The Girl in the Road (23 page)

It was late in the afternoon when we set out for the Royal Enclosure, my hand in yours. Your mood was even higher and wilder, as if now that we were whole again, a single electric current was coursing through both our bodies.

When we were crossing the piazza I saw a woman stirring red stew in an iron pan. You spoke to her and gestured a lot, and laughed in a high, hysterical pitch I'd never heard from you before.

You turned to me and said, She's going to give us a bit of shiro! It's a kind of spicy bean paste. This will be your first real taste of Ethiopia!

The woman handed me a morsel wrapped in brown paper. I picked it up with my fingers, a flap of spongy bread soaked in red sauce, and ate it. It was mushy-sour-savory-spicy.

You like it?

I nodded vigorously. It tasted like what we had just done in the hotel room.

You gave the woman a bill and then we continued on our way. You babbled: If you like shiro, you're going to fit right in here. In Dakar there was an Ethiopian restaurant my friends and I used to spend time in. There was a whole circle of dancers and artists that stayed there for the coffee in the afternoon and the honey wine at night, which they call tej here, remember that, for hours on end, playing music or talking about politics. That's how I learned about Ethiopian dancing and music and jazz. Some of us wanted to go to Lagos or Johannesburg. But most of us talked about Addis, where the president spoke Hindi and wore a traditional Amharic dress to state meetings. There's a whole team of women devoted to spinning her dresses from the best cotton in the world, and three master embroiderers who make the edges, and after she was elected, the fashion shows in Dubai and Mumbai all showed Amharic dresses.

We arrived at the front gate of the Royal Enclosure. You paid for us both. We walked up the pebbled path under blooming hyacinth trees shooting up through the ruins. Birds had built nests on the tops of the pillars. We walked through banquet rooms, empty and echoing, with lizards scooting in the corners. We came into a grand hall with a vaulted ceiling, but the ceiling had crumbled and showed right through to the sky. There were doorways and stairways that led to nothing but air, and diamond holes that showed other castles, far away.

We wandered from ruin to ruin, quiet. Yemaya, I don't think I'd ever been so happy in my whole life, not even in Ouagadougou. Whatever we had done in the hotel room, it'd worked. We were whole again.

When we returned to the hotel, we joined Muhammed, who was dining alone.

So, he said with obvious excitement, it looks like we'll be headed to Lalibela right in time for Timket.

Neither of us knew what that was.

It's the holiest day for the Ethiopian Church, he said. Lalibela has the biggest celebration of it. It's famous all over the world.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? you asked.

It means more headaches, for where to park, where to eat, where to sleep, he said. But it's a very holy day for Christians. They hold mass baptisms with water hoses. I'll go and watch just for the show of it.

So we said we would go too.

You were quiet the next day, as quiet as you had been excited the previous day. It felt like an anticlimax since I thought that, once we were in Ethiopia, and once we had become whole again, your mood would get better and stay that way all the time. How little I understood!

I followed our route on the map splayed on my lap. We were going south, around Lake Tana, which was a gigantic blotch in the middle of the country. Muhammed showed me the lake itself, far below us. At first I was confused—I couldn't see the other side, so I asked Muhammed if that was the ocean, if we'd made it all the way across to the other side of Africa. He said, No, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it is. It's a very big lake. A false ocean.

I found you to tell you what I'd just learned about Lake Tana.

I know, you said.

Do you think it's safe to swim in it?

I don't know much of anything anymore, you said.

What an answer! So I knew you were still in a quiet mood, so I didn't prod you further.

It was hard to keep my balance on the truck that day. We kept winding up and down hills, which was not a landscape I'd ever experienced before. I didn't know the land could be so bumpy, and not only bumpy, but sheared such that I could see land rearing up above me, or plunging away below. Now I know, of course, that we were driving down the outermost lip of the Great Rift Valley.

We passed through a town called Debre Tabor, but only to stop for fuel and snacks, as Muhammed wanted to push on through the night. I tugged on your hand and said, Let's go check and see if there are Indian sweets. You nodded and got up and we dismounted the truck and walked into town. It was twilight. By silent agreement, we went into the most modern-looking store we could find. It turned out they had a huge display of Indian sweets—the biggest selection I'd yet seen. They weren't even prepackaged. They were in tin pans, sitting in syrup, or wrapped in wax paper.

