Jasmine (11 page)

Half-Face stood, totally naked. He was monstrously erect. Prakash had always been so concerned for me. He was afraid of youthful pregnancy, of children bearing
children. He talked to me of muscles tearing, of the girl’s body only
looking
mature, no matter what the rituals, the feudalisms, said. For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human. Half-Face was from an underworld of evil. It was a very simple, very clear perception, a moment of truth, the kind of understanding that I have heard comes at the moment of death. I had faced death twice before, and cheated it.

Yama will not sneak up on me.

“I want water, please.”

“Yeah, okay. You’ll get your water.” He went to the bathroom for me, and when he came back, the glass of water was brown and smelled of the liquor on his breath. He pulled off the puffy panties from Europe I’d been wearing.

He stared. His hands were trembling and then he whooped, “Oh, God!” and tried to kiss me, but he was all hands and face in motion. I twisted, only delaying the inevitable, making it worse perhaps, more forced, more violent. I tried to keep my eyes on Ganpati and prayed for the strength to survive, long enough to kill myself.

“Use a drink?” He lay back beside me, one thick arm over me, the other one with the glass. “I must use the bathroom,” I said, and he let me up. I picked my pants up off the floor and tried to be modest. He balled up my shirt and put it under his head, a second pillow.

“Get yourself cleaned up, but don’t take all night,” he
shouted. “Second time’s the sweetest.” He seemed to find it amusing. I turned on the shower, making it hot. With water pelting the shower curtain, I vomited. Then I showered. I had never used a Western shower, standing instead of squatting, with automatic hot water coming hard from a nozzle instead of cool water from a hand-dipped pitcher. It seemed like a miracle, that even here in a place that looked deserted, a place like a madhouse or a prison, where the most hideous crimes took place, the water should be hot, the tiles and porcelain should be clean, without smells, without bugs. It was a place that permitted a kind of purity.

I determined to clean my body as it had never been cleaned, with the small wrapped bar of soap, and to purify my soul with all the prayers I could remember from my fathers and my husbands cremations. This would be a fitting place to die. I had left my earthly body and would soon be joining their souls.

The bathroom steamed like a smokehouse. I reached into the pocket of my salwar for Kingsland’s knife. Until the moment that I held its short, sharp blade to my throat I had not thought of any conclusion but the obvious one: to balance my defilement with my death. I could not see myself in the steamed-up mirror—only a dark shadow in the center of the glass. I could not see, as I had wanted to, an arm reaching to the neck, the swift slice, the end of my mission.

It was the murkiness of the mirror and a sudden sense of mission that stopped me. What if my mission was not yet over? I didn’t
feel
the passionate embrace of Lord Yama
that could turn a kerosene flame into a lovers caress. I could not let my personal dishonor disrupt my mission. There would be plenty of time to die; I had not yet burned my husband’s suit. I had not stood under the palm trees of the college campus.

I extended my tongue, and sliced it. Hot blood dripped immediately in the sink.

I had planned it all so perfectly. To lay out the suit, to fill it with twigs and papers. To light it, then to lie upon it in the white cotton sari I had brought from home.

I put on my pants and wrapped myself in the towel for the iciness outside. He was, as I had hoped, asleep in his total nakedness, hands clasped peacefully around the glass of half-drunk whiskey balanced on his chest. I drew close to the side of the bed, next to the nightstand, where I could study the good side of his face. My mouth had filled with blood. I could feel it on my chin.

I began to shiver. The blade need not be long, only sharp, and my hand not strong, only quick. His eyes fluttered open even before I felt the metal touch his throat, and his smile and panic were nearly instantaneous. I wanted that moment when he saw me above him as he had last seen me, naked, but now with my mouth open, pouring blood, my red tongue out. I wanted him to open his mouth and start to reach, I wanted that extra hundredth of a second when the blade bit deeper than any insect, when I jumped back as he jerked forward, slapping at his neck while blood, ribbons of bright blood, rushed between his fingers.

