In the dead of night, with soft snow falling on my Arkansas
cabin, my body shifted restlessly. The house was dark, but the light from
distant streetlights skipped over the surface of the frozen ground, and filled
my room with a soft blue. I was asleep, but sweat was forming on the back of my
neck. It wetted my short hair, and soaked into the crevassed pillow.
She had returned to haunt my dreams.
“Excuse me?”
Service was normally stellar in Mumbai, with servers pouring
over your every need, anticipating your want for an extra pav before you knew you needed one. But here at Suzette’s, it was
the customer’s job to pine for the waiter. The owner had truly created the
French experience.
A man clad in a black polo and a stoic expression turned his
head as he walked a tray of empty plates inside. He held up one finger. Another
anomaly; I was used to the standard pinch of the fingers, and the requisite: ek second.
He returned with a small pad and the same expression. He
clicked the pen and waited for my order.
“Can I get the ham and cheese omelet, an orange juice, and
an espresso?”
“Yes sir,” he tilted his head.
“Can I get the espresso after the meal?”
Another nod. He clicked the pen and walked away.
“Wait, can I also get a water?”
It was too late; he had already entered into the AC portion
of the café. I preferred it outside, especially on Sunday mornings. Palm fronds
protected me from the harsh rays, and without the intensity of traffic, the sea
breeze travelled up the road to reach me. It was rare, but it was fresh.
Another waiter walked to the table across from mine.
“Excuse me.”
Like a broken record, my words fell short of his ears.
“Hey!”
He finally turned.
“Can I get a water here?”
He nodded and returned with a glass bottle of warm water,
with an accompanying glass barely large enough to qualify as a shot glass. I
gave no thanks; two can play the French game.
I slid my laptop bag beside me, and put my helmet on top. I
had bought a roll of Halls cough drops long ago, and the Indian heat had melted
the menthol and it bled through two pockets. It would take me another three weeks
to notice the stickiness and the smell. The helmet was once a brilliant white,
with two blue horns painted along the side. Along the chin, the word “Ace” was
printed in cursive. It was that word that lured me to the helmet in the first
place. Ace. It felt good to roar through a foreign city with a title of Ace.
The helmet was now yellowing from the constant exposure to the Bombay smoke and
hell. The visor, which I always kept open, had a film of black dirt on the
inside. The airflow pulled the pollution over the top of my head, and slipped
between the white of the crown and the tinted visor. The particles of filth
stuck like magnets to it, and I tolerated the Wooly Willy dust.
I clasped my hands together on the table. To my left, there
was a large stack of travel books about France. A yellow spine caught my
attention; Bordeaux. I figured it would be a good idea to know exactly where
that was, and maybe use some obscure knowledge at a cocktail party sometime.
Some ass hole might mention his time in Nice, and I’d respond with a comment on
the superiority of the Bordeaux region. I shook my head at the thought. I’d
rather tell him to fuck off.
“Mr. Black!”
I turned back to my right. Alex had walked up the two stone
steps into the portico. His Ray-Bans and pastel polo fit his combed wavy hair
and linen pants. His girlfriend was breathtakingly beautiful, and followed
behind him. She gave a friendly wave. Her cheeks rose to her eyes as she smiled.
It was a telling smile; it was early for her, and her desire to eat alone had
just been smashed. I moved to assuage her concern, because I shared it. A
Sunday morning crepe at Suzette’s is meant to be solitary or with a loved one.
Three was a crowd.
“Alex! How are you?” I elongated the “how”, and shorted the
“you”. It was enough to turn a generic question into a personal one. Life is
all about tone.
“Pretty good man. Getting your crepe on?”
“Ha, yeah man this is the routine.”
“Us to! Usually not so early, but this is the place.”
The greeting had expired, and we stood at a conversational
crossroad. We could dig deeper, ask about work, about life, about plans. Or we
could pause, say it’s good to see each other, and move along.
We both opted for the later.
They sat at the table catty-corner to mine, and I worked
hard to avoid eye contact. This meant staring at the French books until the
omelet arrived. Another breeze floated under the palms, and I breathed it in as
I took a sip of the warm water. The sweat on my back from the ride over was still
fresh, and the breeze called the goose bumps out of me. I was wearing a red Cornell t-shirt,
which had fit once. My body had shrunk since coming to India. Sweat and
diarrhea continuously took pieces of me away, leaving a smaller and more
emaciated me.
The omelet and orange juice arrived. The ham was roughly cut
and salty, like good ham should be. The strings of fat and sinews of meat were
robust, and mimicked wild boar more than an Iowa-fed hog. Meat this good was a
rare thing in the city, and it came with an appropriate price tag. The orange
juice was more pulp than juice, and the tang overpowered the sweet. I devoured
the food like a starving man. The butter chicken roll from Mini Punjab wore off
hours ago, and my tongue missed the simple flavors of salt and sweet. It was
confused and lost from the masala deluge I had subjected it to since coming to
the country. Meals like this were the best way to cure homesickness. I could
practically smell Grammy making scramlets, after a morning of feeding the cows.
As I chewed the last fragment of ham, the waiter came with a
small cup of steaming espresso. Not wanting to risk opening my mouth and let
the flavor escape, I made a writing motion with my right hand. He tilted his
head to the left and closed his eyes; he returned with the check a moment
later. 1000 rupees even. I took out 1010, and left it under the bottle of warm
water. One last of sip of the bitter black drink buzzed the front of my head,
and hollowed out the inside of my hand. The jitters had come prematurely;
usually they didn’t arrive until the caramel macchiato was half empty at the
Juhu Starbucks.