The clerk told you that there was an Indian community in Debre Tabor, and that one of the families made sweets to sell at the markets. Apparently Ethiopian sweets left something to be desired, so Indian sweets were filling the market niche.

Can we take one of each? I said.

Let me see how much money I have, you said. You rummaged in your bag, and then caught a glimpse of my face, which must have looked pathetic, because then you said, Of course we can get one of each.

We left the store with a yellow plastic bag filled with sweets. And when we got back on the road that night, you turned on your sirius so we could see what we were eating. I think it was that night that converted me to gulab jamun, Yemaya. They're best fried, so it's impossible to prepackage them. A fresh one tasted like heaven on earth. I finally agreed with you.

I remember the drive to Lalibela only through dreams: that we were winding back and forth up a mountainside, ascending a road to heaven. When I woke, we were parked in a lot that sat at the edge of an abyss. The plain was a thousand meters down. My brain could not comprehend the distance. I'd dreamed the truth: we'd come to the doorstep of heaven.

You'd been out already. Before I even had my breakfast, you told me to look on the front seat of the truck where, inside a plastic bag, there was a small white dress made of cottony gauze, with deep blue borders and a blue cross embroidered on the front.

You told me to try it on. You held up your blanket while I changed behind it. I was happy to take off my old shift and put this new garment on. You knelt in front of me and showed me how to tie the matching sash around my waist, and then the matching headscarf around my hair. When you were done, you called Muhammed to look. He said I looked just like a little Amhara shepherdess. There were tears in your eyes. Looking back, Yemaya, now I know why.

The two of us set off into town alone. What a spectacle! The town itself was like something from another world, a village of round houses, high on the mountainside above that vast plain. And the mountainside was swarming like an anthill. We were two of thousands of people come to the city for Timket. Everywhere we turned, there were people, families and their donkeys and whole flocks of children running free. Almost everyone was wearing white, many of the women in dresses like mine.

We walked with the crowds because there seemed to be a direction to the flow. You were quiet again, but seemed serene. Now I know why you looked that way: you were preparing for what was to come. The sun broke through the clouds and fell on us hosts of white, rivers of pilgrims spilling from ledge to ledge, down into the ancient stone-cut city, into the trenches and churches.

You picked me up and carried me on your shoulders. I wrapped my legs around your back and kissed both of your cheeks and tasted tears. I knew you were as happy as I was. From this height, I could see again how high up we were. The rest of the earth was so far away! Cliffs and escarpments could only dimly be seen, in pale watery colors, across all that distance. I had trouble breathing because the air was so thin. I had to gulp it in.

We made a turn in the labyrinth. On the street ahead of us was a line of youths advancing, step by step, with bright golden faces, each arrayed in white, hunched and cupping their hands as if to catch water.

You turned your face up to me, and indeed, tears were streaming down your face. They're singing to you! you said. They're singing to Mary!

As they stepped forward, you stepped back. It was like a game. Like we were leading them. You turned to face forward and I twisted back, to make sure they were following us. I didn't speak their language but I could beckon. The youth followed. They were praising me, just like you said. They were calling my name.

We passed down into a crevice of rock that widened again to reveal an ocean of white. The procession of priests moved through it, toward us, carrying their jeweled crosses and fringed umbrellas and water hoses. The song of the youths swelled and merged with the song of the priests and then water rained down on us from above. The crowd pressed forward to receive the blessing. We were picked up by the crush of other peoples' bodies, lifted and carried, coming closer, to where a priest was swinging a hose, back and forth, mouth open in prayer. The spray hit me squarely on the forehead. It was ice-cold and I shrieked and laughed and my brain felt numbed. I was baptized.

And then I realized I was no longer sitting on your shoulders! I was one leg down and one leg across the shoulder of a teenage boy who gave me a confused look.

I called your name. I crawled over people's heads, but that made them angry. I lost my balance and fell. A large woman seized me by the waist, carried me out like a sack of meal and deposited me just beyond the press of people, where I wouldn't be crushed. She said a few stern words in a language I didn't understand and then went back in. I was alone.

I called your name. I turned around and around. But you were gone.

I consult my counselors about the handprint I saw underwater. Their answers unfold in my mind like glotti text.

MUTHASHI:
So you were hanging underwater during a cyclone. That is a stressful situation. And you were in an environment of strict sensory deprivation. I would be surprised if you hadn't hallucinated. You have been hallucinating already: the barefoot girl, the naked woman.

