The Girl in the Road (29 page)

I said, Never.

He slammed down his fist and said, That is unacceptable. How will you receive her blessing? How will she even know you exist?

I didn't tell him all the complications behind my name, that it was also my mother's name and that my mother was murdered with a scalpel, that my grandmother was Catholic, and that anyway I wasn't particularly religious to begin with. I was stunned by his passion.

So I just played the poor waitress card and said, I don't have the money.

He got out an actual billfold and held up an actual fifty-thousand-rupee note.

I'll give you this, he said, If you promise to use it to visit Meenakshi Devi and ask her blessing.

I was sure the note was fake. But just in case it wasn't, I promised with all solemnity that I would use it as he instructed. He gave me the note. I folded it in my pocket. I served him extra respectfully after that.

On my break, I took the note to the cashier's office, and found a dusty box of miscellanea that included paper money and a pen to check for fake notes.

The note wasn't fake.

I left the restaurant, fed the bill into my account so that the money was accessible on my mitter, went back to my studio flat, stuffed my things in a sack, and flagged down an autoshaw to take me all the way down the mountain to Madurai on the plain. The farther we descended, the more I felt myself coming to life. I was warming up. I'd forgotten how much the cold had frozen all the parts of me and now it was like I could move again.

I got a hotel room and then went out walking. Of course I wandered toward the temple complex because that's where all the roads lead. I had Reshmi West's essays running through my head. It happened to be a Friday, Meenakshi Devi's special day. So there were tens of thousands of pilgrims there.

The bodies have been lying perpendicular to me on the Trail. Now they start swinging toward me, headfirst.

There was a thick crush of people trying to get around the Golden Lotus Tank to see Meenakshi Devi at the other end of the complex. So I just had to wait. And I paid the full one thousand rupees to get in line to get right up close to the deity. But again, I didn't feel impatient or unhappy, I just felt content. I'd never felt that way in my life. The line moved from one chamber to another, from the daylit open air to the dark inner passages lit with tubes overhead and oil lamps set in the walls and fans that moved the air of a thousand exhalations. Shiva giving a boon. Shiva killing a boar. Shiva and the elephant. But the real show here is the divine feminine: she's the one we want to see: and then I'm before her and she's black, resplendent, petaled, and smeared.

I looked at her and felt like I wasn't answerable for anything I'd done and I was free of all family, all history, all circumstance. Like I was free of context and could reenter the world as a baby.

Soon after that, I met you, Mohini.

The bodies start tilting up, feet in the air, head dangling, like upside-down marionettes. The golden saris fall down around their hips.

Onam 2068 would be our second anniversary, and I was planning a feast.

That day, when I got in the door from the market and put my bag on the kitchen counter, I heard the sound of furniture moving in another room. Mohini must be cleaning, I thought, or rearranging the bedroom as she had to do every few months “to keep things fresh.” I tiptoed down the hall, trailing my fingers along the wall. It was an old cottage, almost a hundred years old, made of plaster that always stayed cool. When the monsoon came we'd open every window and door to let the rainy air flood the house. We'd painted it with warm colors, each room a different shade of sunrise, with mandalas and murals and verses of the Vedas. As I approached the room, I took off my jacket, and then my shirt, leaving them in a trail in the hallway, and then unzipped my jeans. I heard heavy breathing and felt so much love for you, because you worked so hard for our home. Then I came into the bedroom and saw you lying on our bed in a golden sari with your head turned away from me. I thought you were sleeping. I moved around to the foot of the bed. I came closer to kiss your forehead. And that's when the snake lying on top of your body struck at me.

Your eyes were upside down, open, and tired.

I ran away.

The bodies go away.

For a long time I'm left with the basic elements again. Sea, sky, moon, and the Trail in its glass tunnel. It's transparent, so it's hard to detect. Sometimes I think I see its outline above me. Once I even see the little woman crawling overhead. Whether that lends credibility to her actual existence, I'm not sure. I consult my counselors, who are now broadcasting from the Semena Werk pirate radio station, including both my mother and father weighing in now, up and running and fully ideated, speaking from recliners made of clouds.

