. I say to her, watch your periods because miracles happen here. Have you menstruated lately? She says it has been hectic, but now she has lost her illusion and cannot look at any calendar anymore.
“Fock periods, girls,” says Sue. “There are so many other things to do than care about babies! Why do you want babies so much? Let’s have a special dinner tonight. We need comfort, and we need to celebrate your job offer, froggy, na?”
We ask Mahendra for something different.
“Achha, peperoni pizza for everybody.”
We will go down to the bazaar and get Cokes and Bengali sweets. Jason requests a vegan pizza, and we make assumptions about its possible content. He says he will be out all day birdwatching, because he wants to make the most of it before monsoon breaks. See, all of those clouds up there. The weather is changing. We see him going down the path as we are figuring out our night feast.
Sue tells us about her new project. She works with weavers in a nearby village to build a sustainable business involving natural dyes, applied in patterns that she has helped salvage from Himalayan tribes. She has designed a bag she feels will sell well. Sue found an associate, and her website is ready. She has so much energy and drive, putting people around her in motion. Sometimes she mentions South Africa in passing but only to say how bad it is, how corrupt, how racist. She never dwells on her background. None of us ever dwells on our past, however young we are. Our childhoods have nothing to do with what we are becoming.
That is why I am at home here. There is no storytelling involving nostalgia or fond anecdotes about ties. There are no ties to speak of. Does Mukesh really exist? He exists as evidence that Alicja has cut her former ties, but has she knotted other ones as she claims? Sue often says that India is the emotional dust bin of the West, and we agree, she has this formulaic gift for truth telling, but we also stand at an angle because we are not those hippies bumming around holy cities looking for solace by becoming mere parasites. We are trying to decipher some larger things, but we are trying not to intrude. We all have huge holes that will never be filled, but we refuse to let them be filled with whatever comes to hand.
Foreign is an illusory necessity when you need to be reborn. It provides you with a context in which to be rewritten, reset. I have to say it does not work instantly. It took me some years abroad to accept that blank slate as a reality. I would relapse a few months after I had landed in a foreign territory. I would relapse into the familiar patterns of melancholy, despite foreign tongues, foreign weathers, foreign conditions. Sometimes foreign made the melancholy more acute. I tried to escape everything that sounded or looked familiar. Over time, North America seemed too familiar. At some point as I was traveling around Asia, I thought: I will not be able to go to Mars, so let’s stop here; foreign does not help. Until I got here.
✶
Every day I look at the horizon and see new things, new crests, new crevices, or so it seems, on the monumental canvas that is being exposed. I imagine the steepness of slopes, the texture of the snow up there above seven thousand meters, and I think I can spot lost souls, people looking for something up in the mist. I always imagine myself borne somewhere onto those heights. For nature does not exist in itself. The human mind either must recreate it or inhabit it, penetrate it, touch it from the inside, like the crazy alpinists we keep on meeting here, like Jason in his search for debunking the hidden. It is the first time nature does not make me crave cities. Usually I feel better in big, packed cities, in buildings cramped with humans, in swarming buses. Over the years, crowded cities have saved me, they have kept me alive because they were huge forgiving organisms I could take for granted, and they were feeding me all right. But here the craving has not come yet.
For our special dinner Mahendra puts on a rather white tablecloth and goes out of his way to clean up. Sue claims he’s combed his hair. We have all come to find him companionable and endearing. Here it is awfully hard not to fall into paternalistic, colonialist patterns, so many people end up behaving as know-all white snobs toward barely human beings at their service. At the same time, it would be a disgrace to behave with the caste-ridden impulses we see among the upper-caste Hindus who are ruling the game. We cannot really evade the first pattern, experiencing at first a fair amount of guilt when faced with the destitute and the slave; the Americans, with their egalitarian outlook and upbringing, are the worst, ever so polite and imposing their own ideas of comfort, health, and good manners upon the very victims of centuries-old debasement. After all, an acceptable behavior seems to lie in silent coexistence, when things are best left unsaid, when services are rendered without being exaggeratedly reckoned or looked at as a due. And then day after day, humor plays its trick on both sides; we know we are free to consider Mahendra’s utter otherness, as he has a right to see us as oddities, but oddities that do not try to bully him too hard or pity him too hard, either.
So, we do not invite him to our dinner, but we sort of celebrate him, lightly and earnestly. He has prepared the most perplexing of vegan pizzas: a thick paratha dosed with a generous layer of tomato paste seeped in pepper, on which rests a mix of lady fingers cut in small round slices, bits of black radish and cauliflower, and the remainders of a yellowy dhal. The result is unexpectedly appetizing, and we all wait impatiently for Jason to come back and enjoy.
As we are laying the table with Mahendra, the sky starts to darken.
“Monsoon come,” he says.
Full black clouds have gathered, and open windows start to bang alarmingly.
“We’d better close all of these,” says Alicja.
We decide to start without him. This will make Jason come sooner, as the French say.
“The French are always right,” says Sue. “I said, voulay-vous coucher avec moi, to my Indian partner this afternoon. You should have seen his face!”
Our peperoni pizza tastes great, and we pretend to have fun speaking about sex and boys, without our American male comrade listening. But then the storm breaks. As we are seated inside, the majestic devdar in full view, the first thunder and lightning makes us shriek like little girls. We are so ridiculous, we burst into a laughing fit. The noise is tremendous. The sky has never been so dark so early in the evening.
“Jason’s not gonna make it alive!”
Alicja starts to worry, but we reflect he has overcome worse obstacles in his life as a lone ranger. Mahendra fumbles here and there, closing doors and bringing us lit candles after the electricity runs out. Our excitement is so high we do not panic. The devdar is erect and fierce looking, watchful. Mahendra is muttering something in Hindi that Sue deciphers as a call to his ancestral deity back in his village.
Jason does not reappear. The next day, Alicja decides to report him to the American consulate. We put up signs around Krishnapur. We go through his things. Sue brings me back The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson from his room. He has left his passport in a suitcase. Assumptions are made about an accident, most probably. Mahendra promises he will cook another vegan pizza. He has finally eaten the first himself.
✶
I get out at sunrise. The landscape is in a mess, as if a beast has ravaged it. Bits of branches and dumps of wet leaves are smeared on the path. Leeches will start appearing everywhere in the swamps and ponds randomly created by the monsoon. The horizon, however, has never been clearer and neater. The clouds will come back soon, and the rains will bring their toll in their own unpredictable cadenza, for weeks on end. But now, on the edge of the day, the sky is pristine, and you can see the mountains in their tiniest details, where the minutest of painters has labored all night long. I am confident I will be able to see Jason, to spot his silhouette coming out of the woods, coming out of the snow peaks, from far, far away. My eyes are burning as I fixate them on the farthest possible point.
There is nobody around; it is still too early. I am not worried about Jason’s disappearance, for I have faith in him. I know he has nothing to fear. Neither do I. I have never felt freer. Expectations have vanished into thin air. A faint brushing sound up in the nearest devdar makes me jump: a small reddish bird comes out of the cover, deploying his ridiculously small wings against the blue sky. I follow his jittery flight, and before he goes away for good, he pauses on a pine branch a few meters away. Slightly bending his oversized, crimson head, he seems to ask me: “Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”
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Cécile Seiller is an author based in Paris, writing fiction and nonfiction in French and in English, some which can be found in Kairos literary magazine and Litro US. She holds a Master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and a PhD in literature from the Université Paris Diderot. She is the mother of three children.
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