MOHINI:
Consider it one of the chambers. A shocking one, a scary one, but just another chamber to pass through.

MUTHASHI:
There are five stages of hallucination. The person experiencing hallucinations progresses from understanding their unreality to believing in their reality. And then that reality fuses with real reality, and the person cannot tell the difference.

What if one of the hallucinations is dangerous, and actually real, and I fail to deal with it?

MUTHASHI
:
I suppose that's a risk. Better to defend yourself as a rule. You'll find out on a case-by-case basis whether the threat is real.

But Muthashi, what qualifies something as real in the first place? You define it in the scientific sense: that which is observable, predictable, repeatable, and falsifiable. But so many phenomena are none of those things. Especially lived experience.

DILIP
:
Damn, girl, you're deep.

Dilip, shut up, you assfuck. I wish you were ten thousand times smarter than you turned out to be.

In two nights, losing my scroll starts to feel like a blessing.

Didn't I want to lose context and find myself?

I have nothing to fall back on. Nothing to pull me out of the world I'm in. I have to learn to read stars instead of words. I have to let them write their meanings on my mind. This is what Mohini was trying to tell me: I'm passing through chambers. I have been, ever since I mounted the Trail, but now I'm aware of it and can move forward in a directed and conscious way. My scroll was a distraction.

My pozit tells me it's the first of November. On land I might be celebrating Diwali, or more accurately, scorning Diwali as a racist northern festival while Mohini celebrated it, teasing me that cultural phenomena are allowed to have multiple meanings for goodness' sake. So I would suffer myself to go to temple and light candles with her and be secretly delighted to do so. It was all a show. I loved accompanying her. I loved being seen with her.

I remember less, now, of what came before. My mind used to travel through the same space, and at the same intervals, that my body traveled in. Now my mind only skips along the surface of the space my body travels in. Like a skipping stone.

When the dawn comes, the light shows water colored pale turquoise and green. I might be over a reef, though the nearest shore I know is Oman, a few hundred kilometers north of me, according to my laminated map. I can see schools of psychedelic fish darting a zigzag pattern under my feet. I get out my fishing kit for the first time. There are lines, lures, and sections of a meter-long staff that have to be screwed together, with a hook on the end. It takes some experimentation to find the best position for holding the staff and then for spearing quickly and effectively. I always seem to strain a muscle group I hadn't been aware of before, and only discover via pain. But soon I have three small fish, all of which look innocuous.

I cut off their heads with my filet knife, slice and clean each of them, and put them on my solar plate to cook. I let the fat melt and then sprinkle on spices.

I eat sitting cross-legged as the sun comes up. Now is the difficult time—between dawn and mid-morning, when I used to read. Now I close my eyes and take long tours of places I know. Muthashi's clinic. The house attached to it, where I grew up. The university in Mumbai. Kochi. Kodaikanal. Madurai. Then I open my eyes and stare at the skin of my pod, watching it breathe for me.

I talk to Mohini, who knows my moods, including the manic ones. I've always had a gift for sounding sane when I feel insane inside and she was familiar with that, too. I abused this gift. If I was in conversation with someone I thought was intellectually inferior, I took absurd positions and argued them with perfect equanimity. Mohini would get upset when I did this. She didn't think it was an admirable trait. I saw her point. The longer I was with her, the more I noticed myself refraining from humiliating the less intelligent.

Mohini was intelligent, though. She was brilliant. We had a game we used to play called Distraction. The game was this. We'd be having an intense, heated conversation about religion or politics or literature, and then without warning one of us would steer the other (still conversing) to the bed. The steer-ee would have to keep talking while the other performed erotic acts on her body. So, I would be remonstrating the Indian Congress for their sanctimonious attitude toward the African middle class, whom they essentially regard as a lower caste, though it's not polite to say so, and Mohini would be passing her fingers over my lips and brushing her lips over my breasts. I had to keep talking or I “lost.” Mohini, of course, would continue engaging with me, asking me why I was ignoring the very real and cumulative influence of African fundamentalists, and I'd have to respond. It was a doomed game because nothing was at stake. Eventually one of us would break and we would dive into bed. Or onto the table, or against the wall, whatever surface presented itself for the feast. I once told her: Your body is my shrine. This is where I perform my pujas. This is that to which I attend.