AMMA:
If she tries to hurt you, we'll protect you, molay.

APPA:
Right! We'll give her what-for!

AMMA:
Are you eating enough?

APPA:
And make sure you get enough sleep. You're crabby without it.

AMMA:
Make chamomile tea tonight and I'll tell you a story.

They're an opium drip of all the things I've wanted to hear my whole life.

On a diet of seawater, and the kelp I don't bother converting anymore, my body changes. My blood gets thicker. My flesh is gummy. If I press my finger into my arm, a depression stays, like a dimple, and it takes a long time to fill up again. My lips crack and crust over and I peel them till they bleed. I have trouble sleeping when I lie down during the day, and I have trouble staying awake while I'm walking. The lines between different phases of consciousness aren't clear. I go through cyclical periods of lucidity and fog. I lose a lot of energy. I want to sing a kriti but I can't remember the words, and anyway, I don't have the strength to sing. I can feel the salt on my vocal cords.

But I left you, Mohini, not knowing whether you were alive or dead, so any suffering on my part is good and deserved.

On the horizon I see a new structure. In a burst of lucidity I send up a prayer to whatever gods might be listening, saying, Please, I can't take any more hippies.

But there seems to be only one inhabitant. He's standing on a barge moored to the Trail. There's a kiosk set up, a little thatch-hut stand with a bar, painted in bright tropical colors. He's standing behind it and is working with metal tongs and a plate. I see steam rising from below. I get closer to the kiosk and now I can see a sign that says
witness dogs
in five different languages. There's one stool at the bar.

He's still busying himself behind the counter. When I get to him, and open my mouth to say hello, nothing comes out, so I just knock on the counter and wave when his head pops up.

He looks at me and cries out. I jump back. It's a startling sound after so much of just waves and wind.

“What happened to you?” he says in Hindi.

Again I try to speak, but my throat has the texture of jerky.

He sees me trying to form words. “Here,” he says, and indicates the stool. “Sit down. I have a lot of work to do with you.”

First, he fetches a robe. I'd forgotten I was naked. I hold out my arms so he can fit the sleeves over me and then I manage to wrap it around my front so my breasts are covered.

Then he puts a glass of clear water on the counter. I look at it and turn around just in time to throw up. The vomit is dark green against the barge platform.

“Oh dear,” he says. “No, don't get up. I'll take care of it. You're in worse shape than I thought.”

I watch him clean up my vomit.

“Now take a look at the glass of water again,” he says.

I will myself to.

“Just look at it,” he says.

I can do that.

“Good,” he says. “There's hope for you. I don't suppose you ran into the Lotus Eaters a few hundred kilometers back, did you? That's what I call them. So what, you couldn't think of a story and they confiscated your desalinators?”

I can't think of an expression, or series of expressions, that would convey that I did tell a story, and then threw out my desalinators of my own volition. Let alone why. I wish I knew sign language. Maybe they have entire vocabularies for explaining unexplainable things, even motivations unknown to the speaker.

“Don't worry about talking yet,” he says. “I'm speaking rhetorically. My name is Subu.”

I shake my head to tell him I'm with him. He's already a better trail angel than Ameem and Padma were, ten thousand years ago.

“I run Witness Dogs. I run it for two reasons. One, to serve food. As you can see here, in addition to the fruit of the sea, I cook hot dogs. Kosher. Vitamin-enriched. Don't look at them too long—we don't want you throwing up again. I wrote a designer program for the kiln, patent pending.

“Two, it seemed to me that on a landscape like this, a walker needs a good reality check. That's why I witness.”

Here it comes, I think. He's a Jesus freak.

“Empiricism,” he says. “I witness for empiricism.”