He got his legs over the side of the bed, he stood and staggered, and with each stagger new spatter marks gushed against the walls. He kept trying to stop the blood, but the cut was small and he couldn’t find where so much blood, his blood, was coming from. His hands kept slipping, and finally he fell to his knees at the foot of the bed. I dragged the suitcase to the farthest end of the room. He tried to rise and couldn’t. I pulled the bedspread off the bed and threw it over him and then began stabbing wildly through the cloth, as the human form beneath it grew smaller and stiller.

No one to call to, no one to disturb us. Just me and the man who had raped me, the man I had murdered. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood had congealed on my hands, my chin, my breasts. What a monstrous thing, what an infinitesimal thing, is the taking of a human life; for the second time in three months, I was in a room with a
slain
man, my body bloodied. I was walking death. Death incarnate.

This time, my response was calm. I went back to the shower and purified myself once again. I gargled blood and cold water until the bleeding stopped. I tried to speak, but my tongue burned and refused to bend. Then I opened the suitcase and changed into my last clean salwar-kameez.

I stuffed the suitcase with my dishonored old clothes. The widow’s white sari and Prakash’s suit remained. I took out a blue-jean jacket bought for me in Delhi by my
brothers. There were booklets of matches everywhere; I helped myself. And then I remembered something that surprises me to this day: I remembered the hateful police inspector in Jullundhar, his reports to us of fingerprint evidence on the bomb fragments. I’d been impressed, and now I remembered. I went back to the bathroom and wiped the sink and shower taps.

I took the suitcase with me. Out to the porch, down the spiral stairs. It was a loud, bug-infested night; frogs chorused from a nearby swamp. Fireflies winked before me like lights from anchored trawlers in a choppy sea.

Around back, there were rusty metal trash bins, punched with holes for better ventilation. I laid the suitcase inside one and lit it from the bottom. It sputtered and flared. The outside melted, but then the cotton and wool ignited.

I said my prayers for the dead, clutching my Ganpati. I thought, The pitcher is broken. Lord Yama, who had wanted me, who had courted me, and whom I’d flirted with on the long trip over, had now deserted me.

I had not given even a days survival in America a single thought. This was the place I had chosen to die, on the first day if possible. I would land, find Tampah, walking there if necessary, find the college grounds and check it against the brochure photo. Under the very tree where two Indian boys and two Chinese girls were pictured, smiling, I had dreamed of arranging the suit and twigs. The vision of lying serenely on a bed of fire under palm trees in my white sari had motivated all the weeks of sleepless, half-starved
passage, the numbed surrender to various men for the reward of an orange, a blanket, a slice of cheese. I had protected this sari, and Prakashs suit, through it all. Then he had touched it. He had put on the suit, touched my sari, my photographs and Ganpati.

My body was merely the shell, soon to be discarded. Then I could be reborn, debts and sins all paid for.

If he had only killed me. If he had only left my mission alone. He made me say it, he laughed at it.

Suddenly death was being denied.

I buttoned up the jacket and sat by the fire. With the first streaks of dawn, my first full American day, I walked out the front drive of the motel to the highway and began my journey, traveling light.

18

A
T
the University Club over in Dalton, the woman who’s invited me to lunch says, pressing her fingertips lightly on my arm, “I’ve been wanting to make this call to you for so long! Then finally yesterday I said, What the hell, I’ll call, and if she doesn’t want to meet me, all she can say is no.”

It is not likely that I would have refused a professor’s request. I’d cashed checks for her at the bank and thought her a perfectly reasonable, attractive, soft-spoken, mid-fortyish professional woman.

Her name is Mary Webb, Dr. Mary Webb, with no husband and a big balance listed on her bank records, and she teaches sociology or social work. In the bank, she’d
always seemed circumspect and sober, but here she’s alternately intense and extroverted, with a lime-green barrette in her bobbed hair, glasses rimmed in red plastic, and orange ankle socks. The socks are dyed the orange of Indian swamis’ robes. She does not look like a madwoman.

“I’m glad you called,” I say. What can I say? I look around the small dining room, three tables of ten people each. More women than men. I’m the youngest by at least twenty years. I’ve already been asked what I am studying. I say, “I’m honored to be with all these learned people.” She laughs harshly. I assume all the men and women wielding forks are scholars, more masterly than poor Masterji. I, a dropout from a village school. America, America!