She took this worship as her due. She was used to being beloved. She had a following by the time I met her, but she pointed out that I did too. I didn't remember what I looked like that night but she told me exactly: she noticed my extraordinary mouth, first, shaped like a cowrie shell, and that I was wearing a tight red tank top, tight jeans, brown military boots, a thick tangle of gold necklaces, and red and gold smears on my forehead. She thought I was Hindu. I am, somewhat. But I told her I'd taken to thumbing pastes and powders onto my forehead as an act of identification: culturally Hindu, even though God qua God was not really important to me, except as God manifested in my lovers and the emptiness left by my lovers. It was the only thing I knew how to do, being motherless, fatherless. I had made a religion of making presence out of absence.

When the morning comes, the water around me has turned amethyst. I can see fathoms and fathoms down, a violet sparkle devoid of any life. No fish, no algae, no floating flotilla of seaweed. I stop for the day. I lie down on my stomach. There's a flash of dark at the corner of my right eye. I turn just in time to see a small figure slip into the sea, feet-first. Another hallucination of the small naked woman.

Mohini, see, this is what I mean about my religion.

You say, Yes. Presence and absence are the same thing.

To escape, I retell myself stories of my life.

These stories take several nights, which in general have much less resolution now. They combine into mega-nights. I tip into an extended period of recalling past lovers and the extent of our affairs, one night per lover. I call this mega-night Memory Lane.

Initially it's because I start thinking of the first woman I ever slept with, Ajantha. She was eighteen. I was fourteen. She was my peer counselor at D. K. Soman International. It was a scene from a lesbian pulp comic. One night late at school at our counseling session we were sitting across from each other cross-legged and she leaned over as if to whisper something in my ear but instead she sucked on my earlobe. I remember my vagina made an actual noise, an un-glocking, because my labia got so swollen they unsealed. Ajantha heard it too and pressed her palm over my pants and things went on from there.

She was expelled once she was found out. But I caught something from her, an inclination to disregard norms, boundaries, appearances, already present because of my nonstandard upbringing, orphaned and all. And it was in the air because while I was growing up India was undergoing its third or fourth cultural revolution of the century and even twentysomethings were shocked at what teenagers were doing and teenagers looked at toddlers and wondered what cocktail of traditional and radical and appropriational they'd serve up one day. Mohini and her mother, Seeta, were at the vanguard, calmly accepting Mohini's trans identity and taking action at an early age, despite being lower middle class. But there was more. A whole new sector of the world population declared themselves transracial and sought genetic modification. At college I slept with a man who was undergoing treatment to change from Anglo to Desi features. Rafael aka Rahul. He was misguided. But he was also fucking hot, so I had him to bed.

He was one of a whole string of lovers at college. Having barely made it into IIT-Bombay and therefore fulfilled the Indian grandparent's wet dream, I got there and learned what I'd already known, that I didn't want to be a biofuel engineer, the vague vocation I'd named for my grandparents to placate them, and so I strapped on my goggles and went about destroying myself. People became flavors, collect all fifty. I was riding the wave of a new sexual revolution where all known venereal disease was either inoculable by vaccine or curable by the full-spectrum nanobiotics that came out when I was fifteen, and where all birth control was perfect, administered via aadhaar at puberty in both women and men that had to be deactivated if you wanted to get pregnant, a triumph of international public health in the 2040s.

I ran in the small circle of fellow discontents at IIT-Bombay and had slept with everyone by the end of the semester, even the holdouts I considered a challenge. I studied sex. Women, men, trans, didn't matter. Skin was skin. I was shy and quiet and hated speaking, but I made up for it with genius for flesh. Sexual triumphs were like trophies I piled up in a corner and stared at. Rebekah had punched a hole in the wall beside her bed. Krishna liked to slap my face. Munny sneered like Elvis when he came. Sonali screamed so loud that someone called campus police. Ying used a harness that suspended her from the ceiling and I'd kneel below her and lick her like honeysuckle. Mukesh and Thomas were gay but shared a fetish for tag-teaming a woman. Bilal needed to be blindfolded and deprived of breath. Ahmed was ticklish after orgasm. Kiran wanted me to say dirty things to her in Malayalam while I fucked her. I absorbed this fetish and demanded it of new lovers and so over the course of three months got dirty talk in Cantonese, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, French, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Maya, Arabic, and Zulu.