I threw my bag over my shoulder, and turned it around on to
my back. Helmet in hand, I left the sanctity of Suzette’s to brave the Indian
roads again.
“Y’all have fun” I smiled to Alex.
“Look at this guy!” he shot back. His smile widened, and
pointed to my helmet, “Such a fucking bad-ass.”
I laughed, “Oh yeah. These 100cc’s are almost too much for
me to handle.”
“Drive safe. You, Lukas, and I should get drinks at Yacht
tonight.”
“Hell yes. Just text me when.”
“Alright, sounds good.”
“See you around.”
The motorcycle was parked out in the hot sun. It was only
11am, but the seat had already warmed so much that it was hot to the touch. As
I approached the red machine, I noticed a young girl standing next to it,
leaning on the seat and playing with a flower. The stem was bent over near the
bloom, but as she twirled it in her fingers, the petals spun like a helicopter,
and lifted the stem upright. It only lasted for a second, before she stopped to
twirl it the other direction.
I interrupted her world. “Hey there. I need to get to my
bike, sorry!”
She stopped twirling the flower. The smile she held between
her lips vanished, and she instinctively held out her hand. A whiny request in
Hindi followed, as she tilted her head and took a step forward. Her clothes
were tattered and brown, and a stench floated away from her little body.
“No, nahin.” I
said with a smile, and moved closer to the seat of my bike.
She didn’t move, and I was close enough to warrant the shirt
pull. Her small fingers pinched the red fibers of my shirt, and she tugged
downwards.
“Hey, no.” My words were morn stern this time.
An angry man buried deep in my chest beat a drum. Ruh, ruh.
She continued to tug at my shirt and held her hand out. Her
words had formed a chant, repeating something short and sad.
“Get your fucking hands off me” I raised my eyebrows and
looked directly at her.
Her dark eyes stared back at me. The dark brown pigment
camouflaged with her pupil, creating once large disc absent of color. Where
there should have been white, there was yellow, streaked with small red veins.
Those eyes belonged on an animal or a demon, but they were placed in the skull
of a little girl. Her brown skin was dark, and beads of sweat lined her face.
Some was pooled on the top of her cheeks, just under her eyes. A red bindi was crudely pasted on the
forehead: splotchy and uneven. There were heavy wrinkles running along her
forehead, painful memories of a long life lived in a short time.
Her tugging and begging was incessant, and my animalistic
absence of humanity reared its ugly head. I grabbed both her shoulders. Her
arms were skinnier than I had imagined, and it felt like I was grabbing a small
terrier or large turkey. I picked her light body up, and moved her to the side.
As she was lifted in the air, two thoughts ran through my head:
Gross. What am I
touching?
I hope her feet don’t
touch my shoes.
She didn’t expect to be forcefully moved, and as I returned
her to the road, her begging stopped. Her mouth closed, and her eyes widened. A
bead of sweat accumulated on the ridge of her nose, and it ran downward towards
her cracked lips.
I straddled the bike, the seat hot through my jeans. I
leaned forward to disengage the kickstand, then leaned back and dug my heels
into the Bandra bricks. It took four steps to get the bike into the street, and
with a swift kick downwards, it rattled to life, and I revved the engine as
first gear engaged and the rough tires skidded away from the little girl. As
the gravel jumped backwards from the rear tire, the girl left me with one more
plead.
It was soft, it was sincere, it was heartbreaking. She
closed her eyes, and said:
“Please sir. Please.”
The roar of the engine was my response. I left the girl with
the broken flower, and nothing else.
My foot kicked my body awake. The sweat was heavy on the
back of my head. I looked around the dark of my room. The blue hue was cold,
and the snow falling outside was creating a deafening silence.
She’s not here.
I kicked the covers away from my body, and touched the lamp
beside me to life. The light leapt from my room and landed on the soft ground
outside. The floor was cold as I walked to the kitchen, and my feet picked up
particles of dirt and dust. I filled a glass of cold water, and sat down on the
couch in the living room.
She’s not here.
Under a table across the room, my old motorcycle helmet sat
like a ghost. It was now adding a layer of Arkansas dust to the Bombay filth. I
picked it up and held it in my hands. It had been months since my head had been
inside. I rubbed the letters of “Ace” with the side of my thumb. I sniffed the
inside, and the smell of sweat and mold filled my nostrils; the smell was home.
On the other side of the world, it was 11am on a Sunday
morning in Bombay. She was undoubtedly on the road again, if she was still
alive. Her pain was real, and so was my guilt. She wasn’t the first beggar I
had turned down, nor the last. It was a reality of India. People beg, and
sometimes it’s real. Other times sick and twisted men burn and mutilate
children to better garner an emotional response. Sometimes babies are put in
pain, so they scream in the arms of young girls as they navigate heavy traffic
on bare feet.
She will die before me, probably lying on a dirty rug under
a blue tarp. I didn’t return to my bed that night. Thoughts of her consumed me,
and my eyes were affixed on the dark hill across the valley.
I took a daisy out of a vase on my coffee table. My fingers
ran up the stem, and I broke it in my hand. The bloom bent over my fingers. I
pinched and dragged it across my thumb. The petals rose up in the air, and spun
in a blur of color.
She’s here.
I smiled and the two of us played across the planet.