She leans close and confides, “The things that really matter to me I can’t share with anyone outside the group. This is my group. You must know how it is. Then I saw you in the bank, and right away I had this frisson. I knew I could talk to you.”

“About what?” Suspicion must tinge my voice.

She makes sure the waiter is out of hearing range before she continues. “If I say the word ‘channeling.’ what do you think of?”

“Digging?” I say.

“Oh, marvelous. Exactly!
Digging
.’ The extrovert beams; then intensity takes over. She barely whispers.

“Digging for what, do you suppose?”

I don’t want to disappoint her. I whisper back, because something in the conspiracy compels it, “Bodies?”

She throws her hands up in delight. “Oh, you’ve got it! I just knew you would.”

Mary Webb is telling me about her out-of-body experiences. They are visceral revelations about her pre-life. They used to come upon her out of the blue, in the middle of grading papers maybe, or while shaking herself a margarita (her only vice, this time around), but now she’s learning to make them happen by going to a guru who runs a bimonthly group.

In her last fully retrievable life she was a man. Her gaze is steady; apparently I haven’t reacted. A black man. She leans closer. Not an American, no, an
Australian
black man, an Aborigine. I still haven’t flinched, though I’m desperately trying to process the incongruity. When she’s channeling, she speaks the tribal language perfectly, of course, and even now she remembers a few word-clots. She renames the plates, table, chairs in a strangely glottal series of articulated gulps. “Of course, we don’t have plates. We have bowls made out of skulls and gourds. I’m just approximating. Table, as well. Same with chair. I’m really just giving you verbs for sitting, eating, etc.”

She’s been unable to have a conversation with an Aborigine anywhere in Iowa, though not for lack of searching. One Australian in the music department has listened to a few sentences from her and said it
sounded
Abo to him.

In her most recent adventure, she is closing in on a giant kangaroo—an extinct species, incidentally, the size of a bounding bison—she can taste the meat. She might be the
only person in Iowa with such vivid nostalgia for kangaroo flesh. She/he can anticipate the sexual gratitude of his/her wife, and the admiration of the children—she knows the names of all four, three boys and a girl (do I want to hear them?)—waiting for him/her back in their camp.

“Do they, you, live in tents?” I ask. It’s my first chance to break in.

“Actually, a cave. Face of a cliff, overlooking a vast, flat plain.” A few trees, some water holes. White men haven’t arrived yet, it’s pre-Edenic. It seems that her lives have jumped a groove, like a record arm that gets bumped, and she’s landed up
there
at the dawn of her immortal soul’s mutable, genetic journey, with no knowledge of the thousands of other lives she must have led in between. The other lives are just fragmentary. She has been in many wars, wandered in many forests, borne many children.

Her face
is
transformed as she tells me. Her voice drops, there is a slight Australian diction to her description. “My forearms thickened and muscled. It was so wonderful and weird. My arm and a giant boomerang were one long, curved line. When I let it go, it felt better than an orgasm.”

“Theoretically, I believe in reincarnation,” I say. I am astounded by all this, the American need to make intuition so tangible, to
possess
a vision so privately.

Mary Webb’s guru is a thirty-six-year-old woman who calls herself Ma Leela. “She needed to visit the earth, so she made contact with a woman who’d made up her mind to commit suicide in Medicine Hat, Alberta. This other woman was a battered wife, and she was severely depressed
and there was no talking her out of the suicide. So Ma Leela said, If you are sure you are going to go through with vacating your body, I’d like to take it over.”

I ask Mary Webb how Ma Leela knew that a body was about to be vacated in Alberta, and she explains that in Ma Leela’s natural sphere there is a data bank of bodyflow.

“We believe the body is like a revolving door. So she split her body. The doctors thought they’d saved her by pumping her stomach clean of Seconal, but the person they released from the hospital was Ma Leela. Now Ma Leela is doing her healing all over the Midwest and the Northwest.” She looks around the room, expansively. “We’re all in Ma Leela’s group.”